Samir leads me into the living room. It’s a small, square room with brightly colored cotton rugs on the tatty carpet and pieces of deep red velvety material thrown over the sofa and armchairs. No sign of Naazim, which is a relief.
But it feels as though I’ve stepped into a foreign country with all the colors and the sweet spicy smell floating in from the kitchen. Very different from our living room in the cottage with its wooden beams in the ceiling and the dark, polished furniture.
My eye is caught by the sideboard, which runs down one side of the room. It’s absolutely crammed with dozens of photos of what look like family members and, even more incredible, the entire wall’s covered in photos too. You can’t see one square millimeter of wallpaper. I look over at Samir, who’s fiddling with the radio, finding a music channel. I can tell by the way he’s standing that he’s embarrassed.
I look back at the photos of men and women, all ages, in groups and pairs and on their own, eating meals outdoors in white-hot sunlight. There are little children grinning with their front teeth missing and women with their hair covered, stirring big pans of food. These photos must be from Iraq.
“So where are you?” I say.
“It’s not my family. It’s Auntie Selma’s, my uncle Sayeed’s wife. She came to England six months after me. Uncle Sayeed won’t leave Iraq, so she cries about him a lot,” says Samir over his shoulder.
“But the photos, are they all your auntie’s family?” I say, astonished. How could anyone have so much family? “Where’s your auntie?”
Samir points to a little girl of about nine with a ribbon in her curly hair, holding the hand of a man. He has a mustache and he’s wearing some kind of long white tunic. “That’s Auntie Selma with her father.”
“What happened after that, did they lose the camera?” I say, grinning.
“No, everyone in these pictures is dead. Only Auntie Selma’s left.”
Samir’s looking at me and then he drops his eyes as he sees my face change.
How could so many people from one family have died? Did they all get some terrible disease? Saddam Hussein couldn’t have killed them all in his prisons, could he?
“I don’t understand,” I say.
Samir goes to the door and checks that Auntie Selma’s busy. “She gets upset if we talk about it,” he says, coming back and slumping down on the sofa. “Me and Naazim don’t like it when she cries. We don’t know what to do.”
I sit down too, next to a table with a large, heavy book on it, covered with a green cloth.
“Auntie Selma comes from a village called Halabjah in the north of Iraq,” Samir says. “It’s where the Kurds live. They rebelled against Saddam Hussein and out of revenge he dropped gas bombs on the Kurdish villages. The worst attack was on one single day in 1988 when five thousand people were killed in Auntie Selma’s village. Auntie Selma is the only one left in her family.”
“It must have been a very big family,” I say, thinking about Kim and all her brothers and sisters and uncles and cousins. Not like me, with just Mum.
Samir nods and such a sad look crosses his face.
“Yes,” he says very quietly, and a chill goes through me. “Thousands and thousands of people were killed, and most of them were women and children. Naazim said he saw one picture of a man sitting over the bodies of his wife and ten children, all dead.” Samir looks at me with his sad, dark eyes and I just stare back.
All that in this little living room, every day.
“Naazim doesn’t let me look at those pictures, all those piles of dead bodies. Like they showed us in History class.”
“Germany in World War II?” I say, and Samir nods. Grandpa’s war, I think, only he didn’t go to any concentration camps.
We are quiet for a few minutes. Samir goes back to fiddling with the radio and I look at the pictures on the wall.
Then I say, “But five thousand people killed from one bomb? Surely one bomb can’t do that.”
“No, there were hundreds of bombs, filled with horrific stuff like cyanide and mustard gas . . .”
“Gas? They used that in the trenches.” Grandpa told me how his uncle Ted was gassed in World War I. He never worked again because his lungs were destroyed.
When Grandpa was a boy he used to wave a newspaper up and down in front of his uncle to try and get some air into his lungs. “Terrible, it was,” Grandpa told me, shaking his head.
That’s why they all carried gas masks around with them in the next war. But I thought that was all ancient history. What would Grandpa say about the gassing of Auntie Selma’s family?
“The gas bombs fell for three days, thousands more were killed and thousands and thousands wounded,” Samir went on. “Naazim says he read about one whole family who all went blind. Aunty Selma lost more than a hundred members of her family.”
I can’t imagine so many people in one family, and all of them dead. You couldn’t fit a hundred people into our little cottage. “That’s a very big family,” I can’t help saying.
“There are a lot of families like that in Iraq,” says Samir. “Auntie Selma was only ten. She was sent to live with relatives in Baghdad. She’s some sort of distant cousin of my grandfather. She and our uncle Sayeed played together as kids.”
“Childhood sweethearts,” I say with a bit of a grin.
Samir grins back. “I don’t know about that. She says he used to play tricks on her all the time. But then he went away to university and when he came back the family decided they should get married.”
That’s a bit weird, I think. “Does she love him?” I say cautiously.
“I think so, she misses him a lot. But she also misses all her family. I wasn’t born when the Kurds were massacred. Naazim was only a baby. But when he was about fourteen, the year before my father was arrested . . .”
“When was that?”
“He was taken away in 2002, Naazim turned fourteen in . . .” He pauses and has a think. “October 2001, so I was eight. Anyway, my father told Naazim what happened to Auntie Selma’s family and Naazim told me. I had nightmares for ages.”
We are quiet for a minute while I try and take all this in. First of all, Auntie Selma’s family are all killed, then when she grows up, she gets married and settles into a new life. Then everything goes wrong again about five years ago. She, Samir and Naazim only just got here alive.
Samir doesn’t say anything and I can see he’s retreating into being the ice man. I don’t blame Samir, I feel the same, all sort of chilly and cold inside. It makes me feel very lost and alone again.
Where’s Kim when I need her? I really need to ask her what she thinks about all this stuff. And what about my dad? My biggest problem at the moment is my pathetic parents. Samir hasn’t even got any parents. All my problems with Mum and Dad, cleaning the house and keeping the boiler alight, they all seem so silly when I think about everything Auntie Selma and Samir and even Naazim have been through.
I’m fiddling with the green cloth without thinking and suddenly it falls off, revealing a large, heavy-looking book.
Samir leaps to his feet and quickly covers the book again. “You mustn’t do that,” he says. “It’s the Quran. Our Bible.”
Everything’s so different here what with Auntie Selma’s life history on the wall and religious books that have to be covered, let alone a foreign language, which would probably be a lot more interesting to learn than boring old French.
Maybe I’ll become fluent in Arabic and become a diplomat in Iraq and help to bring about peace. Then Samir and his family could go home.
Samir says, “I used to bring my father the Quran every morning and he would read to us before breakfast. We had to learn the verses by heart in school, so my father would test us.”
He smiles and shakes his head. “Naazim used to call me ghabi, stupid, when I made a mistake, and then he’d get told off.”
“Do you still read it together?” I ask.
“No . . .” and his voice fades away. I stare down at the floor and try to think of something to say. Then Samir sighs and says, “We miss my father’s voice too much.”
We’re quiet for a minute, finishing the cola, and it’s all so sad that I decide we should talk about something else.
“Did you get into trouble for the exclusion?”
Samir shoots me a little smile of relief and his face clears. Then he says, “I haven’t told Auntie Selma or Naazim and school’s closed tomorrow for teacher training so I’m hoping they just won’t notice.”
The door slams downstairs and we both leap to our feet. It’s Naazim and suddenly he’s in the doorway, the usual glare on his face. Samir doesn’t seem to notice and starts chattering away about helping Auntie Selma. But Naazim just keeps glaring at me.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m wearing the wrong clothes even though I’ve got my school joggers on and my legs are covered. Not for the first time I wish I’d listened more in Religious Studies lessons. I try to catch Samir’s eye but he’s just fixed on his big brother.
Then Naazim launches into an interrogation, which makes MI5 look like summer camp, asking me a whole series of questions about brothers and sisters, what my dad does—that one’s easy, nothing most of the time—about my mum and even my dog. I’m getting very nervous and flustered when Samir shouts out, “That’s enough, Naazim. She’s a friend, a good friend.”
Naazim stops but you can see he’d rather just juggernaut on and he still hasn’t managed to crack a smile. “I’m going to see Auntie Selma,” he says, but before he turns to go he says, “Don’t speak about the photos.”