Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (2 page)

We were all wearing masks, and one of us responded with a shot, after which the air exploded in a roar of shots exchanged between the two sides. We learned afterward that the one who fired the first shot was my cousin Sirat, who was in love with my sister Istabraq. For that reason, he was the most zealous and angry of us all, and his aggression carried us all away. We all began firing at the armored vehicles in a tumult until we were shrouded by the smoke bombs that fell from the helicopters. Silence reigned, except for coughs and exchanged curses, which continued until we found ourselves in darkness: every one of us in a cell.

We received punches, kicks, lashes, and curses, and we could only respond with groans. The more they tortured me, the more I thought of Grandfather and feared for him. I kept asking them about him but was answered only with blows. They weren’t even trying to interrogate me. I kept saying to myself, “He will certainly die if they are doing to him what they are doing to me.” My body went numb from so much pain, and I was no longer strong enough to move. I lost consciousness many times under the blows, waking up to curses and cold water being splashed on me.

It went on until I thought I had been there being tortured for years—or was this the torment of the grave, which Grandfather had told us about? I kept wishing that it was all just a nightmare, that I would wake up afterward to my mother’s breakfast of cream and butter on warm bread, dates fried in oil, and cardamom tea. Later we learned that the agony was for one day only, since that night they carried us out and threw us—bloody, groaning corpses piled on top of one another—into the beds of army trucks, after having shaved our hair and mustaches entirely off. The trucks set off amid a military convoy of nine armor-plated jeeps and continued until it reached the village in the middle of the night. There, our worried families were waiting on the rooftops of the houses.

The convoy stopped in the middle of the village, in the big square in front of the mosque. We used to play muhaybis and khawaytimi there at night when the month of Ramadan fell during the summer. It was also the place for village funerals, weddings, horse races, donkey races, and sack races—with the bags used for the cotton crop tied around our waists—as well as the high jump and the long jump. The police and the soldiers got down with their weapons and spread out across the square, while four of them began unloading us, carrying us out by our arms and legs. Before they threw us on the ground, they would bring each person to the captain. He would pull out of his pocket the new ID card that had been issued for each of us. They had changed all of our surnames from al-Mutlaq to al-Qashmar. In the Iraqi dialect, the word has the connotation of scorn, disdain, and insult, and it is applied to those who are said to be oblivious and stupid. In dictionaries of classical Arabic, which I paged through later, it means “short, stocky, piled up on itself.”

I heard my name as I was being carried: “Saleem Noah al-Qashmar.” Then I was thrown on the ground, and pain shot through my back.

When I regained consciousness, my mother said to me, “We thought you were dead, and that they were announcing the names of the bodies. We couldn’t say a thing, we were so afraid.”

“And Grandfather?” I asked.

She said, “He’s fine. They didn’t beat him too much. But they shaved his beard, his mustache, and his hair like everyone else.”

We learned the following day that three of our men had been killed—Grandfather said “martyred”—in the clashes in the smoke in front of the provincial government building, while none of the police were injured. On the third day, we (the young men, at least) were able to get up and move around. I immediately visited Grandfather and had never seen him stronger or more angry. He was thinking of getting in touch with his friends among the elders of the other tribes and villages, men who had learned the Qur’an with him from Mullah Abd al-Hamid. He was also thinking about contacting his friends among the elders of the Kurdish tribes in Makhmur and Arbil, and the Turkish tribes in Kirkuk, and the Shabak people in al-Guwayr, and his Yazidi friends in Sinjar, who were tied to him by a long-lasting relationship of trust from his days as an onion merchant. Likewise, old friends among the Christians in Qarqush and Talkayf, who fought with him during the days of the British occupation. He thought of the chiefs of Najaf and Karbala, whom he had met when he used to travel there to acquire books, as well as his friends in Basra from his days of working in the docks there.

Grandfather was thinking of attacking again, and it seemed that the government had learned of these preparations, for
they returned my father to Subh the next morning. His hair, beard, and mustache had been shaved, and his left leg was crippled: the foot was twisted and swollen with burns because they had applied electricity so many times. When he had begged them at least to transfer the wire to the right foot, they had put it on his testicles until they burned. The healing took a long time. When Noah did heal, he had become lame, and he never again fathered a child after the six of us. He gave up his dream of having twelve children.

Grandfather said to him, “He bit you.”

My father replied, “I will bite him.”

“How?” Grandfather asked.

My father took out of his pocket a bullet from the Tikrit boy’s pistol, which he would later make into a keychain. He said, “I’ll stick the remaining bullet in it.” (He said “in it,” and not “in his ass,” because he would never, ever, dare breathe a coarse word in front of Grandfather.) “I will shave his head and his mustache, and I will tattoo or burn ‘Qashmar’ onto his forehead.”

Grandfather said, “When?”

“I don’t know. But I will most certainly do it.”

Grandfather brought him a Qur’an and said,“Swear on this.”

So my father put his hand on the book and took an oath, feeling satisfied in what he had resolved to do when he heard the satisfaction in Grandfather’s voice. My father added, “The Bedouin man took his vengeance after forty years, and he said, ‘I have made good time.’” My father was trying to show the seriousness of his resolve to fulfill his oath, however long it took.

Later on, we noticed the other families of the village, those who did not belong to our tribe, had begun to call us by our family nicknames, such as “Father of Saleem,” or “Son of Noah,” and not by our surnames, which was the usual way
of things. Moreover, we realized that they did it only in front of us, out of respect for our feelings or else fearing a violent response. Their children, however, openly called our children “Qashmars” whenever there were quarrels, and they themselves, in our absence, used the official surname that the government had registered for us. So Grandfather, who hated hypocrisy, decided we would set off for a place all our own.

He spent a week thinking over the matter, gazing out the window of his sitting room at the Tigris River and Mount Makhul rising on the opposite bank, and repeating prayers for guidance before going to sleep. Then he said, “There.”

During the night, we gathered all our belongings and put them in boats. When we reached the middle of the river, Grandfather called out to us, “Throw out every radio and television! Tear up all government documents and cast them in the river!”

We did so, feeling as though we were being liberated from some obscure burden that had been choking us. A woman trilled in joy when she saw how eagerly the men responded, and when she heard their remarks, such as the man who said, mockingly, “The river will carry our shredded papers down to them, and they can squeeze them out to make their tea!” He laughed, and everyone else did too.

We were fewer than one hundred people, together with several cats, dogs, chickens, and donkeys, and one horse. When we reached the shore and drew our boats up on the sand to secure them, we all stood under the moonlight and looked around. We were surrounded by the sound of waves, the rustling of trees, the howling of jackals, the croaking of frogs, and the chirping of grasshoppers in the nearby thickets.

Grandfather proclaimed, “O people of Mutlaq, be united as one! Show each other compassion, care for each other, and
tend to your women and your flocks. Watch out for the hypocrites in the government: do not believe them, do not make friends with them, and do not allow any marriage ties with them. Build your world here according to what God wants and what you want. Do not ask the government for any documents or alms or property. As for the fuel and the medicine you need, barter for it with the people of Subh, but do not engage them in conversation, and do not ask them about anything at all.

“Never forget your vengeance!” (He looked at my father as he said this.) “When the number of your men exceeds seventy—the number of the Prophet’s companions in the Battle of Badr and the number of his grandson Hussein’s companions at Karbala—start blowing up the pillars of government! Strike them with an iron fist, wherever you are able! Bear patiently the disgrace of your surname Qashmar until you take revenge. For I fear you would forget your rightful claim if you forgot the insulting name.

“Let the Qur’an be your school; let hunting and swimming be your sport; let the truth guide your words; let freedom be your goal; let patience be your mode of life; let honesty be your language; let work be your habit; and let remembrance be your rule! Do not lie down to sleep before you absolutely need to. I declare it unlawful for you to eat food made in factories, to work for the tyrannical government, to wear the uniform of the police, or to spill each other’s blood.

“Now come! Let us build a village that we will call Qashmars today so that we will not forget. And after the vengeance, we will call it Freedmen, or Dignity, or The Absolute. O God, maintain our love for freedom and for human dignity. Kill us as you want or as we want, not as our enemies want! Amen, O Lord of the worlds!”

We all responded, according to the ritual, and with all our hearts, “Amen!”

In the silence of the night, the echo reverberated off the mountain, the forest, and the bend in the river. An “Amen!” swelling like the voice of millions of pilgrims or an army preparing for war. Our fervor and the majesty of the echo intensified Grandfather’s zeal. He continued the prayer, leaving us a space of silence after each phrase for us to give it our “Amen!”

“O God, we seek your protection from weakness and sloth. (Amen!)

“We seek your protection from cowardice and greed. (Amen!)

“We seek your protection from debt and from men triumphing over us. (Amen!)

“We seek your protection from need, except for you, from lowliness, except before you, and from fear, except of you. (Amen!)

“We seek your protection from the worst of mankind, from worry for our daily bread, and from wicked ways. (Amen!)

“We seek your protection from our enemies taking joy in our pain, from the illness that doesn’t go away, and from the crushing of our hopes, O most merciful of all merciful ones, O Lord of the worlds! (Amen! A-a-men!)”

Then we carried our things and pressed into the forest, everyone seeking a spot upon which to build his new home. And to this day, I still hear the echo of that “Amen,” awesome like nothing else.

CHAPTER 2

I
loved my father without understanding him. I sensed there was more than one Noah inside of him, but he was able to harmonize them perfectly.

My mother’s duality, however, was clear. This made it all the easier to love her, even though I only realized the magnitude of my love for her when I was away from her, during my time in the army and now too in my exile. She was always there to absorb our anger, and to share in our pain and our joy. She always took care of preparing our food, washing our clothes, and reminding us of our responsibilities. She passed on the orders of the older children to the younger and prevented the older ones from hitting them. She lulled us to sleep with the narrative rhythms of princesses falling in love, female ghouls, monsters, giants, and Sinbad.

Meanwhile, it was beyond me to understand my cousin Aliya even for a day. I loved her unconditionally, without any real reason, only that she had loved me without any hard questions. It was from her that I learned how to love—quite the opposite of everyone else, who considered Grandfather Mutlaq to be
the only possible teacher. But I now realize that the lessons we learned from him didn’t shape our essential selves nearly as much as having adopted him as our inexorable standard did. He was an adversary who forced us to sculpt our private selves in secret.

My father was the eldest of his siblings, so the greatest burden fell on him. Not only the burden of work but also of Grandfather’s notions about a strict upbringing, that a child should be nourished on the concept of blind obedience to parents: “God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents.”

Noah never once refused a request or a command from his father. I remember, for example, how he returned at noon one day in July, exhausted from his work at the oil company in Kirkuk. He would usually go to the guest room first to greet Grandfather (who had lived there alone with his books ever since Grandmother died) and then come to the house to kiss us and shake hands with Mother. On that day, Grandfather ordered him to go repair the broken water pump at the farm. So he left his bag and headed out to the field immediately, without stopping at the house on his way to greet us, bathe, rest, and eat his lunch as he usually did. He didn’t return until he had repaired the pump, just as the sun was setting.

My father never met Grandfather’s eyes and never even looked at his face. He would always stare at the ground, listening intently to Grandfather’s words. He was more than forty years old, yet he said he was ashamed to look into his father’s face. One quiet day, near the banks of the river, he asked me, curious and almost entreating, “How do you look at his face? Have you looked into his eyes? Have you looked into his eyes?”

I wish that I could ask him now, “Then how could you kill him? And how did you arrive here? When? Why exactly did you come to Spain? Was it that you came looking for me?” But
his first embrace had been neutral, not to say cold. As if he hadn’t even wanted to hug me.