Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (20 page)

Another factor that brought her closer to my inner world was that she reminded me of the appointed times for prayer. Moreover, she resumed her own practice of praying, intermittently at first, then regularly.

I certainly spoke to Fatima about Aliya a lot, and her eyes teared up when she saw me crying as I described the scene of Aliya’s drowning. She embraced me very tenderly, allowing me to pour out all the tears I had in me. Afterward, she didn’t show any jealousy over Aliya’s place in my memory. And she laughed when I told her about the poems that I used to write for Aliya and Aliya’s reaction to them.

As our discussion of poetry broadened, Fatima learned from my responses that I still wrote poetry, and I learned what she thought about it. She was entirely indifferent toward poetry. Rather, to tell the truth, she actually didn’t care for it, even though she claimed, like everyone else, that she liked it. She recited from memory some lines of classical poetry that she had memorized in her school days. But she hadn’t memorized or read anything beyond this. At the same time, she had memorized the words to heaps of Arabic and Spanish songs. She asked
me if I would show her some of my poetry. I tried to refuse in order to avoid any possible discord, but in the end I agreed, thinking it necessary for her to know about what interested me.

“I don’t know where I put what I used to call poems. Wait a moment; I’ll look for them. They might be folded into the pages of one of the books that I was reading four years ago. Under my bed there is a box containing some of them.” The dust rose up, and I sneezed. “Here’s one. Should I read it to you? No, I’m too embarrassed to do it. No! Well, okay, I’ll read it as an example. Listen. Of course, the person meant here is Aliya. Listen:

More precious than light in the dark prison cell

Sweeter than dates to the man who is fasting

Her lips, two dates

Her fingers, rare fruits

Her eyes … speech fails

Shyly she passed, piercing the clouds with her glance

A peasant girl she bloomed, overlooked by the politicians

Her nipples are forbidden to the passion of men

Yet permitted to the water and the breeze on the roof

She will decamp to the unseen, and you will spy her

Never, ever again.

Fatima smiled at my mention of the dates, and when I finished, she clapped gaily and said, “I like it!” Then she asked innocently, “Is it poetry?”

It came to me that she didn’t even know about the existence of modern, unrhymed poetry. I dove into an exposition of modern verse, citing folk songs and the poetry of al-Sayyab as examples. So in the matter of poetry, she differed from Aliya.

I had a deeply rooted conviction that Fatima was the right woman to share the rest of my life with. It was even more clear that she would be my wife. We happily discussed our relationship in this way and made plans to find an appropriate moment to bring the subject up with our families. Was my father, too, trying to find an appropriate moment to let me know that he had decided on the time when he would carry out his mission? This single thing was what most disturbed me and made me anxious. For here I was, finding my life to be in order. As far as I could tell, all its details were organized and clearly understood, especially in regard to work, women, and the future, which I could now almost see.

It almost happened that I broached the subject myself. I would transform my anxious waiting into a matter that was in my own hands. But it was hard for me to find the right way to start. And what ideas could I put forward? How could I form an argument strong enough to turn him away from what he had resolved to do? So it was, as often happens in life, that the moment came on its own, without any decision on my part or his.

It was during his first visit to my apartment. He came a little before noon for some work-related business. He also said he wanted to see the home to which I had invited him more than once. The first thing that startled him—as happens with nearly all visitors to my house—was the overwhelming sight of pictures of Iraq covering the living room’s ceiling and walls. What surprised me was the difference between his reaction and everyone else’s. After he had wandered around more than once, staring at them and approaching some to examine them more closely and identify the scenes, he gave me a long look, biting his tongue on several responses. It was as though he were cycling through them to find the one that expressed
what he wanted. And that was the case, for after he slapped one hand against the other, he stood in front of me, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “What is this, Saleem?”

His censuring tone provoked the echo in my question. “What do you mean?” I blurted out.

He said, “I used to think you had better sense than this. That you didn’t give in to the sick nostalgia that afflicts most exiles, who imagine that everything is beautiful in their abandoned countries, even the ruins and the garbage dumps.”

“But it’s our homeland, Dad,” I protested. “My homeland.”

He uncrossed his arms to illustrate his point, shaking one of them in the air. “No! True homeland is that which we fashion for ourselves, just as we want. Not as someone else makes it, like the tyrant did. That’s not the kind of homeland we want. That’s why we abandoned it. Homeland is like love. It is a choice, not an obligation. If you must put up pictures of a homeland, then put up the ones that you, yourself, want, or even those that you have made on your own. No, no ….”

He was shaking his hand toward the pictures as though saying goodbye to them or refusing something that the walls were offering him. He turned around in a circle where he was, and then he sat on the couch, heaving a deep sigh. He continued to express his disappointment, “No, no. I used to think you had better sense.”

His words provoked me. I felt as though he were tearing down my kingdom, which I had built and arranged with persistent patience over the course of years. In my loneliness, I had invented a complete story for nearly all these pictures, a history, a world. His arrogant dismissal—in a single moment and so easily—of everything that I had established and lived with happily throughout my ten years of exile here enraged me. I felt
as though he had killed my entire family with a single bomb, a family I had formed out of long effort, love, and private dreams.

Therefore, as had just happened to him, I fell silent, searching for the decisive response that would avenge my soul’s wound. I exhaled deeply in my turn and found that I was shaking. My body temperature was rising. I quickly sat in front of him, looking into his eyes with a stormy challenge and a feeling of strength that I had never before known in myself. As a result, my words came out choked and agitated, strikingly aggressive: “And I used to think you had better sense too.”

My words surprised him, of course, and he asked, “How so?”

I picked my chair up and set it down further back, moving away from him a little. I said, “That you would do all this for the sake of achieving a backward, foolish, and insane goal like shoving a bullet up someone’s ass. You are deceiving Mother and abandoning your family. You are deceiving Rosa and exploiting her. Then there’s this radical betrayal of your entire personal, moral, and religious heritage. All that for the sake of a foolish goal!”

I felt both power and relief after saying that, especially when I noticed that I was able to anger and provoke him as much as he had me, if not more. His face contorted and flushed as though I had stabbed him. He wiped his face with his palms and shook his head back and forth as he attempted to absorb the blow and regain control of his emotions. When he spoke, there was a change in his tone of voice that testified clearly to the difficulty he had maintaining his composure.

“I haven’t deceived anyone. Not your mother: I was up front with her about the entire thing, just as I’ve already told you. And not Rosa, whom I actually love. I also haven’t betrayed my moral and religious heritage, as you say. Indeed, the complete opposite! What I’m intending to do is a serious and sincere
fulfillment of that heritage. The only reason I’m breaking my back here is to fulfill an oath I swore on the Qur’an in front of a person who is gone forever. If I were not fully committed to my moral heritage, there wouldn’t be anything else forcing me to fulfill an oath like this.”

I spoke in a still-belligerent tone: “What kind of backwardness is this? And what madness? We are now in a different era, a different country, a different culture! No one will understand an act like this. What you are intending to do will even be considered a serious crime, and the law will condemn you for it.”

Worked up, he rose from his seat, displaying his customary behavior when he’s angry. I would describe it as theatrical, not because he was acting, but because of his intensity. He paced around the room and gestured with his entire body. Every moveable part of him was shaking to the rhythm of words that seemed to be ripped forcibly from his bowels.

“Where is this era of yours? And its culture and laws, while it sees us massacred on a daily basis in our country, right before its eyes? Hell, even with their support sometimes! Huh? Where? Where?”

He was truly frightening as he circled around me like a raging bull, right around my chair, which made me stand up in front of him as though by instinct. Meanwhile, he kept on yelling and kicking the wall. I was certain that if we had been in his house, he would have started smashing everything in his path.

“Well? Where are the laws and the civilization of this pathetic, hypocritical, despicable, fucked-up world? It sees us driven like innocent sheep to the slaughter. Well? Yes, say it! Say clearly that you don’t want to help me. You can be sure that I’m not asking you to. I don’t need you for it. I wasn’t counting on you. You were right to let me know where you stand
before I made myself believe in you any longer. Well, say it then! Speak up! You’re afraid, cowardly, a pussy. You’re chicken shit, a traitor. You’re all fucked up!”

That’s when I somehow brought my face right in front of his. We were standing like roosters in the fighting pit, all puffed up. I shouted, “I am not a coward! The truly cowardly thing is what you intend to do. So you are the cowa—.”

He slapped me on the face with his entire strength, knocking me to the ground. Then he left, slamming the door with a violence that made the whole building shake.

CHAPTER 15

W
hen Fatima came that evening, she found me completely naked, submerged in the bathtub. After my father had slapped me and slammed the door behind him, I remained lying on the floor for a while, sobbing. His palm had paralyzed my face. I reached out to the lowest of the pictures and pulled it down. I began to rip the pictures off the wall and tear them up, bitterly running on at the mouth, “I don’t want a homeland. May God damn it and everything else! I’ve only known pain there, and I’ve only carried pain away with me. My homeland is Spain. No, not even Spain. I don’t want any homeland! I don’t need a homeland.”

I stared at the shredded pictures in front of me. Then I started sobbing with a dejected tenderness, “But Iraq … Iraq! Dad!”

I got up onto my knees and tried to put the torn pictures back in their places. My insides surged with tumultuous, conflicting emotions. An inner rage brought me to my feet in a madness, and I began tearing down the hanging pictures and scattering them like chaff. I felt my right cheek with my hand: the stinging had started to burn even more. I staggered into the
bedroom and ripped up everything there. Then I threw myself on the bed and wrapped myself up completely in the blanket. I rolled myself as tightly as I could into a fetal position, as though embracing myself. I cried there and shook, like a child who has received an entirely unexpected punishment from parents who had been caressing him. My delirium came in waves that crashed over me in the darkness under the covers. I was tossed back and forth between cursing everything and repeating my father’s phrase: “This world is all fucked up. This world is all fucked up.”

I decided I would never see my father after that day, that I would cut him off and remove him from my life completely. It would be as though he had never existed—he, my family, Grandfather. “Ah, Grandfather! How much I need now the extreme tenderness of your fingers caressing us in the sick bed! I am now in my bed, Grandfather, alone and hurting. But you might side with my father because he wants to carry out your every wish. Or else just because he is my father, and you would always say that it’s not permitted to criticize one’s parents or talk back to them for ‘he whose parents are displeased will not obtain God’s favor.’

“I’m sorry, Father. I’ve sinned against you. I was insolent toward you and raised my voice inappropriately. I deserved more than a single slap from you for that. Forgive me, Father. But I’m not comfortable with what you want to do. I tried to divert you because I love you and I’m afraid for you. Yes, I’m afraid. Not because I’m a coward, as you believe, since this fear of mine is of another sort. Do you understand? Do you understand me?

“Throughout my exile I would see you sit me down, a child, on your knee, with your feet in the shallows of the Tigris, as you read Goethe’s poems to me. Why can’t you be the person whose back I longed to clasp when riding our donkey on the
way to the highway? Tender moments, during which I would feel that my small heart was embracing your heart through my ribs and yours. As far as I was concerned, even the odor of your armpits was the most fragrant thing I ever smelled. We would wave to each other, and I would keep watching as you got further away. I would wave and wave until the car would disappear with you, a black dot on the black line of the road. Your slap today—was it a wave in our final parting?”

In the darkness under the blanket, internal billows shook me. I felt as though my sweat formed waves that met the surge of my violent tears and the flood of pain rising up behind my face. I don’t know how long I remained like this. Then I got up, heading toward the bathroom. My right cheek was less red than I had expected, given that I imagined it would be stained with blood. I washed my cheek with cold water and said, “I need water. Water, Aliya, water.”