Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (21 page)

I filled the bathtub, throwing all my clothes on the floor. I stretched out in the water and leaned my head against the edge, sinking in up to my neck, to my ears. I needed to not hear anything. I needed to not hear myself, or my father’s slapping me, or his slamming my apartment door. I sank to my ears, to my chin, until I was suffocating … until Fatima came and fell upon me with a broken heart: “Saleem, baby! What’s wrong? What happened?”

She squatted next to the tub and took my head, pressing it to her chest. Like my mother, like Aliya, like Grandfather in his moments of tenderness. Maybe I cried again. Fatima raised me up compassionately and wrapped me gently in a bathrobe, embracing me. It was like when my mother would snatch me out of the washing basin, crooning songs of the harvest, tea, and rain:

Rain, rain, O high rain

Lengthen the hair of my head

My head, head, O my high head

Rain on the people.

She would take me joyfully and smell me, as though I were a ripe apple. Then she would kiss me and say, “My God, how sweet is my little Saleem. My baby is clean! My baby is clean!”

Fatima said, “Come to bed, baby.” She stretched me out under the covers for a second time. She arranged the damp hair of my forehead for me, brushing it away from my eyes with fingers like feathers. She kissed me on the forehead and on my nose, and I brought her fingers to the surface of my right cheek, where perhaps the stinging had subsided, where perhaps the red had disappeared. Maybe that was the case since she didn’t ask me about it. Or else she saw it and imagined it was from leaning against the edge of the bathtub. She didn’t ask me about it and was content to repeat her question, “What happened?”

And I repeated, “It’s nothing, nothing.”

After a while, she continued, “I found the club closed, and when I rang at your father’s place, Rosa came out to me and led me away from the door, whispering that something had happened between you two—I mean, between you and your father, Mr. Noah. She said he was lying in bed, drinking, smoking, and shaking. That he was in bad shape. She just told me something had happened between you two, nothing more, and that we wouldn’t open the club for work today. And she said, ‘Go, Fatima; stay with Saleem.’ What happened, Saleem? And why are all the pictures torn like that? You’re shaking.”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. Or, yes, I sinned against my father. I raised my voice against him and behaved shamefully. Do you
know, Fatima, that my father never once looked into Grandfather’s face? Never! He respected him and revered him as one ought to. But me, me … !”

“Take it easy, baby. Everything will work out. It’s okay. Everything will turn out fine.”

“No! I’ll never turn out fine!”

“Rest now. Rest, and I’ll make you some green tea.”

I didn’t leave the house for two days. Fatima took care of me as though I were sick. She helped me carry out my desire of taking down all the photos, and she gathered the ones I had shredded into a single box. Sometimes she would caress my lips with her fingers and joke with me, openly flirtatious, “Do you want dates?” The longest that she was gone was to go bring me a pack of cigarettes, to shop, or to visit her sister. I later learned that she would meet with Rosa since she wouldn’t speak with her on the telephone except to exchange a few words, mostly just repeating, “Yes … yes … okay.”

Then Rosa came to me on Friday morning. Fatima had left me on the pretext that her sister needed her that day and that she had to take care of a few household chores like washing clothes, sweeping the floors, and shopping. She said that she would come back in the evening, “and your food is ready in the refrigerator.”

Rosa embraced me and wept as she interceded, “I’m begging you, Saleem! Come with me to visit your father. He’s killing himself like this. He doesn’t eat. He only drinks alcohol and smokes. He sometimes sleeps, shivering and delusional in his bed. He hits his head with his fists; he punches, kicks, and head-butts the walls; he knocks his head against the iron of the bed. He’s destroying everything. He’s destroying himself! He’s in agony, Saleem. I accepted your mediation between us—do you remember? So accept my mediation between the two of
you. I’m begging you. He’ll kill himself if he keeps going on in this way. He’s torturing himself because he slapped you, and he isn’t telling me the truth about what happened. He just slaps himself all the time and says, ‘I struck Saleem, Rosa! I’m an animal. I’m an animal.’ Please, Saleem, come with me. Because he’ll kill himself like this. And if something awful happens to him, I’ll die too. Please!”

I went with her, taking along two packs of cigarettes and a heart beating with noisy commotion. She opened the door for me cautiously and whispered, “You go in; I’ll stay here.”

I saw my father lying on the couch in the dark living room. His hair was disheveled. One arm was hanging off the edge of the couch, holding a glass, and he took a drag from the cigarette in his other hand. As soon as he saw me, he rushed over to embrace me. We cried on each other’s necks, each of us asking the other’s forgiveness. He said he was a failure of a father, and I said I was a disrespectful son. “Forgive me! Please forgive me!”

When we stepped back from our embrace, I found him turning his right cheek to me, saying, “Hit me! Hit me!”

“No, Dad! No!” I kissed his cheek and embraced him again.

He seemed thinner to me, exhausted, defeated. I had never seen weakness like this in him before. When we had calmed down, we sat down next to each other on the couch with empty glasses all around and an overflowing ashtray on the coffee table in front of us. We felt more united than at any other time. We felt our loneliness and our true exile in this “fucked-up” world more than ever before.

Now that calm had the upper hand, I wondered whether I should take advantage of the situation by making it a condition of my forgiveness that he abandon his determination to carry out his goal. But I contented myself with leaving things as they
were, for I was the one who needed pardon from him. Moreover, I wanted to avoid stirring up the subject a second time.

But during our subsequent conversation, I found myself indicating what I wanted in another, less forceful way, with feigned neutrality. He was the one who brought the subject up when he exposed the truth of his hidden weakness, or more precisely, what I knew to be his strength. He revealed to me the struggle inside himself over this issue, for he was, as he put it, caught between two fires. One of them was what I earlier called his moral and religious heritage. I knew the power of an oath on the Qur’an, especially because he had given it in Grandfather’s venerable presence. I also knew the meaning of vengeance and its importance, to the point of holiness, in our social customs.

The other fire was his private conviction, which suited both his personality and my own, that he, in all honesty, rejected violence and the culture of revenge, and that he disapproved of fanaticism. “Believe me, Saleem, even if I appear in the hide of a wolf, I have the heart of a meek lamb.” He said that if he carried out his goal, he would regret it and torture himself. And if he did not carry it out, he would regret it and torture himself then too.

“You will not regret it, Father, and you will not torture yourself. Believe me!”

“But I took an oath on the Qur’an, Saleem. I made a covenant with my father.”

“It says in the Qur’an, ‘God will not blame you for speaking rashly in your vow.’”

“I wasn’t being rash. I was speaking honestly and seriously in my oath.”

“It was the effect of the moment. It took place during an exceptional moment, filled with anger and devoid of clear thinking. God is great; he knows this and everything else.
Grandfather will understand when things are clearer and more open in the world to come.”

I supported my argument with what I remembered from the Qur’an and the sayings of the Prophet, especially when I noticed how easy it was for my father to accept them. It may have been that he, at his core, wanted a justification from this exact source. “The Qur’an also says,
If you dole out punishment, dole it out according to what was inflicted upon you. But if you exercise patience, verily, that is better for the patient ones.
”

“And Azad? What will I say to my brother Azad?”

“Tell him anything. That you carried out the deed. Or that the person you were pursuing wasn’t the right one. Or that he went off to another country, in an unknown direction, to hell. Or that he died. Or anything! Or tell him the truth about your new conviction. Indeed, you could even try to persuade him to stop the series of his acts of vengeance and reprisal. The principle of an eye for an eye is bitter, Dad. It’s true that we’re the ones who established it, but humanity’s subsequent experiences have shown that applying it will, in the end, leave us all blind.”

“It’s not that simple, Saleem. I’ve piled my hatred upon this person for all these years. How could it be possible for me to rid myself of all that in a moment?”

I was silent for a little while, conscious of how the speech had poured from my tongue and how easily the wisdom had come—if it is permissible for me to describe it in this way or to ascribe such a thing to myself.

“In order to get it all off your chest, I think it would be good to call him right now on the telephone. Make him hear everything you want to say.”

I got up and took hold of the telephone book, flipping through its yellow pages, while he looked on with a grave
expression. The cigarette was never far from his mouth, and a cloud of smoke wrapped around his face. Then I heard him say, “I have his name and telephone number.”

He pulled out of his pocket a small address book and opened it up. He held it out to me, pointing to the name and number.

Without looking at his face, I began to turn the dial of the telephone, and when a woman’s voice answered, I asked her to connect me with the person in question. “Please, it’s important.”

She said, “Just a moment, please.”

I held the receiver out to my father and began to watch him. His hand was trembling, his lips quivering. After some short moments of waiting, he burst out in a loud, choked voice, “Why?” Then the awful shout poured out of him to the point of shaking his whole body, “Why?! Why have you done all this to us, you criminals?! You ignoble pigs! You bastards! You—”

Through the phone’s receiver, I heard the other line being cut off, then the dial tone came on. Meanwhile, my father continued shouting, “Why? Why?”

I fell upon him with a hug as he broke into tears, gasping like a slaughtered bull. Rosa burst in anxiously. She embraced us both together, asking desperately, “What happened? What happened?” Then she hurried to the kitchen, coming back with a jar of water, which she used to wash my father’s face and give him something to drink.

After some time—I can’t say how long exactly—of this burning rage, the likes of which I’d never known in my life, and which I doubt I will ever witness again, my father calmed down more than we expected. He was like someone who had vomited out the poisonous food that was hurting him, as though the “why?” was a hurt that had been eating his heart. Little by little, the pallor in his face subsided.

At that point I said to him, “What do you think about us going together to the mosque today for Friday prayers?”

I read a sort of relief in his features, and he nodded to me in agreement.

“In that case, I’ll go home now while you shower and eat something. I’ll come to get you.”

I kissed him and went out. Rosa’s glance followed me, filled with gratitude and questions. She still had one arm hooked around my father’s neck and was holding a jar of water in her other hand.

CHAPTER 16

A
fter we left the mosque following last Friday’s prayers, my father shook my hand. “May your prayers be acceptable in God’s sight!” he said, giving the customary blessing. “Thank you, Saleem.” After he was quiet for a while, he added, “I didn’t expect to find so many Muslims here, or this beautiful mosque.”

He was calm, as though his heart were made of still water. A halo of spiritual contentment clearly enveloped him. I felt at the time that I had regained my father, finding him much as I remembered him to be. So I decided to stop digging up whatever he was hiding. I would stop wondering about it entirely. I would forget. Or, to be more precise, I’d pretend to have forgotten it all, especially everything connected to how Grandfather died. And I wouldn’t ask if he had given up his goal of fulfilling his oath, or whether he had only delayed it and would carry it out without my knowing.

I reinforced this resolve with what the mosque’s preacher said, even if I was only using it as an excuse: “O my brothers, God says in the Qur’an,
Don’t ask about things that, if they become
clear, will hurt you.
It is not necessary to know everything. If sometimes there is a comfort in knowledge, at other times ignorance and forgetting have a comfort that is even greater.”

I felt a certain satisfaction as I recalled my sense in recent days that the details of my life were coming back under control. I painted the walls of my living room, covering the nail holes with white. My father dyed his hair black. Fatima said that her family had agreed to her marrying me.

“All that’s left is for us to inform your father!”

My father and Rosa, after having confirmed that everything was ready for the party that night, were sitting harmoniously in front of us on the other side of the bar, looking very elegant. My father said to me with a laugh, “Your hair has gotten long. Do you want me to cut it for you again?”

My father hadn’t stopped drinking and smoking, but more than once he had mentioned his intention to cut back. I remembered how he had said to me a couple of days earlier, “I think that it would be good for us to try to go to the mosque every Friday.” He raised the glass that was in his hand and added with a smile, “At the very least, in order to cut back on our sins!”

It was evening, and just the four of us were in the club. The two Spanish waitresses hadn’t arrived yet. My father and Rosa were whispering together happily. Fatima murmured to me, “Come on, let’s tell them.”