Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (4 page)

CHAPTER 3

L
ike the rest of my siblings, I never called him “Father” until I was ten, when I was able to make the distinction. Before then, we would call him by his first name, “Noah,” and we would call Grandfather “Father.” That was because Grandfather was the one who was always home with us.

My father, on the other hand, was usually away, working in the oil companies in Kirkuk. He only came to us on weekends, carrying his bag filled with gifts, foreign books, and dirty clothes. Whenever Mother wanted to encourage us to work harder, she would say, “Look at your father. He was a young man of your age when he began working in Kirkuk. I remember that day, exactly one month and two days after our wedding. More than twenty years ago.”

He had begun as a night watchman, then became a metal worker, and then a mechanic. He did so well in his language classes that they appointed him as a supervisor for the workers, and as a translator and intermediary between the German managers and the Iraqi laborers.

It was never important for Noah to make us understand his relationship to us. He had entrusted our upbringing to Grandfather, just as he kept obeying and entrusting his own personality to him until Grandfather’s death (or until he killed him!). Likewise, he didn’t introduce me as his son here in his club. He said “Saleem” instead. Just “Saleem.” He might have filled in Rosa about that afterward, seeing as she started treating me with a special, sometimes even excessive, affection.

My father—or Noah—was massively built. He had powerful muscles but a calm demeanor. Grandfather, on the other hand, was a skinny old man who supported himself with a magnificent bamboo cane, the top of which was the carved head of an eagle with blue beads for eyes. It had been given to him by a Pakistani friend, whom he had met on a pilgrimage to Mecca as they circled around the Ka’aba. But Grandfather only used this cane of his after scratching away the features of the eagle’s head, turning it into simply a ball or an egg. Since he wasn’t able to pull out the two beads of its eyes, he had been content to deface them with the tip of the knife from a pair of fingernail clippers.

“No!” we protested. “Why, Grandfather?”

He said, “These are idols, and whoever fashions the image of a living creature will be asked by God in the hereafter to animate it with life. And given that he will be unable to do so—because that is one of the special powers of God alone—he will then receive his punishment.”

Mother said that Grandfather had been massive and powerful like my father. In this way she reassured herself that my father’s potbelly would shrink and he would become slender again over time. She didn’t realize that Grandfather was so thin because he had come down with diabetes on account of
his craze for devouring sweets and dates. Our house was never without a bag of dates propped up in one of the corners and a box of bride’s fingers desserts tucked between his books.

The death of my grandmother, his third wife, had also had an effect on him. He had begun to wither and dry up, little by little, like the udder of a sick cow, until he became very skinny. But the power of his spirit and his voice had not been affected. Perhaps, if anything, they had increased and compensated for the loss of his bodily strength. That strength was transformed into the commands he imposed on others with such stern conviction that they would carry out whatever he wanted.

His cane, when he swung it, was no less dreadful than himself. We would hear the air whistle around it, threatening violence every time he grew angry or gave an order. We used to fear both him and it, even though we never saw him hit anyone. It might be that our imaginations magnified his dreadfulness beyond what it would have been had we actually experienced his blows.

What increased our conception of his violent anger, besides the recollection of him biting the dog’s neck when he was small, was the story of him cutting off the finger of his first wife when they quarreled one month after their marriage. She had raised her voice against him and warned that she would complain to her brother Hamad, pointing her finger at him in a threatening gesture. Swelling up in pride, Mutlaq flew into a burning rage. He grabbed her index finger just above the first knuckle and picked up a knife that was beside him on the edge of the stove. He chopped the finger off at the knuckle and shoved the severed fingertip into her pocket. It was the size of a small stone or a date, its blood draining out.

Grandfather set her on her donkey, which she had brought as a gift from her family on the occasion of their wedding, and
drove her out of the village. All the while, she held her amputated finger, shrieking and looking at both it and Grandfather, unable to believe what she saw. He pointed her in the direction of her village and said, “Give your finger to your brother Hamad. Tell him, ‘This is my finger, which I used to threaten Mullah Mutlaq in your name.’ You are hereby divorced irrevocably!”

He struck her donkey sharply on the withers, and it set off at a trot, leaving behind drops of her blood in its hoof prints. She never returned, and it is said that Hamad told her, “You deserved it. How could you ever threaten your husband? If I were in his place, I would have done the same!”

As for his second wife, we didn’t know anything about her except that she died of cancer without bearing any children. The third wife, my grandmother, was the one that had provided him with all nine of his children, the eldest of whom was Noah.

Grandfather took upon himself the naming of his children, his grandchildren, and all those connected to his lineage, but he said, “It is God who chose your names, not I.” That was because as soon as one of us was born, he would perform the ritual ablutions and pray two prostrations. Then he would sit at the head of the newborn and open the Qur’an at random. Looking at the face of the child, or else closing his eyes, he would put his finger on the page, and whatever word his finger landed on would be the name. If it happened to be a preposition or if there wasn’t anything in the verse that suited the baby’s gender, he would close his eyes again and move his finger to another place on the same page.

So it was, to give an example, that the Qur’an opened to the first page of the sura entitled
The Night Journey
when my father was born. The finger fell and indicated the verse:
The descendants of those whom we carried with Noah; verily, he was a
grateful servant.
When my mother bore twin girls, Sundus and Istabraq, his finger fell on verse 31 of
The Cave: Those people have the gardens of Eden, under which the rivers flow. Golden bracelets are bound upon them, and they wear green garments of refined silk (sundus) and brocade (istabraq), reclining there on couches. How excellent is their reward, and how lovely the resting place!
My cousin Aliya’s name came from
The Ultimate Reality,
in verses 22-23:
In a lofty (aliya) garden whose grapes hang low.
As for me, the Qur’an opened to
The Poets,
and his finger fell on the following verse:
A day when neither wealth nor sons will be of any use, except for those who come to God with a sound (saleem) heart.

I don’t know whether “The Poets” had a role in my relationship to poetry. I would read poetry frequently and desperately try to write it, despite my fading hope that I would become a well-known and important poet, as I used to dream when I was young. Or perhaps Aliya was my most important influence, in that I wrote it for her sake? I sent her my first poems with Istabraq, and she became frightened of me.

Grandfather was part of the reason too, for he used to tell us stories of knights who were lovers and poets, and he would recite some of their poems, which were filled with horses, the night, the desert, swords, and the flying heads of enemies. And maybe I was also attracted to poetry because of my father, who had memorized Goethe’s
Poems of the East and the West
in German, even if he didn’t understand all the words. His German friend Kristof, head of the division of workers in one of the Kirkuk oil companies, had given it to him, saying, “Read this. He was one of us, but he loved your prophet.” So my father memorized it one weekend, going back and forth on the banks of the Tigris River, waving his arms, imagining an audience in the waves, the pebbles, and the willow trees.

At that time I was a little boy, spying on him from the cliff over the river. I imagined that he was preparing for an exam since my eldest brother, Hakeem, would do the same thing during the days of his exams. One of the times that my father turned to face his audience, he caught sight of me and called me over. I hurried down to him. He sat on a rock and hung his feet in the water, setting me on his knees. He spoke admiringly about Goethe and translated some passages from his book for me. I didn’t understand anything because I was focused on my wish to be big like him so that my feet would reach the water. Just like how I would put off trying to understand things in general until I was older.

My father was repeating, “The Germans are an amazing people. Imagine: Kristof is my boss at work, but he is also my friend! He says to me, ‘Your people invented the phoenix with your imagination, and mine personified it in the world.’ His wife, Sabina, is blond and beautiful. She writes poetry and joins us in the oil work. The Germans are an amazing people, Saleem, an amazing people.”

Because of how frequently my father spoke to me about the Germans, I used to imagine that they were like the people of Paradise, whom Grandfather would describe for us: “In Paradise, which we will enter in the afterlife, everyone is young. Everyone is one hundred feet tall. No one becomes sick, grows old, or dies. They eat what they want, when they want it. They point a finger at any bird, and it falls from the branches of the trees of Paradise; it is placed on a plate in front of them to eat, grilled and delicious; they eat as much as they want; then the bird’s bones reassemble, and in an instant it regains its form and lives again, returning to its branch. We will not defecate there. On the contrary, we will sweat perfume. We will have
magnificent forms, and we will have beautiful women from among the nymphs of Paradise: if one of them peeked out from the sky right now, the light of her face would illuminate the earth. We will lie with them, but they will regain their virginity. To drink, we will dip our hand into rivers of wine, honey, milk, and whatever the soul desires.”

I imagined them in this way because my father never tired of saying, “The Germans are an amazing people.” He learned German and English from the foreigners at the oil companies. He memorized passages of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
as well. Of course, he had also memorized the entire Qur’an because Grandfather was intent on making all of us memorize it. He said that it would be our closest friend in the desolation of the grave, and an advocate to defend us before the court of the two angels, Munkar and Nakeer: “When a person dies, he is buried and abandoned all alone. Then the two angels come and examine him. Therefore, if they ask you who is your lord, say, ‘God’; about your prophet, say, ‘Muhammad’; about your religion, say, ‘Islam’; and about your book, say, ‘The Qur’an.’”

Among all the members of our family, my father was the only one who kept the complete Qur’an preserved in his memory. Therefore, Grandfather would ask his help as he advanced in years and his memory began to fail him. As for us, the children of the next generation, we memorized some sections and forgot them, with the exception of the shorter suras and the verses associated with our names because Grandfather was intent on each of us knowing at least the verse from which our name had sprung.

He would say, “God was the one who chose your names, and their source is here in his book. Look!” Then he would point out for each of us the verse with his finger, as though he were reenacting for us the scene of our own naming, which we had not seen.

Many of the people of our village followed this naming method of his. For some of them, fate brought a rare and beautiful name, while for others, the name entailed problems and psychological suffering. An example of that was Aunt Huda’s son, whose father’s finger fell upon the word sirat (“path”). When we were small and quarreled with Sirat as we played, we would call him dirat (“fart”). In school, whenever he left the room and we could get hold of his notebooks, we would change his name by adding a dot over the letter saad to make it a daad. As a result, he grew up to be the opposite of his peaceful nature and his family’s reserved disposition. He became a fierce boy who would get into many fights, tortured by bearing this name that didn’t give him any rest until his corpse came back with those of my brother Hakeem and three of my cousins among the seventeen decomposing bodies.

We used to pick on Sirat and provoke him, then run away. When he realized that we had escaped his grasp, or when the stones he threw didn’t reach us, he would yell in a loud, agonized voice, “Are you making fun of the name that God gave me? Don’t you fear going to hell? Are you laughing at the painter or the painting?”

That would make us truly ashamed, and we did become afraid of God and pray for forgiveness because we were reminded of a story Grandfather had told us about a man whose name was Malik bin Dinar (“King, son of Gold Coin”). At the time, we had laughed at the name Dinar, only to be scolded by Grandfather before he continued his story. Malik was going along the road one day when he happened upon a donkey (or a dog—I don’t remember exactly now). The donkey was colored in a strange way: white with black spots on its eyes, ears, stomach, and tail. Malik burst out laughing, but then the
donkey turned to him and spoke in a human voice, saying, “Are you laughing at the painter or the painting?” Malik immediately understood the reference to the Creator and the donkey. He fell to his knees and prostrated himself in repentance. He kept crying for forty years and asking God’s forgiveness for the mockery and scorn that he had shown one of his creatures. In the end, after he spent forty years weeping and showing special attention to every donkey he saw, God forgave him.

Only that sentence—“Are you laughing at the painter or the painting?”—could keep us from harassing Sirat. But we would quickly forget it and just as quickly resume our bullying. It continued like that until he died and received his rest—from us and from his name.