Daughters of Iraq (11 page)

I didn’t understand. Today, many years after that moment, many years since
Aba
has passed on, I know what he meant. He never thought he’d live to see that day, to touch the land his father, grandfather, and grandfather’s grandfather had wished and prayed for. And here he was, the first in all those generations privileged to move to the Promised Land.

Chapter Thirteen: Farida

F
arida woke in a good mood. She stretched her legs luxuriously, heaved herself up, and walked over to the closet. It was filled with dresses, some of which she hadn’t worn in thirty years, others she’d never worn at all. One of them, a shabby red dress, had been her favorite. Although it didn’t exactly flatter the lines of her body, Farida pulled it over her head and examined herself in the mirror. She applied red lipstick, which only emphasized the gap between what she wanted to see and what she did see in the mirror. She slipped on walking shoes, left the house, and headed toward the bus stop. On the way, she encountered Dora, her Romanian neighbor from down the hill, and wished her a good morning.

Dora bombarded Farida with a stream of polite questions. “Good morning to you, too, Farida, how are you? The children? The grandchildren?”

The two of them chatted as usual, Dora complaining about her husband who hadn’t left the house since he’d retired, Farida envying her neighbor for having someone at home to keep her company.

“Patience, Dora. Think how nice it is for you, not being alone. I can’t remember the last time I woke up next to a man, even one who behaves like a little boy.” Farida put her hands on her hips and rebuked her neighbor: “When was the last time someone said something nice to me? Or brought me a cup of tea when I was sick? All my days and nights are like this. Lonely.”

“You know what?” Dora chuckled nervously. She seemed taken aback, unsure how to respond to her neighbor of more than thirty years. “You might be right. But believe me, things were better when he was working. At least it was quiet.”

“Everything will be alright, Dora,” Farida assured her. “You should visit me once in a while. At my house it’s quiet. You can have all the rest you want. I’ll make you some strong coffee, just as you like it, and we’ll read our fortunes in the coffee grounds.” They often drank Turkish coffee together, then inverted their cups when they finished, deposited the piled grounds on the table, waited for them to dry, and read their futures in the brown mosaic. “
Ya’allah
,” Farida said, trying to wrap up the conversation—it was putting her in a bad mood. “I’ve got to get moving; my bus is almost here.”

“Where are you going?” Dora asked.

“Town. To get my hair cut, colored, and styled. Look at me! I’m a train wreck, as Sigali would say.
Ya’allah
,
my dear,” she said, “
Salaam
. And come visit me, Okay?”

As she continued down the street, Farida ran into Carmella from the first floor, who asked her about Sigal, and Jamil from the market, who complimented her dress. After that, she felt a little lighter on her feet. She stepped onto the bus, greeted the driver, and sat down behind him.

The bus wove its way through the neighborhood. People came on and got off, said hello to each other, asked after one relative or another. Everyone in the small town knew one another, and they knew all the gossip: who was pregnant and when they were due; who was having an affair; who was getting divorced; who was getting married; who owed money. Knowing each other’s business was a fact of life here, for better or for worse, and Farida felt at home. When the bus arrived downtown, she got off and walked toward the beauty shop.

A fellow named Shimon owned and operated the small salon. His uncle had given him the shop when he’d retired. Shimon had renovated the place, installed a stereo system, and installed comfortable chairs. He’d even set up an aquarium for the clients to enjoy. The salon was the social hub of the neighborhood. Everyone stopped by, and not just for a haircut. They came to drink coffee, talk about this and that, see and be seen. Gossip reached the salon first.

Farida walked into the salon, sat down, and gazed into the mirror opposite her. She grimaced as she ran her hand through her hair. Shimon waited patiently for her to complete the ritual, then offered her something to drink.

“Just some cold water,” Farida said. “You know how it is, the diet.” But when she turned her head and saw the plate of cookies on the table, she was suddenly hungry. She pointed to the sweet date-filled cookies. “Is that
ma’amul
?”

“
Walla
, yes, fresher than fresh. My mother baked them yesterday. Do you want to try one?”

“Your mother, may she live and be well, knows how to bake.” Farida took one and tasted it, smacked her lips, and—like a true epicurean—rolled her eyes in pleasure.

Shimon waited for the verdict. “Well? What do you think?”

“
Walla
,
these date cookies are the best I’ve ever had—almost as good as my
baba
with dates.
Ya’allah
,
don’t be stingy—bring me another one.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Shimon said. He put the plate in front of her and got to work.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy? I told you I was on a diet. I only asked for one, remember? If you leave them here, I’ll eat them all.”

“Alright, alright.” Shimon chuckled as he removed the plate. He stood next to her, staring at her hair and rubbing his stubbly cheeks. Not shaving—that was the style among young people, she thought, among lazy people. “So what are we doing today?” he asked, passing a comb through Farida’s thin hair.

Farida stared into the mirror and sighed. She spoke in her sweetest voice: “Shimon, I’m counting on you. I come in here looking like
kusa machsi
—you know what that is?”

“No, what is it?”

“
Kusa machshi
is stuffed squash. It means I look like what young people call a train wreck.”

Shimon was about to respond, but Farida stopped him. “Wait a minute—I still haven’t told you how I’m going to look when I walk out of here.”

“How are you going to look?” Shimon smiled.

“I’m going to look like a bride,” Farida said, tossing her head. “Do whatever you want,
ya’allah
,
surprise me.” She ran her hand through her hair and flashed him a skeptical smile.

Shimon thought for a minute, then said, “I want to cut the front and the sides and leave it a little longer in the back. And color it. What do you say?”

“Whatever you want, minus a twenty percent discount,” Farida laughed.

“It’s a deal.” Farida was a loyal client, and she also referred a lot of her friends to him.

“Farida,” Shimon said. “You know how we do it. I work, and you tell me stories.” This was the custom between them. Farida was telling him her life story, one chapter at a time. Every time she went to the salon, Shimon would hear another segment, always with a humorous slant, which he liked.

“So what are we going to hear today?”

“Today you’ll hear about what happened when we got to Israel.” She said
Israel
with an exaggerated accent. “How does that sound?”

“Sounds good,” Shimon said and again offered her coffee or tea.

“You gave me cold water, don’t you remember? Listen, Shimon,
I
may be senile, but
you’re
still much too young.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with me,” Shimon laughed. “You’ve got me all confused.”

 “Are you ready to start?” He nodded, and she contemplated Iraq, in the summer of 1950. “Okay. So one day, I remember it was right in the middle of a sweltering Iraqi summer, my father gathered the family and told us they’d decided to move to Israel. I couldn’t understand what was so great about Israel; in fact, I thought my life there would be worse. I was angry. I told my father that in Iraq we had friends and family, and I didn’t want to leave them.

“My father told me we couldn’t go on living in Iraq because we had no money and, regardless, soon everyone would be gone. There was a mass exodus to the holy land underway. You have to understand what it was like back then. My father had been out of work for two years already, but we kids wanted for nothing. Nobody had told us
Aba
had been fired, that he spent every day at the coffee shop playing backgammon. How could I have known he wasn’t working? Only on that day did I learn he’d been out of work since Israel had been declared a state. He was fired because he was Jewish, and that was that; he was never able to find another job.”

Farida settled herself in the chair. “What can I tell you? It wasn’t easy for me to hear that. In my eyes, my father was invincible. He was so strong.” Farida made a tight fist. “Eddie, the wunderkind of my sister,
allah yirchama
”—she stopped to wipe away a tear—“the star student of
Shumash
,
didn’t get into university for the same reason: he was Jewish. He worked as an accountant for a bit and brought in some money, and my brothers-in-law also worked a little here and there. That’s how our family got by. You have to understand, they began stripping my father’s dignity in Iraq—then, here in Israel, whatever dignity he had left was completely destroyed.” Even after all these years, Farida was still angry. “But never mind that—that’s a completely different story, the story of my father. Do you know what it means to finish
Shumash
with honors, like Eddie did?”

“What’s
Shumash
?”

“It’s the best school in Iraq.”

“Ah,” Shimon said. “Good for him. Those Iraqi bastards.”

“Did you know that in Iraq, the whole family lived in a kind of commune?”

“I think I know what you’re talking about,” Shimon said. “My parents lived like that in Morocco, the entire family together, right?”

“Yes, exactly. Everyone helps everyone else. Remember my nephew, Eddie, who I was just talking about?”

“Yes, of course I remember. You’ve told me about him many times. He was killed in one of the wars, right?”

“No, not in a war,
allah yirchamu
.” Farida was quiet.

Shimon applied the dye to Farida’s hair, not saying a word.

“When my father told us we were moving to Israel,” Farida continued, “we understood that my mother and Eddie would stay in Baghdad, because Eddie couldn’t leave his friends from the underground. He was a youth leader, too. It broke my heart,” Farida said, and even now, forty years after that difficult day, her eyes welled with tears. She wiped more tears from her cheeks. “What can I tell you? I cried a lot that day, and for many days after. I was afraid something would happen, and I didn’t want to say goodbye to Eddie, or to my mother. We had to be on the plane within twenty-four hours, they told us. Each of us took one thing, no more, and we wore our best clothes. Can you imagine that? I didn’t even have time to get used to the idea.”

“That’s tough,” Shimon agreed. “I need at least a month to prepare for a trip to Eilat.”

“On the day of the flight,” Farida continued, “my eyes were so swollen it looked like somebody had punched me.” She settled her wrinkled hands in her lap. “My father only allowed us one thing to bring, but I brought two, and he didn’t say a word. I took two books. One of them Eddie had given me for my fifteenth birthday, a small book of poems by Abu Nuwas, a famous Arabic poet. The other was the Bible I’d received from my grandmother at my Bat Mitzvah. That was it. We all boarded the airplane, leaving the past, heading for a future more different than we could ever have imagined.”

Shimon massaged her scalp, working the dye into her hair with his fingers. It felt wonderful.

“The whole flight to Israel, I vomited my brains out,” Farida continued. “I threw up and cried. The flying motion made me sick. Since then, I’m telling you, I have never left Israel, not even once.” She smiled. “What? What don’t I have here? I have desert, I have snow, I have flowers, I have the Kinneret—what else do I need? And when I travel to see those places, I don’t throw up . . .” She laughed, but it turned into a paroxysm of coughing. Shimon brought her a large glass of water. She cursed cigarettes and whoever had created them.

Shimon laughed. He rubbed the last application into Farida’s scalp, instructed her to wait thirty or forty minutes, and turned to his next client, Ruchama from the bank.

Half an hour later, Shimon checked on Farida. He moved a section of hair to the right, then left, humming while worked. He decided she was ready for rinsing. He told Margo to wash Farida’s hair, reminding her to use conditioner. When that was done, he began to cut her hair. Farida enjoyed the touch of Shimon’s gentle hands. She watched him work his scissors, watched tufts of her hair fall, hit her shoulders, and drop to the floor. “Shall I continue?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “
Ya’allah
,
please go on.”

“We changed planes in Cyprus and finally landed in Israel. I looked around, and what did I see? It was hot, it smelled, everyone was running. It was absolute chaos,” she said in disgust. “Someone came and took us to a little building, where they questioned us, asked us our names. Farida, I told them.
What kind of a name is that?
They asked.
That’s not an Israeli name. You need to choose an Israeli name, not something funny like Farida.
What’s Israeli?
I asked.
What’s wrong with Farida?
Farida is a name from the Diaspora
, they said. Diaspora! Can you believe that?”

Shimon looked at her, but Farida didn’t wait for a reply: “They changed my sister Violet’s name, too, and everyone else in the family. Listen, you’ll love this story.” Her eyes twinkled. “In Baghdad, our last name was Twaina. My father decided that from that day on, our last name would be Yishayahu Isaiah because he was one of the smartest prophets in the Bible. That was his dream, to move to the holy land and take the name of a prophet. Like it is written in Isaiah, Chapter 62: ‘For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her righteousness shines forth like the dawn, and her salvation like a blazing torch.’”