Daughters of Iraq (24 page)

When she’d told Victor to call at eight, she never imagined she’d sit and wait for the phone to ring. Why was she feeling like this? She didn’t even know what he looked like. Not only that, she knew almost nothing about him. And would she even want to know about him? When it was almost eight o’clock, she began pacing around the phone impatiently. And then, at eight precisely, the phone rang. She pounced on it and plopped down in her armchair. When she heard the familiar voice, she breathed a sigh of relief. Her sigh was so loud, so nasal, that Victor wasn’t certain he’d dialed the right number.

“It’s me, Farida! Of course it’s me,” she reassured him. “How are you, Victor?” She tried to mask her excitement.

“Great, great, everything’s great.” He didn’t elaborate.

Desperate to fill the silence, Farida told him that her children weren’t coming for Shabbat dinner because her little nephew was sick. So she had all this food. Victor told her that his twin grandsons were spending Shabbat on the army base, that they were both in combat units. “May God protect them,” Farida said. Then she tried to steer the conversation to what interested her the most: Victor himself.

“I have one son and three grandchildren: a twenty-three-year-old girl and nineteen-year-old twins,” Victor told her. “When I moved to Israel, I met my wife at the transit camp in B’nei Brak. We got married, and we were lucky: my business did very well. Little by little, we built a good life for ourselves. We bought a house in an old neighborhood in Ramat Gan, and we lived there for thirty-eight years. She was a good woman, my wife, and one day, when I wasn’t home, she had a stroke. She deteriorated quickly and died two months later. All my life, she had taken care of me, and in the end she wouldn’t even let me take care of her.” Victor stopped speaking. Farida suspected he was on the verge of tears.

“Good for you,” Farida said. “You’re a good man. Show me another husband who wants to take care of his wife. Really, I admire you.”

“You took care of your husband, right?”

“Yes, of course I took care of him, but there’s a difference between a wife looking after her husband and a husband looking after his wife. Maybe my views are outdated, but that’s how it seems to me. But you, you should be proud of yourself. You’re a good man,” she repeated. She could feel her heart beating and the sweat emanating from her body. This man impressed her more and more.

“
Walla
,
what can I tell you?” said Victor. “That’s life—you never know what’s coming. But if you don’t mind telling me,” he said, “what was it like for you, living here in Israel?”

“Oh!” Farida was caught off guard. “You want to know about my life? It was life, that’s all. Things didn’t turn out the way I thought they would. I was in love with Eddie, the Eddie that you knew.”

“Eddie?” Victor was surprised. “But wasn’t he your sister’s son?”

“He was my sister’s son, but he was quite a bit older than me,” she answered, trying to justify herself. She smiled to herself and lit a cigarette, preparing for a long conversation. “I think I loved him for as long as I could remember, and I dreamed of marrying him. It never even crossed my mind that we wouldn’t get married. I had my heart set on him. Him alone.”

“May his soul rest in peace,” Victor said, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then Victor asked quietly, “How did Eddie die? I swear on the Torah, Farida, I don’t want to upset you, but if it’s not too hard for you to talk about . . . I would really like to know what happened.”

“It’s alright, Victor,” Farida said sadly. “Many years have passed since then. For a long time, I couldn’t even speak his name, because my heart ached so much, and even now, my heart still weeps for him. But at least I can say his name, and I can even tell you what happened.”

“Are you sure?” asked Victor. She wondered if he regretted asking the question.

Farida sighed. She extinguished her first cigarette, lit another, and began her story. “In Iraq, Eddie was a member of the Resistance, and we stockpiled ammunition in our house. In a storage area we used to call a
slick
. We all lived together, you know, along with other members that the Iraqis, may their name be cursed, were searching for. Once a Kurdish boy came to us, one of the people the Iraqis were after. We were trying to smuggle him into Israel. He lived with us for a month before the Resistance finally got him out of the country.”

“I knew Eddie was in the Resistance,” Victor said, “but I didn’t know there was a
slick
in your house. Or that you hid people.”

“We hid people; we hid arms; we did everything that had to be done,” Farida said. She thought about how many children there were in the house, and how her parents and her older brothers had agreed to help the underground movement, even though they knew that if the Iraqis ever found out, they would murder everyone in the house, children as well as adults.

“Good for you, really, good for all of you,” Victor murmured.

“When we got to Israel,” Farida continued, “we lived in a transit camp in Ramle for almost two years. What can I tell you? It wasn’t much of a life. There were snakes in the summer and floods in the winter; the summers were sweltering and the winters were freezing. What kind of life is that? In the end, my mother,
allah yirchama
,
went to the housing office and banged her fist on the table, and after a lot of screaming and yelling they agreed to give us an apartment in Lod. Provided, that is, we gave them a deposit of three hundred
lirot
.”

“Three hundred
lirot
?” Victor gasped. “That was a fortune back then! Did you have it?”

“No,” Farida said. “But there was this boy, a friend of Eddie’s, the one who had hidden in our house. He lived in a settlement near Ramle, and when Eddie asked him to lend us the money, he agreed immediately. He said he would do anything for our family, because we had saved his life. He promised to get the money and bring it to the camp by bicycle. All the money, he said, in cash. Thanks to him we got our apartment in Lod.”

“Anyway,” Farida continued, engrossed in her narrative, “they were good friends, this boy and Eddie. They used to get together, either at our house or at his
moshav,
his settlement
.
One night Eddie biked to this boy’s house, and he didn’t come home. It wasn’t like him to stay out without letting us know. In the middle of the night, we all went searching for him. We even called the police. Some Arab shepherds found him the next morning, lying in the road, dead. He’d fallen off his bicycle and injured himself on a boulder, and that was it. No more Eddie.” Farida sighed, and a heavy silence fell.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Victor said finally. “
Walla,
I’m so sorry.”

“What a life,” Farida said, wiping away her tears. “One minute someone’s there, the next minute he’s gone. God gives and God takes, what can you do? Everything is in God’s hands.”

“It’s really true everything is in God’s hands,” Victor agreed.

“You ask me what kind of life I had?” Farida’s voice was bitter. “A hard life. After Eddie was gone, all my dreams were gone, too. I didn’t care about anything; living and dying were the same to me. But in the end, I got married, and I had two children, and I raised them like royalty. I gave them everything.
Everything
. I shielded them from this cruel world. I looked after my husband for many years, and then he died, too. And I’m still here!” She blew her nose. “You’re probably wondering, how could I have married after Eddie died? Well,” she said, not waiting for an answer, “I’ll tell you. One day, Moshe came to our house, and he told my mother he wanted me, and I said okay, whatever, and I married him. I would have married a donkey if it had asked me. I was lucky Moshe was a good man, and that he loved me, but things didn’t go well for us. During the Yom Kippur War, he became what they call shell-shocked, and after that our life was a nightmare. He would jump out of bed in the middle of the night; convinced people were trying to kill him. Then he got sick and died, left me alone, and that was that. So now, I’m telling you that, yes, I lived my life, but that’s all it was. Nothing extraordinary.”

Victor had listened to Farida’s story patiently and without interruption. For a moment he thought that if he had been standing next to her he would have taken her hand and told her that her luck was about to change: he was alone, and she was alone, and why shouldn’t they be together? He was a good person, and she was a good person, and the family she came from well, that was really something. When they hung up the phone, they both felt they knew each other better. They didn’t talk about the future. They didn’t even talk about meeting each other. But they both felt a certain intimacy that hadn’t been there before.

Chapter Forty-One: Violet

Monday, May 11, 1987

I
t’s been a month since I last wrote. It seems to me that my health is not improving; on the contrary, every treatment leaves me feeling weaker. My last few blood tests were not good. Every time I go to the hospital, they send me home without chemotherapy. I don’t bother to ask questions anymore; I don’t want to hear their evasive answers. The pain is unbearable; there are days when I can’t sleep at all; I don’t have the strength to get out of bed. It is only when the children come home that I muster the energy to rouse myself and greet them. Dan is in charge of running the household, and my wonderful sisters Farida and Chabiba are making sure we have a constant supply of food. When Noa comes home on leave, they go out of their way to make her favorite foods. Right now I have only one goal, and I am focusing on it: this diary that I am writing for you, my children. When I am awake I feel around for the thick notebook; the pen is attached to the book. I must keep writing, keep telling my story.

Eddie came to the kibbutz and loaded our meager possessions onto his friend’s truck. Again, parting. I thought to myself, I have already parted from Chanan; I hadn’t seen him since that wretched picnic two days earlier. I have parted from my friends; I have parted from Miriam; and I have parted from the sights, smells, and sounds: the rocky landscape, the pine trees, the roads, the smell of the stable, the clatter of silverware in the dining hall. As our truck rumbled away from the kibbutz, I felt like I was leaving one of my limbs behind. I had nothing left. Eddie sensed my sadness and tried to lift my spirits. Farida seemed happy, but all I wanted was to be left alone. In the end, he directed his rambling toward my sister.

The settlement camp was waiting for us in all its glory. Rows and rows of crowded, dirty, noisy tents.
Ima
had tried her best to make our tent nice and tidy, despite its lack of conveniences. Early the next morning, Farida and I went to look for work, and for the two years that followed, we took any kind of job we could find. We worked wherever we were needed: we did laundry at the hospital; we cleaned; we even worked at a chocolate factory. We didn’t get a proper apartment despite all the promises, and after work we helped
Ima
with cleaning, with laundry, and any other chore she requested.

Aba
was barely able to scrape together a living.
Ima
, clearly in charge of the whole operation, growled about her bitter fate, about the fact that
Aba
brought her to this difficult land and this pathetic tent. She directed most of her rage at
Aba
. As I wrote earlier, as soon as she landed in Israel she turned her back on him and would no longer share a bed with him. He disgusted her, with his shabby clothes, his pathetic attempts at work, his failure to support the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. She mocked him, and she encouraged all of us his children and grandchildren to mock him, too. When
Aba
expressed an opinion about something,
Ima
made him look weak, foolish, irresponsible. She cast herself as the head of the family and took it upon herself to fight for an apartment. We stood behind her, rejecting
Aba
. To this day I regret it, and I am embarrassed by my behavior. I am especially sorry that I never had a chance to ask his forgiveness.
Aba
was always in a good mood, and he never complained. He didn’t ask anything of us. He adhered to his principles and his tradition and observed the
mitzvot
until his dying day. We tried to erase our foreignness, our Iraqi origins; we even learned songs in Yiddish. It was much more acceptable than singing the songs of Leila Mauraud or Farid al-Atrash.

In the end, we did get an apartment, thanks to
Ima
’s persistence, Eddie’s history, and Eddie’s Kurdish-Iraqi friend who had hidden in our house while waiting to escape to Israel. This young man never forgot the risks we took on his behalf. Had they found him in our house, we would all have been taken directly to the town square and hanged. He lent us three hundred
lirot
, which in those days was a lot. Without that money, we would never have been able to secure the apartment in Lod.

When it was time to move, we were overjoyed. Finally, a real home to protect the family from the ravages of both winter and summer. A home of our own. But the joy was short-lived. Eddie, our pride and joy, died unexpectedly, and darkness descended over our lives. Farida was inconsolable. She never said a word to me, but in my heart I know that to this day, she hasn’t recovered from his death. As for Chabiba and Yaakov, my sister and brother-in-law, their lives lost all meaning. The loss of their oldest son created a huge gap between them. Sadness filled our hearts, slammed our doors, and marked our past like a tombstone. Eddie’s name was rarely spoken, but his specter haunted every family gathering, every Shabbat dinner, every wedding, every birth. Brilliant, handsome, wonderful Eddie, who had been dealt such a cruel hand. We never got over Eddie’s loss, and we never will. And you, my children, it is your loss that you never knew him. I hope that through these stories, he will be a present in your lives, too. He never had a chance to have a family, and there is nobody to carry on his name. For me, Eddie is there in Guy’s smile, in Farida’s son, Oren, with the dimple on his chin. He is there at every family event, and every so often, my siblings and I look at each other and know that we are all feeling the same thing: the pain of Eddie’s absence.