Mothballs (15 page)

Grandfather's boat sank in the Shatt al-Arab, and the Shatt was crowded with the names of the six adventurers. The employees were: the inspector of the administrative district, Mr Ahmad Maarouf, the police delegate, the director of the treasury, the precinct physician, and two guards. Their muscles relaxed in the rise of water, they grew heavy and sank beneath the crabs' legs and the jaws of the electric eels. The bed of water took them, and there they fell asleep forever.

Facing the shore she set up a large tent and said, “Here we will mourn for seven days. Here we will await their bodies.” She drew her cloak around her and spread out her carpet on the waves of sand when the tide pulled out. She opened her arms and hugged herself, and went inside when the islands appeared. She walked, wiping her spectacles clean of the sea spray, and went down on her narrow white feet. She had drawn her wedding shift tightly across her middle, and in her hand she held a lantern whose wick flickered whenever the night air stirred. She wailed:

“I have come to you belted with your sash, Abu Jamil! I want to bid you farewell here. You have been gone too long this time. When will you return?”

She waded into the water which radiated from her in successive rings and called: “This is your belt, Abu Jamil. Come and see. It's the first time I've come out to you here. Don't delay, Abu Jamil. Alas, poor Jamil and Farida! Poor Wafiqa, who will come after you!”

She did not grow weary; she did not grow angry. She pursued the water and waited for some sign of the missing man: his striped broadcloth jacket or grey trousers. She waited for her whole life to pass in front of her eyes as she caught sight of a round thing far off, dented, now floating, now sinking, now visible, now not. It was not a person; nor was it any sort of animal. Its colour was somewhere between black and violet. Mysterious, it floated slowly.

She screamed, then fell silent. She paced slowly and moaned. The water flowed over her, and she splashed at it and beat her palms against its surface. Everything round her flapped and fluttered: the birds, the water, the fishermen's boats and their ancient nets. The local people's faces looked on as she stood on the shore. Jamil's voice was nowhere to be heard. Farida stumbled about and cried, wanting her mother. No one interfered with what she was doing; no one was worried about her. They said prayers for her but did not dare invade her watery kingdom. They threw prayers and hurled supplications at her. She disappeared and emerged. She rose and grabbed the water in her hands, her tears mingling with the sand and the threads of the short, twisted limp hat. She pulled at it and released it, and her muscles relaxed a little. Grandmother's body, arms and legs, carried on. The men and women came. They entered the embrace of the water and embraced her and lifted her. The water wet their faces and streamed down like drops condensing on a cold jug. She was livid and pale, and frightened, but still radiant. She coughed and wiped her face with the black cloth. She kissed and smelled it, and slept with it in her hand. In the morning she took it up to the roof of the house and laid it in the sunlight, spreading it out, drying both sides, combing its velvety fabric clean of dirt, mud, and sand; then she shook it. She kept on talking to it and calling to it. She raised it on to the empty coffin herself and they carried it through the narrow, filthy lanes of Ali alGharbi. They wound through the streets near the municipality building. She led the way, walking before them, with Jamil to her right and Farida, tiny, bored, and troubled, to her left. They all walked, the widows of the six men, the women of the neighbourhood, their sons, their daughters, and their old men.

Six coffins, one with the hat like a banner, swaying and shaking, stopping when the crowd stopped before the front door of each dead man's house. The funeral procession walked to the cemetery. They dug up the earth and its cold, damp smell rose. Suddenly, before the burial she removed the hat and held fast to it: “No, I'm taking this to Baghdad, and I'll bury it there.” She made a glass box for it and put the black hat in it. She closed the box, lifted it with her hands, and placed it before her. She greeted it before going to bed, touched it first thing in the morning, and moaned at it at night.

The day they left for the capital, she carried the box next to her chest. She distributed all the things to the people of that area. They rode in a taxi. Her children were silent, and in her hands she held the missing man's only remaining words.

My grandmother's family had a large crypt. It was clean and spacious, with several levels, located near the entrance to the cemetery. It was surrounded by a thicket of oleander trees, dusty from hanging in front of the large opening on to the main street. The family tree was hung at the entrance, all the boughs and branches, going down to the earliest roots. My grandmother's forebears came from the Hejaz, and my grandfather's from central Iraq. This crypt belonged to my grandmother's tribe's kinsfolk, and no strangers were to be buried here.

My grandmother chose a spot behind the crypt. She called for Muhammad the builder, and he opened a new grave, surrounded by a cheap metal barrier painted white. Trees of a sort I was not familiar with were planted flanking it; they had short but plentiful branches, and a mysterious, penetrating smell on hot summer nights, a smell like laughter and tears. The hat was buried there, and every year the grave was repainted, the stones and mud were rearranged, the boughs were trimmed, and the plants were watered. She stood, tall, pale-skinned and sobbing, blotting him out with supplications and sending him prayers.

Farida stood this whole time, looking waxen and rigid, as if venturing into a trap. She did not lament or cry, sob or wail. Her lips moved slowly, and her face showed the shock of terrible sorrow. Grandfather had loved her so much, Mr Jamil had isolated her for a long time. That Munir had vanished and not come back anywhere near her. She stayed inside the house for three days. She struck her head and her voice sounded with all its hoarseness and power, echoing through the rooms, even reaching other houses.

All the voices lamented and fell silent, and Farida never grew weary. Iqbal was before her and Munir and Jamil behind her. The neighbours; the women; the rumours whispered from mouth to mouth:

“Munir is never coming back.”

“They say he knew a week before the wedding the news of the deceased.”

“Why didn't he say so?”

“By God, we don't know.”

“Every day he and Abu Iman get drunk. They set up a table in the bar then Munir would bid Abu Iman farewell on the street and disappear.”

“No, Abu Iman says he'll get married when he's past forty.”

“They say Umm Jamil has fallen apart completely, with Iqbal and now with Farida. Abu Adil has deserted them – this new woman and the children have taken him.”

Grandmother went down into the crypt. Farida hesitated, then followed her down. Adil touched the dirt under the oleander, pulled off some leaves, and threw them on the ground. Behind the window, I looked at my grandmother as she offered her prayers to the dead.

It was the first holy day with Iqbal absent. We waited at the door to the crypt. The women of the neighbourhood, aunts and sisters, their faces slack, their complexions changed, eyelids dewy, eyes meek, their cloaks dusty; but they stood on tiptoe. Their hands clutched the arms of their little sons and daughters. The poor 
sayyids 
waited for their holy day donations holding out their hands and murmuring prayers as they waited for the sacrificial meat of the feast. The sun did not keep Adil waiting; it rose swiftly and was hot. The sky dispersed its clouds. Umm Suturi stood before us, a palm leaf tray in her hand:

“Here is brick oven bread, eggs, and boiled potatoes. Eat them in the train, and remember us when you pray to the Lord of Martyrs. May the sorrow be lifted from all our souls. God be with you.”

I carried the tray on my shoulder. We took the bus to the station at Bab al-Muazzam. The trains stood there, rusty and peeling. People were smiling. The pedlars shouted. The boys and girls boarding before us wore colourful holiday clothes. There were brief goodbyes and stifled weeping, and then we went up the steps. We sat facing one another.

Adil and Grandmother, and Farida beside me. The train filled up with soldiers and luggage and the smell of food. My aunt pulled her bags in. We had our first bite, and the sound of the train as it began to move relaxed my bones and made everything I was experiencing seem small. From the wide iron window which was spattered with grease and the remnants of dried snot, I saw creatures – creatures whose double faces, and faces stripped of features, passed before me. I waved to them with a morsel of bread in my hand, knowing that I would never see them again.

I listened to the noise and yelling, the crying of children, men blowing their noses, and the shouts of the mothers in the corner of the compartment, passing out objects and snacks. They sat on their old suitcases, which were lashed shut with thick, frayed ropes. The women's heads were covered with black bands, from which twisted threads hung down, new and clean, reaching as far as their eyelids. Some pushed us inside and sat down, crowding near Farida.

Adil and I looked at one another. No face looked like Mahmoud's. No girl limped like Firdous. No odour from anyone's mouth was like my mother's. My grandmother drew out her black prayer beads and began to tell them, paying no attention to her surroundings. My aunt picked at some morsels of food and put the rest in a bag, but Grandmother did not touch even a crust of bread. Her cloak was wound all round her body. She watched Farida, and said, in a soft but firm voice: “Wrap your cloak round your body well.” The men's and women's eyes stripped my aunt of her clothing. I looked round at everything about me. The man with the headropes looked like Haj Aziz, but his face was older and less bright. I watched the man sitting far away rolling tobacco in paper, moistening his lips, swallowing, and looking at my aunt, lighting his cigarette, sighing, and then raising his voice in an old southern song, in which he was joined by the soldiers heading home on leave. Most of the women looked like Umm Suturi and Umm Aziz.

A voice sounded, alone, from a woman we could not see in all the confusion: “Whoever has not made the pilgrimage to Lord Hussein has wasted his life!”

Laughter, shouting, and singing. The men's cloaks, and new trousers and jackets. Men's trousers, wrinkled, ironed, old, coloured, long enough to touch the floor, short enough to see holes in socks. We smelled the stink of feet and the odour of sweaty armpits. The women shouted with joy and trilled as they recited the names of Ali Ibn-Abi Talib and his children.

Food appeared: skewers of kebab, grilled goat's testicles, and flat loaves of bread that had become cold and wrinkled. Onions and green tomatoes. The movements of chewing and swallowing in front of me made me join them, and I asked one of them for half a piece of bread and a skewer of kebab. I reached out and took an onion, sat among them and ate. I did not look at my aunt. Everyone was belching.

The boys and girls wore cheap clothes, and their shoes were scruffy. Their socks were uneven – one high, the other low. The girls' ribbons hung down to their chests, and their necks were bare and spotted with grease. I did not know what to wipe my hands on, so I left them as they were and looked at my fingers. I got up and walked back to my seat. Farida was wrapped up, but left part of her chest visible. I looked at my grandmother. She had said before we left that “You will wear an abaya when we get to Karbala.” I saw my abaya underneath the containers of food; Umm Suturi had brought it. I saw the men above our heads and around us. The young men were smoking, coughing, and staring. I turned my head towards the window.

My father had come from Karbala the previous year. He placed a quarter dinar in my hand and said reluctantly, “Take Adil and go play on the swings. Hold on to him tightly when he's on it. If anything happens to him, I'll kill you.”

Iqbal stood silently at the door of the house. She drew another quarter dinar out of her neckline and buried it in my hand, and pushed us outside without a word.

This was the first holy day I had a new dress. It was yellow, and the waist had a shiny belt of delicate satin, a scrap from the cloth of our new quilt. New yellow ribbons adorned my braids. Umm Suturi had stitched my dress in two hours, and Farida finished sewing the back and the sleeves. I was walking, picking off threads and blowing them into the air. Nuriya had sent Adil his new clothes from Karbala.

Firdous and Mahmoud stood in front of the door to their house, Suturi, Hashim, and Nizar waited in the spacious lot behind our houses. That is where the girls and boys of the neighbourhood celebrated.

We walked round the grimy ice cream carts, whose rusty wheels stopped almost as soon as they got rolling, so the ice cream vendor had to hit them to right them. We stood by them. Inside them were large tins surrounded by crushed ice dyed red, yellow, and brown. Small tancoloured plates and old spoons. The man sold us some and we ate it. We crunched the ice between our teeth, turning our lips different colours. We reached in for a second tin of cola in their dark-green bottles. We kept the cold in our mouths and went to see blind Umm Aziz, who had enlarged her palm platter and placed coloured lollipops on it, spun sugar attached to thin sharp sticks, all on another palm fibre platter. We stood in front of her and started our game here. We wrapped scallop-edged five-fils coins in glossy silver-coloured paper; we did this well until we had covered the milled edges, so that when she felt each coin she thought it was a dirham. She was fooled, and we took everything on the trays. A few minutes later, all of a sudden, her voice split the air cursing us and our parents. Adil went back and gave her all his money. Mahmoud, Hashim, Nizar, Firdous, Suturi, and I licked the lollipops and threw the sticks on the ground, putting the candy floss in our mouths, eating and not caring. We went to the fried seed seller and bought dried chickpeas, peanuts, and black and red raisins. We munched them and the ink ran on to our fingers from the words on the old notebook pages in which the nuts were wrapped. The sound of whistles began to lead the way. Paper kites of all colours filled the air. Hands pulled the kite strings and tails, which rose and fell like Euphrates birds as the wind blew. The boys and girls counted their fils and pennies and grasped them tightly. The young men of the neighbourhood stood around in new dishdashas and wide leather belts, keeping their money in linen bags between the waist and stomach. They called out to everyone using the swings. Among the lofty palm trees the heavy ropes waited for our small hands. I placed Adil on one swing and gave him a vigorous push: “Hold the rope tightly, Adouli!” I got on another swing: “Mahmoud, push me as hard as you can – don't worry about me.”