Mothballs (22 page)

I touched the walls of the houses, the gaps in the corners and the grains of dirt. I clung to the ample sand, and my dreams ran into the drains. We wailed, and the streets were changed beyond recognition by violence. We wept and comforted ourselves that all this outcry was warmth and that all this dust was roses.

“You're always quiet, Huda. Where shall we go? Now we're far from home.”

“If you're afraid, go home. I want to go farther.”

“No, I'm not afraid. But I want to cry and I can't.”

Wafiqa said: “They used the last of their tears on the roof the day Iqbal died.”

Blind Umm Aziz gathered her palm leaf tray, counted her coins, put them in a purse, and tucked it into her breast pocket. Abu Masoud the painter remembered that he had forgotten the light in his shop, opened the door and turned the light off, and turned to us. We looked at him. For the first time I saw him seeming dignified and handsome.

“Hello, uncle.”

“Hello, my girl.”

You wanted to throw yourself on his chest and sob into his shirt. The great lock on the door to his shop gleamed, and our eyes gleamed. 

“Huda, where are we going? I'm not tired, just tell me where we're going.”

Walk, Adil. Turn over the new visitors in your hands: doubt, remorse, and our friends who have stayed behind. Everyone walks, sleeps, closes their eyes, restores their bodies, and you alone are a traitor. Walk and don't be afraid of the muezzin's voice, or the stories of forgotten friendship. Don't sigh or move too quickly. Stay beautiful and quiet; stay mournful and afflicted, listen to Suturi's birds flapping their wings in this bloody sky. Spread your hands out and smell the sandstorm in the spring evenings as you fill your pockets with fragrant orange flowers, and throw them at Khulud's house. Smile Adil, if the stones gilded with dreams shout, if the concrete immersed in moaning lies, if the tiles laden with fever, fear and pain grow weary. Do not apologize for your nostalgia, Adil. Wafiqa once said that we were all sick. The books are sick. The table and love are sick. Do not bend or turn. Stay where you are. There is no time left in the world, and spending an hour here is uncanny. Laugh, Adil, at your wandering father, your absent mother, your proud grandmother, your diabolical aunt and your sister who did not love only you.

We stood in front of the dirt dam, pointing to the pessimistic Tigris and Khulud's house behind us. We looked at all the people there: You and Firdous will not meet again. She was the one to leave you. All those whom I loved left me, and all that time retraced its tracks to its original place. It went past my old dress and the ugliness of others and said, ‘This far and no further. Do not turn back to pursue me, and do not look at me.' The dark mocking Tigris – I never do anything in front of it with ease. I was savage and cursed it with obscenities. But my thoughts turned to my father. I understood fatherhood, and instantly my father became precious. In our street, only my father was real. He never concocted stories or lied, never won or remembered.

Come and let me into your world. Give me the instruments with which you once beat me. Beat me, father, use electricity cables. Beat me, then sew up my wounds. Beat me and leave your marks on my flesh and face. Beat me and I will obey you a little.

We were attacked by pebbles and the fishermen's nets. The distant houses packed with lies attacked us, but they looked young and pretty. 

I learned lying early. I lied as easily as washing my face. Lying consumed me, and I memorized it. In the street we did not examine the truth or have time for it. We only told the truth when we were quarrelling, ill or had failed. When our truthfulness piled up, we agreed to wash it out of our mouths.

After six years or six months, take up the axes and chop up the flesh of memories. Do not shout or resist. Begin the parting now, but do not think of farewells.

They took us to the new house. You did not examine anything, not the guest room or the guests of this pain, not the little dead garden. You looked in silence and spat on the ground. The trees lined the street in a different pattern, “You will grow up anew here,” Grandmother said. 

“But I don't know anyone here to grow up with,” Adil replied. 

“Here things will be completely different,” Grandmother said. 

“But the fence is low,” said Farida.

“We'll raise it,” said my father.

Umm Mahmoud struggled like a fish.

“Our new house is bigger. Mahmoud will have his own room and so will Firdous. There will be room for guests and for new neighbours.” She sighed, coughed, and added, “The boy's school is close by. He'll graduate from secondary school this year.”

Firdous withdrew, becoming remote and cruel. She did not come or speak. You were the one who went to her. Your first parting was like your first meeting. You did not speak. You did not look at one another. You both fell silent. You did not touch. The suitcases were ready, and I could hardly recognize the house. Mahmoud's and Firdous's rooms seemed to me like a slaughterhouse. Everything was tied up, the beds and covers, the carpets, the kitchen utensils. Do not withdraw, do not cry, do not laugh. “Is it possible that I'll never see Firdous or hear her voice again?” I felt as sour as vinegar that had gone bad. I did not take astep or offer my hand. I did not want to see what was in front of me. I approached her and she stood before me, her head erect as if she had defeated me. I took her by the arms and shook her, but she did not shake. I bowed my head and looked at her legs. She was ready to fall down. I sensed that she was struggling to hide her emotions, then her gratitude towards me surged forward with her tears, without words. We tried to make the time pass quickly by filling it with small talk. 

“My mother knows your new house and your aunt knows our new house.”

“Give my regards to Mahmoud, but don't say any more to him than that.”

My tears did not flow. They found a different way of expressing themselves, and they held themselves back.

I did not stay long. When they left, when they took their suitcases and dreams, when they took all the streets, those things would be the only things that had power over you. I slammed the door behind me and went out.

I went to everyone in his house and told Grandmother: 

“We won't go until everyone else has gone.”

Everything in our house was being packed. The chaos and confusion, and our very bone marrow. You go up to the roof and attack this universe. You put the legacy of the wedding into wooden boxes. You worked slowly, coughed, but did not cry. You looked at what was left in your hands. Anthills and cocoons, the trails of black and grey spiders, and dead locusts. There was no sign of Suturi's birds in the sky. 

My father became effusive with his compassion: he became tender and indulgent. But my imagination had not killed his old cruel self, and my dreams had not conjured up such an honourable gentleman. He got his sister divorced from her cousin, and sorted out the new house. You had never known him to be so weak and in such a state. We feared for him more than before and our spirits were troubled. 

Every week they took us to the new house. All the houses there were the same: two storeys, with bright exterior colours and sparkling windows. The children wore long trousers and clean shirts. All the girls walked confidently. I saw no lame children on my way, or any cross-eyed like Hashim. I did not see, on any of the fences of the houses, the title “nurse” scrawled in black coal, or stone steps. The entrances were roofed and the garages were spacious, the gardens were terraces with rose bushes and orange and tangerine trees. Each house was separated from its neighbour by fences painted white and light blue. From outside, the curtains looked very thick, and I could see no one behind them.

When we went home in the evening, we immediately went to bed. When everyone was quiet, I dreamed that I was walking. I turned on the taps and gathered up the soap in Baghdad to wash tongues and intestines. I forgot speech and swallowed its remnants. I shook, and stamped on the floor, and Mahmoud and I ate warm bread fresh from the oven. We divided it in half and watched each other fearlessly. When we saw the aeroplane in the sky, we laughed and smacked one another. Mahmoud thrust his face into mine as he said:

“When we grow up, Huda, we won't beat our children, and we won't pull their hair, and we won't make them run away to the shore in the afternoon. We'll go and swim with them. We'll ride the trains, and who knows? Maybe we'll ride in that aeroplane. Perhaps we won't see each other much. That's not important. I will see you when I grow up; I'll wait for your news from far away. Don't worry – I won't change.”

I learned to write those expressions – I won't change; don't worry – every day of the week. Every hair on your head enters the race that is life. The runners tremble. The banners are wiped clean of writing: yellow, red and black. You run alone in the public squares. You do not listen to orders, you fall and you get up. You emerge from the crowd a zero, a fraction. Mahmoud was gone in the first round. He never said good morning or goodnight. Between the ‘good' and the ‘morning' came this wave of walking crowds. Do not ride it until the sand comes up. Do not befriend it until everyone joins you on top of it. Go in the opposite direction, and stop crying. What you are searching for you lose, and everything that you touch flies away. The neighbours lied to you, so you went to Rasmiya, Abu Masoud, Umm Suturi, Abu Hashim, and Umm Aziz. You went round that whole part of the neighbourhood. I went out into the vast square, skipped among the dirt and dry, fallen dates, and lifted my arms up to the date palms, felt the laughing tree and the beloved fronds, and brandished in my hand the bunches of golden fruit. I did not see anyone I knew. Everyone had gone far away. There was no weary advice or serious threat, no marvels erupting from the box of the world; no wonders poking their head out of ancient sacks. They left you no key and no wisdom to hang on your ears like earrings; on whose breast will you fling yourself? Who will dry your tears?

Your grandmother and Farida getting ready, arranging things and measuring the height of the walls, the ceilings and the roofs. They shopped, changed things, sold, and managed, tired themselves out and came back more delighted. Jamil came off the train, not riding a car or falling off a horse; he comes as blessed as the corpse of a prince, and goes as pure as a hymn.

My grandmother told him:

“Jamouli, why don't you remarry? Leave Nuriya to her children and come here. There are a thousand girls who'd want you.”

He did not look at her. It was as if he were breathing his last breath:

“You mean Nuriya can't come into this house either?”

“You know that. Why do you torment yourself and me with you?” 

“All that just for the late Iqbal?”

“And the children. Or did you forget your son?”

“No, I didn't forget. But Nuriya is pregnant now. Mama, shame on you and me. I won't divorce her.”

“We'll look round for you first, and when you get the new star and get transferred to Baghdad and become a police captain, all the families will want you.”

My father disappeared. Liquor incubated his torment. His house in al-A‘dhamiyya was gone. He did not resist, or talk about it, or forgive. He was alone before his uniforms: the hated boots, the sad
sidara
, the silent pistol the olive-green colour of his uniform, and the prisoners' cells, all stung him.

Sometimes he visited them. He looked into the little peepholes at night and smiled. He called to them, one after the other. He got some names wrong but did not care. He poured it out before them and told them about the star he had been promised. No one knew what to say to him in reply. All that red dust, those gleaming pebbles and interrogations by night and silence by day flew before him as he tried to escape from the family's talk and the children's talk, and the unknown words which would lead him he knew not where. He got drunk and chattered and cursed, longing to be heard.

He needed a different mouth and tongue. Everything before him was silent and forbidden, dreadful and different. He knelt on the ground before the closed doors and wanted to eat the dirt. He patrolled the courtyard, his vision confused by the night. Was this Karbala or was it Iqbal's original sensuous voice and her cheap perfume? 

It was his drunkenness driving his mother and his children, his wife and his sister, his illness and his temptation, and he slid down. He stood and probed his body and limbs. The savour of intoxication was strong, and his body was deranged, and smelled, and waited for the moments to come.

He had doubts about the stars as he gazed up at them in the sky, neither shining nor extinguished he scratched his throat, and groaned. He stood in the prison yard, repeating his children's names one after the other, and the name of the one living in his wife's belly. 

Nuriya was gaunt, pale, and quick to flare up. She loved him and excited him. When she laughed, she looked at his body, which knew nothing but nightly arguments.

He told her: “If it's another boy we'll call him Najm – star.” 

“And if it's a girl?”

“I don't beget girls.”

“But –

“Huda is a boy. She's not afraid of me or anyone else.” 

He looked ahead of him and sunk inwardly. Nuriya's body gave him vertigo. When he entered it he forgot everything except the star. He had not counted the columns and rooms of this courtyard. Why had he forgotten to? Its surface was like her thigh, and those eyes inside the peepholes followed him; their breathing, their sighs, and their silence. His legs tensed up. He wanted to piss on the ground. Even his urine sounded intoxicated. He walked and pissed, ran and pissed, not screaming or laughing. The sky appeared perforated to him; like Iqbal's sick chest. Nuriya and Iqbal. He raced as if the clouds were a silken bed, he flew through the air, the prisoners eyes followed him. He did not open the doors or move away from them. The 
sidara 
fell from his head, and he bent over to pick it up, and ran with it.