Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (60 page)

He said, “You’re too young to understand what ails a man my age. Your life is still ahead of you, while mine is heading for the end. Please don’t leave me. Light will disappear from my life if you do. Can I call you Anwar, ‘Lights,’ Khayun, rather than Anhar Khayun?”

I smiled. He got up and kissed me then said to me, “Go now. We’ll talk about it calmly tomorrow.”

I couldn’t get out of the trap I found myself caught in. I dreamed one night that I was lying stretched out in a hole in the ground, my legs wide apart as they would be on Hilmi’s bed and my head in a deeper hole. There were many ravens standing next to my head, pecking at it every time I tried to raise it. When I moved my head back, my neck hurt very much and I felt as if I were going to die. Then some ravens alighted on my thighs and began to peck me as they calmly crept closer between my thighs. I screamed. I found myself on my bed. I cried and decided never to go back to the office. In the morning I went to the agency at my usual time and refused to receive any telephone calls from outside the office. On the following day Nora called me. I said my mother was sick and that was partially true, because it was my brother who took my mother to the doctor’s office. I told Nora to apologize to Abu Mervat and to get me a two-day sick leave. I traveled to Mosul and there I sat at a café on the hill in the woods. I remembered the first time I met Hilmi. Why do I love him so much? Why all that mystery he surrounds himself with? My friend Maysa tells me he is exploiting me. I reject that completely but I can’t stand it any more. I’ve got to find a solution. I searched in the midst of the trees, in the paths where we had walked and disappeared, where we had talked a lot about ourselves. I knew back then that he had entered my heart, but I also knew there were still many barriers between us. I imagined that he had caught up with me here in Mosul and said to me, as they did in the movies: “I was sure I’d find you here.” “How did you know?” “Don’t cry and don’t waste time. Come with me.”

But I was not in an Arabic or a Kurdish movie. I am living in a reality that I couldn’t accept any more. One evening he found me standing in front of the office door. He took me by the hand and accompanied me inside and said to me without any preliminaries, “I know I have been unfair to you. But before I tell you why I am doing that, you must know what I am suffering from exactly. I didn’t promise Fayza anything. It’s just a matter of honor. The honor of
being responsible for the woman who has been taking care of me and my daughters after their mother died.”

“But she hasn’t previously agreed to marr …”

“Please, don’t interrupt me. Let me tell you first what I feel and what is tearing me apart. Fayza was like a tender butterfly who was so much in love with her lover that when he died, she couldn’t see anyone else. Time stole and captured her. Believe me. Her self-image and the image she had created for herself in front of people stood as a barrier between her and going back. It was not faithfulness as much as weakness. That’s something you won’t understand, because you’re still young. You don’t think of death or old age. Faithfulness has a much deeper meaning than fear of marrying another, for when love has united two parties that makes the other external to them both. She is well-educated and sufficiently mature to understand that, and to understand that she would never forget her first love ever, even if she married another man. She is now about forty and I am her brother-in-law. I have been forbidden to her until recently. It would be difficult for her to look at me in that special way that would spark love. But, all of a sudden, she has found herself taking care of my clothes, my food, and my daughters. There is between us, right now, a young girl who has known no other mother and who calls her ‘mommy’ and calls me ‘daddy.’ It is hard to snatch her away from her, for neither of them has known any other mother or daughter. They are now and will remain forever, together. I don’t know if she loves me just as I don’t know if I love her.”

“What? Love her? How about me?”

“Please let me finish. The cost of what I am saying is too much for me and I am an old man. My strength is waning just like my days.”

“I am sorry.”

“I was saying, if Fayza meets a man now, she will have to choose between him and Rana because it doesn’t make sense for her, or so I imagine, to take Rana to him when she is not biologically her daughter or to leave her to me to give her another mother and
introduce her to the experience of loss a third time, even if she doesn’t remember her own mother. Fayza and I are victims of fate. We did not choose our present situation, believe me. And perhaps Fayza doesn’t want me, but it’s a duty. She also wants me to save her. Do you know that she got an unpaid leave from the exhibitions authority where she worked, without consulting me? Suddenly she found herself giving up her salary, which was more than she needs, and living on her late husband’s pension. All I can do now is to take Nora with me to buy her a gift of gold from Suq al-Nahr or to buy certificates of deposit in her name and make the girls give them to her on her birthday. All of that of course amounts to measly sums that don’t compensate her for the loss of her regular monthly salary. Please dry your tears so I can finish what I have to say.”

“Okay.”

“Together we, she and I, are bound to one wheel of life from which we cannot free ourselves. Many have told me to marry her, even my own daughters. But I told them all that I couldn’t, because my wife is still alive within me. She understands that. But, and the truth must be said, immediately before you appeared in my life, I had begun to give the matter some serious thought and perhaps to ask her, after Rana became two years old, to marry me. This way she would be free to refuse my proposal and Rana would no longer be in such dire need of her.”

He sighed and added: “But I was surprised to find myself falling in love. I resisted at the beginning, because you’re young and beautiful while I am at this age and my daughter Mimi is about to finish college and she is almost the same age as you. Please wipe your tears. I cannot bear to look at you crying.”

“Then what? What made you change your mind? What made you love me this love that you’ve just made forbidden? If only you were married to another woman! If only you loved your wife! If only you were a miser or a drunkard or both! If only you were anything other than what you’re telling me now! You’ve killed me without showing me any mercy!”

“You. Your youth. That challenge that your body imposes on my soul. That vigorous vitality that you have without knowing it. You’re like the sky that doesn’t know how vast it is, the sea that doesn’t know how deep it is, the sweet orange that cannot savor its own taste or realize how much it quenches the thirst of one who eats it, the nectar of the flowers, like this wanton nature that plays with our hearts and our fates without knowing what it is doing to us. I am going back to what I started telling you at the beginning! I know I have not been fair to you. I know that you have the right to have me. But, until this moment, I cannot make a decision except to love you. And whether you leave me or stay with me, I’ll go on loving you. My consolation will be that I, at the end of my life, have found the love I have been seeking. I know that many people will imagine that I am chasing a young body to give my body a renewed sexual drive, but you are the first to know that that is the most awkward part of it, that it does not give me strength. On the contrary, it has posed for me a challenge I cannot handle even though I have been with other women. I do not deny that. I see Mimi when I come near you. I am overtaken by fear that I am not permitted to touch you. I wish I were a heretic or the kind of person who can exploit others, then I would be able to accept a complete relationship with you as you sometimes push me to do. I cannot do that because you are my beloved, you are my daughter, and I will not approve of a bridegroom for my daughter who would die in a few years, leaving her in the prime vitality of her life or turning into a tottering old man before you are thirty.”

I screamed, “Enough, enough! What do you want from me? You don’t love me. You are a devil, just a devil. You are a Humbaba! You are Gilgamesh’s ghoul Humbaba himself! What do you want to say? That you cannot marry me and hurt that poor woman who is raising your daughters for you and you cannot marry her because you don’t love her, but love me, but you don’t let her live her life, but dump your daughters on her? Are you saying that you cannot marry me because you are on your way to the grave and I am on my way to live and
because this body of mine is too much for you? What can you do? Just to love me? Okay. I accept. I agree that you can love me as much as you do, but you’ll never touch me. Is this clear? Do you understand? As for this heart of mine, I’ll tear it to pieces if it even glances at you.”

He said, “Is that all you understood of what I said? Is it really?”

My screams got louder as I said, “You wanted me to work with you, so be it with these conditions. If you want me to disappear from your life, I will do it. You choose now what you want.”

“I want you to stay with me. I’ll never talk to you about love again. Please, calm down; the neighbors will hear us.”

He extended his hand and embraced me. He started patting my hair on that night like no other night. His lips looked for my lips and he gave me a long kiss. I felt heat on my face. I opened my eyes and saw tears washing both our faces. I cried out, “No, no,” and ran out. I walked on Abu Nuwas street until I got tired. I didn’t know where to go. Should I go back to him and force him to take the only right step: to be together? Should I go home and to my work and leave him forever? In the morning I went back to work and then to him and to my life exactly like before, knowing deep down that there will come a day when I will not go back.

I was tired and unable to move. My chest felt heavy and hard. I went to the bathroom before my breasts decided to unload, dragging my feet listlessly, preoccupied with Anhar Khayun. If only I could submerge my head under water until I feel awake again! But why do I want to wake up? Why don’t I give in to sleep? Washing my hair might give me a cold. I washed the towel in the sink, refreshing its fabric. Then I went to the small stall with my equipment. The attendant asked me, “Do you need help? You look as if you haven’t slept in days.”

I said, “Thank you. This is exactly what happened. I haven’t slept in days.”

I finished my business and left the stall. The attendant said, “Maybe it’s better to leave the towel on the top of the dryer. You’ll need it on the plane.”

“It is a very good idea, even though the remaining time is not that long. But only God knows. Thank you.”

“We’re all women and we understand our problems. God willing, you’ll go back safely to your baby.”

I said to myself: our problems come from our governments, not our people. I sat down feeling unexpectedly alert. A group of foreign travelers came and some members of the group sat beside me. They were elderly Americans. I wondered what tempted them to visit Jordan. A stout white woman asked me, “Are you Jordanian?”

I said, “I am an Egyptian journalist.”

She said, “Oh, from Sadat’s country. You love him, don’t you? He’s the champion of peace.”

I said, “No.”

She was taken aback and said, “You don’t like Sadat? Why?”

Suddenly my internal energy that I thought had crumbled a few hours ago came back. I said, “It’s difficult to make peace with a thief that has entered your house, occupied a room in it, and said to you: ‘Write a peace treaty with me.’ The thief has to get out of your house first, then if you agree to talk to him after he gets out, that’s a different story.”

Her face turned completely pale and she said, as members of her group began to follow our conversation, “You want to expel Israel? That’s impossible.”

The man sitting next to her said, “What Sadat did is real magic! The whole region will change completely after peace.”

I realized what I got myself into. I said to myself, “You want to change the minds of elderly Americans who don’t know whether Egypt is in Asia or Australia? End this discussion before you get a headache and before they accuse you of being a fanatic or an anti-Semite.”

I said, getting really exhausted, “It is a complicated subject. Sadat is not a popular hero for us. There is disagreement about the Camp David agreement and I believe that the change in the region is not in the Arabs’ favor, by any means. Israel is occupying part of
Syria, part of Jordan, and another part of Lebanon. Getting Egypt out of the war now does not mean the end of the conflict.”

I nodded as I made a faint attempt at a smile and started reading a paper that I suddenly saw on the seat in front of me without understanding a single line of what I was reading. I sensed that they were moving shortly after a call to go to the gate. They left, waving goodbye to me, but still visibly shocked at what I said. They stood in line with their athletic shoes and brightly colored clothes, their short hair, awkwardly overweight bodies, and the heavy burden of their years.

The television was rebroadcasting news of the battles in Iraq and Sadat was still on my mind. I hated him from the very beginning in appearance and substance. After Gamal Abdel Nasser with his irresistible charisma and overpowering popularity, Sadat appeared with his ugly face and his pretentiousness. I never believed him.

I was telling Hilmi Amin that whenever I saw Sadat with one of the new sheikhs who had recently become popular in Egypt, I would turn off the sound and watch wonderful comic scenes.

He said, “That’s true. I would like you, whenever you analyze any of his positions, not to forget the trickster side in his personality, and also the actor aspect. Why did he invite the shah of Iran to come to Egypt?”

I said, “I don’t know. Perhaps to do America a favor and to declare his loyalty. Or perhaps because he is an exhibitionist and a show-off, surrounding himself with kings and the nobility that he lacks in his own lineage. If he were proud of coming out of a modest class like Gamal Abdel Nasser, he wouldn’t have done that.”

He said, “No. It is because of the shah’s wealth. He is the richest man in the world and he is providing for him, in Egypt, a secure life of luxury, making him feel that he is still a king. Then he begins to convince him to spend money to help him get his throne back and get from him billions of pounds under the pretext of funding a coup against Khomeini.”