Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (39 page)

We were friends, Wadi and I. We liked all the same revolting sweets – mint chocolate chip ice-cream, candied apple skins, and marron glacé; I have never, till this day, met anyone else who likes the sugared chestnuts. We complained of the same problems, ear-aches mainly, and shared an eldest child’s self-importance.

As a young insomniac, something of a Bhutto family curse, I would be scared to sleep by Papa with my very own personalised bogeyman. Dr Alfonso was a dentist with a large moustache and gelled black hair who came to naughty sleepless children and pulled out all their teeth. He had a nasal voice and would ring the doorbell and ask for me when I refused to go to bed. Within minutes of hearing Dr Alfonso’s creepy voice I’d be out like a light. One morning after a midnight visit from the bogey doctor, I asked Wadi if she’d seen Dr Alfonso. What did he really look like? Was he carrying pliers?
Was she more scared of him than of Zia? ‘What are you talking about Fah-tee?’ she returned. The dentist, I pushed, I was asking about the evil dentist who rang our doorbell at night looking to pull out all my milk teeth. ‘There’s no Dr Alfonso!’ Wadi said, laughing loudly. ‘That was just your father standing outside in his pyjamas ringing the doorbell like a mad person.’

I didn’t confront Papa until the next time he threatened me with Dr Alfonso. I was half sure Wadi had been joking.

I began pre-nursery school and made friends easily. My first friend was a boy named Ali who would come over at weekends and ask Papa to fry him eggs. His parents become good friends of our family and we built a small circle around us.

We lived as guests of President Hafez al Assad and were given a large white Chevrolet to drive around Damascus in. Papa would put Elvis Presley or Motown tapes on and we would drive to the Noura Supermarket in Abu Roumaneh singing along with the songs. We made special trips to Apollo’s, near the Cham Hotel, to eat fresh pistachio and strawberry ice-cream and my father would always correct my pronunciation of the berry. It’s stro-beh-ree, he would say, not strah-bry. I had an American accent that my grammarschool-educated father would try, somewhat unsuccessfully, to jerk out of me. It was also lih-bree not li-berry. Foh-tee not fortee. In the summer months, we’d go to Damascus’s old city and buy cactus fruit,
sabarra
in Arabic, which Uncle Shah had introduced us to. We would keep them chilled in a bowl in the fridge until they were sufficiently cold for us to eat.

Sometimes, Papa would draw pictures of Zia and his Prime Minister on pieces of paper as he spoke to me about Pakistan. They would have hollow eyes and pointy moustaches. He would explain what had happened, first to my grandfather, then to my uncle. I would ask if we were safe and he would kiss me and tell me that we were safe here. At night, before we slept, Papa would kneel down and search under the bed. I asked him once what he was looking for and he told me he was just checking, making sure there was nothing that might hurt us under there. I assumed he meant a bomb. Or a man with a weapon.
I never felt brave enough to look, but always felt a wave of relief once Papa had completed the routine search.

It was a strange, beautiful childhood. In between the real-life games of hide and seek, the fear of being found, the danger of Shah’s fate following us, and the various other threats that had become regular features in our lives, I almost wouldn’t have known we were different, my father and I. We watched James Bond movies (Sean Connery was our favourite) and we ate chocolates in between meals. Sometimes as I slept, Papa would draw a moustache on me with green Magic Marker and I would wake up for school with a smudged swirly moustache that we would frantically rub off with hot water before my first bell rang. Papa read to me at bedtime, creating funny accents for each story character, and I used to interview him, using a toy microphone. I wanted to be a journalist then, I loved to write and read. He answered all my questions most seriously, taking the time to think between answers and pausing earnestly to watch me form my questions.

Once, watching television and seeing the news of the first Palestinian
intifada
, I studied my father’s face and watched his expressions change. I asked him what was happening on the screen. Papa picked me up and put me on his lap. He called me Fatushki when he was being funny and joking around, Fati when we were being intellectual and serious and Fatima when he was angry at me. He told me that the people on TV, wearing black and white chequered cloths around their faces to protect them from the smoke that surrounded them, were like us. ‘They don’t have a home any more and they’re living like refugees. Fati, you have to include them in your prayers when you talk to God and ask him to help them home, like us.’ I thought about it for a minute and then asked, ‘But if I tell God about the Palestinians and ask him to send them home, what if he forgets about us?’

I knew we were landless; I knew I came from somewhere else, somewhere I had never seen. Papa played old Sindhi folk songs, ‘
Ho Jamalo
’ usually, when he felt like remembering the sounds of his home. He used
ajraks
, the traditional Sindhi block-printed shawls, as tablecloths and he cooked
achar gosht
much too spicily. We ate every meal,
whether it was
hummous
or pizza with a dish of
Sikharpuri achars
, pickles sent from Sindh, at the table. He didn’t speak to me in Urdu all the time; we shared our lives and thoughts in English, but when he was excited about something he would lift his voice a pitch and the sound of another man would come out. He would call me a
dramabazee
, tell me I was jumping around like a
junglee
. He taught me to walk on his back before his afternoon nap and then returned the favour with
thadara
, running his fingers up and down my back to put me to sleep.

In the mornings as he shaved I would beg to be included in the process. So Papa would lather up my face with a dollop of foam and he would take out a plastic Gillette razor for me, without a blade, and we’d stand in front of the bathroom sink shaving our faces together. We did this till I was six years old at least. I walked around in my father’s boots and dressed in his shirts while picking out his ties and cufflinks for him in the morning. I even shined his shoes. Papa was a meticulous dresser and secretly found the act of shoe polishing boring though he considered it a necessary part of his routine, getting ‘suited and booted’ as he would say, borrowing the phrase from a childhood shared with Shah when valets would press their suits and prepare their evening clothes. And there I was, eager to do anything and everything for my father. I polished his boots with relish and took the time to make sure they gleamed just like he wanted them to. He was the soul of my world. Every night, before I slept, Papa would tell me he loved me and that he’d die if something happened to me. He’d kill himself, he’d say. I would too, I’d reply, and roll over to sleep.

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14
}

M
y father fell in love with my mother in an elevator. Every day we would decamp to the Cham Hotel next to Damascus’s Central Bank and go swimming at the pool. We would be the last ones there, deep into autumn when it was still just warm enough to go for a dip. Papa first taught me how to swim when I was two years old, and every summer I would forget and have to be retaught. On the days when there was more sun and we would be assured of quality swimming time, Papa would play squash in the courts next to the pool while I waded in the water. The same courts were used for weekly aerobic sessions and my mother was a regular attendee.

On 15 November 1986 we were at the Cham swimming pool. I was in yellow bikini bottoms and Papa in red swimming trunks. Ghinwa Itaoui was twenty-four years old and in exile from Lebanon. She had grown up during the Lebanese civil war, stopping school to live in the basement of her parents’ apartment on the Green Line, caught in between East and West Beirut, when the shelling and sniper fire became too much. By the time she was twenty the Israelis had invaded and Beirut was no longer a battleground the locals felt familiar with.

Ghinwa left Beirut and came to Damascus, where she worked as a receptionist and taught ballet classes to young girls in the basement of a Catholic church in Abu Roumaneh. On that November afternoon, she noticed a man swimming with his young child. It was his salt-and-pepper hair, she says, that caught her attention and made her notice this tall tanned man. As we left the swimming pool, Ghinwa
was leaving her twice-weekly aerobic classes in the squash courts. Murtaza was wearing a pin-striped navy blue suit with a pink shirt underneath and the scent of his Grey Flannel cologne filled the small elevator. Suhail was visiting us and stood in the elevator patiently while I spoke to my father. Ghinwa noticed how kindly the salt-and-pepper man answered his child and how attentive he was when she replied. ‘He spoke in beautiful English; there was no accent at all. It wasn’t fully British sounding; I couldn’t place where he was from.’
¹

‘It must have been Thursday when I saw him next, two days later.’ They had a common friend, a dentist with a raucous personality named Mazen Aloush. Mazen was an old family friend of Ghinwa’s – he knew her parents and various other relatives back in Lebanon – and a new friend of Murtaza’s, who had been referred to him when experiencing some pain in his molars. ‘As I was going into my aerobics class I saw Mazen walking over to me. He’d come to say hello and he teased me like he always did and asked me to introduce him to some of my friends walking into the class. I told him to shut up. He was married and I knew he was just wasting my time. But he leaned over and said, “Listen, you introduce me and I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine.” I played along; Mazen was teasing, as usual. “Who?” I asked and he pointed over at the man with the salt-and-pepper hair. Mir was walking by the pool and you were running along beside him in your swimsuit bottoms. I told Mazen, I don’t go out with married men. He’s not married, he said, he’s divorced. Mazen was smiling from ear to ear. I left and went to my class.’

After aerobics had ended, Mazen took Ghinwa over to a table where Murtaza and some friends were sitting. He introduced everyone around the table to her as Doctor, an Arabism that Mazen was flying with, since he was the only actual Doctor there. Ghinwa sat down at the table. She was tall, over five feet eight, and had jet-black hair wound in tight curls. She was beautiful.

‘Doctor in what?’ Ghinwa asked Murtaza, breaking the silence between them. He smiled and answered back, ‘Economics.’ He was shy, but debonair. Ghinwa burst out laughing. What bullshit, she thought, what would an economist be doing in socialist Syria? He told her he was from Afghanistan. She bought that fib more easily. They chatted
and Ghinwa asked Murtaza what his daughter’s name was. ‘Fah-tima,’ he replied. ‘Oh, Fa-ti-ma,’ Ghinwa sing-songed back, pronouncing my name with an Arabic lilt. Just as she turned to look for me around the table, she felt my hand behind her back. I had sneaked up behind her chair and wedged my small hands under her back cushion. I was protective of my father; it had always been just him and me in my mind, and I’d come to take a closer look at the beautiful woman he was talking to. ‘Hello Fa-ti-ma,’ Ghinwa said softly. I ducked my chin to my chest and looked at her sideways for the rest of the lunch.

Hours later, Mazen and Ghinwa sat in a taxi together as he offered to drop her off at her flat in Muhajirin, a Damascene neighbourhood tucked under the Qasiyoon mountains. ‘I said to him in the car, Mazen what nonsense,’ referring to Murtaza claiming to be an economist. ‘Who is he really?’ OK, he replied, it is nonsense, but why did you have to ask so many questions?’ Mummy laughs. I live to hear her laugh. She laughs with her ribs, from deep inside and her whole face crinkles with pleasure.

Mazen had been kicking Ghinwa under the table to shut her up when she persisted with her questions about Murtaza’s economics doctorate. In the taxi Mazen told her who Murtaza really was, that he wasn’t an economics expert, but a Pakistani exile, the son of the murdered Prime Minister. ‘To me, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a hero,’ Mummy says as we sit in Zulfikar’s old dressing room, a space we’ve converted over time into a small family sitting room. ‘If heroism had a face, it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s. I used to watch him on TV as a young girl. I was maybe twelve years old the first time I saw him. The whole Arab world was nauseated watching Zia ul Haq send him to his death, and we watched him die so bravely, like a man.’ Ghinwa’s parents were Marxists; her mother Kafia, the daughter of a respected religious sheikh, was a poet and a teacher and her father Abboud an engineer who had fought alongside the Lebanese nationalists in expelling the French colonialists from the country in the 1940s. They knew their history. Mazen swore Ghinwa to secrecy; she wasn’t to tell Murtaza that she knew who he was. She was an exile too; she understood that he had been forced away from his home because of violence,
and it was not a topic she wanted to discuss. She didn’t bring it up with Mazen again.

The next time Ghinwa went to her aerobics class, Murtaza was at the pool alone. When she finished her class he invited her to sit with him and share a drink. They spoke for a while and he asked her about the ballet class she was running. ‘What age do you start taking girls?’ he asked. Ghinwa had resolutely decided she wouldn’t take students younger than five, but she knew Murtaza’s daughter would miss the mark by just six months. ‘Four and a half,’ she replied, and I was ceremoniously enrolled into the ballet class.

I called her ‘Aunty Ghinwa’ and we became fast friends. ‘The next time Mir invited me for lunch, we came to pick you up from the house where you had stayed because you were ill. You were in these girly pyjamas making butterfly paintings with tubes of paint smeared across white paper that you folded and then spread out across the living room floor. You had covered the entire floor and I looked at the sheets of paper and asked you if you had painted them. You nodded, you were proud that your work had been noticed, though it was impossible to ignore it – it was everywhere! Your father took you to change and dressed you in a navy blue cardigan and we went to the Sheraton for lunch.’