He thought about that for a minute, frowning, then said, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
I shrugged.
“Well,” Abu said, “it does, a little. It does.”
* * *
—
It wasn’t surprising that Abu couldn’t find a job. With the Iraqi army disbanded, there were many men desperate for work, some with more mouths to feed than Abu had. Getting the privilege of serving the occupying force was like winning the lottery, and Abu had never been a lucky man.
He joined a political party. I’m not sure what Abu did for them, but they paid him a little. I heard him tell Dr. Yousef that he knew people said they were funded by the Iranians, but in our situation it didn’t matter which country the money came from.
It was strange. There was so much happening around me, and yet my life, my world, was smaller than it had ever been. I couldn’t leave home. Abu said it wasn’t safe, and we couldn’t leave Fahd alone. School was out of the question. We’d lost the internet because we couldn’t pay for it. When there was electricity, I got to watch some TV, but I didn’t want to hear about violence breaking out or statues being pulled down. It was prettier to just watch my mother’s Full House tapes and wonder at lives so different from mine.
“At least things can’t get worse,” Fahd said one day. “Remember what the Quran says, Safwa. After hardship, there is ease. It is a promise from Allah. After hardship, there is ease. Take comfort in that.”
I smiled and didn’t point out that Allah didn’t say how much hardship would have to be endured before the promised ease came or what kind of ease it would be. Death too was ease of a kind. Maybe those weren’t verses of solace at all. Maybe they were just the truth about the human condition: you will suffer and then, one day, you will suffer no more.
“You’ve handled all this so well. Mama would be proud of you,” Fahd told me. “You’ve become so much like her.”
I pulled my hand away from his.
My brother frowned, unsure of what he had said wrong. “You’re so good at managing everything around the house. You do everything she did. You stay home, just like she did. You don’t waste your time with friends or fashion or pointless things.” He laughed, not unkindly. “You even watch that American television show she loved so much.”
I stared at him for a while, then looked away, first out the window at the city forbidden to me and then down at my hands. I didn’t say a thing.
“What’s wrong?” Fahd asked, straining to sit up in bed.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I just never thought about…myself. I’m just doing what I have to with the world as I find it. Just trying to live.”
My brother let out a deep, shuddering sigh. “Yeah. Tell me about it.”
“Very funny,” I said, getting to my feet.
Fahd was right. The life I was living now was indistinguishable from the one my mother had led. Would it end differently for me? Would it be the same? Four walls and a door that I rarely stepped through. Groceries. The stove. The prayer mat. A bed and in it a husband who cared about everything more than he did about me.
“Safwa?”
“Yes?” I said, turning to face my brother, a static smile on my face. “Sorry. I didn’t realize that time was passing. That’s all. I know it’s stupid.”
Fahd didn’t say it was stupid, but then he wouldn’t. That wasn’t his way. Instead, he said, “She was a good woman, you know. It is not such a bad thing to be like her.”
“I know she was good,” I said. “But was she happy?”
“One is more important than the other, don’t you agree?”
“Yes.”
“I know you don’t like talking about what is happening to me,” Fahd said. “But what the books and scholars tell us is true. What the sermons tell us is true. The life of this world is like water held in a fist. Too soon it is gone and nothing remains. So bear your thirst now, and you will drink from the lakes of paradise one day.”
I shook my head.
“What?” Fahd asked. He sounded self-conscious, like he’d tried out something new and was afraid I’d mock him for it. These flights of religiosity were new. They’d started shortly after he’d been diagnosed, when he’d realized how little time he had left. I didn’t particularly care for them. He didn’t sound like the Fahd I’d known my entire life when he spoke like that. He sounded more like a nicer, kinder, more eloquent Abu. Beneath the pretty words, however, the thoughts were the same.
What if there is no heaven and no hell? I wanted to ask him. What if there is no majestic reward at the end of this journey of pain and hurt that you want me to call a life? What if the time Mama had in this world was all the time she had, and she wasted it tied to a kitchen chair, yearning for the fictional lives of characters from a television series?
Maybe those aren’t questions you can ask anyone ever. They definitely aren’t questions you ask a dying man.
“You’re right,” I said.
It was what he wanted to hear, so he smiled when he heard it.
But I threw away all the Full House tapes in the house after I left his room. I never saw Mama’s dream ever again.
* * *
—
I prefer bombs to goats. Bombs explode more often, this is true, and they’re louder, but at least everything is over in a flash. A goat isn’t like that. It goes on and on, bleating and chewing and peeing until its life is ended. Shock and awe is better than slow torment.
I realized this around the first Eid al-Adha after the fall of Baghdad. Our next-door neighbor, Baba Adam, bought a goat to sacrifice and tied the beast up on his roof. This meant that the goat spent all day, and all night, staring right into my bedroom window, chewing hay and looking a little threatening. My only sanctuary in my father’s home began to smell, and the constant, nasty smacking of the goat’s lips became the soundtrack to my life.
It wouldn’t shut up no matter how much I yelled at it. When I drew the curtains to make its glowering face go away, it resorted to head-butting the windowpane.
I’ve never looked forward to an Eid as much as I did that one.
Baba Adam was a wiry, cranky man who lived alone in a building where he’d once housed three supercranky sons. I begged Abu to speak to Baba Adam about moving the goat, but Abu said the old man wouldn’t do it, which was probably true.
Baba Adam had never been nice, but recently, after his three missing sons had been found in a mass grave in Mahaweel, he’d started picking fights with everyone around him—family members, friends, even strangers on the street. Abu didn’t want to start anything with him. My father thought, in fact, that our neighbor had put the goat there on purpose, so his thirst for conflict could be sated.
Baba’s boys had probably been killed during the intifada, when Saddam had been trying to suppress a Shia rebellion. The boys had Shia names, given to them by their Shia mother, and that was probably what had caused their deaths. It was important, Abu said, what we called people and what we called things. It was a matter of life and death.
“Baba’s sons were missing for years,” I said. “Everyone already thought they were dead. Shouldn’t finding them and knowing for sure bring him peace?”
“There is no peace anymore,” Abu said as Dr. Yousef, who had come to check on Fahd, nodded along. “You should feel sorry for the poor animal. And you should envy it. It is giving its life for the sake of Allah. It is making a great sacrifice.”
This wasn’t true. The goat wasn’t noble. It wasn’t making a sacrifice. It was being sacrificed. Those were very different things. The only reason to feel sorry for the animal, aside from the fact that it was going to die, was that it didn’t have any control over what was happening to it. But then neither did we.
I spent a lot more time with Abu in those weeks before Eid. His company was more comfortable than the company of
the goat. Mostly.
I could say that my father was an angry man, and it would be true. He was severe and rigid. He could be unkind, as he so often was to Mama. With me, he was a little more lenient, at least back then, though I had to always be doing something when he was around, because he disapproved of being idle.
One morning, having been driven out of my room, I was just lying on a sofa and watching a ceiling fan spin when he said, “Are you daydreaming again?”
I couldn’t help but wince at the irritation in his tone. “No, Abu. What use are dreams to a girl like me?”
He stumbled over what he was going to say. The sting drained from his voice. “You’ve given Fahd his medicine? He’s resting?”
I nodded.
“And have you no housework to do?”
I could’ve been dusting, I guess. In this city you could always be dusting, forever and ever into the arms of God if you wanted. Even so, I said, “None.”
“Then you should be thanking Allah.”
“That’s what I was doing.”
Abu let his head loll back, looking up at the same ceiling I was looking at. “Not like this. Damaghsiz. Properly with nose touching the ground. You know the Prophet said that you should keep your tongue wet with the remembrance of Allah.”
I bit back my response, got up and went to sit by Baba Adam’s goat.
* * *
—
Abu cleared his throat. Twice. Then again. Shaking my head, I looked up from the shirt button of his that I was mending. That shirt was the best piece of clothing he owned, and he wanted to wear it for Eid.
“What, Abu? I don’t want to mess this up.”
“Remember when for Eid we used to have new clothes,” he said.
I smiled and went back to my task. “That wasn’t so long ago.”
“There was laughter in this house then. You and your mama would sit right there, at that table, and make kleecha, and she’d have to keep telling Fahd not to eat the dates she was baking with.”
I didn’t say anything. I did not want to be asked to make kleecha. I’d tried once, after Mama had died, and had burned all the little cookies, and had broken down into such tears that poor Fahd, alarmed, had gone to buy some from the store. I’d refused to eat them, and now wished I had.
“You know that it is a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad to wear new clothes on Eid, don’t you?”
Yes, I thought, I’m not five years old.
“You taught me that, Abu,” I said.
“That is at least one way in which I have not failed you.”
“Is this about clothes? Abu, really, it’s fine. I swear. I don’t care that we couldn’t get new clothes this year. It isn’t important.”
“It is important.” Abu’s voice rose a little. “The Prophet said—”
“You’re right. I didn’t mean it isn’t important. I meant we need to take care of Fahd first.”
He nodded but continued to hover over me.
I looked up again. “It’ll be fixed soon.”
“I have given some thought to what you said.” Abu stuck his big hands into his pockets, looking like a sheepish schoolboy more than a war veteran.
I returned my eyes to the needle as it pierced the shirt again and again, hurting it and healing it at the same time.
“I wish you’d been born into a better world, habibti.” He fished around in his pockets and pulled out a small, baby pink hair clip. It was shaped like a bow, the kind of thing I used to wear when I was a child. “It isn’t a new dress or even something you’ll use now, I know, but it made me think of you in happier times, when you would sit by your mother and listen to all the stories she knew how to tell and your eyes…they were full of stars.”
He patted my cheek. The skin on his palm was rough, his fingers callused.
“I pray Allah wills that one day you find yourself facing a better destiny than you do now. You should remember who you were, before the dark times came, so you are ready in case you get to see the dawn.”
* * *
—
Baba Adam’s goat didn’t seem to understand the significance of the knife in his owner’s trembling hand. It stood where it was, chewing cud as the old man untied it. When he turned to head back downstairs, the goat in tow, he seemed to realize, for the first time, that I was watching them through the window.
He stared at me for a long moment, a scowl slowly growing on his face, until finally he said, “It is the will of Allah.”
I almost asked him what he was talking about, but then realized he was defending his murderous intentions toward the animal.
“I know,” I said.
“Then don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Baba Adam let go of the rope he’d been using to guide his sacrifice to its end and pointed in my direction. The sun’s light reflected off the steel blade he held and somehow became brighter. Blinding.
“Don’t look at me with those eyes.”
“These are the only eyes I’ve got.”
“I don’t like them,” Baba Adam groused. “They’re strange.”
“Unique,” I said.
“Go beat your head on a wall. What is to happen to this creature”—he swung the blade to point toward the goat—“has already been written in the Book of Fate and the Pen has been lifted. Go on then.”
I started to argue. I didn’t have to go anywhere. I was, after all, in my own room. Besides, the old man was leaving himself, so his ordering me to go made no sense. Then I stopped, remembering what my father had said. Baba Adam wanted to fight. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
I stepped toward the window to draw the curtains when a familiar roar blasted through the air and the ground shook. I stumbled but caught myself. Even as I did so, I knew that we were safe. I could guess with some accuracy how far away an explosion was, and this was close, but not dangerously so.
There was a scream. I looked up just in time to see Baba Adam lying on his roof, a hand outstretched in the direction of his goat. It was running around in a frenzy, its eyes rolled back in its head, its panicked bleating piteous.
It was the only resident of Baghdad not used to bombs going off.
As Baba Adam screeched for the animal to calm down, he struggled to his feet. But the force of a second explosion made him fall again.
The goat was not having it. It let out a final, wild complaint, turned its head first to the right and then to the left, and then took a magnificent leap of faith into the air, toward the waiting concrete below.
Moments after it dropped out of view, I heard the sick slap of its body hitting the street, along with the alarmed cries of pedestrians, who may have just shrugged off the two explosions, but who hadn’t yet become accustomed to the sight of livestock falling from the sky.
Baba Adam finally regained his feet. He turned to look back at me, eyes wide, arms held out as his knife clattered to the ground. His entire slack expression was a question. He was asking me if I’d just seen that. If I could believe it.
“But it was the will of Allah,” he said in the voice of a lost soul.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think it was.”
* * *
—
Fahd thought the story of the goat was hilarious. The goat had not, it turned out, been sacrificed that day. It had been put down, having shattered its hip in the fall, but a wounded animal doesn’t count as a sacrifice for Eid. So, all that had happened was that Baba Adam was out some money and suicide bombers had killed people in the explosions that scared the goat.
“The question,” Fahd said, “is why the goat jumped.”
“That’s the question?”
“Goats live on mountains and things, right? It must have thought—”
“Isn’t the question why two men walked
into a crowd of people and blew themselves up on Eid?”
Fahd shrugged. “They thought they were doing what Allah wanted.”
That’s what Abraham thought too, I almost said, but caught myself in time.
The Festival of Sacrifice was a celebration of Abraham’s absolute obedience to God. So obedient was the great prophet that he was willing to sacrifice his own son when commanded to do so.
It occurred to me that day that Abraham’s story was about more than obedience. It was a story about human ignorance too. Here was a man who spoke with the divine, and thought he understood what Allah wanted of him. Because of that misplaced certainty in his understanding of God’s will, he’d almost slit open the throat of his own child.
Abu had taught me that Abraham’s was an inspirational tale. I thought, maybe, it was also a cautionary one.
Yet two men today had killed themselves and many innocents because they thought they understood what Allah wanted, and they’d done it on a day celebrating Abraham.
“It had to have thought it would escape,” Fahd said.
“What?”
“The goat, Safwa. When it jumped. It must have thought it would manage to get free.”
I looked through one of Fahd’s windows at the street below. At what point during the fall had the animal realized it had made a mistake? It must have, moments after jumping, recognized that what it had mistaken for safety was actually doom.
“It was free,” I said, talking more to myself than Fahd, “for a while there. Right when it jumped, before it knew it had been wrong. There was a moment when it was free.”
“I guess. It still didn’t escape its destiny. I mean, it still died. Instead of a peaceful death as an honored sacrifice to Allah, it ended up on the road, in pain, and got a bad end. What was its struggle for?”
My brother was right. The goat hadn’t escaped its destiny. It had, however, managed to change it. That was not, in my mind, nothing.
* * *
—
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 8
