When the Apricots Bloom

by Gina Wilkinson

  The soldier rapped on Huda’s window.

  I haven’t done anything wrong.

  The boy stooped over. His eyes were as blank as those of a river carp. Huda could no longer see any resemblance to her son.

  “Where are you going? What is your business this morning?”

  The soldier offered no greeting, no peace be with you, no as-salaam alaikum. Huda wondered, What had happened to common courtesy and respect for one’s elders?

  “I’m going to visit a friend in Mansour.”

  The soldier spat a blob of phlegm onto the crumbling verge.

  “A rich friend, then?” The soldier inspected the faded vinyl of the Corolla’s back seat. “You don’t look like you’d have friends in Mansour. What’s their name?”

  “She’s nobody of importance.”

  “A nobody, you say?” The boy wiped his ratty sleeve across his mouth. “There are so many of us nobodies these days.”

  He peered again at the Corolla’s worn seats and faded dashboard. He stepped back and waved Huda on, toward the palace on the far bank. Huda lowered her eyes from the enormous turrets carved with the president’s visage. But even after she crossed the bridge, she could feel his granite eyes boring into her back.

  Her stomach gurgled. She couldn’t tell if it was anxiety, the result of too many sweets, or both. After the fight with Abdul Amir, she’d curled up on the living room couch and wept until she fell asleep. About four in the morning, she got up, stiff-limbed and swollen-eyed, went out to the garden, and ate pastries, one syrupy, nutty mouthful after another, till she thought she would throw up.

  Her gut twisted again. Abdul Amir would be furious if he knew what she was doing in Mansour. Some men would kill their wives for such a thing. Not him though. He never approved of beating women. That hadn’t changed. She was fairly sure of that.

  She passed al-Kindi souk, all the while silently rehearsing what she would say. “You owe me,” she muttered under her breath. “If you ever cared, you will do this.” There were many arguments she could use to achieve her goal. Some were prettier than others.

  Huda took a sharp left. A block later, she turned again. She circled the block twice, checked her mirror at every corner, scanned the footpath, and peered into parked cars. Finally, she pulled alongside the curb. She adjusted her sunglasses, pulled a scarf over her hair, and then hurried along the sidewalk. She prayed no one was watching as she rang the bell at the great copper gate.

  A minute later, the ancient hinges creaked.

  “Huda?” Rania’s hair spilled past her shoulders in frizzy waves. She eyed Huda warily. “Why are you here?”

  Huda extended her palm. In it, she held a paper bag tied with string.

  “I’ve brought lime tea from Basra. My mother sent it.”

  Rania stared at the offering.

  “Tea from Basra?” The wind caught her words and tossed them away. Huda shifted from foot to foot. Eventually, Rania sighed and waved her through the gate.

  “Take a seat in the garden. I will get us some refreshments.”

  “Do not trouble yourself.” The words leaped forth without Huda’s bidding, reflexes she thought she’d conquered long ago, suddenly resurrected. “I can prepare the tea.”

  “There’s no reason for you to do that.” Rania frowned. “Our circumstances are different now, as you reminded me last time we met.”

  Huda extended the bag of tea again.

  “My family has always served the sheikh.”

  “He’s been dead ten years.” Rania took the bag of tea and went inside the house.

  Out in the garden, a bubble-eyed gecko clung to the wall. Huda glanced at the crumbling mansion. She didn’t understand why Rania hadn’t moved to a house like her own, with modern wiring and plumbing. Huda thought back to the tiny, mud-brick home of her childhood. She had left that behind, and for years, she focused solely on building a better future. But the past could be ignored no longer. Abdul Amir had spoken her brothers’ names last night. Now she heard them whisper among the slender leaves of the eucalypt, urging her on.

  In the branches, a crow wailed. Huda glanced at the mansion. Where were Rania’s servants? Surely she could afford a cook at least? But five minutes later Rania emerged from the house alone, with istikans of tea clinking atop a tarnished silver tray. Could she really have fallen that far?

  Rania lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deep into her lungs. On the far side of the picnic table, Huda did the same, but when she exhaled, smoke emerged from her mouth not in a stream but in short, panicky puffs. She fiddled with her glass of tea. Lime-scented steam mixed with cigarette smoke and looped toward the trees.

  Huda wasn’t quite ready to repeat the words she’d rehearsed in the car, so she sought refuge in ritual greetings, asking after Rania’s family, each one by name: her mother, Raghad; her daughter, Hanan; her aunt Muna. Rania replied with the appropriate rejoinders. Her amber stare never wavered. In the boughs of the eucalypt, the crow moaned again.

  Huda shifted in her seat and waited for Rania to inquire about the purpose of her visit. Rania did nothing of the sort. She sipped her tea, puffed on her cigarette, and tapped the long gray column of ash into an ashtray. Was it possible, Huda wondered, that after all this time Rania had learned restraint?

  Huda checked the path to the front gate.

  “I need to ask . . .” She trailed off, nerves getting the best of her.

  Rania remained still as a sphynx, head angled to the left, one knee elegantly crossed over the other.

  “I need a favor.” Huda cleared her throat. “Not for me, for Khalid.”

  Rania didn’t respond. She could have been one of the statues in her garden, a goddess carved from stone, while Huda was painfully aware of her own trembling flesh, her galloping pulse, her aching chest.

  “It’s the mukhabarat,” she whispered. “They say they’ll put Khalid in the fedayeen.”

  “The fedayeen?”

  If Huda hadn’t been watching closely, she might have missed the flare of alarm that lit up Rania’s eyes. Huda plowed on, words spilling forth in a breathless flurry.

  “Khalid’s not even fourteen years old. I can’t let them take him. Please, you’ve got to help. I need to send him out of the country. It’s the only way.”

  “Stop.” Rania raised her hand. “You shouldn’t be telling me this.”

  “You’ve got to help me. If I apply for a passport, the mukhabarat will surely find out.”

  “I don’t see how I—”

  Huda grasped Rania’s hand.

  “The opposition can get him out. They have ways of moving people across the border. I heard they can get passports with fake names. They can smuggle people—”

  “Stop this. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You know people in the opposition.”

  “This is madness.” Rania jerked her hand free. “I don’t know anyone like that.”

  Above them, the crow gave another strangled cry. It plunged from its branch and swept low over the garden, feathers so black they shone blue in the sun. To Huda, it seemed like an eternity before the bird stopped diving and changed course, swooping up again, wings slicing the air as it flapped toward the sky. In that moment she had a vision of Khalid’s future disappearing, like the black-as-night bird vanishing over the flat roofs of Baghdad.

  “If you weren’t connected with the opposition . . .” Huda took a deep breath and folded her arms across her chest. “Then my brothers would still be alive.”

  Rania said nothing, only turned her cheek and closed her eyes, as if she could wish this all away.

  “You and your fancy college friends, you filled my brothers’ heads with your talk of democracy and freedom.” Huda eyed her steadily. “You pretended you were so brave. But in the end, you ran to your daddy and let him fix your mess. You turned your back while my brothers’ bodies were bulldozed into a ditch.”

  Rania turned pale as milk. “I can’t help you.”

  “Can’t? O
r won’t?”

  “There’s no opposition left,” she whispered angrily. “They’re all in exile. Or dead.”

  “You must know someone.”

  “I don’t. I swear. Why don’t you send Khalid to stay with your mother? I sent my own daughter to Basra. It’s safer there.”

  “My brothers died in Basra,” said Huda. “And you know the mukhabarat are everywhere.”

  “I don’t understand. Why are the mukhabarat so interested in Khalid? What did he do?”

  “It’s not his fault.” Huda scowled at the patchy lawn.

  Rania tapped another cigarette from her pack.

  “When you came here with the diplomat’s wife, I said the mukhabarat would be watching. I told you not to play with fire.” She trained her amber eyes on Huda. After a long moment, she whispered, “Are you working for them? Are you trying to trap me?”

  “Of course not,” stammered Huda. “This is no trap.”

  “You must be working for them. Why else would you be gadding around with a foreigner? You’re an informant, aren’t you?”

  “If I don’t do what they want, they’ll put Khalid in the fedayeen. He needs a passport.”

  “It’s impossible,” said Rania. “I can’t do it.”

  Huda slammed her palms against the table. The tea glasses jumped.

  “You have no choice.”

  “Who are you to say what I must do?” said Rania, her face impassive, even as her fingers betrayed her, tying and untying endless, anxious knots. With a start, Huda spotted the pearly scar on her thumb.

  “I am someone who knows your secrets,” said Huda. “And if you don’t help, I will tell my handler that you are inciting dissent. I will tell him that I heard you insult the president.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I will tell him that you are encouraging young men to rise up. Again.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!” cried Rania.

  “My handler will believe what I tell him.” Huda’s heart pounded. “Just like my brothers believed you.”

  “They were good men.” Rania shook her head. “What would they think of you now?”

  A dizzying cocktail raced through Huda’s veins: anger, adrenaline, grief, guilt.

  “Perhaps they would want an eye for an eye. Did you ever consider that?” She set her mouth in a stubborn line. “There’s no one to save you now, Rania. Test me. See how you fare.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The desert had claimed many acres of land since Rania’s last visit to Basil’s farmhouse. The wind was thick with its pearly grains. She took a step back when Basil pushed open the gate. He looked much older than she’d expected: nose drooping, philosopher’s forehead more prominent than ever, earlobes like deflated balloons. The two of them stood stock-still, eyes fumbling across the other’s face, trying to reconcile memories of smooth skin and plump lips. The wind whipped around them in tight circles, got tangled in Rania’s hair, and tossed it about like graying ribbons.

  Always a gentleman, Basil recovered first.

  “My old friend!” He grasped Rania’s hand, discreetly checked the road outside, and ushered her through the gate. “I am so pleased to see you. What an honor.”

  Pebbles crunched beneath their feet as they followed a curving driveway to a large whitewashed home. Weeping gutters had left tear tracks down its peeling facade. Rania imagined if it was lined up beside her own house, they’d be diagnosed as two geriatric patients suffering the same skin disease.

  At the far end of the property, a palm grove formed a dense green wall. Rania remembered when their serrated trunks seemed to stretch to eternity, when the Fertile Crescent still resembled its legend. But then the irrigation system fell into disrepair, and the government decided to break up big farms—at least those not owned by the president and his cronies. Basil’s family was left with just a couple of acres, and the desert crept in, with its sand and thorny scrub, turning freshwater to muddy salt flats.

  Basil steered Rania through the front door and into a long, windowless hallway. After the bright sun outside, it was dark as a well.

  “Let’s go into the drawing room. It’s coolest there.” Basil smiled crookedly. “I’m afraid the air conditioner performed its swan song some time ago, but we’ve got a fan running at least.”

  He deposited her in the high-ceilinged room and went to find the cook and order tea. Rania ran her fingers along a couch of threadbare Persian damask. A bookcase stretched along one wall. The naked shelves reminded Rania of her father’s library, and the precious Koran she’d sold to the bookseller at Mutanabbi.

  A sideboard held a collection of family photos, including a shot of Basil’s mother and a friend. They looked to be in their early twenties. Dressed in knee-length frocks, they smiled broadly and strode arm in arm past the colonnades of Rashid Street. Behind them, a man in a trilby hat and another in an ankle-length dishdasha waited at a bus stop. Neither paid any mind to the young women with their bare arms and hair falling past their shoulders, marching gaily toward the future.

  Rania had similar photos of her own mother dashing about Baghdad in white patent heels and frocks ordered from London, handbag blithely swinging by her side. Rania wished she could go back in time, swap places with the women on Rashid Street, and feel the breeze sweep in from the Tigris and cool her skin.

  “There we go.” Basil hurried into the drawing room. “Tea is on the way.”

  He paused beside a pair of wrought-iron garden chairs. Rania dimly remembered that two fine wingbacks used to sit in their place. They were probably gathering dust in a secondhand furniture store. Rania’s gaze slid to the rug. Decades of sun streaming through the window had left the outline of the missing wingbacks imprinted in the weave.

  “Tell me, how is your family? Hanan must be in high school by now.” Basil gestured at the couch. “Please, sit.”

  Rania remained standing.

  “Do you mind if we go to the garden?” She kept her gaze on the rug. “It would be wiser to talk outside.”

  “Outside?” The word emerged slowly, cautiously, as if stepping onto a high wire. “Is that necessary?”

  Rania nodded, still unable to meet his eye.

  In the garden, they clutched at straws of small talk. Basil spoke of family, old college friends, a book of poems a cousin had sent from London. Rania praised the beds of yellow rosebushes and the tidy herb garden. By a weeping willow, she spotted the wrought-iron picnic table that matched the chairs in the drawing room.

  Basil directed Rania along a cobbled path. Creeping thyme grew in the cracks in the stone, and every step they took released a burst of lemony perfume.

  “If I’d known you were coming, I would have asked the cook to prepare kebab.”

  “Just like the old days?” asked Rania softly.

  She remembered how their college crowd used to pass by Basil’s farm on the way to picnic at Lake Habbaniyah. On the silty shore, they’d barbecue kebab, and play Umm Kulthum or the Rolling Stones on Basil’s cassette deck. Once again, Rania wished she had the power to travel back in time. She’d swim out deep into Habbaniyah’s cool waters, till the shore disappeared, and all that was left was water and the wide blue sky.

  Basil paused by a wooden arbor smothered in grapevines. It listed to the left like a sailboat ensnared in the tentacles of a giant squid.

  “So, my dear Rania,” he said. “After all these years, why are you here?”

  Rania did her best to explain, forcing herself to keep going as Basil’s face went rigid, first with shock, then with fury.

  “This is madness.” He pressed his hands to his bulbous forehead. “I can’t get involved with this. Neither should you.”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Yes, you do. You tell this woman no.”

  The cook emerged from the house carrying a tray of tea. Basil motioned for her to leave it on the garden table. They waited in silence until she returned indoors.

  “She threatened to tell the mukhabarat
that I insulted the president,” whispered Rania. “She said she’d tell them I was inciting young artists to rebel. If she does, it won’t end with my head. Everyone I’m close to will be at risk—the artists at my gallery, my friends, my family.”

  “Surely this woman is bluffing? I thought you said she was an old friend?”

  Rania sighed softly. Dry leaves eddied around her feet, and then the wind swept them toward the palm grove. Rania registered nothing of this. In her mind she saw only Huda: seven years old, squatting on the bow of a slender mashoof, racing along one of the tributaries veining the Basra delta.

  Rania had been sheltering under a fat palm tree and wishing she were somewhere else before Huda sailed around the bend in the stream. On the riverbank, a half-dozen other skiffs were lined up in a row. Their passengers were all women who’d gathered in the long, low mud-brick house behind Rania to visit the newest mother of the al-Baidi tribe. The tribe was small, fewer than three thousand strong, but to Rania it seemed a new member was born every minute, just to spite her.

  “This is the third time this week,” she’d whined an hour earlier, as her mother and aunt herded her toward the curtained women’s quarters.

  “Try not to fidget,” her mother had ordered. “And don’t wake the baby.”

  Rania tugged at the collar of her stiff-starched dress.

  “None of my friends have to do these boring visits.”

  “You’re the granddaughter of a sheikh.” Aunt Muna pinched her arm. “You have duties.”

  Rania slipped off her shoes, added them to the line of sandals outside the women’s quarters, and crept past the curtain. The new mother reclined on a cot at the far end of the room. On the floor beside her, her baby napped in a small plastic bathtub that served as a crib. The baby’s grandmother, the matriarch, quickly guided them to the plumpest cushions nearest the cot. The other guests jostled about, trading positions until all were properly seated once again.