by Sinan Antoon
Youssef got up, hand outstretched. A smile spread across her face, lighting up her eyes.
“Mr. Youssef, head of the export department. Miss Dalal, our new hire. Today is her first day with us and it’s my pleasure to introduce her to everyone,” declared Abu Shukri.
She shook his hand firmly and with confidence, unlike many women he knew whose grip was so limp and lifeless that one regretted shaking hands with them at all. Youssef watched her svelte silhouette as she strode out of his office, and her scent hung in the air even after the director had shut the door. He tried turning his attention back to the papers before him, but that scent was like a raincloud of femininity that had burst above his head and it played havoc with his thoughts. He put his palm to his nostrils and inhaled the fragrance which, from now on, he would smell every single morning as he passed her office, which was fortunately on the same floor as his.
At the time, Youssef was in his mid-forties, unmarried, and without children. He’d had plenty of opportunity to sow his wild oats and had frequented nightclubs. There’d been a sad romance with his cousin, Najat, when he was in his twenties. Very much in love, Youssef had wanted to marry Najat, and the two families had agreed that she would be his if her younger sister, Hayat, was betrothed to his brother Ghazi. Hayat, however, didn’t have a quarter of Najat’s charms and Ghazi was in love with another woman whom he was determined to wed. The ensuing rift between the two families persisted until Gorgis’s death and only then did it end, when Najat’s father joined the rest of the family for the requisite condolence period. By that time, Najat was married to another man and had two children. For years afterward, there were knowing glances between them but she and Youssef never exceeded the rules of propriety, their exchanges remaining entirely formal, in keeping with social convention. As far as Youssef was concerned, Najat was the love of his life and he would never again love another woman like that, or consider marriage and having children. He liked being unattached, he enjoyed his unencumbered life, and had yet to meet a woman who could persuade him to change his mind.
Until Dalal came along and upset all his calculations. At first, he tried to reason with himself and suppress his feelings. She was more than twenty years his junior and she surely couldn’t find him attractive. He was old enough to be her father. Furthermore,
she was a Muslim and he was a Christian, which constituted an impossible social barrier. Not only that, but she had a master’s degree while he, despite his eminent position, had not gone to university—another thing that made them incompatible in the eyes of society. He was vulnerable and these rationalizations were to protect him, a defense against disappointment he could well do without. Still, his armor soon fell away and Youssef found himself defenseless, with his heart fluttering like a feather every time she passed him, whether in the flesh or in his mind’s eye.
During her first week on the job, she came into his office to ask him a question. Seeing the Arabian jasmine he kept on his desk, she expressed delight with the beautiful and fragrant plant. It was from his garden, he told her proudly. The following morning, he took his courage in both hands and offered her a jasmine flower. She thanked him, blushing.
Even though he had not declared himself, he began to wonder whether her glances might reciprocate his feelings, but he quickly banished the thought and told himself that he was deluded. Driving home after work one day, he spotted her not far from the office. It was raining and she was trying to shield her hair with a newspaper as she walked. He hesitated for an instant but then stopped, rolled down the window, and called out to her, offering to drive her home. She thanked him and declined the offer politely, saying she wouldn’t want to put him out. He insisted. “And you’d rather put yourself out by walking in the rain?” he said, leaning across to open the passenger door.
She accepted his offer and got in beside him. The downpour had been a complete surprise—it was warm and no one had been expecting rain. Youssef had never felt as happy about the rain as he did on that occasion. The rain was Youssef’s good fortune that day: it had soaked Dalal’s hair and seeped through her blouse so that it clung fetchingly to her pear-shaped breasts. He also got a glimpse of her knees as she settled into the seat. She tugged at her skirt to cover them and eventually just placed her handbag over them. The rain had softened the ground and connected together the myriad of rivulets that ran between them.
He made conversation and asked her general questions about her studies and the two years she had spent in Britain. She was the only girl in her family and had an older brother who had become a physician. Their father taught in the Engineering Department at Baghdad University and had obtained his doctorate in the U.S. She too wanted to know his story, and asked him about his job and other, slightly more personal questions. The time flew by and she apologized as she requested that he let her off a few streets before they reached her house in Muhandiseen, so as to avert gossip on the part of the neighbors. He assured her that he understood, saying, “We’re still quite conservative, as a society, aren’t we?”
He looked for every opportunity to offer her a ride home and one day when she said she was hungry, he suggested they go and get something to eat together. She agreed. He relished the time they spent talking after he had stopped the car to let her off at the usual place. He thought carefully before taking the next step that would transform their relationship into a more intimate one, because he was afraid of scaring her off. She had once confided in him how much she missed her outings along the river that ran through the little town close to her university in Britain; he suggested that they could do the same thing in Baghdad and she agreed. He would take her to Masbah Park and to the al-Fahama area, and after she’d bought herself a small car with her father’s help, they began meeting in the evenings. She would tell her parents that she was going to visit one of her girlfriends after work. The first time he took her hand as they sat in the car, she didn’t object and, on the contrary, squeezed his hand tightly in hers. This progressed to passionate kisses and caresses after they’d park in one of the few places where lovers went (these could be counted on the fingers of one hand) either in al-Fahama or at the end of Abu Nuwas Street on the Jadiriya side.
Bringing her home was out of the question, with Hinna in most of the day, except for her trips to the market after church.
Youssef was so smitten with Dalal that he was ready to risk everything to be with her. He was prepared to convert to Islam if necessary—signing a piece of paper or mumbling a few words were no big deal, as far as he was concerned. After he broached the subject of marriage, Dalal approached her father. Not only was he displeased right away, but after getting the answers to two questions, he became adamantly opposed to the idea. Youssef was not in the least suitable as a husband, he told her: even if he converted to Islam, he remained much older than she was and he didn’t have a degree. He found her gullibility surprising, he said.
Clearly, her father’s education in the United States had done nothing to soften his inflexible thinking. For his part, Youssef didn’t broach it with Hinna—he already knew what she thought of marriage to non-Christians from what she said about people who,
“got into trouble and did the vile deed.” Her answer would be a flat no. And even if marrying Dalal didn’t remain a mere fantasy and became a reality, it would break Hinna’s heart and would split the entire family. In spite of both sides’ refusal to entertain the idea, Youssef told Dalal he was willing to elope with her. She thought about it for a few days but finally told him, as she sobbed into his chest, “I love you, but I just can’t cut myself off from my family and my community and live like a pariah.”
Although they agreed to remain friends, it didn’t work—romantic love doesn’t turn into friendship just by virtue of changing a relationship’s designation. Soon enough, her father got wind of the fact that they were still seeing each other and he used his connections to distance Youssef from his beloved. Within a couple
of months, a ministerial decree wa
s issued transferring Dalal to an entirely different department of the Ministry of Agriculture.
They met a few more times but eventually decided to break it off.
About a year and a half later, he was so overcome with longing for her that he left work half an hour early and began driving around the area of her new office on the off chance of catching a glimpse of her. His heart missed several beats and felt as if it had landed in his stomach when he caught sight of her standing in front of the building, her belly swollen. A car stopped to pick her up a few moments later and Dalal got in next to a man, probably the person whose baby she was carrying.
Youssef sank into a deep depression. He’d known that she couldn’t be his, that they couldn’t be together, but the sight of her pregnant brought it home brutally: never again would she be his Dalal. This image of her haunted him for months afterward, but in time memory of her pregnant belly dissipated and was replaced by images of Dalal inhaling the scent of the Arabian jasmine flowers which he used to bring her, or of her smile as she sat beside him in the car with her hair fluttering in the wind echoing the flutter of his heart. He never found out what became of her: he didn’t know whether she was still in Iraq or had joined the ranks of the diaspora; he didn’t even know if she was still alive.
Living in the Past
1
I decided it was time for my monthly visit with Saadoun. I’d been missing him recently, and he was the last of my friends who was still alive. We’d met at a soccer match decades earlier; it was the 1979 game between al-Zawraa and al-Minaa at al-Shaab stadium.
We were seated next to each other in the covered section during the unfortunate match when al-Zawraa’s star, Falah Hassan, was injured and broke his leg. In the middle of the second half, Falah was alone in the penalty area when al-Minaa’s goalie ran toward him to cut him off. To avoid hitting the goalie’s head with his foot, Falah leapt into the air in a half-twist and fell to the ground, immobilized. When Thamir Youssef, his offense teammate, approached and saw his mangled leg, he buried his head in his hands and wept. Players from both teams gathered around the injured star. The entire crowd stood up on the bleachers and a stunned silence descended over the stadium. Many people cried that day, as Falah was a star of international repute and Iraq’s most famous player. They laid him on a stretcher, carried him to the ambulance that had driven onto the field from a side entrance, and whisked him away to Medical City Hospital.
Our passion for al-Zawraa and our distress over Abu Taysir, as Falah was known, brought us together, and during our first conversation we commiserated about the fate of his career and the future of the club without his offensive skills. Even though al-Zawraa ended up winning that match by one goal, Saadoun was somber. Speaking loud enough for all the spectators around to
hear, he announced, “This is a complete disaster. Tonight, I’m getting drunk!”
I agreed with him, “It really merits a bender.”
At the end of the game, we headed out together, walking alongside the large crowd of spectators spilling out toward Andalus Square as we commiserated. We went into the first bar we found and spent the next three hours there, drinking and talking. We went over every one of Falah’s offensive plays and all his best goals; we bemoaned his misfortune and al-Zawraa’s bad luck—his injury was obviously serious and we were sure he would never again return to the field even though he was at the height of his form. In spite of it all, I was determined that we should part on an optimistic note.
“To Abu Taysir’s health—may he recover and come back stronger!” I exclaimed, raising my glass in one last toast.
Fully agreeing with my sentiment, Saadoun began repeating the words like an incantation to the wine gods. Falah Hassan went to Britain for treatment and al-Watan sports magazine ran a photo spread of him exercising with the British physiotherapy team helping with his rehab. He was back six months later, and at the first match he played at al-Shaab stadium he got down on his knees and kissed the ground before the start of play. Saadoun and I went to the game together, having become fast friends in the intervening months. That day, Saadoun teared up as he yelled at the top of his lungs, “I’ll lay my life down for that golden orb,” referring to Falah’s bald head.
In those days, Saadoun was a high school Arabic teacher, and he also ran a small stationery shop in Karrada that he and his brother, Salih, had inherited from their father. He invited me to join the al-Khayyam Society and attend its weekly meetings at the eponymous Khayyam Hotel whose bar he described as “Abu Nuwas Central”—an evening of bacchanalia in the best tradition of Abu Nuwas, the doyen of classical Arabic poetry devoted to hedonism.
Ever the master of neologisms and witty sobriquets, Saadoun referred to himself as the group’s ‘founding leader’ both because he was its most ardent supporter and had introduced the merry band of revelers to each other.
The very first time I attended one of these revelries, I understood that the term ‘society’ was something of an overstatement, reflecting Saadoun’s proclivity for exaggeration and verbal prowess. I was the third member of an entire membership of three, the second being Shawqi, Saadoun’s colleague who taught biology at the same school. Not much of a drinker or a talker, Shawqi was a portly man who invariably wolfed down the mezze that always came with our drinks. Saadoun teased him about it mercilessly, “Come on, man, demolishing the mezze in one fell swoop! We are going to dinner later, you know.”
At first, Saadoun said I couldn’t become a full and effective member of the society until I had demonstrated my devotion through regular attendance and confirmed my commitment by drinking the minimum amount of alcohol—three large bottles of beer or their equivalent in araq—over a period of four weeks. Since I was a seasoned drinker, that wasn’t too much of a challenge.
The membership might grow to four or even five, on occasion.
People came and went as they pleased. For me, it wasn’t difficult to be a regular as the hotel was close to the house and I could walk there and back if I had to. Over the years, I became a fixture of the ‘society,’ along with the other unshakable element, namely Saadoun’s irreverent wit—he animated our revelries with his jokes and tales, and his declamations of poetry, especially the wine songs of Abu Nuwas, which he knew by heart and could recite at will. Whenever a waiter passed our table with a tray full of beer bottles, he would declaim a verse or two.
Golden-hued wine, whose abode sorrow never visits, And whose merest touch gives joy to a rock or
Ramadan is past and gone,
Bring the cup, O cupbearer,
A lover longing for another.
And when this failed to get the waiter’s attention, he would remonstrate loudly,
O cupbearer, to you our complaint is directed You hear us not, and still we call on you.
Following the so-called Faith Campaign in 1994 when all the bars were shut down, these drinking jags moved into our homes.
“Sons of bitches,” Saadoun exclaimed wryly, “taking us back to the days of the underground struggle, making us drink in secret!”
I offered to host and Hinna outdid herself with the mezze she produced for us, especially the boiled beets that I love, and the lablabi of chickpeas swimming in oil and vinegar. Sadly, there were no roasted nut mixes to be had in those days because they had become prohibitively expensive. Our gatherings became more spaced out, and we met once or twice a month sometimes, rather than weekly. In the last years of the Khayyam Society, it was just Saadoun and me. We were no longer a legal assemblage, he liked repeating, because that required a minimum of three people, and then he would segue into the Bard’s famous couplet,
“Greetings, O carousers, I am intoxicated.” His plaintive recitation was neither logical nor rational, I objected, “Can’t
we have just one carouser? You could just say ‘ya nadeemi,’
that’s all that’s needed!”
“Of course not,” he answered. “It wouldn’t work with one. We must have two. ‘Pour me a cup you
two. For I miss it like the weaned infant misses suckling nipples.’”
“So why not use ‘ya nadeemi’ then?”
He would answer me by quoting a segment from the “Long Poem” of al-Jawahiri by the same name. Al-Jawahiri was at the pinnacle of the ‘Saadoun encyclopedia’ as he liked to refer to his memory while pointing to his head. Al-Jawahiri was his favorite poet of all time. In his estimation, he placed even ahead of al-Mutanabbi, and Saadoun had committed dozens of his poems to memory. “The entire history of Iraq is contained in his diwan,”
he would tell me.
But decades of drinking took a toll on his health. Medical tests in Baghdad and later in Amman revealed that he had cirrhosis of the liver. To alleviate the severe pain that he likened to being stabbed in the back with knives, he had to give up alcohol, something he initially resisted. He obstinately held to the belief that some trick or stratagem existed which would dispense him from the prohibition. But he eventually came around because he was, “in no hurry to enter hell,” as he liked to joke. After that, his drinking was limited to qahwa, the coffee whose increased consumption the doctor encouraged. He comforted himself with the thought that in the qahwa he drank the old meaning of what the Arabs called wine was present.
Two years into the sanctions regime his younger brother, Salih, convinced Saadoun that they should close down the stationery store since they were making nothing but losses. Salih was a smart businessman—he knew how to turn a situation to his advantage and his cleverness paid off handsomely. He wanted to construct a five-story building, with commercial spaces on the ground floor and apartments on the remaining floors, the rent from which would provide a stable income. Saadoun left Salih to do whatever he pleased because, although Saadoun had absolutely no business savvy, he understood all too well that the project would guarantee more security than his schoolteacher’s pension, which was a joke. The project would be an asset for him and his children who were all that he had left since his wife had been claimed by cancer two years after the 1991 Gulf War.
