Naphtalene

by Alia Mamdouh

  He kept her there and answered all her questions. She wanted Farida to have virtuous children and constant protection. She wanted to stay with her here, to keep her company and await her first birth. Farida was the last of her children, a lover of new ways and fugitive dreams. Farida and Munir: my grandmother laughed, she laughed loudly, and every inch of her seemed delighted.

  “By God, if I knew how to trill, I’d wear out my voice for good, but even if I did know how, my tongue would be bloody for my darling Iqbal. Abu Adil has no objection; you know him, he’s short-tempered, but he has a good heart. He only approves of what is legal and blesses all that God has made lawful. As far as what you said, I’ll do as you say, don’t worry, and congratulations, dear Munir.”

  He rose from his place, took her hand and kissed it, and she kissed his head.

  “Ugh, you smell of arak. You drink in the afternoon. God forbid such a thing.”

  “Umm Jamil, that isn’t arak, that’s the spirit of life.”

  “Quiet. You are like Abu Adil, you always have an excuse ready. God guide you and heal you!”

  Farida stood before us, the tray of tea in her hands, a tumult of joy on her face. Everything was clear. At last it had been said openly; the female had craved this glory.

  Farida smiled with a shyness that did not suit her.

  So let males marry females; let your aunt launch her fireworks into the vast sky, and let it show anew in your faces, and the faces of the neighbors, the coffeehouse men, the women at the baths, in the faces of the neighborhood youths and in the street. Put her on the wedding throne and read her the thousand commandments. Let Farida, electrified by her constant laziness and long mistakes, walk to Uncle Munir. Let her rock back and forth to the music if her head is bowed or her hand is bound. Let her swallow his saliva, his water and his phlegm; let the first Farida disappear.

  Rejoice, now, and strew flowers about her and about us. Sit on the threshold as Rasmiya does, as my mother did and my grandmother does, and wait with the long lines for his bald head and vomit. Go to him. Let Rachel create a wedding outfit for you.

  “Take me with you!” Let them take that Huda to carry a sack of clothes for you of brilliant colors, white, pink, and violet.

  Your grandmother said, “Dear Farida, have a violet dress made—you know how much I love that color.”

  We went to the markets in Baghdad, hand in hand, face to face with the city I did not know. We rode the British-made, double-decker red bus. We went to the upper deck. Just look at this limp, effeminate Tigris! I loved only the Euphrates.

  The first time I saw the Tigris, I ran toward it. Its torrent ran deep and the mud was thick. The water was cold. Grandmother took us to Ali al-Gharbi and left us there. We visited the old house, and saw the women and children, the girls and boys, the donkeys and chickens. We walked over the cattle dung, picked berries from the tree whose branches drooped to the ground. The faces around us were sweaty and dark skinned. The boys wore short, torn dishdashas, and the girls stared at me as I put shoes on my feet. They touched the ribbons in my hair and laughed, winked at one another, and hung on me. They felt my dress and my hand. I was in their midst, glowing from the crown of my head down to my toes. Grandmother left us and went into one of the houses. I walked among them, and Adil stood as if pinned to the ground, afraid of new places and people. I did not bother with him, but left him standing there and went to play with the boys. I took off my shoes and loosened my hair, and we all held hands and ran to the river. They drank and I drank, and we splashed water on our clothes and in our faces. We laughed and shouted and waded in. I walked, headed away from them. The water seized me entirely. I spread my arms and embraced it, immersed myself and got knocked over. The boys grabbed at my wet hair and pulled it, shouting. I kept going, still wading, as if waiting for someone to emerge and talk to me.

  White birds pursued me, their wings beating in the leaden sky. These were birds I had never seen over the Tigris. They were beautiful and shining; their legs were red and delicate, and their feathers were clean. They moved like dancers. They glided and collided with the water, and the sound of their beaks tearing at the small fish took me to Mahmoud speaking to me, coming down beside me, flapping their wings, slowing down and drinking the water, and looking at me. Everything took me into its embrace; the embrace of the water, of the birds, the touch of those excited hands in the middle of the Tigris. I shouted to Mahmoud.

  Firdous said he was ill, and I surprised everyone and went into his darkened room. His mother was at the market, and Firdous was beside me. I was standing at his head, and for the first time I laid my hands on his flesh; he was burning up, and so was I.

  Mahmoud, you have suddenly grown two years and waited for me. Leave the fever behind and come with me. Mahmoud, my mother’s lungs are diseased, and I am equally consumptive because of my love for you.

  I took his hand and folded it, smelled it, and kissed it. These were the fingers of the first man in my life.

  Mahmoud did well in school and I failed the exam. What was it about the exam and the school? Answer me, Mahmoud.

  I wiped away his sweat and looked at his beautiful face and his fine, curly blond hair. His cheeks were fiery hot and briny, his lips were dry. My tears did not fall. You both agreed that neither of you would cry, and you wrote it with black coal on the main street, on the roofs of houses, on the carvings of the houses. No matter if you both failed in school, or if your fathers died or your mothers went mad, or everybody committed suicide, or if our brothers were killed—you would not cry.

  You looked at his arms and entwined your arms around his, and asked him to laugh and be naughty. Mahmoud laughed, and Aunt Farida will get married in a few days; Uncle Munir will remove the warts and lance the boils. And my mother was still dying.

  I leaned over and kissed him. Firdous cried silently: “Huda, I’m afraid he’ll die. Typhoid is killing people these days. All that’s from swimming in the midday heat. Tell your grandmother to pray for him until the fever goes away.”

  “He won’t die.” We had agreed that neither of us would die before the other. We had not actually said that—we did not know how it could be said.

  The Euphrates came out of its haughtiness and tied me to its horizon; and this Tigris, behind which I saw no horizon.

  Men crossed the old wooden bridge, and women wrapped in black cloaks; girls in school uniforms, children marching behind their muttering mothers. And the bus that is capable of taking you to the end of the earth.

  Before going out, my grandmother said, “Buy the household things first, and later on the wedding clothes and gold.”

  Mahmoud’s mother’s voice was behind me, and his voice was before me: “Huda, Huda.”

  My aunt pulled me from the high window: “Come on, we’re going to the market.”

  Every time, one of my mother’s or father’s sisters came with us. Today it was Aunt Naima’s turn, the friend of my grandfather’s big house, the companion of her sister Aunt Bahija, and the seamstress for the homes in the other streets.

  She was tall and intimidating, and her eyes were as black as charcoal; they were narrow, and their whites gleamed, and their irises were the color of roasted coffee. Her nose was straight, her lips thick, and her hair as curly as an African’s. She had a strong body and moved quickly, and her voice was calm and tender. We loved her when she took us and began to tell us stories and tales, but we could not stand her when she was angry. She changed all of a sudden and went into fits; she shook and trembled, her eyes grew wide and her hair fell loose, her fingers became stiff, and she rent her clothing. We looked at her stretched out on a sofa in our grandfather’s big house; everyone but Bahija Khan had vanished before her. She stood at her head, dabbing her with cold water, fanning her diligently. Then she bent over her, took the fingers of her hand, and began to massage them. She looked at her as if seeing a creature that had descended from heaven to be her guest alone.

  The two sisters stayed that way until everythi
ng disappeared, hugging each other in silence. Aunt Naima had never married, and now she was past forty. From the refuge she took a girl who had just been weaned whom she called Zuhur. She was modest, obedient, and tender; she sewed her the costliest clothes and waited for a bridegroom to come for her.

  This was the day for scouring the markets of Baghdad. I changed my rhythm, leapt and played, ran away from their hands and stood alone for a bit on the Old Bridge. The buses passed, and I stood listening to the voice of the corpses colliding: the English, Nuri al-Said, the demonstrations, the firing of bullets, bodies lying on the bridge while others fled into the river. Mr. Ghanim, the son of the barber in our neighborhood, was brought here, carried on their shoulders. Bullets had hit him in the back, gone down to his pelvis, and not come out. His right leg was paralyzed. He remained sitting in his father’s shop, behind the table, collecting money, writing down names, and cursing the English. He had left the school and the street, and ended up in that place, and he was not yet thirty.

  They came and went, and I was not quite twelve. Whatever passed away would reappear, and what was to come would not be unknown.

  Screams, voices, buses rushing by, taxis stopping and speeding off, small trees thrown down in the middle of the square by the bridge, buildings, structures with dirty windows. My mother hated smudged glass. Faces, statures, clothes, trousers, cloaks and red fezzes, black tarbooshes, headcloths that protected everyone from the lethal heat of Baghdad. The smell of sweat, of rank armpits. The sounds of coughing and blowing snot, of belching and spitting.

  A man was pissing against a wall. I surprised them and turned; I stopped and looked.

  Your glances were not vulgar. It allowed you to expand the imagination as you accepted the rest: a man pissing, standing still, the wall before him, and all humanity behind him. His legs were apart. His trousers were old, and from between his parted thighs his urine spouted out onto the ground. The stream splashed on the asphalt, yellow, with a sound like radio static. You passed the human urine, you passed the parted thighs, and before he closed the fly of his trousers, he turned to you; he smiled and shook his head.

  When your father came out of the bathroom, he drew a large towel around his middle. It reached from his waist to just below his knees. My grandmother sat me down before her and began her rich storytelling. She talked but I paid no attention to her. I was restless and wanted to stand in front of the window. He might pass or stroll slowly by; the towel might fall off, and you would see what my father always kept covered. But Adil was holding my hand, and I did not succeed in seeing anything. He had alertly and securely fastened his trousers and pulled them up higher than usual when we went out. When he slept, he was draped in sheets. When he got up, he stayed with my grandmother and mother; they were the ones who washed him; it was they who made the first inspection.

  There was long Rashid Street, broader and cleaner than our street. Its gray concrete lampposts were blotched with dirt, the glass lamps were filthy, the light pallid. This was the Rasafa side; between Rasafa and Karkh, Harun al-Rashid used to listen to riddles and puzzles.

  So this was Baghdad, the city of cities. I raised my arm and waved briefly to my mother. She never went to the market. They bound her to the al-A‘dhamiyya district. She stumbled there. She came from Aleppo, married in Karbala, got pregnant on a cold iron bed, coughed in the ancient bathroom, and gave birth to us on the floor. Grandmother insisted she went out, always repeating, “Take the children and get away from me. I want to be alone.”

  “My dear, come with us, have a look at the market, get some fresh air! Aren’t you tired of being in the house?”

  My mother did not reply or offer any resistance; she went into the kitchen. There she spread all of Baghdad on her table and cooked it at her leisure. She dreamed of it, kissed it, and presented it to herself, made us biscuits, sprinkled them with sugar, almonds, and raisins, and went into a fit of weeping. She alone cried when we left. She had Baghdad bathe with her, and spoke to it in the only room that she knew. The house she tidied, that kitchen whose doors she opened up before her. She washed the dishes and got them as shiny as her eyes, leaving her smell in the spoons. She called out, she praised God, she aged, and when we came back, we saw Baghdad in her eyelids. She surrounded us with her wrist and forearm. We fled from her and she was silent. Baghdad, my mother is the most beautiful thing you have.

  The sounds of hammers in the coppersmiths’ market, the melodies, the blows against pounded red metal. They hammered melodiously, smoothed out, and balanced. The large, flat sheets of metal folded and curved. Every movement of these strong hands produced something, made an object: a large platter, a basin, an old-style coffeepot, a pan. Their hands lifted up the sheets, the big metal-cutting scissors, the high, narrow anvil that the coppersmith put in front of him; he begins to hammer. The wide wooden anvil, narrow in the middle, was for shaping the metal and adding the engraving and ornamentation, pictures, inscriptions and Qur’anic verses.

  The fire softened the metals and burned our hearts and the muscles of the men competing with the muscular metals.

  The young workers and the old men wore unbleached cotton clothes. Their feet were bare. The shops were small. This market was roofed with thin metal sheets. The sound of the hammers grew louder, and the red and yellow shapes changed and evolved. I did not hear the voice of either aunt. Here I can shout as I please; I can sing, joke, stand or walk, or lag behind.

  The languages intermingled; everything assailed anything. The cries of the peddlers flowed over me. The ground was furrowed and muddy, not paved. Every moment brought fountains of flame from the openings of the shops, a stifling flame that spread, along with its blaze, black clouds and a penetrating smell. I did not know what it reminded me of.

  The paths opened up before me. To the right was a short, twisting, dead-end lane that reminded me of the lane in our neighborhood. To the left was an open ditch full of leaden-colored water. The ladies’ cloaks were before me, the sighs of admiration behind me. The men smacked their lips at the expanses the opening in the women’s cloaks revealed and dreamed of the concealed. I never tired of this sight.

  We stood and walked on. Aunt Naima bargained, leaving my father’s sister no opportunity to speak. She let her only open her bag and pay out the money.

  In this new wedding basin Farida would wash away her first blood, and these are new trays, offered to the Prophet Zacharias, inlaid in the center and engraved along the edges. We would put in them long white candles in the middle and sweetmeats and decorate them with green leaves for the Prophet’s blessing. My father’s sister poured out her new scent. She did not smell; she had not seen all this before. She took out the money and counted it. This was grandmother’s money—she had prayed over it before going out, to give it a blessing. It was buried in the old bag, intended for today.

  We entered the cloth market. Rolls of material, colors, golden thread, silver wires, silken ribbons, and black woolen shawls. The smell of the cloth made me dizzy. Floral designs, squares, circles . . . the shops were heaving with goods . . . silk to adorn the bride and lace to drape over her.

  Farida’s voice emerged from all this commotion, rising and falling as she waved the old jacket around, trying it on me: “Stand up straight! God help your poor teachers at school!” They collected clothes for me from family and relations far and near. They washed and dyed them, tapering the ones that were too short and shortening the ones that were too long. They stitched the back and shoulders to make them fit my narrow frame. They changed the leather on the old shoes and dyed them, and pounded flat the nails that pricked me. The day winter arrived, they took down the velvet curtains and Umm Suturi took them to make them into a coat you would wear for two years, three, it was the color of the sky when it rains, neither gray nor blue. You wore it in the dirt and mud. You went to Hubi, where it got stained with grease and blood, and to the baker’s, where it got sullied with flour and bread dough.

  Baghdad’s cold paralyzed the bones;
Mahmoud’s warmth spread as he stood before me in his old jacket.

  He brushed the dust off my coat and blew it into the public street, and in front of everybody he continued to watch the dust fly into the sky: “When I grow up, I’m going to put these clothes in the museum so people can see our clothes. Huda, some day we’ll wear new clothes and read good books. My father says things will change, but I don’t know how. He tells me to study hard so I can become a doctor or an engineer, but I’m very afraid of blood. You remember when we spat in the street to see the blood? That time I was frightened, as if I’d seen all my blood run out in front of me, as though the street was all blood. I was afraid and ran to the riverbank and went swimming, and dunked my head under the water. I swam until I was tired. The sun was strong, and my eyes could hardly see. The other children went away and left me all alone. They said, ‘Mahmoud has gone mad,’ but no one knew what had happened to me. Whenever I lifted my head out of the river I saw blood, so I went under again until it went away. I don’t know what happened then, but I was in the house, shouting and crying, Huda. Lots of blood is scary.”

  8

  This was the day my aunt’s blood would be spilled.

  Farida was the first fortress of this house. My grandmother and her masters were tested by her: Jamil, Munir, Adil, and I. A battalion that emitted a secret life. She had no double wings, but she did have a skull like my father’s pistol, a body as strong as all the men in our neighborhood, and a voice I heard at night that could scare away the angels. This was her imperial, sublime day. Her secrets would be pierced; everything was upside down. She was stretched out on the carpet in our room, nearly naked, her legs open. Umm Suturi lifted her right leg, and Aunt Naima took her left leg. Thick strings passed on each leg. She was having the hair removed from her thighs and legs. She was like steel, turning over on her stomach and her hair going into her eyes. The cube of white chalk was being applied to the dark flesh that had become swollen and red, and the cells taut and full of blood.