by Alia Mamdouh
Their faces glistened with sweat, fatigue, and prayer. Their backs bent over, then straightened up. Their steps were uncertain and shaky, and their knees knocked together. The worn-out mats and tattered carpets got shoved aside, revealing stained but cool and beautiful tiles.
Their feet were bare, their toes slender, their eyes swollen. Their nails were long and dirty. The space was wide and vast, dozens of times bigger than our house, and in each of the four corners gilded yellow candles burned. They were tall and thick, like the palm trees we played around on holidays, and their high flames rippled every few moments, whenever the ranks of people passed before them. They flared up and the melted wax ran down into the containers that held them.
The women thronged together, waiting for Mr. Aziz, who served as the Abu Hanifa Mosque’s administrator: the mitwalli. The doors to this place were crammed with mothers, widows, and sisters. I cried amongst them: “Mama, Mama,” among the loud prayers to clear the way for the mitwalli.
The night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan, our whole neighborhood took refuge here. They knelt before the dome and dreamed, stayed awake, listened to the prayers, exulting with them and waiting for the Prophet’s hair, hidden all year long in the small room, in the golden casket, in the clean and pure place, by the burial plot behind the mosque. Today it came out of its hiding place, wrapped in a length of thick, perfumed green woolen cloth. The hairs floated in an elongated bottle, whose glass was flattened and slightly bumpy, swimming in rosewater.
Hundreds of hands wanted to kiss and touch it. All these heads glowed and made noise. They bit their lips with joy: “God bless the Prophet Muhammad.”
Their bodies twinkled, and the whole multilayered throng uttered the Prophet’s name in loud reverberation, secretive and pure, that rose from their hearts and permeated the entire district of al-A‘dhamiyya.
Mothers carried their children into the odors, reaching Mr. Aziz’s palm.
I shoved and pushed, slid through and jumped between the rows of people: “Hajji Aziz, I am coming through! I want to kiss the hair!”
I was carried by the crowd and pushed far back. I was suffocating, striking out at everything about me and before me. I turned about and cried out, “God keep you, Hajji.” I clamped down on my braids with my front teeth, and bit down hard on them. I pulled and pushed, came and went, like a maddened wave. My clothes rode up and descended again. I was thirsty. I cried out, “Hajji, my mother is gone!”
Above me, the voices intermingled and flew about. “Your intercession, Prophet of God!” Hands and bodies pushed me, and I crumpled to the ground before Hajji Aziz. I pulled at the mitwalli’s new belted robe and brown cloak with my hands. I turned my face up to him. His face was middle-aged and sad; his beard was uncut, and his eyes were as white as my grandmother’s skin. His voice was moist: “Go—kiss and pray, because today all prayers are answered. God protect and guide you on the right path.”
I was hypnotized. The smells and the moans, the prayers and supplications, and the unheard weeping. The scrap of green cloth had a strange smell. I clutched it to my face, touched the bottle, and Hajji Aziz laid it on my head and ran it along my hair. I rubbed it and kissed it. The man’s hand was strong, his palm was wide, and his fingers were creased. I turned and shouted, and the voices about me pushed me: “God bless the Prophet Muhammad.” Weeping draws me into their protection: “Mama, Mama, where have you gone?”
The voices: “That’s enough crying, we want to kiss and smell it, too. Good God, even in this holy place, the greed you see!”
The prayers pushed me away and flung me back. I had asked nothing on this day, I had trusted no one, I had not enshrouded my mother. Her corpse was stretched out before me without limbs or feet. It was just a featureless head.
I looked at it and moved forward on the mosque’s tiles. Her face glowed without a shroud, perfumed and cryptic. It collided with no one and contrived for itself only this integrity.
I wiped my nose on the hem of my dress, wiped my tears, sat down and rested my back against the wall. The mats were dry and harsh. The voices of the rows of people faded into the distance. I saw the remains, creased paper, ribbons fallen from braids, my rusty hairpins, buttons, green leaves, wilted roses, and small-denomination coins.
The old women sprawled out on the floor near me, wiping their eyes and cheeks, and readjusting their head coverings. They sighed. I turned my face, my head, my body to the wall. I stretched out and pulled my hair over my eyes. I had no time to close my eyes. Think of what Mahmoud said: prepare for calamity, and don’t return to the house. Sit here; escape from there; sleep here. Kick your house and the people in it. Let your family follow your tracks; let them go out, alone and in groups, carrying torches or sticks. If you saw any one of them now you would shed their blood.
The voice behind me: “Look—isn’t that Huda, Jamil’s daughter, if I’m not mistaken?” The other woman replied, “Dear, you are Huda, aren’t you? Why are you sleeping all alone here? Today is your aunt’s wedding. Hmm? Where is your family? Strange, leaving a little girl in the mosque by herself!” If the wedding were ruined, or the bride were dead; had the procession gone off looking for you, or had all the sewers and cesspools opened up; had my grandmother gone to pray, or Adil fallen into a daze, or Mahmoud returned to his fever, or your father passed to madness; if the Tigris were to flood or the king to die—if, if—you would still never return.
Among the voices is Rasmiya’s. If she knew, if she saw, if she came, there would be no way out of it: “You are here, Huda? The whole house is upside down over you! Oh, God help you, you’re practically an orphan. Wait for me—I want to make my visit here, and we’ll go back home.”
I turned my head to her, as she disappeared. Her whole form was covered in her black cloak. Her voice sounded portentous in my ears; I could hear the slaps and lashes whistling through the air. I could hear the husband’s whistle.
“What are you doing with the money from the injections? Staying up at night, using surgical spirits and cotton wool, delivering and aborting babies, and every time I open the bag it’s empty. Hmm? Say something. Where are you taking the money? To your family, your brother the pimp? Hah?”
Her voice rose in his face: “Listen, I’ve been patient with you. You’re the one who steals our money and loses it gambling. Your salary’s gone the first of the month. I pay all the debts. The whole neighborhood knows you’re a bully and a sinner.”
Rasmiya did not cry. No one saw her tears, but everyone saw her bruised face, her swollen nose, and her trembling hands.
Whenever I ran away from school I stood at the gate of her house, which was always open. I sat on the stone steps and watched the people passing. The wind fluttered the curtain in the doorway in front of my nose, and I smelled the odor of cooked fat and saw the big holes in it. Her house was near ours. When Abu Iman came out he saw me in front of him: “Hah, Huda, aren’t you going to school today?”
“We were let out today. Our teacher is ill.”
When he had gone away, she turned on the radio and began cleaning up inside. Rasmiya put up with the beating and sang. Her voice reached me, and I sang along softly. She put rings with big and showy jewels on her short fingers. Thick gold bangles glittered on her fat, hairy forearm, dense, brilliant, and crowded together. When she went up to wash the outdoor steps, she stood before me, a bucket of water in her hand, murmuring slowly as she stood: “Do you run away from school every day?”
Her nightgown exhaled the odors of sweat, cooked rice, and her stifled tears. Her breasts were on the verge of sticking into the whole street, and her black hair was pulled up into a cheap red handkerchief. Her neck was short, her arms bare, and her shrill laughter revealed a gold tooth in her upper jaw. When I looked up into her face she did not look at me; she continued singing, her face sallow, a light blue tattoo on her jaw. Her eyes were narrow and black, her eyelashes thick, and her body tense. She still held the bucket. I stood up.
“Good morning, Aunt
Rasmiya.”
“What a waste of textbooks and notebooks! You say you left before the lesson, hmm?”
I did not reply. I heard her harsh breathing as she saw Abu Mahmoud, the cheese seller, in front of her. His shop faced her house. He wiped his face, straightened his cap, and hitched up his old striped wide-belted trousers, shooed the flies away from the cheese, and lifted a morsel of white cheese to his mouth. They looked at each other; the crevice of her breasts was in front of him. He spoke: “Arab cheese, Kurdish cheese—if you don’t buy, just taste.”
She laughed sweetly and easily, and poured the water out, drop by drop. She bent over, the bucket in her hands. Half her height was before me, and his whole face was before her. He smiled and nibbled the cheese, lifted the palm frond and arranged the chunks of cheese, now far, now near. Whichever way I went the water followed me, its spatter and its sound. Passersby stopped at his shop to buy. He sold cheese, cut, weighed, and wrapped it. He wiped his mouth with his hand. He went over to her; she stood before him. The water was gone. The steps were clean, and the radio was still on. And her chest . . . my schoolbooks fell to the ground.
Every day I ran along the high wall of the roof and ended up in the bath. My aunt washed my face, combed my hair, and tied the ribbons on my braids. She dressed me in the dark blue school smock, rolled me up before her and held me by the arm. She ran after me and I dodged her, hiding from her voice and her shouts. She always found me and led me by the hand to the entrance of the school. She moved away only after I was out of her sight. Before leaving the house, I stole five fils from my grandmother and pressed them into the hand of the school janitor, Abu Muhammad. He opened the gate for me, and I passed into the street after the third lesson of the day.
My aunt’s voice split the air as I wound my way through the streets: “I’ve whipped you, but even beatings don’t do you any good. Do you want to leave school to drive me completely mad?”
I walked around the Naaman Park, gazed at the earth dam, the Tigris, and the fishermen. I went down to the al-A‘dhamiyya Park and waited for Firdous and Adil there. I read the advertisements for Arabic films: the face of the Egyptian actress Fatin Hamama covering the whole wall. It was a sad face, as ill as my mother’s when she’d had no injection and taken no medicine. And Farid al-Atrash standing behind her, as fractured as the ice we put in the glasses of homemade fruit punch.
“He looks like he’s going to puke,” said Firdous. “I don’t know how the girls in school can love him.”
Adil smiled and I cackled. Mahmoud emerged from the short trees in front of us: “You skipped school today too?”
I did not reply. We walked along together. Mahmoud stared into the distance, not blinking or flinching. His school was far away, his trousers had become longer and his thighs thicker. The school always surrounded you. Its walls were old and its classrooms dim and small, their dark paint peeling. The benches were narrow, the blackboards smudged. The boys and girls were crammed together in them, four by four. Miss Karima wrote the dates of wars as forcefully as the way my father hit me. She spat on the floor and sat facing us, her legs apart. Her belly was distended; she was expecting her first child. When it moved, she yelped and put her hand on her belly: “I want a boy—otherwise I’m going home to my family.” She rose and moved slowly and almost fell. We grasped her by the arm, but before she got to the door she began to vomit. She left and did not come back until after the birth of her son.
Miss Bahira shouted at us about subjects and predicates, verbs and subjects of verbal clauses. I always laughed in her class, repeating her sentences after her. She grew angry and her color changed. She snatched her ruler and smacked my fingers as I counted the minutes and hours in order to put Arabic grammar in the frying pans, and let them burn on the fire.
I did not stop until getting my bitter punishment: fifty lines of grammatical sentences. When Miss Qadriya came into the classroom she immediately reminded me of my mother. She was as slender as she was, with unforgettably large white, symmetrical teeth that were always clean. It was as if she had never used them for eating. Her eyes were big and bulged, and her hair was long and the color of molasses, though she always wore a white kerchief over her head. They called her Haja Qadriya. She listed diseases, discussing prevention and treatment, medicines and vitamins, and mentioned all the diseases, but not pulmonary tuberculosis.
I did mathematics lessons only with Mahmoud. He taught me the rules of division. He understood odd and even numbers, tens and thousands, fractions and decimals. Mahmoud loved numbers. He piloted them, wrestled with them, danced before them, and they bowed to him. When Firdous made a mistake he shouted at her, and when I made a mistake he rounded on me. Patient, stern, he never retreated from a number, and the numbers acknowledged only him. He laughed in front of us, saying: “These numbers are like people. One time I sat down at night and counted from one to ten. I gave a number to every person I know, and when the numbers ran out, I knew that there are some people who can’t be turned into numbers. The number falls in front of them, and they remain decimals or fractions, they don’t know this language and don’t want to learn. Only I love them, even if they don’t understand anything.”
Before he finished: “And me, have you given a number to me?”
He was silent and lifted his head to look at me. His face was flushed. His eyes were the color of ground coffee, his nose was big and his forehead was high; his lips were thick and his complexion rosy. He was well-built, but melancholy, tall, and agile. When he laughed, his front teeth seemed to jut out. “I don’t know, little Huda. Read well and you’ll pass. Our lessons are silly and the teachers don’t teach math well, but this is all we have.”
The day I failed Mahmoud disappeared. His anger did not dissipate for a month: “This year I’ll forgive you. Your mother has gone away and your father married, but if you had passed in the middle of all these troubles things would have been very different.”
And things were very different. I stood before my aunt, my grandmother, and Adil, and I announced my decision: “I want to sleep and study in my mother’s room. I’m grown-up now and I want to study by myself. My father no longer comes to see us the way he used to.”
“Yes, dear. Anything else?” My aunt’s voice virtually sizzled. “Does her Highness have any other orders?”
“I want us to listen to the radio a little. Every day we listen to the Qur’an and then turn it off. I want to take the radio with me into the room.”
My aunt wanted to tear me to pieces.
“Fine. Fine. By God, if you were my daughter I’d kill you. I wouldn’t let you go to school or see the street again in your life. Oh, God! There is no power or strength save in Almighty God!” I laughed softly. The locked room would be opened, and I would be soaked in my father’s sourness and my mother’s happiness. I opened the closet and looked, felt, and smelled. I rolled around on the big bed. Sleep here. Sleep backward, look as though you’re studying but put thick novels among your books. Roam there alone, perfume yourself with slips of the tongue and sins of the heart. Go from one scene to the next. Catch your breath and open the box of odds and ends. Look at the shelves. All these books will be mine. The spider-webs are mine, and all the dust of the rebellious nights. Here you may scream at al-Aqqad and Taha Hussein. Turn on Baghdad Radio and listen to the royal anthem. Turn the dial to Voice of the Arabs from Cairo and enter Paradise with the voice of Nasser.
The first night I could not sleep. I was not afraid. No ghosts faltered on their way to me, nor was I afflicted by nostalgia. I was gaining my mother for myself, and gathering the power to challenge my father. I went to Adil and did not escape from my grandmother. My aunt was like the lessons I took at school. When we set off for school Adil was waiting for me, looking sad, just inside the hallway: “I didn’t sleep well. Every little while I sat up and saw your empty bed. Huda, what did you do in the room all alone? Were you afraid?”
I ran toward the courtyard of the mosque and sat on the stone wall
under the lofty lotus tree. I looked up at the sky and escaped from Rasmiya.
10
The mosque had no times for women, but the men entered in droves. Grandfathers, uncles, boys, strong men, young and old. Men you knew, and men you did not know. No man lifted your mother’s coffin. They yawned at it in Aleppo, coughed, and the night of indifference fell. Iqbal’s belongings were divided up amongst everyone.
Mr. Jamil did not open the telegram. He set his table and added another glass. He circumnavigated his wife’s belly and awaited his third son. Only Munir entered victorious. He headed inside and turned his back on them all.
They came in, men with round bellies and wrinkled paunches, and chests awaiting meters of pardon and health. Their supplications flew like Adil’s paper kites in the courtyard of the mosque. They gleamed like crystals. Their sandals were dyed and their shoes shined, their cloaks were ironed and their hair combed, their moustaches perfumed and their head coverings clean. Their wide belts slipped below their bellies; their long robes and long garments were diaphanous; their suits had been pressed in expectation of this day.
By night these men did not resemble the men they were by day. These had come from houses, coffeehouses, and bars. They defused resentment and blame. Everyone waited for everyone. They shook hands, clapped one another on the back, stood up; their creased foreheads met: wide, narrow, haughty, away from the window. Their voices echoed among the silver columns, and they knelt humbly.
