“God will compensate us with another child,” he would reassure her.
She exploded in his face, crying. She clawed at her right breast till it bled. “I don’t want another!” she shouted. Fahd was forced to commit her to a mental hospital, resigning himself to her doctor’s orders, fearful of her self-harm. Sadiq informed me: no improvements in his sister’s condition. She spent her waking hours in the hospital room, frowning and staring out the window. She would yell suddenly and clamp her hand on her breast, squeezing it hard while grinding her teeth. “I don’t want another!” Doctors and nurses swarmed around her, injected her with tranquilizers, and restrained her wrists to the sides of the bed. She spent a year in the hospital. During that time, Abbas and his family moved to a new house in Rumaithiya. Sadiq said that they moved there because it was difficult to stay in their old house after Mama Zaynab’s passing. Fahd attributed the move to his father-in-law’s misery in a neighborhood that he could no longer tolerate. “Frankly, it’s better this way,” he didn’t hesitate to add.
When Fahd and I were alone in the diwaniya, he’d speak to me sorrowfully about his wife. She would call him, saying, “I really miss you.” He’d go running to the hospital. Once there, she’d yell, “Get out!” Dark circles ringed her eyes. In spite of her doctor’s assurances, he’d almost given up on her.
“It’s just a temporary thing,” I’d say. Time went by. He abandoned their new wing in the house since his wife had moved to the hospital. Without her, the place became deserted. He went back to sleeping in his old room opposite Fawzia’s. I would call him every night and Abdulkareem would respond, “How long the night is without you, how long the night . . . How long time is without you . . . it’s never-ending.” The song was followed by his recorded voice. “I’m not here right now. Please leave a message.” I knew he could hear me. “Fahd . . . pick up.” He wouldn’t pick up.
This time, before I ended my message, I added, “I know you can hear me . . . I’m waiting for you in the diwaniya.” On that occasion, I didn’t have to wait for more than fifteen minutes before hearing the slam of his car door. He entered, his face pallid. I poured tea in a glass cup. I handed it to him. He held the teacup, examining its sugar content. “My father said, ‘There’s no more kids between you two now; divorce her.’” He went on that Fadhila was accusing Aisha of bewitching her daughter. A laugh escaped me.
“This is serious,” he protested, upset. He explained how Fadhila blindly believed some hoax fortune-teller about there being an amulet buried under Mama Hissa’s sidra and that its power was renewed whenever Hawraa passed by it. Staring at the ground, he said, “I’ve spent two days digging under the sidra . . . I didn’t find anything.” He corrected himself as he forced a smile. “Actually, I found your old passport.” The surprise of finding a passport we had buried fourteen years earlier didn’t stick because I was so caught up with circumstances other than my own. The words crowded up on my tongue, but not a single one escaped. He felt that curses chased him because of his family, as if Mama Zaynab’s passing had left him and his wife bereft of blessings. He pointed to the corner of the diwaniya as soon as he finished drinking his tea. I handed him the oud. He was content to play a familiar tune without singing. I started to search for the words from one of Abdulkareem’s songs: “How hard you make it . . . every day you’re in a different state . . . sometimes near . . . sometimes far.”
One afternoon, he looked me in the eye and asked me if they had made the right choice in getting married. I shook his shoulders. “Fahd!”
He turned his gaze away. “I’m tired.” Between losing his son, his wife being on the verge of losing her mind and refusing to have more kids, and his family meddling in everything, he wasn’t capable of doing anything except cradling his face in his hands. His body shook. “She doesn’t want me,” he said in a stifled voice.
I asked him to take me to the hospital. I knew he’d be annoyed. “Can’t I visit my sister?”
He wiped his face with his palms and answered, embarrassed, “Sure, you can.”
He drove without talking, just listening to the songs issuing from the CD player. We had reached the age of twenty-six that year, 2004, and he was still just as I had known him as a boy. I recall his words about his favorite singer: “He sings to my soul.” I looked over at him in the seat next to me, silent and listening. I asked myself whether he had been more faithful to Abdulkareem, or vice versa.
“Our fate was written down, to live apart, my love; we walked in the paths of time, the nights of sadness taking over us.” I stretched out my hand and turned down the volume.
“How’s Fawzia?” I asked. He moved my hand away from the stereo and turned the volume back up.
“We’ve grown tired of this hope, waiting for dreams to come true.” I pressed the power button to silence it. I turned to him. “Your dreams aren’t lost . . . trust me!” He forced a smile.
It was the first time I visited the psychiatric hospital in the Al Sabah health district. An oppressive place that resembled the hospitals in old Egyptian movies, with antique tiles like the ones in Mama Hissa’s courtyard. Faded, yellowing white walls. I examined the hallways and the faces of the nurses. Nothing like the place that I knew as a child in the TV show that portrayed a hospital that to us, despite the misery of its stories, was one bursting with love, laughter, and jokes. Fahd went ahead of me to his wife’s room, and then I heard his voice calling me in. I opened the door. Sadiq sat next to Ayub, who was visiting his cousin, while Fahd went to fix Hawraa’s hijab to cover her hair. He whispered in her ear, “Darling . . . see who has come to see you.” She looked at me in silence. Her coal eyes summoned faraway memories in mere seconds. She went back to looking out the window.
Sadiq left the room, cradling his ringing phone. “Hi, Dad,” he answered before disappearing behind the door. I tried to get Hawraa to talk. “How are you?” Silence. Her face remained fixed on the window. Her arms were free despite the metal cuffs encircling her wrists. She seemed in a decent enough state. Sadiq returned holding his phone and informed Fahd, “My dad’s asking about yours and if he was here or not.” Each of the fathers would call ahead to avoid bumping into the other. One of them visited the hospital on a seemingly hourly schedule. Saleh rarely dropped by. And if he did, it was only for Fahd’s sake. Ayub piped up that they both needed treatment here, especially if it involved electrotherapy sessions to wipe out their twisted memories.
“Like Mahzouza and Mabrouka,” Sadiq chortled. Fahd laughed despite the evident sadness on his face. A sigh from Hawraa attracted my attention. A half smile was drawn on her face. This encouraged Ayub to tell one of his jokes. He looked at her, inviting her to guess who he saw in the hallway before entering her room. She didn’t answer.
“Dr. Sharqan and Abu Aqeel running, chased by Fuada with her mousetrap!” The half smile on her face became a full one. The full smile opened into a laugh. The laugh breathed some color into Fahd’s bilious face.
I felt at peace. “Thanks be to God.”
It wasn’t long before Abbas arrived. “How is she?” he asked before sitting next to his daughter. She had taken her medication half an hour before we arrived. Her father picked up a newspaper that was on the coffee table. He fixed his glasses on the edge of his nose. Shaking his head, his eyebrows knotted at the headlines on the front page. Newspapers were full of news about the killings happening in Iraq and how one sect was wiping out the other, after the fall of a regime that had been suppressing one sect for decades. And in reaction, some gathered here to demonstrate, carrying signs with the slogan In Solidarity with Our Brothers in Iraq, Against the Assailing Sect Supporting Iran, clearly naming the two sects. At the forefront of the protests were parliamentarians of one Islamist bloc. “Asses!” said Sadiq’s dad, describing the demonstrators, spreading out the newspaper before me and pointing to a photo at the heart of the page. “This here is your ass of a cousin with them!”
Sadiq interjected, reproaching his father, “Dad!”<
br />
His father’s finger still pointed to Dhari’s face in the photo, among the crowds that the government had issued an order to disband. He turned to Fahd and asked, “Is your father Saleh with them?” He then started to curse them, without naming them outright. Sadiq’s ears went red. Fahd stayed silent.
Without turning away from the window, a frowning Hawraa exploded, “The mice are coming!”
9:53 p.m.
Present Day
A huge generator occupies the heart of the small garden. Exactly where the old chicken coop used to be. Its roar bothers those living in Mama Hissa’s sidra. The tree appears to be in good health. Towering and very leafy. I close my hand around the young girl’s and rush her inside as quickly as my limp lets me. I try to avoid looking at what has become of the courtyard. It seems small, unlike the one we used to run wild in years ago. Here we played anbar. There I stood in front of the old camcorder recording a message for my mom. And at this black door, we clung to Mama Hissa’s abaya, begging her to take us. She didn’t do so, and God didn’t respond to her prayer that day when she laughed and said, “May God take you all!” The little girl asks me to wait, pulling at my hand. She looks at the tree, dumbstruck, as if she’s in an abandoned museum.
“The jinn live here?”
“Later,” I respond, my chest tight.
I tread carefully in the old hallway. Everything seems in place in a house I don’t know anymore. The cerulean Persian carpet has become cold marble. The AC has disappeared from the wall. There are central AC vents in the ceiling that flap, a ceiling without carvings or any crystal chandeliers. Spotlights have taken their place, spread out like reachable stars. I wouldn’t recognize this house if not for the wall in front crowded with photos. Fahd as a baby. A kid. A teenager. A groom. And other pictures of everyone who passed by here: Mama Hissa, Tina, Saleh, Fawzia, Hawraa, little Hassan, and . . . The liquid haze in my eyes prevents me from seeing any more. Hawraa’s phone is on the table in the middle of the living room. I pick it up and jam it in my pocket.
“There’s no one here, Uncle.”
She squeezes my palm. I proceed to knock on the doors of the rooms. I open one after the other. A stranger in a strange house. I climb the stairs, seeking support from the banister for the pain in my knee. Fawzia’s room first. I knock on her door. No answer. I push the door, entering with my right foot. As soon as I step on the pink carpet, I’m jolted, electrocuted almost. Everything in here is just as I left it last time. Medals on the wall. Old photos of the emir, the crown prince, and Kuwaiti flags. The poofy pink dress. Videotapes and yellow dog-eared Ihsan Abdel Quddous novels. The two reading chairs in their place. I turn my gaze to the corner behind me. Mama Hissa’s twin is upright by the bed, in its heavy abaya. I have to be the adult here. Hissa hands me a tissue from her bag. She has taken notice of the abundant tears I didn’t feel streaming down my face.
“Uncle . . . are you crying?”
I shake my head. I blame my tears on the rancid smell burning my eyes. She takes a deep breath. She puffs out her chest. She looks around. “But . . . there’s no smell like that here.” She approaches the pink dress hanging on the wall. She raises her head to appraise it. She says it looks like the dress of the girl drawn on the first page of the Ibn Al Zarzur story collection. I nod my head without saying that if she saw the owner of the dress when she was young, it would be clear that it is the same girl. Hawraa’s phone rings in my dishdasha pocket, lighting up with a message. It’s from Sadiq: “If Fahd comes back . . . I’ll come back.” I throw my weight onto Fawzia’s bed. I call him immediately. Once. Thrice. Ten times. The phone’s off. Half my worry slides off my shoulder. The other half weighs down my other shoulder. I play around with the phone, searching for more messages. Nothing, except a three-day-old message from Abdulkareem . . . I mean Fahd, responding to Hawraa’s message asking him to consider divorce. He wrote in his response: “I say farewell, O tortuous night . . . farewell to you as I travel on the clouds . . . and you see me like a mist . . . like an illusion . . . a mirage.”
“That’s God’s choice and not yours.” The words slip out from between my lips, reflecting the images crowding my head.
“Uncle, what’s the matter?” Hissa asks.
“Nothing.”
The lights go out suddenly. Hissa bristles and sticks to me. She trembles like a wet pigeon. “I don’t like the dark!” I try to comfort her. There’s no doubt that the generator is out of diesel. We catch a sound in the living room below.
She squeezes my arm, pulling it to her. “Someone’s downstairs.”
I place my finger on my lips. “Shhh.” I take off three of the medals from the wall with the help of the light from the phone. Wrapping the ribbons of the medals around my fist, I secure the metal medallions on the back of my hand.
Hissa follows me. She rambles. Images of her house being stormed flood back. She raises her voice. “The masked men. Uncle, Uncle . . . the masked men. They’re here.”
I grab her by the shoulders and shake her. “Don’t be scared!” Her fear makes me confront what’s really bothering me, and I can’t bear that right now, in this moment. I drag my steps approaching the stairs.
One of the voices downstairs says, “The courtyard door is open!” I look down into the living room below. An old man with a long beard, a flashlight in hand, and a woman in a niqab, and . . .
THE THIRD MOUSE: EMBERS THE INHERITANCE OF FIRE
THE NOVEL
Chapter 11
The beginning of 2005: we seemed to be stuck in a bottleneck, having been trapped at the bottom of the bottle for a while, not knowing where the opening led. Everything around me was strange. I was noticing this, two years on, and no one else seemed to, or maybe they did and just didn’t say anything. While stopped at a traffic light, with Iraqi songs blaring from the cars around me, my mind wandered. The first thing that came out of Iraq, when its regime fell, was its songs, the crappy ones and the good ones. I didn’t know if the people had stopped singing during the years of the sanctions, or if their songs simply weren’t crossing our northern border. I summoned Mama Zaynab from my memory. If she had lived longer, would she still be Bibi Zaynab, blasting Nazem Al Ghazali’s song in her courtyard, not forced to mask her dialect, dancing at Sadiq’s wedding to an Iraqi song, then dying with her noble Iraqi name declared, proud? The songs in the street grew distant. Cars started honking, alerting me to the green light.
The atmosphere was toxic. Without noticing it, we inhaled the rotten air. We were responsible for it. Our phones took on a new role, serving as constant reminders of how infected people’s minds had become. Photos and video clips of religious men issuing sermons, fatwas, and fake miracles. Laughter at the turbaned men. Debates between the Sunni sheikh and the Shia sayyid. So-and-so’s foul language. See how ignorant the Nawasib are. Rafida conspiracies. We were inhaling our hatred like air. It was impossible to escape. Frankly, everything came down to “us” and “them.” Even when you browsed YouTube, searching for a song or a comedy sketch, inevitably the comments below would take you off track. Which sect was the actor or singer from? Rafidi or Nasibi. The vomit that was spread throughout the Internet leaked to the television channels. Dedicated channels. Controversies followed by thousands. Between the sayyid and the sheikh, who brushed off whom. And I, every time, would turn off the television, shut the laptop or phone, damning Abbas and Saleh as if they were the ones responsible for all this. I didn’t know that in every neighborhood there were several replicas of them. I imagined a tomorrow, not a tomorrow that gathered us in a turbulent land, like Mama Hissa’s courtyard, which brought us together at times and tore us apart at others.
After Ayub got a job there, I started writing stories for the Al Rai newspaper. I was given a weekly column, saying whatever I liked under the cloak of metaphor, as if I were washing my hands of a collective sin we were committing. Every time I wrote, Fawzia would be my hidden reader. I’d derive a blind love from her, for the land and the people. My s
tories took place on our old street. Pieces I wrote myself without having to use my imagination, except when it came to the names. I adopted pseudonyms for us and for Surra. Stories of the three friends became five: Turki, Mehdi, Mish’al, Jaber, and Abdullah!
Mom wasn’t exactly happy about what I wrote until my column became well read. Her friends praised my work. My dad had nothing to do with me except to repeat his question about what good was writing. As long as there was no money to be made, he wasn’t enthusiastic about what I wrote. His wealth had grown exponentially, and he intended to buy a new house. He was taking me away again from the house that had, after eight years, almost become my home. The diwaniya played a part, despite everything, in making Rawda a beloved place. My mom convinced him that the new house should be bought abroad, because foreign houses are assets for when something happens. She lost her peace of mind at the time of the bombings in 1985, and in 1990 she lost faith in Kuwait altogether. Because it was what she wanted, the house ended up being in London. At that time, my father amassed a fortune—his balance in the banks doubled, benefiting from the American presence in Iraq. He owned a fleet of trucks that lumbered back and forth on the northern road whose borders had been shut for years. He delivered food and medical supplies under contracts made with the American army.
During those days, we spent most of the time in the diwaniya, playing cards, using a deck that had reached Kuwait from Iraq. These cards, which fetched exorbitant prices, had become popular after the fall of the Iraqi regime. Each card featured a prominent figure in Saddam’s regime. My cousin had boycotted the gathering space because of my father. “Your dad’s working with them!” My silence made me just as culpable. He bellowed in my face when I told him that my father had nothing to do with me. “Your father’s money is covered in blood!” He disappeared. The blood then appeared in my food, drink, and everything in the house.
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