by Mona Yahia
—Tell me what d’you see?
A tidy, handsome, twelve-year-old is resting on the ground, not bothering about soiling his white shirt or his jeans. The blue jeans which every boy in the neighbourhood envies – as denim is not available in Baghdad. An impulse to stroke his long fair hair seizes me, not for the first time. I clasp my hands behind my back.
His hands advance, his arms pull his body forwards. The hindquarters do not co-operate though. As if a screw has come loose, his lower legs suddenly spring in the air, and cross each other, reminding me of an unco-ordinated grasshopper.
—A grasshopper?
—Wrong. You’ve got no imagination. It’s a lizard, crawling on the ceiling, slowly approaching a light bulb, and just about to snatch a moth. You should have seen it in our yard yesterday. It captured twenty-three moths in one evening!
The idea of watching lizards and counting moths as an evening entertainment appals me. What has television been invented for after all?
—If you have to crawl, put some power into it. Be a crocodile at least.
He frowns. He is about to tell me that I am missing the point, but I shriek,
—Laurence, watch out! Stop!
His nose has, by a hair’s breadth, escaped collision with an anthill. His two pupils face dozens of creatures of the same size and colour, pouring in and out of the sand. He sits up. I squat down. The ants proceed with their activity. In great haste, as if their industry is shaping the future, unaware of their liquidation at the end of the season with the first jet of water.
Laurence has been playing with similar fantasies.
—I wonder what they’d do if I pissed into their mound!
—Do boys everywhere pee in the open?
Laurence sniggers and tells me about the bronze stripling who pees into a fountain in the old city of Brussels. Can I still blame Baghdad for what is equally celebrated in Brussels? I stand up to collect carob pods. Laurence declares,
—What an ideal shelter! It’s a trench we’ve got here!
I refuse him the attention he is requesting and go on picking up carob pods. Cautious not to stoop and expose my thighs, I keep sitting and standing and sitting down again. Laurence paces along the length of the pool, his hands behind his back, soliloquising.
—If only the boys were around, we’d have played at soldiers. What a battle it would have been … we’d have carried on for days without interruption. Imagine, days without food or sleep, just like men at the front.
Does he truly miss such childish games with his English friends, or is he only trying to make me jealous?
Unlike other English children whose parents work in Baghdad, Laurence does not go to boarding-school in England but studies at home, by correspondence. Though he obviously prefers my company to that of the other children in the street, he never gives me the feeling that he actually enjoys it. He does not smile when he drops by, but greets me with a nod and a hello. Hardly audible, lest his voice be wasted on a banality. Sometimes he holds out his hand, like somebody who has come to do business. And even then, he draws it back in the middle of a shake, as if afraid I would walk away with it.
—Down here, in this vast pool? I reply. You must be kidding. One air raid and all your boys are dead soldiers. They’d be lying side by side, head to foot, like sardines in a tin.
Laurence relinquishes the ditch and proceeds to the next round.
Once upon a time, a Greek fellow descended to the underworld in order to recover his deceased sweetheart. After a series of exploits and hindrances he manages to find her. On their way back home however, he commits a fatal mistake. He turns round and looks back – like Lot’s wife I suppose. Needless to say, his beloved vanishes on the spot, and he returns alone to the world of the living.
Laurence wants me to play the dead girlfriend!
It would be just like him to scour the ends of the world for a lost love, particular about his belongings as he is. Not only does he withdraw his hand before it is properly shaken, but he also recovers his jigsaw puzzles before I have finished assembling them, and feels the urge to browse in those particular comics he has lent me.
Am I prepared to die for him?
I dismiss the game as unlikely and propose that we play at Jonah. The prophet had been swallowed by a whale and had had to wait three days and three nights in its intestine until the beast burped and catapulted him out into the ocean.
Will he agree to be locked in with me for three whole days?
The game sounds dull to him. Why not a submarine? I do not object. He takes a piece of chalk out of his pocket and breaks it in two. We draw round white windows on the blue walls of our submarine, through which we will watch underwater life.
For a whole winter, the waterless pool will serve us as a toy box, a container for our games and fantasies.
Laurence chalks a round fountain on the wall of the pool. I draw an octopus beside it. Its arms creep underwater and emerge at the circumference. The eight tentacles curve inwards, and pour out water into the centre. The octopus is taking a shower, Laurence says and adds a few coins at the bottom of his fountain. On the largest of them he sketches the profile of a woman, and a crown on her head.
—Is your queen thirsty?
It is a wishing-fountain, like the one he has seen in Rome. Its floor was covered with coins from all over the world. People, children and grown-ups alike, flipped a coin and made a wish. He tried it a couple of times himself, and the wish always came true.
My turn. I sketch a coin diving into the water. It has a scalloped circumference and “10 fils” marked in the middle. I close my eyes and make a wish.
My checked dress is being torn apart, cut with scissors into hundreds of small green squares. They are floating, like leaves, on the surface of the water. Hundreds of brass and silver coins, profiles of celebrities, are watching the scene from the bottom of the fountain. My new blue overall has two large hip-pockets into which my hands can slide whenever they feel observed. Laurence and I are strolling in the English club. Nobody grumbles that it is improper for a girl to run around in jeans.
I open my eyes again. Laurence is staring at me. His brows are very fair, almost white. His unruffled expression is harder to decipher than his father’s. Reveal my wish? I am taken by surprise. Why me first? No, I don’t argue about everything. What about you? No I’m not, I’m not a chicken.
I tell him I was dreaming of a walk through London. Where exactly? Mayfair, Park Lane, Regent Street, Bond Street, all in the same neighbourhood. How do I know? That’s how they’re arranged on the Monopoly board. Why is he laughing?
—Is that true? Is that what you were really thinking of just a second ago?
—I don’t know. All my dreams collapse when I open my eyes. I can never put them together again. Like, like what’s his name, that egg of a man?
—Humpty Dumpty?
—Right. You now. You tell me, what was your wish?
He was dreaming of a gold medal in the next diving competition. It would be his fifth. It is my turn to doubt his words.
—Barmecide medals!
Then I have to explain. Barmecide was an emir in The Arabian Nights – for which Laurence is such an enthusiast. Today, his name stands for exaggeration if not deceit, as he, Barmecide, used to serve empty plates to beggars and claim they were full of food.
Laurence is not amused by the comparison. He sneers at me, then swaggers out of the pool, on to the spring-board.
He advances to the end of the bouncey plank, some fifteen feet up – the height of the board added to the depth of the pool. I move to the deep end of the pool to get a closer view of him. While I am still on my way, Laurence, without warning, makes a handstand, and before I have had time to take fright, he has sprung back to his feet again. I applaud him fervently. His fearlessness alone has won him my admiration, I shout, beckoning him down. Laurence takes off his shoes, and tosses them down at me, flirtatiously, like a stripper. His show has only just begun, he announces. I pick
up his shoes and plunge my hands inside, feeling the warmth of his feet. He is wiggling the board, testing its flexibility, tempting fate I dare say. My heart is pounding. I can neither look at him nor look away, he is jumping, each time bouncing higher in the air, his straight soft hair like the flapping wings of a bird.
—I’ll show you a swallow dive.
Before I have asked what a swallow dive is he bends his legs, and throws himself still higher. In mid-air his body pikes, his back arches, his arms stretch out to the sides. When called by the force of gravity, Laurence straightens himself and lands back on his feet on the board.
I clap the soles of his shoes, applauding him again, longer than the first time. None of the boys in my class are capable of such a performance. Certainly not of such courage. He can keep the coin in his pocket, the gold medal is his without doubt. He’s a true diving champion. And an acrobat. Can’t he quit the dangerous game and come down now?
—Now a jackknife!
And the golden boy takes to the air. Once, twice, and three times, before his waist bends and his arms stretch overhead. His fingers touch his toes. His legs, his arms, and his back draw a triangle in the blue sky. Immediately the triangle opens up, and its sides unfold into one vertical line again.
In spite of his nimbleness, Laurence’s movements do not suggest haste. Apparently, speed has not so much to do with being in a hurry as with stretching time!
I blurt out my infatuation for his illusory slowness. It incites him to demonstrate one last jackknife. In slow motion, he tenses, and flits upwards. His waist twists, his fingers and toes touch. A cry escapes me. Terrific! His head slightly rises, his eyes meet mine for a fraction of a second. Time enough to steal away his concentration. His arms are waggling. His legs are fluttering. His body has seemingly forgotten what to do next: return with the feet to the board, or plunge headlong into the concrete box.
In less than no time his bones will crash at my feet. His teeth will roll, like dice, about the pool. His mother will kill me. And I don’t even know my way to the underworld …
Fortunately, his feet remember. He is back, safe and sound, on the plank. But just then, seized by a sudden fear of heights, he starts tottering. About to lose balance, he crouches down and, shivering, crawls along to the firm end of the board.
The bounce of the spring-board slowly dies down. Laurence’s face has turned grey, like those immortal profiles scattered in the bottom of the fountain, waiting on the wishes of the living.
December is the month when his wishes are mostly apt to come true.
A Christmas tree three times my size, trimmed with tinsel is placed beside reception to adorn the entrance hall of the Club. Bright balls dangle from its branches, as well as winged angels, dressed or naked, singing or lazing on a cloud. I am fascinated by the heap of wrapped presents at the foot of the tree. Laurence assures me that the packages are empty.
Paper bells and lanterns and golden stars and motley garlands and balloons festoon each room in the Club. In the tea-room, the French windows are dressed with cotton snowflakes, like the shop-windows of Christians in our neighbourhood.
—It’s not Christmas without snow, Laurence explains.
On the blue wall of the pool he draws a white tennis ball that keeps on swelling as the chalk grows shorter. He uses them up, one piece after the other, until the whole box ends up chalked on the wall. Three white balls are placed on top of each other. The one at the bottom is the largest. Laurence rubs his finger in the chalk and removes it from a few places. Two cavities emerge, a carrot-like nose, a muffler, a stick.
Like him, the snowman has blue eyes.
I try my hand and rub more chalk away. New features in blue appear: a few hairs on the forehead, two eyebrows, a mouth. The snowman is not smiling. I add a corrugated beard to his face.
—That’s Bluebeard! Do you know the story?
—Sure! Any rooms in the Club I’m not allowed into? I reply, playfully.
He bursts out laughing.
—The gentlemen’s lavatories! Three of them. But if you’re keen on exploring them, be my guest!
I do not reply.
—Honestly, it’s not forbidden. Nobody’s going to behead you.
My ears feel hot. I may well be blushing.
—Come on, I’ll give you a guided tour!
And like a gentleman, he offers me his arm. Bras dessus bras dessous, we have spent a whole lesson practising the distinction between the French u and ou. But I have never seen it for real, a man and a woman walking arm in arm. Only in foreign magazines and foreign films. A courteous gesture, if only he was not mocking me. I push his arm away and slap his shoulder. He sniggers and offers his arm again. Elegantly, as if it was an invitation to dance. Again I push it away and punch his chest. He does not condescend to ward off my blows. I try to poke his ribs with my fingers, but he deflects them with one arm. I would do anything to wipe that confident smile off his face. The more amused he looks, the angrier I am. How do the boys in our street tease him?
I flick my hand at his long locks and make the sound of a long kiss.
—Sissy!
Before I realise it, his arm has surrounded my neck while he drags me backwards. My knees give in. I lose balance and fall. He plops down on my belly and pinions my arms over my head.
—Say sorry.
—You should say sorry, you started it.
So what? He is the stronger. Nevertheless, he is ready to compromise for a peaceful surrender. Over my dead body! I slash back, fuming with pride and making a new attempt to release my hands. Flounder, buck, worm, wiggle. Nothing doing. His grip is too tight. Cemented. While every square of my checked dress is itching at the back and at the thighs.
—You have no choice, he whispers
I scratch his hands with my fingernails and pierce his flesh. A cry of pain escapes him, but his expression does not change. Carefully, his grip crawls down to my wrists, out of my nails’ reach. Then he grins again, secure enough to find my resistance cute.
Two blows in the back take him by surprise and thrust him forwards. His eyes roll as he drops on me, squealing. I pull up my knees and fling myself upwards, taking advantage of his momentary upset. My arms shove against his. My shoulders join forces and push. Blood rushes into my head. It is now or never. Sweat drips down my back. His elbows are bending. Our eyes meet on the same level at last. His head slowly slopes backwards. I am winning! His face is flushing from exertion. I am the stronger. I’d love him with his ugly grimaces too, I tell myself, already thinking with the generosity of a winner.
A sudden bellow ends my short-lived glee. Startled by his battle cry, my arms loosen. One moment later, his head jerks and faces mine. Two moments later, it is looking over me. My backbone recognises the cold concrete. My head bangs on the ground. His arms force mine to my sides. His legs pin down mine. Our limbs stop struggling, all eight together, bundled in twos.
—Say sorry.
He is breathing on my neck. His warmth covers me like a blanket. A lock of his hair grazes my forehead. I can smell him sweating. The odour is foreign, that of a blond – lighter, sharper than my own. His heart flutters between my breasts – hot and flat like two slices of toast.
—Go to hell, I answer back.
Surrender. Hands off me. Say sorry. You say sorry. I hate you. And other exchanges of the sort divert us from the closeness of our bodies and from the hard swelling in his groin. Is that his penis resting between my thighs? But why so bulky? I never thought … Are we doing something wrong? What if mother saw us? Will father disapprove terribly? It is not my fault! He is the one who started it, and he is not getting an apology from me.
I should resort to passive resistance. Try it Gandhi’s way. It worked with the English, they say. Let mind and muscles relax, let me sink under him, and let him sort it out. It is the least a winner can do. The checked dress is chafing every inch of my skin. His hip-joint is prodding at my flesh. A drop of sweat slides down his cheek and lands on my lower lip
. His legs are pressing against mine. A wave of heat flits through my belly. My throat is sore. I am dying for a glass of water.
—Say sorry …
He is almost begging. I keep quiet. If he can prolong time with his speed, I can stop it with my silence. He is fidgeting. My eyelashes have tickled his neck. It is tense and vulnerable. It succumbs to the strain and his head falls beside mine. He is shivering. His forehead is all sweat. He is about to burst.
—I’ll hold you down forever, he cries out impatiently.
—I’ll cry for help, you big fat bully.
Damn it! I should have kept my mouth shut instead of committing myself to action. Suppose my voice crosses the playground and the lawn and startles Laurence’s mother in the bridge-room, or worse, disturbs his father, who is leafing through pink newspapers in the library, and biting at his pipe as if it were the Kirkuk pipeline itself? Never again will they invite the loud Iraqi neighbour to their orderly club, where members tiptoe through the premises, open and close doors as gently as if they were in a hospital, play bingo and watch tennis matches with incomprehensible listlessness. Not even under curfew would a residential side-street in Baghdad be half as quiet as the English Club on a normal day.
Was it with the same quietness that the English succeeded in dominating half the globe only a century ago?
Try and shout “help” in English, or any exclamation in a foreign tongue. How affected it will sound. Like some oud trying to emit the tones of a guitar. My mouth opens wide. Help, I gasp, but the sound writhes and jitters before breaking on the blue walls of the pool.
—Help, I bawl at last into Laurence’s ear, loud enough to perforate his eardrum.
It takes me three such helps to hurl him to the ground.
—It’s prickling everywhere, all over my body, he yells.
Black ants are racing up his legs and back. A few inches from our feet, they are panicking erratically in and out and around their battered fortress, the way the old Judeans must have mourned their destroyed temple two thousand years ago. Have Laurence and I trampled down their hill during our struggle? Suddenly I realise that it was not my dress itching after all, but that ants, in dozens, are meandering about my body and biting my flesh.
