by Mona Yahia
—As if going there in the first place wasn’t asking for trouble! But never mind. You made it after all. How?
Dudi pulls out his wallet from his pocket and shakes it to make the coins clink.
—I stopped the next semit vendor and bought up all his stock. I was ready to pay anything for his silence. The bastard grinned all over his face and said the spectacle must have aroused my appetite. I was so revolted I could have thrown up. On the edge of the square, an ill-looking man was reciting patriotic verses in front of a circle of admirers. I threw the rings at his feet and walked off.
He takes a deep breath and quietly concludes,
—I ran off in fact, all the way back. I came directly here. It was like swimming against the current. Everyone was pushing against me in the opposite direction. Everyone was heading for Liberation Square.
Dudi lies on my bed, drained and dejected, finished at last. I go down to fetch a bottle of sherbet from the kitchen. On my return, I find him playing with a match-box, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. When he sees me, he sits up and sucks deeply,
—Don’t you have an ashtray? he asks, waving the spent match, his eyes tearful from the smoke.
—You may use the waste-paper basket. Since when do you smoke?
—I bought a packet in the square this morning. It’s my fifth already. Who said smoking affects your health? I ran three miles without a break.
Pressing the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, he takes a long drag, and is seized by a fit of coughing. I pour him a glass of sherbet.
—After I saw what I saw, I felt as if I’d aged by ten, no, twenty years. So I thought I might as well start to smoke. You get the point?
—More or less. If you’re fourteen and your face is still as smooth as a bread roll, then you should go and watch public hangings. End the show with a cigarette, and, sure enough, the calf has grown into a bull.
—That’s not fair! It’s not what I said. My intention was …
—Your intention was to show off! Walk in here like a hero and talk me into listening to your horror stories pretending to be concerned about the victims and …
—Lina, you’re twisting my words. You owe me an apology.
—You make me sick!
—You’re not in your right mind!
—Look who’s talking! As if you were in a position to distinguish a right mind from a warped one.
—Perhaps Valium wasn’t such a bad idea after all! I wonder if your parents can spare you a pill. It seems to run in the family.
—And it seems it’s time to kick you out. Yes, you’ve heard me right. Just lift your ass off my bed and welli, get lost! On the spot! I don’t want to see you ever again.
Dudi spits out a shred of tobacco, wipes his lips, and grins.
—You forget we’re neighbours? It’s quite difficult not to run into each other twice a day.
He guffaws in disbelief as I thump him and pull him out of my bed, as his heavy body thuds to the ground. His cigarette falls and rolls towards the door. Slowly he rises to his feet, coughing and chuckling by turns, limping and groaning, pretending to be in pain.
—What a fuss about a packet of cigarettes! What do you have against smoking? Your mother herself’s a walking chimney.
I shove him out of my room, down the stairs.
—Hey, watch out, my shoulder, you’re hurting me! You’re supposed to be the gentle sex, remember! Goodness, where’ve you got all this strength from? Your hand’s as hard as iron, nobody will dare ask for it. Even I will have to think twice. Lina, are you crazy, I almost tripped. I could have broken a leg. Let go of me! Wait till your father …
—Leave my father out of this, all right? He’s busy reflecting on the meaning of life, did you forget, you creep? Baba can’t cope with anything today. He’s not cool and brave like Dudi. Dudi! There’s a daredevil, a real man, beardless perhaps, but you should see his balls!
Dudi yelps as I push him through the living-room, and boisterously implores my parents to help. They watch the scene nonchalantly, without batting an eyelid. Once in the courtyard, Dudi lowers his voice,
—Lina, wait, you’ve got me wrong. Honestly, I didn’t tell you the whole story. I held back one detail. A crucial one. Remember you kept asking why I went to the square, and I wouldn’t answer?
—I don’t give a damn about your motives any more.
Dudi suddenly stands still, folds his arms across his chest, and is immovable. No matter how fiercely I strike and push and kick, he does not budge an inch.
—Lina, I swear, I went to Liberation Square to make sure that my old man wasn’t hanging there.
His new confession throws me off balance.
—You want me to swallow this now? The names of the executed have been repeated all day on the radio. They were in the papers. Your father’s detained in the Central Prison. His name has never been mentioned in the trials. Your mother visits him every month.
—This is word for word what I told myself, a thousand times and more, and still my mind couldn’t rest. It sounds mad, I know, but I couldn’t help it. I had to go and place myself beneath every corpse in order to believe it wasn’t my father’s. Then I asked the hanged man’s forgiveness for the relief that his misfortune granted me and dragged myself to the next gallows.
A tremor runs through my body. Whenever Dudi reveals a new face, it turns out to be more elusive and upsetting than the ones before. I could have hugged him in my confusion, or, just as easily wrung his neck.
Eventually I hear myself say,
—You must have a screw loose somewhere, Dudi.
He does not reply. Only pushes the gate open and walks away.
His cigarette at the door of my room has burnt into an ashen cylinder. Doubts start looming in my mind. Was Dudi’s fear for his father genuine or did he invent the confession on the spur of the moment as a trick to win me over?
I fling myself on my rumpled bed, bury my face in the pillow. But Dudi’s smell has invaded the bedcover. I kick it away, get up, air the room. Civilization was sacrificed in Baghdad this morning. I wonder how long the stench of its excrement will stick in our nostrils.
PART IV
Anatomy of Hope
Ferial drops the frog into the transparent plastic bag which Selma is holding. Selma hastily purses up the opening, leaving a tiny hole for the yellow liquid our teacher is about to pour in. The frog flaps nervously about, flinging itself against the supple wall only to slide, time and again, down to the bottom. The yellow liquid rises to its ankles. The animal jerks up and bangs its head against Selma’s hand. “Pow!” the boy beside me exclaims, as if we were watching a cartoon film. The frog lifts a weighty head then stretches out its forelegs in a last attempt at a leap. Betrayed by its hind legs, the body slumps back into the sedative, and the bulky eyelids fall, like curtains at the end of a play.
Selma retrieves the numb animal and lays it face up on the dissection table. As she spread-eagles its fore and hind legs for Ferial to nail them to the wooden board, I have a flash of insight. The dual form in Arabic grammar must have derived from the symmetry of the body! My old question, long pursued, then forgotten, has suddenly found its answer, lying right in front of me. How evident it appears now that the rules of speech should reflect the rules of anatomy. I look around, eager to share my thought with somebody, but the attention of my classmates is captured by the two pairs of hands engaged in team-work. Ferial seizes a scalpel and slits the amphibian in the middle, starting from the loins and moving upwards to the neck. The green skin opens, the tissue parts underneath without spilling a single drop of blood. Selma peels away the skin with a pair of tweezers then nails it to the board. Ferial pulls back the flesh until the innards are neatly exposed. Boys crack macabre jokes. Girls let out cries of pity and disgust. Our biology teacher calls for quiet.
—Boys, girls, what do we see, here? What organs can we identify? Who wants to start?
I recognise the heart by its stubborn rhythm. The thro
bbing reminds me of mother’s recent words: “One should never lose hope, not as long as the heart is beating.”
And yet, things do look pretty hopeless for this amphibian.
The bell rings. The students leave for morning break. Selma asks me to wait for her until she has helped Ferial clear up the laboratory. I stroll about the corridor, basking in the winter sun. In the yard underneath, smaller children are playing seven tiles. Passing by Dudi’s classroom, I catch a glimpse of his empty desk. Dudi has not been to school since last Monday, the day of the executions. His absence had escaped my notice until Thursday, when, after school, ustad Heskel led a group of forty students to offer condolences to Hai’s bereaved family. Two of Dudi’s sisters came along and they told the ustad that their brother had a high fever and could not join in. They did not sound as if they knew about his hazardous wanderings in Liberation Square.
—Ferial told me I have the hands of a surgeon, Selma joins me, flaunting her long white fingers, smelling of laurel soap.
At the bottom of the stairs, dozens of pupils are thronging in front of the staff-room, barring its entrance, elbowing one another aside for the view from the window.
—We must have foreign guests again! So early? Have they already gone round the synagogues!
Infuriated by world condemnation of the spectacle in Tahrir Square, our government is repeating that the spies had been proved guilty by strictly legal trials, that they were hanged for being traitors and not for being Jews – as Zionist propaganda is claiming. To prove the fact, foreign journalists are being allowed into the country to judge for themselves if the Jews are truly being persecuted and if there is any trace of discrimination in Iraq.
“He wasn’t even granted a funeral,” groaned Hai’s sister as we entered the house. Dressed in black, her shirt torn from the collar down to the chest, the grey-haired woman was beating her breast, slapping her thighs and roaring her sorrow. “A good Jew his whole life, but murdered like a dog and buried like a dog. God alone will punish them for their crimes. Why weren’t we allowed to attend the burial? How dangerous could a dead man be that the secret police had to escort him to the grave?” Raw and intimidating, her grief not only refused to be pacified, but made our condolences sound as hollow as the cracked shells of pumpkin seeds.
The place was crowded with visitors, and although many were leaving to make room for the newcomers, most of us students had to sit on the floor. I recognised Hai’s nephews by their unshaven faces. A white candle burned in the corner. The mirror at the entrance had been turned to the wall. The girl next to me whispered that they too had turned the mirrors during her grand-mother’s saba’a, the seven days of mourning. Refreshments were served by family friends, and no sooner had we sipped the black coffee than the wails of the bereaved sister broke out again. “A good Jew his whole life, and yet they slaughtered him like a dog and buried him like a dog.” Her lamentations evoked a picture of Hai in my mind – not my suntanned swimming instructor, but the lifeless and battered body Dudi must have encountered in Tahrir Square. I tried to divert my attention from the image by scanning the row of women’s legs in front of me and looking for runs in their nylon stockings. But it was no use. The bare feet with the cracked soles and the pear-shaped big toes kept dangling above my head. “At least he’s lying in peace now!” ventured an old lady. “How can a man rest in peace when he’s been buried by the hands of his own murderers?” retorted the sister. Apparently they have not told her yet that the graves of the executed men had to be fortified – sealed with concrete the same night. By orders of the hacham, the chief rabbi, who feared the worst from the masses.
Selma and I squeeze through the crowd to the window and peep into the teachers’ room. Ferial has just stepped in and let herself fall into the armchair beside ustad Heskel. He is still wearing his torn jacket, although the seven days of mourning are over. Across the room, two tall blond men are interviewing ustad Faouzi, the English teacher in our elementary school. He seems to be faltering in the company of our headmaster, the two foreigners, and the two security men accompanying them.
Will he find a way to convey to the visitors that his cousin, who had been arrested three weeks ago, was sent back home yesterday morning as a corpse in a jute sack?
Ustad Faouzi shakes hands with the foreign correspondents, and draws up a chair towards Ferial and ustad Heskel, his speech flowing freely now. He throws up his hands in a gesture that says “what could I do?” Sit Fahima, another elementary school teacher, has joined them. Ustad Juad, our history teacher, is sipping his tea, aloof yet not inattentive to the agitation of his Jewish colleagues at the back of the room. He has the grace not to stare too long, but to hide his face behind a newspaper. He is all too ready to cast it aside when ustad Riad, the civics and Arabic teacher, taps his newspaper and pulls up a chair next to him.
The headmaster leads the visitors out.
The tall journalists smile in wonder at the restless mass of children waiting for them outside. Followed by the four men, the headmaster makes his way through the crush, distributing his usual scowls of reproof. No sooner have they disappeared inside the office, than Selma nudges me and gives me a thumbs-up.
—Not again!
She nods her head affirmatively.
—But when? They went past so quickly …
—Didn’t I tell you I was gifted? Selma mimes an oud player with her left fingers.
—Which one?
—The beardless one, with the yellow hair and blue eyes. He looked so smart in that brown leather jacket, don’t you think?
—Oh yes, he’s terribly handsome! Pity they didn’t show them around the classes. Imagine if they’d have interviewed us!
—God forbid, my heart would have stopped beating on the spot!
—Come on, Selma, don’t exaggerate!
—He’s like a prince from a fairy tale. But too old for me anyway. And married too! He was wearing a wedding ring, did you see that?
—Say, you’ve really fallen for him! Did you write him a love letter or what?
—Oh no! she giggles. I just scribbled the same message I used for yesterday’s visitors: Please, help us leave Iraq!
—You’re sure you sneaked it into the right pocket? what if the security man finds it in his jacket this evening?
Selma giggles again, pleased with her feat, then gasps,
—Imagine, they’re travelling all the way from France, Belgium, Italy, Holland … just for our sake! If the West intercedes on our behalf, it might work miracles. We could well be holding passports soon! Passports, Lina, passports, can you believe it?
—Not really. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what a passport looks like.
Another miracle is waiting for me at home. Shuli, in flesh and blood, is leaning over the gas cooker in the kitchen, spooning out sauce from the steaming pan and slurping it from the ladle. Startled by my cry of joy, he drops the ladle into the pan, splashing red sauce on his shirt and fingers. I jump on his neck, while he waggles his scorched hand, convulsing with laughter.
—I thought they’d never let you out. What happened?
—Don’t ask me! Maybe the lock of the jail broke and none of the warders knew how to repair it. Maybe there was a revolution and all the guards were shot.
—Shuli, don’t tease me, please!
Instead of receiving his tepid tea at dawn, he was told to dress and was led to the prison commander. In disbelief, he listened to the officer inform him how he, Shuli, had been wronged by the former corrupt regime, but now that the revolutionary government was setting things right, he was free to go. Without bail, without signing any statements. With or without my star? He was tempted to ask, but fortunately kept the quip to himself. In no time, he packed his things and set out from the camp, disoriented like a bat in daylight. Military jeeps raced past him along the dirt track. Sparrows sang above his head. The sun was rising. A new day! There was more to time again than the position of the hands of his watch. His senses were waking u
p. But only when he reached the motorway did he start to feel safe. So they had not planned to shoot him in the back after all. On impulse, he began to run. No, he was not impatient to be home, he was just running as far as possible from the ugly chapter behind him.
I carry the bowl of kubba and beetroot – Shuli’s favourite dish – to the dining-room. Father uncorks the bottle of red wine which he bought this morning especially for the occasion. We gather around the table, the four of us together again. It is as though we are about to have the lunch we missed one and a half years ago. As we raise our glasses and before father has said a word, the bell rings. How strange to hear the doorbell again, Shuli remarks. Father frowns, ill at ease. He has been treating every signal from the outside world as an alarm bell recently. Mother goes to the door. Shouts of excitement soon emanate from the courtyard. She returns arm-in-arm with a boisterous Dudi – cheerful, full of life, and anything but feverish.
Since when has he grown two fingers taller than my mother?
—Abu Dudi’s released too …
—Together with all the Jewish men in the Central Prison … around sixty … all those picked up before the Ba’ath came to power, Dudi adds.
—Alhamdellah, thank God! What a day! Congratulations, my boy, father says, and shakes Dudi’s hand.
—You must drink a toast with us, Shuli proposes.
—What do you mean drink, he’s having lunch with us! says mother. Have a seat, my son. Lina, fetch him a plate from the kitchen, will you?
Averting his eyes from me, Dudi declines her invitation – as required by politeness – assuring us he has had lunch already. When mother insists, he corrects himself and claims the opposite, that they’re waiting for him to have lunch back home.
—Are you refusing Mama’s kubba? I say, getting up.
