Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (12 page)

The music stopped and my father burst out of the crowd, coming over to Fatima to comfort her and check her wound. There was a cut that ran along the back of her four fingers.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her. “It will be okay.”

He told me to put pressure on the wound and take care of her. Then he went back to the adversaries and raised his voice above everyone else’s in a rebuke. With the help of some others, he separated the adversaries and sat them down away from each other. The whole time he was cursing and scolding them amid everyone’s silence.

During this time, I went behind the bar with Fatima. I took hold of her bleeding hand, washed it, and comforted her. She had actually calmed down already, though the surprise had frightened her a little. I began to dry her hand with the apron, which she had hurried to take off. I saw the size of her chest for the first time. It was small, but the two breasts were firm, set apart, and upright, like the newly developed breasts of a young woman. Rosa brought me gauze and a bandage, together with a bottle of iodine, which she had taken from a small first-aid box that was hanging in one of the dark corners. I sat Fatima down on a nearby chair and began wrapping her hand, going around the fingers on their own, then all together.

My father angrily mounted the stage. In a style that ranged from serious to joking, he began addressing the assembly over the microphone, reminding them of the rules of the establishment and his rejection of violence in all its forms. After I had finished bandaging Fatima’s hand, I put my hand on her shoulder, and she stood up with me. We began to watch my father, who was speaking at that moment, giving his address in English, which he would translate himself into German, while Rosa next to him would translate it into Spanish.

“This is a place for happiness, for coexistence, for tolerance, for getting to know each other, for love, for peace, for dancing, for life, for kissing.” (He kissed Rosa, and the crowd laughed.) “For the pleasure of caressing bodies and asses.” (He reached a hand over to Rosa’s butt, and they laughed and clapped.) “Violence is forbidden here, along with arrogance, racism, and calls for force and heroic deeds. Whoever among you wants violence, chivalry, and empty heroism, here’s my passport!” (He took his passport from his pocket and held it up.) “Let him take it and go to Iraq. I guarantee he’ll find
violence there. They’ll teach him manners, they’ll put some muscles on his bones, and he’ll eat the shit he’s looking for!”

Laughter and applause went up. He came down and reconciled the two adversaries, making them embrace each other and apologize. Then, to the one who had thrown the bottle that injured Fatima’s fingers, he indicated that he should apologize to her. A fat German came toward us and began apologizing to Fatima.

My father said to him from behind, “Kiss her hand, you donkey! Just like respectable men do to respectable ladies.”

The guy did so, smiling, and Fatima smiled while extending her hand. Everyone applauded, and my father called out to the music band, “Come, now! Let’s continue the party!”

The din and the dancing started up all over again. Then my father came back to Fatima and embraced her, saying, “My dear Fatumi, how are you?”

He examined her wrapped hand, and she said, “No, it’s nothing, just a light wound.”

He said to her, “You can go home, or to my place, or even to Saleem’s, if you want.”

“No,” she said. “I’m fine. I can stay here and take care of the receipts at least.”

“Fine, just as you like. In that case, have a seat. And whenever you feel pain or want to leave, just go.”

Then he spanked her on the butt and disappeared again into the middle of the crowd, his laughter rising above the noise.

I said to Fatima, “Where do you live?”

“In the Barajas district, near the airport.”

“And how do you get there every night then?”

“Sometimes I take a taxi, and if it’s late, I take the subway when the first train comes at six.”

“And Mr. Noah’s house?”

“It’s close to here, on the next street over.”

“In any case, if you want to go to your house, his house, or even my house, I’m happy to walk you there.”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

I came out from behind the bar and sat back down in my place in front of her. After about an hour, I noticed that the atmosphere had come back to normal. The dancing and the drinking continued, and Fatima resumed punching in the receipts with her right hand, the smile never leaving her face. I wrote my address down for her on a paper napkin I took from the dispenser in front of me. Then I said goodbye to her and headed off for home.

CHAPTER 8

I
couldn’t fall asleep until very late. I stayed up smoking and recalling what had happened, what I had learned that day about my father. So, he still had the Qur’an memorized. And he was proud to confess Grandfather’s method of naming in our family, which he considered to be names chosen for us by God.

He had made Fatima memorize the Cow Sura, yet he spanked her whenever she passed by him. And it was he who had raged like a bull and turned our entire life upside down on account of a guy grabbing my sister Istabraq’s butt.

He took charge of this incompatible multitude, yet he, throughout his life, left the management of our family, and even of his very self, to Grandfather. He would obey Grandfather without discussion, without even looking him in the eyes.

He now drank wine voraciously, yet he was the one who never left a prayer, a fast, or any religious duty unfulfilled. He lived with Rosa, and she wasn’t his wife. (And how exactly did he live with her after what the electric torture had done to his testicles?) His mouth poured out the coarsest of curses in all
languages, yet he was the one who never uttered an offensive word in his life. He laughed the loudest of all those assembled, yet if he used to laugh, it wouldn’t be more than a smile because “if the upright believer laughs, he must not guffaw.”

I was thinking that there were two people inside my father. The person that he revealed back there was hiding here; the person that he revealed here was hiding back there. But he didn’t abandon either of them for good. Sometimes he injected one of them into the other.

And finally, what about the way Grandfather died!?

It had been Grandfather’s dream to construct what might be called “The Ideal City,” or at least “The Ideal Village.” The clash with the government furnished a suitable opportunity to put this dream into effect. To a large degree, he succeeded during the first two years after we moved. It was an ideal place for isolation: a peninsula that the river encircled on three sides, with the mountain on the fourth. He made the mosque the center of the village and the biggest, most important, and most beautiful of its buildings, even though it was just a large hall with a prayer niche. He attached to it a small room and a bathroom. He fashioned the shelves of its library by himself out of branches from willow and tamarisk trees, stacking all his books on them. He didn’t have more than fifty books, most of them containing religious or historical material or popular legends. In their entirety, they formed the sum of my first reading: I read them all as I had a lot of free time during those years.

Perhaps the best explanation for the absence of any delay on Grandfather’s part in choosing the place and deciding to move there is that, over the years, he used to stand and gaze for long periods out the window of our guest room in Subh Village. Perhaps he was forming this plan.

Grandfather’s insistence on accepting the insulting name in the beginning, and his promise to change the name to Dignity after we took revenge, was a tactical, premeditated step. It demonstrated his intention to establish a goal that we needed to struggle to achieve. Tying the goal to the name of the village meant we would always remember it. At the time he had said, “Let the Prophet be our model in everything, for he is the one that changed the name of the city Yathrib to ‘Medina, the Illuminated City’ after emigrating there to establish the core of the Islamic state, which would stretch to all corners of the earth after he was gone. When we avenge our dignity, we, too, will name this village of ours Freedmen, The Absolute, or Dignity.”

That was then. And till this day, I haven’t liked those names because of how diluted those generalized, traditional concepts have become. What’s more, deep down I preferred the name Qashmars, at least from the point of view of how pretty the sound was to pronounce. Perhaps my father was of the same opinion, seeing that he had bestowed upon his club here that very name.

In the first two years after our move, we noticed a newfound vigor in Grandfather’s body and mind. What’s more, there was even an improvement in his health, so much so that he was usually not content just to give orders and plans (even the architecture!) and to oversee the work, but he found it hard to keep his hands from taking part.

He used to say, “This will be a good town, with the Qur’an as its constitution and sharia as its legal system. We will make it a model of virtue and an earthly base from which people depart for heavenly paradise!”

In the village, Grandfather filled the role of absolute governor. No details escaped his notice. Leaning upon his Pakistani
cane, he shouldered his almost eighty years and made daily rounds in the village: writing marriage contracts and blessing those who married young, determining the punishment for wrongdoers, and reconciling adversaries. He would visit the sick, and he would recite incantations and Qur’anic texts over the places of their injuries. He would censure the women who revealed their legs when sitting in front of the washtubs and call to account whoever among them overburdened their donkey. He would proffer advice and teach both young and old about their religion and their world. He meddled in everything and exercised control over everything, doing it all out of zeal to apply “God’s statutes” in their entirety.

He made the mosque’s prayer hall, which was next to our house, his dwelling place and a headquarters for administering all village affairs. Prayers, meetings, and religious celebrations took place there. There, too, were the judgment council, conversations, colloquies, and worship. There was the school where we all learned. And there were the books, the box of sweets, the bag of dates, the poison for rats, and the hereditary family sword.

When picking the muezzin, who performed the call to prayer, he chose the darkest and strongest person among us, thereby imitating Prophet Muhammad’s choice of Bilal the Ethiopian. And because he didn’t want to change the man’s name, he commanded the muezzin to name his son Bilal. Then he called him “Abu Bilal,” that is, Father of Bilal. Actually, he did this even before the son who would confer this name upon the father was born. He ordered stairs to be built that would lift Abu Bilal to the roof to recite his call to prayer from there. So we all woke up at dawn to his voice, which became more beautiful with the passage of time and Grandfather’s instruction. In the same way, we would measure the time according to his five
calls to prayer. Meanwhile, Grandfather reserved the Friday call to prayer for my father, perhaps with the intention of forcing him to come back every weekend from his job in Kirkuk.

My father was the only one who left the village, so he became, in this way, our sole link to the outside world. And judging by the intensity of my father’s obedience to Grandfather, I was certain that he would have left his job, which he loved, had Grandfather asked that of him.

Grandfather stipulated that my father take a path across the mountain and not through Subh. So in order to cross to the other side of the mountain and reach the highway that connected Mosul and Baghdad, my father followed a trail made by the livestock. He would flag down cars going in the direction of Mosul, and from there to Kirkuk. He would sometimes travel by foot, taking more than an hour to cross the mountain. Other times, one of us would accompany him on a donkey. I was the one who liked doing this the most because my father would talk to me on the road about the outside world and about the Germans, whom he liked a lot. He would say, “They really like eating sweets, and they have many different kinds. Next time, I’ll bring you a piece of their chocolate. They are like our family, which is obsessed with dates, but their sweets have an infinite number of colors and flavors.”

Along those lines, I also remember him talking one time about German women. He was talking freely, as though he were alone, or—who knows?—he may have meant to inspire a sense of friendship and treat me like a man. “Their hair is like a field of wheat at harvest time. The fuzz on their breasts and their pubic hair is like a handful of golden grass. But their smell! Their butts are their least beautiful parts since they are not rounded at all, but just a continuation of their
backs and thighs. Butts without personality! If they would encircle their green eyes in the middle of those golden faces with black eyeliner, it would be amazingly beautiful—amazing! Their breasts are large and swaying. Faces and bodies as smooth as butter, but bland and boring—is it because butter is eaten with sweet things rather than savory? There are lots of fat ones with huge bodies. Tall ones, some of them reaching as high as that tree—that one, do you see it? Yes, I’m serious! They are less talkative than the other foreigners I know. Somewhat cold. Is this what makes them love the sun? In the sun, they become red like tomatoes.”

He would talk to me about other foreigners, whom I would imagine to be tribes like us—French, Thais, Americans, and Indians. Also the English, about whom he would say, “I don’t like them because they have yellow smiles.”

I wondered to myself at the time about the secret behind his hatred of the English because of their yellow smiles while at the same time he loved the Germans, who had yellow hair. But I quickly gave up wondering since I didn’t understand what it meant to have a yellow smile, and I didn’t want to interrupt his fiery discourse about the Germans: “There in Germany, Saleem, everything an Arab longs for exists in abundance. I mean water, plants, and attractive faces. All of Germany is one big green field. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s true they might be so serious as to be dry in their interactions, as though they live for work alone. They are stubborn, like your grandfather, and for that reason, iron suits them. They use it to make the best cars. They are very successful in iron and music. A challenge strengthens them, and therefore they built their country up quickly after the war, surpassing their enemies in construction. They have freedom there. Everybody says what
he wants and does what he wants, without anybody interfering in his choices. Freedom, Saleem. Ah, freedom! Do you understand what I’m saying, Saleem?”