Dates on My Fingers: An Iraqi Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (14 page)

CHAPTER 9

I
woke to someone ringing the bell from the main door. I looked at the alarm clock next to my head and saw that it was quarter to six in the morning. I got up and went over to the receiver for the door phone. “Yes, who is it?” I asked.

A voice came to me: “It’s me, Fatima. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.”

“Oh! Fatima. Come on up. Come on up! I’m on the fifth floor.” I left the door open and heard her steps coming up the bottom flights of the staircase. Meanwhile, I hurried to the bathroom, washed my face, rinsed my mouth, and quickly combed my hair. Then I hurried to clear off the surface of the coffee table, which was cluttered with an ashtray filled with cigarette butts and date pits, empty yogurt cups, and scattered newspapers. Afterward, I went to the door and stood waiting for her as the sound of her steps approached the top.

She was panting on account of the climb, and I repeated the playful cliché that I had learned from Pilar and shared with everyone winded by the climb to my apartment: “It’s good exercise. They say that climbing stairs is good for the heart.”

I reached out my hand, taking hold of hers and helping her up the last two steps.

Smiling, she said, “Good morning!” Then she added, “And what am I going to do with a strong heart if I have no intention of shipping it off to compete in the Olympics?”

We laughed together, and I led her inside. Traces of fatigue from staying up all night were clearly visible on her face. Little red veins stained the whites of her eyes. I noticed that her hair was long and pretty. When she passed under the lamp hanging in the hallway, I saw that the skin of her face was tired and shining as though smeared with oil. I led her to a seat in the living room, and she flopped down, heaving a powerful sigh, or as the saying goes, the uttermost sigh of her heart.

Like everyone who comes to my house, she too began to stare at the pictures of Iraq which covered the walls. She said, “This is the first time I’ve seen a house like this. Are they pictures of Iraq?”

“Yes,” I said. “I put them up with the hope of reducing my sense of exile. But they actually increased it.”

She said it was a lovely idea and that she wanted to examine every single picture another time because she loved Iraq and didn’t know much about it. She was wearing a simple dress, which made her seem more feminine in my eyes since in my long years here I had only seen a few women who weren’t wearing pants.

I asked her if she wanted to eat or drink anything, and she requested just a little water. I brought her a glass and sat in front of her, asking about her injured hand.

“It’s certainly better,” she said, “but it still stings. I need to replace the bandage. Do you have any here?”

“Yes,” I said, getting up. “I have iodine and bandages.”

“No, not now,” she said. “Please, sit. I came to tell you what happened. You have to talk to Mr. Noah. I think he needs a close friend to understand and help him.”

“What happened?”

“An hour ago, at the end of the party, he quarreled with Rosa. She was furious and left in tears for Barcelona.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Noah drank more than he should have last night and got drunk. He joked more with the customers. He danced and flirted more with the girls, kissing a few of them sometimes. Rosa was consumed by jealousy. She restrained her anger until the end of the night, when the battle between them began. He answered her harshly, and she picked up her purse and went off, leaving him staggering around drunkenly. I tried to calm her down but couldn’t. Then a co-worker and I took Mr. Noah home. We left him on his bed, passed out like a dead man. He slept in his clothes just as he was. I took off his shoes. Then I locked up, leaving the club in a disastrous mess, and came to you.”

“Does this happen often?”

“No, not like this. He drinks, but he never loses consciousness or his self-control. He drank so much yesterday and became drunk like never before. I didn’t know what to do, so I tried to think of someone else who could help me with this situation. But although Mr. Noah has lots of acquaintances, I noticed that he and Rosa harbor a special respect and affection for you. What’s more, you’re from his village, his country, his culture, and you speak his language, so I thought that you would be the best person to talk to him, listen to him, understand him. In any case, you’re his friend, right?”

I bowed my head for a few moments, thinking the matter over and deciding how to respond. I sighed audibly, then looked at her and said, “He’s my father.”

The sudden surprise threw Fatima back in the couch. Her eyes widened, and all the features of her face changed. Her mouth gaped open, and she hurried to cover it with her right hand. “Really?”

Without any further details, I confirmed that it was true, and I told her that she had to take it easy, to sleep. Likewise, that we ought to let him sleep, and after a few hours we would go to him. She said her body was exhausted, but that her mind was awake, and she didn’t think she would be able to sleep. But she needed to shower and change her bandage. Then she had to call her sister to set her mind at ease and let her know that she wouldn’t be coming home that day. So I told her, “Sleep a little now, and then we’ll take care of everything.”

She said, “Half an hour should be enough.”

I led her to my bed in the bedroom and took out a pair of my pajamas for her, but she insisted on sleeping in her dress just as she was.

I closed the door on her and went down to pick up bread, cheese, and milk. Then I began preparing breakfast for both of us. This time I made it rich and varied, adding eggs, olives, and jam, since it wouldn’t be appropriate to offer her the traditional breakfast I have every day: coffee with milk, cookies, and cigarettes.

She slept more than an hour, and I heard her gentle snoring, like that of an overweight child exhausted from playing or whose nose was stuffed up.

I spread newspaper out on the coffee table, as usual, and started bringing in the dishes and arranging them. Then I got
the coffee machine ready and started it before heading to the bathroom for a shower. When I finished and came back out, I found Fatima sitting in the living room. I greeted her, my hands still drying my hair with the towel.

“Good morning! Did you sleep well?”

“Yes,” she said. She smiled and added with a feminine shyness, “Did I bother you with my snoring? I snore when I’m tired.”

“No! Your snoring is really light compared to mine. I’m the smoker. Mine’s like the roar of a tractor stuck in the mud.”

She laughed, and I showed her the way to the bathroom door. Meanwhile, I went into the bedroom to change clothes. I noticed that she had made my bed in an elegant way, different from how I always did it. I felt that each of us—the bed and I—smiled, giving the other a meaningful wink. I took all the medical bandages and iodine I had out of one of the dresser drawers and carried them into the living room. I brought in the coffee, and I put a popular Fairuz cassette that I was addicted to listening to every morning into the tape player. I sat smoking and waiting for Fatima to come out.

The bathroom door opened, and Fatima’s head and half a naked shoulder appeared from behind the door frame. Her hair hung down, dripping wet. The sight startled me by reminding me of Aliya when she swam—or when she drowned. Before this idea could distract me entirely, she said with a happy smile, “Oh my God! I love Fairuz so much!” Then she asked, “Do you have another towel, or should I just use the one in here?”

I jumped up. “I’m sorry! I forgot. Of course, I do.” And I quickly brought her another towel, which she took with a naked arm that gave off the scent of woman and soap. She thanked me and smiled, then shut the door.

I turned up the volume of the Fairuz song. Then I sat smoking another cigarette and waiting for Fatima while my heart became more and more tender, like butter melting in a dish of warm oil.

We finished our breakfast, during which I asked, “Did you try the dates?”

She replied, “I only like them during Ramadan.”

That provoked a twinge of disappointment, and I said, “Try them; they are Iraqi dates.”

“Really?” She immediately took one.

Fairuz finished her set of songs. The scent of Fatima’s body mixed with the fragrance of the soap filled the room. She said to the cigarette I held out, “No, thanks; I don’t smoke.”

I began to ask her about herself. I noticed that she told her story confidently, on account of feeling relaxed and comfortable. Little by little, with the gradual progress of the morning light, she shared her story and her personality with me.

Fatima was from Tangier. She was four years younger than me, and she’d been living in Madrid for four years. She had four siblings (and for what it’s worth, she likes the number four). Her two older sisters were married; she and her younger sister were here.

As for their only brother, he drowned in the Strait of Gibraltar during a risky crossing to Spain on one of the “death boats.” He had been forced to drop out of college without finishing his degree after their father was laid off from his restaurant job. That job had lasted more than thirty years, but when the restaurant’s owner died, his sons converted it into an arcade. With the change, they replaced the entire staff with younger workers. They gave her father a little severance pay, no longer needing his services. He rapidly aged and various illnesses crept into his body. Fatima’s brother took on several jobs in an
effort to meet the family’s living expenses and the cost of their father’s treatment, but these wore him down and he couldn’t make ends meet. So he decided to embark upon the adventure in which he drowned. He had spoken to them about the dream of Europe and all the money he would send back to them.

In the face of her parents’ distress and her father’s condition, Fatima dropped out too. She went from one job to another in shoe and fabric factories and then a clothing workshop. Still, they went to sleep most nights without dinner. For that reason, she didn’t hesitate in agreeing to marry a man from their street. He proposed when he came to visit his family after a long sojourn in Spain. Fatima moved with him to Spain, carrying with her the unrealized dream of her brother. But after two and a half months, she discovered her husband’s alcohol addiction and his laziness. He would beat her, and he would squander the money she earned from cleaning rich people’s houses. So she separated from him, and then they were divorced. Fatima began to send her family what extra money she had. Later, she brought her younger sister to Spain so that she could keep her company and fulfill the family’s dream that one of them would finish school.

I sensed in the depths of her tone a touch of firm selfconfidence. There was also a cloak of sorrow that Fatima endured with a certain matter-of-factness drawn from the repetition of her daily routine. She had achieved a certain contented acceptance. Indeed, by recalling this sadness throughout her daily life, she had transformed it into a source of strength, and from there, she developed a certain pride in herself. There was something in Fatima the Moroccan, I don’t know what, that reminded me at times of Gulala the Kurd.

I don’t know how the conversation brought us back again to my father, but I found an appropriate way to ask why she
tolerated my father’s flirtations. To be more precise, I wanted to know about his touching her butt, something that preoccupied me deeply. She laughed, her eyes gazing happily off into the distance, like someone cherishing a memory. She began trying to explain to me her feelings toward my father, in whom she had found the father figure she needed. She sought in him an image of her own father: he made her memorize verses of the Qur’an; he gave her orders at work; he showed a special trust in her and handed over the cash register to her; he gave her a set of the keys to the club and his house; he needed her for translating; they understood each other on account of being from the same culture in the midst of people from many different cultures; he sought her help to understand many things in his new environment; he inquired about her sister and her parents; and he compensated her well.

“And the spanking, Fatima! I’m asking about how he keeps spanking your butt!”

“Oh!” Even this pleased her since that was what her father used to do too. When she would go to him as a little girl to show him her drawings or carrying her school report card, he would lift her to his knees, hug her to his chest, kiss her, and give her some dirhams to buy anything she wanted. Then he would set her down between his knees, spank her lightly on her bum, and say, “Run to your mother in the kitchen and tell her how well you did!”

It is not at all uncommon for people to feel a familiarity and intimacy after only one or two meetings, just as though they have known each other for a long time. That’s exactly what happened between Fatima and me, a fact that we remarked upon during our conversation on the short walk to the club. For me, this was the first time that I had felt the oppressive
feeling of exile lightened. The fact that we were speaking in Arabic had a big role in that.

Fatima was also closer to what I imagined a woman to be, or how I grew up understanding them. She seemed somewhat like a sister or a mother. She acquiesced to the role bestowed upon her by life and her environment, the particular time and place in which she lived, together with its framework of traditional concepts that inspired confidence, composure, and an acceptance of reality. There was a sense of adapting oneself to the situation, without relinquishing an ethos of putting things in order and making improvements.

Our instinctive use of many religious phrases as we spoke made us feel a greater trust and closeness. Before we had left, when she saw my prayer rug hanging behind the living room door, in the one spot without pictures, she asked me, “Do you pray?” Without a doubt, she already knew the answer.

“Yes,” I said.

“Me, too, as much as I can. I’m fully dedicated only during the month of Ramadan …. I prefer people who believe in God.”

We arrived. She took out a bunch of keys from her purse and opened the door of the club. We plunged in, going down the stairs after she had turned on some of its dim lights with a small button behind the panel of the door. As soon as we reached the last step, Fatima illuminated the club by pressing a button near the entrance to the bathroom, and the big overhead lights went on, revealing a chaos that resembled a veritable battlefield where hostilities had just ceased. The floor was covered with paper napkins, cigarettes, and all the detritus of the night’s festivities. Overturned chairs, empty or half-empty glasses and bottles were scattered in every direction. There were cigarette butts everywhere, along with lemon peels and olive pits, more
cigarette butts, dishes, ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and toothpicks, empty cigarette boxes, and the remains of halfeaten sandwiches, potato chips, yet more cigarette butts, and the putrid odor of nicotine dominating the place.