Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (24 page)

The family built narrow pathways of reeds and papyrus. I would see my mother riding the mashuf, using a pole to push it forward, bringing more reeds to us. I would ignore her so that my grandmother would not chide me. We would exchange furtive glances as tears flowed down her cheeks. She kept coming and she kept working. Then the water rose suddenly on March 20 and the flood reached its highest point. We rejoiced, knowing that God would soon send us relief, since the highest flood levels occurred between the rising of the Pleiades and its setting over a twenty-five-day period. Once that star set, there would be no increase in the headwaters of the river. My grandmother used to say that the water of the Euphrates needed twelve days to travel from the source of the river to the marshes and that there would be no rising in the level of the water once those twelve days from the setting of the Pleiades had passed. But the star disappeared and the excess water kept coming on the twenty-seventh and the twenty-eighth days.

My grandmother said as she cried, “This is not water. This is a disaster. Oh my son, Oh Mahdi! Woe is me! If only you were here!”

I raised my head. My mother was standing there in her black clothes and big turban, emerging from the dusk of dawn as if she were an invincible being inspiring awe. She said in a commanding voice, “Anhar, gather your sisters and brother and carry everything you can to the balam standing outside. Come on, girl, hold on to my arm.” Then I saw her carrying my grandmother in a lightning quick movement, taking her out to the balam. In a few minutes we looked like an army detachment pulling up its camp quickly for fear of an enemy attack. She had gathered a lot of reeds and papyrus, and my sisters and I kept reinforcing the platforms of our island and my mother moved with energy the likes of which I have never seen
in my life. My mother came back on the forty-second and fortyfourth days until my grandmother gave in and let her take care of the house. Our life went back to normal. My father came with his new wife and learned of what happened, but there was nothing he could do. He spent two days with us and one day after he left, my grandmother died. He came back and took us all to Baghdad. And for the first time I saw my mother smile even though she looked after his new wife as if she were her own daughter and cared for her children as if they were her very own. She continued leading the same kind of life she was used to in the marshes: working all the time, wearing her black clothes and eating her usual simple, coarse food even though my father’s financial conditions had improved considerably. He went into business with my cousins in a commercial enterprise that brought him a handsome profit, which led to a better life and education for us. I was lucky that my father insisted that we get an education despite my grandmother’s objection. I was also lucky or unlucky, I don’t know, to have taken in and clearly understood everything that had befallen my mother, and I took an oath that my life would not be owned by anyone and that I would never place myself at the mercy of customs or traditions. For that reason, when my cousin proposed to me and I had no objection to him, I told him that I would try the engagement and if we were successful, that would be good and fine, but if it were not successful, then the marriage would not proceed. My uncle got very angry, but my father reassured him, saying that it was a good idea and that it would benefit his son more than it would benefit me, and that he, my father, ultimately had the last say in the matter. Thus I found myself once again at the mercy of tradition, repeating what happened to my mother without power to bring about any real change, in spite of my education and the death of my grandmother. My mother stood by my cousin, urging me to go through with the marriage, saying that what God had decreed must come to pass. I asked to finish my university education first and to get a job before marriage. My cousin agreed reluctantly, but my mother got angry
and said I was “overdoing it.” And even though the Regional Command of the Ba‘th Party had issued an edict against a girl’s marriage to her cousin against her will, and although the government had instructed girls to go to a police station to report such a compulsory marriage, declaring any contract of this kind null and void on the spot, only one girl in Baghdad went to a police station and reported her father, her uncles, and her brothers. It was a big scandal which no other Iraqi girl was able to go through.

I tried seriously to get close to my cousin Muhannad, whom I had known since I was a child: he had a good moral character, was successful in his studies and his job. But as time went by I felt that invisible barrier that was always there since my mother was constantly crushed by words that called her the ugliest of names. I couldn’t escape that hatred that my father’s family held and which at times came out of nowhere. I couldn’t have that equanimity that made it possible for love to take root and grow. I couldn’t find a strong enough reason to convince my father and mother to break off the engagement. Therefore I decided to face the problem head on, myself. At the beginning I couldn’t understand the reason for the great effort my mother was exerting to make me agree to the marriage, urging me to get closer to Muhannad, whom she loved and looked after and invited to dinner, when he could enter our house at any time. I had suspicions about her reasons for accepting him so readily: did she think that a fasliya’s daughter would not find a husband unless her cousin married her? But two of my sisters had married outside the family in a very short time. Did she still feel guilty about my uncle who was killed by her brother?

I joined the Communist Party. I read widely and got a job as a journalist, to get a closer understanding of society. It was then that a concept that I had completely missed dawned on me: the concept of women being living embodiments of their dispossession, that they not only perpetuated but reinforced that which repressed them. My self-awareness made me realize the true extent of the tragedy that my mother was living: she was now preserving the very
traditions that had so thoroughly destroyed her life, without any rancor. She even wanted me to be a carbon copy of her, to beget “men.” I said to myself, “I’ll belong to the man I love because he will also belong to me.” That was what I felt when I saw the piercing glances of your eyes that told me that love was your number one goal in life. Do you know when I fell in love with you? And why? Not when we met at the party’s party, and not because of something to gain, as you might think and as you sometimes spell out when you’re drunk, but when you told me one morning that sacrificing for the sake of the homeland was no good if you were not first and foremost responsible for your family. At that time I did not know the status of Aunt Fayza. I thought she was your wife and I loved you even more when I realized your responsibility toward her. But I found myself in a trap bigger than the one in which my mother was caught: torn between her duty to her clan, which sacrificed her, and her duty to us, her children.

You know something? My mother once confessed to me that she dreamed of freedom despite falling in love with my father and was counting the days to get pregnant again and give birth; perhaps it would be a boy, in which case she would go back to her family. She didn’t think for one moment that being free meant abandoning us, her daughters, and my father. She told me, “I kept the nine-year-old girl inside me, thinking, all alone, of her childhood that had been snatched away from her, of her youth which had been wasted, of her family home where she chased little chickens and gathered the eggs from the coop. When the boy came she was happy and couldn’t wait to wean him and for the two years of nursing to be over.” When the moment of freedom came, suddenly there was revealed to me the connection between the child I had been and the woman I have become. When my mother-in-law kicked me out, I understood the lesson and discovered that I had been the victim in all cases. I also realized that your grandmother did not hate me as she imagined, that there had grown between us an affection, an interdependence.”

I told her, “This thread, mother, is the kind of love that ties the victim to the executioner. Because an executioner cannot be an executioner without a victim.”

My mother said, “But your grandmother was also a victim. She was not just the victim of my brother who had killed her son, but the victim of her own son himself, the victim of coveting a woman he knew full well was not his.”

I said, “How do you know that Khulud was not in love with Uncle Mahdi? Can you be certain the two were not in love with each other?”

My mother looked very confused. It seemed she hadn’t thought of this obvious possibility before or that she had deemed it improbable because it would have meant that her life had been wasted for the rash act of a man defending something that did not belong to him, and that he deprived his cousin of her beloved and did her another injustice when he came out of jail and married her, for no one in the clan dared approach her, since she was his fiancé or because she was the source of bad luck.

My mother said, “The two families had read the fatiha of Imam al-Abbas and pledged to marry Khulud to Abbas when they came of age. Great harm would come to the parents of the boy and the girl if they did not fulfill their pledge and go through with the engagement. Anyways, let’s leave the past in the past. I have loved your grandmother and pitied her when I understood what it meant to have a son whom I raised with my tears, my hard work, in joy and strength, then have him snatched away in the prime of youth before wedding his bride. I understood her pain, so I had sympathy for her and that was why I returned when she kicked me out.”

I said, “I love you, mother, but I will never be like you. I will be what I want for myself first and foremost.”

She said, “When I left the house, I stood confused outside the door, not knowing where the balam would take me. The reeds that stood in my way for the first time cut me and the wounds gave me back the feeling of being alive. Finally, I cried from the pain as any
human would. I couldn’t find my way to my father’s house even though I knew where it was even in the dark. My mother had died a long time earlier, after my brother went to jail and after my marriage. My father married my aunt to raise his children. I realized at that time that I knew nothing in my life except the prison where I grew up. I couldn’t recognize the features of that child that I had been in my father’s house. I confronted myself. I brought it out and sat her on the edge of the balam which was making its way with difficulty through the sharp tips of the bulrush and told her, ‘Finally you’ve come back to life.’ The girl looked at me for a long time and then asked me, ‘Who are you?’

“I cried. You know why? I missed my present life at the time. I arrived at my father’s house a total wreck. I kissed his hands that were shaking from the insult and told him, ‘Don’t get angry; I’ll return to my children in the morning.’ The following morning saw me going around the house from the outside, seeing you on your way to school and back, gathering firewood and piling it up by the door, cutting grass for the cattle, picking up your clothes from the clothes lines, folding them and leaving them neatly bundled on the wooden barrel. At night I went back to my father’s house to listen to my stepmother’s constant wailing and complaints. One day I pushed my way into my mother-in-law’s house when I heard of her falling ill and the rising water. I knew that she missed me and tried to believe that I had already fulfilled my reason for existence, giving her a little boy to replace her son. But believe me, daughter, no one replaces anyone else. The boy that she had waited for for a long time was my son, not hers. Your grandmother aged suddenly the moment she saw the baby, because she realized the truth. She couldn’t confront me or the family with that realization. Hence her decision to kick me out was the only practical solution so that her failure would not be there in front of her day and night. The blinders were taken away from her eyes and she knew that she loved me as I loved her for we had shared a life together, even though on the surface it was characterized by hate. This was because neither of us
had a self-image in our memories without the other since her son was killed. I was her shadow and she mine.”

I said, “This is the most painful kind of dispossession no matter what noble sentiments were associated with it. I will seek a man who will give me my share and your share of lost love. And I will find him and he might give me as much as was denied you.”

She said, “My beauty has won your father over. He loved me. Between us we have this shared intimate life and several children. So, don’t feel sad for me. I’ve lived a happy life.”

I fell in love with you, Hilmi, when I realized how much you loved your family and homeland. And I am telling you it was I who chose you. It was I who decided that you belonged to me even before you met me and fell in love with me. I am Ishtar’s daughter.

I closed Anhar’s notebook. I did not know how it found its way to the mailbox, but I knew that I’d do my best to get it to her. How will you find out where she is in a few days, when Hilmi Amin, with all his contacts, could not find out? Maybe he did and maybe she can explain to me what he wants of me. I became aware of the sound of the water that I had turned on to fill the bathtub before I opened Anhar’s papers. I slid into the water whose warmth relaxed my nerves and banished exhaustion from my muscles as I tried to coax the last drop of milk from my breasts in a semiconscious, mechanical manner. When I was done I came out of the water, refreshed. Now I didn’t want to sleep at all or waste even one minute of my time in Baghdad. I wanted to breathe its air and bring back to life all that I’d experienced in it. Faces, smiles, places, and music came back to me in a long reel of Iraqi writers of whom I have been fond: al-Jawahiri Abu Furat, Bayyati, Saadi Yusuf, Gha’ib Tu‘ma Farman, Fuad al-Tekarli, Jalil Haydar, Hasab al-Sheikh Jaafar, Aid Khasbak, Yasin al-Nusayyir, Muhammad al-Jaza’iri, Kamil al-Sharqi, Hamid Said, Muzaffar al-Nawwab; Jawad Salim’s monument in al-Nasr Square, Dia al-Azzawi, Dia Hasan, Layla and Suad al-Attar, Lutfiya al-Dulaymi, the shrine of Mawlana al-Kazim, Najaf, Karbala,
Kufa, the Malwiya Minaret of Samarra, the fire of Baba Gargar, the marshes near Basra, Anhar Khayun, the mountains of Saffayn; Jamal and Sulafa, Hamid, Nariman, Nafi‘a and Layla and Juwan, my neighbors in the Shurta neighborhood, Umm Safaa and Umm Sami, and my neighbors in Dora neighborhood, Abu Dalaf, Umm Jamal, and Umm Samira.