Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (34 page)

The chairman said, “If you need any help, we are here. Sitt Nora, please understand the enthusiasm of our colleagues. There was some crossing of the boundaries of course. Egypt’s role cannot be denied by anyone and no one, be they Arab or foreign, can cast aspersions on it. A decision to boycott will have adverse results in the long run. God is generous. Don’t be angry: blame it on us, or as the Egyptians say, rub it off on us.”

We thanked him and left, full of sorrow for the lack of understanding. We felt that we were dealing with political amateurs. The position of the Ba‘thists was so unbelievably different from that of the communists. Was it power? Or was it the makeup of the party itself? Was the fact that the party was in power the reason for this arrogance? I looked at the signs hanging over the walls of tall buildings in the streets of Baghdad as the taxi was taking us. I told Hilmi Amin, “I can’t stand superlative adjectives and the way they are being used: the biggest, the greatest, the most perfect! My God, is it an Iraqi trait? Or is it the insanity of wealth and power and megalomania?”

Hilmi said in exasperation, “They’re a little happy with themselves. They want to dominate every Arab union and put it in their pockets. But I am not going to let them get away with it. We are at a critical juncture and it doesn’t make sense that the Egyptian national movement should receive blows from all sides.”

I said, “And how will you do that?”

He said, “Don’t worry about it and have no fear.”

Fourth Text

Three knocks on the door of memory restored life to days that were lingering as they turned toward disappearing forever. I tugged at the end of the thread of time that used to tame mountains and humans. The days broke loose and came tumbling down on my heart. I tried to stop their ruthless flow and pay attention to what was happening around me, but I couldn’t. Inside of me there was a rush seeking to recapture the flow of the days and
once again feel the pleasure of the pain that didn’t contain the moment. I was carrying my suitcase on my way to Baghdad to take part in a conference about educating women after teaching them how to read and write. I could not believe that I have indeed arranged to leave my six-month-old son with my mother-in-law in Maghagha, two and half hours away from Cairo. I was hoping to know why and how Anhar Khayun, my Iraqi friend and colleague at
al-Zahra
, the Egyptian magazine in Baghdad, had disappeared. I also wanted to visit my house in Dora hit by Iranian bombers and see if my neighbors there were all right. I wanted to meet with Basyuni Abd al-Mu‘in who joined the Iraqi army and its war with Iran and to give him a letter from his family urging him to go back to Egypt. Among the tasks I set for myself was visiting
al-Zahra
’s office to complete liquidating its affairs and to look for Hilmi Amin’s articles.

On the first day of the conference I was surprised to find notebooks of memoirs of both Hilmi Amin and Anhar Khayun in my mailbox. I left my card and my address for the new occupant of the apartment and immersed myself in the work of the conference, as memories continued to catch up with me. And then there I was, starting a new day in Baghdad.

Haytham’s crying awakened me at five o’clock in the morning. I reached with my hand, looking for him so I could pull him toward me, give him my breast, and go back to sleep. My hand hit the cold empty area of my bed. I sat up halfway and placed a small pillow behind my back, turning on the light and placing the pump on my breast. I wished I could sleep for a bit more; one hour of additional sleep would push me to the peak of my energy. I closed my eyes. Haytham wouldn’t let me sleep. A slap from his little hand on my cheek woke me up again. I turned on the radio and soft music filled the room. I began to carry on with my waking-up routine. I saw Hilmi Amin’s notebook that I had left on the nightstand after reading a few pages the night before last. I opened it after a short hesitation.

He wrote:

Ismat

I released Ismat to the sky. I liberated her because I was madly in love with her. I was in utter, deadly despair. I was being subjected to daily torture—being whipped—as well as the torture of hearing the other prisoners being tortured. I was expecting a death sentence and my father readily accepted her engagement to another man who had been asking for her hand. She lived in my fantasies even though I was married to another woman and had fathered a beautiful daughter I had named Mervat. I hadn’t tried at all to see Ismat before I was arrested again and detained in the Oases camp. I arranged in my imagination a daily tryst with her to make a dent in the wall of time, of distance, and of separation. I set for her an hour for which I had prepared myself since waking up in the morning and going out on the farm detail which we requested. When the camp administration agreed to the garden, we turned that patch of desert into a real garden. I waited for her every day as I followed the journey of the sun as it inclined. When everybody around me withdrew and when they closed our cells, I called out to her, “Ismat,” and she would come like a soft specter. She would tell the story of our days together, our love, and would ask, “Don’t you get bored with our talking?” I would tell her, “It’s all I have in these days of dearth.” I hear her bouncing laughter. I recall the two of us running on the sand of the beach and being embraced by the waves as I sneaked out at dawn to see her with her sisters and girlfriends as they flung themselves into the water, turning into mermaids. She would sense my presence and leave them to their mirth and laughter as they threw handfuls of wet sand at her. We would take off chasing the horizon until we got out of their sight. It was a daily date we had kept ever since we were kids.

My wife comes to the detention camp once a month. She takes the train to the city of Asyut then an intercity taxi to Kharga Oasis, then the prison. She tells me about my daughter, Mervat, who is wearing her hair in braids now, and she tells me what is happening in Egypt and the world. I miss my house but Ismat has a radiant
pendulum that shimmers and moves in front of my eyes, reminding me of those fleeting days and how much I miss her. I didn’t ask myself how much I miss her. I didn’t ask myself how I would see her after I got out. I knew that we had a date, even though she had never written to me. I only received an oral message from her through my wife. She just said, “May God bring your ordeal to an end.”

A few days after my release I was standing in front of my mother with open arms. She cried for a long time before holding me in her embrace. Her voice got louder as she called to people in our alley one by one: “Muhammad, Alaa, Hilmi is here. Yusuf, Fatma, Abu Mahmoud, Salwa, Fathiya, Zeinhom, Hilmi is here.”

Ismat came in the midst of the family and the neighbors. I didn’t look at her eyes. I didn’t exchange a single word with her, but we knew what we were going to do. When the hubbub died down, we sneaked to our favorite spot behind the house where the fields were still under cultivation. We disappeared into the darkness and the rustling cornstalks. I had gotten tired of just speaking with her for years. I let my hands roam freely on her face and my lips, looking for each of her cells to kiss it. My hands reached to squeeze her breasts and feel every part of her body to make sure she was actually there. I sat on an old stone leaning against the wall of our house and sat her on my thigh as I passed my hands over the contours of her body, discovering the feminine changes that marriage brought to it.

I said, “I missed a lot.”

She said, “I am all yours.”

I kissed her hard and my lips squeezed her lips. My nose caught the scent of her lust and that heightened my mad desire to disappear totally and forever into her body. My own body began to writhe as I felt her coiling on my thigh. Neither of us could control our desires. My hands reached out, stripped the lower half of her body, and held on to it. She turned around, opening her legs, to face me and descend upon it before I could free it totally and plunge into her. She screamed as she buried her face in my chest, cupping her mouth to prevent her screams from alerting others to where
we were. I clung to her as I saw her traveling further inward. Now she was not seeing me, but looking deep inside herself and giving herself up with her whole being to it.

I continued my thrusts and hurried the pace to reach the farthest horizon of our passion that was killing us. I aimed my thrusts at a target that I knew quite well despite the strong tremors of her body. She opened herself fully to me and I saw stars shimmering. I reached my fingers to her soft hips as they kept coming back to my thighs. I felt totally intoxicated when I found myself caught in a semicircle sucking me in with a regular rhythm into her mouth and her vagina. I lost myself completely in her as time stopped and her body oozed with honey and milk invading my nose. I discovered that I knew the scent of her coming even though this was the first time she gave herself to me. It was the smell of passion; of waves breaking on moss-covered rocks; the smell of wood soaking and decaying in the water; the smell of a winter morning or a moist summer breeze; the smell of hot black pepper; the smell of the bitter cactus flower which I had bitten one afternoon with her a long time ago; the smell of her laugh; the smoothness and softness of her skin and my deprivation.

We did not need to learn how to control our own rhythm. We’ve been dreaming of it for so many years. The smooth harmony came from nights of longing and desire. I wished each of my fingers were a penis and that I wouldn’t ever stop my thrusts. She came down on me, squeezing me, and easing our simultaneous explosion. She rested in my embrace and even though I still had a great thirst for her, she slipped away to her mother’s house and left me unable to close my eyes, looking at the green fields stretching in front of me until dawn came and, still in disbelief that I was free, I entered the house to sleep many hours until my mother awakened me, saying as she laughed, “You really were hungry for sleep.”

I went back to Cairo, and when I saw Ismat after a short time on a family occasion carrying a little boy and rocking him, I knew without a moment’s hesitation that he was my son.

Did that really happen? Or was it one of those dreams brought on by loneliness, senility, or hallucinations conjuring up the impossible in this closed apartment in Baghdad’s stifling heat?

She named him Gamal, my code name.

I closed the notebook, saying to myself, “God forgive you, Hilmi. I didn’t need this kind of sexual provocation so early in the morning!” I took my bath, quickly estimating the time in Cairo so I could call our house; maybe I’d have better luck in the morning.

I heard my mother’s voice in Cairo reassuring me about Haytham, Yasir, and Hatim. She said, “Everyone is fine. Please focus on your work and I hope it was worth the trouble. What’s the news about the war? Are you safe?”

“It is sad here. I wish I could stay to gather as much information as I can. I don’t sleep much, day or night, so I can convey how things are. It turned out that the idea of taking Haytham with me to Baghdad was a crazy and impossible one, but not the big scandal I was afraid it might be. The city is safe: people have gotten used to working and living their lives and waiting for the news. It’s very much like Cairo during the War of Attrition in the late sixties. The front is relatively far unless Baghdad receives a direct hit, which is rare now.”

“Are you going to extend your stay? How’s your milk? “

Most likely, I won’t stay longer. For Haytham’s sake I have been pumping the milk exactly on time. But I have noticed that the yield decreases in the evening.”

“It won’t stop coming, God willing. But make sure to keep doing it regularly. Don’t give up.”

“I’d like to hear Yasir’s voice.”

His voice choked as he placed the telephone in front of his mouth. He said, “Mom, come, come.”

I said, “I’ll be with you in a few days and I’ll bring you a very big toy.”

He burst out crying. I heard my mother’s voice saying, “Take care of yourself. Goodbye.”

Layla, my escort, who accompanied me throughout, told me that after the conference sessions in the evening, we would get ready to travel to Basra to visit the front and the local branch of the women’s union there and that I should pack because the train would leave at five in the morning.

I said, “The trip usually takes eighteen hours. Isn’t traveling by train dangerous and closely monitored by the air force because they carry weapons and soldiers?”

She said, “No. The raids have targeted military trains and no civilian train has been hit.”

From the balcony of my house, which overlooked the Baghdad railroad line in Dora, I used to watch trains as they moved back and forth. I knew the schedule during my long stay in the house and I could distinguish the various kinds of trains from the whistle which the trains blew as they came through at specific times from Basra harbors, carrying factory equipment and raw materials to the capital, which was building huge industrial compounds at a dizzying speed. When Hatim and I stood in the balcony, we could feel the vibrations under our own feet before hearing the train’s movement on the tracks. Hatim would tell me in admiration, “Watch the development! These are new factories. Iraq is building. It has the money, the desire, and the perseverance. We will be here so long as this train carries new equipment.”

Iraq’s balance of payments surplus was considerable and the oil revenue was converted into investments in factories, roads, and agricultural projects. There was a sense of pride in Baghdad. Where was that now from what I’ve been hearing? Even though construction has not been halted, this was not the Baghdad I knew.

I remembered the day I heard of the bombing of my neighborhood in Dora. It was only nine days after I had left Baghdad, and the war with Iran started. Today I would go to my neighborhood during the break between the morning and evening sessions.

Chef Said came to me after I finished breakfast and said, “I have with me my colleague Mahmoud Abu Wafiya, whom I told you about, Ustaza Nora.”

I said, “Why don’t you go ahead to the lounge and I’ll catch up with you.”