Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (59 page)

In a chagrined tone he said, “I want to make sure everything is okay with Adel’s own trip.”

We went into the office of the dispatcher. He looked at the papers and said, “No. Unfortunately the pilot took eleven bodies. Two others, one of whom is this name, couldn’t make it.”

We both cried at the same time: “Where is he? What should we do now?”

The dispatcher said, “I am sorry. We are doing our best with an Austrian pilot who will fly out tomorrow. There’s also another plane from Italy which had come earlier and taken some bodies. It will come in the evening of the day after tomorrow and then depart right away.”

I said, “Do you have such a big problem with Egyptian corpses?”

The dispatcher said, “In Iraq now there are five million Egyptians and nobody is immortal. If each Cairo-bound plane carried the body that arrived, there would be no problem. That explains why the bodies travel in groups.”

The door opened and a man in his fifties came in. He moved around with the confidence of a high-ranking official. The dispatcher
said as he pointed to Hatim, “The engineer wants to make sure that one of the two remaining bodies would travel.”

Looking at the papers, the official said, “We have the same interest. I’ll lean on the very next pilot.”

Hatim said, “He’s a young man. The head of a family that has already left today.”

The official said, “Death is death and I know more than anyone else what dying away from home means. Get in touch with me tomorrow after three in the afternoon. I’ll have good news for you.”

We left the office, our tears now completely gone and our minds incapable of thinking any further. I said, “Does that mean that Nahid would arrive before her husband?”

“Maybe she’d arrive exactly at the same time, if Adel takes tomorrow evening’s flight, or she might arrive before him if he takes the noon flight because it is also not a direct flight.”

My eyes welled up with tears at the memory. I had read in an Egyptian newspaper that Iraq was sending back to Egypt corpses of Egyptians that had been shot in mysterious killings and that Cairo airport was receiving dozens of corpses. I realized that the sight of multiple funerals contributed to that particular narrative. When I explained what I had experienced in the case of Adel, no one believed me. They would say things like, “You’re only saying so because you love the Iraqis.” Then some people said they were Egyptian soldiers taking part in the war against Iran. One Iraqi officer had told me, “There are no Egyptians in the army. We have a brigade of Arab forces directly under the national leadership, but they are not permitted to take part in the war. There are Egyptians in logistical support: equipment and truck drivers, or people paving roads and the like.” I remembered Basyuni and I sighed deeply at the painful memory.

I remembered Anhar’s notebook that had come into my hands for no reason except perhaps that our paths crossed with that story that was born under exceptional circumstances. I pulled the notebook
out of my bag to continue reading. I had stopped at her mother’s unfortunate marriage circumstances and Anhar’s insistence on not accepting an unjust fate similar to her mother’s and her pledge not to repeat her tragedy.

I turned the pages quickly as images passed in front of my eyes as if they were a long reel of our lives. Anhar did not leave any of the events of our lives without commenting on them. I wanted to ask her, “Why did you go away? I needed you just as you needed me. We were not competitors in anything—work, love, or whatever.” Who knew how much she carried in her heart? All this sorrow, Anhar?

My hand stopped at a page on which was written “Erbil.” My eyes passed over the words until I got to that night on which I saw Hilmi Amin entering her room at that new hotel that had not officially opened yet and in which we were the only guests. She wrote:

I was surprised that someone was knocking on my door. I thought it was Nora, needing something or another, for she had suddenly had a fever today. I asked, “Who is it?” But there was no answer. I opened the door and was surprised to see Hilmi before me. Before I could say anything he had come into the room and closed the door behind him. I felt embarrassed for being alone with him behind closed doors. I feared that some other guest in the hotel might find out. I was more afraid that Nora might realize what was going on. I took pains to hide our relationship from her, especially after I realized her profound closeness to his family, since I did not want to place her conscience in an awkward position. He didn’t know that everything in Iraq was under surveillance and that this move of his would be held against me and my future. I said to myself, “We’re together alone in the office most of the time, so what’s the difference?” But we are in the bedroom. He had sat on a chair in front of the bed and kept looking at me without saying anything. When the silence grew longer, he said as he pointed to his thigh, “Come here.”

I went without thinking. We had exchanged a few quick kisses before. He put his arms around me and buried his head in my chest.
I didn’t say anything as I felt his breaths moving upwards and touching my ear. A tremor ran through my body. I got up.

“You’ll be uncomfortable like this. Would you like to drink something? There’s cold water. There’s milk.”

He held my hand without a word and pulled me onto the bed without any resistance on my part. Our feelings escalated at a speed that left me dazed. His hands extended, reached, and imparted heat to all the heretofore inert inlets into my being, then doing it again with a persistence that kept escalating and pushing my desire to explode even as his hands massaged my body, pulling my mind into an endless zone of imbalance. I almost demanded that he enter me, but I was too shy. I forgot I was a virgin and that losing my virginity would mean being deprived of marriage all my life long. I began to ready myself to receive him with an insane longing that I had never felt before in my life. He was pressing on my lower mouth and moving his palm on it at such a fast speed that I thought sparks were coming out of it and that a fire had started in my clothes, which I had not taken off. Suddenly my body contracted hard, then it relaxed and felt like a fan bringing a cooling breeze on a very hot night. I heard a hissing-like sound demanding more ecstasy. I opened my eyes and saw two very large eyes strangely trained on me. The pained looks in the eyes pierced my heart like arrows and began to awaken my absent mind. But they got there too late. My body had spread its sails and raced into an internal space. It opened for me the gates of paradise and hell in one fell swoop and began to deliver what delight it had, lighting the room with phosphorescent stars. Then it subsided while his hand still held my lower mouth tightly. Then I felt his palm relax and come out from between my thighs. Sleep started caressing me without permission. I longed for a kiss from Hilmi but I couldn’t raise my head to kiss him. I saw him from a distance sneaking out of the room on tiptoes until he disappeared in the dark.

In the morning I stumbled along as I walked between him and Nora, preoccupied with what had happened at night. My mind lost
its ability to give orders or coordinate the parts of my body. It gave a signal to my right foot to move to the right, so I turned to the right. Then it gave my left foot a signal to move forward, but it got twisted around my other leg and I found myself tumbling onto the sidewalk. Nora extended her hand to help me up. I saw in her eyes a question which I ignored for the time being. Then my mind started again: what will the next step be? If we could control our bodies yesterday, would we be able to control them tomorrow? I felt weak. I felt I was going to be the one demanding that he go all the way. At midnight he sneaked in in the dark. We both jumped into bed without thinking. We each started feeling each other’s bodies, exploring. He didn’t waste time and grabbed my breasts, squeezing them as he wound the sheet around his body. I extended my hand to remove the sheet but he pushed my hand away. I pulled the sheet again but he held my hand so hard it hurt. He turned off the light and let his hand sneak to my thighs and massage them until all my organs came to attention. He said, “How beautiful you are!”

I felt my ears catching on fire and turned my face to the other side. He said, “Are you bashful?”

“I am a virgin. Don’t you know virgins’ shyness? Please keep mine intact.”

“I forgot it a long time ago. I won’t let you down.”

He got up and squatted next to me. He began to fondle my body which was all open in front of him, burying his face in my chest, licking me like a cat. I found myself having an orgasm under his palm again.

Our relationship changed completely. We could no longer stop fondling each other’s bodies. But I noticed how he loved the dark and how he hid his body the whole time. I didn’t ask. I sometimes felt that he was shyer than me, so I didn’t ask him to give me more than he already had. And he gave me to excess. I enjoyed a sexual pleasure that was beyond my ability to resist, and that erased from my mind all questions about the future. I came to know what it meant to love an old, generous man who spoiled me no end and
who took care of my body’s needs with a patience that only added to my love for him every day. I asked myself one day: can a young man love me as Hilmi does? Or give me the tender affection that Hilmi gives me? Impossible! A young man pursues his desire and enthusiasm quickly. If such a young man remembered me in that pursuit, that would be nice. That’s what my married women friends told me anyway.

I closed the notebook and listened to a call that I thought was from Egypt Air, even though the time for its plane’s takeoff had not come yet. I went to the counter where I found a Jordanian woman with a white complexion. I asked her whether she had just made an announcement about the Egyptian flight to Cairo. She said, “Yes. There is a two-hour delay.”

I said, “O God, the whole world is intent on tormenting me today!”

She said, “Pray to God that the delay would not be longer.”

I said, “You’re absolutely right!”

My eyes got glued to the board with its many numbers and various cities. I saw the numbers changing, indicating that a Lufthansa flight was scheduled to take off for Germany in half an hour. A great number of passengers came into the gate area, most of them Palestinian. Then quiet prevailed a short while later. I remembered Anhar. What else will you reveal to me, my beautiful friend? And why me? Who are we? Mere stories walking on two feet! Involuntary birth, involuntary death, and in the middle a cruel game that life plays with us! I picked up the notebook and once again I began to turn the pages. A sentence saying, “I got more depressed,” caught my eyes. I started reading again.

I could no longer bear what was happening between us. It got so hard I feared being alone with him. I tried to change my work schedule, to work at the Agency in the evening and go to the
al-Zahra
office in the morning when Nora or Abu Ghayib would be
there. My boss at work said that was okay with him that week until Zabiya came back from her wedding leave, and after that we would wait and see. Hilmi did not like the change, saying to me angrily, “The bureau circumstances need you to be there in the evening shift and not in the morning. I cannot change Nora’s schedule since she is a wife. Besides I need her to make the rounds in the morning, especially al-Khalsa village.”

I said, “These are my work circumstances.”

I didn’t give him a chance to be alone with me. He got angry and flew into a rage at the least provocation. My body had gotten extremely tired of what was happening between us. The ecstasy resulting from the element of surprise was gone. My body wanted the natural, normal release. The long time we spent in bed turned into an onerous burden. I would climax quickly and then wait for our encounter to end, but it would not end. With time I learned to postpone my climax as I noticed that my tolerance increased as long as I hadn’t reached my climax, but I had little tolerance after that. My body needed rest and sleep, while Hilmi wanted to stay awake. I came to fear being close to him and the more desire I had, the more pain I felt until my body betrayed me suddenly and I gave in.

He told Nora, “Today the rounds are all yours. I will take Anhar with me to an appointment at the Ministry of Industry.”

As soon as Nora left, I found him confronting me, “What’s the matter with you?”

I said as tears flowed down my cheeks, “I am tired.”

He said, “Why? We are on an island in the midst of a tumultuous sea. It is much better than our wildest dreams. What more do you want?”

I cried. “I don’t know. I am just tired. We’ve got to stop right away.”

He took me into his bosom and began to squeeze me hard, “I missed you.”

He pulled me inside, kissing my face and neck. I found him on top of me. Once again, preliminaries that led nowhere, for me. His
hand reached between my thighs. I held on to the back of the bed and kept pressing it, gritting my teeth as his hand’s movements got faster and his body writhed next to me. My body exploded with its rising crescendo. Then it came to a standstill and his hands kept moving while his whole body was lying on top of my chest, writhing ceaselessly.

I cried out, “Enough! Enough!”

He came to and said, “What happened?”

“I can’t. My body can’t. Why don’t you …?”

“Why don’t I what?”

He sat up next to me, “You want a complete relationship?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re a virgin.”

“So be it.”

“You know that I … that my body … that my long imprisonment has affected my … that … that …”

“It is not a matter of virginity. My friend’s fiancé takes her from behind.”

“Please forgive me. My health conditions make it impossible and I wouldn’t do that.”

“What should I do?”

“Bear with me for some time.”

I cried. He brought me a glass of tea and took me to the office. He said, “Please don’t mix your work with me with our private relationship. You are free to stay with me until I recover completely. You know I was imprisoned for a long time and I was tortured.”

I said, “I love you more than you imagine, but I don’t understand.”