Dates On My Fingers
by
Muhsin Al-Ramli
To Iraq, the cradle of my childhood and the cradle of civilization
To Spain, my way station of peace after a long road crowded with wars
CHAPTER 1
I wouldn’t have been able to write my family’s story and expose its shame if my father hadn’t encouraged me to do so while cutting my hair in his Madrid club. “Write whatever you want,” he said. “Nothing will happen worse than has already happened. This world is all fucked up.”
At the time, I didn’t comment on what he had said, forced as I was to focus on his razor, which nearly took off the skin behind my ear.
The story began on the day that my father, Noah, went with my sister Istabraq to the doctors in the city, seeking treatment for the illness that had made her waste away and ooze yellow diarrhea into her clothes. She kept eating carob powder, which the old wise women had prescribed, but that didn’t help at all. Her body became skin and bones, and her breasts drooped down, even though she was only fourteen at the time. She turned a pale yellow, like the leaves of tobacco.
All the same, she seemed more beautiful than the other girls her age in the village because she was kept out of the sun in the fields, which dyed everyone’s face the color of old wood. My mother wasn’t able to give her any hard work on the farm, so Istabraq was limited to performing small chores in the house, such as making the beds, washing the dishes, sweeping the floors, and hanging out the laundry. Istabraq had been born a twin, but her sister, Sundus, died at nine months. They had been so, so small, squirming in the cradle like two rats drenched in milk. We had all expected Istabraq would die too, but she kept on living. She remained skinny and pale, but she was beautiful and had a good heart.
Noah set off from our first village, Subh, in the afternoon, taking his daughter, who had put perfume on her clothes. They arrived at the city of Tikrit an hour later. On their way to the doctor’s office, Istabraq walked a step behind Noah, who was clearing a path for her on the market sidewalk. As a black Mercedes drove past slowly, a hand stretched out from its window to grab Istabraq’s butt, and a voice was heard: “Nice ass!”
The young girl cried out in fear, and her father spun around. He immediately grabbed the neck of the driver, shouting furiously in his face, “You son of a bitch!” He lifted him up, as someone might lift a jar by its neck, until he had pulled him out of the car through the window.
The driver was a skinny youth wearing blue sunglasses above his first small mustache. He was dressed in a traditional Arabic robe, white and loose, with a wide leather belt around his waist. A pistol hung down at his side. The empty black car continued its slow course until it collided with a parked car and ground to a halt. Meanwhile, Noah rained blows and curses down upon the young man, who was crying out, “Do you know whose son I am?!”
Without caring and without stopping the savage blows, Noah replied, “Yes, I know: your father was a dog, and your mother a whore!”
The white of the robe was stained with the boy’s red blood. He tried to reach for his pistol, but Noah twisted his arm and lifted him upward before smashing him onto the ground. The boy lay still on his face, not moving. Meanwhile, a tide of fury swept Noah away. He bent down and took the revolver from its holster. Opening the chamber, he removed three bullets and threw the pistol into the sewer drain. He pulled away the boy’s clothes to reveal his butt and began forcing the bullets into his anus. He pushed in two before he found himself surrounded by the shop owners and the “beasts of burden,” as the market’s porters were called. The crowd tackled Noah, who was thrashing like a bull. They yelled at him, “Are you crazy? This is the nephew of the vice president’s secretary!”
Afterward, Noah found himself being carried from the darkness of a police beating to the darkness of a prison cell. He didn’t know anything about Istabraq, who, when she saw the blood, soiled her perfumed dress with yellow diarrhea. She sat down in front of a nearby storefront, crying and shaking like a palm branch in the rain. She remained there until some kind strangers brought her back to Subh Village, where her mother washed her and wrapped her up in bed. Her grandfather, Mutlaq, sat at the head of her bed, and she told him what had happened. Mutlaq leapt up, calling to the family, “If a dog barks at you, don’t bark at it; but if it bites you, bite it back!”
That maxim was his philosophy of life, and he had been famous for it throughout the surrounding villages since childhood. At that time, he attended the lessons of Mullah Abd al-Hamid every day, carrying the cloth tote that his mother had made for him by cutting off the bottom half of a bag of rice. She embroidered a winged toddler onto its side and sewed on a strap so he could put it over his shoulder. The tote would hang down under his arm, carrying a copy of the Qur’an, a notebook with gray paper, a round loaf of bread, a handful of dates, and an onion — just like the bags of all the village boys who were learning the Qur’an from Mullah Abd al-Hamid.
One day, on his way to the mosque, a dog blocked his way and barked at him. Mutlaq walked quickly past it, but the dog walked just as quickly after him. Mutlaq ran, and the dog ran in pursuit. Mutlaq stopped to pick up a stone to throw, but the dog jumped up onto his back. Mutlaq twisted around, and the two fell, wrestling on the ground. The dog dug its claws into Mutlaq’s neck and bit his leg. In response to Mutlaq’s blows, the dog only increased its barking and the ferocity of its attack. Then, at one point in the struggle, Mutlaq found the dog’s neck in front of his face, and he bit it so hard that the dog went still and made no other sound than a low, confused whimpering. It scampered away, tail between its legs, without once turning around. Meanwhile, Mutlaq continued on his way to the mosque, limping. When the mullah asked him about the blood and why he was late, Mutlaq responded in the presence of all the other boys, “A dog barked at me; I didn’t bark at it. But it bit me, so I bit it back!”
The mullah was silent for a moment. Then he smiled and said, “Give him a round of applause!”
He took off his turban and used it to bandage Mutlaq’s leg. Then he gave him a handful of dates and patted him on the shoulder. Since that time, this story about him has been famous, and Mutlaq began to take pride in it, considering his words to be a maxim he had discovered, a maxim sealed by the honor Mullah Abd al-Hamid had shown him: “A thousand mercies upon your soul, O Mullah Abd al-Hamid!”
Up leapt Grandfather Mutlaq, who took pride in bearing the name of our first ancestor, which means ‘The Absolute.’ He summoned his nine sons and all his grandsons, his brothers with their sons and grandsons, and his cousins with their sons and grandsons. He said to them, “Get your weapons and your cars ready for us to storm Tikrit and break Noah out of prison! For if we keep still when they give us the finger, they will mount up and ride us to the ground!”
So everyone hurried to get their clubs, swords, daggers, multi-pronged fishing spears, rifles, and pistols out from behind the headboards and from the garbage dumps where they were buried. My mother pointed to a spot in the mud wall of our house for me to break open once she had taken down the wall hanging of the “Chair Verse” from the Qur’an that was covering it. She handed me the axe she used for firewood and said, “Strike here.”
So I swung at the wall and kept on hitting it until the axe struck something metal.
“Take out this box,” she instructed.
My blows became a delicate excavation, which I widened in a circle until I found the edges of the box and was able to remove it. It was made of tin, and rusty. My mother explained softly, “The box was your grandmother’s gift to us for our wedding, and what’s inside was the gift from your grandfather and his brothers.” Then she added, “Bring it to your grandfather.”