All the people you knew and loved were alive, in front of you: your brother, your mother, your father, your grandmother, and the neighbors’ children. Mahmoud, who moved to middle school, you used to call him Mahmoud Snotnose. He used to chase you and try to hit you, and when you ended up face to face you laughed at him, and he wiped his nose with the hem of his dishdasha. The mothers of your friends were still alive, and their fathers too. You did not know what death would do if it came.
On religious holidays, you all went to the cemetery behind the mosque. You visited the grave of your great-grandfather. Your grandmother stood before it; she did not cry, nor did she wail or smite herself in grief. She murmured verses from the Qur’an, her voice hovering over the dust.
She read aloud, and her voice rang out, painfully sharp. It floated over the expanse of the cemetery, moving the women to sob. You used to watch her as she filled your head with the dark side of death, as if she were opening up all the holes in all the heads, land, and souls. There she used to exercise, standing at her medium height, her slenderness, her clean cloak, her heavenly face: how did the wing of life droop to death?
When your aunt called to you, “God take you,” she did not go into details. “Take you” perhaps pushes you beyond death, and you begin to ascend. Your height, the muscles of your thighs strengthened, and your chest began to thump from within—your heart, too, wanted to ascend.
You did not know what had happened to you. You saw yourself on a wooden bench in the huge, cold dressing room, Umm Suturi was over your head blowing warm, foul breath on you from her big mouth, her thick lips murmuring a few verses from the Qur’an. You knew it was the Sura of Ya Sin, which you knew by heart. She kept breathing on you and started to pull your hair, smacking you gently and rapidly on the temples. She rubbed your chest, the flesh of her creased belly touching your belly, leaving her lower half tightly wrapped in a sarong of delicate Indian material. Her soft breasts brushed against your inflamed cheeks.
She dressed you quickly, squeezed your hair dry, draped you in large towels and put another under your head. You stayed that way until everyone left. You slept like the dead. From there, you conjured up the bodies, the thighs, breasts, braids, basins of hot water, and the soap lather. You entered all of them in that hell and began your first resurrection. You invited them to shriek at one another, to leap about, to be consumed by fire. Their voices cried to the heavens. You opened no window for them, you read them no sura of the Qur’an. That was your place. You became sovereignty in all its magnificence and power. You did not intervene or even appear; you did not threaten or menace. You let them plunge into one another. You cut off the electric current, you scattered snakes in the baths, tore the clothes out of their shiny bags, and smeared them with mud or buried them in cesspools. There, my virginity shone. When I reached this point in my sleep, Aunt Farida was by my head, her complexion peach-hued, her nose shiny, her eyebrows drawn in kohl, her eyes exploring the sleeping girl. She sighed and gasped, leaving me to sit nearby with a white towel around her bosom and hanging to her thighs. Her head was tense, and I did not move—it was as if I was nailed down. I opened and closed my eyes, looking at the water drops on her silken back. I swallowed. Aunt La’iqa went over to Aunt Farida, plump and flabby, her belly like a barrel and her thighs rubbed smooth with fat: her skin was a waxy yellow color, and the hair on her limbs was blonde. She did not cover her body: “I’m dying of thirst. Where is the water?” She leaned over and took out a bottle of water and some pears. Umm Suturi and Aunt Najia were in front of me. The voice of that aunt shrieked in my ear: “Look at this poor animal—she’s still asleep! I hope she never wakes up!”
She looked aside at Aunt Farida, who had begun to put her clothes on: “God guide her. She’s still young.”
“No,” was Aunt La’iqa’s answer. “She has been impossible from the day she was born. Remember when we were giving her khishkhash and she wasn’t yet forty days old. God help us when she comes of age! Marry her off quickly, before she disgraces us.”
Amidst the steam and the sounds of drinking Umm Suturi’s gruff voice sounded: “And who would marry her? She’s weak and pale. She’s skin and bones. Look, Farida, I’m afraid she has her mother’s illness. What about examining her?”
They examined me. One day Mahmoud said to me, with a street light separating us, at the top of our street, “Your mother has tuberculosis.”
I chased him, a stone in my hand. He did not run away from me like the other boys. He stood there. I held the stone in my hand, my face a fountain of flame: “Son of a bitch!”
He did not disappear from my path. We stood together, face to face. I was smaller than he. I was a female and he was a male. It was I who chased him—something he was unable to do. No, but he was able to do many things: run, play, escape from my father’s face when he saw him in the street. He taught me arithmetic with his sister, Firdous. The first time, I stood and dropped the stone and asked him, “What is consumption?”
“I don’t know. My mother says her chest is pierced with holes like a sieve.”
I bowed my head, then raised it. “Maybe everybody’s chest has holes.”
“No, just your mother’s. My mother says, ‘Don’t play with Huda—she’ll infect you.’”
Infection, tuberculosis, isolation! I wanted to raise my head again in front of Mahmoud, but was unable to. He was the bravest child in the neighborhood. I chose him for myself. This would be my first man. That is how free I was throughout all those years. We spat on the ground and looked at our spittle—was there any line of blood? And when we saw nothing, we shouted and screamed and ran through the streets, we hit some people and made jokes with others, we pulled off women’s cloaks and knocked men’s hats off, and knocked on the front doors of houses and ran away.
He was always saying, “My mother says, ‘All the girls in the neighborhood are like your sisters,’ but you’re nothing like Firdous. She’s sensible and you’re like the Devil!”
“Are you afraid of the Devil?”
“No.”
“Listen. Do you like hell or not?”
Since that time Mahmoud kept his nose clean. He changed his long dishdasha once a week. He wore sandals, and the fair skin of his face grew red and sweaty from playing, jumping, and running. We played from three o’clock until five in the afternoon. We went into our houses, drank water, peed, and then went back out to the street.
The girls played “hide the beads.” We made piles of dirt and sprayed them with water to make little houses in which we hid the colored beads we had stolen from our grandmothers and fathers, red and yellow, blue, and black beads. A few meters away, our voices split the air: “Huda, you’re cheating!”
My success in the street was a form of cheating. I usually guessed the number of beads buried in the mud so I took all the girls’ beads. I put them in the bag I had tied around my waist. Winning put me in front. Mahmoud on the other side played with a top and won—his top turned, and turned, and turned, as if it would never stop. It never tipped, it never shook, and he pulled the string tightly before whipping it out on level ground. We all stood to watch, while others did as he had done: Suturi, Nizar, Hashim, and Adil too. We watched and shouted to one another. We sang to Mahmoud’s top, chanting for it not to stop, and mocked the other boys’ tops. Our blood was up—our shouts nearly broke the neighbors’ windows. We acted like lunatics. Adil and Firdous were with me.
“Oh, God, don’t let his top stop. Oh, God!”
Mahmoud’s top stopped when my father appeared.
Every two weeks my father left for Karbala on the dawn train and arrived home in the afternoon. His shadow, his name, and his voice went right through us. We huddled together like terrified puppies. It was no use burying our heads under a pillow or wriggling up against our grandmother—he could hear our pulse as soon as he entered our street, and we could hear him muttering between his teeth—we were about to