good coming from you.”
“Listen, Najia, God help you.”
“Oh, even my name sounds good coming from you.”
“Listen, you know I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“Fine, fine. Don’t get upset. By the way, is Bahija Khan going to drop in?”
Their voices rose and your head was lowered to that wide cavity and had its first encounter with the edges of the hidden split: that mysterious body.
You gave off strange vibrations, you don’t know how, or where they went, or who would feel them.
You will never see these strange women again in your life. You love listening to them. They are gold mines: if you go and extract it, the sun will shine; if you leave them in the belly of the earth, the belly will split asunder and produce a different posterity.
Were these the corrupt women you have heard about?
Women: souls painted with fire, bodies over which the open air passes, making them radiant, over which the salts of the sea pass, making them blaze, at whom fear fires its incomparable rays.
They screamed at you; they watched you.
You were there, in that courtyard, listening to horns that bleated at the threshold of your soul. The neighborhood in which your body lived was agitated. You did not retreat. They dragged you, gently at first; they beat you, and your mother went into the distant kitchen. Her shame was striking in its candor among those brilliant souls.
Aunt Najia started shouting again. Her voice had become riper than any other voice you’d heard in your life: “I want Bahija Khan.”
They gave the title Khan to well-to-do women who lived during the first decades of the twentieth century. The father, grandfather, or brother drove them into isolation and degradation, so the women took both the title and the abandonment.
Bahija was your grandmother’s younger sister, the daughter of her stepmother, pretty like her, and you too loved her.
Beautiful, plump, tall and broad, proud and haughty, she was about to turn thirty. All the women you knew plotted against her. If she stepped into Aunt Najia’s trap, it was because she resembled her. If she went to another, it was because that was her nature.
You did not realize all this. What was occurring in front of you left its mark, a step, and who knows where it is going to lead you. That whole network of arms and legs met unwritten covenants and invisible charters. What went from this to that was bound as a kind of love from whose shadow there was no escape.
Your aunt’s voice emerged sharply from her throat: “I want you to go like lightning to your grandfather’s house and tell my Aunt Bahija to come quickly.”
The big house was one kilometer away from our house. Our grandmother’s sisters lived there, as well as the widow who had suddenly grown senile after the death of her wealthy husband, leaving behind Bahija and Zubaida and Nahida. Nahida had two daughters younger than me, and two sons older. Zubaida was barren, and Bahija loved women. When she entered, everyone looked at her from above and turned their heads the other way when she passed. We called this the house of dreams. We wore our finest clothes when we went there. My aunt combed my hair and pinched me on the arm, saying:
“I swear to God, if you break anything over there, I’ll kill you.”
We tasted all sorts of fruit there, fresh meat and exotic types of sweets and sugary pastries made by Aunt Bahija herself.
When you saw yourself in the street, your fire was stoked. There you flung yourself into the tumult and different ways. You stood in front of the vendors, shooing the flies away from the white cheese wrapped in fresh palm leaves. You greeted the cheese seller, Abu Mahmoud: “Hello, dear Abu Mahmoud,” and stole a fresh cucumber and a date whose sweetness burned your mouth. You did not look up. The alleys of your neighborhood were filthy, littered with onion and aubergine peels, okra tops and fragments of rotten bread, remnants of black tea—all of it took you by surprise. You slapped cross-eyed Hashim, the son of Razzuqi the carpenter, called him a name, and ran away.
“Hey, still cross-eyed?”
He ran after you, the edge of his dishdasha, his ankle-length shirt, in his teeth, his feet trampling through the mud and garbage, and then he slipped and fell, and everyone laughed.
You ran and jumped over the gutters and the children. You passed by the house of Mrs. Rasmiyya, the neighborhood nurse. Her door was always open; a stained white curtain with holes in it hung in the doorway. You heard the voice of her husband as he beat her and snatched the proceeds from the injections she had administered, and he laughed as he bumped into you: “Hello, Huda. Give my regards to your father.”
The houses of Baghdad had stone steps on the outside. You loved standing on these steps, getting to know the herd that waited and knew how to stand. You stood on one of them one day and said to Mahmoud, the son of the cheese seller: “Look, I am as tall as you are.”
There the Baghdadi women sat or lay on cushions, old carpets, and worn-out straw mats. They all held fans, and their veils covered only their heads. Their nightgowns gave off the smell of onions and parsley, eggs and sweat. They opened them a little, as if opening their souls. When a stranger walked by, they exchanged glances among themselves and covered up until he had passed.
The doors to the courtyard were made of old blotchy wood whose coats of paint were peeling in every corner. When winter attacked, everyone waited for Abu Masoud, the painter. In the middle of the doors were shiny or rusty hand-shaped iron knockers. We stood before them, banged the knockers, and ran away into other streets, far away. We raced and gradually became familiar with this district of houses where no one complained of hunger, which were tidy, tall, spacious, surrounded by towering trees and unfamiliar flowers, and built of gorgeously colored or painted bricks. The girls here wore wide pleated skirts and short-sleeved blouses, with colored ribbons around their neck and in their hair. Their hair was always combed, and their faces freshly scrubbed. Their skin was clear and radiant; their blood sang with health. Their food was fresh meat from Mr Hubi the butcher. Hubi was about forty, fat and red-faced, with a big belly and a broad, slow voice. He butchered lambs, singing, as if he were watering his garden.
This was the only man whose orders were obeyed. Everyone in our street wanted to find room in his shop. Even the dogs and cats bathed in the smell of his tender, freshly killed meats.
Cows, calves, and lambs hung there, washed of their blood and blessed with verses from the Qur’an.
Anyone who stopped in front of his shop would be greeted with every compliment and blessing that came into his head.
Hubi knew everyone: the family trees of the people who lived in the palaces far away, overlooking the Tigris and the old wooden bridge, the pedigrees of the houses that ate their meat in silence, the histories of those who ate bones and broth, and those who threw meat to their dogs or into the garbage.
To us, Hubi and the King seemed inseparable. The King of Iraq was young. A portrait of him with his uncle hung in Hubi’s shop, surrounded by spattered blood and animal remains. Hubi sold meat only in the afternoon. The morning was for slaughtering
