could see her dimples. When she was silent, the air she gave off had a hoarse hiss. Your aunt sang, too. Her voice, singing folk songs or mad love songs, climbed and flashed with everlasting Iraqi pain. She lowered herself to the ground, sniffing the delightful smell of grilling meat. She loved the smell of other people’s bodies, their sweat and pungency. Her tongue wanders before it moves; her mouth was dry. The bones of her chest tingled. The arteries in her thighs sang, and she was penetrated by thousands of passions; she trembled and her fingers reached down to her belly. She felt within herself, within the circle of her region—secret sex but tumultuous sex. She wet her lips with saliva, breathing one heavy sigh after another, looking down at her rosy nipples, her pores open, crushing the ribs of this frenzy. She undulated like a firehose, not covering herself. You were behind the window watching her. Her hair was loose like a gypsy’s. No one called you away; no one paid attention to you. Your two aunts were content, one of them sprawled on the mat, her face turned to the glass ceiling, the other rolling a fresh cigarette, sealing it with saliva and lighting two cigarettes. She offered one to the sleeping woman. They took the first puff, and Aunt Najia coughed. “I only like Ghazi cigarettes.” Cough. “I don’t know why I listen to you.”
Your grandmother came down from the roof on tiptoe. The voice of the muezzin called the evening prayer, and the two aunts roused themselves to go to the bath, and after washing they stood with my grandmother to pray. The whole neighborhood was transfixed in awe. Grandmother sought protection from Satan. Her breathing was quick with supplications, the holy names of God. For the first time, Adil’s voice rang out: “I’m going up to fly a kite.” Your mother sought refuge in her room, Aunt Farida pulled her clothing over her thighs, and grandmother stood before all: “Lord, forgive us in this world and the next.”
Adil was already on the roof. This was Wednesday, and your father comes on Thursday.
Thursday was the day of the public bath. Your mother prepared a bundle of clothes for you: a clean vest, an old dress, cotton panties with an elastic waist, dark ribbons for your hair, the comb with the wide, broken teeth, your open-toed sandals, a cotton-lined ribbed cardigan, a square scarf with a pattern of circles and squares, a loofah, and soap. You tied up the bundle and stood in front of it.
This was Aunt Farida’s day. She would put into the palm leaf bag a bottle of water, some pears, a small melon, the black pumice stone, a box of depilatory cream, the black glove, her blue perfume bottle, clean clothes, and a cake of cardamom perfumed soap.
Your grandmother whose asthma had troubled her lately, your mother, ill in her chest, and Adil, who had grown up a little, would all stay at home. The bath at home was old and broken down, but was being repaired. Your father painted it first, replaced the old punctured barrel and paved the floor with new brown cement. He used to go in first and your grandmother would be the last to leave it.
Your aunt was the only one to frequent the public bath. The taste of the journey from the house to the bath, walking through the alleys, calling out to friends encountered by chance, scrutinizing new faces, and before this, leaving the house. We spent the whole day there. We boiled eggs and potatoes, fried kebabs, and grilled onions, then covered the food with flat, warm loaves of bread and packed it all into paper bags. The day Thursday arrived, I held my breath, my skin peeled there, and my blood ran clear. There I was devoured by the muscles of my aunts, the sisters of my father and mother: Najia, Farida, one-eyed La’iqa, and Umm Satturi, opening their layers of pores and putting me in the trap. I stumbled about amidst the tons of flesh and breasts, bellies and buttocks.
The bath in the Safina district was far from us, in the other neighborhood. We went through alleys and emerged in streets. We turned to the right and then to the left, and from the beginning of the street came the smells of women and children, mothers and grandmothers. Their cloaks fluttered, they were blooming and alert, their cheeks were flushed, and no matter where you looked they all busily chewed gum. Women came and went. Their heads were covered, their feet were blistered, and their nail polish was cracked. And you could scarcely hear their voices.
In front of the great door, painted a dark gray, the boys played marbles. Black wooden benches were set in the four corners. Warm breezes blew from inside, and a tall woman in her fifties, slender and ugly, was standing in front of a wooden partition. Her chest was bare, and her breasts were like two withered pears. A damp shawl was pulled around her middle. Her hair was long and hung in her face. She was shouting at everyone.
“You want someone to rub your back or not? Put your things down! How many of you are there? Five? Five costs thirty fils.”
Your aunt stripped off your clothes; she was in her underclothes. She looked to the right and the left. Your aunts came in, one after the other, and languidly undressed. Everyone looked at everyone else. You saw everything here seized by the fever of these features: eyes without kohl, cheeks without cerise, slack lips, and yet flawless bodies. Skulls and bones.
The broad meters of the bath became a source of play and activity.
The first place was not very warm. Children and women dried their hair and limbs. Iraqi style noisy commotion, the drone of aged women talking. Women massaged one another. When we went into the second room, the clouds of vapor were rising. Aunt Najia’s voice:
“Listen, Farida, I can’t walk inside. I can’t catch my breath—I can’t breathe. We’re better off staying here.” Aunt La’iqa answered: “Go on ahead. As soon as you’re there you feel numb. The steam will absorb the cold and damp.”
Umm Suturi walked ahead of everyone. She knew the way, and she knew everyone: Aunt Najia’s neighbor, Aunt La’iqa’s friend, the neighborhood seamstress who charged little. She sewed men’s dishdashas and pajamas, which they bought for circumcisions, funerals, and weddings when they would trill and click their fingErs in celebration.
Aunt Farida did not know what to decide. She was the youngest of all, eighteen years old. The women’s eyes scanned her body attentively.
“Where is Huda? Come here—even in this fire you’ll make friends!”
There you saw the whisper of skin soaked with steam, water, and perspiration. The smell of armpits and buttocks, of urine, mutters, and grunts escaping their lips, and shouts across the water barrel.
Everything passed before you: hands took you and cuddled you between their legs, calling the names of everyone you know, undoing your braids. You were showered and soaked, and bowls of hot water were poured over you, on your head, over your delicate frame. You wailed: from there you sent the first speech recorded with anger, you cursed, paused, sniffed, paused, and asked.
You looked with loathing at all these details. Women, all naked, as if they had just been raped or tortured. They laid old towels over the low wooden stools and squatted on them. The floor of the bath was as hot as a grill, and they cried out to one another and shrieked, and brawled with one another. There were no partitions in Iraqi baths, the borders were open, and the one language in which everyone conversed was physical touch. As if they had all been detained beyond the sky and today they had descended to the floor of the bath. There I made my first discoveries and won my first arguments, and shouted “No, no” among the long “Yeses” you heard from everyone else. Only there you were given the bloody title of Huda, a flaming fire.
I slipped away from them all, glided between their legs, and the cakes of soap pushed me far, and I landed in the lap of one woman, her face covered with soap lather. She shrieked, “God Almighty, God damn you and damn the bloody day you were born!”
I
