over their heads, burning their scalps and skin. I pissed in the great tank. I clamped some of the children between my legs; I kept this one away from that one and began to massage their heads with the pumice stone until they were bloody. Before the huge quantities of clean, hot water I observed my first innocence and united with it, drew on it with a pencil and confessed: as if I were saved from the flood today.
My resistance ripened on the oil fire and the wood logs, blazing and transforming into a creature I have just come to know; Huda, covered with sin, affliction, and ruin, was dragged like an animal to complete the first blessing; and after I am left for a short while between the waters; the offspring of Iraqi women reach the perfection of their beauty.
Umm Suturi emptied the bowls of hot water over my head, and soap went from hand to hand among my aunts. They rubbed and twisted my braids. I died among these women’s fingers; my eyes were blinded by the soap lather. Aunt Najia clutched my thigh as if she were holding a chicken leg. My aunt sighed and leaned over her knee, her breasts putting me into a stupor. The soap, steam, and all that noise; I was an egg thrown onto the ocean. I was moved from one lap to another and I see.
There, crying, wailing, and kicking were useless. After a round of washing, you were left alone and free. They stuck their tongues in your ear and sucked out the water left there. They braided your hair into ponytails, and you watched them all. The steam at the end got into your eyes, ears, and mouths.
Laugh and look well: the hair on the limbs is delicate, fine, coarse, long, short, plucked out. Then all these limbs descended at once and removed their underclothes. You gaped at that continent of femininity. The black bag sewn with big stitches in white thread first appeared on their backs. Every woman turned her back to her neighbor, and every one who let down more coils of dirt than the other proved her strength and youth.
You turned around with them when they stood. Their height blocked the walls, which were spattered with waterdrops. Sweat stimulated the appetite to drink water and eat fruit. The talk was of neighbors, children, and husbands. Rachel, the Jewess, whose second son was aborted at the hand of Rasmiya—the “needle lady,” the midwife. There were no great scandals in our street, nor any great abominations in the houses. The men intensified their glands in obedience to women, and the women waited for their husbands on the benches, on the iron beds, on the ground, on high roofs, half asleep, half dead, half . . . half.
Your aunt hurried behind you. She wanted you to stand in front of her:
“I swear to God I’ll kill you, may God take you and give me a break!”
Aunt Najia answered her: “Come here—I’ll finish washing you.”
I slowed down, and stood among them. All the vapors and odors made me dizzy. Aunt Najia, standing near me, released a fart. I raised my head toward her and laughed loudly. Suddenly she struck me on the face with the bag: “Laugh, you impudent thing. Just wait, I’ll teach you.”
She lifted me up as if I were as light as a punctured ball. I was squeezed by her arms; she began scrubbing my forearm, panting, “Why do you make me smack you? Aren’t you afraid of anyone? God Almighty. Don’t you get tired?” She slid down to my belly and thigh. “She’s weak, like her mother, like she’s eating on credit.”
She curled me up between her thighs. Her hair was loose, long, and wet, sparse and fine. She did not see very well; her eyelashes had fallen out, and her eyelids were swollen.
You gave in and slept. Your skin was now vacant, emptied of its secrets; filth too was a secret. Thus far death had not come to any of you. Until you were nine you did not know what death meant to you.
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
