little devil is the only one who’s not afraid. That’s my little Adouli, his father’s son!”
I was thrown on the floor, moaning but not crying. My hair was disheveled, the ribbons falling out, my braids undone. I looked at my leg and rubbed it with my hand, and gazed at the squares of cheap tile. This one was a dirty blue; that one, a lusterless white. I calculated the number of tiles. I saw the anthills and the salty soil surrounding those little caverns. The floor surface was cold and damp. The shining boots stopped. Now Adil was in front of me and came to me and, burying his chest against me, he burst into tears. I tousled his hair and looked at his locks. I hugged him and he trembled, then broke into a new burst of crying. We cried together, giving it our whole voices, and my father pulled at me again.
“Be quiet. I’ll get the belt and break your ribs.”
He pulled Adil away and lifted him up, kissed him, and gave him five fils. He approached me, tugged at my hair, and lifted my head to face him. He took my hand and gave me five coins as well.
“Sweetheart, go and comb your hair.”
Whenever his voice softened, the sound of my crying got louder. He pinched my cheek.
“God, if you don’t be quiet—”
He kicked and slapped me. “This girl is a strange one. Does she want me to plead with her?”
Adil pulled me and got between us. My grandmother had not said a word. That was her; it was her way of pacifying him. My mother, in the back, took my father’s attack in silence, a mythological creature stripped of all her roles.
Adil and I went into the bathroom. My father went into his room, his voice still ringing with every form of vituperation.
Adil shook my arm. “Huda, take this money as well, just be quiet.”
I pushed him and he fell before me, got up quickly and stood in my face, pleading: “Huda, Daddy will be asleep soon, and we’ll go to the blind woman, Umm Aziz, and we’ll buy hot chickpeas and sweets.”
I gasped and blew my nose. My grandmother was behind us. She stroked my hair and tilted my head to face her. I looked into her eyes, then buried my head in her concave stomach and hugged her round the waist. “Granny, what have I done? Why didn’t Firdaw’s father hit her for playing in the street? Why my daddy, why?”
This grandmother was the center of the circle. I do not know where she concealed her strength. When she walked her footsteps were light and hardly audible. When she spoke, her voice was clothed in caution and patience, and when she was silent everyone was bewildered by her unannounced plans. She was strong without showing signs of it, mighty without raising her voice, beautiful without finery. She was beautiful from her modest hem to her silver braids. She was slim, of medium height, a narrow black band round her head, whose ends dangled by her thin braids. She was light-skinned. I never saw anyone with a white complexion like hers. It was a white between bubbly milk and thick cream. Her eyes were gray with dark blue, wild green, and pure honey-colored rays.
When we saw her in the morning as we got ready for school, they were honey-colored, and by the time we came home in the afternoon they were blue. But at night they were gray.
She was a well-organized woman; she loved justice and set great store by it. She rebuked my father and scolded him behind our backs, suddenly setting upon him, taking all her time, scattering him and tearing him apart, exposing him anew to us. She dazzled us every time she told us, in a clear, distant voice, as if coming from an abandoned cellar, a story of my father which she had never told before. She wiped the dust from the photo album and opened it. At the beginning was a picture of our venerable, terrifying, handsome, harsh, skeptical grandfather, who was in love with her, was jealous, and who never once in his life told her “I love you.” He wore a tasseled fez and went to work in an office in Ali al-Gharbi, a village on the Tigris River. He walked around with a superior air, like an Ottoman pasha. When he went to work everyone scuttled out of his way.
Her fingers rebraided my hair. I was sitting on the carpet in our room. I turned my back to her, and she enclosed me between her skinny thighs: “Relax a little. You keep moving. Are you sitting on a fire or something?”
Adil was in front of us, holding the basin of water in which my grandmother was soaking the wide wooden comb. She began to comb my hair and talk: “Your father fell on his head. His horse threw him while he was training—this was in Ali al-Gharbi—with your grandfather. The weather was fine, and it was a new horse.
“He used to take him out every day, before sunrise, and have him lead the horse and ride him. The first day he went, and then the second, and the third. For two weeks he trained and came back. He had changed, I do not know how, but he was different. His flesh had become firm, his voice had changed—he was like a beast of prey. His father sent him out at night and he wasn’t afraid.”
I interrupted: “Granny, you mean if a boy trains on a horse he becomes nice looking?”
“Not just nice looking! He becomes a man!”
“And if a girl trains on a horse will she become more beautiful?”
“No, a girl’s beauty is in her silence and modesty. Do you want to ride horses as well?”
“Where are the horses now? I get nothing every day but beating, and having my hair pulled.”
“What happened then?” Adil interrupted.
I looked into his eyes. He was smiling, and I pushed him with my hand. The water basin spilled on his clothes and the floor. He did not get angry, but replied, “Stop asking so many questions.”
“Fine. Where were we?”
“My father was like a lion,” was Adil’s prompt response.
She sighed a little and went on.
“He was not afraid. He was a little man. When he came back at night his eyes were still watching the sky. When the moon rose and the sun went down. He said the sky had many gates, all of which were open to him, and that only he could count them. He predicted so many strange things.”
Adil interrupted: “What does ‘predict’ mean?”
“Imagine! You don’t know?” I said. “Predicting means telling the future.”
“Fine, my little Adouli, the sky was open, and he could read everything written there. He said your grandfather would die of drowning, and believe it or not—two years later the ship sank with six employees on board, in Basra. He said he would marry several times—he said that when I was running after him—I wanted to beat him. Oh, those days are gone. Only misery is left.” Her voice changed and trailed off, to the Shatt al-Arab, and her first nights of watching over her son. She took the ribbon from Adil’s hand and continued: “He was fifteen, and the things he said frightened even me. I began to be afraid of him, but the third week they brought him carried on their shoulders. He was unconscious. He was sallow, stricken, like someone shocked by electricity, neither sleeping nor dead. There was a little wound on the top of his head—the skin was broken and the flesh had opened, but there was not a single drop of blood coming out of it. He was different from that day onward. He entered a new phase. He was even scared of his own shadow. You know your father married before your mother; his first wife was with him a year and then died in childbirth, she and her son.”
I asked her: “How did that happen? I don’t understand you. You
