Absent: A Novel Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  THANK YOU

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A READER’S GUIDE

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY BETOOL KHEDAIRI

  COPYRIGHT

  To my late mother and father

  THANK YOU

  Sami Finan for lending me your eyes to see.

  My sister, Raneen Khedairi, and her husband, Dr. Omar Sammaraiee, for being my family.

  Dr. Layla Naim and Dr. Fadia Faqir for showing me the way.

  Dr. Muhannad Younis, Dr. Mehdi Hammadi, Dr. Alaa Tahir, Dr. Fehmi Jaddan, Atta Abdul Wahab, Abdul Razak, Abdul Wahid, Mohamad Aref, Abdulelah Al Sammaraiee, Mohamad Saed Al Saggar, my Arabic language publisher, Maher Kayyali of The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, for your support.

  Zuhair Abu Shaib, Mohammad Al Shammery, Mohamad Al Jazairy, Agnes Bashir, Jamil Awad, Maad Fayad, Kotaiba Al Janabi, Mai Muzaffar, Barbra Nimri Aziz, Khalid Wahal, Jackie Sawiris, Malik Athamneh, Ali Kassay, Ali Maher, for your valued notes.

  Dr. Muhayman Jamil for being my neurosurgeon-translator cousin.

  Deborah Garrison, Alice van Straaten, Clare Gittins, Laetitia Rutherford, Samar Anqud, for your creative editing suggestions.

  My agent Toby Eady for not giving up.

  Ahmad Albeer for watching over me.

  My friends: Mayada Akram, Usama Al Naher, Omar Saadi, Outor Abdul Jabar, Ali Naji, Rana Mamish, Abbas Touqmachi, Hana Sadik, Anita Gallo, Tariq Hashim, Niran Naji, Mark Jones, Madian Al Jazeera, Ali Zayni, Basil Alissi, Majdoline Gazzawi, Manar Jamil, Bayan Barak, Muna Jabali, Nadia Kahtan, Assil Bakki, for believing in my work.

  My nephew Yezen Sammaraiee for being my youngest critic.

  I found the following two books helpful in my research for this novel: Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, 2nd edition, edited by Anthony Arnove (Boston: South End Press, 2002), and The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice by Geoff Simons (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996).

  CHAPTER ONE

  ACCORDING TO THE medical report and the police statement, my father, an oil refinery engineer, died half an hour before my mother, a housewife. It happened as we were traveling by car from Baghdad to his new job in the Sinai desert. Witnesses confirmed that a small bundle was ejected from the front-seat window; the cause: an exploding landmine left over from the 1967 War. The bundle settled in the sand; it was me.

  A police officer said, “Praise to God; the baby doesn’t have a scratch on her.” He handed me over to my aunt. I was four months old. Her bedroom is next to mine. She still has the swaddles in which I was bundled and the eagle-crested death certificate in her bottom drawer.

  Her husband is infertile yet he refused to change his name. He didn’t follow the custom that dictates parents be named after their firstborn child. He didn’t wish to be referred to as the father of his deceased sister-in-law’s child. Instead, he insisted that he should be called Abu Ghayeb, the father of the absent one. My aunt conceded and accepted that she would be known as Umm Ghayeb, mother of the unborn child. It was her way of returning the favor—she would be labeled a barren woman in exchange for his consent to raise me. Growing up, I could never understand this arrangement, so against tradition, I decided to call him “my aunt’s husband” instead of amou—uncle.

  Sometimes, when we’re alone, he calls to me in a soft voice, “Babati”—my little daughter. He sounds like someone who’s lost his voice, and is trying out his vocal cords by calling me.

  She makes her way toward him, with the broom in her hand. She is silent this time. She brushes the warm tiles around his bare feet. She clutches the wooden handle firmly as she sucks in her lower lip. She tries as hard as she can to control her tongue.

  He makes no movement as she sweeps the thin white scales from around him. Some cling to the bristles of the broom. Some of yesterday’s fall away. Last week’s scales now lie on the soil, nurturing the vine as it attempts to reach new heights. The plant ascends laboriously from the mustard-colored pot sitting beside the sofa. Its wilted leaves lift up their greenery lazily toward the fingers of sunlight that tickle playfully at the sides of a restless curtain.

  When my aunt’s husband throws himself exhausted onto the sofa, its seams gape, like little mouths saying “boo” in slow motion. The color of the fabric has recently started to resemble the color of his skin. She will annoy him by taking her time sweeping up. Before he loses his temper, he inserts his finger into the slit sides of the middle cushion, and starts picking at what remains of its sponge filling. A few soft tufts gently drift onto the floor.

  My aunt continues to sweep.

  He bought her the sofa in the Days of Plenty. She wanted an onion-colored sofa. Instead of paying for it in installments, he deferred our trip to Moscow till the following summer so that she could plunge into a leather sofa the color and texture of pine. He ran his hand up and down my aunt’s thigh, patted the treasured new item of furniture, proud to have acquired them both. His salary then allowed him to do that. For her birthday, he brought her the vine. Its pot was bright yellow. She sang to the plant and to him.

  After blowing out the candles on her cake she went to the cloth market in Naher Street. She chose a cream-colored French curtain. It was embellished with soft brown knots made out of shiny nylon threads. It looked as though the tailor had scattered raw sugar cane crystals onto the fabric, and the crystals had dissolved, clinging to the cloth wherever they’d landed. She said, “I’ve got good taste, haven’t I?”

  The problem with the scales hadn’t yet started.

  Many years have passed by this big window. Today, my aunt draws back the curtains. The knots no longer sparkle, and the edges are now frayed.

  She shrieks, “My God, what’s this black grime?”

  Black lines trickle down the sides of buildings, walls, and houses. Stripes of varying thickness dribble down from top to bottom. The city is wearing a jailbird’s pajamas, like a scene in a Disney cartoon from the days of black-and-white television.

  Her husband says, “It’s the black rain. I didn’t want to worry you. They’re saying that Baghdad is wearing eyeliner today. Eyeliner provided by the Allied forces.”

  She replies with a drawn-out wail, “What eyeliner is this? We’re all going to die!”

  I join her at the window to share her amazement. The smoke from the bombing over the past few weeks has combined with the rain from last night, painting bars of loathsome solution everywhere. The local weather forecasters failed to predict the sudden downpour. Its smell is like a mixture of burnt engine oil and the stench of a rat that had died a while ago. Its death had gone unnoticed until the smell of putrefaction began to emanate from a remote cupboard. I said to myself, “Waterproof Lancôme!”

  He says, “If the birds are still alive, then we too will survive.”

  With a movement of her hand she grumbles, “You and your birds! Who’s going to clean up all this filth?”

  “You.” Then he adds, “And the Baghdad City Council, obviously.”

  I walk away from my aunt and her husband. Every window I look through mocks me, singing out, “Black,
black, made of tar; this jumping pig, near and far.”

  I prepare the hot water for him to soak in. He has to follow the instructions. He must mix one cupful of ground oats with warm water. The solution helps to loosen his flaking skin. He must also remember not to rub too vigorously, as that can worsen the inflammation.

  While waiting for the water to bubble up in the big pot, I decide to boil an egg for myself. I peel it quickly before they finish arguing. Ouch! A small splinter of the hard shell gets embedded underneath my fingernail. I pull it out quickly and place the shiny beautiful hard-boiled egg on the plate. Its thin skin is perspiring.

  The pregnant cat wanders back in. I trip over her. The smooth egg slides off the plate and lands on the floor. It breaks open and the yellow yolk falls, disintegrates as it rolls, then collides with the foot of a nearby chair. It reposes there, releasing its steam.

  I lash out at the cat, hitting her head. I could cry. It is the last egg we have in the house today. I yell at her, “You horrid little animal!”

  I pick up the dusty yolk. I try to squash it back into its rubbery white socket. I shove it into my mouth and it quivers with no salt.

  I take a sip of water to get rid of this feeling that I’ve swallowed a mouthful of doughy straw that tasted like a boiled egg.

  The electricity is due to be cut off at any moment for the next three hours. My aunt’s husband refuses to buy amperes from those who have generators. The current price is two thousand dinars for an ampere. Ten amperes is just enough for the fans; forty amperes will operate the fridge, the television, and possibly a fan as well.

  Whenever my aunt uses her hair dryer, the lift stops between the floors and one of the people trapped in the lift calls out, “Abu Ghayeb’s family, for God’s sake, switch off your hair dryer, we’re stuck!”

  This time it’s the thin teacher from the first floor. I leave the heat of the kitchen behind me. The wire netting on the window no longer lets the air in. My aunt often used to douse it with water to cool the breeze as it came through. Eventually the tiny squares became clogged up with a soft filling of rust. The teacher is lucky; the lift stops at our floor.

  I open the metal grille for him. He breathes in deeply from the corridor air. His work is very demanding and he’s developed high blood pressure. When his car stopped working he started giving private lessons in social studies to secondary school students in his flat. Every time he bends forward to tie his shoelaces he gets dizzy and starts to sway. To save his eyesight from the effects of the high blood pressure, he resorted to selling all his shoes with laces, replacing them with ones he could slip on. Eventually, he sold all his other shoes as well.

  He says to me, “Thank you, Dalal.”

  Before she became a seamstress, my aunt taught arts and crafts at a primary school. Abu Ghayeb used to be an employee at the Ministry of Tourism and an amateur artist. He is now, like all his colleagues, professionally retired. In his youth he wanted to become a painter. He enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. Two years later, his teachers called him in and advised him not to waste any more of his time. They told him, “Your eyes can see the beauty of true art, but unfortunately, the lines that your hand draws are flawed.” His dreams went up in flames. He’d hoped to become one of the artists that made up the “Group of Pioneers” who led the Iraqi art movement in the 1940s. That was when the failed student had to accept the offer of a job as a tourist guide after he’d been sent to London on a course to improve his English-language skills.

  My aunt continues to pursue him relentlessly. “You wouldn’t listen to me, refused to become a trader, and look at the state we’re in now!”

  He answers from his bath, where he’s having his soak, “It was I who asked you for your advice in those Days of Plenty. I wanted to invest our salaries abroad. You were the one who was adamant that we shouldn’t. You were the one who said, ‘Darling, how could we possibly send our money away?’ Wasn’t it you who accused me of smuggling our dinars out to foreign banks? And all I was doing was saving up to buy a small property abroad that we could go to for the summer holidays.”

  Whenever they start this argument, I’m reminded of my first-ever reading book at school. The Khaldouniya reading book started with the words, “One house, two houses, many houses. One fire, many fires. One dinar, two dinars, many dinars….”

  My aunt’s anger is reaching a crescendo, “You’re talking about dinars when the official exchange rate was three dollars to one dinar, and now when the rate is nearly three thousand dinars to one dollar, you’re blaming me?”

  “Yes, because all you wanted to do was keep the money there, in front of you. Accessible, in your hands! It’s true that I was never a trader, but still I sought out other people’s advice. But you, you were never convinced.”

  “And so, in order to punish me, you started buying a painting every month. Or were you just doing that to compensate for your feelings of inadequacy because you could never become an artist yourself?”

  “I agree, I’m not a painter, but these artists have been my companions for so many years. I immerse myself in each painting in order to forget. Can you understand that? To forget.”

  “And what benefit have we gained from these splashes of color on our walls, huh?”

  “You wanted to keep the money from our salaries in your hands, isn’t that right? So I converted it into paintings. In this way, I’ve accommodated both your wishes and mine. I enjoy my paintings during my lifetime, and when I die, you can do with them what you will.”

  He then added with a heavy breath, “How could I ever predict this damn blockade?”

  In the corridor overcrowded with paintings, my aunt paces up and down. Her voice resembles successive beats on a worn-out drum, “In 1980, we became involved in an eight-year war with our neighbor Iran. We’d barely celebrated the ceasefire, when in 1990, the government decided to invade Kuwait and the Gulf War started. My God, first the foreigners bomb us, then they crown their operations with an open-ended blockade? Can anyone believe that this is happening to us?”

  She heads toward her husband and me, reaches over and gives him an article she’s clipped out of the paper. Behind her is a row of portraits painted by local artists. He refuses to read so she says, “The glass factory was hit and several thousand liters of liquid gas were released into the atmosphere by the explosions.”

  He answers her, watching out the big window, “I know that.”

  “They’ve also bombed the fertilizer factory.”

  “I know.”

  A little later she adds, “Which caused ammonia to leak out into the river.”

  “I know that too.”

  “Did you hear that, every month, unbelievable amounts of raw sewage are dumped into the Tigris River?”

  “I heard.”

  She stops beneath the photograph of her father that hangs from the wall. It’s a photo of my grandfather; I mean my dear departed grandpa. Her head remains immobile as she faces him for several minutes. She goes through the ritual, “Oh, where have those days gone?”

  She puts half a cigarette in her pocket to smoke it in the afternoon. She mutters, “The days of the embroidered flowing dresses that my mother used to wear when we went for walks along the riverfront. Those were the days of sweets and chewing gum, and balloons on the swings at Eid time. I remember the beauty of the silver earrings my father gave me when I graduated from sixth grade. The lovely ringing tones the house keys made when they jangled against the key of my upstairs bedroom still sound in my ears. My girlfriends would come to visit me, and we’d hide up there to smoke Rothmans. I asked them how they’d learned to inhale the smoke. One of them said, ‘It’s simple, just repeat after me with a gasp, Oh, here comes my father!’”

  She smiles at the photograph, and says, “I made sure they never found out that I used to smoke!”

  This morning, my aunt is using a damp cloth to wipe the black mask. It’s a dark image of a face erupting from its ebony background.

  The m
ask frightens me. It has silver creases around the eyes and mouth. The brow is metallic. It thinks. Bright veins bulge around the skull. She cleans between the aluminum furrows. How she wishes that her husband would sell it before it falls apart.

  When she stands facing it, and blows vigorously into its shallow crevices to disperse the accumulated dust, her face wrinkles; she starts to resemble it. She grumbles at it, “Protocols! Protocols! Isn’t starving civilians considered an unethical and inhuman form of warfare? What’re they doing to us?”

  The mask doesn’t answer.

  Her husband goes out to look for work. She steps back from the sculpture. She’s a short woman; her body appears compressed, shaped like a pear with a large behind and narrow shoulders. She always wears shoulder pads, soft spongy pillows permanently attached to her tight shoulders. On one occasion she forgot to put them on, so her handbag slipped off. Her husband laughed loudly and called out, “Come on my sweet pear, don’t be upset.”

  I’m taller than she is, like my late mother, or so they tell me. My aunt’s nose is very large. I don’t like to look at her as she stands at the big window, watching her husband as he makes his way from the building to the street. Her face is bathed in the sunlight that illuminates her smooth oily nose. I catch a glimpse of the small hairs germinating inside it. She’s always picking at her nose, as if she’s trying to remold it into a smaller shape. Wasn’t it she who said to me—after my illness—that our appearance is determined by the will of God?

  When my aunt’s husband was working, I used to enjoy his business trips more than he did. When I was little, he used to take me with him to many places around the world: Madrid, Paris, and Tunis. Had he known that we’d be unable to travel in the days ahead, we might have tried to visit other capitals. On the way back, he would always say, “Dalal, never forget that no matter where we roam in this world, our country is the source, the cradle of civilization.” He would tell me, in the plane heading back home, about the first Iraqi artist, who’d lived in Tal al-Sawan, six millennia before Christ. Then he would tell me all about the Office of Plastic Arts, where he’d taken on the responsibilities of an official. His duties involved liaising between the Directorate of Artistic Exhibitions and the National Museum of Modern Art. His favorite pastime was telling the foreign air stewardesses with great animation that human beings first started to write in Iraq, using Sumerian mud tablets. It was here that the first library had been set up, the first school, the first epic…. He’d go on and on, until they eventually offered him more fruit juice to calm him down.