Then he counseled Grandfather to treat his diabetes by eating barley bread, reducing his salt consumption, and giving up sugar. “Drink your tea straight, and take a dose of juice pressed from the wormwood tree every day with the morning prayers. It’s bitter, very bitter, like the colocynth, but it will do you good, believe me! You’ll once again be strong as an ox!”
They carried on a long conversation. The two of them spoke while Father and I were content to listen. They continued to speak freely even around the platter of turkey surrounded by bowls of yogurt. The grilled turkey pieces were arranged in a row on a pile of rice mixed with raisins and various types of spices. They spoke about the tobacco fields and the sunflowers in Kurdistan, about sons and grandsons, about the angels and the Prophet’s companions, about the friends they had in common, and about their memories of the days of battle against the English. They cursed the current government.
Following the late afternoon tea, another car stopped in the courtyard of the house, and a Kurdish family of children and an old woman got out. They said that she had been afflicted with the evil eye.
The sheikh said goodbye to us. He and Grandfather embraced, and Grandfather invited him to visit us in our village. The sheikh excused himself, saying that he wouldn’t be able to visit because he didn’t know when God would send him a sick person whom he was duty bound to treat. “But you, come visit me!”
Grandfather gave him a promise. But he would not be able to keep it.
On the road, Grandfather told us more about the memories he shared with his friend, the sheikh. Istabraq was asking for less water. Father wasn’t convinced by what he saw of the treatment, yet he pretended to be satisfied out of deference to Grandfather. All the same, he asked his German friends about it when he returned to Kirkuk. They were dumbfounded and called a friend of theirs, who was a doctor in Berlin. The doctor said, “This treatment for jaundice works too. The powdered pomegranate rinds go through the blood to the worm and drive it out.”
My father was reassured. Meanwhile, I was at a loss about how to get my letters to Aliya during the following two days before Istabraq was able to get up.
At least, I was at loss until we found a hiding place for ourselves in the middle of the forest under the willow trees near the shore. We began to call it our nest. It was there that we knew our first kisses and learned what it was like to suck on fingers and lips that were daubed with dates.
CHAPTER 6
I decided to go to my father’s club that evening too. I had to find a convenient opportunity to talk to him, or else we could agree on a time to meet. At the very least, I hoped that I would get to know him better.
After coming to this decision, I went over to the kitchen window that looked out on the neighboring building. It had a shabby-looking roof on account of the pigeons having taken over its rain spouts for nests. I had tried so many times to destroy these nests with a broom handle, but they were further back than I could reach. So I just swore at the pigeons. They came from Plaza de la Puerta del Sol in the middle of Madrid and from Plaza de España, where there was a statue of Don Quixote and his sidekick, Sancho Panza. I would sit there and stare at them for a long time whenever my longing for Grandfather and my father grew sharp, as though the two of them were in everything I saw. Meanwhile, the pigeons around me would eat from the palms of the elderly retirees relaxing on the benches. They would eat the tourists’ cookies. Then they would come to poop on my clothes, and on the clothes of my Cuban neighbor below me. What’s more, they would even enter the kitchen and poop on my cooking utensils and on top of the refrigerator with the bread crumbs.
When I was with Pilar, she confirmed for me that she had seen them herself. On the morning of the first night that she slept here, just after waking up, a pair of pigeons startled her by taking flight when she first entered the kitchen. She said, “You left the kitchen window open! Why don’t you get a cat? I know a shop with beautiful cats. Beeeeautiful! My God, how beautiful they are!”
I had left her that night sleeping in my bed while I passed the time in the darkness, remembering Aliya and our times alone in the hiding place that we discovered in the middle of the thicket, the place that we called our nest. We found it on the second day after we brought Istabraq back from the house of the Kurdish sheikh who had slit her ears. Mother had prevented her from going out, from housework, and from putting in her earrings until she was on the road to recovery. I was walking around, looking for Aliya in order to give her a new poem that I had written for her, along with a letter. I kept passing by their house and didn’t see the horse. Then I went among the houses, shacks, and reed huts of the village. I wandered around our Qashmar peninsula, going through the forest toward the shore on every side until I found her on the northern end, closest to the mountain.
She was wading in the water, washing her face. Behind her was the head of the horse, taking a long drink. I got confused, and I hesitated as I thought about getting away or hiding. But she turned and saw me, and the surprise stopped her.
“Oh!” she said. “Hello, Saleem.”
She turned around and looked in every direction; I did the same. We didn’t see anyone.
I took the carefully folded piece of paper scented with my mother’s perfume out of my pocket. I said, “I want to give you a letter. Istabraq can’t leave the house. I’d like to talk to you. Are you able?”
“Quick!” she said. “Get into the woods!”
I ran a few yards back and waited at the edge of the forest, keeping my head turned toward her. After waiting until the horse had drunk as much as it wanted, she took a rope out of the saddlebag it was carrying. She put the halter around its head while still turning to look in every direction. She led the horse toward me, its hooves sinking in the sand just as the words which I had prepared in advance sank into the trembling of my heart and were lost. We pressed further into the forest, opening a track for the horse behind us, until we tied it to the trunk of a giant willow tree, where it grazed on the thick grass around it. We explored the area until we found a sandy, circular clearing, shaded by a jumble of poplar branches interlaced in the sky above. There were smaller trees, such as the tamarisk. Reeds went around the clearing, reaching as high as our chests, such that when we sat down on the circle of sand, they were a little higher than us.
We looked at each other. It was the first time that we had been so close. We could hear the racing of our breaths and the beating of our hearts. Aliya asked me how Istabraq was doing, and I began relating to her the details of our journey for her treatment, taking advantage of the narration to regain my voice and my composure. We spoke in low voices that betrayed the pleasure of confiding secrets.
After I finished, I gave her the letter and the poem. I said, “You’ve never told me what you think of the poems I write for you.”
She said, “They are not very precise. Actually, they are one lie after another.”
Her words were a shock, and I found myself placing a hand on my heart and swearing to her the truth of my feelings for her.
She didn’t let me continue and clarified, “I don’t mean that your feelings aren’t true. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have exchanged letters with you, nor would I have come here with you. What I mean is, your poems aren’t convincing because they are filled with lies. You describe yourself as a knight who, for my sake, cuts off a thousand heads with one blow of his sword. In reality, if you actually killed anyone, I wouldn’t like you in the least. So this isn’t right, Saleem. And you’ve never seen a sword except for your grandfather’s sword that hangs on the front wall in the reception room for guests. Maybe you’ve never even touched it. What’s more, you’ve never ridden a horse in your life.