My father came out of the bathroom, revealing his enormous stature and his predominantly gray chest hair. He had wrapped a wide, white towel around his waist. When he saw that the table was ready, he said, “Eat, if you want. I’ll be right there.”
“No, I’ve already had breakfast. This is for you. I’ll just have a cup of coffee with you.”
He went into his bedroom and came out after a few minutes in different clothes, clean and elegant. He had combed his hair and tied it back in a ponytail. He gave off a piercing scent of perfume. I knew he liked to go overboard with perfume, to the point of literally pouring it on his body. It was an old habit that he hadn’t given up. He was following the model of Grandfather, who had constantly repeated, “Prophet Muhammad loved three things in this world: perfume, women, and prayer.”
My father ate with a voracious appetite while I hesitated, uncertain as to how to begin the conversation with him. So it happened that he posed most of the questions at first. As he chewed each mouthful, he asked me about myself: my health, my life, my work. He said he hadn’t known that I was here in Spain, and that nobody from the village had known anything about me. But personally, deep down, he had felt confident that I was fine and in some safe place. He used to reassure Mother whenever she would cry because she missed me, and he would invent stories about how easy life was for those who had emigrated from Iraq. He endeavored to comfort her, while she continued beseeching God on my behalf during her prayers.
At that point, I started asking my questions about Mother. He said, “She is just as she was: a great woman who bottles up her sorrow and keeps on slaving away. Now she takes joy in raising her grandchildren. Istabraq lives with her in our house. Istabraq got married to your cousin Ibrahim. She wanted to name her first son Sirat, but Ibrahim refused. He was right to do so, for reasons you well know!”
We laughed, and I learned for the first time that my father knew the story of Istabraq’s love for Sirat.
He continued, “And so she resorted to the Qur’an for a name, like all the rest of our family. Her health has gotten much better. She now has three children, and I left her pregnant with a fourth. She has become much fatter, and she is not that skinny ‘Reed’ that you knew her as. By the way, she hung a large picture of you in the front of her room, and every day she lifts her children up to it, saying, ‘This is your Uncle Saleem. He is going to return, bringing you lots of gifts.’ The result is that they spoke your name before they spoke the name of their father.”
My father finished eating his breakfast. He reclined next to me against the backrest of the couch and began to smoke with pleasure. He seemed to be more focused, livelier, and more prepared to talk. So I followed his lead and started smoking and asking questions, even frank ones.
I asked about nearly everything apart from the two essential questions that I didn’t dare broach: Was he the one who killed Grandfather at dawn that day? Or had he exploded in Grandfather’s face, just as I had seen before leaving, after making sure that Grandfather had already died? Secondly, where did this passion for women come from? For that matter, how did he make love to Rosa, who loved him and was so intensely jealous of him, given that they had ruined his manhood and his testicles in that electric torture session?
So I circled around these two questions like a butterfly hovering around a flame, taking care not to be burned. Among other detailed questions, I touched on the village, the family, and how things were going there. He answered me at length and sometimes with his own commentary.
We talked together and smoked for more than three hours, during which my father would get up and move around the room waving his arms whenever he was affected by the force of what he was narrating. He would sometimes clench his fists and grind cigarette butts between his teeth, looking like someone acting out a tense scene in a play.
I know I’m incapable of recording here everything that was said, and of describing his movements and his pauses in detail, given that my surprise at his words completely overpowered me. So I’ll summarize the main events he told me, beginning with the day in which I journeyed from the village, the same day in which Grandfather journeyed from this world.
“Everything changed, Saleem. It changed utterly.”
CHAPTER 11
The village buried its sons’ bodies. Then it submitted to the orders of the government, whose institutions applied the pressure necessary to rapidly transform it into a normal village like all other Iraqi villages.
“There was some satisfaction in burying Grandfather at the highest point of the cemetery. They put green banners above his tomb, as well as jars of salt for visitors seeking a blessing to lick. The sick would cut strips from the banners at his grave to tie around their necks or forearms, like consecrated amulets. The people were satisfied as to Grandfather’s heavenly reward, he who was considered a blessed man and one of God’s pious saints.
“Relations with Subh were restored in the traditional way. Its people stopped winking to each other at our surname of Qashmar, not out of respect for us but out of fear of the government, which had imposed the name Faris on our village, and which possessed eyes and ears that spied into every corner: on both banks of the river, on both sides of the mountain, on the dry land and the water, in the air and in the mud.
“An atmosphere of war pervaded the entire country. The television, the schools, the party organizations, and the police were all instruments of the government for mobilizing and exercising control. There was iron and fire. There was fear and repression. We gave ourselves over to waiting and to a faint hope in an obscure salvation. It felt like our hope hung by a thread.”
“The people gradually disengaged from Mullah Mutlaq’s domination after his passing. They were brought into submission by the government’s vicious authority. The sessions for religious studies in the mosque were dissolved, as well as the meetings to solve social problems, which were transferred to the city courtrooms. The number of people who prayed got smaller, and no one talked any more about avenging our honor, which they had pledged to the mullah. I didn’t do anything about that. But inside, I held fast to my covenant, which I had pledged by my soul and sworn in front of my father. It was only I who kept living under the authority of the venerable Mutlaq, eagerly maintaining my obedience to that authority, no matter what the cost.
“As far as I was concerned, Saleem, my father was everything to me, everything: the absolute authority in this life and the next. You, yourself, saw my relationship with him, how sacred he was to me. He was history, religion, values, the absolute, and the single existing truth, or else the source of these things. In my eyes, he was the strong, knowledgeable, and completely correct man. Disobeying him was out of the question. He raised me that way from the moment I became conscious. Engraved into my emotions and my makeup was the dictum that ‘God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents,’ so his contentment was my greatest goal. Actually, in my eyes, my father was God’s sole deputy on earth. And I confess now, to you alone and for the first time in my life, that I would often see the Lord incarnated in him. He represented direct divinity for me, according to what his upbringing established in me. I never once, in all the days of my life, dared to look into his eyes.
“One thing alone interfered with that assurance of mine regarding his divinity; one thing broke it. And that was regret. Yes, for regret is a human characteristic, and a god cannot regret anything he does since he is omniscient in his knowledge, his perception, his control, and his desire. When I say regret, I mean that your grandfather, my father …. My mother informed me one day at noon during a harvest season long ago that the only thing my father had done and regretted — something he had regretted having done throughout his entire life, even to the point that it sometimes made him cry in her lap in moments of weakness — was having cut off part of his first wife’s finger when she had pointed it menacingly in his face. Everyone knew about the incident and used it as an example, but what no one knew — apart from my mother and me, and now you — was that my father regretted it, and that references to this incident continued to torment him. Meanwhile, it helped me by stripping him of that quality of divinity.