Another factor that brought her closer to my inner world was that she reminded me of the appointed times for prayer. Moreover, she resumed her own practice of praying, intermittently at first, then regularly.
I certainly spoke to Fatima about Aliya a lot, and her eyes teared up when she saw me crying as I described the scene of Aliya’s drowning. She embraced me very tenderly, allowing me to pour out all the tears I had in me. Afterward, she didn’t show any jealousy over Aliya’s place in my memory. And she laughed when I told her about the poems that I used to write for Aliya and Aliya’s reaction to them.
As our discussion of poetry broadened, Fatima learned from my responses that I still wrote poetry, and I learned what she thought about it. She was entirely indifferent toward poetry. Rather, to tell the truth, she actually didn’t care for it, even though she claimed, like everyone else, that she liked it. She recited from memory some lines of classical poetry that she had memorized in her school days. But she hadn’t memorized or read anything beyond this. At the same time, she had memorized the words to heaps of Arabic and Spanish songs. She asked me if I would show her some of my poetry. I tried to refuse in order to avoid any possible discord, but in the end I agreed, thinking it necessary for her to know about what interested me.
“I don’t know where I put what I used to call poems. Wait a moment; I’ll look for them. They might be folded into the pages of one of the books that I was reading four years ago. Under my bed there is a box containing some of them.” The dust rose up, and I sneezed. “Here’s one. Should I read it to you? No, I’m too embarrassed to do it. No! Well, okay, I’ll read it as an example. Listen. Of course, the person meant here is Aliya. Listen:
Fatima smiled at my mention of the dates, and when I finished, she clapped gaily and said, “I like it!” Then she asked innocently, “Is it poetry?”
It came to me that she didn’t even know about the existence of modern, unrhymed poetry. I dove into an exposition of modern verse, citing folk songs and the poetry of al-Sayyab as examples. So in the matter of poetry, she differed from Aliya.
I had a deeply rooted conviction that Fatima was the right woman to share the rest of my life with. It was even more clear that she would be my wife. We happily discussed our relationship in this way and made plans to find an appropriate moment to bring the subject up with our families. Was my father, too, trying to find an appropriate moment to let me know that he had decided on the time when he would carry out his mission? This single thing was what most disturbed me and made me anxious. For here I was, finding my life to be in order. As far as I could tell, all its details were organized and clearly understood, especially in regard to work, women, and the future, which I could now almost see.
It almost happened that I broached the subject myself. I would transform my anxious waiting into a matter that was in my own hands. But it was hard for me to find the right way to start. And what ideas could I put forward? How could I form an argument strong enough to turn him away from what he had resolved to do? So it was, as often happens in life, that the moment came on its own, without any decision on my part or his.
It was during his first visit to my apartment. He came a little before noon for some work-related business. He also said he wanted to see the home to which I had invited him more than once. The first thing that startled him — as happens with nearly all visitors to my house — was the overwhelming sight of pictures of Iraq covering the living room’s ceiling and walls. What surprised me was the difference between his reaction and everyone else’s. After he had wandered around more than once, staring at them and approaching some to examine them more closely and identify the scenes, he gave me a long look, biting his tongue on several responses. It was as though he were cycling through them to find the one that expressed what he wanted. And that was the case, for after he slapped one hand against the other, he stood in front of me, crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “What is this, Saleem?”
His censuring tone provoked the echo in my question. “What do you mean?” I blurted out.
He said, “I used to think you had better sense than this. That you didn’t give in to the sick nostalgia that afflicts most exiles, who imagine that everything is beautiful in their abandoned countries, even the ruins and the garbage dumps.”
“But it’s our homeland, Dad,” I protested. “My homeland.”
He uncrossed his arms to illustrate his point, shaking one of them in the air. “No! True homeland is that which we fashion for ourselves, just as we want. Not as someone else makes it, like the tyrant did. That’s not the kind of homeland we want. That’s why we abandoned it. Homeland is like love. It is a choice, not an obligation. If you must put up pictures of a homeland, then put up the ones that you, yourself, want, or even those that you have made on your own. No, no ….”
He was shaking his hand toward the pictures as though saying goodbye to them or refusing something that the walls were offering him. He turned around in a circle where he was, and then he sat on the couch, heaving a deep sigh. He continued to express his disappointment, “No, no. I used to think you had better sense.”
His words provoked me. I felt as though he were tearing down my kingdom, which I had built and arranged with persistent patience over the course of years. In my loneliness, I had invented a complete story for nearly all these pictures, a history, a world. His arrogant dismissal — in a single moment and so easily — of everything that I had established and lived with happily throughout my ten years of exile here enraged me. I felt as though he had killed my entire family with a single bomb, a family I had formed out of long effort, love, and private dreams.
Therefore, as had just happened to him, I fell silent, searching for the decisive response that would avenge my soul’s wound. I exhaled deeply in my turn and found that I was shaking. My body temperature was rising. I quickly sat in front of him, looking into his eyes with a stormy challenge and a feeling of strength that I had never before known in myself. As a result, my words came out choked and agitated, strikingly aggressive: “And I used to think you had better sense too.”
My words surprised him, of course, and he asked, “How so?”
I picked my chair up and set it down further back, moving away from him a little. I said, “That you would do all this for the sake of achieving a backward, foolish, and insane goal like shoving a bullet up someone’s ass. You are deceiving Mother and abandoning your family. You are deceiving Rosa and exploiting her. Then there’s this radical betrayal of your entire personal, moral, and religious heritage. All that for the sake of a foolish goal!”