CHAPTER 2
I loved my father without understanding him. I sensed there was more than one Noah inside of him, but he was able to harmonize them perfectly.
My mother’s duality, however, was clear. This made it all the easier to love her, even though I only realized the magnitude of my love for her when I was away from her, during my time in the army and now too in my exile. She was always there to absorb our anger, and to share in our pain and our joy. She always took care of preparing our food, washing our clothes, and reminding us of our responsibilities. She passed on the orders of the older children to the younger and prevented the older ones from hitting them. She lulled us to sleep with the narrative rhythms of princesses falling in love, female ghouls, monsters, giants, and Sinbad.
Meanwhile, it was beyond me to understand my cousin Aliya even for a day. I loved her unconditionally, without any real reason, only that she had loved me without any hard questions. It was from her that I learned how to love — quite the opposite of everyone else, who considered Grandfather Mutlaq to be the only possible teacher. But I now realize that the lessons we learned from him didn’t shape our essential selves nearly as much as having adopted him as our inexorable standard did. He was an adversary who forced us to sculpt our private selves in secret.
My father was the eldest of his siblings, so the greatest burden fell on him. Not only the burden of work but also of Grandfather’s notions about a strict upbringing, that a child should be nourished on the concept of blind obedience to parents: “God’s satisfaction comes from the satisfaction of parents.”
Noah never once refused a request or a command from his father. I remember, for example, how he returned at noon one day in July, exhausted from his work at the oil company in Kirkuk. He would usually go to the guest room first to greet Grandfather (who had lived there alone with his books ever since Grandmother died) and then come to the house to kiss us and shake hands with Mother. On that day, Grandfather ordered him to go repair the broken water pump at the farm. So he left his bag and headed out to the field immediately, without stopping at the house on his way to greet us, bathe, rest, and eat his lunch as he usually did. He didn’t return until he had repaired the pump, just as the sun was setting.
My father never met Grandfather’s eyes and never even looked at his face. He would always stare at the ground, listening intently to Grandfather’s words. He was more than forty years old, yet he said he was ashamed to look into his father’s face. One quiet day, near the banks of the river, he asked me, curious and almost entreating, “How do you look at his face? Have you looked into his eyes? Have you looked into his eyes?”
I wish that I could ask him now, “Then how could you kill him? And how did you arrive here? When? Why exactly did you come to Spain? Was it that you came looking for me?” But his first embrace had been neutral, not to say cold. As if he hadn’t even wanted to hug me.
I found my father by chance last Saturday night in Madrid. On weekends, I feel a discontent steal into my soul, and I wander through the dark streets and alleys without any fixed destination. I’ll go into any club or bar. This time, I absolutely couldn’t believe what I saw in a club packed with people of various nationalities — immigrants, tourists, and of course Spaniards — as well as hippies, homosexuals, outcasts, hashish dealers, night owls, pacifists, racists, anti-globalization activists, and skinheads.
This man with the shaved mustache. A receding hairline. Long hair tied in a ponytail, with two small locks dyed red and green. Three silver loops hung down from his left ear — earrings. Could he possibly be my father?! Was this really my father?! Then he showed me his keychain, which we had gotten used to seeing after our attack on the provincial government building in Tikrit. The keychain was a small revolver bullet. He had emptied out the gunpowder and inserted a ring through the case, to which he attached a chain for his keys. I kept staring doubtfully into his face, so he quickly showed me his lame foot, after which I was certain. We embraced.
When? How? Why did my father come to Madrid? This chance meeting dazed me for three days. After that, I started to regain my equilibrium as I digested the surprise, content to ignore the incomprehensible. Like how I keep returning to paintings by Salvador Dalí in order to understand reality better.
After my flight from the confines of Iraq ten years ago, I had reconciled myself to forgetting in order to reconcile myself to life. I didn’t realize I was putting into effect my village’s ultimate decision to detach itself completely. No letters between me and it. No news reaching me, and none of me reaching it. My father was the last person I saw there. Unnoticed, I saw him through the window of the mosque before I left at dawn without a farewell. After that, I saw no one else from my village, and I convinced myself with absolute certainty that I would never see any of them. The village would never see me, and I would never again see it. Even had I wanted to, it would never welcome me back, for I had betrayed it when I abandoned it in secret after the seventeen bodies began to rot and the air became intolerable.
That was the reason that I began avoiding foul odors, because they would remind me of all the details I was sometimes happy to forget entirely. I would take out the trash before the garbage bags filled up. I chose fifth-floor apartments in order to live far from the putrid sewer lines in the ground. I sprayed air freshener in the bathroom and deodorant in my armpits. I avoided going past police stations and government buildings, and I didn’t follow the news in the media.
But my father brought it all back with his sudden presence here and his constant repetition of a phrase unlike anything I could have imagined him saying, him being so proper, timid, and religious: “This world is all fucked up.” And when I gave in to this presence of his and asked him about our village, Qashmars, he said, “The whole world is Qashmars.”
The village of Qashmars began with my father, and at his hands it would later be saved from entering the dungeons of the security forces a second time. With the death — or the murder — of Grandfather, he had put it to an end. Now once again, it began at his hands, here in a dim Madrid club. On its door was written “Club Qashmars.” Below that in a smaller script, “In the beginning was freedom: May it endure till the end!” Below that, in the same size lettering but in blue, “The freer you feel, the greater your welcome here.”
I wanted to ask my father about many things: Mother, my siblings, my childhood friends, our village after the seventeen corpses, and about my cousin Aliya — no, Aliya drowned in the river. (Why do I not want to believe that despite seeing it with my own eyes?) I wanted to ask him whether he really killed Grandfather.
But he still didn’t say much, and every time I went to see him at the club in the evening, I found him surrounded by a group of his friends — Spaniards, Dutch, Germans, and English. Most of them had hair that was shaved or combed — messed up, that is — in unusual styles, which they stained with brilliant dyes. Bunches of keys hung from their belts, along with chains like those used to tie up pet dogs. Bits of metal were set into every part of their strange clothing, and loops of silver or plastic hung from their ears and even the noses and navels of some of them.
My father fit right in. He wore a mesh shirt with vivid camouflage, and he had attached three rings to his left ear, each larger than the previous one. But instead of cutting his hair like the others to resemble a rooster, a lion, or a sheep, he had let grow it long. Mild balding had set in at his forehead, and he tied his hair back in a ponytail, like a schoolgirl, dyeing two locks, one of them green and the other red.