Only that sentence—“Are you laughing at the painter or the painting?”—could keep us from harassing Sirat. But we would quickly forget it and just as quickly resume our bullying. It continued like that until he died and received his rest — from us and from his name.
Sirat loved my sister Istabraq, and for that reason he was the most zealous of us all on the day of the attack against the provincial government building in Tikrit, when three of us were killed (Grandfather said “martyred”). Afterward, Istabraq became even more emaciated. Feeling guilty for their deaths, she refused to eat, and whenever Mother forced her to drink chicken soup, she would vomit it up. She became skinnier and skinnier, to the point where we could see her continually wasting away. She was receding from us little by little in the bed, sinking into it like someone disappearing into the horizon. The bulges of her shoulder blades jutted out, along with the joints of her fingers and the bony balls in her wrists. Sirat’s sisters stopped calling her “Reed,” and stopped addressing Sirat as “Reed-lover,” for “it’s just not right to have fun at the expense of the sick.” And what’s more, she had become much skinnier than she was when they gave her this nickname.
Grandfather said, “In that case, forget the doctors. The only hope is in the remedy of God, the Healer and Caretaker, and of his righteous saints. One of my close friends is a Kurdish sheikh who lives in a village near Shaqlawa and possesses miraculous powers. He is in the Naqshbandiya Sufi tradition, and his ancestors trace their descent back to Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Kilani, who struck an infidel in India with his sandal without moving from where he sat in Baghdad.”
So we took her there, my father, Grandfather, and I. I was sitting with Istabraq in the back seat of the car, supporting her on my shoulder and giving her water to drink. At the same time, I was enjoying the view of green fields flying past on both sides. After my father stopped a few times to ask about the road, the village, and the sheikh’s house, the man’s fame became obvious to us because everyone knew immediately how to direct us. We drove the car up to his house, which sat at the foot of a mountain on the outskirts of the village.
As soon as we got out in the front courtyard, we heard the clap of a gunshot coming from the direction of his door. Istabraq immediately fell out of my arms and lay stretched out on the ground, unconscious.
Then we heard Grandfather’s roar, “God is great!”
CHAPTER 4
I didn’t leave my apartment the whole evening. I ate three eggs and some salad since I didn’t feel like cooking. I spent time thinking about my father and remembering, trying to work out what had happened so that I might understand my new father who was here. I got up more than once from my bed, heading to the kitchen to make coffee and smoke cigarettes in the window that overlooked the square courtyard, small and deep, enclosed by my building. Lines stretched between the windows for hanging out the wash to dry. In the courtyard below, there was a small, wooden doghouse for the dog belonging to one of the old women on the first floor.
I’m the youngest resident of the building. Next is a young Cuban woman with dark skin who lives below me; my floor is her ceiling. Meanwhile, old women occupy the other apartments. They are on their own, and the only company they have is their dogs, to whom they speak day and night, and the television hosts reporting on celebrity scandals. After the stance I took regarding the trash, these women started looking at me suspiciously whenever we would meet on the stairs. Their misgivings increased when I refused to meet with the neighbors’ council to discuss repairing the lock of the main door. I said to the doorman: “There’s no need for this waste of time. You go, yourself, and buy a new lock to install. Then collect its cost from the building’s residents.”
That was because I thought their free time made these meetings an occasion to gossip, complain, and satisfy their curiosity by scrutinizing the rest of the neighbors from up close. I had decided not to attend these neighbors’ meetings ever since the first year.
We had met one evening, crowded into the foyer. Some of us sat on the first flight of stairs, while the doorman kept clicking the lights back on after they would automatically go out every minute. The meeting revolved around the garbage can and the fact that some people didn’t pay the monthly fee for the doorman to take it out each night and bring it back in the morning.
Their eyes sought me out, along with gossip veiled in courtesy. Despite my calm nature, and my desire to avoid confrontations with anyone, I don’t put up with other people trying to take advantage of me. So everyone was surprised when I announced quite openly that, while it was necessary for those people who owned their apartments to pay their share, I wouldn’t pay for the trash can since the landlord paid for renters, just as was spelled out in the rental contract. The old women burst out talking among themselves and raising objections, especially those who owned their apartments. At the same time, the other renters thanked me for pointing this out, including the Cuban girl, who became my friend after that.
She and I would stop for a while every time we met on the stairs. We commiserated about the ruling dictatorships in our countries. She vented to me about her sufferings here on account of not having legal residency papers. This meant she worked without contracts and moved frequently between one job and another, where she would be exploited by her bosses. I invited her more than once to drink tea in my apartment, and she invited me to her birthday party. Every time she received one of her acquaintances escaping from “The Island of Sugar,” she would bring me coarse Havana cigarettes as a gift. We exchanged music recordings. We would also turn to each other if we needed salt, sugar, oil, or an onion.
The Cuban stopped paying for the trash, and, like me, she became an object of suspicious glances from the old women. Several times I heard them curse the current government for having opened the gates of the country to foreigners, and they nostalgically praised the days of Franco. More than once, I even heard one of them singing the old version of the national anthem with Franco’s lyrics, “Viva España,” for an entire morning, intentionally leaving her window open so that the neighbors would hear. Even worse, she would sometimes deliberately stretch her arm out the window in the manner of the Nazi salute.
The doorman, however, kept treating me affectionately because I would always give him gifts at Christmas: gloves, a shirt, a jacket, cigarettes, newspapers. I remember one Friday after coming back from the mosque I also gave him a box of Middle Eastern sweets as a gift. He was very happy with it.
Two days after the meeting about the trash can, one of the women stopped me on the stairs and said in a threatening tone, “This won’t do. You have to pay. We are in Spain, not in your country. There are laws here.”
What could I say to this? Would she even understand if I told her that the first law in the world had been decreed by an Iraqi, Hammurabi, in his stele? Her tone, her words, the twitching of her jaw, and the hairs coming out of her nose all provoked me.
“Fine,” I replied. “If you have a right over me in anything, make a formal complaint, and obtain your rights according to this law that you are talking about.”