Muhsin Al-Ramli - Dates on My Fingers - An Iraqi Novel

But I’m one of those people who prefer traveling by train. It makes me feel as though I possess the freedom for long reflection, which flows easily with the rhythm of the train’s motion as it darts through various landscapes. How pleasant it is to sit near the window, looking out at the movement of the ground and the trees, rivers, hills, villages, cities, animals, mountains, plains, fields, and clouds. A long parade of open land and spacious skies. During such times, my mind wanders freely: reviewing, remembering, analyzing, planning, dreaming. Unbroken silence and undisturbed reflection, alternating between the internal and the external. If I’m not contemplating the view, I’m pondering my inner life, and vice versa. While my eyes are focused on one, the mind’s eye excavates the other. Or one of them will bring me to the other by invisible channels of insight. Moreover, train travel has a romantic character, impressed on my mind, perhaps, from watching old movies filled with encounters, farewells, lovers waiting at train stations, or wandering journeys (like mine, now) for the sake of remembering and reflecting. The director usually chooses seats by the window for those characters too.

So it was that I didn’t read more than seven pages of the book I brought with me. I became distracted in recalling the previous night, my first night of work at Club Qashmars, where my father danced with a joy that I knew perfectly well was the result of my being there with him. My agreeing to what he wanted had a big part in it too. After performing his comic opening monologue, he undertook Rosa’s role of general oversight without neglecting his own role of circulating among the customers. Even though he always had a glass in his hand, he didn’t finish more than two beers throughout the night. He had also arranged that things wouldn’t go on as late as dawn, as happened on other weekends. By some clever adjustments, he managed to bring the night to an end by 3:00 a.m. Perhaps he was thinking about Fatima’s fatigue and my own after my first shift, and of my journey the following day. But he definitely didn’t notice Fatima’s and my delight at our growing intimacy and physical contact.

I kept recalling last night’s feeling that barriers between Fatima and me were collapsing. She was teaching me how to manage the accounts and take the customers’ orders. She also pointed out to me the different kinds of drinks and how to prepare and serve them. She was doing double duty, performing her own job and training me at the same time, and we were together behind the bar throughout the night’s enjoyable work. She moved like a bee, buzzing between neighboring flowers, never forgetting anything and always flashing her smile. During that time, due to the narrowness of the place, one of us would often bump into or brush past the other. We felt this contact to the core, and we would shiver — a delicious shudder — even as we feigned indifference and apologized routinely to each other at first. But after it kept on happening, we began to be content with a smile, even when we did it on purpose sometimes.

During all those collisions, I wasn’t able to stop my arms from repeatedly brushing against one of her breasts. Nor could I avoid rubbing my thigh against her butt when I passed behind her in order to take something from one of the waitresses in the lounge while Fatima was bent over to take out more appetizers and olive cans tucked away on the floor under the lowest shelves. My thigh brushing past her butt. It’s an image I’d replayed many times since last night, and now again very deliberately, like a movie scene in slow motion, frame by frame, as though immersing myself in a detailed examination. To be honest, I was just taking delight in it all. My thigh, as it rubbed against her right buttock, found it soft, firm, round, and succulent all at once, like a child’s balloon inflated by his mother. Then my thigh continued its advance, descending into the depression between her two buttocks like a train passing down through the valley between two hills. It sent a shiver passing from my thigh to my loins. My thigh continued its intimate caress onward and up the other buttock, feeling that it had spread them apart a little. I trembled as I imagined it.

The work wasn’t as hard as I had imagined it would be. On the contrary, I found that I liked it, especially in that it allowed constant interaction and working directly with other people, something that I had lacked and consequently suffered from in my former job. I was just a driver there, and my relationships were limited to my friends at work such as Antonio, Mario, and Mario’s girlfriend, Carmen, as well as the owner of the distribution agency. For that reason, isolation and loneliness were the defining characteristics of my life.

This work was entirely different because it provided interaction with different kinds of people. Indeed, it forced you to find strategies to communicate with them and understand them since the idea was to win them over as customers. It was something that had other advantages too, such as the shifts passing by quickly and being full of energy and life, never boring. You don’t feel any fatigue or boredom at the time, but afterward, when it’s over and you decide to take a rest, you’re exhausted, and your legs hurt from having stood for so long. But you do get to rest.

I wouldn’t say that what I felt for Fatima was an irresistible or unavoidable love. Instead, I might be able to describe it as the common situation where you follow the lead of the head, not the heart. There is another person who you believe suits you, the sort you want to be in a loving relationship with. You realize perfectly that you will truly come to love her. Then you start living together. After you get to know her better, you start to feel that she is right for the kind of relationship that might end up with your becoming partners in life, a married couple. So it’s not something that started with an irresistible first glance, nor with obscure feelings of attraction and seduction that overpower your self-control. Rather, it was a kind of persuasion and choice. Or even a kind of conscious and planned intentionality.

As far as I was concerned, this is what I felt toward Fatima. At least, this is what I thought, which is more correct than to say “feel.” The experience was entirely different from my bewildering passion for Aliya, who was my first love, and perhaps my one and only. To me, her small eyes were bewitching and impossible to resist, for in them I saw life’s pleasure and meaning. It’s true that Fatima had large eyes and long, black eyelashes of the sort that I know general, traditional taste considers to be fascinating. Without a doubt, they were enchanting eyes. But they didn’t do to me what Aliya’s eyes did.

As for Fatima, it was possible for me to communicate with her, and there was both affection and sexual attraction. She was a good person, suitable to me, and ready to enter into a loving relationship. I could love her. Her glances, her way of interacting with me, the tone of her voice when she talked to me, her reactions, her affection, and her constant smile all confirmed that she felt the same contentment and willingness that I did. Indeed, taken all together, it formed a kind of call that invites you to the next, familiar step.

There is a certain kind of feeling, which no doubt everyone has experienced or heard about. It is the feeling that the other person across from you shares the same satisfaction and the same readiness. There is an aspect of silent, mutual understanding, and the other person is waiting for the right moment to begin building the relationship.

The additional thought came to me that my father was aware of the matter, given things he had suggested or joked about with one of us while the other was nearby. Deep down, he may even have been wanting it and planning for this relationship to happen.