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

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.

Was this really my father? The people circling around him, boisterous with laughter, with smoke, and slapping each other’s thighs, were all young, with the exception of a woman in her forties. He embraced her from time to time, and she would kiss him. This woman was very talkative, just the opposite of him, and her laughter rose above everyone else’s. She told me her name was Rosa, and that she was from Barcelona, but she was here in Madrid because she loved my father.

Three days passed, and I wasn’t able to get him alone. I would invite him to a café or to come over to my place: “I live here, close by, on Fomento Street, about ten minutes away.”

To which he would reply, “Tomorrow.”

When I would ask the next day, he would say, “Tomorrow,” and he would apologize for the day before. “I’m very busy, Saleem, as you can see. But I promise you, tomorrow. Tomorrow, for sure.”

He didn’t call me “son,” and he didn’t say “God willing,” as would be normal for an Arab.

This kept on until I came one day, and before I could even open my mouth, he said, “Come on, I’ll give you a haircut.”

Without waiting for my response, he pulled a small stool from one of the corners into the middle of the dance floor, amid the debris of the previous night. I sat down. He called out, “Fatumi, bring me my clippers!”

The dark-skinned girl behind the bar stopped washing the glasses and took down a box from one of the shelves behind her. She brought it over to him, saying, “Here you are, sir.”

“Thanks,” he said, and before she moved away he gave her a gentle pat on the butt.

She returned to the glasses, and I asked, “Is she Arab?”

He said, “Fatima? Yes, Moroccan. A good girl.”

The rest of the staff, two Spanish girls, were going back and forth around us, reminding Rosa about the drinks, napkins, and cigarette packs that had run out. Noah was giving them directions with gestures and smiles, with the clippers in his hand over my head. His Barcelona girlfriend kept coming in and out, carrying account books. She was calling distribution companies for beer and other drinks, then asked the fruit and nut shop to send her twenty kilograms of olives, another twenty of dried fruit, and ten of sunflower seeds (“And quickly!”). She also called a cigarette distributor to supply her with a carton of each kind, a box of lighters, and a box of gum (“And quickly!”). They did indeed come quickly, and Rosa directed the workers to quit cleaning (“Right away!”) and to stock the deliveries instead. My father stopped cutting my hair to oversee their work.

When he saw that things were proceeding as he wanted, he asked me, “And how are you doing? What do you do for work?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I work as a driver for a newspaper distribution company. From six till eleven in the morning.”

He asked, “Do you have a woman?”

“No,” I replied.

He called something over to Rosa in a mixture of English and Arabic, and I caught the Arabic word for “tip,” baksheesh. I turned around to see her resisting with a scowl on her face and a wink, so he drew out her name to insist, “Ro-o-osa….”

She gave in and went to the cash register. We all heard the clink of the coins that she put in the palm of the man who had brought in the cases of beer. Then my father resumed cutting my hair and asked me, “What do you do with your free time?”

I said, “I read. Sometimes I write. I go to the movies.”

He asked, “Have you read Lorca and Alberti in Spanish?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t like their poetry very much. I like Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre better.”

“Unfortunately, I still don’t speak Spanish,” he said. “Only a few words. What do you write, poetry?”

“A few poems. But I’m better at short stories. I’ve published a few of them in the Iraqi opposition newspapers in London.”

He was curious and surprised: “The opposition?”

I thought I would make use of writing as a way to ask about Grandfather’s books, about our village, Mother, my siblings, my childhood friends, my cousin — no, my cousin Aliya is dead — and about Grandfather’s murder. So I said, “I’m thinking about writing a novel about our village, but I’m reluctant to expose its shame.”

He said, “Write whatever you want. Nothing will happen worse than has already happened. This world is all fucked up.”

It was the first time I had heard my father use a word like this. I realized then that many changes had come over his personality. There was a lot he was hiding, important experiences that he had undergone in the past ten years when I had been away from him. I wanted to ask him about how he had arrived here and about this Rosa. But he gave my head a playful smack and said, “There! All done. Take yourself off to the bathroom to wash your head.”

When I passed in front of the bar, Fatima smiled. Her two lips were like a split fig, as Herman Hesse says in Siddhartha . She had wide, black eyes, and the thickness of her lashes made them all the more enchanting as she wiped a glass with her apron. I smiled at her too, without forgetting my father’s hand on her butt just minutes before. In the bathroom, I was surprised by my reflection in the mirror with a shaved head. Had he used the number one attachment, maybe even zero? I looked like some of his friends and nighttime customers.

I rubbed my head like someone feeling a strange egg. I had never cut my hair like this except when I was in the army and had no choice in the matter. Sergeant Khazaal had seemed intoxicated by cutting our hair the moment we entered camp. In the hands of the barbers, our heads were an amusing toy that they turned violently in all directions, roughly and happily, as though intending to provoke us.

For a minute, I felt how strange I looked, but I resolved not to think about it for long. The thing that interested me was getting close to my father and having an open conversation with him. I put my head under the tap in the sink and scrubbed as the cold water poured down. I came back up looking for a piece of soap, but I didn’t find one. I brought my head back down under the stream of water telling myself that this was good enough to remove the rest of the hair clippings, and that I would take a shower when I got back to my apartment.

When I brought my head up again, I found Fatima standing beside me, smiling in the mirror. She had a towel in her hand, which she held out to me, saying, “Nice haircut!”

Her full lips in the middle of her light brown skin were like African drawings, and her wide eyes were accentuated by eyeliner and the black of her lashes.

“Thanks,” I said. I tried to look at her breasts since that was what most attracted me in women ever since the first time I fell in love, with my cousin Aliya, who used to smear dates on her breasts for me to suck off. But Fatima turned, going back to wash the glasses, and I saw her butt, together with the image of my father’s hand spanking it gently.