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

I dried my head and looked in the mirror. “Not too bad,” I said to myself, and I went out.

My father was in the corner of the stage organizing the microphone cords. He said, “Do you want me to dye it blond for you?”

I heard him perfectly well, but I still asked, “What?”

He repeated, “I could dye it for you — yellow, for instance.”

“No,” I said, “This is enough. It’s great like this.” Then I added, “I’m going to take off. Do you want to come with me?”

He took the broom from the corner and said, “No, I’m busy now. Leave it for another time. Tomorrow, for example.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m going then. Thanks for the haircut.” I went over to the bar and gave Fatima the towel, looking at her eyes, at her …. I still wasn’t able to see her breasts because she was wiping a glass with her apron.

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. I couldn’t separate from her the image of my father spanking her butt. I would see her; then I would see it.

At the stairs going up to the exit, Rosa was still giving the girls instructions about places to clean or where to put the deliveries. I said goodbye to them, and before I got too far from the door, Rosa called out to me, “Come back in the evening! It’s going to be a beautiful party!”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll see. See you later.”

I walked through the alleys leading to Plaza de Santo Domingo, planning to cross it on my way home. Meanwhile, my father had taken hold of my brain with his “this world is all fucked up” and his hand spanking Fatima’s butt. How could he do that, he being the one that dragged us into battle against the government merely because one of them had touched the butt of my sister Istabraq? I kept trying to pull together what I remembered of him in order to understand these changes. Certainly he was my father: the voice, the tall body with solid muscles, the lame foot, the bullet keychain, and ….

I had to put my thoughts in order, so I wandered over to a coffee shop at the end of the square. Sitting in front of the bartender and leaning on the bar, I ordered café con leche and a glass of water. I took out a cigarette and smoked it, inhaling with long, slow drags. In the mirror across from me, I saw my face framed between two bottles. I rubbed my head, but I didn’t focus on my new haircut too much since the thing that occupied my attention was my father.

My new father. I tried to find an explanation for what had happened, to prepare myself to accept the breadth of his new reality. He was my father, no question. I remembered my entire relationship with him well. I knew his former personality, which I had left in our village in Iraq ten years ago. He was my father, even though he now seemed to be a completely different person. Take it easy, Saleem! Yes, just take it easy. I tried to put the picture in order.

Like the rest of my siblings, I never called him “Father” until I was ten, when I was able to make the distinction. Before then, we would call him by his first name, “Noah,” and we would call Grandfather “Father.” That was because Grandfather was the one who was always home with us.

My father, on the other hand, was usually away, working in the oil companies in Kirkuk. He only came to us on weekends, carrying his bag filled with gifts, foreign books, and dirty clothes. Whenever Mother wanted to encourage us to work harder, she would say, “Look at your father. He was a young man of your age when he began working in Kirkuk. I remember that day, exactly one month and two days after our wedding. More than twenty years ago.”

He had begun as a night watchman, then became a metal worker, and then a mechanic. He did so well in his language classes that they appointed him as a supervisor for the workers, and as a translator and intermediary between the German managers and the Iraqi laborers.

It was never important for Noah to make us understand his relationship to us. He had entrusted our upbringing to Grandfather, just as he kept obeying and entrusting his own personality to him until Grandfather’s death (or until he killed him!). Likewise, he didn’t introduce me as his son here in his club. He said “Saleem” instead. Just “Saleem.” He might have filled in Rosa about that afterward, seeing as she started treating me with a special, sometimes even excessive, affection.

My father — or Noah — was massively built. He had powerful muscles but a calm demeanor. Grandfather, on the other hand, was a skinny old man who supported himself with a magnificent bamboo cane, the top of which was the carved head of an eagle with blue beads for eyes. It had been given to him by a Pakistani friend, whom he had met on a pilgrimage to Mecca as they circled around the Ka’aba. But Grandfather only used this cane of his after scratching away the features of the eagle’s head, turning it into simply a ball or an egg. Since he wasn’t able to pull out the two beads of its eyes, he had been content to deface them with the tip of the knife from a pair of fingernail clippers.

“No!” we protested. “Why, Grandfather?”

He said, “These are idols, and whoever fashions the image of a living creature will be asked by God in the hereafter to animate it with life. And given that he will be unable to do so — because that is one of the special powers of God alone — he will then receive his punishment.”

Mother said that Grandfather had been massive and powerful like my father. In this way she reassured herself that my father’s potbelly would shrink and he would become slender again over time. She didn’t realize that Grandfather was so thin because he had come down with diabetes on account of his craze for devouring sweets and dates. Our house was never without a bag of dates propped up in one of the corners and a box of bride’s fingers desserts tucked between his books.

The death of my grandmother, his third wife, had also had an effect on him. He had begun to wither and dry up, little by little, like the udder of a sick cow, until he became very skinny. But the power of his spirit and his voice had not been affected. Perhaps, if anything, they had increased and compensated for the loss of his bodily strength. That strength was transformed into the commands he imposed on others with such stern conviction that they would carry out whatever he wanted.

His cane, when he swung it, was no less dreadful than himself. We would hear the air whistle around it, threatening violence every time he grew angry or gave an order. We used to fear both him and it, even though we never saw him hit anyone. It might be that our imaginations magnified his dreadfulness beyond what it would have been had we actually experienced his blows.

What increased our conception of his violent anger, besides the recollection of him biting the dog’s neck when he was small, was the story of him cutting off the finger of his first wife when they quarreled one month after their marriage. She had raised her voice against him and warned that she would complain to her brother Hamad, pointing her finger at him in a threatening gesture. Swelling up in pride, Mutlaq flew into a burning rage. He grabbed her index finger just above the first knuckle and picked up a knife that was beside him on the edge of the stove. He chopped the finger off at the knuckle and shoved the severed fingertip into her pocket. It was the size of a small stone or a date, its blood draining out.

Grandfather set her on her donkey, which she had brought as a gift from her family on the occasion of their wedding, and drove her out of the village. All the while, she held her amputated finger, shrieking and looking at both it and Grandfather, unable to believe what she saw. He pointed her in the direction of her village and said, “Give your finger to your brother Hamad. Tell him, ‘This is my finger, which I used to threaten Mullah Mutlaq in your name.’ You are hereby divorced irrevocably!”