Free Mothballs by Alia Mamadouh Page A

pleasure; sleeping between the palms of my hands. My grandmother’s silver spoon, the one she ate from on the day of her first wedding.
    Your father would impose his tyranny on you if he knew you were up here. Your aunt, his sister, would hit you, your grandmother would be silent; your mother would not come.
    Search and search well, and restore safety to all these things. Organize the converging paths and clear the way for seeking the pardon of all that remains before you.
    You were here, and the only window, with its dusty glass, was before you. The neighbours’ clothes were strung along the clothes-lines on their roof, cheap and dragged down by their wetness, touching the ground. The clothes were like people being hanged, and I was waiting for my father to guillotine me.
    My father was the same size as me. Our fear of one another had no mask. He could not bear the loss of me, and it was the same with me. We attacked each other’s walls, and did not confuse anything that passed between us. We plotted together, and publicly: the arena, that place of rancour and celebration, all this sameness. We spread out there and waited for one another.
    They said, “Huda was suckled by Satan.”
    My mother had nursed me only a few days. I drained her milk; I drank only the khishkhash . There you beat longer and harder. They stood, one of them accompanying me to that tent: my father, and I felt as secure as a highwayman.
    Night raised up its new inflection. This roof trained me to count the moths that entered my dreams. They entered the bodies and ate away at everything, as I remove one after the other: first of all my father.
    The pistol threatened everyone. He carried it and went up behind me. When his fear exploded, we went limp with fear.
    He did not pull the trigger. We encircled his footprint and went up to his waist. He was not heavy but he was tall, his shoulders waited for me and his face changed, he changed, smoothing all the paths for me so I might move toward him. Perspiration gathered between his fine, delicate nose and his pendent lips behind which his saliva was gathering. He sprayed it in my face and spat it out in the air between us, as Umm Suturi did in the baths. Then we touched, and at that moment hugged one another, and I pressed my face against his stomach. I clung to him with both arms, though I could not reach all the way around him. This time he was the one who kicked.
    I surrounded him, I held him, I clung tightly to him and turned my face up to his and looked above the first blow and he was carried away to me.
    He knew my braids perfectly. My hair ribbons did not defend me. The neighbours came up to the roof, growling. Mahmoud was silently weeping; Adil saw my grandmother not uttering a word, approaching, not resisting, but ready. If he overstepped, she would unleash her voice and her hand. The pistol was in his hand, and he was tapping it on your head. You did not cry. Your eyelids shone, your eyes were clear, and your eyelashes were dry. Curses were aimed at your back, and your head was lifted to the sky – the Baghdad sky seemed to belong to a bygone age. The world was like a round table on which your body was sprawled. Father started with the shoulders and descended to the restive arms, to the belly and buttocks. He brandished his pistol: “I swear to God, if you come here again, I’ll kill you!”
    At ten you confronted the first policeman in your life, your father. You summoned up all the sins of ten, the rashness and recklessness, the lies and tempting dreams, the yearning to get sunburned in order to shine more: get all this out of your ribcage and celebrate like the feast of Muharram. There I celebrated with the police and summoned to me the insects, black and red ants, and unknown things. The cavities of the locked boxes, I cut the strings of every fact in two, to see, and see, and see. There I opened up to him a fountain of the spirit and did not consent to kill him. If