Back when I was a different person, when I was still called Safwa, I did leave him alone in Baghdad. This is true. Maybe it’s also true that if I’d stayed with him, Fahd would have lived longer than he did. But he still would’ve died. There was no way to save him, so I saved myself.
For that, our father never forgave me.
He never blamed me, not out loud. With words, he only ever blamed Dr. Yousef.
Dr. Yousef Ganni was a small, thin man with little hair who always smelled of rosewater. He had a crooked nose and a bad limp. His being small wasn’t my father’s fault and neither was the sweet perfume he used too much of. The limp and the broken nose, those Abu had given him.
They were best friends. People said they were like brothers. Sometimes, Dr. Yousef came to our house when Abu wasn’t there and didn’t tell Abu. My mother didn’t want Abu to know she was sick.
I was ten and still Safwa when I managed to fake a fever convincingly enough for Mama to let me stay home from school. I wasn’t enjoying my day off. School was boring but staying home and pretending to be ill was boring too. There was nothing to do, so I sat in front of our small television, watching my mom’s videotapes of the American show Full House. It was her obsession. She could quote passages of dialogue from some episodes word for word. She hummed the theme song all the time, sometimes without even realizing it, which irritated Abu.
Abu said it was all nonsense, that the kind, caring American characters of the show, full of love and empathy and compromise, existed only on screens. Abu had seen plenty of Americans during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when he’d fought on their side against the Russians.
“I know how they really are,” he told my mother.
Abu was a tall, powerful man who did that kind of thing—went off to fight wars he had no reason to fight. Of course, to him, Afghans were not other people. They were Muslims.
If it hadn’t been for his willingness to go to war, Abu wouldn’t have been Abu at all. At the very least, we would’ve called him something else. Abati or Abba or perhaps Baba. It was in Pakistan that he’d heard children call their fathers Abu. The name we called him by was a souvenir he’d brought back from battlefields he’d left behind.
“You can’t judge a people by how they act in war,” my mother had said.
“That’s the only way to judge a people,” Abu told her.
My mother hadn’t argued. That wasn’t her way. She was a wilting flower of a woman, and she should’ve married a kind, caring gardener. Instead, she had married the blazing sun.
Mama rarely gave voice to her opinions, and when she did, Abu would get upset. I don’t think he understood how his wife could disagree with him about anything. He must have known that she couldn’t help but have her own thoughts. He just didn’t see why he, or anyone else, should be burdened with them.
When my mother did speak, and was told she was wrong, she offered no defense. It kept peace in the house, and some peace, as those who remember fondly the days of Saddam will tell you, is better than war.
I found it hard to believe that Dr. Yousef and my father had ever fought over Mama, and so viciously that Abu left his rival with a hip broken in three places. Maybe she’d been beautiful once. All hint of that beauty was gone though. All that was left was a lean face, hungry for what I do not know, and dull dark eyes that had no spark I could see.
It would’ve been nice to have a picture of her from when she was young, to see what she had looked like, to get an idea of what she had been, but my father had burned all our family photographs after he came home from Afghanistan. He’d been taught there that pictures were not permitted in Islam.
Anyway, I was watching Full House when the doorbell rang. As I got up to see who it was, I reached for the niqab Abu made me wear. I was young enough that no one thought I needed it, but Abu insisted that habit was character, and made me put it on whenever I stepped outside.
I decided it wasn’t necessary. The visitor was probably one of the women in the neighborhood, coming to chat with my mother or to ask to borrow some sugar or salt.
I walked out into the sharp sunlight and crossed a small courtyard to our iron gate. “Who is it?”
There was a moment of silence, as if the visitor hasn’t been expecting an answer. Then a man cleared his throat, and a familiar voice said, “It is I. Let me in, Safwa.”
“Dr. Yousef?” I asked, undoing a heavy, lightly rusted bolt. It screeched in protest at being disturbed. “Is something wrong?”
“I am sure many things are wrong, dear child. They always are, in this wonderful and terrible world.”
I let out a sigh, which probably made him think I agreed with him. The truth was that I just hated the flowery way he spoke.
“Aren’t you growing up to be a lovely creature? I’ve never understood why you Muslims hide what little beauty there is in the world.”
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t a “creature” but instead I said, “How do nuns dress again?”
He chuckled at that and patted my cheek with one of his delicate, soft hands. “Clever too. Where do you get that from, I wonder.”
I shrugged.
“Maybe the same place you get your eyes?”
I shrugged again. No one else in my family had my pale green eyes. In fact, no one I knew had eyes like mine . . . well, except for Dr. Yousef, of course, but his eyes were different than mine were. They were calm and old, the eyes of a man who had learned to accept his place in the world.
“Did you need something?”
“Your mother called me. She said she wasn’t feeling well.”
I frowned. My mother was always unwell, often in bed or complaining of pain in her back. “Is it worse than usual? She will be better soon?”
“We shall see, my dear. I must examine the patient before I can give you a diagnosis, much less a prognosis. I do not believe that is at all unreasonable.”
“Sorry, Dr. Yousef.”
“Not at all, I am sure,” he said, with a deep bow of his head.
“It’s just that she didn’t seem all that sick this morning.”
“The weather can change quickly, Safwa.”
I wanted to tell him that wasn’t really true, not in Baghdad, where the heat could seem unending, but I knew what a metaphor was, even if it was a bad one. “I’ll go tell—”
“No need. She is expecting me, and I know perfectly well where her bedroom is.”
—
About an hour after Dr. Yousef left without saying goodbye, my mother called me to her room. It was dark, with thick, maroon curtains drawn against the light, but even so my mother was lying in bed with a pillow over her head. I felt my heart beat a little faster as I walked in. Seeing her lying there, unable to bear even a little bit of the sun, worried me. Then I reminded myself that she’d been fine—well, almost like herself anyway—in the morning. It was probably just a bad headache.