In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha

Author:Karosh Taha
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: V&Q Books
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Xalat, not mate, asks me where I’m off to – she approaches me, not out of curiosity, but scared of what I might do. I tell her I’m going out.

You can’t just go outside.

Yes I can, I tell her – I’ll just open the door, I tell her, and walk out.

And where do you want to go?

Just out.

And then?

Then I’ll just walk around.

Are you going in search of your own mind?

I’m not in the mood to explain to her why I need to go outside now and walk, and I probably am searching for something, she’s right about that, even if she was being ironic.

She says, sit down, we women must restrain ourselves to restrain the men, only ne-sakini wander aimlessly. A short dress turned a woman into Shahira. I open the door.

Stay inside. Don’t disgrace us, says Xalat, don’t disgrace us, as long as you’re here. As long as you’re here. I leave the house, I walk down the street, and there are only kids and teenagers on the streets; some corners are occupied by pairs of women wearing house dresses, eating watermelon seeds, meeting for a ten-minute gossip, and they fall silent as I walk past them, and they’ll probably continue staring at me once I’ve passed. An older man with a red-and-white Peshmerga turban cleans the ground outside his front door with a garden hose. He’s also staring, and I cross the street so my sneakers don’t get wet.

I’m going to walk until I reach a town square where I can sit, maybe on a bench, and then people can stupidly stare at me from their flats, and Younes could sit next to me, and together we could say nothing. He’s probably with his father, and Younes really thought his father was going to take him in; his uncle Azad, that false messenger, lured him to Frankfurt. When Younes’ father sees him, he’ll only see Shahira, for Shahira washed all fatherly features from Younes’ face. Younes probably returned to his mother, he’s probably sitting on the bench by now and waiting, but not for me; he wishes he’d never given up waiting. I could enjoy my walk more if the people here weren’t gaping at me; if I wasn’t a spectacle for them. Shermin said everything about me makes them stare: my gait, my clothes, my body; I’m not a complete stranger to them, they recognise their daughter, their sister, their cousin in me; I look like a concept to them, I think. I ask a woman carrying heavy plastic bags where the sîq is and walk in the direction her finger’s pointing to. She looks at me as I walk away; I know, because I turn around to see if she’s watching me. She’s standing there with her packed bags, a strain on her face, staring at me – I said I look like a concept, didn’t I?

In the sîq, shopkeepers stand at the stores’ doorways, sometimes two of them, sometimes with prayer beads, sometimes with

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