Naphtalene by Alia Mamdouh

Author:Alia Mamdouh [Mamdouh, Alia; Theroux, Peter; Cixous, Hélène; Haidar F. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558617124
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY

11

“Little dove of mine, where have you gone?” You have left.

The sounds of the dove mourning on the domes of the mosques and the distant, lofty treetops where it settled. Coming from far away, distorted, they reached my ears, and I repeated their song after it. We were alone; when we felt lonely we stood on the walls of the roofs, between our house and Mahmoud’s. He moved his beak to the rhythm of a nocturnal flute. He murmured when he realized he was still alone. I arched my back, pulled in my stomach, and moved my head and arms, then my fingers, and we shouted aloud together.

When he heard the sound, he began to flutter his short, ruffled wings as they beat against each other and in the sound of flapping grief was gently stirred. It moaned, and I choked back my tears.

My grandmother coughed as she turned on her mattress, then got up and walked to the roof. She looked at our beds and lifted her face to the sky. She murmured, and emitted a hacking, staccato cough. She turned to me but did not see me. After several breaths, she began coughing harder, then tossed away her cigarette and stepped on it.

We came up here, Adil and I, every long, hot summer month. We carried our thick mats up from the little room, aired the sheets and pillows, swept the floor, and sprinkled it with water. The dirt smoothed out, sending up a pale yellow dust that made us sneeze for a long time. We ran around and played, flexed our arms, bent our fingers back. We put out the old chairs and the broken bricks and stood on them to catch a glimpse inside the homes, the roofs of the houses, the dove nests, the bathrooms and their chimneys, and at the colors of the cars and trucks passing by at a distance.

Adil rode the iron beds, jumped up and down on this one and ran circles around another. He looked up at the sky. He jumped in front of me, the pillows in his hand, throwing them at my head one after another and shouting, “Look at the sky! It’s the same color as our grandmother’s face. I don’t like winter—water leaks through the roof. We can’t play in the street because of the mud, and the cold makes grandmother ill. Look at those birds—when they fly high, they might want us to wait for them. Huda, don’t you like birds?”

Grandmother was now standing over me. I looked into her eyes but she could not see me in the dark: I took her hand, and she took mine: “Huda, when did you get up?”

“Whenever you move I hear you. I haven’t slept like you.”

She sat on the edge of my bed and laid her hand on my head and face. I kissed her and hugged her hand: “May God give us all patience. My tears are dry—grief will blind me. Today we’ll be traveling. In a little while we’ll go to the cemetery and then we’ll go to Karbala.

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