Naphtalene. Alia MamdouhЧитать онлайн книгу.
Your aunt was the only one to frequent the public bath. The taste of the journey from the house to the bath, walking through the alleys, calling out to friends encountered by chance, scrutinizing new faces, and before this, leaving the house. We spent the whole day there. We boiled eggs and potatoes, fried kebabs, and grilled onions, then covered the food with flat, warm loaves of bread and packed it all into paper bags. The day Thursday arrived, I held my breath, my skin peeled there, and my blood ran clear. There I was devoured by the muscles of my aunts, the sisters of my father and mother: Najia, Farida, one-eyed La’iqa, and Umm Satturi, opening their layers of pores and putting me in the trap. I stumbled about amidst the tons of flesh and breasts, bellies and buttocks.
The bath in the Safina district was far from us, in the other neighborhood. We went through alleys and emerged in streets. We turned to the right and then to the left, and from the beginning of the street came the smells of women and children, mothers and grandmothers. Their cloaks fluttered, they were blooming and alert, their cheeks were flushed, and no matter where you looked they all busily chewed gum. Women came and went. Their heads were covered, their feet were blistered, and their nail polish was cracked. And you could scarcely hear their voices.
In front of the great door, painted a dark gray, the boys played marbles. Black wooden benches were set in the four corners. Warm breezes blew from inside, and a tall woman in her fifties, slender and ugly, was standing in front of a wooden partition. Her chest was bare, and her breasts were like two withered pears. A damp shawl was pulled around her middle. Her hair was long and hung in her face. She was shouting at everyone.
“You want someone to rub your back or not? Put your things down! How many of you are there? Five? Five costs thirty fils.”
Your aunt stripped off your clothes; she was in her underclothes. She looked to the right and the left. Your aunts came in, one after the other, and languidly undressed. Everyone looked at everyone else. You saw everything here seized by the fever of these features: eyes without kohl, cheeks without cerise, slack lips, and yet flawless bodies. Skulls and bones.
The broad meters of the bath became a source of play and activity.
The first place was not very warm. Children and women dried their hair and limbs. Iraqi style noisy commotion, the drone of aged women talking. Women massaged one another. When we went into the second room, the clouds of vapor were rising. Aunt Najia’s voice:
“Listen, Farida, I can’t walk inside. I can’t catch my breath—I can’t breathe. We’re better off staying here.” Aunt La’iqa answered: “Go on ahead. As soon as you’re there you feel numb. The steam will absorb the cold and damp.”
Umm Suturi walked ahead of everyone. She knew the way, and she knew everyone: Aunt Najia’s neighbor, Aunt La’iqa’s friend, the neighborhood seamstress who charged little. She sewed men’s dishdashas and pajamas, which they bought for circumcisions, funerals, and weddings when they would trill and click their fingErs in celebration.
Aunt Farida did not know what to decide. She was the youngest of all, eighteen years old. The women’s eyes scanned her body attentively.
“Where is Huda? Come here—even in this fire you’ll make friends!”
There you saw the whisper of skin soaked with steam, water, and perspiration. The smell of armpits and buttocks, of urine, mutters, and grunts escaping their lips, and shouts across the water barrel.
Everything passed before you: hands took you and cuddled you between their legs, calling the names of everyone you know, undoing your braids. You were showered and soaked, and bowls of hot water were poured over you, on your head, over your delicate frame. You wailed: from there you sent the first speech recorded with anger, you cursed, paused, sniffed, paused, and asked.
You looked with loathing at all these details. Women, all naked, as if they had just been raped or tortured. They laid old towels over the low wooden stools and squatted on them. The floor of the bath was as hot as a grill, and they cried out to one another and shrieked, and brawled with one another. There were no partitions in Iraqi baths, the borders were open, and the one language in which everyone conversed was physical touch. As if they had all been detained beyond the sky and today they had descended to the floor of the bath. There I made my first discoveries and won my first arguments, and shouted “No, no” among the long “Yeses” you heard from everyone else. Only there you were given the bloody title of Huda, a flaming fire.
I slipped away from them all, glided between their legs, and the cakes of soap pushed me far, and I landed in the lap of one woman, her face covered with soap lather. She shrieked, “God Almighty, God damn you and damn the bloody day you were born!”
I hid the cakes of soap in the big buckets, dunked the bowls into the hot water and poured it over their heads, burning their scalps and skin. I pissed in the great tank. I clamped some of the children between my legs; I kept this one away from that one and began to massage their heads with the pumice stone until they were bloody. Before the huge quantities of clean, hot water I observed my first innocence and united with it, drew on it with a pencil and confessed: as if I were saved from the flood today.
My resistance ripened on the oil fire and the wood logs, blazing and transforming into a creature I have just come to know; Huda, covered with sin, affliction, and ruin, was dragged like an animal to complete the first blessing; and after I am left for a short while between the waters; the offspring of Iraqi women reach the perfection of their beauty.
Umm Suturi emptied the bowls of hot water over my head, and soap went from hand to hand among my aunts. They rubbed and twisted my braids. I died among these women’s fingers; my eyes were blinded by the soap lather. Aunt Najia clutched my thigh as if she were holding a chicken leg. My aunt sighed and leaned over her knee, her breasts putting me into a stupor. The soap, steam, and all that noise; I was an egg thrown onto the ocean. I was moved from one lap to another and I see.
There, crying, wailing, and kicking were useless. After a round of washing, you were left alone and free. They stuck their tongues in your ear and sucked out the water left there. They braided your hair into ponytails, and you watched them all. The steam at the end got into your eyes, ears, and mouths.
Laugh and look well: the hair on the limbs is delicate, fine, coarse, long, short, plucked out. Then all these limbs descended at once and removed their underclothes. You gaped at that continent of femininity. The black bag sewn with big stitches in white thread first appeared on their backs. Every woman turned her back to her neighbor, and every one who let down more coils of dirt than the other proved her strength and youth.
You turned around with them when they stood. Their height blocked the walls, which were spattered with waterdrops. Sweat stimulated the appetite to drink water and eat fruit. The talk was of neighbors, children, and husbands. Rachel, the Jewess, whose second son was aborted at the hand of Rasmiya—the “needle lady,” the midwife. There were no great scandals in our street, nor any great abominations in the houses. The men intensified their glands in obedience to women, and the women waited for their husbands on the benches, on the iron beds, on the ground, on high roofs, half asleep, half dead, half . . . half.
Your aunt hurried behind you. She wanted you to stand in front of her:
“I swear to God I’ll kill you, may God take you and give me a break!”
Aunt Najia answered her: “Come here—I’ll finish washing you.”
I slowed down, and stood among them. All the vapors and odors made me dizzy. Aunt Najia, standing near me, released a fart. I raised my head toward her and laughed loudly. Suddenly she struck me on the face with the bag: “Laugh, you impudent thing. Just wait, I’ll teach you.”
She lifted me up as if I were as light as a punctured ball. I was squeezed by her arms; she began scrubbing my forearm, panting, “Why do you make me smack you? Aren’t you afraid of anyone? God Almighty. Don’t you get tired?” She slid down to my belly and thigh. “She’s weak, like her mother, like she’s eating on credit.”
She curled me up between her thighs. Her hair was loose, long, and wet, sparse and fine. She did