AGRI ISMAÏL Hyper
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To Amanda
When Anacharsis was asked what the Greeks used money for, he replied: ‘for reckoning’.
(Athenaeus)
a salesman’s hand stretched out towards the prospective buyer, cupped into a universal signifier. His fingers flexed slightly towards the palm, in case Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, the potential future owner of the AM /FM radio on display, had trouble understanding: money was to be exchanged.
Rafiq suspected that the anxiety su using the market had made any pickpockets unlikely to be scoping out potential shoppers. Still, he gave a quick glance around him before he pulled out his money from the inner pocket of his blazer. In his hand, it felt as though the stack he’d slid into his blazer that morning had somehow become smaller.
As Rafiq Hardi Kermanj’s life in exile had begun, so had the gradual transformation of his belongings from material objects – houses, furniture, cars – into immaterial wealth: dinars, dollars, toman. By the time he, his wife Xezal and his children illegally crossed the Iran–Iraq border at night, just about everything that they had once possessed had been replaced by a stack of crumpled bills, folded and taped to Xezal’s chest under the pouch that contained the items of jewellery that she had refused to part with. Gradually, as a new life was purchased for them in Tehran, the bills disappeared, in ever smaller increments. The first, largest stack had been given in Iraqi dinars to the smuggler who took them from the outskirts of their native city of Slemani across the mountains into the Kermanshah region where a car was waiting to drive them into Tehran. The second consisted of US dollars that had served as a deposit on a furnished two-bedroom house in the Doulat neighbourhood. Then there had been a car to buy, bribes to pay, a school uniform and supplies to purchase as Mohammed, the oldest child, began his education. The bills that he used to purchase the wood-panelled AM /FM radio in the Grand Bazaar were the last of that original stack.
Rafiq, having come to terms with the fact that he needed to reconsider his relationship with money, bartered with the salesman for longer than was his custom. Two bills returned into Rafiq’s hand upon his pointing out that the wood panelling on the side of the radio was scratched and that the knob felt rather flimsy. Neither assurance of German manufacture nor of superior sound quality sufficed to get the bills back into the salesman’s palm. It wasn’t until a hidden compartment in the radio’s back, perfect for stowing contraband, was demonstrated and explained with a conspiratorial whisper that Rafiq relented.
‘Something is happening, my friend,’ the salesman said, gesturing to the shop in front of them, its gra tied metal door still rolled down. ‘You will need a good hiding place.’
Rafiq handed over the bills and was left with nothing. New money would now have to be made.
The deal done, the money exchanged, the salesman began rapidly wrapping a rope around the radio for Rafiq to be able to carry it to his car. While the man performed his well-drilled ribbon dance, Rafiq lit a cigarette and looked out over the people milling around, buying soaps and sponges, sweets and spices, carrying their purchases in identical flimsy black plastic bags, bathed in the multicolour glow of the light coming through the bazaar’s stained-glass windows. Though Rafiq knew the shopkeepers in the bazaar were prone to exaggeration and fearmongering – for years they had claimed that the Shah’s desired technocracy would mean the end of traditional trade – he did sense that the people around him seemed particularly anxious that day.
In fact, the entire city of Tehran was in thrall to the notion that something was on the verge of happening, a rumour that had begun spreading earlier that day when several stalls at the bazaar were boarded up. A closed stall was always cause for suspicion: the owner’s entire family history would be reviewed in order to ascertain whether or not they could know something that most others wouldn’t. The youngest chewing-gum seller would adopt the conspiratorial tones of a seasoned Kremlinologist, seeing signs and premonitions in every event. The market was where you could sense a coming crisis before
it even happened, where news was amplified, distorted and downright invented well before it ever made it into a newspaper. And so, when it was deduced that the four boarded-up stalls belonged to the same family, and that this family had an in-law who was a member of the Imperial Army, agitated rumours quickly began spreading across the city.
There had been a period of relative calm in Tehran, Rafiq felt, and so it was perhaps time for an attempted coup, for a demonstration, for a new crippling edict. It had been over a decade since Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini had objected to the new modernised dress that the Shah had ordered, an order that had led soldiers to stand outside bathing houses tearing o women’s headscarves, but the protests had lasted only a few days, after which Khomeini had been imprisoned then exiled, relegated to sending cryptic apocalyptic missives from a distance as though he were the returning Twelfth Imam himself. The Iranian Youth Movement in Europe were still chanting May ’68 slogans ten years on, but they were based in London and Paris and might as well have been on the moon for all the influence they had over Iranian society.
The fact remained, however: there were four closed stalls.
The shopkeeper announced that the radio was ready and Rafiq flicked his half-smoked cigarette towards the open sewer that ran through the bazaar corridor, jettisoning tiny explosions of ash as the bright orange of its tip followed its ballistic trajectory. Rafiq thanked the shopkeeper and hurried out of the bazaar’s maze-like structure to find his car.
While Rafiq was spending the remainder of the money he had been able to bring with him to Iran, his wife Xezal was leafing through dated magazines on her second-hand couch, the previous owner’s cigarette burns covered by a green fabric of hers that was now in turn covered in the plethora of stains children produce. She didn’t need to know the language to understand what the glossy photos of singers like Googoosh or Mahasti draped in jewels were intended to convey, daydreaming about times when she herself would not have looked out of place in these pages.
At the time the radio was purchased, in 1978, little separated Rafiq and his family from the rest of Tehran’s many Kurdish Marxist refugees, who enjoyed the freedom of being allowed to criticise the Iraqi government, as long as they avoided including in their criticism any mention of the Shah. Only ten years prior, however, before the 1968 coup that had brought the Baathists back into power, they had been one of the most influential Kurdish families in the whole of Iraq. In the years following the coup Rafiq threw away (Xezal’s words) a lucrative career in medicine to be able to participate in that most honourable of endeavours (Rafiq’s words): leading the Communist Party across the contentious political minefield that was the issue of Kurdish independence. To Xezal’s grand and vocal consternation, the only discernible accomplishment of the political party he founded was that all the drivers and servants were gradually given notice until it was deemed that the Baghdad house was too big for Rafiq and Xezal to manage on their own, which precipitated a move to a much smaller house in Slemani.
Xezal had long grown accustomed to her position in society and enjoyed the way her neighbours would ooh and aah over a new garment her dressmaker had sewn, a new bracelet that the goldsmith had made especially for her. Her silks were uniformly from the great French houses (though these were a few seasons old by the time they settled in Slemani), and her perfume – an extravagant blend of ylangylang, rose and jasmine – was purchased from Harrods in London and flown in first semi-annually, then annually, then not at all.
After they moved back from Baghdad, she found herself no longer spending nights at dinners aside brilliant men and their dazzling wives, but bringing bowls filled with pistachios to her husband, who would be sitting on the floor in a circle with a handful of moustachioed men, smoking cigarettes, drinking counterfeit whisky, and discussing the various exploits of Lenin and Marx. At night, at least one of the children would wake up from the sound of a drunk man reading aloud from Marx’s Capital as though it were juvenile love poetry, and if Xezal were to voice a complaint Rafiq would just smile, his eyes trembling with liquor, and tell her that it was important for the children to hear this too. So Xezal would bring either of
her toddlers, the youngest having yet to speak her first word, to sit late into the night listening to Rafiq and his friends recite the e ect of circulation time on the magnitude of capital advanced.
One day, to Xezal, completely without warning, her husband announced that he was rejecting his birth name, tied as it was to the Islamic conquering and subjugation of the Kurdish people, and that he was changing it from Mohammed to Rafiq (meaning comrade ), a name that better suited his newfound beliefs. Xezal knew then that this was not just some brief folly of his that she was to indulge as a loving and supporting wife. Nonetheless, she remained committed to the man who had shown her, a mere girl with neither wealth nor family name to speak of, the world and everything in it. And she did remain immensely proud of him when she saw how much the people of Slemani respected the work that he was doing. There wasn’t a house that wouldn’t be honoured to welcome them for dinner, and the pamphlets that Rafiq would print and distribute illegally became much sought-after totems of a revolution to come. So when she returned from the bazaar one day and found a printing press in what was little Mohammed’s room, she accepted it, just as she accepted Rafiq’s bizarre insistence on naming the third child Laika after that Soviet dog who was sent to space. Xezal, who had been raised from an early age to aspire to be a good wife, accepted all of this. She knew that her husband was a brilliant man, and that brilliant men were known to do stupid things.
It wasn’t until four months into their exile in Iran that she found that she did, in fact, have a limit. As she put the children in the back seat of their Paykan, she heard her husband – fighting the ignition of the car to get it to start, as he did every morning – casually mention that Xezal might have to sell some of her remaining jewellery. Rafiq Hardi Kermanj, the man who had once showered her with gifts so lavish that she was the envy of Baghdad’s entire Mansour district, now had the audacity to tell her to pawn it o . She shut the door to the back seat, went around the car to get in the passenger seat and steeled herself for the part that she realised she now would have to play. Any good wife knows that sometimes their husband needs to be guided back in line, so she ran through her options: a migraine that
would render her bedridden for days, a cascade of tears, a barrage of threats. As the car’s engine finally sputtered into a purr and her safety belt clicked into place, she drew a deep breath. Guilt. Guilt would do.
‘Rafiq. Our homes have been taken away, all of our belongings you have sold, you take the food from our mouths, from the children’s mouths, to give to the people. And this we do not complain about, this we have accepted. But what have they ever done for us, the people? You tell me that, Rafiq. No, really: tell me. This ring,’ Xezal pointed her middle finger in his direction, ‘this ring was given to me by Faisal himself. You want me to sell a king’s ring to feed our children, I will do it, I will do it right this minute.’ She put the thumb and index of her other hand around the band, as if to demonstrate her willingness to rid herself of the ring. ‘But you don’t want to do that. You want me to sell my only remaining belongings so that you can print more pamphlets. It’s not enough that these damned machines take up half our house, stain our hands and clothes with their ink, now they need to be fed our possessions? Mohammed Hardi Kermanj, by God, this I simply will not do.’
The pouch that she had strapped to her chest as they crossed the border did indeed contain one ring given to her by Faisal II during the years of respite when Kurds and Arabs ever so briefly found an uneasy, fragile peace. The other bracelets, rings and necklaces, however, were often of far more humble origin, yet in future iterations of this quarrel – and there would be many in the years to come – it would be this one ring that she used as the core of her argumentation, as though suggesting to sell the flimsiest gold bangle found at a disreputable souq was tantamount to selling o Iraq’s crown jewels.
Rafiq, incensed by his wife’s use of his rejected name, swerved to the kerb and pulled the handbrake to a chorus of honking cars.
‘These jewels of yours, Xezal, they’re mere baubles, it pains my heart to see you so easily duped by shiny commodities.’ He used a more heightened register of Kurdish as he spoke to her, not so subtly indicating that whatever Xezal enjoyed pretending to be, she was still the plain-spoken peasant girl who had been lucky enough to marry him. ‘These items, they have no use-value to us. Capital that is not being used is dead capital. You hear this, children? Repeat after me:
capital that is not being used is dead capital. Only exchange provides commodities with utility. We will not be hoarders of commodities, Xezal, I will not allow it. As Marx said: “Value does not have its description branded on its forehead, rather it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyph.” Your jewellery is the fruit of the labour of men slaving away in mines all over the world, the fruit which we have decided to accord an arbitrary value to. So: let us use the value! Let us use the gains against capitalism, against the feudal Arabists and western imperialists of this region who are striving every day to dispossess your children of their freedom.’
(Rafiq was not above invoking the plight of his children for the sake of winning an argument either.)
Now, as she went through the beats of this argument in her mind, riling herself up at her husband’s words once more, Xezal noticed Mohammed was standing next to her.
‘Story time?’ he asked, reminding her of their daily ritual. She banished her husband from her mind, slapped her magazine shut, and called the other children to join her.
She could no longer remember if it had originally been her idea or her children’s, but for the past few months she had found herself gathering them around her like dolls at playtime in order to imagine their glorious destinies. It was a way to pass the time, a way to make sense of the lives they found themselves living, to connect the strands of the chaotic events that had brought them there, and weave those strands into a cohesive narrative of their lives.
‘You, Hama,’ she said, licking her thumb, rubbing some imaginary dirt o Mohammed’s cheek, ‘you will be a famous, successful doctor, like your father was. Maybe you will be a beauty specialist and work with all of the world’s celebrities. I can tell by your hands, my dear, you have such good hands. You will go to the best universities and do so well; you will come first in the whole country. Maybe you will discover the cure to some disease . . . or a new medicine. You will have a beautiful, glamorous wife . . . but don’t you go forgetting your old mother then! No, you’ll be a good son, I know you will. I will intervene on behalf of our family to talk to the girl’s parents – your father will be useless at that, let me tell you. Yes, I’ll
see to it so that even if we don’t have two fils to rub together, they will know that our family’s name echoes through the annals of Kurdish history.’
She then turned to Siver, who sat anxiously waiting her turn.
‘Siver, you will marry a rich, handsome man. Someone who is good to you, the kind of man who showers you with gifts. And you will love him and provide him with great joy. You’re going to be so, so beautiful, covered in jewels.’
Every so often the call to prayer would be heard from the nearby mosque. A loud, distorted wail that had initially led the children – who had not heard these sounds in their old neighbourhood in Slemani – scurrying under the kitchen table believing it was a siren announcing an upcoming airstrike. The sound would always momentarily stop Xezal from conjuring the fate of her children, her lips moving as she retraced the future she had described before the interruption.
‘Ah yes, jewels! And your children – you will have two children, a boy and a girl – will be beautiful, just like you, my dear.’ She smiled, patting her daughter on the head.
The only one she worried about, though she would never say this aloud, was Laika, little Laika with his ridiculous name insisted upon by his father, with his inability to string together the most meagre syllables hinting at ‘mother’ or ‘father’, even though he was almost three years old. Of course – for her own sake as much as for the child – she would concoct a glorious destiny for him as well, even though she felt he would be the most di cult to mould into happiness, to steer onto a productive path. Her e orts, however, would ultimately bring her joy, she knew, assisting him in his struggles, helping him navigate the path to a successful marriage.
Oh yes, her three children would be successful, and happy, and they would make their parents proud.
Soon, the demonstrations did indeed start, amplified echoes of the recent protests in Qom and Tabriz, which led Rafiq to pace the living room and proclaim ecstatically that this was it, this was the end of the Shah, that imperialist puppet of the West. The students were in the
street, they were demanding their rights, a just socialist society; this would be the first communist enclave in the Middle East, freedom would spread, ring across the continent, remove the shackles of a people oppressed for far too long. ‘Come, bring that book,’ Rafiq said to Mohammed, who diligently carried a heavy tome from his father’s stacked shelves. ‘Children, this, this contains all of human history, here, in these pages. Today, these empty pages at the back are being filled. Remember today, children: a new chapter begins.’
Later, when their house went up in flames and they had to leave their second country in a decade before being granted asylum in Europe, they had to leave most of the books, which burned with the house. In the truck that took them across the border, Rafiq asked his children if they’d brought the concise encyclopaedia, then berated them for choosing to bring their toys and stu ed animals instead. ‘All of human history,’ he muttered as he counted the cash that his family was now left with. ‘All of human history.’ Until he died, poor and forgotten in a London suburb, he would keep referring to this one book. Even as they had to sell King Faisal II ’s ring to pay the rent, as the children grew up traumatised and apprehensive, all that Rafiq ever would admit to regretting was having left the encyclopaedia behind.
But all of that was yet to come. When the protests began in 1978, he still had the book in his hands and looked at its final pages with a fervour that the children would never forget. ‘A whole new chapter,’ he said to himself, then, noticing his audience: ‘Can you hear that?’ he said to his three children sitting on the floor observing him the way they would a monkey at a zoo. ‘That is the sound of freedom marching this way. Listen!’
The children tried to hear the sound of freedom, but all they could hear was the corner grocer yelling out the low, low price of cantaloupes.
one
Testament (2010–2011)
The dark blue passport with its golden eagle and its Koranic calligraphy on the cover opened to show the laminated photograph of a child awkwardly distorted, looking more computer-generated than human.
Baghdad photographers, keen to show o their image-editing skills, would Photoshop the pictures of anyone who asked for a passport photo: blemishes and birthmarks would be erased, cheeks reddened, eyes enlarged. A passport photograph looked less like the person it was meant to help identify and more like the photographer’s ideal version of said person. In the case of Siver Hama Hardi’s daughter Zara, this ideal seemed to be a slightly e eminate potato.
The immigration o cer at Dubai International Airport squinted, trying to match the smooth artifice of the photograph with the flesh before him. Iraqi passports had yet to incorporate any advanced biometrics, and so, without any fingerprints, facial-recognition systems or iris scans digitised and embedded in the passport cover, he only had the photograph to go on. A photograph that had authority over the body: only the body could be deemed to be incorrect, never the photo.
‘Lift.’
Siver, lost in thought, didn’t understand what was being asked of her.
‘The girl, lift, I need to see.’
‘Oh.’
She picked her daughter up, a sharp pain running through her right bicep as it supported the child’s weight.
‘Zara, honey, look at the nice man,’ Siver said, trying to shake the girl out of whatever funk of slumber or shyness had befallen her.
‘I’m sleepy!’
‘Honey, if you can just be awake for a little while longer, I promise I’ll buy you something, OK ?’
The child obeyed.
After a slight head-tilt and a glance back down at the laminated potato, the immigration o cer finally seemed satisfied. He closed the child’s blue passport and opened Siver’s red one, both colours muted on the gleaming laminate counter.
‘Take o your sunglasses.’
She did as she was told, removing the oversized glasses she had kept on for the duration of her flight. He looked at the passport photo, taken nine years ago, when Siver was barely twenty-eight, then up at her, then back at the photo. Yes. She had gotten old.
‘Siver?’
‘That’s me.’
‘How long you stay in Dubai?’
‘Oh, a month. We’re on holiday,’ she lied.
The immigration o cer, dressed in an immaculate white thawb, leafed through the passport, visibly bored, and yet he kept flipping the pages back and forth, to find either a blank page or an incriminating stamp. He looked at Siver once more, scanning her face, her body.
Siver’s designer jacket – a present, but one she had chosen for herself – was beaded in Romania after the shell had been sewn up in Bhutan, the fashion house whose name was on the jacket’s tag taking advantage of the changing regime to set up factories in a country where cheap labour was suddenly both plentiful and legal. The finishing touches to the jacket were added in a traditional atelier in the Yvelines outside of Paris, where the leather piping to the sleeves and collar were applied and the buttons were fastened. This could, of course, have been done in Romania as well, the skills requiring no real expertise, but having it done in the Yvelines allowed the fashion house to put the coveted ‘Made in France’ label on the garment. The jacket looked expensive. It was made to look expensive.
‘Why she not have same passport as you?’
Siver started to explain, her husband was Iraqi and—
‘You must learn Arabic.’
Siver pursed her lips as the man stamped their passports. ‘Go,’ the passport controller said, waving them away. -
On the flight from Baghdad to Dubai, she had spent most of the journey re-enacting the day when Karim told her that he intended to marry a second wife. She was surprised at how moments seemed preserved in an almost hyperreal state, while other moments were blank, as though the events of that day were comprised of short scenes. She remembered the light just as it entered through the kitchen windows – the dull, heavy light of late spring – illuminating in its path swirls of dust, dancing in the air, cutting across the kitchen until it sharpened into a corner where Siver had noted, not for the first time, a procession of ants, hugging close to the wall of her Baghdad home, its paint cracked with heat and humidity. She remembered thinking she should do something about the ant problem. Then nothing, nothing until Karim was home from work and dinner was already on the table. She remembered the shirt he was wearing, a light blue poplin plastered to his belly, his upper back, his arms, spots that seemed translucent from sweat. She remembered the moment he asked her what she thought of him getting a second wife, how he was scrolling through his phone when he said it, either because he couldn’t look her in the eyes or because it was to him such an uncontroversial question that he may just as well read the news while asking it.
She remembered laughing, thinking that he was joking, and then, as he looked up, realising that he wasn’t. ‘Nothing will change between us, habibti,’ he told her, getting up from his seat to kiss her forehead. ‘I just think that it would be good to have someone else, yahni, to help out with the house? What do you think?’
Siver blinked. ‘You’re describing the need for a maid. We already have one of those.’
Karim, whose eyes had been soft and loving the way they always were when he asked for something, sti ened, his eyes now flat and impenetrable. ‘No, I mean a wife. It is very normal, you know.’
She did not know.
She did not remember the rest of what the smashed plates testified
must have been a memorable argument. She remembered no violent gestures, though bruises on both of their bodies attested to that e ect, and she did not remember her daughter crying as they argued. She could only see herself in the bathroom, already in her nightgown, rubbing anti-ageing cream on her cheeks with ferocity, as though she were applying warpaint. ‘You’re being so unreasonable,’ she remembered him saying from the bedroom as he got into bed.
She did not remember sleeping next to him.
She did not recall whether she actually entertained the notion of sharing her husband with another woman, but her leaving was not immediate. She would find herself mulling over the memory of when her mother had, a decade or so ago, told her that Rafiq had been unfaithful. ‘Many, many times. It brings me shame to say this. Even when we went to Paris, remember when he went out all night? Someone had left him a phone number. I did not say anything, of course.’ Then, after a beat, ‘I stayed for you, you know.’ At the time, the revelation had only made her irritated: her mother blaming her own cowardice on her children while sullying the memory of their trip to Paris, the one birthday present she cherished. But then, once Siver was faced with a similar dilemma herself, she wavered as well. Men were men, after all. She should not be so naive as to expect anything from them.
She did get a passport issued for her daughter and put her a airs in order so that she could keep her options open. But she did not leave, not at first.
But then. She went to his o ce one day to drop o a tablet he had left at home which contained a presentation that he needed, and saw the woman he had in mind. The moment she was pointed out to Siver by a conspiratorial employee, she knew this was not something that she was willing to accept.
She was a child; what could she be, eighteen, nineteen? Definitely younger than Siver was when she had met Karim. ‘She has nobody,’ Karim told her that night or whatever night Siver brought the subject up. He was trying to appeal to her sense of empathy by telling her that the girl had recently lost her father. ‘Her brothers were all martyred by Saddam. She has nobody.’ ‘Oh, I see, so you want to
fuck her for her own good, is that it?’ Her use of profanity incensed Karim, who, she knew, found such language unbecoming. ‘I cannot talk to you when you’re like this.’
She remembered the moment she looked at her husband and saw a stranger. Though she imagined that the end of her eight-year marriage would feel more substantial, it only took a moment for a man she had loved deeply ever since they met at university to turn into someone who had the same traits as someone she used to know. She remembered flipping open her wallet and counting the hundreddollar bills inside, checking various bank accounts, making sure she had enough. She remembered packing her bags, packing her daughter’s bag, him shouting, ‘If you leave, I will not be supporting you, you know that?’ as she tried to fit a life into suitcases.
She did not remember leaving.
The moment she wheeled her wobbly luggage cart out of the perfectly air-conditioned terminal to where the taxis had been waiting for hours, Siver was overcome by the city’s extreme humidity. She could almost feel her pores opening, sweat being conjured all over her body, sleeper agents called to task.
‘How was your experience at Dubai International Airport today?’ Before she could join the taxi queue, she needed to answer a robot’s customer-service request. The robot, fixed cartoon smile on its face, airport logo on its forehead, encouraged her to press a screen on its belly where four figures were illustrated, faces that went from red and irate to green and beaming with joy. It wasn’t clear whether it was a functioning robot or just a humanoid iPad holder. Siver pressed the greenest of figures.
‘Ma’am, ma’am, please this way,’ a uniformed man said as soon as her interaction with the robot had been completed, one of a dozen human beings performing the job of a single sign. He motioned with a wave of his arm for her and Zara to approach the row of parked Lady Taxis.
Siver couldn’t remember seeing these the last time she had been to Dubai: garish pink minivans with female drivers dressed up in polyester uniforms that resembled o -brand Aladdin outfits. It was a nice
addition, she thought, not having to be creeped out by a male driver the moment you land. Once, before Zara was born, a cab driver had berated her for not wearing a veil. Another time a driver had leered at her through the rear-view mirror so long he was seconds away from crashing into another car. Karim wanted to report this last driver, but Siver made him promise not to. ‘He’ll be deported immediately. You really want an entire family’s su ering weighing on your soul?’
‘When did you become a Buddhist?’ Karim said, putting down his phone.
Having greeted the budget Disney princess in the driver’s seat, Siver fiddled with Zara’s seatbelt as a man put their luggage in the trunk. ‘Where to, ma’am?’ the female driver said, with a surprisingly spot-on British accent.
‘The One & Only, please.’
‘Which one?’
‘The One & Only hotel?’
‘Yes, ma’am; there’s two One & Only hotels. One on the Palm, one on the Marina.’
Flustered, Siver got her phone out and went looking through her emails.
‘I’m sure I have the hotel confirmation here somewhere . . .’ A Lady Taxi behind them started honking. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know there were two.’
‘No problem, ma’am. Take your time,’ the driver said, glancing anxiously in the rear-view mirror.
There. Finally. ‘The Marina. Royal Mirage.’
‘OK, ma’am.’
They left the airport complex behind, got on the city’s main highway which stretched out in an almost chronological line from the old heart of the city where the airport lay. Buildings became ever more ambitious, their architectonic features morphing into the future. It was soothing, this feeling of leaving the past behind.
Entire clusters of towers rose far into the black of night, towers that had not been there on her last visit, between swirling roads and glitzy malls that had sprung from the desert. When she had first seen the city she was shocked at how such decadence and modernity could
exist there, surrounded by countries that were in the throes of a brutal medieval LARP. ‘How is this place not bombed to pieces?’ she’d asked Karim, marvelling at the prostitutes in designer wear with their Cartier shopping bags. ‘Money needs sanctuary,’ Karim had shrugged. ‘It’s why Switzerland was spared. Money needs cities where it can be safe. And this is one of the safest cities of all.’
‘Where are you travelling from?’ the taxi driver asked, her cheap turban bobbing with the movement of the car.
‘Iraq,’ Siver said. This would have to do. She did not owe the driver her entire life story.
‘Ah, inta t’kallam arabi?’ the driver asked her, in the broken Arabic of someone who had learned the language from studying the Koran. Where could she be from? Pakistan? Siver said yes, yes she did, but neglected to ask a follow-up question, hopefully indicating that she was not in a talking mood. Zara, as was her wont, had fallen asleep the moment that she got into the car. Siver should really have brought a child seat, she realised. A six-year-old should still be in a child safety seat, she was pretty sure. Suddenly, and not for the first time that day, she was overwhelmed by the feeling of being a terrible mother.
‘And your husband, he lives here?’ the driver continued as they sped through the buildings that were erected in the late 90s, all blue anti-reflective windows and crude Lego-looking shapes, to the future, to the future.
No, no her husband was not here.
‘He is, yes,’ she said, looking out the window.
They met in Advanced Ethnographic Study class, in her second year at SOAS , though later he would admit to her that he had attempted to speak to her several times, but not dared to do so. ‘You had a look that said “don’t talk to me”,’ he laughed. ‘Wollah, you terrified me, Siver.’
The once wealthy Rafiq Hardi Kermanj was by now poor, and only a combination of loans and grants permitted Siver to pay the yearly tuition fee, but Xezal had never allowed them to look poor, insisting throughout their childhood that they wear the best clothes that they could a ord. ‘Your father doesn’t understand these things,’
she would whisper to her children, telling them not to mention how much their Global Hypercolor T-shirts, OshKosh B’gosh jeans and Nike Airs actually cost, ‘but as long as I’m alive, you will have only the prettiest clothes.’
Though she referred to ‘pretty’ clothes of ‘good quality’, she mainly bought the children whatever was in fashion at the time, having a keen understanding of how fashion situated a child in a particular social context. Xezal knew, of course, that the United Colors of Benetton sweatshirt that Mohammed wanted was of no better quality, really, than one she could get for a fraction of the price at Hennes & Mauritz, but she was aware of what such a sweatshirt meant: a message she was adamant her three children would in fact convey.
So when Siver sat in that fateful Advanced Ethnographic Study class, she had tied around her neck a Fendi scarf that Xezal claimed to have found at a jumble sale (Siver knew better than to enquire further). Karim, in his crisp shirt and pleated khakis, leaned across toward Siver, smelling like every boy did at the time, doused as he was in Francis Kurkdjian’s omnipresent blend of bergamot, cinnamon and cloying artificial vanilla. She had noticed him in lectures, with his scru y hair and neat beard, the way that his limbs, always tanned from the sun that imprinted itself on rich people, draped over armrests, the backs of chairs. Even when she did not know his name, she saw a man who seemed perfectly at ease in his own body, and for this Siver both resented him and desired him. ‘Nice scarf,’ he said, giving her a wink, like a character in a TV show. He had little dimples high up on his cheekbones, little quotation marks that appeared whenever he was being kind or sarcastic. Siver didn’t know if anyone had ever winked at her before. She’d been leered at, hollered at, felt up and harassed. But winked at?
After she finished sixth form, she spent the next few years working the odd menial job, which allowed her parents to pay their bills on time, until her father sat her down and told her to apply to universities, that her life was too precious to be wasted away slaving for capital.
So when she started her BA in Politics and International Relations, she was already a few years older than her classmates, viewed with suspicion by the freshly turned eighteen dressed in an assortment of post-grunge outfits and Spice Girls-derived crop-tops. She didn’t look
young enough, she felt, for the boys in her class to show any interest in her and she wasn’t emotionally mature enough, in her view, for the older boys to be into her. And, mostly, this suited her just fine. Boys were trouble, boys got you into trouble.
After the lecture she saw Karim awkwardly lingering outside the classroom, pretending to look for something in his bag. ‘Hey!’ he shouted out as she passed him. ‘Want to get a co ee?’
She was about to say no. She always said no, it was more reflex than anything at this point. And yet when she opened her mouth she found it forming the word yes instead.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked as they walked out towards the unoccupied storefronts around the Brunswick Centre, a question that annoyed her when other people asked it, since it put her in a position where she had to justify her heritage, while jumping into a fifteen-minute soliloquy about the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the consequences of the First World War on the Middle East. She stole glances at his bare arms, arms covered in peach fuzz, the gentle ripple of his muscles. She wanted to reply ‘Sutton’, the way that her friends were able to, but when she limited her answer to the name of an impoverished London suburb, she would get a cocked eyebrow and a ‘No, but, like, really.’ She did not like the question, and yet, coming from this boy, she did not feel insulted. So she said ‘Iraq’, though she would usually have said ‘Kurdistan’. A betrayal, one of endless betrayals, to be loved, to be worthy of love.
‘Wollah? So am I!’ he said as he squeezed her hand, sending an electric charge through her, and he smiled that awkward, wonky smile that broke her heart just a little. Damnit. -
The Lady Taxi drove up to the hotel’s massive domed entrance, a train of golden camels towering above them, the intricate statues lit up from below making them look like malefic phantoms.
‘I don’t like them,’ Zara said as the taxi parked in front of the entrance.
‘They’re just statues, monkey,’ Siver said, rummaging in her purse until she found her wallet.
A man appeared to whisk the suitcases out of the cab and into the hotel while Siver handed the Lady Driver some of the local currency she had from her previous trip. ‘Keep the change,’ Siver said, knowing that she couldn’t be handing out money like that in the future.
As another man guided them into the hotel, they walked past a guest shouting at the sta , his voice vibrating with anger, rising with each sentence. Before the automated glass doors shut behind Siver, she’d understood that he was demanding his car be parked in front of the hotel, while the disconcerted sta kept apologising and referring him to valet parking. There was a Rolls-Royce, a Maybach and an Aston Martin already parked outside the hotel almost as advertisement, the owners’ wealth reflecting on the hotel’s exclusivity. The complaining man stood next to his Maserati, realising his status wasn’t what he thought it was, and o setting his humiliation on those around him.
‘I’m so sorry about that, ma’am,’ the man escorting her through the dazzling entrance said, the spectacle ruining the hotel’s welldrilled introductory routine.
‘Welcome back to the One & Only,’ a woman said, taking over from the man, a tray of champagne flutes filled with orange juice perfectly balanced on one hand. How this woman knew that Siver was a returning guest, she had no idea. ‘Would you care for a non-alcoholic beverage while you check in?’
‘Zara honey, do you want a drink?’
The woman crouched so that Zara could get a glass, gingerly balancing it between the child’s small hands, as Siver approached the check-in counter with her membership card in hand. She prayed Karim had accrued enough points over the years for a week’s stay, that she would be allowed some breathing space as she attempted to cobble together a new life.
‘You have points for six nights,’ the unreasonably chipper man at the desk informed her. ‘Should I put your final night on your credit card?’
She should have changed her reservation, told him that she didn’t need the last night. Surely this man who barely earned enough to survive would understand her predicament. And yet she found herself fishing out her Trade Bank of Iraq credit card, heard the faint slap
