Would you have been willing to carry all your years on your shoulders and flee across the desert to Kuwait to find a crust of bread?
He sat up, leaned on the ground with his elbows, and began to look at the great river again as though he had not seen it before…. So this was the Shatt al-Arab, “a vast river that steamers sail along carrying dates and straw, like a street full of passing cars in the center of town.”
That’s what his son Qais had shouted, hurriedly, when he had asked him that night:
“What is the Shatt al-Arab?”
He meant to test him, but Qais quickly answered in a loud voice, adding:
“I saw you looking through the classroom window today….”
Abu Qais turned to his wife, who grinned. He felt a little embarrassed, and slowly remarked:
“I knew it before.”
“No, you didn’t. You learned it today while you were peeping through the window.”
“All right. And what does it matter whether I know it or not; is it the end of the world?”
His wife glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and then said:
“Qais, go and play in the other room.” When he slammed the door behind him, she turned to her husband:
“Don’t speak like that in front of him. The boy is happy because he knows it. Why do you discourage him?”
He stood up, went over to her and put his hand on her stomach, whispering:
“When?”
“In seven months’ time.”
“Ah!”
“We want a girl this time.”
“No, we want a boy. A boy.”
But she gave birth to a girl he named Hosna, who died two months later. The doctor said distastefully:
“She was extremely emaciated.”
It happened a month after he left his village, in an old house in another village far from the firing line.
“Abu Qais! I feel I’m going to give birth!”
“All right. All right. Keep calm.”
He said to himself:
“I wish that women gave birth after a pregnancy of a hundred months. Is this the time for labour?”
“O God!”
“What?”
“I’m going to give birth.”
“Shall I call anyone?”
“Umm Umar.”
“Where can I find her now?”
“Hand me that cushion!”
“Where can I find Umm Umar?”
“O my God! Lift me up a little. Let me rest against the wall.”
“Don’t move much. Let me call Umm Umar.”
“Hurry! Hurry! O Lord of creation!”
He hurried outside. But as he shut the door behind him he heard the cry of the newborn child, so he turned back and put his ear to the wood of the door….
The roar of the Shatt, the sailors shouting to each other, the sky blazing, and the black bird still circling aimlessly.
He got up, brushed the earth from his clothes, and stood looking at the river.
More than at any time in the past he felt alien and insignificant. Rubbing his hand over his rough chin, he brushed from his head all the thoughts that had gathered like teeming hosts of ants.
On the other side of this Shatt, just the other side, were all the things he had been deprived of.