Father of Lions, page 15
‘What?’ roared Abu Laith. ‘The thieves. I’m going to kill them.’
Lumia rushed in to the living room. ‘Oh really?’ she said, voice acid. ‘You’re going to take on Daesh by yourself because they’ve stolen your stupid birds? You have fourteen children, and Daesh has put a price on your head, and you’re going to risk their lives and yours to get revenge over some birds?’
Abu Laith weighed his options, and backed down. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I won’t go after them.’
‘Too right you won’t,’ said Lumia.
26
Marwan
MARWAN STOOD BY THE TAP, RED HOSE IN HAND, LETTING the water pool over the cement floor by the ostrich cage. It was around 3.30 p.m., and the afternoon was still hot. He was attempting to clean the cages, though he couldn’t get inside them to do so, and just spraying water on the floor seemed to make little difference. There were no paying customers at the zoo any more.
Every day planes had been criss-crossing unseen, high over the streets of east Mosul, dropping bombs that sent up plumes of black smoke drifting on the horizon for hours. Marwan would watch them. Abu Laith, who had seen in the Iran–Iraq war what lay at the bottom of those plumes, looked away.
Across Mosul, those who could were stockpiling food, filling basements or cupboards, safe from looters. The animals – despite Marwan and the children’s efforts – were still hungry. Rice and leftover chicken bones could only take them so far. The lions needed meat, and the bears needed fruit. It had been a long time since Zombie, Mother and Father ate properly, and it seemed to be affecting them all in different ways. Zombie was growing restless, pacing around his cage. Father was wasting away, just a ragged coat and bones, more dog than lion aside from his great head. Mother, however, was angry. Each day she yowled louder. If Marwan didn’t feed her fast enough, she would swipe at him. She mainly ignored Father, though she shared a cage with him, and Zombie, who was in the cage to her left. To her right, in a cage that faced directly on to hers without a gap between them, were Lula the bear and her cub, Warda.
The water was glittering around Marwan’s feet when an animal scream made him drop the hose. He turned to the lion’s cage and was almost sick. Mother’s face was up against the bars of the cage, and she was shaking something very hard. Thick blood pumped on to the ground, and Lula had her paws up against the bars, roaring.
Mother had the young bear Warda by his paw through the bars and was tearing at him, back and forth, making him flop like a fish on land. Lula was trying to fight the lion off her son through the bars of the cage.
Marwan couldn’t think straight. ‘Stop,’ he later remembered shouting, running over to the cage. ‘Get off her.’
There was a shovel leaning against one of the cages and he picked it up. The lion and the bear were still screaming, tearing at each other. He took the shovel and stuck it through the bars, taking a blow at the lion’s side. She twisted but didn’t let the cub go. The blood was pooling on the floor. He took the shovel and hit the lion again, a thwack on the ribs that should have bent her in half. Hissing, she dropped the cub and threw herself at Marwan, smashing against the bars of the cage, her black eyes flat.
Marwan ran over to the bear’s cage. Warda was curled up, shaking. Thick, red blood was seeping from the stump of his arm. Lula wailed as she petted her bleeding child.
Mother was roaring at the lost taste of blood. In her paws she held the bear cub’s arm, tearing at it with her teeth. Zombie, agitated, paced wildly up and down. Father cowered in the corner of Mother’s cage.
‘Help,’ Marwan shouted over Mother’s roaring. ‘I need help.’
He could hear the men who operated the rides and maintained the park running towards the enclosure. They needed to get inside the cage, he thought. If they could get Warda out and take him to the vet, they might be able to save him. But Abu Laith had taught him that nothing was worse than getting between a mother and her cub. Lula would kill him before he could take Warda away.
They would have to separate them.
‘We need to get her into the house,’ he told the others. Inside the enclosure there was a small hut where Lula and Warda slept and were sheltered from the rain. Haji Faez, the ancient caretaker, who trimmed the plants and occasionally swept up by the food stalls, seemed to understand.
‘I’ll lure her in,’ Marwan said. ‘Then one of you can pull the gate down behind her.’
There was a gate to the small house that could be closed by someone sitting on the roof of the cage. One of the others jumped up, the bear roaring below him. Marwan ran around the back of the cage with Haji Faez. The house had a small window there, and if they could lure her in from the enclosure, the gate would slam behind her and they could rescue Warda without being attacked.
But hard as they tried, Lula wouldn’t leave her cub. Marwan thought hard. He remembered how much she liked apples, and one of the workers was dispatched to the fruit market to fetch some. Haji Faez and Marwan, using the limited tools at their disposal, tried to entice the bear into the house. She was roaring still. Occasionally, she nudged her cub with her nose. He was barely moving except for his chest, which rose and fell.
The apples arrived.
‘Throw one over by the hut,’ Marwan said.
The apple thudded to the floor, and Lula looked up. She twisted around and made for the door of the house, where the apple lay. Marwan threw in another few from the back window.
‘Go on,’ he shouted. ‘Come here.’
Lula walked slowly through the door. In a rush of metal, the gate slammed behind her. She threw herself against the bars and roared. Separated from her cub, she was squealing in terror. Marwan ran around the front of the outdoor enclosure and opened the door. The cub was writhing on the ground, thick blood smudged all over the floor where he had stumbled in his agony.
Marwan ran to the cub. Gently, he cupped his hand under Warda and turned him over. What remained of his arm was sticky and warm. In the bark-brown fur, there was a deep hotness. As he moved him, the young animal whined.
‘Does anyone have a car?’ Marwan shouted, lifting the bloody cub. ‘We need to take him to a vet.’
Haji Faez did, and in a moment the cub – now in a small cage – was stowed in the back. Two workers drove off, and Marwan looked down to see his hands were covered in Warda’s blood.
Abu Laith blamed himself, when he learned what had happened. ‘We should have put something between the cages,’ he said, as the tears flooded down his face.
Marwan had told him how sometimes, Warda would scamper up to the lions and take a swipe at them through the bars of the cage. But they had both thought Mother just found it annoying. Warda was the size of a beach ball, and it had seemed impossible that the lions might reach through the bars to kill him.
Abu Laith was inconsolable. It was partly his fault, he later said, for trusting Mother. He should have bought another cage, and placed the lion and the bear cub further away from each other.
They waited until the evening, no one saying much, until they heard a car draw up outside the zoo. Marwan ran over to the gate. The caretaker’s car had pulled up on the side of the road.
‘What happened?’
Haji Faez was carrying the cage in his arms. Marwan’s stomach sank. But then he saw that Haji Faez was smiling. ‘He’s all right,’ said the caretaker. ‘He’ll survive.’
‘Warda,’ came a shout from behind, and Abu Laith, who had been waiting at the house, crashed towards them. ‘He’s alive,’ he hallooed.
Together they trooped to the bear’s cage and put Warda inside, closing the gate behind him. Lula was still wailing and moaning from inside her house. Marwan jumped on to the roof and raised the gate.
The bear bounded out, roaring as she went. Lula was far skinnier than she had ever been, but she was still a terrifying sight. Then she saw her cub on the ground, limping towards her on three paws. She wailed, and wrapped herself around him. Trapping Warda against her stomach, she licked him all over the bandage wound around his stump and over his head.
Marwan took an apple and threw it into the cage. The bear, he thought, deserved it. But for the first time, Lula – hungry as she was – didn’t take it. She was with her cub, and nothing could distract her.
Leaving Lula to her son, Abu Laith, beaming, turned around and walked away from the cage. Next to him, the younger children were kicking the bars of the lion’s cage, shouting and crying at Mother.
Furious, he grabbed one of them. ‘Don’t you dare touch that lion,’ he shouted, as the children cowered. ‘She can’t help being an animal.’
The children were less forgiving. That evening, as they sat on the verge by the zoo, they grumbled together. None of them had ever really liked Mother, and Warda was their friend. Abu Laith said that Mother had eaten Warda’s arm because that was the law of the jungle, and that that’s what lions did. She was extremely hungry, and nothing could be done about it. But the children didn’t care. All of them were hungry, too. For weeks now, they had been running and cycling for miles every day to find food for the animals. Mother didn’t deserve the food they were giving her.
‘We need to do something about Mother,’ said one of them. ‘She’ll kill Father next, and then probably Zombie.’
Abdulrahman spoke up. ‘We won’t need to do anything,’ he said. ‘I saw it on National Geographic. Father and Zombie will throw her out of the pack for what she’s done, and then she’ll pine away and die.’
And the children, thirsty for revenge, nodded sagely.
27
Imad
2010
SARA’S HUSBAND WAS RELEASED FROM JAIL JUST A FEW short years after Imad had turned up on her doorstep, reeking of whisky and declaring his love for her.
Almost immediately, Imad had started spending a lot of time in Baghdad with his children, where they lived together with Sara and her three kids. It was as if nothing has changed in the twenty years they had been apart.
Three months after Imad had come back, they went to see a cleric for a temporary marriage that would allow them to spend more time together without causing scandal in the family. Though they were Sunni, they had gone to a Shia cleric, who would be less likely to know any of their relatives, and Imad had slipped him a few dinars to turn a blind eye to the fact that Sara was already married.
At the weekends, they would go to the park with their brood and watch as they ran riot across Baghdad’s manicured public spaces. Imad would get in trouble for feeding ice cream to the animals in the zoo in al-Adhamiyah. But one day came an announcement that there was to be a prisoner amnesty, and that Sara’s husband would be included. From jail, he sent word that Sara had two choices. She could be with Imad, and never see her children again, or stay with him, and see them grow up.
It wasn’t really a choice at all. Imad would have to go.
It was a development that, while unpleasant, was accepted as completely inevitable by everyone involved. Neither Imad nor Sara were overly sentimental, and while they loved each other deeply, they accepted that this was the hand they had been dealt. Besides, both knew that they would still be able to see each other, as long as they were subtle about it.
So it wasn’t long afterwards that Imad found himself again back in Mosul, alone with his children in his house by the park. The life of a bachelor suited him extremely well. Each day, he would wake with the sunshine that streamed through the window, and the screaming of a dozen small-ish creatures roving about the house.
He had taken quite happily to being everybody’s mother, and cooked and shouted and restrained when he needed to do so. The others had become relatively proficient at cleaning and animal husbandry, the two other major skills that were needed in the family.
At breakfast, he would lecture the children on the mating habits of dogs (let them get on with it) and the feeding schedule for ostriches (in the morning, and not too much). When he was done, and they had gone to school, he would go to his mechanic’s shop, where he would fix American cars for $300 a job.
By the standards of Mosul, he was a rich man, and proud of it. When he went to dinner with his friends at one of the mezze places in the city, he would always pay, threatening any man who tried to stop him. He wore a long thobe that reached down to his sandals, and grinned over the starched collar, his sienna hair slicked back over his great head.
Despite the drinking and the dogs, he had become a respected man, known for his generosity and his fighting prowess. Since he had built a mosque, he was considered a pillar of the community, and no one really minded that he had stopped praying, and held regular afternoon drinking sessions in his courtyard, whisky and arak spilling on the floor as he laughed and cracked dirty jokes with his friends.
He was regularly invited to coffee at the homes of various neighbours and members of his extended clan. Every time he would go, invited on the pretext of meeting an ancient great aunt or uncle, there would be a shy young woman serving him coffee and making eyes at him. He’d wink at her, but his heart wasn’t really in it. They all seemed a bit meek and retiring. He couldn’t imagine any of them wrestling with the children, or giggling with him late at night, taking turns to swig from a bottle of whisky.
That made no difference at all to his family, who decided he needed to marry, whether he wanted to or not. Besides, they had a lingering, and entirely accurate, suspicion that Imad had been planning to incapacitate Sara’s husband.
It wasn’t until Laith, Imad’s oldest son, was getting married that anyone took serious action. At the reception in the house, a local sheikh came and – at the prompting of Imad’s daughters – sat down next to the man of the house. ‘You need to get married,’ the sheikh said. ‘You have your own daughter-in-law now. There needs to be another woman around to help her in her work.’
Imad, who had heard it all before, said he wasn’t interested. He could cook and clean as well as anyone, and didn’t need help.
‘There’s a woman in the Green Flats area,’ said the sheikh, ignoring him. ‘She’s never been married, and she’s in her forties. I’ll go and see her with my wife and arrange something.’
The idea of going to meet an old spinster did not interest Imad in the slightest but – as his daughters had astutely predicted – he felt he couldn’t argue with the sheikh.
A few days later, Imad knocked on the door of a house in the Green Flats, accompanied by the sheikh. They were welcomed in and went through into the living area where the family entertained their guests. Sitting on the floor cushions were an older man and two younger men. Next to them were two girls. One was dressed in a full-length black robe, and her hair and neck were covered in a tight-fitting black scarf. She wasn’t smiling, nor was she talking.
The other one, who had leaped up when Imad walked through the door, had already shouted out a greeting and was grinning at him through a pale, round face framed by a long curtain of black hair. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, and she was wearing a purple dress that clung to the dumpling curves that Imad so admired in women. She was about thirty, while the other girl looked a few years older.
He hoped that it was her he was supposed to find interesting. Grinning, he looked at the sheikh, who looked meaningfully at the other girl. Imad sat down, disappointed.
The men introduced themselves, and took their place on the cushions along the walls. The girl in the purple dress, who had a high, rapid-fire voice, was already questioning Imad.
‘Do you own your house?’ she asked, as the family gaped at her. Her sister – the woman Imad was here to meet – looked at the floor mutely.
Imad, who didn’t want anyone marrying him for his wealth, lied and told her that he rented his house, and that the only car he owned was a taxi.
‘And how is your business?’ Imad asked one of her male relatives, politely, as he stared at the loud girl. While he was there, no one would discuss the woman, or the issue of marriage. It was, to all intents and purposes, a simple social call, with enormous implications.
The drab woman he was supposed to be marrying still hadn’t said anything. Imad didn’t know what to make of her. She seemed very devout, and had completely ignored him. Her sister, on the other hand, was quizzing him so fast he barely had time to answer – scandalizing her relatives with her boldness. There was so much life in her, Imad thought. He knew, without a slightest doubt, that he wanted to marry her.
With another round of hand-clapping and well wishes, they left the house half an hour later. As soon as the door slammed, Imad turned to the sheikh. ‘Who was the other girl?’ he asked. ‘She’s the one for me.’
‘She’s her sister,’ the sheikh said. ‘I warn you, she’s a widow, and already has three children.’
They walked for a minute, Imad cheerfully unconcerned. ‘What’s her name?’ Imad asked.
‘Lumia,’ the sheikh replied.
Imad was grinning. ‘She’ll say yes to me.’
28
Hasna
IN THE GREY LIGHT OF THE MORNING, IN THE BIG HOUSE near the Tigris, Hakam’s sister Hasna awoke to another unpromising day. It had been months since she had left the house, and even then she had been bundled into a car, every inch of her skin covered, and taken to relatives’ homes for a quick visit.
Her exams had finished a long time ago. She had all but stopped going outside when the public executions became more common, and rumours began to thrive about the excesses of the all-female morality police called the al-Khansaa brigade. She’d heard that they pulled over women who were dressed immodestly and beat them with electric cattle prods or a metal tool called the ‘biter’ that ripped through cloth and skin.
Hasna had taken her course books home with her, thinking that she could at least study with her friends. But then they couldn’t leave their houses either, so in the end, she studied alone. Though sometimes she was afraid, she was mostly just bored. The government had disconnected Mosul’s broadband internet to stop Isis spreading its propaganda online. The Zararis now had a satellite connection like everyone else, but they all knew that Isis was monitoring the internet traffic. She no longer dared chat to her friends.
