An Excerpt from Najem Wali’s ‘My Romantic Aunt’

Najem Wali’s 2024 novel My Romantic Aunt, published by Rewayat, follows a man’s relationship with his boundary-breaking aunt.

From ‘My Romantic Aunt: Her friends, Her Relationships, and Me’

By Najem Wali

Translated by Nada Hodali

About Her 

My “Romantic Aunt.” Whoever gave her this nickname remains a mystery; it could have been one of the men that passed through her life, one of her best friends, or perhaps she herself chose the nickname, which she used to sign a paper that she left for me in an old box that once belonged to my grandmother. Over the years, there were many changes to her name, and to the adjectives people used to describe her throughout her life: sweet, beautiful, even crazy, although these qualities came late to the game. They came years after “romantic” stuck as her nickname. I don’t remember and cannot pinpoint when this name first came about, although I want to put a date to it. For now, all I can say is that she always had this nickname, ever since it was given to her by some partner or another. I don’t ever remember overhearing a conversation about her without “romantic” popping up; it was her trademark. Sometimes, I wonder whether my grandmother was the one who gave my aunt that nickname. Grandmother must have heard one of the characters say it, in one of her movies or shows. At the time, Grandmother was addicted to these shows. During wartime, too: when the bombardment would begin in the early hours of the morning and God only knew when it would end; or at times when we had a curfew that turned the house into a miniature prison, with nothing to do other than sit and watch TV. My grandmother said that she sits in front of the TV willingly, even without the presence of bombardment or curfew. She enjoys watching the love stories that come on; they remind her of days past, a past that is brighter than the present, back when love was precious, as she always muttered. My grandmother and my father were polar opposites: he, her only son, saw movies and TV as a waste of time, and he couldn’t understand why an old woman my grandmother’s age insisted on watching such mind-numbing nonsense. He would pick on my grandmother as, during his visits, she stared at the TV, becoming part of the couch. Maybe my father was exaggerating, who knows. But he wasn’t the only one who thought like that—my aunt herself was not a fan of my grandmother. I rarely saw her sit and watch TV with my grandma, except once, when she had to stay at home for a while. The reason my aunt looked down on TV shows was—and this was her opinion—because the topics addressed in television series were not even remotely similar to what happens in real-life relationships, and that TV romances aren’t truly romantic. On TV, there are no real stories, no real characters, and everything comes off as tasteless and faded. 

My Romantic Aunt—I don’t know when or why she earned this nickname. Was it because one day at the height of war—while she was passing out cups of tea to her friends in one of their sessions at the flower shop, a place where she stayed until the day of her disappearance—she said: “It’s sad that we’re in such a mess. We’re still young and bright, and all we want is some peace. All we want is love, and here we are, getting knocked off course by this war. Don’t you guys see what I’m saying?” She passed around the tea, then took a sip before adding: “It’d be better to read this story in a novel, where the men we dream about aren’t faced with rifles, and where a bomb from one of the airplanes doesn’t fall on our heads.” Then she pointed up at the ceiling: “Don’t you see it?” I remember that her friends kept silent, maybe because they were taken aback by her words, not knowing exactly what she was getting at. When they finished their tea, my aunt asked them: “Why don’t we act the way we did before, as if the war had never started?” Taking out a sheet of paper that she had hidden in her chest, she said that she was going to read something that she’d seen somewhere and liked, adding, “You’ve got to listen to this beautiful text.” She might have mentioned where she found this text, I don’t know. In any case, that text described the dream man.

“Whoever nicknamed you Romantic knew what they were doing!” her friends said, all at once, as though they were a chorus. This supports what I’ve always thought: that someone gave my aunt this nickname. However, her friends never mentioned who it was, not during that gathering, and not in any other. 

Sometimes, I think my mom and dad were responsible for the name. Maybe I heard my father say it, or maybe it was my mother, during one of their discussions that to me seemed never-ending. They tried to be discrete when they talked before bed, so I wouldn’t hear. They would lean back against a pillow and stare up at the ceiling, just talking and talking. Maybe the name suddenly jumped out of my mom’s or my dad’s mouth while they were remembering an old romantic movie that they associated with my aunt. Maybe it popped up when they remembered how they had married; after all, wasn’t it a love match? Or maybe it came up as they talked about my aunt’s celibacy, how she hadn’t married even after many men came—as my grandmother said—to ask for her hand in marriage, and she refused them all. If she didn’t refuse because of her romantic sensibilities, then why else would she insist on remaining single?

My Romantic Aunt. It would have been impossible for me to have created this nickname. Back then, I didn’t even know what it meant, as I was still a young child of about five. When I started tagging along with my aunt, I hadn’t even started school yet, and that’s when I first heard her friends describing her as romantic. At that age, I rarely sat still to watch TV with my grandmother, and I spent most of my time playing with my aunt. We would build miniature wooden houses that rose up high into the air, and, as soon as we built a line of them, we would immediately knock them down. What caught my attention was my aunt’s tendency to knock them down even quicker than I did; it was clear that she wanted to demolish them. I didn’t notice at the time; I simply thought it was part of the game, or maybe I thought she wanted to compete with me. Is there any child who doesn’t have this urge? I mean the urge to build a house, or a street, or a tower, anything—as long as you build something—then to tear it down only to rebuild it again? I never met a child who doesn’t do this: excitedly build a house only to demolish it with the same excitement. The strange part is that no child demolishes what they’ve built without acting serious about it; the child speaks about his toys as if they were real people standing in front of him. My aunt, though? Why did she do it, even with her childish self?

She spent a lot of time playing, and I was always her best partner in these games. She would go along with whatever I chose, and she was always full of laughter. Maybe I would have given her lots of nicknames back then, but, for me, it was always about the games. She liked hearing me talk, so she encouraged me to natter most of the time. But even though I invented cute nicknames for her, some of which I now realize were completely absurd, I never called her “romantic.” I’d never have thought of such a thing. How would I even know what this or any other nickname meant? They were simply names uttered in my presence, just background noise. 

The only constant, back then, was that I worshiped the ground this woman walked on. I don’t know whether I loved her more than I loved my parents; I haven’t really thought about it. I always viewed her as a saint who no one could tarnish, and any nickname that I bestowed on her didn’t matter. I gave her these nicknames only because I feared for her. I was afraid of losing her, and I wanted to save her as if she was in trouble, to be her savior. I gave her lots of nicknames, most of them out of love and endearment, and I have long since forgotten all of them except for one: “poor thing.” That was the main thing I called her. She would ask me, “Why do you see me as a poor thing?” I would always answer, “It’s because when we play a game, you always lose.” The banter would go on with her saying that wasn’t true, that she’d she won against me lots of times. I would always bob my head and say that the only reason I called her “poor thing” was because she lived alone with my grandmother, because she had never married a man who she could move in with, like my mom had. She would pinch my cheek and say, “Why do you think I’d want to marry someone, to be someone’s partner?”

I remember I would laugh whenever she said this. Maybe I thought she was joking. And maybe—this is probably true—she thought she was doing the right thing. In reality, I was always comfortable with her staying single. That way, I’d be the closest person in her life, and I’d have no competition. It is true that she had a number of friends, and that several men entered her life, but for a long time, I was her closest companion. I remember asking her once—maybe to make sure that I was the only one in her life—whether my mom was younger than her? She surprised me by saying that my mom was 12 years older. Then I asked why she was the opposite of my mom and didn’t have any children, only for her to reply, “Well, I do in fact have children, but they live in France.” France…? These words were mysterious to me, even though my aunt spoke them in a convincing way, making them sound true. I believed her, and I didn’t think too much about whether it was true or not. The important thing was that I was the only important person in her life at that moment, even with the inclusion of her virtual children. Until the day she left, or rather the day she suddenly disappeared from my life, we were only apart for brief periods. Men came and went, friends came and went, and I stayed. It didn’t matter what obstacles were thrown in front of us, from wars to hunger to siege; the two of us stayed together, as if we’d promised to do so without signing a contract. We were happy. 

Maybe I didn’t understand at first, when I was four or five, but she was the only person I counted on. Up until I was six and entered school, I thought it was normal. I spent most of my time with her, and not just playing—she would also drop me off and pick me up from school. At first, we walked to school. But after three or four years, she started driving me there in the Toyota my father had gifted her. I remember that my mother was always working at the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, always traveling, always on a delegation to one city or another. She would travel outside of Iraq, too, going to a other Arab countries. As for my father, he worked as a geologist, and he’d leave for days on end, traveling to work on a new route surveying task. I don’t know what would have happened to me if my aunt hadn’t been around. She always said that she didn’t take care of me simply because my parents weren’t around or because they had busy schedules. She genuinely wanted to do it; she was much happier with me by her side. My presence didn’t bore her, she said. And if it had been up to me, I would have moved to my grandmother’s house to live with her permanently.