New Short Fiction: ‘Evil in My Bag’

 

Evil in My Bag

By Aya Chalabee

Translated by Jonathan Wright

I didn’t tell anyone what the soldier put in my pink bag; I just pretended the whole thing never happened. But after more than twenty years, I still remember every detail that day, which bore witness to my first story worth telling.

Before getting into the story, I should say something about the road between our house and the school. For me, this road has a special importance. The first time I went to school and back all by myself, my mother took my hand and drew a map, with two separate squares and a line connecting them.

“This is the house, and this is the school. Walk along the line and you’ll get there and back very easily,” she said. I looked at the palm of my hand. The first world I entered was very small.

“And what if I wanted to visit Sawsan? Will the same line take me there?”

“No, no. There will be other lines later.”

Then she hugged me, and for some reason I remember how that hug felt different from other hugs. I felt that, if we went on hugging any longer, I would fall asleep.

The road was as easy as my mother had described it. The first few days I concentrated intensely on the way there and back. I didn’t look either side. I just walked from one square to the other as my mother had drawn them. Gradually other things started to come into sight. It wasn’t just a road. It was a world teeming with other lives. When I stepped out of the house, I had to cross the street, and the first thing I saw was a photographic studio run by a local woman. Then there was a row of many houses of various sizes pressed in side by side. At the end of the street, there was an enormous house with a door painted silver. We children had long imagined the house was cursed, because at midday, the door reflected the rays of the sun, and this made people avoid walking in front of it or shield their eyes from the glare. After that, a large sandy area opened up, completely empty most of the time, but full of people on special occasions. At Eid metal swings for children were set up, and stalls sold sweets and toys. The locals would also hold weddings there, and in summer, children used the space as a football pitch. After that, there were shops that sold exercise books and sweets.  One-eyed Ammu Jalil’s shop was the one the kids in our school liked best, because he kept up with the latest trends: beautiful notebooks, pens like the ones we saw in ads, and novelty stationery items that children would swap among themselves. From the shop window, the school was very close.

Many of these details changed after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. For example, the photo studio was closed, and no one knew what had happened to its owners. At first U-S- army armored vehicles were parked in the sandy area for months, and then someone in the neighborhood- put a generator there, and others started throwing their rubbish in that spot. All that was left of it was a narrow path for walking to the school. Only the silver door stayed as it was.

I didn’t go to school and back by myself for long. My cousin Sawsan moved to my school because of maintenance work at her own school, and even though she was in the eighth grade, which meant she was two grades ahead of me, we would leave our own classmates and walk together during break times. We looked and behaved older than we really were. Sawsan’s jaw and cheekbones were prominent, which gave her a serious look. My face was soft, and my eyes were large.

I heard a girl in the ninth grade telling one of her friends that eating chocolate would make her breasts bigger. She’d actually tried it, Sawsan told me one break time.

I didn’t know, and neither did Sawsan, how our ideas about our bodies took shape. We didn’t know that their curves were our material limits in this world. We were very thin, and our mothers were strangely fat. But Sawsan’s mother made a decision to go on a diet and lose weight. At that time, all my mother and my aunt could talk about was replacing one kind of fat with another, as a first step, eating boiled eggs and vegetables, and avoiding all sweets. As for our fathers, I never noticed them taking part in these conversations, or maybe only once. That’s when I discovered that men are not big fans of saying the same thing twice. At the time, I was upset that my body wasn’t growing and expanding like my thoughts and observations. I thought that I understood and remembered everything.

After that conversation in the schoolyard, we decided to test what the ninth-grade girl had said.

Like anyone early in their life, neither Sawsan nor I had a sense of time. We wanted things to happen immediately. As soon as we came out of school, we headed to Ammu Jalil’s shop and spent some of our savings on chocolate bars. We gobbled them down instantly and bid each other cheerful goodbye. We were convinced that, as soon as we woke up in the morning, our breasts would be fully rounded.

In the evening, my mother was wearing a light-green dress decorated with flowers the color of mustard. The dress had strange bulges because of her plumpness. Although she was fat, as my aunt Ahlam used to say, I thought it was wonderful for someone to be that size. If I had worn the dress it would have looked like a piece of cloth hanging in the wind.

In the morning, Sawsan and I both looked grim. Nothing had happened, but Sawsan said we had to try the experiment again.

“Maybe the girl in the ninth grade didn’t mean just one chocolate bar. What if she ate more than one?” I asked, and we mulled that over. Before long, we decided to buy another bar and share it between us.

On the next day, I took more money out of my piggy bank and went to sit on the floor while my mother combed my hair. I was nervous. What if she found out? What would I tell her? My mother definitely must not find out.

While she was combing my hair, she noticed chocolate marks on the collar and left sleeve of my blouse. She grumbled and told me to change the blouse before going out. As I hurried to change, all I could think about was not being late to meet Sawsan. While I was going out, I threw a glance at my mother. The sunlight made her green dress look more beautiful than ever.

I left in a hurry and didn’t notice the remains of the photo shop or the cursed silver house or the pace. But before Ammu Jalil’s shop, there was an American military patrol. I could see Sawsan standing at the shop´s door, waving at me to hurry. I walked fast, my bag swinging from my hand. I hadn’t put it on my shoulder that day, out of concern for my savings, but apparently carrying it this way aroused the soldiers’ suspicions. One of the soldiers shouted at me to stop. I had in fact already stopped. My feet weren’t moving. After all the horrible stories we´d heard about American soldiers and the crimes they´d committed, the sight of them made me feel completely helpless. They were vast men, and all I could see of them was their faces. Their clothes were the same dusty color as their armored vehicles. For ages, I had thought of them as moving stone statues.

One of the soldiers put out his hand, which was covered in a massive glove, and told me to show him the bag. I handed it to him, and he weighed it in his hand. It was a pink bag with an image of bright purple high-heels shoes. The soldier passed my bag to a colleague, who opened it and started searching it. I didn’t understand any of what they were saying. I had that feeling again, that I was powerless in their presence. The soldier searching my bag reached out to his own kit bag, took something out, and put it in my bag. Because the glove he was wearing was so big, I couldn’t make out what the thing was. He gave me my bag back and gestured that I could go on my way.

I had often heard stories about American soldiers giving out mines and other explosives to children or throwing them in the street like toys, and, as soon as anyone touched or opened them, they would explode. I was afraid, and I tried to hold back my tears.

I went to Ammu Jalil’s shop, and my only thought was to see Sawsan. I walked around the shop looking for her. Ammu Jalil was sitting there, looking at me and eating something from the plate in front of him.

“What did the soldier put in your bag?” he asked.

The shop windows gave a view of everything that happened outside.

My eyes settled on a skipping rope with a picture of Barbie on the handles.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what. He put in a bomb, a very small bomb,”.

“Your bag’s still light, isn’t it?” he went on.

Fear had gripped all my senses, and I was no longer sure of anything.

“Why don’t you give it to me, instead of exploding and dying?”

“But that means you’ll die.”

He took another piece of whatever he was eating and said, “Me? I won’t die. My right eye’s missing but I can still see. If your bag explodes, I can still survive. Come on, give it to me.”

I clung even more tightly to my bag.

“You don’t seem to believe me. Let me show you my eye, so you can be sure.”

He started to remove the leather patch that covered his right eye. As I stepped back to leave, all I could see was the empty eye socket, with tongues of flame moving inside his head.

I pushed my way out of the shop and headed toward school. My throat hurt. I tried to touch it, but it was as if someone had punched me there. I was very late, and there was no way I would be in time for the first lesson. My consolation was that the owner of the school store, Abu Farah, took me into the schoolyard to wait for the second lesson.

The sun was scorching. I thought about the silver door at the cursed house. It would definitely be glaring fiercely now. I walked to the yard behind the school, where there was a big tree, and then I went all the way to the wooden bench in the corner. I carefully put the bag on the ground, and when I opened my fingers, they ached because I had been holding the bag so tightly. I started crying bitter tears. Was I going to sit next to this bag forever?

The sun’s rays were shining on the purple shoes on the bag. I felt my breasts. They hadn’t grown yet. Strangely, silence reigned, and all I could hear was crows in the distance. But I had many things to think about. What if I opened the bag and saw what the soldier had put in? Maybe I would die. Should I bury the bag or throw it on the rubbish dump? I thought about how I could hide something, hide it completely so that nobody could touch it.

Do things really disappear? Or do they simply move from one part of life to another, and so on, forever?

This was the first time I felt a need to know the time. Before, time had been like something instinctive that moved inside me. What time was it now? And when would the first lesson end so that I could see Sawsan and tell her what had happened? I was hungry, but I couldn’t reach the food in the bag or the money I had hidden there. All I had was my clothes, my shoes, and the clip in my wavy hair.

I started counting the things I was wearing and then the school windows. The windows all reflected the rays of the sun, and I couldn’t see anything that was going on inside. One of the windows reflected a small cloud. At first, I had the impression there was a pile of cotton wool inside one of the classrooms. While I was focused on counting the windows, a crow dove at my bag and flew off with it, settling at the top of the big tree. I can’t deny that I felt relieved for few moments before my fears returned. The bag hadn’t disappeared, it was just a little further away than it had been.

My only option was to climb the tree. Although I hadn’t climbed a tree in years, I discovered that I was still a good climber. I checked the strength of each branch before I put my weight on it and, little by little, I climbed to the top. I hadn’t noticed that, near the top the branches, there was a dense, circular platform like a carpet. From there, the trunk grew even higher, with other branches sprouting out at the very top to form a kind of umbrella.

The crow was standing next to its nest, where it had thrown my bag. I’d never seen a crow this big before. It was about half my size. I didn’t know what I should do. I stood there, clinging to the trunk and looking at the crow and the bag, which the crow had torn open and emptied into the nest. My feet trembling, I started talking to the crow:

“I’m not going to hurt you. I just want my things back.”

Then I stepped toward the nest. The crow opened its beak and wings, and it started to caw. I was almost sure it was saying, “No, no.”

I tried again. “I just want my things back. I’m not going to hurt you,” I shook my head. This time, the crow didn’t answer.

I stood there for a moment, then threw myself into the nest. The crow started cawing in the same way as before. The bag was completely empty, and  I saw all its contents mixed up with other things the crow had collected: pens, Pepsi can pull tops, rings and small balls of various colors; my money was scattered around, with a half-finished strip of gum, a piece of a broken bottle, a small red tin with a picture of a tiger, a card with a picture of a pair of glasses. The food in my lunch was strewn all over the place. I couldn’t see everything. The crow had started pecking me. I’d never felt such pain, and I shielded my face with my hands. For a moment, I thought I was going to die, and that the crow would keep my body with all these other things.

Because of the crow’s cawing and my shriek, Ammu Abu Farah and his wife quickly climbed up the tree with a broom to drive the crow away. Later, they took me to the shop and Abu Farah disinfected the wounds the crow has given me. Umm Farah put the hem of her long hijab over her mouth and cried without making a sound.

“What made you go up into the crow’s nest, my dear?” Abu Farah asked.

I was looking into his eyes, which were focused on my wounds. He was slowly cleaning them out, moving his hand from me to his box of instruments while his hand held me firmly, as if to stop me from falling off the table. I looked around the shop. The goods on sale hadn’t changed since I started school: a bag of peanut-flavored chips, a crimson bar of chocolate. They hadn’t stopped producing them. At the end of the counter, there was a small packet of sweets that didn’t seem to be on sale; instead, they seemed to belong to Abu Farah and his wife. On its packet, there was a picture of milk being poured into a glass. I stared at it for ages without noticing anything else, until I almost fell asleep.

Okay then, that’s how my sensible life began. To some, it might seem a precocious, cruel start. But that’s the only start I’ve lived through, so it’s all the same to me.

Aya Chalabee was born in Baghdad, Iraq and lives in Helsinki, Finland. She holds a BA in interpreting from Diaconia University. No Sun in Baghdad لا شمس في بغداد  was her first short story collection (2015) and Two Friends in Ur صديقان في أُور  is her latest (2021). Her works also appeared in the Eksil anthology by Screaming Books (Denmark). She has translated the children’s book Siinä Sinä Olet البعيدُ القريب from Finnish to Arabic (2021) and participated in Linnun Neljä Laulua (2022) as a translator.

Jonathan Wright is a translator and former Reuters journalist. His previous translations from the Arabic include Khaled Al Khamissi’s Taxi, Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel, Saud Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk, Hammour Ziada’s The Longing of the Dervish, Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (shortlisted for the Man Booker International), Mazen Maarouf ’s Jokes for the Gunmen (longlisted for the Man Booker International), and Hassan Blasim’s God 99, The Madman of Freedom Square, The Iraqi Christ, and Sololand. He lives in London.