By AMY ALKHALIFI
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM
Fardous Loses Her Mind and Invents a New Future
“At the beginning, it was easy. Customers were in and out all day, and money was flowing,” Fardous the soothsayer says to her neighbor Um Khalid after revealing to her that “business is bad.”
Fardous narrates to her customers a past they know all too well, because, in her view, people are soothed by listening to their own memories. It reassures them to know that their past is real, that once upon a time they were. This makes the future an easy prophecy for fortune tellers like Fardous. All she has to do is twist, turn, and circle around the past for it to produce another, more monotonous past known as “the future.” Customers know what to expect. The past was the only time they knew. Out of mounting boredom, the market for fortune tellers swelled—nothing remotely interesting was going on—and visiting them became a favorite pastime. One day, out of the blue, Fardous decided to break from routine, inserting into the future an event that had never taken place in the past.
Her customer Maram was aghast. She yanked her hand from between Fardous’s hands and said: “Where the hell did you get that from? Did a new line suddenly grow on my palm or the palm of Amman?” She rushed off without paying a single dinar. Fardous had told her something she’d never heard before. Maram couldn’t retrieve it from her memory or the memory of the city—which were one and the same.
She went and told all her friends, and word got out that Fardous had lost her mind.
Her Life, Tied in a Loop
“Get in, I’ll give you a ride,” he offers sweetly. “How much for a night?” he asks gently. I get in and “negotiate my price” to see what he will do. He freezes as if a response is not what he was expecting.
In the real world, I ignore the offer and go home with the bitter taste in my mouth that sneaks up on me without warning as soon as I start to feel that this city does not belong to me. I leave my house the next day as if I’m about to finally receive the Tapu, the deed, for the entire city and be free from their prying eyes. But just because I want something to happen, it doesn’t mean it will. Sometimes when I’m looking at someone, I feel my lips moving along with theirs, as if I know what they’re going to say next. I feel dizzy, and my mouth is bitter. My head spins in the room eight times, like the number of mounds in Amman. A distant voice says: “So he followed you from your home to work. So what? He didn’t touch you.” I say to myself: What guarantee is there that he won’t touch me? How do I explain a danger that resides deep within me to someone who has the luxury of living without fear?
Amman has more piles of dirt than ever before, too many for me to grasp. They scatter the light, making the city difficult to see. The GPS, like me, calls out the names of streets that don’t belong to me. It directs me, “After one hundred meters, take the second exit. Better yet, turn back and go home.”
The Sun’s Roof
It seems to Nour that everything has a roof, as if the entire city’s inhabitants are gripped by an obsession for building roofs out of zinc, brick, and cement. Even the trees appear gaunt—a gray roof seems to have grown over their branches. Her mother, seated on the right side of the bus as it makes its way down the 99, thinks only of Nour passing over her cousin Hamouda. Nour, the eldest daughter, gazes absentmindedly out the window, casting a roof over everything she sees. Her mother’s chattering about the other girl Hamouda got engaged to, after giving up on Nour, barely registers.
“That one was smart. She didn’t turn down Hamouda in order to wait like an idiot for someone like Ali to miraculously get his life together and open a barbershop, and she didn’t sit around waiting for her mother-in-law’s approval,” says Nour’s mother.
In front of Nour is a child in cowboy shorts, teaching his pigtailed younger sister that if the tip of one finger brushes against the other and they quickly move apart, a musical sound is produced, like a pop or a clap. Then he begins to teach her a dance. Next to her, a man is on the phone to someone called “Abu Surūr,” assuring him that “the kitchen will be ready next week.” Nour decides it’s better to listen to her mother’s reproach than strangers on the bus making fun of her calamity—how do they know about her thwarted plans, anyway?
Before she turns her attention to her mother, who has moved on to talking about the fiancée’s dowry, an ugly glass building catches her eye. It spirals and coils, as if on the verge of devouring itself. Where does this building end? Nour imagines the building’s core as a mouth, ready to bite off its head and replace the roof. Behind her a man sleeps with his hands covering his eyes to block out the sunlight. Nour thinks: Why don’t we just roof the sun and be done with it? We might as well. The driver blares the horn for ten continuous seconds at some kids cycling in the bus lane. Nour’s mother pauses after the horn stops. Suddenly Nour notices shadows in rectangular and triangular shapes from the sides of buildings that have made their way inside the bus. It’s as though the buildings are wearing straw summer hats whose shadow is reflected on the pebbles and sand. “Why don’t they take off their hats?” Nour, feeling hot, erupts. She doesn’t know what time it is. The man standing in front of her, his arm clutching the yellow pole, has a wristwatch that reads three o’clock. “Impossible,” says Nour. “The sky is reddish, and the mosque is reciting Quran for Maghreb prayers.”
Nour is tired of waiting. She doesn’t want to hold on any longer—not three hours for sunset, which she was sure had already arrived, and not another thirty days of Ali’s endless delays. She doesn’t want to wait for the roofs to grow when they have already grown in her mind.
But she will wait. First for the bus to reach Yajouz, then for the five minutes it takes her and her mother to walk to the house, and so on and so forth. One wait will drag into another until a new roofing decision is made.
Desperate Attempts to Stir My Nonexistent Nostalgia
Red Lancer, silver Avante, red Ford Fusion, another Lancer but this time silver, black Toyota Camry, black Prius, silver pickup, gray Mitsubishi pickup. Within twenty minutes and eight kilometers of careful observation, and turning away from the tracks, preoccupied with this inventory, I compile modest statistics of the cars my eyes have tracked behind the wheel. What triggered this hasty study? Stickers of Saddam Hussein’s face, placed on or near the trunks of those cars.
When I reach the Ghamdān Horse-Riding Club, I see Bahiyya strutting next to Qaswara. Bahiyya, a gentle mare given to beginners, in contrast to Qaswara, whose nature is understood from his name, stubbornly defies his rider and throws him to the ground. I wonder: If the owners of those cars acquired horses for transportation, as we once did in days past, would they have slapped Saddam Hussein stickers on Bahiyya and Qaswara as well?
Less Desperate Attempts
Droplets from a clothesline on one of Amman’s balconies fall on my face as I lie underneath.
A herd of sheep appears out of nowhere. I lie on the leather seat of the car for an hour, waiting for it to pass.
Now it’s Saturday, and the sound of lawn-mowing and the gas truck’s Beethoven seeps into my ears as I alternate between laying on the carpet and on the couch.
I plunge my hand into the pillows and find Amman. Someone planted Amman or forgot it under the pillow.
Where can I lie down to find it again?
In Basra, as in other cities of mine, there are no balconies like Amman’s balconies, nor is there the buzzing noise of boredom like Amman’s to lie beside. The sheep never come. In my distant home, I don’t find Amman wherever I place my hands on the furniture.
A final attempt: I look in the sky for a water tank, circular and white, floating between homes. I want to lay behind it until it’s empty. I don’t find it.
No matter where I lie down, I always shroud myself in Amman, even if it’s only warm from the outside and is hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Amy Alkhalifi is a visual and literary storyteller. Through mixed media and words, she tries to find and interlace the particles left from her country of citizenship, Iraq. Currently, Amy resides in Germany, where she is pursuing her degree in energy engineering. In 2024, Amy co-authored a book on Amman, where she was born and has lived most of her life.
Mayada Ibrahim is a literary translator and editor based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works between Arabic and English.
