Mothballs Read Online Free PDF

beginning of the street came the smells of women and children, mothers and grandmothers. Their cloaks fluttered, they were blooming and alert, their cheeks were flushed, and no matter where you looked they all busily chewed gum. Women came and went. Their heads were tense, their feet were blistered, and their nail polish was cracked. And you could scarcely hear their voices.
    In front of the great door, painted a dark grey, the boys played marbles. Black wooden benches were set in the four corners. Warm breezes blew from inside, and a tall woman in her fifties, slender and ugly, was standing in front of a wooden partition. Her chest was bare, and her breasts were like two withered pears. A damp shawl was pulled around her middle. Her hair was long and hung in her face. She was shouting at everyone.
    â€œYou want someone to rub your back or not? Put your things down! How many of you are there? Five? Five costs thirty fils.”
    Your aunt stripped off your clothes; she was in her underclothes. She looked to the right and the left. Your aunts came in, one after the other, and languidly undressed. Everyone looked at everyone else. You saw everything here seized by the fever of these features: eyes without kohl, cheeks without ceruse, slack lips, and yet flawless bodies. Skulls and bones.
    The broad metres of the bath became a source of play and activity.
    The first place was not very warm. Children and women dried their hair and limbs. A commotion of Iraqi exclamation, the drone of aged women talking. Women massaged one another. When we went into the second room, the clouds of vapour were rising. My Aunt Najia’s voice:
    â€œListen, Farida, I can’t walk inside. I can’t catch my breath – I can’t breathe. We’re better off staying here.” Aunt La’iqa answered: “Go on ahead. As soon as you’re there you feel numb. The steam will absorb the cold and damp.”
    Umm Suturi walked ahead of everyone. She knew the way, and she knew everyone: Aunt Najia’s neighbour, Aunt La’iqa’s friend, the neighbourhood’s cheap seamstress. She sewed men’s dishdashas and pyjamas, which they bought for circumcisions, funerals, weddings – to trill and clap.
    Aunt Farida did not know what to decide. She was the youngest of all, eighteen years old. The women’s eyes scanned her body attentively.
    â€œWhere is Huda? Come here – even in this fire you’ll make friends!”
    There you saw the whisper of skin soaked with steam, water, and perspiration. The smell of armpits and buttocks, of urine, mutters and grunts escaping their lips, and shouts across the water barrel.
    Everything passed before you: hands took you and cuddled you between their legs, calling the names of everyone you know, undoing your braids. You were showered and soaked, and bowls of hot water were poured over you, on your head, over your delicate frame. You wailed: from there you sent the first speech recorded with anger, you cursed, paused, sniffed, paused, and asked.
    You looked with loathing at all these details. Women, all naked, as if they had just been raped or tortured. They laid old towels over the low wooden stools and squatted on them. The floor of the bath was as hot as a grill, and they cried out to one another and shrieked, and brawled with one another. There were no partitions in Iraqi baths, the borders were open, and the one language in which everyone conversed was physical touch. As if they had all been detained beyond the sky and today they had descended to the floor of the bath. There I made my first discoveries and won my first arguments; and shouted “No, no” among the long “Yeses” you hear from everyone else. Only there you were given the bloody title of Huda, a flaming fire.
    I slipped away from them all, glided between their legs, and the cakes of soap pushed me far, and I landed in the lap of one woman, her face covered with soap lather. She shrieked,