The Midwife of Mosul

Chapter One: The Green Ledger

The baby came in the hour before dawn, when the old city of Mosul was at its quietest and the muezzins had not yet climbed their stairs.

Salma Haddad knelt on a cotton mat in the back room of the Jalili house with her sleeves pushed above her elbows. The mother, Wafaa, had been labouring since the afternoon before. Her face was grey with effort, and her hair was stuck flat to her forehead. Her mother-in-law stood in the doorway saying prayers under her breath. An aunt held the kerosene lamp so close that Salma could feel its heat on her cheek.

'One more,' Salma said. 'I can see his head. One more and he's yours.'

'I can't.'

'You can. You did it twice before. Your body remembers even if you don't.'

Wafaa pushed, and screamed, and the child slid into Salma's hands all at once, the way they sometimes did after hours of nothing. It was a boy. He was blue. The cord was looped once around his neck, and he was not breathing.

Salma hooked one finger under the cord and slipped it over his head. She turned him face down along her forearm and rubbed his back hard with two fingers, in firm circles between the shoulder blades. The aunt began to cry. The prayers in the doorway grew louder.

'Hush,' Salma said, not unkindly. 'Let him hear himself.'

She cleared his mouth with her little finger and rubbed again. Five seconds. Ten. Then the small body stiffened, and the boy drew a ragged breath and let out a cry so loud and so offended that all four women laughed at once.

'There,' Salma said. 'Listen to him. He's already complaining.'

She laid him on his mother's chest, tied the cord with boiled thread, and cut it with the scissors from her bag. When the afterbirth came she checked it carefully under the lamp, turning it in her hands to be sure it was whole, because a piece left inside could kill a woman days after everyone had stopped worrying. It was whole. She washed Wafaa, packed her with clean cloths, and showed her how to bring the boy to the breast. Only when mother and child were both settled, and the older woman had gone to boil water for tea, did Salma take the ledger from her bag.

It was a thick book bound in green cloth, its corners rubbed white, its spine mended twice with bookbinder's tape. Her mother had bought it in the Bab al-Toub market in 1951 and had written in it for thirty years. Salma had written in it for the seven since her mother's eyes had failed. Every birth either of them had attended was there: the date, the names of the parents, the weight of the child, whether it had come easily or with difficulty, and any mark on its body that might one day matter.

'Why the marks?' Salma had asked her mother once, when she was a girl carrying the bag.

'Because people get lost,' her mother had said. 'Soldiers take men. Floods take houses. Governments lose their papers whenever it suits them. But a child's body is a record, and this book is a record. If a boy comes home after twenty years and no one knows him, the mark on his foot will be written here by someone who had no reason to lie.'

At the time Salma had thought this was the kind of thing old women said. She understood it better now.

She weighed the boy in the cloth sling of her spring scale and wrote by the lamp in her small, even hand:

14 March 1988. Son of Ghassan Jalili and Wafaa Sultan. 3.6 kilos. Cord once around the neck, slow to breathe, then strong. Brown mark the size of a lentil on the left heel.

At the door the grandmother pressed a fold of dinars into her hand, and a paper twist of sugared almonds for her boys. 'You have your mother's hands,' the old woman said. 'God rest her. She brought my husband into the world.'

'Then I'll write that in the margin,' Salma said, smiling. 'Three generations.'

Outside, the alleys of the old city were turning from black to blue. Salma walked home the long way, along the lane above the river, because she liked to see the Tigris in the first light after a birth. The stone houses leaned close on either side, their wooden balconies almost touching overhead. A baker was pulling the first rounds of bread from his oven, and the smell followed her down the street. Above the rooftops the minaret of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri stood against the sky with its famous tilt. People called it al-Hadba, the hunchback. Her mother used to say it was bowing toward the Prophet's birthplace. Nadim said it was simply badly built and too stubborn to fall.

The Haddad house stood in a lane off the Maidan quarter, a narrow building of yellow stone around a courtyard no wider than a bedsheet. A lemon tree grew in a cracked clay tub in one corner. When Salma pushed open the gate, she found her husband at the gas ring in the kitchen doorway, making tea in his vest, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a schoolbook open on the step beside him.

'Boy or girl?' Nadim asked.

'Boy. Cord around the neck. He gave me a fright.'

'You gave him one first, I expect.' He poured her a glass, strong and sweet, and kissed the top of her head. He smelled of chalk dust and soap. He was thirty-two and already going grey at the temples, a thin man with careful hands and a smile that arrived slowly and stayed a long time.

Their elder son, Rami, sat at the low table with a book of his own. He was eight, serious and neat, and he looked up at the bag on her shoulder with an expression she knew well.

'Can I see?'

'Wash your hands first.'

He washed them twice and dried them on his shirt, and then she let him turn the pages of the ledger to the new entry. Rami loved the ledger. He read it the way other boys read comics, running his finger down the columns of names and weights. He knew which families had all daughters, which babies had been born in snowstorms, which entries were in his grandmother's looping hand and which in his mother's upright one.

On the cushion in the corner, under a blanket, something stirred. A head of black curls appeared, and then a furious, sleep-creased face.

'I want to see mine,' said Bassam.

He was four. He had been born in this house, in the back room, on a February night in 1984 when the electricity failed. Salma's mother had delivered him by candlelight, and because Salma was the one giving birth and her mother's hands were full, it was Nadim who had written the entry. Bassam knew this story. He asked to see it most mornings.

Rami turned back through the years and found the page. Nadim's handwriting sloped across it, larger and shakier than the women's:

9 February 1984. Bassam, son of Nadim Haddad and Salma. Born at dawn in this house, in the dark. 3.4 kilos. Came out shouting. A small mole below the right ear. God keep him, because I will try.

'Came out shouting,' Bassam repeated with satisfaction, pressing a finger to the mole under his ear as if to check that it was still there.

'You haven't stopped since,' said Nadim.

Salma slept through the middle of the morning. Nadim taught the afternoon shift that term at the Nineveh Primary School, three streets away, and when she woke he had already gone.

She heard about the joke that evening.

It had happened, he told her, at the end of the arithmetic lesson. A boy at the back had thrown a rubber ball, and it had struck the wall above the blackboard and knocked the portrait of the President crooked. Every classroom in Iraq had the same portrait: the President in his olive uniform, his black hair combed back, his thick moustache, his eyes following you wherever you sat. A crooked portrait was not a small thing. Nadim had climbed onto his chair to straighten it while twenty-six children of eight and nine watched him in respectful silence.

When he had it level again, he had looked at it for a moment and said, without thinking, 'There. The President is straight again. Now if only someone could do something about that moustache.'

The children had laughed. Most of them had laughed the way children laugh at anything a teacher says that sounds a little naughty. But one girl in the second row, a small, quick girl called Fatin Mansour, had laughed so hard that she got hiccups, and the whole class had laughed at her hiccups, and for a long moment the room had been full of noise.

'And then I said, Arithmetic, and that was the end of it,' Nadim said. He laughed at himself and shook his head. 'I don't know what came over me. The man looks down at me every day of my life. I suppose I was tired of him.'

Salma did not laugh. She put down the bread she was tearing and looked at him across the table until his smile went away.

'Nadim. Not in the school. Not in the house. Not anywhere.'

'They're children, Salma.'

'Children have parents,' she said. 'And parents have dinner tables.'

He reached across and touched her wrist. 'It was nothing. By tomorrow they'll have forgotten it.'

She wanted to believe him. She washed the glasses, and put the boys to bed, and sat for a while in the courtyard under the lemon tree with the ledger on her knees, reading her mother's old entries the way some women read the Quran, for comfort. Above the rooftops the hunchbacked minaret stood black against the stars. Somewhere across the city, at a dinner table she had never seen, a nine-year-old girl was waiting for her father's guest to finish talking so that she could tell him something funny.