Read Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots for Free Online Page B

read that somewhere. This was part of a relationship. Part of being alive. It thrilled me for a second to think that we were still active in something, both of us. Still him and her.
    For a moment, I was caught in a memory of a place that no longer existed. I was eighteen years old, combing my mother’s hair in her bedroom. Two days before, she’d thrown herself from our balcony, desperate for my father to notice her, something. She was so sick then, her truths oozing out of her like a night sweat. My father had turned his back to speak to her, her face ravaged by the fall. “You look like a bad watermelon, rotten,” he’d said. “I cannot bear to look at you.” She begged him to stay with her but he left. He was a wearing a perfectly ironed shirt, English-tailored and white. I remember thinking,
I will never love a man who looks this civilized, this kempt.
As I combed her hair that morning, I looked out the window. There was Joseph, two steps behind his father, following the call of the
shamash,
shouting,
“Abu rahmin!”
Kicked-up sand coated just the backs of his pant legs, as if he’d fallen into a spill of Bedouin yogurt. I’d seen him before on his way from the Hinnuni bazaar. Our eyes locked. He didn’t look away. He stopped walking altogether. For a moment, I thought he was going to throw something at me. But he didn’t. We just stayed like that, looking. Joseph squinted his eyes—was that a smile?—and put his hand on his belly. With the other hand, he wiggled his fingers. It was a smile. It was a wave. He wiggled some more. I gasped, laughed out loud. He mouthed,
Are you all right?
He must have heard. I nodded. He pointed to the sun, then to where it would be at around four o’clock. Then he pointed to where he was standing. I would meet him here.
Yes.
I nodded. Thank you.
    Our love affair lasted nearly a year in Baghdad. Often, we met at the Suq el-Haraj, where my family never shopped and where no one would recognize me. We walked along al-Mutanabbi Street, pretending we had important business. We stood together on the summer riverbed when the Tigris and the Euphrates had fully receded. When my father was at the Mee-Dan until the wee hours of the morning, we could be alone on the roof on my bed (which we’d brought up for the season), drawing invisible lines between the formations of stars. We loved to watch the stars. Joseph gave me everything I’d never had: affection, attention, hope. All the while, our relationship was a secret. We weren’t the same, he and I. My father would never have let us marry. “An aggressive rooster,” he liked to say, “yells when he is still in the shell.” Joseph was poor but good. His heart was the purring engine in his chest, motivating everything he ever did. My father would never have understood. TB took my mother two months after we met.
    Joseph went to the United States before me, preemptively, sure of what Baghdad was about to become. I wanted to go with him, of course. My father said over his dead body. So it was. He was a wealthy Jew, my father, and so suspected of Zionism. He was too proud. He’d always been too proud. I left the day before he was hanged. The only bit of kindness he ever showed me was when he woke me in the dead of night and pointed to the car across the street. “Go,” he said. He’d sewn my mother’s gold into the hem of my coat. There was nothing left for me. “Go,” he said again. I went. I crept into the car packed with strangers. We sat in that car like matches in a matchbox and were driven for what felt like forever. When a baby coughed, his mother put her hand over his mouth. She didn’t mean to but she killed him. Can you believe that? She didn’t even cry out when she could no longer feel his pulse. She choked on her own breath and it sounded like her insides were drowning. Later, I woke up to a Bedouin with a dagger over my face. “Give me your sweater,” he said. God knows why he didn’t want my coat. And the