The Weight of a Mustard Seed Read Online Free Page A

ground they played on was limned with salt and the salt would stick to the camel milk football and scratch up their toes as they kicked it.
    Whenever I talked to Kamel Sachet’s friends or military colleagues they always used two words to describe him. They said, “he was brave” and that “he was a simple man.” In translation, this “simple” meant uncomplicated, straightforward, straight talking and clear-cut. But I always imagined Kamel Sachet’s simplicity in another way, as a purity of mind carved out of hard-edged shadows in a single color: yellow of the sun that beat through a yellow sky onto the yellow earth. Kamel grew up in poverty that did not know it was poor—spartan, austere, simple . It was not the way of the village for boys to fight and scrap but to let anyone hurt you was haram, forbidden, and shame.
    Kamel was part of the clever group of boys at school and his teacher praised him to his parents and encouraged them to send him to middle school. Whether it was for this reason or economics, when Kamel was twelve his father Aziz moved the family to the outskirts of Baghdad, to the district of Dora, a pre-suburb area that was still then fields and unpaved roads and to which electricity (and television and radio and music and news) was not to come until 1964.
    Here was the teenager, testing limits and boundaries, leading his little gang into the adjacent Christian neighborhood, fighting other little gangs, studying under trees when it was too hot at home and then jumping into the Tigris to cool down, falling in love with a girl from a good Jobouri family who refused his humble proposal, becoming momentarily inflamed with Unity! Liberation! Ishtiraqiya [Socialism]! during the shortlived Baathie coup of 1963, even temporarily manning the checkpoint near the Dora refinery with a green uniform and an Egyptian rifle (“so bad that if you dropped it, it would discharge and explode”) and encouraging his father to go to the new literacy classes sponsored by the socialist revolution.
    His ambition, as that of his friends and childhood gang from the neighborhood, those that had seen their fathers struggle with the land, was to work as an employee in a government position that would bring a salary and a position. Many of them, after the humiliation of “The Aggression” of the 1967 war when the Arab states were defeated by Israel, felt compelled to join the military. After passing his baccalaureate, Kamel Sachet applied for the airforce, but he was turned down and joined the police instead.
    Â 
    A YEAR AFTER Kamel’s proposal, Shamh was chatting at the bus stop with a boy from the university, who was praising her high marks. “I can still remember his name,” said Um Omar wistfully, “it was Mahmoud.” Kamel saw this, and walked over with high red indignation and his fists raised. Shamh told Mahmoud to leave to avoid a confrontation, but then she reminded her suitor that he had no rights over her.
    The next year he agreed to buy a house of his own and she accepted his marriage proposal. Her sisters had married people introduced through matchmakers and relatives; Um Omar chuckled that she had found a husband by herself. Her brother asked around about the reputation of a young policeman called Kamel Sachet. In general people praised him: he had a reputation for being brave, but also he had a quick temper. He got into fights. If someone cut him off at a traffic light, for example, he was liable to beat them up.
    Kamel Sachet and Shamh were married in 1972.
    PHOTOGRAPH: Polaroid of Shamh-Um Omar as a young mother in the seventies. She is wearing a knee length sundress with a bright geometric pattern and a pair of towering tottering white platform sandals with bows on her toes. She’s laughing and holding a baby, her first son, Omar.
    Was Kamel Sachet always religious? Didn’t he impose the hijab on you when you were married?
    â€œNo, no! It