Noor’s grandmother, Bibi (also known by her given name, Betool), reigned as the voice of calm and reason in the clan. Betool was not even the eldest person on the living and breathing greenery of the family tree; one of her uncles was still living, but he was in Iraq, and frail, and could be reached only through the crackly telephones. Every little while, an ominous woman’s voice would appear on the line to say, ‘‘three minutes – remaining.’’
Betool was very aware and present in all her children and grandchildren’s lives, on top of spending about ten hours a day in prayer. She knew everyone’s grades in school, and she knew who had loaned money to whom, and had such a thing occurred, she would have known precisely which of her sons-in-law was mistreating one of her daughters. Then she would have had some things to say to him. On each of her grandchildren’s birthdays, even those absent in Sweden, she consumed in flame the requisite number of candles on an old tin circle, faintly stained with waxy residue.
Sometimes, she cried a little bit, when the sad stories of the past bobbed up. Noor knew which names, with their associated traumas, to avoid mentioning. Howver, if Noor asked her, or if Koether was curious, Betool would commence the telling of the abridged, happy version of ‘The Story of Old Times’. There was the story of Betool walking to school when she was a tiny child of nine, in the black-and-white photo days of Baghdad. A man had asked the group of school children if they wanted a picture. Everyone pitched in some left-overs of pocket change.
This was a not a picture on prominent display in the Danish house. It was hidden amongst papers and trinkets in a cabinet, that Noor and Koether had once gone sleuthing through, while their grandmother and TV murmured in the background. It showed the child figure of Betool, whose hair someone had parted to a side and neatly pinned back, the straight tresses stopping primly at a puckered, obedient mouth above a porcelain oval of a chin, and a dress of some stiff material out of which popped knobbly knees.
Then there was the story about Betool when she gave birth to her first girl, and made a pact that every one of her kids must graduate college. Ah, she was not aware, then, that doing so involved the simple matter of dodging a war and a sudden exit from her homeland. But it made no matter, the decree held, just as her mother had insisted that her daughter continue school past compulsory levels.
The younger kids might listen in to these tales, but they amused themselves much more with the jokes and characters Noor related to them from the ready repertoire of her university acquaintances. She told them, when Khala Majeda had been busy with kitchen pots, about the professor who took whole groups of his students out for drinks after lectures. Mariam looked shocked, and Noor had caught Koether smirking slightly at Mariam’s ten-year-old innocence from the corner of her eye.
‘‘Does he pay for everything?’’ Amer demanded.
Hahaha, he gloated when answered in the affirmative. After some fiddling, he had transformed the story into the ‘‘professor who showed up drunk to class. Dude, he’s awesome!’’
Or, the professor who had abruptly broken off his lecture, with perhaps a hundred students’ waiting pens posed over their notebooks, to confess: ‘‘yes, I got a divorce, what can I say, I made a mistake.’’ To the immediate sympathy and collective ‘awwwwww’ of half the female section of the audience, and the rolled eyes of the rest.
Koether had just graduated from her university in Lund, and whenever anyone mentioned her new teaching job, or wanted to hear stories from the school, Koether would nod self-importantly while looking nervous.
But Mariam said rather wickedly of her older sister, ‘‘Selwa comes home with the same story every day, all about her bad grades.’’
Sh-sh, Noor admonished her, but Selwa was at that point holed up in her room, pursuant of significant chatter with an assemblage of her closest friends from school, and Koether said, rather prissily, ‘‘watch out before the same thing happens to you!’’
‘‘Koether, you planning on failing any of your students?’’ Amer asked.
‘‘No, all my students are going on to college.’’
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