The World Through the Eyes of Angels

Part Five: The Ravishing Madeleine

60 P A R T F I V E The Ravishing Madeleine Madeleine was a rare beauty—a gracefully voluptuous figure, reddish coffee-brown hair, fair skin, and dimples on both cheeks. Her melodious laugh, like the clinking of crystal, had always raised my spirits to the sky. Soaring, I would close my eyes and roam God’s seven heavens, until my soul dissolved in the sweetness of the tune. The ravishing Madeleine sometimes hugged me and showered me with kisses. We were left alone together numerous times, and she granted me glimpses of charms that no one else besides her fiancé Diya’ ever got to see. Her kisses were sweet, but different from those of Selam—who I felt was a part of me—and from those of Sumaya, who, before she left, was to propel me into adolescence. I believe none of my peers ever had the chance to meet a beauty like Madeleine. She was a treasure that enriched my spirit and a tragedy that blistered my heart, torturing me still like the memories of Selam and Sumaya. Pure and vibrant memory wavers between two eternal foes: immeasurable bliss and unbearable pain. Maybe this is simply the nature of life. The friendship began one day in summertime when I delivered fabric to her house. Mary and Madeleine were having a heated conversation. I hesitated in the doorway. I wouldn’t have The Ravishing Madeleine 61 walked in if the door had been closed. But their front door was always open. I was only to see it closed once. Mary was there sitting in the heart of the courtyard, a big golden cross shining on her chest. All the passersby descending the twenty steps or more that made up the wide street opening into the public square could glance in and see her sewing clothes. The house was built from al-farsh, a bluish-white Mosul alabaster . The courtyard was about two by four meters, and Mary was hunched over an old Pfaff hand sewing machine in front of the family room. Two steps up and to the right, Madeleine sat in a similar space, in front of her bedroom. Perhaps she chose that spot seeking some privacy, especially during summer where she would be almost naked in a thin, revealing muslin robe. Their mother was perched on a rattan chair by the entrance to a lowerlevel room, also accessible via two steps, operating a Singer pedal foot sewing machine. I was the delivery boy for a draper, bringing Mary the day’s consignment of goods to be sewn. She handled the business dealings for her mother and sister Madeleine. She would negotiate a deal and record it in her poor handwriting, a series of scribbles nobody but her and God could understand. Mary was one of dozens of seamstresses who sewed robes for the Arab and Kurdish villagers. (The Assyrians, Jews, Aramaeans, Turkmen, Yazidis , and Shabak used the services of tailors in their own villages.) Those farmers flooded into Mosul every summer after harvest. They would come in throngs of hundreds upon hundreds to buy fabric for their entire family and have it sewn into robes, and then head back. Many drapers cheated the poor peasants in several ways. They used to charge them 120 fils to sew a jallabiyah or dishdasha while they would pay the seamstress only 70 or 80 fils. A 62 The World Through the Eyes of Angels few of them were honest and paid as charged. But the Mad Dog belonged to the first category. Mary and Madeleine were terrified of him. He was as hard as a rock. He used to skim off part of their and their mother’s hard work. The only one he didn’t cheat was Umm Ghanem, because he was afraid of her brother, who owned the store he was renting. This exploitation pained me as much as it did the seamstresses. I expected he would reward them for the long hours of work, for meeting deadlines, and for mastering their job, but he insisted on skimming 50 fils if the total bill was around one dinar (a dinar containing a thousand fils) and 100 fils if the total was around 2 dinars. This extortion couldn’t have been for the purpose of making him rich, because he was already very wealthy. So I suggested to Mary that she fudge the number of pieces...