Excerpt: The Djinn’s Apple by Djamila Morani (translated by Sawad Hussain)

Chapter 1

My siblings’ screams still pierce my ears no matter how hard I squeeze my head between my hands. Their cries ring out, filling my head until it almost bursts.

I’m recalling that day so long ago. It had started like any other with the meuzzin’s early morning call to prayers sounding across Baghdad—the most opulent city in the world they said—and my home.

I’m curled up in my bed as I hear Laween and Rohan arguing in the hallway. Rohan must have been dragging his feet to get to prayer like he always did, and the last thing Laween would want is to upset my father. My mother’s head pops out from behind the door, and she’s surprised to see me awake.

“Here you are! Your father is waiting for you so we can pray. Hurry up!”

“Okay, okay,” I say as I lift my blanket off my body. But instead of getting ready right away, I pause by my window and open it. I fill my lungs with the scent of basil grown just below—my favourite way to start the morning. How could I do anything different when we have a garden with plants of all shapes and colours? Maybe this house isn’t as big as our last one in downtown Baghdad, but having this garden makes it the most beautiful place to be—a haven after we escaped with our lives from the caliph’s constant threats.

And then that night disaster struck.

***

I couldn’t see anything in the dark; the moon hidden behind the clouds, embarrassed by what it might see or hear. I felt my way through the willow trees, my father’s face coming into focus as he opened the back gate to our house. “Go, now,” he ordered. “We’ll be right behind you. I’ve got to get your siblings and mother.” He shoved me out and shut the garden gate, but I didn’t budge. How could I leave knowing that he was going back to die?

We had been in his study, Baba as usual transcribing something or other while I gazed curiously at a strange manuscript, the candle in the hanging lantern casting flickering shadows on the parchment. “Leave that manuscript alone and finish your reading, Nardeen,” he scolded. Tugging on my bottom lip, I stared at the odd drawing on the page, which kind of looked like a human: it had four limbs that seemed like arms and legs and a small circle that could have been a head.

“What’s this, Baba? Did a child draw it?”

He cut me off with a sternness I wasn’t used to. I raised my book in front of my face, pretending to read the words, while my eyes stayed glued to that manuscript…but the next thing I knew, a powerful boom shook the room, causing the book to slip from my hands.

“Al-Rashid’s men! Al-Rashid’s men!”

The name of Harun Al-Rashid echoed in every part of our large house, a name that spelled our death. Strange, seeing how—just a few weeks before—it had meant the life we had always dreamed of.

It’s hard to wrap your mind around the fine line between life and death.

Sometimes it’s so thin you can barely tell the difference.

I rushed to the balcony and craned forward to see men with their swords drawn, chanting, “Kill the apostates! Kill the infidels!” They didn’t look anything like Al-Rashid’s guards. How did they find us? Flinching at their voices, I turned to my father, who had jumped up from his chair when he heard the word “apostates”. He grabbed my hand and dragged me behind him down the stairs, his eyes surveying the area before him. He turned round to look at me. My eyes clung to the fear I had seen in his. I pulled on his hand and mumbled, “Baba…”

He stumbled but didn’t stop. I pressed my small palm into his sweaty one. Fear, for me, at twelve years old, was usually a bogeyman from my mother’s stories chasing me; he would melt away, disappearing completely, whenever I ran into my father’s arms. But this fear that had blanketed Baba’s eyes was uglier than any bogeyman. He opened the back door and pushed me out harshly towards the garden gate. I tried to open the door again, but Baba had locked it from the inside.

I stood on the doorstep, listening to the sounds of bodies and things crashing to the floor; my brother and sister yelling; everyone calling out for everyone else, but nobody answering, like they couldn’t hear each other. Bayan’s loud wail…I could pick her out in the middle of the storm of shouting. Usually her cries were loud and annoying, but now it was a desperate wail that tore my heart up. A loud wail that didn’t belong to her five-year-old self. Suddenly she fell silent. The quiet slithered slowly all through the house and garden, and the voices fell away. I only heard the cautious, firm steps that Death itself took inside, searching, it seemed, for another life, the final one to snatch before it left the place. My grip on the door handle loosened and I pushed my ear up against the door.

“Sire…I’ve looked for her everywhere.”

“She must be here, look harder,” Death ordered.

My knees felt weak. I backed down a few steps. My foot slipped and I fell. Are they looking for me?

“I told you, keep looking!” Death yelled.

I stared at the shut door and imagined it opening. I sprinted outside the garden, not looking right or left—if I glanced back even once, Death would swallow me whole. I ran without knowing where I was going, my feet leading me to a nearby mosque. I used to love looking up at the lamps that hung from chains along the streets, watching as they swayed in the wind and the dancing light guided us along the path. But that night, I did not look up even once.

I steadied myself against the wall and sank to the ground to catch my breath, my heart pounding so wildly it felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. I caught sight of the ink that had drawn a line along the length of my hand. A reminder of another life when I sat with my father making notes in my book while he talked. It looked like henna, actually, just like the henna of the Bedouin women! I remembered the face of that woman Anan, the dark Bedouin soothsayer, whose hand was dyed with henna—she had visited Mama a few days before. A cold shiver travelled through my body, without me knowing why. Was it the cold night wind or what she had said?

***

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