For Ali Warsall, names were unfathomable.
On the 22 August 1921, he was born in Shaibah Air Base, Mesopotamia. On account of his father’s absence, Ali’s mother had full naming rights. This was indicated by the doctor waving a piece of paper in front of her nose. At this point, Dalia was used to having foreign papers waved in her face. This was, apparently, the primary method of communication between the British. Through an instinct granted by Allah, she knew this was the document to name her firstborn son. By the same instinct, she knew he would be called Ali Warsall. If her child bore a last name from his father’s country, he should bear a first name from his mother’s.
“Ali”, she whispered to her child, cradled in her arms. The doctor nodded, wrote the name down, and fled.
It was both her boon and doom that she couldn’t read these documents. She was sane and, for the most part, content. On the other hand, the British devils treated her as a second class citizen on account of her illiteracy. Or, perhaps, her status as concubine to the Air Marshall was not one that garnered respect. Dalia found it hard to respect herself at times, knowing her own cowardice.
Dalia had a command of language that surpassed many of the greatest scholars. Thoughts arrived in her head as formed poems. Sentences and emotion were woven from the same fabric. Light streamed through windows, and she only saw the metaphors emanating from its core. Dalia’s soul was bursting with stories to tell. None of these were ever written down, and there was no one left to share them with.
A gurgle erupted from the life that she had just brought into this world. The sounds of bombs and screaming, the feeling of blood on her hands, smoke in her throat, disappeared. Dalia’s shoulders relaxed, and she planted a kiss on Ali’s forehead. At last, she would have someone to share in her language.
The following day, Air Vice Marshall Frederick Warsall arrived at the base and tore the birth certificate to shreds. In a spluttering growl that Dalia understood none of, he declared that his son’s name would be a proper British name, like David. It wasn’t clear if his preferred name was David or he was only requesting that the child had a name like David. The Marshall stormed away, muttering under his breath.
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometres away in the capital city, the monarch Faisal I of Iraq was legitimised, causing Mesopotamia to change its name to Iraq. The country stirred at the news. The Marshall was called in for unrest in the capital and disappeared for another four months.
Ali grew up in the company of weary soldiers. They would arrive back on base, dizzy from the atrocities they had just committed in the name of stopping atrocities from happening elsewhere. It became the young boy’s mission to bring joy to their circular existences. Through heat and humidity, he convinced them to play all types of games. A gap-toothed smile from the half-Iranian child was enough to break their stupors. They would weave between the bomber planes, trying to catch one another, drinking in Ali’s guiltless laughter.
Evenings in the desert were melancholic. The unforgiving sun had scrambled elsewhere. Silent creatures of the night would worm out of their holes to hunt. The air relaxed. In their tiny room, Dalia would whisper stories to her child. Beings in the night sky that protected them from other universes. Flavours so vibrant it would make a man’s tongue slide out through his eyes. Heroes of old who shaped the morals of mankind forever. And, of course, her family that had perished in the bombings. Characters so ridiculous and detailed that they materialised in the room as their names were spoken of.
Dalia cried when he first said maa-maa, echoing the inflection of her own words. At last, she had a companion to converse with. Deep into the night, they would chatter away. Bed-time was a concept elsewhere, not here. All she knew were her son’s thoughts and emotions. She absorbed them as a plant feeds on sunlight, wielding his feelings into elegant songs. In turn, the boy saw his mother as a god, a walking monolith of love.
Dalia had rescued a single item from the wreckage of her home. It was a Jacob’s ladder that she called ‘the klick-klack toy’. It was the only recognisable thing in sight, the day that she rummaged through the rubble of her what was once her home. Given to her as a child by her father, who had been given it by his mother, it had the wisdom of trees. Made of six lacquered, light-brown blocks held together with twine, its illusory movements mesmerised Ali for hours. With fingers smaller than the ancient blocks, he would rock it left and right, watching the pieces tumble downwards, but never change position. Ali carried it around with him at all times. The soldiers would joke that they could hear the klick-klack of Ali’s toy before they would see him.
Dalia could make Ali laugh without stopping. As he grew, he too learnt to make her laugh. They fed off each other’s joy, knowing that it wouldn’t continue like this. For now, in the midst of a war-torn country experiencing an identity crisis, scattered allegiances and warring beliefs, Dalia and Ali were at peace. Dalia stopped dreaming about her home being destroyed. Her ears stopped ringing. The bombs were too far away to hear, at the base where they were planning to drop them.
Ali couldn’t see farther than the woman who held him, and his teeth were pointing in every direction but straight. Cargo arrived every month, and each month they tried a new pair of spectacles on Ali. Invariably, they would fall into the steaming dust of the desert, lost, and sometimes arriving back cracked and wayward. Until the next cargo shipment, Ali would run around blind, hands in front of him, energised with freedom. At the age of six, Dalia figured out a way to tie his spectacles to his head via a piece of string, solving the broken-glasses problem about half of the time. Regarding his teeth, the doctor shrugged away any solutions. They would fall out soon. The adult ones would point the right way, maybe.
Ali had a smile like the spines on the back of a stegosaurus. Eyes fogged over, he would look up at the tall pilots, grin so wide that they had no choice but to smile back. When words came to him, they flowed like water. He spoke Arabic like a poet and English like a soldier. The crew at base warned him not to mix Arabic words into his English sentences, but this was poor advice. Sometimes there wasn’t the right way to say something in English, and he had another arsenal to draw from. Soon enough, they were picking up on his lingo, shouting yalla yalla before heading out on a mission, wondering if their God sometimes went by another name.
Ali was seven years old when he was whisked away from paradise. Frederick returned to base one day after six months of absence. Without greeting, he stormed into their room, locked eyes with his bastard son and snarled.
“How old are you? Four?”
“Seven,” Ali said.
“You need a proper education. You’re going to Britain.”
With that, the Marshall spun out of the room, leaving Ali to translate the words for his mother.
At first, concubine to the Marshall had been a wild play for safety. Dalia was beautiful, and she knew the weaknesses of man. The country was being burnt down around her. Without family or place to go, she had sought refuge with the enemy. Despicable, but wise. At first, it seemed that Allah had forgiven her, for why else would she have been given safety, food, and Ali? Now, though, she realised it was a wicked punishment. Only after growing so close to her child, he would be ripped away from her. Realisation rolled in like an air strike: devastating, inescapable, dark.
With a trembling thumb, she wiped away the tears from Ali’s face. Leaning in close, she spoke the words that would haunt Ali’s dreams for the rest of his life.
“I am doomed, but you have a chance. Be free of this place, Iraq, it is all I ever wanted for you.”
Ali wanted to scream. Tear his father’s throat out. Take a bomber plane and destroy the air base. Implode the universe into the size of a marble. But these were not things that he knew how to do. Instead, he chose to bring laughter to his mother.
“That’s okay, Iraq is boring. I always preferred Mesopotamia.”
For the first time in his seven-year-long life, Ali boarded a plane and left the air base. Dalia stood at the hangar and waved until she was an ant, then a dot, then a memory, then nothing. Only once his plane had disappeared into the mist of the horizon did Dalia collapse to the floor, sobs racking her body, pledging to bring Jahannam – hell – to the Marshall for every second he kept her apart from her child.
From above, Ali rocked the klick-klack toy in his hands and observed the truth of his land. It was barren and hot, much like the air base. Then, mountains, rising from the ground like goliaths reaching to pluck the plane from the sky. He had seen these before, in his mother’s stories. They were amazing to behold with his eyes. Beyond, there were buildings, and fields of grain, which looked like variations of the air base. Ali’s face was plastered to the window of the plane. His eyes stung as he forced himself not to blink, lest he miss a single detail. Islands. Cities. Lakes. It was a crescendo for the chorus. The ocean.
When the plane touched down in London, Ali was in a stupor. Even the klick-klack toy was still. Like a piece of luggage, he was passed from official to car to train. Eventually, he arrived at the mythical place that the British called school. Stacks of stone, brick, and concrete. Hissing pipes wormed around the walls. The floor echoed under his feet, mocking the way he walked.
“David Warsall.”
Ali turned around. A man stood before him. Headmaster. Towering above him and quivering with displeasure. The words my name is Ali melted on his tongue. It was clear that it would not be appropriate to correct him. The headmaster described how the next ten years of Ali’s life would proceed as though he were explaining how to mop the floor. Once finished, he gave Ali a look that indicated that it would be in their mutual interests for them to never cross paths again.
Sobbing in silence became Ali’s greatest skill. When the owls were hunting for mice, the Iraqi expat could be found hunched under his blankets mourning his mother, culture and the sliver of country that he came to know. None of the other boys ever found out.
Ali was taught that his god was false, his people were poor and troublesome, and his language an embarrassment to hide away and forget. At first, the boys tried to bully him, by stealing his glasses and leaving him blind. But Ali was familiar with darkness, and they could never torture him as much as his father had, by taking his mother away. The bullies soon gave up. Soldier’s English earned him points with his peers – especially the swears he introduced them to. Half-British blood and overcast weather gave his complexion enough pallor that everyone forgot about his heritage.
Holiday periods alone at the boarding school hardened Ali’s principles. The weeks of silence, with no other company but the klick-klack toy and the cattle in a nearby field, were unforgiving. Whatever sweetness his mother had imbued in him transformed to stoicism. It was a matter of survival. Dalia’s whisperings faded into the back of his mind. The word ‘mother’ became a pleasant feeling in the back of his mind. She was safe and happy, back at the air base, just like he remembered her. He placed the klick-klack toy at the bottom of his trunk.
There was no choice but to catch up on studying. Many of the other students had been tutored from a young age, and Ali’s grades were not looking good. It terrified him to think that the school might be mailing his grades back to his father. Long nights were spent in the cold library. The books sneered at him from their shelves, derisive at the outsider.
For two years, he was terrible at football, forced onto the pitch by his friends, struggling to understand why no one wanted to sit at a table and have a conversation. This opinion was held in secret until the fateful lunch break came when Ali was to score his first goal. He would lie in bed that night, thinking about the way the net rippled as the ball, the ball that he kicked, reached the back of it. The way that his peers swarmed around him, holding him aloft, trumpeting in glory. The feeling of ecstasy, reminding him of a time when he would chase soldiers around the hangar in the desert.
After that day, Ali realised that football had a lot in common with studying. With a bit of practice, one was sure to improve. Ali became a legend on the pitch, a myth in the hallways. His grades started to pick up, and soon he was top of the class. Younger students would point at him, muttering about his speed, agility, the way the ball seemed glued to his foot. The blind footballer. The second-best import from Iraq after oil. The most handsome of the prefects, until he smiled, revealing a cave of wayward stalactites and stalagmites.
Ali Warsall became David Warsall.
Six nights before graduating from school, David lay in bed, restless with excitement. The end was in sight, and he was all hopes and aspirations. University offers were piling in. The far away assurance of his father’s sponsorship was a certainty. There were talks amongst his friends of a trip to France or Spain. A local premiership football club wanted to sign him on to play, and they were talking about paying him. The thought of being paid to play football sent twitches through his toes.
It was all too much. David crept out of his room and into the hallway, heading for the window with the view of the fields. It was a rare, cloudless night. The gibbous moon shone down upon the grand walls of the school. It was almost too bright to look at, but David tried anyway. Squinting, he could make out the craters on its surface.
Across the world, in a country on fire, the same moon shone down on an arid plain. Nearby, an airbase under British control was in constant operation, struggling to retain control over a population it had no interest in. The only thing that mattered was the viscous black mud, deep within the Earth, the melted bones of creatures that could crush a man with a nod. War was close. Oil would be needed.
In the last decade, Shaibah Air Base had expanded its operations. When Air Headquarters sent men over for an audit, they were perplexed by the laundrywoman. Not a single man would speak on behalf of the gorgeous, Arabic lady who washed the men’s garments. Unknown origin, motives and not a word of English to defend herself.
It was a breach of security beyond comprehension. They couldn’t let the woman go, since they don’t know what kind of intelligence she had collected. It was too large a mistake to report back to Air Headquarters. If one of the Marshals found out about this, there would be hell rained down upon them all. Execution was the answer, but these were men who preferred to murder from above. Holding a gun to a trembling, pleading woman’s face was not in their repertoire.
They decided to wait until mid-morning the next day. It was blinding hot. Like a pack of dogs herding a single sheep, they marched her out to the perimeter of the base and pointed out into the haze of the desert. She gave a solemn nod and began walking. They stood watching until she had disappeared beyond the horizon.
Dalia Salman, a forgotten concubine who hadn’t the words nor the paperwork to plead her case, was exiled into the desert. Pious, knowing this had always been her fate, she died with Ali’s name on her cracked lips.