One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (3 page)

More clearly than these things, I remember myself a year or two later, dressed in a starched school uniform: white shirt, pressed slacks, thin straight necktie. I remember that I was a good student, not from any particular award received from school itself, but from the impression my older brother, Yasin, left on me.

Many nights after school he would be summoned into my father’s bedroom, upstairs on the colonnaded second floor of our big empty house, and my father would beat him with a cane or a belt or with his hand. School wasn’t Yasin’s best subject. At fifteen years of age, he failed his entrance exams for secondary school, a shame on our family.

On the night Yasin brought home the news of this failure, my governess, Fatima, sent me upstairs to wait outside my father’s room with a warm rag so that I might apply it to Yasin’s back. The beating lasted five minutes, maybe ten, but it seemed like an eternity to me as I listened in the darkness of the hallway from behind the locked bedroom door. I was amazed that Yasin did not cry.

I knew I would have.

When the door at last opened, before Yasin came out, I heard my father say to him, “Allah’s blessing that I do not have two such failures as you to scourge my name. Your brother, praise be, has no such handicap.”

Yasin exited the room, back bowed. I offered him the warm towel but he stiffened, gazed directly into my eyes with his flat black expression, and spat on the floor before walking away from me.

He didn’t take the towel.

4

Thursday

LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING
, again this evening, as is becoming quite usual. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as a golden sunset reflects its light against the overpass where the highway from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger highway from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect. As always, the American convoys pass north, pass south, just far enough away from me that they shimmer from the heat. The wheels of the lumbering vehicles disappear in this mirage so that their chain of chassis looks like a snake gliding over the road. The noise from the convoys reaches me through the mirage, distant and rumbling. Twenty go north. Sixteen return south. One convoy passes over the bridge of my intersection, much closer to me than the bypass. It heads southeast toward Umm Qasr and the big American prison called Camp Bucca that is located just off the road between Safwan and Umm Qasr. The convoy is made up of buses rather than semis. The buses are guarded by the normal three Humvees, one in back, one in the middle, one in front. A short convoy, four buses in total, compared to the normal thirty-plus semis. A different sort of convoy. I make a little notch on the doorpost of my shop, the fifth such notch since I arrived here and began my game of convoy counting.

Today marks the fourth day of Layla’s visits. Also the twenty-second day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. The toughs from Hezbollah have stopped at my shop, as they have at every shop in the new market here on the north side of town. They are a gang of youths with green headbands, though their leader, Hussein, is close to my own age, maybe forty. He has a hawklike face, the classic Semitic hooked nose, and deep-set eyes underscored with purplish semicircles. He is a short man, though wiry, and the young men in his gang are all short and wiry as well. It seems to me that Hussein has collected a half dozen imperfect copies of himself.

Hezbollah performs three functions in the market and in the town. The first of these functions I applaud: providing a sort of social welfare, distributing assistance to the poor, setting up some services—like vaccinations—that neither the Iraqi government nor the American or British military regularly provide. But the other two functions I deplore: coercing merchants and citizens to pay for their protection and conducting a campaign of moral policing.

The Hezbollah gang’s arrival could easily become an ugly scene for me, for I neither want, nor feel like paying for, their protection. And, as a new man in town, my moral qualities are—I am sure—still somewhat suspect in their eyes. Fortunately, they do not bully me very much, Allah in His Mercy be praised.

“It is your first month,” Hussein tells me, eyeing my mobile phones. “We like to encourage new businesses, so no fees for you yet.”

I give him a phone to try for a week or two. He repeats his line about the importance of protection for businessmen in the Safwan markets, especially in this newer market, where, if I haven’t noticed, I am inside the on-ramp loop of an overpass, ground that is officially government property. Hussein doesn’t go so far as to call it a black market, as some townsfolk do. Nor does he tell me that I have taken up my place in the market illegally. And I do not go so far as to tell him that I have already made special arrangements with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah for the privilege of the location and for the privilege of better protection than his band of scrubby youths could ever hope to provide. I want to say, “Seyyed Abdullah guarantees my business.” I want to say that very much. But I remain perfectly cordial with the man.

As the
muezzin
wail of the call to prayer dies in the evening air, the guard for the overpass wanders along the edge of the quarry on the far side of the road. It is an abandoned quarry, a place where the local people dump their household trash. The guard can see the bridge from his position, so he hasn’t completely abandoned his post. He prods at mounds of garbage, stoops to pick up objects from wind-tattered black trash bags. Goats and a crow graze through the refuse behind him, more closely inspecting what he has overturned and discarded.

“My mother asked me to check on the tomatoes in the market today,” Layla says.

“Tomatoes?” I say.

I don’t want to look startled at her abrupt arrival this fourth day, so I keep watching the guard in the trash pit at the edge of the quarry. I should not be surprised at her anymore, at her sudden appearances and her sudden departures. I should be at ease around her. I am a man of business. I am a man. I should be unflappable, stoic, a model of sobriety and confidence. I should not panic.

Layla steps in front of me, making sure I do not ignore her.

“Yeah,” she says. “You know…red, round, squishy inside. Tomatoes.”

“Is she making a salad?”

“No. She doesn’t eat salads. We don’t eat salads.”

“What?!” I say. “All mothers like salads. Or is she a robot or something? Maybe an alien?”

I laugh at my joke, this theme of robots and aliens and genies. I expect Layla to laugh. She does not.

She says, “We farm tomatoes. She wanted to know the price for when we go to sell them. I saw
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. I wonder that Nile Drama TV allows such a thing, such a show to air, where the U.S. isn’t destroyed by aliens at the end, like in the movie
Independence Day
. Such a movie the imams certainly approve!
Independence Day
! I like to see the U.S. destroyed, the White House being exploded by death rays from the sky.”

“I have not seen this film,” I say. “I do not pay much attention to the cinema.”

“You don’t?
Alhumdu l-Allah!
” she says. “I love movies.”

“They are idolatry,” I say, but only halfheartedly, as I ponder again my list of movie stars: Tom Cruise, Schwarzenegger, Jack Black. Maybe Rufus Wainwright doesn’t belong in the same list…I take him off the list but I add Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and Gary Oldman, who played a splendid Beethoven. I admit to myself that I know a lot about American movies, certainly more than a mobile-phone merchant should.

Layla’s words continue over mine, drowning my objection on the grounds of idolatry in a fine flow of enthusiasm: “He’s drawn out to the desert, Neary, the hero in
Close Encounters
who confronts the aliens, like Muhammad is drawn to the desert when he says he has seen the breaking of the light of dawn. It is the same. They climb a mountain of light, Jebel an-Nur. He has visions. He is persecuted by the men of his tribe but escapes. Just like the hero Neary in the movie. Then he hears the voice of Allah.”

“But Allah is no alien,” I say.

I begin to take offense at her comments. I tell myself I should visit this girl’s father. I tell myself that the man must be convinced to use whatever means necessary to banish such wild thoughts from her. They will not do, such thoughts, such travesties. They will not.

“And Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him,” I say, “Muhammad hears the voice of Angel Gabriel when he is on the mountain, not the voice of Allah, not the voice of aliens.”

“It is one and the same,” she says.

This is blasphemy for sure.

I anger and say, “Girl, you should not speak in such terms!”

As if bowled over by the force of my irritation, Layla closes her eyes and sits cross-legged on the ground in the dust in front of my shack, positioning herself as an unmovable object. She puts her hands to either side of her body, bracing herself. In the street behind her, cars pass, honking and screeching and rumbling as always, the nearest lane only a few feet from where she sits. The drivers do not notice her. A bit of tissue paper—colored, like the wrapping of a present—tumbles along the road in a draft of air behind a truck. Layla sways back and forth and then starts to hum. Between the notes of humming I hear bits of words, snatches of sound, like the distant lonesome Persian song I had heard from my seat outside Bashar’s café, yet even less comprehensible, even more elusive, more wonderfully foreign.

I cannot make out the words beneath and between the humming. Perhaps they are Quranic. Holy. Perhaps they are the talk of devils or of genies who have taken possession of her body and possession of her voice. I come out of my shack. I mean to shake some sense into her. Instead, my arms go out to her. I mean to grab her but I am incapacitated by the sound of her voice, by the shield of her voice spreading around her, and I never truly touch her. I kneel, first one knee and then the next, holding my arms toward her like a supplicant in some Eastern religion who has prostrated himself before an idol or before a fasting holy man in the shade of a thorn tree.

“What are you singing?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply. She just keeps singing. From the shop beside mine, where Sadeq sells oils and lubricants for cars and machines, a few men emerge, grubby men. They stand around me as I kneel. More men come from other shops, shopkeepers and their guards and people browsing through the market.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

She sings, then stops, then sings and hums and speaks between the humming and singing, words that aren’t words at all. I can feel it in my bones, the high fluting resonance of her voice conducting a call-and-response with something I cannot pretend to hear, cannot pretend to know, something distant and angelic. The sheer beauty of it banishes the idea in my mind that she might be possessed by evil, by the Devil. But I’m convinced, utterly convinced, that she is possessed by something.

“The music,” I say again. “Beautiful.”

The group around me grows larger: an old veiled woman with a basket over her arm; a gaggle of schoolchildren in buttoned vests, pants, and dresses; two traffic policemen in blue shirts with white gloves and batons holstered at their sides. I try not to notice them. I focus on Layla.

Layla strikes a last long note, the loudest of all, then looks up at the sky and stops. She stands and looms above me. Her shadow crosses the ground in front of me. I am shaken.

“Abu Saheeh,” she says, “that is the music the aliens sing when they come to the mountain. That is everything I remember of the song Neary hears as he watches the alien ship descend. He communicates with the aliens by singing back to them and making mountain shapes in his mashed potatoes.”

Her voice returns to normal and she asks: “Do you believe in aliens?”

“It is beautiful,” I say again.
“Alhumdu l-Allah.”

Layla reaches down and touches my forehead, lifting me from the dust where I have bowed down. When I am on my knees, we are more closely the same height. She looks at me directly, her blue eyes searching and holding mine. Then she releases me.

“I must check on the tomatoes,” she says.

At that, as quickly as she had come, Layla leaves, running to the south, toward the vegetable market at the center of town, just past the town hall behind Bashar’s café. I realize I am facing Mecca as I kneel. I say a prayer, touch my head to the dust once more, as if to atone for any blasphemy I may have unwittingly committed in kneeling to the song of a girl rather than to the song Allah has put in my heart. I know they must be different, the two songs, the spiritual God-reflecting song and the song of a little beggar child, stolen from an American movie. But do not all things reflect the majesty of Allah? And, maybe, sometimes some of those things reflect His majesty and wonder more perfectly, more clearly, more purely. Perhaps worship in any form leads the mind and the spirit toward Allah in His Oneness. Perhaps that is so. Or perhaps I am an old fool of a man, an old fool of a
kafir.

When at last I rise, the men from Sadeq’s shop and the others who have gathered still look at me.

“You have had a vision?” one asks.

“Yes,” I say.

I am not blaspheming in answering them with this answer. The vision, and her voice, the song of the mountain, have gone, not into the wilderness, but into town on a common pathetic errand to find tomatoes. I look up. I look around me. Through the crowd I see the guard on the lip of the quarry using his Kalashnikov as a crutch or a staff, prodding at the body of a dead goat decaying in the mounds of trash beneath his feet. If he were Moses, the prodding of his staff might cause a spring to gush from the earth. The guard, however, has no such luck. He picks his way from mound to mound, looking up at the overpass only every once in a while.

Tonight I do not go to the café of my friend Bashar. I go, instead, to the mosque, where the silence inside allows me to hear more clearly in my mind the remembered notes sung by Layla’s aliens. I stay there, in the mosque, through the last of the day’s calls to prayer, the fifth call. Yet, all that while, and despite my best efforts to both exactly remember and completely forget, the song Layla sings never wholly returns to me.

My brother, Yasin, continued to live in our father’s house for several years after his expulsion from school, up until the time I reached twelve years of age.

“Maggot,” he would call me, daily, like a term of endearment, as he descended the back staircase into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, tired, just catching me on my way out the door to my school. “You look like a maggot in that prissy shirt.”