One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (7 page)

“You’re Hezbollah?” he says. “You work for Hussein?”

“No,” I say. I slap him. He winces but tries to hide it. “Don’t say that again. I work for no one. But I’m watching you, and I don’t want to see you sleeping anymore.”

I hold Mahmoud’s gaze for a moment. To his credit, he does not flinch. Then, as quickly as I had come, I leave him and head on my way, not toward the center of the city, to Bashar’s café, where I would normally dine, but along the outskirts, the outer road, which leads more directly to my house.

Tonight, the kebab has filled my need for food. I do not wish to talk about Ulayya with Bashar, as he certainly will wish. I wonder whether it is wise for me to have antagonized the guard. It was clumsy. I had no clear plan when I approached, and he knew the visit from an older man like me could not be attributed to anything purely social. Yet it wasn’t all a waste. Mahmoud fears me a little now: an unknown force in town, not Hezbollah. He will watch me and watch my store as well, which is worth a little even with the protection of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah overarching everything.

What’s more, lazy and inattentive as Mahmoud is, he can see all four ramps of the overpass from where he leans and idles on his camp chair. He can see my store. And I’ve checked with my own eyes just how far in each direction—up the road toward Baghdad and down the road toward Umm Qasr—the view extends, a vantage of many miles, a great length of important road.

The year 1980 was a glorious year for Iraq, to be followed quickly by seven years of ignominy. Saddam Hussein launched his surprise attack on Iran in September of 1980 and, at first, Iraq’s armies trampled over unaware Iran like a second blitzkrieg. I had just turned seventeen. I wanted to go to war. I wanted to join Saddam’s Republican Guard. I wanted to be among the first of our conquering armies to set foot in Tehran.

My father offered Yasin his blessing when Yasin signed up for Saddam’s army. I think he felt ashamed that Yasin had not yet found a calling in life. At least this would be something, a career, a chance to distinguish himself, something better than spending his nights on the town, wasting his money in idleness. My father allowed Yasin to join, but he forbade me.

“You are meant to do better things,” he said. “And Yasin is a man now, old enough to make his own decisions.”

When Yasin came home on leave after military training, when he came home clothed in pressed military fatigues with a body and a face hardened from the rigors of military discipline and physical training, I nearly cried with envy. He stood straighter when he walked. He spoke more clearly and more decidedly. And when he looked at my father, he looked less like a beaten child and more like the grown man my father said he had become.

“The war will be over in three weeks,” Yasin boasted.

“Don’t be so sure,” my father replied.

“We have the latest Soviet tanks on the ground, the latest MiGs in the sky,” said Yasin.

“But they have religion,” my father said, a thing I didn’t understand at all until our initial gains, trumpeted in the headlines of every Iraqi newspaper—capturing the Shatt al-Arab in Basra and Qasr-e Shirin in the north, entering Khuzestan and Abadan and Ahvaz, laying siege to Kermanshah deep in Iranian territory—until these gains were repulsed by Iran’s human-wave tactics. Our papers said nothing about the turning of the tide at the end of 1980, but rumor spoke of the fearlessness of Iranian martyrs who came to the front lines with death shrouds wrapped around their shoulders, ready, joyfully ready to enter heaven. These martyrs would walk into our machine-gun fire until our machine guns ran out of ammunition.

After Yasin left for the war, we did not hear from him, not by letter, not by phone, not by telegram. For all I know, my father may have received notice of his death or capture through some private channel. He may even have had some communication with Yasin. If so, he kept his information to himself.

He never again spoke Yasin’s name in my presence.

8

Monday

I WATCH FOR LAYLA’S VISIT
this evening, as I do most evenings. As the sun sets behind the overpass, I wonder if she will return tonight, appear magically when I least expect her. Or, alternatively, I wonder if our customary meeting has been halted by my harsh words, like the breaking of a charm, or halted by Ulayya’s intrusion, like the freezing of time under the influence of a curse. I lose track of the convoys, at least superficially. They become something more like background noise. My little game of counting their comings and goings has been supplanted by other games, reminiscences, and my wandering mind cannot be controlled from thinking about Layla, about Layla, about Layla and Ulayya.

Today marks the eighth day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-sixth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. A normal day. I sold a few items. I chatted with a few customers. I held off my impatience for the setting of the sun and the shutting of my shop by watching the guard, Mahmoud, as he watched me, watched my shop, pointedly walking down the overpass bridge at hourly and semihourly intervals to see behind my shack, to crane his neck this way and that, demonstrating, with astounding subtlety, his diligence. I am a new factor in town. I’m starting to show a little authority. I don’t belong to Hezbollah. Need he know anything more? I brought him a box of ammunition this morning, but it is, of course, the good word with the police he really craves, the potential that I might even pay the bribe required to get him on the police force.

As if to prove his loyalty, Mahmoud again rises from his stool and walks the length of the bridge, checking on me, checking on my store, though I am in the store myself. Could the man truly be so thick-witted? Could he think I mean for him to watch over the store while I inhabit it? I question myself for having struck any sort of deal with him. Yet he can see all four ramps of the overpass from where he sits, a much better view than the view from my shop, looking up from the market.

Mahmoud doesn’t look at me. He never looks at me directly. He is trying to be sneaky about his attention to me. He now shoulders his Kalashnikov instead of leaving it at his tent or carrying it listlessly at his side. He walks back and forth with it like a tin soldier on parade. As he returns to his tent, an American convoy approaches the overpass from the north. It is Monday, just at sunset. I note the time, seven forty-two. Three gun trucks, Humvees, topped with .50-caliber machine guns in turrets operated by gunners with dark face-shielding sunglasses. Robots, all these Davids and Patricks and Winstons. That’s more like it: robots. Less human. Less need for me to feel any sort of remorse, watching them, watching their movements, recording their habits.

The vehicles of this convoy shepherd four coach buses. I observe the convoy as it passes. The buses have opaque windows with blinds drawn tight. I let my eyes linger on the vehicles until they are out of sight to the south, heading toward Umm Qasr and Camp Bucca, just ten kilometers farther down the road. After I can no longer see the convoy, I can still hear it, even above the sounds of the market, above the braying of goats, the clucking of chickens, the banter of men, the passing of automobiles, the sigh of the wind. The diesel rumble of Humvees: a distinctive, marrow-numbing sound. I make a notch on the door frame of my store, the sixth such notch.

A group of schoolgirls in black uniforms passes my shop. They all have backpacks. They all have hair tied modestly with modest-colored ribbons. The eldest cover their heads—some cover even their faces—with plain, modest scarves. In the countryside, here in the south, where the old traditions prevail, girls of such age are considered old enough to marry. I avoid looking at them directly. They wait under the bridge of the overpass, where their families, mostly from outlying tomato farms, pick them up.

I imagine Layla among them, cleaned, looking proper, looking, perhaps, contrite after a good stern lecture from her father about religion and blasphemy and cleanliness and robots. The imaginary Layla shyly waves at me from amid the group.

A little Toyota truck arrives under the bridge. The schoolgirls jump into the back, onto the open, sand-swept bed of the truck. The truck turns a half circle in the middle of the road without coming deeper into the market, without coming closer to me. I watch it disappear. Unlike the sounds of the convoy, the sound of its small engine is soon overwhelmed by the noise around me.

Does Layla attend school? I don’t know the answer. I picture her years from now, that spark of creativity gone, maybe with the sound of an American movie from a little black-and-white TV droning unheeded on a kitchen shelf above her as she completes her house chores, a good wife but nothing like the sparkling thing she is now. What a shame to think ahead on the life she must lead.

I shut and lock my shop for the night.

I walk into Safwan and eat dinner with Bashar. He does not mention Ulayya directly. But as he sits with me he shows me a list of other names, potential brides, women I should meet. It is a new tactic for him. I notice how pointedly he avoids mentioning Ulayya. She is an absence in his recommendations. He wants me to notice the absence and mention her myself.

“Let us not talk of women,” I say instead. “Have you found the movie?”

“Yes,” he says, looking disappointed. “A friend’s cousin from Kufa has a copy on disk and will bring it down tomorrow. Will you come to my house to watch it?”

“I will be delighted to watch the movie at your house. I have no DVD player.”

I tip him an extra thousand dinar, which is just a few dollars now that Iraqi currency is so much inflated. He takes away my empty teacup and, with it, the remains of my dinner.

After Bashar has gone, as well as all through the time he and I spoke, I keep my eyes open for some hint of the boy who works for him, the boy who visits Mahmoud on the bridge. But I do not see this boy tonight in Bashar’s café.

I don’t talk about the war with Iran.

I refrain from thinking about it if possible. My father kept me from going to the war for as long as he could by obtaining an exemption for college study. I would have preferred to join the army immediately, like Yasin. I itched to join. But my father’s word was law. He sent me to Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and I took a bachelor’s degree.

When, after I graduated in 1984, my draft notice arrived at our house, my father did not immediately share it with me.

He called Abdel Khaleq.

And Abdel Khaleq told Nadia.

And Nadia was the first to inform me.

“There’s nothing my father can do about it,” she said after rushing to my house with the news.

She had just turned seventeen and her roly-poly face with its button nose now graced a figure dark and willowy. She wore American-style blue jeans, a T-shirt splattered with paint, and an assortment of golden bangles on her wrists. Iraqi culture, like its army, had become a secular place, a more westernized place, especially for wealthy families like ours. All the girls at that time dressed like Cyndi Lauper, all the boys like Tom Selleck in the role of Magnum—Ray-Bans and Hawaiian-print shirts. Thick mascara bled onto Nadia’s cheeks from eyes wept red and swollen.

When I didn’t respond, Nadia added, “Father says every young man must serve.”

I wanted to share her feeling of disappointment, though truly—not yet knowing the horror of war—I felt no sort of disappointment at all. Quite the opposite. I pictured myself wearing a pressed uniform like Yasin’s. I pictured myself beside Yasin as we turned back the Iranian hordes, turned them back to the very gates of Tehran.

I didn’t want to reveal my excitement, so I sadly said: “This will delay our wedding.”

“Yes,” she said. “Father told me it will be two years until we can reschedule.”

9

Tuesday

LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING,
like most evenings, this evening once again. And this evening I am at least a little glad, I admit, to see her. After two days of her absence I had begun to doubt whether she would ever return and whether I would ever hear the song again, the alien song. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as the sun sets behind Jebel Sanam and casts its light against the overpass where the road from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger road from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect.

Before her arrival, I concentrated sincerely on the convoys, focused my mind on them. In the greater resolution of this focus, each of the soldiers in the Humvees looked less robotic, more alive, more real. I counted my Dave and my Dave Junior and my Dave-Who-Is-Shorter-Than-Dave-Junior. I saw one of my Patricks. I noticed that Winston was not wearing his sunglasses. The color of his eyes appeared darker than I expected: brown rather than the American blue all Americans supposedly have. I think about Layla’s blue eyes, rare in the south of Iraq but not wholly unknown. What freak of nature made them blue? How strong was the gene in her, the gene of blue eyes, to overcome generations of brown, brown upon brown, like the clouds of a sandstorm parting at last to reveal the far-above sky? Are they naturally blue, bred from the depths of some ancient Assyrian lineage? Are they a carryover from the days the British fought here in Basra province during the world wars, some intermingling of fair British genes? Or, as I first thought, might she be a mistake, the result of a moment’s lust during the Americans’ first war here? Her age would be just about correct, thirteen, maybe fourteen years.

Today marks the ninth day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-seventh day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A long day. A weary day. The bottle lay beside me when I woke and, ever since, this whole morning, I have felt leaden. I am happy, if happy is the right word, to only perform the work of an immobile seller of mobile phones. I can handle such work on days like this, sitting with a thick head while I keep an eye on the roads.

My convoy counting and my naming of the American soldiers helps me pass the time and today I have additional reason to scrutinize each car. I do not know what Bashar’s friend from Kufa who has the
Close Encounters
disk might look like. I cannot, of course, expect that he will be holding his copy of the movie against the window of his car to advertise his presence, the sun casting reflected rays from the DVD in a halo of self-proclamation. But somehow I think I might know the man. I think some slight signal, some glint in the eye, might cue me that he isn’t just a normal shopper come south to our little market for bargains on the latest Kuwaiti imports, legal or smuggled. Or, inversely, perhaps I think that I might later recall his arrival when Bashar introduces us.

“Ah,” I could say. “You were the man in the Volkswagen.”

Or the Toyota pickup.

Or the Yukon with the shaded windows and nice shiny hubcaps.

But I see nothing out of the ordinary among the multitudes who pass through the market, north to south, south to north.

The idiot Mahmoud on the overpass waves to me. I make a point of not waving back. I feel foolish. He clearly wishes to speak to me but I don’t care to have a conversation with him. I begin shutting my shop.

Layla speaks to me before I see her.

“Are you angry with me, Abu Saheeh?”

“That depends,” I say. “Are you clean?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to blaspheme Allah’s name? Muhammad’s name, Peace Be Upon Him?”

“No,” she says. “I do not mean to…I did not mean to…I never do. I am sorry.”

I can tell she sincerely regrets it. I can tell she is somewhat upset. She won’t look directly at me. I speak over her protestations: “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I am not angry with you.”

Then I look around. I had heard her, but she wasn’t nearby. Behind another shop? Behind a stack of tires in Rabeer’s used-car lot? I spin in a circle and then look back into my shop.

“Where are you?”

“Behind the store. I see you through this crack in the wall.”

“Hiding?”

“Why does the guard on the overpass look behind your shop now?” she asks. “Every day for the last few days he looks behind your shop. Many times every day. I’m hiding here until he next walks along the bridge, just to prove he is blind. He looks behind your shop but he doesn’t see me, so what is he looking for?”

“I threatened him in order to—” I stop speaking; it would be foolish to tell her such things. She doesn’t care anyway, it seems. She leaps to her next question, her mind skipping like a rock on the surface of a glassy pond.

“Can
you
see me?” she asks.

I go out the door and look for her. She has leaned a section of sliding door, probably stolen or discarded from Rabeer and Maney’a’s lot, against the back wall. The bottom of the door props against the base of the shack behind mine, where the men from the propane filling station play cards and listen to music during the day. The top of the door rests against my tin roof. The space in which she hides is not large, a foot and a half across, not large enough for an adult. She crouches under the door. I pretend not to see her although she is plainly visible, her eyes wide open, glinting in the shadows.

“I can’t see you,” I say, pretending.

“You can’t?”

“No.”

“I thought not,” she says.

She comes out from under the door. She walks around me in a slow circle. I keep squinting at the door, at the place from where I last heard her voice.

“Still can’t see me?” she asks.

I startle as she speaks from beside me. She laughs.

“No,” I say. “Are you walking around? Are you a ghost?”

“Ooooh,” she says as eerily as she can while still stalking around me. “Ooooh.”

I stick my hands straight in front of me, like a man sleepwalking. I try to feel around the space where she had just stood. I find nothing.

“Show yourself!” I say. “Show yourself, you fiend!”

She ducks back under the sliding door.

“Show yourself!” I say again, and louder.

The propane filling station men break from their game and look through their side window. They can see me but they can’t see Layla. I notice that I’m making a fool of myself. I stand straight, put my arms down at my sides. I smooth the front of my
dishdasha
over my legs.

“Masah il-kheir,”
I say to the men, a little too formally.

They wave their cards and focus on their game again, dismissing my episode as just a touch of craziness, nothing worth watching, nothing worth mentioning. Or so I hope.

I wait until they are no longer interested. I bend. I look under the sliding door.

Layla has gone.

Later that evening, after falafel and tea at the café; after smoking a little
bukhoor
with Bashar in his
diwaniya;
after all the pleasant conversation, the preliminaries; after seeing his children once again paraded before me; after feeling again the gaze of Bashar’s wife upon me, lurking out of sight behind the shadowed lattice of one of the courtyard windows—after all this, Bashar at last produces the DVD.

“I am sorry my friend could not remain in Safwan long enough to meet you, Abu Saheeh,” Bashar says. “But he left the movie for you, for us.”

I imagine the black-tinted windows of a GMC Yukon rolling down as the vehicle of Bashar’s friend stops in the alleyway behind Bashar’s house. The friend, in sunglasses, hands the DVD through the window, drop-and-go, fast-food style. Bashar blesses him, wishing him a safe journey back to Kufa. The friend waves, noncommittally, and then squeals his tires as he drives away over the trash and spliced electric lines, the open sewer and piles of goat manure in the alley. Any man who owns DVDs of old American movies would have more important things to attend to, surely. It is a wonder to me that Bashar knows someone who possesses the movie at all, and that he has influence enough to get the movie delivered. But then it seems Bashar knows everyone, a benefit stemming either from his new career as a restaurateur or from his old career, our old careers, in Baghdad.

Bashar has placed a TV on the far end of the
diwaniya,
away from the windows. We move our pillows toward it and sit in front of it. I recline on my side, propping my head with my arm. Bashar puts the movie into his DVD player. He moves his
narjeela
between us as the credits roll. We watch the movie and smoke. When, partway through the movie, I take a small handheld tape recorder from my pocket and set it on the ground in front of me, Bashar looks at it and then at me, questioningly.

“I bought this in the market today. Amazing the things you can buy! I want to record the song, you see,” I say.

Yet the tape recorder remains unused for most of the movie. It is much as Layla said: aliens, various alien sightings, science fiction, as the man Neary, who is the hero, fights his way through the American secret military and onto the American secret base. Thinking about it more deeply than I would have otherwise done, I suppose the plot does exhibit certain parallels with the experience of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, when he first appeared with his message before the merchants and old families of Mecca. They fought him. They tried to detain him and hinder him before his escape north to Medina. They were unbelieving, some of them, until the events and miracles and words of Angel Gabriel conveyed through Muhammad showed clear proof of the Message and Messenger of Allah.

At the climactic moment in the movie, I turn on my cassette recorder. It hisses as the tape winds forward to capture the sound from the television. The alien ship sings to the assembled scientists. All of them stand together in awe on the mountain platform specially prepared for the occasion. The aliens sing. The American scientists play their own song in return. The two sides communicate through music. And just as Neary is about to meet the aliens, just as he walks out from his hiding place among the rocks to meet the aliens at the gangway of their ship, at that moment Bashar stops the movie.

“This is what you want to see?” he says.

“No,” I say. “I’ve seen enough already.”

“It disgusts you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Blasphemy.”

I turn off the tape recorder and slip it into my pocket. Blasphemy, I say. But in my heart I think something altogether different. The song the aliens sing in the movie, although having similar notes to the melody Layla sang, isn’t at all the same. It is something different entirely. Heard through her, amplified through her, resonating through her, the song changed. That change made me think of Muhammad again, reminded me more of the true miracle of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, than did any part of the movie’s plot: how the supposedly illiterate Muhammad heard the words of Angel Gabriel and spoke them, recited them, read them so that they would be known to the minds of men. The change Layla wrought in the music reminded me of the way that the spoken sound of the Quran is itself hypnotic and sacred. Had Layla done something similar? Was her voice, singing alien songs or songs of rock and roll, somehow influenced by a godly power? Was she touched, divine? Were her mixed-up tales of Beverly Hillbillies and Arnold Schwarzenegger an index to something, when taken in aggregate, infinitely more precious?

While I ponder these things, Bashar continues speaking. I catch the end of his thoughts: “…this person who asserts these blasphemies. I will have his name! Abu Saheeh, you will give the man’s name to me and I will tell Hussein from the Hezbollah and then: woe unto this blasphemer, this
kafir!
”

The TV, with the DVD still paused at the aliens descending the gangway of the ship onto the mountain platform, flickers with static.

“No, Bashar. No,” I say.

But he is frantic. Whether to calm him or whether due to some deeper, more human impulse, I change the topic. He sits immediately.

“Let us talk of Ulayya bint Ali ash-Shareefi again, my friend,” I say, dropping her name on him like a bomb. “And let us forget this movie entirely, though I wish you to give my devoted thanks to your cousin’s friend for driving from Kufa with the DVD.”

We spend the rest of that fine evening talking of Ulayya and of women in general. The TV flickers with the suspended moment of alien contact. The tape recorder in my lumpy breast pocket is heavy, feeling heavier because it is full. I waste time with Bashar, but the waste isn’t something unpleasant. Time slips easily past me here. I see myself changing, mellowing a little. It is as if the shell of me, the exterior, has begun to cool and harden. And perhaps that is why Layla bothers me so much. Each time she comes to my store, the cooling shell, the part of me that most easily molds itself to this town and this life and the possibility of marrying again, each time she comes, the shell feels more like a shell, the inside feels more like an emptiness, a shiftiness, a pool that churns and churns under the surface, though with less force each and every day. I worry that my soul will callus completely.