Baghdad Central (35 page)
He pays for the tea and gets up. He lights a cigarette and walks down Rashid Street. A plan begins to form in his mind. A plan to rescue Mrouj. To resign. Or to disappear without a word. A plan to go home and stay there. At a busy corner, he stops to light another cigarette. He stands there, looking at the motion around him. The chaotic, frenetic movement of men and women and children walking and driving and riding and going. The dance of the city, its messy pulse. Its life. Its life despite everything.
Khafaji watches a boy herding a flock of fat sheep across the intersection. Against the signal. The first cars swerve.
The next ones stop. The ones stuck behind begin to honk their horns. The boy is a study of focus and grace. He hits the shanks of the animals calmly, but ignores everyone else. He could be in the village right now.
Khafaji watches the herd complete its journey across the boulevard, then steps off the curb. He collides with a young woman. In that accident, he feels for one moment the girl's body. The warmth of her body, and its solidity. As they both stumble, Khafaji is aware that the contact doesn't so much arouse him as remind him of his own body. He holds out an arm to help the girl get up, but she just glares at him and rushes away. Khafaji starts to apologize, but too late.
He looks around and suddenly the street is full of women. Women wearing hijabs, and not. Women wearing tight pants. Women wearing loose skirts and thick black robes. Women who look at men when their eyes meet. Women who turn away. Young women who are beautiful only because they're young. Older women who are beautiful because they are beautiful. A street of women, it suddenly seems.
They cannot rescue us from the sweet wanderings of night
. Khafaji stands there taking it in, and finally remembers the line:
As we prepare sword and spike, death slays us without a fight / Tethering our steeds at hand but still, they cannot rescue us from the sweet wanderings of night
.
The line Mrouj stumped him with. The words tell him to go to see his daughter, but the meaning tells him something else. Who better than Zubeida to ask about wanderings in the night?
Khafaji decides to go straight to her. He stops a taxi and gets in. As soon as Khafaji says “Madain”, the driver declines and pulls over to let Khafaji out. He gets the same response from the second and third taxis as well. He walks past a stall selling kitchen supplies. He looks through the knives, and
buys the biggest one he can find. The seller turns to find newspaper to wrap the blade, but Khafaji is already walking back to the curb.
When the driver of the fourth taxi refuses at the word “Madain”, Khafaji surprises him by taking out the knife. The man begins to stammer and then cries. Khafaji doesn't stop him when he opens the door and gets out. Khafaji slides over into the driver's seat, kicks off his sandals, and accelerates before the man can return.
He speeds out of the city. At the fourth checkpoint a soldier asks for his ID, then disappears behind a thick concrete wall. Khafaji smokes a cigarette before they signal for him to step out of the car. Khafaji stands there listening to the radio snap and spit as someone makes a call. One and a half cigarettes later, a Humvee shows up and an interpreter gets out wearing an oversize bulletproof vest and helmet. She and two other soldiers walk over to Khafaji. She orders him to follow them behind the wall.
“This says you work for the CPA,” she says. Her accent is educated. She looks at him skeptically through small eyeholes. And Khafaji suddenly sees himself. No man in his family ever wore a
dishdasha
before.
“Are you on official business?” Her voice is soft and young. Through the mask, her eyes seem pretty. Khafaji wonders why he is thinking about that.
“I'm meeting colleagues in Madain,” he says.
She looks at his ID again, but says nothing. She walks over to the US soldiers. A few minutes later, a young soldier returns and hands Khafaji his ID. “They'll radio ahead. Have a good day.”
As Khafaji drives away, he wonders why they didn't ask what he was doing driving a taxi.
At each checkpoint, Khafaji slows up and rolls down his window, but the men wave him through. It's difficult to spot the interpreters. They're either well hidden, or these units have been left without them. Soon Khafaji is sailing over seas of sugar cane. He goes so fast that he misses the side road. He turns around and goes back. As he turns down the road, he watches a flock of pigeons flying up in a widening circle about the cane fields. They soar up, then suddenly dive down. He drives through the gate but doesn't notice it, his eyes mesmerized by the flock. He almost runs into the row of black Suburbans parked at the end of the gravel. Khafaji brakes. The tires make a loud churning sound on the gravel. Dust starts to rise. When it clears, he looks more closely at the cars. He rolls down the window, reaches for his cigarettes, and thinks. It takes another moment to recognize the insignia: Meteoric Tactical Solutions. Outside, Khafaji hears nothing but the rustle of the wind in the cane. Faintly, he hears the whisper of the flock as it plunges, then catches itself, then rushes off again on its wobbly loops. Khafaji inhales and watches the pigeons as they struggle to climb.
When they come, he doesn't see them. It's their footsteps on the gravel he hears first.
Two large young men holding assault rifles are walking down the driveway. Khafaji smiles and waves to them. But this only makes them point their weapons. One of the men shouts something. They fan out, one to Khafaji's left, the other to the right, and their pace becomes very slow and deliberate. When two other men appear behind them, Khafaji puts the car into gear and begins to roll. Khafaji smiles and waves. He knows how hard it is to shoot a man when he's looking right at you, and so he never takes his eyes off theirs. The other men begin to jog toward Khafaji. He accelerates, then slams
the wheels to the left, putting the car between his body and their guns. He hears the first bullets hitting the passenger door and the trunk of the car, pushes his foot down as far as it will go and crouches down. Head beneath the dashboard, he speeds down the narrow lane as bullets rip apart the trunk and smash out the back window. Khafaji flies blind down the narrow lane until at last the sound of hot popping metal comes to an end. By the time he sits up and looks in the rear-view mirror, there's nothing to see but dust. He takes a last drag from the cigarette on his lips, and flicks it out into the cane.
Khafaji's hand is fumbling in his vest for another cigarette when a figure leaps out into the highway. A man whose face is wrapped in a
kuffiyyeh
points an AK-47 at Khafaji. And this time Khafaji stops. The man walks up to the passenger side and opens the door. He looks at Khafaji, then exclaims, “Mr Muhsin. Thank God!”
Even without unwrapping his mask, Khafaji recognizes Zubeida's driver.
The man disappears into the cane field. A moment later he comes back, a woman hanging over his shoulder. Khafaji leaps out and helps carry her to the car. Khafaji holds Zubeida in his arms while Omar brushes off the back seat. The two men then lay her down. Khafaji looks at Zubeida. She opens her eyes, closes them again. Khafaji feels for her hand and is surprised by how hot it is.
Khafaji gets back into the front seat, and they race along the highway toward Baghdad, Khafaji's hands gripping the steering wheel, Omar's fingers clutching the gun on his lap, Zubeida's hand falling limp onto the floor. She coughs and coughs. Khafaji adjusts the mirror and looks at her face. But she doesn't move. As they come up to the first checkpoint, Omar shouts, “Turn right.”
Khafaji smiles and ignores him. He slows down and waves at the soldiers. When he sees one soldier behind them pulling traffic spikes across the road, he realizes he's made a mistake. Khafaji pulls over. Smiling, waving and maintaining eye contact, as always. The soldier walks up to the car. He looks at the damage. When he asks Khafaji and Omar to put their hands above their heads, Khafaji punches the gas pedal, knocking him over the hood of the car. The body makes a sickening thud as it rolls across the windshield and slides off. Without warning, a storm of bullets hits the car, but not before Khafaji has put distance between them. In the rear-view mirror, Khafaji sees a Humvee in pursuit. The vehicle gains, but then disappears when the highway takes a bend through the cane. Omar shouts at Khafaji again and this time he does not hesitate to turn off the highway. For a few kilometers, they zig left toward the river, following a dirt road that crosses one irrigation ditch and then another. Then they zag right, crossing the highway again and entering a vast date orchard. In the faint shade of the trees, they pass men climbing barefoot up tall ladders. Other men on the ground carry thatch baskets. One peasant, buried up to his knees in earth and mud, watches them go by. Low in the sky behind them, an Apache helicopter swoops low and fast along the highway. Then another right behind it.
Khafaji slows down to avoid ruts and ditches. A few people watch them, but no one stares.
Eventually Omar wakes up. He looks at his watch and then at the road. He accepts a cigarette from Khafaji and smokes. After a few minutes he says, “Stay to the left up here. We'll be at the hospital soon.” He looks at Khafaji and shakes his head. “Why did you come?”
“I should be asking you the questions. What happened back there?”
Omar looks at the road as he answers. “The Americans came to the institute this week. They took everything. It didn't take long for them to find the house. They weren't coming to arrest anybody. They were shooting before they showed up.”
Omar turns around and looks at Zubeida. He looks so long, Khafaji has to ask, “Who is she? I mean to you?”
“She is my aunt. My mother's sister. She took me in when my parents died.” He looks at Khafaji and adds, “I'm not the only one. There are a lot of us who depend on her.”
A minute later, the date trees end, and the road spills into the town of Madain itself. Omar directs Khafaji through crowded streets until they arrive at a hospital. Two medics come out to the car and greet Omar by name. Khafaji gets out and inspects the car. The only unscathed part is the tires. A streak of blood runs along the passenger side. Only then does Khafaji notice his
dishdasha
looks no better.
The nurses rush Zubeida inside. Khafaji walks alongside, holding her hand, watching her face. Her eyes never open, but her hand holds his tight. When they take her into an operating room, Khafaji finally lets go. Omar walks up and murmurs, “We've got to get out of here. Now.” Khafaji watches Omar walk down the corridor. Then he turns and walks in the opposite direction.
In the corner of a crowded waiting room, Khafaji sits, thinking. He takes his coat off, then turns it inside out. It looks ridiculous, but better than horrible. He walks out of the front door and crosses the street to a taxi station. He pays the driver the fare to downtown. They manage to enter the city without passing any checkpoints. Khafaji tells the driver to go to Checkpoint Three.
The man is silent for a minute before he admits, “I don't know what that is.” Khafaji directs him through downtown and then across the river. Stuck in a traffic jam on the bridge, Khafaji offers the man a cigarette. He takes two. He lights one immediately and sticks the other one behind his ear.
When you visit the American zone, leave your
dishdasha
at home. Wear clean clothes. Wear pants. Iron your shirt. Better yet, wear a jacket and a tie. And while you're at it, wash the blood off before you get to the gates.
They should post this advice at every barricade and every checkpoint. Maybe it's so obvious that they don't need to. And on any other day, Khafaji would have laughed at the idiot who needed this advice. If Khafaji had thought about it for a minute, he would have simply gone home. But Khafaji wasn't thinking. If there were any thoughts in his head at all, they were about his daughter.
People begin to stare as soon as Khafaji steps into the crowd. They don't even wait for his turn to come; they step up, weapons drawn, and order him to take off the overcoat. When they see the blood, they push him to the ground. A boot pins his shoulder blade while they pat down his body. Khafaji protests. The words are like pebbles spilling out of his mouth and across the sidewalk. Then they zip-tie his hands behind his back and pull him inside the gates. Which means that someone has looked at his papers. Khafaji shouts, “Call Mr John. Mr John Parodi. He wants me there. Call Mr John Parodi, he knows who I am.” It is unclear whether anyone can understand.
Khafaji waits for an hour. He starts to shiver, then closes his eyes and rests. Eventually, he hears a voice, “Yeah, that's him. You can release him. I'll take him.” Khafaji turns and sees a black man whose face he doesn't recognize. The man is holding his ID and wallet.
“Khafaji. Rawls. We met last week. Parodi sent me. You're in trouble. Come on.”
Rawls whistles as he hands Khafaji his wallet and papers. The man holds onto Khafaji's gun for an extra moment. Rawls intervenes. “I'll take that.”
Khafaji feels around in his jacket pocket. “Where are my cigarettes?”
He regrets it immediately. The man at the gate shakes his head and says, “Sorry, man. You can get some at the Hajji shop.” Khafaji looks around and notices a crumpled pack on the ground. He picks out a couple that are smokeable. He puts one in his vest pocket and the other in his mouth. His fingers look for his lighter. When he doesn't find it, he gives up.