Caliphate (6 page)

"About time you showed up," had led to a bear hug, Hamilton picking Hodge up and swinging her around in full circle before setting her on her feet again. A bear hug had led to talk. Talk, as it will, led the two lieutenants downstairs to the bar almost directly beneath. That had led to some serious drinking, the more serious after four years of the anally tight control of the Imperial Military Academy and two months, in his case, and three, in hers, of far worse deprivation in Ranger School. Drinks were there. Rooms were there. Bodies were there. Attraction, apparently, was there as well. It had seemed only natural to put two and two, or—more technically speaking—one and one, together. Several times.

"I wonder if we'll be in the shit over this," Hamilton mused further.

He didn't expect an answer but got one anyway. Speech still a little slurred, Laurie Hodge answered, "No, dipshit, we're lieutenants, not cadets. We can fuck if we want to. Be unnatural if we didn't. I mean,
Jesus,
'a man who won't fuck won't fight.' Don't you read
any
history?"

"I have read the histories," Ishmael said, "but
Il hamdu lilah
; the
Nazrani
actually live like this?"

Ishmael led a cloth-wrapped Besma to the front door of Petra's family's home—hovel would have been more accurate—in the town. The slave had a point. The town, whatever it might once have been, had grown decrepit over the years. The asphalt of that portion of the road they trod was sufficiently broken up that the cobblestones underneath it would have been an improvement. The houses were small, dirty and unpainted. Animals—to include disgusting pigs and dogs—wandered free. Worst of all were the people. They, walking with uncertain, shuffling steps, kept their heads down. Even the grubby-faced children seemed to understand their second-class status.

Or do they look and act like that because
we're
here,
Besma wondered. An unpleasant aroma reached the girl's nose.
They
might
look and act like that because we're here, but that smell is something that was here already. Maybe I shouldn't feel so bad that Petra is with me.

Ishmael stopped a passerby and asked, "Where can we find the house of the little girl who was taken as a slave recently?"

Still keeping eyes carefully focused on the ground—yes, Ishmael was obviously a slave but he was equally obviously a
Muslim
slave and thus far above any
Nazrani—
the townsman pointed with one hand, saying, "Down that street. Just before the old train station. On the left."

"
Shokran, sayidi,
" Ishmael answered. From his point of view; well, yes, they
were
stinking
Nazrani
but
he
was a slave. And politeness cost nothing.

"Come, Miss Besma," he directed, leading the way.

"Is this the house . . . the former house . . . of Petra bint Minden?" Ishmael asked.

The door, hung on leather hinges, was only slightly ajar, just enough for one eye to peek through. The door started to open, then stopped.

"Wait," said a woman's voice, closing it again.

When the door opened again, fully this time, the woman had covered her hair and the lower half of her face. "What about my daughter?"

Besma pushed past Ishmael and said, "She's with us now. But she told me she'd left behind her doll and . . . "

"She's with
you
now?" the
Nazrani
woman repeated. "Who are 'you'?"

"I'm Besma bint Abdul Mohsem. My father is a merchant . . . not a slave dealer; he doesn't sell people."

Backing away from the door with unsteady steps the woman sat heavily into a roughhewn chair. "You mean my daughter was not sold to . . . to . . . ?"

"She's with us," Besma repeated. She saw that the woman's eyes were red and puffy as if she'd been crying for days. "She's fine but she misses her family and her dolly. So I came to get it for her. I can't be away from home very long," the girl added.

"Her dolly?
Yes,
her dolly!" the woman said, excitedly. "Please wait . . . just a minute, please."

She immediately raced from the room, disappearing somewhere into the back of the hovel. Besma heard scuffling of feet and the opening and slamming of trunks. When the woman came back she had a doll in her hands, but also a bundle of clothing, ratty clothing, to be honest, in her arms. She was also accompanied by a boy who looked enough like Petra that he just had to be her brother.

As the mother turned the bundle of loosely gathered clothes over to Ishmael, Hans pressed an old leather bound volume into Besma's hands.

"It's our great-grandmother's journal," he explained. "They won't let me take it where I'm going soon. Petra can't read it yet but . . . "

"I can read," Besma said. "My father insisted. I can teach her."

"Yes, I read history," Hamilton said to the form lying next to him on the narrow, issue bed. "But, no, I never read that."

"Patton . . . in Italy, I think, during the Second World War," Hodge explained.

"Okay, if you say so. But I'd like to see the history book you dug that little tidbit out of."

"It was down in the library back at IMA.
Deep
down," she amended.

"Yes, but in the sober . . .
okay
, the seriously hungover, light of day, we're still—"

"—no longer cadets," Hodge interrupted. "Not in either's chain of command. Free and over twenty-one. Adults. Moreover, there'll be no punishment tours for you from getting blown by the first captain."

"Hey, at least the first captain was female. That isn't always the way it works." Hamilton laughed aloud. "You know what, Laurie?"

"No, what?"

"She wasn't worth it. Unlike say, you, she gave lousy head. Mechanical, you know. All technique and no feeling."

"That's what I heard . . . from more people than you would care to imagine."

"Jealous, are we?" Hamilton smirked.

"Not anymore," she answered, turning to face him.

Tikrit had fallen the previous day, totally eliminating any chance that Saddam Hussein might defeat, or even slow down, the American-led invasion. Gabrielle was of mixed feelings about that. The fighting was over, she thought, and civilian casualties would stop. These were unquestionably good things. But the Americans had not been humbled; America bestrode the world like a colossus. There was no way that could be good.

She saw the waiter from the previous week, Mahmoud, at this week's protest. He stood out for at least four reasons. One was that there were many fewer people; most of the stalwarts who could be counted on for this sort of thing were disillusioned and heartsick, and saw no reason to contest a
fait accompli
. Another was that he wasn't carrying a sign; indeed he was sitting down sipping a beer, a Kesselring, on this fine spring morning. The third was that he had a look of wry amusement written across his face. He didn't really seem to be part of the demonstration at all. The fourth was that, as she had thought when she had first seen him,
Yum
.

Gabrielle walked over and sat down. Well, she
was
, after all, a very modern girl.

"It's pretty hopeless, isn't it," she said, meaning the protest.

"Beyond hopeless," Mahmoud agreed, still smiling wryly. If he meant the protest he didn't specify. "If I cared it would be humiliating."

"You don't care?" she asked. "You don't care about the hundreds and thousands of innocent people hurt and killed?"

"Don't you care about the tens and hundreds of thousands killed by the former regime or the even greater number who will now be saved?" he countered.

"But—"

"Never mind," he interrupted. The look of wry amusement disappeared. "I can't care because I can't do anything about any of it. What the Americans don't know, though, is that neither can they. The Arab world is a mess . . . beyond redemption. There is nothing anyone can do to change it. All you can hope for is to escape. That's why I came here. I don't even want to
be
an Arab anymore."

"You are Arab?" Gabrielle asked. "I would have thought Turkish."

He shook his head. "No, not a Turk. I'm from Egypt."

Ah, well, that was okay. Gabrielle hadn't known many Egyptians but those she had known seemed among the gentlest and most reasonable of people.

"Moslem, though?" she asked, eyeing the beer.

The wry smile returned as Mahmoud put out one hand, palm down and just above the beer, and wagged it. "If so, not much of one," he shrugged.

Egypt . . . Egypt. There was a
beautiful
actor from Egypt . . . very famous. What was that man's name? He looked a little like this one, too.

Which prompted another thought. "I don't even know your name," she said, which was not strictly true. On the other hand, asking was a way to be friendly.

"Mahmoud," the Egyptian answered. "Mahmoud al Beshay. And . . . ?"

"Gabrielle von Minden."

Mahmoud raised an eyebrow. "Ohhh . . . a 'von.'"

"Not the way you say it. 'Von' hardly means a thing anymore for ninety percent of the people who have it. And for the other ten percent . . . to hell with them. I'm an artist, not an aristocrat."

Mahmoud shrugged. "I'm just a waiter, but I hope to be something more someday. The problem though, is that while I came here to escape, I think I am still stuck with the Bedouin curse."

Gabi raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Curse?" she asked.

"We flee the desert, but we bring it with us wherever we go. I, and many like me, flee the restraints of Islam, yet we bring it with us, wherever we go."

Narrated Ibn Abbas:
My mother and I were among the weak and oppressed. I from among the children, and my mother from among the women.

—Imam Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Ibrahim
Ibn al-Mughirah Ibn Bardiziyeh, al-Bukhari

"Ooo, I almost forgot!" Besma exclaimed. Arms flying, she raced for her burka, lying on a carved wooden trunk on the opposite side of the room from her bed. She'd concealed the book Hans had given her in the burka's folds.

Petra, still clutching her rag doll to her breast, looked on in curiosity until Besma produced the book. "I can't read," she said. "My brother was trying to teach me but we hadn't gotten very far."

"I know. I can teach you. I'd like to teach you."

"You can
read
?" Petra asked, wonder in her voice. "I thought that Muslim girls were forbidden to learn to read."

Besma nodded. "Some
are
forbidden, but it's by their families, or sometimes by the local emirs and sheiks, not by the Quran. My father says that that's wrong, that it's 'improper and impious.' But a lot of people—maybe even most—still forbid their daughters an education in anything but managing a home and family. Some do other things to girls and
those
my father says are worse than impious. He says they're an 'abomination.'"

"What things?" Petra asked

"You don't want to know. Come on," Besma changed the subject, "let's see what new clothes we can put on your dolly."

Besma and Petra leaned against cushions set up against the wall between Besma's bed and her trunk. It was very late and so Besma had a small lamp lit, set into the wall behind them. The flickering flame of the lamp would have made reading the hand-scrawled words in the journal next to impossible except that the writing was so firm and fine. Whoever had written those words must have had very fine motor control of her hands.

"I can't understand any of it," Petra said, her head hanging with shame.

"We'll work on that later. For now, let's just look at the pictures."

"Pictures?"