One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (12 page)

I wave at him. I am friendly. I am nonchalant. I begin to ask Layla if this is her new acquaintance, the lieutenant. But when I look down from the soldiers on the bridge I find Layla nowhere near me. All that remains of her is a smaller version of herself, running away, halfway through the market, heading toward the Americans.

As if suddenly and stupidly possessed, I call out: “I am engaged. I will marry Ulayya.”

I am unsure if she hears me but I know others in the market do indeed hear; the men and women around me stop their haggling. One says to me, quite softly, “
Alif mabrouk,
a thousand congratulations.”

I do not respond to him.

I see Layla turn to look back at me, as if the sound of my words at last reaches her. She puts her hand to her mouth and kisses it, then blows a kiss to me across her open, flattened palm. I see her disappear over the edge of the highway. I do not know if she has understood the meaning of what I have said. I am to be married. The relationship between us is now
haraam,
has probably always been
haraam,
inappropriate on many levels, an old man and a market-rat of a girl having such conversations. But it will be more than inappropriate when I welcome Ulayya to my house, or she welcomes me to her house. Then I must respect Ulayya. I must be a respectful man, not a man who associates with a girl who sings alien songs and talks about America. Everything will change. But everything will be as Allah wills. Everything is as Allah wills.
La illah ila Allah:
there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him.

I remove the black rope of my
aqal
and my red-checked
kaffiyeh
and put the Chicago baseball cap where they had been. It fits, but only uncomfortably. It needs time to break in, to form to my head, to become part of me. I know that by wearing this cap I will draw unnecessary attention to myself as I walk into town for dinner but, heedless, I keep the ball cap on, close my shop, and go to Bashar’s café for tea and conversation. I am sure he will want to talk about Ulayya. And, for once, I, too, want to talk about Ulayya. Layla’s blown kiss, a distant kiss, so fleeting, has done nothing but harden my resolve. The things that are wrong,
haraam,
with such a kiss can be easily remedied with a good dose of self-respect and propriety, things like wanderlust and craziness and the half-formed sense that somehow, through her felicity, part of me has sprung alive.

The receptionist’s voice sounded far away, reaching me as if through water or through a thick layer of golden honey. “Paging Dr. Shumari.”

Reluctantly, I excused myself from the woman in the exam room, breaking away from the quick flow of our conversation: places we had each known in the Middle East, chances we may have run into each other, fate, fortune, the strange path that life hobbles along. I excused myself, backed out of the exam room, and took a deep, cool-feeling breath.

I picked up the phone line and said: “This is Dr. Shumari. How may I help you?”

I heard no reply. A long, static-filled interlude worried me as I waited.

“Is this my son?”

“Father?” I said immediately, tensely.

The woman in the exam room did not disappear from my thoughts altogether. I kept a close eye on the thin blue curtains, hoping no other doctor—not even Bashar—would usurp me and begin ministering to her. Part of me listened to my father on the phone. But most of me watched the exam room. Most of me recalled the bits and pieces of this woman that I could not concentrate on during our first moments together: the white sheen of drying sweat, the tear in her dress, a broken fingernail.

“Yes,” my father said. “Yes, it is me. Allah be praised, it is good to get through to you on this telephone connection. I am in the Ministry of Culture building, Baghdad, patched through Syria on a government line.”

My father had written to me every month, a rambling series of letters filled with politics and talk of Saddam. And I had faithfully visited Baghdad every summer, returning to see him and to see Nadia. But he had never before called me, and the effort of speaking to him, stuck on a very public phone in the middle of the ER floor, was palpable. I knew he would speak to me in a roundabout way, not only because—outside his own house—he always veiled his words, but also because he wasn’t familiar with telephone etiquette or with the costs associated with transatlantic communication.

“You have been following the news?” he asked.

“Yes,” I lied.

“It will happen tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said, playing along. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything is in the hands of Allah,” he answered.

“You can’t talk about it?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Just wanted to hear your voice,” he said.

“Okay, Father,” I said. “It is nice to hear your voice, too.”

I knew there had to be a more definite reason for his call. I had just returned to Chicago no more than three weeks earlier, after spending most of July and August with him.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked again.

“We’re sending Nadia to you,” he said. “Abdel Khaleq is smuggling her to Damascus and then she will go to Beirut and then to New York and then Chicago. It might take a few months because she doesn’t have her papers.”

“But she has money?”

“Of course.”

“All will be well,
insha’Allah,
” I said.

“All will be as Allah intends,” he said.

Then, after a moment, he said, “Good-bye,” and the line cut.

14

Thursday Evening

AS I WALK INTO SAFWAN
, my thoughts turn inward. I forget about the Cubs baseball cap and I do not notice if people stare at me.

I pass through al-Sadr’s arch. Among the crowd of people, the noisy cars, the white-gloved traffic police, the old men lounging in what shade they can find, I am lost even as I tread familiar steps toward Bashar’s restaurant. Vividly I remember and replay in my mind the first coincidental meeting I had with Bashar in this town, so far away from where we had once known each other. This meeting occurred before any of Layla’s visits. It occurred before Layla ever stood in shadow under the awning of my little store, with the big highway behind her and the cars rolling north and south between Baghdad and Umm Qasr. It happened the first day I spent in Safwan, before Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah and I scouted for the particular shack where I have established my shop, before I knew my way around town, before I began counting American convoys.

Without knowing it was Bashar’s café, I chose to take my dinner there after having traveled south from Baghdad with Seyyed Abdullah the day before, arriving late in the night and then sleeping and breakfasting as a guest in Seyyed Abdullah’s home. Chancing into Bashar’s café, I happened to sit in the very same chair, at the very same table on the outside patio, where I habitually sit now every time I visit Bashar. It was as if the seat had been preordained for me, the table laid. Bashar maintains a few such outdoor tables on one side of his building, connected to the main room and the kitchen by a decorated door. The patio is raised, a wooden platform. The platform keeps guests aloof from the street, removed from the filth of the gutters, above the noise of the crowds but connected to the world. An awning covers the group of tables on the platform, bowered by sparkling lights that work intermittently, as electrical power in town allows. The tables are small, black-painted iron.

That first day, I raised the menu to my face as the waiter from the café approached me. He knew I wasn’t a resident of the town, and I knew he would have no reason to recognize me, so the gesture of raising the menu, the veiling it provided, I undertook unconsciously and purely as a reflex, a very guilty sort of reflex. I did not mean to hide. But in hiding, I made myself conspicuous.

“What can you recommend?” I asked the waiter.

The waiter did not respond. I said it again, more clearly and with as much of a southern, Persian-influenced inflection as I could muster: “Do you have a recommendation from this menu, my host?”

When the man spoke, his voice cracked at first, failing him. The man was Bashar himself, waiting tables as he often does when short of staff or when he sees one of his particular friends enter the café. Not knowing it was he, I continued to hide behind my menu, strangely scared and off-balance in this new place, this new town.

“Perhaps…perhaps I can recommend some bowling,” Bashar said at last. “And, as an aperitif, God willing, maybe you would be so kind as to tell me how you have been these last months, and why you have chosen to visit me here in this wasteland, my dear friend.”

I dropped my menu. I recognized him at last. I stood, toppling the little iron table. It caused a commotion among the other diners, but neither Bashar nor I cared. I took my friend in my arms and held him for a long while, a long minute, until he withdrew, straightening his
ghalabia,
and with a hand on each of my shoulders, grasped me at arm’s length so that we could more honestly and closely assess the changes, large and small, that life had written on our faces.

“Let me take you to a special table, maybe to my house itself, it is not far from here, a place more fitting, all these people…” His thoughts were not in good order. They tumbled one upon the other.

“Do not mind the people, my friend. This is how I want to be known,” I said. I looked at the ground.

“You are undercover? You are trying to blend?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“You are what?”

“A businessman. I will start a business here. That is my goal here.”

“But your little…”

I put my hands on his shoulders and I squeezed him more forcefully than he expected. I could see in his gaze that he wanted to wince, that he had become a little soft in his restaurant hauteur. I held him steady, though. And he held me steady. And without saying anything, I know he certainly understood what had happened to me. He understood me in a way that was more clear and convincing than any words of mine would ever have been able to communicate. He has never since asked me about it but it worries me, nonetheless, that he knows this particular truth about me. With two men, Bashar and Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah, in a small town such as Safwan holding fast to the secret of a third man, how can that secret not escape? I am sure Seyyed Abdullah has said nothing and will say nothing. He is the soul of discretion. Perhaps Bashar, too, has been discreet in that regard throughout the few weeks I have operated my store here. But perhaps he has said other things unintentionally, bragging and unwittingly bringing about the interest of Ulayya and her father in making a match with me, making a match through me with my clan, ash-Shumari. Certainly they expect great things from me in the future, things that I will not be able to deliver, not anymore. They could not have birthed such expectations of me without some hint, without some loose talking from one of these two men, my friend Bashar or my patron, Seyyed Abdullah.

“What shall I call you,” Bashar said then, “if you are not to be known here? Surely you must have a name?”

“Call me Abu Saheeh,” I told him, birthing the alias immaculately. “Which will be for me the greatest lie of all.”

What was supposed to be merely a year apart from Nadia—a first year for me to concentrate on my medical studies, establish myself in Chicago, and then return to marry her and bring her back with me to the United States—had become two years, then three years, then four. I returned every summer, sometimes also during the winter break, and we spoke of the subject of marriage each time.

“After this second year I will be finished with my classroom work and then we will better enjoy our time together,” I told her.

“This next year, my third year, is the first time I deal with real patients. I must be sharp,” I said.

“I am still just a poor student. I can’t provide for you the things you deserve. Next year I will be a resident. Then I earn money. We’ll be able to buy a real home,” I rationalized after delaying the marriage for a third time, though—between her father’s fortune and my father’s fortune—money wasn’t the issue.

“I will wait,” Nadia simply said.

Always she took these postponements well. It wasn’t ever a matter of if we would marry. It was a matter of when. She could come with me immediately or she could wait. It was one and the same thing. She was still young, not yet twenty-two. She had almost completed a degree herself, a path many young women were able to pursue under Saddam’s government.

All of this, all this history, I told to the woman in the ER as we waited for the police. I told her how I had come to America. I told her of the call from my father. I told her about my childhood engagement. I told her that my fiancée, Nadia, was fleeing Iraq at that very moment to join me in America. I told her about my brother, Yasin. I spoke to her about the war with Iran, the things I had witnessed. When speaking to her I found words I could not say or write to Nadia. I don’t know why I felt able to speak with her so openly, so freely. Maybe it was the flow of her Arabic, intoxicating layers of Saudi inflection and American liberality. Maybe it was because she didn’t know me, hadn’t grown up with me and with expectations of me that I might feel unable or unwilling to fulfill. Maybe it was her eyes, so clear as to be innocent but demanding from me more than just the usual superficial explanations. During the time we spent waiting for the police, we said nothing more about her husband at all. She told me nothing about his death. But I told her everything.

After what must have been two or three hours, Bashar opened the curtain of the examination room and said, “The police aren’t coming.”

The woman held up her hands, the blood on them now quite dry.

“They don’t believe I killed him?” she said.

“I didn’t call,” said Bashar.

After a moment of uncomprehending silence from her and from me, Bashar said to me: “Go on. Get her out of here. Take her somewhere. She’s not hurt and the police don’t need to know she was ever here. I’ll cover the rest of your shift.”

He tossed me a warm wet towel. I took one of the woman’s hands and then the other into the folds of the towel. I massaged them until most of the blood rubbed away. When her right hand was no longer soiled, she held it out to me.

“Annie,” she said. “Annie Dillon.”

We shook hands the American way, firmly, quickly. But then I also folded my other hand over our clasp, a more tender embrace than is customary between Americans, and we held hands that way, the Iraqi way, for a long moment.

“Let’s go,” she said, leading me from the hospital to her home, a little suburban cottage, a whitewashed American romance, complete with a porch swing.