One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (14 page)

17

Saturday

LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING,
like most evenings, this evening once again. But before I even open shop, before Layla arrives to stand where the sunset casts its light on her, before then, an important thing happens as I walk to my shop.

Most days I take a circuitous path around the outskirts of town, where the desert most closely approaches the city. I like the possibility of meeting wild things in the early morning, lizards basking on the freshly sun-warmed ground near their burrows, half-domesticated goats, stray dogs sleeping in old bomb craters and tank scrapes, and, if I am lucky, maybe even a falcon turning high in the oil-stained sky. I like to watch the lights in the houses turn off as the sky lightens. I like to hear the silence that descends when the farmers and homesteaders power down their generators one by one and the town gets quieter as a result, a stillness before the noises of the day. I like to watch people begin their routines, men waiting on the roadside for trucks to come and taxi them to their places of work, women softly singing, hidden behind the walls of houses as they hang clothes and knead dough and feed their chickens, children complaining as they get into starchy school uniforms and are fed, tidied up, prepared for the day. I can feel the town come alive around me as I watch it. It pleases me to see the world continue as it has always continued, unshakable despite the shaking and the changing and the pulsing and the tumult.

But today—the day marking the thirteenth day since Layla’s visitations began and also the thirty-first day of business for me since I moved to Safwan—today I walk through the middle of town instead of journeying around the desert edge. I come close to the green single spire of the minaret lofting above the empty, quiet market. I hear the tape-recorded
muezzin
call from the loudspeakers. Those who are outside kneel right where they stand in the street to pray in the direction indicated by the
Qibla,
to pray toward Mecca. I, too, pray, facing southwest, at an angle to the street. This is the time of the greatest quiet, all prayer, no business, very little background noise, just the voice of the
muezzin
crier. As the prayer finishes I stand and continue walking. And when I come into the shadow of the mosque itself, I see something that gives me a great deal of concern, something that I think about throughout the rest of the day before Layla arrives at her customary evening hour.

The something that worries me is a small gathering of men, no more than a dozen, standing around the entrance to the mosque. They do not face into the mosque, where one might expect them still to cling to the echoing words of our imam, Safwan’s imam. Neither do they face outward from the mosque, as if they were leaving their prayers behind to venture into the daily routines of work and worry and business. Instead they face to the side, where a young man stands on a pile of lettuce crates. I move into the midst of these men and listen, looking up at the youthful speaker as he continues his address to the gathered group.

“…not Baghdad, not Fallujah or Ramadi or Najaf or Mosul. Not even Basra. This town, this very town, is the place to strike. Why? Exactly because it is peaceful here. Exactly because life has returned to something near normal. This is jihad. It is sacrifice. We all must sacrifice so that we each may win a share of glory. Here, in the south, the Americans are weak. Their focus is not here. Their energy is not here. Their weapons are not here, not in the same overwhelming numbers as farther north. Here on your road, around that far side of town, on your road, your city’s own street, all the supplies travel north to feed the army that is occupying our lands. This road is the jugular of the beast in all its throbbing vulnerability. By shutting the road we will shut down the American war machine.”

The speaker is, as I said, a young man, maybe twenty years of age. He wears a clean white
dishdasha,
a black
aqal
. He has a very finely clipped mustache, no beard, not even the shadow of a beard. Rather than sandals, beneath his
dishdasha
the tips of polished, expensive shoes reveal themselves, oily black leather with a fine sheen of unavoidable dust on them, as though he has only just recently stepped out into the street. I hear the foreign accent in his voice as clearly as all the people must hear my own accent. He is, without a doubt, from somewhere other than here, most likely not even Iraqi. Is he Lebanese? Syrian? Is he Jaish al-Mahdi? Hezbollah? Is he allied to Hussein? If he is Shia from the northern militias, does he know for sure that the Shia clans here will embrace him? Who has sent him? Has he come from Iran? Was he trained there? He has a very carefully folded pair of sunglasses in the breast pocket of his
dishdasha,
new sunglasses, dark and shiny like the ones the American soldiers wear. I wonder where he got them.

I step back out of the crowd. The speaker’s gaze locks on me as he sees that he is losing me from his audience. Rallies of this sort have a critical mass. Speech makers and jihad-mongers know this. Those first dozen men, alone, are not enough, though they are a good start, certainly a better start than no listeners at all. Thirteen, me included, becomes something more like a crowd, each body lending legitimacy to the cause, excitement to the speech, a sense that the force and feeling are shared among all. What is more, if one man leaves such a rally others may follow him. I would rather see this boy preaching to dust. I would rather keep the town quiet. And I am sure Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah will feel the same. His goal is to consolidate power, and the presence of a radical speech maker can do nothing but disturb his plans.

Having singled me out, the speaker asks me, “Are you a believer?”

“Of course,” I say.

I try not to speak too much. I do not want him to hear the foreignness of my own voice, the northern tones, for if he is indeed an Iraqi he will hear them, he will know he is not alone, not unique as a visitor here. If he is Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, maybe my Baghdad inflection won’t sound so wrong. But I keep my sentences short, just in case. I do not want to chance the matter.

“Will you join us?” he asks.

“Perhaps when your voice changes,” I say.

I hear the other men laugh and I finish turning away from the warmonger completely. I show him my back just as Bashar showed me his back last night. I think to myself that the boy doesn’t know what he asks. He knows nothing at all. It is as if he were fresh from the
madrassa
, given a first assignment somewhere harmless, trumpeting his own importance. Perhaps he should have spoken with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah before he came here to proselytize on behalf of jihad. Seyyed Abdullah is against war—not fundamentally, but only insofar as it hurts business and stability. Nothing good can come from a trumpeter, a braggart, a boy who needs jihad for his identity rather than for his God. Nothing good can come from this boy’s assignment to our town.

This is what I think about all day: the million bad things the speechmonger’s presence might lead to. The million bad things his presence
will
lead to. I tell myself, as I begin shutting my shop, that I must speak to Seyyed Abdullah tonight, immediately, maybe even before my dinner. I am sure Seyyed Abdullah will contrive to remove the boy from town, if he hasn’t already put things in motion to do so. Perhaps the police are raiding the mosque even now.

With my mind churning over these thoughts, focusing itself on this one thought—how to rid myself of the boy—I am startled (as always, it seems) when Layla arrives.

I do not recognize her at first.

What I see, coming toward me through the ramshackle market, is a tall thin woman in a black
abaya
who appears to be drunk. She wobbles from side to side. She spins around in a circle, nearly falling. Then she rights herself, wobbles on, crashes into a garbage can, frantically reaches out with a hand that seems too short for her body, catches hold of one of the supporting poles of Jaber’s kebab stand, disturbs the carcasses of the hanging chickens so that the flies that have landed on the chickens rise up in a cloud, buzz around her, and settle again on the swaying, slapping, hanging chunks of featherless yellow meat.

This drunken woman arrives at my shop, leans against the windowsill of my storefront, looks at me, makes eye contact with me through the slit of her
burqa.
I am bewildered. I do not yet comprehend that this woman is Layla. The height, the wobbliness, they do not connect in my mind with the girl who channels angelic alien voices. Nor does the
abaya,
the black covering robe, connect with my idea of a dirty market rat. What I see of her eyes, from a distance, shaded as they are, shows me only a heavy application of kohl, artificially dark lashes in the shadow of the
burqa.
Beneath the lashes I cannot see the blue of Layla’s eyes.

Thinking the woman is drunk, I close the tin shutter of the shop window in her face.

“Business is done today,” I say.

She grabs hold of the corner of the shack, peering through the open doorway, and says, with an artificially deep, gruff voice: “You do not recognize me?”

Despite all this camouflage, the sound of her voice, still girlish as she tries to mock Ulayya, betrays her. I do not jump at the recognition. I laugh a little, covering my laughter with a fake cough, then return my voice to the same gruff tones, playing along with her charade. “No, madam. But if you would like to buy a mobile phone, perhaps it would be best for you to return tomorrow, when you are more stable.”

“I am not in need of a mobile phone,” Layla says. “I have a big empty house and a big empty heart and a big empty purse and I need more than anything in the world to buy a husband today.”

She bats her eyelashes at me and continues with her imitation of Ulayya: “Unfortunately, my father, who is able to smuggle everything else into this country, everything from Rolex watches to Mercedes cars, cannot get me the sort of satellite dish I need, not one with diamonds encrusting it, or with pearl hearts forming its center. Do you know anyone who sells satellite dishes so perfectly ornamented?”

“Indeed I do,” I say.

“It’s me,” Layla says at last, lifting the veil of her hijab a little so that I can see her face. “It is me, your friend Layla. Do you like my disguise?”

“Very much,” I say. “Are you pretending to be Britney Spears?”

“No, silly,” she says. “I’m your sweetheart.”

The words hit too close to home. A cloud forms in front of my eyes.

“It was my fault,” I say. “My decision.”

“What?” Layla asks.

She sways to the side and dismounts from a unicycle hidden under the too-large
abaya
she wears. The black fabric drapes over the ground. She lets the unicycle fall. I should be amazed. I should wonder to myself where a market rat purchases, let alone learns to ride, such a thing. But I merely stare at it, dumb and deaf, my mind drifting away, away.

“Sweetheart,” I say.

I see snow, a shroud of snow descending around me, which the Sears Tower pierces like the black spire of an evil mosque rising up and up and up into the Chicago skies. I see drifts of snow, like dunes of sand but lighter and brighter and cold. Upon them I see the pink snowsuit of a little girl. I see her tumbling and laughing and running toward me. These wafting, disconnected memories feel like dreams, are dreams, actually, removed from my current time and place and context. I feel, as they swirl in me, like I am floating, being buoyed and floated by them, weightless. In my mind, my dream, my memory, I grasp for the girl in the pink snowsuit but my arms miss her. I run after her. My hand takes hold of her hand for a short moment. I tug, and the pink mitten she wears comes free from her hand. It falls onto the snow at my feet.

Layla snaps her fingers in my face.

“Yoo-hoo,” she says. “Mobile-phone man. Tune in.”

I look at Layla again. From up close, the thick lines of kohl around her eyes seem grotesque on her young face.

“I love you,” she says, trying to mock Ulayya’s voice again, trying to cheer me up.

Her words seem far away: she loves…

She loves me.

I realize I should say something back to her. I should say, “I love you, too.” I should say, “I love you right up to the moon and back,” just as Nutbrown Hare says to her little bunny. I should tell Layla that no father has ever loved his child to the depths and to the heights and to the distances that I love her. I should say something. I should say, “I love you,” but the closest I come to those words is to repeat myself, to say again, “We never should have returned. It was my decision. My decision. It’s horror. Horror. I picked your arm from the rubble.”

Layla’s face contorts. Her brow furrows. She has had enough. This is too crazy even for a girl whose universe includes robots and unicycles and Arnold Schwarzenegger. She veils herself again. She mounts her unicycle. She begins, stiff-backed, to pedal backward away from me. Her
abaya
swells out in front of her as though it is blown on the wind. She rotates on the axis of the single wheel so that I see her back. Then she wobbles away, through the market, her nose up. A few meters down the road she turns her head, thrusting her arms out to her sides for balance. She looks like a giant bird fighting to control the lift of its leathery wings, to balance updrafts of air. Then she drops her flapping arms, leans forward, and—like a ghost hovering over the pitted market street—cycles away, under the bridge, toward the place where her family must maintain its desert tomato farm.