One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (15 page)

As she passes under the bridge, I see the American convoy from Baghdad to Camp Bucca approach in the northern distance—four buses surrounded by three heavily armed Humvees. I make a notch on the doorpost of my shack: the seventh notch. Two days late due to the sandstorm. I wonder whether they’ve packed the buses fuller to compensate for lost time. Shutting down Abu Ghraib and moving all the prisoners south takes effort, takes planning, but the Americans, Allah bless them, thrive on effort and planning.

Later that night I see Layla again, between the time I dine with Ali ash-Shareefi and when I go to speak with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah about the new speech maker, the new jihadist, who has arrived in Safwan. I see her as she entertains the soldiers of one of the American patrols who sometimes lounge on the overpass bridge. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t look for me. She is oblivious to my presence, as I am usually oblivious to her presence in the brief moments before I notice her at my store. She couldn’t have known I was watching for her, that I went looking for her. She couldn’t have known that I needed to see her.

The unicycle had lodged in my mind that evening. It was absurd, a child in Safwan riding such a thing. The more I thought about it the more unreal it seemed, up to the point where I even doubted the authenticity of everything I had seen, everything I had felt. Why had none of the other merchants or townsfolk paid any attention to such a strange sight—Layla on a unicycle, wearing the
hijab,
wobbling, seemingly drunk?

I had to reassure myself. I had to look at Layla again. I had to see that she is real and not some figment of my imagination, some clinging projection that had come to haunt me. I needed to see her on her own, independent of me, her fire, her liveliness, her spark still lit when not immediately before me. And I did see her. I saw her spinning in a circle with her finger on her nose and her face to the night sky so that the soldiers on that bridge laughed as she ran, crazy-legged, from one side of the overpass to the other. Closing my eyes, I could almost see the tracery of her footsteps burned into the back of my eyelids, like the negative image of fireworks, pion and muon trails, and protons bursting. The capture of her, however fleeting, proved to me at that moment that the girl was created in the world, inhabited the world, worked her strange magic in the world.

I walked away, back to my house, convinced more than ever that Layla was real.

I visited Annie every day in that jail while she waited for her trial. Every day I visited her and every day the sergeant told me she refused, once again, to see me.

I didn’t tell Bashar.

“When do you two leave for Venezuela?” Bashar asked me.

“I think we’ve decided on Ireland,” I said.

“Aren’t you worried that the Irish will arrest her? I think Venezuela will be safer.”

“We’re going to change our names.”

“And say that you’ve got a really deep Irish suntan?”

I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll go to Iraq.”

“It will be unsafe for Sunnis. The Americans will topple Saddam after they’re done bombing him,” Bashar said. We had been watching the buildup of Allied forces in Saudi Arabia, listening to fruitless UN negotiations over Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. We’d been listening to war analysts speculating on options ranging from diplomatic coercion to the use of nuclear weapons.

“Baghdad might not even exist when the Americans are done,” Bashar added.

“Maybe we’ll go to Canada,” I said.

I didn’t care about the war. I didn’t care about anything other than Annie Dillon.

“Nadia arrives when?” Bashar asked.

“Today, maybe tomorrow. She called from London this morning. Her plane probably is in the air right now,” I said. “You’ll tell her I’m gone?”

“It would be better if you were, actually, gone,” Bashar said. “You should make it quick.”

“They’ll set bail for Annie soon,” I said.

Not wanting to dwell on it too long, the subject of bail, the subject of my plans with Annie after I bought her freedom from jail, I added, “Nadia won’t miss me at all.”

18

Saturday Night, Visiting the Homes of Ali ash-Shareefi and Seyyed Abdullah

I VISIT ALI
ASH-SHAREEFI
first, not owing to any sense of propriety or any shadowy, foreboding intuition, but mostly due to mere convenience. His house, his new house on the outskirts of the town, the opposite side of town from the American road, is situated farther from my final destination, my own house, than is Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s residence. It is a fortunate decision to see Ali al-Hajj first because, after my conversation with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah, I am sure I would have been in no mood to discuss the arrangement of an engagement feast and a marriage.

The way to ash-Shareefi’s home leads me, as does my walk to Bashar’s café, through the blue-tiled arch with the poster and the mosaic of al-Sadr. But, at the first intersection, where the headquarters of Hezbollah and, behind it, a children’s elementary school are prominent landmarks, and from where the main section of the downtown—the city hall, the police station, the fire station, the civilian border-crossing compound—can all be seen, from there I turn left, away from my own home, away from my dinner and tea at Bashar’s café, away from Seyyed Abdullah’s house. My stomach is not happy about the change in my schedule, nor is my mind, which continually drifts toward conversations I might instead have been having with Bashar, with Layla, with Layla’s father, should I ever be so fortunate as to meet him, drifting toward the remembered taste of falafel, toward the enclosing comfort of the sounds of the market that blanket all such difficult, troubling thoughts in a muffled haze of numb communion.

The road around the outskirts of Safwan passes a makeshift football field, just an open lot with some white-painted cans to mark the goalposts. The boys playing this afternoon are oblivious to my presence. They concentrate on their feet, on the movements of the other players toward the goal, the press of their bodies toward a common objective. After I spend a few long moments contemplating them, and as the sun sets over the desert behind them, they at last notice me. They stop, all of them, spontaneously. One of them picks up the ball, an old thing, worn bare in places and neither perfectly black nor white but a constant dusty brownish gray. They do not wave at me. They do not salute me. They do not smile. They watch me as I walk away, and it isn’t until I come to the gate of Ali ash-Shareefi’s house, where the road circling the outskirts of the town bends toward the south, that I hear the game resume. What has scared them about me? I have seen men die, men who know they are walking toward their deaths. Men of that sort are not objects of terror but objects of adoration. A kind of calm, a kind of holiness clings to them, wreaths them. Why do these boys turn to look at me in silence when I am about to meet with a man and start my life anew through his graces? To marry and start life anew: this isn’t dying, though it is trading one skin for another. The process is holy, but not as holy as dying. It isn’t martyrdom. But perhaps the lesser holiness retains some of the same awe as that of a man with death on his head.

When I arrive at Ali’s house, I see that he has a man on guard at his gate, not a strange thing for a rich merchant in a town such as this. The guard leans on the hood of a black Mercedes parked in the exterior courtyard. A bank of prismatic new windows looks down from the house’s second story over the courtyard and the Mercedes, over the street, back into the heart of the town, like a blind man who turns his face when he feels sun warming his skin.

I tell the guard I am to visit Ali. He doesn’t say anything. He just nods to show me he hears me and understands me, the classic tough-guy silence. He goes into the house and a moment later ash-Shareefi returns, with the guard behind him, and unlocks the gate for me himself.

“Come in, my son, come in,” he says. “We have been expecting you.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I shall not stay long.”

But I leave after nightfall, having eaten dinner, having smoked the
narjeela
with al-Hajj, having committed to a firm date in one week’s time to hold a feast for my engagement to Ali al-Hajj’s daughter, Ulayya. His family, his clan, will set up tents in the streets. They will close off several blocks of the city in order to hold a general celebration. They will bring musicians and dancers and foods from Basra, Baghdad, Kuwait City. Of course, his daughter must have a dress. And as to the matter of the dowry, he understands my position, the fact that my business is a new business without an accumulation of capital, without a basis for credit. He tells me he is sure I will thrive in the near future. He is sure of it. And I am more sure of it, too, leaving him at last in the darkness of his courtyard when we part. I am so sure that my business and my life will thrive that I almost forget to visit Seyyed Abdullah on my way home. I almost forget Seyyed Abdullah until I pass the green single spire of the downtown mosque and see the upturned crates where the jihadist had spoken that morning to the villagers.

It is thus, at a late hour and without proper invitation or warning, that I visit Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah to ask him if he knows of a new man in town who has taken to talking publicly of jihad. This question catches my benefactor in a very different frame of mind from our previous meetings, perhaps because my visit comes at a time when he is not expecting to receive me or to face my questions. Or perhaps he feels a little guilty and assumes the rougher attitude as a mask.

“Indeed,” he says. “I am the one who invited this boy to Safwan.”

“You’ve done what?”

“Calm yourself, my brother,” the sheikh replies. Involuntarily, I shiver as he calls me brother—for I see Yasin superimposed on the split and exploded bodies of U.S. soldiers, like so many kittens. I hope that Seyyed Abdullah does not notice my lapse of attention, my shiver, my loss of concentration.

“The boy is my new wife’s nephew,” he says, stroking his chin with the fingers of his right hand. “I now consider him part of my family. He is harmless. He will soon be under control.”

“Talking like that, gathering a crowd, he isn’t harmless at all. He could be a big problem for us. Do you want to rally more people toward Hezbollah?”

“Maybe things with Hezbollah need to be brought to a head.”

“With your wife’s young nephew as the instigator?”

“You’re doing nothing to instigate, as was our agreement.”

“I’m getting to it. Give me time.”

Seyyed Abdullah stops stroking his chin. He rubs his hands together and passes a flattened palm over his eyes. When he looks at me again, he speaks very plainly, which is a frightening thing.

“These are exactly the reasons why I have invited the boy to Safwan. First: you’re taking him on as your protégé. It is time for you to expand your shop. You need an assistant. Mobile phones are getting more popular every day, and I hear that you now sell satellite dishes as well. You will teach him the business and, in addition to the business, I hope you will teach him some restraint.”

I am exasperated. That boy as my assistant?

“What will I do with him?” I ask. “Is he tied to Hezbollah, to Hussein, to some other militia? Where did he learn all this speaking and speech making and rhetoric? And, never, never, did I ever agree to take on an assistant.”

Seyyed Abdullah raises his voice at me for the first time in our acquaintance. He says: “You need an assistant, I’m certain of it. You are moving too slowly. And my wife’s nephew needs a master. Better that master be you than someone else.”

“I need no help. And I’m in no frame of mind to mentor the troubled youth of the world,” I say, trying to sound as bitter as I can. “And what about Hezbollah? Are they the ones you worry about?”

“I don’t worry at all,” Seyyed Abdullah says, in such a tone, so icy, that I know even if he does worry it is a worry grounded in patience and preparation. “I want Hussein to seem more closely tied to your activities. If my firebrand nephew leaks our plan to Hezbollah, all the better. We will direct the fury of the Americans toward Hussein and I will have one less problem in town after the Americans deal with him.”

I start to say “One less competitor in town,” but instead I change my mind and try a different angle, asking him: “Why, suddenly, why must I hurry? I thought I was merely observing until we get word from Baghdad.”

“I have had word from Baghdad,” he says, calming down, finally lowering his voice. “Abu Ghraib is almost empty now. It will be one of the next few convoys. We’ll know for certain the day before it happens. So my nephew will be useful to you. He
will
help you get ready all the more quickly.” He emphasizes the word
will
rather than the word
help
to demonstrate that the condition is settled, no longer open to argument. The emphasis comes with some of the anger, some of the gruffness of his earlier tone.

Seyyed Abdullah beckons for his gun-carrying servant to approach. He takes from the servant another plain brown cardboard box, similar to the one in which my smuggled whiskey comes.

“So soon?” I ask. “I’m not finished with the last one.”

I shake the box. Amid the muffled sounds of packing tape and plastic wrap I hear the faint jingle of metal against metal. The weight of the package had at first led me to believe it contained liquid, booze. But the jingle isn’t that of glass on glass or even of glass on metal. It is metal on metal. I have long expected such a shipment, but now that I am receiving it I’m not sure I want it after all. I’m not sure I want it near me. I’m not sure which of my two selves actually takes the box from Seyyed Abdullah, whether I am at that moment the regenerating man who is starting his life over or the shriveled soul of a man who can no longer think, speak, or reason without his ghosts surrounding him. Is it steel in the box? Steel on steel? Is it copper? A triggering mechanism? Timing components? The device, so long discussed between Seyyed Abdullah and me, rests in this box either in part or in its disassembled entirety. It has reached me easily, disguised by the ruse of the whiskey bottles that the border officials have grown accustomed to passing, with a small bribe, through their offices. Alcohol is forbidden, yes, but for a bit of
baksheesh
the border becomes permeable. And that
baksheesh
, at regular intervals, numbs the border official’s mind. He becomes addicted to it, grows accustomed and easy to manipulate, so that the pieces of a bomb, which weigh the same as a bottle of whiskey, cause no comment, no excitement, when passed under the table to Seyyed Abdullah’s agent.

Seyyed Abdullah merely smiles, doesn’t discuss the contents, even as he reaches toward me, touches the box I hold, and makes its contents jingle again. His smile is a knowing one.

“My wife’s nephew Abd al-Rahim will visit you tomorrow in the market,” he says.

Then he shows me to the door of his house, kissing me on each cheek and holding me close.

“My town,” he whispers. “Though you are welcome to stay here as long as it takes.”

“Thank you,” I say, which upon reflection is a very weak, an uncharacteristically weak, way for me to voice my sudden disgust. Weaker even upon reflection, since his parting words contain the first hint, not so very deeply veiled, that my presence in town is not to be permanent. Our conversation ruins the feeling of belonging brought to me by my meeting with Ali ash-Shareefi. Any stability I might find here is only temporary, only a clever disguise I must now assume.

I can excuse Seyyed Abdullah’s initial brusqueness with me. It is his town, after all. And I am only a mobile-phone salesman with nothing to recommend me, no reason to receive his favor or the hand of Ali ash-Shareefi’s widowed daughter. I have nothing to recommend me but what these people guess of my background, though all of them except Seyyed Abdullah guess wrong. None of them knows that I am dead, more than half dead. None of them guesses that I struggle, part of me numb, part of me awakening in the embrace of a new family, awakening to a simple life, here in the south, here as a man of business.

The dead half and the alive half of me fight. And that is why I opt to get very drunk when finally, finally I reach my house this night.

Every day for a month I visited Annie in that jail. Every day for two months I visited her. Every day for three months. When Nadia came to Chicago, I did not stop visiting Annie, I just disappeared from Bashar’s life, from the hospital, from my life, for enough time to let Bashar and Nadia get to know each other. I transferred my residency to a hospital downtown. I rented a new apartment. But I did not stop visiting Annie’s jail.

The day the Americans launched their Desert Storm ground offensive, routing Iraq’s armies from Kuwait, I visited Annie. The day they stopped pushing north, stopped in Safwan itself, in the shadow of Jebel Sanam, I visited Annie. When the truce was signed, leaving Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party still in power, I visited Annie.

Not once did she appear at the visitation window.

“The trial is in two months,” the desk sergeant told me. “Then what’ll you do?”