One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (21 page)

25

Tuesday and Layla Is Absent

LAYLA SHIES AWAY FROM
her habitual evening visits. When she is absent I look for her always. I look for her standing in the shadow of my store, appearing there suddenly, magically. I listen for her whispering voice behind me, trying to surprise me. I wait for her to come rolling into town on a unicycle or zooming toward me at some inopportune moment wearing a harlequin mask and roller skates.

She does not come.

I count convoys passing. I wait for the special convoy of buses that is sent south to Camp Bucca every four days. Perhaps it will come today, a day early, because of the possibility that the sandstorm created a backlog of prisoners destined to travel south, a backlog the Americans might fill by sending an extra convoy outside the normal schedule. That extra convoy would be big news, a big problem I would need to discuss with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah. It would change the flow, the expectation we have developed: one convoy every four days, four buses in each, for a total of about two hundred prisoners. But no such additional, provisional convoy passes me. And Layla never appears in the shadow of my little shack, here on the outskirts of Safwan in the illegal market.

She does not come to visit me for our habitual evening talk, and I think it is Abd al-Rahim’s hovering presence that scares her. She has not shied away from me except maybe for a day or two, when I have been angry at her blasphemous ways. Then she has returned with a freshness and a vigor that make me wonder whether there had indeed ever been a break in our visits, an absence in my new life hollowed out into the exact shape of her small and sparkling self.

I think she shies away because she has felt the feral lingering of Abd al-Rahim’s gaze, his unhealthy, unholy fascination coupled with his disregard for her. He has measured her with his keen, quick gaze, and she must know she will become utterly disposable once he has used her for the purposes I suppose he contemplates. I hate to think of her fortune should she encounter Abd al-Rahim alone.

That is how I rationalize the fact that she does not visit as usual, does not come to see me in the open, in the evenings, when the town has begun to cool and the people have begun to return to their homes from the market.

Though she does not visit in the evenings, when I arrive this morning—long before Abd al-Rahim has had time to don his clean
dishdasha,
shine his shoes, and trim his mustache—I find the mark of her presence outside my store: little footprints circling the building. I see them and I follow them so that I, too, circle the shop. With each step I take, my feet trample the traces of her that are left in the fine, dusty earth. Because of this, it seems, after my second revolution, that no such prints, no such evidence, ever existed. I check for her where she had once hidden, under the lean-to door against the back face of my shop, pretending wholeheartedly to be invisible. She is not hidden there. I look closely around the base of the door at the side of the shack. The last of her footprints stop there, two marks that are deeper, more indelible than all the others. These prints face the door directly, capturing a moment of long and earnest contemplation.

Before I open the door I think to myself that Mahmoud on the bridge may have witnessed something, if indeed Layla has circled the shack and paused here, at the door, dreaming of a way to get inside. Mahmoud’s task, our personal contract, would seem to require him to note such a thing as a young girl staring at the door of my shop in the thieving hours before morning. Yet as the sun rises across the market, its warm light chasing the shadow of the previous evening down the light poles, down the roadway railings, down the edge of the embankment toward Mahmoud’s tent, he only now is wakening. He stretches. He emerges sleepily from his cot into the fresh day. He sees me and salutes. He watches me nervously for a moment. Then he begins to make himself tea.

Of course, I think, he has seen nothing. I wonder if Layla was tempted to steal his Kalashnikov again, sneaking into his tent as she has snuck into the market—without so much as a single glance from any living creature.

I unlock and open the side door. The footprints do not continue inside the shack. I look closely. The wooden floor might not show the prints as easily as the ground outside, but the floor is not perfectly clean, and unless she blew dust from her palm to cover her tracks on the way out, she truly did not step inside. The prints stop at the threshold. Though she left no mark of her presence in the shack, I see another little gift, a package very similar to yesterday’s gift: a plain box with a blue silk ribbon and an orange desert flower. The box rests squarely in the middle of my store, farther from the side door than Layla could reach, even if the doorway had been open for her to enter. Perhaps, I think, she grew wings, lifted so softly, so gently in the air as to not have disturbed the delicate dust prints she left outside. Perhaps she hovered for a moment in the middle of the shop. Somehow, she got in.

I enter the shop and pick up the present. Then I look outside the door again, quickly, guiltily. Abd al-Rahim is nowhere to be seen. Only a few other shops have opened, owners and their hired men sliding shuttered windows apart, arranging chairs and tables and cushions under canopies where potential customers will sit in shelter from the heat, and hanging freshly plucked chickens from wires on the roof of Jaber’s open-air butcher shop just down the road. Among these industrious people Abd al-Rahim is nowhere to be seen. He will not arrive for at least an hour, certain as the rising and setting of the sun. This I know even after only a few days employing him. He is no early riser.

I duck into my shack again. I haven’t opened my front window. That corrugated sheet remains firmly locked in place. Through the chinks around its edges the morning sun now shines, casting nearly horizontal rays that light the swimming dust I have disturbed in my motions about the room. As I open the package, I think about the last gift Layla left me, the blue silk that became in my dream a flowing scarf of water wreathing and haloing her dream form. I almost expect, by extending the illogic of the dream, that this package might contain water, nothing more than water, beaded up into a single teardrop of quicksilver, self-​contained and animated.

The present, when I open it, is mundane in the extreme. Another length of cloth. Cotton, this time. White, finely woven Egyptian cotton. Good-quality stuff. I wonder briefly before I fold it and return it to its box and hide the box behind some mobile phones on the upper shelf of the store, I wonder where Layla obtained the money for these gifts. I wonder how she could afford such luxuries. I make no connection with my own gifts for Ulayya until very much later that day. Then, suddenly, I say to Abd al-Rahim, “Have you already delivered my second gift to the house of Ali ash-Shareefi?”

“Certainly,” he says. “Just as you ordered.”

“What was in it?” I ask.

He looks puzzled. We’ve discussed the gifts so many times, how could I possibly forget the contents?

“The cotton,” he says. “Just as we agreed: silk, cotton, linen, jewelry, crystal, clothes, and henna. The seven gifts I purchased on your behalf. One for each day. This being the second day, it is the cotton.”

“And you’re sure that the gift was, indeed, delivered to the ash-Shareefi house? It wasn’t left lying about? It wasn’t accidentally forgotten? It wasn’t stolen? You didn’t rely on someone else to deliver the package, did you?”

“I put it into the hands of the guard at the gate of the house myself. I did nothing between the time when you handed me the box,” he says, looking defensive, “and when I turned the box over to the care of the guard.”

My relationship with Abd al-Rahim has taken a big step toward its proper form now. I continue to despise him while still seeing enough of myself in him to make me painfully aware of my own faults and failures, to make me aware of the pathways in my life I have left untaken. This is the proper attitude for a mentor, the type of mentor Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah expected I would become for this nephew of his. And now that Abd al-Rahim’s will has been bent by my pliers, my threatening pliers, he has assumed the necessary deference toward me that an apprentice should exhibit. All along, his efforts have been adequate, if not exactly skilled, but his conduct has been aloof, slouching, too cool by far, and casting a sneer of disapproval over everything pastoral, over everything here that in any way might be deemed inferior to Baghdad. Trust and blind obedience—from fear at first and then from the promise of material gain—that is the proper attitude for an apprentice of the type Seyyed Abdullah intends me to use to speed and ease my work.

Indeed, the many things I must do this week will be impossible without an assistant. Most important, I must let nothing interrupt the rhythm of my life, my store’s life, my observations, my camouflage. So all the details of the wedding, and now also the execution of the minutiae associated with our planned bombing, all these details require an assistant.

“We go to Bashar’s café for dinner tonight,” I tell Abd al-Rahim as the sun nears the point, low in the sky, where it is when habitually I close shop, where it is when habitually Layla makes her visits.

Abd al-Rahim does not reply for some moments. He is busy sweeping the ground at the front of the shack, the sides of the shack, behind the shack. I mentioned the dust to him merely because it was on my mind, Layla’s footprints outside, the lack of her footprints inside. I said nothing to him about those footprints. I did not want to clue him in to the idea that she might visit this place alone, in the early morning darkness, a time when she would be defenseless against him. I merely mentioned the dust, and the reference gave me cause to daydream. Yet Abd al-Rahim, in his new deferential attitude, took the words as a reproach. He began cleaning, sweeping.

After a few swishes of his broom, he asks, “Together?”

“Yes,” I say. “That is the meaning of the word
we.
We will dine together at Bashar’s.”

I can’t tell if he wants to dine with me or not. I can’t tell if the idea pleases him or if I have interrupted some other plans he may have made for the evening.

To whet his appetite I add, “Before I finish my meal, when the evening has grown truly dark, you will leave the restaurant, go to my home, and retrieve the jack-in-the-box.”

I hear him stop sweeping. He leans his broom against the wall of the shack with a soft tap, the wooden handle butting against the thin, cheap plywood wall.

“Tonight already?” he asks.

“Why not? No better time to start than now.” I discover that I am anxious, excited, like a child at play. I wait another moment for him to respond. He offers no advice, provides no commentary on the great and metropolitan methods of bombing and its associated martyrdom as practiced in Baghdad, Baghdad, Baghdad.

“That okay with you?” I ask when he neither responds nor appears in person to look at me with the proper awe, wonder, approval, and worship. A few more moments pass. Still he does not reply. I wonder if he has gotten cold feet. I try again: “I want the jack. In truth, it is the jack that I want for tonight. The one you built, not mine.”

Still no response. Annoyed, I turn around from my work arranging and rearranging the merchandise on my store shelves, being sure to keep the box containing Layla’s latest gift of cotton well hidden. I turn around and lean out over the counter at the front of the shack.

“I want the jack,” I say once again, this time louder and with a note of aggravation in my voice, just in case he needs a reminder of my capacity to get violent with him. I wish I had the pliers or the wire cutter from last night, a nice prop for the raised, threatening hand. “The jack, I say!”

“What’s ‘the jack’?” says a new voice.

I lean even farther over the edge of my counter and look around the side of my shop in the direction of downtown Safwan. I am startled at what I see: an interpreter who works for the Americans stands in the shadow just where Layla usually appears. Behind him I see several soldiers in a small group, fanning out in positions around my shop. The interpreter is a Kuwaiti man all of us merchants and townsfolk know, at least a little, for he has worked in Safwan since the beginning of this second American war. He has worked for lieutenant after lieutenant as the American units cycle home every few months to be replaced by new troops. He is their continuity in Safwan.

Irritatingly, this man insists in speaking Fus’ha, the high Arabic of newscasts and professors. I think it makes him feel superior to us. To me, the sound of his voice recalls a particular professor from my time at Al-Mustansiriya University, before I went to America. That man had a long gray mustache, a drooping mouth, and perfect diction. His words came out in discrete little packages, like gunfire, like clear glass baubles floating in an aquarium. No living language sounds so clean. Yet that is the sound the voice of this Kuwaiti man recalls to my mind: glass baubles, droopy mustaches.

The American lieutenant stands only a few feet away from his interpreter. After a moment, when he has seen to the dispersion of his troops, he, too, approaches me. Like all the soldiers and like the Kuwaiti interpreter, he wears a bulletproof vest, a helmet, and dark and shiny Oakley sunglasses. Two Humvees idle on either side of the road some distance from us. I marvel that I did not hear their engines, their approach.