One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (28 page)

Maybe I should drink!

I scrounge in the dust at the side of the shack. I remove my carefully placed cinder block from its position over my bottle’s hidey-hole. On my knees in the dirt, I raise the whiskey to my lips so that I might once again toast the vortices. I swallow and joust with the ecstasies, the darknesses, that ease and flood and swirl in comfort around me. I fight them and gulp against them. The burning furrow of the liquid soothes me, woos me, defuses me until I can open my eyes again. Then I see, through the distortion of the thick mottled glass at the bottle’s upturned end, Layla standing in front of me. We are at eye level with each other, me kneeling.

“Go away,” I say. “Go swimming or something. Go become a goldfish. I know you aren’t real.”

She doesn’t go anywhere.

I think of telling her that the American lieutenant plans to adopt her. I think of slapping her, as Abd al-Rahim slapped me, to knock some sense into her, to make her stop staring at me, to make her disappear again, drift away, away, float away.

She says, “You’re going to get married.”

“Yes,” I say.

“We can’t be friends anymore?”

“We shouldn’t.”

“That makes me sad,” she says.

“Me, too,” I say.

I should tell her about the lieutenant. I should tell her about the adoption. I summon up the words, the courage. But as I am about to speak, she extends a clenched hand.

“Here,” she says. “Thank you for letting me wear it, but I think you should keep it now.”

I put my hand up to hers. She opens her fist and the anklet of bird bones and dollhouse keys falls from her hand into mine.

“I will miss you,” she says.

She steps forward, stands on the fallen lean-to door, and puts her small hands on my shoulders.

“Stand up,” she says.

I obey, rising to one foot, then the other. I’m unsteady. I lean against the wall of my shack. All of me is dun-colored from the dust. I wipe at my knees and leave patches of relatively white cloth showing on them where the dust falls away.

When I am upright, Layla stands back, plugging her nose. She sizes me up and says, “Now you’re too tall. Bend down a little.”

Again, I obey.

She adjusts me a little more, getting me to the right height, squaring my shoulders in just the right way, straightening my back, lifting my chin. When all is as she wants it to be, she kisses me, once, twice—one kiss on each cheek. Then she pulls away and looks at me to judge the effect of her kisses. I don’t know what I’m doing. I might be smiling. I might be laughing. I might be crying. Yes, I think I’m crying. If there are rules for a conversation between an old man like me and a young girl like Layla, I have broken them. She pulls me closer, closer again, and holds me as a mother holds a newborn child. Her arms wrap around the outside of my arms. I feel her hands between my shoulder blades, rubbing small reassuring circles. This embrace lasts until the last light from the sunset lifts above us. Then only the tops of the market tents and the telephone poles shine.

The rest is night.

It seemed like it lasted an eternity, my inability to pray as I knelt beside the jack-in-the-box in Zawra Park. But it must have only been a moment, for—after I rose from the ground and sprinted back across the bridge—I arrived at my house in time to beat even the Americans. What few neighbors remained in that diplomatic community looked at me from their windows or peered at me from behind the pillars of their front porches. As at the scene of Hezbollah’s punishment of Michele, none of the bystanders approached too closely, none offered me help.

Heedless of them, heedless of the heat from the burning wreckage of my home, I rushed forward, vaulting one of the collapsed walls. I kicked at rubble, threw aside burning beams and window frames and melted sections of sofa cushion. I didn’t know what, exactly, I was doing. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I picked up little things from the cinders, shiny things: bits of glass, bits of bird bone, bird beak, maybe teeth. I picked up dollhouse keys. I secreted these things away in my pockets. I picked up flotsam, tokens from the rubble until I found one of the bigger things I had hoped, without ever forming the thought of such a terrible desire, never, never, ever to find.

By the time the Americans arrived at my house I had emerged from the rubble and the smoke to stand on my front lawn, preciously lush grass scorched black on its tips and littered with burned and burning pieces of whitewashed stucco, shattered brick, smoldering clumps of deep purple bougainvillea. I was dirty and bloody and sweating and exhausted already. Soldiers stormed past me to surround the building. One of them pointed his weapon into my chest but did not shoot. I held myself very still and observed the jerky slowness of everything that happened for the next few minutes: Iraqi paramedics milling about on the street, arranging white sheets on hospital gurneys and spreading plastic tarps over my front sidewalk, teams of soldiers talking on radios, inspecting the home, the damage, a helicopter circling overhead.

At last the American soldier guarding me lowered his weapon at the command of his sergeant. Two Iraqi policemen hurried to take his place guarding me.

The first of them removed from my halfhearted grip the arm I had found inside my house, limp at the joints of elbow and wrist. He took it from me and put it into a big blue translucent plastic bag. Then he labeled the bag with a black Magic Marker and sealed it with a zip tie.

The second of the two policemen took me by the hand and led me behind one of the ambulances, saying to me: “Come, Doctor, we must talk with you for a minute.”

32

Thursday Until Monday’s Dawn

IN MY HOME I
sit completely naked at my kitchen table for a long while. In front of me I have placed my whiskey bottle. It is empty. Behind the whiskey bottle, I have placed the bomb, the next bomb, the second and, I hope, last of those bombs bought with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s money, smuggled across the border in pieces behind the disguise of the whiskey bottles. The thick and rounded glass of the bottle distorts the shape of the bomb. The facets of the bottle reflect the image of my haggard face, superimposed on the curving shape of the detonation charge, so that the bomb seems to have my rough whiskers, my black tumble of hair, my untrimmed mustache, my depthless, reddened eyes.

I sit there for a long while, an hour, maybe two hours.

Father Truth.

I say it at last, very quietly, admitting the thing that lies at the center of the void.

I say, “My daughter.”

The house is very still then. I hear the pulse of my heart as it beats through the veins of my head. No thoughts come to me. I say the truth once, there in my house, and then I stand, don my new suit, the suit tailored for my engagement feast with Ulayya. It is a black double-breasted affair, faintly striped in silver, complete with silken handkerchief folded in the breast pocket. I put on stiff leather shoes over socks with matching faded stripes of the same thin silver thread. I run a comb through my hair, each side, pulling it straight back and holding the mass flat against my scalp with a liberal application of cream.

I sweat profusely as I put on the clothes. The beads of sweat drip from my forehead. They soak the pits of my arms. They drool down my back and down the backs of my legs. I wipe my forehead but I cannot dry my body once the clothes are on me, sticking to me.

I will go to Ali ash-Shareefi’s house. But first I will visit each of my friends’ homes in town, to admit to them what I have done.

“I have killed my daughter,” I say when I reach Bashar’s gate. “I brought her to Iraq and she’s dead now.”

I stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the wall of Bashar’s courtyard. I peer between chinks in the scrollwork of the iron exterior door. I can see his house, dim in the evening light, but no life stirs within.

“Are you there?” I yell.

I get no response.

“Maybe he’s hiding. Maybe he thinks you’re coming to take Nadia from him,” Layla whispers.

I look down. I look around me. I see Layla nowhere near me, but I find, there in the dirt at the side of Bashar’s gate, a foot. It is hardly noticeable, covered in dust, the flesh dried and textured like jerky. A plain cloth shoe, decorated with pink glitter, clings to the flesh below the jutting, shattered ankle bone. It looks like it has been carried here and gnawed by some roving dog.

I pick up the foot and take it with me.

I proceed to the house of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah to make my confession there. All the lights are off. The front gate is locked. I walk around to the back, to the shack in the alley where Seyyed Abdullah’s servant parks his black bulletproof Yukon. I try the gate there. It, too, is locked. I shake it.

“I want to say something,” I yell. “Abd al-Rahim, are you there? Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah? Anyone?”

I wait a moment. I hear nothing.

“I’m responsible,” I yell. “She’d be alive and happy and with me if we had stayed in America!”

“But I’m here,” Layla says. “I’m here.”

“No, you’re not,” I say.

I look around me again, certain I have heard her voice. I reach to touch her, my eyes closed, thinking that if I just imagine her strongly and precisely enough, I will be able to find her again, hold her again, comfort her again.

Yet where I expect her, I find only the sliced torso of a child, hung from the wall of Seyyed Abdullah’s house like a cut of lamb in a butcher shop. I untie the blasted-apart body and lower it to the ground. It does not fit in my pocket as the foot does, so I carry it under one arm as I continue through town.

Always Layla is whispering to me.

I stumble as I walk. I tear a hole in the knee of my engagement suit.

“Where are you, Layla? Where are you? I want you here to guide me. I want you to approve before I marry this daughter of Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi.”

Staggering, I grasp Layla by the shoulder, gently by the shoulder. The next moment she is gone and the streets are dark and each time I grope in the wasteland of this town, I find near me some additional shard of her: sinew and blood, bone and earth, and waste, such waste, such horror. I have her hands in my pockets and am intertwining my fingers with hers and stroking the cold and mangled joints for reassurance. I walk upright, dapper, hands hidden. Then the next moment I grasp a rusted signpost that warns the unsuspecting passerby of the presence of the antitank ditch. I grasp it as though I have fallen against it. I grasp it as though I am holding it upright, using it to prevent the world from spinning. Dangling from the sign is the crusted mass of her hair, scalped, bloodied, tangled, but still with matching pink bows gracing the locks. Maybe I touch her cheek one moment, but the next moment it is stone under my hand, a worn stair step in some forgotten alley, a lintel, a colonnade column desecrated by graffiti and gunfire. And a face, stripped clean from the skull, disfigured, flattened by the absence of supporting bone, supporting cartilage. Such horrors, such whispers, accompany me as I walk across Safwan in my engagement suit, shouting to all the houses, all the people: “It is my fault that she has died.”

At last I arrive at Ali ash-Shareefi’s house through the back alley. I find my engagement tent crumpled against Ali’s back courtyard wall. I kick it. It is a dusty thing, stinking of mildew. I try Ali’s back courtyard door. It, too, is locked. I yell the announcement of my guilt. I hear no reply. I stand on the mildewed engagement tent. I yell again. I mumble. I drop the pieces of the little body, turning my pockets inside out, tearing my shirt and the front of my jacket as I try to rid myself of the accumulated guilt, the dismembered bits of her.

I look into Ali’s courtyard through a gap between the courtyard door and the garage. In contrast to the rest of the town, the rest of the houses of my friends, I find this house lit, the windows filled with solemn-looking people milling about. A line of people extends into the street in front of the house, shielded from me, shielded from the empty back-​alleyway courtyard.

Again I yell, trying to get someone’s attention. “Can anyone hear me? It’s me, Abu Saheeh. I’ve come to marry Ulayya. I’m ready!”

No one acknowledges me. No one can hear me over the noise of the party going on inside Ali ash-Shareefi’s house. I think about walking around to the front, but instead I climb Ali’s fence and slide over its top, landing awkwardly and then rolling in the dust. No one expects me to enter from the alley—the guest of honor, the groom-to-be.

The only person I find in the courtyard is Ali’s guard, the man who never speaks. He stands in front of me, above me, where I have fallen in the dust. He has not drawn his gun. For a moment he merely looks at me. Then he extends a hand to help lift me to my feet.

“Don’t go in there,” he says, tilting his head toward the main section of my father-in-law’s house.

He points to the line of people queued at the entrance of the
diwaniya.
The line stretches away around the corner of the road.

I think,
What a popular groom I am!

“It’s my engagement feast,” I tell the silent guard.

I grab his arm for support as I try to stand. He pushes me away, but gently.

“No,” he says. “Don’t go.”

“Ulayya and I will be married,” I say.

I look around for Layla. She is nowhere to be seen. She has abandoned me again, like Abd al-Rahim, like everyone I have ever loved.

“Ali is dead,” the guard says. “The Americans shot him at your little bombing. He was the slowest, the last to run into the quarry.”

Through the window at the back of the house I see Hussein. He doesn’t notice me for a minute, not until I take the silken handkerchief from my front pocket and snap it in the air in front of me to shake the dust of my daughter’s blood from it. The sudden motion attracts Hussein’s attention. Or maybe he hears the sound. Or maybe the dust of blood glitters in the air like snowflakes. I watch him, hoping he will beckon to me. And, indeed, after a moment he waves his mobile phone at me.

“That’s my signal,” I say to the gate guard. “Time to go into the party now.”

Hussein dials the phone. He calls me. He rings directly to my line, the phone in the inside pocket of my suit jacket. I don’t use the phone often. All its numbers connect to Baghdad, to ministries there, to ministers there, to great men. I don’t know how Hussein got the number. From Bashar? From Seyyed Abdullah? I feel the vibration of the phone like an electric current against my chest.

I let it ring.

I watch Hussein as the call goes to my voice mail. But instead of speaking into his phone, he hands it to a man standing to his side, a man standing just where I cannot see him, beyond the frame of the window in the back of Ali’s house.

A few more people gather at the window around Hussein. They are backlit by the orange glow of candles within the room, candles on tables, candles on the lid of a coffin, which, I imagine, must hold Ali’s body. Hussein points to me. Then he makes a sweeping motion with his arm, leading the gathering of men toward a descending set of stairs at the side of the house, leading them toward me.

“Go now,” the guard says. “Go.”

The guard helps me through the gate. On the way out, he pushes apart two trash cans behind Ali’s garage and rummages between them.

“Take this,” he says, handing me a big brown cardboard box. “The things inside are yours.”

He locks the back gate and then steps into the shadows of the courtyard as I leave. Seconds later the group of men with Hussein, ten or twelve of them, bump against the locked gate, rattle it in frustration, caught behind it for precious moments. They don’t see me but they know I am near.

“We’re coming for you,” Hussein says. “You can’t go far.”

I crawl across the alley, pushing the box with my head. I call for Layla. I tell her, “I shouldn’t have ever brought you here.”

But Layla doesn’t respond. There are no more pieces of her for me to find.

I am alone, alone.

I hear Hussein gathering more men in the street, calling to them on a megaphone, his voice ungodly loud, crackling, full of static and interference. Some of the men on the far side of the house light torches, oil-soaked rags wrapped on the ends of broomsticks and baseball bats. The light from the torches makes the shadows of the men leap across the alley as if they have suddenly discovered the place where I crouch and cower, waiting for Layla to come carry me away to one of her dreamlands.

But Layla doesn’t come.

I hear the crowd stirring. I hear Hussein exhorting them. They are ready to chase me. They have the necessary numbers, the necessary fury, the necessary incitement.

“Rocks,” Hussein bellows into his megaphone. “Stones. We’ll do this like the
hajj.
We’ll stone Iblees, stone the Devil. We’ll cast him away from us.”

I picture them coming for me. I picture the rain of stones, the inglorious end, trying to keep myself upright, trying to shield my head, my face, as the fist-size rocks pelt me and bloody me.

I gather my strength and, lifting the big brown box in my arms, I dart from the shadows, recrossing the street and dashing into the maze of alleyways. Hussein’s mob pursues me, light from their torches flickering off the corners of the passageways behind me, off the roofs and walls of the houses that loom over me. I manage to stay a street or two ahead of them, turning at random, striding down straightaways, doubling back. Spittle flies from the corners of my mouth. I haven’t run so hard in ages. My chest feels as if it has been split open, sawed open, butchered, burning on a line of slashed sutures where my brother has ripped me in half.

Still I call for Layla: “Save me. Save me. Bring me a horse or an airplane or a Jet Ski.”

And still she does not reply. She has abandoned me. Without my whiskey, without a moment to stop, to wet my tongue, to loosen my mind and my imagination, I know she will not come. She isn’t here.

After a few blocks the light of the torches fades. I have lost them. I slow to a trot and then to a walk. In the distance I hear the rumble of the mob and, by listening to it, I can tell the direction toward which they head: west, toward my house. I know I will not return there. Like the pristine white diplomatic house in Umm al-Khanzeer, it is a place to which I know I will never return. There will soon be no house left. So I head north into the quiet closed shops in the market, my market in the cloverleaf intersection, my vantage point for watching the American convoys. It is the only safe place left for me.

When I reach the door of my shop, the first ray of the morning sun just barely crests the eastern oil fields, out beyond the quarry and the overpass.