One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (4 page)

I tried to ignore him, but from the very start he knew the most cutting words to say, the most hurtful things to do to me. I was happy when he started spending most of his evenings out on the town with a band of friends he was smart enough never to bring within my father’s sight.

My father’s friend Abdel Khaleq as-Samara’i was among the important men who sometimes visited our house. He would give his coat to the doorman and then he and my father would seclude themselves in my father’s parlor, smoking and talking.

Sometimes Abdel Khaleq brought his daughter, Nadia, and her nursemaid with him. Nadia’s nursemaid and Fatima would cook for the men and talk to each other as they boiled tea and made pastries in the kitchen. No one paid attention to Nadia and me. We were free to roam where we wanted. I was happy, very happy, to spend the evening with a companion, even a girl. I was happy to have a friend of any sort, especially one less cruel than Yasin.

I remember Nadia as a roly-poly button-faced child, shorter than me by more than a head, a thing that was natural enough, since I was twelve and she eight. We had been engaged to marry when she was born, my father hoping to cement his place in the Baath party by tying our family to the family of as-Samara’i, who was one of Salah Omar al-Ali’s close associates. I thought nothing of it at the time, the idea that at such an age my future bride had already been chosen for me. We knew no other way.

These nights of her father’s visits, Nadia always wanted to play house, to pretend we had already gotten married. I wanted to climb trees in the walled pavilion behind our kitchen or to make forts in the garage, where my father kept his cars. Usually my ideas won, and I persuaded her to play my games. But usually, also, she changed the rules just enough to accommodate her plans.

When I suggested that we make a fort, Nadia agreed but said, “Only if I can set up tea inside the princess part of your fort.”

So we slipped into the garage through an open side window and crawled down from the window over the workbench, where my father’s chauffeur oiled and retooled various parts of the cars. We slid from the workbench onto the earthen floor of the garage and fumbled around in the dark until, reaching for the pull-cord attached to a light above my head, I found Nadia standing on tiptoe just in front of me, the smell of her breath warm against my face.

“Kiss me,” she said.

Quickly, as quickly as I could, I turned my face away from her, saying, “No, that’s disgusting.”

“All married people kiss,” she said.

“But you’re like my sister.”

“I’m your fiancée.”

The statement was true enough. I had no recourse. So I kissed her, though I didn’t want to. A small peck of a first kiss, our lips brushing against each other and our hands stiff at our sides, unsure where we should put them.

5

Friday

IF LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING,
as she has on most evenings, I am not there to see her. She may stand in shadow under the awning of my little store, but I do not know.

Today would mark the fifth day of such visits. Also the twenty-third day of business for my shop. A Friday, the day of prayer. So leaving the shop shuttered and locked is natural, though my piety in this instance feels most unnatural, most unlike what I normally think of as godliness. I hear, but do not see, the continued ever-present movement of the American convoys bypassing Safwan. I am not offended that they continue their passage on a holy day like today. They are ignorant, sure. But only annoying, not offensive. I imagine that my hearing is as good at the game of counting convoys as is my sight, but such is not true. I can only guess at the number of convoys today. Same as usual: twenty or so heading north, twenty or so south.

I do not know what the guard on the overpass does today. I’m not sure I care. I imagine he sleeps. Or leans on his chair. Or watches the cars and trucks pass in an endless rhythm along the highway toward destinations far from his little outpost. He remains as effective a guard as always. I do not care what the Hezbollah thugs do in town today, harassing someone other than we merchants, all of us with our shops closed for the day of prayer and rest. It crosses my mind that their leader, Hussein, is the only man in town, other than myself, who is both unmarried and of marriageable age. I tell myself to remember to speak to Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah about this man Hussein and about the guard on the overpass.

At noon I go to the house of my friend Bashar and knock on the wrought-iron front gate. I have not visited him at his new home in Safwan, though often we have walked past the gate of his house when returning together from his café at the close of the evening. I live far on the western edge of Safwan, across the north-south military road and the special border-crossing point for America’s military convoys. I can see Kuwait from the top windows of my house, more of the same empty, dusty scrubland, but with electric lights on gray metal light poles all along the big highway. The poles have not been stolen for scrap metal, as they have been on our side of the border. From my house I cannot see the yellow-and-black pipe that stretches far to the east and west or, just in front of that pipe, the big antitank ditches, three meters deep and ten across, that mark the no-man’s-land created after the first U.S. war. But I know those obstacles exist, hidden behind other buildings and fences and trenches. What I can most clearly see is the place where the line of light poles ends, the place where Kuwait ends, the place where Iraq begins.

On the far side of the military road, a few new houses have gone up on the western fringe of sand among an old dusty orchard of date palms. My house is one of these, a building too large for my bachelor needs. In contrast, Bashar told me he lived above his café when first he moved to Safwan, his six children and wife in two meager rooms. My idea of his new home, hidden behind a wall and gate, is not much better. A separate space, but no palace. I am, therefore, surprised when he opens the courtyard door.

At the gate we shake hands, clasp each other close, kiss on each cheek.

“Hello and welcome, my friend. Your presence pleases us,” he says, ushering me inside.

“May Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you and upon your family,” I say.

From outside the cracked and decaying plaster wall, the scribbles of political graffiti and the tattered limbs of Russian olives shielding the courtyard present an image of poverty: foreboding, glum, not worth a burglar’s time or effort. From within, though, the wall is clean, brick with a veiling cascade of purple flowers. The olive trees have been pruned on their undersides. They form a small arch over the center of the yard, a leafy cloister, beneath which a fountain burbles beside a curved concrete bench. A cobblestone path winds from the door to the fountain, spreads around the fountain in a ring three meters wide, and separates toward the two doors of Bashar’s home. One door opens onto the family quarters, where I hear Bashar’s children playing. The other opens onto the
diwaniya,
Bashar’s private den, where children and women are forbidden and Bashar may entertain guests like me in relative peace.

I ask after his children, how they are growing, the health of the family. He promises to bring them out later to see me. I don’t ask after his wife. Such a direct question is wholly inappropriate, even for old friends like us. I imagine her in a flurry of activity at this unexpected visit: scrubbing feet and hands and hair; finding clean caftans for the girls and clean pants, maybe school uniforms, for the boys, the starched white shirts. I try to remember if it is three boys and three girls. I decide it is actually four boys and two girls, although a girl is the eldest of the brood, somewhere in her mid-teens. Bashar and his wife have been fertile, productive. He will grow old in comfort with his family settled around him in this town. I wonder if he teaches them specially in the sciences, which he learned during our days together at university—anatomy, chemistry—or if he is content to let the schools and the normal way of life inform them, mold them, save them from knowing too much of the world. It was his excuse when he left Baghdad that he wanted safety for his family above anything else. But with too much safety comes ignorance.

Better for them to grow up safe and dumb or world-weary and wise? I wonder.

As Bashar and I walk toward the door of his
diwaniya,
I scan covertly each window of the house that looks upon us, thinking that I might see his wife. I shouldn’t even look for her, but the lure of a forbidden thing is too tough for me to resist. However, I do not see her face in any of the windows.

When we enter the
diwaniya
we sit on cushions. Bashar lights a water pipe that burbles softly as it warms, the scent of
bukhoor
wafting from it. He smokes flavored tobacco. I do not smoke. If I do, I do so only when occasion demands, social niceties. A small silver radio in the corner of the room tinkles with the sound of a Lebanese singer, perhaps Carole Samaha? More modern than my taste, but pleasant. Not Britney Spears.

“The house is very nice,” I say.

“Better than above my shop. Still nothing like the old days,” Bashar says.

I nod. I remember his house in Baghdad, the sound of water sprinklers on the lawn in front, beneath the palm-lined driveway, such a luxurious waste, that free-flowing water, such a westernized existence in our gated and guarded secure little community of diplomats and reconstructionists.

However, I say only: “I can’t remember the old days.”

Bashar offers me a sad smile. He serves tea in delicate
finjan
glasses, a lump of sugar dissolving in each. We discuss the weather, the crops, the American and British occupation, their soldiers, the smell of their breath at close quarters—cow’s milk and meat, sugary soda and hot minty chewing tobacco—a different smell on them from the smell of diplomats and politicians with pressed suits and cologne. We discuss the coming elections, Muqtada al-Sadr’s effect on the various parties, whether the Sunni minority will get any seats in the Council of Representatives, whether there is a Kurdish conspiracy to steal northern oil. Our conversation winds through these topics with no real feeling, just formality. This takes time, half an hour, almost an hour. I am in no rush, but I can tell that Bashar wants to know the reason for my visit.

“Is it about women?” he asks at last. “I meant what I said the other day. I know people here in Safwan now. Saddam killed most of the men after the southern tribes rose in support of the Americans the first time. And now this war means more have been killed. There are plenty of eligible widows for your big new house. Ulayya bint Ali ash-Shareefi, for instance. An alliance with that family would do your business good. You would sell a million mobile phones.”

He mentions the number and the business, but secretly carves the shape of an hourglass in the air between us to show me that Ulayya is also a comely woman.

“No,” I say. “Not women. That’s not why I visit today. Nor business, mobile phones, or whatever.”

Bashar sits straighter on his cushion. He looks taken aback. His mind must have been filled with such plotting. He appears to wipe his thoughts clean, not without some effort, a crinkling of lines on his narrow forehead and between his eyes. Then he leans more comfortably on one elbow and waits for me to explain.

It is hot in his
diwaniya.
The
bukhoor
smoke causes the walls to feel close and the air to feel raspy, like the voice of Carole Samaha.

I take a moment to compose my thoughts. I have mentioned Layla already to Bashar. I do not want him to think I have any marital or sacrilegious intentions regarding the girl. None whatsoever. Nothing so simple as that. Two mentions of her in as many days might give him the wrong notion, would almost certainly give him the wrong notion. So I approach the subject carefully, in a roundabout way. I decide not to talk about Layla at all.

I ask, “Have you seen the movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
? It’s an American movie…released back when we were at university, I think.”

“Why, no,” he says. “No, I haven’t.”

“Do you know whether anyone here owns a DVD of it?”

“Was it a popular film?”

“Yes, perhaps. I think it played on Nile Drama TV a few nights ago. A rerun.”

“You want to watch it?” he asks.

Something obviously doesn’t make sense to him. Why would I pay a visit, a formal visit of this sort, to discuss a movie?

“A friend of mine compared it to the time Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, spent meditating on Jebel an-Nur. I wish to watch the movie in that regard, to see if the friend has spoken a blasphemy. Most of all I want to hear the music of the aliens because the friend, my friend, likened it to the sound of the voice of Angel Gabriel.”

“Certain blasphemy,” Bashar says.

He stands. He is filled with anger, perhaps a mocking show of anger. His face turns red. He pulls at his thin, clipped mustache with the fingers of one hand. He is unsure how I feel about blasphemy and he wants to err on the safe side.

“Is this friend Shia or Sunni? We should ban this movie, write a protest to Nile Drama TV. We should have the imam issue a decree, a
fatwa
,
against such a…”

“We should watch the movie first,” I say.

Bashar sits. He composes himself. He is happy to hear that I am rational, not full of indignation. But he is confused and flustered.

“I will make inquiries,” he answers after a moment of unbroken eye contact between us. He can tell it is important to me but he doesn’t understand why. He wants to ask me why it is so important as to merit a visit like this. If I am not necessarily condemning it as blasphemy, then what? I can see the words of various questions forming on his lips, re-​forming as he searches for the right phrases.

Just then his eldest son, Saleem, enters the
diwaniya.
The boy is about ten years of age, taller than Layla already but younger and cleaner. He has a blunt little snub of a nose and a roly-poly face.

“Mama asks if we should present ourselves.”

“Around the fountain,” says Bashar. “Abu Saheeh and I will finish here in a moment.”

Saleem leaves. I hear him, under his breath, repeat my name, “Abu Saheeh…Father Truth.” The boy laughs. He has his father’s sense of humor, a short, under-the-breath laugh followed by the silent repetition of the joke, mouthing the words as if he will be called upon to repeat the joke later, afraid that he might fail.

I hear Bashar’s children lining up outside, hear little Saleem pipe up over his older sister, putting them all in order. Saleem, or one of the other children, whistles like a bird, somewhat secretively. With that, Bashar stands.

“I will let you know if I can find the movie,” he says as he takes me out into the courtyard again. “And you let me know if you change your mind about Ulayya bint Ali ash-​Shareefi or another woman, any other woman. I tell you, you will have your pick of them, my friend.”

“I’m not interested in women,” I tell him. “I’m not here to settle down.”

“Then what? What are you here for?”

“The market.”

“Lofty new ambitions as a mobile-phone salesman? I don’t get it. A man like you!”

“It’s the view,” I say, which makes him laugh.

The children smile and stand straight as Bashar and I inspect them. Bashar ruffles Saleem’s hair. He raises an eyebrow at the youngest girl’s sandals, unbuckled and clinging to her feet in a most slipshod fashion. I don’t say anything. The children don’t say anything, either, but they giggle a little as Bashar and I pass them. I hear Saleem whisper “Father Truth” to the sister nearest him. Despite several glances I cast at the in-facing courtyard windows, I still do not see their mother. This is traditional society now. This is her role—cloistered, separated. She won’t break the pattern, now that it has settled over her, even for the sake of an old friend like me. Though I don’t see her, I feel her watching us, watching me. I feel her intensity and it takes all my willpower not to ask Bashar about her specifically and directly.