One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (6 page)

Yasin waited in the corner of the kitchen until my governess, Fatima, left with a plate of breakfast for our father.

“I see you found my little experiment,” he said.

From behind his back he revealed the kitten, my kitten. Holding it by the scruff of its neck, he seemed to offer it to me across Fatima’s big butcher-block chopping table. I reached for it.

“Give it to me,” I said.

He pulled it away. Stepping back but still holding the kitten high in the air, he brought his other hand up to the kitten’s belly. Before I could rush around the table, he untied the cords holding the safety rag around the kitten’s midsection. Then, as the kitten frantically clawed the air, all four paws in furious motion, he dug into the gash. Sawing upward, inserting one, then two, then all four of his fingers, he further tore the wound. He pulled my stitches free. The kitten’s intestines spilled out in a long, coiling mass.

When at last he handed the little animal over to me, its heart had already stopped beating.

7

Sunday

LAYLA DOES NOT VISIT THIS EVENING.
Perhaps the dirt and oil could not be scrubbed off in time for her to visit. Perhaps she is afraid of my wrath, as well she might be, if she doesn’t heed my warning from yesterday and show up clean and with a reformed attitude toward Allah. As the sun sets behind the overpass, I watch for her, unwilling to be surprised at her arrival. In addition to the convoys today, I notice a British patrol moving about the desert near the bypass road’s intersection. This is the first time I have noticed a patrol near the convoys, something other than the normal three Humvees the Americans use to guard their vehicles. Maybe they are concerned about the pipeline still. Maybe they hunt for a jihadist.

Today marks the seventh day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-fifth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. I did not sell much of anything but, after the repeated visits from the Shareefi clan yesterday, I do not feel much like talking about satellites or mobile phones. I do not feel much like haggling over prices and plans.

The guard for the overpass brings out his tea set and arranges it on an overturned box beside his three-legged chair. I watch him make tea for himself, the lukewarm water he had left in a tarnished tin pot under the sun all afternoon, the sachet of chai dipped over the edge of the pot, two small tin cups ready to receive the brew.

Seeing no sign of Layla, I begin to walk down the road into Safwan. I try to think of Ulayya and of other Safwan women, but I discover I am thinking of Layla’s story, of Jed Clampett finding oil. I picture myself as a butler. I picture Layla in Beverly Hills, among mansions and swimming pools and robot actors. I picture Layla with a corncob pipe in her mouth like Jed Clampett, riding through town on a flatbed jalopy with a gun laid across her lap. I remember Layla stealing the guard’s gun. I turn around and look up at the guard. He has poured one cup of tea for himself. He drinks from this cup but the other cup sits on the tray unused. He apparently does not have a visitor, no one to drink from the second cup.

I change course, walk back across the market, past Rabeer’s used-car lot, past Maney’a and Ibrahim’s stacks of doors, door frames, sinks, knobs, and fixtures, past Wael’s dusty gray bags of concrete, past my own shop. I stop at Jaber’s stand and purchase two kebabs of chicken. These I take with me as I walk up the gradual curve of the cloverleaf on-ramp to the place where the guard’s tent perches in the last of the day’s long light.

“Masah il-kheir,”
I say. “Fine evening!”

The guard snaps to attention. I am happy to have caught him unaware, lazing. I feel like a genie or an alien arriving unannounced. I feel like a nosy butler. I want to put on a fake Austrian accent and say “I’ll be back,” but I don’t think I have the necessary talent for voices. I am, nevertheless, proud of my stealth, and my pride erases most of the self-loathing I had felt for my previous thoughts about him. I do not put the young man at his ease. It is good that he should be deferential to me. I must be twenty years his senior, maybe twenty-five.

The guard looks at the kebabs, one in each of my hands. They are oily, cooked to a perfect golden brown and flavored with fenugreek, caraway, cumin.

“Would you like one?” I say.

“Thank you, but no thank you,” he says, the polite thing.

“Please,” I say. “Please. It’s my honor.”

Again the guard refuses, but only after darting a glance at the kebab nearest to him.

“No,” he says. “No.”

I thrust the kebab in his direction, making it hard for him to avoid the gift.

“I insist,” I say.

He takes longer than I expect to reach his hand out for the food. During the pause, the delay, he looks past me, quickly, up over my shoulder across the market toward town. I follow his gaze and see a slim-bodied boy standing beneath the ayatollah’s arch. This boy looks at the guard and then at me. For a second time he looks at the guard before turning and running back through the arch into Safwan. I recognize this boy: one of the waiters or busboys from Bashar’s café. Perhaps he was bringing the guard some food for dinner. No matter. I have food.

“By Allah, yes,” the guard says at last, snapping his eyes back to me, back to the kebab. He is still standing straight, at attention, as if I am his commanding officer or some such thing.

I release the kebab into his grip. At the same time I glance at his teapot and his spare cup. The man has no manners. I glance at the cup again, more pointedly, and almost nod my head in its direction.

He gets the hint at last.

“Please, please,” he says, “please, sir, sit. Do share of my tea if you are in the mood to share with a humble man such as me.”

“I am just a vendor in the market, a humble man myself,” I say. “No need to be so formal. We are like brothers, men who work for a living. Not princes. Not politicians with stuffed-up shirts.”

This at last puts the man somewhat back into balance, though he twitters around me, arranging space for me among his things on the little flat space around his tent, arranging his tea set, his box table, his chair to make more room for us both. Throughout this dance he steals looks whenever possible across the market toward the spot where the boy from Bashar’s café had stood. After a moment he finally manages to pour a cup of tea for me while still holding the kebab I gave him. I look around for a chair to sit on. There isn’t one. The guard offers me his, pulling it away from its spot beside the telephone pole and placing it nearer to his tea set. Before I sit, I introduce myself more completely.

“Abu Saheeh is my name,” I say. “I own a shop below.”

“My name is Mahmoud, sir,” he says.

We try to shake hands but the kebabs baffle us, both in our right hands, both of us unwilling to touch the food or each other with the impure left hand. I wave my kebab in the air to show Mahmoud that the handshake doesn’t matter, not now. I am glad not to have to complete our introduction with the customary clasp and kiss. The man is unshaven like most men, but he has also been a long while without a bath. He likely has vermin in his patchy beard. I sit on his chair. He opens the front flap of his tent and pulls his cot from within. He sits on an edge of the cot as it teeters and adjusts to his weight. We eat the kebabs chunk by chunk, chicken and onion and tomato, sliding the pieces from the skewers into our mouths. I drink a little of his tea, poor thin stuff, bitter.

When I finish eating, I say, “You have a marvelous view.”

“Nearly the whole city.”

“And up the road quite a distance.”

“And that way.” He points. “Down toward Umm Qasr, too.”

“Quite a responsibility!”

“A start, for me. A start,” he says. “I hope to become a member of the Safwan police soon, or even maybe the special police from Basra, when I have the money to pay the deputy his bit.”

“You have to pay to become a policeman?”

“To pass the test,” he says. “Just a little
baksheesh
goes a long way. That, or family. Or both.”

“How much do they ask?”

Mahmoud blushes.

“Come, come,” I say. “I am a merchant. Money is just money. I am accustomed to such things. And maybe I can help you.”

“I could never repay—”

“We can work something out,” I say, not at all certain why I am offering him my patronage. In fact, the next thing I say is nothing but a bald lie: “I watch you working diligently up here. You are here every day, yes?”

“All day,” he says. “Except for Fridays, when the deputy relieves me so I can visit my father and attend prayer. They bring me food, water. I sleep here.”

He thumps his hand on the edge of the cot to emphasize the place where he sleeps. He points out his prayer rug, too, to show me he completes his daily observations even when not allowed to go to the mosque. I see his Kalashnikov leaning against the side of the tent.

“Are you a good shot?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “They never let me shoot.”

“Why don’t you shoot that can?” I point to a paint can overturned on the edge of the on-ramp embankment about thirty meters down the road.

“I have no spare bullets,” Mahmoud says. “What will I do if I use the bullet they have given me?”

“What purpose will one bullet serve, anyway?”

“I am to use it to signal the police.”

“Then ask the police for a new one. Tell them you used it for practice. Or tell them you used it to scare away the dogs. Or that you shot an American or something.”

“It will come out of my pay. I cannot afford—”

“Hah,” I say. Without rising from my chair, I reach back toward the tent, pick up his gun, shoulder it, aim at the can, and pull the trigger. I brace for the kick the gun should make, but it doesn’t kick at all. There is no bullet in the chamber. Layla’s story is true. I am disappointed at the weapon not firing, having had in mind a remembrance of the smell of sulfur and saltpeter, the sweet acrid hot deathly smell that should have filled the air after the click of the trigger.

I play dumb.

“It must be broken,” I say. “See if you can fix it for me.”

Mahmoud is standing. His mouth is open, aghast that I have touched his Kalashnikov, the mark of his limited authority. He is a little man, not much taller than me even as I sit. His uniform, dark blue, sags from his shoulders and bunches at his waist, where he has belted it with a length of rope.

I hand him the weapon so that he can open the chamber and inspect it. He grabs it from me, pulls the bolt back, and looks inside.

“There’s no bullet,” he says after a long puzzled moment.

The thought crosses my mind to seal some sort of deal with the man: offer him help with his police examinations, with the bribes, offer to bring him some additional bullets for the gun. Yet I’m not sure enough of myself. Not sure how this man, Mahmoud, fits with my plans. I need to watch him more. I need to study him more. I need to play a game of “Watch Mahmoud,” similar to my game of convoy counting, though
game
is probably the wrong word for such an activity, too soft by far, whereas
spying
—as Layla calls it—sounds far too indirect.

“I’ll bring you a bullet,” I say, a small concession on my part. “Maybe a few bullets. What good is a guard without bullets?”

“Thank you,” he says.

The conversation ends on a down note, like that. It had been building toward something, toward a partnership, an odd sort of uneven partnership. Do I need him to watch over my store, my shack, when Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah guarantees it? No. I’m at a loss. I stand. I see the city of Safwan spreading beneath me into the distance to the south, with the overpass high enough above the flat desert to command a view for miles in every direction. I take longer than I should, standing there, observing everything, turning my head to and fro.

We’ve finished our kebabs. I’ve got nothing left to say. I see him, Mahmoud, secretly looking toward the town, toward the arch, maybe in the hope that the boy from Bashar’s café will return. He cleans up the tea set. He shuffles around me. Like me, he has nothing to say. Yet all the while, he glances uncomfortably toward the arch.

I think of Layla in the market, there beneath the arch, and for just a second a very different image from how I usually see her flashes through my mind. In this vision she is covered with blood. She is shot through with bullet holes. She scurries from place to place, from shop to shop, trying to pick up pieces of herself that have come apart, that have spilled from her body like the intestines of a dying kitten. The vision brings with it a pounding sensation in my head. I blink. I put one hand out to the side as if I am about to stagger. Mahmoud moves toward me, concerned. He is about to touch me but I shake my head, rather vigorously, and the vision of blackness disappears.

“One more thing,” I say to Mahmoud, my voice ringing falsely, almost angrily, in my ears. “Who do you work for?”

Mahmoud has sensed the shift in my disposition. He looks troubled. The muscles of his face tighten.

“No one,” he says.

“No one?”

“The police—”

“The police?”

I spit to show my disapproval of police in general and also my disbelief in his statement. He
must
work for someone. The police don’t initiate the sort of man-to-man, tribe-to-tribe relationships on which real work depends.

However, Mahmoud insists it is the police, only the police.

I ask him twice more, just to be sure.

“The police,” he insists. He shows me the stamp of the Ministry of the Interior on the butt of his Kalashnikov.

I give up, thinking: perhaps he has no master, no one to whom he is bound. The thought causes me to change course once again, to establish my authority over the man in a way even more complex than I had originally thought possible—with a carrot and with a stick.

“Maybe I
should
talk to the police,” I say. “I don’t want to see you sleeping on the job anymore.”

With that, the matter is concluded. He had been waiting for it all along. The pleasantries of eating together, sharing tea, small talk, all of them had been building toward some sort of official message. Mahmoud had been expecting it. His posture immediately stiffens. He thinks he has been inspected, checked on, tested.