One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (8 page)

At the end of the night, when we are parting at his front gate, just after Bashar and I kiss each other’s cheeks, I think of Mahmoud, the guardian of the bridge. I should probably not be reminded of Mahmoud by this kiss, this formal and customary kiss between men, yet Bashar and I are the type of close friends for whom the kiss is a mark of deep endearment, kinship, almost, that is as binding as, and maybe more enduring than, any passionate love.

I should not think of Mahmoud, but I do. I think of him and I think of his night visitor, whom I suspect to be Bashar’s own employee.

“The boy in your café,” I say, “the one with the big white teeth and the slim face.”

“His name is Michele,” says Bashar.

The two of us hold each other by the shoulders, our faces near together. I can smell the sweetness of pear-flavored
narjeela
smoke on his breath.

“What do you think of homosexual relations?” I ask.

Immediately as I say the words I realize that they have come out wrong. Bashar drops his hands from my shoulders.

“No, no,” I say quickly. “You’ve got me wrong. Not me. I’m not interested in him! I’m a confirmed lover of women, my friend. Like I said, maybe this woman Ulayya. The thing is…I suspect the boy, your employee Michele. I think he visits the guard on the overpass in his tent at night.”

I’ve approached the subject wrong. Bashar’s eyebrows furrow into a frown. Perhaps he, too, feels the kiss we exchanged was oddly uncomfortable. Perhaps he feels even now the same emotion that made the image of Mahmoud and his night visitor come unbidden to my mind. And perhaps Bashar feels embarrassed about his feeling for me. Whatever it is, he is suddenly cold, formal.

“I don’t think about private relationships between men,” he says after a moment of hesitation. “I’m sure it happens. But…”

“Never mind,” I say. “Never mind. Just a random thought; forget about it, please. Forget about it.”

Bashar slaps my shoulder with his hand, trying to be jovial, but he doesn’t embrace me again before we part. He promises to disregard my remarks. The gate of his outer courtyard, open behind him, creaks as a gust of wind swirls. He shuts it, looking at me through the iron scrollwork, an effective divider.

“Allah’s blessing for your walk home,” he says.

“And upon your family as well,” I say.

It is close to midnight when I leave him. The gusty wind blows from the west, having shifted during the time I spent watching the alien movie. It is a dry wind, the
simoom,
scorched by its passage over the wastes of Saudi Arabia, a wind bearing aloft thickening clouds of dust and sand. I put my face to the sleeve of my
dishdasha
to keep the particles from entering my lungs, but I force myself to look upward at the sky, where the stars are smudged by thickening dust so that only the brightest few remain. I know in my heart and in my bones that a storm will blow.

I wrote to Nadia as I promised.

In the beginning I wrote to her. But my letters stopped after only the first few months of my time on the front lines. I couldn’t convey what I had seen and smelled and heard. How could I have done justice to the sight of one of our many machine-gun battlements firing into the pacing bodies of massed Iranian martyrs, firing until no more bullets remained, then waiting until the hordes overwhelmed and ripped apart the men behind the silenced weapon? How could I have told Nadia what odor burned flesh emitted, burned hair, the sweet harsh wafts of poisonous chemicals pooled in low places, like bomb craters, all over the battlefield? How could I have adequately described the sound of a man’s scream or a man’s prayer in the strangled moment when he realizes he must die?

When the letters seemed hollow and false and when, at the same time, the words wouldn’t come to me—then I stopped writing.

Nadia’s father and my father hadn’t prevented me from being drafted. But they ensured my service would be as a medic, rather than as an infantryman or a tanker, the more dangerous jobs. The work suited me. Every man I treated was another kitten, another chance to show Yasin that he hadn’t really defeated me.

I won an award, a decoration. I don’t really know why, for everywhere on the battlefield men undertook heroic or foolhardy deeds and most of the time these deeds were impossible to distinguish one from the other, impossible to assign value to, impossible to quantify as worthy of notice. At the time, the award felt misplaced. I recounted a hundred events I had witnessed that far surpassed my action in terms of daring, in terms of impact, in terms of compassion.

When my father heard of the award he quickly sent me the following telegram:

I did not argue as I had once before argued, when I had imagined myself among the conquerors of Tehran.

The summons came.

I went home.

10

Wednesday

NOTHING MOVES IN SAFWAN
today. I stay in my house. Where the wind finds chinks in the construction, around the bases of the doors and windows, the ventilation, I place wads of paper towel or rags. These turn tawny brown as fine particles of dust clog their fibers. It is as if each towel ages before my eyes, withering and yellowing. Better to stop the dust there, at the chinks and creases, than to let it into the house. Or better to stop at least some of the dust before it enters. Plenty more finds its way. The air is thick and stale. My teeth feel dry and they grind whenever I close my mouth, a film of fine grit coating them.

The bypass for the American convoys, so close to my house, remains quiet all day. Allah’s storm stops them. I picture convoys in their staging areas, so much material destined to move north now backlogged in dust-choked parking lots, so many semis to return south and refill. How vast is the might of America, this far from its own sovereign soil, to bring the power of one thousand semis a day north and south, south and north, day in and day out, except for a day such as this, when the force of nature, Allah willing, halts them in the dusts.

Inside my house I keep the lighting low, just one or two bulbs burning in case the sky darkens completely. Everything takes on a color similar to bruised flesh: cinder-block walls, most of which I have not painted; the kitchen, with its unfinished floor tiles heaped like counted coins among bags of powdered grout; the refrigerator, which is empty and unplugged. Perhaps most disturbing, the only item lending a true splash of color to my house is a small child’s toy, an old-fashioned crank-operated jack-in-the-box that came with me from Baghdad. Its home is now one of the bare shelves in my kitchen. The jack-in-the-box is sprung. Its face leans and leers at me across the intervening space between my kitchen and the place where I sit at a small table in my big, empty dining room. When the wind of the storm blows hard, the house itself, though made mostly of concrete, shakes. Then the head of the jack-in-the-box bobs on its spring.

The house is barely habitable, but it is all I need right now. Just a few rooms and the promise they offer of being, someday, complete. Bashar tells me I should hire a crew to finish the house more quickly, but I am happy enough with the slow progress I make in the evenings. What else do I have to distract me? What else should I do today but slowly and meditatively place tiles in simple crosshatch patterns on the kitchen floor? What else except string wires to bedrooms, install plumbing in the bathroom, in the hope, Allah willing, that electricity will one day soon be made available for more than a few hours each day; in the hope, Allah willing, that the water tower in the town square, burst open by a helicopter rocket at the beginning of this latest war, will once again be whole and provide enough pressure for water to reach my toilet and my bath? I will have crown moldings to set off the joinery between the ceilings and the walls. I will paint the rooms by hand with bright and lively colors, blues and reds and golds. I will have wallpaper, pillows, dark satin-finished wood trim and a library, Allah willing, a library. I will, one day, cover the bare cinder block and the bare floors. I will make these things according to the speed and the skill of my own hands.

But the house will be as empty as was my father’s big old house if it is only me, only my voice and my thoughts and my work and my play to fill the rooms. Because of this, I am in no hurry to rush the gilding, to superficially alter a thing that must retain its essence of emptiness until the time comes for it to be empty no longer.

Because everything is written, happens as it will, according to the unknowable plans of Allah, and because I am in no rush—after I fill, with my rags and towels, all the spaces where the wind and sand and dust penetrate, and after taking the little tape recorder from my pocket—I begin to drink. I am in no hurry. I drink: whiskey from a bottle that came to me in a sheath of sawdust hidden beneath one of my shipments of mobile phones from Kuwait. When I finish that bottle, a bottle I had sipped slowly for the last few days, I open another and I drink most of it. I drink without the benefit of a cup. I do not own a cup. The glass lip of the bottle is cool when it presses against my lips. I listen to the wind outside, shivering in tune with the bass note the gusts strike against my hollow-drum house. I look at the tape recorder where it sits, noiselessly, on the table in front of me. I drink. Then I walk through each room: bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, empty bedroom, balcony swept with sand, piling with sand, a balcony that overlooks the town but is not used by anyone for the act of overlooking. I walk down the stairs again, into the hall, front room, sitting room, empty sitting room, half-tiled kitchen, washroom, courtyard,
diwaniya
. A big house. A shell house.

I lie on my bed, a mattress only, no bed frame, just a mattress placed haphazardly, diagonal on the bare living-room floor. I have been watching the market for the right bed frame. Oak or mahogany. Beech or maple. Carved but not with figures of men, no blasphemy in my house. I’d like ivy, a European dream, rivulets of ivy and acorns and cascading leaves in lustrous oak or mahogany. Mahogany or oak. Or teak. Well-oiled. Old. Old like me. But just the right age for a widow like Ulayya, who has retained her womanly figure. I picture the frame of the bed encompassing the bare mattress on which I now lie. In the air above me I outline the frame of the bed with my hands, a big four-poster. I hold the tape recorder, which has come with me from room to room, and as I outline the shape of the imaginary bedposts in the air, the tape recorder waves, swishes, cuts through the greenish gloom. Its weight makes my hand feel heavy. I let it rest, setting it down on my belly.

I think of Mahmoud and Michele. I try to picture them together, perhaps sharing the cot in Mahmoud’s tent. Perhaps they kiss, Mahmoud’s beard coming close to, then touching Michele’s hairless face. I shake my head, shiver, forcing the image away. I grope for something else to think of. My brother, my brother, Yasin, appears in my mind, his dark but depthless gaze staring at me and through me and beyond me like the gemmed eyes of a funerary god. I shake my head again, more vigorously. He disappears, but in his place I am surrounded by the faces of the American soldiers, the Davids, the Patricks, the Winstons. They clamber on my shadowed ceiling like cherubs in a baroque fantasy. They parade before me, each with sunglasses, Kevlar helmet, clean white teeth. They point fingers at me. They mouth words of accusation, each of them with a belly split open, flaccid drooping intestines like living coils of rope gathered and bunched in bloody, mucus-covered hands.

I feel for them. I feel bad for them. I try to apologize to them. I try to apologize in advance. “It’s not you,” I whisper toward the impersonal and undecorated ceiling of my room. “You’re just in the way. You and your good intentions. You and your noble ideas of justice.”

I pull these phantom soldiers down from the rafters of the room, one at a time, and I make motions in the air with my hands, needle and thread, scissors and clamps, sewing them, making them whole, doing what I can to fix them. Poor little kittens, lifeless things.

When at last I sleep, I do not dream. But I wake with the recollection of things that were like dreams, nearer to me, more precise yet elusive, too, as if I have read the labels of manufacture on gifts I have purchased, like jack-in-the-boxes, or new little red dresses, or windup toy soldiers, remote-control boats, robots. As if I have read the labels on the gifts but cannot account for the make or the model of the things I have purchased. I wake full of little useless details, the times when convoys roll over the bridge from north to south, south to north; the times Mahmoud the lover comes and goes, sleeps and wakes, takes tea, checks on my shop; the times when British and American patrols enter Safwan, regular as clockwork, for meetings with the Safwan police, with the Safwan town council. I am full of details but completely empty of association between each detail, a string of savant facts flowing from the mouth of a man who can no longer speak the names of the things he has seen.

At last, having slept most of a day, having roamed in and out of dreams, and having eaten nothing, for I have nothing in my house to eat, I get restless. Fully awake, I realize the daylight that remains has perceptibly brightened, the storm has nearly blown itself out. So I dress myself in a clean white
dishdasha,
my best, find a cloth to hold over my face so that I do not inhale a devastating amount of dust, and go to the house of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah, where I know I will be welcome to a plate of food, a fresh drink, and some news of the world.

Forty-two men and eight women received scholarships from Saddam’s government in 1984 to attend medical programs in the United States or Europe. My father, with Abdel Khaleq’s assistance, reserved one of these scholarships for me.

All fifty award winners appeared together for a photograph session and a press briefing. I had my picture taken with Saddam Hussein. He put his arm around my shoulders for a moment. Then all the scholarship winners boarded a flight from Baghdad headed to Zurich, each of us taking connecting flights to the countries where we had been assigned to study.

“Where are you assigned?” asked the man in the seat next to me as our plane taxied onto the Baghdad tarmac.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere not in Iraq.”

“
Alhumdu l-Allah!
” said my neighbor, a fine-boned man about my age dressed in penny loafers and a soft woolen sport coat. A wire-thin mustache decorated his upper lip. His eyes were a lively light brown, his fingers slim, his disposition cloyingly cheerful. He held his hand out to me in the Western style, offering it to me to shake.

“My name’s Bashar Dulaimi,” he said. “My father’s the minister of—”

“I know,” I said, cutting him off rather abruptly. “I was in his army.”

“The army? You?” he asked, seeming puzzled.

He pulled his unshaken hand away from me as if I might contain traces of poison gas. Then he looked at me slowly, carefully—my good shoes, my well-tailored suit coat. He breathed in the lavender scent that still clung to me from Fatima’s freshly pressed towels and sheets. These things didn’t add up in his mind to the idea of a soldier. He looked at my face and saw, set deeply in it, eyes that still retained a vacancy despite the pampering and luxury I enjoyed since my return from the war.

He must have seen this because he coughed a little and then said: “Didn’t your father buy you an exemption?”

A stupid question, a self-evident answer. I didn’t bother to reply.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, turning away to look out the little fogged window of the airplane. “I’m sorry but I just said good-bye to my fiancée, and I’ve never flown before. I’m not feeling quite well.”

He shrugged and left me alone, but only for a little while.

When the wheels of the plane lifted off the ground, he turned to me again and said, “Was she pretty?”

“Who?”

“Your fiancée.”

“Very.”

“You don’t speak much.”

“Don’t have much to say.”

At this he wrinkled his nose and closed his eyes tightly so that crow’s-feet appeared around their edges. He tugged at one corner of his mustache.

“It’s going to be a long flight,” he said. “A long couple years, actually. Let me start over with this conversation. I know where you’re going. We’re going to the same place, you and me: Chicago. Northwestern University. I had my father specifically request that I be allowed to sit on the plane next to whomever shared—”

“If you mention your father one more time during this flight I will specifically request a new school,” I said.

“Okay, then,” he said huffily.

He raised his hand. When the stewardess came down the aisle to check on him, he slipped her a hundred-dinar note and got himself moved to a new seat closer to the front of the plane.

I put the armrest between our seats into its upright position and curled my legs beneath me, happy to have both spaces to myself.