The Mirage: A Novel (15 page)

Fadwa looked at him warily. “What if I can’t conceive?”

“Don’t be silly. You will. Of course you will.”

“What if I
can’t
?”

“Fadwa, come on.” He cupped her face in his hands. “You know I would never put you out.”

She closed her eyes and nodded and pretended to be reassured. But after that day things were different between them. Fadwa began demanding sex more often—in itself, nothing to complain about, but the act was tainted by an aura of desperation that grew stronger over time. In matters of faith, Fadwa became a scold, chastising Mustafa for any sign he was shirking his obligations.

Six months later Fadwa still wasn’t pregnant and Mustafa conceded that there might be a real problem, though he felt sure it was temporary, some biological speed bump that medical science could cure. He told Fadwa to make a doctor’s appointment. She did, but the appointment kept getting rescheduled. After several months of delays, Mustafa placed an angry call to the doctor’s office and found out it wasn’t the doctor who’d been postponing the exam.

Now it was Mustafa’s turn to play the chastiser. “You need to stop being foolish and get this checked out, Fadwa,” he said. “Whatever’s wrong, we’ll get it fixed.”

The verdict, when it finally came, was devastating. “Premature ovarian failure.” Mustafa repeating the doctor’s words felt sluggish and dumb. “Premature ovarian failure, that’s, what is that, early menopause?”

No, it wasn’t; it was much worse. A woman in menopause knows she cannot have children. A woman with premature ovarian failure knows only that she is unlikely to. Between five and ten percent of women with the condition still managed to conceive, the doctor said; but because the underlying causes were still poorly understood, there was no way to predict who would be in that lucky minority. And while they could treat Fadwa for some of the related symptoms, about the condition itself there was nothing to be done.

“And you’re sure that’s what’s wrong with her?” Mustafa said this several times, not so much because he doubted the diagnosis but because he needed time to get used to it, this new reality that was not at all what he had expected. Meanwhile Fadwa was sitting right beside him, watching him, absorbing his every word, every facial tic. If Mustafa had it to do over again, he would have insisted on meeting with the doctor alone, first—not the act of an enlightened husband, perhaps, but one that would have allowed him a chance to sort his own feelings in private. As it was, Fadwa suffered the double torment of hearing the bad news herself while observing Mustafa’s reaction to it—and projecting, into that reaction, all of her worst fears. By the time Mustafa had collected himself enough to try to comfort her, it was too late.

Fadwa called her mother that night in tears. Within twenty-four hours, the whole family knew. Fadwa’s father was the first to offer advice, saying that of course they mustn’t put all their trust in one doctor. They needed a second opinion—at least!—and he knew just where to go for one: a hospital with a first-rate family planning clinic that had recently opened in Adhamiyah.

Mustafa knew the hospital he was talking about. It had been financed by donations from Baath and the Saddam Hussein Foundation, and was already under scrutiny by Halal for possible narcotics violations. But Fadwa’s father, now a fully employed union member, no longer regarded Saddam as a bad guy, and when he offered to arrange an appointment at the clinic, Mustafa couldn’t refuse without insulting him.

The Baath fertility specialist confirmed the original doctor’s diagnosis but added a measure of optimism. There were a number of experimental therapies, he said, that might increase Fadwa’s odds of conceiving.

Mustafa quite naturally suspected a scam. “If the treatment is experimental, I assume it’s not covered by Blue Crescent. Will Saddam’s foundation be paying the bill?”

“Ah, no, I’m afraid you’ll have to bear the expense yourself,” the doctor replied. “And I won’t lie, these therapies aren’t cheap . . . But really, how can one put a price on parenthood?”

“You seem unashamed to,” Mustafa said. Then he felt Fadwa’s hand on his wrist and knew he had been overruled.

The doctor knew it too: “Let me get someone to take your financials.”

While they waited to see whether the clinic would deliver more than hope in exchange for their savings, Mustafa and Fadwa received other therapeutic suggestions from family and friends: folk remedies, charms, foods to eat and foods to avoid. Mustafa’s uncle Tamir, with the authority granted him by the eight children he’d sired, said that getting a woman pregnant was mostly a matter of proper positioning during the sex act.

And there were religious therapies, too. In addition to her regular attendance at mosque, Fadwa began making weekly pilgrimages to an Armenian church dedicated to Umm Isa, the mother of the prophet Jesus. Mary, revered by Muslims as well as Christians, was believed by some to be able to intervene on behalf of the faithful; pregnancy issues were, for obvious reasons, one of her specialties. A few of Mustafa’s Sunni cousins grumbled that this was idolatry, but Mustafa was more concerned that, like everything else they tried, it would prove ineffective.

“Fadwa,” he said one evening, as she prepared for her visit to Umm Isa’s house, “you know I’ll never stop praying for you to be able to have a child, but if . . . if it doesn’t happen, will we—”

She looked at him as if
he
were an idolater—or a blasphemer. “How dare you say that! How dare you say that! God can do anything!”

“God can do anything,” Mustafa agreed. “He can say no. If He does—”

But Fadwa didn’t want to hear
If He does.

Mustafa went to see his father. Alone among the relatives, Abu Mustafa had refrained from volunteering advice so far, but now Mustafa asked him the question that Fadwa refused to consider: “What if nothing works? What if we simply can’t have children?”

“Do you love her?” Abu Mustafa asked.

“Yes,” said Mustafa.

“And how will you feel if you never become a father?”

Mustafa had to think about it. Since the initial shock of the diagnosis, he’d been so focused on reassuring Fadwa, he was no longer sure of his own feelings. “I will be disappointed if that happens,” he said finally. “Probably more disappointed than I can imagine now. But I believe I could learn to live with such disappointment. What concerns me is Fadwa. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to accept it. Or trust that I have.”

“A marriage without trust is a failed marriage,” Abu Mustafa said. “There’s a simple solution for that.”

“No.” Mustafa shook his head. “A divorce would crush her. It might even kill her. I won’t do that.”

Abu Mustafa smiled sadly. “So what is it you’re asking me, then? How to live with a wife who can never be satisfied? You want my expert opinion on that?”

“Father,” Mustafa said, abashed. “I don’t—”

“No, it’s all right. My answer is simple enough: Be kind.”

Mustafa frowned. He’d been hoping for something more detailed. “Be kind . . . That’s it?”

“If you can do it consistently, you’ll be a better husband than I was,” his father told him. “And Mustafa? If you can’t be kind, be honest. The sooner the better.”

He did what he could. He acceded without complaint to whatever baby-making regimens Fadwa proposed, no matter how hopeless or absurd they seemed. He cultivated patience, and kept his own frustrations to himself, and tried not to be drawn into arguments. But here already he wasn’t being honest, and the problem only got worse.

To help pay for the experimental fertility treatments (all worthless, and each series more expensive than the last) Mustafa began volunteering for extra assignments at work, as much overtime as he could get. This meant being away from home a lot, something that Fadwa couldn’t reasonably object to. She objected anyway, saying that Mustafa was running away from her, which he denied.

The denials weren’t lies, at least not exactly. Yes, there were times when he needed to get away from Fadwa, but his ultimate goal wasn’t escape, it was renewal. Whatever the discontents of his marriage, Mustafa continued to find fulfillment in his work. It wasn’t as easy as it had once been—like many a drug warrior before him, Mustafa had become a cynic about prohibition—but bringing down a villain, avenging (or more rarely, saving) an innocent: These things still gave him a jolt of righteousness, a sense that he was contributing, in some small way, to God’s plan. Sometimes the sense of righteousness was infectious: He’d go home after a particularly good day and Fadwa would smile and laugh and be almost like her old self.

These moments of grace never lasted, and in the long run, the idea that the joys of one sphere of life could compensate for the deficiencies of another was probably poisonous. But it kept Mustafa going for quite a while.

Then in the fifth year of their marriage, at the end of another failed series of fertility treatments, Fadwa fell into a depression that lasted for months. Mustafa went out and arrested Saddam’s chief lieutenant in Anbar Province, catching him red-handed with a truckload of whiskey and convincing him to give up his entire distribution network in exchange for leniency. This was a major coup for Halal Enforcement—a career-making success—but it didn’t improve Fadwa’s mood in the slightest. Mustafa, unable to contain his feelings for once, ended up shouting at her: Why could she not be happy for him?

That night he lay awake, thinking about the wedding party where he and Fadwa had reconnected as adults, wondering what his life would be like if that day had never happened. What if Fadwa’s letter of invitation had been lost in the mail? What if his car had broken down, or he simply hadn’t gone? What if, what if. Of course it might not have made any difference. It could be that he was fated to marry Fadwa no matter what. But it was possible to imagine a world in which that wasn’t so. What if, what if.

He began looking at other women, not in a sexual way (well, not
only
in a sexual way), but as emissaries from that other world. He tried not to be completely selfish about it: If he got to walk a different path, so did Fadwa, and so he always gave her a husband who was loving and patient and kind and who, most of all, had the wisdom Mustafa lacked, the knowledge of how to make her happy. That being stipulated, his most detailed fantasies all focused on his half of the equation.

A woman in line at the post office; the secretaries at Halal; a mother at the supermarket wrangling three healthy children . . . What if, what if. Or a woman he spied waiting for a bus, sixty if she were a day and obviously plain-looking even in youth, but just as obviously content with her life. What would it be like to be married to such contentment, to see it every morning and every evening, to share a bed with it? What if, what if. And as the fantasy continued to take shape: I wish, I wish.

Such wishing was harmless, he told himself, so long as he remembered it wasn’t reality. He had the wife he had and not another. He wasn’t going to leave Fadwa; he’d sworn that oath a thousand times already and he meant it, even if she didn’t believe him. Nor would he become like Samir, who’d broken off two wedding engagements because of his freely confessed inability to stop womanizing.

But maybe he wasn’t careful enough about keeping his fantasies to himself. Or maybe God wanted to test his resolve. One morning at breakfast Fadwa started telling him about the previous night’s homily in church, which had concerned the prophet Ibrahim’s wife Sarah and her servant, Hagar . . .

Mustafa was only pretending to pay attention, so it was the silence that followed Fadwa’s words rather than the words themselves that caused him to look up. Fadwa was at the kitchen sink with her back to him, standing rigid as though awaiting a physical blow.

“What did you just say?” Mustafa asked.

“I said, maybe you should take a second wife. Then you could have children, and I—”

“My God,” said Mustafa, his bewilderment turning instantly to rage. “My God, Fadwa, what sort of madness are those Christians filling your head with?”

He stormed out of the house. Fadwa followed, calling his name, but he was through the front door and into his car before she could catch him.

But he couldn’t outrace the knowledge of who he was really angry at. Not Fadwa, for making the suggestion. Himself, for being tempted by it.

The dead man’s name was Ghazi al Tikriti. He was a mid-level Baathist who managed a string of rat cellars and a semi-legitimate nightclub in Rusafa. On the evening in question he’d left his car in a no-parking zone for an hour while he went to have dinner; he returned to find a ticket on his windshield and a surprise package wired to his ignition.

Mustafa was dropping Fadwa off at Umm Isa’s church when he got the call. “It’s a murder,” he told Fadwa. “I’ll be home late. Can you—”

“I’ll find a ride.” She got out without kissing him goodbye.

Samir and a homicide detective named Zagros were already at the crime scene. A group of Baghdad PD uniforms stood by the rope line, ogling the car—a brand-new Afrit Turbo—and holding a high-spirited debate about how much the corpse would affect its blue-book value.

Mustafa was surprised that the vehicle was still intact. “I thought you said he got blown up.”

“He did,” Samir replied. “Somebody replaced the air bag in the steering column with a pack of ball bearings and some extra propellant. Think shotgun.”

“Clever piece of work,” said Zagros, who was crouched by the open driver’s door. “It looks like they unscrewed the dome light to keep him from noticing the tampering. Or maybe that was to get him to lean in closer when he put his key in . . .”

“What about the parking ticket? Have you tracked down the cop who issued it?”

Samir pointed to one of the smugger-looking bystanders. “He claims he didn’t see anything suspicious. But wouldn’t you know, he’s also from Tikrit. We’re running him through the computer now, to see how close a relative he is of Saddam’s. And whether he’s got any auto shop experience.”

“Here’s the victim’s wallet,” Zagros said, standing up. “The driver’s license matches the registration, but we’ll need to check fingerprints to be absolutely sure.”