The White Zone (2 page)

The soldier laughed and dropped the helmet. It fell with a hard plunk. Two red cans of Coke rolled into the dust.

Talib scrambled to grab the cans. Soda—especially American soda—was a rare treat. He picked up the heavy helmet and put it on. He heard giggles from his cousins. With real army equipment like this, he'd be more of a real soldier. He looked up at the window, but the solider had retreated inside. Maybe he didn't care about the helmet. With the Cokes in his arms and the helmet on his head, Talib hopped back over the wall.

He heard the soldier calling after him. Although he couldn't understand the English, he knew the words were rough. Talib paused. Allah wouldn't approve of his taking the helmet. The soldier needed it for protection. But it would be too shameful to turn back now.

Talib crouched in the thorny bougainvillea, head down, the cans against his chest, the helmet low over his eyes. That soldier wouldn't dare get out of his tank. He peeked up to look at the big gun. What if it turned in his direction?

The other boys joined Talib in the shadow of the wall.

“That took guts,” said Anwar. He eyed the helmet on Talib's head.

Glancing at the tank, Nouri reached out to touch the helmet.

“Are you going to share the Cokes?” Anwar pointed to the cans.

Talib adjusted the helmet to see better. “Should I?” he asked. “You didn't help me get them.”

“You should share,” said Jalal, looking at the others.

“Is that an order?” Talib asked, smiling.

“Yes,” replied Jalal.

“If you don't share,” said Nouri, “we won't play with you. After all, you're a Sunni.”

Talib pressed the hard cans to his chest, his smile fading. “You know I'm not completely Sunni,” he protested. “Only my mother is.”

Anwar scooted closer to Nouri and Jalal saying, “You can't be Shiite if you're half Sunni.”

“But Baba is a Shiite like you,” Talib protested further. “He's your uncle.”

Anwar shrugged.

With white bougainvillea flowers dropping like soft bombs, Talib's three cousins—his very blood— suddenly looked at him with the hard eyes of enemy soldiers. He'd been braver than all three of them put together, but now that meant nothing.

He knew that Nouri's uncle had just been killed by a Sunni bomb. But that hadn't been
his
fault.

Talib handed over one of the cans. “You three can share this. The other's mine.”

Jalal popped the tab, and Talib popped his. The soda, shaken in the fall from the tank, shot out and sprayed them with warm, syrupy sweetness.

Anwar laughed, wiping his face with the hem of his shirt.

“What about the helmet?” asked Nouri. “We each want to try it on.”

Talib hesitated before handing it over.

Just as Nouri was placing the helmet on his black hair, the muezzin called, ordering them to prayer—
Allah is great! There is no god but Allah!

Talib didn't like the fact that it wasn't a real muezzin calling, that it was only a recording blasting from the tower. He pretended the call came from a real man, a man whose heart overflowed with the love of Allah, the way his own heart overflowed.

Talib drained the last of his Coke and tossed the can aside. Even though his cousins ignored the muezzin's call, he never missed prayers. In order to be pure for Allah, he needed to wash. But since there was no water, he'd have to use sand.

As he stood up and reached for a handful, he caught sight of Nouri looking out from under the helmet, still seated.

As Nouri passed the helmet to Jalal, Talib finished rubbing sand between his palms. But he couldn't pray with a clean heart without giving the helmet back.

Talib lifted the helmet off Jalal's head. He jumped over the wall. He hoped the soldier wouldn't shoot him. Laying the helmet below the window of the tank, he called, “Mister!”

Back on the other side of the wall, Talib turned in the direction of Mecca, knelt, then bowed forward, pressing his forehead to the dust. He sank into the earth:
Allah is great. There is no god but Allah. . . .
As he bowed down, everything vanished from his mind— the tank, the fight, his cousins.
Allah is great. . . .
Even the sun, the sky, the very ground vanished as Talib let Allah's sweet presence fill his being. Allah was as close as his own breath.

KERPOW YOURSELF

“Time to eat!” The voice of Nouri's mother sailed through the air.

Nouri led the way into the courtyard where A'mmo Hakim's car was parked. “Don't touch it!” he ordered his cousins, glaring at Talib.

Beyond the dry fountain, the smallest cousins sat on the flagstones making mud pies, their hands red with cold.

Nouri pushed open the door into the big room off the courtyard. The members of his Shiite family ate together every Sabbath. Inside were gathered A'mma Hiba, his aunt, and many more aunts, uncles, and cousins from all over the city. Because of A'mmo's death, they wore black.

Baba stood, his hands on his hips, talking with A'mmo Murtadha. Baba's face was red, as if he'd been arguing.

Nouri held the door wide for his cousins, but his grip tightened as Talib passed into the room. Talib wasn't really welcome. Not after the bombing.

Talib's mother was the only Sunni here, and Talib was the only person of mixed blood. They came only because A'mma Fatima had no relatives of her own in Baghdad.

They came without her husband and Talib's father, A'mmo Nazar. On the Friday Sabbath, when many liked to shop, Nouri's uncle tended his bookstall on Mutanabbi Street.

Mama stood near the table of food, her silver bracelets clattering on her wrists. She directed the other women: place the dishes here and there, over there.

“Smells good,” said Jalal.

“But it's not what she used to make,” said Anwar.

Anwar was right. Before the war Mama would have served minced meat with nuts, raisins, and spices, and
quzi
, roasted and stuffed lamb. Now she offered less expensive dishes like
dolma
, tomatoes stuffed with rice. But at least there was always food since Baba had a good job as a security guard.

Before the war they'd all dug deep with the big serving spoons, piling the fragrant food on their plates, covering it from one edge to the other. But lately on these Fridays, there was only enough for everyone to take a little.

There wasn't really enough, Nouri thought, for Talib and A'mma Fatima.

Nouri spotted Talib's mama in a pink head scarf, black curls showing around the edges of her face. She was sitting with the small girl cousins. Usually she ate with Mama and Hiba and the other women, chatting and laughing. But today she sat, like a children's nanny, in the corner. That was where she belonged.

From behind him, Nouri couldn't help overhearing a conversation between Baba and two of his uncles.

“The Sunnis are working with the Americans now.”

“Over in Anbar Province.”

“First those Sunnis betray us with Hussein, and now they do a double cross and go over to the side of the occupiers.”

“Instead of offering jobs and other bribes, the Americans should clean out that nest at Anbar . . .”

“Shhh,” A'mmo Murtadha said, glancing at Talib's mama. Anbar province was the home of A'mma Fatima's Sunni family.

But Nouri found himself hoping that A'mma Fatima had heard. A Sunni had bombed the market where A'mmo Hakim had died. A Sunni like Talib and his mother. And Nouri felt they should pay.

Mama handed down a plate of cubes of braised lamb, saying, “Share this among yourselves.”

Nouri took three pieces and passed the plate to Jalal and Anwar, who also took three. Only when there was one bite of lamb left did Nouri offer the plate to Talib.

After the meal, while the men smoked and talked, the women cleared the dishes, then spread out blankets and pillows for napping.

Nouri led the way to the large room where Mama kept her potted orange trees in winter, where sunshine spilled through the glass ceiling. Pigeons flew in through a broken pane, darting in the muted light.

“
Kerpow!
” Jalal shouted, making a pistol with his hand, his index finger pointed at Talib.

“Kerpow yourself,” Talib retorted, standing motionless.

“Aren't you going to play?” asked Nouri. Although part of him wanted to play as they had all these years, pretending to be enemies, another part of him felt like it wasn't so much a game anymore.

“He's going to sleep like an old person,” said Anwar, pillowing his head on his folded hands.

Nouri watched as Talib sat down on the cement floor and scratched patterns in the dust. When the twig broke Talib tore off another.

A mortar shell dropped somewhere in the city, the loud blast rattling the panes of the glass room.

In the orchard of potted orange trees, the smaller cousins began to play hide-and-go-seek, crouching beneath the glossy leaves, slipping behind a large dusty tapestry. They shrieked whenever someone was found.

“Let's play that too,” said Anwar.

“That's a little kids' game,” answered Nouri.

“What are you going to do then?” Jalal asked.

Nouri gestured toward his uncle's black car, covered in dust in the driveway. “Clean it.”

“Can we help?” asked Anwar.

Nouri shook his head and walked away, leaving his cousins behind. He didn't want anyone else to touch his uncle's car.

Taking one of Mama's kitchen cloths, he wiped off the dust, his straight dark-brown hair, his round chin reflected in the black finish. Wiping, he noticed dings in the paint he'd never seen before, including a long scratch along the bottom of the passenger door.

He polished until the little black car mirrored the branches of the
nabog
tree arching overhead.

When Mama rang a tiny bell announcing afternoon tea and sesame cookies, Nouri noticed that Talib was no longer there. He wasn't in the orchard. Nor were he or his mama in the big room.

They'd taken the hint, Nouri decided.

NO BREAD TONIGHT

Talib led the way across the courtyard, past the tiny black car. He went out through the gate to the broken sidewalk.

“Thank you for rescuing me,” Mama said as they walked toward home.

“I hoped that was what you wanted.”

“I was so uncomfortable. . . .”

“They're upset about Nouri's uncle.”

Mama tugged at her head scarf. “But that had nothing to do with us. . . .”

As they walked, Talib ran his fingertip along a wall of graffiti. At the far end, Saddam Hussein had been drawn with devil horns. Someone had thrown red paint across one side of his face.

“My cousins weren't friendly either,” Talib mumbled. He still felt wounded by their words, words that had felt like the bougainvillea thorns that had scratched his hands during the game of war.

. . .

Mama cooked dinner while Talib did his mathematics homework at the kitchen table. The water had been shut off again and Mama dipped into the extra jug she kept in the corner for emergencies.

She wore a jacket since kerosene had become scarce. So much had changed with the war. Even though Talib had been very young when the fighting had started, he remembered the days when food had been plentiful, water ran freely from the taps, and the house had been bright with electric lights.

Mama tucked her head scarf around her neck. By the way she paused and listened, Talib sensed her waiting for Baba's approach.

Although his hands were stiff with cold, Talib penciled his fractions on crinkled yellow paper. He wrote very small in order to fit all the problems on the sheet that his teacher, al-Khaldoun, had allotted him.

He erased, and the paper tore.

Mama sucked in her breath.

In the upstairs apartment where the Korashi family lived, Talib heard loud words, footsteps running across the ceiling, then a door slamming. It seemed as though everyone was scared or angry lately.

Talib bit his lip. With each equation, he too began to listen for Baba's return.

He listened to mortar shells flying and bursting. The city was divided into zones: the main one was the Green Zone where the American and Iraqi government buildings were located, and the area just outside it was called the Red Zone. Talib lived farther out, beyond the Red Zone. Tonight shells crossed the Tigris River, shelling the Red and Green zones and sometimes, probably, areas beyond.

Just as Talib had finished the last column, he heard his father wipe his boots on the mat. The doorknob jiggled and Baba entered, his footsteps loud on the stone floor. He unwound a red scarf from around his shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair.

Then Baba reached into a bag. “For you,” he said to Talib, placing a book on the table beside the page of numbers. “You'll like it.”

“Thank you, Baba.” Talib flipped through the pages of
Daoud the Camel Boy
. It looked all right. There were even ink drawings. But really, Talib thought, no book could ever be as exciting as playing outside. A page was just black words on white paper.

While Baba washed up, scooping water from the jug, Mama brought
yabsa
, white beans cooked with tomatoes, and a plate of eggplant to the table. “There's no bread tonight,” she said. “The bakery shelves were empty.”

“And I didn't sell a single book today,” Baba said, drying his hands. He sat down to spoon
yabsa
onto his plate. “No one has money, but people still come. They love to browse. Reading is one of the only pleasures left to us in this city.” He sighed.

Talib noticed Mama biting her bottom lip.

“But instead of
buying
books,” Baba went on, “people are bringing their collections to sell to us booksellers. People don't need books when there's so little food.”

Suddenly, Mama lifted her face, her cheekbones illuminated by the single bulb, saying, “Maysoon and Hiba have been avoiding me at the Friday gatherings. They don't make a place for me. In the kitchen, they don't talk to me. They say unkind things about Sunnis.”