One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

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1

Monday

LAYLA FIRST VISITS TODAY,
in the evening, like most evenings hereafter. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as a golden sunset reflects its light against the overpass where the highway from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger highway from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect. Here, the American convoys pass around the outskirts of the little town of Safwan, crossing the border between Iraq and Kuwait. They pass north and south and I count them as they pass, a hobby, a private game, relieving the boredom of work in my store. This girl Layla is, I guess, ten years old. Or something like that. A girl. A small girl. Her appearance coincides with the closing echo of the evening call to prayer, so that among the kneeling, quieted people, she is the only object seemingly alive.

Today is not only the first day of Layla’s visitations but also the nineteenth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. I received a shipment of used and new mobile phones to sell, so now it is not just phone cards with minutes for the people to buy, but also actual merchandise.

As the sun dips lower, I see on the edge of the road above me the guard for the overpass leaning back on his three-legged chair. He smokes a cigarette with deep concentration while his Kalashnikov rests against the tent behind him. The day has been a windless one. A trail of smoke from the guard’s cigarette rises through the sunset, mirroring plumes from oil fields behind him, where gas by-products burn above the scattered derricks and refineries of the Rumailah oil fields, staining the sky.

Layla arrives from the direction of the guard, as if emerging from the smoke of the oil field. Gradually her apparition then mingles with and breaks free from the thinner smoke of the guard’s cigarette. This distortion wafts over a patch of scrubby, littered desert toward the market, toward me. The guard is a lazy man, letting a little girl cross the highway unnoticed and without reprimand. I tell myself to remember to speak to Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah about his laziness.

Layla wanders into the market and eventually comes to my store. Eventually, but not immediately. Having seen her cross the road, picking her way between prostrate figures of men kneeling on prayer rugs, I watch her. She talks to Jaber, who sells whole plucked chickens or kebabs of chicken from a shop even smaller, more pathetic, than mine. Jaber shoos her away as he rolls up his prayer rug. She runs a stick along a row of empty propane tanks at the tank exchange point, skipping to the rhythmic hollow-shell sound. She passes my stand, heading into town, then passes more stands lining the way between my store and the town gate: Rabeer’s used-car lot fenced with barbed wire; the lot where some of the Shareefi cousins, Maney’a and Ibrahim, sell parts of houses, doors, sinks, siding; a concrete vendor, Wael, whose bags of powdery mixture lie in the open, stacked on weathered wooden pallets. Layla blends with the trash that fills all the space between and around our shops—faded plastic bottles, napkins, bits of paper and plaster and mortar and clothing. She steps on, over, through these items. As she passes each shop, the vendors or their hired thugs stare through her even as they look at her. She is a part of the landscape, a rag doll in dirty clothes amid dirt and dust, debris and decay. The guards pay her no more attention than they pay to the roving mongrel dogs.

At the town gate Layla stops beneath a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr recently plastered over a mosaic of his father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad bin Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, whom Saddam Hussein killed just before the American war. The gate is a relic of more prosperous years, twenty feet tall, its two solid pillars tiled in beautiful blue-and-gold faience with the ayatollah’s white turban luminous in the center. In the poster, as in all his posters, Muqtada al-Sadr includes his father, the two of them standing nearly side by side, the son hoping thereby to share some of the aura of his father’s respect and eminence. The mosaic beneath had been made in days when workmen took pride in their art. It evidences patience, the piecing of so many little fragments into a whole. It evidences care. As I think about it, I find it suddenly comical that the mural should be covered with the poster’s ridiculousness, its flimflam politics jockeying for attention, the two images of the ayatollah juxtaposed in faience and in flimflam. But neither the poster nor the mosaic is really in accord with Islam. They are idols: art, advertising, politics—pictures of men serving only to distract from the contemplation of the Compassion and Mercy of Allah. A trail of little machine-gun holes peppers the mural, breaking through the luster to reveal plain, skin-colored adobe. The holes brutally underscore my point about impiety while also providing a flavor of the history of this town.

Layla looks up from the mosaic, back across the market. Perhaps she has heard my involuntary sigh of disdain over the poster’s symbolism. When she sees me, some hundred feet away, and when our gazes meet, she moves steadily toward me, shop to shop, retracing her footsteps. Her approach can mean no good for me, nor can it mean anything good for my business. I begin to close my store, putting away mobile phones I’ve unpackaged, returning phone cards to their plastic cases. I step out the side door and look into the shade under the awning, expecting to find the girl there, frowning with an expression of practiced piteousness. I do not see her, and I breathe a sigh of relief. One less beggar to fend away. As any good man does, I pay
zakat,
the yearly religious alms that go to support the poor and the needy. Perhaps this girl’s father and mother already have benefited from my money. Anyway, I need not tithe every beggar girl or boy who chances into the market.

I reach up, under the awning, and unfasten the corrugated tin cover I have made for my shop window. It swings down, and I lock it in place with a padlock. I run my hand over the front of my
dishdasha
to return the key for the padlock to my breast pocket. But I miss the pocket with my hand, and the key falls to the ground. Bending to retrieve it, I see the girl standing very close in front of me. First I see her bare feet, then blue jeans that end in tatters just below the hem of her flowing caftan. There, where the jeans end, I notice a length of yarn with bird bones and little dollhouse keys tied around her left ankle.

“I have no handouts for street children,” I say.

“I don’t want handouts,” she says.

This should end the conversation but for some reason it does not. Layla stands still, as if sprung freshly from the ground. I put my shop-window key into my pocket, patting it for extra certainty. I feel a touch of remorse for having spoken harshly, for having assumed the girl would ask me for
baksheesh
—money or food or water or some little trinket.

“My name is Layla,” she says.

“Mine is Abu Saheeh,” I say.

If this were a business deal between men, we would clasp hands, kiss cheeks. But I know of no rules to govern a meeting between a forward little urchin of a girl and an old man like me. Or no rules I wish to follow. Doubtless she is a street child, but I can’t bring myself to speak the harsh words that would send her on her way to beg from the next stall in the market, to steal from the next unwary businessman. Instead, I stand there, looking odd, my stomach anxious for me to begin my walk into Safwan, where I will go to my favorite café and order tea and hummus and falafel.

“Have you been to America?” she asks. “I haven’t,” she says, “but I watch TV, and I talk to the soldiers sometimes, and my favorite is Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

“He is not a real soldier,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

Again, this should end it. I stand a little straighter, look past her toward the gate and its mosaic of the ayatollah, past the mosaic toward the town, the café, my dinner.

“Do you believe in robots?” she says. “Arnold Schwarzenegger is a robot.”

“Only in the movie,” I say.

I wonder why I am arguing with her about robots, about movies, about American actors.

“So you don’t believe in them?”

“No. How silly.”

“But the Americans have them; the British, too. I’ve seen them blow up a bomb with a robot near the az-Zubayr al-Awwam Mosque up near Basra. I think the Americans are robots and the British are becoming robots. I think they have skin over their metal, and they send their old robots that aren’t shaped right for skin coverings to blow up the bombs, to do the dirty work.”

She leans closer to me. She puts a hand to her mouth as if to shield her words, her secret words, from being overheard by others in the market. She whispers, “I think it is a conspiracy of robots, anyone, everyone. I think they all might be robots except for you and for me.”

“I think you’re funny,” I say.

She laughs, a snorting little falsetto laugh. I notice that the tendons of her neck are tight, nervous.

“I like you,” she says. “I will come back tomorrow evening.”

At that, as quickly as she had come, Layla leaves. I lock the side door to my shop. When I close the door it emits a deep thump that reminds me of the sound a hand makes when slapping an empty oil drum, an empty shell. The wind, absent all day, gusts in from the north, across the oil fields, bringing with it the stink of burning crude and causing my corrugated window covering to rattle so that the shop continues to resound, tinny clanging over a deep and fearsomely sad undertone of emptiness.

I shrug, look up toward the road, to where the guard still lounges on his three-legged chair. I take my time walking through the gateway that has the mosaic of the ayatollah on it, and as I pass under it, I touch one of the blue fragments of mosaic tile. It is cool and rough along its edge.

When I arrive at the café in the main downtown market of Safwan—a place owned by a man named Bashar, a friend of mine from university—I am greeted with a handshake and a kiss on each cheek and a handwritten menu. I read the menu for a while but I order only tea and hummus and falafel, my usual dinner. The evening is warm and pleasant and empty around me, even though it is filled with myriad voices, people everywhere, people passing in the street, haggling, ordering food from the café. The noise washes over me like an outgoing wave, while beneath it I hear a darker undertone, a shell of a town, perfect for me, resonating yet hollow.