One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (10 page)

“It is a big house,” he says. “An empty house now, too.”

“Empty like my own,” I say after surprisingly little hesitation, the words slipping from me before I even realize what I am saying.

Al-Hajj sets his
narjeela
pipe down again and, using the hand that had held it, the same hand I had shaken and held earlier, he clasps me again, then folds his other hand over both of our hands so that I am caught in his weathered but solid grasp.

At the start of my fifth school year in America, September of 1990, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen entered the emergency room of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Bashar and I were on night shift together, having drawn the worst duties during the first year of our medical residency.

This woman stepped into the ER through the automatic double doors—the same doors through which paramedics usually rushed gurneys into curtained rooms. She took two strides into the center of the shining waxed floor and then stood still, looking around her, apparently dazed. From the elbows down, blood sheathed her arms.

I was too stunned to react, not by the blood but by her: tall—taller than me—wearing roan-colored knee-high boots that perfectly matched the chestnut color of her hair. Her skin had a luster of translucence to it, like bone-thin porcelain. And though her eyes were absent of sparkle, they were wide-set and liquid and framed in a face seemingly stolen from a cinema poster—Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn. I hesitated but Bashar leaped from our shared desk at the nurses’ station and rushed to help her.

Nurses joined him. They swept back the curtains of an examination room, threw back the thin blankets of a bed, readied bandages and towels. Bashar took the woman’s hands, heedless of the blood, and ushered her behind the partition. Then he shut the curtain.

I hadn’t even stood up. I doubt whether I even breathed from the moment this woman entered until the moment Bashar closed the curtain.

12

Wednesday Night

I LEAVE SHEIKH SEYYED
Abdullah’s house with a package under my arm, not, avowedly, the main purpose for my visit but something I knew I would receive. Seyyed Abdullah and I have not spoken of the package all evening. But, as I prepare to leave, he motions to his serving boy, the boy with the half-hidden pistol. I know what is coming when the boy quickly exits the
diwaniya
and when Seyyed Abdullah rises to escort me to the door. Just beyond the
diwaniya,
outside and a few paces out of earshot from us, I see the remaining visitors who wait for their audience. Seyyed Abdullah looks at them but pulls me close. The serving boy reappears behind him with the package.

“So much business to do,” he says.

“I don’t envy your position,” I say.

“Sometimes I think of doing what you’re doing,” he says. “Starting over, being unknown. Having my time to myself once again.”

“It has its advantages,” I say, but then I think of his house, his many children, his wives. “But, too often, loneliness is my companion. For that reason I thank you most sincerely for your hospitality tonight. I have felt welcome here, and happy.”

We exchange these words directly into each other’s ears, like conspirators in a crime, and then we kiss, the customary farewell. I feel nothing when I kiss him, nothing but a slight revulsion that still fills me from the similarity I’ve inadvertently noticed between him and my brother. When we have finished embracing, the serving boy comes even closer and hands the package to me. It is of medium size, not something unnoticeable but certainly something unmentionable. It’s a box wrapped in plain brown paper and string, like a cut of meat from a butcher shop.

“Mahmoud needs no bullets,” Seyyed Abdullah says. “Not with you.”

“I know,” I say. “I am watching, will be watching.”

“Soon it will be more than just a single bottle of whiskey. Soon more important things will come.”

He taps the box.

“Yes,” I say. “No problem.”

He shifts his eyes away from me for a moment and then back to me, looking directly at me. The tone of his voice shifts, too, softer yet equally authoritative. “Do you want to marry Ulayya bint Ali ash-Shareefi? Her father, Ali, with whom you just sat, mentioned the thing to me this evening before your arrival. He seems to favor you as a match for her.”

“Does he know me for something other than a merchant?”

“I have said nothing,” Seyyed Abdullah says, and I can tell by the continued unflinching directness of his gaze that he speaks in earnest.

I wonder if my friend Bashar has let something slip. Perhaps I should tell Seyyed Abdullah about Bashar. Perhaps I should tell Seyyed Abdullah that at least one other person in town has been taken into my confidence, that one other person in town knows my history both recent and long past, and that at least one other person in town seems to have guessed at my reasons for moving here.

I say, “Not only does Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi want me, a seemingly poor merchant with no family, for his daughter’s husband, but he also asked me if I was Shia or Sunni. It led me to suspect—”

“It’s the Baghdad accent in your voice. From so far north. It calls the question to mind, especially in these times, when we kill each other like curs.”

“Indeed, how do your townsfolk reconcile the idea of a northerner come so far south to live among them? This has always bothered me about our plan.”

“I told you that you would be noticed.”

“I know. But what do they think I am?”

“Wounded.”

“That’s all?”

“They don’t want to ask the other questions. They make assumptions. You pray as a Shia. You go to mosque with the people. But you haven’t been overly open or friendly with them. Perhaps they think you were a fighter.
Mujahideen.
”

“For whom would I fight?” I ask, somewhat laughingly.

“That is the big question, isn’t it?”

“Marrying into a Shia family might be necessary,” I say. “The people will suspect an eligible bachelor who shows no interest in marriage.”

Seyyed Abdullah nods to show his agreement just at the moment when Ali al-Hajj approaches us, looming in the shadowed interior of the room. Ali looks at the package in my hands. Then he looks at Seyyed Abdullah. He touches his forehead in a salute, not at all similar to the mocking, military-style salute Hussein gave me with his mobile phone in the market as he followed Ali’s daughter into town. Ash-Shareefi is a tall, thin man when standing, perhaps only a little shy of six feet. On the couch he had seemed smaller, with his white hair like a flame in the charged darkness of the room. His height now gives me the feeling that he had been folded up, neat as a message in a bottle, when he sat.

“Ya fendem,”
he says to Seyyed Abdullah. “It is time an old man like me returns home for the night. May I trouble your guest, my new friend Abu Saheeh ash-Shumari, to walk with me across town to my house?”

“These are difficult times,” says Seyyed Abdullah, a phrase he has come to repeat quite often, his mantra, perhaps. “Allah willing, Abu Saheeh ash-Shumari will indeed see you home safely.”

Seyyed Abdullah emphasizes my family name, questioningly.

“Yes,” I try to silently convey to Seyyed Abdullah with my own fretful expression. “Yes, I told Ali al-Hajj my real family name. It was only proper, with him offering his daughter in marriage. He should know to whom he allies himself.”

Aloud I say that I will enjoy walking my esteemed new friend home. Putting my wrapped package under one arm, I take Ali al-Hajj’s hand and leave the doorway of Seyyed Abdullah’s
diwaniya,
crossing his open courtyard and proceeding through the gate of the house into the sand-strewn alley, into the last of the dusty maelstrom. Only when I am outside do I remember I had meant also to ask Seyyed Abdullah about Hussein from the Hezbollah. Was he truly competition? What was his history? Was Ali al-Hajj’s offer of marrying his daughter to me inspired by a desire to avoid union with the likes of Hussein?

These questions mirror in my mind the swaying shadows of Russian olive trees that arch over the alleyway. Bits of paper, a black plastic bag, a tin can rattle and flee, circle in whirling eddies where the alleyway walls angle and the wind churns. We step around these things, Ali and I, over them, arm in arm. I help him when proper, but for the most part he does not rely on me. He is strong and wiry for an old man. He seems not so much ashamed of my help as hesitant about accepting it, as if leaning on me becomes by extension symbolic, part of our relationship. He is hesitant about letting me help him but he does accept my help, up small flights of stairs in the alleyways, across rough patches of ground. This leaning and supporting and assisting mirror the process of becoming a member of a town, of a community, of gaining family. It involves finding allies, making enemies, spending hard-earned money and respect in pursuit of something infinitely more difficult to quantify: trust. And for one like me, the idea of being trusted, relied upon, might be the scariest thing to have occurred so far since starting my life anew.

“You will see Ulayya’s home a few streets from here,” says Ali.

He is tiring from the walk, leaning on me more and more, even over small obstacles, even when there is no obstacle. Our arms are more comfortable where they link together.

“Ulayya’s brother, my youngest son, Shakr, lives with her as a matter of propriety until the time comes when I find her a new husband. Shakr is only thirteen, though, and Ulayya quite effectively rules her house. I offered her a place in my own home and so, too, did her dead husband’s family. But she pleaded that she would rather have her husband’s things—his house, his memory—around her as she mourned. A lie, of course. She is fully finished with her mourning, though I am sure she is lonely and misses Zayed. The truth is, she likes her independence, at least for as long as it takes me to find her a new husband.”

I raise an eyebrow. “A dominant woman?”

“Certain of herself, but pliable.”

“I am flattered that you consider me suitable for your daughter,” I say, bringing the matter fully into the open.

Al-Hajj nods as I say this.

We pass through a small gateway and out of the tangled maze of alleys that surrounds Seyyed Abdullah’s home, in the old part of town, into the open central town square, which was once graced by the fountain-statue of a mermaid in blue tile, the same blue tile as in the mosaic of Muqtada al-Sadr’s father. All that remains of the fountain is half the catch-pool wall and the torso of the mermaid, her broken arms ending in masses of rebar and chicken wire, which had once strengthened and supported the weight of her destroyed concrete body. The mermaid no longer spouts water. The ground around her bears a countenance as pitted and dusty as the face of a beggar. Stalls for vegetable and fish vendors keep a respectful distance, as if she were a tombstone. But the smell of the food market, rotten cabbage and fish, hangs thickly in the midnight air.

I hear children running in the alleyways. At midnight? Why? Are they stalking us? Chasing the old man and the new mobile-phone vendor from the market? Are they spies? Matadors? I think of Layla. I imagine her in a pith helmet carrying Mahmoud’s gun. I imagine she has come to revenge the destruction of this mermaid. I imagine she has come with stolen bullets and sweet misconceptions of life to paint the statue of the mermaid shimmering blue again.

I stop as I listen to the voices. I glance behind me, where echoes from the walls of the alleys and the houses ring as though they were caught in glass jars.

Al-Hajj turns to face me, a step ahead, and he asks me, “Is something wrong?”

“No,” I say.

We stand a few feet apart for another moment, there in the dark town square. The voices do not return. Quickly, taking a single big step, I close the gap between the place where Ulayya’s father stands and where I have been standing. I catch his arm in mine.

“This marriage, how does it benefit your clan?” I ask. “I am no one compared to you and to yours.”

“Ulayya wants it,” says al-Hajj. “She is too old now for a young husband, too wise for a fool, too beautiful for an old man, too rich for a poor man. She is unsuitable for the men I know in this town. Your arrival here is like providence to her. She is lonely. She has her children, yes, my grandchildren, but there is a hole in her like the hole in the water tower above us, and her soul grows dust.”

He waves good-bye to the mermaid.

The gate to Ulayya’s house stands before us. We stop. He fiddles with the latch. The door creaks open. He motions for me to follow him into the yard. With a mockery of stealth we enter through the gate and find a seat in Ulayya’s blooming garden. It does not appear to me that she grows dust. Fronds of date palm sway above us. Trickles of sand from the storm snake around the fountain Ulayya herself had earlier described to me, a fountain with real water but with no mermaid at all. The pathway, crisscrossed by these trails of sand in the moonlight, looks like a miniature desert, dunes upon dunes from the thin grit and sand of the sandstorm. I notice a layer of dust on the petal of a flower, filmy as milk in the moonlight.

Ali ash-Shareefi has given me a nice speech about the rationale for wanting this marriage, I admit, but I am not wholly convinced. I think he must know something more or suspect something more. His eyes did not really light up when I gave him my family name. How could he not know ash-Shumari? How could he not be impressed? How could he not wonder whether I am part of that same family of ash-Shumari that is now at the forefront of the new government, trying to find a way to make the country work again, to bring Sunni and Shia together? The only explanation for this would be that he either really did not know the name Shumari, or that he already knew and already had made his decision to ally himself to my clan with the full knowledge, the premeditated knowledge, of who I am and what sort of failure I must represent, fleeing as I have from Baghdad.

I ask no further questions, though, but agree with the old man as he points out the many fine aspects of Ulayya’s house: the trellis of climbing jasmine, the stonework, the fine beveled glass in the windows. The house is quiet at this hour, now in darkness, and when the light in a window above the courtyard turns on, Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi whispers up toward its source: “Just me, my daughter, just your old father sitting under the jasmine.”

From above I hear Ulayya’s sleepy reply, trusting and warm: “I love you, Papa.”

Then a smaller voice, high and piping, shrill almost, speaks from a balcony jutting from the opposite wing of the house. For a moment I think it is Layla, stalking me in her pith helmet, ready to accuse me of manufacturing androids or of hoarding all the secret Cracker Jack decoder rings. But the voice coming from the room is only the voice of one of Ali’s granddaughters, one of Ulayya’s children. Ulayya says something soothing, something soft and birdlike. The two lights in the balcony windows go dark. The women of the house speak no more. Ali stands, his sandaled feet rubbing the groomed gravel pathway with a sound like the grating of teeth.