One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (11 page)

“Good night,” he says to me.

“Good night, Father,” I say as we embrace. Then I leave the courtyard and head home.

A few feet outside the gate I fill with water, like a merman planted haphazardly in a town-square fountain, a merman who sees the replica of something he has lost, like a water tower rocketed in war but patched again, the replica of a thing but not the thing itself.

In the distance I hear the American convoys revving up, once more starting their journeys north after the storm. The return of their noise, the ever-present diesel engine rumble, reverberates around the town.

A reminder, a constant reminder.

When I entered the ER examination room, the beautiful woman with the bloody arms was sitting on the edge of the bed with one nylon-clad leg crossed over the other. Her hands she held out straight at her sides, as if the blood—already mostly dry—might drip and stain her clothes. She stared at the empty cinder-block wall of the exam room to the left of the place where I parted the screening curtain. She didn’t look toward me at all as I entered, but said, “I told you already that I killed him. What more do you need to know? I killed him and I’m not sorry at all. The asshole.”

“Bashar has gone to get the police,” I said to her, my voice faltering, sounding dumb in my ears. I felt helpless.

“Who’s Bashar?”

“The other doctor.”

“Oh, shit,” she said, turning to look at me. “You’re a different guy. You look the same.”

“We get that a lot. We’re both Iraqi.”

Her eyes lit up. In perfect Arabic—high Quranic-sounding Fus’ha—she said, “I grew up in Saudi. Father worked for Saudi Aramco.”

“I am amazed,” I said, switching to Arabic as well. “I would never have thought—”

But she interrupted me: “Caught him with the babysitter.”

“Who?”

“My husband.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Damn what? He deserved it.”

“Damn, you’re beautiful.”

This stopped her for just a moment in her rage. She looked at me.

And she blushed.

13

Thursday

LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING,
like most evenings, this evening once again. It has been only a day since I last saw her but such a day indeed—a long, lonely day despite the people who surrounded me at Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s house, despite my tacit agreement to become part of the family of Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi. Absurdly, I feel as though I should announce to Layla the news of my impending marriage to Ulayya. I should tell Layla as a matter of conscience, as a matter of good form. But telling her would place her on the same plane of consideration as Ulayya. And that would be absurd.

I see Layla now. I see her before me in flesh and blood. She stands as if nothing has happened. How can she know that anything happened? She can’t know! But her mere presence, her nonchalance, makes me watchful, wary, nervous. So much has happened and I may tell her none of it. She must guess. And she hasn’t yet guessed.

So, just as she does every day on her visits, today she stands in that same shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as the sun sets behind her, where the road from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger road from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect. Twenty-nine convoys have gone north, a new record. The Americans push the supplies hard today. After delays from the sandstorm they must be running low on all the various things hauled from Kuwait up to Baghdad and Ramadi and Najaf and Mosul. Only twelve convoys come south. I imagine them bottlenecked, held back at bases farther north, where the sandstorm still churns. All the soldiers guarding those convoys, the Davids and Patricks and Winstons in their buttoned-up Humvees, all of them must be homesick, must be road-weary. And the convoy of buses for Camp Bucca, it is late as well. Due every fourth day, usually on schedule, it didn’t come yesterday. Nothing moved on the roads. Nor have the buses come today. I watch for them and I look at the notched marks on the post of my store’s door frame: six notches; should be seven now. Maybe tomorrow, resuming their regularity.

Today marks the eleventh day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-ninth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. An exhausting day. A day with no buyers. Like me, everyone deals with the sand. Sand has seeped under the door of my shack. Sand has seeped between the stacked boxes of mobile phones on my shelves, forming ridges and pyramids in the spaces where it came to rest. It has wormed into the boxes themselves. When I open one such box I find the phone inside packed tightly in sand. I find even within the wrapped plastic that a fine powdering of dust coats my merchandise. I spend the morning opening each phone, plugging it in, charging it, testing it. All but one works. I can afford the loss of a single phone. Likewise, I think to myself, I can afford the loss of a little market rat if the news—when she discovers it—of my engagement to Ulayya should scare her away.

As the sun dips lower, Mahmoud shovels sand off the overpass. I see his tea tray arranged outside his tent and I see the boy Michele with food from Bashar’s café. Mahmoud shovels sand. Michele tends to food and tea. It’s a division of labor between them like that of man and wife. While Michele waits, Mahmoud continues to shovel. The sand from his labor puffs and drifts in a cloud where it has landed on the scree of the embankment below him. It looks, in its feathery drifting, as if it is snow, so white and airy and bothersome. My mind strays to a memory of snow, of children playing in snow. I want to discuss snow with someone, a man who might understand. But I know none of these townsfolk around me in the market have ever seen the stuff. I want to go sledding. To throw snowballs. To make a snowman, a snow angel. I wonder what Seyyed Abdullah knows about snow. I tell myself I should mention snow to him. I begin with snow on the top of my mental list for our next meeting, though deep down I know I will not bring it up. I think he might grasp the idea of what I really want to talk about if I ask him about snow. He might connect the thought to America and he might think I am starting to get cold feet about our plan.

Layla stands in front of my shack, there in the shadow, and she asks me: “Abu Saheeh, how did you weather the storm?”

She means, of course, the sandstorm. But with my mind wandering I think of blizzards instead of the
simoom.
I think of snowdrifts instead of sand dunes. I look tired, she tells me. I tell her I have shoveled all day. I tell her that I have unpacked sand from packages where it should not have penetrated. I tell her that I have swept sand from my porch, brushed the dust of sand from my clothes, swallowed sand with my tea, rubbed sand in my eyes. I tell her that there have been no customers because of the storm and because of the cleanup, which is the storm’s aftereffect. I tell her all the windows of my house have frozen shut from the blizzard, iced up, the water pipes have burst and the fire hydrants all down the block have come alive with fountains of ice, feathers of ice, sculptures of mermen and blasted-apart blue-tiled ladies of the sea. I don’t really tell her that last little bit. I think about it, though: the farcical idea of this town even having fire hydrants or blizzards. I think about people wandering the streets wrapped in parkas and mittens and earmuffs. I think about frozen pipes and a new sport we might participate in, Layla and I, in which we go from house to house to shoot frozen pipes with Mahmoud’s gun, spewing ice crystals into the air.

I hear Layla’s voice, far away, her conversation droning a little. I have trouble focusing on her. I think about Ulayya, which is a change. An image appears in my mind’s eye of Ulayya immersed in the middle of a giant snowball, rolling downhill, with her hands and legs flapping wildly. She caws like a bird. Perhaps she is naked inside the snowball. I can’t tell. The
hijab
blocks everything from my imagination.

“Have you ever seen snow?” I ask Layla.

This makes her pause, but only for a second.

“I was with the Americans during the storm yesterday,” she says.

I am jolted back to the present. Turn for turn, I try to get ahead of her, asking her about snow, sharing with her a bit of my private language without giving her the secret key to the Cracker Jack decoder ring. Her response, flitting from fact to non sequitur, disturbs me on many levels: Why was she with the Americans? Why does she answer my question with something that isn’t an answer at all? Does she ever hear the words I speak? Does she guess at the idea of America that was coded into my question about snow?

At last, quite profoundly, I say, “What?”

“The American lieutenant took me into his Humvee for a ride. He found me on the side of the road and it is a good thing he found me because I came into town, to your house, to check on you. I was worried about you with the storm raging and everything. And I got confused by the sameness of the sky and the desert. I got lost. I found my way back to the road after an hour or two of wandering, and I sat there on the roadside until the American Humvees came. They gave me some water and a Gatorade and some chicken from their MREs. It tasted like sugared cardboard. Then they took me into their base with them. I stayed there for the night in a big empty tent, where the wind beat against the tent flaps and made them sound like the wings of a giant bird.”

“The base in Umm Qasr?” I ask. “The base called Bucca?”

I am incredulous. Such a thing is nearly impossible. No Iraqis get into American bases and then come back out again, not after only one day. Not without looking at least a little scared.

“No,” she says. “Across the border. The Safwan base, not the Umm Qasr base, where the prisoners are kept. The Americans call their base across the border Navistar, which sounds like science fiction, a place Darth Vader might—”

For once, I interrupt her: “That is in Kuwait!”

I am in even greater disbelief. No Iraqis ever, ever go across the border to Kuwait. Not anymore. Not since the invasion of Saddam’s forces in 1990 to regain Kuwait as an Iraqi province. Nowadays, even when the ministers from Baghdad go into Kuwait it is with much wrangling, much hassle, much bowing and hand shaking and signing of official letters of cooperation and love. When they go into Kuwait it is a matter of national attention, news, acclaim. No girl from Safwan would be let across the border, simply given a ride in a Humvee into the American base.

“I bet that next you’ll want to tell me they have robots and Arnold Schwarzenegger and genies on their base, too,” I say.

“No,” she says. “But they have delicious food. Nothing cardboardy like the MRE. I had a hot dog and a slice of pizza and a root beer and three scoops of ice cream, one vanilla, one strawberry, one chocolate, all in the same bowl. My stomach still feels full today! They like my stories. I speak to their interpreter and he tells the stories to the lieutenant and the lieutenant laughs and when he laughs all the soldiers sitting at the table with us laugh, too.”

I do not know what to say to this. I lean forward over the counter of my shop. I put my weight on my elbows to bring myself closer to her height. I stare at her. My mouth falls open. I do not realize it is open until Layla touches me, touches my chin, pushes my jaw to close my mouth. Her fingers are warm and thin. I do not expect them to be warm. In my imagination, her otherworldliness, her singing and her magical appearances and disappearances, makes her seem as if she would not share such a tangible thing as warmth with the rest of humankind. She should be cold. She should be aloof. She should be more terrible, sprung from the mind of Zeus, as the Greeks imagined Athena to be, rather than from the heated flesh of man. Such a being should not help an old merchant mind his manners by closing his mouth with slim, warm, living fingers.

“Can you tell me about Chicago?” she asks.

“Chicago?”

“Yeah, a city in America, I think. They tease the lieutenant, the American soldiers tease him, because his Chicago team loses the World Series every year or something. Is this baseball they tease him about? The World Series? Is it like the Mondial? The World Series isn’t on our television. They tell the lieutenant his city is cursed. It must be a horrible place. And it has snow.”

I look around me, at the market in which my little stall stands. And I think: this is the place that is truly cursed—the flying paper, the flying sand, the flies themselves, landing on the chickens hanging in Jaber’s kebab stand. This place isn’t Chicago. I picture snow angels. I see in my mind a flickering image of the steel-black waters of Lake Michigan where they contrast with the sheet of snow on the shore, snow blanketing a lakeside park over which loom the lights of so many skyscrapers. I see seagulls. I see children playing in snow, little groups of children scattered and at play throughout the park. They all appear safe, happy, warm, living, though I know they are nothing more than a figment of my dreams.

“Yes,” I say. “It is baseball that curses Chicago.”

“You’ve seen snow, then,” says Layla as she examines my faraway gaze. Perhaps she can see the reflection of snow swirling in my eyes. Perhaps she can see the groups of safe and healthy children who play in my mind.

“Why must you ask me about snow if you have already seen it?” she says. “You should tell the lieutenant from Chicago that you know about Chicago and about snow and about America. He would be interested in swapping stories with you like how he swaps stories with me.”

Indeed, she has made the leap into my Cracker Jack code, an astounding leap, an intuition more womanly than waiflike. She stares at me as if she will ask something more specific, something more threateningly close to the truth of the pain and the loneliness that grind like steel-black water at the small harbor sheltered in my heart.

But she only says, “I’ve brought you a gift. He gave it to me but I thought you would like it and find it more useful, my Abu Saheeh.”

She hikes up the hem of her caftan in a way that is certainly neither womanly nor waiflike and takes from a pocket beneath it a folded-up baseball cap. It is blue with a big red English letter
C
on it. I recognize it immediately, the Chicago Cubs, the cursed team. I smell hot dogs. I smell popcorn, Cracker Jack. I hear the sound of wooden bats striking horsehide beneath and behind the sounds of this dusty market, the hollow wind that rattles my tin shack, the squabbling vendors, the brooms and shovels that still ply through the settled sand, the honking of cars, the voice of this girl in front of me. She’s given me a mark of the cursed, a baseball cap from Chicago. I wonder if I should even touch it.

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I ask her.

“I think you’re a secret,” she says. “A secret like those written in the bottom of Turkish teacups. I don’t think you’re a mobile-phone salesman at all.”

A pause occurs in our conversation, a rare thing. Usually Layla skips fluently from one idea to the next. But now she waits for me. She looks at me. I look at her, then past her, through her. On the overpass behind her, I see two American Humvees pull up and stop, one on each side of the road. Lost amid my remembered sounds of baseball, I have failed to hear them coming. I have not picked the sound of their diesel engines from the real and remembered sounds that assault my ears. Now one of the American soldiers speaks with Mahmoud the guard. Now Mahmoud motions toward the market, toward my stall. Tall and tanned, with sunglasses covering the main portion of his face, his eyes, his expression, the soldier looks over Mahmoud’s shoulder toward me.