One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (23 page)

All throughout this Nadia looks at me until finally, when Abd al-Rahim pauses to remove his clothes, she mouths the single word
help
in the direction of the window from which I watch.

I drop to the ground just as I hear the heavy thud of Abd al-Rahim’s pistol hitting my kitchen floor amid the general discard of his clothes. He has forgotten it, forgotten the place where he stowed it before Nadia showed herself to him. I crouch for a second beneath the window and listen. Abd al-Rahim groans as he falls upon her, but she remains deerlike, noiseless. I can’t determine, by listening, whether they grope on the floor together or whether they remain standing. It does not matter. He will take her. He controls her already. She does not resist, does not scream. She does not give away the fact that she might have a rescuer near at hand. She will submit, and he will enjoy her submission.

I enter the front door of my house. I move stealthily. In the darkness I see again Nadia’s naked form replayed in my mind, the silhouette of it, the curving hourglass. I feel myself stir, not only from pure and painful animal longing, the likes of which Abd al-Rahim now feels, but also from a sharper and deeper place. I ignored her in America. I ignored her, as best I could, in Baghdad. I ignored her when I felt her watching me from the bowered windows of Bashar’s new Safwan home. But I don’t ignore her now. I can’t ignore her now. She is standing on tiptoe in my memory, waiting for me to kiss her in the garage of my father’s mansion. We are children again in my mind, with all the sweetness and promise of life stretching before us.

Nadia, like Abd al-Rahim, begins moaning, though, unlike Abd al-Rahim, her moan is not of pleasure. It’s closer to a grunt, containing all the pressure of holding back, of preventing herself from calling out for me to save her. I take another step into the hallway. I hear Nadia shudder. She verges on screaming; her exhalations become intense. I rush forward down the hallway and then stop just at the doorway of the kitchen. I wait in the last bit of shadow before the kitchen light. There I see Abd al-Rahim standing over her. He has already put on his
dishdasha.
He is refastening his pants under the folds of cloth. He picks up his oiled pistol from the floor and puts it back into his belt, hidden again. He has finished with her already. She lays spread wide and breathing heavily on the floor of the kitchen, open to me in all the carnal emptiness a body possesses when it ceases to dazzle. I stop and I watch her for a moment and then, when Abd al-Rahim goes back to the table to work on the jack-in-the-box, leaving Nadia to gather her clothes, I quickly turn and walk from the house, back out the front door and into the darkness of the streets outside.

When the cool night air hits my face, the flush of heat evaporates from me and my thoughts calm. For a moment I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what to think about what I have seen and what I have done. I want to think that it was more than just cowardice that kept me from intervening. I would have had to kill Abd al-Rahim and I’m not sure I would have succeeded. More than that, I would have had to flee Safwan afterward, for Seyyed Abdullah’s loyalty must lie with his family first and must supersede any bonds he and I have forged. It would have been the ruin of everything I have built here, the shop, the coming marriage to Ulayya, my friendship with Layla.

I want to think I am not a coward of this sort, to think first of the things I might lose and then, only second, of Nadia’s pain. I begin to justify my actions, telling myself that leaving was, actually, the correct thing to do in order to preserve Nadia’s honor. She can be silent. She can return to her family, her shame a private thing, a secret. Had she encountered me alone, as was her intent, the secret would have remained between us, regardless of whether I took advantage of her or not. But had I rescued her from Abd al-Rahim there would necessarily have ensued a hue and a cry from which her honor could not possibly have emerged intact.

I do not know whether the course I have chosen, through my inaction, was correct. But what has happened is finished already. I cannot go back. I would change so many things, but I cannot go back.

Forgive me, Nadia.

One particular day as I returned to Umm al-Khanzeer from the Green Zone in Baghdad, I met my brother, Yasin. He approached me in front of one of Saddam’s barricaded palaces, a place the American military leadership occupied as their headquarters, surrounded by American tents and American dining halls and American gymnasiums. I carried my briefcase full of papers. I wore a business suit, black, and I had loosened my shirt collar to let heat escape from my chest on the sunny walk home.

“Greetings, brother,” Yasin said to me.

I knew it was him. Immediately, even before I saw him, I knew it was him. I tried to ignore him. I tried to walk past him, but he wouldn’t let me continue on my walk without acknowledging him. He wouldn’t let me pass without stopping, for a moment, right there in the middle of the day in front of all the military might America had brought to our country.

He wore a
dishdasha,
leather sandals. Though we looked similar, tall and dark and broad-shouldered, we were differentiated by our costumes and our stances, I straight-backed and hurrying, he easing out from under the shade of a date palm to stand in front of me.

“You may still join us,” he said.

“I have nothing to say to you,” I answered.

He put his hands on my shoulders and drew me close as if to kiss me on each cheek, but I turned my face from him.

“Look at you,” he said. “All fancied up in your American suit. Have you become a Jew?”

I gave him no satisfaction by replying.

“Certainly you’re a Zionist, an occupier, a traitor,” he said. “But we know you really want to help Iraq. I’ve been sent to give you another chance, maybe a last chance.”

These words of his did not bother me. He could call me what he wanted. I knew of the strife occurring in the rest of Baghdad, the rest of Iraq, the cleansing of mixed Shia and Sunni neighborhoods, the foothold al-Qaeda had made in our disenfranchised, dissatisfied Sunni former ruling classes. I had long expected a threat like this. I expected, even, to hear the threat delivered from someone close to me. I had thought it might be Nadia’s father, Abdel Khaleq, who came to persuade me, a far more difficult man to deny than my brother. Hope remained in my heart if good Sunni men like Abdel Khaleq still resisted al-Qaeda, still strove to make Iraq a better place. Such hope helped me continue my work with the Americans. Such hope helped me deny Yasin.

I ignored Yasin, gritting my teeth and letting him insult me. But he had one deeper, more cutting threat to deliver.

“We’ve heard of your
kafir
wife in prison and your half-American, half-Iraqi little—” he said.

This was too much for me.

I launched myself at Yasin. With all my weight, I stepped inside his widespread embracing arms and leveled my shoulder into his chest. The blow sent him sprawling to the ground. He looked at me, there, for a long, hate-filled moment.

“You will regret this,” he said.

Then he reached into the front of his
dishdasha.
I thought he might take from it a gun or a knife. I thought he might kill me, right then and there. I braced for him to rise. I even lifted my briefcase in front of me, my only weapon. But before he picked himself up from the ground he looked around at the domes and turrets of Saddam’s palace, at the weapon-toting troops on the sides of the roads, at the dark-windowed bulletproof SUVs and armored Humvees policing the gated, dusty roads.

Yasin retracted his hand, empty of any weapon, from the folds of his
dishdasha,
picked himself up from the ground, and brushed himself off. Then he walked away from me along a road of dusty American tents and out a side exit, a pedestrian exit. After passing through this fence he disappeared into the Baghdad throng.

27

Wednesday, Michele Smiles

LAYLA DOES NOT VISIT
today, not in the daylight, not face-to-face. Her method has changed. I receive from her the gift as surely as I send, through my emissary, Abd al-Rahim, my own gift to Ulayya. So her presence remains strong with me here, here in my shop, though she no longer stands in shadow under the awning of my little store in the lovely slanting sunshine. Her gifts continue and they continue to match exactly the gifts I provide to Ulayya: today it is linen, fine linen, finely woven, enough to make sheets for the nuptial bed, as is the custom, though I am sure Ulayya’s sheets will be silk, imported from Paris, the finest available, at least after our traditional first night together.

Today is not only the seventeenth day since the beginning of Layla’s visitations, it is also the thirty-fifth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. What is more, today is the last normal, uneventful day of my time here. I feel it in my bones now, as the day unfolds. I feel it in the slow and timeless way that the sunlight passes from morning, at its nadir, into its evening goldenness. After a busy week, the calm comes as a relief. I use the lull to think. I luxuriate in the lack of pressing details, the fact that I need not arrange anything, for everything important is already in motion. I need not attend to anything, for the correct patterns are well established. I need not watch the road so closely, or the Americans, or the town, because they have begun to ebb and flow in me and I would sense any disruption as I would sense a quickening of my own heartbeat. The only concern I have is Layla, for she is the wild card, the lightning that might strike me any moment, the unexpected arrival, the thing that could cause me to turn from my decided path. She does not come to me in person, does not visit. And I am glad, almost, not to see her. At a safe distance from me, her presence is like the tickling lift of fine hair on arms and on neck when a thunderstorm passes near, the reminder of lightning without the danger of its shock.

My eyes refocus on the present time and place, and I see on the edge of the road above me Mahmoud once again lounging on his three-legged chair, just exactly as I saw him the first time I noticed him. Indeed, he smokes his cigarette with the same deep concentration while his Kalashnikov rests lazily against the tent behind him. So, too, the men in the shop behind mine play cards the same way they play cards every day. So, too, the chickens are hung in Jaber’s store from the same hooks as always. The same flies swarm their carcasses, or at least descendants of the original flies, who repeat an inherited and stable pattern of chicken swarming. This is the way here: centuries, millennia, shifts of time and person and government make only a slight impact. People in this land between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, do what they have done every year, every decade, every lifetime. The set cycle may ripple under the interrupting influence of war. The set cycle may change, slow as geology, wearing away glacially, the language no longer Assyrian, Babylonian, the religion no longer centered on the idolatry of the gods of Baal, but the same people, the same lives, the same skies and rivers and deserts and dreams. Things never change suddenly here. They never leap into robots and American movies. For that reason I feel it keenly: the sense that the tingle at the base of my neck will leave me when Layla leaves, when Layla goes to America to start her life anew with the American lieutenant. I will be like the Ziggurat of Ur, left to crumble in the stillness of time.

When Abd al-Rahim at last arrives at the shop, standing there in the slanting light, he is contrite. Quickly I replay the image of him in my mind, the swift sure stowing of his pistol under the folds of his
dishdasha.
I think of one word to perfectly describe him:
overqualified
. He is overqualified to work and to live in a town such as Safwan. The place is too small for him. Yet when he arrives at my shop he does a good job acting like he wants to learn, like he at least wants to make the effort to blend in. He has brought the repaired jack-in-the-box with him. He offers it to me.

“Not tonight,” I say. “I am tired tonight and the pace of the world is such that one day, one night, one moment will not matter.”

Abd al-Rahim nods in agreement. He says nothing to me. I wonder if he feels that he will betray himself, betray the liaison he and Nadia experienced, if he speaks too much, too quickly, too loudly. He does not know that I have seen him in the act. He does not know that I already am aware of his transgression. I watch him for signs of overattentiveness and overcompensation. Truly he must fear he will expose himself, yet he is natural. He acts naturally. He has been well taught in the means of disguise, emotional as well as physical. He hides his emotions as well as he hides his pistol.

Finally, as we are closing the shop, Abd al-Rahim says, “I am sorry I fled from the Americans.”

I accept his apology, saying, “A young man like you, with all your life ahead,
insha’Allah,
you must be careful, prudent.”

“Must be careful,” he says, echoing me.

As he turns to walk into town ahead of me I watch for the shadowed outline of his pistol. I want to know if he wears it all the time, or if he only put it on to visit me last night. It isn’t odd for a man to wear a pistol here, or a knife. As his uncle Seyyed Abdullah says, “These are dangerous times, lawless times.” Nothing strange in wearing a weapon, just strange to wear it so well.

I watch for the outline of the pistol as we walk into town and I do not see it until he plants his right foot and turns, stepping down from the curb into the street. The fabric of his
dishdasha
flows over the hilt of the weapon, catching on it and leaving a minuscule bulge, as if his hip bone projects farther on the right side than on the left. I have not noticed that shadow before. But now I see it. I see it every time he steps. I try not to pay too much attention or to be too joking, too easy, too serious, too harsh. I make myself into a swarm of flies, ubiquitous and everlasting. I hide my knowledge as though in a jack-in-the-box: I am noisy, rancorous, in a great mood, expansive. I tell him stories about Baghdad and America. I reveal myself but I do so only to camouflage the fact that my mind has wrapped itself around him more completely than he knows.

“When I returned to Iraq from America,” I tell him, turning toward him and walking half sidewise, crablike, down the road toward Bashar’s café, “the first thing I remember when I returned was the smell. It is funny how the body’s senses grow immune to such things. America doesn’t have strong smells like open-air markets, the rotting vegetables, the rotting fish, sewers flowing uncovered in the streets. Everything is so clean there, so antiseptic.”

“So fake,” Abd al-Rahim says.

“My bags came off the plane,” I say, pretending not to hear him, “and I remember looking at them and feeling like opening them in Iraq would be like opening Iraq to everything American.”

Abd al-Rahim spits on the ground. “America,” he says. “America is nothing but greed, cowardice, and Israel.”

“America is freedom,” I say. “America is a torch for the world.”

Abd al-Rahim stops walking. Right in the middle of the street he turns to face me. He keeps his expression blank, eyes not meeting mine. He’s trying to remain submissive. I watch his right hand, the one closest to his gun, because as he stops walking he uses it to smooth the slight creasing of his clothes over his gun’s hilt. It’s a telltale sign. His mind drifted to the gun, briefly, at my mention of America, and his hand unconsciously drifted that way, too.

“We’re not ready for freedom here,” he says, very softly, still submissively. “The people need strong leadership. They need to be ruled.”

The thumb of Abd al-Rahim’s hand remains relaxed. When he goes for the gun the thumb will open away from his fingers before his hand moves in order to better slide through the slit at the waist of his
dishdasha
and then over the hilt of the weapon hidden underneath. I am sure, if he goes for the gun, he will do so smoothly and quickly. So I watch for his thumb to indicate his intentions. The thumb does not move, but it is ready.

“I have some strange opinions of America,” I say. “Especially for a jihadist.”

“My uncle cautioned me about this,” Abd al-Rahim says.

I smile. It is enough of a confession. I know, from it, why Abd al-Rahim works for me. I know why the sheikh assigned him to me. Abd al-Rahim isn’t here to help me. He is Seyyed Abdullah’s insurance policy on me, my ticket out of town when I’ve finished my work. He is overqualified as an apprentice, but perhaps not so overqualified as an insurance policy.

I think of ending that possibility, here, now, in the American way: confronting him immediately in the street, like a gunfight in a spaghetti western, except I don’t have Clint Eastwood’s steely blue gaze or grizzled chin. Nor do I have a gun. The idea fades. The moment passes. Being gunless at a gunfight is a bad idea. I opt for my rancorous approach once more—pulling Abd al-Rahim closer to me, grabbing him by his shoulder. I drape my arm over him, throwing him off-balance, and I lean on him a little as we continue through the crowded market street toward Bashar’s café. We walk that way, shoulder to shoulder, parting the crowd, until we pass Bashar’s busboy Michele heading the opposite way, hurrying toward the overpass bridge with the nightly platter of food for Mahmoud.

Michele smiles when he sees me, recognizing me from Bashar’s café and perhaps also from his times passing through the market on the way to Mahmoud’s tent. His thin face is washed clean and shining. He averts his gaze from me until I say, “Hello.
Masah il-kheir,
fine evening.”

To which, in reply, he touches his right hand to his smooth forehead and says, “Good evening to you. Good evening to you both, gentlemen.”

Michele sees Abd al-Rahim. He notices Abd al-Rahim’s cosmopolitan dress, the clean clothes, the fine shave, the shined shoes, the folded sunglasses stowed with care in the front breast pocket of his
dishdasha
. He notices how I have thrown my arm around Abd al-Rahim, warmly and trustingly. He finishes his quick examination of us and smiles again, more brightly, aiming the smile at Abd al-Rahim. Abd al-Rahim refuses to say anything. He does not even look directly at Michele.

We part ways, heading in opposite directions.

Abd al-Rahim spits again, and perhaps begins to curse the sort of freedoms Michele represents, saying something like, “In Baghdad this would never—”

Yet before he finishes his sentence a scream silences the crowd around us, continuing and even building in intensity, shrill and loud and shocked, as a ripple of fear causes the people, all of us, to freeze. A smell reaches us, sweet and sickeningly hot. Abd al-Rahim and I turn toward each other.

My mind goes blank for a moment, a sweaty, black moment, and I find that I am holding my brother, Yasin, by the shoulders. I am holding him and shaking him and pounding at him with my hands, clawing at him with my fingers, stabbing at him with a whirling assortment of knives, clean lancets and saws, dirty garden tools. I want to kill him. In my mind I destroy him, pulling him apart limb by limb. I spit on the pieces of him as I toss them from his deteriorating body into the gutter, where the
wadi
dogs come running to fight over his remains.

I blink. I discover I am holding Abd al-Rahim by both shoulders. He isn’t Yasin, but I am shaking him, trying to push past him. He won’t let me pass.

“Let me go,” he says.

I realize where I am. I realize what I am doing. I hear the piercing shriek not far down the street from us. I see my fingers knotted in the fabric of Abd al-Rahim’s
ghalabia
. I release my grip. I brush Abd al-Rahim’s shoulders, a little clumsily, by way of apology. He shakes himself free of me and runs toward the sound of the scream. He runs back the way we came, back down the street, and after a moment, I, too, run. I follow Abd al-Rahim.

We run toward Michele.