One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (25 page)

30

Wednesday, a Bomb Explodes

ABD AL-RAHIM AND I
plant the jack-in-the-box in the middle of the road, where no convoy can possibly avoid it. I unwind the mechanism. As the spring-loaded door opens and the head rises, one of the arms jams. I am forced to pry it loose. The fabric of the sleeve tears. The arm pops free from the body of the jack. I try to refit the arm to the jack but I can’t fasten it, not without suitable tools, not without suitable time. I shrug and put the detached arm into the breast pocket of my
dishdasha
.

We retreat to a mound of rubble on the edge of a quarry about one hundred meters from the road. Behind us, the abyss of the open mine provides an escape route should the Americans pursue. No Humvee can traverse the narrow goat paths down the inner wall of a quarry. Nor will the Americans have time to dismount and chase us on foot before we disappear into shadows. We wait for the approach of a convoy, the lights of which will be visible, strung out for miles like a necklace in the northern desert.

“My turn now,” I say. “Why do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Fight.”

“I am but your apprentice,” he says, rather facetiously.

He laughs again. We’ve established our true relationship, more like equals than like master and apprentice, despite our ages, despite our nominal daytime roles.

“A man your age,” I say, “perhaps he goes looking for war just as a hobby. Perhaps he wants glory. Perhaps he wants to do something interesting.”

“None of these things,” he says, and I can hear in the tone of his voice that he does want to talk.

“Of course not,” I say. “It is never that, never such a thing. Boys might pretend to fight, might dream of it, but none of them goes so long, goes through as much training as you have undergone, without having a reason, a good reason.”

“It’s not the Americans,” he says.

“Yet here we are preparing ourselves to kill them.”

“My uncle says they will just be collateral damage. He says you are doing something more important than killing a few Americans.”

“Maybe more important. Maybe not,” I say. “Certainly an older and more respected reason for war than blind jihad.”

“I don’t understand,” he says. “What’s older? What’s more respected?”

“Family,” I say.

But Abd al-Rahim only looks at me with a blank expression, his face pale and flat in the darkness. I don’t know that I can explain it to him any better, not until I know the reasons that commit him to fighting, the reasons he risks his life.

“Family?” I ask, saying the word again but with different inflection so that it points toward a different meaning. “Is it also family that makes you fight? Did Saddam kill your family?”

“No,” he says. “We fled to Ahvaz during the war, across from Basra on the Iranian side. They live there still—my mother, father, brothers, sisters, all of them. Even some cousins.”

“Then what?”

“There was a boy in my hometown in Iran, Abadan,” he says. “That was where we lived before we moved farther north to Ahvaz. The boy was a few years older than me, a blind boy. As a child, I would sit and listen to him sing outside the mosque. Most days a crowd gathered around him because of the purity of his voice, the sweet way that the Holy Suras lifted from his tongue. Other children would play ball in the square or run wild in the streets, but often I would sit and listen, adults around me on all sides, just talking quietly and listening to the boy.”

Abd al-Rahim pauses. He wets his lips with his tongue. Then he says, “They killed him.”

“So I guessed,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me. I saw many similar things.”

Yet Abd al-Rahim continues. “Saddam’s soldiers came into Abadan during the war. A great victory, they called it, retaking Al-Faw and some land from the Iranians. I tell you what I called it: slaughter. There were no Iranian troops in town. Just old men, just old women, just blind boys singing in front of the mosque.”

“There is no such thing as a great victory,” I say.

A convoy appears. It wends its way slowly toward us, heading south on the Baghdad road along a great sickle curve that shows each vehicle, each set of lights, spaced evenly, rolling smoothly, moving inexorably closer to our jack-in-the-box.

“We watch now,” I say. “Take notes in your mind. I think the things that the Humvees do in response to a bomb will be something new for you.”

“Yes,” he says.

The convoy comes nearer. For a moment it had been silent, just distant gliding lights. But soon we hear the rumble of engines and the hum of a turning multitude of tires.

“They killed him for sport,” Abd al-Rahim says when the convoy is only a kilometer or two away. He hisses the word
sport
from his mouth, loudly, with venom, as if the noise of the approaching convoy covers his emotion, makes his emotion somehow permissible. “They toyed with him. Tapped him on the shoulder so that he turned around. Tapped him again, so that he turned around once more. He knew they were there. He sensed the silence around him after the fleeing of his crowd. He kept singing until the silence came. He sang as Saddam’s tanks pulled into the square. He sang as they revved their engines, turned their turrets toward our mosque, our Shia mosque, and leveled it with a few well-aimed shots. He sang through the noise of the collapse and through the silence after it, when he could hear no more due to the ringing in his ears.”

The lead Humvee in the convoy sees the jack-in-the-box. It screeches to a halt, skidding sideways toward the jack, almost rolling over. Behind it the semis pile up, jackknifed and peeling away along the embankments. All of them stop as quickly as they can, great clouds of dust rising from beneath their wheels. The lead Humvee is only a few feet from the jack-in-the-box. The face of the jack stares into the headlights of the Humvee as if it were under interrogation. I start counting in my mind, slowly, one…two …three …

“They tapped on his shoulder, turned him around, turned him around again. And then one of the men seized the boy and cut his tongue from his mouth.”

A light from the lead Humvee shines into the desert. We duck behind our pile of rubble. Shadows jump and scatter as the light shifts from side to side, sweeping back and forth. I continue counting…ten …eleven …twelve …

“They won’t leave the road,” I say. “That is the first thing to know. You might think they will come out here. But they won’t leave the road.”

Abd al-Rahim whispers, “They cut his tongue. I remember one of them holding it in the air to the cheers of the others as the boy sank to the ground. I remember blood flowing from his mouth. It was like the boy in the market today.”

The light from the Humvee stops passing to and fro over us. It concentrates on an outcrop of stones and rock on the other side of the roadway. I look over the top of our protective mound.

“They have night vision,” I say. “They can see even when the spotlight is gone. So don’t show yourself. But watch. Watch just a little now.”

Abd al-Rahim rolls over, worms forward and up the rubble mound on his belly. My count continues, aloud but softly, under my breath: “…twenty-eight…twenty-nine…thirty…”

One of the American soldiers dismounts the lead Humvee. A second Humvee, the middle guardian of the convoy, rolls forward and stops next to him. I cease counting. Thirty-eight seconds. About what I had expected.

Voices from the two nearest Humvees carry clearly to the spot where we watch.

“If we continue whispering, they can’t hear us,” I say. “The noise of their engines is too close to them. But their voices cut through the noise to reach us, the deep growl underneath and the higher voices above. Can you hear them speaking?”

I turn toward Abd al-Rahim to see how he is doing. His hands are white, clenched tight. He nods to show me he understands.

“It’s just a joke,” one of the Americans says. “It’s a kid’s toy. A creepy joke.”

“Maybe a bomb?” says the other, more nervous about it. “Maybe a disguised bomb?”

“Too obvious,” says the first. “If they disguise the bombs they make them look like rocks or like garbage. And they don’t place them right here, in the middle of the highway. They put them on the sides of the road, under railings, against telephone poles. Someone wanted us to find it. I’m sure they’re watching.”

At this, the soldiers scan the debris heaps at the side of the road again. I motion to Abd al-Rahim and he follows me slowly, on hands and knees, staying in the shadow cast by the pile of rubble until we reach the edge of the quarry and lower ourselves down into the safety of the big pit’s impassable terrain. We walk slowly, then, slowly away from the highway toward a side road, where we plan to hitch a ride south.

Everything goes perfectly well. Our reconnaissance mission provides the information I need, confirming the convoy security element’s response time. Abd al-Rahim and I walk away from our mock bombing uninjured. We’ve established a little more trust in each other. Everything goes according to plan, at least until the soldiers demolish my jack-in-the-box with a burst from one of their machine guns.

I jump then, the noise. A shiver courses along all the bones of my body. I find myself standing over the shredded remains of a patient—car accident, coal-mine blast, a fall into a corn-harvesting combine’s grinding gears, something of that sort. Sanitary, glaring lights in a remembered American operating room blind me. I reach for a hand. I reach for a foot. I lay them on the table at the places where they should be reattached. I reach into the patient’s open chest cavity, bristling with clamps and tubes. I pull from the wet disordered organs a necklace of bird bones and dollhouse keys. It emerges slowly. I coax it out gently and steadily, like a segmented worm reluctant to leave the blood on which it has gorged.

“Thirty-eight seconds,” Abd al-Rahim says. “Is it enough for whatever you plan?”

I mean to tell him of the plan. I mean to confide in him. I know now that he can be trusted because he is fighting for something more meaningful than just himself.

But before I tell him that thirty-eight seconds should be sufficient, Layla interrupts me.

“If you are invisible, then thirty-eight seconds will be enough,” she says.

She stands beside me as I walk with Abd al-Rahim up the path on the far edge of the quarry. She tries to take my hand, to hold my hand, to offer me a little support, a shield against the darkness that plays at the corners of my vision. But I brush her away as though she were completely insubstantial.

“Did you hear me?” Abd al-Rahim asks.

I look at my hands to see if they are bloody from the operating room. I expect to find them sheathed in sterile blue latex. I expect to see myself carrying a little girl’s arm. I am surprised to find my hands empty and clean.

“I heard you,” I say. “I heard you.
Insha’Allah,
thirty-eight seconds should be enough.”

I feel fortunate that Layla leaves me alone for the rest of the trip as Abd al-Rahim and I return to Safwan. Other than noticing the quick spasmodic shake of my left arm, which causes Layla to flee, to disappear, to dissolve into the sparkling nothingness where she truly belongs, Abd al-Rahim pays her no attention whatsoever.

Father Truth!

I smash my emptied whiskey bottle against the far kitchen wall. The shards of glass scatter across the floor to cover the ground where Abd al-Rahim raped my Nadia. I spit. The glob strikes the bare concrete wall at head height and flattens into an octopus shape, its arms drooling down the wall for several seconds before the concrete and the hot night air win their battle against gravity. The spittle stops. It begins to dry and evaporate, losing shimmer, solidifying.

Father Truth!

After my confrontation with Yasin that day in front of the Baghdad palace, I bought my jack-in-the-box. Walking home to Umm al-Khanzeer, I was thinking of family, of things I had done wrong, of ways to make amends. I was thinking of Bashar leaving Baghdad. I was thinking of safety. I wasn’t looking at the outside world at all until a store window caught my eye. Sun reflected from the big plate glass of its display, somehow miraculously intact despite the recent violence.

“Masah il-kheir,”
I said to the shopkeeper. “Good evening. May peace be upon you.”

“And upon you,” said the shopkeeper as I approached.

“I see you are shutting your store for the night. A toy store?”

The shopkeeper looked at me very carefully: my Western suit, my wingtip shoes, my crisply starched shirt. He noticed my hand in my pocket as it caused a handful of coins to jingle.

“Not at all, sir,” the shopkeeper said. “The store is open for you.”

It was a matter of serendipity to find a toy store open in Baghdad. Also a matter of serendipity that I bought a jack-in-the-box.

A jack-in-the-box!

A thing intended for children far younger than any I knew. Maybe I was thinking of Bashar’s young family, though they had already left town. Maybe I bought it for myself. Maybe I thought I might hear the few remaining neighborhood children laugh, startled and jumping, as the thing burst in their arms. Maybe it had been too long since I’d heard such laughter.