One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (13 page)

15

Thursday Evening at Bashar’s Café

WHILE REMEMBERING THIS FIRST
night in Safwan, Bashar and I sit and talk to each other in the very same place where we reunited. Yet now we talk about my engagement to Ulayya. I know Bashar brims over with happiness inside himself, though he remains controlled and calm on the outside. He questions me with the voice of a disinterested person but with the intensity and clarity of a man fully involved in the topic.

“No, I don’t know where we will have the engagement feast. Nothing has been formalized yet.”

“No, I haven’t met with Ulayya and the rest of the family of ash-Shareefi, though I intend to do so before long.”

“No, I do not plan to sell my house. Maybe we will keep two houses, both houses.”

“No, the fact that she has children by another man doesn’t bother me. I am an old man. I have no conflict helping her raise them.” To which, almost as an afterthought, I mention that I had indeed already seen and heard one of Ulayya’s children speaking from the child’s balcony room the previous night.

“You have done what?” asks Bashar.

“I was sitting with her father, you fool,” I say quickly, in case he thinks I have exchanged my disguise as a practical, middle-aged, respectable businessman for that of a lover, singing beneath windows, reciting poetry, mooning. “Ali ash-Shareefi led me there last night to show me the house. We sat in the garden together after our walk across town from Seyyed Abdullah’s home. I think this will be the first real challenge in my marriage to Ulayya, if Allah indeed wills this marriage, for the woman seems quite settled in her house and I am not willing to part with mine. Perhaps we will keep them both, both houses. One house for the family and the other house like a separate
diwaniya,
a place for me alone, when I want to be alone.”

“You will lose, brother,” says Bashar with a knowing laugh. “A woman is the government when it comes to the house and the home.”

“I will have to take your word on that matter,” I say.

Mention of homes and of houses makes me think of snow, of Chicago. The snow makes my heart and mind feel still, quiet, blanketed, cloistered. I look away from Bashar and his gaze follows mine, out across the busy street toward the town’s finger-thin minaret and the electric loudspeakers affixed to its bricked-up, old-fashioned windows. When I look back at Bashar I notice that he focuses on my baseball cap.

“Your hat is drawing a lot of attention,” he says. “People in the street have glanced at it. I’ve overheard several in the café talking about it. They will tell Hussein, I’m sure, and it will be declared
haraam
from town, forbidden. His Hezbollah will have a real reason to bother you. They’ll say you’re Western. They’ll start to look into your past. They’ll find out that you’ve lived in America, that I’ve lived in America. Then there will be hell to pay.”

“It’s just a baseball cap.”

“We don’t wear baseball caps here, my friend.”

“I’m starting a new trend.”

“New trends are out of style.”

“I know. Call me crazy.”

“I think some people are indeed calling you just that,” he says. He lets the thought hang.

After a long moment I say: “Ulayya does not remind me of her. She doesn’t remind me of her. Not at all.”

Quickly Bashar becomes conciliatory, quiet. “I know, it must hurt,” he says.

“Every day,” I say. “I was swept up by the moment and by the hope of the times we lived in. It was a bad decision to come back. I wish I could return to Chicago.”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” Bashar says.

“No,” I say. “No, of course not.”

I am crying and I don’t even realize it until the tears hit the waxed paper that protects the tin plate on which my
shawarma
had been served. My tears make a crinkling noise as they hit the paper. I pull off the baseball cap and use it to shield my face.

After a moment, as if certifying the idea that I am indeed going insane, I put the baseball cap on my head again and say, “I told her about it.”

“Who? What?” he says.

“The engagement,” I say.

He waits.

“Who?” he says. “Who did you tell?”

“The girl,” I say. “That girl who has been visiting me in the market, Layla. I told her that Ulayya and I are engaged. I don’t know why I told her, but I did.”

Bashar stands, pushes himself away from the table. He eyes me suspiciously again. “You are indeed going insane. I think this marriage will be good for you, my friend. Maybe the only thing that can help you.”

He steps away, turns his back to me as if he is going to leave me. But then he turns around and faces me again.

“I warn you, my friend,” he says. “These are difficult times. Hezbollah will crack down on you for something like this. Inappropriate relationships are very much frowned upon these days.”

“What do you mean by that?” I say.

The muscles at the sides of his mouth clench. He doesn’t intend to say anything more, but neither does he turn from me to flee into his café.

“What do you mean?” I say again, angrily, though I control my voice. “Do you imply that I take advantage of this girl?”

I stand. Bashar and I face each other, almost chest to chest. The hard, partially molded brim of my baseball cap touches his forehead. Sweat from his brow clings to the cloth lip of the cap, a fat quivering droplet suspended just at the place where the focus of my vision blurs.

I am about to say something else. I am about to, maybe, say something I might regret, something to prod Bashar still further in his accusation, something to bring the matter fully into the open. But, at that very moment, the busboy Michele moves toward my table to sweep away my dishes. He must think I have finished eating. He must think Bashar and I have stood because we are done with our conversation. He must think that the table is ready to be cleared. When he approaches and realizes that Bashar and I confront each other in anger, he backs quickly, quickly away from us, off into the shadows of the bowered door. He says nothing. But Bashar darts a guilty glance at him. The words of Bashar’s last statement flit through my mind—“inappropriate relationships are very much frowned upon.”

I fix my gaze more firmly on my friend and I say to him, very quietly, “You told Hussein.”

Bashar does not deny it.

“You told him,” I say. “You told him what I thought about the bridge guard.”

“He’s lazy and incompetent,” Bashar says at last. “You said so yourself. And it is good, important for me and for my business. Important for me and for my family to keep on Hussein’s good side.”

Bashar and I sat together for coffee in the hospital cafeteria before the start of our shift the next evening.

“You’re glowing! You look like a new man!” he said.

“Thank you! I had no idea—”

“You’d never, you know, with Nadia?”

“I told you, she’s always been like a sister to me.”

“And this murderess, this—”

“Her name is Annie.”

“—this Annie. I guess you felt no similar inhibition?”

“
Ya Allah,
” I said, rubbing my eyes with exaggeration to show Bashar I hadn’t slept at all.

“She’ll go to trial. She’ll be in prison,” he said.

“I’ll pay her bail.”

“That’ll only delay it. Then what?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a strange night, a strange day. I’ve got to think.”

“Don’t do anything too crazy,” he warned me. “You’re a good doctor and you’ll do good things in your life. But once you get an idea in your head—”

“You know, it was my father who called, all the way from Iraq. It was him on the phone when I had to step out of the room.”

“What did he say?”

“Good-bye,” I said. “He said, ‘Good-bye.’”

“That’s odd. Do you need to go home to him?”

“No. He said Abdel Khaleq is finally sending Nadia here to America.”

“It’ll be a pretty scene when you introduce Nadia to your pretty little murderess of an American mistress.”

“I know. I know. My father will disown me,” I said.

I stood from the cafeteria table, leaving my coffee and my half-eaten plate of dinner, peas and scalloped potatoes and questionably
halal
meat loaf. I paced. But only a little. Just two strides away from the table and one stride back toward it. Then I froze. My gaze fixed on Bashar. I grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him squarely in the eye.

“I owe you so much already from yesterday,” I said. “I hate to even think of asking another favor of you.”

“Anything,” he answered.

I told him my idea, an idea I thought he wouldn’t mind: that he would host Nadia—take care of her, show her the town, show her America—while Annie and I ran away.

Bashar agreed. He remembered that I had described Nadia as being pretty. And he knew her family, Abdel Khaleq. He agreed most eagerly and, without delay, we launched into detailed, mischievous planning. So intent were we on our scheme that we did not notice the television in the cafeteria as Brit Hume, the ABC reporter, announced the entrance of Iraq’s armies into Kuwait. Only later did we pay attention to Saddam’s invasion and the repercussions that would follow.

16

Friday

THIS DAY IS A FRIDAY.

I would omit it from my story, for nothing happens. The stores are closed. The market is closed. The houses are closed. The mosque, with its dusty spire, hums with life.

I would omit this day except to do so would be akin to omitting Allah. I spend the day in contemplation and surrender. I spend the day in my home, every moment in prayer, with my concentration distracted only by the sound of the highway to the north, the cars and trucks rolling along it, the American convoys with their fitful stops and starts, air brakes squealing, as they pass through Safwan.

Perhaps the sound of the highway lures me back to the market that afternoon. I decide there is no harm in stretching my legs. I go to a small hill between my house and the market, a place where I am at the same height as the overpass and can see across the roofs of the houses and the shops. I stand there as sunset casts warm colors across the land. I look for the American convoys. I look for Layla. I see Mahmoud’s replacement, the man from the police force who gives Mahmoud his weekly Friday respite. He is a fat man. He never stirs from Mahmoud’s little three-legged chair for the entire time that I observe him. When the boy from Bashar’s café, Michele, brings the evening plate of food, the fat man takes the plate and eats it all while Michele waits. Then the man calls the boy close to him, wipes his greasy fingers on the boy’s
dishdasha,
and waves him away. The police send only their best and brightest to guard my overpass.

I leave in disgust, thus ending the twelfth day since Layla’s visitations began, the thirtieth day I have owned my shop.

After my shift I rushed back to Annie Dillon’s house to tell her the solution Bashar and I had devised. Yet instead of finding her wrapped in the sheets of her bed where I had left her, instead of finding her waiting for me, I returned to a locked front door, darkened windows, and a folded sheet of plain lined paper taped to one of the two hollow wooden columns that framed her little front porch.

The note wasn’t addressed to me by name but the content left no doubt. It said:

Like any lover, I read, reread, dwelled upon the words, the meanings, the hidden meanings. Though the message seemed a little off-kilter, a little too conditioned, a little too measured, still I extracted from it great pleasure, the words
loving you
and
good sort of madness
especially. They seemed to me to contain important promises for a future that I imagined we might spend together. The words did not, in all those many first readings, hint at good-bye.

I drove directly to the police office nearest to Annie’s house.

“Yeah, she’s here,” the booking officer told me. “She showed up this morning with a little suitcase of clothes and makeup. Just like a flight attendant. Funniest thing.”

I reached for my checkbook, spread it open on the counter between the policeman and me.

“I want to pay her bail.”

“It hasn’t been set. And anyway, she refuses.”

“What?”

“She refuses,” the sergeant said. “She told us specifically that she would not accept bail if anyone tried to post it.”

“What?”

The sergeant whirled his finger in the air next to his forehead and rolled his eyes: crazy. “She said she’s guilty and that she’s happy to serve her time.”

“Can I see her?” I asked.

“No,” he said, quite simply, and though I tried to argue, tried to convince him, tried—even—to pay him, bribe him, he could not be moved to change his mind.

I left the police station and, like any lover, I read and reread Annie Dillon’s letter. I dwelled on its meanings once again, and the meanings seemed to change, to morph in front of my eyes into ugly, bald dismissals. I could hardly believe it. It could not be. She could not know that I would try to free her, to run away with her, to throw away my life for her. It ruined the plan Bashar and I had developed—he and Nadia getting to know each other, alone in Chicago, while Annie and I went to Greece, Russia, Fiji, Kilimanjaro. Annie needed to play along. She had to come with me. It was impossible, given my feelings toward her, to consider that she would refuse me in such a blanket fashion. It must be wrong. I must have heard wrong. The police sergeant must have misunderstood. After such a night, after such wonders, how could coldness of this sort possibly exist in the world?