One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (18 page)

“How could a friend like me expect to charge you for the honor of serving the guests at your wedding?” he says.

We close my shop and walk to my house as the sun sets, all without Layla appearing. Much to my shame and discomfort, I hold part of myself aloof, waiting for her, for the duration of our conversation. Bashar and I discuss so many things. We even fantasize about exotic honeymoons: maybe escaping to Dubai, where Ulayya and I could put on earmuffs and jackets and breathe the indoor, artificial winter chill at the Dubai ski slope. But we don’t talk about America. And we don’t talk about Mahmoud and Michele or Hussein’s use of his Hezbollah as moral police. Most certainly we avoid any mention of the song from the
Close Encounters
movie—I wait for him to ask me about it, if he will. My attachment to the song has steadily increased, the melody playing constantly in the background of my mind. I don’t want Bashar to know about this attachment, this possible blasphemy. Likewise, I am especially careful not to mention the fact that Layla has begun to infect my dreams, waking and sleeping. The combination of her dream self and her real self forms a layer of truth and beauty through which I now see the roughness and the pollution of the world.

I knocked on the door. After I stood for a few moments, staring blankly up and down the empty hallway, Bashar opened the door of his apartment, the apartment he and I had shared for close to five years.

“My father is dead,” I informed him.

Bashar wore nothing but loose-fitting
sirwal
pants and plastic flip-flops. His chest was bare—no shirt, no
ghalabia.
I needed to talk to him. I needed to tell someone about the phone call I had just received.

“Now is not a good time,” Bashar said.

“My father is dead,” I said again. “My brother is alive. He wants me to come back to Iraq. He wants me to be a spy—”

Bashar put his hand to my mouth, pushed me out of the doorway of the apartment, and shut the door behind him.

“Some welcome,” I said.

“You’re supposed to be in Ireland.”

“I’m not.”

“No bail for your murderess?”

“She won’t even see me when I visit.”

“Jesus,” said Bashar. “That’s so pathetically romantic, so
majnoon
…”

“Can I come in?”

“No,” he said.

But I didn’t hear him. I pushed past him. I put my hand to the latch of the door but before I even turned it, Nadia opened it from the inside, leaving me grasping at air.

She slapped me.

“There,” she said. “There. I hope it hurts a little. But I hope this hurts more: I’ve decided to marry your friend. You and I are no longer engaged.”

Then she shut the door, slammed it.

From behind me Bashar’s voice, keyed up a half note from the tension, said: “We’ll all be friends again soon. Don’t worry. Just give it a little time. It’ll be the three of us. The four of us. You and Annie. Me and Nadia. We’ll do things together. We’ll go bowling…”

With his words echoing behind me, I walked down the hall, away from him, away from Nadia.

I did not see either of them again until thirteen years later, when Bashar sought me out and convinced me to return to Iraq with him after the Americans’ second Iraqi war.

We never went bowling together, the three of us, the four of us. But the promise figures in the memories Bashar and I share of America, like a secret password, a code between friends.
Bowling
—​a word to represent things intended but never completed.

21

Sunday Night with a Rock the Size of a Heart

AT NIGHT, WHEN I
arrive home after walking with Bashar, I find the window to my upstairs bedroom shattered. Someone has thrown a rock through it. Big as a fist, plain brown, rough-edged. It is hard for me to look at the rock as if it were anything more than just a rock, such an obvious thing, so earthen, so devoid of symbol. Yet with the shards of glass glinting around it and with the rock itself the size of a heart, casting a Zen-like shadow on the bare bedroom floor of one of my upstairs rooms, I know it must contain some meaning, some message to me, a violent message. Children do not throw rocks as big as this. Nor do children throw rocks so high as to shatter second-story windows. A baseball, a home run, hit by a great batter, the champion among the children, maybe, just maybe, could be excused in this context. I would go into the street, find the child who hit it, scold him, and then secretly put the ball on a shelf in my house beside my Cubs hat. It would be a trophy, a monument to the skill of some forlorn child whose talent the world of baseball will never know. But rocks are not toys. And children do not hit rocks with baseball bats, not in Safwan. Children play football, European football. And when children throw rocks, they do so in jest. They throw pebbles, clods of earth, nothing more. It takes a man to throw a rock as big as a heart through an upstairs bedroom window.

I wonder: whom have I angered? Is it Hussein? I think he might really be intent on courting Ulayya. Maybe my wearing the baseball cap gives him justification to harm me or to threaten harm. I can picture him doing something as impersonal and aggressive as throwing a rock through my window. But maybe it isn’t Hussein. It could be anyone.

The warning this rock contains within it leads me to imagine men with faces wrapped, townsfolk whose eyes I know but whose expressions are turned away from me due to guilt and conflict within their hearts. I imagine them as they come for me in the night to take me, half-struggling, from my house. They blindfold me. They put me in the trunk of a car. We travel up a paved highway, one of the big roads north or northeast toward Baghdad or toward Basra. But after a few miles we leave the smooth surface of the roadway. I am rocked and bruised as the car bumps and struggles over rutted country roads, up
wadis
and down, turning to the left and to the right as my shoulders ache from the bindings that fasten my arms, ache from ropes they have wrapped around me, ache where cords bite into the flesh of my wrists to keep my hands tied behind my back. My legs cramp from the confines of the small trunk. I push with my calves against the metal of the trunk’s interior, but I cannot escape the awkward fetal position for the entire duration of the journey.

I imagine all of this. I imagine all of it right up to the point where the car stops at some dusty shack far from anywhere, a place with one light run by a diesel generator chugging in the near distance. Banditos with hats pulled low over their eyes gather under the single light, bad men. I am manhandled by them from the trunk and I am set on the ground. That is where the image ends. After this point I cannot picture what happens next. I cannot bring my imagination to complete the scene, though I have heard stories of what might occur, though I have seen pictures of what might occur. And what might occur occurs now all too often in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful. May He forgive us.

I lift the rock from my bedroom floor. I feel the weight of it in my hand, heavier than a baseball, rougher than a baseball. Through the shattered pane of glass I hear the noise of the American bypass outside my house, a sound usually muffled and insulated from me by the barrier of the glass. The sound comes through the hole in the window like blood squirting from a severed artery, pulsing, truck after truck, the labor of diesel engines and air brakes, the rumble of heavy-duty tires, the singing of metal rubbed against metal as wheels and axles turn.

With the rock in my hand I wind up, deliberately cock my arm like a baseball pitcher, lift my front leg, turn my hip, and pitch a perfectly flat beeline back through the window. I am no ballplayer. The throw is a little high, a little outside the strike zone, but it is moving fast. The rock nicks a jagged edge of the glass that remains in the window frame. The broken glass fractures completely. More shards scatter, this time outward. Now the snow of shattered glass glitters outside the house as well as on the floor beneath my feet. I hear the rock thump in the dust somewhere in the moon-shadowed orchard of date palms that surrounds my new little Safwan neighborhood.

The convoy has passed. I only faintly detect the sound of its many engines in the distance north of town. The town has grown quiet. My house feels more vacant than ever before, now that it has this opening, this puncture, this wound that exposes it to the noises of the world.

I go downstairs, open the first brown package, sit at my table, where the parts of the jack-in-the-box are still scattered. This time, to ward away the silence, I let the tape recorder play. I listen to the song of the aliens, deep and fluting but never quite imbued with the same meaning and importance and resonance as when I first heard it sung by Layla. I listen to the song over and over again, rewinding the tape, playing it, rewinding it as I drink myself to sleep for the second night in a row and hope to hear again the similarity, the echo, the collusion that exists between that song and heaven.

I laugh at myself—
Father Truth.

Thirteen years, my last years in America, are an emptiness, a vast blackness in my memory.

I know the shape of this void.

I know it well.

It isn’t the shape of Annie Dillon. I have never forgotten her. How could I? But life came between us. She got her prison time. She refused to consider defending herself, each time stating to the court her bald and unremorseful opinion: “He deserved it.” And, although at first I visited her, gradually, ever so gradually, the space between visits grew until I made the two-hour drive south to the women’s penitentiary in Dwight, Illinois, only once or twice a year.

I know the shape of the void.

It isn’t Bashar. Nor is it Nadia. Nor my father.

I can look into it, the emptiness, the thirteen-year expanse of nothing, and I can see the outline of it the way astronomers infer the existence of a black hole from the bending its gravity exerts against starlight. As with starlight, I can see things on the edges of the void, collected around it, aggravated by it, in close orbit. But I cannot see into the thing itself, despite so many nights spent staring at it through the bottom of my whiskey bottle.

Maybe it is in aggregate, in that periphery of memory, where the best image exists for me, seeing the thing in its outline as a means to draw myself closer to the missing substance. Whereas the void itself is cold, callous, and silent, the objects, the memories orbiting it, are sometimes loud, sometimes warm, oftentimes trivial, occasionally brilliant, and gut-wrenchingly real.

I see myself, for instance, working in my clinic in Chicago. I see any number of my former patients. I see their wounds, their maladies, their complaints, their whitely aged ankles with folds of skin drooping over old bones.

I see Annie’s house, her little whitewashed house. I bought it from her and nailed a black Quaker-style mailbox over the place on the hollow porch column where she had taped her farewell letter for me. I see a snow-dusted holiday wreath on the front door of the house. I see a Christmas tree lit in its living-room window.

I see myself praying, unrolling my prayer rug in the morning from the shelf in my bedroom closet, during the day in the break room of my clinic, on Fridays kneeling in Al-Fatir Mosque on Woodlawn Avenue.

In the periphery I watch movies. I watch TV.
The Terminator
and
I Love Lucy
and
Stand By Me
and
Beverly Hills Cop
and
Encino Man.
Also
Sesame Street, Steamboat Willie, Home Alone 1, 2, 3,
and
4, Cinderella
at least four hundred times,
The Goonies,
and god-awful
Barney.

I see Cubs games, Cracker Jack, popcorn, corn dogs, Pepsi-Cola, the windows of my former loft staring down at me from the twelfth story of that nearby apartment building.

I see a girl’s mittens discarded in a drifted snowbank, pink mittens.

I feel fishing line spooling out from under my thumb as I cast and reel and lounge with my feet propped on the railing of a gently rocking pontoon boat. A bobber drifts behind the boat. A loon calls from the far tree-lined shore.

These memories aren’t empty. They aren’t cold. They aren’t lonely. They aren’t upset. They are peaceful, radiant, loving, open, and detailed.

And they stand in stark juxtaposition against the thing into which I stare and cannot, cannot name. It’s a space of thirteen years into which I stare. It’s a space of thirteen years that is completely invisible to me.

22

Monday

WHERE LAYLA HAS BEEN
these last few days, I do not know. But when she visits me at last today, this fifteenth day of our acquaintance, I am like a lamp that has been stored in a closet or an attic, a lamp uncovered at last and into which a spark is fired, finding its oil still flammable, finding its light suddenly grown large and hungry, finding itself transfigured from mere spark into solid, voluminous flame.

Yes, the convoys move north and south. Yes, Mahmoud paces on the bridge. Yes, Abd al-Rahim annoys me. I find work for him as I must, a morning’s worth of work. But by the time Ali ash-Shareefi himself, my new friend, my new father-in-law, visits my shop, Abd al-Rahim has assumed his lounging attitude. I introduce Abd al-Rahim to the head of the ash-Shareefi family. And I must admit that the city boy has manners—too-fine manners, perhaps. He removes his sunglasses so that he does not hide his eyes and his soul from the old man. He bows. He addresses ash-Shareefi respectfully. He calls him al-Hajj without even having been told that ash-Shareefi is one of the few in this town who have indeed made the Holy Pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the few who deserve the title that is so blithely applied in our current age. It is a good introduction between them, and I notice that Abd al-Rahim’s attitude of perfect attention reflects well on me. He is my assistant and his conduct is my responsibility. Ash-Shareefi’s eyes have a look of wonder in them, knowing as he must that Abd al-Rahim is not a local boy. I am sure that Ali, like the others in this town, expects great things of me, and I suspect that having an assistant with shined leather shoes and American sunglasses is merely confirmation of the honor they already imagine I will bring them.

My father-in-law leaves only after purchasing a satellite dish and a subscription to Nilesat. He does not haggle with me and his expenditure is an astounding sum of money, more than I had thought to charge. All of it he pays in actual U.S. dollars. It seems more like an outright gift than a purchase. And it will certainly make things easier for me in arranging my wedding to Ulayya. Purchases on credit are normal for such an occasion as a wedding and I had planned to buy almost everything on credit, hoping my name and reputation might bear the burden. But even a few purchases in cash, or down payments of cash, open the gates of trust and fine service anywhere, not just here in Safwan.

Halfway down the street on his way home, ash-Shareefi turns and says to me, “Excuse an old man for his poor memory, my son. In talking of the satellite dish I forgot the main point of my visit today. I would like you to please do me the honor of dining at my house again tonight.”

It is an invitation I gladly accept.

So when she does arrive—Layla, my little friend—it is with much confusion that Abd al-Rahim watches me. He must wonder: how can a man soon to be the son-in-law of al-Hajj ash-Shareefi acknowledge such a girl as Layla? How can he have these conflicting bits of personality: ascending social aspirations yet also easy familiarity with the dregs of the earth?

Layla is not on her unicycle when she arrives, a thing for which I am thankful. She is not covered with oil. She hasn’t just shot Mahmoud’s Kalashnikov and returned it to him empty. She is not singing alien songs or dancing Britney Spears’s hip-thrusting dances. She is a little girl, just a little girl. As she walks down the street she extends her hands for alms, for
baksheesh,
on the chance that one of our merchants or one of our shoppers might feel pity today. She could be anyone, though I notice her ankle with its bird bones and yarn, white in the glancing rays of the sun.

Abd al-Rahim tries to shoo her away when he first sees her standing in the shadow of my shop. She emerges from the shadow with her hand out, palm up, her face turned toward me, smudged and open-eyed, pitiful, not grinning with any familiarity at all. Abd al-Rahim sees her, sees the reality of her, her physical presence. I am glad he sees her, because I had half convinced myself that Layla was all along nothing more than a mirage, a genie, a bit of flotsam cast loose from my imagination.

Abd al-Rahim sees her and brushes her away from the shack with a look and a gesture that would surely scare away any other beggar child. His eyebrows crease into a frown. He glares. Yet he remains aloof, too, as if to say, “Your life and your death matter not at all to me. It would be a little thing to me, nothing at all, really, to toss you out of a moving car somewhere deep in the desert.”

Thinking he has shooed her away, Abd al-Rahim leans over the counter of my shack, looking from the outside in. I lean on the counter, too, on the opposite side, under the cover of the shade of the tin roof. Between us we have spread the engagement gifts, little trinkets, really. Each of them I will wrap and then have Abd al-Rahim deliver to Ulayya’s house on the days between now and the engagement party. One for each day, as is the custom in this far southern part of the country.

Abd al-Rahim refocuses his attention on the gifts, points to one of them, a length of blue silk. Then he notices that I no longer focus on the silks, the linens, the rolls of wrapping paper and bright bows. He looks at me and then he looks back over his shoulder at Layla, who has not fled at his first withering glance. Abd al-Rahim straightens, turns, and takes a step toward Layla with his hand raised as if to do her at least a little bodily harm. What does he care? What is she to him?

“Stop,” I say.

Abd al-Rahim does not expect this from me. He does not expect my interference. He hesitates.

Poised on the curb of the road, they stare at each other, Layla and Abd al-Rahim, a lioness and her prey. Layla looks at me, looks at me for approval. I shake my head at her. Whereas Abd al-Rahim’s earlier gaze did nothing to her, my disapproval affects her much more noticeably. First she frowns. The sunlight disappears from her face. Then she drops a little package from her hands into the dust. She stands there, a shadow falling on the package. She hovers over it and looks from me to Abd al-Rahim and back to me again. I see one of the corners of Abd al-Rahim’s mouth slowly turn up, a feral half smile. He has measured her, judged her age perhaps more accurately than I at first judged, weighing her on a scale of his own shameless appetites.

The change in his look, from one of utter dismissal to intense yet impersonal interest, breaks Layla’s will, breaks her ability to stand firm in the dust in front of my store under the combined intensity of my disapproval and his desire. She turns around and runs back into the market toward the north, through the narrow tented alleys between the shops. And so she disappears. She has said nothing. Her visit isn’t as remarkable as most, except for the fact that she has come and has been seen by someone other than me and has left me what appears to be a gift, a gift wrapped in plain brown paper with a little silken blue bow under which the stem of a single orange flower is lodged, a desert flower.

Abd al-Rahim takes the package in his hands and lifts it carelessly from the ground.

“That was strange,” he says with leering intensity still coloring his features. His voice has a slightly snarling sound to it, higher pitched, as if his throat has constricted. Yet he speaks without alluding to the change. He speaks as if to cover, to hide from me the change that has overtaken him, saying: “What a strange sort of beggar child to leave behind a gift! Most of them take, take, take, hands out, pouting faces, poor little children. I am sick of them, sick of them all. But this one shies away at the last moment and leaves us whatever this is. Do you think we should open it?”

He begins to finger the blue bow and the seams of the brown wrapping paper that cover the package. He lifts it toward his face and smells the flower.

“I know her,” I say. “The girl visits me every now and again.”

Abd al-Rahim raises an eyebrow at this.

“Visits me here at my shop,” I say quickly, lest he—like Bashar—get the entirely wrong idea about the relationship between Layla and me.

I hold out my hand for the package. Abd al-Rahim gives it to me but looks at it as if he expects me to open it in front of him. I don’t give him the pleasure. I put it in a pocket under my robe. I will open it later, after I close the shop, after I go to dine again at Ali ash-Shareefi’s house. I will open it after the day is done and when I am at last alone with my disassembled jack-in-the-box, my tape recorder, and my bottle of whiskey.

I look down at the wedding gifts arrayed in front of me. Abd al-Rahim and I have spoken about them all at length. We have consulted Bashar about them: the silk, the cotton, the linen, the jewelry, the crystal cups, the clothes, the package of henna to adorn Ulayya’s feet and hands. Bashar approves of them, of course. He approves of me adding someone new and real to my empty shell of a life. He approves of me starting over, starting anew, putting the past behind me. He approves of these things, I think, because of Nadia.

Abd al-Rahim and I have done all the consulting, talked all the talk, completed every minute examination I can think of with regard to these gifts, their symbolism, which to give Ulayya first, which last. The topic has been thoroughly exhausted. There is nothing new to say about any of these things, nothing that will take Abd al-Rahim’s attention away from the other gift, the new little package Layla left on the ground for me.

Worried about what Abd al-Rahim might ask me in regard to my relationship with Layla and having nothing else of substance to distract him from the package, I say out of desperation: “Meet me at my house tonight, maybe ten in the evening, maybe later. You will know when the sounds of revelry from ash-Shareefi’s house go quiet. Then I will be on my way home. We will work late, so please bring tea for keeping your mind sharp and candles for lighting our work when, like most nights, the electricity fails.”

Abd al-Rahim nods to show me he understands and agrees. He does so very slowly and precisely, not wanting to ruin the moment of trust between us with any sort of spoken words or any sort of overt display of excitement. Then together we close the shop, one of us on either side of the corrugated tin shutter, letting it fall slowly so that it doesn’t disturb the screws Abd al-Rahim has finally fixed, first with his hammer and then later with a proper screwdriver. We let the shutter fall slowly so that it doesn’t scratch the fresh coat of paint he has applied to the exterior of the shack. We let it fall slowly so that it doesn’t tear the temporary sign he has made of paper letters and glued to the front face of the shop, a sign that proclaims
MOBILE PHONE SALES
. Below those big letters is a line of smaller script spelling out the name of the proprietor, me, Abu Saheeh, Father Truth.

In Baghdad my friendship with Bashar flowered anew. He convinced me to return, to take a job working for him in the Ministry of Health, helping patch together our countrymen and our country after the Americans at last overthrew Saddam in 2003.

Our days were filled with important meetings, planning sessions with generals and ambassadors, delegations of visiting senators and members of Parliament. Bashar and I asked for and received many millions of dollars to rebuild hospitals, to hire doctors, to reinvigorate vaccination programs, to treat our fellow citizens who had suffered either directly from the war or indirectly from the long period of sanctions against Iraq.

I was sewing up the bellies of many thousands of ripped-apart kittens, helping many thousands of Iraqis. And the evenings were filled with wonderful parties in our gated and guarded little diplomatic community on the island of Umm al-Khanzeer, an island on which Saddam had built houses for his ministers, an island accessible to the rest of Baghdad only by a small bridge that connected it to the west bank of the Tigris River. There, on plush lawns, amid the clink of wineglasses and the rush of rambunctious children around us, Bashar and I toasted the success we thought nearly within our grasp: a new Iraq, a place where a family like mine, split into Shia and Sunni branches, need not fear subjugation by one sect or another, a new democratic Iraq where power might be shared among the Kurdish peoples, the Shia, and the Sunni.

Thinking back on it, I remember that I became very fond of one of Bashar’s several young daughters, a tenderness of the sort I might have felt had the girl been my own child. I played catch with her in our fenced backyard under the high whitewashed walls of our home, lulled by the shifting shadows of tall watered date palms, charmed by the scents of climbing jasmine and bougainvillea. I remember putting a ball cap on the girl’s head, a Cubs cap, of course, fitting the adjustable strap to her small head. I remember her smiling at me, even giving me a shy but warm kiss on my cheek.

I remember all this about Bashar’s daughter but I find myself unable to remember her name. I rack my brain to think of her name but it does not exist in my mind. I hear her voice in my memory, but each time I speak to her in those memories I call her something sweet, some little pet name or another: “my bird,” “my pet,” “my dear.”