One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (22 page)

I look about me to see where Abd al-Rahim has gone, to determine why Abd al-Rahim hasn’t warned me. I see him at last, quite far off, walking away as quickly as he can through the blue-tiled arch and into the maze of streets in the older part of Safwan. He has lifted a fold of his
dishdasha
to partially conceal his face. He has fled. He has deserted me. Cold feet or too hot a situation, I cannot tell.

“Surprised?” asks the interpreter. “We came from the town hall meeting and the lieutenant wanted to stop to see you. We’ve been watching you.”

I have nothing to say to the man. He hasn’t even greeted me or wished me a good afternoon as is customary and proper. I turn back to the mobile phones on my shelf. I show him the same respect he shows me.

“What did you mean when you said ‘the jack’?” he asks me again.

I try to ignore him, but in my mind I fumble for an explanation:

It is harmless…

It is nothing…

A toy, a game…

A little entertainment for my nights alone…

It’s just something I take apart and put back together, a neurosis…

I try to find something harmless to say, but everything seems like a lie. Everything is a lie. The blood drains from my face as I feel the interpreter’s gaze fixed on the back of my head.

Just then, though, the lieutenant pulls the interpreter aside. They have a short conversation together. I look around my store, hoping there might be some way to gracefully run away. A moment later their talk ends. Together they approach my store and lean even more casually over the counter. Their two heads are shaded by the canopy of my tin roof.

The lieutenant speaks to me with the sort of slow exaggeration usually reserved for the aged and hard of hearing.

“Dear Merchant, I Want To Ask You Something,” he says, looking at me and then motioning for the Kuwaiti to translate his English words into Arabic.

The Kuwaiti says only: “Storekeeper, I want to know what this ‘jack’ you speak of is.”

I have understood the lieutenant perfectly well. Most Iraqis know at least some English, so perhaps my slight startle of a reaction, when I hear the interpreter purposely ignore the words he was supposed to translate, is excusable.

“My Problem Is Kind Of Difficult,” the lieutenant says. Again, he motions for the Kuwaiti to translate for me.

“You will pretend,” says the interpreter, “that I translate correctly. That way you and I can have a real conversation while this American says whatever silly thoughts have inspired him to come here into your godforsaken market. If you don’t pretend well enough, if you don’t play along like a nice little boy, I have influence enough on the Kuwaiti side of the border to shut down your business and the businesses of your future father-in-law.”

I nod to show that I understand. I look at the lieutenant and smile. He smiles back at me. His teeth are white. I wonder if they are fake. I wonder if they are robot teeth. I want to tap them with a chisel to see if the white enamel reveals a Terminator metallic alloy underneath. He is too clean-faced, too fair-haired, though he’s sweating a little so that his cheeks flush pink. His dark sunglasses seem like a shield for his youth and he holds himself in such a way that he seems to be compensating for his age, for his good looks, for his cleanliness—chest out, chin high, a wad of chewing tobacco protruding from his lower lip.

The Kuwaiti approves of my conduct, my appearance of unworried greeting. He, too, smiles at me, an imperious smile. We all smile at each other.

The lieutenant speaks again, at last more naturally, the smiles relaxing him: “I am sorry. Introductions before we go any further. My name is Boyer. I am in charge of the American patrols on the road to the west of Safwan. All the convoys that go north and south, my men protect them.”

“Nod and smile in return,” says the interpreter, “and tell me a little about yourself. You are new here and different from the other store owners. You carry yourself differently. Are you from Basra Province?”

“Tah-sharafna,”
I say to the lieutenant. “Pleased to meet you.” And, to the interpreter, I say, “I sell mobile phones and subscriptions to satellite TV.”

“Your name?” asks the interpreter.

His question catches me off guard, the subtlety of it. I have forgotten in the days since I began my work here the importance of names. Everyone in Safwan accepts me as Abu Saheeh, an honorary name, a joking title, maybe, enough to be known and to do business in an illegal market without causing too much commotion, especially since my real name has at least some connection with the Shia and the southern people. But the name Abu Saheeh won’t work for this conversation. Presenting it would seem too glib and informal. The interpreter wants my family name. I put my hand over my heart again. I bow a little. I try to buy time as I scroll through a mental list, people I know, families I know. Something convincing. The interpreter has worked in Safwan a long while, so he knows all the families. He knows I am not ash-Shareefi. He knows I am not a member of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s clan. He will also know my own clan, ash-Shumari, a name I will not give him. Perhaps the Americans, and through them this Kuwaiti interpreter, are concerned that one of their government officials has gone missing. Perhaps there has been a bulletin on me, a wanted man, throughout the country.

On the other hand, perhaps they are lazy, careless, unaware, uninformed. Perhaps I am safe. Either way, I will not take the chance.

I say, at last, “Bashar.”

“That’s a first name,” says the interpreter. “Family name?”

The lieutenant interrupts again, somewhat annoyed with the Kuwaiti. “If you’re done making friends with him already, can we get to business?”

I steel myself for the tough questions that will follow. The interpreter knows I am getting married. He knows the business I run and the businesses Ali ash-Shareefi runs. What else does he know? The brown packages? The items smuggled across the border? Has he seen me with Layla?

The lieutenant and the interpreter talk to each other again. They argue. I can’t give them Bashar’s actual family name: Dulaimi, the former defense minister’s family. Though it is a big tribe, the name would be suspicious here. A Baathist name. I like the idea of a big tribe, though, the anonymity of it, the countless number of men named Ali or Kareem or Muhammad or Bashar within the ranks of such a tribe. I think of other large families. I think of Layla. Suddenly, spontaneously, a name occurs to me. I blurt it out, interrupting the conversation between the interpreter and his boss.

“Al-Mulawwah,” I say.

“Bashar al-Mulawwah,” says the interpreter to his boss.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” says the lieutenant, an aside to the interpreter.

Facing me again, the lieutenant puts a sheaf of about five papers on the counter in front of me.

“I need you to sign these,” he says. “I want to adopt the little girl who told us stories in our mess hall during the night of the sandstorm. She told us you are her guardian, the only person responsible for her, and I need your permission to bring her back with me to the United States. She’ll go to a good school and have all the advantages of life in the USA. What do you think?”

This further confuses me. My mind whirls. The Kuwaiti continues to ask me difficult questions as I ponder the paperwork the lieutenant has placed in front of me. I answer him somewhat at random. I look through the papers somewhat at random.

Layla? Adopted? America?

“Why do you talk to yourself?”

Layla to become the daughter of this American man, this lieutenant?

“I am married,” the lieutenant says. “I have a good family back in Illinois, which is a state in the very middle of the United States. The big city of Chicago. You may have heard of it?”

“To which part of the family of al-Mulawwah do you belong? From which city? Are you Yemeni? Who are your relatives? Why have you moved here to Safwan?”

“We need your signatures for the adoption.”

“What’s this ‘jack’ of which you have spoken? Is it a code word?”

“It will be a few weeks, a few weeks for the paperwork to clear after you sign. Then she can come home with me when I am done with my duties here in Iraq.”

Be glad for her. Be glad.

A convoy draws near the western bypass, slows as it begins its turn off the highway and onto the smaller road that leads to the Kuwaiti border. Instinctively, we all turn our heads to watch it. The noise of it is distant but penetrating. When it has passed I take the papers from the counter in front of me, fold them, and put them in the inside pocket of my
ghalabia
.

“I will think about it,” I say to the interpreter in Arabic—the low Arabic of the market, the low Arabic of the southern marshes. “You will have an answer from me in a few days’ time.”

I first saw Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah at one of the many interminable meetings at the headquarters of the American forces in the Baghdad Green Zone. Bashar was not there. So it must have occurred after he and his family fled, though I’m not quite sure.

“And now Dr. ash-Shumari will brief you on the status of the health-care system,” said the American officer in charge of that particular briefing.

Around the horseshoe-shaped table in the bare-walled conference room sat various military personnel as well as members of the elected governing councils from some of the regions of Iraq, cliques of men, each faction with a seat at the table.

“At last we have ironed out a system to ensure the flow of medicine to northern hospitals,” I said, starting my briefing. “The supplies will, at least temporarily, come through with American military transports from Kuwait. This is the only way to ensure that critical items reach their destinations.”

I noticed one of the well-dressed, fine-suited men in the room lean forward from his place along the side wall of the room. He whispered in the ear of the deputy governor for Basra Province. The deputy governor then raised his hand.

“Yes?” I asked. “What may my honored colleague be pleased to know?”

“Will the Americans still pay customs at the border crossing in Safwan?”

“If they come across on the American convoys, through the American military’s own crossing point, customs won’t be necessary,” said one of the American officers at the table. “It would be like paying the government to pay itself.”

As the officer said this I watched the man by the wall. His face was impassive. But the face of the deputy governor for Basra flushed red.

“This will decrease Basra’s revenues,” the man said.

“It will make medicines cheaper and more available throughout Iraq,” said the officer.

I was glad not to have to argue the point. I knew what was happening. It wasn’t Basra’s revenues that would suffer. It was
baksheesh
charged by officials at the civilian border crossing that would decline.

I noted, again, the passivity of the well-dressed man. He was really the man in charge of the Basra faction. It was his revenues the new plan endangered. Yet he seemed content to let the Basra deputy conduct the futile argument with the American officer.

I thought to myself that if Bashar were here, he would know this man’s name.

I filed the incident away in my mind for future reference, labeling the well-dressed man as the true power holder on the Kuwaiti border. The Americans would be wise to make a friend of him.

26

Tuesday Evening

ABD AL-RAHIM DOES NOT
come to dine with me at Bashar’s café this evening, as I instructed him to do. I eat alone as usual. In fact, I am even more alone than usual. Bashar does not visit my table. I am unsure of his whereabouts until one of his employees tells me he has gone to Basra to make arrangements for an engagement feast he plans to cater. Of course it is my engagement feast, but the employee does not know this. I wave the man away from me. I eat my falafel slowly, dipping little bits of it in hummus with my fingers.

I spread the lieutenant’s adoption papers in front of me and stare at them. I read all the fine print. I look thoughtfully at the several places where my signature is required: adoption, naturalization, a waiver of any legal rights I might have with regard to Layla’s future, a waiver of my visitation rights so that no problem arises, no future requests for seeing her that might facilitate my emigration from Iraq. I am not part of the deal, beyond the necessary permissions. I wonder what name I will use when I sign each block. Bashar al-Mulawwah. What a dumb-sounding name!

The cord that connects me to Layla will be cut.

I try to guess whether Layla knows anything of this matter. I wonder if the American lieutenant has asked her if she wishes such a thing. I do not doubt what her opinion will be, what her decision must be. I hear her voice in my mind ringing with enthusiasms, speculations, newly birthed associations. She will live next to Sharon Stone. She will ride in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s motorcade. She will throw a shoe at George Bush. Surely the lieutenant has come under her spell in the same way that I have. And his solution is better than any I have pondered. It will be no easy thing for him to navigate the extradition and adoption laws, but still better than any future Iraq could possibly offer Layla, unless I were to adopt her myself, unless I were to leave this place with her and return to America or establish a new life somewhere else, France or Australia, Sweden or Fiji.

As Bashar and I sat together one previous night, he brought up another idea, an easier idea, an idea that was like an elephant in the room, too big and too obvious for either of us to ignore.

“Of course, you could simply marry her, if you’re so concerned about this market girl,” he said.

I shivered a little, inwardly, but didn’t say anything in response.

“It’s the traditional way to resolve such a situation,” he said. “We’re in the countryside now. Things are different here. No one will find fault with you for marrying a girl her age. It is what Muhammad himself, Peace Be Upon Him, advocated for the widowed wives and daughters of those men who fought in the great opening of the world at the beginning of Islam. It is one of the reasons he permitted a man to marry more than one woman, so that they might have shelter and protection.”

“I’m too American now to consider such a thing,” I answered.

This put an end to the conversation. It put an end to Bashar’s suggestion. But as I walk across town to my house, I think about it. It’s not just the concept of marrying someone so young that bothers me. It’s Layla herself. I think of her too much as a daughter to truly contemplate the idea of marriage. She might think about marriage, but I do not. Bashar might think about marriage, but I will not.

I stop walking before I reach the military road, a few hundred feet from the house, and watch from the shifting shadows of an alleyway as a convoy passes northward in the night. Truck after truck, diesel fumes and dust cut by swaths of jouncing headlights, some sulfur yellow, some halogen bright. The drivers in them are fresh, wide-eyed, heading north into the war zone from the safety of their homes and workplaces in Kuwait. How many similar trips have they made? How many rolls of the dice have they taken on these dangerous roads? So far they’ve won each roll. They live to drive northward. Each trip, they have escaped—narrowly or maybe even blindly, blithely—a fate following them closely. But for how long will their luck hold?

These truck drivers are not Americans. They are contracted Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Laotians. They speak a thousand languages and are herded north, north, north, always north, by Humvees nipping at their heels. Those Humvees are the only place where actual Americans work on convoy duty: the Winstons, the Davids, the Patricks. The American soldiers don’t expose themselves in the thin-skinned semis. They are cocooned beneath layers of Humvee steel.

The rumble of this convoy’s passage lasts five minutes, ten minutes. I don’t time it exactly. I just stand and watch. When they are gone and when the dust has settled, I cross the road and disappear from the floodlit area of the American occupation into the shadows that surround the cluster of newer homes where my own house is located.

I enter my front gate. To my surprise, the light in my kitchen glows. I see it from the gate and it makes me pause, makes me stop in my barren courtyard to consider. I try to remember if I left it lit when I went to the shop this morning. I have no clear recollection of turning it on or of turning it off, yet I never by habit leave it on. Each day I check off my morning list of chores and habits as regularly as I check off my list of daily observances at work. It is a more mundane checklist by far, but regular: lift head from table; wave once or twice to ward away the spirits and smokes of the dream from the space above and behind my head; listen for the ticking of the clock, the crowing of roosters; listen for the rumble of convoys, that ever-present background noise without which I would feel hollow; wash face, hands, neck, arms; unroll prayer rug and perform the morning
salaam;
prepare coffee, just one cup, an American thing, coffee in the morning, and then a flatbread, jam; robe myself; clean my teeth; stare at the organized chaos on my kitchen table, how it grows, changes, modifies itself each night as my hands wander over it. Then I leave for the shop, turning off the lights, shutting the blinds, locking the doors. That is the routine, sometimes varied in time, waking before morning light, waking at first appearance of the light, waking somewhat after the sun has risen, but always those same steps.

No, I didn’t fail to turn off the lights this morning. I followed every step. I remember them all now, clearly, all the steps, even to the point of feeling again in the first fingertip of my right hand the smooth cold nub of the light switch as I backed out the front door and flicked it down to darken the room.

The glow from the window spills flat and orange on the ground to one side of my courtyard, a pool of lit dust. Rather than enter through my front door, I first step around the bright patch, sneak toward the window, use my arms to pull myself to the height of the iron-barred pane of glass. I look inside. To my relief, I see only Abd al-Rahim there. He has a screwdriver in one hand, a roll of duct tape at the ready on the table in front of him. His back is bent over the table, over my jack-in-the-box. He is working, a study of concentration, and though he squarely faces the window, he does not shift his focus from the work, does not notice me spying on him. The door between the kitchen and the main entryway, the hallway, remains open behind him, as if he entered in haste and did not care to hide his presence. He is at work on the project I assigned him, and I get the feeling he works so as to appease me, an unspoken apology for fleeing from the Americans this morning. My heart warms for him, doing this little thing for me. I imagine that he will apologize in words, grand, eloquent, rhetorical words, when I enter. I will pretend to scold him, but in truth I will be drawing him nearer to me. I will reject the improvements he has made to the jack-in-the-box. I will reprimand him. But I can’t truly fault him for his excess of caution in the moment when the Americans approached us.

The muscles of my forearms begin burning from the effort of supporting myself a foot or two above the ground. I release both hands and let myself fall. The short drop produces a muffled thud, just enough to draw Abd al-Rahim’s attention. I hear him put down the jack-in-the-box and the screwdriver.

“Who’s there?” he says.

I am about to reply when I hear another voice, a woman’s voice, from inside my house.

“Just me,” the voice says. “Your dear old friend.”

Quickly I lift myself to the window again, grabbing the same iron bars. I look inside. Abd al-Rahim has spun to face the door on the opposite side of the room. He holds a gun low at his waist, a sleek black pistol pointed in the direction of the female intruder, but hidden from her, too, hidden behind a fold of his draping
dishdasha.
I can see it plainly from the window because he does not attempt to hide it from behind, a direction from which he expects no interference.

I see no woman. I look from corner to corner of the room. I see no woman, but neither does Abd al-Rahim. He says, “Show yourself.”

I am surprised, but only momentarily, to hear how well he imitates my voice. “Show yourself,” he renders in a tone twenty years older than his own, a deeper, gruffer, more firmly controlled voice. He is clever enough to hide himself as long as he can, even while the voice of this woman, the voice he and I have heard, seems more seductive than threatening. He is cautious. Abd al-Rahim is far more cautious than I would have thought.

“To one like me who has visited America and who has partaken in its culture of decadence, the words
show yourself
could have many meanings,” the female voice, still hidden, says in heavy tones.

I recognize the voice now: Nadia.

Abd al-Rahim lowers his pistol. He secretly lifts the fabric at the back of his
dishdasha
and slides the barrel of the weapon into the waistband of his pants. He looks down, straightens the folds of the overgarment to make it look normal. He does a better job hiding the weapon than Seyyed Abdullah’s bodyguard does. He has been trained, and the inadvertent display of this training gives me a moment’s pause: the rhetoric in front of the mosque, the training. Who sent him here to Safwan? Is he an agent of Iran? I know Seyyed Abdullah has connections that point toward Iran, as do most successful Shia. For example, it is known that Seyyed Abdullah studied at Qom for a period. He is a man of the book, a minor religious figure. It would be natural to accept one of Iran’s undercover Revolutionary Guard into this town,
his
town. Such a simple thing, hiding a weapon. But to do it well requires training, and Abd al-Rahim has done it with deftness, speed, and fluency while keeping his eyes focused in front of him where he expects Nadia soon to reveal herself.

The soft sound his hands make passing over and arranging the fabric of his
dishdasha
is matched, echoed, by a slightly more voluminous but similarly soothing whoosh of cloth from Nadia’s direction. Abd al-Rahim stands straight and puts his hands in front of him, forcibly relaxed.

The next moment, Nadia steps into the doorway opposite the place where I watch. I can see her over Abd al-Rahim’s shoulder. She has unclothed herself and she stands naked and unashamed in the place where the light of my kitchen first touches the dark safety of my hallway. A shadow snakes over her sensuous middle and divides her body, one half lit, one half hidden.

“God bless America,” Abd al-Rahim says in his own, higher-pitched voice as he advances toward Nadia like a man walking in his sleep.

He no longer pretends to be me. His body eclipses Nadia, passing directly in front of me, between the spot where I watch and the place where she has undressed. He continues walking. Her face and her nakedness emerge from behind the blockage of his body, bit by bit, as he proceeds.

I have never seen her completely unclothed. She is lovely, a full woman, no girl. Her hands are on her hips, swelling hips that have been changed by childbirth, made fuller and glassier, rounded and whitened from lack of daylight, marked by their forbiddenness and made more alluring because of the shocking difference between that which had been secret and that which is made suddenly and wholly bare. Above her hips, her belly slims like a tapering candle but neither so suddenly nor so deeply as to show at its top the outline of her ribs. There is a layer of smoothness, fat and fullness and cushion, even before the swell of her breast shadows her lovely waist.

I am guilty, my gaze lingers too long. I notice too late that Nadia does not concentrate on the figure of Abd al-Rahim gliding toward her. She stares past him. She looks at the window from which I watch her. Slowly her openness and her unabashedness dissolve. One of her hands covers the black center of her pubis, while the other whips across her breasts to push them tight against her. White flesh bulges on either side of her pressing arm. Her eyes widen. They flicker away from me, glancing at Abd al-Rahim to confirm that he is indeed not the man she had expected to find in my kitchen. She looks at him and fear touches her face, a black shadow that leaves the counterfeit blackness of the kohl around her eyes looking false and frivolous. She does not recognize Abd al-Rahim at all.

Abd al-Rahim does not notice her fear. He is focused now. He is unthinking. He is animal. He sees her before him, but his preoccupation with her physical self obscures from him her fright, her withdrawal, all symptoms deeper than the skin. Or maybe the fright and withdrawal themselves are alluring to him. When he reaches her, he pulls her to him and forces her arms and hands from sheltering her shame. She resists, but only slightly, squirming and striking him softly on the chest and on the shoulders in ways that only serve to increase his desire.