by Caleb Adams
“What they say is true,” she said. I turned to find she had finally raised her head so that I could see her face. My God, she looked even younger than I had originally thought.
“What is true?” I asked.
“That I am a Caliphate whore. Within my belly is a Caliphate child. But I will not part with it. It is from God. Praise be to Him,” she uttered in this voice that I swear came with some sort of reverb. I remained silent. “You can go now. Do not worry about me. God will protect us. He has told me.”
“I am not leaving you here,” I replied. “Come on, let’s go. They might return.”
I helped her to her feet, and we walked for a bit. However, with her ankles bound, we were not putting enough distance between us and the spot where I had found her. So, I lifted her in my arms and started to carry her. My arms weakened quickly though, and I had to put her down. I looked back from where we had come and thought I heard voices. It seemed wise to just get off the path. The next residence we came upon we entered. I ushered her to a seat on the ground. From my shoulder bag, I took out a piece of bread and offered it to her, along with a plastic bottle of water. She shook her head, then fixed her eyes on something off to my left. I followed her gaze and saw that we were not alone.
The woman met my eyes and then looked over to the girl, after which she stood up and began to walk toward us. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. The red dress she was wearing hugged her body tight. She had the figure of a teenage girl but her face, while still beautiful, had run ahead to about forty years of age. She had red hair. The ends of it fell over her breasts, which were half exposed and still firm. I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
She knelt and placed her hand on the girl’s cheek. The girl smiled. I was looking at her ivory-pained nails when my nose began to twitch. Frankincense. That is what she smelled like. I knew the scent well. After my graduation, I had traveled to Israel for a month. In the Old City, in the markets of the Jewish and Muslim quarters, it burned day and night.
“You may go to your business. I will look after her now,” she said to me in an Eastern European accent that I guessed could have been either from Ukraine or from the Russian Federation.
“They want to kill her,” I said.
“They will kill no one,” she answered with a bit of a huff and imperiousness that dismissed my admonition.
“I’ll leave you this knife.”
“We do not need it,” she said, using the pronoun to indicate she had already claimed possession of the girl.
“Fine then. I’ll be back after my shift with something to remove that padlock.”
“It will be gone by then.”
I gave the girl one last look and stood up. I was about to cross the door when I turned my head over my shoulder. The girl already had placed her head against the bosom of the woman as if mother and daughter had been reunited.
As I began walking to the commissary, the unsettling words of the young girl returned to my head: “Within my belly is a Caliphate child. But I will not part with it. It is from God. Praise be to Him. You can go now. Do not worry about me. God will protect us. He has told me.” When I first heard them spoken, I was still shaken from having a knife at my throat, so I didn’t have the time to really think them through. Now, as I was walking alone, they became a disturbing companion. What could she have meant by saying it was from God? Did she truly believe that with a sane mind, or was it just a delusion of a frightened young pregnant girl?
I reached the commissary at 11:53 a.m. It was lunchtime, so there was a line of people waiting to make use of their work credits for items such as soap, candles, shoes, underwear, and some snack items if available. No real food though per se. Real food was distributed solely at the food line and meted out only by ration cards, which were equally distributed at the first of every week. Most of the time, that was the only way one knew that another Monday had arrived. Needless to say, there was a thriving black market for what could be eaten or drank. While illegal according to our bylaws, no one to my knowledge had ever been brought up on charges.
The line as always looked like one that was leading to an infirmary rather than for one that was leading to a store of necessities. Few spoke, and understandably so, for what really was to be said. I saw the soldiers arrive and I walked over to them. I handed them my identification papers, and after reviewing them, they asked for the password. I opened the envelope and said, “Search and Destroy.” We moved on. I counted three bends along the freight tunnels when I was rudely pushed up against a wall. There I was frisked. There they bound my hands and placed a hood over my head. The general wasn’t taking chances. And why should he? I could have easily been one of them.
✽ ✽ ✽
As soon as I arrived, he dismissed my escorts and shoved into my chest a stack of notebooks written in Arabic.
“Put these in English and have them on my desk by the end of the evening.”
“Yes, sir,” I said and then saluted him.
“You got a fucking date, Translator?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Then put that salute away and sit your ass down somewhere. This isn’t a goddamn take-home assignment. I lost three men retrieving those. They’re from a post just outside the city. Pretty fucking important, I’m guessing.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
I got to work immediately. The general was right. They were pretty important. The notebooks contained troop movements, a roster of new recruits for a buildup in the city they were starting, correspondence from high-ranking Ayla officials, and some information that detailed our latest attacks in the city. While I was working, I kept glancing over to him. He had taken off his uniform jacket and was on a bench lifting weights. In between reps, he sat there re-stringing a guitar. When he finished with both, he stripped out of his camouflage shirt. The silver cross and chain that had oddly been in his shirt pocket and not around his neck fell to the floor. He didn’t notice, and so while he was pulling out a new shirt from a desk drawer, I went over and picked it up.
“You finished already?” he asked after turning around.
“No, sir. Your cross and chain. It fell out of your pocket while you were removing your shirt.”
I held out my palm, and he swiped it into his own.
“Thanks, Translator,” he replied and placed it in the pocket of his new shirt.
“You’re welcome, sir.”
I didn’t leave at first. I was having trouble reconciling the cross and the man. They didn’t seem to belong together.
“You got something else to say?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why the fuck are you still standing there?”
“I was just wondering about the cross, sir. You don’t seem like . . .”
“Like the type who would have a cross?”
“Well yes, sir,” I answered. “Something like that.”
“Since you’re so goddamn inquisitive, the cross was given to me by my grandmother when I was nine. She unclasped it from around her neck in a hospital room and placed it in my palm a few hours before she died. It’s a fucking gift of remembrance, nothing more. If she had handed over her fucking dentures, then that’s what I would have in my goddamn pocket. Now get the fuck back where you were.”
“Yes, sir.”
✽ ✽ ✽
I started back in on my translating of the notebooks. The troop movements and build-up near the edge of Ayla I learned were due to a threat from another faction that was nearing the city. This faction appeared to be staking a claim to Ayla. It took me another three hours or so to complete. I then composed a summary for the general. I brought it to his desk and placed it in front of him.
“A little fucking summary. Goddamn. Good work, Translator. The last motherfucker just handed over the translated documents and left me to read through all the other shit.”
“What do you think?” I asked him after he lowered my two-page synopsis from his eyes.
“I’m not in thi
s position to think, Translator. I am in this position to know. And I know that in a week’s time there’s going to be a war above our goddamn heads. And that’s good for us. That will keep them occupied and off our ass for at least a little while. First Sergeant Johnson.”
“Yes, sir,” a young man immediately replied as he stood up from his position at a long table where the computers were.
“Get your ass over here and escort Translator to his new quarters. I’m done with him for the day.”
“Do you want me to bind and hood him, sir?” the first sergeant asked.
“No, I want you to take his goddamn hand into yours and whisper into his ear all of our little secrets. Of course fucking bind and hood him, Johnson. This motherfucker just translated a stack of Caliphate documents like he had been born in Saudi Arabia. The last thing I need to wake up to tomorrow morning is a thousand fucking towelheads outside my command center waiting to light me on fire.”
First Sergeant Johnson walked off to the back of the command center. In the interim, I stood there by the general’s desk and watched as he reached in a drawer, took out a Bible and started reading from a point where he had placed a bookmark. I suppose I didn’t realize I was watching him. It was just that, as with the cross he was toting, I couldn’t seem to understand the juxtaposition of a man of war reading a book of God. His eyes floated off the page and fell onto mine.
“Now I suppose you want to know why the fuck I’m reading this, don’t you? Right now, I’m betting you’re thinking I’m some kind of Jesus freak.”
“No, sir. That’s not exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Then what the fuck are you exactly thinking?”
“I’m just wondering whether you actually believe in God or if you’re just studying him.”
“That’s good, Translator. I suppose I would be pondering the same goddamn thing if I were you. To tell you the truth though, I’m not really sure. All I know that if there is a God, He sure does like a good fucking war. Think of all the battles that have been waged in history while He’s been at the helm. And He never steps in right away. He always watches and waits. Waits for the stones to be thrown, the arrows to be shot, the cannonballs to be fired, the mortar shells and rockets to be launched, the chemical weapons to explode, the atomic bombs to be dropped, and now the biological agents to be delivered. You believe in that God, Translator, you better ready yourself for heaven because it sure as hell isn’t likely to be as peaceful as everyone’s been saying. This guy’s got a voyeur’s penchant for watching destruction, and there’s no sober reason to think that if He does exist, His kingdom is filled with flowing fucking rivers and endless fields of lavender. My best guess is that when we arrive there, He is going to give us a big old salute, hand us a perfectly tailored military uniform, and then proceed to tell us which fucking team we’re on.”
I didn’t know what to say after that. The words left me dumbfounded and rattled. Not because they at first seemed so outrageous, but because they seemed so logically constructed. This couldn’t have been the first time man had contemplated this. Certainly, on some tablet, in some scroll, in some text or in some e-mail, another one of us had postulated a heaven such as this. It couldn’t possibly have been given birth today. First Sergeant Johnson returned. He hooded and bound me. My first full day was over.
Entry #2
The next day I awoke early. I was in my new quarters now, in which I was the only occupant. A luxury and privilege here. But an accommodation necessitated by the work I was going to be doing. I’m certain the general ordered it. If there was any translating I had to take home, he wouldn’t have wanted any other eyes to fall upon the papers.
I walked over to the Department of Occupancy and Vital Records to give notice that I had moved. A requirement for those of us who changed quarters. For some reason, they had no record of me but would enter my new address. On my way back, I found an official envelope pinned to the wall. It said I was to report to the Department of Excavation until further notice. I started to give it thought but then realized if it was truly a reassignment, and the general had been displeased with my services, then I would have been evicted from my new place of residence.
The Department of Excavation was ball-busting work. It was twelve-hour days of either carving out the clay earth just on the other side of the tunnel walls or hauling it away. Rumor had it that we were trying to link up with a Sector 3, which rumor also had was situated to our south. I’m not one for rumors down here. You hear so many of them that eventually you stop believing in their validity. The girl from my course on Arabic and Islamic Studies was still there. For the first few days, we just exchanged glances. On the third day, we started to copulate. There weren’t any long discussions and there wasn’t any intimacy. We barely even kissed. After our long days, I would follow her back to her quarters. She would lay down, turn on her side to face the other way, and bring her pants and underwear to her knees. I would pull down my own and hold on to her at the waist. She would be in her own head, and I would be in mine. We didn’t want love. We didn’t want commitment. We only wanted the mutually agreed upon touch of another human being. We only wanted that ephemeral flash of release that pushes out everything else you had been thinking about.
✽ ✽ ✽
After my tenth day at the Department of Excavation, I was awoken, hooded, bound, and taken away. It was 5:55 a.m. when I entered the command center. The place was already a hive of activity. I sat in the corner of the room at the desk where a sheet of paper had been taped to a wall that said “TRANSLATOR.” My place had now been permanently assigned, as far as one could define permanent down here. The general was pacing about from one end of the room and then back to the other. He reminded me of a cougar I had seen at a zoo once, except for the knife in his hand. That my cougar didn’t have. Strapped to the interrogation chair this time was an Ayla woman. Her niqab and abaya were on the floor, leaving her covered with only a very modest beige undergarment, which was embroidered at the chest. I guessed her to be mid-thirties. She was quite thin and wearing black-framed glasses. She wasn’t bruised and she still had both her ears. They must have just started the interrogation I thought.
“Goddamn fucking rats. It never ends. You kill one, you kill twenty, it doesn’t seem to matter. They just keep coming back again and again and fucking again. Rats with thobes, rats with uniforms, rats no older than nine, rats from Iran, rats from Yemen, and now a rat with a black abaya carrying an AK-47,” the general said to all of us. “And why in the fuck do they keep coming through our sewers. None of the other sectors seem to have this much activity.”
My eyes left the general for a moment as I focused on that last sentence. It was true then. There were other sectors beneath Ayla. And in that, I found some comfort. Comfort that all of us here weren’t alone. A macabre comfort that we weren’t the only ones being hunted and slaughtered. Then I began to think of my mother and younger sister. Perhaps plausible it was that they had found refuge in another sector. In the beginning, I had scoured Sector 4 looking for them. It was a quest of insanity that lasted for three months. Insanity because no one from the suburbs had made it in after the invasion. But if there were other sectors here, then why wasn’t it possible that we had sectors everywhere. Stop, I then told myself. You know better. Hope, that’s what all gods fit inside the hearts and minds of those they create to keep them obedient and faithful. It’s only a ruse from above though. A Trojan horse if you will. Once inside, it may seem like a gift, but in the end it’s only filled with disappointment, horror, and then death.
“Translator, come over here,” I then heard from the outside world. It seemed distant and echoed. I ignored it at first. The next sound, though, was a puncturing scream that sent me down an embryonic river right back to where I was. “Goddammit, Translator, get your head out of your ass and get the fuck over here.”
“Yes, sir,” I said while rushing to my feet and bringing my body beside him.
“Jesus Christ, Translator.
Where the fuck did you go?”
“Nowhere, sir,” I replied.
“If I have to call your name more than once again I swear to fucking God I’m going to send you up there with a tattoo on your bare chest that reads: ‘I Fucked the Imam’s Daughter in the Ass.’ You got that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, now fucking translate this for me,” the general said as he reached in the front pocket of his shirt and handed me a folded piece of paper. “We found it stuffed in the panties of that cunt you see strapped to the chair.”
I read it once. Then I read it again.
“Well?”
“It’s a notice, sir. It says that any citizen of Ayla who captures an infidel from the sewers will be rewarded with two hundred gold coins. One thousand if the infidel is a Jew.”
“Dead or alive, Translator? Do they need to bring us back breathing or with maggots crawling out of our ass?”
“It doesn’t say, sir,” I replied and handed him back the sheet of paper.
“So that’s why the fuck they keep coming lately. They decided to turn the whole goddamn populace into bounty hunters. Holy shit, what a great fucking idea.”
The general neatly folded up the notice, placed it back in his pocket, then set his hands on his hips. After a shake of his head that came with a puff of air through his nostrils, he unstrapped his side holster, and with a flick of his thumb, put the barrel of the massive silver gun to the side of her temple. Those who would be in the line of the exit wound hurried to their feet and moved to a safer location within the command center.
“You got anything to say before I blow your goddamn . . . ,” the general began to say in Arabic. “Translator, give me the fucking word for ‘brains.’ ”
“No need, sir,” I answered.
“And just why the fuck is that?”
“She speaks English.”
“And just how in the hell do you know that? You met her before? Went fucking falafel shopping with her and her uncle at the souk? Maybe the three of you went to afternoon prayer or something?”