Out of Mesopotamia
Page 5
I knew I’d been tailed all the way back to the house. They’d made sure that I’d notice it too. But who could it be? H’s people? No reason for it just now. Dodonge? He’d already rubbed it in by dropping in on Atia and me at the café. I’d parked the motorcycle next to a twenty-four-hour health clinic on busy Valiasr, where I knew it would be hard to steal, and caught a cab home.
The phone lit up. It was Miss Homa.
I congratulated her on her upcoming gallery show.
“Saleh, you have not come to visit my studio in some time.”
“I don’t write about art anymore, Miss Homa. You know that.”
“That is no reason not to pay an old woman a visit.”
I promised her I’d come the day after tomorrow. But even before we’d hung up, Saeed’s name appeared on the screen.
I paused, hesitant to answer. In light of all that came about during this period of shuttling between peace and violence, I should have known nothing was an accident, not even Miss Homa’s apparently casual call. Because the fraudulence of this calm, which I was enjoying a fragment of just then, was evenly matched by the fraudulence of the war, which sooner or later I’d have to return to.
I said a gruff hello into the phone.
Saeed cleared his throat. But I didn’t give him a chance to speak.
“Listen, you human-trafficking poor excuse of a man, was it you who had me followed this afternoon?”
“Brother—”
“Don’t brother me!”
First time we had been hitched together was in East Africa. Saeed got the job because he was a native Arabic speaker, I got it because my English was good. We were there only a few weeks together and it cemented something: we lost our minds—not completely, but enough to abandon any speck of hope we had in ourselves.
“I heard you were in Damascus,” he said. “Why didn’t you take me?”
“I wasn’t carrying a camera. I simply went to visit the Zaynab shrine. I went for my heart.”
“Your heart is satisfied now?”
I didn’t answer.
“I have a job for us.” He explained that a British channel needed footage and they paid well. I listened but still didn’t respond. Finally, he barked, “Say something! What is your problem?”
“My problem is Africa, you son of a whore!” I hung up.
A bright early morning. We’d left the Iranian Red Crescent office to roll some film outside of a refugee camp. Another civil war. Another continent. We watched a chirpy white reporter—I don’t know from where—go on a stroll for “a breath of fresh air” right under that African sky inside the refugee camp. I put away the camera and sat with my head between my hands.
A little later I’d caught Saeed working the guy, entreating him in abominable English for a foreign assignment job. When I called him a whore that first time, he looked at me quizzically and said, “Yes. Well, so?”
It was then I knew we were the living dead. Nothing mattered. Refugees. Civil wars. Atrocity. Starvation. Someone still had to go stroll for a breath of fresh air in the madness. I went right back to the Iranian Red Crescent office to tell them I wanted out. We’d been young and adaptable back then.
Twenty years later, not so much.
But I’d found myself working with Saeed again. Because work is work. If I only relied on working at the Citizen and writing art reviews I’d end up in the poorhouse and my mother would have to stop watching Turkish TV.
In the meantime, Saeed could stew for a while.
The black Peugeot was still outside. Two men. They were parked near the sky-blue gate of the synagogue. The driver got out and looked directly up at my window and waved me down.
I knew him. I knew the other one who now got out of the car too. They were the State TV hacks who had stolen my idea and bought the sniper footage off Saeed.
4
Several barefoot Iraqi kids played in the mud, and in the distance the sound of big guns rumbled like an earthquake in successive waves that made one imagine beasts lurking beneath that earth.
The woman came out of her hut, unsmiling but gracious. Somebody had reported that a month earlier she’d cut the heads off two dead enemy combatants.
She offered me bread that she had freshly baked. It had been awhile since I was last in this region. The place had changed hands a few times until the men managed to push the enemy deep into the mountains beyond Tuz Khurma. Up there the sons of bitches would have to be flushed out one at a time and eliminated, and I didn’t mind being a part of that operation.
“Will they pay me?” she asked.
“To film you? Yes. But you didn’t keep the heads, did you?”
She looked crestfallen. “I should have kept them?”
“We must get away from here.”
“But they are coming to make the film. Yes?”
“No . . . I mean yes. But they are only using you.”
“What?”
She had a distant resemblance to Atia, and like Atia her cheeks flushed red when she was distraught. I wondered to myself what kind of knife she’d used in order to cut off those heads. Was it difficult? Did anyone see her do it? All we knew was that for several days the outside of her hut was decorated with them, as if it were a set for some gory medieval war film.
“Maybe,” she said hopefully, “they will help me leave this evil land.”
The ground shook and shook. Above us the sound barrier was being broken. Americans? A convoy advanced toward us. A last-ditch desperate battle fought by men who should have given up on this area and taken their war somewhere they could actually fight it. I saw Saeed and his British charge stick their heads out of one of the Toyotas as it zoomed past us.
The Englishman shouted, “Don’t you bloody well lose her!”
I would have shouted back that he could take his cameras and his recorders and his cash and go fuck himself, but now came the inevitable: shrapnel, smoke, the earth shuddering as if a prehistoric giant had stepped on its own toes.
I stood with this woman, Zahra, who was no one’s heroine. If we lived through today, Saeed would film and the Englishman would interview her, and later, if by some grace of luck she managed to leave this “evil land,” she’d probably be implicated in war crimes. Someone with a degree in international law and a regular paycheck would decide that having her four brothers, husband, and three sons killed in front of her was not reason enough for Zahra to take a bit of revenge on a couple of already-dead motherfuckers.
The children who were playing next door a few minutes earlier were gone, as if they’d never existed. The convoy was gone. Saeed and his Brit were gone. It was just me and Zahra the Beheader left in this place, and I didn’t even know if it was a friend or foe that was bombing us.
Nonplussed, she looked at nothing in particular and said, “I don’t care if I die. But will they help me leave Iraq? Please eat the bread while it’s hot. Are they your friends?”
A sharp whistle went over our heads and in the vague distance the ground did a somersault. Bread in hand and half deaf, half blind, I told her, “They are not my friends. And now we must leave.”
“To where?”
“We’ll start with Baghdad.”
Her eyes sparkled like a child’s. She repeated “Baghdad” like it was a magic charm. “In Baghdad they will film?”
“Inshallah, they will never film.”
* * *
I finally lost the cell phone containing the photos of the Marcel Proust pages and the Kurdish women of combat. There would be other phones, like there would be other battles. And none of this should have mattered. Except that it did.
The outlying village we’d been trying to take was critical for cutting off the escape road from Tal Afar into Syria. The barrage of ammo that fell upon the village was senseless; it was overkill. The enemy was not fighting back because it was probably no longer there. There was no reason to lose a cell phone during a lopsided fight like this. But I did. And then I lost something far more precious.
>
Afterward, my days and nights turned into stirring huge pots of rice for the men in the front. I let myself go in the life of the mokeb. I did not ever want to think about another art review. I could, like a few of these guys here, hope that the war would never end. And I’d go on peeling potatoes and shouting “moz, moz,” handing bananas to the grime-ridden, empty-eyed men who took time away from the ever-shifting front to rest awhile at the mokeb. I had already begun to fall in love with the Arabs in previous tours, but this time our struggles were the same and so my love for them turned into something acute, physical; I would have taken a bullet for any of these men. It takes time to arrive at such a place. I was willing to die for them because in the Arabs I found an innocence, a childlike bigheartedness that embarrassed my own unscrupulous world. How could men be this way and not lose the shirts off their backs? Generous to a fault, they humbled you, awed you with their transparency, and finally turned you into a better person.
One night at the mokeb, while we prepared the morning breakfast for several men of the Ali-Akbar Brigade who’d asked for the favor of billeting them for a day or two, I dug into my notebook and recalled that I’d only copied one single line from the Frenchman: A book is a large cemetery where on most tombs one can no longer read the faded names. Now, as I write these words, I realize that there are so many lost names to a life that the best one can do is to simplify, to not fret the act of forgetting; the soldiers in a platoon might remember every tick and oddity that one of theirs carried, but a fellow in a mokeb is lucky to remember his own name after enough time has passed, let alone the names of the dead.
One of them I’ll remember, however, because the love we had was immediate—and he also happened to have the same name as the brigade we were hosting just then: Ali-Akbar.
He came in one day for tea, his hand-me-down shirt ridiculous and dangerous in its oversizedness for a crack sniper. He was rail thin and his buddies, like him, were Iranians. Volunteer dead guys. I had not spoken a word of Persian in weeks. Not even with the fighting cleric, Cleric J, who had taken me under his wing and brought me way up here to the last true front line left in Iraq. Those of us who wanted to fight on would have to move west, crossing the obsolete border back into Syria, and pretend we were still defending the holy places. We all knew it was no longer about that. It was about something else, something elemental having to do with adrenaline and revenge; I imagine hunters know something about it. We had been chased and, at times, humiliated. But now the tables had turned. Watch a man whom you’ve finally caught and whom you know has killed a few dozen people, mostly civilians, just because he could, because even as recently as one week ago he could afford to be judge and executioner, and because he’s a piece of shit, then examine his eyes as he does not even try to protest his innocence because he knows that you know—see the way he goes limp inside of himself—observe him carefully while the gone-insane among you, and maybe the odd sadist, turn up to beat the soles of this man’s feet before they shoot him, and you’ll also know never to dishonor a man beyond a certain edge. I don’t know what that edge is. And I don’t want to investigate it too deeply. I just want to tell this story without the encumbrance of all the names that I have forgotten already.
Because they’ll all die anyway.
I served Ali-Akbar and his three comrades—whom I’ll call the Three Magi—their tea, and we spoke long into the night. They were billeted less than half a klick away with an Iraqi sniper squad, but unlike the Iraqis they had some leisure to go AWOL now and then, stay out, even mess around with their ammo, leave stuff behind that the normal army structure would have chewed them alive for. Who else could do this but the Iranians who didn’t have to be here but came anyway, in order to “help” their brothers? So the Iranians were humored. The locals were grateful. Even at the mokeb they treated someone like me differently. “Saleh, do you seriously enjoy getting shot at? Go back to Tehran. It’s heaven there.”
I didn’t want heaven. Heaven is a bore.
And confounding.
5
Ten days after the interrogation with H, I’d finally traveled to south Tehran to arrange that marriage for Nasif who, I assumed, was still fighting in Syria.
And I’d taken Atia along with me.
“Are you taking my family for fools?”
The father of the young widow/bride-to-be had said this immediately and my heart sank even before he’d finished. I looked at Atia, who looked away. By now martyrdom was a way of life. It was the grammar of our everyday lives, not just an appendage to it. In other words, I knew the news of another death was on someone’s lips even before the news had been spoken.
Atia pressed for the sake of appearances, “Haji Aga, our intention is pure.” She said something about Nasif which I didn’t catch. I was waiting for the bad news to drop and . . . then it did.
The bride-to-be’s father set his phone between us, tapped the app that most of the fighters I knew subscribed to, scrolled down to the latest news from Syria, and there it was—the news of Nasif’s martyrdom.
“When?” I asked.
“Yesterday.”
I took the cell phone and scrolled through more photos. Blood-soaked posts and also romantic ones. All of them filled with the claptrap of an “honorable death.” War had turned into a game of telephone tag. What was happening to us? It wasn’t just Nasif who’d died. They’d all died. Moalem was dead. So were several of the Afghans. Khan-T hadn’t fallen, but the red house finally had—a place no one should have fought over in the first place.
You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.
Sensing my disorientation as we stepped out of there, Atia guided me to a smoothie shop nearby. I had been thinking of that opening sentence from the famous Hemingway story: In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore. The line kept echoing like a song I’d sooner forget.
Yes, the war was always there, but in fact it always came at us; we couldn’t avoid it. And it wasn’t just one war; it was wars, one blending into the next like an ill canvas. The war never ended.
Atia said, “It’s as good a time as any to tell you something.”
My heart sank for the second time that hour. “What?”
“Remember that talk we had about marriage? I’ve decided to do it. Get married.”
“I’m in mourning, Atia. Do you have to tell me this now?”
“It’s precisely the right time to tell you. We just went to that house to ask for a girl’s hand in marriage. Her husband’s dead. So is her new suitor. Remember that Hebrew poem you once translated but the Censorship Department wouldn’t allow you to publish?”
“Atia, for the love of Imam Husayn! Now is not the time to have a literary discussion.”
“That poem said Ecclesiastes was wrong to tell us we don’t have time for everything. We do. We do! Because it’s the only life we get, Saleh. We most certainly do have seasons enough for every purpose.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I hadn’t told you, but our dear boss, Mafiha, has been proposing to me for six months now. I’ve finally decided to say yes.”
It was a punch in the gut, coming right after the news of the death of my men in Syria.
“So this is what you’ve been doing while I’ve been away? Flirting with the chief?”
“Saleh, I’m not some teenager. Don’t speak to me that way. I’m your colleague. And friend. And what this is, is not flirting. It’s called life. And change.”
“But . . . with Mafiha? That fraud?” I barely managed to get the words out.
“He’s not a fraud. He simply takes his opportunities.”
“If you say so.”
“And he’s not such a bad writer.”
“You mean all that peace-poetry shit he’s been publishing lately?”
“Peace is not a bad thing, even if some people take advantage of it.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
“Come on, Saleh. Give me y
our blessing. I beg you. Besides, like I told you before, Mafiha wants you to edit the art section at the paper.”
“With Imam Husayn as my witness, I’ll do no such thing.”
“All right. How about just giving me your blessing then?”
“What, bless you for marrying a guy who deals with art like it’s real estate? What about truth? What about all the men I knew who just got mowed down in Syria?”
“That is exactly what I mean. What about them?”
“They’re dead!” I shouted. “But Mafiha, your boss and I guess husband, isn’t. Dodonge, the apparent fucking prince of the Syrian front, isn’t. And that other whore’s son, my so-called partner, Saeed the fake documentarian, isn’t either. Men die while these motherfuckers take their books and photos and films on tour to Europe and win awards for them. Something stinks about all this, Atia. The world fucking stinks.”
“Something does stink, you’re right about that. And that’s your self-righteous nagging. You think I don’t know what you’re up to?”
“What am I up to, Atia?”
“You’re no better than Dodonge or Saeed or, if you will, Mafiha, my husband-to-be. You want to manufacture glory for yourself off of dead soldiers’ backs. At least a guy like Mafiha just writes a few poems. And he’s a first-rate editor. Without him none of us would have jobs. But what about you? I’ve read your reports from over there. We all have. You make it sound like you’re under attack 24/7.”
“In war you’re always under attack. Even when you’re not.”
“Don’t give me your philosophical bullshit, Saleh. I know you better.” She paused for a second, added a “Fuck you,” and then burst into tears.
“For the love of Imam Husayn . . . Atia jaan, take it easy. All right, I accept.”
She said softly, “I’m tired of this running, Saleh. I want to write my books. I want to not have to wake up every morning thinking how I’ll make next month’s rent.”