Out of Mesopotamia

by Salar Abdoh

  “But why him? Are the men in Tehran such shits that you had to settle on him?”

  “Yes, they’re shits. He’s just a little bit less of a shit, if you will. And a winner.”

  I sighed. “That he is.”

  “And he’s not dishonest in love, Saleh.”

  I winced. “Fine. I get it. Don’t go there, please.”

  “And he wants you back writing for us too, even if you won’t edit the section. Imagine, when I’m Mrs. Mafiha I’ll look out for you 100 percent. You’ll get a raise. I’ll have them send you on sweet foreign assignments, not ones where you get shot at.” She meant all of this and she’d stopped crying. She was like the mother I’d always wanted. She repeated, “Bless me, Saleh. Please!”

  “But if it’s only a matter of marriage, I’ll marry you. Yes, why not! I’m proposing right now.”

  She looked away, exasperated. “You’re an idiot, Saleh.”

  “Why am I an idiot?”

  “Because you are consumed with martyrs and martyrdom, while Mafiha wants to live and let live.”

  I muttered, “Sort of like you, I suppose. You’re pretty good at this business of living too.”

  “Yes,” she hissed. “And why not? Why can’t I be good at life?”

  “With Mafiha as your life partner?”

  “Yes, with him. Why not?”

  I said meekly, “But Atia, those peace poems he writes!”

  “Shut up, Saleh! He’s more than just those poems. He’s a good guy. He sticks around. He’s capable. That counts for a lot.”

  “Some would call what you’re doing selling out.”

  “Or buying in.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?”

  “They’re not. And if you had half the brains he has, you wouldn’t let people steal your documentary footage or your TV pilot. At least at the paper, I can watch over you. You’re a child, Saleh.”

  It’s not a good feeling getting deconstructed like that. She couldn’t have possibly meant it when she said I was as awful as Dodonge or Saeed, could she? Suddenly my whole existence was in question. The men in Syria were dead. Men who had saved my life more than once. Gone up in smoke just like that, and I didn’t even know how. Maybe I was a pimp in this war, after all. It was sickening.

  I reached out and barely brushed Atia’s hand.

  She looked back at me. Sad. Exhausted. Thoughtful. “Bless me, Saleh. Bless me, I beg you.”

  And I did. I blessed her marriage in the Abdulabad District of Tehran, at a smoothie shop across the street from the home of the widow who might have been another young man’s wife if it hadn’t been for a miserable, utterly purposeless piece-of-shit red house in faraway Syria.

  6

  Yet it was the sniper Ali-Akbar’s accidental martyrdom in Iraq, and not the martyrdom of the men in Syria, that finally sent me into a tailspin. I had stopped sending dispatches from the Eye of the Horse. And after my phone was lost in that truckful of onions while we were preparing to liberate the village outside of Tal Afar, I was at last free from having to answer to anyone about anything. H couldn’t find me unless he sent Military Intelligence way out here for someone they could care less about. H, I knew, hated Military Intelligence as much as they hated ordinary Intel. Besides, they had more important things to do than play cat and mouse with a stray, half-committed journalist.

  The Americans were firm about us not going anywhere near Mosul. Behind the scenes, it was their play in that direction, and we let them. That city was going to be a goddamn dogfight anyway, and the Iraqi regulars could take the brunt. We stood to the west, by Syria, and bided our time, continuing to choke the escape routes out of Tal Afar, killing when we had to and feeding the hungry when we could. We’d meet every afternoon at Khaled’s place across from my mokeb and trade war gossip. That day I was serving tea in front of the mokeb at twilight while a herd of sheep scampered by, bleating with an irritated persistence which made you think they too were sick of it all and would sooner be eaten. Khaled came over. He smoked like a man possessed. And at that moment he was. A Turkmen out of Mosul who had lost everything to the enemy, he spent his days perusing military-grade Western satellite apps that you had to pay a small fortune to get and have security clearance for but which all of us in Iraq had for free because someone somewhere had cracked the code. Someone always cracks the code. Khaled would show me the very window to his house in Mosul, or what was left of it, and peer at the cracked screen of his cell phone with the hunger of a man who does not necessarily want revenge but simply to rebuild again. Nothing replaces home and no one exemplified its absence more than Khaled, who now gave me the most concerned look in all of Iraq just then (which is saying something), when he asked: “Weyn Ali-Akbar?”

  “He’ll show up. Don’t worry.”

  I watched him go at his cigarette like he might swallow the thing. Like a man who had survived a death patrol. I’ve only seen combat soldiers smoke this way. Them, and hopeless, beyond-the-pale drug addicts.

  “But he is always at my place this time of day.”

  “Maybe he got held up at the sater, in the trench.”

  “He always lets me know.”

  Khaled paced around the tea stand. A convoy of heavy guns thundered by, making the petulant sheep run every which way. Haji Yusuf, our septuagenarian inspiration, held up his AK inside the mokeb and let out a few rounds in honor of the convoy, his white hair dancing to the dust as Cleric J came hobbling out of his quarter without his one prosthetic leg and gave Haji Yusuf an earful for acting childishly inside a bustling mokeb. This, of course, only buoyed Haji Yusuf, and so he let out another spray of bullets and danced his southern Iraq tribal dance to the good cheer of the soldiers—he was a man from Kut, where the British had suffered their most humiliating defeat of WWI in the Turkish theater of war. This slight detail somehow seemed significant to me, though I wasn’t sure why.

  Khaled smoked.

  Then I felt cold sweat on my palms. The sky over northern Iraq just then was as holy as I’d seen above Damascus while saying my last goodbye. It was an orange to give your life for. And that’s what men did: they gave their lives for it.

  Khaled said, “Let’s go to their billet and find out.”

  We went. Ali-Akbar’s Iranian mates, the Three Magi, weren’t there. A young Iraqi sniper, all of sixteen, pointed to a white Toyota with two men inside. Iranians. Intel men. One could distinguish them from regular soldiers by their jadedness and general lack of enthusiasm.

  Khaled asked the question—where was Ali-Akbar?

  There are some words you never want to hear if you can help it. Yet after you hear the word, you just have to rearrange your brain and tap deep into your drying well of stoicism or else you’ll lose your mind: “Istashada. Martyred.”

  * * *

  The mokeb became my Ferris wheel. Cleric J and his team had done their stint for the month and were ready to head back south to their wives and children. It was night and we lay in a filthy room the enemy had booby-trapped four previous times. The only thing that never changed about the room was the framed picture of some old European fairy-tale gingerbread house on the pock-marked wall; no matter how many times this place switched hands, neither side took the framed picture down to smash it to pieces. I could not figure it out. Maybe in the hearts of all of us, a light burned for Hansel and Gretel and cease-fires.

  And probably this had been the room of a child once.

  Outside that room was even filthier, the mokeb a monstrous trash heap with the drying and despicable turds of good-natured, often lazy men who seldom bothered to take their business elsewhere.

  On more than one occasion I’d watched Cleric J turn combat into a dance. His business was faith and supply lines. In war he turned into a kid in a candy shop. Saeed and I had discovered him when the war first began. Somehow he always got himself into the thick of the fray. And there he stayed, directing bumbling tank traffic as if he were General Rommel, and killing time in no-man’s-land so that en
emy snipers could casually take a crack at him. I didn’t understand him, but I loved him. He was also useful. I could hide behind his clerical robe and avoid Iranian Intel who’d sooner shoo me home and back to writing pointless art reviews.

  “Saleh, if you stay here too long you will become like me. War will get into your skin and bones and you will forget your duties.”

  Cleric J’s Persian was singsong. He had spent most of the years of Saddam’s dictatorship in Iran and learned our language. After losing three brothers and a leg he was still fighting. The boyish good nature in his voice didn’t let up even when men were trying to stuff their oozing guts back into their split bellies. I wondered if he’d ever had nightmares. Whenever he quoted from the Koran a mischievous twinkle came into his eyes, as if to say, I really do know this stuff and I am firm in my faith, but it’s not where my heart is. My heart lies with the men at the sater.

  “What are my duties then?” I asked.

  “You don’t have a wife? I’ll get you one in Diyala. Come back with me. Take a rest. We’ll come back here in three weeks. Don’t worry!”

  “I can’t leave here for three weeks.”

  “You have the bug of nabard, the thirst for combat. I can tell.”

  “And Intel will force me to go home if I head back south with you.”

  “They won’t. They came to see me. I told them that this man—you—has lost his mind. But in proper fashion. He desires martyrdom. And that you—meaning they—cannot deny you—meaning you—this.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nothing. They went home. Or wherever it is those kinds of men go to at night.”

  “So you’ll let me stay?”

  “The mokeb is yours if you wish to stay. But you must not do it for the wrong reasons. If it’s martyrdom you seek, I am with you. But if you want to just stay here and mourn your friend Ali-Akbar, then you are acting spoiled and also dishonoring your friend’s perfectly adequate martyrdom, and so you must return to Diyala with me to find you a suitable wife.”

  “I will, inshallah, see you in three weeks, ya sayedina.”

  * * *

  There was never time to mourn. The mokeb was always replenishing itself. Other mokeb crews came and went while Cleric J and his men were on leave. They came equipped to be generous, men who had fought at other times in the same places but now kept to the background and took pleasure in the art of feeding warriors. At night, as my eyesight went from bad to worse, we’d sit in the long room and trade stories. The Arabic was viscous with all the head-splitting variations of Mesopotamia, and after a while instead of better understanding what was said I withdrew into my near blindness and added deafness to the mix and kept stirring the rice, unfreezing the chicken, and chopping the onions. Without a cell phone for the time being, I was a man tethered only to God’s will.

  Before long, Khaled took the heavy truck and went to join the government forces gathering outside Mosul. I could not blame him. Mosul was his home. The waiting here was like cultivating mold, and after Ali-Akbar’s premature death even martyrdom seemed questionable, though we never mentioned it. Then a man in charge of intelligence for the formidable Kataeb forces came up from Baghdad and ordered the rest of the Iranian sniper team, the Three Magi, to go south with him and then home. One dead Persian from a sniper squad was enough to put him through the ringer. He didn’t want more. This left me alone to my sealed-in circumstances. I smiled a lot at my revolving door of Iraqis who were especially enamored of this thing called Facebook and who watched me wide-eyed when I explained I did not yet have an account. Who knows if years from now the name will even ring a bell, but back then, in that geography, this virtual republic of Facebook was the river that connected the Arab warriors. They took pictures of themselves five minutes before dying. Then, three minutes before dying—if luck and bandwidth were with them—their smile was making the rounds on the Internet, immortalizing them just as they were about to leave the world. It was an odd, even batshit-crazy metastatement on the last thing that might be thought sacred: combat. We should have already known nothing was sacred. We were simulations. In another year or two tourists would probably be roaming this very ground where Ali-Akbar had stepped, stupidly, on a trip wire inside a school building while we took that village.

  We were, in other words, ornaments.

  In the meantime, I kept trying to wrap my mind around that day of Ali-Akbar’s loss. Cleric J had been pushing the men forward toward the village with his “God is great” bravado while I stood back, camera in hand, marveling at his brilliant madness. Some Arab guy was doing a little victory dance with the AK raised over his head even before the village was fully secured. I didn’t know where Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi were. I imagined, being snipers, that they were far from the main action. Taking aim. Sealing escape paths. Cutting down stragglers. A half hour later, after I’d shoved a banana to each victorious brother, a dozen guys came out from the schoolhouse repeating the Koran verse, “To God we belong and to him we’ll return.” They carried a blanket from which only a leg stuck out. I’d trained the lens on that leg, Ali-Akbar’s leg, not realizing that that was him with a missing head and arms.

  “Hu istashada. He’s martyred.”

  It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been others. The martyrs in Syria, for starters. But somehow this was the one that really did me in. And Khaled too. To get taken down because you trip over a wire in a schoolhouse! What was he doing there in the first place? It was too close to the action. In fact, the schoolhouse was the action, and no sniper motherfucker should have been there. But he was. And therein lay the issue. Ali-Akbar was the war in all its stupidity. He’d left home, crossed the border, and come here for this?

  I thought of that Hemingway saying again but tweaked it a little: In the fall peace was always near, but we did not go to it.

  * * *

  Then one day Saeed showed up at the mokeb. Alone.

  Cleric J and his people were due back in a couple of days, but rumor had it that the enemy was planning a second reckless attack on the town. A week earlier they’d made a beeline for the center, which was us, because across the street behind where Khaled’s quarters had been there was a fuel depot. The fact that they didn’t blow it up, which would have been easy, but instead tried to take it over and escape with the fuel, showed desperation. The noose continued to tighten in the west, and to get to Syria they’d need that liquid which they were running out of. Their suicide mission made this obvious, which also told us all we had to do was hold ground.

  We almost didn’t. There had been men with absurd, Akkadian-length beards shooting in broad daylight and strutting down the dusty thoroughfare, as if this was Main Avenue on a Friday afternoon, before they were finally brought down. I’d lain low inside the mokeb and mostly seen two of everything with my bad eye until the crisis was over.

  A week later my eyes had settled a bit, and when Saeed came at me in the mokeb I saw, correctly, only one of him, and there was no mistaking what he was about to do. His first swing missed, and before he had time for a second swing four burly Iraqi men had him by the arms and wrestled him to the ground. He was screaming in Arabic, telling them to let go and that there was a score to settle.

  I took him to the room with the gingerbread house on the wall. “I’ve done nothing to you. Why do you come to my mokeb and embarrass me?”

  “There’s a war going on, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. And every man out there has a weapon and this is my mokeb.”

  “Yours?” He laughed.

  “What is it you want?

  “I lost the contract with the British station. Because of you. You disappeared on me in Tuz Khurma and took that head-chopper woman with you. Where? I have no idea.”

  “There are ten thousand stories in every little town in Iraq right now. They need to have the one about a woman who cut off a couple of heads that were already beginning to stink?”

  “That’s what makes the story. It�
��s why the English guy wanted it. It wasn’t your business to make that call.”

  “But I did.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I took her away so a whore’s son like you—and your masters—won’t make a caricature of her for foreign TV. She cut off those heads because she was angry. I can understand that.”

  “You can?”

  I said nothing. I didn’t understand anything. I’d set up Zahra the Beheader in the sprawling Sadr City quarter in Baghdad for the time being. She’d become my charge because everything I’d suffered at the hands of TV bastards like Saeed came down to keeping her from them.

  “Go out of here. Please!”

  “What, you think you found your calling making lunch for the militias?”

  “And dinner.” After a while I added, “And breakfast.”

  “Please, Saleh! I can’t work in Iraq without someone who can speak your kind of English. All right, forget about the head-chopper. Get your backpack on, we’ll go to Baghdad and find new work with some other Europeans.”

  “Fuck the Europeans.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is their mess.” I mumbled, “Sykes and fucking Picot.”

  “Say what?”

  “Nothing. Just go away.”

  There was an AK hanging off the wall and like a fool he jumped, grabbed it, and aimed it at me. “I’m taking you to Tehran then. For disappearing like you did, they’ll send you to that place where grown men have to beg for their mothers.”

  “Put that thing away, for the love of Imam Husayn.”

  He put the weapon back and sighed. I could tell he felt silly.

  “Listen, Saleh, the audience for the Abbas: Sniper Legend and Fist of God serial has shrunk to half what it was two months ago. Do you understand what that means back in Tehran? O Channel is blaming you for it.”

  “I’m not responsible if their writers can’t write. They should have thought things through before they bought the film footage from you. Footage that, by the way, you stole from me.”