by Salar Abdoh
She walked away. Walking like a trailing oud solo behind the looking glass and beyond my reach forever.
Oh Atia!
* * *
I was being followed again.
I texted H: The art of life is to reach the divine through those who make us suffer.
He replied almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting: To glimpse something anew is to revisit all that one’s eyes saw the first time.
H, I decided, had lost his mind. He was sitting in his interrogation room reading a mountain of a European book from early in the twentieth century. I wondered if he’d ever had to torture anyone.
Me: Are you having me followed? Because I am being followed right now.
H: It’s not us. It’s someone from your own family.
Me: I don’t have a family.
H: Certainly you do. Your mother is family.
Me: Well yes. But that doesn’t really count. Besides, she is indisposed.
H: I am not talking about her.
Me: Who then?
He did not answer.
I spent the rest of the night in the darkness of the apartment mostly staring out the window. The courtyard of the synagogue was like an old friend. Inside it the place was blinking. From its upper story the dimmed light of the chandeliers gave one a feeling of martyrs and magic and afterlife.
I went back to that first e-mail that had come from abroad: I am a scholar interested in the old Jewish quarter of your city. Your article . . .
I finally replied to the e-mail: What can I do for you?
Around three a.m. there was another text from H: Don’t e-mail this person again.
I wrote: Entrapment?
H: Not quite.
Me: Why are you helping me?
H: Because I don’t like my life.
* * *
When I opened my eyes at three p.m. there had been fifteen missed calls on the phone. All of them came from my mother’s nursing home.
“Is she dead?”
“Sir?”
“You people have been calling me nonstop. Is my mother dead?” I gave my name.
“There is a visitor. We cannot give out telephone numbers. So we dialed your number for them.”
Since the Persian language lacks feminine or masculine pronouns, I had to ask, “Is them a man or a woman?”
“Man.”
In an hour I was at the nursing home. My mother was staring vacantly at her Turkish soap opera. The woman next door who had relived the Bolshevik invasion every day for the last forty years had finally died. In her place they’d wheeled in an ancient Hungarian who kept asking, in perfect Persian, about tomorrow’s weather.
On the other side of bed sat an owl of a man. His eyes were fixed, hardly batting an eyelash. Avesta—short, fifty, neurotic, and always looking slightly desperate despite the fame he’d manufactured for himself abroad—stood up and came at me with a handshake that felt like a knife. We did not like each other and were make-believe cousins by obligation because of my mother’s second marriage into wasted wealth. Even his name gave me hiccups, one of those pre-Islamic decorations that the rich always like to give their sons and daughters. Whereas I’d grown up in near poverty, Avesta and his kin had gone to the best schools abroad. Francophones to the hilt, they went out of their way to show they did not mind you being French-illiterate. But of course they did mind. A lot. And I had always been that poor pretend cousin whom they kept at a distance, but not too far because, after all, I did write for the papers for a living. They might need me sometime.
Avesta needed me now. That attempt at a handshake gave it away. He would have air-kissed me otherwise.
I reached over and kissed my mother. Her reaction was slow but definite. “Why have you no hand?” she said. Then her head swiveled just as slowly and she zeroed back in on the television. She was a blank. I was losing her the way you lose a toy you stopped playing with years ago.
“What can I do for you?” I said to the pretend cousin.
“You have to write an article and take everything back about what you said regarding that Homa woman.”
“Miss Homa to you.”
“Whatever. She’s becoming too famous outside of this dump of a country and—”
“It doesn’t suit you?”
“Because of what you wrote, everyone here thinks I stole my dome and minaret paintings from her.”
“Well, the domes you did steal from her. And the minarets you stole out of inspiration from the domes. So technically you are a thief.”
“A curse on you, Saleh!”
“But no worries, cousin. In art everyone is a thief. I don’t see why you’ve come all the way from—wherever it is you live now, Paris? Berlin? New York?—come all the way here to this, as you correctly put it, dump of a country to complain about an article no one cares about.”
He stared at his invented aunt, my mother, as if he needed a witness.
There are people who want and want. I had spent the last years of childhood being invited once in a blue moon to this family’s immaculate homes in the north of Tehran where they kept pristine swimming pools even in the worst days of the revolution and during the war with Iraq; I’d been relegated to the kitchen to eat with the servants while my mother worked to ingratiate herself with our new rich relatives.
This world was empty that way, and a man like Avesta still wanted to have more of everything.
Avesta gestured at me to follow him outside. He didn’t say anything until we were well beyond the walls of the nursing home. Across the street two men sat in front of an expensive-looking Citroën. One of those men was Saeed, my backstabbing filmmaker partner. He didn’t get out of the car.
I said to Avesta, “It was you who was having me followed yesterday. You could have just knocked, you know.”
“What about that article you are going to write taking back everything you said about Miss Homa’s work?”
I started to repeat my usual line, that I was just a poor writer and that my words were not even worth the paper they were printed on. But he stopped me.
“I’ll pay you. I’ll give you two paintings.”
Avesta had been trying forever to make a name for himself beyond, to him, the lowly Middle East. But when middle age came and he was still not considered a tier-one international artist, he’d settled on the art markets of the Gulf where he too was followed by Emirati collectors the way Miss Homa was. With our currency’s value plummeting as it was, one of his paintings could now buy me an apartment here. Two of them could buy me two apartments. I could rent out both of them and not have to think about writing art reviews anymore.
I had to get him off my back. “All right. I’ll write something.”
“When?”
“What’s your hurry? Miss Homa’s not feeling well anyway. The poor woman will probably die soon.”
“No!” he shouted. “She can’t die. Not now. If she dies, her prices will go through the roof and . . .”
I was no longer listening. I was thinking of Miss Homa. Our vocations of martyrdom had prices and estimates, it seemed. The war too had turned into an auction. And the martyrs were the works being sold.
9
Cleric J stuck close to the ground in his faded blue tunic. He could have been a nineteenth-century dervish in an Orientalist painting selling spiritual mumbo jumbo on the pilgrimage roads of Western Asia. In his hand was the AK he seldom used but kept close. Maysam, a mountain of a man and Cleric J’s head of security from Amara, lay twenty meters to our right. Maysam had the face of a bear and when he smiled it was ample, as if the world had opened up at last and it was a holiday. He was frowning now, telling me to keep my head down. He swore something in dialect that I didn’t understand.
Cleric J laughed and said in his singsong Persian, “Saleh, you are trying too hard to become a martyr.”
The whiz of bullets split the air, sometimes so close they were whispers an inch away. This had been going on for an hour and I was bored at last. And unco
mfortable. The ground was mud; detritus from weeks and months of stasis was rolled into the landscape, making it resemble some kind of death-paste. The Kurds stayed at Bartella and bided their time. There was an unspoken border between us and it wasn’t really unspoken. In the middle sat Mosul, waiting.
Cleric J was in his element when he was getting shot at. Tranquility graced his face. He looked at you with clinical eyes, as if to say: Watch, because if this is my last moment, I want you to know and tell everyone I gave it my all. I will go with a smile on my face. I envied him that. I’d left Miss Homa down south in Najaf and told her I’d be back in a few days. A week had gone by, and the enemy’s reinforcements were suddenly like genies out of thin air. It made us wonder if the Americans were not playing us. Maybe they had an entire army of these men under lock and key and were dispensing them in paces just to test our will and kill us in easy-to-deny numbers. Whatever it was, it worked. Men got tired and jumpy. This corner of the war should have been over. I’d come back after three months and not only had we not budged, but now they were raining rockets on our positions. The Kurds, God bless their grit and spirit, occupied the heights and were not unhappy to see us softened a little. There would be reckoning later.
The beauty of all this, and also its silliness, was that the distances were a tease and I could still check my e-mail through the Iran data plan on my brand-new phone. And so I did. A mortar round fell to the right and Maysam cursed again. In fact it wasn’t a curse at all but something with God in it. It wasn’t quite prayer either.
The talk from other dugouts reached us in spurts:
“Why can’t they call a gunship? It’s a lone position.”
“Because they’re all busy with Tal Afar.”
“My brother is getting married after Muharram.”
“I can’t afford to get married. They haven’t paid us in two months.”
“I’m not coming to the war anymore if they do us this way.”
“It’s that thief, Abu—they say he has friends in high places in Baghdad.”
Someone moaned. Shrapnel.
“Professor, do you have pain pills?”
I looked into my pack and saw cold medicine. I tossed it over. “Take two.”
“Who just said he is not coming back to fight? We’re not here for money . . .”
“Li beyk ya Husayn!”
“Li beyk ya Husayn, li beyk ya Husayn!” we all shouted back.
Sometime later two rattling armored vehicles went right up to the enemy nest and blew it to pieces. The whole thing was so anticlimactic and unheroic that I didn’t bother to go over for a look while everyone went on shouting Li beyk ya Husayn. But as I continued to scroll through useless e-mails on the cell, a text message came from H.
H: O Channel says you haven’t sent anything in the past week for the Abbas show.
Me: A little busy at the moment.
Maysam was shouting for everyone to come over to where the nest had been. We all got up and walked dutifully that way. We were tired of the enemy. Tired of their clever bunkers and their tenacity. Most of our Hashd forces could have been home this evening for dinner. Instead they were here in this camel’s ass of a no-man’s-land trying to smoke out remnants of a dwindling war. Maysam pointed to a hole in the ground where the enemy had scuttled back and forth over the past few weeks. Cleric J was on the phone, hearing it again from a commander—exactly what was the reason that the people of the mokeb had to be out here engaging the enemy? Cleric J gave his usual beautiful and dubious lecture about the burden of those who were living, and that we’d really come so far out because we’d heard there were villages that needed feeding. It was untrue, of course—no villages here. Cleric J had been itching for a fight and the men at the mokeb were depressed from the previous two days and nights of rain. Nothing like getting shot at to remind you of the blood running through your veins. Cleric J was a therapist at heart.
H: Are you still there?
Me: Please transmit the following to O Channel: Abbas falls in love.
H: How?
Me: He meets his match in a woman sniper near Hawija. He stalks her for days and finally has her in his sights as she is drawing water from a spring. He does not pull the trigger. She is . . .
H: Beautiful?
Me: Majestic. O Channel will have to find a suitable woman for the part.
H: They won’t go for it.
Me: The writers, Ajooj and Majooj, will have to deal with the Censorship Department. That’s not my concern.
H: Ajooj and Majooj?
Me: The cowriters. It’s my name for them. You’ll know who they are.
We lost connection for a minute. I looked around. In the time I’d been typing messages back and forth to H, a man had gotten blown to pieces. There was a lone tree and he’d gone there to take a piss and stepped in the wrong place. I closed my heart to that and did not go near to take a peek. There had been an explosion and I’d certainly heard it. But you get inured to it. Hard men were shouting hard words in Arabic. That broken tree was going to have pieces of the dead man hanging and dripping from it for a long, long time. It would be near impossible to get it all off. I already knew all this and forced myself to not be curious.
H: Any news from the enemy scholar?
I was confused for a moment and wrote, Enemy scholar?
H: You know, the OTHER enemy. Not those prehistoric fools in Iraq and Syria.
Me: YOU told me not to write to her.
There was silence. And silence from H meant this: Don’t you ever use capital letters like that with me, boy!
I wrote meekly, knowing full well that he already had the information and was just testing me: The answer is yes. This other enemy—she asks that since I will not answer her, perhaps I can recommend someone else who will do the research she needs in Tehran.
H: Tell the scholar to meet you in Erbil.
Me: What?
H: Do it. Erbil is a taxi ride away from you!
Me: What, take a cab through enemy lines?
H: Don’t play stupid. You know what to do. Do it!
Haji Yusuf came up to me looking glum. “I keep telling the young men not to just walk around as if this is their father’s backyard. To God we return!”
“To God we return, ya Haji Yusuf!”
And then we both turned and saw our world. Maysam and the bomb-disposal guy in the middle of no-man’s-land. The disposal man digs his hand with its two missing fingers into the ground and slowly picks around a diameter. This is nothing like the movies. Rather, it’s as if he’s a child—and he is a child, twenty at most—looking for treasures of the Median armies who passed this way before time. Soon he has a barrel next to his feet and is explicating on it quietly to Maysam. He walks not nearly carefully enough some paces, digs again, and comes up with another barrel. Then another. And another. It’s a mine highway. It’s a painting. It’s midfield in a football stadium. It’s many things and giant Maysam and the bomb-disposal boy stand there and look toward the horizon, while Cleric J talks into the phone telling other commanders other things they should know about the location. From all of these barrels they’ll extract incendiary material and reuse it for rockets. This war may be stupid but it possesses genius. Meanwhile, Cleric J’s faded and muddy blue tunic flaps magnificently in the wind. The awkwardly built armored vehicles, looking like mud-caked lozenges, rattle their way back down the road to their own shitholes, oblivious to the miseries they have set in motion.
I wrote: Do you continue not to like your life?
H did not answer.
* * *
That night the big guns aiming toward Syria would not give it a break. Unable to sleep, I walked across the road to where Khaled used to keep house and where Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi of the sniper team would come every afternoon unless they were pulling duty at the sater. It seemed like a lifetime ago. In real terms only a few months had passed. Nostalgia can blanket a man when the people who populated the dangers he knew are no longer there. I
knocked on the door and no one answered. But people were staying here. Recently washed clothes hung from clotheslines. I knocked again and when there was still no answer I let myself in. Same room. Nothing had changed, except for the fighters who lived here while the war continued. In a corner the same mattress lay where Shorty, one of the Three Magi, had taken a long sleep after his best friend Ali-Akbar’s martyrdom. Shorty was a compact twentysomething from Qom whose prayers tended to go on interminably. That day, the way he slept after Ali-Akbar was killed, it was as if he were cleansing himself of something. When he woke up it was like he’d slept a thousand years and during that time he’d made many ablutions. We didn’t talk about Ali-Akbar again until Tehran.
I crawled onto the mattress and closed my eyes. Before long there were men in the room. All of them young Iraqis. Their AKs hanging off the same hooks where Khaled and Martyr Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi used to hang their weapons. The television was on. This was new. There hadn’t been a TV before. And they seemed to clearly receive the channels broadcasting from the Gulf. I sat in silence alongside the other men watching a Hollywood movie in English with Arabic subtitles. Every single actor in the film looked astounding, the women and the men. A story about a future world where survivors of some catastrophe live in a bubble and the heroine is mermaid-like and more beautiful than anything in The Arabian Nights.
We were mesmerized. Just a few kilometers from the sater we sat watching the world of the beautiful. Their fictions broadcasting right into this broken room that the enemy almost managed to capture some months ago on their way to steal fuel they needed to get them to the capital of their fictitious empire down the road in Syria. I do not know how to translate any of this. I do not know in how many worlds a person can live simultaneously before they lose themselves completely. There is not language enough to explain all of this.
So I sat and watched the film to the end. And when it was over somebody turned on the lights, food was brought, and everyone came over and kissed the new guest twice on the right cheek as if I were their long-lost brother. No one asked who I was. They’d only seen me across the road at the mokeb serving tea and rice and chicken to their brothers, and that was all they needed to know.