by Salar Abdoh
I wrote to H: Tell O Channel that they must end the Abbas show with his falling for the enemy sniper woman. Abbas and the woman begin a cat-and-mouse chase that is their version of a flirtation. The flirtation of the best two snipers in Iraq. But in the end, one of them has to kill the other. This is the law of this land. And it is not the man who kills the woman. It cannot be.
Men dispersed for sleep now and I saw that light was seeping from underneath the room already thick with the breath and snores of those who’d been on first night watch. I went outside. Across the road the mokeb had come to life. Haji Yusuf, Maysam, Cleric J—everybody was out front serving tea and dates and calling out, Shabab, shabab, hala-bikum, hala-bikum. The machinery of combat was unwrapping itself for the day. The morning freeze of northern Iraq chilled the bones and men jumped off personnel carriers with cold faces, rubbing their hands together to take their bitter tea with mountains of sugar. There was nowhere else I wanted to be on this earth. The big guns aiming for Syria still hadn’t quit. They were annoying, like dogs when they go on too long.
I went back to Khaled’s and into the kitchen where it was still too early for anyone to barge in except for two men who went back and forth catching up to their short morning prayers. I wrote quietly for the next hour, drawing out the contours of the Abbas tragedy for the TV show’s finale back in Tehran. I was filled with doubt again. The writing life in my corner of the world, except for brief interludes of good, had turned out to be not just a disappointment but a tectonic lie. This realization was so all-encompassing that little could be salvaged from the rubble.
Even Iraq had turned into a lie—here, where men would take their tea at Cleric J’s mokeb in the morning and be dead by nightfall. I had, disgracefully, turned Abbas, the great hero of Iraq, and his life into shit, like everything else that was turned to shit here. I finished the bullet points and segments of dialogue for Ajooj and Majooj and the O Channel and sent it off to H this time to transfer to them. Someone had begun blasting martyr songs from the fuel depot. The songs and the rhythmic chest-beating of tens of hundreds of men was hypnotic. A remarkable symmetry and adoration. We all were itching to be back down south, in Samara, in Karbala and Najaf, taking that long walk of the martyrs for the Arbaeen pilgrimage ceremonies. It was surely more habit than belief, because our ceremonies of self-flagellation were really a mother song. We’d been born into it and this time of year was to have been ours. Instead we were here, fighting an enemy who wanted to make short work of us. At the same time our vigilance made us believe our sacrifice was on a mythic scale. We thought that we were not just fighting for ourselves but for eight billion souls. Because this enemy meant to destroy the world with its talk of jihad and its persistent suicide missions in all the major capitals. If anything, the Americans and Europeans should have feted us, lionized us, given us compensation and weapons for our sacrifice. What we got instead was their aversion. Because we did not look like them. Because we could afford to die in large numbers and they couldn’t. We convinced ourselves of all of this even if it was only half true and sometimes not true at all. Yet we wanted to be understood and appreciated. We were ruined and romantic at the same time. There was a reason that Lawrence of Arabia had gotten carried away with himself in these landscapes and wrote about it as if he were writing about something divine. He had come into contact with that touch of the divine about the Arabs—no matter which side of the fighting they were on. Their dignity was like skin; it never wore off, even when they had to turn to infidelity. In all of these ways they were different than us Iranians and the fighters from other places. They honored The Word and what it could do. They were born into poems and they died there; poets all, from day one.
By the time I got back to the mokeb, Maysam was beside himself. He came up and gave me a good shake. “You are alive!”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“Saleh, don’t ever leave the mokeb again like this. Don’t go without telling us.” The concern in the big man’s face was of a scale different than I’d ever seen.
“I always go away and come back. What’s different now?”
“The enemy.”
I waited for him to explain.
“They’ve put a prize on Iranian heads.”
This wasn’t news. It had been the same in Syria. But I’d always thought of it as the unlikely thing that happens to the next guy. It was too much like the movies and I didn’t want to buy into the fear. But I could see his disquiet wasn’t going away. I said, “It’s different here, Maysam. The good Iraqi people won’t sell an Iranian out.”
“Don’t be so sure. When the prize is high and—” he pointed to the bleakness that was everywhere, “when this hell is what a man has to wake up to every day, he will sell his own brother. Trust no one outside the mokeb.”
I nodded. Maysam was our mother and father here. Sometimes he got so pissed off at Cleric J’s recklessness that he dared to do what no one else did and screamed at the fighting cleric. Those were the best of times and we all sat back, grinned, and bet on who’d win that round.
“I hear and obey.” I turned to go toward the big pots to start the rice, but he held my hand.
“There is something else.”
Death, in all its colors, immediately hovered. We had all become connoisseurs of this sentence—there is something else.
“Someone has been martyred?”
“Your three friends. The Irani.”
I looked at him nonplussed.
“Martyr Ali-Akbar’s friends from before,” he added by way of an explanation that I didn’t need. He was speaking of the Three Magi.
“But they were not supposed to be here,” I said weakly. “They were back in Iran.”
“Arrived two days ago. Friendly fire.” He pointed skyward. “Air. Seven more from our own Hashd men were also martyred with them. They were inside . . .” He pointed to a large concrete drainage pipe sitting on the side of the road. “Inside something like that, I believe.”
This added detail, for some reason, was sickening. Not the friendly fire, which happened all the time, but that they’d been inside some big tube. Why? I was boxed into this little detail and couldn’t get out of it. Nor could I understand why the Three Magi hadn’t made contact with me when they’d arrived two days earlier.
“Do you want to escort them back home?” Maysam asked.
“Is there anything left of them?”
He nodded. “Enough.”
* * *
The rest of the day I sat on the roof of the mokeb’s longhouse watching convoy traffic outside and mokeb traffic inside. There was a lot of agitation. Three white-turbaned, AK-carrying younger clerics from one of the farther outposts came up and consulted with Cleric J. Their sater had been penetrated yesterday. The enemy had a thing for saddling their pickups with explosives and looking for weak spots in the line. Once they thought they’d found one, they came at it with a single-mindedness that made the toughest men holding the line pray for their mothers. It took only one guy getting over that hump and blowing himself up inside the trench to birth a dozen martyrs, if not more. The hump was everything; once you were over it there was not a thing anyone could do. The already-dead bastard was not there to use his weapon. His weapon was to blow himself up, which was next to impossible to stop.
Blame seemed to be going around today. Everyone drank their tea and said God’s name too many times. The Americans were always the object of derision in these conversations, their occasional air support for us questionable at best. On the surface we were fighting on the same side for a change, and against an enemy that wanted the earth itself to be gone. Over at places like Palmyra in Syria and Mosul down the road from us, the enemy had gone on orgies of destruction of all things ancient, afterward gloating in their sick cruelty over priceless historical stones that could not fight or talk back. No wonder then that in the mokeb, and up and down all the saters of the war, we quietly saw ourselves as the soldiers of civilization, even if no one else believed us or
gave a shit. It was not something that was talked about. But it was there. In the air of every minor battle. And in the newscasts out of Iraq too. This was Nineveh, after all. The ancient capital of the Assyrians. The Nineveh of the Bible and the vast 2,700-year-old stone tablet library it had once held. We were certain we were fighting for something bigger than just Mesopotamia. And we were eating the bullets that the Americans, who despised our skin and our faces and our weapons, should have been eating right alongside us. The Americans saw us as rodents, and we saw them as a hollow Goliath. They laughed at our poetry and “queer” dancing in the middle of war, while we wept and held wakes after their friendly fires that killed our brothers. I wondered if anything, anything at all, could ever bridge these suspicions. I wondered if the so-called friendly fire that had killed the Three Magi had not only been the Americans but also thoroughly calculated.
Still, even if we were to find out the truth about the murder of our boys, what then? What could we do with that information?
Not much. I’d gradually come to think of them—the Americans—as entities beyond the realm of touch, or comprehension. Now and then we would run into their convoys on the trunk roads of Iraq. We passed one another like ghosts in the afternoon. Their equipment and vehicles had the feel of high walls with no human beings visible from our vantage. They were extraterrestrials to us. Here but not quite here. And sometimes I asked myself if we too were not just as invisible to them.
I stared at my buzzing cell and put it on speakerphone.
Atia was quietly crying.
“Dear, I don’t have enough money on my account here. If you’re going to cry, please hang up, cry to your heart’s content, and call me again later.”
She stopped. “You are a fool, Saleh. Do you mean you are over there again?” When I stayed silent she said, “I take that as a yes. Who are you in competition with? My husband?”
“Atia, please forgive me, but . . . fuck your husband!”
“That is my job. Not yours.”
“That hurts!”
“Good! I need to talk to you.”
“Well, I’m here and you’re there and my phone will go dead in a minute if you don’t go and put money in my phone’s monthly balance. I can’t do that from here.”
I waited for her to call back. Haji Yusuf waved at me from the tea stand he had set up across the street. Men huddled here and there over small fires warming their hands. The guy I called Egyptian Mo was teaching several young Hashd warriors how to do a headstand. He lined them up against the bullet-riddled metal of an old rattletrap and patiently went through the motions of showing the proper placement of the hands and the initial kick to get themselves upright. It was almost pastoral, this image. Except that about fifty meters away an old man walked in their direction with two sheep. My initial reaction was, What if he’s carrying? What if in the next half minute Haji Yusuf and Egyptian Mo and the Hashd boys become scattered body parts? The old man and his sheep approached and passed, quietly and without fuss. Just a straggler who had been left behind when the last of the villages in the outlying areas were liberated.
There was clapping of hands from the Hashd boys as Egyptian Mo stayed in position on his hands, then twisted around, did a flip, and went up again repeating everything on just one hand this time. It was a performance worthy of a champ. I thought: I have no idea what has brought Egyptian Mo all the way here from Egypt; I have no clue what has driven him to become one of us instead of one of them. Is it his love for the story of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom? Is it a love for the underdog?
I knew nothing.
Why did we fight? I had believed I knew. But I didn’t. Why did any of us come back to this godforsaken spot over and over again? Why did old Haji Yusuf personally put that North African enemy combatant out of his misery back in early autumn? Haji Yusuf could have just as easily let someone younger and more enthusiastic do the killing. Why dip your hands in blood like that when you don’t have to?
* * *
Minutes passed and still no Atia. Maybe she’d never call again. Maybe she’d fall into the sinkhole of a Middle Eastern marriage like many a good woman.
I had a flashback of her while I remained there on the mokeb roof—a last glimpse of my beloved on the night of the Mafiha/Dodonge book launch back in Tehran. The two men holding forth like they were UN emissaries. It was a reunion of a lot of people I knew from work at the Citizen and also from other papers I’d moonlighted at during the past few years. Book launches in Tehran were at best an inglorious failure. But not this one. Book City on Shariati Avenue had a line snaking outside. Did people care so much about books on war? Or was it Mafiha’s peace hokum they’d come for? Interrogator H was there too, reckless in his desire to be anything other than what he’d been hired to be, a feared agent of the state. If he continued like this he was bound to get fired, or worse; you didn’t just walk away from a job like that, and you certainly didn’t show your face so freely at public events like this, since there were bound to be people there whom you had interrogated at some point. I’d always thought that what H really desired was reincarnation; now I was sure of it. He was a burnt-out case, his job a burden. I saw him perusing the young adult section and moved quickly away, only to catch sight of more folks from the Citizen between the Western art and philosophy bookshelves. A little farther down was an entourage of war veterans, some deliberately still wearing combat fatigues. No doubt Dodonge had brought them along for show, as a part of his ongoing bravery extravaganza. The vets shuffled uncomfortably next to psychology and social science, looking out of place but enduring. They knew everything that was happening here was because of them; they were the spark for it. They were doers, though now diminished, serving as background decor for a piece of theater that had nothing to do with the war and everything to do with two men’s literary ambitions.
When the program started, with Mafiha reading a poem that began with “Peace has a price,” I shut his bullshit out and focused a little more on the faces of those veterans. I was sure they were men who’d known combat maybe as recently as last week. But without their weapons they were ordinary civilians who did not know what to do with their hands. They were childlike and their vanity had been crushed. Yet their faces betrayed a knowingness devoid of the zest that ran like blood in the civilian audience’s impenetrable wall of smiles. It was then that I saw Shorty, one of the snipers of Three Magi fame who would soon be dead, alongside his comrades.
Shorty’s nose was in a book that looked to have been borrowed from the photography section.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
He didn’t seem surprised. “Saleh! We’re on our way to jebhe.”
When a man says to you that he’s headed for the front, you enter another region with him. It is as if everything you say to him or hear from him no longer quite belongs to the realm of life. I could not have known that soon Shorty would be dead from friendly fire inside some industrial barrel on the Syria-Iraq border. And like most of those deaths, his death too would have little to no color for me, because I would not be close enough to witness it. It was like being cheated out of real lamentation. One minute you are making rice at the mokeb and the next minute somebody comes up to you with the familiar words: Something has happened.
“Your boys are with you?” I asked Shorty.
He put the book away, a collection of war photographs from the 1980s. “No. I came alone. They advertised this thing tonight in Nights of Damascus.”
Nights of Damascus was an online group that all the Defenders of the Holy Places veterans subscribed to on their cell phones. Mostly pictures of martyrs on the Syrian front, but not Iraq. It made me guess that Shorty and the others were soon headed much farther west than Tal Afar.
“Well?”
“Well what, brother Saleh?”
“This event. What do you think of it?”
He looked genuinely perplexed by the question. “Nothing. That Dodonge guy, he is a fake. The other guy, I don’t know hi
m. He doesn’t look right either.”
We stood there for another minute listening to Dodonge pontificate on the sacrifice of our boys in Homs and Damascus and Hama, rattling off place names he could be sure everyone understood. His eyes welled up with tears. Those tears would sell a lot of books tonight. Then Mafiha came back with another poem. This time he was likening peace to a mother waiting for her soldier-child to return home. The mother is by the river drawing water while the sound of guns echo from the other end of one of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia.
“Kos o she’r,” Shorty said.
“Yes. He is a shit-talker for sure.”
We instinctively made our way toward the exit, pushing past former colleagues I had to nod to and smile at.
Outside, Shorty lit a cigarette and said something under his breath. I could not make it out. He looked totally glum. He said, “You know, the government is not giving Ali-Akbar his martyrdom benefits.”
“It’s not like he exactly needs it now,” I joked tastelessly.
Shorty spat. “You know what I mean, Saleh. His family. His mother. The man even had a wife.”
“Are you going out to defend the holy places for the sake of the fringe benefits, or are you going for Imam Husayn?”
“Come on, Saleh! A man needs to feel some support in his death! Some martyrs get their faces on posters every year and their families get allowances for life. Others, like poor Ali-Akbar, may God have mercy on him, they don’t even get two words of thanks from you know who. You should write something about these things in the paper.”
“Is this why you showed up here tonight?”
He didn’t answer.
“They’ll hang me by the balls, Shorty, if I write about stuff like that.”
He spat again. “Then what’s it all for? What are we doing all this for?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. You guys are the ones going out there without the right permissions from the Guards. You guys head out there alone and then get yourselves killed. But it’s the Guards who have to practically glue you together and ship you back home so your mothers can mourn over you. You ever think about that? Maybe that’s their way of saying, Whoever goes to fight without permission can look forward to an afterlife of obscurity and zero martyr benefits.”