Out of Mesopotamia

by Salar Abdoh

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Not much is.”

  Shorty’s eyes twinkled. “But we’re going legit this time. The Guards came calling after we came back from Tal Afar. They’re the ones shipping us out. They need guys who can carry the load, if you know what I mean. And they know we can. We proved it to them in Iraq.”

  “They’re sending you to Syria, though, aren’t they?”

  Shorty nodded. “Our war’s almost over in Iraq. We need to graze elsewhere. You coming with us?”

  “No.”

  “But you were there recently. What’s it like in Syria?”

  “Different.”

  “How different?”

  “You have to watch your back in Syria. If the Syrians on your side tell you they’ll cover your flank, it probably means they won’t. There’s brother against brother over there. It’s different than Iraq.”

  “So what’s a guy to do?”

  “Cover your own damn flank.”

  Shorty laughed. “That’s a good one. Best advice I ever got.”

  “Shorty . . .”

  “What?”

  “Your brother comrade, Ali-Akbar, there was no reason for him to step on a wire. You guys are better than that. Cover your flank, son. I beg you!”

  “Saleh, remember that village? I came out of the schoolhouse for just one minute and boom! I’d stepped out for a smoke. I thought we were done in that accursed village. Now I have to live with this for the rest of my life. Ali-Akbar was my brother. With Imam Husayn as my witness.”

  “Don’t worry. The rest of your life won’t be much longer. Syria will see to that.”

  His face lit up, a mixture of worry and enthusiasm. He looked like a boy about to smoke his first cigarette. “You really think so?”

  “Yes. So please take care of all your business that you have to take care of first. If you need to bequeath this and that to someone, do so now.”

  “A guy like me, what does he have to bequeath? You make me laugh, Saleh. I’m not educated like you. I finished seventh grade, that’s all.”

  Later I’d find out that, officially, they’d put down Shorty and his two comrades as having been martyred in Iraq, not Syria. It had been a border operation. None of this mattered then and none of it would matter afterward. But at least Shorty’s family would get the martyr allowance that Ali-Akbar’s family would never get. Shorty’s op had been official; Ali-Akbar’s hadn’t. It was another stupid toss of the dice.

  “Saleh, let’s find a mosque and pray together. For old time’s sake. Two rakats each for the happiness of the soul of our brother, Ali-Akbar.”

  I pointed the way to the nearest mosque. “Do two rakats for me too. I have a little business inside. God protect you, brother.” I turned to go.

  “Saleh!” I waited for him to speak. “One day at the Eye of the Horse we saw you bury a book. It was the first time you were there. We didn’t know you then.”

  “So it was you guys who reported it!”

  “We didn’t know what it was. We dug it up. Just a book. But we didn’t know what was in it. There was, you know, some other handwriting. But the book was English, I think. We didn’t understand it. Ali-Akbar . . . he said it was our job to report it. Just to be sure, you understand.”

  “I understand.”

  “So what was in the book?”

  “Wisdom.”

  “What did it say?”

  “The man writing those words, he’d lived through a war too.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “He wrote that there’s something cruel about the leaves they grant to the men at the front.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you should be in Syria right now. Or Iraq. Here, you don’t belong. You need to be in the fight.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears, Saleh.”

  “Inshallah!”

  * * *

  Back inside Book City I hovered near the exit. I thought I deserved at least five minutes alone with Atia before I took off again for Iraq, not knowing what exactly I wanted to accomplish in those five minutes. I finally spotted her far from the stage they’d set for Mafiha and Dodonge. People were clapping. There seemed to be some sort of intermission. Atia was busy ordering something at the café next to the magazine section. I didn’t have the energy to trek all the way through that crowd. Maybe I’d join Shorty for those two rakats of prayer after all.

  Then, as I turned to leave, I saw him. The same Beatles haircut. That astounded boy’s face behind round, wire-rimmed glasses. You couldn’t miss Daliri of Marcel Proust fame if you tried. I went over, grabbed him by the arm, and pushed him toward the door.

  He was terrified. Turning around to object, there was an immediate hint of recognition in his face seeing me and so he said nothing.

  I forced him to sit on the back of my motorbike and we rode into the night.

  I knew exactly where I was going. I was going to Miss Homa’s.

  * * *

  “Saleh, it’s official. The Citizen has been sold.”

  Atia’s voice was back on the line and it echoed on the roof of the mokeb longhouse. For a moment I was discombobulated, unsure where I was. I’d been so deep in my daydreams of recent events in Tehran that I’d completely forgotten I was waiting at the Eye of the Horse for Atia to call back from across the border. A text message had also arrived reporting that my phone had been recharged over in Tehran. It still astonished me that you could get an actual text message from another country while in a combat zone, informing you that your monthly balance was good and that you could even get a week’s worth of free Internet if you punched in a few numbers.

  I said, “Well, we already knew that.”

  “But it still hurts. So many of us put in a lot of effort into that place.”

  I had no sympathy—not for her or for myself or anyone associated with the periodical. True, it had been, hands down, the best paper around. But we knew that as writers and editors our lives were bound by a piece of thread. We had nothing that was ours. Even our writing wasn’t ours. It was either commissioned, which made us drudges and hacks; or, even if the idea was ours, it still had to go through the obstacle course of the censor’s bureau. We were liars. But mostly we just lied to ourselves, thinking that we were engaged in the life of the world, that we mattered, that we were somehow softening the ugly edges of living where we lived. But the good old censor always had the last word. That was a reality we would never escape.

  Atia remained silent and so did I. Below the mokeb roof I heard someone calling my name.

  “Do you have to go?” Atia asked.

  I asked her to wait and peered down. A circle of people—Cleric J and several young men and another man I’d never seen before. The new guy with them was a bit disheveled and I could tell he wasn’t one of us. Maybe he was around forty, maybe a little older. His eyes gave him away. There was irony in them and an acknowledgment of the absurd. This man has to be a Westerner, I thought.

  I put out five fingers asking for five minutes. Cleric J nodded and the men walked toward the room I shared with the cleric in the back of the mokeb.

  “Atia, did you only call to tell me the Citizen has been sold? Good riddance, really.”

  “How can you talk like that?”

  “Easy. Everything is for sale. Even you, my very best friend. So why not the Citizen?”

  “Have you considered that I might be happy?”

  What if she was?

  I was worried that this war would end and I’d have to reinvent the wheel of everyday life again. Some people, like Cleric J and Egyptian Mo, were already seriously talking about the next fight. Cleric J’s words verbatim: If we don’t find martyrdom in Iraq or Syria, inshallah, there’s Yemen.

  I thought about Yemen and Atia’s happiness as a continuum, one long black-and-white reel beginning with devastation and ending in a marriage of convenience.

  “I apologize. I am happy for you, Atia.”

  “Mafiha w
ants to quickly put a new magazine together and he’d like you to run the art section again, immediately. He’s got all kinds of money backing him.”

  I didn’t lose anything by agreeing.

  “Fine. Tell him I’ll do it. I’m not going to Yemen anyway.”

  “Yemen?”

  “Nothing. Talking to myself. Tell him I’m on board.”

  “But there’s a problem.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There are two problems, actually. One is that your old friend Saeed has been making trouble for you. He’s been going around saying all the story ideas you’ve sent for the Abbas show you stole from him. He’s put in official complaints with several unions. And he also has that painter, your cousin Avesta—”

  “That impostor is not my cousin.”

  “Whatever. He’s got Avesta also trying to get you blacklisted from working in media here. You are in deep trouble, Saleh, especially with the Journalist’s Union. Unless, of course, you write another piece admitting that not only did Avesta not steal the ideas for his paintings from Miss Homa, but that in fact Miss Homa stole them from him!”

  “So all of my troubles are about theft? Either I stole something or I falsely accused someone of stealing?”

  Atia sighed into the phone. “You could say that. Yes.”

  “You know, our country is truly a work of art. Maybe I’ll go to Yemen after all.”

  “Don’t go down that road, Saleh. Please!”

  “Fine. What’s the second thing you wanted to tell me? Or was this all of the good news for today?”

  “The second thing is that our mutual friend called me in for a talk.” She meant H. “He also wants to know if I’m happy in my marriage. I told him yes. He seemed disappointed. Then he asked where the hell you were. You’d disappeared again, he said, and he hasn’t heard from you for a while.”

  “He knows perfectly well where I am. He just wanted to see if you knew. But if it makes him happy, tell him I’m back where Marcel Proust was buried.”

  “Why do you talk in code, Saleh?”

  “This is not code. Next time you see him, tell him I’m here where Marcel Proust was buried and that I truly miss our literary chats. He’ll understand.”

  “So you’ll work with the new magazine?”

  “I already said yes. And, Atia, I’m truly happy for you and your marriage.”

  “What about Saeed and Avesta? What are you going to do about their lawsuits?”

  “I’ll handle them.”

  I had no idea how to handle them. But Cleric J’s man was on the roof now, calling more forcefully this time. Apparently there was to be an ad hoc ijtima.

  As soon as I’d bid Atia goodbye the phone’s screen lit up again. It was a text from Daliri, my Proust. The message came from a new Iraqi number I’d given him: Dear Saleh, Miss Homa and I are on the move. Please come to us before it’s too late.

  10

  I’d gunned the motorbike straight for Miss Homa’s house that night after the war-and-peace charade at the Tehran bookstore. When Proust, riding at my back, tried to ask questions, I told him to shut up; I was the one asking questions. It was a role reversal of sorts—as if he was me and I was Interrogator H.

  Miss Homa placed sweet mint tea in front of us and sat gazing at Proust. It was a curious look. She obviously could not decide whether she should be amused or angry at me for bringing a perfect stranger to her house at night. Proust, meanwhile, looked on in awe around the living room. Miss Homa’s canvases, especially those domes and minarets, appeared to overwhelm him. In the days ahead I would come to know as much as there was to know about Proust. Born in one of the shore towns of the Caspian Sea, he’d scored high enough on his national exams to be accepted to the state medical school. But he’d opted for literature, the fool. After four years of reading the Persian classics and another four toward two higher degrees in French literature and translation, respectively, he’d finally landed back on earth to face reality—there was not a bloody thing for him to do to make a living. His family had supported him far longer than they should have and then one day told him to get a life. Which meant get married, settle down in small-town Iran, and, at best, become a bank clerk or a schoolteacher. I’d encountered dozens similar to this poor bookish fuck. I’d worked with them, heard them out when they contemplated suicide, and I had drunk to their afterlives once they’d hanged themselves or went missing or threw themselves under a truck. These were not the martyr types. They did not go to war. They read modernist European literature instead, in barely passable translation, and dreamed of other places—of Paris in the 1920s maybe, Vienna during the late Hapsburg period, or Madrid and Hemingway and bullfighting. They were budding Middle Eastern poets with nowhere to go, no visas to the West they could procure, no doors of the greater good world open to them. They had no money and they dreamed of ordering whiskey in a bar somewhere where there was a hint of freedom. They could just about taste that real whiskey that they’d never before tasted while simultaneously imagining writing the next great Persian novel, not realizing that the previous great Persian novel had never been written. And when that avalanche of reality one day finally came bearing down on them, they either got enough prescriptions of antianxiety pills to put a horse into a deep coma or else they jumped off a cliff. Usually they did both, though with a several-year interval of utter misery in between. That was Daliri/Proust in a nutshell. I’d had students like him at the University of Art in downtown Tehran. There must be a factory somewhere where they made the likes of him—with that bowl-shaped haircut and writerly glasses and hangdog look.

  I did not want to waste time. “What were you thinking showing up in Tehran like this? You’re supposed to be dead, son.”

  “No one knows I am here.”

  He had a way of withdrawing when he spoke, as if afraid he might get hit or run over. He was in his early thirties. I imagined during his military service he’d been the butt of everyone’s jokes. They wouldn’t have bullied him exactly, but they certainly would have made him pay for loving books and not being manly enough. He’d probably spent a lifetime being scared but chance had finally brought him a job working for State TV. He was indistinct enough that even State TV, which vetted your great-great-grandmother before refusing you a job, had taken him on. He was the invisible man incarnate. But one thing had led to another and now he was considered a martyr. His family would continue to draw a pension from his loss. He was at last good for something to them. All that French and Persian literature he’d studied! It took faking his own death to be appreciated in his motherland.

  “Do you realize how much trouble you’re in?”

  “I swear, Agha Saleh!”

  “No need to call me sir. Just call me Saleh. How do you know me anyway?”

  “I used to read some of your dispatches.”

  I was about to drill into him again while, as they say, the oven was hot. But Miss Homa who’d been quiet so far, stopped me.

  “Can’t you see he is scared, Saleh? What do you want from him?”

  I watched Proust and felt a pang of guilt. Maybe I’d been around men like Interrogator H and Cleric J and the Defenders of the Holy Places for too long. Hard men. I wasn’t being fair to Proust. I stood up and asked Miss Homa if I could help myself to her bar where there was an array of liquor. When I came back to them they were quietly talking, as if they’d known each other forever. I’d been hoping for this, but to see it happen so quickly was still odd.

  “Well?” I said.

  Miss Homa looked at me. “Mr. Daliri here tells me—”

  “Just call him Proust,” I blurted impatiently.

  “Proust?”

  I nodded.

  There was a look of shock in Proust’s face, but he said nothing for now.

  Miss Homa said, “Fine. Proust tells me that on the way to my house you told him he must leave Iran and never come back. Is this true?”

  “Miss Homa, if they find this guy here, they’ll—”


  “I know, I know. He told me all about his recent martyrdom.”

  “They’ll provide him with new identity, some money, even a job, and all he has to do is go back to Iraq and start a new life.”

  Proust shrugged hopefully. “It’s not like I had a great life here. I hated my job. We made propaganda documentaries for stupid television.”

  There was a pause during which all three of us imagined the alternate lives we could have lived. Something was happening. A transformation and a coming into being of light at the end of the tunnel. But this light was the light of extinction, of annihilation. This was about dying. Call it martyrdom or whatever name you want to put on it. The colors in my left eye began to jump. Shafts of light going every which way. I hadn’t been taking care of the eye again and now everything was a rainbow on a roller coaster. I saw Miss Homa, and to a lesser degree Proust, as bundles of moving light, as if they were saints in those Persian and Mughal Indian miniatures of old. Miss Homa glowed the way the soldiers I’d known at the front began to glow when the spirit of martyrdom came calling. At first I used to put it to excessive imagination. But later, when I talked to others, especially men who had fought in the eight-year war three decades earlier, I realized this was something you really did begin to see. You began noticing the signs of martyrdom-to-come. Its colors and variations. Its velocity.

  Maybe getting left behind enemy lines was the best thing that had ever happened to Proust. Luck had made him survive the ordeal. The lines were still so fluid just a year earlier that you could walk half a kilometer and be on the wrong side of the war. Proust had walked, by utter chance, to the right side. The Iraqi Hashd men had taken him in once they found out he was Iranian. Somewhere along the line he’d left that book of his which I’d found and buried at the Eye of the Horse—the same book that Interrogator H was now steeped in. This toss of incongruity had no end and no one would believe it unless you were there and saw how allegiance was not necessarily to any belief but to the blood of friendship. I’d sat in that house across from the mokeb many times, when Khaled, a Shia Muslim to the marrow of his bone, somehow received word from his hidden-away Christian neighbors in Mosul about enemy troop movement inside the city.