Out of Mesopotamia

by Salar Abdoh

  I said into the phone, “Proust, I cannot meet you and Miss Homa in Najaf. Impossible!”

  Proust softly spoke back: “Saleh, you don’t have to. We are not in Najaf anymore.”

  “You are in Karbala then? Are you at the shrines?”

  “No. We are in Samarra and hope to come north. We are coming to you.”

  They were already farther north than I was.

  * * *

  Grand mosques are humbling experiences, like grand churches. They are bullies. It is the little mosques, rather, that warm a traveler’s soul. The small, makeshift excuses that are merely functional, marked with the sweat of refugees and the destitute, reeking of shoelessness and longing.

  Jasim and I sat in one at an outer ring of the mechanics’ quarter of Sadr City. Ahead of us was a graveyard of cars as far as the eye could see. Across the road a man and his two assistants were busy converting an old, decrepit tractor into a homemade Hashd armored vehicle to be sent north. The trifling faded-blue dome of the mosque was pockmarked with bullet holes and words. Men with missing feet, legs, hands, arms, eyes, and ears sat around praying or quietly talking. Once in a while people showed up with offerings of food for them. They were veterans, these incapacitated men, having fought in recent wars or old wars—now with no one to care for them except the folks in the mechanics’ quarter.

  Beforehand, we’d stopped at Jasim’s home nearby and taken his little boy and girl out for ice cream. Their innocence was like fresh air. I thought of how during long stretches at the sater, you no longer remembered there’s a world of children in the back somewhere. Unlike Iran, Iraq was a country swarming with kids, in every street and alleyway, yet you’d forget they existed at all. Just as you tended to forget that half the world were women. You ached for them distantly and not in a sexual way. They were your mothers and sisters and beloveds and they were not here. Not one. The setting of the men of the Hashd turned desire inward until it was extinguished. You bottled it up and threw away the key until the next time you were, say, in Baghdad or Amman. And then, in an instant, just the mere sight of an ankle could throw your world into disarray. You remembered who you were. You were not a ghost.

  I said to Jasim, “Your children will flourish and you will live. Stop worrying.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Like I said, the time for revenge is over. So you did a little work for the Americans back in the day. A lot of people did. If anybody wanted to get you for that, they would have by now. Someone’s playing a stupid joke on you. They want you to feel some heat. It’s your job to try to figure out why.”

  I left him to that thought for a minute and stepped outside. A man without legs was perched on top of the shell of an old white Toyota which itself was perched on top of several other car shells next to a garage full of broken wheels. There was no way to explain how this legless man had gotten up there, but there he was, as surely as I was here now watching him watch the makeshift mosque. He was the illness and hope of this land. I knew that as a reporter I’d never be able to quite convey what I saw here. Yet I didn’t want to take a picture of him either, as easy as that would have been. For the same reason I could no longer go south to the Karbala pilgrimage. I was tired of photos and photographers capturing pilgrims as if they were coins in a piggy bank. Miss Homa must have taken one look at that landscape and seen the same thing. Death would have diminished returns alongside several million walkers having their pictures taken all the time.

  Smoking a cigarette, Jasim joined me outside. Our eyes rested on the legless man.

  I said, “Look at me and my partner Saeed, we worked for all kinds of people. In fact, you were the one who brought a lot of those jobs for us. But no one’s threatening us with death for working with infidels, are they? None of it matters now, Jasim. Someone is playing with you. That’s all.”

  “And I should take it easy because it is only a joke? Would you take it easy? I have a family. You just saw my little ones.”

  He had a point.

  He went on: “By the way, what happened between you and Saeed? Why do you no longer work with him?”

  “Never trust a man with a camera, Jasim. His loyalty is always to his contract.”

  “You are telling me this now? It is my job to work with men of that sort. It’s how I make my living in this terrible land.”

  “And look at where it got you today!”

  He turned and stared at me. “Thank you for making me feel so much better.” He spat and walked to his car.

  “You’re welcome—and I’m sorry!”

  I closed my good eye and the world was soft again. I was back in Khan-T in Syria in a pothole with Nasif waiting for the enemy to make a move. I was with Moalem writing in his tedious diary. I was with the Afghans coming back to the red house to show they were not just fair-weather friends. I was with Atia going to a widow’s house in the Abdulabad District of Tehran to ask for the widow’s hand on behalf of a comrade who had already been killed a day earlier.

  Atia picked up on the second ring.

  “Saleh, our mutual friend says that State TV is not accepting the ending for the Abbas show. Their exact words: Abbas, the great sniper of Iraq, cannot be taken down like that by a common enemy sniper, and a woman at that. Audiences will not accept it. Nor will State TV accept that Abbas falls in love with a female enemy combatant.”

  “Then tell our mutual friend and State TV to go to hell.”

  “Our mutual friend also says that once you have finished with the business of a certain French book and its owner, if you don’t go to Erbil for that other business, whatever that is, he will have to send people after you.”

  “Tell our mutual friend that once he is in hell, he should remain there.”

  “Where are you, Saleh?”

  “In a graveyard of hopeful car parts.”

  “I have one piece of good news though. Two, actually.”

  “You are going to have a child with the boss—and they are twins!”

  The silence was painful. And now I saw the legless man slide down the car shells with such ease, and with a cigarette in his mouth, as if he had natural glue on his palms.

  “I’m sorry, Atia, for my bad behavior. I think it’s called jealousy. Or maybe defeat. Maybe both.”

  “The boss—Mafiha, my husband, your friend—has rid you of your problems. He spoke with State TV. And they told Saeed he had better withdraw his lawsuit against you regarding the Abbas show, if he knows what’s good for him. They are committed to you being the original creator of the series.”

  “All they want in return is a happier ending for Abbas, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank the boss for me.”

  “He also took care of that other lawsuit against you.”

  I had already forgotten that Avesta, my pretend cousin, intended to sue me too for the article I’d written about his theft of Miss Homa’s ideas.

  “The painter guy. Your cousin.”

  “My so-called cousin!”

  “The new magazine has decided to commission a long article on him. You don’t have to do a thing. Mafiha will write the article himself. The lead piece in the art section for our second issue.”

  It was too clean an ending for it all. And it was classic Mafiha. Just taking care of business with more business.

  The legless man had disappeared and the guys turning the old tractor into an armored vehicle were swearing, livid about something. Apparently their oversized gadget’s turret was stuck and wouldn’t turn.

  “Any chance your husband could fix my issues with our mutual friend as well?”

  “You know that’s beyond his scope.”

  “I guess there are still some things the great man cannot do.”

  “Saleh!” Atia’s voice was forceful. “You need to call our mutual friend. In fact, you need to get back here as soon as possible.”

  “What’s for me there, Atia?”

  “A visit to your mother’s grave, for star
ters.”

  “Nane-Saleh is gone?” I closed my good eye and tried without success to see her.

  “Are you all right, Saleh?”

  I imagined this place without a war. Just men casually missing limbs and other men turning a piece of farming equipment into a killing machine.

  How did it feel to execute someone? It was an insight that Abu Faranci would possess by now.

  “Atia, tell our mutual friend I will go to Erbil for him. I promise.”

  “Saleh!”

  “And thank your husband for arranging my mother’s funeral. I’m sure he’s the one who took care of that too. I know he’s really doing all this for you. But I’ll take it. I owe him in a big way. I’ll even read his peace poems and try to like them. I’m not saying this with irony. Honest!”

  One of us hung up.

  Beneath some hard-to-make-out Arabic graffiti on the battered vault of the mosque, someone from somewhere had written, in concise and nearly immaculate Persian: A mountain will never reach another mountain, but a man will reach another man and take his revenge . . . if he must.

  It was a variation on an old saying. The original Persian proverb said nothing about revenge. Whoever had written those words had some precise ideas about what they wanted to do. And you could have summed up this land in those words.

  * * *

  Miss Homa lay in bed in the back of a barbershop near al-Alwa Square, a short walk from the Askari shrine. Her eyes were closed but she was awake and Proust held her wrist, crying quietly. Jasim waited in the car outside. The barbershop was a two-seater and pilgrims, all of them Iranians, were lined up against the wall waiting for haircuts. From their beaten appearance, you could tell they were the kind of tireless wanderers for whom a simple march to Karbala was not enough; they had to come this far north and had walked past Baghdad all the way to Samarra to show their true worth as walkers. You’d see them on the side of the road, looking haggard and monumental in their great revel of sacrifice. They were beyond reach and reason, like exquisite skeletons. I imagined some of them reincarnated as Christian martyrs nailed to a rock and weeping ecstatic tears of blood. While others came on buses and didn’t walk at all, suggesting that they were complainers and a potential nuisance in their excessive wants.

  The chaos of it all was infectious. The look of trance, and rapture, in the eyes of a pilgrim who has trekked a thousand kilometers is worth being born into this world for.

  I walked over to Jasim.

  He said, “I may not see you again, Saleh.”

  A dusty wind had picked up and the town seemed under a barrage. So much had happened in the years since the Americans had come and gone. So much wasted blood, all the destroyed mosques. The enemy had been relentless on Samarra, swooping in from the horizon in their pickups and black banners, waving their atrocity in our faces and rubbing it in. We had been losing then, but the cordon for holy Samarra had withstood the assault, barely.

  Evil was still in the air, however, and this dusty wind had a smattering of that time.

  “You had best get going before the road to Baghdad is closed.”

  “Saleh, you haven’t asked me why I may not see you again.”

  I did not tell him that a man can only take so many goodbyes. I was exhausted. Mostly with my choices. And those of others. I met Jasim’s eyes and waited for him to speak again.

  “I will take my family and go to Morocco. I worked there before. I have connections.”

  “Jasim, Morocco is not Iraq. They don’t need translators like you over there. You’ll be bowing all day and night to French and German tourists. You’ll be a waiter in some tourist-trap restaurant.”

  “So be it. Do not be harsh on me, Saleh. I cannot live in fear for my family here every day. Look at what happened to . . .” He trailed off.

  “Zahra the Beheader?”

  “Ay, yes,” he said in a way that was not quite his own Iraqi accent, as if he were already considering himself gone from here.

  “God be with you, my friend.”

  “And them?” He pointed toward the barbershop.

  “I guess I will not have to worry about a haircut in Samarra.”

  “What will you do with them? That old lady looks very sick. She needs a doctor. And that young man, he . . .”

  “Looks confused? That he is. He can’t go back to Iran.”

  “Why not?”

  “They already named a street after him. He’s a martyr.”

  Jasim raised an eyebrow. “They think he died in battle?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you are here to do what for him?”

  “He believes he should become a real martyr and not remain a fake one.”

  “But Saleh!”

  “I know, my friend. You have to escape to Morocco and this man, I suppose, has to do what he has to do.”

  Jasim thought for a bit. “I could take him to Morocco with me.”

  “You are too kind. I’ll figure something out for him. He will not die. Not if I can help it.”

  “Allah!”

  “Allah!”

  Jasim disappeared in a squall of dust and traffic.

  Back in the barbershop, the old guy cutting the pilgrims’ hair was making fast work of his clients. He was an austere believer with a square, unsmiling face. His green skullcap slanted a bit to the side, making him look slightly comical with that Moser shaver moving like an orchestra conductor’s baton in his hand. I knew him from earlier passes through Samarra. After they had pulled his nails out and burned his tongue with scalding water, he had eventually become part of the sea of Iraqi refugees who escaped to Iran during Saddam’s reign. He did little but cut hair with an efficiency and single-mindedness that made you a believer in regular visits to the barber. I was not sure how Proust had known to come to him, but here we were and it was as good a place to be as any.

  Miss Homa’s eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, when I came back in. She turned to me. She seemed pleased about something. In her weakness, she was also strong. As if illness had given her a reserve of strength and I had to play catch-up before she expired.

  “Saleh, you are here.” She smiled again, a weak smile full of compassion. “I guess this gives a whole new meaning to ‘appointment in Samarra,’ doesn’t it?”

  Proust sat on the chair. He had cried himself into silence. I had never felt so sorry for this land as I did just then. It was one of those sentimental “why us?” moments that can make a man turn his face up to the sky and start an irrational conversation.

  “You will be fine, Miss Homa.”

  “She will not!” Proust yelped, suddenly wanting to pick a fight.

  I glanced from him to her. Then I took out my cell phone and wrote a message to the last number I had for H: I have our Proust.

  H wrote me back right away: What do you plan to do with him?

  Keep him in Iraq. Like you ordered.

  I went closer to the smallish, uncomfortable-looking daybed to get a better feel for Miss Homa. Proust sprang to his feet. He had become her protector.

  “What happened?” I asked, addressing both of them. “Why did you two come all the way up here?”

  “She wanted to walk with the pilgrims,” Proust volunteered.

  “Yes. But this is not Karbala. You didn’t just walk seventy-five kilometers. You walked three hundred! What were you thinking, if I may ask?”

  Miss Homa eyed me gently. “It’s what I wanted.”

  “She caught a cold,” Proust said quickly. “She caught something. An infection maybe. Maybe it was bad water. She refuses medicine. Made me promise not to call you. She kept walking. She will not eat.”

  “Son!” She reached for his hand. “Is this not why we came here?”

  That did it. Proust was off again, crying. The three of us like lost baggage from a shipwreck in that sea of humanity that was the Arbaeen pilgrimage of Iraq.

  “But why Samarra?” I asked again.

  Her breath was light but she spok
e clearly. “We decided to come to where you were. To where the war is. The pilgrimage was fine. But it was a carnival. It was not what I wanted. This is as far as we got. I could not go on.”

  Proust added, “And the roadblocks north of here wouldn’t let us.”

  “I could get you a doctor,” I said to her.

  She dismissed my suggestion with a wave of her hand. “Saleh, do you think the Mahdi, our hidden Messiah, really vanished right here in Samarra? Do you think when he comes back he’ll reappear here after a thousand years?”

  “We don’t know, Miss Homa. All we know is his father died here.”

  “A place of mysteries then, Samarra.”

  “I did not realize you believe in these things.”

  “It’s never late to believe, Saleh. It’s like being asked for a dance. I always liked to dance when I was younger. I’d like to believe my paintings are dance.”

  The barber stuck his head in the back room, his green skullcap like a vintage attachment to his body. He gave a nod, grunted, and retreated.

  I knew the color of death. Miss Homa would die tonight. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. She was paler than ever. She had made sure to squeeze the last of life out of herself during this pilgrimage. I’d sometimes see it with other pilgrims of her age too. A sort of counting down until the light went out, as if they were here to secure a spot for their own funeral march. And in doing so, they became angels. She was glowing. That familiar glow above the head. The glow I’d seen on all the martyrs up and down this country.

  * * *

  At dawn I opened my eyes at the foot of the Askari shrine. Somebody had stuffed my shoes under my armpits while I was asleep so they wouldn’t vanish. Later, when I looked in at the shop, the barber had gone out and in his place Proust had taken up the Moser to cut the hair of the pilgrims. He seemed to be doing just as fine a job of it too. Two days passed like that. Our nontalking barber, Proust, me, and Miss Homa in a town where our Messiah may or may not have disappeared for his centuries-long absence. Tradition had it that when he returned, none other than Jesus Christ would be accompanying him. The two of them together would set the world right again.