Out of Mesopotamia

by Salar Abdoh

  When H still didn’t answer after several attempts, I figured his lack of discipline and general predilection toward high art and Marcel Proust had finally cost him something. Maybe his freedom. Or maybe he was already in Erbil or somewhere else trying to escape this rotten Middle East forever. I waited one more day. Neither of them wrote, neither H nor the enemy scholar.

  In return, I did not answer Atia’s calls and messages, not even when she reminded me I’d better soon come up with that new ending for the Abbas show for State TV.

  More eventless days. No casualties. No captures. The mokeb was running itself with Abu Faranci and Proust and the other guys. One night I dreamed of the Kurdish combat women over in Syria and suddenly I had the end of the Abbas show in sight. He would not be felled by an enemy sniper whom he had fallen in love with. But rather, he would save a platoon of Kurdish women, his occasional allies and occasional enemies, depending on the time of the year in Mesopotamia. He would put his body and his soul in between them and the enemy as they approached the heights in which the Kurds were trapped. The greatest sniper in Mesopotamia would make one last stance to save the women. He would not be killed by one woman; he would die for many. Heroically. Rapturously. This melodrama, I thought, State TV surely had to accept.

  I was back to being a writer, even if what I wrote was questionable at best, and hackwork at worst. I didn’t want to think about that.

  I spent most of the following days cooped up in that room, rewriting and periodically listening in on the chatter of the mokeb, its poetry and its occasional French.

  * * *

  They hit hard at first. It was around four p.m. I had my back against the entrance of Khaled’s old place and counted three rockets coming down just up the road where the sniper squad used to bunk. My pristine table of tea and sugar in plastic cups, waiting for the afternoon warriors en route toward the border, did a backflip and then everyone was running. We of the mokeb were just Friday fighters who happened to be here every day, and suddenly the town seemed unusually exposed. I was frozen. It was not that I was unable to move or that I was shitting in my pants. Nothing like that. It was a perfect freeze inside my body, as if I had swallowed a man-sized cylinder of ice. Now the coffee man came hobbling this way. His small, tribal coffee mokeb by that old snipers’ billet was dust. This much I was certain of. But as he passed me I was not sure if the next thing I saw was my imagination—he seemed to have only two dusty stumps for arms. His kaffiyeh blood-soaked and dangling barely off his neck.

  My irrational anger of the moment had mostly to do with my ruined tea for the men. I saw stars and turned deaf. One of the several Muhammads from the mokeb was shaking me and screaming in my face and I swayed back and forth to the strength of his passion.

  I was dumb. Frightened into a version of courage. We were running, in circles it seemed. And for a brief moment it appeared as if the attack was coming from every which way. It wasn’t. They were only in front of us. We were not flanked. There was not a bloody thing to flank anyway. There were no pickups or APCs, just men on foot, not more than two or three specters that popped in and out of buildings like paper targets at a gun range. It was outlandish, gamelike. Yet many of the men from the mokeb did not even possess weapons. Troop movement had been concentrating on the west for two days, toward the general direction of Deir ez-Zor in Syria where the enemy was making an all-out play for the city. There was fear they might blitz us too from that direction. I thought that absurd, because we all knew they could not spare the manpower to move back into Iraq. They were spent, the sons of bitches. They were trying to get out of Iraq, not back in it. But you could not argue this fine point with Friday commanders and fighting clerics who, after all, only meant well.

  Now, as I write these words, fully conscious of my ignorance of all things martial, it might appear that I know what the fuck I’m talking about when I discuss the things that happened. I don’t. I have shot a few weapons in my life. But it was always as a guest of the weapon. Not its master. And I never hit anything that I intended to hit because my eyes would not cooperate.

  It was no different now. Emptied of the random platoons that made up the Hashd forces in this ghostly place, the isolated mokebs suddenly found themselves on the perimeter of a battle that should not have happened. In the last few days we had thought this geography finally cleared of the enemy, their last suicides taken down at the threshold of the Eye of the Horse a week before. Maybe there would be pockets here and there—and not so close—that would eventually be flushed. But nothing like this. I wish I could give a minute-by-minute account. But mostly I was just searching for a lens through which I could have a modicum of vision.

  I saw him, that familiar stance of the guerrilla with an RPG that I’d last encountered at Khan-T. Here: a dusty roadway with occasional battered buildings on either side. You could have imagined two cowboys suddenly appearing from behind their respective walls to face each other and you would have been forgiven the mindfuck cliché. Because that was exactly what it looked like. I closed my left eye to see better, or see period. There he was in that disheveled hatred of his, several buildings down in the direction that the coffee man or the coffee man’s specter had just hobbled from. Cleric J saw him at the same time and screamed, “Down!” which we all obeyed because he was our mother and our prophet.

  That man could have killed every one of us. Instead he chose as his target the emptied mokeb. I don’t know why he did that. But God bless him! Then his backup followed with another round into the smoking mokeb. They must have had information that that was the place they should hit if they wanted to score a major body count.

  An instant later, Maysam took one of them down with a clean shot, just as Moalem had done in Khan-T. The ground shook and the fresh rattle of vehicles from the fuel depot gave us hope. We had backup after all. Maysam started gathering the men, and once the two armored engines were on the dust road, we all hung back behind them, scared buzzing flies that we were, and slowly walked toward the destroyed coffee mokeb and the ruined sniper billet.

  Maysam and his men fanned out in front of the second building where we’d seen the targets, while I stayed with Cleric J, Haji Yusuf, Abu Faranci, Proust, and several of the men who didn’t have weapons. Arabic escaped me then. It was a language bristling with heat, concentrated and heroic, reaching my cottony ears in surges like staccato elegance from the Koran.

  The enemy was “scissored.” They’d retreated inside the one-story building that had lately been used by the local quartermaster. I knew what Cleric J was thinking. This was going to be our new mokeb, because our old one had just turned to shit. An argument ensued. Maysam was giving signals to take the quartermaster’s building down with the engines, but Cleric J wanted the place intact. He was being unreasonable. We could carry our seared onions from the destroyed mokeb a little farther up or down the road; there were plenty of desolate buildings to choose from. But Cleric J wouldn’t have it; he had no time or patience to sweep for explosives in a questionable building before we inhabited it.

  We were not going to pound these bastards; we’d flush them instead.

  Then he ran. Cleric J, limp-dashing toward that building to show us schoolchildren what it meant to be a fighting cleric. He was, as always, setting an example. For isn’t it said in the holy book that no fear shall be upon the friends of Allah?

  He ran, and then Abu Faranci and Proust ran after him.

  I’ve tried ever since to hold onto this moment. Investigate it. Try to understand its contours. The moment when men and women choose courage (perhaps a better word would be sacrifice) at the expense of survival, which is everything. I already knew nothing would happen to Cleric J. When you have spent enough time with a guy in a war you get a feeling if he’ll go down or not. I never saw that halo of the martyr over Cleric J’s head. I never feared I would lose this mad guardian-angel cleric.

  Now he did what he always did, turning around and screaming something to us that was his version of charge!
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  Abu Faranci and Proust stayed right with him.

  Our turret swung right to left, pointing above the heads of the three men. Out popped the enemy, his legs standing a good meter apart, as if he were drunk or had something precise to prove about how much of this earth he could cover in his last moments.

  His shots, wild and random, missed Cleric J, who was hobbling on his prosthetic leg, and instead found Abu Faranci square in the neck and shoulder.

  In return, the machine-gunner’s volley lifted the man off his feet and pounded him back into the building. It was like he had been trying to catch a ball just beyond his reach that went right into the next world. I watched Cleric J and Proust slowly crawl toward Abu Faranci. A pool of blood had already formed around him. I didn’t move. There were more random shots, but it seemed to be clear. Maysam and his men stormed the building belatedly and a few minutes later they came back out carrying only the upside-down black flag of the enemy. Uncharacteristically, since it had God’s name on it, they threw the black flag to the side of the road, and not without some disgust on their faces.

  Men came from the north side. Our guys. Clearing buildings one and two at a time. The engines and Maysam’s men moved to join them but I still didn’t move. Haji Yusuf, excited as always, was shouting things I only half heard.

  Proust didn’t have a scratch on him. I stood back and watched him staring at Abu Faranci’s dead body. Cleric J was murmuring something; perhaps he was saying a fatiha for the dead Christian.

  * * *

  Later, when we were situated just as Cleric J wanted in the quartermaster’s place, Proust came up to me while I was cooking the Iraqi rice noodle dish the men loved so much.

  “They buried him like a Muslim.”

  “The man was righteous,” I said noncommittally without looking up.

  “Saleh, I don’t know what to do next.”

  “You were counting on being dead. I know.”

  “But I’m alive.”

  “Seems that way.”

  “When then?”

  “I’m not the angel of death, you know! Besides, you made a good try. You ran right alongside Abu Faranci. No one will take you for a coward here. I can’t say the same about myself. It could have easily been you instead of him.”

  “Do you not feel his absence?”

  I glanced up at him finally. I had expected, when the time came, a more intense battle. Something at least mildly heroic. Something that would earn Abu Faranci the gold standard martyr status. But it didn’t really matter, because they were calling him a martyr anyway. And that was all he had wanted. Or maybe he didn’t even want that.

  No one would know he’d been here—no one outside Iraq and the orbit of our Hashd lives and deaths. When I followed the news of all the people who were joining this war from far away, those delicious stories took place elsewhere and belonged to other people—and that was just as well for us. Yet I knew that Cleric J had already made sure news would head south to the tribe of the executed man: a certain Abu Faranci is dead. The revenge narrative would stop with him. The equation was complete. It would not go beyond that.

  Proust said, “Why did you not come to say a prayer for Claude?”

  I had not wanted to hear the names of the dead. I’d drunk a lot of coffee from the hands of that coffee man. If he was dead, I didn’t want to know. If he was alive, I didn’t want to know. And if he was wounded beyond recognition, I still did not want to know. I wanted, in general, to stay ignorant of many things now. I didn’t want to get to know people and then have them die on me. It was better; the flights of despair came less frequently that way.

  I said, “I’ve been praying for Claude all night. He was . . . a complicated man. I am sorry we did not get to know him more.”

  “What becomes of me?”

  “You’ll have to stay here. Try not to die if you can. This war’s ending. There’s no reason you should do what Abu Faranci did.”

  “Stay in Iraq? Really? Forever?” It was as if he were pleading his case.

  “Do as you wish. Go back to Iran if you like. They’ll think you’re a ghost.”

  “Please don’t mock me, Saleh. You know that return for me is impossible.”

  It was. And it hadn’t escaped me that with two major works of Miss Homa to my name, I’d be a rich man when I got back to Tehran.

  “You can stay with Cleric J in Diyala for now. I’ll arrange it. I will send money your way from Tehran. After a while you can join the sea of refugees from this war going to Europe. Head for France if you can, your first love. Take long walks in Paris. I always wanted to go there. Send me a photograph.”

  14

  You can lose everything. Refugees know this. But so too do people who live their lives in photographs. I had many pictures of this war. One war among many and one I tried in a roundabout way to write about. Because it was there.

  It wasn’t long afterward that one day I woke up back in my house across from the synagogue in Tehran and realized my computer and all that was in it had died—like Abu Faranci at the Eye of the Horse, or like my lost cell phone before it. All those photographs and videos taken by a half-blind man—gone!

  I could reach out to the living (and I did) to retrieve some of the images—photos others had taken of us at places like Khaled’s billet. Shots taken with cell phones through cracked, battle-beaten screens. Certainly many of these images were circulating around. The ether didn’t let it all go up in smoke. But my own images, the ones I’d taken with my own hands, they had disappeared for good from one day to the next.

  This didn’t make me question what we did and if any of it was real. It was. All of it. The proof is in the everlasting posters of the martyrs. Or at least as long as the martyrs are still honored in posters and photographs. Because they too may one day go up in smoke. In memory, just as they did in body. Then what? At nights I lie awake and watch the synagogue chandeliers and think about such things. Because I haven’t even a war to keep me busy now and away from the demons of peace.

  * * *

  Abu Faranci’s death put a damper on us all. Cleric J gave us a variation of a sermon on loss. He said that it was debatable whether we could call Abu Faranci a martyr. Who knew why he had really come to us? But come he had, and he’d done more than his share. Therefore we had to honor the man, but only in our memories and taking it no further than that. There was a practical reason for this, Cleric J reminded us again. If we brought news of his death beyond Iraq, somebody would surely make a case against us. They’d say that we had murdered him. Because this was what they always said about us. How could we explain (and who would do the explaining?) that Abu Faranci had been among the best of the righteous. He had served and fought valiantly. And when the call came, he had given his life. Abu Faranci was one of us. And we would recall him the way men recall those who have taken a bullet for their brothers: we’d keep him in our prayers.

  Nevertheless, his death was the closing of another chapter. The enemy had tried, desperately, to make another “last push” in these parts and failed. It had been a ridiculously low-level fight and when it was over we’d sat around wondering what the point of it was.

  So the war would go on, but not here. It made us feel disrupted. When I told Cleric J that I had to go to Erbil on some business, he did not protest—even though in his mind the city of Erbil, firmly situated in the sphere of influence of our uncertain allies the Kurds, was an eventual battleground.

  I went back to Baghdad and from there flew to Erbil. I took a hotel room and every day for four days visited the coffeehouse at the hour I’d asked the enemy scholar to come. She was a no-show and I’d figured as much.

  I drank.

  The second day, as I was drinking in the Ankawa District, I saw a Kurd I knew from three years earlier. He had been part of the bodyguard detail of a man I’d tried to name, in a dispatch, the “kindest warlord in all of Iraq.” The Censorship Department in Tehran, naturally, had slashed the entire sentence—in fact, the entire
paragraph. The warlord was a brave old rotund Kurd who had fought Saddam to a draw in another lifetime and had had to live with wolves, so he said, in order to do it. This former bodyguard of his was a poet at heart who had been caught too many times writing instead of being alert. The kindly warlord had let him go so he could be a poet instead of a warrior. And now I was seeing him four tables across from me, scribbling away deep in his notebook, the world literally at his fingertips, happy, content in his art at last. I envied him his happiness. And I was not even sure why, besides the drinking, I had come to Erbil at all.

  I went back to the hotel and for the very first time tried to look up this enemy scholar online. I hadn’t done that until now because I’d been afraid of what I might find. Maybe I’d find nothing and realize it was all a hoax and that Interrogator H was testing me as usual. But there she was. Smallish and with the graceful face of a reader. Her steel eyes seemingly lit up the camera, her smile intelligent. I did not want her to be my enemy, or anyone else’s enemy. Why had she not written back? What were we to each other but two people riveted by the same universe?

  I came across a few photos of her backpacking somewhere by the Sea of Galilee some years earlier. The pain of losing Atia was now confused with the sudden love I had for this person whom I’d never met and, I knew, would never meet. So for the next two days, while waiting senselessly for her to show up at the coffeehouse at the souk in Erbil, I had visions of us in an alternate life. Married with kids and happily backpacking around all the troubled lakes of the world. I imagined long nights of heated political argument that ended in heated lovemaking and toasting to the spirit of all the martyrs of all the wars around us.

  And then my four days were up. Without love, only with messages from Atia that said the going rate for Miss Homa’s works had already doubled and people were clamoring to know where she was buried. I knew she was not saying any of this in a mercenary fashion. She just wanted to provoke some response out of me and probably figured this was how to do it.