“What did he say?” I asked, grazing the concrete ocean with my fingertips.
“He just kept saying: I got you. I got you. You’re here.”
“Will this thing we have ever go away, brother?”
“I don’t know, Mikey, it’s just there. But my wife is going to kick me out if I don’t get it together. I mean, how do you go back to watching TV next to the missus when you’ve spent a year dodging bombs in Mosul?”
Bowers never took to calling me by my given name, Shaker. When I talked to the guys, I was forever Mikey, and I liked it that way.
“Maybe in time it will get better,” I said. “It’s what they say.”
“You don’t peel off a whole war like a Band-Aid, Mikey—especially not a farm boy like you. That’s all I know.”
IN THE SPRING, I started the car, my family all packed inside it, trunk stuffed, roof rack teetering, and took the beat-up track toward the foot of our sacred mountain. Back and forth, I made the same drive to and from the villages, ferrying cousins, aunts, and uncles for the annual pilgrimage known as the Cemayî, which we undertook to restore our weather-beaten shrines.
Up on the terraced foothills, the great hull of Mount Shingal sat docked against the vacant azure, sun just burning off the morning haze. The smell of fresh meat was thick in the air, and wood smoke from the early fire pits ambled along the grassy apron. A few first blooms showed on the red rose bushes in the holy gardens, and standing on the cultivated bank I could just make out our old farmlands spread out far below like a long emerald patch. Further up the terraced lengths that stood like a giant’s staircase hacked into the rocky hillside, I glimpsed the white spires of our temple with its burnished peak molded into the shape of the sun.
White tents were set up like miniature houses across the leveled fields, and whole tribes crowded inside and outside them: eating, cooking, napping, playing music together. We would all live there, sleeping and rising to celebrate for days, until our monuments were repainted, the temple rooms restored, and the food ran out.
I walked right through that sea of kin that numbered in the thousands, in a bright scene that had played out in peace across Shingal throughout my lifetime, and felt at one with my people and the land we lived on. Up narrow steps made up of cut slabs of ancient rock, I joined the long line to our small temple and waited my turn. Not far from that place, thin canopies of trees shaded the hallowed ground where my father’s bones metamorphosed into eternity.
Why did God put the mountain there for us? I heard my young boy’s voice say on the tide of wind.
Because he knew we might need it one day. To give our people a place to hide in. The breeze whispered into my ear, and I felt Babo press his hand over mine.
WITHIN THE HEART of the sacred room, dim as a grotto, I knelt over the smooth stone ground. For every wish uttered to God inside the temple, we tied a small knot into the billowing curtain. By the end of the pilgrimage a bright constellation of knotted longings decorated the silks, untied only to make room for others while setting free our secret dreams. Maybe that day I fastened a wish to love, or to find peace in my heart. These were all I ever needed—even now.
When I wandered back to our field and stood along the ledge looking down into the neighboring meadow, I saw her. A few meters from the cemetery yard, she just stood there like a column, as though waiting for my lonesome eyes—so tall, and lithe as a flowering vine. Her white fingers flickered like wings over the black linen of her long skirt, nails lacquered to blood-red petals that matched the shade of her blouse. Closing my eyes this very moment, I can still repaint her in minute detail. And the thing I wish never to forget: her rich tresses worn por vekeri—open hair. Those heavy strands poured in midnight streams down her back. Five feet from the stones over my father’s grave, she was alone.
Guitars played and people danced in wild circles. Groups of girls flitted about. Some had their faces buried in small mirrors, smearing on lipstick and dabbing their cheeks. Not her. She wore her alabaster skin like her gaze, clean and free of any artifice.
“She’s very pretty,” said my sister Nadia, leaning into my ear.
“Maybe you could go down there and find out her name. Please say your brother Shaker would like to say hello.”
And I watched Nadia clamber down to the field in her sundress and make her way through a wall of gyrating dancers. Lost in a reverie, the girl still hovered in place. But then, as though mocking my desperation, the crowd converged into itself like a curtain closing over the grass, obliterating my perfect vantage, and I lost sight of her.
Minutes later, Nadia was back all pink-cheeked and breathless. “She said she doesn’t know you, Shaker. Nothing I can do. But she was nice.”
Hours later, while sitting back on the crowded stairs that centuries of sandals had worn down at the center, I saw her again. Between two chattering friends, she strolled a long path that meandered like a ribbon toward the temple. If only I could know her name, I thought, I would overcome the mute spell that that first sight of her had put me under. Then as the trio strode past, her companion tripped, and as she leaned over to hold out a helping hand her skirt brushed against me. I looked up and she was staring down, sunlight spilling all over her.
“Are you all right?” I said after several heartbeats.
Then she smiled at me, still moving down the steps, and opened a trap door into eternity.
BY MORNING, THE field below ours stood vacant and she was gone. All I learned was where she’d come from, like a prophecy—a tiny nameless hamlet, some forty miles from Khanasor, on the south side of the mountain. Sitting like a speck of dust over the desert floor and tucked far from the main roadways, the village was as hard to uncover as a stolen secret. Still, every free day for nine straight months, I got into my car and drove like a man possessed around the base of Shingal in search of her. She was like a ghost. A being from some other world. A narcotic. Block after block, my eyes roved her narrow village lanes, passing cars, peering into the open windows of houses, scouring alleys and crossing fields where people were out harvesting; but it was as though she’d existed only in some lonely chamber built from the ruins of my mind.
Sometimes, I believed I was going mad. Time gave way, weeks collapsed, and the heat of summer beat through the car, but failure could not break me. I must have driven a thousand miles on irrational faith alone. I only wanted to know her name—that’s what I told myself. A suffocating man only hopes for a single breath.
It might have been late afternoon in Khanasor, the light low against the plains. I was hurrying through the market, looking for shoes, a dress shirt, or some other trivial garment. Cars moved slowly along the roadways; a recent spell of rain left the ground in a perfumed steam that permeated everything, and I walked alone.
One block, then two, and I passed by a dress shop and glimpsed a neighbor’s wife running her hands along the heavy racks of clothes. Catching sight of me wandering by, she raised a palm, called out. And I nodded, thinking nothing—then in a thunderclap that traveled right through me, time came to a halt. Barely a foot away and standing by the counter, the girl was there. I was sure. Moments later, as though sensing my famished eyes, she turned. One look from her was all it took—my world riven in two.
“Shaker, meet my friend,” Farida said to me.
“We’ve met before,” I said, my mind fumbling. “Perhaps you don’t remember.”
“I’m not sure,” the girl laughed, coming over. “How do you know me?”
At the first notes of her voice, it seemed the universe came to life. Then she told me her name—Dil-Mir—and made everything new.
ONE PHONE CALL a week turned to three, then five, then twenty. We discovered all the things we shared; our values, love of children and cooking—the want for a home. University degrees. The desire for peace in our time and on our land. Faith in God above all things. After a thousand hours or more, the sound of Dil-Mir’s voice in my ear was an elixir, and the darkness that had seemed absolute lifte
d. Finally she agreed that I could come to see her—it only took half a year.
As we walked the perimeter of her courtyard in the hamlet, eyes on us from every side, she seemed to hover over the ground in her sundress. Every now and again she ran her fingers through her unadorned hair and I’d have to hold my breath a moment.
“I’m from one side of Shingal and you are from the other,” she said. “It’s a great distance for us. We must take our time.”
“I have as much to give as you need to take,” I told her.
“Why do you want to keep coming all this way?”
“I like how you talk, how you wear yourself.”
Dil-Mir took a seat against the wall in the yard of her plain house, her family all inside, perhaps wondering where all this was going, if anywhere. She tucked her legs under her layered skirt, arms wrapped about her knees, and looked up at me, curious. Her face was as smooth as milk filling a glass.
“Sometimes, your fingers shake a little,” she said finally.
“It’s from the war.”
And I held my hands together as though in prayer to steady them.
“Tell me one of the worst things.”
“I don’t know that I should.”
“I can see from your dark eyes you don’t sleep.”
“No, not much.”
I looked down at my open palms, examining the deep lines etched over the surface. Those hands had carried wounded bodies; the fingers had plugged bullet holes, and lately turned the soft pages in textbooks that I could barely comprehend. Where to start?
“Last night, I saw Migone again,” I began. “Riding in the Humvees…”
TEAM SPIDER WAS working a section of the desert, hugging the serrated borders of another rat-line village. The steady convoy of Humvees stirred up a dense fog of grit over the derelict streets. On that particular day, I was in the last vehicle right behind Migone’s, the IA rigs taking the lead up front. Through the windshield I could see the armada of trucks moving fast and accelerating. The driver pressed down on the gas. Hard to keep up. The wheels screamed as they tore over the ground and I checked the clasp on my belt.
A burst of static crackled over the radio.
“The Iraqis are driving like lunatics again,” Migone sputtered.
We were all holding on to our helmets and ourselves as the truck heaved forward. It was like riding in a tin can. I looked out the windshield again and could see the gunners standing in the forward vehicles hugging the turrets. Impossible to tell if they were enjoying the wild ride.
“You ever get a driver’s license, Mikey?” Iavecchia said, turning in his seat.
“We don’t have those here, sir,” I said.
“So what the hell do you do when you want to drive a car?” Migone barked over the headset.
“We just go, sir.”
Waves of sand assaulted the glass like thick brown rain. Our truck was hurtling so fast over the road that my teeth rattled and my feet went numb. Seconds later, we heard a loud snap and the underside of the front Humvee flew straight up, spewing an avalanche of dirt.
“Christ, he’s flipped it,” Migone shouted. “Stop!”
The sun hung the pale red color of a ripening cherry as we rushed on foot through the coarse gloom. Soldiers in fatigues disgorged from the long line of vehicles and rushed soundless to the front through a funnel of smoke and steam. I could see Migone reach the upended truck and I ran to him, breathless. All anyone could think about was the man who’d been standing in the turret, exposed. No one had to say it.
“Where was he?” Dil-Mir said.
“Trapped under the truck. It landed on him.”
“Did he live?”
“How could he?”
From underneath the heap of metal blood kept pouring out. So much of it. It was on our boots. Everywhere. I kept thinking his body must be empty. Migone looked down and put his hands over his head. Hordes of soldiers were screaming in a high-pitched mess of Arabic and English, surrounding the truck and trying against every law of rational physics to lift it. Some of the IA people were howling like children. It was chaos. Finally I ran to get a jack from Migone’s truck, but I didn’t want to see what was under there—what had happened to him. It was bad.
“But you did. You saw it.”
“Yes.” I drew out the word like a long needle.
My legs had buckled at the sight of him dragged from that death trap—a young Kurd with a family at home. Wife. Children. Migone knelt way down, feeling around the deadweight wrist for a pulse—for anything—against all logic. I got in closer to help and saw what I saw: the tectonic force of the impact had sheared off the full back of the gunner’s skull, ripping the brain like a big pomegranate seed right out of it. Then, from that visceral mayhem, some irrational instinct compelled me to search for the missing parts of the dead man.
“Bodies are things, Dil-Mir,” I said. “That’s what I learned out there.”
“They can break.”
“Yes, into pieces.”
“Into pieces,” Dil-Mir repeated. “Like your mind—but the mind isn’t a thing, is it? You can find its missing pieces and put them back where they belong.”
Then she reached out and ran a thumb over my open palm.
“Maybe,” I said, feeling her small touch infiltrate my lifeblood, and I was back on solid ground in the yard of her small house again.
And the macabre vision she’d had me paint over the curtain of stilled air between us suddenly vanished. I could feel it leave my body like a malevolent cell.
“Some people say there is medicine, Shaker, for what you have. But you can’t take too much of it.”
“Talking to you,” I breathed, wanting to hold her and not let go. “Talking to you is my medicine.”
Never too much of anything, my son. And I could hear my father’s voice say it—never too much of anything, but love.
Chapter Twelve
The Islamic State Comes Home
AT SUNDOWN SEVERAL MEN DISGUISED AS BEDOUIN MOVED over the low-lying dunes along the western reaches of the Jazeera. They got into pickup trucks, battered rifles slung over shoulders, their scrubbed hands still fragrant with gun oil. Strips of cloud spattered the sky like the chevrons of waves and cool winds poured over the shiftless sands; as far as the eye could see there was no sign of civilization. Out there, those forgotten shadows of the war were still free to roam like rogue cancer cells—die-hard Sunni insurgents the foreign occupiers and Shia-laden ISF had neglected to excise. Scores of them would congregate in safe houses nestled along the no-man’s-land, mere miles from the border, sip chai, unfurl maps, and hatch their plans.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as al-Shabah, “the Phantom,” surviving leader of AQI, had sent small contingents of those leftover fighters into Syria to support the embattled rebels fighting to topple the regime of the “apostate” Shia-Alawite, Bashar al-Assad. Once there, they joined with several Syrian jihadists to form Jabhat al-Nusra, “the Victory Front,” which drew considerable support from the beleaguered Sunni population, who had seen al-Assad’s militias “cleanse” their towns and burn down their homes.
Things had gone far better than expected. In the mayhem of Syria’s civil war, those rag-tag al-Qaeda jihadists had found themselves a fertile breeding ground. In March 2013, the rebels captured the eastern city of Raqqa and locked their sights on the nearby oil fields. Soon, they were selling crude on the black market, collecting taxes from the terror-stricken civilian population, and increasing their ranks exponentially. By April of that same year, while I was falling in love with Dil-Mir, al-Baghdadi imposed Sharia law over the captured territory, declaring the merger of AQI and al-Nusra into the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL, or ISIS—and resurrected a withering holy war.
BACK HOME IN Khanasor, sitting in the front room before our satellite TV, we watched those events unfold in neighboring Syria with little concern. Most people thought that the risk to our country was still remote—after all, the American
s had left the IA well equipped with tanks, MRAPs, guns, and missiles, and we believed that the foreign powers who lit the powder keg back in 2003 would surely intervene if our nation fell under serious threat. Not to mention, the recent antics of our paranoid Shiite president Nouri al-Maliki were taking up most of the country’s attention.
In a doomed effort to protect his power base, our newly unfettered leader had unleashed a campaign to systematically disenfranchise and abuse the Sunni population: arresting its members of parliament, using lethal force to suppress public protests, and incarcerating thousands of civilians, many of them tortured beforehand and held in grim conditions without any formal charges laid. The inclusive democratic government al-Maliki had promised the tribes in exchange for their crucial support in routing out terrorists during the “Sunni Awakening” was now a blatant sham.
In hindsight, we should have connected the dots between what was happening in Syria and what was happening in Iraq—perhaps we simply didn’t want to. The fact was, we Yazidis were pacifist villagers eking out an existence in a poor province under a surging nationwide unemployment rate. After years of war, we just wanted to get back to living.
ON A WEEKEND break from school, I stood in Dil-Mir’s aromatic kitchen, carving up the fresh meat. Often, we prepared meals together, practicing the domestic bliss we were certain to share after the exigencies of school and finding work were over. Dil-Mir had tied her abundant black hair into a loose braid and wore a simple dress that flowed in a rambling pattern of blossoms all the way down to her ankles. I sat in her perfumed wake, as her hands worked over the cutting board. Rising heat painted the soft arcs of her cheeks to a high pink flush—she needed no other adornment.
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