Now Amal is on the verge of tears, too. “It’s not fair! How come Nabil gets to do everything and I’m always stuck here?”
“You want to go out and get shot like their driver?”
“Baba!” In my frustration, an image flashes across the screen: me tied up, Baba as my captor. I start to turn my watch over. “Hey, Amal. How about later on you and Sam and I can spend some time together? I’ll send out for ice cream and we’ll eat it up on the roof. Okay?”
She looks reluctant to admit she likes the idea. “Okay,” she mumbles. Her shoulders drop, her head tilts with a roll of resignation. “But I am not spending any more time in the kitchen today,” she announces, and goes to her room. In America teenage girls rebel by doing drugs or getting pregnant. But this is all Amal has. Refusing to make jam.
I sit back down at the table, and hold my hand out towards the chair where Baba had been sitting. Part of me wants to give him a lesson in dealing with Amal, in the futility of meeting her frustrations with anger and impatience. My parents, like any good parents of a fourteen-year-old girl, have hardly let her go out since before the war began. Amal is a prisoner of war, held hostage by parents whose only way to protect her is to keep her virtually locked up at home.
I nod at the seat and Baba drops his hefty weight into it.
“You know, all of this is hard on Amal, too,” I say.
Baba tilts his head back and forth, vaguely acknowledging my argument. “But she shouldn’t behave like that. She has to start acting like a grown-up.”
“She’s already pretty grown up,” I say, rubbing my eyes. They ache with exhaustion, and at the same time, I can feel a slow panic behind them: they have seen too much on too little rest.
“Do you trust him?” I ask. Definitions of Baba course through my fingertips: brooding, brilliant, a big bully. Also an excellent judge of character.
“That man, Safin? Of course. He’s Rizgar’s cousin, isn’t he?”
I nod. “Relative.”
“Whatever. You said Sam really liked Rizgar. She’s obviously very upset. So why wouldn’t you trust him?”
“I don’t know.” I don’t think he would lie. How stupid I was, believing Mustapha. Maybe I was wrong to believe Saleh, my own cousin. Or maybe Saleh just had no idea. Someone tricked him.
My father lowers his head, forcing me to look him in the eye. “Nabil.” He lowers his voice, too. “What happened last night? It wasn’t because of the curfew that you didn’t come home.”
I stare at the table. How much of it to tell? Everything? Nothing?
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m sure it is. Act like a journalist. Give me the headlines.”
“We were held captive by the men who made those documents. It was...pretty awful. Now they want $10,000.”
“What, they held you and then let you go, and now they want you to pay the ransom once they gave you your freedom?”
“Well, something like that.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Usually they go to the captives’ relatives to demand the money.”
“I know. But in this case, I guess they didn’t know who my relatives are. They thought you were some professor. Maybe they’re figuring that a big newspaper owned by rich Americans will come up with the money — sort of like protection money so she can continue to work here.” I thought of Adeeb. “That’s not unheard of, right?”
Baba thinks for a minute. “They sound like amateurs to me.”
“Do they?”
“Yeah. They’re not going to come and find you. There are seven million people in this city. Thousands of people named al-Amari.” He clucks his tongue. “They’re just trying to scare you.”
I shrug. “That’s all there is, Baba. It was after eleven and I had no way to call because the phones still don’t work.” Only now I can look at him again: “I thought you would figure that’s what happened. I didn’t mean to make you worry.” My tongue swipes the inside of my mouth, trying to wash the lies off my teeth.
Baba knows it’s not the real story, or the whole story anyway, but says nothing, and for that I love him and hate him all at once. “You don’t trust him?”
“I don’t know who I trust anymore.”
“Then I don’t think you should go with him. If you have a bad feeling about him, go with it.” My father, the atheist-scientist, the man who treats the heart as a machine, turned reader of omens and premonitions.
“It’s not just that,” I say. “I’m sure he’s a good man. But going out of the city in that big jeep. Only foreigners and Kurds drive those big jeeps, or people working with the Americans.”
Baba’s head bounces in agreement. “True.” His eyes look a lot like mine, plus thirty years, and yet, they are somehow stronger. “You should take my car. Take my car and go without him.”
He shows no signs of doubt or any hint of desire to have his offer refused. “Really, Baba? Are you sure?”
“Of course. You shouldn’t go with that jeep, and you shouldn’t go on a trip like this with someone you don’t know, don’t trust one-hundred-percent. Maybe Rizgar was trustworthy,” he raises his eyebrows. “Maybe his cousin isn’t. You can’t be sure. So don’t go with him.”
I am surprised by Baba’s insistence, if only because it means he’s putting all his trust in me — to drive his car half-way across Iraq, to get Sam safely out of the country, to bring back his prized Mercedes in one piece.
“But he knows the way, Baba. His people are from there.”
“You can figure it out. I already asked him to write out a map, or some notes, right? So there you have it. Finished.” With that khalas, my father runs his hand across the barrel of his stomach. It seems somewhat smaller than it did a month ago. “People are looking for you, aren’t they.” He poses it as more of a statement than a question.
I shift, hearing most of all an accusation. “Well, probably, yeah.”
“Are they the same people who killed Rizgar?”
“I don’t know. Actually, they told me to come back to them tonight with money, and to come in his old Impala. But if his car’s gone, maybe they have nothing to do with it.”
Baba studies this fact, blinking. “If the people looking for you are not the same people who killed Rizgar, then they will be looking for three people, right? Including a very foreign-looking lady in the backseat. So if you travel as a couple, you have a better, well, disguise.” He smiles at me, perhaps waiting to see how I will react to couple. “If it’s just you two and she’s in hejab, you’ll just be a young couple.”
“We’re not a couple.”
Baba lifts his hand again to speak. “I have an even better idea. You can load up the rack with boxes of junk and blankets. You will just look like refugees going back up north after the war.”
“Why would refugees come south to Baghdad during the war? It was worse here than it was there. The traffic went in the other direction. People left Baghdad.”
“I don’t know! You’ll make something up. You’re the poet. Think of all those poor Sunnis who Saddam stuck in the north, who started getting chased out by the Kurds as soon as the government collapsed. Some of them are going back up north to their homes now.”
“That’s the worst thing they could think. The people up north hate those Arabs, Baba. They came barging in and got all kinds of benefits from the government that the local people didn’t.”
His face hardens. I suspect he dislikes hearing me speaking about Sunnis as they, rather than we. “Oh, I don’t know, you can pretend to be from Mosul or something. You’ll figure it out.” Baba gets up, moaning Allah as he does, and motions for me to follow him to the storage room upstairs, on the way to the roof. He leads and we climb up in silence. I find myself wondering what Sam is doing now. Crying? Sleeping? Writing?
~ * ~
Baba pulls open the door and unleashes the dust trapped inside, sending out musty air that smells a hundred years ol
d. I follow him inside, taking short breaths through my mouth. There are all sorts of things that should be tossed out: tattered furniture, old bedding, mouldy boxes. Baba picks up two blankets. He tugs at an ancient mattress, signalling with his eyebrows, and I drag it to the door.
“Do you really think a family who drives a Mercedes would be sleeping on an old mattress like that?”
A laugh bursts from Baba’s mouth, and then he kicks at a plastic set of crates at his feet. “Come on,” he says. “Be serious now. It’s not exactly the newest or the fanciest Mercedes on the market. I was hoping to buy a new one.”
I step deeper into the collection of used and useless things. I put a floor-cushion under my arm and he passes me a crate to take in the other, and I know that every hope my father had is now a was hoping. Was hoping to buy a new car, was hoping to send Amal to the best preparatory school for university. Was hoping to make a wedding this year. The was lingers there as a statement of the past. Is it a hope that continued for a period of time and might one day resume its activities? Or a hope that has already run its course?
We line up some of our booty in the hallway, and then go back in for more. Baba points out two old suitcases in the far-right corner. While I’m there, I yank open the window, blinking to stop the dirt from assaulting my eyes.
“Don’t bother,” says Baba. “It’ll just fill the room with more dust.”
“Don’t you think this room needs a little fresh air?”
“Nothing’s going to freshen up this junkyard.”
While passing Baba one of the suitcases, I spot some refuse from our happy past. A blue-and-white football banner for Birmingham City. I think it was from that game Baba took me to when they won; they usually got slaughtered. I pick it up and wave it with a cheer, sending another sprinkling of dust into the air.
“Goal!” Baba calls.
I turn the banner around and there is the emblem of the Birmingham City Football Club, founded in 1875. The ribbons wrap around two spheres: one a football, the other, the world. My connection between the two, when Baba bought me the banner after I begged him mercilessly during the game, was quite uncomplicated. If you were a great player, you could see the whole world. I decided to apply myself harder on the field, which quickly turned out to be a losing proposition: I was fast but completely uncoordinated.
“You wish we’d stayed in Birmingham, don’t you? With all that nice English you have—”
“No, Baba. I’m glad we came back.” I put down the banner and pick up the last suitcase.
He smiles and nods like he’s finally, for a moment, extraordinarily proud of me. “A man should know where his home is. If you leave home because it’s not easy, you’ll wind up without one. Come,” he says, lifting up the blankets and a suitcase to take downstairs.
~ * ~
It is a good thing we have neighbours we trust — several of them are related to us. But just in case, Baba moved his car behind the house, driving over the fuzz that hardly passes for grass, to park in such a way that it isn’t easy for a passerby to see. Here we have spent the last hour or more placing what should appear to be the contents of one’s home, in a haphazard enough way to look authentic. I think Baba is enjoying himself, using rope to weave and tie everything into place. Perhaps it is relaxing for him to use his mind for stitching up something other than flesh and blood.
He steps back, surveying our masterpiece. “That’s the most beautiful refugee car I’ve ever seen,” he says, laughing and putting his hand on my head to mess what’s left of my hair.
“Let’s get in,” he says, pulling open the passenger door, leaving the driver’s side to me. Inside, he hands me the keys and instructs me to turn on the air conditioning. Even though the windows have been left open a crack, the car is an oven.
Baba runs through all the things I could possibly need to know about his car and I listen as well as I can. In the middle of his lecture, he jabs me in the arm.
“Are you going to fall asleep like that tomorrow and crash my car?”
“Sorry, Baba. I’m so exhausted.”
“I can see. So, are you going to tell me what really happened last night?”
And then, with the air conditioning breathing its sweet breeze over my forehead, I spill everything. Not quite everything. Not the parts about Sam and me. But the brutal basics of the story, Mustapha and Technical Ali. Being held at gunpoint and tied up, being threatened, being let go. Being told to pay our own ransom.
When I have finished, I sit holding the steering wheel, moving it slightly as if pretending to drive, like a little boy. My chest heaves with that kind of feeling that comes before you cry, and I feel enormous relief when it washes away. “You go and rest,” Baba says, laying his hand gently on my back, “and I’ll go and see if I can get Wa’el next door to pick up your ice cream.”
~ * ~
54
Laying
Pistachio, strawberry, banana-date. Some kind of a rainbow mix. These are the flavours Wa’el brought to us, which we promptly put in the icebox and saved until after dinner. I think he chose well. But Sam lifts each of the containers and gives something of a girlish frown. “No chocolate?”
The three of us are sitting in a row on the cushions we lined up against the wall on the roof, with Sam in the middle.
“What is it with foreigners and chocolate?” I ask. I pass Sam the pistachio, which I think is one of the best they make. “You don’t like this one? It’s very healthy. Look at all the nuts.”
She takes it and lifts a spoonful into her bowl. “Yes, I’m sure all the green food-colouring is full of nutrients.” Amal looks at her like she doesn’t get it. Sam takes some and, probably realizing that she may have appeared to be impolite, offers up a sound of enjoyment. “It’s good.”
Amal is mixing all of the flavours together in her bowl, which is a surefire way not to be able to truly enjoy any of them. She is clearly more interested in Sam than the ice cream. “Chocolate isn’t such a favourite here,” I explain. “It’s not so common to find it, even. But the banana-date is good! Did you try it? Made from the best Iraqi dates.” She nods and takes a spoonful of it. Maybe our tastes are just different, like our mentalities. Our mouths start out the same but then get introduced to flavours predominant in our own corners of the world, eating our own spices and delicacies, shaping the words of our own languages, until we can never agree on what’s truly best. Not in our governments, not on our tongues.
“When you come to America someday, I’ll take you out for rocky road,” Sam declares. “That’s the best.”
“Rocky road,” Amal repeats. “The best,” she says, parroting Sam.
“Yeah, it’s great,” Sam says. “It’s this super-chocolatey mess with chunks of real chocolate and nuts. Oh, and marshmallows. It’s fabulous.”
Amal smiles. “This is favourite American ice cream?”
Sam gently swirls Amal’s silky ponytail. “It’s this American’s favourite ice cream!”
“Tell more things about America,” Amal implores.
“First eat your ice cream,” I say, pointing out that it’s melting. If Amal’s not going to eat it, I’d rather give it to Mum and Baba. They professed not to want any, which I think was a way of letting us enjoy ourselves on our own up on the roof. Before, this was a popular way for Baghdadis to spend a hot summer evening, when the houses refuse to cool down, even after dark. Now, many people are afraid to spend time up on the roof, not knowing what might be flying through the air, or who might try to shoot at you. But as far as I see it, and I think Baba tends to agree, it makes no difference. If you are so unfortunate as to have a bullet with your name on it, it’s going to get you even if you’re in your own living room.
“Why’s it called rocky road?” I ask.
Sam shrugs. “Never thought about it. But I guess the chocolate ice cream is the road, and all the lumpy things are like the rocks in it.”
“That’s a saying, right
? As in, ‘It’ll definitely be a rocky road towards Iraq’s reconstruction.’”
Sam looks bemused, her lips like the wavy hieroglyphic for water.
“I heard you say it once on the phone. I think you were being interviewed by a radio station in America.”
“Oh.” She smiles at me in a way that makes me think she must find me terribly strange, committing things to memory the way I do. I cannot help it. Even when I’m not air-typing, the keyboard in my mind often keeps going, like one of those eerie player-pianos I’ve seen in old films. The keys rise and fall all on their own.
“How the life in America?” Amal pleads.
“What’s life like?” Sam smiles, looking uncertain how to answer. “It depends on where you live. Some beautiful areas, some terrible areas — sort of like Iraq. It’s a huge country.”
Baghdad Fixer Page 53