Amal’s face portends a thousand more questions. “America is very free, yes? You do, you say...whatever you like.”
“Something like that, but you still have to follow the law and pay your taxes.”
“Are you happy America coming to Iraq?”
“She means are you—”
“I know,” Sam sighs. “It’s a tough question. I don’t know. It wasn’t my idea to come here, but now that we’re here, I hope Iraq will be better off. I mean, you have to believe that, or...” Sam stops mid-sentence and stares towards the south, where there’s a dark smoke column rising against the sky, black-on-blue. “Right now, it’s not looking so good, is it?”
Amal shakes her head no, it isn’t.
“But I bet you’re glad Saddam is gone, no?”
Amal pushes out her lower lip. “Nabil says he was too bad. But me, Amal? My life was not bad before. I went to school, saw my friends, go shopping with Mum, no problem. Now, everything problem.”
Sam smiles like something hurts.
“I’m going to take the rest down to Mum before it melts,” I tell them, collecting the ice cream containers.
“I thought you said they didn’t want any,” Sam says.
“An Iraqi trying to be a good hostess says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”
Back on the roof again, I find Sam sitting behind Amal, plaiting her hair. Amal looks like she is in heaven. Nirvana, even.
I sit next to Sam. “Trading beauty secrets?”
“I wish I were as beautiful as this one,” Sam says, and I see Amal’s smile spread fast and wide. This is what she probably dreams of — having a big sister, instead of big brothers who are never around.
Sam finishes her work and presents the end to Amal. “Grab it,” Sam says. “You need to tie it with something, or it will fall apart.”
Amal pats the back of her head with her free hand, obviously impressed by the feel of the intricate pattern Sam has woven. “Sam made a Frenchy braid, Nabil!”
“I see. Beautiful.”
Amal jumps up to get an elastic-band. “We’ll meet you downstairs,” I call after her. But I don’t think she heard me, and I don’t think she wants to.
Sam looks enchanted. “She’s a darling.”
“I know. Very smart, too, but you probably couldn’t tell from the way she acted tonight.”
“No, I could tell,” says Sam, leaning her back up against the wall.
“You hardly ate the ice cream.”
“It was good,” she says unconvincingly. “Maybe I wasn’t in the mood.”
“You liked it better last time, when we went to Al-Faqma. Wa’el said it was closed so he went to Al-Ballout.”
The lines between Sam’s eyes emerge like fresh stitches. I want to eat my words. I put my hand on her forearm, near the elbow.
“Rizgar liked Al-Ballout.”
“I know,” I say.
“I still can’t believe it. I keep thinking it must be a mistake.”
“I know.”
“He’s going to come back any moment and just tell me he had to wait on some crazy line for gasoline, or went on a long drive to buy cigarettes where they’re cheaper.” Sam lets her eyes close, to stop the need to say more. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, she leans her head on my shoulder.
I am the happiest man in the world at this minute. It sounds terrible to say, because it ignores everyone’s pain and loss, hers and mine and Rizgar’s family’s, but that’s just what I feel. Stop everything, stay here. My hand in her hair the way I had dreamed, its thickness a deep, dense forest, an easy place to get lost.
She pulls away and sits up. “Are you sure we can’t go to visit his family here in the morning before we leave? At least to pay a condolence call.”
I sit forwards, too. I cannot concentrate on such radically different emotions at the same time. For Sam, they appear to be all tied up, one in the other.
“I don’t think so, Sam. Maybe we could try to find his family on our way through the north.”
“Really?” Sam looks hopeful, then washed over by a wave of fear. What would happen, I wonder, if word hadn’t got to Rizgar’s family yet. If we were the ones to have to tell them?
“Is that what you want? You want to see his family, even if it means taking another day to get to the border?”
Sam touches her own hair now, stretching out a coil. Were her hair straight, it seems, it would be twice as long. Many things about Sam are only half-visible.
“I guess I should just get out. But Rizgar—” she shakes her head and sniffles. “I don’t even know what’s right anymore.”
We sit for a while without speaking, listening to the crickets and to the last teenagers playing football down the street.
Amal returns, as I expected she would, showing off the bow she found for the end of the plait. Sam ties it on for her. “Gorgeous,” says Sam. “You’re a movie star.” With this, Amal beams like a shy girl being romanced.
“Amal, can you leave us here to talk for a while?”
She tuts, her face predictably heartbroken. “I thought—”
“We need to talk about our trip tomorrow. Maybe you can make sure Sam’s bed is made up nicely?” I already know it is, but better to give her a job to do, something that makes her feel connected to our guest.
Amal takes her leave, giving Sam a peck on her cheek to say thank you for doing her hair. Sam seems genuinely charmed.
When Amal disappears, I try to explain. “She doesn’t know, and I think Mum doesn’t. But Baba does.”
“Know what?”
“About what happened to us — with Mustapha and Ali and all.”
“Oh,” Sam says, as if I’ve just wrecked her efforts to expunge the events of yesterday from her mind. “Okay.”
“He doesn’t want us to go with Safin, and I agreed. We’ll go alone.”
Sam tenses, as if waiting for an elaborate defence. “That’s the sort of decision I would want to weigh in on.”
I stare out towards the palm trees, their towering trunks swaying in the hot evening breeze. I’ve had fantasies recently about marrying Sam. I daydreamed we would have a girl and name her Lena. It’s perfect. I know they have that name in the West. In Arabic it means small palm tree. She’d be like her mother, named after a tree.
“Please trust me with this, Sam. We discussed it round and round and we decided it was the absolute safest way to go. We don’t think it’s safe to go with him.”
“The jeep?”
“That’s only skirting the surface.”
Sam exhales a laugh through her stuffy nose. “Skimming the surface.”
“What?”
“You skim the surface. Or scratch it. You skirt an issue.”
If I spent my life with Sam, she would probably drive me crazy.
She is keen to make it up to me. “I do trust you. I do. If you say it’s safer, I trust you.”
“Good.”
“What about the story? Miles says they’re definitely running it tomorrow, remember?”
The possibilities spin through my mind. What if Ali reads the story and we’re still in reach? What happens when I don’t show up to give him the money?
“Is it going to mention Ali? Or Akram?”
“I don’t even know, I haven’t had a chance to read the thing yet.”
“Why can’t you tell Miles that the story should be published only when you’re out of Iraq?”
“Miles says he doesn’t have any choice. They’re afraid of how it will look later if it seems that we had the information and sat on it. It’s all mixed up with legal stuff, you know, the damage to Jackson’s reputation. But mostly, it’s about money. Every day the paper doesn’t settle this is a day they’ve got expensive lawyers on retainer. They’re incurring more and more legal fees.” She breathes in deeply, like it’s her first fresh lungful of air all evening. “It’s essentially a financial decision, not a journalistic one
.”
We know where you live. Ali said so. But does he? There’s no clear indication that the others — the package, the thugs of the so-called Neighbourhood Resistance Committee — have any connection to Ali. If they do, we’re all dead. And the alternative? Pick up the whole family and flee? Baba would never hear of it.
While I’m contemplating these options, like tree diagrams planting deeper and deeper roots in my head, we both grow quiet. The air is damp with humidity, carrying its own language in the form of things that hover: insects, dust, galaxies. “Look at the stars,” I say, gazing up at the night sky.
“Wow,” she sighs, her head leaning against the wall. “It’s amazing you can see so many stars in such a big city In Paris or New York, you’d never see a sky like this.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Maybe because in those cities everyone has their lights on at night.”
Sam turns to me. “You’re right. It’s an electricity thing.”
I can’t help it, my lips meeting hers, my hand back in her fiery hair, my other holding the silky curve where her neck meets her jaw. I hear the shock in her chest, almost like a contraction in her stomach that could be excitement or repulsion and how can I know which? And she kisses me back, and then she freezes, and in the stillness of her mouth I know that everything is not all right, and that there’s nothing to do but stop.
I still have her head in my hands, wanting to hold it with care, and when I pull my face away from hers, I can see her eyes are again full of tears. She lets me hold her as she cries soundlessly, and then she is done. I try to wipe her face with my sleeve, but she squirms for me to stop.
“Nabil, we can’t do this.”
I don’t answer.
“We can’t. This has to stop.”
“Because of Jonah?”
“Jonah? He has nothing to do with this.”
“Because I’m Muslim and you’re Jewish?”
“Nabil.” She shuts her eyes tight, as if she might cry again, or maybe because she wants me to go away. “We just — we can’t. We can’t be together. I can’t be your lover.”
“Your lover? You think I just want to use you like that?” I feel tears, oh I can hardly believe it, my own real tears, and I blink them back.
I wait a moment, until I know I can speak without my voice breaking. “Sam, I would spend my life with you if you would let me.
She doesn’t respond. I can feel how much she wants to lean on my shoulder again, to let me hold her. She shakes her head, looking towards the date palms. “Nabil, I think we work together incredibly well, professionally, and I, I’ve learned so much from you.”
I watch her and feel myself growing angry: a little at her and a little more at myself. I want to make her shut up, to stop her from explaining why she doesn’t want me.
“I do care about you. But you know it can’t work. It can’t work because…” She stops herself and sniffles into the edge of her shirt, and pushes the wetness of her face into the hair beyond her cheekbones. “It just can’t work. We’re too different. And you know, this is really, what we have is a professional relationship that started to become an important friendship as well. I’m sorry if I made you think I wanted more than that. In another world, I would have loved...look, why do this? I’m leaving Baghdad tomorrow, right? I don’t even know when I’m coming back. If I’m coming back. I’m leaving, Nabil. You don’t want to be with someone who’s leaving.” She wraps her hand around my hand and kisses me softly in the crook of my cheekbone, just beyond the corner of my left eye. And then she stands to leave, bending over to pick up the empty ice cream containers.
~ * ~
55
Bending
I pack my overnight bag. I lay down and try to sleep, but my eyes stay wide open, sore but alert. I imagine Sam and myself travelling together in Istanbul, taking pictures by the famous mosques, the royal-blue waters of the Bosphorus stretching out behind us, just like in the photograph of my parents on their honeymoon. And then I kiss her and she falls into me, a warm wrap around my chest.
But I’m not going to Turkey with her. I feel the invisible, internal tears starting to shake me again, that shuddering in my chest. I’m living on my own fault-line, weathering small tremors that might one day burst wide open, split the ground beneath my feet, swallow me whole.
It’s my mother’s tap on my door — I know it from the weight of her fingertips, thicker and sturdier than Amal’s. She opens the door. There is a saffron light coming into my room at an angle that tells me it’s very early. “Nabil, it’s 5.30,” Mum calls softly “You said you wanted me to wake you now.”
I sit up. “Let me go and wake Sam.” My throat is like a plant on the terrace that hasn’t had a watering for weeks, my voice hoarse.
“She’s already up. She has been arranging her things and she went to have a shower. I’ll put out some breakfast for you.”
“I don’t know if we have time.”
My mother glares at me from the doorway. She appears to have grown new lines beneath her eyes in the past few weeks, and the ones leading from the middle of her lip to her nostrils have cut themselves deeper into her skin.
I squint at my watch and reach for my glasses. “You’re right. There’s time.”
I have to lean towards the edge of the bed to gather enough energy to stand on my feet. Faced with falling, I will rise. My mother points to the glass of water she left on my desk. When its contents disappear into my body, I feel a little closer to being able to speak and to get dressed.
I hold my hand up to knock on the door that was once Ziad’s. How is it that we can feel nostalgia even for the parts of our childhood we hated most? He was my older brother, but in my young adolescent years, I saw Ziad as more of a warlord — a dictator to call my own. I was far more frightened of him than I ever was of Saddam. Among other things, Ziad wanted me to knock on his door and receive permission before entering. He, on the other hand, could strut into my room at any time he wanted and push me around.
I tap lightly on the door and hear Sam’s voice call out quietly.
I nudge the door. “Sam?”
“Come in,” she says. She’s sitting on the edge of Ziad’s bed. Her body is lost in the black jupeh Mum lent her. Around her neck is the white scarf, hanging over her chest instead of covering her hair. With the white on black, she looks something like a judge.
I sit down next to her, a respectable distance away. “Did you sleep?”
“A little. Probably five hours, but not much more. You?”
“Same.”
I have the urge to put my hand into Sam’s damp curls, not wet but just a bit moist from the shower, to touch them just once more. Instead, I reach into my pocket to take out the box I have been holding on to for three days now, ever since I picked out a gift for her from the souvenir seller in the lobby of the Hamra Hotel. I hold it out to her.
Sam’s face lights up and she opens the box quickly. She pulls the watch out, and from the look on her face, I can see she almost wants to giggle, but the urge to do so is overwhelmed by the need to be gracious. But now, in her eyes, I see a shimmer of it — a sense of delight.
“Oh...my goodness.” She holds up the watch to the light. She turns it over, looking for what, I wonder. A designer label?
She turns it back, and examines the face. “It’s beautiful. Is that...is that supposed to be Babylon?”
“Yes. It was this one, or the one with a picture of Saddam on it. But I wasn’t sure if you were serious about wanting one like that.”
She smiles, her mouth open enough for me to see the pink of her tongue. “No! I mean, those are funny, for a joke, but this is just adorable. I mean, it’s beautiful.”
I look at her put the watch on her left wrist and carefully fasten the buckle. It perfectly encircles the flesh and bone that is her hand, once bound and now free. Free to wave goodbye to me in a day or two. Had we gone to Babylon
, she’d have been so dazzled, she would have fallen in love with everything here -including me.
She turns her wrist to look again at the watch, already set to the right time. Nearly a quarter to six. Not fully light yet, and the best time to leave.
“Does it really still look like that?” she asks. “Or is that some kind of idealized version?”
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