•
That night the three were to make one of the long clothing runs up to Dahuk. There was a man there, a night watchman at an airplane hangar that had been converted by the Americans into a storage warehouse for the pallets of aid materials that now came over the Turkish border. As a toddler Araz had been adopted, taken from a religious orphanage by the widower Bertrand Baradost, a lawyer years ago returned from Beirut; the night watchman had once been a client of his, and it was understood that the clothing arrangement was in service of his fee. Bajh drove his father’s rickety old flatbed pickup while Araz and Asti sat between the squares of stale hay in the back. By this time they knew what would be waiting for them after the two-hour chugging ride along the throughway into Dahuk: the gray canyons of buildings; Bajh’s craning neck as he carefully backed the truck up to the side of the hangar; the watchman, rousing himself from sleep to sip at a thermos of tea, watching them roll up the loading-bay door with a series of metal clangs. And inside, the dark labyrinth of shrink-wrapped pallets, stacked higher than their heads.
This warehouse was where the NGOs for the northern half of the country stored secondhand clothing donated from America. The tightly wrapped plastic glistened in the dark, catching the dim light from the opened bay as Araz walked down the rows. The best pallets had many T-shirts of bright colors or thick clothes good for the winter or anything that had a prominent logo, and the three had been instructed to try to discern the contents of the pallets and pick one that looked to have the most of these. Though Araz knew the pallets were basically all the same anyway; he had watched the children employed by his father in the market hawking the T-shirts with large seals of American sports teams, the endless Christian youth group fund-raising slogans, the button-up shirts with armpits yellowed by years of sweat. The warehouse was endlessly refilled, and the watchman insisted that the NGO in charge of distribution didn’t even keep records of what it received.
This night, the trip had been quiet so far. Twice before, on previous runs, they’d been stopped by local security of the towns they guided the truck through (Bajh had been instructed to stay off the main roads on the way back), but each time they’d gotten by with only the loss of a few shirts and a blazer. They’d only had to go through an American checkpoint once, very late at night, with Araz whispering translations of the soldiers’ orders through the back window of the truck’s cab, where Bajh, fingers white around the wheel, carefully obeyed them.
Now Araz and Asti lay as they always did on the return trip, squeezed on either side of the mound of clothing (once the pallet was loaded, the plastic had to be cut away and discarded so as to avoid suspicion), pressed against the low containing rails of the truck’s flatbed. On the more bumpy roads, they were to keep the clothes from flying off.
Araz sighed and put his hands behind his head, looking up into the litter of stars that shifted slightly with each jounce of the truck. In the cab, Bajh turned off the radio he’d been listening to and a silence surrounded the exertions of the engine. After a while there were the sounds of other cars, and distant voices, and the truck eased to a stop.
Araz sat up and looked around. The small side road they’d taken, which ran parallel to the highway, was full of headlights and the sounds of motors stopping and starting. There was a traffic jam, stretching as far down as Araz could see. Maybe a breakdown, or a convoy moving through.
“What’s going on?” Araz said through the back window.
Bajh pointed to the slim, false horizon of the actual highway dimly glowing in the distance to their right. “It’s stopped there too,” he said. He opened the door and leaned out to look behind the truck. There was no one there. They were the last car.
“No problem,” he said. “I guess.”
Bajh got back in and reversed, using the shoulder to turn around. They traced back to the nearest turnoff and followed it, the tires making a dull thump as they went from the paved road to the dirt one. They traveled like this for a while, the roughness of the road causing Araz and Asti to sit up. The commotion of the late-night traffic jam eventually receded until its luminescence only barely troubled the dark of the sky behind them.
Araz watched Asti, who was sitting with her legs pulled up beside and under her. He thought again of her body, the form that her simple long-sleeved shirts and jeans under dresses both embraced and obscured, of the quality of her skin, the way it held light, its grace over her naked hollows and rises as he had seen her the afternoon two weeks before, laid along Bajh’s body on the cot in the abandoned guard hut outside town. The afternoon light had been warm and came tripping down through the gentle movement of a tree’s lower limbs outside, finally falling through the glassless window, making of their pose a shifting chiaroscuro, revealing then hiding Bajh’s huddled nakedness behind her. They were asleep, pressed together in the slight chill of the hut’s shadows, even though it was a balmy day. Bajh’s face was turned down, nestled between the stiff material of the cot and Asti’s shoulder blades. Asti’s hair was folded under and hung over the metal brace of the cot, where the long sun of the afternoon alighted on it in bits and pieces, leaving the rest to sit darkly in the shadow of her body. Araz had stood for a second, stilled at the doorway, and carefully taken in the fact of her nakedness, letting his eyes run down to the dip of her stomach and the rise of her hip, Bajh’s own hip behind hers, the slim line of his body, mostly hidden behind hers, grayed and blued by the foregrounding distance, even in that small room. There was the pocket of dark hair, surprisingly silky and flat, where her legs met, and the easy curve of her calf, her delicate ankles. They did not wake as he turned away and left.
•
The truck gave a wrenching creak and came to an abrupt stop. Bajh jumped out, cursing. A thin tree of smoke assembled itself out of the air above the cab. Araz got down and watched Bajh kick the front wheel, cough a little from the smoke and pace away, mashing down a button on the cell phone they carried for emergencies and waiting for its small square of light to come on. Asti stayed up in the truck.
The truck’s interior lights then quit and Araz found himself in a deep darkness, able to see almost nothing at all. He strained to look around. They were on a farming road, and he thought he could make out the dull metal of an irrigation well-marker glinting flatly a little way off, though he couldn’t be sure.
Araz turned to look back toward Bajh and the night came alive, breaking itself around Araz’s head.
A skirling came out of the sky, a mechanical screaming, directionless, as if out of the molecules of air itself, its howling barely even a discrete sound. By the time Araz was able to process it at all, the sound was alive in his chest, his hands, his skull, his mouth—percussive, felt more than heard, as was his own voice; if his scream even existed, he couldn’t tell. Araz only heard the blast once; the night was blown to a lucid muteness afterward, though he could not yet feel the wetness of the blood trickling from his ears and coating the sides of his jaw and neck.
Later, Araz would find himself unable to divorce his actual memory of what happened from the strange, otherworldly vision of the Internet video he would be shown by a roommate at his boarding school in London. Araz’s memory of that night was thus perpetually recast in the shaky, falsely illuminated field of a helicopter’s night-vision recording, the only omniscience able to sort the physical chaos. Though the particular video he saw was certainly not of his own night (and though no such video record of his own experience even existed, as far as he knew), Araz would forever afterward bear the acute feeling that he’d witnessed what happened to himself only through the real-time eye of the gun-sighted screen.
In Araz’s mind: the glowing white shape of his own prone body beside the truck; of Bajh, statant, in the field’s furrows; of Asti, limbs held close, a jumbled blob of the white that signaled body heat to the helicopter’s lens. The trio had not been aimed at, so none of them were hit. Instead, the rounds meant to disable the already-disabled truck (a hundred? a thousand?) found something (a
half-full oil can forgotten under the truck’s seat? a spare gasoline container wedged without thought under the hay in the back?) to alight on, and the viewfinder was quickly awash with a riot of heat-shapes, an amorphous monster mounting the vehicle—fire.
From the sky came more screaming of metal, though Araz did not hear it. Here, the false implantation in Araz’s memory of the concussion of air made by the helicopter’s blades. The truth, of course, was that he heard nothing.
Finally, the brief sensations that would not end up savaged by the violence of time passing: the load of clothes, half ablaze, lifting up and up into flight and falling, slowly, slowly, onto Araz’s back, lighting his own clothes. Araz struggling up, wildly glimpsing what must have been the shape of Asti’s body in the bed of the truck, where she was somehow embracing the clothes, the fire, to her; then Araz knocked flat by the collision of Bajh’s panicked, tilting run. At some point, Asti was pulled down off the truck and landed near where Araz lay. A scurry of dirt as Bajh smothered her flames, Araz somehow still burning, the heat spreading up his side and reaching around to his chest like a grasping hand, then the feeling of Bajh returning to smother him again, the heaviness of Bajh’s body landing on his own, seeming—because Araz never quite got his breath back—to last for hours and hours.
The afterward Araz would remember better, the coming of morning. He lay situated in a position where he could see only the flat expanse of the field and the horizon beyond. He assumed the truck, Bajh, and Asti to be somewhere behind him, but in the strange otherworld of his condition he did not really think of them, and the emptiness of his mind was even vaguely pleasant. He felt no pain (or he felt pain so completely that all other sensation was wholly undone, and so did not suffer). There came a distant, rainless storm, and the brief office of lightning gave way to an ataraxic lightlessness just before dawn. The subsequent creep of color into the sky had a curious physical presence to it, limning the ridges of the field and the dirt nearest Araz’s face. Just before daylight was full, a drizzle stung Araz’s eyes, and he woke for a moment simultaneously into the effluvium of the morning and the insanity of his reverie, just enough to process the arrival of other cars and other people, after which there was only the long surrender of unconsciousness.
2.
Araz’s return was inaugurated by a wet, lifeless spring, the air damp and torpid. Even the subdued light, which each day snuck obliquely into the town under the guard of the heavy, unsettled clouds, failed to obscure the glaucous film that covered the buildings and streets. In the middle of the town the river’s surface was matte-faced, and its wavering pulse quickened, as if hurrying through.
Araz had arrived on one of the new, dreamily christened “Amman-Qum” expresses, its name suggesting the bus might continue on, long after all the returning Iraqis disembarked, all the way to Iran instead of turning back as everyone knew it did at Baqubah, not even within sight of the border, and refilling itself with dozens of Baghdadi businessmen eager to see the midlevel luxury hotels of Riyadh. After the express, Araz had to connect with a smaller bus to go north for the final leg into town, and as the aged vehicle growled and whinnied its way up the highway, dutifully collecting the tunnels of blast barriers at abandoned checkpoints and police outposts, Araz had the distinct impression that some kind of magic had been broken—specifically, that the spell which had kept the country of his memory outside the passage of time had been lifted, and that all the built-up brutality of urban aging had, in the six years of Araz’s absence, suddenly happened at once: the reclamation of concrete security dividers by sand and dirt, the winnowing to bone of buildings once thrown up for immediate use, the incidental artifacts of the American, then Provisional, then New Iraqi, then New Parliamentary authorities (the burned-out skeletons of Humvees, imported black SUVs, white Toyota pickup trucks, and cheap, Chinese-made taxis, respectively) all suffering what looked to Araz to be the deconstruction that time practices on civilizations over hundreds of years, but in the span of just six. It was as if Araz had looked away and turned back only to find himself adrift in a vision of the country’s distant future.
The eternal city had changed too, though in less pronounced ways. During the six years Araz had been gone, news of the town’s transformation had drifted to him—little asides and clippings from his father washing ashore in his Darlington Abbey Boys’ College mailbox and then, after Araz had turned eighteen and departed for King’s College London, via those abbreviated emails of rumors that had wended their way into the law office in Beirut, where his father had gone back to. Araz read every bit of information about the town carefully and each time felt a sort of wonder at the familiar foreignness, especially as he got older. This was the driftwood of his years in the town coming back to him, even in England, to reconsider; time and the distance these anecdotes traveled seemed to have softened away any real detail or utility. At any rate, he’d heard some things, learned them from his father’s half-mentions or his own bored, late-night Internet searching. Though what he’d learned had not prepared him for the place itself.
The town had grown. It was now fully a city, apparently, the city center (now referred to as “downtown”) built up with multilevel buildings and shops, all of which perhaps wouldn’t look quite so pointedly modern if they did not surround the original dun-colored buildings of crumbling local bricks, which looked positively Neolithic by comparison. The farming compounds previously on the edges of town had been quietly taken in, assimilated by the city’s amebic expansion, and were now just groups of low buildings unnaturally close together. What Araz felt on his first exploratory drives around with Asti, her ruined cheek turning this way and that to watch the simulacrum of their town pass by the window, was not so much that the home of their adolescence had changed (it was not a betrayal of time, exactly) but more that the town in some eerie way had approximated the change Araz knew he had experienced in himself while thousands of miles distant.
This feeling was especially borne out in the strange balance of layout the city had settled into in his absence. In the north, the Kurdish farmers who had lived in the town of Araz and Asti’s childhood had bunched into a loose agricultural suburb that got thinner and thinner the farther it projected from the city’s center until it eventually just petered out, reaching wistfully back in geo-ethnic time toward Iran. In the south, there was a similarly nebulous comet-tail stretch back toward Baghdad, origin of the Shi’a money that was now developing the city, except that this trail was made up of shanties, as if many of the Shiite pilgrims streaming in from Baghdad’s religious environs had simply run out of money before they could reach the city proper. And finally, in the west, gesturing toward Samarra and the Al-Askari, was the real cause for the town’s increase: a previously little-noticed mosque, in whose tranquil courtyard the Shi’a Imam Al-Alwani had decided, during an American siege, to relocate the holy relic that now made the city such a destination.
All of which bore a curiously accurate spatial resemblance to the grounds of the Darlington Abbey Boys’ College (an unassuming but respected catch-all for the children of foreign diplomats) and the general world Araz had spent his first four English years in. He’d woken each morning in his cramped, separatist, scholarship boarder’s room on the north end of campus and made his way to the dining hall in the middle, where he met with the devout children from the religious quarters on the south end (both groups eyeing enviously the spacious central dorm suites of the rich students) before trudging off to prayers at the small mosque, partially obscured in the west part of the campus by the larger, largely unused chapel building beside it. The whole time during this morning walk, Araz felt as if he belonged exactly no place, or rather to some undisclosed place nearby that he always seemed to be waiting in vain to stumble upon. He got this very same feeling driving around with Asti in his first weeks back in the city: full of hope that he might at any moment turn a corner into an unknown neighborhood that felt perfectly and finally familiar.
The popular mosque of Imam
Alwani was situated at the tip of a fingerlike projection of new buildings rising from the city’s chorion, and it presided calmly over a muddy stretch of rich soil, a panorama of the verdant, soggy fields stretching out behind it. Its entrance and the minarets topping the four corners of its courtyard looked back toward the city, and the curving, prehensile jetty of development that it crowned enclosed a small slum that had grown up around a wide nearby square long before anyone could remember. The slum had hung on, despite the best efforts of the mosque’s wealthier pilgrims; the area seemed to have the power to revert any new venture or building to its natural, semidecrepit state. This was certainly what it had done to the Hotel du Chevalier, where Araz took a flat.
The Hotel du Chevalier had been built and then quickly abandoned and sold by a foreigner a few years before the invasion and had already, in the span of a little more than a decade, undergone several discrete phases of decay. By the time Araz rented a fourth-floor flat on an indefinite lease, it had passed from hotel to run-down boarding house to something resembling a Caliphate-era inn, and had become, finally, a sort of crumbling, late-empire Roman cathouse.
The building did tower over the uneven harlequin blanket of the surrounding slum’s roofs, though, and if it had portions of ceiling or intermediate floors missing—the bits of concrete rebar exposed like nerves, hung with the residents’ colorful wet wash—it also had rooms, mostly on the southeast corner, that were more or less intact and that, as Araz’s did, even improbably retained bits and pieces of the hotel’s old official errata, regurgitating them whimsically. Once, braced on all fours on the gritty floor beside the bed as a low-level officer of the “Imam’s Army” thrust into him, Araz knocked into the leg of the room’s desk and a piece of stationery floated down and landed in front of him. As the man’s timid grunts (really he was just a boy, or maybe a late teenager) accelerated, Araz stared at the miniature, ridiculous hotel seal at the top of the sheet—not a knight, as it should have been, but a falcon—and recited to himself (simultaneously in this room full of late-afternoon sunlight and back in Father Vere’s poetry class at Darlington) the Hopkins poem Vere had passive-aggressively demanded all the Muslim boys memorize. As the man-boy climaxed, Araz recalled the words: “Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!” The man was silent for a long time before Araz realized he had spoken the last line aloud. The man’s breathing was uneven and querulous, and Araz had laughed sharply into the quiet.
Elegy on Kinderklavier Page 12