Conrad sat on the sofa, his back to the wall. Ollie sprawled in a big armchair. They both stretched out, putting their feet on the glass-topped coffee table. The table was made from a pair of printer’s trays, and the small compartments held whimsical family objects: a tiny box containing one of Conrad’s baby teeth, tiny and yellowing; a freshwater mussel shell, a pearl encrusted in it, found by Jenny; the tarnished brass name tag from Yeats, the beloved childhood dog. Everyone was in there, one way or another.
Conrad stretched his arm along the back of the sofa and took a long swallow of beer. He let it run down his throat, cold and yeasty and dark.
“Man,” he said, “this is what everyone dreams about, over there. Sitting down back home, with a beer. Everyone has a dream, the plan of the first beer: What brand. Where you’ll be. With who.”
“What was yours?” Ollie said.
Conrad waved his hand at the golden light, the green canopy, the fresh-cut grass.
“Here, I guess,” he said.
Actually, he couldn’t remember. Until he’d gone to Ramadi, his first deployment, it would have included Claire. After she’d made her declaration, he didn’t have a plan for that first beer. He didn’t have a local bar or a bunch of buddies he’d grown up with. His friends from college now seemed distant, separated from him by something huge and untranslatable. He couldn’t imagine talking to them, this whole country lying between them. He’d rather see another vet, someone who’d been there—but now he was trying to get past that.
He didn’t want to stay in the world he’d been living in, he wanted to get on. You couldn’t come home and still go on living in Sparta.
He took another swallow (the second one never quite as good) and thought, I’m home. It’s over. There was no longer any need to throw himself under a table at a loud noise. He was safe. Alive.
But instead of being a relief, this was faintly sickening. It led somewhere he didn’t want to go. There was some unnamed weight attached to his being here. He was here. Olivera was not, and never would be, and how had that happened? And there were those other lives, the pattern on the wall and the girl, and the man lying in the street, and how was he to read that equation? How was he to learn the somber laws of metaphysics that determined who survived and who did not? How could they be tolerated?
He would reenter his life here. He took another swallow (the third always ordinary) and turned to Ollie. “So, what’s up at Bard?”
“It’s all good.” Ollie nodded.
Ollie looked older, Conrad could see. He’d lost the blurred look of adolescence; his features had become defined. He looked like a blend of the family, Marshall’s wide mouth, his wide-set amber eyes, something about Lydia around the nose. Ollie had become handsome. Conrad felt pleased, surprisingly proud: his little brother. Olivetti.
“So you’re heading into your sophomore year? What courses you taking?” Conrad tipped back his bottle as Ollie recited them: English lit, anthropology, Mandarin, the Origins of Islam.
“Mandarin,” said Conrad. “Whoa. How’s that?”
“Seriously hard.” Ollie shook his head.
“I bet it is,” said Conrad. In a high, hissing voice he said, “You must be cra-zee.”
It was the punch line from an old family joke about a psychiatrist and a dog. The joke itself had been lost, but the punch line had become part of the children’s private language. It was used only among themselves, and delivered in a shrill, manic singsong.
“No shit,” said Ollie, laughing. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“No, it’s good,” Conrad said. “Good move. Europe’s over, China’s next. The Chinese will be taking over the world, and you’ll be all set. Fluent.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Ollie glanced at Conrad. “You ever study any Iraqi?”
“I know the basics,” Conrad said. “‘Stop. Put your hands in the air. Lie down. Your ass is grass.’ All you need.”
Ollie grinned uncertainly, and Conrad regretted what he’d said.
“But you had an interpreter, right?” asked Ollie.
“Sometimes. In Ramadi we had a terp when we went on the school missions. I told you about him: Ali.”
“Why did he know English?”
Conrad shrugged. “Why are you learning Mandarin? He was an engineer. He had a graduate degree. A lot of educated Iraqis speak English. They learn it in school, just like you.”
But why was he snubbing his brother? He’d made the same assumptions himself.
* * *
Ali was tall and thin, in his early forties, with curved shoulders and a hollow chest. His face was long and hawkish, the cheekbones high and sharp. A dense black mustache, sloping hazel eyes, thick black eyebrows, jutting Adam’s apple. He wore a kaffiyeh twisted jauntily around his throat, a long-sleeved loose white cotton shirt, and khaki pants. He held himself erect and with dignity.
Conrad met him when he and his first squad were providing security for a visiting officer going to a base outside Ramadi. It was a long trip; Conrad and Ali sat next to each other.
Conrad asked him what he had done before the war.
“I was an engineer. That is over now.” Ali drew a line of completion in the air with long fingers. “During a war, a man does whatever he can. I am fortunate to have this job.”
Conrad nodded. This was not true for him, nor for any of the Americans here. They were doing what they’d chosen, not whatever they could. That was the difference between himself and Ali, between occupier and occupied.
Ali seemed without resentment, though Ramadi was in chaos. The occupying forces had been there for a year, and still there was no sewage system, no trash removal, no reliable clean water, and only sporadic electric power.
Ali had gone to university in Baghdad; he spoke very good English, with a colonial British accent. He asked if Conrad had gone to university and what he had studied.
The classics, Conrad told him. “The Greeks and the Romans. The ancient world.”
Ali nodded politely. He said, “Of course, all that came after us. We think of them as the modern world.”
Conrad laughed.
Ali was curious about everything: Conrad’s religion, his favorite books.
“What, in your opinion, is the greatest work of literature?” Ali asked.
Conrad told him the Iliad.
Ali hadn’t read that, but he’d read Hamlet and King Lear. “I understand that Lear is considered the greater of these two, but I prefer Hamlet. Ambiguity,” he said. “This is something we admire.”
They had often gone on missions together after that. When Dingo Three was detailed to oversee a rebuilding project at a local school, Ali became their regular terp. He always brought food and always offered to share it. Ali was Conrad’s introduction to Iraqi food—rich, savory stews with sweet currants, sharp citrus, mysterious spices.
Once, Conrad offered him an MRE in exchange. He showed him how to rip open the brown plastic packet and start the chemical reactions to heat it up. It was a vegetarian omelet, though, one of the worst MREs.
Ali took a bite and began to chew, staring at Conrad in concentration. His mouth began to pucker. He swallowed, his jagged Adam’s apple shifting.
“Conrad, let me ask you something,” he said politely. “Do you Americans call this food? Or is it just what you call supplements?”
“We call it food,” Conrad admitted, sheepish. “At least, the military calls it food, and we eat it.”
Ali asked about Conrad’s family, where he’d grown up, what the landscape was like, what kind of birds there were: he knew a lot about birds. He showed Conrad a photograph of his two daughters. They were small, six or seven years old, arms wrapped around each other, heads pressed together. They were smiling; one was missing a front tooth. They had that honey-colored Iraqi skin, the big, dark, melting eyes. Along the hairline, their dark hair had turned coppery from the sun.
Conrad handed the picture back. “They’re beautiful,” he said. “Not like you.”
Conrad showed him a picture of his parents on the lawn behind the house. Ali leaned over it closely. “Your parents are very handsome,” he said. “And this is where you live? This tree, what is the name of it?”
“White ash,” Conrad told him.
“And this?” he asked, but Conrad couldn’t tell what he was pointing at.
“Nothing,” he said. “What?”
“This,” Ali said, “all this green. A carpet? Is it grass?”
“Grass,” Conrad told him. “That’s a lawn.”
“Ah,” Ali said, nodding. “Of course. We don’t have many of those here. We don’t have grass like that. Like a carpet.”
It was an odd notion: no lawn. Conrad remembered his brother and sister in their pajamas, playing leapfrog on the grass, singing.
Conrad asked to see a photograph of Ali’s wife, but Ali shook his head. Conrad didn’t know if Ali didn’t have a picture, or if he didn’t want to show her to an infidel, or if it was dangerous to show it to an American soldier.
Nor would Ali say where his family lived. Translators were considered traitors by the insurgents, collaborators with the infidel invaders. Terps received death threats; there were kidnappings, decapitations. Ali said nothing about his job being dangerous, though Conrad knew it was.
On the base at Ramadi, the hard manual work was done by locals. They were given low wages to do whatever was dirty and menial—digging ditches, construction, loading trucks. Each morning a group of them arrived early and waited in the clearing room to go through security. Every day there was a line of them, shabby men in grimy clothes and broken shoes. They stood silently against the wall, some sliding their backs down it to sit on their heels.
One morning Conrad came into the clearing room looking for Ali. His gaze skimmed past the laborers, and he went on looking around the room. He heard his name called out and looked back: Ali stood among the shabby men, smiling and beckoning.
Conrad didn’t like this. He didn’t like seeing Ali standing with them, didn’t like him smiling and beckoning. Instead of answering or approaching Ali, Conrad lifted his chin, almost as a command. Ali turned to the man beside him. He was thin and hollow-eyed, with thick, messy black hair, a dirty striped shirt, and worn baggy pants. The man smiled at Conrad, but Conrad frowned, gave an abrupt nod, and turned away to speak to someone else. He didn’t like any of it. It irritated him.
Later, on the way to the school, Ali said, “Conrad, that was my friend Mohammed in the clearing room. I had told him about you. I wanted you to meet him. He is very pleased to be offered work at the base. For a long time now he has been unable to get work and could not support his family. Now he is glad to have some salary.” Ali spoke cheerfully; he seemed unaware of Conrad’s snub.
“That’s good.” Conrad felt distaste again at the somehow unsavory link between the shabby laborers and Ali. “What did Mohammed do before the war?”
“Mohammed is like me, a chemical engineer,” Ali said. “Before the war he was a supervisor, in charge of one of the largest oil refineries.”
This irritated Conrad. “What’s he doing on the base?”
“I think he is digging trenches.”
“If he speaks English, why isn’t he a translator?”
“Many people apply for that job. We are not all so fortunate. But Mohammed is well educated. He studied the Greeks, like you. He is very fond of Homer. I thought you would enjoy talking to him.”
Conrad didn’t answer. He saw Mohammed, the grimy clothes and broken shoes, the hollow face and black eyes, and for some reason Conrad thought of his own father, imagined him like this, standing along a wall, waiting.
There was the question of appropriate behavior. Conrad was an officer; he couldn’t talk to every laborer with broken shoes who had read Homer. And he couldn’t consider every question that arose and challenged his moral right to be in Iraq. He was there to carry out the mission, to obey his commanding officers in a branch of service he deeply respected. He was doing his duty. There was the question of why the U.S. forces had destroyed this country. The question of why they were treating their allies—the people they had come here to liberate and protect—with such deep and lethal contempt. The question of whether what they were doing was honorable.
None of these were thoughts he could address. He said nothing more to Ali about Mohammed, and Ali never mentioned him again.
* * *
Conrad didn’t want to remember any of this. He was trying to put everything behind him. He would make a rule: no thoughts of Iraq until the end of the conversation. He was going to hear about Ollie’s school year.
“So,” he said to Ollie. “Why ‘The Origins of Islam?’”
“Just—you know.” Ollie jerked his chin and picked at the label on his beer bottle.
“Because of me being over there,” Conrad said.
Ollie’s eyes flicked up. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I’ve been hearing from you and watching it on the news for years.”
“Nothing you see on the news is real,” said Conrad.
“I know that,” Ollie said. “I just mean—”
“Nothing here has anything to do with what it’s like there.”
“Yeah, I know that.” Ollie seemed both deferential and subversive, as though he were pretending respect while planning mutiny. He shifted uncomfortably.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” Conrad said.
Ollie nodded, picking at the label, peeling the corner away from the slippery surface. “I know.”
“Even what I told you isn’t what it’s like.”
Ollie nodded again, frowning at the label.
Suddenly suspicious, Conrad said, “You’re not thinking of signing up, are you?”
“I’ve thought of it,” Ollie said. “Not right now. Maybe after I graduate.”
Conrad leaned forward. His heart began to pound. “Don’t even think of it. Don’t fucking even think of it.”
“What do you mean?” Ollie asked, aggrieved. “All of a sudden you think it’s a bad idea?”
“I’m saying you shouldn’t do it.”
“You did it,” said Ollie.
“I’m saying you shouldn’t,” Conrad said.
“You don’t think I could handle it?” Ollie asked. “Is that what you think?”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t handle it,” Conrad said. “I’m saying you shouldn’t do it. I’m telling you not to.”
“Oh, I see. You’re giving me an order? You think you’re the only one who can do the big things?” Ollie said. “You think you’re the only one who’s brave enough to be a Marine? Fuck off, Conrad. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I can tell you what to do about this,” Conrad said, his voice rising. The inside of his head was becoming hot and swollen. He stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Don’t you fucking think about signing up.” He leaned over Ollie and screamed into his face, “I’ll tear your fucking head off.”
“Great,” Ollie said. Shockingly, his eyes filled, and he blinked. “Be an asshole. Just be an asshole, Conrad. What the fuck is the matter with you?” He turned his head away. “Are you saying you wish you hadn’t joined?”
Things rose suddenly into Conrad’s mind like waves. There was no warning, he couldn’t stop it. Leaning over his brother, furious. It was like an alarm going off, the horn blaring over and over, and then he was back in Haditha.
* * *
In the morning an IED had gone off, hitting the third Humvee in a convoy of four. They’d been on a milk run, delivering food supplies to a small outlying base, picking up some Iraqi policemen who served with their troops. They made the run every morning, taking a different route each time to avoid IEDs. But this one had been buried under the road and concealed by fresh paving. There was no way to detect it.
The blast destroyed the Humvee, splitting it in half and flipping it over into the crater made by the bomb. The
driver’s head was crushed, and he died on the scene. The man riding shotgun had been blasted out the door of the Humvee: his foot was blown off, and he had trauma to the head. Another Marine was in shock, dazed and unable to speak.
The other Humvees had stopped, and everyone jumped out. Up the road from the convoy was a taxi, which had stopped when the Humvees headed up the street. After the blast went off, the doors opened and five men got out. They waited with their hands in the air. The Marines opened fire on them; they were all shot and killed. There was some fire received from nearby houses. Marine tactics are to lay down superior fire right away, and the fight was over quickly. There were no American casualties in the firefight. Choppers came in to medevac out the two Marines wounded by the IED.
Conrad was on the QRF, Quick Reaction Force, which was called in afterward. By the time he got there, the firefight was over and things seemed under control. Nearby houses had been searched for whoever had detonated the IED. From what Conrad had heard, everything was over. The squad had gone through the houses, and everything was quiet.
Conrad’s squad pulled up near the other Humvees on Route Chestnut. He got out and walked toward the row of houses on the north side of the road. They were low, one story, the front doors facing the dirt road. Two Marines stood outside one of them. Conrad walked up to them. They were from another platoon; he knew them.
“Redbank,” he said, “what’s going on? I’m QRF.”
“LT,” Redbank said, nodding. “We had an IED go off. One KIA and two wounded. They’ve been medevaced out. There was some trouble afterward. We took some fire, then cleared these houses. It’s over now. We’re all set.”
He seemed to be standing in Conrad’s path.
“Okay, thanks,” Conrad said. “I’ll just take a look around.”
Redbank was a short, burly guy. For a moment he didn’t move, but Conrad didn’t, either, leaning toward him until Redbank stepped back to one side. Conrad stepped past him.
The house was painted stucco, with straggly plants outside. It was sixty or seventy meters from the road, and not close to the IED. It would be unlikely for snipers to choose such a distant site.
Inside was a big, shadowy high-ceilinged room with a window on one side. Nearly at Conrad’s feet lay a man in robes, his arms flung out at his sides. Just beyond him was another man, his hand open on the floor. A sandal lay next to his head. They were covered in blood. At the back of the room lay another man; beyond him was a woman. She was half kneeling by the sofa, one arm flung across it, as if she’d been trying to climb onto it. Her head was dark and glistening. On the pale wall behind her, flung high, were dark spatters in a sickening spray.
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