Hezbollah performs three functions in the market and in the town. The first of these functions I applaud: providing a sort of social welfare, distributing assistance to the poor, setting up some services—like vaccinations—that neither the Iraqi government nor the American or British military regularly provide. But the other two functions I deplore: coercing merchants and citizens to pay for their protection and conducting a campaign of moral policing.
The Hezbollah gang’s arrival could easily become an ugly scene for me, for I neither want, nor feel like paying for, their protection. And, as a new man in town, my moral qualities are—I am sure—still somewhat suspect in their eyes. Fortunately, they do not bully me very much, Allah in His Mercy be praised.
“It is your first month,” Hussein tells me, eyeing my mobile phones. “We like to encourage new businesses, so no fees for you yet.”
I give him a phone to try for a week or two. He repeats his line about the importance of protection for businessmen in the Safwan markets, especially in this newer market, where, if I haven’t noticed, I am inside the on-ramp loop of an overpass, ground that is officially government property. Hussein doesn’t go so far as to call it a black market, as some townsfolk do. Nor does he tell me that I have taken up my place in the market illegally. And I do not go so far as to tell him that I have already made special arrangements with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah for the privilege of the location and for the privilege of better protection than his band of scrubby youths could ever hope to provide. I want to say, “Seyyed Abdullah guarantees my business.” I want to say that very much. But I remain perfectly cordial with the man.
As the muezzin wail of the call to prayer dies in the evening air, the guard for the overpass wanders along the edge of the quarry on the far side of the road. It is an abandoned quarry, a place where the local people dump their household trash. The guard can see the bridge from his position, so he hasn’t completely abandoned his post. He prods at mounds of garbage, stoops to pick up objects from wind-tattered black trash bags. Goats and a crow graze through the refuse behind him, more closely inspecting what he has overturned and discarded.
“My mother asked me to check on the tomatoes in the market today,” Layla says.
“Tomatoes?” I say.
I don’t want to look startled at her abrupt arrival this fourth day, so I keep watching the guard in the trash pit at the edge of the quarry. I should not be surprised at her anymore, at her sudden appearances and her sudden departures. I should be at ease around her. I am a man of business. I am a man. I should be unflappable, stoic, a model of sobriety and confidence. I should not panic.
Layla steps in front of me, making sure I do not ignore her.
“Yeah,” she says. “You know…red, round, squishy inside. Tomatoes.”
“Is she making a salad?”
“No. She doesn’t eat salads. We don’t eat salads.”
“What?!” I say. “All mothers like salads. Or is she a robot or something? Maybe an alien?”
I laugh at my joke, this theme of robots and aliens and genies. I expect Layla to laugh. She does not.
She says, “We farm tomatoes. She wanted to know the price for when we go to sell them. I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wonder that Nile Drama TV allows such a thing, such a show to air, where the U.S. isn’t destroyed by aliens at the end, like in the movie Independence Day. Such a movie the imams certainly approve! Independence Day! I like to see the U.S. destroyed, the White House being exploded by death rays from the sky.”
“I have not seen this film,” I say. “I do not pay much attention to the cinema.”
“You don’t? Alhumdu l-Allah!” she says. “I love movies.”
“They are idolatry,” I say, but only halfheartedly, as I ponder again my list of movie stars: Tom Cruise, Schwarzenegger, Jack Black. Maybe Rufus Wainwright doesn’t belong in the same list…I take him off the list but I add Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and Gary Oldman, who played a splendid Beethoven. I admit to myself that I know a lot about American movies, certainly more than a mobile-phone merchant should.
Layla’s words continue over mine, drowning my objection on the grounds of idolatry in a fine flow of enthusiasm: “He’s drawn out to the desert, Neary, the hero in Close Encounters who confronts the aliens, like Muhammad is drawn to the desert when he says he has seen the breaking of the light of dawn. It is the same. They climb a mountain of light, Jebel an-Nur. He has visions. He is persecuted by the men of his tribe but escapes. Just like the hero Neary in the movie. Then he hears the voice of Allah.”
“But Allah is no alien,” I say.
I begin to take offense at her comments. I tell myself I should visit this girl’s father. I tell myself that the man must be convinced to use whatever means necessary to banish such wild thoughts from her. They will not do, such thoughts, such travesties. They will not.
“And Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him,” I say, “Muhammad hears the voice of Angel Gabriel when he is on the mountain, not the voice of Allah, not the voice of aliens.”
“It is one and the same,” she says.
This is blasphemy for sure.
I anger and say, “Girl, you should not speak in such terms!”
As if bowled over by the force of my irritation, Layla closes her eyes and sits cross-legged on the ground in the dust in front of my shack, positioning herself as an unmovable object. She puts her hands to either side of her body, bracing herself. In the street behind her, cars pass, honking and screeching and rumbling as always, the nearest lane only a few feet from where she sits. The drivers do not notice her. A bit of tissue paper—colored, like the wrapping of a present—tumbles along the road in a draft of air behind a truck. Layla sways back and forth and then starts to hum. Between the notes of humming I hear bits of words, snatches of sound, like the distant lonesome Persian song I had heard from my seat outside Bashar’s café, yet even less comprehensible, even more elusive, more wonderfully foreign.
I cannot make out the words beneath and between the humming. Perhaps they are Quranic. Holy. Perhaps they are the talk of devils or of genies who have taken possession of her body and possession of her voice. I come out of my shack. I mean to shake some sense into her. Instead, my arms go out to her. I mean to grab her but I am incapacitated by the sound of her voice, by the shield of her voice spreading around her, and I never truly touch her. I kneel, first one knee and then the next, holding my arms toward her like a supplicant in some Eastern religion who has prostrated himself before an idol or before a fasting holy man in the shade of a thorn tree.
“What are you singing?” I ask.
She doesn’t reply. She just keeps singing. From the shop beside mine, where Sadeq sells oils and lubricants for cars and machines, a few men emerge, grubby men. They stand around me as I kneel. More men come from other shops, shopkeepers and their guards and people browsing through the market.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
She sings, then stops, then sings and hums and speaks between the humming and singing, words that aren’t words at all. I can feel it in my bones, the high fluting resonance of her voice conducting a call-and-response with something I cannot pretend to hear, cannot pretend to know, something distant and angelic. The sheer beauty of it banishes the idea in my mind that she might be possessed by evil, by the Devil. But I’m convinced, utterly convinced, that she is possessed by something.
“The music,” I say again. “Beautiful.”
The group around me grows larger: an old veiled woman with a basket over her arm; a gaggle of schoolchildren in buttoned vests, pants, and dresses; two traffic policemen in blue shirts with white gloves and batons holstered at their sides. I try not to notice them. I focus on Layla.
Layla strikes a last long note, the loudest of all, then looks up at the sky and stops. She stands and looms above me. Her shadow crosses the ground in front of me. I am shaken.
“Abu Saheeh,” she says, “that is the music the aliens sing when they come to the mountain.
That is everything I remember of the song Neary hears as he watches the alien ship descend. He communicates with the aliens by singing back to them and making mountain shapes in his mashed potatoes.”
Her voice returns to normal and she asks: “Do you believe in aliens?”
“It is beautiful,” I say again. “Alhumdu l-Allah.”
Layla reaches down and touches my forehead, lifting me from the dust where I have bowed down. When I am on my knees, we are more closely the same height. She looks at me directly, her blue eyes searching and holding mine. Then she releases me.
“I must check on the tomatoes,” she says.
At that, as quickly as she had come, Layla leaves, running to the south, toward the vegetable market at the center of town, just past the town hall behind Bashar’s café. I realize I am facing Mecca as I kneel. I say a prayer, touch my head to the dust once more, as if to atone for any blasphemy I may have unwittingly committed in kneeling to the song of a girl rather than to the song Allah has put in my heart. I know they must be different, the two songs, the spiritual God-reflecting song and the song of a little beggar child, stolen from an American movie. But do not all things reflect the majesty of Allah? And, maybe, sometimes some of those things reflect His majesty and wonder more perfectly, more clearly, more purely. Perhaps worship in any form leads the mind and the spirit toward Allah in His Oneness. Perhaps that is so. Or perhaps I am an old fool of a man, an old fool of a kafir.
When at last I rise, the men from Sadeq’s shop and the others who have gathered still look at me.
“You have had a vision?” one asks.
“Yes,” I say.
I am not blaspheming in answering them with this answer. The vision, and her voice, the song of the mountain, have gone, not into the wilderness, but into town on a common pathetic errand to find tomatoes. I look up. I look around me. Through the crowd I see the guard on the lip of the quarry using his Kalashnikov as a crutch or a staff, prodding at the body of a dead goat decaying in the mounds of trash beneath his feet. If he were Moses, the prodding of his staff might cause a spring to gush from the earth. The guard, however, has no such luck. He picks his way from mound to mound, looking up at the overpass only every once in a while.
Tonight I do not go to the café of my friend Bashar. I go, instead, to the mosque, where the silence inside allows me to hear more clearly in my mind the remembered notes sung by Layla’s aliens. I stay there, in the mosque, through the last of the day’s calls to prayer, the fifth call. Yet, all that while, and despite my best efforts to both exactly remember and completely forget, the song Layla sings never wholly returns to me.
* * *
My brother, Yasin, continued to live in our father’s house for several years after his expulsion from school, up until the time I reached twelve years of age.
“Maggot,” he would call me, daily, like a term of endearment, as he descended the back staircase into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, tired, just catching me on my way out the door to my school. “You look like a maggot in that prissy shirt.”
I tried to ignore him, but from the very start he knew the most cutting words to say, the most hurtful things to do to me. I was happy when he started spending most of his evenings out on the town with a band of friends he was smart enough never to bring within my father’s sight.
My father’s friend Abdel Khaleq as-Samara’i was among the important men who sometimes visited our house. He would give his coat to the doorman and then he and my father would seclude themselves in my father’s parlor, smoking and talking.
Sometimes Abdel Khaleq brought his daughter, Nadia, and her nursemaid with him. Nadia’s nursemaid and Fatima would cook for the men and talk to each other as they boiled tea and made pastries in the kitchen. No one paid attention to Nadia and me. We were free to roam where we wanted. I was happy, very happy, to spend the evening with a companion, even a girl. I was happy to have a friend of any sort, especially one less cruel than Yasin.
I remember Nadia as a roly-poly button-faced child, shorter than me by more than a head, a thing that was natural enough, since I was twelve and she eight. We had been engaged to marry when she was born, my father hoping to cement his place in the Baath party by tying our family to the family of as-Samara’i, who was one of Salah Omar al-Ali’s close associates. I thought nothing of it at the time, the idea that at such an age my future bride had already been chosen for me. We knew no other way.
These nights of her father’s visits, Nadia always wanted to play house, to pretend we had already gotten married. I wanted to climb trees in the walled pavilion behind our kitchen or to make forts in the garage, where my father kept his cars. Usually my ideas won, and I persuaded her to play my games. But usually, also, she changed the rules just enough to accommodate her plans.
When I suggested that we make a fort, Nadia agreed but said, “Only if I can set up tea inside the princess part of your fort.”
So we slipped into the garage through an open side window and crawled down from the window over the workbench, where my father’s chauffeur oiled and retooled various parts of the cars. We slid from the workbench onto the earthen floor of the garage and fumbled around in the dark until, reaching for the pull-cord attached to a light above my head, I found Nadia standing on tiptoe just in front of me, the smell of her breath warm against my face.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Quickly, as quickly as I could, I turned my face away from her, saying, “No, that’s disgusting.”
“All married people kiss,” she said.
“But you’re like my sister.”
“I’m your fiancée.”
The statement was true enough. I had no recourse. So I kissed her, though I didn’t want to. A small peck of a first kiss, our lips brushing against each other and our hands stiff at our sides, unsure where we should put them.
5
Friday
IF LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING, as she has on most evenings, I am not there to see her. She may stand in shadow under the awning of my little store, but I do not know.
Today would mark the fifth day of such visits. Also the twenty-third day of business for my shop. A Friday, the day of prayer. So leaving the shop shuttered and locked is natural, though my piety in this instance feels most unnatural, most unlike what I normally think of as godliness. I hear, but do not see, the continued ever-present movement of the American convoys bypassing Safwan. I am not offended that they continue their passage on a holy day like today. They are ignorant, sure. But only annoying, not offensive. I imagine that my hearing is as good at the game of counting convoys as is my sight, but such is not true. I can only guess at the number of convoys today. Same as usual: twenty or so heading north, twenty or so south.
I do not know what the guard on the overpass does today. I’m not sure I care. I imagine he sleeps. Or leans on his chair. Or watches the cars and trucks pass in an endless rhythm along the highway toward destinations far from his little outpost. He remains as effective a guard as always. I do not care what the Hezbollah thugs do in town today, harassing someone other than we merchants, all of us with our shops closed for the day of prayer and rest. It crosses my mind that their leader, Hussein, is the only man in town, other than myself, who is both unmarried and of marriageable age. I tell myself to remember to speak to Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah about this man Hussein and about the guard on the overpass.
At noon I go to the house of my friend Bashar and knock on the wrought-iron front gate. I have not visited him at his new home in Safwan, though often we have walked past the gate of his house when returning together from his café at the close of the evening. I live far on the western edge of Safwan, across the north-south military road and the special border-crossing point for America’s military convoys. I can see Kuwait from the top windows of my house, more of the same empty, dusty scrubland, but with electric lights on gray metal light poles all along the big highway. The poles have not been stolen for scrap metal, as they have been on our side of the border. F
rom my house I cannot see the yellow-and-black pipe that stretches far to the east and west or, just in front of that pipe, the big antitank ditches, three meters deep and ten across, that mark the no-man’s-land created after the first U.S. war. But I know those obstacles exist, hidden behind other buildings and fences and trenches. What I can most clearly see is the place where the line of light poles ends, the place where Kuwait ends, the place where Iraq begins.
On the far side of the military road, a few new houses have gone up on the western fringe of sand among an old dusty orchard of date palms. My house is one of these, a building too large for my bachelor needs. In contrast, Bashar told me he lived above his café when first he moved to Safwan, his six children and wife in two meager rooms. My idea of his new home, hidden behind a wall and gate, is not much better. A separate space, but no palace. I am, therefore, surprised when he opens the courtyard door.
At the gate we shake hands, clasp each other close, kiss on each cheek.
“Hello and welcome, my friend. Your presence pleases us,” he says, ushering me inside.
“May Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you and upon your family,” I say.
From outside the cracked and decaying plaster wall, the scribbles of political graffiti and the tattered limbs of Russian olives shielding the courtyard present an image of poverty: foreboding, glum, not worth a burglar’s time or effort. From within, though, the wall is clean, brick with a veiling cascade of purple flowers. The olive trees have been pruned on their undersides. They form a small arch over the center of the yard, a leafy cloister, beneath which a fountain burbles beside a curved concrete bench. A cobblestone path winds from the door to the fountain, spreads around the fountain in a ring three meters wide, and separates toward the two doors of Bashar’s home. One door opens onto the family quarters, where I hear Bashar’s children playing. The other opens onto the diwaniya, Bashar’s private den, where children and women are forbidden and Bashar may entertain guests like me in relative peace.
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 3