One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

by Buchholz, Benjamin

  “I don’t know,” he says. “They never let me shoot.”

  “Why don’t you shoot that can?” I point to a paint can overturned on the edge of the on-ramp embankment about thirty meters down the road.

  “I have no spare bullets,” Mahmoud says. “What will I do if I use the bullet they have given me?”

  “What purpose will one bullet serve, anyway?”

  “I am to use it to signal the police.”

  “Then ask the police for a new one. Tell them you used it for practice. Or tell them you used it to scare away the dogs. Or that you shot an American or something.”

  “It will come out of my pay. I cannot afford—”

  “Hah,” I say. Without rising from my chair, I reach back toward the tent, pick up his gun, shoulder it, aim at the can, and pull the trigger. I brace for the kick the gun should make, but it doesn’t kick at all. There is no bullet in the chamber. Layla’s story is true. I am disappointed at the weapon not firing, having had in mind a remembrance of the smell of sulfur and saltpeter, the sweet acrid hot deathly smell that should have filled the air after the click of the trigger.

  I play dumb.

  “It must be broken,” I say. “See if you can fix it for me.”

  Mahmoud is standing. His mouth is open, aghast that I have touched his Kalashnikov, the mark of his limited authority. He is a little man, not much taller than me even as I sit. His uniform, dark blue, sags from his shoulders and bunches at his waist, where he has belted it with a length of rope.

  I hand him the weapon so that he can open the chamber and inspect it. He grabs it from me, pulls the bolt back, and looks inside.

  “There’s no bullet,” he says after a long puzzled moment.

  The thought crosses my mind to seal some sort of deal with the man: offer him help with his police examinations, with the bribes, offer to bring him some additional bullets for the gun. Yet I’m not sure enough of myself. Not sure how this man, Mahmoud, fits with my plans. I need to watch him more. I need to study him more. I need to play a game of “Watch Mahmoud,” similar to my game of convoy counting, though game is probably the wrong word for such an activity, too soft by far, whereas spying—as Layla calls it—sounds far too indirect.

  “I’ll bring you a bullet,” I say, a small concession on my part. “Maybe a few bullets. What good is a guard without bullets?”

  “Thank you,” he says.

  The conversation ends on a down note, like that. It had been building toward something, toward a partnership, an odd sort of uneven partnership. Do I need him to watch over my store, my shack, when Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah guarantees it? No. I’m at a loss. I stand. I see the city of Safwan spreading beneath me into the distance to the south, with the overpass high enough above the flat desert to command a view for miles in every direction. I take longer than I should, standing there, observing everything, turning my head to and fro.

  We’ve finished our kebabs. I’ve got nothing left to say. I see him, Mahmoud, secretly looking toward the town, toward the arch, maybe in the hope that the boy from Bashar’s café will return. He cleans up the tea set. He shuffles around me. Like me, he has nothing to say. Yet all the while, he glances uncomfortably toward the arch.

  I think of Layla in the market, there beneath the arch, and for just a second a very different image from how I usually see her flashes through my mind. In this vision she is covered with blood. She is shot through with bullet holes. She scurries from place to place, from shop to shop, trying to pick up pieces of herself that have come apart, that have spilled from her body like the intestines of a dying kitten. The vision brings with it a pounding sensation in my head. I blink. I put one hand out to the side as if I am about to stagger. Mahmoud moves toward me, concerned. He is about to touch me but I shake my head, rather vigorously, and the vision of blackness disappears.

  “One more thing,” I say to Mahmoud, my voice ringing falsely, almost angrily, in my ears. “Who do you work for?”

  Mahmoud has sensed the shift in my disposition. He looks troubled. The muscles of his face tighten.

  “No one,” he says.

  “No one?”

  “The police—”

  “The police?”

  I spit to show my disapproval of police in general and also my disbelief in his statement. He must work for someone. The police don’t initiate the sort of man-to-man, tribe-to-tribe relationships on which real work depends.

  However, Mahmoud insists it is the police, only the police.

  I ask him twice more, just to be sure.

  “The police,” he insists. He shows me the stamp of the Ministry of the Interior on the butt of his Kalashnikov.

  I give up, thinking: perhaps he has no master, no one to whom he is bound. The thought causes me to change course once again, to establish my authority over the man in a way even more complex than I had originally thought possible—with a carrot and with a stick.

  “Maybe I should talk to the police,” I say. “I don’t want to see you sleeping on the job anymore.”

  With that, the matter is concluded. He had been waiting for it all along. The pleasantries of eating together, sharing tea, small talk, all of them had been building toward some sort of official message. Mahmoud had been expecting it. His posture immediately stiffens. He thinks he has been inspected, checked on, tested.

  “You’re Hezbollah?” he says. “You work for Hussein?”

  “No,” I say. I slap him. He winces but tries to hide it. “Don’t say that again. I work for no one. But I’m watching you, and I don’t want to see you sleeping anymore.”

  I hold Mahmoud’s gaze for a moment. To his credit, he does not flinch. Then, as quickly as I had come, I leave him and head on my way, not toward the center of the city, to Bashar’s café, where I would normally dine, but along the outskirts, the outer road, which leads more directly to my house.

  Tonight, the kebab has filled my need for food. I do not wish to talk about Ulayya with Bashar, as he certainly will wish. I wonder whether it is wise for me to have antagonized the guard. It was clumsy. I had no clear plan when I approached, and he knew the visit from an older man like me could not be attributed to anything purely social. Yet it wasn’t all a waste. Mahmoud fears me a little now: an unknown force in town, not Hezbollah. He will watch me and watch my store as well, which is worth a little even with the protection of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah overarching everything.

  What’s more, lazy and inattentive as Mahmoud is, he can see all four ramps of the overpass from where he leans and idles on his camp chair. He can see my store. And I’ve checked with my own eyes just how far in each direction—up the road toward Baghdad and down the road toward Umm Qasr—the view extends, a vantage of many miles, a great length of important road.

  * * *

  The year 1980 was a glorious year for Iraq, to be followed quickly by seven years of ignominy. Saddam Hussein launched his surprise attack on Iran in September of 1980 and, at first, Iraq’s armies trampled over unaware Iran like a second blitzkrieg. I had just turned seventeen. I wanted to go to war. I wanted to join Saddam’s Republican Guard. I wanted to be among the first of our conquering armies to set foot in Tehran.

  My father offered Yasin his blessing when Yasin signed up for Saddam’s army. I think he felt ashamed that Yasin had not yet found a calling in life. At least this would be something, a career, a chance to distinguish himself, something better than spending his nights on the town, wasting his money in idleness. My father allowed Yasin to join, but he forbade me.

  “You are meant to do better things,” he said. “And Yasin is a man now, old enough to make his own decisions.”

  When Yasin came home on leave after military training, when he came home clothed in pressed military fatigues with a body and a face hardened from the rigors of military discipline and physical training, I nearly cried with envy. He stood straighter when he walked. He spoke more clearly and more decidedly. And when he looked at my father, he looked less like a beaten chil
d and more like the grown man my father said he had become.

  “The war will be over in three weeks,” Yasin boasted.

  “Don’t be so sure,” my father replied.

  “We have the latest Soviet tanks on the ground, the latest MiGs in the sky,” said Yasin.

  “But they have religion,” my father said, a thing I didn’t understand at all until our initial gains, trumpeted in the headlines of every Iraqi newspaper—capturing the Shatt al-Arab in Basra and Qasr-e Shirin in the north, entering Khuzestan and Abadan and Ahvaz, laying siege to Kermanshah deep in Iranian territory—until these gains were repulsed by Iran’s human-wave tactics. Our papers said nothing about the turning of the tide at the end of 1980, but rumor spoke of the fearlessness of Iranian martyrs who came to the front lines with death shrouds wrapped around their shoulders, ready, joyfully ready to enter heaven. These martyrs would walk into our machine-gun fire until our machine guns ran out of ammunition.

  After Yasin left for the war, we did not hear from him, not by letter, not by phone, not by telegram. For all I know, my father may have received notice of his death or capture through some private channel. He may even have had some communication with Yasin. If so, he kept his information to himself.

  He never again spoke Yasin’s name in my presence.

  8

  Monday

  I WATCH FOR LAYLA’S VISIT this evening, as I do most evenings. As the sun sets behind the overpass, I wonder if she will return tonight, appear magically when I least expect her. Or, alternatively, I wonder if our customary meeting has been halted by my harsh words, like the breaking of a charm, or halted by Ulayya’s intrusion, like the freezing of time under the influence of a curse. I lose track of the convoys, at least superficially. They become something more like background noise. My little game of counting their comings and goings has been supplanted by other games, reminiscences, and my wandering mind cannot be controlled from thinking about Layla, about Layla, about Layla and Ulayya.

  Today marks the eighth day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-sixth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. A normal day. I sold a few items. I chatted with a few customers. I held off my impatience for the setting of the sun and the shutting of my shop by watching the guard, Mahmoud, as he watched me, watched my shop, pointedly walking down the overpass bridge at hourly and semihourly intervals to see behind my shack, to crane his neck this way and that, demonstrating, with astounding subtlety, his diligence. I am a new factor in town. I’m starting to show a little authority. I don’t belong to Hezbollah. Need he know anything more? I brought him a box of ammunition this morning, but it is, of course, the good word with the police he really craves, the potential that I might even pay the bribe required to get him on the police force.

  As if to prove his loyalty, Mahmoud again rises from his stool and walks the length of the bridge, checking on me, checking on my store, though I am in the store myself. Could the man truly be so thick-witted? Could he think I mean for him to watch over the store while I inhabit it? I question myself for having struck any sort of deal with him. Yet he can see all four ramps of the overpass from where he sits, a much better view than the view from my shop, looking up from the market.

  Mahmoud doesn’t look at me. He never looks at me directly. He is trying to be sneaky about his attention to me. He now shoulders his Kalashnikov instead of leaving it at his tent or carrying it listlessly at his side. He walks back and forth with it like a tin soldier on parade. As he returns to his tent, an American convoy approaches the overpass from the north. It is Monday, just at sunset. I note the time, seven forty-two. Three gun trucks, Humvees, topped with .50-caliber machine guns in turrets operated by gunners with dark face-shielding sunglasses. Robots, all these Davids and Patricks and Winstons. That’s more like it: robots. Less human. Less need for me to feel any sort of remorse, watching them, watching their movements, recording their habits.

  The vehicles of this convoy shepherd four coach buses. I observe the convoy as it passes. The buses have opaque windows with blinds drawn tight. I let my eyes linger on the vehicles until they are out of sight to the south, heading toward Umm Qasr and Camp Bucca, just ten kilometers farther down the road. After I can no longer see the convoy, I can still hear it, even above the sounds of the market, above the braying of goats, the clucking of chickens, the banter of men, the passing of automobiles, the sigh of the wind. The diesel rumble of Humvees: a distinctive, marrow-numbing sound. I make a notch on the door frame of my store, the sixth such notch.

  A group of schoolgirls in black uniforms passes my shop. They all have backpacks. They all have hair tied modestly with modest-colored ribbons. The eldest cover their heads—some cover even their faces—with plain, modest scarves. In the countryside, here in the south, where the old traditions prevail, girls of such age are considered old enough to marry. I avoid looking at them directly. They wait under the bridge of the overpass, where their families, mostly from outlying tomato farms, pick them up.

  I imagine Layla among them, cleaned, looking proper, looking, perhaps, contrite after a good stern lecture from her father about religion and blasphemy and cleanliness and robots. The imaginary Layla shyly waves at me from amid the group.

  A little Toyota truck arrives under the bridge. The schoolgirls jump into the back, onto the open, sand-swept bed of the truck. The truck turns a half circle in the middle of the road without coming deeper into the market, without coming closer to me. I watch it disappear. Unlike the sounds of the convoy, the sound of its small engine is soon overwhelmed by the noise around me.

  Does Layla attend school? I don’t know the answer. I picture her years from now, that spark of creativity gone, maybe with the sound of an American movie from a little black-and-white TV droning unheeded on a kitchen shelf above her as she completes her house chores, a good wife but nothing like the sparkling thing she is now. What a shame to think ahead on the life she must lead.

  I shut and lock my shop for the night.

  I walk into Safwan and eat dinner with Bashar. He does not mention Ulayya directly. But as he sits with me he shows me a list of other names, potential brides, women I should meet. It is a new tactic for him. I notice how pointedly he avoids mentioning Ulayya. She is an absence in his recommendations. He wants me to notice the absence and mention her myself.

  “Let us not talk of women,” I say instead. “Have you found the movie?”

  “Yes,” he says, looking disappointed. “A friend’s cousin from Kufa has a copy on disk and will bring it down tomorrow. Will you come to my house to watch it?”

  “I will be delighted to watch the movie at your house. I have no DVD player.”

  I tip him an extra thousand dinar, which is just a few dollars now that Iraqi currency is so much inflated. He takes away my empty teacup and, with it, the remains of my dinner.

  After Bashar has gone, as well as all through the time he and I spoke, I keep my eyes open for some hint of the boy who works for him, the boy who visits Mahmoud on the bridge. But I do not see this boy tonight in Bashar’s café.

  * * *

  I don’t talk about the war with Iran.

  I refrain from thinking about it if possible. My father kept me from going to the war for as long as he could by obtaining an exemption for college study. I would have preferred to join the army immediately, like Yasin. I itched to join. But my father’s word was law. He sent me to Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and I took a bachelor’s degree.

  When, after I graduated in 1984, my draft notice arrived at our house, my father did not immediately share it with me.

  He called Abdel Khaleq.

  And Abdel Khaleq told Nadia.

  And Nadia was the first to inform me.

  “There’s nothing my father can do about it,” she said after rushing to my house with the news.

  She had just turned seventeen and her roly-poly face with its button nose now graced a figure dark and willowy. She wore American-style blue
jeans, a T-shirt splattered with paint, and an assortment of golden bangles on her wrists. Iraqi culture, like its army, had become a secular place, a more westernized place, especially for wealthy families like ours. All the girls at that time dressed like Cyndi Lauper, all the boys like Tom Selleck in the role of Magnum—Ray-Bans and Hawaiian-print shirts. Thick mascara bled onto Nadia’s cheeks from eyes wept red and swollen.

  When I didn’t respond, Nadia added, “Father says every young man must serve.”

  I wanted to share her feeling of disappointment, though truly—not yet knowing the horror of war—I felt no sort of disappointment at all. Quite the opposite. I pictured myself wearing a pressed uniform like Yasin’s. I pictured myself beside Yasin as we turned back the Iranian hordes, turned them back to the very gates of Tehran.

  I didn’t want to reveal my excitement, so I sadly said: “This will delay our wedding.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Father told me it will be two years until we can reschedule.”

  9

  Tuesday

  LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING, like most evenings, this evening once again. And this evening I am at least a little glad, I admit, to see her. After two days of her absence I had begun to doubt whether she would ever return and whether I would ever hear the song again, the alien song. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as the sun sets behind Jebel Sanam and casts its light against the overpass where the road from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger road from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect.

  Before her arrival, I concentrated sincerely on the convoys, focused my mind on them. In the greater resolution of this focus, each of the soldiers in the Humvees looked less robotic, more alive, more real. I counted my Dave and my Dave Junior and my Dave-Who-Is-Shorter-Than-Dave-Junior. I saw one of my Patricks. I noticed that Winston was not wearing his sunglasses. The color of his eyes appeared darker than I expected: brown rather than the American blue all Americans supposedly have. I think about Layla’s blue eyes, rare in the south of Iraq but not wholly unknown. What freak of nature made them blue? How strong was the gene in her, the gene of blue eyes, to overcome generations of brown, brown upon brown, like the clouds of a sandstorm parting at last to reveal the far-above sky? Are they naturally blue, bred from the depths of some ancient Assyrian lineage? Are they a carryover from the days the British fought here in Basra province during the world wars, some intermingling of fair British genes? Or, as I first thought, might she be a mistake, the result of a moment’s lust during the Americans’ first war here? Her age would be just about correct, thirteen, maybe fourteen years.