Today marks the ninth day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-seventh day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A long day. A weary day. The bottle lay beside me when I woke and, ever since, this whole morning, I have felt leaden. I am happy, if happy is the right word, to only perform the work of an immobile seller of mobile phones. I can handle such work on days like this, sitting with a thick head while I keep an eye on the roads.
My convoy counting and my naming of the American soldiers helps me pass the time and today I have additional reason to scrutinize each car. I do not know what Bashar’s friend from Kufa who has the Close Encounters disk might look like. I cannot, of course, expect that he will be holding his copy of the movie against the window of his car to advertise his presence, the sun casting reflected rays from the DVD in a halo of self-proclamation. But somehow I think I might know the man. I think some slight signal, some glint in the eye, might cue me that he isn’t just a normal shopper come south to our little market for bargains on the latest Kuwaiti imports, legal or smuggled. Or, inversely, perhaps I think that I might later recall his arrival when Bashar introduces us.
“Ah,” I could say. “You were the man in the Volkswagen.”
Or the Toyota pickup.
Or the Yukon with the shaded windows and nice shiny hubcaps.
But I see nothing out of the ordinary among the multitudes who pass through the market, north to south, south to north.
The idiot Mahmoud on the overpass waves to me. I make a point of not waving back. I feel foolish. He clearly wishes to speak to me but I don’t care to have a conversation with him. I begin shutting my shop.
Layla speaks to me before I see her.
“Are you angry with me, Abu Saheeh?”
“That depends,” I say. “Are you clean?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to blaspheme Allah’s name? Muhammad’s name, Peace Be Upon Him?”
“No,” she says. “I do not mean to…I did not mean to…I never do. I am sorry.”
I can tell she sincerely regrets it. I can tell she is somewhat upset. She won’t look directly at me. I speak over her protestations: “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I am not angry with you.”
Then I look around. I had heard her, but she wasn’t nearby. Behind another shop? Behind a stack of tires in Rabeer’s used-car lot? I spin in a circle and then look back into my shop.
“Where are you?”
“Behind the store. I see you through this crack in the wall.”
“Hiding?”
“Why does the guard on the overpass look behind your shop now?” she asks. “Every day for the last few days he looks behind your shop. Many times every day. I’m hiding here until he next walks along the bridge, just to prove he is blind. He looks behind your shop but he doesn’t see me, so what is he looking for?”
“I threatened him in order to—” I stop speaking; it would be foolish to tell her such things. She doesn’t care anyway, it seems. She leaps to her next question, her mind skipping like a rock on the surface of a glassy pond.
“Can you see me?” she asks.
I go out the door and look for her. She has leaned a section of sliding door, probably stolen or discarded from Rabeer and Maney’a’s lot, against the back wall. The bottom of the door props against the base of the shack behind mine, where the men from the propane filling station play cards and listen to music during the day. The top of the door rests against my tin roof. The space in which she hides is not large, a foot and a half across, not large enough for an adult. She crouches under the door. I pretend not to see her although she is plainly visible, her eyes wide open, glinting in the shadows.
“I can’t see you,” I say, pretending.
“You can’t?”
“No.”
“I thought not,” she says.
She comes out from under the door. She walks around me in a slow circle. I keep squinting at the door, at the place from where I last heard her voice.
“Still can’t see me?” she asks.
I startle as she speaks from beside me. She laughs.
“No,” I say. “Are you walking around? Are you a ghost?”
“Ooooh,” she says as eerily as she can while still stalking around me. “Ooooh.”
I stick my hands straight in front of me, like a man sleepwalking. I try to feel around the space where she had just stood. I find nothing.
“Show yourself!” I say. “Show yourself, you fiend!”
She ducks back under the sliding door.
“Show yourself!” I say again, and louder.
The propane filling station men break from their game and look through their side window. They can see me but they can’t see Layla. I notice that I’m making a fool of myself. I stand straight, put my arms down at my sides. I smooth the front of my dishdasha over my legs.
“Masah il-kheir,” I say to the men, a little too formally.
They wave their cards and focus on their game again, dismissing my episode as just a touch of craziness, nothing worth watching, nothing worth mentioning. Or so I hope.
I wait until they are no longer interested. I bend. I look under the sliding door.
Layla has gone.
Later that evening, after falafel and tea at the café; after smoking a little bukhoor with Bashar in his diwaniya; after all the pleasant conversation, the preliminaries; after seeing his children once again paraded before me; after feeling again the gaze of Bashar’s wife upon me, lurking out of sight behind the shadowed lattice of one of the courtyard windows—after all this, Bashar at last produces the DVD.
“I am sorry my friend could not remain in Safwan long enough to meet you, Abu Saheeh,” Bashar says. “But he left the movie for you, for us.”
I imagine the black-tinted windows of a GMC Yukon rolling down as the vehicle of Bashar’s friend stops in the alleyway behind Bashar’s house. The friend, in sunglasses, hands the DVD through the window, drop-and-go, fast-food style. Bashar blesses him, wishing him a safe journey back to Kufa. The friend waves, noncommittally, and then squeals his tires as he drives away over the trash and spliced electric lines, the open sewer and piles of goat manure in the alley. Any man who owns DVDs of old American movies would have more important things to attend to, surely. It is a wonder to me that Bashar knows someone who possesses the movie at all, and that he has influence enough to get the movie delivered. But then it seems Bashar knows everyone, a benefit stemming either from his new career as a restaurateur or from his old career, our old careers, in Baghdad.
Bashar has placed a TV on the far end of the diwaniya, away from the windows. We move our pillows toward it and sit in front of it. I recline on my side, propping my head with my arm. Bashar puts the movie into his DVD player. He moves his narjeela between us as the credits roll. We watch the movie and smoke. When, partway through the movie, I take a small handheld tape recorder from my pocket and set it on the ground in front of me, Bashar looks at it and then at me, questioningly.
“I bought this in the market today. Amazing the things you can buy! I want to record the song, you see,” I say.
Yet the tape recorder remains unused for most of the movie. It is much as Layla said: aliens, various alien sightings, science fiction, as the man Neary, who is the hero, fights his way through the American secret military and onto the American secret base. Thinking about it more deeply than I would have otherwise done, I suppose the plot does exhibit certain parallels with the experience of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, when he first appeared with his message before the merchants and old families of Mecca. They fought him. They tried to detain him and hinder him before his escape north to Medina. They were unbelieving, some of them, until the events and miracles and words of Angel Gabriel conveyed through Muhammad showed clear proof of the Message and Messenger of Allah.
At the climactic moment in the movie, I turn on my cassette recorder. It hisses as the tape winds forward to capture the sound from the television. The alien ship sing
s to the assembled scientists. All of them stand together in awe on the mountain platform specially prepared for the occasion. The aliens sing. The American scientists play their own song in return. The two sides communicate through music. And just as Neary is about to meet the aliens, just as he walks out from his hiding place among the rocks to meet the aliens at the gangway of their ship, at that moment Bashar stops the movie.
“This is what you want to see?” he says.
“No,” I say. “I’ve seen enough already.”
“It disgusts you?”
“Yes,” I say. “Blasphemy.”
I turn off the tape recorder and slip it into my pocket. Blasphemy, I say. But in my heart I think something altogether different. The song the aliens sing in the movie, although having similar notes to the melody Layla sang, isn’t at all the same. It is something different entirely. Heard through her, amplified through her, resonating through her, the song changed. That change made me think of Muhammad again, reminded me more of the true miracle of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, than did any part of the movie’s plot: how the supposedly illiterate Muhammad heard the words of Angel Gabriel and spoke them, recited them, read them so that they would be known to the minds of men. The change Layla wrought in the music reminded me of the way that the spoken sound of the Quran is itself hypnotic and sacred. Had Layla done something similar? Was her voice, singing alien songs or songs of rock and roll, somehow influenced by a godly power? Was she touched, divine? Were her mixed-up tales of Beverly Hillbillies and Arnold Schwarzenegger an index to something, when taken in aggregate, infinitely more precious?
While I ponder these things, Bashar continues speaking. I catch the end of his thoughts: “…this person who asserts these blasphemies. I will have his name! Abu Saheeh, you will give the man’s name to me and I will tell Hussein from the Hezbollah and then: woe unto this blasphemer, this kafir!”
The TV, with the DVD still paused at the aliens descending the gangway of the ship onto the mountain platform, flickers with static.
“No, Bashar. No,” I say.
But he is frantic. Whether to calm him or whether due to some deeper, more human impulse, I change the topic. He sits immediately.
“Let us talk of Ulayya bint Ali ash-Shareefi again, my friend,” I say, dropping her name on him like a bomb. “And let us forget this movie entirely, though I wish you to give my devoted thanks to your cousin’s friend for driving from Kufa with the DVD.”
We spend the rest of that fine evening talking of Ulayya and of women in general. The TV flickers with the suspended moment of alien contact. The tape recorder in my lumpy breast pocket is heavy, feeling heavier because it is full. I waste time with Bashar, but the waste isn’t something unpleasant. Time slips easily past me here. I see myself changing, mellowing a little. It is as if the shell of me, the exterior, has begun to cool and harden. And perhaps that is why Layla bothers me so much. Each time she comes to my store, the cooling shell, the part of me that most easily molds itself to this town and this life and the possibility of marrying again, each time she comes, the shell feels more like a shell, the inside feels more like an emptiness, a shiftiness, a pool that churns and churns under the surface, though with less force each and every day. I worry that my soul will callus completely.
At the end of the night, when we are parting at his front gate, just after Bashar and I kiss each other’s cheeks, I think of Mahmoud, the guardian of the bridge. I should probably not be reminded of Mahmoud by this kiss, this formal and customary kiss between men, yet Bashar and I are the type of close friends for whom the kiss is a mark of deep endearment, kinship, almost, that is as binding as, and maybe more enduring than, any passionate love.
I should not think of Mahmoud, but I do. I think of him and I think of his night visitor, whom I suspect to be Bashar’s own employee.
“The boy in your café,” I say, “the one with the big white teeth and the slim face.”
“His name is Michele,” says Bashar.
The two of us hold each other by the shoulders, our faces near together. I can smell the sweetness of pear-flavored narjeela smoke on his breath.
“What do you think of homosexual relations?” I ask.
Immediately as I say the words I realize that they have come out wrong. Bashar drops his hands from my shoulders.
“No, no,” I say quickly. “You’ve got me wrong. Not me. I’m not interested in him! I’m a confirmed lover of women, my friend. Like I said, maybe this woman Ulayya. The thing is…I suspect the boy, your employee Michele. I think he visits the guard on the overpass in his tent at night.”
I’ve approached the subject wrong. Bashar’s eyebrows furrow into a frown. Perhaps he, too, feels the kiss we exchanged was oddly uncomfortable. Perhaps he feels even now the same emotion that made the image of Mahmoud and his night visitor come unbidden to my mind. And perhaps Bashar feels embarrassed about his feeling for me. Whatever it is, he is suddenly cold, formal.
“I don’t think about private relationships between men,” he says after a moment of hesitation. “I’m sure it happens. But…”
“Never mind,” I say. “Never mind. Just a random thought; forget about it, please. Forget about it.”
Bashar slaps my shoulder with his hand, trying to be jovial, but he doesn’t embrace me again before we part. He promises to disregard my remarks. The gate of his outer courtyard, open behind him, creaks as a gust of wind swirls. He shuts it, looking at me through the iron scrollwork, an effective divider.
“Allah’s blessing for your walk home,” he says.
“And upon your family as well,” I say.
It is close to midnight when I leave him. The gusty wind blows from the west, having shifted during the time I spent watching the alien movie. It is a dry wind, the simoom, scorched by its passage over the wastes of Saudi Arabia, a wind bearing aloft thickening clouds of dust and sand. I put my face to the sleeve of my dishdasha to keep the particles from entering my lungs, but I force myself to look upward at the sky, where the stars are smudged by thickening dust so that only the brightest few remain. I know in my heart and in my bones that a storm will blow.
* * *
I wrote to Nadia as I promised.
In the beginning I wrote to her. But my letters stopped after only the first few months of my time on the front lines. I couldn’t convey what I had seen and smelled and heard. How could I have done justice to the sight of one of our many machine-gun battlements firing into the pacing bodies of massed Iranian martyrs, firing until no more bullets remained, then waiting until the hordes overwhelmed and ripped apart the men behind the silenced weapon? How could I have told Nadia what odor burned flesh emitted, burned hair, the sweet harsh wafts of poisonous chemicals pooled in low places, like bomb craters, all over the battlefield? How could I have adequately described the sound of a man’s scream or a man’s prayer in the strangled moment when he realizes he must die?
When the letters seemed hollow and false and when, at the same time, the words wouldn’t come to me—then I stopped writing.
Nadia’s father and my father hadn’t prevented me from being drafted. But they ensured my service would be as a medic, rather than as an infantryman or a tanker, the more dangerous jobs. The work suited me. Every man I treated was another kitten, another chance to show Yasin that he hadn’t really defeated me.
I won an award, a decoration. I don’t really know why, for everywhere on the battlefield men undertook heroic or foolhardy deeds and most of the time these deeds were impossible to distinguish one from the other, impossible to assign value to, impossible to quantify as worthy of notice. At the time, the award felt misplaced. I recounted a hundred events I had witnessed that far surpassed my action in terms of daring, in terms of impact, in terms of compassion.
When my father heard of the award he quickly sent me the following telegram:
You’ve served well enough and long enough. I’ve used the most recent example of your valor to persuade certain people to send
you for further medical training. You will be recalled to Baghdad.
I did not argue as I had once before argued, when I had imagined myself among the conquerors of Tehran.
The summons came.
I went home.
10
Wednesday
NOTHING MOVES IN SAFWAN today. I stay in my house. Where the wind finds chinks in the construction, around the bases of the doors and windows, the ventilation, I place wads of paper towel or rags. These turn tawny brown as fine particles of dust clog their fibers. It is as if each towel ages before my eyes, withering and yellowing. Better to stop the dust there, at the chinks and creases, than to let it into the house. Or better to stop at least some of the dust before it enters. Plenty more finds its way. The air is thick and stale. My teeth feel dry and they grind whenever I close my mouth, a film of fine grit coating them.
The bypass for the American convoys, so close to my house, remains quiet all day. Allah’s storm stops them. I picture convoys in their staging areas, so much material destined to move north now backlogged in dust-choked parking lots, so many semis to return south and refill. How vast is the might of America, this far from its own sovereign soil, to bring the power of one thousand semis a day north and south, south and north, day in and day out, except for a day such as this, when the force of nature, Allah willing, halts them in the dusts.
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 7