One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

by Buchholz, Benjamin

  Inside my house I keep the lighting low, just one or two bulbs burning in case the sky darkens completely. Everything takes on a color similar to bruised flesh: cinder-block walls, most of which I have not painted; the kitchen, with its unfinished floor tiles heaped like counted coins among bags of powdered grout; the refrigerator, which is empty and unplugged. Perhaps most disturbing, the only item lending a true splash of color to my house is a small child’s toy, an old-fashioned crank-operated jack-in-the-box that came with me from Baghdad. Its home is now one of the bare shelves in my kitchen. The jack-in-the-box is sprung. Its face leans and leers at me across the intervening space between my kitchen and the place where I sit at a small table in my big, empty dining room. When the wind of the storm blows hard, the house itself, though made mostly of concrete, shakes. Then the head of the jack-in-the-box bobs on its spring.

  The house is barely habitable, but it is all I need right now. Just a few rooms and the promise they offer of being, someday, complete. Bashar tells me I should hire a crew to finish the house more quickly, but I am happy enough with the slow progress I make in the evenings. What else do I have to distract me? What else should I do today but slowly and meditatively place tiles in simple crosshatch patterns on the kitchen floor? What else except string wires to bedrooms, install plumbing in the bathroom, in the hope, Allah willing, that electricity will one day soon be made available for more than a few hours each day; in the hope, Allah willing, that the water tower in the town square, burst open by a helicopter rocket at the beginning of this latest war, will once again be whole and provide enough pressure for water to reach my toilet and my bath? I will have crown moldings to set off the joinery between the ceilings and the walls. I will paint the rooms by hand with bright and lively colors, blues and reds and golds. I will have wallpaper, pillows, dark satin-finished wood trim and a library, Allah willing, a library. I will, one day, cover the bare cinder block and the bare floors. I will make these things according to the speed and the skill of my own hands.

  But the house will be as empty as was my father’s big old house if it is only me, only my voice and my thoughts and my work and my play to fill the rooms. Because of this, I am in no hurry to rush the gilding, to superficially alter a thing that must retain its essence of emptiness until the time comes for it to be empty no longer.

  Because everything is written, happens as it will, according to the unknowable plans of Allah, and because I am in no rush—after I fill, with my rags and towels, all the spaces where the wind and sand and dust penetrate, and after taking the little tape recorder from my pocket—I begin to drink. I am in no hurry. I drink: whiskey from a bottle that came to me in a sheath of sawdust hidden beneath one of my shipments of mobile phones from Kuwait. When I finish that bottle, a bottle I had sipped slowly for the last few days, I open another and I drink most of it. I drink without the benefit of a cup. I do not own a cup. The glass lip of the bottle is cool when it presses against my lips. I listen to the wind outside, shivering in tune with the bass note the gusts strike against my hollow-drum house. I look at the tape recorder where it sits, noiselessly, on the table in front of me. I drink. Then I walk through each room: bedroom, bedroom, bedroom, empty bedroom, balcony swept with sand, piling with sand, a balcony that overlooks the town but is not used by anyone for the act of overlooking. I walk down the stairs again, into the hall, front room, sitting room, empty sitting room, half-tiled kitchen, washroom, courtyard, diwaniya. A big house. A shell house.

  I lie on my bed, a mattress only, no bed frame, just a mattress placed haphazardly, diagonal on the bare living-room floor. I have been watching the market for the right bed frame. Oak or mahogany. Beech or maple. Carved but not with figures of men, no blasphemy in my house. I’d like ivy, a European dream, rivulets of ivy and acorns and cascading leaves in lustrous oak or mahogany. Mahogany or oak. Or teak. Well-oiled. Old. Old like me. But just the right age for a widow like Ulayya, who has retained her womanly figure. I picture the frame of the bed encompassing the bare mattress on which I now lie. In the air above me I outline the frame of the bed with my hands, a big four-poster. I hold the tape recorder, which has come with me from room to room, and as I outline the shape of the imaginary bedposts in the air, the tape recorder waves, swishes, cuts through the greenish gloom. Its weight makes my hand feel heavy. I let it rest, setting it down on my belly.

  I think of Mahmoud and Michele. I try to picture them together, perhaps sharing the cot in Mahmoud’s tent. Perhaps they kiss, Mahmoud’s beard coming close to, then touching Michele’s hairless face. I shake my head, shiver, forcing the image away. I grope for something else to think of. My brother, my brother, Yasin, appears in my mind, his dark but depthless gaze staring at me and through me and beyond me like the gemmed eyes of a funerary god. I shake my head again, more vigorously. He disappears, but in his place I am surrounded by the faces of the American soldiers, the Davids, the Patricks, the Winstons. They clamber on my shadowed ceiling like cherubs in a baroque fantasy. They parade before me, each with sunglasses, Kevlar helmet, clean white teeth. They point fingers at me. They mouth words of accusation, each of them with a belly split open, flaccid drooping intestines like living coils of rope gathered and bunched in bloody, mucus-covered hands.

  I feel for them. I feel bad for them. I try to apologize to them. I try to apologize in advance. “It’s not you,” I whisper toward the impersonal and undecorated ceiling of my room. “You’re just in the way. You and your good intentions. You and your noble ideas of justice.”

  I pull these phantom soldiers down from the rafters of the room, one at a time, and I make motions in the air with my hands, needle and thread, scissors and clamps, sewing them, making them whole, doing what I can to fix them. Poor little kittens, lifeless things.

  When at last I sleep, I do not dream. But I wake with the recollection of things that were like dreams, nearer to me, more precise yet elusive, too, as if I have read the labels of manufacture on gifts I have purchased, like jack-in-the-boxes, or new little red dresses, or windup toy soldiers, remote-control boats, robots. As if I have read the labels on the gifts but cannot account for the make or the model of the things I have purchased. I wake full of little useless details, the times when convoys roll over the bridge from north to south, south to north; the times Mahmoud the lover comes and goes, sleeps and wakes, takes tea, checks on my shop; the times when British and American patrols enter Safwan, regular as clockwork, for meetings with the Safwan police, with the Safwan town council. I am full of details but completely empty of association between each detail, a string of savant facts flowing from the mouth of a man who can no longer speak the names of the things he has seen.

  At last, having slept most of a day, having roamed in and out of dreams, and having eaten nothing, for I have nothing in my house to eat, I get restless. Fully awake, I realize the daylight that remains has perceptibly brightened, the storm has nearly blown itself out. So I dress myself in a clean white dishdasha, my best, find a cloth to hold over my face so that I do not inhale a devastating amount of dust, and go to the house of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah, where I know I will be welcome to a plate of food, a fresh drink, and some news of the world.

  * * *

  Forty-two men and eight women received scholarships from Saddam’s government in 1984 to attend medical programs in the United States or Europe. My father, with Abdel Khaleq’s assistance, reserved one of these scholarships for me.

  All fifty award winners appeared together for a photograph session and a press briefing. I had my picture taken with Saddam Hussein. He put his arm around my shoulders for a moment. Then all the scholarship winners boarded a flight from Baghdad headed to Zurich, each of us taking connecting flights to the countries where we had been assigned to study.

  “Where are you assigned?” asked the man in the seat next to me as our plane taxied onto the Baghdad tarmac.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere not in Iraq.”

  “Alhumdu l-Allah!” said my n
eighbor, a fine-boned man about my age dressed in penny loafers and a soft woolen sport coat. A wire-thin mustache decorated his upper lip. His eyes were a lively light brown, his fingers slim, his disposition cloyingly cheerful. He held his hand out to me in the Western style, offering it to me to shake.

  “My name’s Bashar Dulaimi,” he said. “My father’s the minister of—”

  “I know,” I said, cutting him off rather abruptly. “I was in his army.”

  “The army? You?” he asked, seeming puzzled.

  He pulled his unshaken hand away from me as if I might contain traces of poison gas. Then he looked at me slowly, carefully—my good shoes, my well-tailored suit coat. He breathed in the lavender scent that still clung to me from Fatima’s freshly pressed towels and sheets. These things didn’t add up in his mind to the idea of a soldier. He looked at my face and saw, set deeply in it, eyes that still retained a vacancy despite the pampering and luxury I enjoyed since my return from the war.

  He must have seen this because he coughed a little and then said: “Didn’t your father buy you an exemption?”

  A stupid question, a self-evident answer. I didn’t bother to reply.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, turning away to look out the little fogged window of the airplane. “I’m sorry but I just said good-bye to my fiancée, and I’ve never flown before. I’m not feeling quite well.”

  He shrugged and left me alone, but only for a little while.

  When the wheels of the plane lifted off the ground, he turned to me again and said, “Was she pretty?”

  “Who?”

  “Your fiancée.”

  “Very.”

  “You don’t speak much.”

  “Don’t have much to say.”

  At this he wrinkled his nose and closed his eyes tightly so that crow’s-feet appeared around their edges. He tugged at one corner of his mustache.

  “It’s going to be a long flight,” he said. “A long couple years, actually. Let me start over with this conversation. I know where you’re going. We’re going to the same place, you and me: Chicago. Northwestern University. I had my father specifically request that I be allowed to sit on the plane next to whomever shared—”

  “If you mention your father one more time during this flight I will specifically request a new school,” I said.

  “Okay, then,” he said huffily.

  He raised his hand. When the stewardess came down the aisle to check on him, he slipped her a hundred-dinar note and got himself moved to a new seat closer to the front of the plane.

  I put the armrest between our seats into its upright position and curled my legs beneath me, happy to have both spaces to myself.

  11

  Wednesday Evening

  SEYYED ABDULLAH’S HOUSE IS not far from my own. It looks toward the border of Kuwait, toward the American military crossing point on the border, just as my house does. Yet his house is on the far side of the military road, in the older, original part of the town, and it is surrounded by the winding type of alleyway and the mud-brick sort of hovels that make old movies about Baghdad or Damascus or Cairo picturesque. His house, like mine, is also a two-story affair. But that is where the similarity ends. Whereas mine is empty as a tomb, his is as peopled as a bazaar. Whereas mine is bare—bare rooms, bare ground, bare walls—his is clothed with the trappings of a well-established man. Whereas mine is without family, his teems with family. He has taken a third wife recently and he dotes upon her, making it generally known in town that the pick of new jewelry smuggled from Kuwait should be hers; likewise the pick of perfumes and of flowers harvested by children from the banks of the Shatt al-Arab canal near Umm Qasr. His children from his first two marriages play underfoot. They stream from the gutters and over the railings of balconies that look inward on his bowered courtyard. They are like living rain or handfuls of sand tumbling along a dune face. Most pointedly, whereas my house lacks visitors, his visitors queue outside his diwaniya even on, or especially on, a shut-in stormy evening such as this.

  I hold back the image of my brother from the forefront of my mind as Seyyed Abdullah approaches to greet me. The resemblance between them is close, uncanny: tall, dark, smilingly feral. I almost pull back from Safwan’s sheikh when he puts his hands on my shoulders, as we exchange our greeting kisses.

  “I am sorry to have kept you so long,” he tells me as he leads me inside his diwaniya, takes me from the group of anxious supplicants as though he is the embodiment of a saving angel. The others, those not fortunate enough to merit his personal greeting, these others huddle under the half-shelter of the courtyard, rags to their mouths to keep the last wisps of the gritty sandstorm from their lungs.

  “I am sorry to have kept you so long,” he says again, “but I have so much business, so many people to see.”

  “You must not apologize to a simple mobile-phone salesman,” I say.

  He laughs at this, a good-natured laugh. Despite his position of authority in town, despite his autocracy, Seyyed Abdullah is a good-natured man. In fact, his humor and disposition support his authority rather than detract from it. He is the type of man who makes the best of companions and the worst of enemies. I feel the humor radiating from him. It contradicts the resemblance to my brother that clings to him in my mind. No man fears to come to Seyyed Abdullah with problems. His effectiveness as a mediator is both academic—he knows the law and the traditions and the histories that exist between the families and tribes of his town—and personal: he pronounces judgment and reward with candor, goodwill, and very little in the way of personal pride, though he is proud and wealthy and educated.

  As we enter his diwaniya through a massive set of green-painted double doors, we must indeed appear to those within the room to be brothers, our features so similar, our arms linked together. As my eyes adjust to the light of the room, I see on the couches lining the walls several other men, most of them in dishdashas, different from Seyyed Abdullah’s neat, dark, silken suit and coat. The men smoke from two big narjeelas that dominate the middle of the room, braided glittering rubber pipes extending from the central hookahs like tentacles. The men talk among themselves. They are relaxed and friendly, though they all look at their sheikh when he enters.

  “Come, come,” Seyyed Abdullah says.

  “Really,” I say, “no special favors. Nothing.”

  “As you wish,” he says. “You know everyone here?”

  I nod in affirmation, although in truth I do not know one of the men, a fat policeman who does not wear his uniform shirt but betrays his occupation by his shined black shoes and his flat blue polyester pleated pants, the cuffs of which show under his dishdasha. Seyyed Abdullah notices my glance at this man and he shrugs, as if to tell me not to worry. I exchange some mild pleasantries with the seated men. The nearest of them rises to his feet, intent on shaking my hand. I motion to him that it is not necessary for him to stand, but I take his hand anyway. We embrace, and he sits, and I sit next to him.

  “Will you take food?” the man asks me.

  “No,” I say, though I am almost painfully hungry after the day of unexpected fasting.

  “Smoke?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Are you sure you will not take food with us?” Seyyed Abdullah says, still hovering over me until he is certain of my comfort and my reception. “We have platters and platters coming, albeit slowly. It will be a fine evening.”

  As if this were his cue, a young man steps into the diwaniya with a tray. I want to eat very much, having eaten nothing all day, but to seem too eager would be poor manners. The food is only partly the reason I visit, should be none of the reason at all if I were visiting purely for the sake of business and not because the sandstorm had caught me without food in my house. I shake my head no at this second offer of food, but I do not shake it very emphatically. Seyyed Abdullah waves the boy with the tray into the room and the boy sets the food in front of me. The man with whom I sit selects a sticky sugared date and then settles back o
nto the couch. He arranges his dishdasha over his knees, plucking at it, and listens as Seyyed Abdullah and I talk. I notice that the serving boy wears a pistol on the belt of his blue jeans. He thinks the blousing of his T-shirt hides the weapon but its hilt shows plainly, a hard angular outline of gunmetal under cloth. Seyyed Abdullah notices me looking at the outline of the gun.

  “These are difficult times,” he says. “One in my position cannot be too careful.”

  “The Wild West,” I say. I think of Jed Clampett and black gold. I think of Mahmoud, the sleeping guardian of the overpass. “Do you know the boy who guards the overpass?”

  “Small in size, although maybe twenty years of age?” asks Seyyed Abdullah. “From the family of al-Jorani? His uncle on his mother’s side owns a farm north toward Az Zubayr.”

  “Yes,” I say. “He has been given no bullets from the police. How is he to guard the overpass without bullets?”

  True, I have bought him a package of ammunition, but I’d rather fix the problem, have the police themselves provide the bullets.

  “Must a guard be seen to be a guard?” says the man sitting beside me.

  Seyyed Abdullah turns away, rather too quickly, as the man beside me says this. I understand the idea of invisible guards, the true way to have something stay guarded. What worries me is the very visible presence of this guard and the possible reasons why he is not better supplied. It is not just a matter of a lack of money for bullets. I want to ask why they bother posting a guard on the bridge at all, if there are truly invisible guards for the market and for the overpass. But I know the Americans like to see guards. Are these town leaders embarrassed to have given the Americans such a simple thing, embarrassed to let the Americans feel like they are protected? And if a guard like Mahmoud is to be seen and to be uniformed, why not equip him with bullets anyway? Might he mistakenly interfere with the real guards or with the business, legal or otherwise, these town leaders undertake in the markets and on the highways? Have they purposefully selected Mahmoud for this job, knowing he will conduct his duties in a slipshod and inattentive fashion? I ask none of these questions. Instead, I take a small sesame-crusted pastry from the tray and lean back on the couch. I feel like I have embarked on business too quickly by asking about Mahmoud’s situation. I tell myself to enjoy the food, to enjoy a smoke with the men, to enjoy the evening. The time for questions will come. Or it won’t come. Either way, as Allah wills.