After a long moment I say: “Ulayya does not remind me of her. She doesn’t remind me of her. Not at all.”
Quickly Bashar becomes conciliatory, quiet. “I know, it must hurt,” he says.
“Every day,” I say. “I was swept up by the moment and by the hope of the times we lived in. It was a bad decision to come back. I wish I could return to Chicago.”
“It wouldn’t be the same,” Bashar says.
“No,” I say. “No, of course not.”
I am crying and I don’t even realize it until the tears hit the waxed paper that protects the tin plate on which my shawarma had been served. My tears make a crinkling noise as they hit the paper. I pull off the baseball cap and use it to shield my face.
After a moment, as if certifying the idea that I am indeed going insane, I put the baseball cap on my head again and say, “I told her about it.”
“Who? What?” he says.
“The engagement,” I say.
He waits.
“Who?” he says. “Who did you tell?”
“The girl,” I say. “That girl who has been visiting me in the market, Layla. I told her that Ulayya and I are engaged. I don’t know why I told her, but I did.”
Bashar stands, pushes himself away from the table. He eyes me suspiciously again. “You are indeed going insane. I think this marriage will be good for you, my friend. Maybe the only thing that can help you.”
He steps away, turns his back to me as if he is going to leave me. But then he turns around and faces me again.
“I warn you, my friend,” he says. “These are difficult times. Hezbollah will crack down on you for something like this. Inappropriate relationships are very much frowned upon these days.”
“What do you mean by that?” I say.
The muscles at the sides of his mouth clench. He doesn’t intend to say anything more, but neither does he turn from me to flee into his café.
“What do you mean?” I say again, angrily, though I control my voice. “Do you imply that I take advantage of this girl?”
I stand. Bashar and I face each other, almost chest to chest. The hard, partially molded brim of my baseball cap touches his forehead. Sweat from his brow clings to the cloth lip of the cap, a fat quivering droplet suspended just at the place where the focus of my vision blurs.
I am about to say something else. I am about to, maybe, say something I might regret, something to prod Bashar still further in his accusation, something to bring the matter fully into the open. But, at that very moment, the busboy Michele moves toward my table to sweep away my dishes. He must think I have finished eating. He must think Bashar and I have stood because we are done with our conversation. He must think that the table is ready to be cleared. When he approaches and realizes that Bashar and I confront each other in anger, he backs quickly, quickly away from us, off into the shadows of the bowered door. He says nothing. But Bashar darts a guilty glance at him. The words of Bashar’s last statement flit through my mind—“inappropriate relationships are very much frowned upon.”
I fix my gaze more firmly on my friend and I say to him, very quietly, “You told Hussein.”
Bashar does not deny it.
“You told him,” I say. “You told him what I thought about the bridge guard.”
“He’s lazy and incompetent,” Bashar says at last. “You said so yourself. And it is good, important for me and for my business. Important for me and for my family to keep on Hussein’s good side.”
* * *
Bashar and I sat together for coffee in the hospital cafeteria before the start of our shift the next evening.
“You’re glowing! You look like a new man!” he said.
“Thank you! I had no idea—”
“You’d never, you know, with Nadia?”
“I told you, she’s always been like a sister to me.”
“And this murderess, this—”
“Her name is Annie.”
“—this Annie. I guess you felt no similar inhibition?”
“Ya Allah,” I said, rubbing my eyes with exaggeration to show Bashar I hadn’t slept at all.
“She’ll go to trial. She’ll be in prison,” he said.
“I’ll pay her bail.”
“That’ll only delay it. Then what?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a strange night, a strange day. I’ve got to think.”
“Don’t do anything too crazy,” he warned me. “You’re a good doctor and you’ll do good things in your life. But once you get an idea in your head—”
“You know, it was my father who called, all the way from Iraq. It was him on the phone when I had to step out of the room.”
“What did he say?”
“Good-bye,” I said. “He said, ‘Good-bye.’”
“That’s odd. Do you need to go home to him?”
“No. He said Abdel Khaleq is finally sending Nadia here to America.”
“It’ll be a pretty scene when you introduce Nadia to your pretty little murderess of an American mistress.”
“I know. I know. My father will disown me,” I said.
I stood from the cafeteria table, leaving my coffee and my half-eaten plate of dinner, peas and scalloped potatoes and questionably halal meat loaf. I paced. But only a little. Just two strides away from the table and one stride back toward it. Then I froze. My gaze fixed on Bashar. I grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him squarely in the eye.
“I owe you so much already from yesterday,” I said. “I hate to even think of asking another favor of you.”
“Anything,” he answered.
I told him my idea, an idea I thought he wouldn’t mind: that he would host Nadia—take care of her, show her the town, show her America—while Annie and I ran away.
Bashar agreed. He remembered that I had described Nadia as being pretty. And he knew her family, Abdel Khaleq. He agreed most eagerly and, without delay, we launched into detailed, mischievous planning. So intent were we on our scheme that we did not notice the television in the cafeteria as Brit Hume, the ABC reporter, announced the entrance of Iraq’s armies into Kuwait. Only later did we pay attention to Saddam’s invasion and the repercussions that would follow.
16
Friday
THIS DAY IS A FRIDAY.
I would omit it from my story, for nothing happens. The stores are closed. The market is closed. The houses are closed. The mosque, with its dusty spire, hums with life.
I would omit this day except to do so would be akin to omitting Allah. I spend the day in contemplation and surrender. I spend the day in my home, every moment in prayer, with my concentration distracted only by the sound of the highway to the north, the cars and trucks rolling along it, the American convoys with their fitful stops and starts, air brakes squealing, as they pass through Safwan.
Perhaps the sound of the highway lures me back to the market that afternoon. I decide there is no harm in stretching my legs. I go to a small hill between my house and the market, a place where I am at the same height as the overpass and can see across the roofs of the houses and the shops. I stand there as sunset casts warm colors across the land. I look for the American convoys. I look for Layla. I see Mahmoud’s replacement, the man from the police force who gives Mahmoud his weekly Friday respite. He is a fat man. He never stirs from Mahmoud’s little three-legged chair for the entire time that I observe him. When the boy from Bashar’s café, Michele, brings the evening plate of food, the fat man takes the plate and eats it all while Michele waits. Then the man calls the boy close to him, wipes his greasy fingers on the boy’s dishdasha, and waves him away. The police send only their best and brightest to guard my overpass.
I leave in disgust, thus ending the twelfth day since Layla’s visitations began, the thirtieth day I have owned my shop.
* * *
After my shift I rushed back to Annie Dillon’s house to tell her the solution Bashar and I had devised. Yet instead of finding her wrapped in the sheets of her bed where I had
left her, instead of finding her waiting for me, I returned to a locked front door, darkened windows, and a folded sheet of plain lined paper taped to one of the two hollow wooden columns that framed her little front porch.
The note wasn’t addressed to me by name but the content left no doubt. It said:
I’ve gone to the police to surrender myself. I think I went mad, out of my mind, those hours between killing my husband and loving you. It was a good sort of madness. I’m sane again now. Thank you for that.
—Annie
Like any lover, I read, reread, dwelled upon the words, the meanings, the hidden meanings. Though the message seemed a little off-kilter, a little too conditioned, a little too measured, still I extracted from it great pleasure, the words loving you and good sort of madness especially. They seemed to me to contain important promises for a future that I imagined we might spend together. The words did not, in all those many first readings, hint at good-bye.
I drove directly to the police office nearest to Annie’s house.
“Yeah, she’s here,” the booking officer told me. “She showed up this morning with a little suitcase of clothes and makeup. Just like a flight attendant. Funniest thing.”
I reached for my checkbook, spread it open on the counter between the policeman and me.
“I want to pay her bail.”
“It hasn’t been set. And anyway, she refuses.”
“What?”
“She refuses,” the sergeant said. “She told us specifically that she would not accept bail if anyone tried to post it.”
“What?”
The sergeant whirled his finger in the air next to his forehead and rolled his eyes: crazy. “She said she’s guilty and that she’s happy to serve her time.”
“Can I see her?” I asked.
“No,” he said, quite simply, and though I tried to argue, tried to convince him, tried—even—to pay him, bribe him, he could not be moved to change his mind.
I left the police station and, like any lover, I read and reread Annie Dillon’s letter. I dwelled on its meanings once again, and the meanings seemed to change, to morph in front of my eyes into ugly, bald dismissals. I could hardly believe it. It could not be. She could not know that I would try to free her, to run away with her, to throw away my life for her. It ruined the plan Bashar and I had developed—he and Nadia getting to know each other, alone in Chicago, while Annie and I went to Greece, Russia, Fiji, Kilimanjaro. Annie needed to play along. She had to come with me. It was impossible, given my feelings toward her, to consider that she would refuse me in such a blanket fashion. It must be wrong. I must have heard wrong. The police sergeant must have misunderstood. After such a night, after such wonders, how could coldness of this sort possibly exist in the world?
17
Saturday
LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING, like most evenings, this evening once again. But before I even open shop, before Layla arrives to stand where the sunset casts its light on her, before then, an important thing happens as I walk to my shop.
Most days I take a circuitous path around the outskirts of town, where the desert most closely approaches the city. I like the possibility of meeting wild things in the early morning, lizards basking on the freshly sun-warmed ground near their burrows, half-domesticated goats, stray dogs sleeping in old bomb craters and tank scrapes, and, if I am lucky, maybe even a falcon turning high in the oil-stained sky. I like to watch the lights in the houses turn off as the sky lightens. I like to hear the silence that descends when the farmers and homesteaders power down their generators one by one and the town gets quieter as a result, a stillness before the noises of the day. I like to watch people begin their routines, men waiting on the roadside for trucks to come and taxi them to their places of work, women softly singing, hidden behind the walls of houses as they hang clothes and knead dough and feed their chickens, children complaining as they get into starchy school uniforms and are fed, tidied up, prepared for the day. I can feel the town come alive around me as I watch it. It pleases me to see the world continue as it has always continued, unshakable despite the shaking and the changing and the pulsing and the tumult.
But today—the day marking the thirteenth day since Layla’s visitations began and also the thirty-first day of business for me since I moved to Safwan—today I walk through the middle of town instead of journeying around the desert edge. I come close to the green single spire of the minaret lofting above the empty, quiet market. I hear the tape-recorded muezzin call from the loudspeakers. Those who are outside kneel right where they stand in the street to pray in the direction indicated by the Qibla, to pray toward Mecca. I, too, pray, facing southwest, at an angle to the street. This is the time of the greatest quiet, all prayer, no business, very little background noise, just the voice of the muezzin crier. As the prayer finishes I stand and continue walking. And when I come into the shadow of the mosque itself, I see something that gives me a great deal of concern, something that I think about throughout the rest of the day before Layla arrives at her customary evening hour.
The something that worries me is a small gathering of men, no more than a dozen, standing around the entrance to the mosque. They do not face into the mosque, where one might expect them still to cling to the echoing words of our imam, Safwan’s imam. Neither do they face outward from the mosque, as if they were leaving their prayers behind to venture into the daily routines of work and worry and business. Instead they face to the side, where a young man stands on a pile of lettuce crates. I move into the midst of these men and listen, looking up at the youthful speaker as he continues his address to the gathered group.
“…not Baghdad, not Fallujah or Ramadi or Najaf or Mosul. Not even Basra. This town, this very town, is the place to strike. Why? Exactly because it is peaceful here. Exactly because life has returned to something near normal. This is jihad. It is sacrifice. We all must sacrifice so that we each may win a share of glory. Here, in the south, the Americans are weak. Their focus is not here. Their energy is not here. Their weapons are not here, not in the same overwhelming numbers as farther north. Here on your road, around that far side of town, on your road, your city’s own street, all the supplies travel north to feed the army that is occupying our lands. This road is the jugular of the beast in all its throbbing vulnerability. By shutting the road we will shut down the American war machine.”
The speaker is, as I said, a young man, maybe twenty years of age. He wears a clean white dishdasha, a black aqal. He has a very finely clipped mustache, no beard, not even the shadow of a beard. Rather than sandals, beneath his dishdasha the tips of polished, expensive shoes reveal themselves, oily black leather with a fine sheen of unavoidable dust on them, as though he has only just recently stepped out into the street. I hear the foreign accent in his voice as clearly as all the people must hear my own accent. He is, without a doubt, from somewhere other than here, most likely not even Iraqi. Is he Lebanese? Syrian? Is he Jaish al-Mahdi? Hezbollah? Is he allied to Hussein? If he is Shia from the northern militias, does he know for sure that the Shia clans here will embrace him? Who has sent him? Has he come from Iran? Was he trained there? He has a very carefully folded pair of sunglasses in the breast pocket of his dishdasha, new sunglasses, dark and shiny like the ones the American soldiers wear. I wonder where he got them.
I step back out of the crowd. The speaker’s gaze locks on me as he sees that he is losing me from his audience. Rallies of this sort have a critical mass. Speech makers and jihad-mongers know this. Those first dozen men, alone, are not enough, though they are a good start, certainly a better start than no listeners at all. Thirteen, me included, becomes something more like a crowd, each body lending legitimacy to the cause, excitement to the speech, a sense that the force and feeling are shared among all. What is more, if one man leaves such a rally others may follow him. I would rather see this boy preaching to dust. I would rather keep the town quiet. And I am sure Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah will feel the same. His goal is to consolidate po
wer, and the presence of a radical speech maker can do nothing but disturb his plans.
Having singled me out, the speaker asks me, “Are you a believer?”
“Of course,” I say.
I try not to speak too much. I do not want him to hear the foreignness of my own voice, the northern tones, for if he is indeed an Iraqi he will hear them, he will know he is not alone, not unique as a visitor here. If he is Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, maybe my Baghdad inflection won’t sound so wrong. But I keep my sentences short, just in case. I do not want to chance the matter.
“Will you join us?” he asks.
“Perhaps when your voice changes,” I say.
I hear the other men laugh and I finish turning away from the warmonger completely. I show him my back just as Bashar showed me his back last night. I think to myself that the boy doesn’t know what he asks. He knows nothing at all. It is as if he were fresh from the madrassa, given a first assignment somewhere harmless, trumpeting his own importance. Perhaps he should have spoken with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah before he came here to proselytize on behalf of jihad. Seyyed Abdullah is against war—not fundamentally, but only insofar as it hurts business and stability. Nothing good can come from a trumpeter, a braggart, a boy who needs jihad for his identity rather than for his God. Nothing good can come from this boy’s assignment to our town.
This is what I think about all day: the million bad things the speechmonger’s presence might lead to. The million bad things his presence will lead to. I tell myself, as I begin shutting my shop, that I must speak to Seyyed Abdullah tonight, immediately, maybe even before my dinner. I am sure Seyyed Abdullah will contrive to remove the boy from town, if he hasn’t already put things in motion to do so. Perhaps the police are raiding the mosque even now.
With my mind churning over these thoughts, focusing itself on this one thought—how to rid myself of the boy—I am startled (as always, it seems) when Layla arrives.
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 12