I do not recognize her at first.
What I see, coming toward me through the ramshackle market, is a tall thin woman in a black abaya who appears to be drunk. She wobbles from side to side. She spins around in a circle, nearly falling. Then she rights herself, wobbles on, crashes into a garbage can, frantically reaches out with a hand that seems too short for her body, catches hold of one of the supporting poles of Jaber’s kebab stand, disturbs the carcasses of the hanging chickens so that the flies that have landed on the chickens rise up in a cloud, buzz around her, and settle again on the swaying, slapping, hanging chunks of featherless yellow meat.
This drunken woman arrives at my shop, leans against the windowsill of my storefront, looks at me, makes eye contact with me through the slit of her burqa. I am bewildered. I do not yet comprehend that this woman is Layla. The height, the wobbliness, they do not connect in my mind with the girl who channels angelic alien voices. Nor does the abaya, the black covering robe, connect with my idea of a dirty market rat. What I see of her eyes, from a distance, shaded as they are, shows me only a heavy application of kohl, artificially dark lashes in the shadow of the burqa. Beneath the lashes I cannot see the blue of Layla’s eyes.
Thinking the woman is drunk, I close the tin shutter of the shop window in her face.
“Business is done today,” I say.
She grabs hold of the corner of the shack, peering through the open doorway, and says, with an artificially deep, gruff voice: “You do not recognize me?”
Despite all this camouflage, the sound of her voice, still girlish as she tries to mock Ulayya, betrays her. I do not jump at the recognition. I laugh a little, covering my laughter with a fake cough, then return my voice to the same gruff tones, playing along with her charade. “No, madam. But if you would like to buy a mobile phone, perhaps it would be best for you to return tomorrow, when you are more stable.”
“I am not in need of a mobile phone,” Layla says. “I have a big empty house and a big empty heart and a big empty purse and I need more than anything in the world to buy a husband today.”
She bats her eyelashes at me and continues with her imitation of Ulayya: “Unfortunately, my father, who is able to smuggle everything else into this country, everything from Rolex watches to Mercedes cars, cannot get me the sort of satellite dish I need, not one with diamonds encrusting it, or with pearl hearts forming its center. Do you know anyone who sells satellite dishes so perfectly ornamented?”
“Indeed I do,” I say.
“It’s me,” Layla says at last, lifting the veil of her hijab a little so that I can see her face. “It is me, your friend Layla. Do you like my disguise?”
“Very much,” I say. “Are you pretending to be Britney Spears?”
“No, silly,” she says. “I’m your sweetheart.”
The words hit too close to home. A cloud forms in front of my eyes.
“It was my fault,” I say. “My decision.”
“What?” Layla asks.
She sways to the side and dismounts from a unicycle hidden under the too-large abaya she wears. The black fabric drapes over the ground. She lets the unicycle fall. I should be amazed. I should wonder to myself where a market rat purchases, let alone learns to ride, such a thing. But I merely stare at it, dumb and deaf, my mind drifting away, away.
“Sweetheart,” I say.
I see snow, a shroud of snow descending around me, which the Sears Tower pierces like the black spire of an evil mosque rising up and up and up into the Chicago skies. I see drifts of snow, like dunes of sand but lighter and brighter and cold. Upon them I see the pink snowsuit of a little girl. I see her tumbling and laughing and running toward me. These wafting, disconnected memories feel like dreams, are dreams, actually, removed from my current time and place and context. I feel, as they swirl in me, like I am floating, being buoyed and floated by them, weightless. In my mind, my dream, my memory, I grasp for the girl in the pink snowsuit but my arms miss her. I run after her. My hand takes hold of her hand for a short moment. I tug, and the pink mitten she wears comes free from her hand. It falls onto the snow at my feet.
Layla snaps her fingers in my face.
“Yoo-hoo,” she says. “Mobile-phone man. Tune in.”
I look at Layla again. From up close, the thick lines of kohl around her eyes seem grotesque on her young face.
“I love you,” she says, trying to mock Ulayya’s voice again, trying to cheer me up.
Her words seem far away: she loves…
She loves me.
I realize I should say something back to her. I should say, “I love you, too.” I should say, “I love you right up to the moon and back,” just as Nutbrown Hare says to her little bunny. I should tell Layla that no father has ever loved his child to the depths and to the heights and to the distances that I love her. I should say something. I should say, “I love you,” but the closest I come to those words is to repeat myself, to say again, “We never should have returned. It was my decision. My decision. It’s horror. Horror. I picked your arm from the rubble.”
Layla’s face contorts. Her brow furrows. She has had enough. This is too crazy even for a girl whose universe includes robots and unicycles and Arnold Schwarzenegger. She veils herself again. She mounts her unicycle. She begins, stiff-backed, to pedal backward away from me. Her abaya swells out in front of her as though it is blown on the wind. She rotates on the axis of the single wheel so that I see her back. Then she wobbles away, through the market, her nose up. A few meters down the road she turns her head, thrusting her arms out to her sides for balance. She looks like a giant bird fighting to control the lift of its leathery wings, to balance updrafts of air. Then she drops her flapping arms, leans forward, and—like a ghost hovering over the pitted market street—cycles away, under the bridge, toward the place where her family must maintain its desert tomato farm.
As she passes under the bridge, I see the American convoy from Baghdad to Camp Bucca approach in the northern distance—four buses surrounded by three heavily armed Humvees. I make a notch on the doorpost of my shack: the seventh notch. Two days late due to the sandstorm. I wonder whether they’ve packed the buses fuller to compensate for lost time. Shutting down Abu Ghraib and moving all the prisoners south takes effort, takes planning, but the Americans, Allah bless them, thrive on effort and planning.
Later that night I see Layla again, between the time I dine with Ali ash-Shareefi and when I go to speak with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah about the new speech maker, the new jihadist, who has arrived in Safwan. I see her as she entertains the soldiers of one of the American patrols who sometimes lounge on the overpass bridge. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t look for me. She is oblivious to my presence, as I am usually oblivious to her presence in the brief moments before I notice her at my store. She couldn’t have known I was watching for her, that I went looking for her. She couldn’t have known that I needed to see her.
The unicycle had lodged in my mind that evening. It was absurd, a child in Safwan riding such a thing. The more I thought about it the more unreal it seemed, up to the point where I even doubted the authenticity of everything I had seen, everything I had felt. Why had none of the other merchants or townsfolk paid any attention to such a strange sight—Layla on a unicycle, wearing the hijab, wobbling, seemingly drunk?
I had to reassure myself. I had to look at Layla again. I had to see that she is real and not some figment of my imagination, some clinging projection that had come to haunt me. I needed to see her on her own, independent of me, her fire, her liveliness, her spark still lit when not immediately before me. And I did see her. I saw her spinning in a circle with her finger on her nose and her face to the night sky so that the soldiers on that bridge laughed as she ran, crazy-legged, from one side of the overpass to the other. Closing my eyes, I could almost see the tracery of her footsteps burned into the back of my eyelids, like the negative image of fireworks, pion and muon trails, and protons bursting. The capture of her, however fleeting, pr
oved to me at that moment that the girl was created in the world, inhabited the world, worked her strange magic in the world.
I walked away, back to my house, convinced more than ever that Layla was real.
* * *
I visited Annie every day in that jail while she waited for her trial. Every day I visited her and every day the sergeant told me she refused, once again, to see me.
I didn’t tell Bashar.
“When do you two leave for Venezuela?” Bashar asked me.
“I think we’ve decided on Ireland,” I said.
“Aren’t you worried that the Irish will arrest her? I think Venezuela will be safer.”
“We’re going to change our names.”
“And say that you’ve got a really deep Irish suntan?”
I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll go to Iraq.”
“It will be unsafe for Sunnis. The Americans will topple Saddam after they’re done bombing him,” Bashar said. We had been watching the buildup of Allied forces in Saudi Arabia, listening to fruitless UN negotiations over Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. We’d been listening to war analysts speculating on options ranging from diplomatic coercion to the use of nuclear weapons.
“Baghdad might not even exist when the Americans are done,” Bashar added.
“Maybe we’ll go to Canada,” I said.
I didn’t care about the war. I didn’t care about anything other than Annie Dillon.
“Nadia arrives when?” Bashar asked.
“Today, maybe tomorrow. She called from London this morning. Her plane probably is in the air right now,” I said. “You’ll tell her I’m gone?”
“It would be better if you were, actually, gone,” Bashar said. “You should make it quick.”
“They’ll set bail for Annie soon,” I said.
Not wanting to dwell on it too long, the subject of bail, the subject of my plans with Annie after I bought her freedom from jail, I added, “Nadia won’t miss me at all.”
18
Saturday Night, Visiting the Homes of Ali ash-Shareefi and Seyyed Abdullah
I VISIT ALI ASH-SHAREEFI first, not owing to any sense of propriety or any shadowy, foreboding intuition, but mostly due to mere convenience. His house, his new house on the outskirts of the town, the opposite side of town from the American road, is situated farther from my final destination, my own house, than is Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s residence. It is a fortunate decision to see Ali al-Hajj first because, after my conversation with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah, I am sure I would have been in no mood to discuss the arrangement of an engagement feast and a marriage.
The way to ash-Shareefi’s home leads me, as does my walk to Bashar’s café, through the blue-tiled arch with the poster and the mosaic of al-Sadr. But, at the first intersection, where the headquarters of Hezbollah and, behind it, a children’s elementary school are prominent landmarks, and from where the main section of the downtown—the city hall, the police station, the fire station, the civilian border-crossing compound—can all be seen, from there I turn left, away from my own home, away from my dinner and tea at Bashar’s café, away from Seyyed Abdullah’s house. My stomach is not happy about the change in my schedule, nor is my mind, which continually drifts toward conversations I might instead have been having with Bashar, with Layla, with Layla’s father, should I ever be so fortunate as to meet him, drifting toward the remembered taste of falafel, toward the enclosing comfort of the sounds of the market that blanket all such difficult, troubling thoughts in a muffled haze of numb communion.
The road around the outskirts of Safwan passes a makeshift football field, just an open lot with some white-painted cans to mark the goalposts. The boys playing this afternoon are oblivious to my presence. They concentrate on their feet, on the movements of the other players toward the goal, the press of their bodies toward a common objective. After I spend a few long moments contemplating them, and as the sun sets over the desert behind them, they at last notice me. They stop, all of them, spontaneously. One of them picks up the ball, an old thing, worn bare in places and neither perfectly black nor white but a constant dusty brownish gray. They do not wave at me. They do not salute me. They do not smile. They watch me as I walk away, and it isn’t until I come to the gate of Ali ash-Shareefi’s house, where the road circling the outskirts of the town bends toward the south, that I hear the game resume. What has scared them about me? I have seen men die, men who know they are walking toward their deaths. Men of that sort are not objects of terror but objects of adoration. A kind of calm, a kind of holiness clings to them, wreaths them. Why do these boys turn to look at me in silence when I am about to meet with a man and start my life anew through his graces? To marry and start life anew: this isn’t dying, though it is trading one skin for another. The process is holy, but not as holy as dying. It isn’t martyrdom. But perhaps the lesser holiness retains some of the same awe as that of a man with death on his head.
When I arrive at Ali’s house, I see that he has a man on guard at his gate, not a strange thing for a rich merchant in a town such as this. The guard leans on the hood of a black Mercedes parked in the exterior courtyard. A bank of prismatic new windows looks down from the house’s second story over the courtyard and the Mercedes, over the street, back into the heart of the town, like a blind man who turns his face when he feels sun warming his skin.
I tell the guard I am to visit Ali. He doesn’t say anything. He just nods to show me he hears me and understands me, the classic tough-guy silence. He goes into the house and a moment later ash-Shareefi returns, with the guard behind him, and unlocks the gate for me himself.
“Come in, my son, come in,” he says. “We have been expecting you.”
“Thank you,” I say. “I shall not stay long.”
But I leave after nightfall, having eaten dinner, having smoked the narjeela with al-Hajj, having committed to a firm date in one week’s time to hold a feast for my engagement to Ali al-Hajj’s daughter, Ulayya. His family, his clan, will set up tents in the streets. They will close off several blocks of the city in order to hold a general celebration. They will bring musicians and dancers and foods from Basra, Baghdad, Kuwait City. Of course, his daughter must have a dress. And as to the matter of the dowry, he understands my position, the fact that my business is a new business without an accumulation of capital, without a basis for credit. He tells me he is sure I will thrive in the near future. He is sure of it. And I am more sure of it, too, leaving him at last in the darkness of his courtyard when we part. I am so sure that my business and my life will thrive that I almost forget to visit Seyyed Abdullah on my way home. I almost forget Seyyed Abdullah until I pass the green single spire of the downtown mosque and see the upturned crates where the jihadist had spoken that morning to the villagers.
It is thus, at a late hour and without proper invitation or warning, that I visit Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah to ask him if he knows of a new man in town who has taken to talking publicly of jihad. This question catches my benefactor in a very different frame of mind from our previous meetings, perhaps because my visit comes at a time when he is not expecting to receive me or to face my questions. Or perhaps he feels a little guilty and assumes the rougher attitude as a mask.
“Indeed,” he says. “I am the one who invited this boy to Safwan.”
“You’ve done what?”
“Calm yourself, my brother,” the sheikh replies. Involuntarily, I shiver as he calls me brother—for I see Yasin superimposed on the split and exploded bodies of U.S. soldiers, like so many kittens. I hope that Seyyed Abdullah does not notice my lapse of attention, my shiver, my loss of concentration.
“The boy is my new wife’s nephew,” he says, stroking his chin with the fingers of his right hand. “I now consider him part of my family. He is harmless. He will soon be under control.”
“Talking like that, gathering a crowd, he isn’t harmless at all. He could be a big problem for us. Do you want to rally more people toward Hezbollah?”
“Maybe thing
s with Hezbollah need to be brought to a head.”
“With your wife’s young nephew as the instigator?”
“You’re doing nothing to instigate, as was our agreement.”
“I’m getting to it. Give me time.”
Seyyed Abdullah stops stroking his chin. He rubs his hands together and passes a flattened palm over his eyes. When he looks at me again, he speaks very plainly, which is a frightening thing.
“These are exactly the reasons why I have invited the boy to Safwan. First: you’re taking him on as your protégé. It is time for you to expand your shop. You need an assistant. Mobile phones are getting more popular every day, and I hear that you now sell satellite dishes as well. You will teach him the business and, in addition to the business, I hope you will teach him some restraint.”
I am exasperated. That boy as my assistant?
“What will I do with him?” I ask. “Is he tied to Hezbollah, to Hussein, to some other militia? Where did he learn all this speaking and speech making and rhetoric? And, never, never, did I ever agree to take on an assistant.”
Seyyed Abdullah raises his voice at me for the first time in our acquaintance. He says: “You need an assistant, I’m certain of it. You are moving too slowly. And my wife’s nephew needs a master. Better that master be you than someone else.”
“I need no help. And I’m in no frame of mind to mentor the troubled youth of the world,” I say, trying to sound as bitter as I can. “And what about Hezbollah? Are they the ones you worry about?”
“I don’t worry at all,” Seyyed Abdullah says, in such a tone, so icy, that I know even if he does worry it is a worry grounded in patience and preparation. “I want Hussein to seem more closely tied to your activities. If my firebrand nephew leaks our plan to Hezbollah, all the better. We will direct the fury of the Americans toward Hussein and I will have one less problem in town after the Americans deal with him.”
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 13