One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

by Buchholz, Benjamin

  “We need your signatures for the adoption.”

  “What’s this ‘jack’ of which you have spoken? Is it a code word?”

  “It will be a few weeks, a few weeks for the paperwork to clear after you sign. Then she can come home with me when I am done with my duties here in Iraq.”

  Be glad for her. Be glad.

  A convoy draws near the western bypass, slows as it begins its turn off the highway and onto the smaller road that leads to the Kuwaiti border. Instinctively, we all turn our heads to watch it. The noise of it is distant but penetrating. When it has passed I take the papers from the counter in front of me, fold them, and put them in the inside pocket of my ghalabia.

  “I will think about it,” I say to the interpreter in Arabic—the low Arabic of the market, the low Arabic of the southern marshes. “You will have an answer from me in a few days’ time.”

  * * *

  I first saw Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah at one of the many interminable meetings at the headquarters of the American forces in the Baghdad Green Zone. Bashar was not there. So it must have occurred after he and his family fled, though I’m not quite sure.

  “And now Dr. ash-Shumari will brief you on the status of the health-care system,” said the American officer in charge of that particular briefing.

  Around the horseshoe-shaped table in the bare-walled conference room sat various military personnel as well as members of the elected governing councils from some of the regions of Iraq, cliques of men, each faction with a seat at the table.

  “At last we have ironed out a system to ensure the flow of medicine to northern hospitals,” I said, starting my briefing. “The supplies will, at least temporarily, come through with American military transports from Kuwait. This is the only way to ensure that critical items reach their destinations.”

  I noticed one of the well-dressed, fine-suited men in the room lean forward from his place along the side wall of the room. He whispered in the ear of the deputy governor for Basra Province. The deputy governor then raised his hand.

  “Yes?” I asked. “What may my honored colleague be pleased to know?”

  “Will the Americans still pay customs at the border crossing in Safwan?”

  “If they come across on the American convoys, through the American military’s own crossing point, customs won’t be necessary,” said one of the American officers at the table. “It would be like paying the government to pay itself.”

  As the officer said this I watched the man by the wall. His face was impassive. But the face of the deputy governor for Basra flushed red.

  “This will decrease Basra’s revenues,” the man said.

  “It will make medicines cheaper and more available throughout Iraq,” said the officer.

  I was glad not to have to argue the point. I knew what was happening. It wasn’t Basra’s revenues that would suffer. It was baksheesh charged by officials at the civilian border crossing that would decline.

  I noted, again, the passivity of the well-dressed man. He was really the man in charge of the Basra faction. It was his revenues the new plan endangered. Yet he seemed content to let the Basra deputy conduct the futile argument with the American officer.

  I thought to myself that if Bashar were here, he would know this man’s name.

  I filed the incident away in my mind for future reference, labeling the well-dressed man as the true power holder on the Kuwaiti border. The Americans would be wise to make a friend of him.

  26

  Tuesday Evening

  ABD AL-RAHIM DOES NOT come to dine with me at Bashar’s café this evening, as I instructed him to do. I eat alone as usual. In fact, I am even more alone than usual. Bashar does not visit my table. I am unsure of his whereabouts until one of his employees tells me he has gone to Basra to make arrangements for an engagement feast he plans to cater. Of course it is my engagement feast, but the employee does not know this. I wave the man away from me. I eat my falafel slowly, dipping little bits of it in hummus with my fingers.

  I spread the lieutenant’s adoption papers in front of me and stare at them. I read all the fine print. I look thoughtfully at the several places where my signature is required: adoption, naturalization, a waiver of any legal rights I might have with regard to Layla’s future, a waiver of my visitation rights so that no problem arises, no future requests for seeing her that might facilitate my emigration from Iraq. I am not part of the deal, beyond the necessary permissions. I wonder what name I will use when I sign each block. Bashar al-Mulawwah. What a dumb-sounding name!

  The cord that connects me to Layla will be cut.

  I try to guess whether Layla knows anything of this matter. I wonder if the American lieutenant has asked her if she wishes such a thing. I do not doubt what her opinion will be, what her decision must be. I hear her voice in my mind ringing with enthusiasms, speculations, newly birthed associations. She will live next to Sharon Stone. She will ride in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s motorcade. She will throw a shoe at George Bush. Surely the lieutenant has come under her spell in the same way that I have. And his solution is better than any I have pondered. It will be no easy thing for him to navigate the extradition and adoption laws, but still better than any future Iraq could possibly offer Layla, unless I were to adopt her myself, unless I were to leave this place with her and return to America or establish a new life somewhere else, France or Australia, Sweden or Fiji.

  As Bashar and I sat together one previous night, he brought up another idea, an easier idea, an idea that was like an elephant in the room, too big and too obvious for either of us to ignore.

  “Of course, you could simply marry her, if you’re so concerned about this market girl,” he said.

  I shivered a little, inwardly, but didn’t say anything in response.

  “It’s the traditional way to resolve such a situation,” he said. “We’re in the countryside now. Things are different here. No one will find fault with you for marrying a girl her age. It is what Muhammad himself, Peace Be Upon Him, advocated for the widowed wives and daughters of those men who fought in the great opening of the world at the beginning of Islam. It is one of the reasons he permitted a man to marry more than one woman, so that they might have shelter and protection.”

  “I’m too American now to consider such a thing,” I answered.

  This put an end to the conversation. It put an end to Bashar’s suggestion. But as I walk across town to my house, I think about it. It’s not just the concept of marrying someone so young that bothers me. It’s Layla herself. I think of her too much as a daughter to truly contemplate the idea of marriage. She might think about marriage, but I do not. Bashar might think about marriage, but I will not.

  I stop walking before I reach the military road, a few hundred feet from the house, and watch from the shifting shadows of an alleyway as a convoy passes northward in the night. Truck after truck, diesel fumes and dust cut by swaths of jouncing headlights, some sulfur yellow, some halogen bright. The drivers in them are fresh, wide-eyed, heading north into the war zone from the safety of their homes and workplaces in Kuwait. How many similar trips have they made? How many rolls of the dice have they taken on these dangerous roads? So far they’ve won each roll. They live to drive northward. Each trip, they have escaped—narrowly or maybe even blindly, blithely—a fate following them closely. But for how long will their luck hold?

  These truck drivers are not Americans. They are contracted Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Laotians. They speak a thousand languages and are herded north, north, north, always north, by Humvees nipping at their heels. Those Humvees are the only place where actual Americans work on convoy duty: the Winstons, the Davids, the Patricks. The American soldiers don’t expose themselves in the thin-skinned semis. They are cocooned beneath layers of Humvee steel.

  The rumble of this convoy’s passage lasts five minutes, ten minutes. I don’t time it exactly. I just stand and watch. When they are gone and when the dust has settled, I cross the r
oad and disappear from the floodlit area of the American occupation into the shadows that surround the cluster of newer homes where my own house is located.

  I enter my front gate. To my surprise, the light in my kitchen glows. I see it from the gate and it makes me pause, makes me stop in my barren courtyard to consider. I try to remember if I left it lit when I went to the shop this morning. I have no clear recollection of turning it on or of turning it off, yet I never by habit leave it on. Each day I check off my morning list of chores and habits as regularly as I check off my list of daily observances at work. It is a more mundane checklist by far, but regular: lift head from table; wave once or twice to ward away the spirits and smokes of the dream from the space above and behind my head; listen for the ticking of the clock, the crowing of roosters; listen for the rumble of convoys, that ever-present background noise without which I would feel hollow; wash face, hands, neck, arms; unroll prayer rug and perform the morning salaam; prepare coffee, just one cup, an American thing, coffee in the morning, and then a flatbread, jam; robe myself; clean my teeth; stare at the organized chaos on my kitchen table, how it grows, changes, modifies itself each night as my hands wander over it. Then I leave for the shop, turning off the lights, shutting the blinds, locking the doors. That is the routine, sometimes varied in time, waking before morning light, waking at first appearance of the light, waking somewhat after the sun has risen, but always those same steps.

  No, I didn’t fail to turn off the lights this morning. I followed every step. I remember them all now, clearly, all the steps, even to the point of feeling again in the first fingertip of my right hand the smooth cold nub of the light switch as I backed out the front door and flicked it down to darken the room.

  The glow from the window spills flat and orange on the ground to one side of my courtyard, a pool of lit dust. Rather than enter through my front door, I first step around the bright patch, sneak toward the window, use my arms to pull myself to the height of the iron-barred pane of glass. I look inside. To my relief, I see only Abd al-Rahim there. He has a screwdriver in one hand, a roll of duct tape at the ready on the table in front of him. His back is bent over the table, over my jack-in-the-box. He is working, a study of concentration, and though he squarely faces the window, he does not shift his focus from the work, does not notice me spying on him. The door between the kitchen and the main entryway, the hallway, remains open behind him, as if he entered in haste and did not care to hide his presence. He is at work on the project I assigned him, and I get the feeling he works so as to appease me, an unspoken apology for fleeing from the Americans this morning. My heart warms for him, doing this little thing for me. I imagine that he will apologize in words, grand, eloquent, rhetorical words, when I enter. I will pretend to scold him, but in truth I will be drawing him nearer to me. I will reject the improvements he has made to the jack-in-the-box. I will reprimand him. But I can’t truly fault him for his excess of caution in the moment when the Americans approached us.

  The muscles of my forearms begin burning from the effort of supporting myself a foot or two above the ground. I release both hands and let myself fall. The short drop produces a muffled thud, just enough to draw Abd al-Rahim’s attention. I hear him put down the jack-in-the-box and the screwdriver.

  “Who’s there?” he says.

  I am about to reply when I hear another voice, a woman’s voice, from inside my house.

  “Just me,” the voice says. “Your dear old friend.”

  Quickly I lift myself to the window again, grabbing the same iron bars. I look inside. Abd al-Rahim has spun to face the door on the opposite side of the room. He holds a gun low at his waist, a sleek black pistol pointed in the direction of the female intruder, but hidden from her, too, hidden behind a fold of his draping dishdasha. I can see it plainly from the window because he does not attempt to hide it from behind, a direction from which he expects no interference.

  I see no woman. I look from corner to corner of the room. I see no woman, but neither does Abd al-Rahim. He says, “Show yourself.”

  I am surprised, but only momentarily, to hear how well he imitates my voice. “Show yourself,” he renders in a tone twenty years older than his own, a deeper, gruffer, more firmly controlled voice. He is clever enough to hide himself as long as he can, even while the voice of this woman, the voice he and I have heard, seems more seductive than threatening. He is cautious. Abd al-Rahim is far more cautious than I would have thought.

  “To one like me who has visited America and who has partaken in its culture of decadence, the words show yourself could have many meanings,” the female voice, still hidden, says in heavy tones.

  I recognize the voice now: Nadia.

  Abd al-Rahim lowers his pistol. He secretly lifts the fabric at the back of his dishdasha and slides the barrel of the weapon into the waistband of his pants. He looks down, straightens the folds of the overgarment to make it look normal. He does a better job hiding the weapon than Seyyed Abdullah’s bodyguard does. He has been trained, and the inadvertent display of this training gives me a moment’s pause: the rhetoric in front of the mosque, the training. Who sent him here to Safwan? Is he an agent of Iran? I know Seyyed Abdullah has connections that point toward Iran, as do most successful Shia. For example, it is known that Seyyed Abdullah studied at Qom for a period. He is a man of the book, a minor religious figure. It would be natural to accept one of Iran’s undercover Revolutionary Guard into this town, his town. Such a simple thing, hiding a weapon. But to do it well requires training, and Abd al-Rahim has done it with deftness, speed, and fluency while keeping his eyes focused in front of him where he expects Nadia soon to reveal herself.

  The soft sound his hands make passing over and arranging the fabric of his dishdasha is matched, echoed, by a slightly more voluminous but similarly soothing whoosh of cloth from Nadia’s direction. Abd al-Rahim stands straight and puts his hands in front of him, forcibly relaxed.

  The next moment, Nadia steps into the doorway opposite the place where I watch. I can see her over Abd al-Rahim’s shoulder. She has unclothed herself and she stands naked and unashamed in the place where the light of my kitchen first touches the dark safety of my hallway. A shadow snakes over her sensuous middle and divides her body, one half lit, one half hidden.

  “God bless America,” Abd al-Rahim says in his own, higher-pitched voice as he advances toward Nadia like a man walking in his sleep.

  He no longer pretends to be me. His body eclipses Nadia, passing directly in front of me, between the spot where I watch and the place where she has undressed. He continues walking. Her face and her nakedness emerge from behind the blockage of his body, bit by bit, as he proceeds.

  I have never seen her completely unclothed. She is lovely, a full woman, no girl. Her hands are on her hips, swelling hips that have been changed by childbirth, made fuller and glassier, rounded and whitened from lack of daylight, marked by their forbiddenness and made more alluring because of the shocking difference between that which had been secret and that which is made suddenly and wholly bare. Above her hips, her belly slims like a tapering candle but neither so suddenly nor so deeply as to show at its top the outline of her ribs. There is a layer of smoothness, fat and fullness and cushion, even before the swell of her breast shadows her lovely waist.

  I am guilty, my gaze lingers too long. I notice too late that Nadia does not concentrate on the figure of Abd al-Rahim gliding toward her. She stares past him. She looks at the window from which I watch her. Slowly her openness and her unabashedness dissolve. One of her hands covers the black center of her pubis, while the other whips across her breasts to push them tight against her. White flesh bulges on either side of her pressing arm. Her eyes widen. They flicker away from me, glancing at Abd al-Rahim to confirm that he is indeed not the man she had expected to find in my kitchen. She looks at him and fear touches her face, a black shadow that leaves the counterfeit blackness of the kohl around her eyes looking false and frivolous. She does not recognize Ab
d al-Rahim at all.

  Abd al-Rahim does not notice her fear. He is focused now. He is unthinking. He is animal. He sees her before him, but his preoccupation with her physical self obscures from him her fright, her withdrawal, all symptoms deeper than the skin. Or maybe the fright and withdrawal themselves are alluring to him. When he reaches her, he pulls her to him and forces her arms and hands from sheltering her shame. She resists, but only slightly, squirming and striking him softly on the chest and on the shoulders in ways that only serve to increase his desire.

  All throughout this Nadia looks at me until finally, when Abd al-Rahim pauses to remove his clothes, she mouths the single word help in the direction of the window from which I watch.

  I drop to the ground just as I hear the heavy thud of Abd al-Rahim’s pistol hitting my kitchen floor amid the general discard of his clothes. He has forgotten it, forgotten the place where he stowed it before Nadia showed herself to him. I crouch for a second beneath the window and listen. Abd al-Rahim groans as he falls upon her, but she remains deerlike, noiseless. I can’t determine, by listening, whether they grope on the floor together or whether they remain standing. It does not matter. He will take her. He controls her already. She does not resist, does not scream. She does not give away the fact that she might have a rescuer near at hand. She will submit, and he will enjoy her submission.

  I enter the front door of my house. I move stealthily. In the darkness I see again Nadia’s naked form replayed in my mind, the silhouette of it, the curving hourglass. I feel myself stir, not only from pure and painful animal longing, the likes of which Abd al-Rahim now feels, but also from a sharper and deeper place. I ignored her in America. I ignored her, as best I could, in Baghdad. I ignored her when I felt her watching me from the bowered windows of Bashar’s new Safwan home. But I don’t ignore her now. I can’t ignore her now. She is standing on tiptoe in my memory, waiting for me to kiss her in the garage of my father’s mansion. We are children again in my mind, with all the sweetness and promise of life stretching before us.