One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

by Buchholz, Benjamin

  We run toward Michele.

  28

  Wednesday, Acid

  ABD AL-RAHIM DOESN’T TAKE his gun out, but I notice that he touches it twice as he pushes ahead of me through the unmoving crowd in the street. When we reach Michele no one from among the mass of people surrounding him has begun doing anything useful. Some of them scream, though their screams are drowned in a scream more intense than anything they could produce themselves. Some of them stare with mouths agape. Most of them simply turn their faces away. One of them falls to his knees and vomits. Yet no one approaches Michele. An empty space, three meters wide, rings the boy.

  I see in the open center of the circle Michele’s tray of food spilled on the ground. I see shreds of his clothes with vapor rising from them, wafts of curling and hissing smoke, sweetly scented, burningly sweet. I see the boy himself, somehow still upright on one knee. The ground is blackened with moisture around him, maybe his blood, though a stomach-churning steam rises from the damp ground just as it does from his body and from his clothes. He is turned three-quarters away from me so that I see his back, his shirtless back, with a few scraps of white dishdasha still clinging to the seared red flesh. He clutches his face with his hands. He scratches his face with clawing fingers. He screams and then, suddenly, his screaming stops. A gurgling, pitched almost as high as his scream, emanates from his face, from his throat, muted in a waterfall of blood. Through it all he remains half-standing, half-kneeling, miraculously though foolishly upright.

  I rip off my dishdasha and spread it over my arms. I push into the center of the ring of useless observers, panicked observers, and even before I throw my dishdasha over Michele’s body, even before I push him to the ground, protecting myself with the cloth, I begin giving directions to the people around me.

  “You there, water! Buckets of water. Get me water and ice if you can. The boy with the wheelbarrow full of ice should be near.”

  “You there, get bags of concrete from the market. Wael’s shop is not too far from here. The powder will ease the burning.”

  “You, clean rags. Take off your dishdashas, all of you. I need them. Tear them into strips. Clean rags to bandage him.”

  Yet nobody moves. Nobody. They are as silent and as actionless as I was in the moments I watched Abd al-Rahim rape Nadia.

  I spread the weight of my body on Michele’s jerking and cramping body, pinning his arms to his sides in order to prevent him from doing additional damage to his face, flattening him to expand his chest and to increase the air capacity of his lungs, rolling him to brush away any residues of acid not yet absorbed into his clothes or his body. That is the sweet smell, the hot, burning, sweet smell: acid.

  The boy still breathes. Most of the skin has been eaten from his face. What the acid hasn’t destroyed his fingers have decimated. His eyes and mouth are burned away, gaping holes. The flesh and muscle of his right cheek, up to the suborbital ridge, are absent. Slick sinew and the bones of his teeth and jaw protrude. The tissue in the back of his throat, a mass of red, swells and congeals, emitting thick bubbles of blood and gore that drool through the split cheek with each exhalation. I realize I will have to perform a makeshift tracheotomy before he drowns in his own fluids.

  “Abd al-Rahim,” I yell. “Get me a pipe. A plastic pipe.”

  I get no response from Abd al-Rahim. I yell for him again. I continue yelling for him.

  I yell, “Abd al-Rahim!”

  “Abd al-Rahim!” I say. “Where are you?”

  But he does not respond. I pump at Michele’s chest. I put my fingers in Michele’s mouth to try to clear the blockage from his throat. The swollen tissue collapses, swallows my hand, engulfs it. Nothing solid remains for me to clear from the path of his breath. I put my mouth to the place where Michele’s mouth had been. I try to breathe for him but I cannot form a seal on his skinless, slippery face. The acid, now diluted in spit and blood and phlegm, still has power enough to burn my lips. I feel the chafed surfaces of them, dry and burning. I push my breath into the cavity where Michele’s mouth had been, but the breath will not penetrate. His mouth fills, blood gushes from it, but none of my precious oxygen enters his lungs.

  When at last I stand to look for Abd al-Rahim, Michele has stopped breathing. He is dead. I am surrounded by staring, useless townsfolk.

  “Where is Abd al-Rahim?” I ask the people.

  I speak quietly but my voice sounds loud now that the worst of the chaos is finished. No one answers me. The street has grown suddenly silent.

  I am about to condemn Abd al-Rahim in my mind. He has fled twice while I have been in danger, in need of his help, his protection. I tell myself that Abd al-Rahim is truly no servant of mine. He is only Seyyed Abdullah’s spy. I am about to condemn Abd al-Rahim in my mind, about to tell myself it will be his death or mine next time we meet. I am about to condemn him when he returns, running, huffing, with a twelve-foot section of plastic tubing—totally useless for a tracheotomy—in his hands. He waves it about as though it were the trunk of an elephant.

  “He’s dead already,” I say, again sounding loud, too loud, as though my voice explodes inside my head. “Probably better that way, dead. It would have been no life after this, no life worth living.”

  At last one of the townsfolk speaks, saying: “They said anyone who tried to help would suffer.”

  “Who?” I ask. “Who?”

  The villager doesn’t reply. No one replies. They look at one another and gradually they depart, drift away, sneak away, ashamed. I do not rage against them. They are not guilty of anything. They are cautious. They are smart. They have survived a hundred thousand harshnesses in this land of Cain and Abel.

  Abd al-Rahim and I lift Michele’s body and carry him to the overpass, to Mahmoud’s tent. I don’t know what else to do with the body. I can’t leave Michele in the street, where no one will dispose of him until the dogs and the crows have begun their work. I think of bringing him to Bashar’s café, which in hindsight probably would have been a smarter thing to do. I decide that Bashar is responsible, indirectly, for having alerted Hussein. But if that is the case then I am responsible, too, maybe more responsible than anyone. It was my suspicion. I told Bashar what I suspected of the relationship between Michele and Mahmoud. Maybe he told Hussein. Michele’s death is on my head, despite my effort to save him.

  By the time we put Michele on Mahmoud’s fragile cot, the residue of acid dripping from him has burned into the sleeves of my undershirt. Abd al-Rahim’s white dishdasha is red and brown at its cuffs. Blood runs from my nose, singed from the vapors. Blood runs from my lips, blistered by the acid that remained on Michele’s face when I tried to resuscitate him. I haven’t been able to wipe my own blood clean while carrying the boy, so Mahmoud wipes it for me. Then he tries to wipe the blood from Abd al-Rahim, but Abd al-Rahim backs away.

  After a moment Abd al-Rahim apologizes to Mahmoud. He says he is sorry for having backed away. He says he is sorry for Mahmoud’s loss. The words are heartfelt yet Mahmoud doesn’t hear Abd al-Rahim at all.

  Mahmoud tries to light a cigarette, tries to take a cigarette from the pack in the front pocket of his police uniform. His hands shake too badly to open the pack. I help him. I take the cigarette out. Abd al-Rahim strikes a match and holds the flame to the cigarette’s unfiltered end. I put the cigarette between Mahmoud’s lips. He puffs at it and then shuts his eyes.

  When we leave, Mahmoud still wipes at Michele’s body, repetitively, meditatively. He rocks slowly from side to side as he wipes and wipes again at the blood, as if cleanliness might mean life. I try to explain what happened, Abd al-Rahim tries to explain, but Mahmoud raises his hand. He prefers silence. He knows what happened. He cries a little, but quietly. I take Mahmoud’s Kalashnikov with me when I leave the tent, though only to prevent the boy from doing himself harm.

  29

  Wednesday, After Michele Dies

  “I WILL NOT SLEEP tonight,” I tell Abd al-Rahim as we pass my shuttered shop.

&n
bsp; “Likely the same for me,” he says.

  “Before this horror occurred it was the wrong night,” I say, “the wrong night to practice our bombing. It was a day of relaxation. A day of nothingness.”

  “Not so much now,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “Now I will not sleep and the day has changed for me. It is now a day for action.”

  Together we open the side door of the shop. I undo the lock and then Abd al-Rahim holds the door wide.

  I crouch, using Mahmoud’s Kalashnikov for support. I take the jack-in-the-box from beneath the counter, where I stowed it when Abd al-Rahim brought it as his peace offering. Peace has now been made. An image of Abd al-Rahim flashes in front of my eyes, ridiculous, with the too-long, too-wide length of drainpipe held over Michele’s lifeless body. I think about how I had almost resolved, in that moment, to confront him. The scene is macabre. I might scream, rage, or cry over the futility of it. Instead, I laugh.

  “What?” he asks.

  “You aren’t very mechanically inclined.”

  He realizes that I laugh at him. He stiffens a little, straightens his back. The lights on the highway overpass, which work only intermittently, flash alive, bathing the interior of my shack with a slice of sulfurous, orange illumination. I place Mahmoud’s Kalashnikov flat on the ground under the counter and watch Abd al-Rahim’s shadow as it plays over the surface of the rifle, losing its stiffness and curling forward. He might be drawing his pistol, ready to shoot me should Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah have ordered it. But the gentle quavering of his shadow tells me he either cries or laughs with me. I turn to face him and I see it is true. He has both his hands on his belly and he is shaking with a wheezing, almost sobbing sort of laugh.

  It’s good, our laughter, our shared laughter: a natural release after such tensions and horrors pass, though we keep it soft in order to avoid disturbing Mahmoud’s vigil on the bridge.

  “You brought a rake to sweep sand away from the shack,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says between chortles. His laugh is higher-pitched than mine, feminine.

  “You brought a hammer to screw together the shutter.”

  “Yeah,” he says again, wincing.

  I keep up the commentary, or else the laughs will relapse, fade, turn into real crying. We can distract ourselves or we can give in to the horror and the shame of the nearness, the inevitability of death.

  “You brought a twelve-foot section of drainpipe for a tracheotomy.”

  “That’s really morbid,” he says, laughing and groaning amid the laughter as every sense of propriety in him fights against the idea that he might find himself laughing over such a situation.

  “Ya Allah,” I say.

  I slap him on the side of his thigh. I grab the hem of his dishdasha and use it to pull myself up from my kneeling position. And while I do that, bumbling with my hands aflutter amid his robes, I lift his pistol from his belt, pull it free, and spin it in my grip so that I hold it by its barrel and offer the hilt of it back to him when I stand.

  Abd al-Rahim is no amateur. He realizes what I have done.

  “Don’t screw with me,” I say. “Bringing a hammer to fix a shutter is one thing. But you’re no idiot with a weapon. Don’t pretend to be absent next time I need you. If you must be gone for a while to report something to Seyyed Abdullah, just tell me. I’ll be more than happy to let you go.”

  I return Abd al-Rahim’s gun. Then, without saying anything else, I place the jack-in-the-box into a paper bag, shut the door of the shop, lock it, and walk ahead to a spot under the highway overpass. Abd al-Rahim still laughs. He’s not angry or sulky at the fact that I was able to steal the weapon.

  “That was good,” he says. “Real good.”

  From under the bridge we hear Mahmoud talking to the dead body of his friend Michele. We can’t hear his words clearly, just the sound of his voice, the soothing sound, as though he is comforting Michele. After a short while Abd al-Rahim and I hitch a ride in the back of an open pickup truck heading north from our market to the town of Az Zubayr, some twenty kilometers distant. With the wind from the moving vehicle whipping around us, we are alone.

  “Why did you do it?” he asks, shouting over the wind.

  “Do what?”

  “Try to save him, the boy.”

  “I’m a doctor. That’s what we do.”

  “My uncle didn’t tell me that. He said you were a scientist, an engineer or something. He said you know how to make bombs.”

  “I do.”

  “That’s not normal for a doctor.”

  “I was in Saddam’s army.”

  “As a maker of bombs?”

  “No, as a medic, before I went to university. It is not so much different, sewing up bodies, wiring up bombs.”

  After a moment, Abd al-Rahim says, “What do you think he’ll do with the body?”

  “That’s trivial,” I say. “More important to wonder what he’ll do with himself…”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “You took his gun.”

  “Just until he cools off.”

  “Will he want revenge?”

  “That’s the way here. Clan on clan. Feud on feud.”

  “No,” says Abd al-Rahim. “I mean personal revenge. Will he try to go after Hussein?”

  “If so, he won’t succeed.”

  Abd al-Rahim looks out over the dusty farms, each with a single glowing overhead light, a courtyard fenced with woven reeds, a mud-brick building or two, maybe a tractor or a plow or a rusty implement of some sort mingled with the hulks of cars and trucks left to sit in the dust. He looks up at the sky, scans it from horizon to horizon, a warm darkness through which, only a few miles from the glow of Safwan’s lights and from the haze of the oil fields, star upon star bursts forth, a frost of stars, a bath of stars.

  “My uncle wants to clean Hezbollah out of town.”

  “I know,” I say. “But the Americans are the answer to that, not Mahmoud.”

  For a moment this reply of mine seems serious because it follows the track of Abd al-Rahim’s thoughts and because my voice utters the words in the same serious star-searching tone of conspiracy Abd al-Rahim had assumed. But then both of us, at the same time, look at each other. We must see the same thing in our minds: Mahmoud with his old Kalashnikov and his too-big police pants assaulting Hezbollah’s local headquarters in their two-story barbed-wire-​fortified building downtown. The image is evil. It is vile. But, Allah save me, it is funny. We burst into laughter anew and we barely have regained control of ourselves when our pickup truck drops us at our destination, an interchange several miles north of Safwan.

  30

  Wednesday, a Bomb Explodes

  ABD AL-RAHIM AND I plant the jack-in-the-box in the middle of the road, where no convoy can possibly avoid it. I unwind the mechanism. As the spring-loaded door opens and the head rises, one of the arms jams. I am forced to pry it loose. The fabric of the sleeve tears. The arm pops free from the body of the jack. I try to refit the arm to the jack but I can’t fasten it, not without suitable tools, not without suitable time. I shrug and put the detached arm into the breast pocket of my dishdasha.

  We retreat to a mound of rubble on the edge of a quarry about one hundred meters from the road. Behind us, the abyss of the open mine provides an escape route should the Americans pursue. No Humvee can traverse the narrow goat paths down the inner wall of a quarry. Nor will the Americans have time to dismount and chase us on foot before we disappear into shadows. We wait for the approach of a convoy, the lights of which will be visible, strung out for miles like a necklace in the northern desert.

  “My turn now,” I say. “Why do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Fight.”

  “I am but your apprentice,” he says, rather facetiously.

  He laughs again. We’ve established our true relationship, more like equals than like master and apprentice, despite our ages, despite our nominal daytime roles.

  “A man your age,�
� I say, “perhaps he goes looking for war just as a hobby. Perhaps he wants glory. Perhaps he wants to do something interesting.”

  “None of these things,” he says, and I can hear in the tone of his voice that he does want to talk.

  “Of course not,” I say. “It is never that, never such a thing. Boys might pretend to fight, might dream of it, but none of them goes so long, goes through as much training as you have undergone, without having a reason, a good reason.”

  “It’s not the Americans,” he says.

  “Yet here we are preparing ourselves to kill them.”

  “My uncle says they will just be collateral damage. He says you are doing something more important than killing a few Americans.”

  “Maybe more important. Maybe not,” I say. “Certainly an older and more respected reason for war than blind jihad.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says. “What’s older? What’s more respected?”

  “Family,” I say.

  But Abd al-Rahim only looks at me with a blank expression, his face pale and flat in the darkness. I don’t know that I can explain it to him any better, not until I know the reasons that commit him to fighting, the reasons he risks his life.

  “Family?” I ask, saying the word again but with different inflection so that it points toward a different meaning. “Is it also family that makes you fight? Did Saddam kill your family?”

  “No,” he says. “We fled to Ahvaz during the war, across from Basra on the Iranian side. They live there still—my mother, father, brothers, sisters, all of them. Even some cousins.”

  “Then what?”

  “There was a boy in my hometown in Iran, Abadan,” he says. “That was where we lived before we moved farther north to Ahvaz. The boy was a few years older than me, a blind boy. As a child, I would sit and listen to him sing outside the mosque. Most days a crowd gathered around him because of the purity of his voice, the sweet way that the Holy Suras lifted from his tongue. Other children would play ball in the square or run wild in the streets, but often I would sit and listen, adults around me on all sides, just talking quietly and listening to the boy.”