Abd al-Rahim pauses. He wets his lips with his tongue. Then he says, “They killed him.”
“So I guessed,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me. I saw many similar things.”
Yet Abd al-Rahim continues. “Saddam’s soldiers came into Abadan during the war. A great victory, they called it, retaking Al-Faw and some land from the Iranians. I tell you what I called it: slaughter. There were no Iranian troops in town. Just old men, just old women, just blind boys singing in front of the mosque.”
“There is no such thing as a great victory,” I say.
A convoy appears. It wends its way slowly toward us, heading south on the Baghdad road along a great sickle curve that shows each vehicle, each set of lights, spaced evenly, rolling smoothly, moving inexorably closer to our jack-in-the-box.
“We watch now,” I say. “Take notes in your mind. I think the things that the Humvees do in response to a bomb will be something new for you.”
“Yes,” he says.
The convoy comes nearer. For a moment it had been silent, just distant gliding lights. But soon we hear the rumble of engines and the hum of a turning multitude of tires.
“They killed him for sport,” Abd al-Rahim says when the convoy is only a kilometer or two away. He hisses the word sport from his mouth, loudly, with venom, as if the noise of the approaching convoy covers his emotion, makes his emotion somehow permissible. “They toyed with him. Tapped him on the shoulder so that he turned around. Tapped him again, so that he turned around once more. He knew they were there. He sensed the silence around him after the fleeing of his crowd. He kept singing until the silence came. He sang as Saddam’s tanks pulled into the square. He sang as they revved their engines, turned their turrets toward our mosque, our Shia mosque, and leveled it with a few well-aimed shots. He sang through the noise of the collapse and through the silence after it, when he could hear no more due to the ringing in his ears.”
The lead Humvee in the convoy sees the jack-in-the-box. It screeches to a halt, skidding sideways toward the jack, almost rolling over. Behind it the semis pile up, jackknifed and peeling away along the embankments. All of them stop as quickly as they can, great clouds of dust rising from beneath their wheels. The lead Humvee is only a few feet from the jack-in-the-box. The face of the jack stares into the headlights of the Humvee as if it were under interrogation. I start counting in my mind, slowly, one…two …three …
“They tapped on his shoulder, turned him around, turned him around again. And then one of the men seized the boy and cut his tongue from his mouth.”
A light from the lead Humvee shines into the desert. We duck behind our pile of rubble. Shadows jump and scatter as the light shifts from side to side, sweeping back and forth. I continue counting…ten …eleven …twelve …
“They won’t leave the road,” I say. “That is the first thing to know. You might think they will come out here. But they won’t leave the road.”
Abd al-Rahim whispers, “They cut his tongue. I remember one of them holding it in the air to the cheers of the others as the boy sank to the ground. I remember blood flowing from his mouth. It was like the boy in the market today.”
The light from the Humvee stops passing to and fro over us. It concentrates on an outcrop of stones and rock on the other side of the roadway. I look over the top of our protective mound.
“They have night vision,” I say. “They can see even when the spotlight is gone. So don’t show yourself. But watch. Watch just a little now.”
Abd al-Rahim rolls over, worms forward and up the rubble mound on his belly. My count continues, aloud but softly, under my breath: “…twenty-eight…twenty-nine…thirty…”
One of the American soldiers dismounts the lead Humvee. A second Humvee, the middle guardian of the convoy, rolls forward and stops next to him. I cease counting. Thirty-eight seconds. About what I had expected.
Voices from the two nearest Humvees carry clearly to the spot where we watch.
“If we continue whispering, they can’t hear us,” I say. “The noise of their engines is too close to them. But their voices cut through the noise to reach us, the deep growl underneath and the higher voices above. Can you hear them speaking?”
I turn toward Abd al-Rahim to see how he is doing. His hands are white, clenched tight. He nods to show me he understands.
“It’s just a joke,” one of the Americans says. “It’s a kid’s toy. A creepy joke.”
“Maybe a bomb?” says the other, more nervous about it. “Maybe a disguised bomb?”
“Too obvious,” says the first. “If they disguise the bombs they make them look like rocks or like garbage. And they don’t place them right here, in the middle of the highway. They put them on the sides of the road, under railings, against telephone poles. Someone wanted us to find it. I’m sure they’re watching.”
At this, the soldiers scan the debris heaps at the side of the road again. I motion to Abd al-Rahim and he follows me slowly, on hands and knees, staying in the shadow cast by the pile of rubble until we reach the edge of the quarry and lower ourselves down into the safety of the big pit’s impassable terrain. We walk slowly, then, slowly away from the highway toward a side road, where we plan to hitch a ride south.
Everything goes perfectly well. Our reconnaissance mission provides the information I need, confirming the convoy security element’s response time. Abd al-Rahim and I walk away from our mock bombing uninjured. We’ve established a little more trust in each other. Everything goes according to plan, at least until the soldiers demolish my jack-in-the-box with a burst from one of their machine guns.
I jump then, the noise. A shiver courses along all the bones of my body. I find myself standing over the shredded remains of a patient—car accident, coal-mine blast, a fall into a corn-harvesting combine’s grinding gears, something of that sort. Sanitary, glaring lights in a remembered American operating room blind me. I reach for a hand. I reach for a foot. I lay them on the table at the places where they should be reattached. I reach into the patient’s open chest cavity, bristling with clamps and tubes. I pull from the wet disordered organs a necklace of bird bones and dollhouse keys. It emerges slowly. I coax it out gently and steadily, like a segmented worm reluctant to leave the blood on which it has gorged.
“Thirty-eight seconds,” Abd al-Rahim says. “Is it enough for whatever you plan?”
I mean to tell him of the plan. I mean to confide in him. I know now that he can be trusted because he is fighting for something more meaningful than just himself.
But before I tell him that thirty-eight seconds should be sufficient, Layla interrupts me.
“If you are invisible, then thirty-eight seconds will be enough,” she says.
She stands beside me as I walk with Abd al-Rahim up the path on the far edge of the quarry. She tries to take my hand, to hold my hand, to offer me a little support, a shield against the darkness that plays at the corners of my vision. But I brush her away as though she were completely insubstantial.
“Did you hear me?” Abd al-Rahim asks.
I look at my hands to see if they are bloody from the operating room. I expect to find them sheathed in sterile blue latex. I expect to see myself carrying a little girl’s arm. I am surprised to find my hands empty and clean.
“I heard you,” I say. “I heard you. Insha’Allah, thirty-eight seconds should be enough.”
I feel fortunate that Layla leaves me alone for the rest of the trip as Abd al-Rahim and I return to Safwan. Other than noticing the quick spasmodic shake of my left arm, which causes Layla to flee, to disappear, to dissolve into the sparkling nothingness where she truly belongs, Abd al-Rahim pays her no attention whatsoever.
* * *
Father Truth!
I smash my emptied whiskey bottle against the far kitchen wall. The shards of glass scatter across the floor to cover the ground where Abd al-Rahim raped my Nadia. I spit. The glob strikes the bare concrete wall at head height and flattens into an octopus shape, its a
rms drooling down the wall for several seconds before the concrete and the hot night air win their battle against gravity. The spittle stops. It begins to dry and evaporate, losing shimmer, solidifying.
Father Truth!
After my confrontation with Yasin that day in front of the Baghdad palace, I bought my jack-in-the-box. Walking home to Umm al-Khanzeer, I was thinking of family, of things I had done wrong, of ways to make amends. I was thinking of Bashar leaving Baghdad. I was thinking of safety. I wasn’t looking at the outside world at all until a store window caught my eye. Sun reflected from the big plate glass of its display, somehow miraculously intact despite the recent violence.
“Masah il-kheir,” I said to the shopkeeper. “Good evening. May peace be upon you.”
“And upon you,” said the shopkeeper as I approached.
“I see you are shutting your store for the night. A toy store?”
The shopkeeper looked at me very carefully: my Western suit, my wingtip shoes, my crisply starched shirt. He noticed my hand in my pocket as it caused a handful of coins to jingle.
“Not at all, sir,” the shopkeeper said. “The store is open for you.”
It was a matter of serendipity to find a toy store open in Baghdad. Also a matter of serendipity that I bought a jack-in-the-box.
A jack-in-the-box!
A thing intended for children far younger than any I knew. Maybe I was thinking of Bashar’s young family, though they had already left town. Maybe I bought it for myself. Maybe I thought I might hear the few remaining neighborhood children laugh, startled and jumping, as the thing burst in their arms. Maybe it had been too long since I’d heard such laughter.
A jack-in-the-box!
I walked across the street with it wrapped in a brown paper bag. I walked with it away from the toy store down the length of Zawra Park along Al-Kindi Street. As Bashar’s note had said, vendors no longer lined Sharia al-Kindi, selling hot kebabs and shawarma. No musicians played in the park. I heard across the expanse of the silent street the shopkeeper roll down his overhead security door, protecting the store window. The sound of the rolling door, grating and harsh, flew through the park, across the Tigris, bouncing back from the far shore. A group of birds rose from the bank, circled, and landed again on stilted legs. They gathered around and bent over a carcass in the river mud, picking at it. The muezzin call from the Sheikh Ma’aruf minaret began. I set my package with the jack-in-the-box on the grass beside me, knelt facing Mecca to the south and a little to the west, and prayed for the duration of the salaam.
When the muezzin ceased wailing, with the air seeming clearer and cleaner between all the towers of the city, I stood, brushed the knees of my pants clean, and walked toward Tigris Bridge. As I summited the bridge, the view of Umm al-Khanzeer spread before me: Saddam’s white-stucco ministerial houses nestled amid green-shaded streets, sprinklers whisking back and forth in the jeweled evening, a paradise.
I looked at the paradise for a long while, not thinking of my brother at all. I forgot about the disagreement he and I had, the blow I gave him. I just looked and looked across the city. Calmness penetrated my mind. I thought clearly for a moment, and the thought that occurred to me was this: it had been a mistake, my mistake, to return so soon to Iraq. It had been a mistake to return at all.
I crossed the bridge and the cloud of foreboding finally lifted from me. I decided that I would admit that I was wrong. I’d tell her that we would soon be leaving. I’d apologize to her for bringing her to Iraq. I’d apologize for staying in Baghdad even after Bashar and all his children, all her friends, had left. I’d give her the jack-in-the-box and I’d hear her laughter again and everything would be good. Everything would be fine.
Father Truth!
Maybe I’d even call Annie to share the news that we would soon return to America and would soon get to be together as a family again, if only through the prison visitation window.
My step lightened.
By habit, I took my identification card from my pocket as I approached the gate on the island side of the bridge, holding my wallet in one hand, the card in the other.
“Late this evening, Doctor?” asked the guard.
“Yes,” I said.
I handed him my identification, a formality. We knew each other well after so many comings and goings. The guard opened the pedestrian entrance. Imbued with the sense that everything, everything in the world, would be better once I left Baghdad, I felt lighthearted. I tarried at the guard post for a moment, making small talk.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Late tonight. I stopped at a toy shop…”
It was then, in mentioning the toy shop, that I realized I had forgotten the jack on the other side of the river, in the grass of Zawra Park, where I had knelt to pray.
I took my identification card from the guard and returned across the bridge. As I approached the jack-in-the-box—still wrapped in its brown bag—a terrible vibrating thump shattered the stillness of the evening, shattered the air behind me. The sound was all too familiar, occurring all too often those days. I did not jump. I did not startle. But I turned and looked across the bridge. In the distance the slums of ath-Thawra, Sadr City, glowered, a haze of heat and smog rising from dull brown rooftops. But the thump came from a place closer to me than the slum. In the distance sirens blared, moving toward the sound of the bomb. Smoke curled over Umm al-Khanzeer itself. Smoke on the protected island. Smoke near my home.
Uncertain, panicking, I turned again toward the jack-in-the-box. Then I turned toward the island. Then I turned toward the jack-in-the-box, spinning, the world spinning. At last I chose my direction, toward the south, toward Mecca, away from Umm al-Khanzeer. I knelt again, knelt in the direction indicated by the Qibla, but I could not pray. I could not pray! I could do nothing other than look at the jack-in-the-box, my jack-in-the-box.
It had sprung.
31
Wednesday Night
FATHER TRUTH!
At one point, I’m not sure when—sometime after I open another whiskey bottle and drink a good deal of it—I crawl to the spot where my spit dried into a dull shellac on the wall. I crawl across the glass pieces on the kitchen floor, hearing them break and screech as they catch in my skin and drag across the tile floor, but I feel no pain in the flesh of my body. I crawl to the wall beneath my spittle and I turn myself around, propping myself upright with my back against the wall so that I stare at the empty space on the shelf behind my kitchen table, where my jack-in-the-box had so long been preserved.
I sit that way for a long while.
At some point that night, while I sit there, I vomit. When I wake the next morning, chunks of food and mucus float in my half-full whiskey bottle. A rancid, sticky coating covers my left hand, clings to my unshaven cheek and my bare chest, soils my pants. Blood from my knees, hands, and shins has also dried on the floor, a smeared brown trail that begins, faintly at first, where the farthest piece of the broken glass glitters in the morning sun. The trail of blood ends where I sit. When I pick the biggest pieces of glass from my legs and hands, the wounds open anew and fresh red blood oozes from me, coating the duller brown.
There is no aspirin in the house. No orange juice. No raw-egg-and-Tabasco-sauce hangover cure. No way for me to easily pull myself together. I look at my whiskey bottle for a long time, with my own acids and greases coagulated on the surface of the sweet brown liquid.
Thirteen years of emptiness, void, and denial.
Father Truth.
I raise the whiskey to my lips and drink, pulling from the bottle like a suckling calf. The taste of it is horrible. Father Truth. I drink again. Thirteen years. I drink until I cannot sit upright and then, at last, I sleep.
I do not dream, not when I sleep. I am thankful for the absence of dream. The void is imploding. I do not want to look at it any closer than I must, but when I am awake, neither can I bear reality. As a refuge, then, in my waking hours, I dream. I drink and I dream and I sleep when I can, day or night.
Father Truth.
I talk to her, too, as I dream. I talk to her as I walk about and do the real-world things I must do. I talk to Layla, or at least to the image of Layla that haunts my dreams. I am aware of the strangeness of this. Maybe it is like a mark of henna on me, painting me as a bride would be painted, a celebration and a bereavement both, a setting aside of myself, making myself haraam from the world. When I talk to Layla I see the questioning looks on those who pass me in the streets, those who pass my store. During such times, as often as I can, I send Abd al-Rahim away from me. I send him on errand after errand, pointless errands, now not so much because he annoys me but because I do not want him to interrupt my conversations with Layla. He has caught me speaking to her, little words, whispers and hushes and laughs and gestures.
I know, now, that she’s not there. I know she is just a figment of my imagination, Layla popping up at such inopportune moments. My dreams cling to me as I witness the most real realities, as I endure the most mundane moments. Keeping her with me in my dreams like this provides a little respite for me, a breath in a bubble as I drown, a charmed muon burning her spiral on the CRT screen of my life.
Abd al-Rahim catches me talking to her. Others notice that I talk to her. I don’t care.
When Mahmoud leaves with Michele’s family to bury Michele’s body in one of the cemeteries of the holy city of Kufa, my drunkenness imposes a layer of dream over the reality. I see Michele’s family depart with Michele’s plain wooden coffin lashed to the roof of their car. But I see, too, an apparition of Layla lying on top of the coffin. She crosses her hands over her chest and has fastened black-painted cutout cardboard Xs over her tightly shut eyes. She plays at death in order to make me laugh.
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 23