“I have to check for thieves,” I say to Abd al-Rahim, a little loudly, as a way to mask the noise I make when I bump into the back wall of my shack.
“My uncle is growing concerned about you,” Abd al-Rahim says with a measure of patience and a measure of annoyance. He doesn’t come around to my side of the store. He waits in front. “My uncle says a little craziness is okay. A little craziness is holy. A little craziness is to be expected in such circumstances as yours.”
“It is just a little craziness,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
An idea occurs to me.
“Invite him,” I say. “Tell him it’s tonight. Invite Uncle Seyyed. I’m inviting everyone, really. Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi will come. Hussein from the Hezbollah will come along with all his minions. Why not Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah?”
I say this to Abd al-Rahim even though I have already, myself, personally invited his uncle. Why not? Let the young man, my jihadist apprentice, feel important. Let him feel as though his shined shoes are worth something more than a busboy’s smile. Abd al-Rahim doesn’t have to know that Seyyed Abdullah is already committed to attending our practice event. Abd al-Rahim doesn’t have to know. He thinks I’m a little crazy. They all think I’m a little crazy.
I don’t know if Abd al-Rahim is laughing or if he is shaking his head in wonder and fear, but he doesn’t answer me. He doesn’t answer my command to invite his uncle.
I sip from my bottle, once, twice, enough to keep the dreams coming. When I lower the bottle from the last of those three drinks, Abd al-Rahim stands in front of me. He slaps me on the face. Shocked, I drop the bottle. I reach down to retrieve it but he kicks it away. I try to shove him. I try to steal the pistol from his belt, but I stagger against the lean-to door. I knock my head as I stand up and my shoulder thumps against the inside slope of the lean-to, a bruising thump from which echoes of numbness spread, shivering, down the left side of my body. The door lifts. Its base slides away from my shack, slides in the dust so that the top of it slams to the earth. Abd al-Rahim grabs me and pulls me toward him. Dust puffs around us. Abd al-Rahim holds me, not exactly with a hugging embrace, but close enough.
I start to giggle and I can’t stop.
“Rhett Butler, you’ve saved me,” I say, pretending to swoon.
He slaps me again.
“That was last night, you fool,” he says.
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a—’ ”
“It was last night. Real bomb but still a practice,” says Abd al-Rahim. “And it would have worked.”
“What?”
“It was all set up. Every damn dignitary in town invited by you and your loudmouth friend Bashar. A whole line of old men crouching in the quarry and peering over the slag heaps with their watches in hand so they could help you confirm, after the chaos of a real explosion, that it would still take your same precious thirty-eight seconds for the response.”
“Did they like our jack-in-the-box?”
“No,” he says. “It wasn’t the jack. It was the real bomb last night with your melted copper charge and IR trigger beam and remote activation.”
“Did we kill some infidels?”
Abd al-Rahim shakes his head at me in disbelief.
“You mumbled something about how Winston and Philip and David shouldn’t come to Hollywood. We all know you’re crazy. We know. You live all alone in a half-finished house. You pretend to talk to this market girl Layla, even when she isn’t around. We know you’re crazy—”
“Layla?”
He ignores me. His face is flushed red. I look down at his feet, where my whiskey bottle, unbroken, still sloshes a few fingers of liquid in it. I think about reaching for the bottle but Abd al-Rahim grips me too tightly.
“We know you’re a little crazy,” he says. “But that bomb cost my uncle ten thousand U.S. dollars. Everything was perfect with it until you strolled out into the road in front of the convoy, waving your arms to stop them.”
At that, he slaps me again, one more time.
“Go home,” he says. “Sleep it off. We will start again tomorrow.”
Abd al-Rahim returns to the front of my shop and I hear him begin to close up, to put the mobile phones back into their boxes from the display cases on the counter, to stack and organize brochures on the various shelves.
I reach down for the bottle. The liquid has stopped moving. I think about drinking from it but instead I push the fallen lean-to door aside and I kick the masonry block with my toe. The block shifts just enough to reveal my hiding spot. I put the bottle into the hole and cover it again with the block.
I am sweating. The evening sun cuts a wedge between the tents and the buildings on the far side of the road. Its light drenches me without the protection of Layla’s lean-to door. I feel the heat multiplied inside me, the combined warmths of sun and whiskey.
A smell comes from me, an unwashed dirtiness. I am upset with myself, upset with my lack of hygiene. I resolve to bathe. I resolve to drink no more whiskey before my engagement party tonight, tomorrow night, yesterday night, whichever night. I must keep myself sober. I must be ready and fast and fluid. Maybe I don’t have enough time to get sober. Maybe I shouldn’t even try. Maybe everything will be easier if I continue to float a little, skim a little, come with a load of story and myth hanging over my head while the dancers at Ali’s party dance and the singers at the party sing and my bride, Ulayya, and I agree, formally, to wed.
Maybe I should drink!
I scrounge in the dust at the side of the shack. I remove my carefully placed cinder block from its position over my bottle’s hidey-hole. On my knees in the dirt, I raise the whiskey to my lips so that I might once again toast the vortices. I swallow and joust with the ecstasies, the darknesses, that ease and flood and swirl in comfort around me. I fight them and gulp against them. The burning furrow of the liquid soothes me, woos me, defuses me until I can open my eyes again. Then I see, through the distortion of the thick mottled glass at the bottle’s upturned end, Layla standing in front of me. We are at eye level with each other, me kneeling.
“Go away,” I say. “Go swimming or something. Go become a goldfish. I know you aren’t real.”
She doesn’t go anywhere.
I think of telling her that the American lieutenant plans to adopt her. I think of slapping her, as Abd al-Rahim slapped me, to knock some sense into her, to make her stop staring at me, to make her disappear again, drift away, away, float away.
She says, “You’re going to get married.”
“Yes,” I say.
“We can’t be friends anymore?”
“We shouldn’t.”
“That makes me sad,” she says.
“Me, too,” I say.
I should tell her about the lieutenant. I should tell her about the adoption. I summon up the words, the courage. But as I am about to speak, she extends a clenched hand.
“Here,” she says. “Thank you for letting me wear it, but I think you should keep it now.”
I put my hand up to hers. She opens her fist and the anklet of bird bones and dollhouse keys falls from her hand into mine.
“I will miss you,” she says.
She steps forward, stands on the fallen lean-to door, and puts her small hands on my shoulders.
“Stand up,” she says.
I obey, rising to one foot, then the other. I’m unsteady. I lean against the wall of my shack. All of me is dun-colored from the dust. I wipe at my knees and leave patches of relatively white cloth showing on them where the dust falls away.
When I am upright, Layla stands back, plugging her nose. She sizes me up and says, “Now you’re too tall. Bend down a little.”
Again, I obey.
She adjusts me a little more, getting me to the right height, squaring my shoulders in just the right way, straightening my back, lifting my chin. When all is as she wants it to be, she kisses me, once, twice—one kiss on each cheek. Then she pulls away and looks at me to
judge the effect of her kisses. I don’t know what I’m doing. I might be smiling. I might be laughing. I might be crying. Yes, I think I’m crying. If there are rules for a conversation between an old man like me and a young girl like Layla, I have broken them. She pulls me closer, closer again, and holds me as a mother holds a newborn child. Her arms wrap around the outside of my arms. I feel her hands between my shoulder blades, rubbing small reassuring circles. This embrace lasts until the last light from the sunset lifts above us. Then only the tops of the market tents and the telephone poles shine.
The rest is night.
* * *
It seemed like it lasted an eternity, my inability to pray as I knelt beside the jack-in-the-box in Zawra Park. But it must have only been a moment, for—after I rose from the ground and sprinted back across the bridge—I arrived at my house in time to beat even the Americans. What few neighbors remained in that diplomatic community looked at me from their windows or peered at me from behind the pillars of their front porches. As at the scene of Hezbollah’s punishment of Michele, none of the bystanders approached too closely, none offered me help.
Heedless of them, heedless of the heat from the burning wreckage of my home, I rushed forward, vaulting one of the collapsed walls. I kicked at rubble, threw aside burning beams and window frames and melted sections of sofa cushion. I didn’t know what, exactly, I was doing. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I picked up little things from the cinders, shiny things: bits of glass, bits of bird bone, bird beak, maybe teeth. I picked up dollhouse keys. I secreted these things away in my pockets. I picked up flotsam, tokens from the rubble until I found one of the bigger things I had hoped, without ever forming the thought of such a terrible desire, never, never, ever to find.
By the time the Americans arrived at my house I had emerged from the rubble and the smoke to stand on my front lawn, preciously lush grass scorched black on its tips and littered with burned and burning pieces of whitewashed stucco, shattered brick, smoldering clumps of deep purple bougainvillea. I was dirty and bloody and sweating and exhausted already. Soldiers stormed past me to surround the building. One of them pointed his weapon into my chest but did not shoot. I held myself very still and observed the jerky slowness of everything that happened for the next few minutes: Iraqi paramedics milling about on the street, arranging white sheets on hospital gurneys and spreading plastic tarps over my front sidewalk, teams of soldiers talking on radios, inspecting the home, the damage, a helicopter circling overhead.
At last the American soldier guarding me lowered his weapon at the command of his sergeant. Two Iraqi policemen hurried to take his place guarding me.
The first of them removed from my halfhearted grip the arm I had found inside my house, limp at the joints of elbow and wrist. He took it from me and put it into a big blue translucent plastic bag. Then he labeled the bag with a black Magic Marker and sealed it with a zip tie.
The second of the two policemen took me by the hand and led me behind one of the ambulances, saying to me: “Come, Doctor, we must talk with you for a minute.”
32
Thursday Until Monday’s Dawn
IN MY HOME I sit completely naked at my kitchen table for a long while. In front of me I have placed my whiskey bottle. It is empty. Behind the whiskey bottle, I have placed the bomb, the next bomb, the second and, I hope, last of those bombs bought with Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s money, smuggled across the border in pieces behind the disguise of the whiskey bottles. The thick and rounded glass of the bottle distorts the shape of the bomb. The facets of the bottle reflect the image of my haggard face, superimposed on the curving shape of the detonation charge, so that the bomb seems to have my rough whiskers, my black tumble of hair, my untrimmed mustache, my depthless, reddened eyes.
I sit there for a long while, an hour, maybe two hours.
Father Truth.
I say it at last, very quietly, admitting the thing that lies at the center of the void.
I say, “My daughter.”
The house is very still then. I hear the pulse of my heart as it beats through the veins of my head. No thoughts come to me. I say the truth once, there in my house, and then I stand, don my new suit, the suit tailored for my engagement feast with Ulayya. It is a black double-breasted affair, faintly striped in silver, complete with silken handkerchief folded in the breast pocket. I put on stiff leather shoes over socks with matching faded stripes of the same thin silver thread. I run a comb through my hair, each side, pulling it straight back and holding the mass flat against my scalp with a liberal application of cream.
I sweat profusely as I put on the clothes. The beads of sweat drip from my forehead. They soak the pits of my arms. They drool down my back and down the backs of my legs. I wipe my forehead but I cannot dry my body once the clothes are on me, sticking to me.
I will go to Ali ash-Shareefi’s house. But first I will visit each of my friends’ homes in town, to admit to them what I have done.
“I have killed my daughter,” I say when I reach Bashar’s gate. “I brought her to Iraq and she’s dead now.”
I stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the wall of Bashar’s courtyard. I peer between chinks in the scrollwork of the iron exterior door. I can see his house, dim in the evening light, but no life stirs within.
“Are you there?” I yell.
I get no response.
“Maybe he’s hiding. Maybe he thinks you’re coming to take Nadia from him,” Layla whispers.
I look down. I look around me. I see Layla nowhere near me, but I find, there in the dirt at the side of Bashar’s gate, a foot. It is hardly noticeable, covered in dust, the flesh dried and textured like jerky. A plain cloth shoe, decorated with pink glitter, clings to the flesh below the jutting, shattered ankle bone. It looks like it has been carried here and gnawed by some roving dog.
I pick up the foot and take it with me.
I proceed to the house of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah to make my confession there. All the lights are off. The front gate is locked. I walk around to the back, to the shack in the alley where Seyyed Abdullah’s servant parks his black bulletproof Yukon. I try the gate there. It, too, is locked. I shake it.
“I want to say something,” I yell. “Abd al-Rahim, are you there? Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah? Anyone?”
I wait a moment. I hear nothing.
“I’m responsible,” I yell. “She’d be alive and happy and with me if we had stayed in America!”
“But I’m here,” Layla says. “I’m here.”
“No, you’re not,” I say.
I look around me again, certain I have heard her voice. I reach to touch her, my eyes closed, thinking that if I just imagine her strongly and precisely enough, I will be able to find her again, hold her again, comfort her again.
Yet where I expect her, I find only the sliced torso of a child, hung from the wall of Seyyed Abdullah’s house like a cut of lamb in a butcher shop. I untie the blasted-apart body and lower it to the ground. It does not fit in my pocket as the foot does, so I carry it under one arm as I continue through town.
Always Layla is whispering to me.
I stumble as I walk. I tear a hole in the knee of my engagement suit.
“Where are you, Layla? Where are you? I want you here to guide me. I want you to approve before I marry this daughter of Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi.”
Staggering, I grasp Layla by the shoulder, gently by the shoulder. The next moment she is gone and the streets are dark and each time I grope in the wasteland of this town, I find near me some additional shard of her: sinew and blood, bone and earth, and waste, such waste, such horror. I have her hands in my pockets and am intertwining my fingers with hers and stroking the cold and mangled joints for reassurance. I walk upright, dapper, hands hidden. Then the next moment I grasp a rusted signpost that warns the unsuspecting passerby of the presence of the antitank ditch. I grasp it as though I have fallen against it. I grasp it as though I am holding it upright, using it to prevent the world from spinn
ing. Dangling from the sign is the crusted mass of her hair, scalped, bloodied, tangled, but still with matching pink bows gracing the locks. Maybe I touch her cheek one moment, but the next moment it is stone under my hand, a worn stair step in some forgotten alley, a lintel, a colonnade column desecrated by graffiti and gunfire. And a face, stripped clean from the skull, disfigured, flattened by the absence of supporting bone, supporting cartilage. Such horrors, such whispers, accompany me as I walk across Safwan in my engagement suit, shouting to all the houses, all the people: “It is my fault that she has died.”
At last I arrive at Ali ash-Shareefi’s house through the back alley. I find my engagement tent crumpled against Ali’s back courtyard wall. I kick it. It is a dusty thing, stinking of mildew. I try Ali’s back courtyard door. It, too, is locked. I yell the announcement of my guilt. I hear no reply. I stand on the mildewed engagement tent. I yell again. I mumble. I drop the pieces of the little body, turning my pockets inside out, tearing my shirt and the front of my jacket as I try to rid myself of the accumulated guilt, the dismembered bits of her.
I look into Ali’s courtyard through a gap between the courtyard door and the garage. In contrast to the rest of the town, the rest of the houses of my friends, I find this house lit, the windows filled with solemn-looking people milling about. A line of people extends into the street in front of the house, shielded from me, shielded from the empty back-alleyway courtyard.
Again I yell, trying to get someone’s attention. “Can anyone hear me? It’s me, Abu Saheeh. I’ve come to marry Ulayya. I’m ready!”
No one acknowledges me. No one can hear me over the noise of the party going on inside Ali ash-Shareefi’s house. I think about walking around to the front, but instead I climb Ali’s fence and slide over its top, landing awkwardly and then rolling in the dust. No one expects me to enter from the alley—the guest of honor, the groom-to-be.
One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Page 25