One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

by Buchholz, Benjamin

  The only person I find in the courtyard is Ali’s guard, the man who never speaks. He stands in front of me, above me, where I have fallen in the dust. He has not drawn his gun. For a moment he merely looks at me. Then he extends a hand to help lift me to my feet.

  “Don’t go in there,” he says, tilting his head toward the main section of my father-in-law’s house.

  He points to the line of people queued at the entrance of the diwaniya. The line stretches away around the corner of the road.

  I think, What a popular groom I am!

  “It’s my engagement feast,” I tell the silent guard.

  I grab his arm for support as I try to stand. He pushes me away, but gently.

  “No,” he says. “Don’t go.”

  “Ulayya and I will be married,” I say.

  I look around for Layla. She is nowhere to be seen. She has abandoned me again, like Abd al-Rahim, like everyone I have ever loved.

  “Ali is dead,” the guard says. “The Americans shot him at your little bombing. He was the slowest, the last to run into the quarry.”

  Through the window at the back of the house I see Hussein. He doesn’t notice me for a minute, not until I take the silken handkerchief from my front pocket and snap it in the air in front of me to shake the dust of my daughter’s blood from it. The sudden motion attracts Hussein’s attention. Or maybe he hears the sound. Or maybe the dust of blood glitters in the air like snowflakes. I watch him, hoping he will beckon to me. And, indeed, after a moment he waves his mobile phone at me.

  “That’s my signal,” I say to the gate guard. “Time to go into the party now.”

  Hussein dials the phone. He calls me. He rings directly to my line, the phone in the inside pocket of my suit jacket. I don’t use the phone often. All its numbers connect to Baghdad, to ministries there, to ministers there, to great men. I don’t know how Hussein got the number. From Bashar? From Seyyed Abdullah? I feel the vibration of the phone like an electric current against my chest.

  I let it ring.

  I watch Hussein as the call goes to my voice mail. But instead of speaking into his phone, he hands it to a man standing to his side, a man standing just where I cannot see him, beyond the frame of the window in the back of Ali’s house.

  A few more people gather at the window around Hussein. They are backlit by the orange glow of candles within the room, candles on tables, candles on the lid of a coffin, which, I imagine, must hold Ali’s body. Hussein points to me. Then he makes a sweeping motion with his arm, leading the gathering of men toward a descending set of stairs at the side of the house, leading them toward me.

  “Go now,” the guard says. “Go.”

  The guard helps me through the gate. On the way out, he pushes apart two trash cans behind Ali’s garage and rummages between them.

  “Take this,” he says, handing me a big brown cardboard box. “The things inside are yours.”

  He locks the back gate and then steps into the shadows of the courtyard as I leave. Seconds later the group of men with Hussein, ten or twelve of them, bump against the locked gate, rattle it in frustration, caught behind it for precious moments. They don’t see me but they know I am near.

  “We’re coming for you,” Hussein says. “You can’t go far.”

  I crawl across the alley, pushing the box with my head. I call for Layla. I tell her, “I shouldn’t have ever brought you here.”

  But Layla doesn’t respond. There are no more pieces of her for me to find.

  I am alone, alone.

  I hear Hussein gathering more men in the street, calling to them on a megaphone, his voice ungodly loud, crackling, full of static and interference. Some of the men on the far side of the house light torches, oil-soaked rags wrapped on the ends of broomsticks and baseball bats. The light from the torches makes the shadows of the men leap across the alley as if they have suddenly discovered the place where I crouch and cower, waiting for Layla to come carry me away to one of her dreamlands.

  But Layla doesn’t come.

  I hear the crowd stirring. I hear Hussein exhorting them. They are ready to chase me. They have the necessary numbers, the necessary fury, the necessary incitement.

  “Rocks,” Hussein bellows into his megaphone. “Stones. We’ll do this like the hajj. We’ll stone Iblees, stone the Devil. We’ll cast him away from us.”

  I picture them coming for me. I picture the rain of stones, the inglorious end, trying to keep myself upright, trying to shield my head, my face, as the fist-size rocks pelt me and bloody me.

  I gather my strength and, lifting the big brown box in my arms, I dart from the shadows, recrossing the street and dashing into the maze of alleyways. Hussein’s mob pursues me, light from their torches flickering off the corners of the passageways behind me, off the roofs and walls of the houses that loom over me. I manage to stay a street or two ahead of them, turning at random, striding down straightaways, doubling back. Spittle flies from the corners of my mouth. I haven’t run so hard in ages. My chest feels as if it has been split open, sawed open, butchered, burning on a line of slashed sutures where my brother has ripped me in half.

  Still I call for Layla: “Save me. Save me. Bring me a horse or an airplane or a Jet Ski.”

  And still she does not reply. She has abandoned me. Without my whiskey, without a moment to stop, to wet my tongue, to loosen my mind and my imagination, I know she will not come. She isn’t here.

  After a few blocks the light of the torches fades. I have lost them. I slow to a trot and then to a walk. In the distance I hear the rumble of the mob and, by listening to it, I can tell the direction toward which they head: west, toward my house. I know I will not return there. Like the pristine white diplomatic house in Umm al-Khanzeer, it is a place to which I know I will never return. There will soon be no house left. So I head north into the quiet closed shops in the market, my market in the cloverleaf intersection, my vantage point for watching the American convoys. It is the only safe place left for me.

  When I reach the door of my shop, the first ray of the morning sun just barely crests the eastern oil fields, out beyond the quarry and the overpass.

  33

  Dawn Monday, a Phone Call

  AT LAST I SIT safely inside my store. I dial my voice mail so that I can hear the message.

  “Hello?” I say. “Hello?”

  “Press one for menu. Press two for voice mail.”

  “Hello?” I say again.

  I press two.

  After a moment I hear the voice on the message. I expect to hear the voice of Hussein or one of Hussein’s cronies, one of the men continually surrounding him. But the voice I hear, the voice of the man to whom Hussein handed his mobile phone, is that of Abd al-Rahim. He says, simply: “My uncle withdraws his protection from you. He says to tell you, to remind you, that you are half dead.”

  That is all Abd al-Rahim says. He clicks the phone shut, audibly, midway through a raspy little laugh I hear from Hussein in the background.

  I play the message again: “You are half dead.”

  “You are half dead.”

  Again and again, Abd al-Rahim’s voice instructs me: “You are half dead.”

  It is the sign, our sign, the sign Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah has all along promised to give me when he determines for certain that the convoy comes. The sheikh has launched Abd al-Rahim into the final phase of our plan. Seyyed Abdullah and Abd al-Rahim easily enough convince Hussein to do their dirty work, getting rid of me. And, if I pull off the bombing of the American convoy, I’m sure Seyyed Abdullah will direct the Americans’ fury against Hezbollah, ridding him of that problem, too—a double victory, a masterstroke.

  “Seyyed Abdullah withdraws his protection from you. You are half dead,” says the voice of Seyyed Abdullah’s messenger.

  I play it again.

  You are half dead: a sign from long ago, a hieroglyph in my Cracker Jack language. A reference similar in its depth and obscurity to my very favorite word of all: bowling.
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  * * *

  I didn’t sleep for days after the bombing. I never went back to the Americans in the Green Zone. I started drinking and I lived as a homeless man, unkempt, a scarecrow, similar in appearance to the way Saddam Hussein looked, unshaven and wildly filthy, when the American forces pulled him from the hole where he had hidden himself in Tikrit.

  Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah came up to Baghdad on some errand of business and it was he who found me, he who rescued me from the life I lived at that time.

  If it weren’t for the quality of the suit I wore, the fine tailoring, if it weren’t for the wingtip shoes, a man of his sort would never have deigned to speak with me, so covered in dust, so ragged had I become.

  “Allahu Akbar, God is great,” said he. “But you, sir, you look horrible. You look half dead.”

  I turned, then, to face him, for I recognized his voice from the medical briefings in the American headquarters. I turned to face him, and, despite my hollow eyes, my harrowed face, he recognized me.

  “Ya Allah,” he said. “Is that you, good Dr. ash-Shumari? What has happened to you?”

  The void had opened in me already, blown open. I could not look into it. I could not admit that my daughter was dead, so I said to him: “I thought I was an American. I lived there fifteen years. I thought it would be okay for me to return here and help. I thought I was one of them.”

  “Certainly you looked the part,” the sheikh said, not without a little disapproval.

  “Now I want to kill my brother,” I told him. “And the Americans, their justice, their life-in-prison, such a thing isn’t justice enough for me.”

  The sheikh recited from the Sura of the Feast for me then, saying, “And we decreed for them that it is a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That is what I have decided. I tried to bribe my way into Abu Ghraib so I could do the job myself. But that doesn’t work with the Americans. He’s safe from me. I have no recourse. I have no honor.”

  Seyyed Abdullah grew silent for a moment as I told him this. When I finished he said, “Abu Ghraib?”

  “Yes.”

  “They are shutting Abu Ghraib, you know.”

  “No. I didn’t know this,” I said.

  The fact only increased my despair. I had guessed, the moment the bombing occurred, that Yasin was responsible. I knew it in my heart. It was the only explanation. My work was for the good of the ummah, the community. No one else had threatened me. No one else had reason to threaten me. I told the Americans of my suspicion. I led them to Yasin and he confessed. But instead of allowing me to kill him, as I expected, they put him in their prison—just close enough to tempt me, just far enough to be shielded from the justice I wanted, I needed, to deliver.

  “Where will they take him?” I asked. “Guantánamo?”

  A light flickered in Seyyed Abdullah’s eyes.

  He said, “They are building a new prison in Basra Province, very near my town of Safwan. A new prison into which they will transfer the Abu Ghraib detainees.”

  “Impregnable, I’m sure.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Three perimeters. One far out in the desert, with no walls but with remote sensors. Then the fences: a perimeter facing outward, barbed wire, guard towers, machine guns leveled at our goats and oil derricks. The last perimeter, facing inward—more fences, more towers, more machine guns—to keep the prisoners in.”

  “So?” I asked. I could see that he was thinking.

  He offered me his hand, helping me to my feet. We walked together across the street to where his pistol-carrying servant held open the door to a black bulletproof Yukon.

  “He will be most vulnerable along the way,” Seyyed Abdullah said after a moment. “All we will need to know is when the Americans transport him. That will be a piece of information we can purchase from any of the translators who work at Abu Ghraib.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  34

  Dawn Monday, Countdown

  THIRTY-EIGHT SECONDS.

  The sun breaks free of the eastern desert, lifting above the low haze on the flat horizon.

  I am safe, at least for the next necessary moments, while Hussein focuses on my house. Calmly I go out the side door of my store and watch from curbside as the underbelly of the cloudy morning reflects the fire that burns on the far side of Safwan. It didn’t take Hussein’s mob long to reach my house, a five-minute walk across town, no more. Even from the market I could hear their voices, the chanting. I could hear the shattering of my windows. Now I hear the fire itself, the lapping of flames, the sucking sound, the crackling.

  I wonder if the fire might slow or scare the American convoys coming around the bypass. I decide it will not slow them at all. They’ll regard it as a civilian matter. Nothing for them to care about as long as the crowd itself, the bulk of them streaming across the road, doesn’t affect the transport of supplies north and south, south and north, one thousand semis a day. Even if it does affect the convoys going to and from Kuwait, it will not affect my special convoy, the bus convoy, the prisoner convoy. That group of vehicles never turns onto the bypass. It always continues south, passing Safwan, passing over my overpass on its way to Camp Bucca, just a few kilometers down the road.

  I watch the fire and the column of smoke that rises in the west. I watch it for a long moment before I take a small bottle of acid from a shelf in my store—a covered can, nothing more—then gather under my other arm the box given to me by Ali ash-Shareefi’s guard. Still calm, I walk up the nearer on-ramp to first wake and then speak with Mahmoud in his tent.

  Thirty-eight seconds.

  I don’t mention my ripped engagement suit, my dirty, unshaven face, my sweaty skin, or red eyes to Mahmoud. His own eyes are still red, his own clothes dirty, his own face unshaven and unkempt. Mahmoud is too deep in his grief to notice mine. It does not take me long to convince him to switch places with me.

  “Hussein will come to my shop,” I tell him. “He and his mob even now are burning my house. He will come to burn my shop next. He will seek me there.”

  “You are sure?”

  “An eye for an eye,” I say.

  I hand Mahmoud the can of acid. I unscrew the cap of it, cautious not to let the clear liquid slop over the edges. The fumes do more than burn my eyes as they escape. They sicken my stomach. I see Michele’s body, still kneeling upright in the street, hands repetitively scratching scabbed skin from his face. I see my brother, the blank black look in his eyes when I brought the police to the door of his house and watched them arrest him. I see gore. I see horror. I see bits of Layla in the rubble of my house. Quickly, to protect myself from these visions, to protect myself from lapsing into hallucination, I screw the cap on the acid bottle once again. The smell, the burning scent of it, dissipates. So, too, the upwelling, insistent images disappear—at least temporarily.

  “An eye for an eye,” I say to Mahmoud for a second time.

  He agrees with my plan. He takes the bottle with him to my store. After he enters, he shuts the side door but does not lock it. It remains slightly ajar, an inviting sort of openness, a temptation. I imagine him waiting on the edge of the stool, poised with the bottle of acid for Hussein’s arrival.

  I set the big brown box in front of me on Mahmoud’s cot. I open the box and unpack it. As I suspect, it contains all the gifts I gave to Ulayya.

  I take them out and arrange them, one at a time, along the curb in front of Mahmoud’s tent, spacing them at three-meter intervals: pretty wrapping paper ripped open, pretty bows wrecked and askew, pretty tissue paper torn and wrinkled, pretty like Michele’s face. When I finish the arrangement, the packages blend with the strange debris on the periphery of the road. Nothing out of place, I think, to see unwrapped gift boxes amid such refuse. Nothing out of place to see a big man with brilliantined hair in an expensive but dirty and sweaty pin-striped suit instead of the normal scrubby littl
e overpass guard.

  I scan the packages as I sit, just as Mahmoud normally sits, leaning on the three-legged stool.

  Farthest down the road, the box that held the blue length of silk and, resting in front of it, the gift that I substituted, the gift Ulayya actually received: a rock the size of a baseball, still with little shards of glass clinging to it from two passages through my upstairs window.

  Then the box that held the length of cotton cloth and, resting in front of it, the gift I substituted, the gift Ulayya actually received: a mobile phone, nothing too modern or too fancy, not an iPhone or BlackBerry or whatever the Americans now use.

  Next closest to me: the box that held the linen sheets for our wedding bed. Resting in front of it, the gift I substituted for Ulayya: a little microcassette tape containing a song of alien voices.

  Then, directly in front of me, the biggest box, the one that held several faceted crystal goblets. Resting in front of it is the gift I substituted, the gift Ulayya received: a Chicago Cubs baseball cap.

  Closer to the overpass bridge, I’ve positioned the box that held the green and blue women’s clothes and, in front of it, the gift for Ulayya: a single arm from a toy jack-in-the-box, dwarfed without its body.

  Then, even closer to the bridge: a bottle. It originally contained henna, but the bottle now resting in front of the unwrapped box isn’t henna at all. It is blood, blood I substituted for henna. If my new bride was to be marked in celebration on her hands and feet, if patterns were to be painted there, I wished it to be with blood from my own veins. And so I had opened the flesh on the palm of my right hand after drinking enough whiskey to dull the pain. I had opened the flesh and filled for Ulayya a bottle of my own living blood.

  Last, the final box, the box that had at one time held the golden necklace I purchased for Ulayya. It is a small box. In front of it I have placed the gift furthest removed from its context, furthest removed from any possible understanding that could ever have dawned on Ulayya. It is a single dirty length of yarn adorned with bird bones and dollhouse keys strung into the form of an anklet. What business had I in trying to bequeath this item to Ulayya? How could she possibly have understood it without knowing what had happened to my daughter? How could she possibly have understood it without the context of that first sight of Layla, two or three weeks ago, when her dirty foot jangled in the evening sunlight, bones and trinket-keys tinkling?