One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913)

by Buchholz, Benjamin

  “Thirty-five, thirty-four, thirty-three…” Whether I board the buses in an orderly fashion, each in turn, unobserved by the panicked and scattering security guards, who tumble, coughing and dizzy, into the roadway, or whether I run from place to place, half mad, I do not know. It is one and the same thing.

  “Thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty…” Whether the smoke increases, something on fire, a vehicle, a store, the tents in the market, or whether my eyes cloud with tears, I do not know. It is one and the same thing.

  “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…” Whether it will take the middle and the rear Humvees as long to sort out the proper response as it would in a normal convoy with thirty-odd vehicles, or whether the response will come more quickly, I do not know. I will reach the buses before the Americans or after the Americans, as Allah wills, one and the same thing.

  “Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four…” Whether the safety lever on Mahmoud’s Kalashnikov flips itself into the hot position of its own accord, or whether my years in Saddam’s army, years of forced operation, training, taught me to do the thing instinctively, I do not know. Either way, it is one and the same thing.

  “Twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one…” Whether each face I see as I step up into the first bus really is distinguishable from every other face, there in the chaos, there in the smoke and noise, or whether they all, by assuming such looks of doubt and wonder and dismay, blend into one another, I do not know. I scan them on the first bus and I am certain, despite their sameness, that none of the faces is the face of my brother. I would know. I am certain he is not there and I am certain that it is not one and the same thing. It is a particular thing. His death is nothing I want to leave to chance.

  “Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…” Whether the body of a little girl lies flat beneath this bus, or if by miracle it has been lifted and thrown from the onrushing vehicles—angelic interference, robot psychosis—I do not know. I am crazy. I am crazy to think such things. She is imaginary. She is mine and imaginary and I care only to think of her in the way I will always see her in my memory, before I picked the pieces of her from the rubble of my house, thinking forward already at that moment to the time when I might avenge her.

  “Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen…” I do care. I care. An eye for an eye. I will exact my revenge upon my brother, even if the long tortures and deprivations of the American prisons, and the longer decisions of its courts, will not give me Yasin’s life. I will have it. I will, may Allah allow. I testified against Yasin in the American courts, and I will have his life.

  “Fourteen, thirteen, twelve…” I board the second bus and find no sign of my brother. I do not worry. It is too late for worry. Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah assured me Yasin would be among them this time. Seyyed Abdullah will have his town cleared of interference from Hezbollah after he pins the blame on Hussein’s gang. “Hezbollah triggered it,” he will tell the Americans. “My nephew Abd al-Rahim witnessed them at the scene. He was standing there in the market next to this very man, this man Hussein, who lifted up the head of one of the victims.” The Americans will arrest Hussein. Seyyed Abdullah will have his uncontested authority in Safwan. And I will have my brother’s blood.

  “Eleven, ten, nine…” The third, the third bus, there in the third, midway down the left aisle of seats, I see him, my brother, Yasin, and he recognizes me as his brother, just as I want him to do. He recognizes me and stands to accept me as his rescuer. All the old hurts will be sewn up, like a kitten’s belly, and he will forgive me. He will forgive me for not joining his cause. He will forgive me for being smarter than him. He will forgive me even though Father liked me best. He might go so far as to apologize for my daughter’s death, for Layla’s death. I see him. I see my brother. He plans his words of reconciliation.

  “Eight, seven, six…” He plans his words. They form on his trembling lips. He purses those lips, sputters syllables of thankfulness until he sees my bandaged hand, the hand from which I have drawn the blood I used to swear myself indelibly to follow this path, to board the prison buses, to track him, to find him, to take him at a time when he would be exposed, the blanket of American protection forcibly removed. My brother plans his sweetened words until he sees my finger firm and sure on the trigger of Mahmoud’s rifle.

  “Five, four, three…” I raise the barrel of the Kalashnikov. I sight it upon my brother’s chest. He turns to the side, an instinctive reaction to minimize his exposure. But the shackles of the Americans hold him fast to his seat. They hold him facing forward. I have long expected his flinching reaction. I have long dwelled upon the sweetness of seeing him cower. It is exactly as I pictured it in my dreams: his refusal to take the death I bring him as a man should take it, full in the chest with eyes upturned toward Allah, or gazing directly into the face that faces him down.

  No man should die like a coward, like a running dog.

  Yet he turns from me. He flinches from me even as I pull the trigger of the weapon to bring his fate unto him. Cowardliness or bravery, they are one and the same thing. They are nothing.

  “Three, two, one…” The hammer falls, yet that familiar, comforting stench of sulfur doesn’t reach me. I smell no scent at all. The hammer falls and the trigger clicks, but the bullet, the bullet, the bullet has been taken from my gun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for helping me process and understand the strange experience of almost-war, slow-war, during the bloody rebuilding of Iraq that I was privileged to help undertake—however successfully or unsuccessfully—in 2005 and 2006. First, to the men who lost their lives in that war, our soldiers, whom none of us will forget. Second, to my military chain of command and to the British troops—Brigadier General Charles Barr, Lieutenant Colonel Todd Taves, Captain Roddy Christie—who supported my work with the Safwan town council. Third, to my interpreters, especially Bashar al-Masri, who not only provided the vital link of language between me and the Iraqis but who also served as a veritable textbook on Islam, local culture, and the recent history of Basra Province. Fourth, to my teachers at the Defense Language Institute, especially Guitta Nader, Loris Ibrahim, Salah Kamal, and Fawzi Khowshaba, who opened up the beautiful Arabic language to me and who read and provided valuable commentary on the various drafts of this book. To the several other people who read the manuscript and commented—my wife, Angie, her friend Deborah Hawkins, my friend Aflah al-Harrasi, and especially Jon Sternfeld and Vanessa Kehren, who each read and reread the book numerous times. Finally, I would like to thank the Safwan town council and the people of Safwan itself. They have endured three wars and the presence of our coalition troops, not to mention the corruption and ineffectiveness of the upper echelons of their own government. Yet somehow, by the grace of God, life there continues.

  About the Author

  BENJAMIN BUCHHOLZ is the author of Private Soldiers, a book about his Wisconsin National Guard unit’s year-long deployment to southern Iraq. He was stationed with his family in Oman from 2010 to 2011 and currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is pursuing a graduate degree in Middle East Security Studies. One Hundred and One Nights is his first novel.

  BACK BAY • READER’S PICK

  One Hundred and One Nights

  A novel

  by

  Benjamin Buchholz

  A conversation with Benjamin Buchholz

  How did the idea for One Hundred and One Nights come to you?

  In the same way much of Tim O’Brien’s work aims to help him, and perhaps others, find a catharsis for the experience of Vietnam, I found that even while I was still in Iraq, the events I experienced began to pour into and (sometimes unintentionally) fill the writing I was doing. Two events in particular—the death of a young Iraqi girl and the bombing of one of our American convoys—really affected me. Abu Saheeh’s story is an attempt, on one hand, to understand and empathize with the types of personalized hatred and personalized loss and personalized dementia that I believe to be at the core
of the mind-set required for someone to perpetrate a bombing or kill another human being. And, on the other hand, Layla’s character demanded to be written, maybe in memorial to the dead little girl. So those two characters conspired. They gripped me. Writing about them allowed me to think more clearly about them, about their problems and the ways they might have interacted during the war that consumed them. It took me a while, a couple of years, actually, to really put Abu Saheeh and Layla into their current form as characters. They appear, the Layla character especially, in a lot of the shorter, more fragmentary work I was writing and publishing as short fiction before beginning One Hundred and One Nights in earnest.

  How does your career with the U.S. military overlap with your identity as a writer?

  Of course the army has given me a base of subject matter that I can draw on and that, often, seems to demand (of its own accord!) that I process, churn, think about, and eventually clarify into the structure of a story the quirks, shocks, joys, horrors, and moments of close comradeship such experience contains. So that is the big, overarching impact the military has on my writing. But also my day job affects my writing in more subtle ways. For instance, the required format for military writing frowns on any use of passive voice because of the nonattributive nature of passive verbs. I like the fact that the active voice has been ingrained in me, almost brainwashed into me. I think it has had a positive effect on the pace and quality of my fiction. Maintaining a military career makes me think very hard about drawing a line between fiction and nonfiction. Being influenced by and processing real-life events through fictionalization is one thing, but actually reporting them, in a nonfictional way, can strike too close to home, either with regard to the work itself or to the people around me who have experienced war and military life. In a larger way this is something with which all writers contend, drawing a line between fiction and fact. Because military work focuses on fact and present-day circumstances, I find it sort of freeing and necessary, actually, to have an outlet for hypothesizing, a place that allows me to give structure to ideas and concepts that seem in the real world important but also ephemeral, shifty, unquantifiable, nonlinear. I hope that the opposite may also happen, that my writing will someday contribute to and benefit my work for the military, perhaps giving voice and depth to discussions on the Middle East that otherwise remain in the purview of mass media and politics.

  Why did you decide to write from an Iraqi perspective rather than a more familiar, American one?

  I think it is an issue of empathy, of trying to understand other people. Writing from my own point of view or from the point of view of someone culturally similar to me would have been boring. A novel is a long, painful, intrusive thing to produce. Having some separation between the narrative voice and the voice of “myself” was important during the writing process. Abu Saheeh’s voice kept the writing fresh and interesting for me. Additionally, I find the Iraqi man to be prototypical. He dances. He sings. He makes war without flinching from his adversaries, without hiding behind bulletproof glass. He is loyal, temperamental, sentimental, strong. The language of Iraq, the Arabic dialect used in the region, is gruff, thick, and poetic. I knew that the portrayal of an Iraqi man long exposed to the comfort of America and its somewhat emasculating tendencies would automatically exhibit certain types of internal conflict. I hope that Abu Saheeh captures some of this conflict, some of the way in which I think a man’s inherent rationality falters when experiencing major, soul-shaking events. Abu Saheeh is offered a softer, less definite spirituality (through Layla’s dreams and Layla’s haunting) that might help him live a sane life. Whether he chooses to accept that offering is the crux of his internal struggle and the most immediate reason I was compelled to write from his perspective.

  Is there a reason you chose to write fiction rather than nonfiction?

  As I mentioned earlier, fictionalizing my military experience has allowed me simultaneously to process and to keep a certain amount of emotional distance between actuality and creativity. Also, I’ve seen a lot of movies and read a number of nonfiction books (some of them very good, like We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young and Black Hawk Down) told from the perspective of the American soldier. But I have not seen very many efforts at telling the flip side of war. While such stories do exist—like Slaughterhouse Five, Doctor Zhivago, and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War—I don’t think an attempt has been made for the current age.

  What are you working on now?

  I’m really interested in how American culture continues to influence the Middle East, how it affects the traditional lives of people there, sometimes producing moments of beauty, sometimes moments of confrontation or even calamity. This was a theme in One Hundred and One Nights, and it is a theme that continues in several projects I’m currently working on. First, I’ve started a blog called Not Quite Right, which provides small insights and observations on the plethora of things in the Middle East that seem a little weird. But, more than just condemning Middle Eastern oddities, the blog tries to probe past the obvious into the reasons our American perspective finds such things weird. I’ve covered topics that range pretty widely, both geographically and in terms of subject matter, from Morocco to India, from strangely shaped pyramids to escargots.

  I’ve also got another novel in the works. It, too, deals with the confluence of American and Middle Eastern cultures, but it takes a bit of a different (and perhaps even more explosive) angle. This new novel, which I’m calling Taxi to Queen Alia, revolves around the assassination of an American diplomat and his wife outside the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan. The diplomat’s two children, boys of similar age to my own two children, who are now eight and eleven, have been seatbelted into the backseat of a taxi when their parents are killed. Somewhat oblivious to the noise of the shooting (like all boys their age, they’ve got their video games shielding their eyes), they are startled when the taxi driver panics, hits the accelerator, and flees the scene. This scenario provides the novel with the opportunity to explore how two American children, marooned in a foreign culture, react. It also lets me rejoin the idea of writing from the perspective of “the other”—this time telling the story from a point of view where the reader must empathize with several people who are arrested and blamed for the conspiracy behind the assassination.

  Questions and topics for discussion

  What images come to mind when you think of the Middle East, and Iraq in particular? To what extent has your knowledge about the region been informed by the media’s coverage of the current conflict? Does One Hundred and One Nights change the ways you think about Iraq and the people living there? If so, how?

  Abu Saheeh is a man caught between two worlds, strongly tied to his birth country, Iraq, but also greatly influenced by the time he spent in America. What actions does Abu Saheeh take that seem to be based on the Iraqi side of his personality? What actions are more in line with the American side?

  Discuss the relationship between Abu Saheeh and his brother, Yasin. What drives their competition and their hatred of each other? Do you think their behavior goes beyond sibling rivalry?

  Life in the town of Safwan, Iraq—both in One Hundred and One Nights and, for the most part, in reality—continues relatively normally, despite the toll taken by three major wars in three decades. How do you think your community would react to war if it were similarly unlucky?

  Layla’s fascination with America is shared by many young people in the Middle East, yet there is also a backlash against Western cultural, economic, and military imperialism. How does this tension play out in One Hundred and One Nights?

  Many of Abu Saheeh’s actions have unintended consequences. Do you think he could have foreseen them? Do you hold him responsible? Why or why not?

  Against his will, Abu Saheeh takes on Abd al-Rahim as an apprentice. In what ways does Abd al-Rahim support and even save Abu Saheeh, and in what ways does he work against him? Discuss how their relationship progresses over the course of the novel.

  Has a
nyone close to you experienced the tragic loss of a family member? If so, what similarities or differences did you notice between this person’s reactions and the ways Abu Saheeh deals with his grief?

  Abu Saheeh says that there is “an older and more respected reason for war than blind jihad” (page 275). Do you agree with him? Do you think that war is ever justifiable? Why or why not?

  Benjamin Buchholz served as a liaison for the U.S. Army in Safwan. How do you think his experiences shaped the novel? Does the story have more authority because of his time there?

  The novel’s title is an allusion to The Arabian Nights. What are the similarities and differences between the two texts? How is Layla like Scheherazade?

  Acclaim for Benjamin Buchholz’s

  One Hundred and One Nights

  “One Hundred and One Nights is a fearless and seductive piece of ventriloquism by a storyteller in full command of his craft. Written in spare, lyrical prose from the point of view of an Iraqi doctor haunted by violence, this first novel is a spike in the heart, a powerful testimony to the insanity of war and the undeniable demands of love.”

  — Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound and

  When She Woke

  “Benjamin Buchholz’s brilliant debut offers a powerful look at life in war-torn Iraq. Stocked with finely drawn characters and political intrigue, One Hundred and One Nights blows down the highway with all the furious momentum of an army convoy while delivering its real prize: a heart-wrenching story of love and loss and redemption.”