Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  She found the cultural-sensitivity training by turns maddening and intriguing: there was enough of both to make her pay attention. She remembers an Arabic word explicated by the public affairs officer; Haider just used it, inshallah, meaning “God willing.” A word employed in the same way an English speaker might say “I hope so” or “maybe” or “only time will tell.”

  The proof was in the language, the public affairs officer claimed; Arabs literally thought nothing was left to chance because in their minds there was no such thing, all events already divinely predetermined. This doubtful insight came as a bullet on the final PowerPoint slide, followed by “A firm grasp on the Arab mind will be your key to winning Arab hearts.”

  The sentiment sounded recycled and hokey, if vaguely plausible. Even more so when compared with the cultural analyses proffered by some of the soldiers in the audience, including the chaplain’s assistant, a nebbish altar-boy type who was usually gentle but who would rant with appalling vehemence about “ragheads,” denouncing Islam as a “barbaric and savage religion” to anyone in the battalion who would listen.

  Now, as she looks out across the parched and brittle fields and the poisoned water going stagnant in the canal, the smoldering trash pits giving off a dusty orange smoke probably laden with heavy metals, she thinks that when it came down to it, the public affairs officer understood next to nothing about this place or these people. How could he have? He himself admitted he’d never been here. He took his knowledge of Iraq from briefings and books, which weren’t useless—his class did teach her plenty she wouldn’t have learned otherwise—but there was nothing in what he said about the Sunni–Shia rift or the basic Islamic customs that even hinted at what it was like to live in a mud hut by the side of the highway, to give birth to stillborn monsters with twisted bones and exposed spinal cords, all the while knowing how comfortably safe the good life could be in other parts of the world where lived other, more fortunate people, because television is everywhere, even here, and you wouldn’t have to watch much to realize this place you had chanced to be born into is terrible. That it exists as if a nebulous and malevolent force has been directed expressly against it. You couldn’t explain that by learning the fucking Five Pillars of Islam.

  She watches McGinnis return down the highway after running off the last of the kids, who are fearless, lighthearted, and not much bothered by a seemingly crazed foreign soldier screaming at them to get the hell away. What they have missed in worldliness, they make up for in courage; at ten years old they have more balls than the average American badass she’s known. Crump, who aspires to badassness, called them dirt kids, and, while that name lacks any human kindness, there’s something more vital in those two words than in anything the public affairs officer said during his hour-long lecture. There’s nothing abstract about dirt kids. Which makes it a much safer idea than the Arab mind. More than childish insults, pleasant-sounding abstractions are the thing to get large numbers of people killed.

  McGinnis arrives at the truck breathing hard, sweating. She passes him a canteen, and he takes a swallow, leans back, and pours some water over his hair, casting it off like a wet dog.

  “You all right, Sarge?” Crump says. “Never really seen you go ape like that.”

  “For their own good,” McGinnis says, still panting a little. “We’re a great big target, sitting here. Waiting on whatever comes down the highway. Let’s say the shit does pop off. We start taking incoming. Maybe a suicide car bomber blows through the concertina. I don’t know about you. I’d rather not have a bunch of dead kids on my conscience.”

  Crump says nothing but chews his lip, tilting his head thuggishly.

  “They come back, you tell them to get lost. The word for that is ishta.”

  7

  ABU AL-HOOL: THE FORBIDDEN TIME

  3 Days Before

  IRAQ (FALLUJAH; TRIANGLETOWN)

  When I was twelve, Father took the entire family to London. It was my first trip to Europe, just another business junket for Father, but on behalf of his children, he seized every opportunity to make it an education; that was the kind of man he was, never abiding a wasted minute. Unlike most of his peers, he didn’t follow the cricket matches. His dinner table was no place for diversionary chatter but a venue to instruct us in political philosophy, literature, the fine arts, whatever he’d chosen as the day’s subject.

  In London he behaved no differently, rushing us hither and yon like some combination of dapper patriarch and mad tour guide. We saw Parliament, the British Museum, the Tower and the crown jewels, Buckingham Palace, and many more attractions, but the one that made the most vivid impression on me was Westminster Abbey. The statuary cluttering the walls shocked my sensibilities; I’d been taught graven imagery did not belong in sanctified places. I was fascinated by the tombs of the English kings, the reliquaries that compelled me with a boy’s morbidity to wonder at what their regal, mummified bodies must’ve looked like inside those crypts after so many undisturbed centuries.

  I moved through the nave and into the quire, exploring every nook of this monument that rose up toward heaven and our striving and common pain. The place awakened something in me. For the first time in my life—at least, the first that I can recollect—I had a physical sense of the divine, the feeling welling in my chest until I thought I would cry tears of joy. I climbed the flight of stairs to the Lady Chapel, where I was struck motionless by the delicate beauty of the space, the fan-vaulted roof, the stained glass, the misericords carved in oak, upon which the monks had leaned during especially long services. A placard explained that these upturned seats were normally kept out of sight and so were free to be engraved with all manner of nonreligious subjects: male and female nudes, a fox riding a goose, winged dragons, foliated corbels, mermaids, boars and squirrels, malignant-looking apes, devils, and a monster chained to a stump.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  I turned and saw her—at first I’d not even registered that she was speaking to me—a peripheral voice, distracting from my contemplation of the carvings, a woman in late middle age wearing a docent’s uniform. Helped along by my boyish imagination, I thought she looked a little like the queen: thin bony nose, brown hair tightly curled, pinned under her hat.

  “Very beautiful,” I said. “I like it here.”

  “That’s wonderful, darling. Why don’t you run along and find your parents now.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  My soaring religious feeling, my affinity for all mankind, soured into confusion and soon annoyance at being bossed around by yet another adult. It wasn’t until much later that I thought there might’ve been something else at play in the docent’s suggestion for me to find my parents. I wondered if she would’ve said the same thing to any other twelve-year-old boy who lingered too long in the Lady Chapel. Or if the mere sight of me, brown skinned and unaccompanied, had offended her in a way that even she was barely conscious of. I couldn’t say. I didn’t have much experience with overt racism. Father had warned us about the skinheads, a new British youth cult that had sprung up, but we’d not seen one. I remember sort of wanting to, the idea of it so bizarre; the British and French expats who lived near us in Maadi were friendly with Mother and Father, even deferential to their political connections, wealth, and education. One white couple or other came over for drinks almost nightly, and their children always treated us as equals. I suppose I was young enough then to be forgiven for believing that the way people speak to you and treat you accords at all with how they think of you.

  Today, for the first time in years, I thought of that trip to the abbey. Among other things, it made me realize just how seldom I’ve felt the presence of God, an indecorous thing for a mujahid to admit, and not to say I’m an unbeliever. There’ve been times when I’ve been moved to holy ecstasy, glimpsing in my mind’s eye the knotty heart of the infinite, mystery of mysteries, beyond what we’re given to observe with these meager organs of flesh.

  Afforded little more f
reedom than a prisoner, holed up a month now in this Fallujah mosque, waiting for our new emir to decide the time is right to begin operations in Baghdad, I have had ample occasion to drift through the eddies of the past. There’s not much else to do: I spend most of my day in the prayer hall. Adjoining it is a large storage room that Dr. Walid has made his own; before he appropriated this dim and mostly empty space, it had been used to store firewood, a jumble of rolled-up moldy old carpets, spare wire, a few hand tools, and a dusty palanquin, looking out of place amid shelves of fluorescent light tubes and tins of scouring powder. Showing us around after our arrival, the imam (to whom we’d been referred by the Haditha physician) had informed us that the palanquin—cedar, gilded in silver arabesques—was once carried in processions during colonial days, before its use fell out of favor with the people, who judged it an idolatrous pretension.

  In this storehouse Dr. Walid has set up a makeshift television studio. Apparently he had designs to do this all along. But until we arrived and he unpacked his things, I’d had no idea he’d purchased so much video equipment in Aleppo. The crush-proof cases that I’d assumed contained sensitive detonators or perhaps radios instead held, in black eggshell foam: a camera, a computer, a boom microphone and audio recorder, power cords, cables, battery packs, a tripod, and a 300-watt lamp with a lens like a crystal goblet, the light hot enough to make one sweat in its beam.

  He’s put the apparatus to much use already, enacting his latest scripts. The one he produced today was much like the others he’s insisted on filming over the past weeks: on his orders, the brothers gathered in the storage room in front of a black felt backdrop, upon which was hung our black flag, black on black; and so too were the brothers dressed for battle in black and olive drab, with black and red and white keffiyehs, ammo belts draped across their chests, rifles and rocket launchers held at the ready, faces hidden; only our emir, fearless and self-admiring as ever, allowed himself to appear on camera unmasked. None but a fool would dispute that he wants fame for himself as much as our cause.

  For my own part, I gently refuse to participate in any of the videos, lingering off-scene with Abu Hafs, who works the camera. With his youthfulness and fortunate upbringing, he is already very familiar with its use. This new generation can operate a computer more proficiently than a rifle, and the Yemeni is no exception, demonstrating quite the aptitude for all of Dr. Walid’s new devices. To my chagrin, this duty has once again pulled the boy away from my tutelage and back under the doctor’s wing; Abu Hafs and I speak seldom these days. When not filming, he’s engrossed in editing and reproducing the material, and as often as he can, makes trips to the bazaar with some of the other brothers to buy blank tapes and supplies. He’s not mentioned taking a wife since our conversation in Haditha, but I imagine him searching for that in the bazaar, too. Making eyes at the vendors’ daughters. Casually letting on that he’s a mujahid, then going on to make inquiries at another electronics stall—the foolishness of it! Talking about his quest for a satellite hookup that will allow him to send videos directly to the World Wide Web, without the need for couriers. He’s already acquired a diesel generator, which even I will admit is becoming more useful with each passing day, power failures and brownouts rippling through the city with increasing frequency.

  I find myself vexed by the boy and his new role as Dr. Walid’s technically minded factotum. Although Abu Hafs seems to relish these duties and is obviously skilled in performing them, it’s not skill alone that’s won him the part as chief engineer in this peculiar cinematic process. Further isolating a potential protégé from my influence has undoubtedly factored into the doctor’s decision to assign him the camera.

  “How does it look, Father of Lion Cubs?”

  Abu Hafs peered through the viewfinder. “Father of Friendliness isn’t quite in the frame. Everyone needs to get in tighter.”

  The brothers grumbled but obeyed, shuffling closer together, cracking jokes about the smell. Here the front row knelt, there a tall and a short one switched places, the mass of men sweating under their costumes and combat loads in the heat of the film lamp, the stuffy room, a warm spring day in Iraq.

  Abu Hafs made a few last adjustments. “I think that’s good,” he said, ducking from behind the camera. “We’re ready, Emir.”

  “Very well,” Dr. Walid said. “I’ll begin.” He lifted the microphone to his mouth. “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, I wish to speak to the Americans. This talk of mine is for you and will concern the best way to avoid another Manhattan.”

  Lounging in the palanquin like a colonial overseer from days not so long past, yawning discreetly, I took in the performance. The doctor claimed to speak directly to the Americans but of course that was a sham, nothing more than a rhetorical frame: his words not intended for the enemy but rather his supporters and those among the faithful who might heed his call to travel to Iraq. By ostensibly addressing the Americans, however, he meant to show his benevolence, that even as he fought to expel the kuffar, he was gracious enough to explain to them why.

  I’d crossed out this particular passage from his script but was not surprised he’d added it back in. I followed along as he delivered the rest of the speech from memory; I knew it almost as well. Earlier in the day he’d asked me to proofread it.

  “Do me the honor,” he’d said, venturing out from his dim dark cave of the storeroom to find me in my customary place in the mosque’s prayer hall. I feigned no happiness at seeing him, knowing it could only mean some new imposition. He was too prepossessed with his work, however, to mind my surliness. He handed over the two-page document. “After all,” he added, “you are the poet among us.”

  I grunted skeptically. “I haven’t written a verse in years.”

  “Just take a look. If my phrasing is awkward, rework it. If an obvious point has escaped me, add it in. It’s not like you’ve never done this for me before.”

  “When do you need it?” I asked, making no effort to hide my exasperation.

  “This afternoon. I’d like it if you’d appear on the tape—”

  “I’m afraid you’ll want younger brothers to stand to your left and right. You and I aren’t nearly as fearsome as we once were. There’s too much food here to eat. Too few mountains to climb. I have to say, this is the most luxurious jihad I’ve ever fought in.”

  “You’ve done nothing lately but mope around and scribble in that book of yours. Maybe I should take more of an interest in it,” he said, eyes on my journal. “I might find something there to explain how you’ve come by this sulky, womanish mood.”

  I spoke in a strident whisper, growing heated myself but not wanting to disturb the peace in the hypostyle hall, where the high domed ceiling amplified every sound and the imam was always on the prowl, looking for infractions.

  “You haven’t heard any of the brothers complaining behind your back? No? Well, you should pay closer attention. They came here to make jihad, but they’re making videotapes—videotapes. They’re amateurish drivel. We are fighters, Walid, not propagandists.”

  I was exaggerating to make a point; though the doctor had still not found a suitable opportunity for us to join the war, of course we were doing more than filming videos. He had sent out daily recon patrols, groups of two traveling the highway unarmed, studying convoy routes, troop numbers, tactics at the checkpoints. This kind of meticulous groundwork is necessary, but it’s hard to convince the average soldier that a month of it is time well spent. The fruits of Dr. Walid’s propagandistic efforts were even more meager: he’d sent copies of his work to every major news outlet operating in the Gulf and some beyond, but to my knowledge not a single frame of a single tape has aired thus far, nor has a single drop of ink been spilled by any journalist writing about us.

  “You may be right, Father of Dread,” he admitted, ego clearly wounded, a glint of anger in his voice. “The tapes may be no good. But we must crawl before we can walk. The world has changed since we started on this path. You’re sh
ortsighted not to see it.”

  Yesterday was a brief but heavy downpour, the kind of rain in which the last drops, fat and smelling of ozone, fall from a clear blue sky. Afterward the sun baked the earth, and the rising moisture steamed the air, complicating our restlessness. The brothers caviled at Dr. Walid’s orders to clean weapons after the rain, and it didn’t take any special clairvoyance to realize things would be coming to a head soon. What I’d told him was true: The brothers have tired of inaction. They hadn’t come all the way to Iraq to wait out the war in a mosque.

  Before evening prayers, the imam caught Abu Annas smoking outside the ablution room. A stupid infraction, trifling but at the same time egregious; the diminutive old cleric hectored Abu into the courtyard, forcing the larger man to retreat before his fury.

  “You dog!” he cried. “You dirty lout!”

  None of us should be smoking. It would be improper for a man to enter this place reeking of spicy food, let alone tobacco, but some of the brothers, in our present period of lassitude, have fallen back on old habits. Discipline has lapsed; the cigarette smoking is only the most blatant and easily detectable manifestation. I have no doubt some of the men are engaged in all manner of other vices. Just the other day I overhead two discussing rumors of a brothel in the city.