We discussed how we’d become army officers. He’d originally become an Iraqi policeman to escape his family’s rice farm south of Baghdad, near the banks of the Euphrates. He’d been at the police academy when the Invasion occurred.
Saif wanted to know about my childhood in California, refusing to believe I didn’t surf. He scoffed when I suggested the suburban dream was decaying, telling me that American-style villages were all the rage in the affluent parts of northern Iraq. When I said I’d spent a college semester in Ireland, he asked how the Irish had dealt with their diaspora.
“We have the same problem now,” he said. “All the minds have fled—the doctors, the politicians, the businessmen.”
The kettle beeped to indicate the water had boiled. The jundi platoon leader kept talking as he rose to his feet again nimbly, a physics problem in action. He scooped Earl Grey tea leaves into a small teapot and cracked open two cardamom pods into the pot.
Though he’d been raised Shi’a, his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Sunni, something that proved useful during the Surge, when the Iraqi government, desperate for diversity in the Shi’a-heavy army, offered bonuses and promotions to souls brave and stupid enough to make the jump.
“The ministries didn’t actually want us to switch,” he said, pouring the boiled water into the pot, shielding my view of the procedure as if it were some secret recipe. “They were under pressure from the American generals. The Shi’as controlled the national government for the first time, and wanted to keep control of the army and police. The Sunnis countered by creating the Sahwa gangs. So I used my grandfather’s name as my own, and was sent to officer school and got more pay. My trainers didn’t run me off, once they realized I was Shi’a like them.”
“Higher didn’t catch on?”
He loosed a cavalier smile. “I blamed the paperwork. It was one of my family names, so it wasn’t hard.”
Setting the teapot on top of the kettle, Saif resumed his seat across from me. “The leaves soak for ten minutes,” he said. “Proper chai must be dark, with lots of sugar. Nothing like the Iranians make. That’s not tea. It’s water.”
Pretending to understand what this brewing preference signified about Persian culture, I thought about how the only food or drink I could make was an orange cappuccino for my mom. I couldn’t even cook, unless instant ramen counted. This seemed like hard evidence for our earlier discussion about the decay of suburbia, but I wasn’t about to embarrass myself like that in front of a colleague.
“You’ve been quiet, Loo-tenant Porter.” His head tilted in consideration.
I sighed. For weeks—months, really—I’d needed nothing more than a sounding board to salvage my sanity. Will could do only so much from across the sea, and Marissa was still unresponsive. But I barely knew Saif. I wanted to trust him. I really did.
“Tough day. My platoon sergeant almost got stabbed over a dead goat? I don’t know. Maybe the heat’s getting to me. And I just found out that a friend killed himself back in the States.”
“Was he a soldier?”
“An officer. A young officer. Like us.”
Saif leaned over and put his hands on my shoulders. “I mourn with you. The martyrs who fall after are still warriors. You will see him again.”
I didn’t know how to explain that I’d never met Grant, so I just said thank you.
We swapped information on Dead Tooth. He hadn’t known about the shooting death of Azhar’s cousin, but said it didn’t surprise him. Excuses for stupidity were an insurgent’s calling card, he said. He seemed skeptical of Fat Mukhtar’s claim that Dead Tooth wasn’t welcome on the Sunni Strip, saying that one of their sources had seen him there the night before. He called the Sahwa leaders ali babas, arguing that they were just armed thugs who’d filled the power vacuum created after the Invasion. That may be true, I said, but they’re still our allies.
“Allies or partners?” he asked. “Big difference.”
“Insha’Allah?” I was growing fond of the many meanings this one Arabic phrase provided.
The sweat underneath his pits had gathered into pools, and he plucked small hairs from his mustache, hiding the freed hairs in his palm. Dark, puffy circles hung under his eyes like speed bags. Everyone touched by war seemed aged or corroded in some way. Saif wasn’t even thirty yet, but he had the calloused look of a man nearly twice as old.
“You hear anything about a new insurgent named the Cleric?” I asked. “Got a tip he was involved in the attack on my soldier last month.”
“The Cleric?” he said. Seconds passed in warm, heavy silence. I realized belatedly there was no fan in the room. “A bad joke. The Cleric is dead.”
Saif stood again and took four long steps to the chai. He placed two cubes of sugar in white teacups, pouring the tea from the pot over the sugar. He then stuck a small spoon in each cup and set a biscuit on each of the saucers.
“It’s hot,” he said. The chai was golden-brown, like wheat husk. I took a sip and bit my lip while my tongue simmered.
I was about to explain the tip, but Saif spoke first. “The Cleric was a powerful sheik in Ashuriyah some years ago, after the Collapse and al-Qaeda wars. He was a tribal leader, not a real cleric, but the townspeople called him that out of respect.”
“The guy on the arch?” I asked. “With the beard?”
Saif nodded. “Yes. Sheik Ahmed.”
“Ahmed.” I closed my eyes and bowed my head, remembering the name from a First Cav statement. Though our relationship with Karim the Prince’s father, Sheik Ahmed, and the Sunni Coalition of Ashuriyah have been negatively affected . . . “I’ve heard of him.”
“He died of tuberculosis before I came to town as a police cadet. We did security for the funeral procession because his family wouldn’t allow the Americans to come. He’d worked with them for many years, but it was his dying wish.”
“Because they killed his son.” The words tumbled out of my mouth like dominoes, and I took another sip of chai to mask my enthusiasm. Now cool enough to taste, it reminded me of warm Kool-Aid. “That’s what I heard,” I added. “An American kill team. Supposedly.”
Saif waved off the rumors of past civilian murders, claiming every Iraqi town and village had them. “Propaganda from the militias,” he called them. He said he’d heard of the sheik’s al-Qaeda son, though he didn’t recognize Karim’s name. Nor did he seem to recognize Chambers, laughing off the notion that he was the same man who’d frightened locals in 2006.
“Just as all Iraqis look the same to your eyes,” he said, “all Americans look the same to ours.”
“You never heard anything about a kill team?” I asked again. I hadn’t revealed that Chambers had admitted to being in Ashuriyah before, but something about Saif’s dismissive laughs made me think he knew more than he was letting on. “What about a guy called Shaba?”
Saif raised a bushy eyebrow. “Shaba.”
He set down his saucer and pushed himself up once more, his knees cracking. He went to the trunk in the corner, looking over his shoulder as he unlocked it, as if to ensure that I wasn’t memorizing the combination.
Everyone’s so goddamn paranoid around here, I thought.
He sifted through his trunk, stacking folders of passports and driver’s licenses in the corner. Confiscated from detainees, he said. He pulled out an envelope of photographs, flipping through them before raising one into the air.
He handed the photo over. An American soldier’s plate carrier, a thinner, lighter version of our body armor, was covered in blood and dirt and set against a house wall. Much of the photo was a void of black, and the time stamp read, APRIL 5, 2006, 4:25 A.M. The nametape was missing, but the rank was not: the barbed chevrons of a staff sergeant pierced through the dark.
“My police mentor gave me that, when the army assigned me back here,” Saif said. “Said I needed to remember what Ashuriyah really was.”
“The hell?” I asked, shaking the photograph as if an answer would fall out of it.
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“Let me remember.” He sighed, returning the piles of evidence to his trunk. “The older I get, the more my mind turns into that of a Marsh Arab.”
Yes, of course he’d heard the legend of Shaba. Shaba was the man who could travel by shadows at night to kill terrorists but handed out money in the day to the townspeople. His mentor had been on duty the night Shaba disappeared and had taken the photograph I now held. After a long firefight near the stone arch, they’d rushed to the scene, finding only the bloody plate carrier and shell casings. Hundreds and hundreds of shell casings, Saif said, his mentor had always stressed that. They looked for Shaba for many months but never found him.
He’d first learned of Shaba at the sheik’s funeral. The townspeople couldn’t shut up about him. No one knew what had happened, not exactly, but there were theories.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Just crazy gossip,” Saif said. “Some said Jaish al-Mahdi killed him because he’d joined al-Qaeda. Others said the opposite. He was out there by himself that night, that’s certain. No one knew why, not even the Americans. So strange.”
As for the sheik, he’d had many relatives, but his wife had been dead for years, and there was only one living child, a daughter. And no one had seen her for some time. Not until the funeral.
A jewel, Saif said. Even from afar, even covered in her mourning burqa. She’d caused a minor scandal by refusing to wear a face cover, opting instead for a translucent veil. But she didn’t seem bothered by the reactions it provoked. She walked, Saif said, like royalty, snubbing everyone she passed on the street, looking down on everyone else even when they were on level ground. She’d come to Ashuriyah with her husband and two little boys. The townspeople said the youngest looked so much like his father, but the eldest had a different appearance, Iraqi coloring with no Iraqi features.
Some of the townspeople said an American soldier had raped the shiek’s daughter during the sectarian wars. Others said the dead sheik had promised her to an Anbar doctor. Still others said she’d been taken as a wife by al-Qaeda, and when her husband was killed by the Americans, she’d gone to prison and given birth there.
But most people, Saif said, simply didn’t want to talk about it. They hushed the others and told them to respect the memory of the sheik. It was funny, he said, even though he’d returned to Ashuriyah many months before, he hadn’t thought about these names and people for years.
“They are the past,” Saif said. “It is the future I’m interested in.”
“The daughter?” I asked, trying to contain my interest behind a swig of chai. “She alive?”
He shrugged. “Ask the cleaning woman. She used to be one of Sheik Ahmed’s servants.”
My mind reeled. Had Alia meant to mislead me? Had I asked the wrong questions? Had she been conspiring with Chambers this entire time? She’d said that Shaba had “died like anyone else in Iraq. By the gun.” What exactly had that meant? It seemed like the more I learned, the less I understood.
“What troubles you, Loo-tenant Porter?” Saif asked.
There was no more chai in my glass to drink, so I sucked on what remained of the sugar cube. I wanted to tell him everything, how everything was troubling me, the past, the present, and the future. But I kept down my half-drawn story of love, war, and consequence. I looked back at Saif. He’d resumed sitting on his knees. He was a thick, sweaty, balding man with brown skin from here. I was a thin, sweaty baby face with white skin from there. He was still a them. I was still an us. No amount of chai could change that.
“Nothing,” I said. “Think I could hang on to this for a while?”
His eyes followed the photograph in my hand. He seemed to be in deliberation with himself, though I couldn’t tell why.
“A gift,” he said with a tight smile. “We are partners now.”
I nodded and handed him my glass and saucer. After a handshake and arm clasp, I left the room, stealing a glimpse of him locking his trunk behind me. Later I pulled out my own trunk and stuck the photograph into the Lawrence of Arabia book with the sworn statements. It seemed the thing to do with a bloody vest.
22
* * *
Dawn found me on the back patio listening to the call of the muezzin, waiting for Alia.
Rise, rise and offer the Fajr prayer to Allah, the muezzin called. I pulled out a cigarette and lit up, holding smoke in my chest as long as I could, exhaling slowly.
I hadn’t slept. Because of Saif. Or Alia. Or Marissa, who’d finally written back with three paragraphs about a life I no longer understood. Or because Alphabet was less clear in my memory with every new day. Or because of Grant. Or Dead Tooth. Or Chambers, who, other than detesting me and possibly being a bloodthirsty murderer of innocents, had kept the platoon together during the previous month like a goddamn professional. Or because I’d returned from my chat with Saif to find Ibrahim waiting to tell me that the Muslim jokes had started in our platoon, and could I make the soldiers stop? Or because of Rios’ bloody vest. Or because I still needed to call my mom, who wanted to hear my voice so much she was pretending to be fine. Or because of the clerics, both the one who’d killed Alphabet and the one whose spirit watched over Ashuriyah from the stone arch.
A burning oil refinery far in the west licked the horizon, its orange flame hovering like a torch. Slightly nearer, a sea-green minaret lacquered in grime shot up out of Sumerian dust. It was mounted with speakers that carried the call to prayer throughout the Shi’a slums. There were rumors that during the sectarian wars it carried calls to battle instead. Calls to battle the heretic Sunnis. Calls to battle the foreign infidels. Calls to kill and calls to die and calls to martyr.
When Will and I were kids, we’d hated going to church. We’d preferred talking to God on our own terms. And as children of a half-Catholic, half-Presbyterian divorce, we were able to. Catholicism provided pomp and ceremony, which had its place, but the Presbyterians promised access, and who didn’t have something to yell into the ear of God?
Will always had plenty to say. He didn’t think I could hear him at night, when he cried and prayed underneath his pillow, but I could. The wall between our rooms wasn’t that thick. He’d burned with righteousness his entire life, something that didn’t go over too well in high school, not with teachers, coaches, or girls. He’d had it tougher than I did growing up, something I never gave him credit for, because acknowledging it would only have made it worse. I’d always managed to fit in, even when I wanted to be different.
He went to West Point because that’s what people like him did. I went to regular college because that’s what people like me did.
We both went to war because that’s what people like us did for countries like ours.
I considered the minaret and thought about our grandma. The spring before she’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she attended my middle school’s poetry recital. She’d come to California some six decades earlier as a young girl, part of the great Okie migration. She never left, valuing home and family over everything but the Presbyterian Church, pocketing sugar packets and clean napkins at every restaurant we went to.
Will had just gotten into West Point, and even though 9/11 was still three years away, she held on to him in the audience as if it were December 1941 all over again. He sat there like a raw-headed figurine while our grandpa made sure everyone in a ten-row radius knew that they were sitting near the future chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
I stumbled through the four stanzas of “The Road Not Taken,” which somehow made it more endearing to the audience.
“I’m very proud of you both,” our grandma said after the recital. After she passed away, I learned her first fiancé had been mowed down by Japanese machine guns on a tiny island called Guadalcanal. “But, William, Jackson, too much introspection is bad for the soul. All things in moderation. Pray, then poet, then pray again. You come from devout stock. Never forget that.”
I tried to remember, but some days were harder than others.
; Back in Iraq, I held up my cigarette and blotted out the minaret. A curl of smoke drifted from it, and I narrowed my eyes until the minaret fell out of focus and looked like a burning Twin Tower on a television screen. That day was a long time ago, now.
Alia would be in at eight, I remembered. As I checked my watch, a small rock skipped by my feet.
“Molazim!” I heard a voice trying to whisper and shout at once. My eyes scanned the patio, but no one was one there. “Molazim Ja-ak!”
It was coming from the other side of the perimeter gate, to the north. I charged my rifle and walked that way, to where Chambers had dumped the prizefighting scorpion a couple of months before. The chain-link fence was covered with a semitransparent camo screen. Squinting through the zig hooks and the screen, I saw an outline of a frail man with a hunch in his back.
“Haitham,” I said, letting my rifle sling go slack. “How’s life on the lam?”
His response was irritated and incomprehensible. I’d no idea how he’d gotten through the outer perimeter of blast walls or avoided the American eyes on the roof—so much for our improved security, I thought. His soccer jersey was caked in dirt. Grabbing the walkie-talkie clipped to my belt, I considered my options.
“Snoooop,” Haitham sounded out. He pointed at me. “Molazim.” He pointed at the outpost. “Snoooop.” Then he crossed his forearms into an X, something I took to mean he’d only speak to us.
“CP,” I said into the walkie-talkie. This is Hotspur Six. Wake Snoop and send him to the back patio. Got some paperwork for him to look over.”
We waited in silence, the early morning slashing our faces with light. I didn’t mind being alone, but hated sharing quiet with other people, something about the way it made my brain roll around. I began whistling a jingle from a Disney musical about a group of 1890s newsboys on strike, something Haitham mimicked. Is he making fun of me, I thought, or have I found a fellow fanboy? As a kid I’d memorized the matching dance steps, but before I could test the Iraqi on the routine, the metal door of the outpost clanged open. I whistled again, shrill and without melody, to get Snoop’s attention.
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