The Lover

by Laury Silvers

  She looked down at this little girl who seemed to know her well, well enough to come to her with a problem this heavy, and yet she never bothered to ask the girl her name either.

  She said, “Sweet one, Imam Ibrahim is not in this alleyway. He doesn’t come here.”

  She turned around and bent over to open a wooden box sitting next to long drum nestled in the corner and pulled out her spare wrap and handed it to the girl, “Here, get up, use this.”

  The girl rose and wound the wrap around her like one of the rich girls, loosely covering her whole body and head, trying to hide her face with one edge. She was only short a niqab to complete the costume. Zaytuna thought the little girl looked ridiculous. But at least she was willing to head out dressed this way, warily following Zaytuna out into the courtyard through the twisting, narrow passageway that led around and past the houses that fronted the alley.

  Without speaking, they walked past the one-story houses not far from the Shuniziyya cemetery in Tutha. They were made of sun-dried yellow mud blocks with roofs of thick reeds packed with mud and dried to fill the gaps. Some were even dug down into the cool earth a bit, but none offered more than one room for each family on a small central courtyard, like hers, or sometimes not even that. Mainly, they were just rooms built onto rooms like a sprawling house of cards, with narrow passageways turning corner upon corner leading in between the houses from only slightly wider main alleyways. Everyone living up against each other. Everyone in each other’s business. But better here than inside the walls of the cemetery itself where the poorer of the poor did the best they could against the elements, even if it meant burrowing a den into its thick walls to sleep.

  Zaytuna knew this girl came from someplace like this. She spoke like a Baghdadi street urchin, with a mix of sounds culled from the immigrants who kept pouring into the city from every corner of the caliphate. Muslims, Jews, Christians, Arabs, Persians, Abyssinians, Nubians, and Zanjis, Turkic peoples, even from as far east as China and south as Sind. Most free, some enslaved. Despite an inquisition, the civil wars, the sieges, the floods, and even the caliph moving the capital to Samarra, people kept coming. Labourers, artisans, scribes, hopeful young religious scholars. They thought the opportunities were here. Plenty had made good, it’s true. Some made their wealth here. Others lived well enough and the enslaved lived as well as their masters permitted. But as sure as God is the Withholder, not just the Open-Handed, many never found a way and ended up sleeping rough, picking through road sweepings, begging, or cutting reeds and collecting dung to sell for fuel, if they were lucky.

  Here in Baghdad, this girl’s parents probably found themselves in worse poverty than wherever they came from. And here is where they likely indentured their daughter to work so she’d at least eat and have a safe place to sleep. If she were lucky. More likely she’d be beaten by the women and ready to hand for the boys and men of the household. Zaytuna looked down at the girl, hand in hers, orphaned whether her parents are dead or alive and wondered if she had anyone to love her.

  The street narrowed quickly into a pathway where they could no longer walk side by side and the girl fell behind her and grabbed onto a bit of Zaytuna’s long qamis, tugging at it as they walked the last few steps to the small, busy square. The square led out onto four small streets, like Zaytuna’s, and one, directly ahead of them, leading down to the canal. Small stalls were set up in front of one or two room homes open to the square, this one selling stews and bread to take home, that one dry goods, another tinder and fuel for cooking, dung cakes, reeds, thorn bush, and dried bones stacked in neat piles. While some people rushed through the square getting to where they were going, others lingered at the stalls, haggling, chatting with friends. A couple of men sat on stools outside one stall, a tavern barely masquerading as a shop selling fruited drinks and mild cider, one of them openly drunk. Beggars lined the footpath on the far side, winding down towards the banks of the Isa canal past the lean-tos and shanty shacks. People kept building there even though floods had washed them away before. Zaytuna hated that they returned to build in the same place time and time again, but where else did they have? The little girl reached up to take her hand again and they began to weave their way through the square, heading toward the canal.

  Zaytuna heard deep laughter coming across the square and felt the girl flinch at the sound of it. It was Salman, but Zaytuna didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of noticing and having to greet him. Then she heard him call out, “Assalamu alaykum, Zaytuna! Ya Layla, sweet one! Where is your friend Zayd? He missed his lesson yesterday!”

  The girl nearly jumped hearing him calling her name and pulled at Zaytuna’s hand to hurry. Zaytuna looked down at her pleading face. So, her name was Layla. She said to her, “Don’t worry, I don’t like him, either.”

  Zaytuna looked over at him now. Salman, like always, was sitting on his stool in front of his drinks stall with one of his cronies. He was smiling at them, smiling like always. She thought, What are you smiling about? One of your boys is dead and I’m not going to be the one who tells you.

  Without stopping, she kept walking with Layla down to the canal to gently wash her shawl and let her unravel her tale.

  Chapter Two

  Ammar told the night watchman to stand behind him as he waited outside the gate to Imam Ibrahim’s home. A young man opened the small door inset into the large arched double gate only partway. He looked at Ammar without expression and asked without a hint of propriety, “Police?” Ammar nodded. The young man stepped back to hold the door open completely, saying, “The boy, Zayd, is in the inner courtyard.”

  Ammar took in the young man who opened the gated door. The cursed instincts that got him forcibly transferred into the Baghdad police from the Infantry were awake and informing him on everything he saw. The young man was obviously not a servant. Ammar pegged him as one of Imam Ibrahim’s students, likely nineteen or twenty years old. A very wealthy student at that, going by his attire. What’s that, washa silk he’s wearing? Imam Ibrahim did not have that kind of coin, although he’d been told, the scholar was aspiring to it. The young man’s casual display of wealth, his alabaster skin and nearly blond, red curls tumbling out from underneath his snow-white turban, suggested that this boy’s mother was or had been a high-priced slave. He thought, she was probably enslaved by the Muslims right out of Byzantine slavery—maybe to a governor, had to be someone who could afford her—taken by them first from somewhere much farther West. No doubt skilled in poetry and music, too. She would be as good as a wife to her master with her child born a free Muslim. Now look at this rich, free boy. No doubt thinks himself quite the thing. Ammar wouldn’t call him a man; all that flash only made him look like a mother’s son. And those long curls. The scholars liked to have a close-cropped head; he wondered what they made of him. At least Imam Ibrahim made him answer the door, as he should.

  The student ushered Ammar through the gate opening set to one side of the property. There was a narrow garden fronting the house with fruit trees set out in a line. An apricot tree was heavy with ripe fruit on his right, near to the gate door, and two apples and pomegranate were just filling out on the other side. He saw a wide passageway just around the corner of the house beyond the apple trees where the second floor was built over to a shared wall with the neighbours. He could make out a narrow well at the opening of the passageway. No water carriers needed here to fill a house cistern. The kitchen door is likely back there too. The young man walked ahead of him and opened the door to the house itself. A wide, low couch was set out by it. Maybe the Imam held classes outside in cooler weather. It had the morning shade now, but not for long. He stepped down two steps into the dim light and cool of the house, grateful to be out of the morning heat.

  Ammar had deliberately left the local night watchman standing in the street. The watchman had reported that a boy as big as a man had run up to him as he was patrolling that night to say that one of the servants of his household had died in an accident. The bo
y was crying such that the watchman could barely make out what he was saying. Ammar was given the case when he arrived for work first thing. He had to go searching for the watchman, and found him snoring in an alcove while waiting for him. Ammar gave the man a kick and he pulled himself up heavily to take Ammar back to the house. The child’s dead body would have to have been there for at least part of the night and now the sun was rising rapidly. This would have to be done quickly before the body started to stink. He would have felt bad for the watchman, as tired as he was, but the man still found energy to stand at the gate posturing, tossing his stave between his hands. He looked as belligerent as any hung-over mean drinker of wine.

  Despite his irritation with the watchman’s bluster, even in his exhaustion, Ammar understood this type. He had to admit he was one. He’d prefer to let his sword do all the talking like the old days. And, no doubt about it, his sword had turned out to be a fine communicator in many of the cases he’d had to solve so far. Mainly he dealt with street crime that ended in fatal stabbings and beatings. But these jobs dealing with the rich were about close observations, talk, and, most importantly, social negotiation.

  Observe he could do. It was his observations about a murder in his garrison that had got him transferred against his will from the Frontier Infantry to The Grave Crimes Section with the Baghdadi Police for a fraction of the pay. He wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  Talk he could also do. For a short and wiry man with a bull of a face, he could charm even a careful woman into a compromising flirtation.

  Social negotiations with the wealthy were harder. He hated them all with their open greed or worse, dressed up greed as piety, whether they be Sunni scholars like this one or—and his mother would slap him hard across the face to hear him say it—Shia administrators and viziers sucking at the tit of the caliphate. He hadn’t fought against the Byzantines on the Frontier for the Caliph al-Muktafi or any of the other pretenders to the throne; he fought for Islam. He fought for the Prophet, his blessed family, and the Shia Imams, the rightful inheritors of the Prophetic line. To him, they were the true rulers of the people.

  He’d objected to being told he could not wear his cuirass on these jobs. His sergeant had explained to him that when the police showed up in battlewear at the estates of the wealthy, it only meant one thing: they had displeased the Caliph and they were going to rot in the dungeons. All the more reason to wear it, he thought, but did not say. Objecting instead, “It’s just a leather cuirass, not chain mail.”

  His sergeant, tired of him already, replied, “Just the black turban. No armour.”

  There was no mention of his sword, thank God. It fought for him as if it were a part of his own body. He felt the hilt in his hand, straightened its strap crossing his chest, and readied himself to deal with the likes of Imam Ibrahim.

  The Mother’s Son left him in the reception hall and went through a wide doorway into a room to Ammar’s right. Ammar couldn’t see into the room from where he was standing, but he could see straight through to the courtyard from there. The watchman told him the dead boy was out there, but he could not yet see the boy from where he stood. He could hear that fop of a student say, “Excuse me, Imam, The police are here and would like to speak to you.” He could hear Imam Ibrahim reply, but not the words despite the quiet of the house.

  Ammar examined the high ceiling and the stuccoed niche with its carved designs. Stylized vines and flowers were interlaced, framing the words, There Is No God But God and Muhammad is God’s Messenger. He saw it was delicate work, expensive and understandably confined to just a niche in the wall. It was a tasteful choice. He could have paid less to have pre-moulded and carved blocks of calligraphy inset into the wall surrounding the room, but it would have looked exactly like what he paid for it. This hadith scholar with only a few paying students and a middling patron at court was indeed hoping to move up.

  How ironic that the Imam spent his life devoted to the study of accounts of what Muhammad had said or done since Muhammad and his blessed family had lived and ruled from a state of extreme poverty. Ammar’s sergeant had told him no Hanbali mosque would allow Imam Ibrahim a pillar to teach from because of the way he sucked up at court. He could only imagine that this man’s beloved Ahmed ibn Hanbal, would not be pleased knowing how he and his like clambered for caliphal influence and money after he and so many others had been persecuted by them during the inquisition some sixty years earlier. No wonder Imam Ibrahim chose to live around the caliphal taxmen and secretaries rather than one of the neighbourhoods known for its hadith scholars.

  White Turban returned and led Ammar through the main reception hall out into the central courtyard. Ammar held his hand up to cover his eyes as he stepped out of the dark hall into the morning light hitting the courtyard and saw the small body lying face down on the far side, uncovered. He felt the boy lying there like a punch in the gut. Dead bodies were daily business for him now, and he’d buried his unfortunate share on the battlefield. But he’d never gotten used to the bodies of women and children. Not then, when the Byzantine troops would slaughter the families of soldiers in the camp towns or in the villages on the borderlands, and not now, policing in Baghdad. Every body of theirs was a tragedy to him. He felt a hollow loneliness that no one would ever know these unimaginable losses but the ones who were closest to the dead and those who leant their mourning to the families’ grief.

  All he could think was how few feel for a loss of life that does not touch their own. These kinds of thoughts always wove their way through him to the spectre of Karbala. His love for the Prophet’s family, and the bitterness he felt over the theft of their lives and noble rule in those years of civil war after Muhammad’s death, overtook him in these moments. Although the sun was not yet on this boy and the dirt in the courtyard was packed as hard as rock, to him it was as if that day at Karbala were before him and this boy were Qasim, the son of Hasan, slaughtered and trampled by horses. He felt the thick of that day’s blistering heat bearing down on the gentle child and imagined the dry plain’s dust rising around the boy’s body like a halo radiating the expansive tragedy of his lost life. Ammar tried to pull himself back in from the panoramic scope of the massacre of the Prophet’s own family at the hands of other Muslims, greedy for power, religious and political, as if he were dragging a wailing woman from the body, so he could attend to the boy sensibly. He wanted to fall to his knees in grief, but he remained standing, his face impassive, breathing, saying inwardly, Boy, may you meet Husayn, son of Ali, and Qasim, son of Hasan, and may you take your place near them in the next world.

  He forced himself to look around the area where the boy’s body lay, to note everything around him. Keeping to the details calmed him. From here it seemed like they hadn’t touched anything. He observed his surroundings. There were two stories, but the courtyard was not large enough to allow for the second floor to be cantilevered over it. Low couches were laid out along the walls and small tables set here and there. They’d have shade along one wall or another except midday here. But it’d still get cursedly hot. At least the courtyard was pounded earth, not brick radiating heat. At the centre of the courtyard, there was an ornamental basin of water that a servant would have to fill from the hand pumped well. The basin was surrounded by pots filled with vining and flowering plants with delicate red and white blossoms, and a twisting jasmine, rooted into the earth floor of the courtyard itself, vining up an arbor made of reeds bending under its weight. There was a wide door in fine wood, carved with flowers and painted light blue, and two large shuttered windows on the east wall, nearest to the body. On the north side of the courtyard, he could see a small window cut out of the thick wall and a narrow door carved and painted like the grander door on the far wall, leading to what must be the kitchen and servants quarters. Yes, the Imam paid dearly for this house. He wondered how far the man was in debt.

  As he walked further into the courtyard, he glanced into the room where the Imam led his classes. No one was there. He lo
oked behind him to see if the Imam had come into the courtyard to meet him. Not yet. The room had a wide arched doorway opening onto the courtyard. The floor of the study was covered by layers of rugs with sheepskins placed before three low desks. Nothing was on the desks, but the closed inkwells and the reed pens sat waiting for the Imam to read out the hadith, and for them to copy what they had heard, then read back what they had written to double check it. A few more steps and from there, he could see the Imam’s place on a low pallet, not too far off the floor but high enough to know who was who in the room. There were layers of sheepskins for him to sit on and what seemed to be a large volume sat on his desk covered with cloth. On the far side of the pallet there was an area screened off from view.

  From here, inside the courtyard, he could hear whimpering upstairs. It sounded like a young girl. He was told Imam Ibrahim had a daughter and now he could hear a woman’s voice comforting her. No women wailing. But why would they for a servant? No doubt this fine Sunni scholar would not permit it even if there were a woman here who wanted to wail for the boy, even just to honour his life and his passing. The woman comforting the girl could not be her mother; he was told she had died some years back, maybe five, six years ago. He imagined that the Imam had not permitted the neighbourhood women or even the women from his family to wail for his wife either. Women did it anyway, no matter what these Sunni scholars said. But in the Imam’s own house? There would be none of that, he figured, not even his daughter for her mother. Where was the comfort in that? He wondered who it was with the girl now.

  He turned to the body of the boy and saw that the morning sun was slanting quickly into the courtyard. The light would hit the boy’s body soon. With the thought of the sun on the boy, the spectre of the bodies of the Prophet’s family burning in the hot sun on the plain of Karbala came up at him again.