The Lover

by Laury Silvers

  Imam Ibrahim asked the student to bring the housekeeper to the courtyard. He said to Ammar, “If there will be nothing else, I’ll leave you to discuss this with Maryam. Please let her know when the body can be taken to the corpsewashers. We hoped to send him for his funeral prayer at the Shuniziyya for the afternoon prayer time, bury him there, and put all this behind us.”

  “You won’t send him to the al-Anbariyya mosque right here? Won’t the Shuniziyya be a bit far for a busy man like you to go for the prayer? And then the walk to the Shuniziyya graveyard with the bier, and then the burial?”

  “It’s better if he is with his people. I won’t be attending. I fear I would only be a distraction to their mourning.”

  Ammar held himself back again. He doubted this boy had any family. The Imam meant to send him to the poor for prayer and to a pauper’s grave with only strangers reciting the Qur’an over him as the earth is shovelled over his body, leaving him alone to be questioned by the angels. No women to wail for him. No wake for people to gather to remember him and comfort those who’ve lost him. This man would be right at home among the armies of Yazid, looting the bodies of the family of the Prophet at Karbala, leaving their noble persons for others to bury. He couldn’t speak to keep from putting his hand around the man’s throat.

  Imam Ibrahim stood to leave, “I hope there will be nothing further and we can close this matter immediately.”

  Ammar stood up, straight. He wanted to do nothing more than take hold of the man, but he left his arms consciously still beside him. If only we were on the battlefield or on the street at night.

  Chapter Four

  Ammar sat down and tried to recover himself while waiting for the housekeeper. He heard the slap of her feet coming down the hall, not moving quickly, a tired sound, an old woman walking as one who had worked too hard her whole life. He expected to see sadness when she turned into the room. He stood for her. She deserved that much. But there she was before him, a heavy woman, old, but not as old as he imagined, with a face of such open kindness that he was filled with emotion for her. Grey hair stuck out underneath a kerchief tied around the back of her head in the way of the women from the countryside, her wrap around her waist like an apron with a length unwound to loosely pull over her shoulders and head for his sake. Her wrinkled face told of the laughter and love she found in people somehow despite this despicable world. This woman looked like she had raised many children of her own and still had love to spare for others. Her eyes were swollen and red rimmed from crying. He saw them move toward the body on the other side of the courtyard and tears welled up in them.

  He said, “I’m sorry, should we move inside?”

  “No, I don’t mind being here with him. He shouldn’t be alone. He shouldn’t be lying there, but the Imam wouldn’t let us move him. He said you would have to see him first. Can’t we move him now, Sir? I want to bring him to the corpsewashers and give the boy the care he deserves.”

  “I understand, but he was right to tell you not to move him. I’m sorry, the sooner we talk, though, the sooner I can let him go.”

  She spoke Arabic with a heavy Persian accent and was formal in that way Persians so often were. He asked her to sit, but she remained standing so Ammar stood with her, “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Like I told the Imam, we were all sleeping on the roof and I heard a sound. It woke me. I looked up and saw poor Zayd fall right over the low wall on the roof. He never let out a sound. We wouldn’t have known until morning if I’d not woken up.”

  “What happened after you saw him fall?”

  “I came running downstairs to help him, but he was already dead. In all God’s mercy, God made it quick for the boy.”

  “When you checked on him, what did you do?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did you move him to see if he was still alive.”

  “I saw his face.” Her face sagged recalling it, “His eyes were fading to grey like a freshly slaughtered lamb.”

  She looked down at the couch beside her and let herself sit. She didn’t slump into it. She held herself with dignity despite the exhausted pain on her face. Ammar sat with her. He changed his question to move her mind away from the thought of the boy’s face.

  “Can you tell me who works here and who is a regular visitor to the household?”

  “There’s just me, Yusuf, and poor Zayd. I don’t see how anyone else would matter, Sir. They don’t come here at night.”

  “What do the boys do for you?”

  “They help me with all the heavy labour, bringing fuel for cooking, getting deliveries, that sort of work. Yusuf is even learning to cook. I can’t lift as much as I used to. There is a girl who comes in to help me with the washing. That can be backbreaking work. Then one of the boys will carry the laundry to the roof to help her hang it.”

  “This girl, who is she?”

  “Her name is Layla. She works next door. They’re kind enough to share her with us, although they are not kind about much else. I make sure she gets some fatty meat to eat and a sweet or two. That girl would crawl right into my lap, so starved for love she is.”

  “But she wouldn’t have been spending the night?”

  “For shame, no. Only Yusuf, Zayd, and me were on the roof.”

  “Yusuf, did he not wake up?”

  “Not until I woke him. I came to get him after I’d told the Imam. He’s a heavy sleeper. A heavy everything. I love him like one of my own, but that boy’s like molasses, sweet and slow. Poor boy, he’s heartbroken at the loss of his friend. Can’t stop crying.”

  “You take good care of these boys….”

  She interrupted, “Like my own, like my own.”

  “I’d like to speak to Yusuf.”

  “He’s not here, sir. Yusuf’s out bringing in deliveries for the Imam. He ordered more paper just yesterday for the copying of his important book about the Prophet, may God protect the Imam’s efforts.”

  Ammar wanted to correct her on the Imam’s efforts but didn’t see the point.

  “I’ll need to interview Yusuf when he comes back. When do you think that will be?

  Maryam said, “He’ll be in and out. He has to do Zayd’s work as well as his own now. I can’t be sure, but I can hold him here. If you can tell me when you’ll return.”

  “Alright. I’ll let you know. For now, can you tell me anything about Zayd? Did he always walk in his sleep?”

  “I saw him do it now and again, when things were troubling him. I keep an ear and an eye out for everything that goes on here. I’d find him and lead him back to bed.”

  Ammar asked, “If he was walking in his sleep, then something must have been on his mind.”

  At this, her eyes opened wide and she realized she’d said something she shouldn’t have.

  He pressed, “You’re close to these boys. You must have some suspicion of what was wrong.”

  She began to weep. Here it comes, Ammar thought. He wanted to push her to say what she thought, but he felt himself wanting to comfort her instead. He wanted to show her she had a right to grieve, unlike her Yazid of a master. But there was no touching a woman outside one’s family; he held back even kind words. He needed her answer. He wondered now if there was something to investigate here. This would tell him.

  After a few moments, she recovered herself and said, tears still on her cheeks, “Sir, I should have known better than to let him sleep on the roof, but with the heat as it is…. I feel like I killed him myself. How will God ever forgive me?”

  That’s all, she just feels guilty.

  Ammar tried to console her, consciously lowering his voice for her, “It could not have been your fault. It was God’s will that the boy die, no one can prevent what God has commanded.”

  She nodded and wiped at her cheeks and nose, but he could see she still felt at fault. He couldn’t see how this was anything other than an accident. There was nothing left now but to see the roof and release the boy’s body for washing and
burial.

  The housekeeper led him back towards the entrance of the house to the stairs leading to the second floor and on up to the roof. He followed her up the narrow staircase. It was lit by small windows onto the street cut into the thick walls. The openings were cleverly cut so that they only looked out onto the solid walls of the building across the street. He knew there would be no view from the staircase onto the rooms occupied by the family, either. All the same the doorway to the second floor was covered by a fine linen curtain with bands of embroidery along its edges. The girl is in seclusion. She’d have no direct contact with unrelated males by herself, not even male servants. No man would see her face except those in her immediate family and whichever man her father gave her to in marriage. Bile raised in his gut. You’d think the women of Prophet’s family never interacted with the men in the community. You’d think those women had never been on a battlefield. Never nursed the wounded or picked up a sword themselves when necessary or never demanded justice for the slaughter at Karbala before the Caliph Yazid himself! Women have their proper place, but it wasn’t in seclusion. These asses! Locking their women up and calling it piety.

  They reached the top step and the housekeeper opened the door from the staircase vestibule onto the terrace. The borders of the flat roof were defined by parapet walls of varying height, providing privacy and protection from the street and the neighbours’ roofs. He could see from here that there was no rear garden. The walls of the house abutted the neighbours on three sides. The well, where there must be a kitchen entrance, was set into a dead-end passageway rather than leading to an alley. There were no alleys in this neighbourhood with rear entrances that you’d find in even wealthier neighbourhoods.

  He looked north out over city. There was a good view from there. The Tigris glittered in the sun as it curved around the old fortified Round City; the original Baghdad, built some one hundred and fifty years earlier by the Caliph Mansur. It had been fully enclosed once, its battlements and ramparts encompassing markets and residences within; his garden palace and great mosque were located at its very centre. It now stood demolished in parts and used mainly as barracks, prisons, and administrative offices, including the police; but the green dome still stood, the statue of a mounted horseman atop it, while the mosque still called people to prayer each Friday and stood open for the education of young scholars and daily prayer. Succeeding caliphs had built their palaces along the Tigris in other parts of the city while Baghdad sprawled well beyond the Round City in every direction across the boat bridges spanning the Tigris, eating up villages, and old estates, making them home to some millions of people according to where you drew the city lines. Ammar thought, looking out over the city, that Baghdad had overtaken the caliphs, diminishing their power. This city, he said to himself, belongs to its people.

  He turned back to examine the rest of the terrace. The interior parapet walls looking down onto the courtyard were much lower, no barrier to falling. Washing lines were strung across from the vestibule toward the front of the house to the rear exterior parapet. It was a working roof, for the servants. The Imam and his daughter most certainly never came up here. On the hottest nights, they would sleep in the cool of the courtyard below, although who knows if he would allow his daughter to sleep there now that she was in seclusion. The housekeeper took him across to the area where they slept. Three bedrolls were folded in the corner neatly. One, must have been Zayd’s, had his robe and sash folded neatly on top of it with his scrap of turban beside them. She’d come to straighten up despite everything. Old habits, he supposed, but he wished she’d left everything as it was.

  “He was right here. He walked off right there.”

  Ammar walked over toward the edge taking care near the low wall. He wasn’t sure how the boy had made it to the edge without tripping, boxes and an old pot were in the way. There was an easy path through the boxes, but the pot was right up against the edge. Maybe the boy tripped on the pot and tumbled from there? He looked carefully over the edge and saw Zayd lying below. The sun was beginning to shine on Zayd’s head. He shuddered at the injustice of it all. He’d need to let them take the body now.

  “It will be alright now. If I need to interview the other boy, I’ll send someone to get him. Please call the washers to come and get Zayd.”

  Chapter Five

  Layla ran ahead of Zaytuna up the footpath up from the banks of the Isa Canal hurrying to get across the quarter and back to work before she was missed. Her wet wrap was thrown over her head and clung to her qamis, soaking her back and legs, and dripping water on her bare feet, caking them with dust from the road. Zaytuna watched her run out of view, her heart breaking.

  Zaytuna didn’t believe a word of Layla’s story but she didn’t let on. She let the girl talk it out. As far as Zaytuna was concerned, it was impossible that Imam Ibrahim would have killed Zayd because his daughter, Zaynab, had fallen in love with the boy. Not because fathers did not do this sort of thing. It was that Zaytuna could not imagine that a daughter of a religious scholar, and a rich one at that, had ever been given an opportunity to fall in love with a servant boy in her father’s household. She’d been in enough of these houses, washing clothes for these kinds of people, to know how they guarded their girls. And if somehow the Imam’s daughter had found a way to spend time with a servant boy in secret, she knew that no little girl with everything at her fingertips would have fallen in love with an ugly little boy like Zayd. The rich have no use for the poor in matters of love. They take what they want. They don’t love. And there would be no draw to that poor thing with his bent nose. But for Layla, poor Layla with nothing in this world, she loved the boy so much she believed that everyone must love him the same.

  She and Layla had climbed down the banks of the canal and sat at its edge, far enough away from a round reed boat with goods to unload so they would not be a distraction to the men pulling sacks off it and onto their backs to carry up into the neighbourhood. Zaytuna kneeled by the water, the girl’s wrap grasped tightly in one hand, and let it rinse in the swift water of the canal. She pulled it out and stood to twist the water from it, then walked up the bank a bit to lay it out over the stubby grasses growing there. She turned back to sit near Layla, kicked her sandals off by the waters edge, and put her callused, bony feet in the cold, clear water. The girl stood watching her. Once Zaytuna was settled, Layla came close, kneeling before her, leaning forward on her hands, and begged her to look into Zayd’s death, “...to set things right,” she said.

  Zaytuna listened, but she couldn’t imagine for the life of her what this girl thought she could do about it, let alone why Layla had thought of her at all. None of this made sense to her, but she’d agreed, simply to quiet the girl’s heart. The only thing that would come of this, as far as she was concerned, was the disquiet of her own heart at the tragedy of these children’s lives. There was nothing to set right. The boy fell off the roof somehow. A short, brutal life ended in fear and pain. That’s all. God have mercy on his soul. And poor Layla, she’d lost the only one whom she loved in this world. Zaytuna understood too well that none of this would ever be made right for this girl. How could Layla still be naïve enough, even at her age, to think it would?

  Layla looked back at the wrap, nearly dry already in the hot morning sun, and told her that Zayd had given it to her as a promise that someday they would marry. Zaytuna thought he’d likely taken it from the rag pile at the Imam’s home, one of the Imam’s daughter’s finely woven wraps discarded once stained or after she simply became bored with it. Her own clothes, Saliha’s too, came from those piles from the houses where they washed clothes. But that didn’t matter to Layla. Layla loved him without question. That worn piece of cloth was as good as a written contract in the girl’s heart. Maybe it was for the boy, too. How could Zaytuna know?

  As she walked up the footpath, and Layla disappeared around a corner far ahead of her, she grew angry thinking about why Zayd had told Layla that Zaynab had fallen in love with him. Wh
at was the need of it? Why tell her that he and the Imam’s daughter talked about each other as if they were the storied couple, “Zayd and Zaynab”? In the boy’s telling of it, God forgive him, the two had been forced apart because she was promised to “another.” Zaytuna guessed the Imam’s daughter was contracted to marry someone chosen by her father and Zayd made up this secret love between the two in order to make Layla jealous. A boy like that, maybe he thought Layla wouldn’t love him unless he was desired by someone utterly out of reach? Layla had said, “Zaynab thought he loved her! But Zayd told me everything and we laughed at her. She thought she could have everything. But he loved me not her!” If this was Zayd’s way of winning Layla’s devotion, it was a way of cruelty.

  Zaytuna looked askance at the beggars sitting along the footpath, close to the square. A woman sat, her clothes in tatters, her hand out, her eyes pleading, with her empty breast exposed, while a child with rolls of fat on its arms and legs, and so obviously not her own, tried to suckle at it. A man called out to her for some change, his arm bloated and red, likely from tying it up overnight to swell, and smearing it this morning with lizard blood to elicit sympathy from kind folk who didn’t know their tricks. A boy lay wedged in against one of the shabby houses, not far from them, begging with his good hand; his other arm was bent at a sickening angle, likely crushed for this purpose alone. Maybe the man with the arm was running them all for his own take. Her heart was already thumping in her chest, her jaw setting hard at the thought of what had happened to Zayd and Layla, and now this. This man and what he’d done set her head to pulsing such that she was nearly choked of her senses by the sight of them. She knew begging like this was business, but why did these children’s lives have to be destroyed? Did that man break that boy’s arm so he could bring him back some coin each day? Her mind turned to Zayd’s broken face. Is that what happened to him? She barely heard the man yelling out to her, “Sister! Don’t you have some change so I can feed my family? I can’t work with this arm the way it is.”