It was difficult for Helen to understand what was happening. In that moment, Samir’s breath became like a voice in a dream; an echo with no body attached, for neither of them had bodies, here, not bodies as they had been, separate, discrete, disloyal. As Samir tore off Helen’s clothes she didn’t feel as though she were undressing in a graveyard city, or a place that had been abandoned by the living since 2017, eighty-six years before.
In the bedroom Helen discovered that Samir was a virgin; she had guessed as much from his behaviour at college, but now it was confirmed by his nervousness. She wanted to engulf him. She wanted to plunge his face into her bare chest, as if to nurse him, and as her lust soared she threw him down on the bed and started to bite at his chest. As he entered her, his fevered kisses grew more rapid, spread out over her face and temples, gently at first and then with greater and greater savagery, pushing her to the point where she cried at the top of her voice, as if to make herself heard out in the courtyard.
* * *
Helen stirred and was alarmed to find herself completely naked under the blanket, alongside Samir. She wriggled free from his arm, propped her head up, and looked at him.
‘I wonder what our teacher would say if we brought him here?’
‘Mr Farhan?’
‘Yeah, I never saw him more emotional than the time he talked about those two lions—the one in the jungle and the one in the circus.’
‘Poor man, he was just nostalgic for this dead world…’
A rustle came from outside the room, like someone walking towards them. Helen raised her finger to Samir’s lips before he could say anything.
‘Can you hear it?’ she whispered.
‘What is it?’
‘It sounds like someone eating,’ she replied hesitantly.
‘There’s someone else down here!?’
They listened until chewing became crunching: a drier, scratchier sound that grew closer and closer. Samir got up and tiptoed to the door, unashamed in his nakedness. Helen also got up but made for the closet at the side of the room instead, and beckoned him over.
‘Sshhh,’ she whispered as he had climbed gently in beside her.
They stood there in the darkness listening to the sound of someone eating, almost imperceptible at first, but gradually it grew louder and louder. Samir held the closet door too, but his hand was shaking. Whatever it was it was definitely getting closer, though neither of them could see anything through the slats in the closet door. Samir seemed to be holding his breath indefinitely; his shaking was getting worse. Helen feared it would soon make the whole closet rattle. All of sudden, Samir exploded, bursting out of the closet, and throwing the door to the room open. As he did so, however, he let out a wild, uncontrolled yelp, and leapt high in the air. Something dashed across the floor, into the room, making straight for the closet, which Helen vacated almost as quickly as Samir had.
A rat! Helen threw herself onto Samir and they both fell on the bed laughing.
‘Dear God!’ Samir laughed. ‘Among all this death—only the rats survived!’
Helen replied with more kisses, and Samir threw a shoe at the closet. The creature promptly scuttled out, made its way along the wall, and eventually, after another shoe was thrown, left the room forever.
‘What did that fucker want in the there anyway?’ Samir asked, but it was Helen who got to her feet, and walked back to the closet.
She leant inside and felt something hanging in there.
‘Look what I found!’ she said, returning to the bed, holding a long, white, perfectly smooth robe.
‘A dishdasha!’ Samir exclaimed.
Helen removed the hanger and as Samir got to his feet, held it against him.
‘It’s your size!’
‘Nah!’ said Samir, smiling.
‘Please!’ Helen begged. ‘I’d love to see you wearing one of these!’
‘Why?’
‘Because you want to be one of them, don’t you? You always have.’
‘Not after today, seeing all this,’ Samir gestured at the museum-world outside.
‘Imagine, wearing it up there, back in class!’
Samir smiled and reached for her hand. ‘I’ll take it back with us. But not to wear, okay?’
NAJUFA
IBRAHIM AL-MARASHI
At the passport control of Baghdad International Airhub, I scanned my index finger in front of the droid, but the mock Ishtar Gate of alternating blue and yellow Teflon bricks failed to slide open.
‘Muhammad, your Iraqi passport is embedded in your middle finger,’ my grandfather, Isa, reminded me.
‘Thank you, Jidu.’1
We were travelling with a seventy-two-strong hamla2, a pilgrimage organised by the Iraqi Shi’a community of Alaska, and were lucky to be the first of them to enter baggage claim. On collecting our aircases, we were met by our assigned droids, Abbas R-12 and Zaynab C-12, our guides in Iraq.
While waiting for the others, I double-tapped my forehead to call up the local weather report, even though we’d barely be stepping outdoors. It was fifty-two degrees in Baghdad, a cool January day for that city. I couldn’t help check the weather back in Alaska too. Thirty-five degrees. There must have been a warm breeze blowing in from the South Canadian deserts that morning.
‘Have you called your father to let him know you’ve arrived safely?’
‘I don’t have to, Jidu. Your status automatically updates when you land.’
‘It would be nice for him to hear your voice, at least.’
‘I’ll call him when we get to Najufa.’
Once all seventy-two members of our hamla had gathered in front of the droids, Abbas instructed us, in Iraqlish, to follow the two of them to the station where we’d take the maglev direct to Najufa. Before we’d even started walking, however, Umm Hayder, seeing something to her right, suddenly stopped: ‘Yaaa. Duty Free!’, and snapping her fingers at Abbas, ‘Ya hajji droid! Khalina fed daqiqa3 so we can buy fed shii.’4
For a moment, the red LED pupils in Abbas’s eyes looked furious. Droids hate being called ‘droids’. Each one has an official job title, and if the AI Revolution in China had taught us anything, it was that they deserved respect for their work. Abbas’ title was ‘Automated Liaison to the Holy Sites’. But old prejudices are hard to kick, especially around people of senior years.
Abbas said, ‘No. Maku waqt5 for shopping. We will miss the…’
But before he could finish his sentence, Umm Hayder and her seven kids had abandoned their aircases and fled to the Duty Free zone, with others following close behind.
Abbas stood next to me, tilting his head in disapproval. ‘I cannot condone this disregard for the schedule, this … shqad hosa!’6
My grandfather whispered, ‘Look at the other hamlas. So organised.’
A guide-droid spoke in Urdulishto to an orderly group of Pakistani Shi’as that stood nearby, while a party of East African Shi’as walked in unison towards the station, led by a droid draped in an elegant, orange thobe.
Abbas R-12 and Zaynab C-12 finally returned from Duty Free, herding back the strays to our hamla, and we arrived at our platform just as the train was about to close its doors. Fifteen minutes later, the train made its first stop at Karbalafor where more pilgrims climbed aboard.
As the train waited, I told my chair to move to the upright position, shifting from ‘vigorous’ to ‘gentle’ massage. ‘Jidu, how long did it take your father to get from Baghdad to Najufa on his ziyarat?’7
‘It was just “Najaf” back then.’
‘Of course.’ My history was terrible. After 2003, Najaf, I knew, had grown rapidly and eventually merged completely with the nearby city, Kufa.
‘So, do you want to know about his first trip in 1979, or his last in 2010?’
‘1979. The first.’
‘He would have only been five at the time. I think he said it took about three hours, but many of his “memories” from the trip were taken from what his mom told him later. They
stopped at the Nus-khana, a rest-stop café, on the way, I know that. He talked about his parents making him a sandwich out of two English tea biscuits, with a piece of lokum in between. It’s strange the details she recounted. He described it to me as like a s’more, but with Turkish delight instead of marshmallow in the middle.’
‘That was so like my grandmother, always feeding everyone halwiyat.8 My father probably had cavities in his milk teeth!’
‘And in 2010?’
‘That trip took them over seven hours. Seven long hours with my father, in his late thirties, crammed in beside his father, on what they called an “omnibus”—a kind of large car, with many wheels. It took them that long because every thirty minutes they had to stop at another checkpoint. The takfiris always targeted those checkpoints with car bombs, as there were always police there. Each time my father’s omnibus stopped, he would stare out of the window at the car in the next lane, thinking: This is the car that will explode next.’
I glanced out of the window as the last pilgrims boarded. It made sense to build a maglev connecting Baghdad to the shrine cities. Building the entire system underground must have been for security reasons.
‘My father agreed to make that second trip, in 2010, simply to accompany his by-then aging parents, fearing for their safety. They had insisted on going that year, even though it was still dangerous, because they were convinced the U.S. was about to reinstate some kind of neo-Ba’athist government, in a last-ditch attempt to restore some kind of order. The more my father mocked this conspiracy theory, the more they stuck to it.’
The maglev started again.
‘Why were your grandparents so scared of the Ba’ath?’
‘My grandparents, Morteza and Biba, never lived in Iraq while Saddam was President. That was close to twenty years. They were scared they might be thrown in jail if they went back. Just having lived in the U.S. was enough for the mukhabarat to accuse you of being a spy.’
‘Oh. You mean the old mukhabarat.’
I remembered from my history-casts that ‘mukhabarat’ once meant Saddam Hussein’s ubiquitous secret police—very different from the current ‘mukhabarat’, ‘The Directorate of Public Security Droids’, which were introduced to smoke out the remaining sleeper cells of ISJISL, the Islamic State of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in the late 2080s.
Jidu never told me why he, personally, never visited Iraq. Isa’s father, Ibrahim, had never wanted to take them there. I knew that they had all grown up in Baltimore, while wars were raging in Iraq, making any visit impossible, and then when they moved to Alaska, and it declared independence, visas to the oil zones were nigh-on impossible. But he could have visited more recently. We all suspected he was slightly scared of it. His bedtime podcasts to us, as kids, had all been uttered in hushed and reverent tones, even when describing Najaf during the hard times. But they were all made up of other peoples’ scattered memories. He had never been. I had decided to finally drag him there, hoping he would realise he had nothing to fear; new experiences of the place could integrate with old, handed-down legends. The two weren’t mutually exclusive. Jidu always said that the second trip, in 2010, had transformed his father, Isa’s life, and stood as a turning point for the whole family. None of them ever went back.
Fortunately our ten-star hotel was connected to the station by an air-conditioned moving walkway. It seemed from the many other pilgrims being conveyed toward it, that only Alaskan-Iraqis were staying at this hotel, and naturally all of them were doctors. It was 8:30 p.m. and fifty-one degrees outside.
‘I wish this thing moved faster,’ I complained.
‘You know, in 2010 all motorised conveyances were banned in Najaf,’ Jidu began. ‘Those takfiris were targeting crowded markets with their car bombs. So cars were not allowed into town. Imagine travelling for hours on an omnibus, like my father, only to then be dropped off on the outskirts of the town. “Thank Allah,” my father would say, “for the young boys with their horses and wooden carts appearing from nowhere to carry all their luggage, and some of the older people too.” Can you imagine walking alongside an animal!’
‘Zayn. Aftahamat. I get it. I’ll stop complaining.’
Once up in our rooms, I deactivated my aircase and watched it hover gently to the ground. ‘Call Dr Allawi,’ I said. It had been difficult to find someone to take on my scheduled neural-chip interface surgeries at the hospital, and I wanted to see how my wife was getting on with the extra workload. She didn’t pick up.
‘Did you call your father?’
‘Yes … I will … just let me relax for a minute.’
In an attempt to distract Jidu, I moved to the window and pointed below. ‘Look. We have a perfect view of the hadhra!’ I tap-activated my telescopic retina, and scanned the shrine’s golden dome and four minarets, illuminated by the floodlights.
‘What is that smaller hadhra next to Imam Ali’s?’
Jidu paused. ‘My father never mentioned a second hadhra.’ Then he clicked his fingers. ‘Aha. That must be the shrine of Sayyid Ali Sistani. Sistani in the 2020s finally got Iraqis to stop killing each other. When he eventually passed away in the ’50s, all the Shi’as, Sunnis, Christians, and Sushis poured into the streets equally to mourn him.’
Again I struggled to remember my history-casts. The Sushis—children of intermarried Sunnis and Shi’as—had formed their own militia in the early ’20s, and had pushed back the takfiris from the cities into the deserts. That was when they were just called ‘ISIS’, but in the deserts they regrouped and redirected their mania towards Jordan and Lebanon, becoming ISJISL. It was hard to imagine that these crazies were once even more feared, as a terrorist group, than CAKA, the Christian Assembly of Kansas and Arkansas.
I stared at the jagged skyline in front of us.
‘My father described this city as a ghost town in 2010.’
‘That was almost a century ago, now Jidu.’ When Iraq’s oil fields ran dry in 2050, pilgrimage traffic became Iraq’s greatest revenue generator, making the cities of Najufa, Karbala, and Kadhimayn the nation’s wealthiest.
‘Ani so ta’aban’, I said, and then commanded my bed to remove the blankets and sheets. I dropped down on the edge of it and unzipped the foot-soles from my one-suit. ‘I think I will take my vapour shower in the morning, before we go to the hadhra.’
‘If you’re tired, imagine how they felt,’ he began, launching into yet another set of comparisons. I had half expected him to be morose when we got here, disappointed by things looking so different from how he’d pictured them. I thought I would be the one to do the all the talking. No such luck.
‘Are you jaw’an?’
‘No Jidu. I took a dinner pill at the airport,’ I replied, lying face down on the bed.
‘Zayn. How about we go to the lobby for some chay.’
‘Chay!’ I sat up. ‘You know you can’t drink it.’
‘I know, but I just want you to try your first glass of real Iraqi tea.’
‘Khosh. I’ll have a chay-droid bring some up to the room,’ I said, looking for the room service button.
‘No. I want you to have it in the lobby.’
I looked across at him.
‘Please. To make your jidu happy. So we can have a moment together, create a new memory.’
‘Okay, okay.’
* * *
Taking my first sip, I said, ‘Jidu, I wish you could enjoy it with me.’
‘May khalif. The chay you are drinking will never be like the chay they had back then. In the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Iraqis used to make it from a samawar with half a cup of tea and half a cup of sugar resting on the bottom.’
‘Samawar shinnu?’ I asked, blowing on my tea to cool it down.
‘That was a contraption where boiling water underneath percolated upwards through the tea leaves in a chamber at the top. Nowadays the samawar is no doubt somewhere inside the chay-droid; obviously you can’t see it. And the leaves are synthetic now, of course.’
‘I can’t imagine what tea with real sugar tastes like. Too much, I suspect.’ The Great Global Drought happened just before I was born. After that, the Glucose Cartels became sole share holders in the few remaining sugarcane fields, and possession of unrationed glucose was upgraded to the same criminality rating as possession of synth-narcotics.
My grandfather stopped talking, having finally acknowledged the others filling up the lobby—families with kids running around, pilgrims returning from their final evening prayers.
‘All my grandfather wanted, it seems, was to sit around Najaf in hotel lobbies, drinking tea. My father accompanied him, reluctantly, nervously eying everyone around them, suspecting every pilgrim, and every member of the hotel staff of being a takfiri. After 2003, my great-uncle, who was living in Baghdad at the time, was kidnapped because he was known to be well off. When the ransom demand came, his family tried to barter over the price, you know, because that’s what Iraqis do. Haggle.’
‘That’s why your grandmother told you all never to say you were from America,’ I said, waving the chay-droid over for a refill.
‘Of course.’ The minute the chay-droid had finished pouring, Jidu asked it if it was from Najaf. When the droid said, ‘yes’, Jidu added, ‘My great-grandfather, Hassan, was from Najaf.’ He then launched into a retelling of a large swathe of the paternal family history: recounting the details of Hassan’s flight from Najaf in the 1920s, being imprisoned by the British, discovering one of the prison guards was Hassan’s former neighbour, escaping prison with his help, fleeing to Iran, and eventually taking a ship to Zanzibar. The waiter stood there and smiled, knowing the protocol for listening to older guests. Jidu regaled him with the finer points of Hassan’s son, Morteza’s journey to Baghdad in the ’50s, to study medicine, how he then moved to London, became a British citizen, went back to Baghdad to marry, and then moved to Maryland, to practice neurology at John Hopkins University. Jidu was lucky it wasn’t 2010. He may as well have been screaming to the entire lobby, I am a wealthy North American. Kidnap me!
I yawned in between sips from the second cup.
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