Pieces of Me

by Natalie Hart

  “He’s a teenage boy,” I shrug. “I think it’s pretty normal.”

  “Em—, I mean Mrs McLaughlin. Can you tell me and Mama your story now?” says Farwa, squeezing my leg to move my focus away from her brother.

  So I tell them. I tell them the story of Adam and Emma. Of Ameena and Ali. I tell them about Adam and how he wanted to help, and how I fell in love with an American soldier when it was the last thing I thought would happen to me out there. How I stayed there after he came back. How now I am here and he is back there. Farwa is enrapt throughout the story.

  “What about Ameena and Ali? Where are they now?” she asks.

  “Well…” I pause. “Ameena is in the States but Ali, I don’t know…”

  Zainab watches me intently. She notices something in my reference that Farwa doesn’t. Farwa is too young.

  “Have you been to see Ameena since you arrived?”

  “Not yet,” I say. In truth, it hadn’t even occurred to me. The “USA” that I helped Iraqis get to feels like a different “USA” to the one I live in. The same way that the Iraq that leaves the lips of the military wives is different to the country where I lived and worked for three years.

  “And Mr McLaughlin? When does he come back?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “Not yet. But I’m sure he’ll want to meet you all when he does.”

  “Inshallah he will arrive back safely,” Zainab says, taking my hand and holding it tightly between hers. I look down at her hands. The slightly wrinkled skin, the polished nails, the gold wedding band. They are strong.

  I blink back the tears that have unexpectedly filled my eyes.

  32

  Subject:

  Hey. Not sure how to tell you this Em. I finally got news on Ali. He was killed in February. He went to work with a different unit and just didn’t turn up one day. Someone gave his mother compensation but no one wrote down contact details so I don’t know how to find her. Fucking idiots.

  Adam

  Subject: Re:

  Adam. Shit, no, that’s awful. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Can you call me? Love you. Emma x

  Subject: Re:

  Sorry babe. I’d rather not talk right now. Don’t worry about me – I’m fine. I’ll Skype you later in the week. Adam

  Subject: Re:

  Okay. Stay safe. I love you.

  Is that what he wanted to tell me?

  I spend the afternoon moving listlessly around the house. I wipe the work surfaces and the sink, but Ali’s voice fills my mind. I wonder whether he knew this was coming and whether someone, anyone, could have done more. I try to breathe. To calm my thoughts. I vacuum the floor and try to drown out the voice in my head that says you should have known. You should have helped him. You should have stayed.

  Has Adam known this since the night of Sally’s party?

  I want to call someone, to be comforted myself. But Ali is Iraqi. Kate won’t understand. Penny will give me a hug and tell me to pray. Zainab will understand but she will understand too well and I am supposed to be helping her to settle in. Not dredging up old trauma. There is no one to call, so I must do something else.

  I decide to try yoga. It has been a long time since I have moved my body through these routines. I first tried yoga at the suggestion of a therapist I spoke to after what happened to Sampath. I had a couple of counselling sessions with her. Talked over what had happened; how to deal with the moments of panic that would hit me unexpectedly in the gym or the chow hall afterwards. She taught me breathing exercises. Tapping techniques. Suggested yoga. We talked about Sampath, about the other stories I heard on a daily basis, but then she started to ask questions about my dad and that was too much for me so I didn’t have the sessions any longer. Not until the other thing that happened anyway.

  I retrieve my mat from the garage and roll it out in the back garden. I look around me, at the decking and the flower beds and the large safe-looking houses that look out onto wide tree-lined roads. Ali’s death took place in a different world, a world where I once was and Adam is now. I don’t know whether real life is here or over there.

  I move through the positions and I start to sweat. My limbs are tight from sitting tensed in front of the emails. My chest is tight from what I have been told. I try to empty my mind, but it darts between Colorado and Baghdad. Jessica the aerobics instructor also led the yoga class on the IZ. I imagine her now in her neon Lycra and bright headband, guiding me through the routines. But then for a second Jessica flickers to Sally, and Sally is pressed up against the man under the flashing lights. I force my mind back to Jessica. I focus only on my body and my breathing. But now we are in Child’s Pose with our bodies sinking into the ground and I see Ali beside me. He is on his knees too, his forehead on the floor, his body folded in prayer.

  Jessica’s voice continues to guide me through the breathing exercise.

  Inhale slowly, she says. Exhale.

  In breath number one, Ali gets home and his mother is at the door. She clasps his face between the palms of her gnarled hands. They called again, she says. They called and said they have a bullet for each of us. He takes her hands and kisses them, then presses them to his forehead. Do not worry Mama, he says. They just want to scare us. The lie is heavy as he tells it. They called him too.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  In breath number two, Ali kisses his mother goodbye as he leaves for work. He locks the tall metal gate behind him and waves a greeting to his neighbour, who is washing dust away from the front of her house with a hose and broom. A vegetable truck crawls slowly past, laden with peppers and onions and the fat purple figs that are now in season. The seller honks his horn and shouts out his wares. Ali puts his key in the car door. He does not see the man emerge from around the corner, a dark metal object in his hand. His neighbour drops her broom and screams. His mother hears the shot as she rinses soapsuds from a dish at the sink. Dirty water runs down the gutter and mixes with Ali’s blood.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  In breath number three, he is on his way home. The traffic is bad and the journey is taking longer than usual. He cracks a sunflower seed between his teeth and extracts its fleshy centre with a deft flick of the tongue. His father’s old prayer beads hang from the mirror and glint red in the sun. A Tamer Hosny song plays on the radio, the same one that I have as my ringtone. He winds down his window and lights a cigarette.

  The traffic is caused by a temporary checkpoint up ahead. When he reaches it, they check his ID and pull him over to the side of the road. An officer leans into the vehicle to talk to him. Ali realises too late that the checkpoint is a fake. The policeman isn’t real.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  In breath number four, Ali is in a dark room. His hands are tied behind the back of the wooden chair he sits on. His head is bowed forwards and there is a trail of dried blood from his ear. The door opens and closes but Ali does not look up. He knows what comes next.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  In this breath, the old woman with the gnarled hands is at the gate of the US base. She tries to talk to guards who do not understand her language. Their eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses. She cries tears of frustration and they do not understand her, but she won’t go away, so an interpreter is called. The interpreter knew Ali. He tries to comfort her with quick, low words and watches on uncomfortably as she is searched before being let onto the base.

  They take her to a small room and give her a cold bottle of water. Droplets gather on the outside of the bottle. A senior looking soldier comes in and is unsure whether or not it is appropriate to shake her hand.

  Dollar bills are counted across the desk. She takes them and her cheeks burn with anger and shame. She shoves the money into her bag and exits the base. She stands in a dusty road and the sun beats down and she wonders what happens now. She must find a way to get word to Ameena. Ameena must know.

&nb
sp; Inhale.

  Exhale.

  And Adam?

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  Adam sits on his bed in a bare room. There is the distant sound of shooting from the PlayStation downstairs. Occasionally there is a whoop or a frustrated curse. He is alone. He picks up his phone. Puts it down. Picks it up again. He types.

  Exhale.

  Exhale.

  Exhale.

  Hey. Are you around for Skype?

  I am in front of the mirror in a silk blouse. I am checking my make-up in the mirror. Just heading downtown with the team wives. My phone is in my bag and the door is shutting behind me.

  Inhale.

  With this breath, I open my eyes quickly. Stand up. Get off the mat. I do not know what I am doing here, practising yoga in my garden in Colorado while the birds are singing and Ali is dead. I feel helpless. Useless. This is not me.

  33

  The next few days are unsettling. Surreal. Everything is blurred around the edges, as if I am not inhabiting myself but watching my body go through the motions of living. I am detached from Ali’s death by both time and space. I do not know how to inhabit this sadness. It fills my bones and my body aches and I am heavy with grief.

  Eventually I send Kate a message to tell her what happened. I need to tell someone.

  My father died when I was fifteen. So many people came to the funeral that some had to stand at the back of the church. My dad hadn’t been inside a church since Rebecca’s christening, but he knew it was what my mother wanted and funerals are for the living, not the dead.

  I was an awkward, quiet teenager at the time. I stood glued to Rebecca’s side as strangers came to offer their condolences. It was Rebecca who thanked them. Even though she was younger, she was always better at that kind of thing.

  When the illness took hold of my father, everything changed. He cut back his hours at the hospital and eventually didn’t go in at all. He moved into the spare room, lying propped up on pillows so that he could see the fields. His bones became visible and his hair thinned and his body was racked by a deep persistent cough.

  I started to avoid the spare bedroom. I would get dressed quickly in the morning and sneak out to school in the hope he would not wake. Sometimes he would hear me and call me in to say goodbye. I would try not to flinch as he pulled me in for a kiss and I felt the angle of his cheekbone against my fleshy cheek.

  When he tried to be cheerful, I got angry with him.

  “How can you smile when you are going to leave us?” I asked one morning.

  When he was sad or desperate, I got angry too.

  “You’re supposed to be the strong one,” I said. “You’re not supposed to cry.”

  If you thought that being a doctor would prepare you for your own mortality, you are wrong. In the months before his death, I woke at night to the sound of him begging and bargaining with a God he had never believed in. I remember the strange feeling of being repulsed by his weakness and an intense shame that I could feel that way.

  “Go in and see him,” urged my mother continually. “He’s still your dad.”

  While I went in less and less, Rebecca was the opposite. She had to be prised away from his side to eat meals and go to school. The closer she got, the further I withdrew. After the fear came silence. The nocturnal bargaining stopped. Rebecca told me he was at peace with his fate in the last few weeks. She would know better than I.

  The day that he died, I did not see him at all. He called to me as I was at the top of the stairs, although it was barely a whisper by that point.

  “Em. Emsie, come here.”

  “Can’t, Dad, gotta go. Late for school,” I yelled and rushed down the stairs and out of the door.

  My mum turned up at my classroom just before lunchtime. I saw her pale face through the criss-crossed pattern in the small pane of our classroom door. She didn’t need to tell me what had happened, she just hugged me tightly and guided us to the car. The funeral was a week later.

  *

  I never found out whether there was a funeral for Sampath in Sri Lanka. Perhaps there was some kind of service in his village, where people who hadn’t seen him for four years wept as they wondered how they would afford to live without the money he sent home.

  Jessica held a special aerobics class with a playlist of his favourite songs, but our hearts weren’t really in it. The room felt more stifling than usual. One of the PSDs suggested we have a drink for him in Baghdaddy’s, but that didn’t seem right either. He never would have been able to go in there himself. Eventually someone in Green Beans put a framed photo of him on the counter, a grainy photo enlarged from his ID badge. It was a constant reminder of how little we knew him.

  I may never know whether Ali had a funeral either. I don’t even know whether there was a body to bury, whether anything was returned to his family to be bathed and enshrouded and laid in the ground facing Mecca. I wonder what Ameena did, on the other side of the ocean, when she found out. If she found out at all.

  I think of all the women in the art group. Noor, Afsoon, Hope, Paz. I wonder who they have lost along the way and the different shades of grief they have traversed. It is built up, generation after generation. Layers of sediment and trauma are built into their foundations. The stories are passed down through families and as people move across borders and oceans they are ripped from their roots. A violent removal. They have all lived a thousand deaths.

  Does Adam feel like we failed Ali too? If I had been in Iraq, at least I would have known about his application. Perhaps I could have pushed it through. If Adam had been there, perhaps the background checks and recommendations would have been quicker. But we weren’t. We were both in Colorado.

  “You can’t save them all, Emma.”

  That was the advice that my boss Nigel gave me on the first day of my job in Baghdad.

  “You can’t save them all. All you can do is record their story in the most accurate, honest and detailed way possible, then pray to God that the system doesn’t fail them.”

  Nigel’s words resonated with me because I’d heard them before.

  “You can’t save them all, dear.” My mother said those same words to my father one evening when I was a child. He was sat in his favourite chair with a tumbler of whisky in one hand while the other rubbed at his forehead. I was sat on the living room floor doing homework, but Mum told me to go upstairs for a while. I sat on the staircase, leaning against the banister and picking at the brownish carpet while I listened to find out what was wrong.

  “You did your best, Bill,” she said. “I’m sure of it. You can’t carry them all with you.” But he never did get over the patients he lost.

  As I got older, I thought of my mum’s comments and imagined my father walking around followed by the figures of all his patients who had died. Some held his hands. Others clung to the back of his shirt. The youngest was a girl who always sat on his shoulders, the girl he lost the day he drank whisky in the living room. When they diagnosed him, I wondered whether the ghosts had just become too heavy.

  Until Iraq, I didn’t fully understand how he felt, but now I do. I carry ghosts with me. Adam does too. Ali will forever walk beside us both.

  There was a woman who I couldn’t save not long before I left Iraq. I shouldn’t have still been there at that point. It was after the bar incident and I wasn’t dealing with anything well, but I was stubborn. I didn’t want one person’s actions to drive me out of the country.

  Her name was Dina Al Wazzan. When I interviewed her, she was an intelligent, nervous young woman whose mannerisms reminded me of Ameena. She didn’t have a son, but two young daughters. She came to the interview with both of her parents. The war had left her without a husband.

  Dina worked as a journalist at one of the Iraqi television stations that was funded by the US. I recognised her face from the news channel we sometimes had on in the office.

  I recorded her story as Nigel had instructed me to on that first day – accurately, ho
nestly and with as much detail as possible. I interviewed her and her parents. I took down biometric data. I listened to her talk about the threats she had received. She recounted the ways they said they would kill her, each in a level of detail that made my stomach churn. She said it all without emotion, as if she were at work, on camera, reporting on the victims of the latest attack. It was only her mother who cried.

  When I said goodbye to her that day, I went straight to my manager, by that time a man called Rick, and asked for permission to expedite the request. She was a single mother with a high-risk profession. He said no.

  “We have lots of applications from single mothers at the moment, Emma, we can’t just expedite them all. She still has both parents. She’s not completely alone.” I argued and argued, but Rick stood firm. On the scale of desperation, she was not desperate enough.

  If Dina hadn’t been a TV journalist, I might never have found out that she had been killed. She would have got through the background checks fine, perhaps, but then missed her follow-up interview. I might have checked the database and seen “did not attend” and wondered what happened, but I would never have known.

  As it was, I did find out, just a few weeks later.

  I was in the office at the time and happened to glance up at the television screen on the back wall just as her photo was shown. The first thing I saw was a professional portrait of her in a dark blue blazer and cream blouse. She was wearing thick eyeliner and a dark lipstick that made her face look much harder than the woman I had interviewed. There was a microphone in her hand.

  “Turn up the volume!” I said, moving closer to the TV.

  Hana and Mohammed looked up, surprised.

  “What’s happened? Is she dead?” I asked.

  “Who? Dina al Wazzan?” Hana said.

  I nodded without taking my eyes off the television screen, which was now a montage of her major reporting moments.

  “Yeah, they found her body dumped last night. She’s been missing for a week,” Hana said. The montage was over and now replaced by a close-up photo of her body and clear gunshot wounds. I sometimes forgot that Iraqis were used to graphic footage of murders and attacks. The television stations didn’t cater to the sensibilities of western audiences.