by Salar Abdoh
“From us. I stole from us. There’s a difference.”
“Well, at least you admit to the theft.”
His face turned morose and sulky. “You made a deal with O Channel before coming back out here. You’re going to write for them again. I’ve heard about it.”
“I could not exactly refuse.”
It was the day they’d followed me from my mother’s nursing home. By then they were already stuck for new ideas for the Abbas show. I’d asked them why they didn’t just wrap it all up. The show had already completed its arc and now it was time to wind it down. But word from the ministry was that the series must go on another year. Their exact words: The restive population, nervous about the state of the currency against the dollar, needs an antidote to keep it home watching programs that promote both patriotism and partnership with our good neighbors. In this case, the “good neighbors” were the Iraqis. It was also why H had insisted I come up with a new pilot that followed a hero circa 2006, when the Americans were deep in Iraq. I had said yes to both, since saying no was not an option, and then I had disappeared back into the maw of the war here.
I did not see a healthy return to Tehran and Saeed knew this.
A commotion had broken out outside. Men were shouting. Someone was popping off AK rounds and for a moment I thought Cleric J might be back and that was old Abu Yusuf being overenthusiastic with his weapon, as usual. But the scene in the open area of the mokeb looked positively violent. More people came inside to see what was going on, where a tight but widening circle of men were kicking and swearing at something or someone. I could not catch what they were saying.
A teenager from Najaf who’d been helping at the mokeb ran toward me. “Come! Ta’aal, ta’aal!”
People made way. On the ground I saw the pummeled, bloodied face of a young man. Maybe nineteen. You could see his beard was choppy, like he had been trying to cut it with a knife in a hurry. He looked half-starved and ready to fall asleep or die. The kicking barely made a dent in him. He was done. He had the long, handsome face of a North African, and when I was told he might be Tunisian I wasn’t surprised. A van screeched to a halt outside the mokeb and two men came running toward us.
“He’s ours. We’ll take him.”
No one gave way. One of the kitchen guys shouted back, “He’s not yours! We found him hiding in the mokeb. He’s ours. Who are you?”
They tried pushing past the crowd but were shoved back. It was a standoff to see who owned the enemy combatant. He’d probably been cowering in some dark corner of the mokeb ever since last week’s misbegotten blitz on the town and somebody going to take a dump in private had finally found him. The two men, from whatever outfit they were, really didn’t have a leg to stand on here. We weren’t part of anyone’s command structure. We didn’t have to give up the kid if we didn’t want to. What I didn’t know then (and I should have) was why we weren’t giving him up. I realized that with those two men he had no chance, wherever they took him; what I didn’t realize was that he had even less of a chance with us.
“It is up to you!”
I turned around and saw the Najafi kid, his unlikely curly blond hair caked with the dust of northern Iraq and Syria, whispering in my ear. “You are Cleric J’s man while he’s gone. Whatever you say goes here.”
The kid’s whispering suddenly turned all attention our way. The Tunisian remained on the ground, coughing weakly. “Ma,” he whimpered.
I gestured to the Najafi kid, who picked up one of those ubiquitous bottles of water for the fighters from right by his foot and took it over to the boy. I was not sure, but it felt as if we were slowly being sucked into some evil. Nearly all the men in that mokeb had had some kind of history with the Iranians going back to the Saddam days; it was a factor that carried cachet. And to be Cleric J’s rep carried even more. As I started toward the two men, I noticed that Saeed was at the periphery of the circle, camera in hand, filming. When you spend enough time with a group of men, even if it’s through the revolving door of a mokeb, when you feed them for days on end and call them heroes even if you only half mean it, when you give them aspirin (because that’s all you have) even though it’s voices they’re hearing inside their heads and they thank you anyway like you’ve given them the last elixir on earth, something happens between you and them—call it a bond, a special contract of blood that an outsider best not meddle with.
One frown in Saeed’s direction was enough for the four burly men who had held him down before to do it again. The mokeb seemed to be in a time warp, everything slowing down—the North African on the ground, starved and eminently executable; the two men who had materialized out of nowhere looking annoyed and confused; and Saeed pinned like that, his camera thrown to the side, its lens open and layered with fresh dust.
“I’ll get you for this, Saleh.”
It was the last thing Saeed said as they manhandled him out of the mokeb and away from the Eye of the Horse.
* * *
The boy was killed two days later.
I went blind for six hours with the news. Afterward, I drank in the miracle of vision like it was my first time seeing. Even the sight of mounds of discarded plastic bottles was like witnessing a wedding. I forgot that North African boy we killed because he was guilty and because we could. Someone had to do it, and the guilt only stayed as long as I had time to dwell on it in darkness. When light returned to my eyes, the boy was history. I did not give a fuck about his fate. Well, maybe I did. But tangentially. Maybe it was he who had set the trip wire that killed Ali-Akbar. I doubted it. But I did not dismiss it either. It was easier this way; it allowed me to live with us. Maybe the world was right and we were beasts after all. But what did the world know? Where was the world anyway, and what did it have to do with the Eye of the Horse?
I wanted to go to Baghdad and have a few shots of hard liquor. Anything would do. Then I would pick up Zahra the Beheader and take her with me to Tehran to give her new life. All she had done was the thing many of us would if we had the heart. I still see that North African boy lying on the ground of our mokeb. I tell the men to throw him in a room and tie him up. Cleric J will be back in a day or two and he’ll decide. But by morning the night shift had already gone to work on the kid and even filmed him, because this war, all of it, was on video. He admitted to having killed many of us. In combat and through executions of civilians. You name it, he’d done it. He admitted it all methodically, as if he were counting off from his grandfather’s abacus. I despised him for his truthfulness. He left zero room for mercy. Perhaps he thought that since lying would get him nowhere, which it wouldn’t, telling the truth to its last detail might. Where did he think he was? He was inside a mokeb of the Hashd forces; we did not forget, period.
The next afternoon Cleric J was back and handed me a Colt. “Saleh, he’s your charge. Do it! The men expect no less.”
“If I don’t?”
“This war is not a holiday, you know! You are not on vacation.”
He wasn’t angry with me. He had said it casually, matter-of-factly.
Twelve hours later, when we were serving tea at dawn to the first replacement convoys of the day heading for the sater, I saw that old Haji Yusuf was grinning.
“Your man went swimming late last night. He’s not coming back.”
“The North African?”
“Him.”
“Who carried it out?”
All of a sudden Haji Yusuf had never looked so sober. He might have been one of Lawrence of Arabia’s boon companions, laying charges on the railroad tracks of this land circa 1916 and singing ancient poems of the desert deep into the night.
A century had passed. Yet not a lot was different in this landscape. We were still fighting the same fight.
“I have had six sons and forty-two grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Out of those, I have lost two sons and two grandsons to two wars. So I thank you.”
“Thank me for what?”
“My satisfaction.”
* * *
It would not do to hang around for much longer. I had thought the end was close. But the enemy thought otherwise. They had nothing to lose now, so they fought like rabid dogs. Sometimes we’d find them dead, chained and locked to their weapons. Men speak of grudging respect for a capable enemy. I had none of that. Rather, I was irritated by their pluck and didn’t want to share my God with theirs. They needed to find another alphabet and say God’s name differently than us. Which was why whenever we smoked them out of their lairs and captured their black flag with Allah’s name on it, the first thing we did was to turn the flag upside down and take a picture. It was the ultimate insult, this. God’s name was turned on its head and it was no longer God but something else. Something foreign and unworthy of attention because it had been manufactured by men who knew neither God nor His Prophet.
Nevertheless, by being as dogged as they were, they stole the show. We wanted them to just go die somewhere. But they had other ideas. And when my left eye started to really go bad, as bad as some of the gassed vets I’d seen with their permanently damaged corneas, I decided to go home for a respite. I had done nothing for Tehran and their expectations. Losing the cell phone had been a master stroke—it absolved me of having to look for the Proust guy. Though this meant that H would be waiting. And so would the O Channel thugs.
Peace, ultimately, was a problematic condition.
War, putting everything on hold, was sometimes more desirable.
I went back to Baghdad to fly to Tehran. But I did not go to Sadr City to fetch Zahra the Beheader that first night. Instead I took a hotel in the Karada District and went to my usual corner liquor joint off Abu Nuwas for a bottle. It was obviously bootleg Scotch and tasted dubious but it did the job. Next day, wracked with both a hangover and guilt, I called my friend Jasim who immediately began to berate me.
“Do you know how many calls I got from Tehran from people looking for you?”
“I can guess.”
“What is this number you are calling from?”
“I lost my phone. I’m in a hotel.” I gave him the place’s name.
“Don’t move from there!”
I did.
Jasim worked for a TV network in Baghdad loosely connected to the Hashd forces. He was the kind of man of whom you think: if there were another ten thousand more of him, this country would not be in such a state of putrefaction. Instead, he did fixing and producing jobs for next to nothing for inept people who had dollars, people who’d never know Jasim was saving their lives at least five times a day in the Baghdad of now, just as he had done in the Baghdad of ten years earlier. He was the quintessential guy behind the scenes, quietly smoothing the way, loved by even the worst of men because he stayed honest to his own disadvantage. I always had the feeling that if Jasim too one day went up in smoke in a suicide bombing, then I wouldn’t want to live anymore. It wasn’t because I loved him, which I did, but because there comes a place where you have to draw the line with God. Not everyone should have to die. Somebody should stay around, somebody without bloody hands.
But I couldn’t face Jasim just now. He was too responsible a citizen for me to face with a hangover. I’d left Zahra the Beheader in Baghdad to live temporarily at Jasim’s house with his wife and two children. But Sadr City was a sprawling meganeighborhood of love and dashed hopes, where extended families put on slippers and shuffled from house to house to visit next of kin, and next of next of kin, for hours on end every night when the weather cooled down. How would Zahra the Beheader, who had lost everything and had been on the verge of being put on display like a circus freak, get by in Sadr? I didn’t know.
I ran out of the hotel toward the long-suffering waters of the Tigris at Abu Nuwas. Down the road there was a checkpoint. Young men stood by the river laughing, as if the war was a million miles away. You couldn’t begrudge them that. The war was right here at that sleepy checkpoint. We all knew it and still acted like a checkpoint made a difference. I did not know why I had even bothered to let that North African enemy boy at the mokeb get a drink of water. Wouldn’t it have been better to not give him hope?
“You really need to get yourself a wife, Saleh.”
Jasim, smallish and prompt and neatly dressed in his standard gray suit, stood next to a palm, eyeing me with some concern. Being the professional fixer that he was, I knew his MO. He’d called the hotel desk and told them to have the Iranian followed if he left the hotel. Jasim’s true job was to survive. Once, two American rockets had fallen on either side of him by the Eastern Gate souk. He should not have survived and had the right to wax philosophical about it ever afterward. But platitudes were not his thing; he never said things like, Every day above ground is a good day. He knew better than to think this bullshit was true. Many days above ground are worse than death.
A magnificent pile of garbage floated twenty meters away from us on the river, the sun shining off it as if it were jewels and not more plastic.
“For the life of me, Jasim, I was ready to marry two months ago. But she went and married a so-called poet.”
“A good poet?”
“As fake as they come. He writes antiwar noise and reads in famous world capitals. They get translated and he gets invitations to talk about peace in our time.”
“Why don’t you do the same?”
“I would if I believed in it.”
“Then there is no hope for you.”
“Besides, this poet is also, kind of, my boss. In other words, the woman I would have married went and married the man who signs off on my paychecks.”
Jasim said nothing. Something was wrong. Usually he had a lot more energy than this. He didn’t deal in pessimism and hopelessness. Not even with rockets dropping on him at the Eastern Gate. On the phone he’d been just about ready to kill me, now he was subdued. He had something to say.
He sang in the loveliest Arabic that a man can sing: “The greatest loves relinquish all hope of union.” Then he laughed, bitterly. “Listen to me! Am I quoting the great al-Mutanabbi or the great Ibn Zaydun or only my humble self on a street named after the great Abu Nuwas? And this while you speak of fake poets. What was the name of your love?”
I said Atia’s name.
“Saleh, something has happened!”
I took a breath. I had an idea what was coming. “You wish to tell me something about the woman from Tuz Khurma. Yes?”
He nodded.
“Dead?”
He nodded again.
“How?”
“She got it into her head she wanted the world to know her story.”
“She told people what she’d done up north?”
“Worse. She walked into one of the TV stations. Saleh, one can do that in Sadr City among our own—maybe! But Baghdad is a city that dies a thousand deaths every day. It is still a divided city. She was followed, I’m sure, once she came out of the station. They got to her by the Queen of the Rosary Church not far from here. I’m sorry, my brother. I have never failed so hard. I did not watch her carefully enough.”
I was the one who had failed. Maybe in Tuz Khurma she would have had a chance. Maybe the documentary would have turned Zahra the Beheader into a genuine heroine. Some country or other would have even given her a visa . . .
“Here.” In Jasim’s hand I noticed several notebooks. They looked familiar. He handed them over. “They came for you.”
Syria. Moalem’s painstakingly tedious notes about defending a useless red house at Khan-T.
Jasim sang another classical verse: “Such times when I struck my sword on the waves of mortality.”
“Do you know, Jasim, my left eye and right eye see the world as differently as the moon and the sun? I am mostly blind in the left eye.”
“And that has something to do with what?”
“If I close the right eye and look at the river with the left eye only, all the garbage in this ancient river could be diamonds.”
“But they are not diamonds. There is no romance to them. W
e Iraqis have to live here, you know. You are only passing through.”
We were silent awhile.
“Tell me, how many ways are there to die in Mesopotamia?”
“Six thousand years passed, brother Saleh, and we are still counting the ways.”
* * *
Afterward I went to the Queen of the Rosary Church alone and walked around. Somebody had left flowers in a corner of the sidewalk and I wanted to believe it was for Zahra the Beheader. Two men, guards, watched with curiosity and then with some alarm as they saw I was hanging around outside the church too long and not going away. There had been dozens of bombings in the area.
I walked off.
There is a window of time to grieve for others. And sometimes you have to shelve it for another day. Other times you have to do the grieving now and be done with it because there won’t be another time. I’d had no ideas for Zahra other than to try to take her away from this country. But she had neither a passport nor the proper identification (the enemy had seen to that) to get her a passport anytime soon. It meant that this thin attempt at kindness had been a pipe dream. I had unwittingly left her in Baghdad to die. She had been a walking time bomb with just enough notoriety to get herself assassinated.
Back on Karada Street that night I drank copiously to her, to Zahra.
She had made a promise. If I managed to take her away from this land, she’d always, always bake us fresh bread. I would not grieve for her again, not like tonight. There were other martyrs on the way.
7
The domes shimmered on the canvases. I had never seen Miss Homa’s meticulous brushwork so kinetic. She’d pushed past seventy many years ago and I would have thought time would have eventually caught up to her. Time instead seemed to have turned on her afterburners. Back in the day she had picked lovers like grapes. Yet she never married. Always stayed “Miss Homa,” even during the darkest days of the revolution when she could barely afford her electric bill. Hers hadn’t been a rescue from obscurity but a chance at a second coming. It had been, like so much else with art, a matter of timing. Timing and profit. Now the world wanted her. People bid absurdly for the painted domes that just a few years ago no one would look twice at. They came to her door. Invited her, to no avail, to hideously wasteful parties in a country where every five minutes, on the dot, I would watch another hungry face stick their head in the corner dump by my synagogue.
