The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  The poetry, most of which was in Farsi, wasn’t very good—or if it was, Anwar’s whispered Arabic translations didn’t do it justice. Soon enough Jemila pronounced herself bored and left, but Amal stayed, enjoying the tickle of Anwar’s breath in her ear, even though the words he spoke weren’t that interesting. Afterwards he walked her to her next class and asked if he could see her again. She said yes.

  They began meeting regularly, going on dates that weren’t acknowledged as dates: picnics on the seawall that bordered the university; long walks through the city center, which after a decade-and-a-half-long recession was finally undergoing an economic revival, new buildings springing up daily. Amal met more of Anwar’s friends, including a number of Americans—funny, good-natured people with hilarious accents. Years later, in the buildup to the invasion, she’d remember them and wonder if they were OK.

  Anwar told her about his adventures as a diplomat’s son and Amal shared some of Aunt Nida’s political war stories. About her parents she was more circumspect, but she did eventually let on that her father was a Baghdad cop. Partly as a test, she told Anwar about her intention to become an ABI agent. She could tell from his reaction that he thought this was an odd career choice, but he didn’t dismiss it. “Perhaps you’ll visit me at the State Department when you come to Riyadh,” he said smiling.

  She invited him to come shooting with her. Anwar was not a natural with firearms, but he was a good sport, applauding as Amal hit the center of the target repeatedly while he largely failed to hit it at all. On the way back to campus from this outing, they stopped at a magazine shop. While Anwar bought cigarettes at the front counter, Amal wandered back to the shelf where they kept the out-of-state newspapers. That was where she saw the picture of her father, in uniform, on the steps of Baghdad city hall with a dozen other police captains. STANDING UP AGAINST CORRUPTION, read the headline on the Baghdad Gazette. SADDAM INDICTMENT EMBOLDENS REFORMERS, added the Daily News. The Post’s headline was more sinister: THESE ARE THE ONES.

  “Amal?” Anwar said, coming up beside her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine!” She pulled him away before he could see what she was looking at. It was the first time she’d ever taken his hand—and she didn’t let go, even after the shop was far behind them.

  In the days that followed there were other firsts. And so it happened that not long afterwards, on a morning when they both should have been in class, Amal found herself at their favorite picnic spot on the seawall listening to Anwar read a new poem, a proposal in verse. The key word in the poem—sigheh—was not one of the handful of Farsi terms she’d already learned from him, but from the context and the passionate way in which he spoke, she assumed he was asking her to marry him. And he was, sort of.

  “Temporary marriage?” The concept, essentially a love affair with God’s blessing, was straight out of a trashy romance novel. It also fell squarely into the category of things no smart or self-respecting girl would even consider.

  Amal didn’t know what to make of Anwar’s proposal. It was as though he’d used an epithet whose meaning was ambiguous. Did he take her for a fool? Did he think she was a whore? Or was he really, in his own strange way, trying to be sweet? Anwar meanwhile interpreted Amal’s dismay as a sign that he’d mortally offended her, and tried to take his words back. “Please,” he begged, “forgive me! Forget I said anything!”

  But Amal—recalling his breath in her ear, the touch of his hand—wasn’t so sure she wanted to forget it. She needed to think it over some more.

  She considered going to the campus Shia mosque for advice, but the place was a POG hangout and thus not exactly welcoming. Instead, she talked to her roommates.

  Jemila was dismissive: “Don’t be ridiculous, Amal! If you want to sleep with him, just sleep with him.” At first Amal thought this was just Jemila being modern, but then she realized there was more to it than that. Jemila was Sunni, and Sunnis believed that temporary marriage was forbidden. Of course Sunnis like all Muslims also believed that sex outside of marriage was forbidden, but Jemila apparently made a distinction between sins she liked and sins she found distasteful. “I mean really, it’s kind of gross if you think about it. Like being an actual prostitute.”

  “What are you saying, Jemila?”

  “Well . . .” Jemila grew defensive, recognizing she was on shaky ground. “It’s just, to make a formal bargain . . . It’s like you’re renting yourself out . . .”

  Amal stared pointedly at the gold bracelet on Jemila’s wrist. “So says the girl who expects gifts from all her boyfriends.”

  “Those are gifts, not contractual obligations!”

  Iman wasn’t surprised by Jemila’s attitude towards temporary marriage. What surprised her was that Anwar didn’t share it. “Isn’t he a Sunni, too?”

  “He’s Sunni, but his grandmother is Shia.”

  “My grandmother is a Jew,” Iman said. “But you don’t see me celebrating Yom Kippur.”

  “Anwar knows I’m Shia,” Amal said. “And he respects me, so—” She stopped, because Iman was laughing. “Fine. You think he just wants to have sex with me, is that it?”

  “If he were Shia, I would definitely think that. And I still think it’s the most likely explanation, but there’s a difference: A Shia boy who proposes temporary marriage to get sex may honestly believe he’s following God’s law. A Sunni boy knows he’s being cynical.”

  “I’m glad you think so highly of Anwar.”

  “It’s not the only possible explanation. I can think of other reasons why a Sunni might propose temporary marriage, but they’re all worse.”

  “What other reasons?”

  “He might be an idiot,” Iman said. “Or mentally ill.”

  “Oh, wonderful. Anything else?”

  “The worst reason of all: He might be in love with you. Maybe what he’s really after is a permanent marriage, but he’s afraid you’re not ready, so this is his way of easing up to it.”

  “You call that the worst reason?” Amal said. “How could Anwar loving me be a bad thing?”

  “Because you don’t love him,” said Iman. “I’ve listened to you talk about him, Amal. You like Anwar. You enjoy his company and the attention he pays you. He distracts you from worrying about your family. But you don’t love him, and I don’t think a temporary marriage—or an affair—is going to change that.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Amal said. “I mean, it’s not as if I were going to say yes to Anwar’s proposal.”

  “You haven’t told him no yet, though.”

  “No, but I’m going to.” And then, as if to demonstrate that there was an idiot here, but it wasn’t Anwar, she added: “Don’t worry, Iman. I know what I’m doing.”

  The number on Umm Dabir’s message slip had a Baghdad area code rather than the Riyadh code Amal would have expected, and as she dialed she entertained the notion that this really was just a prank of some sort. But the voice that answered said “Al Rasheed Hotel,” and when she asked to speak to Abu Salim bin Amjad she was put straight through. The next voice she heard was Anwar’s.

  He told her he was in town for a conference. He told her he needed to see her. He wouldn’t tell her why, but he also wouldn’t take no for an answer, and any impulse Amal might have had to hang up on him was checked by the thought that he’d just call Farouk’s office again, or perhaps show up in person.

  She named a restaurant a few blocks from the hotel and agreed to meet him that evening at half past six. She arrived early, and like a Bureau agent setting up a sting, parked her car across the street, facing the direction of his most likely approach.

  She’d run his name on the office computer. Sure enough he was a federal employee, though not with the State Department as he’d always planned—his posting was in Commerce, in the Patent and Trademark Office. His wife, Nasrin, was Persian, the fourth daughter of a former trade delegate. They had two daughters of their own . . . and one son.

  Abu Salim. Salim�
��s dad. Of course it was the most natural thing in the world for a father to take the name of his firstborn son. But when the son is the product of a marriage that should never have happened and a woman who rejected you . . . Who does that? What does it mean? What do you want from me, Anwar?

  Amal had been in the fifth month of her sigheh when Aunt Nida found out. Amal never learned who tipped Nida off, though she suspected Iman, in an act of kindness, had made a phone call.

  That day she’d gone to the seawall to walk and think about drowning herself. Even in her worst despair, suicide wasn’t really in Amal, but another idea—of fleeing across the sea to some country where no one knew her—appealed more strongly, and if she’d come upon an unguarded boat she might have taken it.

  Instead she went back to the dorm. A girl sitting in the lobby stared at her as she came in, and Amal walked by swiftly, drawing her abaya around her. To conceal her weight gain she’d been dressing more and more conservatively, but not even a burqa would hide her belly-bump much longer. Already there were whispers.

  Anwar wanted to do more than whisper. “Let’s declare our marriage openly and move in together,” he said. “We’re in love, what’s the problem?” The problem? The problem was a future in which Amal ended up living in Riyadh, not as an ABI agent but as a suburban housewife. A future in which instead of helping her father chase Baath out of Iraq, she went shopping at the Hayat Mall. Oh, and they weren’t in love. Anwar was insane, and Amal was stupid.

  She opened the door to her room and Aunt Nida was inside, sitting on her bed and smoking a cigarette. Amal stopped short, in panic trying to come up with some lie to tell, but it was pointless; she could see on Aunt Nida’s face that Nida already knew everything.

  “Amal,” she said. “I’m very disappointed in you.” This mild rebuke, the only one Nida would offer, struck Amal like a blow to the head. She didn’t pass out, not exactly, but the terror she’d just barely been holding in check rose up and cloaked the world in a haze.

  When the haze lifted, Amal was sitting down and Nida was interrogating her.

  “How many months?”

  “One more,” Amal said numbly. “The sigheh ends in thirty-four days.”

  “Not the marriage. The pregnancy.”

  “Oh.” Amal reddened. “I don’t know. It’s been three or four months I guess.”

  “Three, or four?”

  “I don’t . . . Four. I think four.”

  “Ah.” Tradition held that God gave a fetus its soul a hundred and twenty days after conception. In civil terms, this translated into abortion being legal during the first four months of pregnancy and expensive thereafter. “Does the boy know?”

  “Anwar? Yes, he knows.” She almost laughed. “He thinks it’s great news.”

  “And you?” said Aunt Nida. “Do you want to stay with this boy, Amal? Raise a family with him?”

  “No.” No hesitation. “I want—” I want the last five months back. I want the future I had before I did this stupid, stupid thing. I wish, I wish. “No,” she repeated.

  “All right then,” Nida said.

  “All right?” Amal couldn’t imagine those words applying to her.

  “I’ll talk to my friends in the capital, see who knows his family.” At the mention of family Amal flinched, which Nida acknowledged with a nod. “I will have to tell your mother, too, of course.”

  It wasn’t her mother Amal was most concerned about. “And father?”

  “Shamal has other matters to deal with, as you know. Perhaps we need not distract him with this just now. No promises,” Nida added. “We’ll see what your mother says.” Looking around the room: “OK, let’s get you packed.”

  “Packed?”

  “Of course. You can’t stay here, looking like that.”

  “But . . . my studies . . .”

  “Those will have to wait awhile.” Nida had on her game face now, the expression she wore when she plotted against the POGs. You could almost see the stratagems queuing up behind her eyes. “Don’t worry, we’ll work something out . . .”

  Amal spent the next week at her aunt’s house, not going outside, not even looking out the windows. One day there was a loud banging at the front door; Amal hid upstairs and listened while Anwar argued furiously with Aunt Nida. He came back again the next day and that time Nida had her bodyguards deal with him.

  A few days after that, she sat Amal down for a talk. “I’ve spoken to the boy’s family. The father is a reasonable sort. He agrees it’s best we pretend this whole thing never happened.” Then the bad news: “The boy is being much more difficult. He is afflicted with a combination of rebelliousness and romanticism. Too much time hanging around artists in Tehran I suppose.”

  “Please,” Amal said, fearing the worst. “Tell me I don’t have to stay with him.”

  “No. The marriage is finished. Well, soon enough. But there is something else the boy wants. Something he is willing to defy his own father to have.”

  Amal, feeling a kick, dropped a hand to her stomach.

  She couldn’t give birth in her aunt’s house. With Aunt Nida’s election campaign gathering steam, her opponents would be trying to dig up any dirt they could. But Nida was owed favors in some unlikely quarters; she made a call and arranged for Amal to complete her pregnancy in a place the Party of God would never look.

  The convent was on the coast, an hour’s drive from Beirut. Amal never learned the name of the place or of most of the women who lived there. With the exception of a Sister Demiana who met her at the gate and showed her where she’d be sleeping, the nuns had all taken vows of silence.

  Amal was given a room in the convent’s north tower that faced the sea. The view was nice, but she could have done without the icon of Saint Mary, the irony of which was not lost on her. Umm Isa, Amal prayed that first day, my request is simple: Please stop staring at me. Later, as her confinement dragged on, she asked a different favor: Can we speed this up somehow?

  The baby did arrive early, though Amal’s labor lasted an entire night. Towards the end of it she grew delirious and imagined herself in two places at once: the clean bright hospital ward to which Sister Demiana had delivered her, and another, much dimmer and lonelier room, with not even a saint’s portrait for company, just a flickering bulb that transformed itself into a tall and smokeless flame. “Push,” said a voice—the midwife’s, her own—and Amal pushed.

  By September she was back at Aunt Nida’s, filling out a stack of forms for her readmission to school. Anwar was gone. The baby, whose face Amal had never seen, was gone too. Amal had a strict curfew now and a paid chaperone to accompany her everywhere, but otherwise it really was as if the whole thing had never happened. Best of all, Amal’s father had still not been told, and it seemed more and more likely he never would be.

  Amal knew she should be grateful and she was. She was also terrified. Good fortune doesn’t have to be matched by bad, but Amal very much feared this was one of those times when it would be. And it wasn’t hard to imagine how the scales might be balanced.

  On the eve of Saddam Hussein’s trial, Hussein Kamel had disappeared. The rumor was that Kamel, faced with a lifetime in hiding, had decided at the last moment on an ill-advised attempt to reconcile with his father-in-law. He’d slipped the marshals assigned to protect him and gone to Saddam to beg forgiveness—with predictable results. Absent Kamel’s testimony, the case against Saddam collapsed; federal prosecutors threw up their hands and retreated to Riyadh, leaving the local cops who’d defied Saddam standing naked and exposed, like the vanguard of an army of liberation that had never arrived.

  “Father?” Amal said, speaking to Shamal by phone the day after Hussein Kamel’s body was found. “Father, are you OK?”

  “Yes, we are all fine here!” He had to shout over the background noise. He was calling from a pay phone, no longer trusting their home line. “It’s so good to hear your voice!”

  “Father, are you coming to see me?”

  “Your moth
er will be visiting you soon,” Shamal said. “Your brothers too. I don’t think I can get away right now . . .”

  “No, father, you have to come too!”

  “I have things I have to do here, Amal. I will see you when I can. I miss you.”

  “I miss you too, father,” Amal said, and began to cry.

  . . . and now she was crying again, in this other world, the city of the future where her father was no more.

  Sunlight flashed off a passing car and she saw Anwar across the street. He hadn’t seen her yet, and as he made his way along the sidewalk checking signs for the restaurant, Amal hurried to compose herself. The man from my past, she thought, stepping out to call his name. Just not the right one.

  “You’re looking well,” Anwar said.

  They sat in a back corner of the restaurant, untouched menus and water glasses on the table between them. Already Amal regretted the choice of meeting place, with its implication of a long and leisurely conversation. She just wanted to find out what Anwar was after—what it was going to take to make him go away—and then get out of here.

  Anwar for his part seemed equally uncomfortable. His smile was forced and there was a pained rigidity to his posture, as though a mild electrical current were passing through the chair in which he sat. But rather than hurry to come to the point, he insisted on making small talk.

  “So,” he said, trying another gambit, “you actually did it. Became a federal agent, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Amal said.

  “That’s great!” A waiter passed by, carrying food to another table, and Anwar reached for his menu. “Are you hungry? Should we—”

  “Anwar,” Amal said sharply.

  “Right.” He dropped the menu and lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “OK.”

  “Please tell me what this is about. You call my office, my boss’s office—”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Anwar said. “That was stupid, I know. I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “So you decided to call my boss? Did you think embarrassing me would make me more willing to speak to you? Or was it supposed to be a threat?”