“I agree,” he said. “I’ll finish off the screenplay for you, but just for you.”
She smiled, as if he had paid her a compliment, then she took a sip of juice and looked out at the afternoon sky from the sixth-floor cafeteria of an expensive hotel on Arasat Street. Mahmoud had no idea how he had plucked up his courage, but he reached out and put his hand on hers. Maybe he thought he was still in the dream he’d had the night before, but whatever the case, he no longer felt so inhibited and thought it unlikely she would react violently.
His intuition was sound: Nawal didn’t react. She continued looking out at the light coming in through the big window and sipped her mango juice quietly, then turned to him and said, “You seem unwell, Mahmoud. Let’s just talk about the screenplay, please.”
Mahmoud didn’t remove his hand. He squeezed hers a little, and she felt compelled to pull her hand back slowly.
“What’s up, Mahmoud? I’ve been talking to you for an hour about Saidi and his games. You don’t seem to have understood.”
“No, I understand. I’m sorry. But I think about you.”
“Why do you think about me? You’ve got young women at the magazine. Women your own age. Think about them.”
Something didn’t make sense to Mahmoud. Why couldn’t Nawal have said all of this at the magazine? What would have happened if the staff had heard her speaking badly of Saidi? Mahmoud sometimes heard his colleagues at the magazine making fun of Saidi and his exaggerated fashion sense. And then the idea of writing the screenplay didn’t seem like such a good idea. Nawal hadn’t spoken about film till now, and she sounded like a businesswoman or the bored wife of a businessman, not a film director. She looked like she spent more time sitting in front of the mirror than behind a camera.
She was looking for a man to sleep with, thought Mahmoud, and when Saidi stayed away so long, she cast her net wider. She wanted a taste of this dark young man. That’s what Mahmoud told himself as he leaned back in his chair, keeping a polite distance between himself and Nawal.
5
Mahmoud had been sitting in a bar in the Zawya district for longer than he could remember. The sky outside had darkened, and he had drunk himself into a state of confusion as he went over in his mind how miserably his meeting with Nawal had ended. They had agreed to meet again so he could give her a preliminary summary of the screenplay, then they left the restaurant and got into the elevator to go downstairs. As soon as the door closed and they were alone, Mahmoud turned to Nawal, put his arms around her, and kissed her on her red lips. She submitted to him as he pressed his lips against hers and held her soft body tight in his arms. He had waited so long for this. When the elevator had reached the ground floor, Nawal pushed Mahmoud away with her hands and exited as soon as the door opened. Mahmoud tried to keep up with her. At the door of her car she said, “That wasn’t a nice thing to do. If I loved you, I would be more than generous. Try to respect me.”
He wanted to apologize, but she shut the door in his face and drove off.
He mulled over her parting words in his drunken head, trying to get to the bottom of what she meant. Why hadn’t she rebuffed him more forcefully? She had lit a fire in him, then abandoned him.
When he left the bar, he found it hard to walk steadily. He realized the curfew would start in less than an hour. Who would drive him to Bataween at this time of night?
Seeing few cars on the main street, he resorted to the emergency option before long and called Sultan.
After a nerve-racking half hour, Sultan’s car pulled up. When Mahmoud got in, he realized that Sultan, too, was drunk. He showered him with apologies for having called so late but was more relieved than he would have imagined to have grim-faced Sultan beside him.
Out of the blue, Sultan started speaking in a tone Mahmoud hadn’t heard from him before—like a big brother, not like a driver to his boss.
“If you don’t mind me saying, sir, I saw you today with that Nawal.” Before Mahmoud could respond, Sultan continued. “Forgive me if I’m intruding, but I have this opportunity to talk to you now and might not have it tomorrow or any other day.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going away tomorrow.”
“Going away?”
“Yes. But I wanted to tell you, sir. You see, that woman Nawal is not cool. I hope you don’t believe anything she says. She was Mr. Ali’s girlfriend. He used to have fun with her. I mean, she stuck to him like flypaper, and then she wanted to marry him, and Mr. Ali doesn’t have time for stuff like that. I mean, you know . . .”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, it’s because of her that they brought this case against him. She started running after Mr. Ali, and then she started threatening him if he didn’t marry her. She’s a rude, loose woman, and she has connections in the Green Zone and relatives in parliament who caused trouble for the boss. You thought he’d gone to Beirut for a conference? No, he’s avoiding that whore Nawal.”
“Okay, and when’s he coming back? You mean there’s a possibility he won’t come back at all?”
“No, he’ll come back. He’s mobilizing his friends to block the case, but they advised him to leave Baghdad for a while.”
“Okay, and why are you going away tomorrow?”
“I have to take the boss’s sisters and mother to Amman. His mother’s very ill and needs treatment, and Mr. Ali’s now waiting for us in Amman.”
Mahmoud got out in front of the Dilshad Hotel and thanked Sultan profusely. Before going into the hotel, he took out his phone and dialed Saidi’s number in Beirut. He got an automatic message saying the number he had dialed was out of service.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DANIEL
1
AT DAWN THE NEXT DAY, Sultan was driving Saidi’s mother and his two unmarried sisters from Baghdad to Amman. But the car never reached Amman. Other drivers on the same route said armed gangs were hijacking cars and, depending on the passengers’ religion, massacring some in the nearby orchards. Saidi tried to call Sultan several times, but no one answered.
A day earlier someone else had left Baghdad, in this case with no plans to come back. This was Abu Anmar, the owner of the Orouba Hotel. He turned the ignition key of the new GMC truck he had bought with the money from his deal with Faraj, then adjusted his headdress and headband and looked at his face in the rearview mirror: he felt he was on top of the world. He had transferred the rest of the money to his nephews in his hometown, Qalat Sukkar, in the south, where he was now headed, having washed his hands of Baghdad, a city he no longer recognized. After twenty-three years, the city had abandoned him, becoming a place of murder and gratuitous violence.
Ten minutes after Abu Anmar had left, Faraj removed the Orouba Hotel sign. He threw it on the ground and trod on it, then called on one of his young workers to take it to the sign writer and have him remove the name Orouba, or “Arabness,” and rewrite it with the name Grand Prophet Hotel. He was confident he would succeed where Abu Anmar had failed.
It was a good season for business, as far as Faraj was concerned. He had made two major deals within the month and felt he was closing in on others. The dire state of the country offered opportunities only to the bold and adventurous, and Faraj was not short of a sense of adventure. Gangs were on the rampage in the streets of Baghdad, and people were abandoning their homes or shops for fear of being kidnapped or killed. Faraj was seizing these opportunities. Overnight he had become a major landlord with a growing staff. Some people accused him of leading a criminal gang, but except for some slaps and kicks that he dispensed liberally to those who had the misfortune of standing in his way, he hadn’t killed or robbed anyone, not openly at least.
Four young men who worked with Faraj went to the hotel, opened the door wide, and set about finishing what Abu Anmar had started—clearing the hotel of all its old contents.
With a china bowl in one hand and his black pray
er beads in the other, Faraj watched his workers with a sense of satisfaction. He was about to go to the bakery to buy some bread and clotted cream for his family’s breakfast when a massive explosion deafened his ears and the china bowl slipped out of his hand. It was the largest explosion that had ever taken place in Bataween.
2
Faraj didn’t die in that explosion. It wasn’t his time yet. He had more to learn. For one thing, he had come to accept that Elishva really did have secret powers.
A week before the explosion Faraj had made another successful deal. With Elishva. She had finally given in and accepted his offer to buy her old house—because Daniel had finally come back. It was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the installation of His Holiness Mar Dinkha IV as patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. Elishva had gone to celebrate the occasion in the Church of Saint Qardagh in the Camp al-Gilani district. She felt spiritually fulfilled and was proud of herself for crossing Tayaran Square, going through the pop-up fruit and vegetable market and the busy car park at the end of Sheikh Omar Street, and then walking back the same way without feeling any fatigue or any of the usual pain in her legs. She was thinking of spraying the courtyard with water and sweeping it now that she had some energy. Then she heard a light knocking on the front door.
The residents of Lane 7, especially Umm Salim, her taciturn husband and her children, and some inquisitive young men who lived nearby, had been watching Elishva in recent months, trying to catch sight of her son. Elishva had been chatting about his return and about what the two of them had been up to, but no one had seen anything conclusive. They ended up saying that thieves who knew Elishva was senile were taking advantage of her to make off with some of her valuable possessions. But then the old woman’s son really did appear. He had black hair parted down the middle and long on the sides, as in the traditional images of Christ. He had a pale white complexion and was slim, with the body of a twenty-year-old. He wore a white shirt with a high collar, torn jeans, white sports shoes, and a red leather bag of the kind that young conscripts had in the early 1980s. He looked sad and romantic, like a dejected lover. He walked with slow, hesitant steps, looking around as he went, like a stranger or someone who had left long ago and had just returned. He seemed to be looking for traces of distant memories of the place he came from. Behind him came the old deacon, Nader Shamouni, dawdling to give the stranger a chance to see the place and relate to it without interference.
So had the old woman really been telling the truth? Had her son really survived the slaughter of the 1980s? Over the last three years the local people had heard many stories that were no more believable. Dead people had emerged from the dungeons of the security services and nonexistent people appeared out of nowhere outside the doors of their relatives’ humble houses. There were people who had returned from long journeys with new names and new identities, women who had spent their childhoods in prison cells and had learned, before anything else in life, the rules and conventions for dealing with the warders. There were people who had survived many deaths in the time of the dictatorship only to find themselves face-to-face with a pointless death in the age of “democracy”—when, for example, a motorbike ran into them in the middle of the road. Believers lost their faith when those who had shared their beliefs and their struggles betrayed them and their principles. Nonbelievers had become believers when they saw the “merits” and benefits of faith. The strange things that had come to light in the past three years were too many to count. So that Daniel Tadros Moshe, the lanky guitarist, had come back to his old mother’s house wasn’t so hard to believe.
When the two men arrived at the old wooden door of Elishva’s house, the thin young man knocked, looking around between each rap on the door, aware that inquisitive strangers might be watching him closely. The door opened, and Elishva appeared—tiny, with a black scarf on her head and thick glasses on her nose. She looked up, then inched forward with labored steps until she stood in the lane in front of the young stranger, examining him in the full light of day. It was definitely him— the very same young man with the slight gray smile that was in the old picture in her sitting room. He had the same look, the same clothes and face, the same smile that spread across his face when his dark eyes met the old lady’s. So Saint George the Martyr had carried out his promise after all, bringing Elishva’s son back to her just as he looked that morning when he left the house reluctantly and in sadness, his heavy boots pounding the pavement till he disappeared from sight at the turn onto the main street.
Elishva looked around her and saw Umm Salim standing at the door of her house. She saw other onlookers—women and children and young men at the other end of the lane, toward Bataween’s main street, and in the upper windows of the mashrabiya balconies. She wanted to be sure that everyone was a witness to her miracle. Here was her beloved son, come back to embrace her.
He leaned down tentatively, and she wrapped her arms around him, pulling her son toward her with a strength she did not possess.
“This is Daniel, Elishva,” said Nader Shamouni, though this was as clear as daylight to the old woman. She held him in her arms for two minutes or more. Then she noticed that Umm Salim and some of the other neighbors had come forward, surrounding her in growing numbers. Umm Salim actually touched Daniel’s arm to make sure he was not a phantom. Daniel slipped out of the old woman’s arms, looked into her face with a smile, and addressed her. He had to make sure she was still in her right mind and knew what was happening around her.
“How are you?” he asked in Assyrian, giving an even broader smile. She scanned his face and ran her veiny hands down his arms, then pulled him gently into the house, saying, “I’m fine. I’m fine.”
Inside the house, in the sitting room, Nader Shamouni spoke firmly, trying to put an end to the old woman’s fantasies. He told her he didn’t have much time, that he had to go back to his family in Ankawa, that Father Josiah was awaiting his answer, so she had to make up her mind. Her daughters, Matilda and Hilda, were now in Ankawa, having come from Australia with some of their children for one purpose—to take the old lady back to Australia with them.
“This is Daniel, your grandson, Elishva,” said the deacon. “Hilda’s eldest son. She used to send you pictures of him in the mail. Don’t you recognize him?”
Phone calls between Matilda and Father Josiah had helped to pinpoint the strategy: that there was a strong similarity between Daniel her grandson and Daniel her dead son, strong enough to confuse the old woman. Matilda, Hilda, and her son Daniel had flown to Iraq and stayed in Nader Shamouni’s house in Ankawa. The next day the deacon and Daniel had gone to Baghdad. The young man, who spoke Assyrian and English but wasn’t fluent in Arabic, was nervous about the mission. He was motivated by a sense of family duty rather than by any personal nostalgia or strong feeling toward his grandmother, of whom he remembered little since he had left with his family at a very young age.
The whole plan depended on one element: the old woman being moved by the sight of her grandson and going along with his suggestions. Daniel told his grandmother she had to come with him. She had to sell the house and get rid of all her stuff. She had to live with him. He said the last sentence in a sincere tone. As he talked to her, he felt the influence of the place slowly seep into him. A mysterious sadness came over him when he looked up at the gray pictures hanging on the walls. He felt he recognized the house and had faint memories of the times he and his mother used to come and visit his grandmother and grandfather more than a decade earlier.
Nader left them to go over these memories together and went off to the Garage al-Amana district to run some errands. Elishva and her grandson chatted till nighttime. The more they talked, the more Daniel had the impression that he and this frail old woman really did have shared memories, and the more the grandmother was convinced of the illusion that her grandson and her departed son were one and the same person. When Elishva stood in the kitchen, to make dinner by the light of t
he oil lamp, and caught sight of her pale, wrinkled face in the windowpane, she knew she had traveled far in time and no longer had a son in his twenties who was frightened of going to war. But she was exposed to feelings she hadn’t experienced for a long time—smelling and touching her son’s arms and stroking his hair and having him put his head on her lap. These were valuable things that mattered in her life, not just fantasies in her head, and she was willing to do anything to preserve them.
She washed a large china basin, although it was already clean, and put it in an aluminum tray to receive the tomato omelet from the frying pan. She saw her cat, Nabu, come into the small kitchen, drawn by the smell of food, and at that moment she decided to accept the request of the son who was her grandson. She would do anything to make sure she could continue to caress his skin and his hair and smell his childlike smell, which she had never forgotten.
3
Daniel turned on his cell phone and called his mother in Ankawa. He told her in clear English, “Now’s the time to act, not to tell the truth. Speak to the old lady, but humor her. Agree with everything she says.”
He gave the phone to the old lady, and the women chatted amiably for a quarter of an hour. Elishva was happy and was seeing the world with new eyes. She made Daniel kneel in front of the picture of Saint George and offer him thanks because he had fulfilled his promise to her. As she folded her hands in silence in front of the picture, she waited for the saint to say a few words to convince her son that a miracle really had taken place, but the saint held his tongue.
The light from the oil lamp faded. Elishva tried to stand up to fill it with oil. Daniel went to help her but discovered that the barrel was empty. The oil had run out without the old lady noticing. Elishva took this as another sign that her time in Baghdad was running out.
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