by Roy Scranton
“The Americans won’t be happy until they’ve got all Islam under the lash. It’s always been that way, they’re just using their own guns now. We’ll have to fight them sooner or later.”
“We’ve struggled a long time against the Zionists.”
“God willing, we’ll destroy their armies on the field of battle.”
“Insha’Allah,” Aziz said flatly. “How is your mother, Salman?”
“She’s preparing to celebrate Ashura. Privately, of course.”
“Ashura.” Aziz took a drag from his Marlboro. “I’m wondering, Salman, if you’ve thought much about what happens after the war.”
Aziz was a hard man, a shadowed man, and although Salman didn’t know exactly where he stood in the Mukhabarat hierarchy or what he did, he suspected Aziz would have no compunctions at all about cutting Salman’s balls off with a dull knife and stuffing them down his throat. He might even enjoy it, if the man ever felt joy. Either way, Salman was confident that in the clandestine webs sure to be spun in the postwar chaos, Aziz would remain one of the nastier and more important spiders.
“I am your servant,” he said. “And a soldier of the Revolution.”
“We expect the war to be a long one. We expect the Zionists to make great gains, initially. But there are plans for what comes after. Salman, you have always served us very well.”
“I’m honored to do so.”
“But not everyone is so loyal. We expect many Shi’a to collude with the Zionists.”
His father gunned down by helicopter, his brothers dragged off to be shot like dogs, the mass graves and burning bodies, his tunnel that was almost a tomb—Salman imagined a boot stamping the images out. “You will need information,” he said.
“Yes. The Saddam Fedayeen and Mukhabarat are prepared, in the event of the Zionists’ temporary success, to fade into the desert and carry on the fight. We are Arabs, after all. We shall scatter like the Bedu and strike at the Zionists from the dunes, as we once fought the Turk and the British. We’ll raise a jihad against the Americans and bleed them the way the Afghans did the Russians. We’ll cut them four thousand times for every time they cut us. It may take years, of course, but patience makes all things possible.”
Salman saw where this was going. “The Americans will need collaborators. Translators.”
“Your English is good, no?”
“Fair. Mostly economics terms. But it’s passable.”
“Work on it. Here,” Aziz said, putting a satellite phone on the table. “This is how you maintain contact. The phone has two preprogrammed numbers. The first is to call me. I may or may not answer, and if I do, I may not have time to speak. Use it only when it’s most urgent for you to pass on information. The second is strictly for emergencies. Strictly. But if you need it, don’t hesitate. You will be all but on your own. We will call when we need you. Keep the phone close by. You understand?”
That all sounded fine, so far as it went. A bit like planning your own funeral. “Yes.”
“Good. Now we must come to a more urgent topic.”
Salman raised his eyebrows. Here it is, he thought, and struck first: “If I may, sir, I have something to tell you.” Aziz showed no response. Salman went on. “I’ve heard Munir Muhanned may be selling information to the Americans, via an agent in Kuwait.”
“You have evidence?”
“Not yet. But . . . I have a line. I think one of my colleagues is working with Muhanned’s men to encode the messages.”
“What’s his name?”
“His name?”
“Yes.”
“His name.”
“Yes, Salman.”
“Of course. Qasim al-Zabadi.”
“I see. Well, we’ll take care of it. For now, I need you to deliver a package.” He slid a folded piece of paper across the table. “Go here and ask for Naguib. He’ll have instructions for you.”
Salman palmed the paper. “Is that all, sir?”
“Yes, for now. You have university work, don’t you, that exempts you from emergency mobilization?”
“Of course.”
“Good. You’ll be well placed, if you manage to make it through the next few weeks. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Yes, sir,” Salman said, and left as calmly as he could, elated to have been exempted from reserve service. He’d needlessly used up his “suspicions” about that weed al-Zabadi, but that was fine. There would always be another Qasim.
Ashura had come and gone, unobserved, the Lament of Husayn forbidden on state radio. Qasim got up early all the same and prayed, irritated and guilty, thinking of his mother and Lateefah. Of more interest to the rest of the family—mostly Sunni—was the impending UN vote and the threat of veto, the worldwide protests, and the upcoming deadline. Indeed, the house buzzed like a newsroom. All day long, Al Jazeera and BBC ran on the TV in the living room and Iraqi radio played in the kitchen, while the family talked constantly. The chatter eased and obscured the fear behind their preparations.
The generator had benzine and the lines were hooked up. Extra propane tanks had been bought for the kitchen gas, since no one knew when the filling stations would reopen. The windows were taped. Mohammed had drilled a well, but the foot valve was leaking, so Mohammed’s son-in-law Ratib was out in the front garden trying to fix it. Ratib’s eldest, Siraj, worked in the garden with him, digging a hole for the benzine cans and propane tanks, and little Abdul-Majid, barely out of diapers, pretended to help, poking at the dirt with a stick till Siraj sent him running with a smack. The little one ran in the house wailing, snot-faced, crying for his mother, Warda, who was rifling through the living-room closet collecting candles—citronella candles, scented candles, beeswax candles, all jumbled together in a box.
Warda knelt and wiped Abdul-Majid’s face while he cried and told on his brother Siraj. She kissed his head and gave him some candles to carry, picked up her box, and led him into the kitchen, where Thurayya’s widowed sister, Khalida, was preparing the midday meal: chicken with red rice, salad and pickles, shineena, with golden vermicelli for dessert.
It had been a year since Khalida had come to stay with her sister. She’d once been an editor at a respected publishing house specializing in trade books, and her husband had been a policy coordinator for the National Progressive Front. About four years ago, he’d disappeared, but she kept working, living alone, waiting for him to come home, until one day her spirit just gave out. By the time Thurayya and Mohammed took her in, she was a scarecrow: withered to a stick, hair unbrushed, nails chewed to ragged nubs, darting eyes flashing out at a world full of hidden enemies. She was a bit better now, but the run-up to the war was wearing on her nerves.
“Hello, Auntie,” Warda said.
“God bless,” said Khalida, wiping her hands on a towel. “And what have you got there, little man?”
“Some candles,” Abdul-Majid said, sniffling.
“And what are you going to do with them?”
“We’ll light them with matches.”
“That’s right,” Khalida said. “We’ll light them with matches.”
“And they’ll make light,” he said.
“That’s right! They’ll make light! So that your auntie can see your beautiful face!”
Thurayya turned from her shopping list, warmed by the joy in her sister’s shy voice. She smiled at Khalida, Warda, and Abdul-Majid, her daughter Nazahah sitting next to her slicing cabbage, her precious family, her beautiful home—then scowled as she remembered the snake upstairs.
“Nazahah,” she said, “pay attention to what you’re doing.”
She still couldn’t believe Mohammed had refused to turn his back to the ingrate, brother’s son or no. After all his shiftlessness, all his laziness, and finally this, this disrespect—Thurayya had given up on him. She never thought her sister-in-law Nashwa had been hard enough
on the boy anyway, especially after Faruq’s death, and now . . . staying in Baghdad, leaving his wife in Baqubah, during a war . . . unimaginable. Then, to talk to her as if she was a child! What did you expect from such a one? Those who haven’t learned from their parents will learn their lessons from the days and nights. And for her own husband to nurse this viper . . . Mohammed left her no choice but to snub him at every turn, to cast a pall of tension over the house so thick, they’d suffocate till she got her way.
Yet what good was hardening your heart when they’d soon be huddled together praying for mercy? What did you gain by adding trouble to trouble? It was almost enough to make her want to forgive him—but the thought of his smug smile enraged her all over again, and she reminded herself that to show weakness with men was to submit to endless trampling.
“What are you doing?” she yelled at Nazahah. “Cut thin, thin! Shred the cabbage, don’t chop it!”
“Yes, mother,” Nazahah said. She knew Mother wasn’t really mad, not at her, anyway. Thurayya doted on her daughters, and her corrections usually took the form of good-humored exasperation or gentle scolding. Only in the most extreme circumstances did she lose her temper, and when that happened there was no mistaking. Mother would volcano, throwing plates, screaming, turning the house topsy-turvy until the violator collapsed in a shamble of tears. The last time that happened was when Maha got caught with a French magazine—Heaven knows where she got it—full of shirtless male models. “That was so worth it,” Maha said after, her face still puffy and red. They had, Nazahah couldn’t deny, been exceptionally beautiful men.
Nazahah often enough found herself a target for her mother’s irritation, but never her rage. She did what she was told, said please and thank you, and hardly argued with anyone. Her eldest sister, Warda, was well behaved, too, though stubborn as a mule, very much in her mother’s mold. It was poor Maha who was doomed to be the sower of strife: daring, cruel, walking through life with a feather on her head, always fighting the flies in front of her face. She terrorized Nazahah, who cowered before her older sister like a beat dog.
Nazahah’s comforts lay elsewhere. On turning thirteen, she’d fallen in love with God, and since then she’d floated through her days awestruck, contemplative, the world around her a tremulous vision. Every thing, every moment quivered with weight and substance, perfection, symmetry, and beauty, since all was the will of God, the one and only: every thrush, every wren, every cloud, every fear, every slice of cabbage, every word her mother shouted, every shifting emotion vibrating though the house, even the coming war. All. Her only problem was reconciling Michael Jackson, whom she understood to be somehow vaguely yet irrevocably not halal, possibly even haram. She would not let him go, however, and solved her conundrum by ignoring it. Michael and Fatimah sat side by side on her tiny shrine, holding the Prophet between them in harmony.
“Wake up,” her mother snapped, slapping the table. “You’ll cut your fingers off.”
Nazahah smiled at her mother.
“When you finish the salad, go see if your brother-in-law needs anything out front,” Thurayya said. “I’m going upstairs to check on your sister.”
Maha was Thurayya’s lamentation. She was too pretty by half, for starters, and she knew it. Then her temper! And the airs she put on! Thurayya’s plan was to get her married as quick as possible. They needed someone from the right kind of family, though, someone attractive, with good prospects . . . and young. Maha was picky—haughty—frankly, impossible. There was no shortage of available men, but the problem was that they needed a real Prince Charming, someone handsome and brave, sweet enough to treat her well but strong enough to control her. God willing!
Thurayya went up to the girls’ room, where Maha lay on her bed listening to a bootleg CD of Brandy’s Never Say Never and flipping through an Egyptian movie magazine. She watched her daughter daydream, wondering where she got her pride and her insolence, but loving her for it too. Maha would be a queen someday, when she found her prince. Thurayya smiled, then said, “Daughter.”
Maha flipped the pages of her magazine.
“Maha! Go downstairs and help your auntie with lunch.”
“But Mom . . .”
“No buts! Downstairs!”
Thurayya watched Maha stomp down the stairs, then circled back to her bedroom, where Mohammed was showing Qasim how to work his AK-47. Qasim held the weapon’s barrel awkwardly in his crudely bandaged left hand and struggled to pull back the charging handle. The weapon kept slipping from his grip.
“Here,” Mohammed said, “put the barrel on your foot and let the weapon pull down—not on the ground! On your foot. If you get dirt in the barrel, it’ll blow up in your face.”
Qasim tugged on the charging handle, and this time it slid back and clacked home. Mohammed found himself wishing, again, as he often did, that the boy had served his time in the military instead of getting the deferment Faruq had wrangled for him.
“Are you staying for lunch, my dearest husband, great and wise lord of the home?” Thurayya asked.
Mohammed frowned. “No. Is Ratib still working on the well?”
“I don’t know anything about wells, my noble sheikh of infinite courage. I’m just a silly woman who isn’t even given due respect in her own house.”
Qasim turned in time to catch Thurayya’s cold glare as she left.
“We need to talk,” Mohammed said to Qasim. “But first we have to finish cleaning out the office. Go start up the van.”
Qasim rode the bolt forward on the Kalashnikov and handed the rifle to his uncle, then headed downstairs. So he’d snapped at her—so what? Was he supposed to feel bad now, or pretend women got to boss him around? What could she do about his stupid hand? It was fine. Okay, it was oozing pus, developing a yellow crust around the hot, raw wound, and it hurt more every day. It might even be infected, but he was sure it would heal soon. A little bite, nothing he couldn’t handle. He certainly didn’t need a gaggle of women honking over him.
He started the van and slid his bandaged hand over the wheel, letting himself slide into the pain aching up his arm. He would master the pain. That would be manly.
Mohammed got in the passenger side.
“You can drive with your hand like that?” he asked.
“Yes, Uncle. It’s nothing. The bandage is just to keep it clean.”
“Let’s go, then. First stop is Zubair’s, then we’ll go get Othman.”
Qasim honked the horn and Siraj ran over and opened the gate, then stood aside while the van backed into the street. As they drove off, Mohammed noticed a black Mercedes pull out and follow them.
Mohammed had two offices, one in the Karrada, where he met with clients and handled paperwork, and one in a warehouse out in Baghdad Al-Jidida, where he kept the trucks and machinery. Earlier that week, they’d gone out to the warehouse and secured the outer wall with barbed wire and spikes, bricked up the windows, and locked up the equipment. Mohammed’s chief foreman, Yaqub, lived near there; he promised Mohammed he’d keep an eye on things. The Karrada office, on the other hand, Mohammed had decided to empty. He, Othman, Qasim, and two employees with a pickup spent the afternoon hauling out all Mohammed’s files and personal effects and as much furniture as they could manage, then securing the building.
Qasim laid mortar, bricking a window, while Mohammed sat at his desk going over outstanding contracts. Othman double-checked the file cabinets to make sure they were empty.
“I think,” Othman said, “it’s a great opportunity. I think they really mean democracy.”
“Nonsense,” said Mohammed, not taking his attention from his papers.
“It’ll be like Russia, I think.”
“Russia, huh?”
“Iraq’s a great nation, my friend, but we sow and weep under the lash of a tyrant. Our wheat is salted with tears of oppression. After the war, we’ll be free to farm how we lik
e. Our fields will sprout with joy.” Othman’s fine, soft hands spread to mimic tears falling on the wheat, then sprang up to show the new harvest.
Qasim thought the poet a silly old man, but Othman had been Mohammed’s best friend since they were boys. The two men were oil and water, Harun al-Rashid and Jafar, Don Panza and Sancho Quixote. Whereas Mohammed was an engineer, a pragmatist, and a nationalist, Othman was a poet, romantic and cosmopolitan. Whereas Mohammed had never left Iraq, Othman had traveled to Cairo, Paris, and Moscow, and had spent two years in exile in Beirut. Mohammed built houses and offices; Othman wrote poetry and had translated Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. Mohammed was broad-shouldered, with a square, handsome face that in a good light looked like Omar Sharif’s; Othman was dumpy and pear-shaped, with a long, sloping nose—he looked more like Nour El-Sherif. He wore thick glasses, through which he peeped out at the world with eyes that always seemed to be laughing.
“You’re a poetizing fool,” Mohammed said, slamming down his pen and sitting up. “Iraq is a great nation because we have a strong leader. You’d rather have madness, revolution after revolution, like the sixties? You’d rather a plague of crusaders? Because that’s what they’ll be, Othman, these Americans, just like the British. A plague. They’re going to come in like pharaoh and put their foot on the neck of Iraq.”
“They’ll take Saddam’s foot off the neck of Iraq, is what they’ll do,” Othman said, “and you’d see that if you weren’t so old and set in your ways.”
“Set in my ways? Listen, brother, I know you’re an ignorant old skirt chaser who doesn’t know from a handful of lentils, but you must have been taught a little of your nation’s history.”
“I know ‘His watchdogs have corrupted the land,’”—Othman recited, quoting his teacher al-Bayati—“‘stolen the people’s food, raped the Muses, raped the widows of the men who died under torture, raped the daughters and widows of his soldiers who lost the war, from which, like rabbits in clover fields, they had run away, leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants . . .’”
