~ * ~
During the taxi ride here, I gave my father more of the details of how his car had been written-off. About Sheikh Mumtaz, about Sam’s broken ribs and torn spleen. I didn’t even remember that there was such a thing as a spleen, I said. Baba said of course there is, Nabil, didn’t you pay any attention to anything when you took biology? He must have forgotten that I had almost failed on account of my squeamishness, on account of the fainting. He doesn’t know that I used to juggle the teacher’s words and invert them, make derivatives of them and add suffixes or prefixes until nothing made sense, so that I could pretend he was speaking some language I couldn’t understand. I imagined myself a visitor in a foreign country, pretended I was an anthropologist in the field, studying the ways of the local people. Maybe I have always wanted to be somewhere I don’t belong, grappling with a foreign language that I would intuit over time. To be forever ten years old and discovering some new tongue and opening the possibility of never having to go home. Maybe I still want to be somewhere that is not here.
Stupid words fill my head, rhymes like the ones that young American photographer was making up one day while we were waiting for an American press conference at the Convention Centre to start. Back when the very sight of them running our government from within was one of the most shocking things I had ever seen. Qabil. Before the story, before Sam.
Torn spleen, beauty queen, ugly stories made pristine...what did they call that thing black Americans do when they put their poetry to a beat? Rap music. Maybe because it feels like it’s rapping you in the head. But I like that it involves improvisation, sort of like a maqam.
Sam said she thought it was a duty to come here and report. Not a duty to her country, but to the truth. I wonder if that’s only half the truth. Maybe she, too, likes to be in places where she doesn’t belong.
~ * ~
My mind is swirling and I know I have lost where I am supposed to be. I realize that the imam must have been talking about Noor because everybody is saying, Rahim-ha, rahim-ha. God be merciful to her. The imam’s voice sounds like the violin Ziad had learned to play, but not entirely well: melancholy, haunting, slightly out of key.
The imam doesn’t stop for my lack of attention. “Ali said: Every day an Angel of Heaven cries: ‘O people there below! Produce offspring to die; build to be destroyed; gather ye together to depart!”‘
Miles said Sam would be just fine. A torn spleen, broken ribs, going home soon. Nothing fatal. I think of Sam’s lovely body, the bones holding it up somehow broken, and not easily fixed. No real treatment for that other than rest and time, Baba told me when I explained what happened. Not fixable, and somehow, my fault. If only I could have protected her. If only she could have landed on me in the car, instead of the other way around.
And so I remain here, unscathed. Only scarred. From the corner of my eye, in the outer ring of the mosque, behind the columns where the women sit, I catch a bright face. Noor’s? I could swear it is. I turn to see it, but it’s gone, dissolved into the face of someone who cannot yet be fourteen. Somebody else’s light.
At Noor’s house, the meat of a large lamb slaughtered in honour of her Arbaain lies on the table. Another lamb’s meat is passed out to the poor in a nearby neighbourhood. I don’t have an appetite but Baba pushes me, and I manage to eat some quuzi, the whole animal stuffed with rice and almonds and raisins. A dish I used to love.
What would Sam think if she saw this feast on a day of mourning? I wonder if her people, Christians or Jews, whatever they are, prepare all this food when they are thinking about someone who has died. It seems like the least appropriate moment to eat. And yet, this is the way we honour our dead - by showing how thankful we are that we are alive. By making sure the people around us will not go hungry.
~ * ~
Halfway through our taxi ride home, Baba breaks the silence.
“While you were gone, Cousin Saleh stopped by,” he says, speaking in a whisper, as if the driver might eavesdrop. “He wondered where you were and why you stopped coming.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That you were on an out-of-town trip. That I didn’t know more.” Baba stares out of the window at the Ministry of Defence, riddled with blackened craters caused by US missile strikes at the start of the war in March. The building, with its high, sloping sides leading to a flat plateau, looks like it was meant to recall the age of the ziggurat, when our ancestors thought a temple built this way could connect heaven and earth. Baba looks at the ravaged building as if noticing it for the first time, though I know he’s passed this way before. Being a passenger sometimes forces you to see more than you do as a driver.
“Maybe you should stay with Saleh,” Baba says. “You shouldn’t stay in the house on your own.”
“I don’t know, Baba. I’m not sure Saleh was such a great help after all.”
“No?” he asks, lowering his eyelids as if he senses that this is an understatement.
“No.”
“Oh, and he says his wife is pregnant.”
“Mashallah. That’s good news.”
“I’d like to see you start a family.” He senses the imposition. “Eventually, I mean. Anyway, I don’t think you should stay in the house alone.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine. I’ll figure something out. If you’re really worried, I can stay with Wa’el next door.”
“I don’t worry. I plan.”
“Are you really leaving tomorrow?”
Baba pushes out his bottom lip. “Well, I might put it off a day or two, just to make a few arrangements. Put things in storage. I need to finalize things with a driver. But we are leaving, Nabil. Are you sure you want to stay?”
“I’m sure,” I say. My fingers twitch to type out a fuller, more complex response. Instead, I look him in the eye as I never have before. “I’m absolutely sure.”
“That’s what I’d hoped you’d say.”
~ * ~
At home, I head straight for my room. I can feel Amal following me there, hovering at the door. I invite her in and ask her to close the door after her.
I lie back on the bed. She shows me the sea-green sweater she is knitting, a look-alike of an English prep-school jumper, in miniature. She says it’s for Ziad’s son, who will be two years old soon. Harun, our nephew, my parents’ first grandchild. We have yet to lay eyes on him. A funny name, choosing Harun. Harun al-Rashid, who died in the year 809, was Baghdad’s most famous rebuilder. He, if anyone, was the great fixer of Baghdad. Maybe our little Harun will come home some day to build us up again. Sometimes it feels that it will take that long, a quarter of a century at least, to imagine a time when we will be rebuilt.
It can be very cold in France in the winter, Amal reminds me, as if she knows this from first-hand experience. This being late May, and already the thermometer inching towards 40-degrees Celsius, I cannot muster much sympathy for them. It’ll be a nice colour for Harun, I tell her. In the pictures they sent, he appears to take after his mother, who has green eyes.
“Nabil, did you ever ask her if she would marry you?”
I glare at her a moment, then up at the ceiling. “You know I didn’t.”
“I don’t mean Noor. I mean Sam.”
“What? No.” I can’t figure out how my sister seems to look past my clothing and flesh and bones, directly into my brain. “Of course not.”
“Didn’t you think of it?”
No answer. My eyes on the window. Anything to avoid looking at her, letting her see any more than she already does.
“Well I think you should have. You obviously love her,” she shrugs. “Maybe she loves you, too. How many times in a lifetime do you think that happens? You should have at least told her.”
I take my desk chair and sit on it backwards, the way I’d once seen Sam do while we were in her suiteroom at the Hamra. It seemed terribly unfeminine to me, and at the same time, kind of sexy. I rest my elbows on the edge of the chair, my hand
s on them, the way Sam did. I watch my sister’s face, the eagerness in it masking the pale hue she has developed since she stopped going out, since the first bombs fell on Baghdad — in this war, that is. Since our lives were transformed into something else entirely.
“Don’t ask me anymore about Sam. This is a day for thinking about Noor.”
“But you’re thinking about Sam as much as you are about Noor. Maybe more.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking? There’s no one in the whole world who knows what it feels like to be in my shoes today.”
“Tell me, then. You can tell me. I promise I won’t tell Baba and Mum.”
“Sure you won’t. You think I don’t know that they send you in here to check on me?”
Amal’s eyes betray a sense of guilt. “What do you expect from them? They’re just worried about you. Mum is so sad about what happened to Sam. And considering Baba’s car, I think—”
“Amal,” I say, cutting her off. I feel a slicing in my stomach, the sound of the glass showering over our heads. “I’m going to pay him back for that. I’ve saved up a lot.”
“Good luck getting it out of the bank.”
“It’s all in cash, from working with Sam. I have enough to buy him a used car today, but he said it’s better that they hire a driver to take the three of you to the border, because you wouldn’t be allowed to take the car into Jordan anyway.”
“That’s not the point,” she says.
“I know.”
“You should go and talk to them. You should be with them now.”
I shake my head. “Later maybe, before you leave.”
Amal carries on but I find myself tuning her out, like a radio losing reception. I have no energy left in me for giving comfort, nor for receiving it. As much as I love them, Amal and my parents, I want them all to go away. I’m glad they’re leaving. Maybe I am responsible for that, maybe Sam is. Maybe George Bush is. Maybe all of America. Maybe Saddam. It hardly matters. Most importantly, they’ll be safer elsewhere.
The helicopter in my mind is taking off again, and this time, I jump on the landing skids, too. Get carried away along with Sam. It would be terrible of me to tell Amal to leave me now, but that’s exactly what I want.
Instead, I’ll go where she can’t: out. I hold my hands out to hug her, and she falls into me. There is nothing in the world like a little sister’s love, one of the few kinds of love that comes without condition, without a price, and, if you are as lucky as I am, without the pain of almost every other. I rock her in my arms, the most beautiful moment of my day.
“I’m going out for a while. Tell them not to worry.”
Amal pulls away from me. “Where? Where are you going now?”
“I don’t know. For a walk.”
“You can’t just go walking around town, Nabil. That’s crazy.”
No, you can’t just go walking around, I want to say, because no father in his right mind lets a pretty young daughter out on to the street anymore. But just an average man like me? It hardly matters. “I do it all the time. I walk closer to town to get a cab to work.” I say walk and not walked, as though I will get up tomorrow and do what I used to do. As though I have any idea what I’m supposed to do with my life tomorrow.
“Can I go with you, then? I want to see the city once more before I leave.”
Her hopeful face makes me want to cry. “Not now, Amal. When you come back.”
Her head rolls back with disappointment, the remnants of her girlishness snapped into place by her growing womanhood, which decides that she is not going to cry. Instead, she picks up the half-knitted sweater she had set down, which looks like it is unravelling more than it is being put together. “Just don’t do anything foolish, and don’t stay out late,” says my fourteen-year-old parent. “And don’t take any unnecessary risks,” she calls as I leave the room, her hands moving the long needles quickly, as if her time were precious.
~ * ~
The long walk is good for me. What does it matter if I walk for miles, from Yarmouk Street down to Jinoub, all the way south though Qadisiya, into Tamim and Maarifa. It feels better just to move, to keep putting one foot in front of the other until my soles are almost numb. It is only now, when I get to Jazair, where I know I can find some place to get close to the river, that I feel the throbbing in my thighs, the pain of pushing too hard for too long, of pretending to be unable to feel anything. My shoulder, too, is sore, though much less so than yesterday.
Everyone says you should avoid the river these days. The Americans control everything along the Tigris now, because how can you control Baghdad if you don’t hold the river in your hands? Many people stay away, because if a soldier thinks you look suspicious even for a moment, they say, he will shoot you dead and never hear a word of complaint about it. But there are still fishermen who come here regularly, whether early in the morning or late in the afternoon, the cooler parts of the day, to fish out a fresh catch of simmich from the murky brown water. If you’re not sure your family will eat dinner, you will fish despite the fear of not coming home again.
Of several fishermen on the bank, I see an older man who has more than one pole with him. I ask him if I can borrow one for a while, and I hold out a few dinars in my hand. The fisherman waves away my offer and readily hands me his extra pole, scratched and burnished as though Abraham himself might have used it. Maybe he, our forefather, fished just like this in Ur, south of here, on the other river that demarcated what we were from what we were not. Between here, the Tigris, and there, the Euphrates, we became a Mesopotamian people, probably the world’s first civilization. We built cities and languages and towers. Wrote tales of Gilgamesh and codes of Hammurabi. Founded mathematics. Forged religions. Hosted prophets. Discovered God, or let God discover us. No defeat from afar can take that away from us, can shame us from the love and pride for Iraq that we carry in our hearts.
I move down the sloping stones, closer to the river. From here I can see the silhouette of the statue of Scheherazade, just a little further down the bank. Maybe instead of trying to tell Sam about the hand of Fatima, I should have told her about the mind of Scheherazade. She saved her life from a murderous king by her ability to tell him a new story every night. Until then, the king had a habit of marrying a beautiful woman every day, enjoying her for the night, and then having her beheaded in the morning, sure she had betrayed him. Through her great knowledge of history and literature, through her ability to weave stories together, Scheherazade told the king enchanting tales that kept him on tenterhooks each night until it was almost daybreak. After a thousand nights of this, he fell in love with her and made her queen. The writer Ibn al-Nadim mentions it as already having been famous in his tenth-century catalogue of books in Baghdad. So we have known for at least a thousand years that a storyteller - a female one, at that — can change the course of history.
Our stories are our strength. They have the power to keep us alive.
The odd thing about the bend in the Tigris in this part of Baghdad is that it is sometimes hard to tell which way the river is flowing. Logic says it must be moving downstream, but right now, I am quite sure it is flowing up. Sometimes you must simply trust that things will flow exactly as they are meant to, and when they don’t seem to flow in ways that make sense, to believe that the hand of God is behind it. Al Mu’eed — the seventy-fifth of God’s ninety-nine names — is the Restorer. Though I hope it is not blasphemy to say so, I should like to create the hundredth: the Fixer.
I tie my bait with a flimsy knot that I know will never hold. I like the liberating feeling of the khamsa as it flies off my pole, waving to me just before it hits the water.
Nihaya — The End
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Baghdad Fixer Page 61
