Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  “I made you my guests,” the imam said. “And you repay me this way. Unbelievable. You, who call yourself mujahideen. Smoking in the mosque.”

  “I didn’t do it indoors—” Abu Annas started dumbly.

  “Speak another word and I’ll have you in bastinado,” Dr. Walid said. He’d heard the commotion and come out from the storeroom with a look that could have killed a cat. “I assure you, sayyidi,” he said to the imam, “no man of mine will disrespect this place again upon pain of flogging, so long as I’m in command.”

  The imam seemed a little pacified by this ultimatum but made clear that another transgression would force him to reconsider our arrangement. Once more, Walid promised a reformation. He upbraided Abu Annas in front of the brotherhood and ordered us, in an act of mass contrition, to scrub the mosque top to bottom; with buckets of soapy water, rags and bristle brushes, we scoured the mihrab, the minbar, the minaret stairs, the fountain (after first draining it), the columns in the prayer hall, and the tile floors. The imam took a quiet but apparent pleasure in our ordeal, pointing out spots we’d missed, going around from man to man and ladling water into our mouths so that we might work longer without breaking for refreshment. Our penance lasted into the night, and even as a new day has dawned, and the smoking incident has resolved itself, with everyone exhibiting a renewed abstinence from tobacco, I believe yesterday’s events have caused Dr. Walid to reexamine our state of affairs. He must know now that I wasn’t sulking or spinning lies when I informed him of the brothers’ dissatisfaction, his authority threatened by any number of unforeseeable, seemingly inconsequential turns. These men came here to fight. One way or another, we will.

  Several days later, we left the mosque around noon, taking little-used roads south and east of Fallujah, making our way toward Baghdad. The brothers who had been scouting knew of a supply route relied upon by the Americans, and several ideal places to set an ambush along it. Dr. Walid had selected one of these, an isolated area about an hour’s ride south, and we headed there. I was in the lead truck with him, Abu Annas, and two other brothers.

  “The shamal,” the doctor remarked pedantically, “is a study in the patient accumulation of force. As long as the wind shall hold, two will become four, four will become eight, and in time, eight grains of sand will grow heavy enough to hobble a giant.”

  “God is greater,” I muttered. The storm he was referring to was forecast to hit overnight; nature had finally given us our chance. But something always goes wrong. Twenty kilometers into the trip, about halfway to our destination, one of our Toyotas—the trucks had been a gift from a Syrian intelligence officer—began to overheat, billowing steam from its engine compartment. We pulled to the side of the highway and discovered the radiator hose split lengthwise in a way that made patching it difficult.

  “A thousand cocks in this damn machine! If we miss our chance because of this piece of shit… damn it!” Dr. Walid ranted, the obscenities coming hard and fast as he kicked a dent in the truck’s quarter panel. Back in Aleppo I’d argued we shouldn’t accept the HiLuxes. Every Salafi who left Syria for the jihad in Iraq was one less that Bashar al-Assad would have to contend with when his own time came to face justice. It was to Assad’s benefit to bleed both the Americans and us at the same time, hence the gift of the HiLuxes from his agent; the trucks were so many Trojan horses.

  The doctor managed to contain himself and stopped abusing the quarter panel. While we were delayed, the storm drew closer, diffusing the sun until it was indistinguishable from red-and-gray sky. Finally the radiator cooled enough to be uncapped, and Abu al-Deehar, who had served as a ship’s mechanic before joining us, wrapped the split hose with most of a roll of electrical tape, topping off the reservoir.

  “It’ll hold for now,” he said, finishing the repair. “But it’s going to leak. We’ll have to stop every so often to add fluid.”

  Dr. Walid ordered everyone to be on the lookout for any Toyota that might provide a suitable replacement hose. We remounted the trucks and set off down the highway another ten kilometers before entering a village too insignificant to merit a garrison of American troops but which did appear to contain an assortment of well-used automobiles. Our prospects of finding another hose seemed fair.

  We drove the narrow streets, taking stock of the place, laid out in a rough triangle. A gang of children, some grotesquely deformed, trailed behind, shouting and begging. We took a turn and slowed to a crawl in a constricted alleyway. The doctor lowered his window and waved one of the boys over.

  “You, child! I’ll make it worth your time if you tell me where I can find a man who owns a truck like these.”

  His arm dangling out the window, he slapped the door. The boy looked at him boldly in his face; one day, these Iraqi street children will make the best sort of mujahideen.

  “Sheikh Hamad has one, sir. Come on.”

  The boy ran ahead of our truck, taking us deeper into the village. A short drive later we stopped by a rusty sheet-metal gate set in two-meter-high walls surrounding one of the larger compounds in the area: a sprawling, gauche construction, like someone had tried to build himself a mansion out of hand-fired brick.

  We found the gate shut tight. The doctor knocked until a judas on the gate was slid open by another boy, who looked nearly like the one who’d brought us here. No doubt the resemblance was familial, the two brothers or cousins.

  “What do you want?” this second boy said.

  Dr. Walid rebuked him wryly. “This is how you talk to your elders?”

  “It’s how I talk to strangers who come pounding on the gate and frighten my mother.”

  “Why should a visitor frighten anyone?”

  “Don’t you know the Americans have come through here?”

  “Have they,” the doctor said, intrigued by this news but not very surprised, as we were near the highway they had been using as a supply route. “Are they gone already? Where are they now, do you know?”

  The child didn’t answer, disappearing from the judas. A moment later an old man took his place. “Peace be with you. Forgive my grandson; he has lived only in evil times.”

  “And unto you peace,” the doctor said. “God willing, the times won’t remain evil for long. I assume you’re Sheikh Hamad?”

  “I am. And I hope you’ll also forgive me for not extending the typical courtesies. My granddaughter isn’t well. What’s your business here?”

  Dr. Walid’s eyes brightened at the mention of an illness in the household: clearly, we needed an inroad with this old man, who had already shown he would not be intimidated easily.

  “God is merciful, my sheikh. I’m a physician.”

  “What?”

  As proof, Walid called for his medical bag to be brought from the truck, and he opened it and held it to the judas.

  “God brought you!” the sheikh exclaimed, admitting us into his home. For the first time, we got a good look at him, stooped and frail, and we could see by the disarray in his courtyard that the family as a whole had also fallen on hard times: there were brightly dyed dresses hung out to dry, but they were dusty, as if the wash had been neglected for days. A few potted palms drooped along the walls, and there was a fig tree with fruit rotting underneath, and in the air, the stink of clogged sewage pipes. We were pleased, however, to see that our boy informant had led us to the right place. Parked under an awning was a Toyota truck only a few years older than ours. Dr. Walid noticed it, a covetous gleam in his eyes, but tactfully made no mention of the truck, the true purpose of our visit. He asked the sheikh to show us his ailing grandchild, and away we went into the house. The old man must’ve been overcome with grief, as he did not ask why we’d come or how we’d known who he was. It was good if he took it on faith that God brought him a doctor in his time of need. That’s one truth of what happened, however poorly the business ended.

  He led us to an upper floor of his crumbling manse and from there to the sickroom where lay a girl no more than five years old. She was bein
g attended to by her mother and grandmother.

  “This little bird has never been very strong,” the sheikh said. “But the last few days it’s gotten bad. She can’t take any food. What comes up, doctor, is like coffee grounds.”

  “What’s her name?” Walid asked, kneeling beside her, opening his bag.

  “Fatima.”

  “A good name, sweet one. It’ll give you strength.”

  He took her vitals, glancing at his wristwatch, two fingers pressed on her neck, her skin beading sweat over a grayish pallor marred by bruises and spots like dark-red pinpricks. Dr. Walid felt the nodes in her stomach and underarms and helped her to open her mouth so he could take her temperature.

  “Thirty-nine,” he said disapprovingly, returning the thermometer to its case. “Does she complain of pain in her joints?”

  “Constantly.”

  “And these bruises…”

  “Just from touching her. We had to move her today. My wife—well, it doesn’t really matter why she moved her. But a woman’s touch is enough to cause them.” With some difficulty the sheikh bent down and stroked his granddaughter so tenderly, it was as if his fingertips brushed no more than the downy hairs on her forearm. “Do you know what it is?”

  “I couldn’t be sure without the proper tests,” Dr. Walid said, now engaged in auscultation to discern the murmurings of her heart and lungs, moving the stethoscope’s chest piece from place to place. “But I can tell you this. It’s serious. She must be taken to hospital immediately.”

  The sheikh’s wife and daughter, mother and grandmother to the girl, exchanged a distressed and knowing look, as if the doctor had touched on an already sore point. At the mention of a hospital the sheikh also grew agitated and moved away from the sickbed. He thumbed through his prayer beads, pacing the one window in the room, peering out over his decrepit courtyard and our trucks, parked in the alley near the gate, studying them like he had noticed for the first time the mortar tube strapped in the bed of the rearmost HiLux, the black flags, the Kalashnikovs carried by the brothers who milled about on the street, teasing the children.

  He turned to the sickbed in anger. “You’d have me drive her into Baghdad with what’s happening there? The hospitals filled with the maimed and dead and dying. Anyway, it’s impossible. The Americans have closed the road.”

  “Where?” the doctor asked, doing his best with the succinct question to maintain a magisterial, barely interested tone. I was probably the only one in the room who realized how the sheikh’s answer might shape our immediate future.

  “A few kilometers east of here at a traffic circle.”

  “How many are there?” Now Walid could barely mask his excitement. The prey was close; he had feared our opportunity had slipped away, but luck had found us again.

  “Fifteen, twenty. They had four trucks. My grandson told me one of them was a woman, carrying a rifle just like the other kuffar. A woman, can you imagine? Anyway, that’s all I know. But, doctor, you know what’s wrong with Fatima. I can see it in your face. Speak, I beg you.”

  Dr. Walid sighed and looked at the girl; he seemed truly sad to be the bearer of bad news, but there was more to it: surely he had hoped for something easily treatable, a quick fix that would earn the sheikh’s gratitude. It wasn’t to be.

  “Possibly rheumatic fever. But, more likely, cancer of the bone. There’s no way to be sure without more tests.”

  I could tell he was hedging; he was quite sure it was cancer, and that meant I was sure of it, too. His leadership qualities may have been doubtable, but his prognostic capabilities were not. During the jihad against the Soviets, he had gained a reputation among the Arab Brigade for medical genius. His professional skill, in fact, had occasioned our first meeting. For some years of my youth, I suffered mysteriously from low blood pressure and required daily glucose injections to keep up my strength. After our field medic was martyred by a Russian tank, Dr. Walid personally took it upon himself to make the perilous drive over the Khyber, traveling to the front lines from his clinic in Peshawar several times a month. This was before he fully dedicated himself to the armed portion of our struggle, still harboring idealistic ambitions to uphold his oath to do no harm. But he could help in other ways, and did. He treated the wounded brothers, ferried new arrivals, and delivered shipments of painkillers, bandages, IV bags, and other medicaments, including my glucose. It was often in short supply, and so it was not uncommon for him to arrive in camp and find me lying on the floor of the cave in painful delirium. While he administered the treatment and restored me, I would regale him with tales of the latest miracles witnessed at the front. It’s difficult to remain dignified while being treated by a physician, and so, in the airy darkness of the cave, its entrance sealed by a boulder that we moved in and out of place with a bulldozer, I turned the doctor’s attention from my failing body to those of incorruptible martyrs uncovered in their graves, men whose flesh would not putrefy in death but would, even weeks later, still smell sweetly of musk. I told of brothers who returned from ambushes only to find bullet holes in their waistcoats but no commensurate wounds on their bodies. I relayed the well-known account of a wounded mujahid whose dying groans were drowned out by the humming of an angry swarm of bees, millions of them, though none could be seen anywhere. I spoke of a patrol pursued and overtaken by Soviet jets, the brothers cornered in a steep-walled valley, but when all seemed hopeless, they were spared at the last minute by a flock of birds that took wing and formed a dense canopy overhead, a shield of beating feathers that forced the kuffar pilots to avert their attack. To these and other reports of preternatural events, Dr. Walid listened by my side, enthralled. The following spring he forsook his medical oath and took up the rifle.

  Seldom had I seen such a willing disciple. One might suppose, given his Western training and scientific cast of mind, that he would be skeptical of miraculous tales, but this was not the case. The doctor was the proverbial study in contradictions. On the one hand, he refused to drink ice water, complaining it was a European luxury with the tendency to weaken a man’s vigor. Yet before selling all his possessions and traveling to Peshawar to establish his clinic, he’d been a foremost expert, at least in the Arab world, on the subject of using immunosuppressants to increase the odds of success after an organ transplant.

  If he had determined the sheikh’s granddaughter was suffering from cancer of the bone, I didn’t question his judgment, not in the slightest. The girl lived, but I thought of her as dead already, my mind moving to other problems: the radiator hose, the coming storm, the enemy on the road a few kilometers east. I wrote her off. A harsh thing, but so is war.

  The bleak diagnosis had the opposite effect on Fatima’s mother, who clung all the tighter to her daughter and prayed; the grandmother wailed and tore at her own breast and hair, cursing the earth, blaspheming God for the children He had taken from her in the past and now this one, their poor little bird, who would die before she’d even lived, who would starve to death while the cancer feasted on her bones.

  “You and your cautiousness,” she said to her husband the sheikh. “You who were too afraid even to speak with the Americans. We might still go to them—”

  “Silence, woman!” the sheikh roared, with more potency than he had theretofore displayed. His wife demurred straightaway and assumed a more compliant attitude. One got the feeling, watching them, that they had gone through this argument many times before and that it had, through sufficient rehearsal, become something of a pantomime, albeit one fraught with dangerously real consequence.

  “How long does she have?” Fatima’s mother asked.

  The doctor had finished packing away his kit and pulled himself wearily to his feet. “Weeks. Days. Only God knows.”

  “Can’t you do anything?”

  “I could leave morphine for her comfort. But with her being so weak, even a small dose would probably kill her.”

  “Would that be the worst thing?” I asked, shocking the sickroom into silence. The
re was only the wheezing of a small, dying child. Probably the others had forgotten I was there; I hadn’t spoken once since entering, and with my black fatigues and stillness of body, it was as if I’d blended into the darkness of the corner in which I stood.

  “My brother,” Dr. Walid said, shifting his attention from the girl to me, his eyes belying the politeness of his tone, “what you’re talking about is unlawful. Illness is sanctification, a blessing in disguise. ‘Have no fear, the ailment will prove purifying from sin if God wills it so.’”

  “There’s no need to lecture me on the Sunna,” I said. “I know it well.”

  “Then you’ll agree it absolutely forbids what you are talking about.”

  “Who are we to make their decision for them?”

  “The sheikh is a good Muslim. Plainly, he agrees with me.”

  “So he does,” I said, looking the man over, already regretting that my discomposure had afforded Dr. Walid such a chance to rebuke me. “You’re right, he does. Forgive me. I’m not myself today. How can one look at such suffering and not despair?”

  In light of these grave developments, bringing up the subject of the radiator hose was a delicate matter indeed. We’d left the cloistered sickroom for the open air of the courtyard; the sheikh had chairs and a table brought out, and we were there being served chai by his grandson, the same one who first appeared at the door, and who seemed less than ideally suited to wait on us, due to an unusual deformity of one of his hands.

  “Thank you for the hospitality in this difficult time,” Dr. Walid said. “We only wish we could do something more for your family. Maybe we could. Here’s a thought: Maybe we could drive ahead. Test the American blockade. If it’s possible to reach a hospital in Baghdad, we could send word. You could follow with the child.”