by Nafisa Haji
The cook shook his head and said, “No, the owner’s name is Abu Muhammad.”
One week left to go! Can’t wait to see Mom and Dad and Jo.
In Baghdad, life sucks, as usual. I just can’t wait to get the heck out of here.
Every time we go by a restaurant, I remember the doctor. Sana. Truth is, I think of her and what she said every time I look into Foley’s eyes. I see what she meant. He’s messed up. Not just scared, like the rest of us. His eyes are still dead, even when he laughs or jokes around. After the boy’s funeral, I heard the captain tell Foley not to worry about what happened. That it was a stupid mistake, but a mistake all the same. He told him to just brush it off, and get on with doing his job.
“The lady is asking about the old owner, whose name was Ali,” Qasim explained again, patiently, for the third time.
“The old owner? I only just started working here. What do I know about the old owner?” the cook demanded.
I waited impatiently for Qasim to translate back to me, the pretense of not already having understood grating on my nerves.
“Ask him if there’s anybody here who did know the old owner.”
After a few minutes of this exasperation, an older man, someone sitting and eating in the restaurant, shuffled up to us. “Why do you want to know about Ali?”
I could barely stop from speaking to him myself, in Arabic. But I remembered not to, turning to let Qasim speak instead.
“Ask him if he knows him.”
“Of course I knew him. You don’t know that he’s dead?”
TCP tonight. I hate Traffic Control Points even more than going on raids. Especially the kind we’ve been doing lately. Flash. Set up suddenly, so no one’s expecting us. Hard Ass Platoon shot up a pregnant woman the other night. She was in labor and the husband was driving her to the hospital, driving too fast.
Just a few more days.
“Yes, the lady knows that he’s dead,” said Qasim. “She wants to know where he lived. She’s an old friend of Ali’s wife. Sana. She is trying to find her. Do you know where the family lives?”
“Of course! They live in Dora.”
“Yes, yes. But where? She needs the address.”
Bad night. The Hard Ass Platoon had a suicide car bomb hit them at the TCP. Couple of bad injuries. And Kirp’s dead. Two more days and I am out of here.
We followed the old man’s directions carefully. We passed through a militia checkpoint on the way into Dora. Qasim had said to let him do all the talking. After a few minutes of him explaining who we were—Shias on pilgrimage, from Pakistan, here to visit a friend—they let us in.
When we got to the street we were looking for, we knocked on what we thought was the right gate. A young man answered. Qasim told him we were looking for Sana.
The man frowned. “There’s no Sana here. Who are you?”
Qasim said, “These people—this young woman—is an old friend of Sana. She wanted to visit her. Is this the wrong house?”
“I don’t know any Sana!” the man shouted, looking around to see if anyone was watching before slamming the gate of his home shut.
We knocked on the gates on either side of the first one. No luck. Only more gates slammed in our faces. I glanced across the street, wondering which house could be the one of the boy Foley had killed.
After a few more minutes, we were starting to attract attention. A group of people gathered around us. Some among them were young men wearing black headbands, like the militiamen who’d greeted us at the checkpoint into the neighborhood. Someone said, very suggestively, “Oh, Sana, eh? The doctor? With two little children named Uthman and Ayesha?”
Qasim shot me a look. I nodded. After that, Qasim stopped asking the people around us questions, asking me, instead, in a whisper, “Is this woman a Sunni? The one you’re asking about?”
I shrugged.
Qasim frowned. “If she is, you have put us in a bad position. This is a Shia neighborhood.”
Then, someone in the group that had gathered around us, referred us to one of the houses across the street, saying softly, “Those people. They’ll know.”
I’m still shaking. I can’t believe it. We set up a flash checkpoint tonight. A car was approaching, slowing down and still pretty far, no reason to worry. Then we heard a bang. It must have backfired. But that’s not what it sounded like. Someone, one of us, yelled and fired and then we all joined in, round after round, until the car came to a stop, red mist coming out of its windows. In the silence that finally returned, I heard the sound of children crying. No one moved.
We knocked at the gate the man had pointed at. After a few seconds, someone answered it. Qasim started his spiel again.
The man at the gate said, “Dr. Sana? Why do you want to know? She’s a good woman! Isn’t it enough that you fanatics have driven her away? Out of her home and out of her job! Leave her alone! She has suffered enough—more than any of us and we have all suffered plenty!”
It took a while, in the three-way conversation, to calm the man down. I took over, unable to contain myself, regardless of the warning look Sadiq tried to hush me up with.
I told Qasim, whose jaw was hanging open, “You just translate for Sadiq and Deena, so they can keep up, and let me do the talking here.” The man whose house we were standing outside of was still looking at me with indignation. “We are friends of Sana. We are not here to hurt her. I— are you the man whose son was killed by an American Marine? In 2003? The very beginning of the war?”
He nodded.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He stayed silent for a long time, staring at me, and then moved aside, gesturing for us to come into his home. There, he served us tea and cookies. We met his wife. And his other children. We talked for more than an hour. At the end of our visit, I had Sana’s address in my hand.
When we got back to the car, Qasim’s voice was shaking. “You should have told me, Jo. That you speak Arabic. You were not honest with me. And now? Now, you want me to take you to Adhamiya? Are you insane? That is far too dangerous. For me. For you. La, la! There is no way, Jo.”
On our way back to the hotel, a car bomb went off a block ahead of us. The blast shook our car, rattling my teeth and bones. We were stuck for two hours before we could move forward and get to our hotel.
It didn’t seem to faze Sadiq and Deena, who went right back to the drawing board, helping me to figure out a plan for the morning. I watched them, wondering why they bothered. When it was all set, Sadiq used his cell phone to call Qasim and woo him back on board with what he and Deena had planned. Then Deena used the phone to call her husband, Umar.
“Don’t worry, Umar. We’re fine. I know. But this is something Jo has to do. For her brother. And I have to be with her. She’s my granddaughter.”
When they were both done with the phone, I told them, “I’m so grateful for everything you’ve done. But I can’t let you come with me to Sana’s house. Not now. What Qasim said is true. You saw how the people gathered around us in Dora. That was in a Shia neighborhood. In Adhamiya, it will be even more dangerous. Especially for you. I speak Arabic. I’ll manage, somehow, with Qasim, by myself. But— you guys— it’s too dangerous. I don’t want you to come with me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jo,” Sadiq said. “I’m coming with you. Though I agree with you on one point. Amee, you don’t need to be with us. You’ll stay here. Jo and I will go and take care of this problem for Chris.”
“Oh, no! You’re not leaving me back here! As if I were some old woman, too fragile to take risks!” cried Deena.
I looked from one to the other of them and started to cry.
“Jo! What’s wrong?” Deena asked.
“I— there’s something— I— haven’t told you. Something you have a right to know. I mean, here we are—in a war zone!—and you, Deena, you wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me! And Sadiq would have been home by now, with the rest of the group that left Baghdad yesterday mor
ning. That bomb, today, went off a block away from us. If it had been a few minutes later, we would have been right on top of it. And—I’ve been hiding something from you both. I lied to you, Sadiq. When you and Deena asked me if I had a picture of my family.”
Sadiq frowned. “What do you mean? Why?”
I went to my purse and pulled out the picture I was carrying, the picture I’d brought with the intention of showing him, but which I hadn’t had the courage to do until now. I handed it to Sadiq. He looked at it for a second and then looked at me.
“Look—that’s my brother. Chris.”
Sadiq looked at it again and Deena pulled her reading glasses out of her bag and perched them on her nose, then stood beside where Sadiq was sitting, looking over his shoulder.
Deena said, “Chris. He—he has brown eyes?”
I nodded.
“He—I thought—he’s your—”
I nodded again. “He’s my twin brother. Younger than me by half an hour.”
Sadiq’s face paled. “He’s—he’s my son?”
“Yes. I promised my mother I wouldn’t tell you—or him. He doesn’t know. And I was afraid you’d—that you’d want to—talk to him—that he would find out. Before. But—after his accident, I decided I had to tell him the truth. Eventually. And that I had to tell you, too. You—he and you both—you have a right to know. You’ve—you and Deena—you’ve taken care of me on this trip. Letting me tag along. And I’ve been feeling terrible, thinking about Chris and why I’m here. I’ve put you both at risk. And I never told you the truth.”
After a long while, Sadiq asked me all kinds of questions. About Chris. And then he got very quiet.
Deena said, “Well. It’s good you told us. Don’t feel bad, Jo. I knew. I knew there was something you weren’t sharing. It— it was a difficult situation for you. And I’m glad you’ve cleared your heart now.” She came over and gave me a hug. Then, wiping tears from her eyes, she gave a little skip. “Two grandchildren! Twins!”
“Can I— when will you tell him?” asked Sadiq.
“I don’t know, Sadiq. I—I’m still trying to figure that all out.”
“But you will tell him?”
“Yes.” I got up and went and stood in front of him. Awkwardly, I gave him a hug. “I will. I—don’t know when or how. But I will.”
He put his hand on my face and wiped a tear off my cheek.
Then he said, “Are there any more of you I should know about?”
In the end, none of us could convince any of the others not to come the next day to Sana’s house. In the morning, still a little miffed, Qasim didn’t say anything when he came to pick us up, merely raised his eyebrows at the sight of all three of us waiting outside the hotel.
We took one taxi to the outskirts of Adhamiya and then another one to drive us through to the checkpoint, manned by Sunni militia, the way the one in Dora had been manned by Shia the day before. As Sadiq had asked him to do, Qasim brought his old ID, from before he was forced to move, so they’d think he was Sunni. His name was a neutral one, used by both Sunni and Shia. He told the guys at the checkpoint the same thing he’d said the day before, that we were old friends of someone who lived in the neighborhood, from Pakistan, and were just coming to visit. The men asked for our passports.
Qasim shook his head. “Sorry. I told my guests to leave them at my house, where they are staying. I told them they wouldn’t need their passports. That the people of Iraq, despite all our troubles, still have big hearts and know what hospitality means.” The men squinted into the car for a second and then smiled and let us through.
We had to stop and ask directions a couple of times. And then we were knocking—finally and rightly, I hoped—at Sana’s door.
We all still had our rifles ready. Then, slowly, the rear door of the car opened. A little girl came out, covered in blood. Then a boy. Finally, a woman, shrouded in black, also came out of the backseat of the car. The woman gave her children a quick embrace, and pushed them away from the car, gesturing to them to wait, the high-pitched screaming of the girl unbearable to anyone who could hear it. It was dark. The mother went around to the front of the car and saw what we did when we advanced toward it, shining our lights in to see the front seat. She moaned. There were two men, the driver and a passenger in the front. No search needed to be conducted to know that there had been no reason to shoot. The driver—the father, the husband—had no face left. The front passenger moved, he said, “Ummi,” and then his head fell forward. The woman opened his door and checked to see if he was breathing. Desperately, she gathered him out of the car and checked again. Then, she cradled his body in her lap and started screaming, “La! La! Ya Allah! La!”
The red mist that had sprayed out of the car seemed to have filled my head, because all I could hear, aside from the screaming and the sobbing, was something that sounded like a fountain. Or snow on a television. It was the sound of nothing. Or something—the sound of my blood flowing, the way the blood of those two men would never flow again. The woman left the body of her older son and went again to her younger children, turning her back, shielding them from the sight of us, but not before I got a look at the little boy. The loathing and terror in his eyes registered through the sound of the flow in my head. I did that to him, I thought. I did that.
Soon, an ambulance arrived at the scene. It loaded all of them up. Before the door shut, my eyes caught the eyes of the woman, shrouded in black, whose whole life I had just destroyed. It was like a shock, the spark that flowed from my eyes to hers, from hers to mine. The spark of recognition. It was Sana, the doctor, whose husband, Ali, and son, Ali Asghar, we’d shot and killed. It was her son, Uthman, whose eyes had simmered with hatred, her daughter, Ayesha, howling, drenched in the blood of her father and brother.
A woman answered the door. She was wearing jeans and a shirt. She looked afraid to see strangers standing there in front of her house.
I said, “Sana? Are you—are you Dr. Sana?” I’d spoken in English.
Looking confused, she answered in the same language, “Yes?”
“I—my name is Jo.”
“Yes?”
“I—we’ve come to see you. To—talk to you. May we come in?”
She stared at me, the way the man in Dora had stared. She looked from my face to Deena’s, Sadiq’s, and then Qasim’s. Like the man in Dora, she moved aside and gestured us in.
I sat in silence for a long time. She sat and watched me with a puzzled frown. I had known it would be difficult. But I hadn’t realized that it would be impossible. How do you even begin the kind of conversation I was here to have?
“I—I went to your house in Dora to look for you. I met your neighbor. The family across the street. The one whose son was shot by an American two years ago.”
“Yes. I remember. I remember that day very well. That neighbor of mine—he is an incredible man.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Imagine. To invite the man who killed your son to your home. The very next day.”
“But—the Marine, the man who shot the boy, he didn’t come,” I said gently.
“No. He didn’t. Some other soldiers came. An officer. And two of them who were there when the boy was shot.” Sana’s eyes hardened a little, making me too afraid to continue for a while.
“You’re American?” Sana asked.
I nodded.
“You’re—you’re here—because you’re connected? To what happened?”
I nodded again.
“I saw one of those soldiers again. On the night—” Sana’s voice broke off.
I picked up her sentence. “On the night your husband and son were killed.”
“How do you know this? Who are you?” She looked frightened.
Quickly, because I didn’t want her to be frightened, I said, “I know because the man you saw again is my brother. I—I came because I know what he—what he did. I know what happened. I know and I wanted to come—because—I had to come—” I felt my ey
es begging hers, for some kind of sign, some kind of softening. And I felt guilty for what I was asking, knowing it was something I doubted I could give if I were in her place.
“Your brother? Your brother is that soldier? But I still don’t understand. Are you also a soldier? Why are you here?”
“Because he can’t be. Because he can’t remember what he did. But he wrote about it. In his journal. And I know—I know how sorry he was. Is. Would be, if he remembered.”
“You’re telling me that he’s forgotten? What he did to my family? That he is one of those who killed my husband and my son? He’s forgotten?”
“He—my brother didn’t forget. He wanted to. He—tried to kill himself. He crashed his car into a tree. And when he recovered from the accident, he’d lost his memory of the last few years. About everything that happened here in Iraq. But I wanted you to know that he was sorry. That he suffered for what he did. I don’t know if that makes it any better for you. I don’t think it does. But I wanted you to know.”
She started to cry, very softly. I cried with her. So did Deena and Sadiq, and Qasim, too.
After a long, long time, Sana said, “You—you’ve come—just for this? Just to say this?”
I nodded.
“You know—I’ve thought about my neighbor in Dora many, many times in the last two years. I used to visit his wife and ask her—what kind of man is he? Is he some kind of saint? How could he have invited those soldiers into his home on such an occasion? How could she, his wife, have allowed it? She told me that he has always been like this. That he says anger is like milk. It doesn’t keep. It becomes sour, bringing sickness and death to anyone who tastes it when its time has passed. Grief, she said he likes to say, ages better than anger. It is eternal. Her husband is a Quran teacher. He teaches his students that the huzn of the Quran—that is, its voice—is one of sadness. I never realized this before she said it. That the voice of God is a sad voice. Now, I hear it all the time. The grief of God. The grief in the sound of the call to prayers. The sadness, the tears, it wells up in my heart every time I hear of the madness in the streets of Baghdad. When we don’t understand this, when we trade our grief in for anger, bad things happen. No, they don’t just happen. We do them. We do bad things to each other.” She stopped talking for a while. Then continued, “If someone had told me—that I would feel what I feel, at your coming, I would have laughed. You think saying sorry will take away what has happened to me? I lost my husband, my son. I lost my home. Because I am Sunni and I lived in a neighborhood where Sunnis were driven away. If my husband had been alive, they would not have dared to threaten me, even sending me warning notes at the hospital where I worked. My husband was a Shia. Not that these things ever mattered to us. Look at the way we named our children! Deliberately, mixing Shia names with Sunni names. Because these things—the names of people, what we call them—shouldn’t matter. But my husband was gone. And those thugs drove me out of my home and out of the hospital and the work I loved. Your sorry doesn’t change any of that. It doesn’t give me my son back. It doesn’t give me my husband. What does your sorry mean? What can it mean? I’ll tell you, Jo. It means everything to me.” Sana started to sob. “It means everything. That my pain is something you recognize. That you share. It means everything, everything, everything and more.”
