“Kate!”
He reaches out for my arm. I shake him off.
“Listen to me!”
“Go fuck yourself.” I walk even faster.
“Kate, come on! Don’t be like this.”
I climb the ladder to my tower, refusing to answer. He stands there in the wind for a long time looking up at me. But I won’t look back at him.
Only after he gives up and leaves do I drop my head onto my arms. Whatever made me think Jimmy would be any better than the other guys in this craphole? It’s a boy’s club and it’s never going to be anything else. Bros before hos, as they like to say.
I’m such a fucking fool.
THE SOLDIER IS sitting in a circle with a bunch of female vets, who shift uneasily in their hard plastic chairs. Brightly colored admonishments blare down at them from posters on the walls:
Love Yourself as Much as Others.
Listening Is the Key to Success.
Heal by Hugging a Friend Today.
And the one that irritates the soldier the most: Learn From Your Mistakes, They Are Our Teachers.
She hunkers down in her chair and glances at the other women with disgust. They look like a bunch of washed-out alcoholics in their sloppy sweats and paper slippers, faces medication-puffy and blank. They’re older than she is, too, fat and shapeless. Vietnam nurses, first Gulf War pilots. They probably are alcoholics, she decides.
The therapist, a stringy-faced female in glasses who sits as if she’s got a poker up her ass, does the same thing she did in the last few meetings: makes the women go around speaking their thoughts like kindergarten kids. Vicky, the Vietnam nurse, mumbles something about her husband knocking her around. Nicole, the Gulf War pilot, complains that her memory’s gone. But most annoying is the tiny broad who says she was an Army corporal but has the dumbest little voice imaginable. Corporal Betty Boop. Her contribution is that her head won’t stop aching.
The soldier scowls and wraps her arms across her chest. She hates this fucking shit. She’d rather go back to the pills.
“Kate, would you like to take a turn sharing your thoughts with us today?” Pokerass says when the others are done, peering over her doctor specs.
The soldier glowers at her without answering. The other vets glance at each other.
“Kate,” Pokerass says again, “if you don’t feel like sharing, we understand. But airing our issues usually helps. That’s what we’re here for. Are you sure that you don’t want to contribute?”
That suffocating feeling is coming on again, the one that makes the soldier panic and her breath come short and hard. She doesn’t want all those eyes on her, all those loser eyes. She doesn’t want to hear those women’s sad-sack loser stories, either. She doesn’t want to hear how, thirty friggin’ years after the Vietnam War, they’re still as screwed up as she is.
Anyhow, none of them was a real combat soldier like her. They have no fucking idea.
[ KATE ]
THE SANDSTORM BLOWS harder and harder as the day goes on, and being stuck in a tower like I am, I get the brunt of it. The sky turns a spooky dark orange, and the wind scoops up the moondust and blows it around in swirling billows, clogging my ears and nostrils. The prisoners stay inside their tents but I don’t have that luxury. So I cover my mouth with my scarf and hunker down in the chair, watching my sunglasses cake over with sand, wiping them, then watching them cake over again. Soon nothing’s visible except brownish-gray muck. I only hope the prisoners don’t try anything. My rifle, which I just cleaned, is already too sand-jammed to shoot; I’m blind from the dust, deaf from the wind. They could walk right out of the prison and I wouldn’t even see them—all they need to do is dig out some sand and wriggle under the wire. They could sneak right up and cut my throat, too.
Jimmy comes back after a few hours. He calls out to me, although I don’t answer, and when he gets close I can just make out the jagged brown streaks on his uniform through the dust. He’s bent forward against the wind, a white scarf over his mouth and nose like mine, and for a moment it makes me think of the scene in that old movie, Doctor Zhivago, when Omar Sharif is struggling through a blizzard to catch up with his great love, Lara. I used to watch that movie over and over in high school. Nobody minded a star with an Arab name back then.
Jimmy climbs the ladder to join me, uninvited.
I don’t say anything and I don’t move from my chair. What I really want to do is push him off the goddamn tower.
He sits on the platform floor beside me, knees pulled up to his chest. His face is still hidden under his scarf, and his helmet and goggles are covered in moondust. For a long time neither of us says anything. Just sit there like a couple of abominable sandmen.
“God I miss green,” he finally says over the wind.
I don’t answer. Fool me once, I’m thinking.
“I miss air, too,” he says next.
Another silence.
“This country’s famous for its date palms, you know that? Forests of date palms. I’d love to see a forest of date palms.”
I shift in my chair.
“They got beautiful palm trees all over Iraq, hundreds of different species. And all we get is desert. Not a fucking tree in sight.”
“We’ve got Marvin.”
I say that without meaning to but Jimmy doesn’t show any surprise. He just answers, “Who’s Marvin?”
I point in Marvin’s direction, although he’s totally invisible right now.
“Oh, you mean Rambo.”
I don’t want to, but I smile.
We sit without speaking for a time, the wind and sand whirling around in a brown blur.
“I miss birds,” I finally say.
“Yeah, what the hell happened to all the birds? Even the desert’s got to have birds.”
“I know. I’ve been wondering about that.”
“Guess we bombed the fuck out of them, too.”
“Guess so.”
“What else do you miss?” Jimmy asks.
“You mean other than people?”
“Yeah.”
I think for a moment. “Tree roots.”
“Tree roots?”
“Yeah. You know when you walk through the woods and they snake around and make all those beautiful patterns on the ground, like they’re trying to match the branches above? There’s this lake in Willowglen called Myosotis, which is Greek for forget-me-nots. And in May and June, the forget-me-nots grow in beautiful blue clusters all around it, tucked right inside the tree roots. And even better, there are tiny butterflies that match them exactly.”
“Flying forget-me-nots. Cool.”
I glance at him. Is he making fun of me? I can’t see him too well, but he sounds serious. “What do you miss?” I say then.
“I miss riding my bike with my brothers. I miss swimming.”
“Swimming. I love swimming. I used to swim in the lake all the time with Tyler.”
We sit in the dust cloud, not saying anything more for a time. Jimmy, I notice, has put a condom over the end of his rifle to keep out the sand.
“Jimmy?” I finally say. “Why do the guys here hate me so much?”
[ NAEMA ]
WE HAVE HAD a terrible night. We were sleeping on the roof, as usual, when Granny Maryam awoke shrieking from a nightmare. The sound was so ghastly, as if her throat were being cut, that Mama and I jumped up straight out of sleep, our hearts knocking wildly. We roused Granny and tried to calm her, but she could not shake the horror from her head. I had to grope my way downstairs in the dark to fetch her some of the precious date juice we have been saving. Yet even after swallowing this, she took many minutes to recall where she was.
It is not only the shock of Papa’s and Zaki’s arrests that did this to her, but the fact that the war is coming so close. Last night, the sky above Umm Qasr was lighting up in white flashes, and plumes of black smoke were blotting out the moon. After we roused Granny, we stood on the roof to watch for a moment, listening to the explosions and shots, the throb and roar o
f helicopters so loud they seemed to be pounding inside our own chests. Then we quickly gathered our sleeping pallets and took Granny downstairs, hot as it was. No more cooling off in the night air for us; not with the bullets and bombs this near.
Zaki and Papa must also have heard the noise in their prison. I wonder if Zaki was frightened. My golden-eyed brother, with his sweet, funny face and his little-boy fantasies of being a rock star… what kind of an army puts a child like that in prison? A child who would rather feed a baby goat than pick up a gun? And why couldn’t the Americans at least have allowed father and son to stay together? Zaki was so terrified when the bombs fell on Baghdad, although he pretended not to be. “Don’t fuss over me, go help Mama,” he kept saying when I tried to hold him, but I felt his little bones quaking. Who can protect him now in a tent full of thugs and thieves? Because everyone knows that among the incarcerated are not only innocents like him, but soldiers of the Republican Guard, brutish and corrupt, as well as criminals and perverts who will rape little boys.
And what about Papa? Surely this new incarceration must be reviving his days in Saddam’s prison. His legs have never recovered from being smashed again and again by Saddam’s prison guards—he walks bent over and limping now, as if he is stepping barefoot on glass. How can his mind and heart, already broken by torture and starvation, bear the strain?
I have to stop thinking like this. The not knowing, this is what drives one mad. So I concentrate on keeping useful. I wash and say my morning prayers, then go to the mirror, pick up my blue hijab, a garment to which I am still unaccustomed, and put it on by the light of a candle: fold the front over my forehead, pull the sides over my ears to hide every strand of hair, wrap it firmly around my neck and pin it at the back. I never wore a hijab before this war, just as I never had to wear long skirts, and have not yet learned to move my head without fear of it slipping off. I spend all day holding my neck high and stiff until the ache burns down my back.
I look at my unfamiliar face in the mirror, a pale and tired oval framed in blue, then extinguish the candle and go outside once again to join the same handful of beleaguered citizens who accompany me to the prison every morning: Umm Ibrahim, with her stout middle-aged daughter, Zahra; wrinkled old Abu Rayya and his despairing wife; and the fierce widow Fatima. On our way I think again of asking Fatima’s advice about where my family can flee once Papa and Zaki are released. But I dare not. Mama’s words ring in my head: “Remember, we can trust no one, Naema.”
It is so lonely not to trust.
The journey to the prison is not a pleasant one. We keep to the edge of the road and walk in single file, for any minute we might have to scramble out of the way of a military convoy barreling past and prepared to stop for no one. Already, we know of children and old people mown down by those convoys because they could not move out of the way quickly enough. I have seen the bodies myself, run over so many times they lie flattened on the road, reduced to nothing but bloody patches of organs and bones. But when we break away from the road to escape those convoys, or to take a short cut over the desert, that brings its own dangers. Hidden landmines left over from the last war. Roving dogs, mad with hunger or rabies. A stray colored ball from a cluster bomb.
I cannot think of those cluster bombs without outrage. It is forbidden by international law to use them in urban areas, yet the Americans and British rain them down on us without compunction. Cluster bombs are filled with small, colorful tin balls, many of which do not explode on first impact. Instead, they lie in the streets looking as harmless as toys, waiting for a passing vibration to detonate. Thus the child who picks one up with delight or the young mother who walks by innocently pushing a pram are turned into suicidal murderers, setting off an explosion that shreds themselves and all around them to pieces. This is one of the reasons our hospitals are filled with babies without arms and our graveyards with disembodied heads and limbs. What sort of a demon invents a weapon like this? And what sort of a population allows its armies to use it?
But then, what did we do when Saddam gassed the Kurds with his own demonic weapons? And what did we do when he slaughtered the Shia, my mother’s people, stole their water, dried up their fields and destroyed their livelihoods? We, too, can be sheep.
My companions and I reach the prison just as the sun comes up, joining all the other anxious families who, like us, have come once again to find their loved ones. They usher me to the front, as has become our custom, and press their photographs into my hands so I can give them to the girl soldier. Then we wait, as the powerless must always wait, no more effectual than asses swishing away flies with their sleepy tails.
The dawn suffuses our faces, first with rose and then burnished gold, the sun as resplendent as if this were a time of celebration, not horror. And finally, when that same indifferent sun has risen high and hot, the soldiers exchange shifts and I can look for the little Kate with her silly, ignorant face. I wonder what she believes she is doing here—serving God? Or is it her president she is serving, with the same cowed obedience with which our soldiers served Saddam?
But I am disappointed, for the soldier who comes toward us is not Kate. Instead it is another woman, a tall one, with wide, heavy shoulders and full breasts filling her uniform. Her face is round and red but hidden behind the usual sun goggles, so I cannot judge her age. But her mouth is grim. I brace myself for the worst.
“Good morning,” I say to her in English.
“Get back!” she snaps and waves her rifle at me.
“Excuse me, but I am only trying to help. I can interpret for you.”
She runs her eyes over me, this tight-mouthed Amazon, her jaw set hard. “Yeah, I heard about you. Well, I got news: there’s nothing to interpret. Now leave, and tell the rest of your buddies to leave too. Go!”
“But where is the other soldier, the one called Kate?”
“Didn’t you hear me?” She raises her gun and points it at my heart. “I said git!”
I draw myself up and look at the woman with disgust. She does not frighten me, for she is too obviously frightened herself. “You have no right to talk to me like that,” I tell her in my very best English. “You come here, invade my country for no reason, lock up our children. What kind of people are you?”
“Naema, in the name of Allah, stop!” Umm Ibrahim says, pulling at my sleeve. She cannot understand my words but my tone is unmistakable. “You mustn’t quarrel with the soldier like this, she’ll kill you! Come away!”
The soldier stares at me coldly, her rifle still pointing at me. On her chest I see the word McDougall. For some reason, this word makes me laugh.
“Come!” Umm Ibrahim urges again. “You’re going mad. Come!”
I allow her to pull me away, for there is obviously no point in staying. But I cannot refrain from looking back over my shoulder and shouting, “You should be ashamed!” to satisfy my stubbornness.
Mama has always said I am as stubborn as a goat. Perhaps it comes from being the eldest, or perhaps from having had to help her cope when Papa was in Abu Ghraib during my school days. Saddam had him arrested for writing a poem about the death of a young soldier in our war with Kuwait. Papa’s accusers said he had “committed an irreverence toward His Excellency, our Venerable Leader” by portraying the death as a tragedy rather than a triumph of patriotic martyrdom. But we knew the real reason was that Papa had refused to join Saddam’s Ba’ath Party. Papa is a free spirit and hates despotism, as do Mama and I. But Saddam, of course, punished anybody who would not bend to his will.
“I knew this would happen,” I remember Mama crying to me just after Papa was taken. “As soon as your father showed me his poems when we were courting, I knew they would bring him trouble one day.” She looked at me, her dark eyes wide and frightened beneath her glossy hair, which was still a deep black in those days. “Your father’s a good man, but he wears his heart for all to see. His poems hide nothing if one is not blind. You know what I said to him when I first read his poetry?”
/> “What, Mama?” I looked at her warily. I was sixteen at the time and terrified that Papa would die. I was not at all sure I wanted to hear what she was about to say.
“Your father and I were in my uncle’s parlor. That’s where we did all our courting because, with my mother in Basra and Father deceased, may Allah have mercy on him, I was under my uncle’s protection while I went to college in Baghdad. Uncle kept a strict eye on us! Your father hated it—he wanted me all to himself.” Mama smiled, forgetting for a moment the present and all its miseries. “We were sitting side by side… not too close… on the sofa, his soft eyes looking at me. Your father was so handsome in those days, like Zaki, such a gentle face. A poet’s face.” She paused, at peace for a moment within her memories. “Then he handed me the poem, blushing. ‘Be merciful, Zaynab,’ he said. ‘Please don’t think me a fool.’
“I took it and read, feeling his eyes watching me anxiously. It was a young man’s poem, full of flower imagery and longing. It makes me smile now to think of it, and I know it embarrasses your father. But even then I could see that this juvenile effort was dangerous.”
Mama shook her head and sank to a chair by the window. “You know what I told him, Naema? ‘You bare your heart in these poems, my darling,’ I said. ‘It’s a good heart, but I fear it will bring you sorrow.’ Yet he kept writing those poems anyway. And now, you see? I was right.”
But Mama was not angry with Papa, only frightened, for we had no idea if he was alive or whether and when he would be released. Once a person disappeared into Abu Ghraib, the family was told nothing. One was forced to wait in ignorance until the prisoner was released, perhaps without fingers or a hand, perhaps crippled or mad. Perhaps dead.
The Americans at least have lists.
Mama tried to stay strong for me and Zaki while Papa was gone, but it was not easy being two women alone with an eight-year-old boy to feed. Our relatives did what they could to help us, but Mama had to keep going to the hospital to see her patients or else lose her job, so I was forced to stay home from school to look after Zaki, go to the market, cook and clean. How I missed school and my friends! But I read my books when I could, went with Mama to bribe and petition this or that official for Papa’s release, and when he suddenly appeared at our home eleven months later— alive, praise be to Allah, but with his legs bent and crooked from torture, his skin torn, his body emaciated and his heart fluttering weakly in his chest—I nursed him for months. What choice is there but to grow stubborn under such circumstances?
Sand Queen Page 9
