So that evening I do. Jimmy brings him over to my tent right after our shifts, and the three of us stand outside sharing a smoke and talking for a few minutes before we have to turn in. Ortiz turns out to be this Nicaraguan guy with a strong Spanish accent, who enlisted to get his citizenship. He’s nice-looking, with a broad face and big brown eyes, but he can’t be more than five feet tall, even shorter than me. I’m amazed the Army let in such a squirt. He seems all right, though, so I tell him how Naema interprets for me and show him the photo of her dad and brother. “You ever seen this kid?” I ask.
He squints at the photo in the evening light. “He does look familiar. But I do not know.”
“If I give this to you, could you try to find him? And tell me if he got hurt in the riot last night?”
Ortiz looks puzzled, but he agrees, so I carefully tear the photo in half and give him Zaki’s side. Naema’s dad, with his long, sad face, I put back in my pocket. “The kid’s name is Zaki Jassim—it’s written on the back. And his sister’s Naema. Okay?”
Ortiz nods. He doesn’t look too happy, though.
“Do you have any way of talking to the kid if you see him?” I ask then.
“Yes, maybe. The interpreter for our platoon, he comes sometimes to spend time with the boys.”
“Great! Will you get him to tell the kid that his sister comes every day to ask about him and their dad?”
“I do not understand,” Ortiz bursts out, squinting at me angrily. “Why am I doing this favor for hajjis, huh? The boys in my tent, they are fighters, not innocent babies. They hate us.”
“I know,” I say quickly. “But this kid isn’t like that, I’m sure. And I figured it would keep the girl translating for us if we did her a favor. You think you could get a message from the boy for her?”
Ortiz shakes his head. “This is crazy! How do you know she is not using you to send secret codes? How do you know to trust her?”
“She hasn’t given me any codes.” This squirt is pissing me off. “She just wants to know if her little brother’s safe. No big deal.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy chimes in. “Don’t worry. It’s part of the whole ‘winning hearts and minds’ thing, you know?” He smiles at Ortiz reassuringly.
Ortiz hesitates a second, then shrugs. “All right. If Teach here says it is okay, I will do it.” He still looks pretty unconvinced, though. He stuffs the photo in his pocket and walks away.
I’ve got a pretty strong feeling that’s the last I’ll ever hear from him.
The next day, right after my shift, I tell Third Eye what I’ve done. “Naema is still showing up every morning, right?”
“Yeah,” Third Eye grunts in her usual get-the-fuck-outof-my-face way.
“She still interpreting for you?”
“Sometimes, when we get the lists. But I hate dealing with those friggin’ sand jockeys. They’re a bunch of hysterics. And they stink.”
Naema doesn’t stink, but I decide not to point that out. I just want to do some tiny bit of good for someone here, that’s all. Something, anything, other than hiding my head in the sand. “But if I get any news about her brother, will you tell her for me? Please?”
“All right! Jesus effing Christ, Brady, you’re such a fuckin’ nag.” Third Eye sits down to pull off her boots. She’s moving unnaturally slow these days, and speaking in a low monotone, too—that is, if she speaks at all. Most of the time she stays by herself, lying on her rack and staring into space.
She doesn’t even read or listen to music. She won’t go running anymore, either, even though I keep inviting her. I’m running with Jimmy every morning now, Yvette joining us when she’s around. But anybody can see from a mile off that Third Eye’s depressed as shit. And I know why.
“Third Eye?” I say quietly. “I need a shower before it gets dark. Come with me?”
She can’t refuse battle-buddy duty, so she heaves herself off her cot with an annoyed sigh and follows me out of the tent. I do want a shower, but mostly I want to try again to say what I lost the courage to say before, even if it does mean breaking open her shell.
“I got something to ask you,” I say when nobody’s close enough to hear. “No pressure though, I promise.”
“What’s your problem, Brady? Why can’t you leave a person alone?”
Her insults don’t bother me. I understand them now.
“Look, I know it’s hard, but I want to report Kormick and Boner, and I wondered if you’d do it with me. You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to, but I just can’t stand the idea of you having to work with those fuckers every day. Maybe with the two of us reporting them, they’ll take us seriously and get rid of them, you know?”
Third Eye doesn’t answer. She just thumps along, her big feet stirring up the moondust. But then she stops and swivels to face me, her eyes black and narrow in her big, round face. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. There’s nothing wrong with those guys. I don’t need you mixing up more shit for me, okay? Now drop it, and keep your sick little fantasies to yourself.”
THE SOLDIER IS back in the therapy circle, refusing again to talk. This is her new strategy, her way of protesting. If they’re going to force her to listen to all these other losers, she, at least, isn’t going to join in. It’s none of their goddamn business anyhow, what she’s been through. Why she’s here.
“Kate,” Dr. Pokerass says then, turning to her with a smile like an anaconda’s. “We heard about the problems you had with your parents when they visited last week. I wondered if you would like to share your feelings about what happened?”
The soldier can’t believe her fucking ears. This is just like being back in her platoon, everybody knowing everyone else’s friggin’ business.
“It would be more productive if you would join in once in a while, Kate,” Pokerass goes on. “We only want to help. Perhaps you have feelings of anger toward your parents because they supported your decision to enlist? It might help you to talk about it.”
Dr. Pokerass has the soldier’s whole sorry history right there in a file on her lap. So, since she’s got the answers already, why bother to talk?
“My parents were the opposite,” Corporal Betty Boop chimes in, although nobody asked her squeaky opinion. “My mom said she’d let me sign up over her dead body. So I waited till I was eighteen and she couldn’t do anything about it.”
“Mine, too,” says the Vietnam nurse whose hubby knocks her around. “They didn’t want me to join at all. Said it was only for boys. They were damn right, too.”
That’s when the soldier gets her idea. She’s going to escape. They can’t keep her here, torturing her like this. It’s not a prison. She can leave whenever she wants.
The thought cheers her up so much she decides to talk after all.
“You’re an asshole,” she says to Betty Boop, and stands up. “You’re all assholes.”
And she walks out.
[ NAEMA ]
AT LAST, GOOD news! I am so excited that I burst into the house shouting, “Mama, come quickly!”
She runs in from the back, where she has been scrubbing our clothes in a barrel of muddy water from the village well, which is all we have to wash with now. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“That girl soldier kept her promise at last! I thought she was lying to me, but no—she’s found Zaki!”
“Praise be to Allah!” Mama cries. She grasps my hands and shakes them up and down. “Tell me!”
“The other girl, the big rude one, you know?” Mama nods eagerly. “She gave me his message—she read it from a piece of paper in English. He says he’s fine, only bored. He’s made friends in his tent, two boys from Basra. They have rice to eat, chicken too. He says he misses his guitar.”
“And us? He doesn’t miss us?”
I laugh, I am so light-headed with relief. “Of course, I’m teasing you. He says he misses us terribly… and his guitar.”
“Do you have the paper, may I see it?”
I shake my head. “No, Mama. The soldier said she was not allowed to give it me.”
Mama wipes her chafed hands on the torn sheet she has tied about her waist for an apron. “And he said nothing about them being cruel to him? They don’t beat him?”
“No, he said nothing like that. It was a cheerful message, Mama.”
She wraps her arms around me then, her cheeks wet with tears. “Blessed is Allah! Thank you, thank you, my love!”
I hold her close, stroking her hair. Mama was always so reserved before this war, so dignified. She never used to call to Allah all the time, or walk about so disheveled. How she has changed.
At last she pulls away, blotting her tears with her rag of an apron. Then she looks at me, a new fear in her eyes, and begins to knead her hands frantically, pulling at her fingers and rubbing her knuckles, as she has been doing more and more often of late. “But what about your father? Has Zaki seen him?”
“No, I’m afraid not. No news of Papa.”
Her face falls again, deepening the lines across her brow. She looks so much older than when we arrived here and has grown terribly thin. Her body, once so graceful, has become gaunt, the sinews in her arms and legs shadowed and protruding. Her cheeks have sunken, making her black eyes too large for her face, and the lines around her mouth are carved deep and harsh. She is only forty, yet she looks more like Granny every day.
I, also, have grown too thin. There is almost nothing to eat. The local farmers can no longer irrigate their fields because there is no electricity to drive the water pumps. The truck drivers who bring us food from the north are being kidnapped or killed, their trucks looted. And all the beautiful date groves near here have been ploughed under or bombed by the Americans for who knows what reason; to punish us, I suppose, for not loving them. So we are lucky when I can find a little salty cheese or yogurt at the market to buy, or if a local peasant woman sells me a cucumber or watermelon she has managed to coax from the dry, dying earth.
“I wish we could hear from your father. Why don’t they let the prisoners write to us?” Mama says then, wringing her hands again.
“I don’t know. When I met that girl soldier, Kate, she told me the Americans have thousands of men and boys in that prison. They don’t even know all their names, Mama. Maybe when they are more organized, we will get Papa’s letters.”
Mama looks at me sadly. “In Saddam’s prison they didn’t let him write letters, either. But when they locked him alone in a cell for months, you know what he did to keep himself from going insane, my little one? He wrote letters and poems to me in his head and memorized them, every word. Only a poet would do that, no? Then, when he got home, he wrote them all down for me. Look, I brought them here.”
She goes to the bedroom we share in the back of the house and pulls out a large envelope from her clothes drawer. “Read them,” she says, pushing the envelope at me. “I’ve been reading them every night since your father was taken. They help to bring him closer. Maybe they will help you, too.”
I sit at the table and take out a bundle of letters, already yellowing and brittle. I have never heard about these letters before and the thought of poor Papa locked in a cell with no paper or pen, working so hard to memorize these lines for Mama, wrenches my heart. “But these are yours,” I say shakily. “He didn’t write them for me to see.”
“I know, but it doesn’t matter now. He wrote them to prove that the corrupt have no power over love or art. They contain his spirit, Naema. You should read them.” She waves her hand at them eagerly. “Go on!”
So I pick up a letter, unfold it carefully, and, with an ache in my chest, begin:
May Allah keep you well and safe, my lovely Zaynab. I think of you all the time in here, of you and your flowing, scented hair. Of our intimacy and the ways we have grown together. Of our children and my gratitude to Allah for their strength, their beauty, for being all a parent could want. Memories of you and our little ones are my way of protecting my mind and body from the blows.
I put the letter down quickly. “Mama, I can’t read this.” What I do not say is that it does indeed bring Papa back, as if he were here beside me, whispering of his suffering right into my ear. It is unbearable.
But Mama will hear none of my objections. “No, go on,” she insists. So, reluctantly, I do.
I receive no letters from you, dear soul, but I am sure you are writing them. The guards here are no doubt burning them, for they do their best to use you as a way of torturing me. They tell me dreadful things about what they have done to you and the children, things I will never repeat. But although they succeed in steeping me in fear, deep down, far away from their cruel words, I know, somehow, that you are safe. I feel it with a father’s instinct, and that of a husband. I feel you and Allah giving me strength.
I wish I could know how little Zaki is faring. Is he managing at school? Is he being a little man for you at home? It must frighten him so to have his Papa gone, but I am sure that Naema, in all her grace and strength, will cheer and distract him. And you, my darling Zaynab, I hope you are not too sad or frightened for me. Do not be. I will keep myself strong for you.
The guards are shouting. They turn us out of the cell all the time to look for hidden weapons or money. It is absurd, for how are we to hide such things here, where we have nothing but stone floors and walls? I think it is only another method of stopping our sleep. They keep bright lights on us all night for the same reason, hang us naked by our arms for days. But I hear the guard opening the cells down the row from me. In a second, I shall be turned out with the others.
I leave you with a poem, my love, albeit a rushed, unpolished one. It is a prison poem, written quickly in my head as the shouts and foul language of the approaching guards clash in my ears like sharpening knives. Here it is. Please forgive its roughness.
A flower trembles in the prison shadow
Struggling to blossom,
One pale petal at time,
Just as I, in this exile,
This graveyard of hope,
Struggle to remember you,
One pale kiss at a time
I fold the letter, too shocked to speak. Papa never told me exactly what they did to him in Abu Ghraib. I knew they broke his legs many times and starved him, but I did not know about the other tortures he describes here. I am sickened.
But Mama is merciless. She thrusts yet another letter at me and points to a paragraph. “Read!” she urges. “Read it, Naema!” I do not understand why she needs me to do this, but, again, I obey.
Zaynab, habibati, O you of the deep black eyes and silken skin. O you of the scents and softness, my woman, my wife. I ache for you like a young man newly in love.
“You see how he loves me?” Mama says then, leaning forward, her eyes gleaming with tears. “You see how he kept his love for me alight?”
“Yes, Mama, I see.” And I understand now. She needs to see me recognize Papa’s love for her so she can feel it again herself—so she can keep it near and alive.
She sits back, satisfied. “Read the letters whenever you want, my sweet one. They will teach you.” But then she sighs and begins again to knead her hands, rubbing her fingers, chafing the skin. “How I wish I knew what they’re doing to him and Zaki in that prison. It’s so painful knowing nothing! Do you think they have enough to eat? Can they wash and pray?”
I lean over the table and place both my hands on hers to still the kneading. “I don’t know, Mama,” I say quietly. “But I’ll go back every morning until I find out more. My patience has paid off for Zaki, hasn’t it? He sounds well fed and safe. We must keep hoping, that’s all.”
I do not tell her how few of us are left with hope among those who accompany me to the prison now. Umm Ibrahim has grown too sick and despairing to come, so stays at home staring at the walls and praying to Allah to save her husband and sons, her daughter Zahra tells me. Old Abu Rayya and his wife have also stopped coming, too weak from lack of food to walk and stand for hours under the scal
ding sun. Now only two other women go with me every morning: Zahra, always so stolid and grim; and old widow Fatima, who even at eighty keeps up an extraordinary strength and courage. But we know that each day our journey grows more dangerous. Our local militia, under the control of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose anti-American army multiplies by the day, has decreed that any male who is Shia must join their gang or die, and anyone who is Sunni must flee or be killed. And the militia’s imam has declared that women are no longer allowed to leave the village unaccompanied by men. Furthermore, we not only have to cover our heads every time we go out, but our legs and arms, too, lest we tempt unclean thoughts or rape. If we do not obey, the imam has warned, we will be captured and beaten.
We are sliding backwards in my country. We are becoming narrower than we have been for decades. Soon we women will be forced to live the life Granny had to lead— married off as little girls, beaten by our husbands, shrouded, enslaved—our rights as human beings obliterated. I know that some fundamentalist clerics, who have taken advantage of the current chaos and fear to gain new power, are already trying to obliterate the rights that Iraqi women have had for fifty years. They want to put us under the Sharia laws that treat us as slaves. If this comes to be, how are we women— how is our culture—to survive?
It makes me miss my old life in Baghdad more than ever. Yes, we were confined and fearful under Saddam, and yes, I will never forgive what he did to Papa and so many others. But at least I was able to go to school and Medical College as boldly as any boy, wearing jeans and a shirt. I was not forced to think about whether I was Shiite or Sunni, or half and half, as I am, because among the people I knew it did not matter. And I was free to become a doctor, hold a job, marry as I wished and walk through the streets alone without putting my life in danger from men who have nothing better to do than stamp upon the freedom and joy of others.
To escape these bitter thoughts, and recover from Papa’s letters, I leave Mama for a moment and go into a small room in the back of Granny’s house. This is where we are keeping Papa’s and Zaki’s belongings for the day they come home. Zaki’s guitar is hanging by a string on the wall, the way he has always insisted it be hung so that no one in his clumsy family steps on it by mistake. I lift it off, sit on a cushion and try to tune it as he once taught me, then strum it randomly. The sound is jarring, for I have no idea how to play, but it brings Zaki back nonetheless. He is so funny about his guitar, so serious. I remember when he called us in to hear him once, all excited because after months of studying traditional oud music with his tutor, a distinguished but conservative man, Zaki secretly taught himself to play a Beatles song on his guitar. He made us sit in a row, cross-legged on floor pillows like a real audience: our parents, me and four of our cousins. Then, slowly, his tongue between his teeth, his Beatle hair flopping into his eyes, he plucked out a song he said was called “Good Day Sunshine.” He taught us the chorus and the harmony and soon he had us all singing and swaying from side to side. Mama and my cousins understood nothing of the words, of course, but it felt wonderful to sing together anyway, that melody of happiness and love. And when we applauded at the end, Zaki stood up and bowed, trying to look indifferent, the way he thought a rock star would. But he could not keep a straight face for very long and broke into a big, beaming grin.
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