by Saad Hossain
“They were? Did you stop them?”
“Shit, Hoff, I was fast asleep.”
“Safe, Tony,” Hoffman said. “I asked you to get them safely into Shulla. Does letting them get fucked by the JAM sound safe to you?”
“Calm down, pendejo,” Tony said. “Who said anything about getting fucked?”
“What?”
“Your boy dropped some bodies,” Tony said. “Pop, pop, pop, like a fucking cowboy.”
“They’re still alive?”
“I hauled a bunch of dead JAM off the street. Ain’t none of them your guys,” Tony said.
“You’re sure?” Hoffman asked.
“Fuck off, Hoffman,” Tony said. “I’m from San Diego. All brown guys don’t look alike to me.”
“What was the body count, Tony?”
“Four JAM dead, including Alihassan, not more than a couple hundred feet from my patrol,” Tony said.
“Alihassan? The son of Hassan Salemi?”
“Damn right. I gotta jump through hoops now keeping him happy. But Alihassan had it coming. I told that boy a hundred times, carry on like that in the middle of the night, with the guns and the religious chanting and all that and someone’s liable to put a bullet through you.”
“Lucky it wasn’t one of your men then,” Hoffman said.
“Hassan Salemi doesn’t care who it was,” Tony said. “He wants blood.”
“So who shot him?”
“Your boy Kinza shot Alihassan in the head. One shot, right between the eyebrows, mafia style. That’s what the witnesses say. Your guy’s got quite a name on the street. He then fled in the general direction of my patrol in a goddamn running battle with the JAM.”
“It was the Wednesday night roster?” Hoffman interrupted.
“Exactly.”
“Your patrol was Sunni.”
“Too damn right, genius,” the sergeant said. “You should have seen it. Hell, you should have been in it. It’s your fucking fault. Man, when these pendejos see each other, it’s like they forget that we even started this war. Goddamn riot in the street like it was the 4th of July, with my fucking handpicked squad officer leading the way. I got three injured, one dead, and at least five more dead JAM, although they took their bodies back, so I can’t be sure. Sometimes my guys like to show off and exaggerate the body count. All this blood on my fucking street, which is why I’m patrolling out here in this puta sun. Apparently, ‘I can’t keep the streets clean by sitting on my ass inside the base eating nachos.’ Fucking faggot officer. Stop laughing, Hoffman. I swear I’m going to kick your ass right here.”
“So what happened to my guys?”
“They fucking waltzed into Shulla while all this was happening,” Tony said, indignant. “No signing in, no hellos, nothing.”
“Well, I owe your squaddies then, Tony,” Hoffman signaled to his hummer. “I got some candy bars for ‘em.”
“That’s real sweet of you, Papa Noel.”
“You want some detergent instead?”
“Just gimme the fucking candy.”
“You’re getting fat. You know that, Tony. Maybe your CO was right.”
“Fuck that shit,” Tony swallowed a Mars bar whole and then spat out the wrapper with a rasping choke. “Listen, Hoff. You know I don’t ask questions about your business and all, but this chingado Kinza is getting to be a real pain. Lotta guys after him. I got orders to bring him in myself for questioning. Hassan Salemi just posted a ten thousand dollar bounty on his head, double that if he’s caught alive. My CO’s busting a gut trying to catch him before the JAM start dropping pieces of him all over town.”
“Hold off on that for a while,” Hoffman said. “I’m on special assignment on this guy, straight from Bradley. He has some information we need.”
“Col. Bradley? That lunatic motherfucker?” Tony shook his head. “Listen, Hoff. That maricon still sees Saddam’s ghost in every street corner. Just last week, he called in an air strike on a fucking model tank. It was made of fucking wood for chrissakes. The local JAM boys nearly died laughing. Now they’re putting up papier-mâché T-72 tanks everywhere hoping to get bombed.”
“Yeah, it’s funny how the army promotes all the psychos,” Hoffman said. “You happen to know what my guys were doing here for so long?”
“Sure,” Tony said. “They were hanging around a grocery store for three days. Had the whole street riled up about something. Someone there called in the JAM, anyway. Old pendejo called Sheikh Amal runs the store. I was going up there to have a look.”
“Leave it to me, Tony. I’ll take care of it,” Hoffman said. “In the meantime, have some Skittles.”
6: TEA PARTY AT THE HOUSE OF FURIES
DEEP INTO THE SERPENTINE HEART OF SHULLA, THERE WAS AN abandoned Jaish Al Mahdi safehouse, sparsely furnished, stocked with old canned food, a remnant of ancient times before all of Shulla became the playground of Sadr, now largely forgotten, the old revolutionaries dead or retired, old guns stilled finally, replaced by the shrill voices of youth shiny and privileged, born with a swagger in their pants, pacing Shulla like hair dried lions, the old caves for old jackals now cast off like so many moth-ridden clothes.
In this one lived three ladies, two of them veiled in old lace, the third a crone of such wrinkled age that the veil was deemed superfluous, almost an insult for such a pedigreed garment. They had washed up here on the mysterious tides that wracked the city, swirling its inhabitants from corner to corner with a cavalier disregard for ownership, leaving them miraculously upright in a foreign house, fully stocked with the detritus of someone else’s life, leaving them alone in the quiet, hopeful of being forgotten, letting the shock dissipate, until finally, with a shrug, they picked up the threads and started all over again.
The three ladies had lost a lot. Their men folk lay dead or dying across the city. Some were buried, some rotting in pieces, some thrown into the air in violent red embers. Sons, husbands, and brothers were absent, so much so that there were doubts if they had ever existed to begin with, for the women rarely spoke of such things. One might even consider that it was no great loss, this sacrifice of men to the grand war machine, for the men had constructed the machine in the first place, in dim caveman times, and it was their natural fate to keep feeding it now. Not to say that the ladies adhered to this view, for such things were never vocalized, and indeed, the pattern of life had made conversation largely unnecessary by this time; lacking foreign intrusions, silence was the order of the house, carefully built on a series of rituals.
Alas, Baghdad was a city in flux and even silence was not to last. The safehouse, largely forgotten, existed still in the mind of the little boy Xervish, who had once lived next door to it and, in one vivid night, had seen in full moonlight three men in checkered scarves executing one of their number with a sword, there in the arched doorway, the severed head bouncing down the stairs like a football. This boy, grown now into manhood, recalled every step of the old house, every door, ever window. He dreamed of the house often and in idle moments blamed the direction of his life on that single steel arc of arterial red, on the wet noise of the head bouncing, a moment of explosive violence that had somehow infected him and haunted him remorselessly thereafter.
Twenty years later, sitting in a café, pressed by Kinza for a safehouse, his mind immediately went to the one house he most definitely did not consider safe. Yet as he rotated the idea in his head, it took hold that this was precisely the place for his old friend, now come suddenly stalking into his life, an iron shod warhorse showering sparks all over the most tenuous papering of his days.
“There is a place for you to go,” Xervish said. “An old place. Forgotten by the new JAM, forgotten perhaps by anyone still living.”
“You want me to hide from the JAM in a JAM safehouse?” Kinza asked. “The idea is ridiculous. I might even do it.”
“Hassan Salemi wants you,” Xervish said. “Hassan Salemi.” Saying the words made him glassy with fear. “You need to get off the st
reets fast.”
“Did I ask Hassan Salemi to send his stupid son after me?” Kinza shrugged. “Forget Hassan Salemi. Let him come out of his cave if he wants to find me. I’ll put a bullet in his head.”
Xervish stared at his friend, aghast, his mind unable to reconcile this man with the boy he had once played football with. “Hassan Salemi,” he repeated, as if intoning the name enough times would drum the direness of the situation into Kinza. “He has ordered five jars of vinegar. He keeps them on his desk and polishes them every day. He has sworn to take your head, your hands, and your feet for trophies.”
“He should take my balls,” Kinza said.
Xervish shuddered. “How can you joke about this? Please, Kinza, just go to the house. I’ll smuggle you out of town as soon as I can.”
“There are three of us,” Kinza said.
“What?” Xervish felt the acid snaking in his stomach, a churning anguish prophesying disaster, the certainty that he would soon be tested, and fail, as he had done repeatedly in the past, to make the right choices.
“Kinza, you have to dump them,” he wailed. “You have to think of yourself. Salemi is already looking for all of you. He has the descriptions—you, the soft man with glasses, the crippled man. Three of you together will be so easy to find. You must forget about them. If Salemi takes them, then maybe he will be satisfied and call off his dogs.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Hassan Salemi,” Kinza said quietly. “I’m not giving up anybody. You make arrangements for three.”
“Kinza, he’ll cut your head off.”
Kinza laughed. “I have a grenade in my left hand that says otherwise. When I die, you’ll hear the earth shake.”
“Why do you make it so hard?” Xervish cried out, his equilibrium gone. “Why can’t you for once just…”
“I remember when two Syrians kidnapped your sister, old friend,” Kinza said. “They raped her and then killed her. Do you remember?”
“You know I do.”
“I found them for you, Xervish,” Kinza said. “I hunted them and I tied them down. I cut them for you, friend, when you couldn’t hold your knife straight. I held you up so you could see them scream their voices away. And when you looked away, I shot them for you. Do you remember, friend?”
“I wish you hadn’t,” Xervish said. “I wish to god you had never gone near them. I wish they were still alive somewhere, I wish I couldn’t see them anymore. Do you think you fixed anything? I’ll do as you say, Kinza. Go to the house. You’ll be as safe as anywhere. I’ll find a way to get you out of Shulla.”
Thus, the three men found their way to the House of Furies. The blue doors were faded, gummed shut with cobwebs. Xervish stirred nervously and left them in the stairwell, his parting words hurried, lost in the thick swirls of wind dusting through the alley.
“Where the hell have you landed us now?” Hamid asked.
“A place to lie low for a while,” Kinza said. “Xervish is lining up a way to get us out of here.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Hamid said. “That man is broken. He’ll betray us.”
“I’ve known him for a long time.”
“I’ve looked into the eyes of a thousand men like him,” Hamid said. “Grown men have wept at the sound of my voice, soiled themselves at the fall of my foot.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is, why do you consistently disregard my experience?” Hamid said. “I can read men like a whore reads your wallet. I know when they are lying, when they are holding back. That man Xervish is afraid of you, and he hates you for it. Do you think some childish attachment will count for anything when he is put to the test by the Mahdi dogs? Are you really that much of a fool?”
“Should we part ways then?” Kinza asked.
“No,” Hamid said, looking away, his voice dull. “What would be the point of that? None of us would get to Mosul then.”
“And all that gold,” Kinza snorted.
Dagr meanwhile was standing, entranced, by the door, tracing the lines on the blue, remembering, long ago, another blue door, with handprints smudged three feet from the floor, where his daughter used to push, breathless, wobbling into their apartment, as he chased her, growling hideously, sometimes a bear, sometimes a giant dog. The door was always open because they knew all the other tenants, were like a family, really, the old couple below, adopted grandparents who would babysit at a moment’s notice, every day even, and the landlord on the ground floor, a kind-faced engineer drifting into unwilling bachelorhood, who used to make small brass toys by hand, hiding them all over the building so that her holidays were an ongoing, elaborate treasure hunt.
The hallways had been narrow, cluttered with the smell of cooking, the sound of his daughter shrieking, running from door to door, under the impression that the whole building was hers, the other tenants mere extensions of her will. Each of the doors had been painted blue by the engineer landlord, who believed fiercely in the efficacy of paint, and it had worked out for him, in the end, for he had died on the street on his way to work and not home in bed as he had feared.
Dagr leaned forward, oblivious, and the door opened of its own accord, making him stumble into a dark hallway. He fell near a pair of slippered feet, stockinged, rising up through varied clothing to a diminutive, incredibly old head.
“Welcome, dear,” the crone said, reaching forth a feathery hand and ruffling his hair. “Are you certain you are at the right door?”
“Door…no,” Dagr said. “It looks like a door I once knew. My door. It was open. This door, I mean. Xervish brought us here.”
“Xervish,” the crone said. “A good boy. He is haunted by this house. This door, specifically. It frames the substance of all his dreams. Thus, he consigns to this place all those who disturb him.”
“My friends are outside,” Dagr said, rising to his feet. “Two of them. May we come in?”
“Are you asking permission?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” The crone asked. “Your friends outside have guns. Even now they are moments from drawing them.”
“We are not here to turn you from your home,” Dagr said. “If you want us to leave, we will go away.”
“You might, dear boy,” the crone said. “You might go away. But those two outside would not. Do you venture to speak for them?”
“I do.”
The crone smiled, revealing a most awkward dental landscape. “What a good boy you are. I am Mother Davala. You may come in. This house has been home to many. Three more will not tip the balance.”
“Is there room enough, for us, grandmother?” Dagr asked, letting the others in.
“Oh yes,” Mother Davala said. “Plenty of room. Would you like some tea?”
Bizarrely, within minutes, they found themselves in the sitting room, drinking glasses of mint tea from a silver filigreed teapot, a most elegant setting, the room well lit from semi-shuttered windows, a fine, faded Persian carpet on the floor, the furniture old and shabby yet still noticeably better than anything from the shops, the tea things appearing so much a part of the room that they scarcely questioned who had brewed it so fresh, with just the right number of cups, steaming at exactly the right temperature.
In a separate alcove by the window, far from the coffee table, were two striped armchairs most advantageously positioned, commanding the light as well as a fine view of the street. Two ladies sat there, dark eyed, veiled in lace, ages indeterminable but for the thin white hands moving like graceful spiders, warping, wefting.
“Don’t mind them, dears, they hardly ever speak,” Mother Davala said.
“Why is that?” Dagr asked.
“Tragedies, dear, tragedies,” Mother Davala said airily. “Destroyed homes and missing families, lost loves, and soured ambitions, futures catastrophically forked into a directionless mire. What is there to speak of, little boys, when all possibilities are gone and life is reduced to single moments of consciousness, unmoored from either past or futur
e? Great silences stack up on each side, like my sisters here. We suffer impenetrable silences, the absence of those voices stilled forever, and when the sum of these is great enough, there seems no more purpose in speaking. This is life for those of us left behind.”
“Left behind?” Dagr asked.
“Left behind when men decide in which peculiar holocaust they will end their world.”
“Women do not perpetrate holocausts?” Dagr asked.
“Only in reaction. In the claiming of retribution,” the crone said cheerfully. “We do not initiate the madness. But sometimes we must seek redress to approach balance.”
“I notice that the ‘great silences’ have not affected you overmuch,” Kinza said.
“I speak for those who are struck literally speechless,” Mother Davala said. “Those who continually lose must, at some time, begin to take back. We arrive at this conclusion at different times of our lives but arrive we must, even if at the edge of a knife, in a tub of hot water.”
“You babble, woman,” Hamid said. “Living in this empty house has robbed your mind of sense.”
“I know you, Torturer,” Mother Davala said. “You are a man who has found joy in your profession. What frightens you is the vengeance that is owed to you, that has been piling high since the day you first embarked on your career. Do you think you can avoid it forever?”
“What do you know, witch?” Hamid shouted. “Whom have you told? Kinza, we are betrayed! That shit Xervish has sold us out!”
“Do you think to command me now?”
“No,” Hamid said in a low voice. “No.”
“What game is this, old mother?” Dagr asked. “What secrets do you know of us?”
“No secrets,” Davala said. “Not by some nefarious path. I only use my eyes. Your nature, for example, is written on your face plain as the day. Your losses, dear one, mount up higher than you can bear. Soon, you, too, will live in silence. What have you left to wager, after all? You could float away, unfettered, invisible, valueless.”
