Beginning on one side, the officers took a sturdy rope and tied it around each boy’s waist, attaching him to the boy next to him. We all looked around, confused.
“This is so we don’t get lost or separated, especially if there’s a dust storm,” said the officer in charge.
Ebi turned back and said, “A dust storm? It feels like the wind hasn’t come near here in years.”
“I guess dust storms can come fast,” I said, looking at the blue sky.
“On my command,” the officer went on, “you’ll run down this dune and straight ahead. Don’t sprint; keep a steady pace.”
I tried to smile at Ebi to hide the cold sweat I felt gathering at the base of my neck. I flashed him a wave, and he gave me one, too, but it wasn’t the fist in the air from a few weeks ago.
Suddenly the man behind us roared, “May God grant victory to our army. May God defeat our enemy and its allies. May God make their children orphans and their women widows. God is good; we sacrifice for God. Hold up your keys, boys!” Many boys reached for the golden plastic keys around their necks. I left mine under my shirt.
“If you die today, you are all bridegrooms,” the officer continued, his voice trembling now. “Think of this as your wedding day. God is waiting to welcome you to his kingdom.”
I looked around to see the man’s face. I tried to think of something funny to say to Ebi, but the line began to move. I watched my feet and the ground in front of me. If one of us fell, we’d all fall together.
I hurried to keep up. Wait. Why were the officers in the rear of the group? Shouldn’t they lead the way—dust storm or not? Fear smoldered like coal in the pit of my stomach.
The distance between the lines grew. Ebi was still in front of me, but he was twenty meters away. We’d only been jogging along for a few minutes when it happened. I heard it before I felt it—a deep booming noise. Then high-pitched screams.
A huge fireball exploded near the front of the line, where the first boys were running.
It reminded me of the cloud I’d seen during breakfast, but it wasn’t fluffy or peachy. It was deep orange like hot lava—its billowed edges were jet black.
“Keep moving, boys,” snarled a voice from behind.
Keep moving? Was he serious? My eardrums throbbed with a scream. In a second that lasted an hour, I realized it was mine.
In that same second, adrenaline sped through my body like a match lighting dry straw.
Then I understood. We would never get rifles. We weren’t tied together to keep from getting lost. We were tied together so that when the truth hit—hit like a kick in the solar plexus—we couldn’t run away. Ebi and I—and all these other boys—we weren’t soldiers. We were legs and arms they didn’t mind losing. We were here to die. We were human rags, walking straight into a minefield to wipe it clean.
I tried to turn, to stop where I was and yell, but I was dragged into hell by the boys who hadn’t figured it out.
Another mine exploded in front of Ebi’s line. He looked back at me, and I saw the exact moment of recognition on my best friend’s face.
It was the last thing I saw.
My feet left the ground and I flew through the air.
A searing pain shot through my lungs. Then I felt nothing at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I opened my eyes. It was black, inky black. Where was I? It was as dark as the fort Ebi and I once made from his mother’s chador.
But that was a long time ago.
And where was Ebi?
My eyes adjusted, and I saw dark shapes that couldn’t be in Ebi’s living room. Rows of beds in a long, narrow room. Antiseptic everywhere. I was flooded by a memory of black smoke and flying bodies.
Where was Ebi?
I pulled my elbows up under me, trying to sit. Pain jolted every cell in my body. My right arm immediately buckled. I fell back onto the bed, unconscious.
When I opened my eyes again, it was later—hours or days, I didn’t know. Sunlight filled the room. Someone lay to my right, head bandaged except for slits for mouth and eyes. On my left, a boy lay still, an IV line hooked up to his arm.
I clutched at my sheets. I knew I had to run from this place, but my arms and legs weren’t getting the message. There had been the explosion and nothing after that. I strained to catch my breath but almost choked on the smell of boy sweat mixed with the Mercurochrome that the school nurse used for skinned knees. Arabic words floated through the room. I tried to remember the vocabulary I had learned in school.
Where was Ebi?
Every time I closed my eyes, smoke and fire reappeared behind my lids. If I didn’t know what had happened to me, how could I find Ebi?
Finally panic reached my legs and I kicked at the heavy material that held me down. I struggled to sit up. A dark-skinned man in a white tunic rushed over and placed one hand on my knee and another on my shoulder. “Hold on there, Mr. Reza. Calm down. Nowhere to go today, my boy.” His accent was so heavy, it took a second for me to realize he was speaking Farsi, my own language.
“Ebi…” My throat was bone-dry and my voice sounded gravelly, like it had never been used. “I need to find my friend.”
“You need to move slowly now.”
“No,” I croaked. “You don’t understand. I need to find…” I tried again to push up from the mattress, but pain came from so many places, I slumped back onto the bed.
The man leaned close. The kindness in his eyes calmed me down, but the pity made me want to run again. He put his hands on either side of my face. His big thumbs felt cool on my flushed cheeks.
“I know this is frightening, son, but listen closely. You have severe lacerations all along your torso—twenty stitches—and your right arm is broken. You were lucky.”
“Lucky?” I wondered if his Farsi was that bad. Did he know what lucky meant?
“You didn’t die or lose a limb.” His hands left my face and started changing the dressing on my left shoulder. “Many boys do.”
I noticed a cast on my right arm. How had I not seen this before? His words sank into my brain—die or lose a limb. “My friend?”
The man turned away, looking for something on the table next to the bed. “Was he with you when you went into the minefield?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
He was silent as he finished with my bandages. Finally he said, “You boys came in four days ago. I can check the list. What’s his name?”
“Ebi Saberi, sir.”
“Drink some of this broth.” He handed me a warm mug and helped me sit up. “I’ll check for your friend and be back soon.”
The first sip of hot liquid stung. The second was a warm summer rain that made me feel sleepy. I closed my eyes and tried to replace the fireball with football or a beach scene. Footsteps stopped at my bed. I opened an eye.
“I’m afraid he wasn’t with your group,” said the man.
“What does that mean?”
He hesitated. “If he survived—and I hate to tell you that it’s only an if—he could have been sent to another hospital, or to another camp.”
I winced as he applied ointment to cuts I hadn’t known were on my face. I wondered what he meant by camp.
“I need to find him. Can I go to these other camps?”
The man rested his hand on my wrist. “Son, this is a hospital that serves several prisoner-of-war camps. Once you’re well enough, you’ll be placed in a camp and you could be there for a very long time. You are a prisoner of Iraq.”
Prisoner? The word echoed in my mind and bounced off what he’d said about Ebi—if he survived.
I handed him the unfinished broth and lay back in the bed. A memory flooded my head. When I was five or six, before the revolution, they took down an old building to make way for a new shopping center downtown. We all went to watch. The streets were full of people. We might have taken a picnic. Everyone cheered when the eight-story building fell in on itself. People clapped and talked as the dust settled, and we headed home. But I
kept looking over my shoulder. I knew the building had been there; then everything had turned to rubble. It was as if it never existed.
Dad, Uncle Habib, the old piano, Ebi—there was no evidence of my old life here. Not even the rubble. Tears spilled from my closed eyes and filled my ears, but I didn’t care.
* * *
The man in the white shirt was replaced by another, and another. I spent hours trying to think of something other than the last time I’d seen Ebi’s face.
After that first day I wasn’t afraid. I mostly felt empty—cracked and dry like Maharlu Lake in a drought. I spent hours trying not to think. One day I realized I had no idea how long I’d been in the hospital. I slept. I woke, tried not to think, and slept some more. The cuts on my shoulder became scars, but the wounds in my mind wouldn’t form a scab.
There was no music in the hospital and no music in my head during the day. But in my dreams I heard shrill saxophones and booming drums and no melody at all.
At some point during the first few days I was fully conscious, I noticed I was dressed in the same drab hospital scrubs as everyone else and that my jacket was missing. If it was gone, I’d lost my last tape and Uncle Habib’s wallet. I’d been living at the bottom of a dark hole, but realizing my last thread with Uncle was gone made me feel like I was buried alive.
I clutched the plastic key, still on the cord around my neck. It hadn’t been lost with the rest of my things, but what good had it done me? I yanked it over my head and dropped it in the trash can next to my bed. Burying my face in my pillow, I sobbed silently until sleep came again.
I no longer prayed. At first I had no idea time was passing. Once I could tell one day from the next, I couldn’t physically kneel down. But as weeks went by, it wasn’t the physical pain that kept me from facing Mecca with the others. It was the knot that lodged just below my heart.
How could I pray to a God that sent boys, hundreds of boys, to die? Or maybe worse, to let someone like the boy in the bed next to me sit for days on end staring into space. What kind of God could make a world full of music and fruit and girls and then take it all away? What kind of God killed all the people I loved? Every time I thought about joining the others in prayer, the knot tightened and grew.
Each day was the same as the one before. Some boys read or played cards, but not me. Unless the orderlies were talking directly to us, they spoke Arabic. Words I barely understood swirled in my head. The hours were divided by the coming and going of meal trays, the days by the coming and going of broken boys.
A few days after my cast was removed, someone across the aisle groaned, “It must be Wednesday; they’re serving that tasteless crud again. Every Wednesday it’s the same damn thing.”
“Maybe if you eat, you’ll get out of here,” said the orderly who brought the tray.
“Yeah, yeah,” said the boy. “But I’m right, aren’t I? It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s Thursday. Thursday, June seventeenth. Ramadan comes soon. When Ramadan starts and you have to fast all day, you’ll be wishing you ate this hot meal.”
Thursday, June seventeenth? My birthday. I wondered what Mother was thinking today. Did she know I was alive? If she thought I was dead, was she proud? Where would I be next year at this time? I was thirteen. I was finally thirteen, but I felt older than anyone I’d ever known.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Seven weeks after I was carried unconscious into the hospital, I was given a pair of bright yellow pants and a matching jacket and was ushered out the door. Feeling the sun on my face for the first time since the explosion, I squinted and hunched my shoulders against the light.
A doctor loaded me into the passenger seat of an old jeep. He helped another boy into the backseat and said, “Take care of yourselves, boys. You’ll be playing football soon.” He waved as the driver pulled away. “It’s a short ride to the camps.”
We were tossed up and down as we drove along a rutted road. There were no street signs or landmarks to tell me where I was. Somewhere in Iraq—maybe that’s all I needed to know.
To the right lay a small town, just a scattering of two-story buildings. The jeep turned left and passed an old factory with high windows, shattered and filthy. In a dusty open lot, a pack of wild dogs leered as the jeep passed. Soon we came to a battered chain-link fence and a guarded gate.
The guard nodded to the jeep’s driver and, waving him in, raised a large wooden barricade. Once inside, there were six more gates, three on either side, each leading to short brick buildings. Each complex was surrounded by a low concrete wall topped with barbed wire.
At the last gate stood a five-foot-high picture of a grinning Saddam Hussein. I could barely see the leader’s uniform under all the ribbons and medals. I knew I was supposed to hate him, but I didn’t really care. We passed the portrait, and another wooden barrier rose and dropped shut behind us. Twenty yards beyond the gate, the jeep pulled up to a small office.
“Stay here,” said the driver. He grabbed a stack of papers and went inside.
“Where does he think we’re going?” asked the other boy with a laugh. We’d exchanged a few two-word sentences in the hospital, but I didn’t remember his name. He had a round, open face. When he smiled, it showed a gap between his two front teeth. “Superman couldn’t make it over these walls with those guards standing every hundred meters. They’d fill us with holes in a millisecond.”
A shudder rippled down my spine as I saw one of the soldiers toss a Kalashnikov to another. I remembered the guns they’d piled up next to the truck before they sent us into the exploding desert—the guns they never meant for us to use. I could go the rest of forever without seeing another gun like that.
Dozens of boys were hanging around the yard, some younger than me, others needing a shave. A hot, strong wind rustled their identical yellow jackets and pants. At one end of the space was a football goal marked by two boards shoved in the ground. At the other end, ruts in the dust formed the other side’s net. The boys passed an old ball back and forth. I looked at them, wondering if there were any from Shiraz, or even from my school.
The driver came back and jumped behind the wheel. “Out, you two.” He gestured to a boy who’d followed him from the office. “This is Salar. He’ll show you around.”
After we stepped into the yard, the jeep reversed, sending up billows of dust as it shot back through the open gate.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” said Salar as we shook hands. He was tall and thin, all arms and legs. He swept his arm out as if presenting a palace. “It’s bad, but it’s not exactly jail. We get outside every day and the food isn’t half sand.”
“That’s a welcome change,” laughed my jeep companion. For the first time in months, I laughed too, and a tiny breeze of relief rippled through me.
“So you heard the man, my name’s Salar. I’m from Tabriz, up north. I’m sixteen. Been here a year and a half.” He pointed to me. “And you?”
“A year and a half?” I croaked.
“Like I said, it’s no fun.” Salar shrugged. “But since we might all be here awhile, what’s your name?”
“Reza. I’m from Shiraz.” The sound of my voice in the open air seemed strange. Salar nodded and turned to the other boy.
“I’m Jaafer.” He pointed to himself. “From outside Birjand.”
“I have a cousin in Birjand. Used to visit every—” Salar was interrupted by a loud bell. “Aha, fine fellows, that bell means lunch.” He turned abruptly to us. “Unless of course you’re fasting. If you are, you could go to lockdown early or come watch us eat. Either of you fasting?”
We both shook our heads, mumbling no. Ramadan had begun and I’d barely thought about it. I wondered if my aunts and uncles were coming to feast with Mother at the end of the day. Did they talk about me?
Salar ushered us into one of the concrete buildings and down a corridor to a large hall full of boys. The windows along one side hadn’t been cleaned in years. As we sat down at a table, the scent of
garlic and cumin was so strong it made me squint. A boy with an apron brought an aluminum pan heaped with white rice, topped with boiled cabbage in a brown sauce. It looked like last week’s leftovers, but my mouth watered all the same.
“Eat up, gentlemen,” said Salar, snapping his fingers and motioning toward the food. “It tastes better than it looks.”
Three boys were sitting there. Salar eased in at the head of the table and said, “Welcome our new recruits, boys. Introduce yourselves.”
When the youngest, a boy named Farhad, said in a small voice, “I’m almost thirteen.” I heard my own voice, a million years ago, saying the same words to Uncle Habib.
“I’ve only been here a few weeks,” said Farhad, his voice barely audible above the din of talking boys. “I was in the hospital for five months.” I followed the boy’s gaze to his lap and noticed a small set of crutches. One of his legs had been amputated below the knee. I felt like I should look away, but I couldn’t.
“I’ve been here the longest,” said Omid, a boy with loose black curls that fell below his ears. He had the beginnings of a beard and a hooked nose. His mouth looked like it was on the edge of a smile, and his voice was as loud as Farhad’s was quiet. “I signed up when fighting started and landed here three weeks later. Stupid or what?”
The third boy stared at his empty plate. All I saw was jet-black hair and a razor-sharp jaw.
Salar said, “Pasha, speak up, man. Introduce yourself to the new meat.” The boy scowled, then turned back to the empty plate.
“Pasha hates us, yet for some reason he continues to grace us with his presence.” Salar raised his hands in the air. “It’s one of the wonders of the world.”
“You’re so skinny, Salar.” Omid let out a hearty laugh. “You’re easy to abuse. Me—he just can’t stay away from my good looks.”
Pasha pushed the plate to the middle of the table. Standing up, he said, “It’s bad enough only the youngest of you observes the holy days.” I noticed then that Farhad wasn’t eating either. He watched with a serene smile as Pasha said, “You sit here and do nothing but joke,” and left to sit at an empty table nearby. Even his back looked angry.
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