The Waiting Hours

by Shandi Mitchell

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Her lungs sucked air. Her heart pounded her rib cage. Help. She needed help. She reached for the phone and it crashed to the floor. Wheezing, she fell to her knees, her fingers fumbling for the numbers. Pressed to her ear, the phone rang and rang…

  “Bluebird Taxi, how can I help you?”

  18

  Hassan focused on the strobe of bridge struts and the percussive rhythm of his tires slapping against the cement seams. He liked bridges. He appreciated the in-between. The view reminded him of the Tigris, but not as beautiful. Tamara’s hands were clasped tightly on her lap. She had never sat up front in his cab before.

  He knew that the woman, Tamara, was afraid of the bridge and it saddened him that she was deprived of its beauty. He wished she would look up and out. She was different when he dropped her off at work. With each step that took her closer to the door, she stood taller. Her stride became more confident and her head lifted higher. She was no longer small. On their drive together, she seemed to gather her strength. It pleased him that he could give that to another human being.

  But something had changed between the salon, home, and now. “I need to cross the bridge,” she had said. He hadn’t asked for the address. He knew where they were going and wondered how she knew the dead boy.

  The bridge deck merged with solid land and her hands released. Palms flat on her knees, her fingers worried the cotton fabric of her skirt. She seemed to be mumbling something under her breath. He slowed for the toll booth and tossed the coins without making a full stop. They jangled in the basket and the arm lifted. Accelerating up the hill, he checked the bobbing wild roses in the vase to assess the smoothness of her ride. She sat up straighter as he eased around the right-turn corner. The barricades and caution tape had been taken down.

  “Stop,” she said.

  But it wasn’t safe. He promised, “Just up ahead.”

  She craned to look back and her braids parted, revealing her slender neck. He pulled into the empty school parking lot, a right turn, and kept the car running. He would like to turn off the air conditioner, but she didn’t seem cold. They stared straight ahead, his arms goosebumping under his cardigan.

  When he had picked her up, she had been standing at the curb. He had never seen her waiting outside before. She looked small and sad. He had pulled up close, but when she didn’t get in, he nudged the passenger door open. He understood the loneliness of the back seat.

  She placed her hand on the glove compartment’s stencilled words and then touched the sprig plucked from the bush outside of dispatch. The flower bounced under her fingertips. She had long, delicate fingers and the nails were cut short. He didn’t need to remind her to put on her seatbelt.

  The woman, Tamara, was looking at him. He had never seen her from this angle before, face to face. Even in their hurt, she had beautiful brown eyes. Classical eyes. The eyes of Queens and Muses. Eyes that reminded him he was an old man. The faint scent of coconut perfumed the car. He said, “Shall I walk with you?”

  “If you keep the meter running,” she said.

  He heard, Yes, please.

  * * *

  —

  They walked the two blocks side by side down the sidewalk. The evening air had the same dusted heat of Baghdad. The sun was low and the world golden. They could be walking towards Al Mutanabbi Street after supper, just like he had done so many times as a young man. He could conjure the harbour into the river Tigris, maple trees into date palms, and cement into clay. He could summon the markets crowded with vendors and the aromas of shawarma grilling on spits, simmering chickpea lablabi, and wood-roasted masgouf river fish—the taste of freedom.

  Tamara clenched her purse like a shield. She seemed uncomfortable in the outside world. Her lips were pressed tight, not inviting conversation. She had said she liked books. She would have appreciated Al Mutanabbi Street’s bookstalls, stationery shops, and literary cafés and marvelled at the array of books from around the world laid out on blankets and plastic sheets paving the street, books harking back to the golden age when art, culture, and science were revered. He would like to tell her about Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, that sheltered four hundred thousand original manuscripts, and the caravan of a hundred camels that transported precious manuscripts from Khorasan to Baghdad, and the scholars who translated the words of Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates.

  This was the time of day when Hassan would have made his way to Shahbandar to listen to the writers and intellectuals, men and women, who gathered unconstrained. The café’s blue and white walls were tobacco stained from decades of discourse, and paint-chipped wooden benches were polished from the rub of every seat taken. Paintings of holy sites and ancient streets were displayed alongside faded black-and-white photographs taken when the British flags came down and King Faisal I and his pet leopard stared forcefully into time. The samovars were always filled with sweet strong black tea infused with cardamom. It was dirty and hot. There was rarely electricity and when there was, the fans made no difference to the heat. It was glorious.

  He would like to tell her how the men gathered for poetry chases. Anyone could make a challenge. A labourer and a university professor could face off. One competitor would start with a line of poetry and the opponent would respond with another line beginning with the last letter of the last word. It was a great feat of skill and memory, an ancient Arabic rap. And every Friday night, there was a literary salon and writers would read their work to the standing-room-only crowd. He wondered if she would like that story.

  Or maybe he could tell her about how his mother kept his supper warm when he’d come home late from university, and how he’d make excuses to run to the market and return with strangers in tow. The first few times he did this, she was angry and embarrassed that she hadn’t prepared enough food. He tried to explain he needed others, at least two others. Friends or strangers, Sunni or Shi’ite—it didn’t matter. What was important was listening and learning and telling each other’s stories. From then on, his mama kept extra food warming. All these years in this country and he could still taste her lamb stew, but couldn’t replicate it. The spices weren’t alive here. Maybe Tamara would like that story better.

  His leg pained, but he didn’t slow. He kept pace beside Tamara and wondered what her stories might be. She was breathing through her mouth. He noticed her surreptitiously touch her skirt, her purse, her hair, and the back of her neck. She was counting.

  He could only share his stories of Before. He couldn’t tell her about the After, when books were burned and paper became as precious as gold. When newspapers, publishers, theatres, and film companies had to register typewriters and photocopiers and private ownership was banned. When professors, writers, and students were detained in the Palace of the End and the President for Life commissioned a calligrapher to write the Qur’an with twenty-seven litres of his own blood. Or how his mama used to stuff the cupboards full with newspapers, because every paper had a picture of the Anointed One on the front page and couldn’t be thrown away for fear of insult. Before he had to leave.

  Long before the shock and awe. She didn’t need those stories.

  He wasn’t there to see Al Mutanabbi Street and his beloved Shahbandar destroyed by a car bomb. Though sometimes it felt as though he were. He has dreams of books on fire. Sees the walls imploding around him as he sits on his favourite bench drinking tea. He can even taste the sweetness. He is always about to speak just before it happens. He holds papers in his hands. He has written the greatest poem. In his dream, he is not the young man of then. He is the age he is now.

  In his dream, other men have gathered around him. They are poets and former political prisoners. They show him pictures of their confinement, as though sharing wedding photographs. The men tell him how they survived. In the photos, they are hunched in groups, thin and hollow eyed. They show him their scars. He does not show them his.

  He is about to stand to speak his poem when the windows blow. Unlike
life, which he imagines would be starkly divided as before and after with no between, in his dream there is between. He is seated as the books fly past. Covers open, pages aflame. They lift like a murmur of swifts. Words separate from papery skin, a swarm of cursive script combusting. The paper in his hands, his magnificent poem, flutters to reach the others. Each abjad lifts from the scorching pages, right to left. The words of Abbas Chechan, Saadi Youssef, Abu Nuwas, Dunya Mikhail, Muzaffar al-Nawab, Al-Mutanabbi…absorbing his words into a blinding light that breathes just one word, Allah, before the world explodes.

  He does not die in the dream. He is lying on his back amidst rubble and scorched books. He has glass in his mouth and cannot speak. It crunches against his teeth, shears the inside of his cheeks and lips. Pages float above him, a gyre of flames and smoking sky raining cinders, the words extinguishing into ash. Falling on him like snow in the desert. Bones and blood and paper. The taste of poems on his tongue.

  Only then does he awake.

  The entire street no more. Thirty-eight people no more. Thousands of books no more. Baghdad no more. He heard that Mohammad al-Khashali’s four sons, who were working in the café, were killed in the blast. They say his sons are with the books and manuscripts they loved. They say, Al-Hamdu Lillah. As Allah has willed; praise be to Allah.

  He heard that the day after the bombing, a poet stood on the remains of Shahbandar on a hill of broken-backed books and spoke for those who could not speak. Another poet stood all day at the edge of the gaping remains of an upper storey, his arms spread wide, a wooden crate on his head the size of a child’s coffin. Saying nothing. Men looked up at him and wept.

  Tamara stopped before a shrine of teddy bears, balloon bouquets, roses, carnations, red and white, white and red, blood and bones. Photographs of a smiling boy were propped against a makeshift cross with DEVON scrolled in rainbow crayon colours.

  “This is the wrong place,” Tamara said as though she might cry. “This isn’t where he died.” Her breath was ragged and one hand was clutching her skirt.

  “We keep going,” he said, and she stepped forward.

  He followed her along the trodden dirt path to the birch tree bower where the police tent had been and the grass was trampled. She knelt and parted the parched blades until she found where the bone-dry earth darkened to burnt umber. She laid her hands on the stained earth. “I should have brought him something.”

  He had never spoken the words out loud before, but he remembered them all and gave them to her. He tried to carry the music of his language into the translation of hers, knowing he would fail.

  “I wrote the letters of your name in the sand, and they were washed away by rain.

  I wrote them on the roads, and they were wiped away by feet.

  I wrote them in the air, and they were blown away by wind.

  I wrote them on people’s faces, and they were lost to me.

  I wrote them as tunes, and they flew away.

  I wrote them in days, but the years erased them.

  Shall I write it in the depths, so it shall continue to pulse through veins?

  Where shall I write your name?”

  Tamara, the woman with shining eyes, was looking up at him. “Did you write that?”

  “No,” he said. “A poet whose name is lost.” And it was not a lie. They were words he had read as a student. Anonymous. Unlike this boy. There wasn’t a name to write.

  “Amen,” she said and bowed her body in perfect sujud: forehead, nose, both hands, knees, and toes touching the ground. She might have been praising Allah, except the words she kept repeating were I’m sorry.

  He looked away, according grief the respect it deserved. Don’t worry about the eyes with tears, his mama used to say. Worry about the eyes without. He wondered why this one boy had garnered so much attention.

  In Baghdad, some streets would be rendered impassable with teddy bears and balloon bouquets.

  * * *

  —

  It took six right turns to get back onto the bridge and eight more to reach Tamara’s front door.

  “Thank you, Hassan.” She said his name softly, as though it might break, and asked if he could pick her up tomorrow morning for work.

  “Of course.” He didn’t tell her that he was working the night shift. She paused unlatching the handle, and he thought she might speak again, but she didn’t.

  “Tamara…”

  He eased the wild rose from the dashboard vase. The flower drooped between them, its petals already withering. He was embarrassed by its decay and odd lack of scent. It wasn’t worthy. He wished it was a branch of night-blooming jasmine, but she took it anyway. He watched until she was safely inside before pulling away.

  The sun was low, so he headed towards the Hill. Up the steep, manicured mound, over the humped shoulders guarding its stone citadel. He drove until he cleared the scrape of buildings and could glimpse the dimming harbour and awakening bridge lights. The tour buses had departed and the star-shaped fortress’s dry moat, stone walls, and cannons were retreating in the gloaming night. He parked close to the guardrail, opened the trunk, retrieved his kit bag, and locked the doors.

  After checking to make sure that he was truly alone, he stepped over the rail and headed down the steep incline towards the illuminated town clock that had been keeping time for a mere two hundred years, and unrolled his prayer rug. He removed his shoes and set them aside. Dried grass stuck to his socks. He opened his water jug, filled the basin, and dipped his hands into its warmth.

  “Bismillah,” he said. In the name of Allah.

  Three times he performed ablutions: washing his hands up to his wrists, his mouth, his nostrils, his face. Cleansing his right arm, then his left. Running his wet hands through his hair from his forehead to the back of his neck and ears. He was almost cleansed. He passed his wet hands over his sock feet. The horizon was bleeding red.

  He stepped onto the prayer rug facing Qibla. Even though he had long stopped believing that the Eternally Merciful One was listening, the melodic words of each rak’ah were all that remained of his homeland. He raised his hands to his ears.

  “Allahu Akbar.” Allah is great.

  He crossed his hands over his heart, even though he knew he would burn in the fires of Jahannam a thousand years for his crimes. And that was just.

  “Allahu Akbar.”

  The holy words lifted from his throat and reverberated in his chest. The sky flamed pink and red. He thought, Poets would have words to describe these clouds.

  19

  Mike took a swig of cold beer and gave thanks to the setting sun. He was a lucky man.

  Caleb, with Snappy in hand, ran screeching through the sprinkler again. Connor, seated on a blanket, gleefully clapped his hands at each running pass made by his big brother. Mike looked back to the kitchen, where Lori was tidying up. A boisterous bouquet of sunflowers, daisies, and delphiniums shouted from the table. After work, he had grilled chicken, potatoes, and even remembered the vegetables. Caleb helped him set the picnic table with paper plates and cups for easy cleanup, and together they braided a dandelion crown for Mommy. His sons laughed at his big, fumbling fingers, and Caleb sprinkled the popped-off yellow heads on their napkins.

  Throughout dinner, he kept the baby on his lap, poured the drinks, and encouraged every rambling story Caleb could imagine. Lori had laughed, more than once. He did everything right, and by the time he had scooped the bowls of ice cream he knew he was forgiven for his lapse in judgment at the shopping centre.

  “Last run. Time to get in your pyjamas.”

  “Noooooooo…” Caleb protested. Mike would have done the same.

  “I said one more. Make it good.”

  “Okay, okayyyy. This is last time, I gonna jump over the very, very top. You watching, Daddy, you watching?”

  “Yeah, I’m watching.” Mike took another sip of beer.

  Caleb set Snappy on his brother’s blanket and ran back to the starting position. “Heres I go!” He crouched
down to make himself fast. “One, two, thee, four—GO!”

  His expression said he was running faster than any human being on earth, faster than a lion, faster than a car, faster than a plane, he leapt and water sprayed his chest and face. “One more—I didn’t jump high enough!”

  “That’s it. Get your brother.” Caleb furrowed his brow. Mike worried it could all go wrong here. Defuse and distract. “Remember I’m going to read you a story tonight. Your choice.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yep, anything! Pick up your toys.” He gathered up the empty beer bottles, surprised to find four instead of three. He turned in time to see the boys in a tug-of-war over Snappy and Caleb slamming his brother in the chest. The baby toppled back and after a shocked delay screamed bloody murder. Lori looked out the window, and Mike waved at her to stand down, he had this.

  He strode over and picked up the baby, whose face was blaring red. He squirmed, railing at being held. “What did you do?” he said to Caleb.

  “Nothing.”

  The kid lied right to his face. He didn’t even twitch. “Caleb…”

  “He fell over.”

  Mike brushed the dead grass from Connor’s back and hair. The baby rubbed his snot face on his shirt. Mike jiggled him up and down, back and forth, and the sobs subsided. He was going to be a tough kid. “You have one more chance, Caleb.”

  His son’s chin lifted defiantly. “He stole Snappy! He was bad!” He hid the toy behind his back.

  “So you hit him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “He was bad!”

  “You could have hurt him. You know you don’t hit people.”

  Caleb’s eyes narrowed.

  “What do you say to your little brother?”

  “I sorry?” His bottom lip was trembling.

  “Tell Connor.” He knelt down with the baby on his lap.

  “I sorry.” Caleb leaned in and hugged the baby. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Connor hugged him back.