Sam tears a page out of her notebook and hands it over to him. Adeeb’s wife breezes in to pick up the second-to-last son, who starts to yell that he doesn’t want to go. She enlists the oldest son, who is probably eight or nine, to help carry him away. “But I want to hear,” he cries. “I want to hear them speak the infidel language!” He really called it that, using the word
kafir
and all. I’ll have to tell this to Sam later on, just because it’s so amusing.
“Do you know how much Harris paid to Akram?”
Adeeb shakes his head. “Thousands of dollars.”
“Thousands of dollars? Are you sure? That’s a lot of money for a journalist.”
“Maybe it was one thousand. I don’t remember.” He looks at Sam. “Why can’t you ask Harris? He is your colleague, right?” I translate this for Sam, and I see the hesitation, the look of uncertainty when, in a moment, you must decide: to lie or not to lie? Adeeb probably doesn’t realize that Harris is in trouble. He couldn’t know that if Sam’s editors confirm their suspicions that Harris paid for the documents, this will be even worse for Harris.
“Yes, of course,” says Sam. “We just can’t get in contact with him because communication is so bad right now. I can’t reach him.”
Adeeb nods several times. The room is quiet for a moment, and then our silence is punctured by the sound of one of the boys whimpering in his bed.
“I remember now,” Adeeb says.
“What do you remember?” I ask.
“How Harris learned about General Akram. But you must swear that you will not tell anyone I told you. No one.”
“Bismillah.
In the name of God. I swear.” On Sam’s behalf, too, like her legal and spiritual representative.
“It was an odd chap named Suleiman. Suleiman Mutanabi. He was one of the fixers. He came to Harris at the Palestine Hotel and said he could put him in contact with a man who has good information. Lots of documents. So Suleiman took Harris there the first time.”
“Do you have any idea where this Suleiman is now?”
“No idea. He was from Syria originally, so people also call him Suleiman es-Surie. Just go and speak to General Akram himself.”
He wipes his forehead, grown damp even this late into the evening, and then dries his hand on his trousers so he can write.
“Go and see him, and if I can help you any more, please do come and visit me again.”
His pen scribbles across the paper, twice piercing a hole in it. Just as he finishes I notice a squarish blue blur on his hand. It looks like he had something tattooed on the skin between his thumb and forefinger, and then later tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to have it removed. He must have noticed me staring, because he lifts his hand to eye level, turns it out, and smiles.
“It was a cross,” he says. “I was a Christian but I decided to become Muslim.” He gives the paper to Sam and retakes his beads, moving his fingers through them rapidly. His eyes roll over the perimeter of her body, looking while trying to look away. “Do you have any tattoos?”
I translate this for Sam. “He wants to know if I have tattoos?” She is amused.
“Yes.”
“The answer is no.”
“This very good,” Adeeb says, switching back to his spotty English. “Then you can marry fancy city man like this,” he smiles, putting a forearm on my shoulder and squeezing it roughly. “And to become Muslim should be very much easy for you, like for me.
Sam’s laugh emerges short and sharp, like the honk of a horn. Embarrassed, she lifts her hand, quickly covering her mouth, and one of Adeeb’s little boys begins to cry again.
~ * ~
19
Covering
It made sense to stop at a restaurant with Rizgar and Sam for dinner, but it’s also made me late. When I walk into the house, my parents and my sister are sitting around the radio. They are lit by two kerosene lamps, which gives them a strange yellow glow. My mother jumps up and puts her arms around me, and then takes my face in her hands. “
Al-Hamdulilah,”
she says. “Thank God you came back.”
“Of course I came back,” I tell her and kiss her cheek. I unbutton my damp shirt and walk towards my room.
“There’s dinner waiting for you in the kitchen,” my mother says. “Don’t you want?”
“Maybe later,” I say. “I want to have a shower first.”
“Don’t open your mouth when you’re showering,” Amal calls as I near the hallway. “And don’t let it get in your eyes. The water was coming out brown today and it smells funny. Baba says there’s a bacteria in it.”
Lately, when I come home at night, our house is like this — almost dark, without electricity. I think of Sam’s room at the Hamra, of all the foreigners who mill around the pool into the late hours, of the lights that are in the very pool itself, making it possible to swim at night. They just arrived and they have all the light in the world, while we, the native inhabitants, are sitting in the dark.
It is amazing the things you can manage to do without much light, when you are in a place that you know so well that you don’t really need to see. Amal calls out and asks if I want a torch, but I tell her no. If the water is brown, I’d rather not see it anyway.
The water is warm and it washes away layers of the day, and in my mind I can imagine how the dirt and dust look as they stream towards my feet and down the drain. I inhale deeply, but cannot detect the smell my sister is on about. Poor Amal. She has nothing to do these days but roam around the house and notice what’s wrong.
After, I lay in bed and fiddle with my own small radio, searching for a station that doesn’t have news. I’m forced to settle on Oum Kalthoum, whom I like but have never loved. She’s one of my father’s favourites, and to say you don’t like her is considered unpatriotic to the Arab cause. Nearly every song sounds like an elegy; every love ballad could easily be mistaken for a dirge. But it happens I like this one,
Il Atlal,
The Ruins, because the words were written by Ibrahim Nagi, who was a very talented Egyptian poet. Baba told me that after the Six Day War,
An-Naksah
(The Setback), this was played on the radio all the time — an ode to our losses.
A rapping on the door, and then the creaking of it opening. Baba stands in the doorway with a raised arm leaning on the frame. In the other, he holds a small gas lantern, one of the new ones he purchased in the past week.
“Can we talk for a bit? Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’m just tired.”
He walks in and takes the chair from my desk, dragging it closer to my bed. He turns it around, with its back towards me. The chair emits a groan of protest.
“Why don’t you eat what your mother made?”
I sit up and straighten out my back. “I ate in a restaurant with Sam on the way home. She was...we were hungry so we ate dinner at a restaurant on Arasat Street,” I say. “I can’t eat again.”
“Do you realize how hard your mother is working to try to keep things going around here? Do you know how difficult it is just to get fresh food now?”
“Of course I know. That’s why if I have a chance to eat with Sam, I will. It saves us a little.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Baba says. “Your mother will make food for you because she’ll always assume you’re coming home for dinner. Until you get married…”
“If there were a way to call you, I would.” I roll the ridges of the tuner beneath my forefinger and thumb, trying to get clearer reception.
“Ah, Oum Kalthoum. I thought you didn’t like her.”
“I don’t. What else am I going to listen to? I can’t get another station. When I save up enough money from working with Sam, we can buy our own generator. That’s what they have at all the hotels, so that they can have electricity all the time. Then we can do what we want in the house, and maybe we’ll even get a satellite like I promised for Amal so she can watch all the TV channels.”
“Yes, terribly important,” he says, which could be either serious or sarcastic, and I’m not sure which. He rests one arm across the back of the chair and in the light from his lamp, I see the wiriness of the hair on his arms and knuckles.
“We were in Fallujah all day and we didn’t have lunch. Everyone was hungry and she wanted me to eat with her. Actually, a very nice restaurant called Lathakiya. You know it?”
“I don’t like Syrian food,” he says. “Why would you go to Fallujah? I thought you were supposed to work as her translator in Baghdad.”
“Well, mostly Baghdad.”
“I don’t like you going to Fallujah.”
“It was fine. We didn’t have any problems. In fact, we were received very well by one of the tribal leaders.”
I like the picture I am presenting for my father. There is a thread of truth running through it, just like it is when the journalists write their stories. They choose a string of events and some words that were said, but they never present the full picture of all that transpired. Sam let me read her Abu Ghraib story the other day, and it had only a fraction of all that we saw and heard, stitched together like embroidery, so that you couldn’t tell what was missing.
Baba leans over and plucks the radio from the table. His thick thumb moves the volume louder for a minute, then back in the other direction, clicking it off.
“Mr Mubasher came to visit today.”
From school? Moin Mubasher is the headmaster of the Mansour Boys School. My other boss.
“Yes. He says that they are going to try re-opening the school next week. They want the boys to be able to finish the school year. He says they only expect about half the students, or maybe even a third, to show up. But they will fix some of the windows and bring new chairs. He would like you to come.”
“To teach? Now?” It had never occurred to me that any school in Baghdad would try to re-open before September, which is five months away.
“Sure. He says some of the boys need to take tests to move up into the next year’s class, or to university. He doesn’t want them to have to repeat a grade, to have a whole year of work go to waste.”
“And what about the girls?”
Baba shifts in the chair. “What do you mean? It’s a boys’ school.”
“I mean what about the girls finishing out the year? Doesn’t that matter? If Amal’s school were going back into session, would you send her now?”
He doesn’t respond but I know the answer. No one is sending any daughter to school right now because of the chaos, because of the rumours of kidnappings.
“That’s not the point,” Baba says.
“Did he say that there were other teachers who were willing to come?”
Baba shrugs, nods without looking at me. “A few.”
“So let them teach.”
“Nabil, you have a job to do.”
“I have a new job now. I’m working in journalism. It’s much more important.”
“More important than education? More important than the future of the best students in Iraq? I don’t think even you believe what you’re saying.” Baba stands up and I feel his bulky body breathing heavily, hanging over me. “Think about it. You could tell your lady friend that your family insisted.”
“She’s not my lady friend.” I gape at the air, searching for a word. “She’s my employer.”
“But what about the Iraqi employer you’ve had for, what is it, five years now? And what happens after the Americans leave?”
I roll out of bed. I’m too far from sleep now, and I want to be on his level. I lean against the window. If my father pushes any harder, maybe I can just escape from here, fly out on a carpet like they do in the fairytales. “I’m not quitting,” I say. “Definitely not.”
In the distance, a crackling of gunfire fills the air. It is a gentle popping, so benign it may as well be the sound of boys bursting balloons at a birthday party. Then a bigger bang, followed by a feeling of a sound wave moving through my flesh, the sensation of something tingling down the length of my arms and across my back.
What makes Baba think the Americans are leaving? Who says it would be any better if they left now?
“You’ll do what’s right,” he says. He turns and lumbers towards my door. Across the floor, even his footsteps feel weighty. Then the sound of the door opening, the heft of my father standing in it. “My boys always do well. Eventually, they always do well.”
He moves to close the door but then opens it wide again. “Your mother made a
tabeet.
That chicken is bursting with raisins and apricots and cardamom, the way you like it. She must have been in the kitchen all day. If you don’t eat some, then maybe you really have lost your mind.”
“Tell her to save it for me and I’ll eat it tomorrow, Baba.”
“There’s no electricity, remember? So there’s no refrigerator,” he says.
“Well then, I’ll get up in a bit and eat some,” I say, but he’s already shut the door.
I am alone again, and there is a small happiness that derives from the quiet of having no one here, no one talking to me or through me. But the joy of this feeling passes quickly, and I begin to think of how good it would be to be here with Sam. How, if I could be honest with her, I could tell her how hard it is to let my father down. How complicated she has made everything. She and the army she brought with her.
My mind fails to enjoy the stillness. Instead, it circles like the thrilling rides at those little amusement parks Baba took us to when we were young, before Amal was born. I go to the section on my bookshelf with a collection of my favourite Iraqi poets. As I read I translate aloud, as if for Sam, to make her understand. This one is by Muzaffar al-Nawwab, who spoke most of his poetry in live performances.