“I’m glad Saddam is gone,” I say. I suppose I mean it, too. It can’t all have been made up by the Americans, all those stories, those deformed children. If America hadn’t come, maybe Saddam would do that to some other place. If Saddam were still here, Sam wouldn’t be.
Rizgar nods as if he’s ready to believe me but hasn’t yet made the decision to do so. He points out that we’re on Saleh’s street. I’m startled; I had meant to ask him to wait a few blocks away, and now down the street will have to do.
“Can you wait here? It’s better you don’t park in front of his house.”
“Maku mushkile.”
Ashtar answers the door. She invites me inside and tells me she will set the table for me to eat. I tell her I had a huge, late lunch, and that I just need to have a quick talk with Saleh. He isn’t here, she says; he said he’d probably be staying late at his new job, but why don’t I have tea and wait for him? I end up running inside to use the toilet. It’s a terrible feeling, knowing that someone else is having to listen to the sound of you throwing up.
Out in the hallway, her face is drawn with concern. Am I all right? Do I want to have a
biriani
— just rice and potatoes this time, not at all spicy? Just tea? Stay and rest, she says. I tell her no, just a glass of water, and that I really should be going home. And in fact, that’s all I want just now, because I’m thinking that it might not be the last time tonight I’m going to be sick. “Stay here. Let me call your parents and tell them you weren’t feeling well,” she says. “You don’t have to,” I say, “and besides that, the phones still aren’t working,” and she touches her forehead to show she forgot. Just tell Saleh I came by, and that maybe I’ll try to stop by tomorrow before work, and she says he leaves early now, by 7.30. And as I head for the door she rushes back to the kitchen to give me some
dolma
she made for me to deliver to my family.
~ * ~
In the car, Rizgar is waiting, his face still bearing traces of sleepiness.
“Don’t you get enough rest at night?” A stupid question on my part. I rarely get more than five hours these days.
“The family that I’m staying with just had a baby girl,” he says. “She keeps me up half the night. I’m going to have to find some other place to live.”
“Really?” It occurs to me I hadn’t asked him much about his living situation. I assumed that he was staying either with relatives, or in a cheap hotel. “Where are they?”
“In Karada.” I try to contain my surprise. Karada is a relatively affluent neighbourhood, right near the Hamra. Did I assume poverty, only because he’s Sam’s driver? They might be Rizgar’s distant relatives, Kurds who’d done well for themselves as businessmen in Baghdad.
“So when you drop me off in my neighbourhood after work, it’s totally out of your way,” I say.
He bends his head to one side, a kind of humble acknowledgement that he had never let me know that he was sometimes spending an extra half-hour in the car, maybe more on bad days, just to help me get home safely. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s my duty.”
“It’s not your duty. Sam probably doesn’t know the difference.”
He shrugs. “There are a lot of things Sam doesn’t know. It’s my job to see that you do everything safely.”
“Oh, by the way, can you drop me off in Mansour? I’m going to walk from there.”
He glances at me with a squint.
“Like you said, there are a lot of things that Sam doesn’t know.”
He smiles, reaches for a cigarette, and opens the window a crack before he lights it.
“You’re very kind.”
“Anything for the prince,” he says.
“Oh! The prince,” I chuckle.
“As I see it, when I’m driving her I have to treat her like the queen. You, you don’t exactly qualify as the king, so I decided that you get to be the prince.”
“Oh, really. Well, then I’ll have to appoint you as the head of royal security!”
He grins and I find myself wishing, just for a minute, that I also smoked, so that I could share that with him, or that I knew some Kurdish.
“How do you say, how are you?”
“What?”
“How are you, in Kurdish.”
He blows out the smoke with rounded lips. “It depends on the Kurdish.”
“Well, your Kurdish.”
“Choni chaki
.”
“Choni chaki?. Choni Chaki
is
shlonak?”
He nods as if he knew I would make fun of it.
“And
zorspiz,
this is thank you?”
“Zor spas,”
he says, correcting me.
“What a great language.”
He glares at me with his cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Zor spas.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Shei ne nah.”
“What?”
“That’s you’re welcome. Or not at all.”
“Ya Rizgar, we have to do an interview tomorrow, Sam and me, and we have to go alone.”
He gives me one of his looks that says he thinks I’m kidding, like I’ve suggested maybe we should drive to Mecca tonight, do a mid-year
hajj.
“We have to go back to that office I went to today, and they want us to come in a taxi.”
“What...why?”
“They made it sound like they might recognize your car.”
“Who are
they
?”
“I don’t know, some people.” And I don’t, which is the most unsettling feeling of all. “Some people who also have an interest in the story.”
“So I’ll get another car.”
“I think they recognize you, too.”
“So I’ll get an orange-and-white cab. One of my relatives can get me one if you give me a day.”
The traffic on Jinub Street is heavy, forcing us to slow down.
“We don’t have another day.”
Rizgar seems to be thinking this over, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel as he does.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he says. “You shouldn’t just get into any taxi.”
“Why not? I do it all the time.”
“You’re not American.”
“I told her to wear
hejab.
No one will notice.”
“And what if you get into trouble and I’m not there with you?”
I start to think of the times we’ve already slid towards trouble, like the day I thought we might get trapped in Khalil’s basement. It seems funny now. I got all nervous for nothing. But what if Khalil had been planning to murder us, or hold us to ransom? What would Rizgar, sitting outside in his comfortable car, have been able to do about it?
“What would you do if you were there and we did get into trouble?”
Rizgar opens the glove compartment, and then I see it. The gleaming silver body of a short-barrelled gun.
“What kind is it?”
“A Remington.”
“How much?”
He waves his finger at me and snaps the compartment shut. “You don’t need to know.”
“I’m thinking I should get one.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Not you.”
“What do you mean, not me?”
“You’re not the type.”
“What’s the type? You don’t need to be a type. I need to protect myself. And Sam.”
He sniffs at the air. “What’s that smell?”
When I sniff at it too, I feel a bit sick again. “Ah, my aunt’s
dolma.
She wanted me to bring some home to my family.”
He smiles. “You come from a nice family, Nabil. You don’t need a gun. Besides, if you have a gun, it’s more likely someone will use a gun against you.” He sits waiting for the light to change, looking me over. “Do you know how to use a gun?”
“Not really.”
“Well, I can teach you. And after you’ve learned, then you can decide whether you’re ready to go out and spend your money on a piece of equipment meant to kill people.” He stops for a red light and looks me over. “But you’re not the killing type.”
I look at his ashtray, full of dead, twisted butts in their pool of grey ash. “You sure of that?”
“I’m sure,
dostum
,” he says. Everyone knows that one - friend. “Where to?”
“There. In front of Mansour High School.”
He moves his elbow towards my arm. “Good idea. You should go back to teaching.”
I consider convincing Rizgar to give me his gun for the day, but he’s probably right. I know nothing about how to use it. I asked my father once about his, but he said that until I’m ready to have my own house — in other words, get married and have children — I didn’t have any need for it. I thought he didn’t trust me enough, but at the time, I was only seventeen. I never bothered to ask again.
Rizgar pulls up in front of the school. Some of the windows have been repaired, but others are still broken.
“I’m going to follow you tomorrow in a separate car,” he says. “You’ll go in a taxi, and then I’ll follow you in some other car. Not this one. I’ll manage to get another and I’ll follow a few cars behind.” He looks in the mirror, pushing his thick moustache in the direction of his nostrils. “And maybe I’ll shave this off. It’ll be part of my disguise.”
He hums a tune that I think comes from one of the old Egyptian films, played at the moment the villain comes on screen. We both laugh.
“That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll follow you,” he smiles, pleased at his decision. “I must protect Miss Samara.
Zayy uhti, bint hailed’.’
Sam is like his sister, he says, a good girl, using a term we usually use to refer to a young, innocent Muslim girl. Not the words I would use to describe Sam, but a great compliment just the same. Almost the total opposite of calling her
majnouna
earlier today.
“You, too. You’re like a younger brother,” Rizgar says.
I smile to show I feel the same. “If you really don’t think it’s safe, maybe you should tell her we can’t go.”
Rizgar shakes his head. “Never.”
“Never?”
“I never say she can’t go. That’s not my job.”
“I thought you said it was your job to protect her.”
“Yes, but to protect her while she’s doing her job. This is her job.” Rizgar lowers his window to spit into the street. “You love all those Arabic mottos, Nabil. I always hear you telling them to her. Here is a good one for you. ‘What is written on the forehead, the eye must see.’ This means that whatever will be, will be. We have this one in Kurdistan, too. There is even a
hadith,
maybe you’d know it, since you’re so smart and you must have read a lot. ‘Everybody will do according to his destiny.’ Do you think if I told her not to go, she will not go? If I won’t take her, she’ll probably find some other way to go. She’ll do what she wants. That’s how American women are.” He spits again, then smiles at me with his teeth, the one on the side capped with gold, the rest of them growing brown with nicotine and time. “It’s different there. You can’t make decisions for them. My job is to protect her in whatever decisions she makes, not to make the decisions for her. Understand?”
I nod that I do.
“Don’t forget your
dolma,”
he says, pointing to the bag at my feet. If I do, it occurs to me, I won’t have to give it to my parents, and therefore, won’t have to explain why I went to see Saleh a second night in a row.
“Why don’t you have it?” I say, handing it to him and opening the car door. “Courtesy of the Sunni-Shi’ite-Kurdish Reconciliation Committee.” He takes it with the happiest face I’ve seen on him yet, like a little boy getting a birthday present. “Mmm,” he says, prying the lid open and pushing his nose into the container. “I love that smell.”
~ * ~
44
Pushing
I’m late, late, and late. I’m not the kind of man who is late, who likes to be late, who thinks it’s fine when other people are late. Of all days to sleep late!
Not that it was without reason. I came home last night and threw up twice more. I got up in the middle of the night, thinking I might be sick again, and instead passed out in the hallway. Apparently it woke up Baba and Amal, whose door I hit on the way down, but not my mother, who slept through the commotion. I told Baba I had eaten something bad. He made me drink a glass of water with sugar and salt in it, which tastes downright strange but always puts me right again, and then put me to bed. Amal must have shut off my alarm clock after I went to sleep.
And now, close to 10 a.m., I am finally heading out to meet Sam, filled with some eggs and fresh
samoun
my mother made me, cursing the fact that I can’t call to say I am running late. I promise my parents that I am perfectly fine. I am not sick, I just ate something bad. As I move towards the door, Mum moves in the other direction, heading to my room and the bathroom to do what promises to be an antiseptic cleaning job, as if I had the plague rather than an upset stomach. Amal, seeing that I wasn’t going to stay home despite my illness last night, went back to her room, a rather sad place for a fourteen-year-old to be at 10 a.m. on a weekday. But they’ve already decided that her school, unlike Mansour High School, is not reopening until the autumn.
“I want to ask you something.” Baba is sitting in his favourite chair. It seems he took the morning off to check that I was doing all right.