“Sam?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think about getting married?”
The exhale in her nose is like a whistle, nearly musical. “Yes.”
“Do you want to have children someday?”
She turns her head to me slowly, with soft eyes that seem for the first time like they might allow themselves to cry. But I can see the controller inside Samara Katchens’ head, holding back the tears.
She switches back to the river. “Yes.”
“Would you marry Jonah? Do you see your future with him?”
She hesitates. “No.”
“Do you love him?”
Sam doesn’t answer. Her hands shift and make the tape squeak. I look at her, the profile I’ve traced a thousand times, the hair that lit up darkened rooms. Her cheek is streaked with the tracks of tears she must have shed when I wasn’t looking. I would give my life at this moment to press my lips against that cheek, have her drop her jaw with an unexpected sigh of joy.
“Sam?”
“What.”
“Did I ever tell you that the night I met you, I was actually on a date? And that I was possibly going to marry her? Her name is Noor. Was. I mean, my parents were hoping I’d marry her.”
Sam turns to me, her rounded brows pulled down into a tense, flat line. “Noor?”
“The daughter of my father’s friend. My parents were hoping, I mean, my mother — that night, at the hospital, when you were—”
“You were going to marry someone your parents introduced you to? Like in an
arranged
marriage?”
“Maybe. They wanted me to.”
Sam closes her eyes and squints, as if trying to picture something and having a hard time summoning the image. Or not liking what she sees.
“Sam?” She does not answer. I do not ask again.
~ * ~
It’s been quiet for some time, until now. They came suddenly, the sound of Sam’s near-silent sobs, her crying like a gasping, nothing but the breaths of a person breaking down, the release of misery unaccompanied by words. I look at her, but she lifts her arms to block her face, or perhaps to mop up the tears. The guard in the corner gazes nervously at me with a slight smile, and looks away.
“It’s my fault, Nabil.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have jumped up to leave. I got nervous. He pushed the wrong buttons for me and I couldn’t handle it. I should have stayed calm, and—”
“Sam.”
“What?”
“You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s very likely that even if you hadn’t jumped up to leave, we’d be here anyway.”
Sam shrugs and sniffles. She lifts her tied hands to wipe her nose somewhere along the sleeve of her upper arm. “Maybe I should have told you,” and she hesitates a moment, “everything about me. Maybe I was wrong.”
“About? That doesn’t matter now. Unless you think they might—”
“I have no idea.”
“So just forget it.”
“Where do you think Rizgar is?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I say, sounding surprisingly calm. “We’ll get out of this.”
I have to sound positive, even if I don’t believe a word of what I say. Rizgar was supposed to follow us and wait. If he was outside all this time, wouldn’t he have made an effort to come in and get us? And with whom? With a pack of Kurdish
peshmerga
gunmen he’s going to hire for a few hours?
Sam struggles in her chair a moment. “I’m worried about him,” she whispers.
“I could piss an entire bloody ocean.”
“
Tfaddal
,” she says. Be my guest.
But I can’t disgrace myself like that. My mind is in control, not my body.
~ * ~
The hours pass, the whole world slow and tedious. This is my life, and this is the life of Iraq. Maybe this is how it has always been. Maybe I’ll be here forever, tied down and trapped. I only know we have been here this long because the sky grew dark, first to navy and then to ink. It must be close to 9 p.m. I’ve listened to Sam’s stomach growl, to my own breath rattle when my imagination was seized by some worse-case scenario, to the guards changing positions, to the muezzins move their prayer-call across the rooftops. From one of the back rooms, I’ve heard occasional chatter, the sound of Ali and Subhi and the others arguing.
What if we
don’t
get out of here? If Sam dies, it will be my fault. I should have told her that we should stop our investigation and let her editors do whatever they want.
But didn’t I? Didn’t I tell her?
What if Ali is a rapist? I don’t like the way he looked at Sam, the way he talked to her, touched her hair. Maybe Rizgar was wrong. Maybe I should have made the decision for her.
~ * ~
I think I actually may have drifted off for a moment, because I feel a bit confused and dizzy. The alarm of Ali standing over me, my chin in his hand. He gives my cheek a light slap and sits back in the chair across from us. The three armed men are standing behind him, scrubby faces and bulky bodies. He indicates for them to move behind us instead.
“Okay, then. Are you listening? I’m glad you’ve been having a nice little dream.”
I can’t believe I could have fallen asleep. Is that possible? But then I realize I must have. I was in Babylon with Sam. She was standing next to one of the old columns and I was taking pictures of her and when I got close enough to kiss her, I realized that her hands were tied behind the column and someone’s hands had reached for her throat, as if to strangle her.
I look over at Sam, who is staring straight ahead, her eyes like a zombie’s. I am relieved when I see her blink.
Ali watches me and then sits in his swivel chair. He crosses one leg over the other and takes his gun out of his trousers and examines it again. Points it at Sam. Pulls the trigger.
Pip.
Nothing but a scary, metallic click. “Oh, my God. Did I forget to load my favourite gun? My goodness.” He points it towards his own temple, frowns facetiously. “Where is my head?” The voices behind us laugh. Someone’s hand pushes the back of my head. “Just a joke. We wouldn’t want to do away with your beautiful friend without getting something first.”
“Oh, now,” says Ali. “Poor little girl.”
I turn slightly to look at Sam. Tears spill down her cheeks, quickly replenished by more which seem to emerge from deep inside her.
I keep thinking how good it would feel to ram my knee into Ali’s head now. How, if I had him against an alley wall the way those thugs had me against the wall, I would bash everything in, slamming until he stopped moving.
Sam stares up at the ceiling. The tears leave marks running over her jawline and down her neck.
Ali reaches into his shirt pocket and picks out a cartridge, shoves it into the gun, releases what I assume to be the safety. Points it at her, then me, back at her again. Rests his elbow on his bent knee so that the barrel hovers in the space between us. “I’ve decided to be really kind with you. You’re lucky that I’m such a merciful man.” He calls one of the men over, a thin, tall man, and hands him the gun. Ali reaches out to someone behind us and returns with Sam’s large bag. Out of it, he takes the folder and opens it up. Holds up the documents we’ve been carrying around with us, day and night, as if they were the Holy Koran itself. I have seen them so many times, studied them, I can probably draw them blindfolded.
“This,” Ali says, displaying the pages as if they were an animal’s intestines being offered for inspection at the butcher’s before the meat is deemed acceptable, “this stays with me. And this camera,” Ali adds, holding up Sam’s Nikon. She once told me it cost about $1,500. “This very nice camera stays with me.”
He flips a small latch open, pulls out the little square disc that Sam had told me was like film. I had never seen a digital camera before. “It is really nice of you to leave this for me as a present, too.” He laughs again. In my mind, I’m imagining all the important pictures saved, somehow, inside that small piece of plastic. Pictures from our first day of working together. Pictures of Akram. The picture Rizgar took of Sam and me, when we stopped by the river that day on the way back from Tikrit. Irreplaceable images.
“It’s very simple from here,” Ali says, tucking the disc into his shirt pocket. “We’ll let you go tonight, but we’ll hold on to these documents, these pictures and the camera. After all, you know so much by now that you don’t need these.” Ali stands up, points his gun at Sam and me, and winds a counter-clockwise circle around us. He walks deliberately, his dress shoes tapping against the tiles. After a full revolution, he stops in front of us.
“You’ll give us $10,000 for having inconvenienced us and we will be through.”
“Ten thousand dollars? I am sure she cannot have that kind of money with her in Iraq. That can’t possibly—”
“Shut UP!”
Ali bellows at me. I can smell his odour, a mix of cigarettes and roast chicken and I think even beer, a scent that makes me want to throw up. He is closer now, the gun pointed at me. If he slips, my head will be a blur on the wall behind me.
“You just
listen,
Nabil,” Ali says. “She can easily get us $10,000 and you know it. We will bring you back to Al-Hamra tonight. If you want to live and you want your very pretty ladyfriend to live, and to leave Iraq walking instead of being carried away, you’ll do exactly what I tell you to do. You will meet us tomorrow night with the money and then you will have our assurance that you’ll be protected from now on. No one in Baghdad will ever bother you again. I can assure you of that.” He looks at the men behind us and smiles with a smug, closed mouth.
“You get that, Miss Katchens? Only $10,000. You getting off easy.” He bends a bit to put his face parallel to Sam’s, purses his lips for a minute as if he might kiss her. I have never before been so close to a gun and felt I had the capacity to blow out someone’s brains with it.
“Ah,” Ali says, straightening up again. “The other price for your release, of course, is that you must never write or say anything about us. You don’t print anything in newspaper.” He rests the hand with the gun in it along his waist. With his free hand, he pretends to pull the trigger in the direction of Sam’s forehead, then mine. He blows the imaginary smoke off his index finger. “No story in newspaper,” he says in his broken English. “Or maybe say, Jews-paper? This newspaper, the reporters are most of them Jewish, no?”
Sam stares at him blankly, her lips slightly parted. Her face gives away nothing.
“Is it not?”
She clears her throat. “Sorry?”
“I asked you if many of the reporters at your newspaper are Jews. We were told that your newspaper is loving the war because they are Jews, and this war make good for Israel.”
Sam shrugs as if the man at the hotel asked her whether she’d like tea or coffee. “I don’t know if there are many Jews at the newspaper. In America we don’t usually ask people what their religion is in order to be hired for a job.”
Ali looks at me, as though he’s not sure he got what she said. I repeat it in Arabic, trying to sound as even as Sam did, but my voice is trembling.
Ali lifts his chin towards the men behind us. “Wrap them up.” My spine stiffens when I feel it: the blindfold being wrapped around my eyes, twice, and then tied in the back. Next to me I can feel that Sam is getting the same treatment. I feel another rush of anger.
Don’t touch her.
It’s darker now, but I can still see a glow of light. And then, a cold ring against my face. The barrel of Ali’s gun, pressed up against my cheek. “I’m dead serious, Amari,” he says into my ear. “You don’t know how lucky you are. We’re taking a chance, letting you go.” He takes the gun away, lifts me briskly out of my chair by my tied hands, so that a rip of pain tears through the lower part of my back. “If you don’t get us the money, or if you publish a story about us, you can be sure that your beloved boss will not leave Iraq in one piece.”
And then a bag over my head, burlap perhaps, the smell of dye, or maybe potatoes. Have they done that to her too? At least two sets of hands, maybe three, are leading us out of the door, down the stairs. After the first few steps, I trip like a blind man walking for the first time. The men catch me and laugh.
“Sam?”
“Hmm.” Her voice is muffled, distant.
“You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
A too-hard tap on my skull. “Keep quiet, Amari.” Subhi’s voice, though I haven’t seen his face for hours.
We are pushed outside, into the muggy night air. The door opening, the feel of my body against the car, my head being pushed down, shoulders shoved inside, and the strange excitement, suddenly, of my thigh colliding with Sam’s. Now I surely will explode.
“I’m sorry, would you mind letting me out to just relieve myself?”
“Amari, good lord,” Ali says. “Some guys just can’t hold it, can they?” The other men in the car laugh. “Ah well, let no one say I was as cruel as Saddam.” He yanks me out and pulls me back towards the building. He stands me up against a wall. “Go ahead,” he says.
I stand there for a moment, waiting in the dark with my taped hands in front of me. “I can’t undo my trousers.”
“Oh, still a bit tied up, aren’t we? Subhi, undo his trousers.”
“Don’t!” I twitch, surprised by my own reaction. “Forget it, I’ll wait until I get home.”