Ali drags me back in the direction of the car. “These professors’ kids. So god-damned spoiled.”
As we drive, Ali issues an order from the front seat. Meet him tomorrow, 8 p.m. Just under the Sarafiya Bridge, on the east side. No Americans are posted in the vicinity.
“This time, come in your driver’s Impala so we’ll know it’s you,” he says. “Don’t come in a taxi. If there is anyone in that car but you and your driver, we will kill you on the spot. And if you don’t come, we will kill you before you can get out of Iraq.” I feel nauseous from the motion. The turns are fast and numerous. We stop abruptly, the car rocking us forwards and then back. Then the unsettling sound of flick knives being opened. One knife works on my bonds, and another, on Sam’s. Oh please, God. All I need now is for one of these mindless men to miss and slit one of my wrists, or hers.
But the bonds break, bloodlessly, and someone yanks the covering off my head. The blindfold beneath it comes off as well.
“Yalla,”
Ali orders. “Go on. You’re free to go.” The guards sitting on either side of us get out, pulling us out with them, much less roughly than they had pushed us into the car. Ali grabs both my shoulders and looks me in the eye. “It will be easy to find you,” he says in English. “If you miss your appointment with us tomorrow, you will soon be regretting it.”
~ * ~
49
Regretting
Sam stands there at the intersection, not moving. I can feel the exhaust of Ali’s car filling my lungs, turning them black like in those pictures Baba showed me so I wouldn’t smoke. The car is gone, but the exhaust shadow it spurted out still hangs over us on the street where it idled a second ago. Did anyone see us get dropped off I look at my watch. It’s already 11.00 p.m. Well past the 9.30 p.m. curfew. Who else would be out at this hour? Anyone who might try to kidnap us again.
“Sam, let’s go!” I start to run across the street, but she isn’t following. Maybe she’s in shock. I read about that once, when I was going through one of my father’s medical textbooks, trying to understand what it was that was making me faint. “Sam!”
I run back and put my arm around her. She shakes me off and starts walking.
“I’m fine,” she says. She walks briskly across the road, tearing at the remnants of tape on her wrists, and I follow after her.
“Wait here,” I say, pointing to a darkened corner at the edge of an alleyway. A few paces away, I let rip the piss of a lifetime, trying not to cry out in relief as I do. It sends a river down the pavement and a stinky steam rising up in my face.
I zip up and turn round, but she’s not there.
“Sam? Sam!”
She’s left the alley and gone back to the main road, walking.
“Sam, wait!” I’ve caught up with her, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. Doesn’t look at me.
“I’m fine.” She’s moving so fast now that I almost need to jog to keep up.
“Let’s first...Sam?” I leap ahead and stand in front of her. Her mouth opens and I hear a gasp for air, as if I’ve scared her. “Maybe we should go back to my house instead. Not the hotel.”
She steps aside and keeps walking. “Now? With the curfew? Don’t be ridiculous. I have to go back to the hotel anyway. I have all my things there.”
“Do you even know if you’re walking in the right direction?” I say in a half-yell, half-whisper.
“Aren’t I? Look,” she points up. “There’s the Hamra sign right there.” And indeed the red neon Al-Hamra Suites sign is lit up against the night sky, indicating it’s just blocks away.
She swings her arms as she walks, almost runs, and I reach for one like a brake, to get her to slow down. Even someone from a block away would notice from the way she’s walking, even from her silhouette, that she’s not Iraqi. Maybe one of the neighbourhood watch committees, the ones formed to prevent night-time looting, will see us and be suspicious.
“Stop it,” she says. “I’m fine. I just want to get back to the hotel room so I can figure things out. I should call Miles and tell him what happened.”
She is already ten steps ahead, and we’re on the block next to the Hamra, so it really doesn’t matter anymore. With her arms swinging that way, she reminds me of a small bird, trying — but not quite managing — to fly.
We say nothing as we move through the hotel, past the front desk, and then out into the courtyard which is virtually empty, now that most reporters have turned in for the night.
But across the pool I see them — Sam’s friends. Two of them, Joon and Marcus rise from a table which has more bottles of beer scattered across it than there are people around it.
“Sam!” Joon cries. ‘“My God.” She rushes over, leaving Marcus standing there, the three others with their heads fixed on us. “We were worried sick about you, for Chrissake. Are you all right?”
No answer. Sam still moving towards the door, coming home like any other day. Me following behind, unsure what to say.
“We were close to calling AP to put out a story on you,” Joon says, almost accusingly. She approaches Sam, but something in Sam’s distance holds Joon a few feet away, waiting.
Marcus sizes her up, looking to me for a split second before focusing again on Sam. “I never thought I’d say this, Katchens, but you look like shit. What happened?”
“I’m fine.” Sam’s voice, hoarse but emotionless, as if every time she speaks, she is adding
of course.
Of course I’m fine. Of course.
“Did you...” Joon stares like she knows something is wrong, but doesn’t want to force the issue — to demand what Sam isn’t offering. She takes hold of one of Sam’s wrists. “What the—? Are you guys all right? Where
were
you?” Despite Joon’s professed concern, it looks to me like she has been for a swim. I can see the skinny black straps straddling her neck beneath her shirt, like puppet strings to move her shoulders.
Sam unhinges her arm from Joon’s hold. “What the fuck would you care? Wasn’t it only yesterday you accused me of hoarding sources and stealing boyfriends?”
“Sam, I’m sorry about that,” Joon pleads. “I was way out of line.”
Sam stares at her blankly.
“I said I’m sorry What more do you want?”
“I don’t want anything, Joon. I appreciate your concern, but I’m just a little too exhausted to be standing on my own two feet right now, or to speak another word.”
“Really, Sam,” Marcus approaches. “What’s going on? Everyone wants to know—”
“Don’t they always,” she says, and starts for the atrium door. I avoid their stares and follow her.
“
Sa
-am,” Joon pushes in. “Wait, can we please talk?”
Sam pauses, her right hand on the handle. Her hair has an electrified frizz running through it, as if fully aware of the harrowing hours in Ali’s townhouse on the Tigris.
Joon’s face is a sneer. “You could have at least called or texted one of us to tell us you were all right!”
“No,” says Sam, calm and quiet. As in no, I don’t want sugar in my coffee. “I couldn’t.”
Sam drags the door open as if she needs to pull the weight of her body in the opposite direction to do it. Her eyes train on mine and swing upwards. The night guard has already replaced Rafik, which somehow feels like a great relief. What would he think if he saw me following Sam up to her room at this late hour?
I know Sam usually likes to walk up, but the lift is here, open and waiting for us. Her eyes say it all: I’m too tired to take the stairs. She enters and I follow. Her back is to the wall, and mine to the doors closing behind me.
I can see her watching the numbers change above my head. With her eyes lifted that way, the amber colour looks even more beautiful. But the whites are reddened, as if she hasn’t slept in days.
She catches me staring at her. Neither of us breathes. The lift doors part.
Sam is already holding the key to her room, though I can see she is having a hard time steadying her hand enough to get it into the lock. From behind her, I feel myself inches away from putting myself around her, making her be still, just holding her. The clicking turns three times and pricks at the vertebrae between my shoulders. The sound of Ali’s gun at Sam’s head.
Sam pushes the door open and I hear her exhale, a lungful she had been holding, at the sight of her familiar suite. Sam’s things fall off her — her shoes, her bag — and I feel any second her clothes will follow.
She stands with her back to me and I can feel her thinking, collapse on the sofa? Send Nabil away and go to bed?
“I need a shower.”
“Do you want me to stay here?”
Her eyes lift, rounding towards me like the second hand on a clock. “Yes.”
She walks towards her bedroom, and I am frozen here. She turns back to me. “You...you could have a drink or something. Why don’t you make yourself something? There’s some, I don’t know, some stuff in there,” she says, lifting her chin towards the cabinet with the television on it, the one that has never worked, as far as I know.
The sprinkling of the shower carries into the living room almost like rain on the roof in winter — a sound I used to love. Will I be around next time it rains in Baghdad? Will Sam? I can feel myself stirring. I’m ashamed to even think of these things now, after what happened to us today. But it’s true. I can feel myself burning with it. There isn’t anything I want more right now than to walk in and make love to her right there, with the water falling over us, helping us wash it all away.
A love poem by Nizar Kabbani comes to me, and I air-type it for him, in his memory.
Undress yourself.
For centuries
There have been no miracles,
I am mute,
And your body knows all languages.
Inside the cabinet, below the television, I see what Sam meant. A bottle of Bombay Sapphire, a bottle of red wine that looks to me to be very old, and a bottle of Glenmorangie, the stuff my father likes. I lift out the bottle, only half full, and hold it up to the light. Clear and warm, almost amber, almost the colour of Sam’s eyes. With the uncapped bottle under my nose, my chest shudders. One of the many Western things that appear better than they taste. No point in forcing it. I’ll make tea.
I stand over the kettle while it builds to a boil, pretending the steam clouds will provide our escape, enjoying how they look when they ride through my outstretched fingers, until my own skin is hot and moist, almost puckered, the way Sam’s must be by now. When it’s done, I hear her water stop, too.
I choose two bags from the fancy box of assorted British teas she picked up at the store the other day, the one offering imported goods to foreigners at four or five times the normal price. Chamomile. Didn’t Sam once say she liked that one? I steep them and seat myself.
She comes out, her hair drenching wet so that it looks more smooth than curly, a white towel in one hand as she tries to squeeze out the water. She is wearing a dark green robe, and she is so striking she looks like a piece of jewellery, an emerald topped with rubies.
When she sees me sitting on the sofa with two steaming mugs on the table, she laughs a little, then collapses into the space next to me, brushing against me as she hits the seat. She has never sat next to me like this. Always on the sofa which is at right-angles to this one, or at her desk.
She leans her head back against the sofa. I can feel the wetness of her hair, the smell of her shampoo. Her eyes are closed. “After all that,” she says in a low voice, “you’re only having tea?”
I sit up to move. “Did you...I can get you something else. I saw there is whisky and maybe vodka, and—”
“I know what we have. Tea’s good.” She pulls her mug towards her, leans her face over it, her elbows on her knees. “Mmm. Chamomile, right?” I thought she had leaned her head that way to feel the aromatic steam on her face. But I hear the air in her throat break. Sam is crying out loud now, streams running over her cheeks and towards her tea.
I hesitate, wanting to stop her, to stop myself. Didn’t she sit here rather than there? My arm is around her. Across her back, my hand wrapped around her shoulders.
She’s crying harder now, in a way I’ve never heard her. Quiet, deep sobs, like she can’t stop it, like something invisible is rocking her, snatching away bits of breath.
I wait for her to pull away, to get up and head for the bathroom, to come back pretending nothing has happened. Nothing has gone wrong.
I’m fine.
Instead she lets her shoulders go, drops them, and falls towards me, shaking without a sound, just contractions of her stomach.
My hands, in that red hair, holding that head, smoothing out the wet curves like ripples in a pond. “Shh...” I whisper in her ear, rocking her a little, so much more slowly than her sobs. “Shh...it’s okay now. We’re okay now.” And there is a rasp in Sam’s throat, the sound of gears moving in different directions, a heave of her chest as if she might be sick. I hold her a little more closely, a little more tightly, her knees curled up almost into my lap. What do you think you’re doing, Nabil? “Shh...” a rocking like a boat on the river, swaying just a little the way the fishing dinghies do when the weather gets windy, and then I can feel it, her cheek against mine, my lips against her cheek, tasting all of that saltiness, almost repelled and yet pulled closer by the taste of her tears, taking in the curve of the damp bone that rounds up to her eye, wanting to soothe everything, every part of her, to quiet her, and then I feel them: Sam’s lips stuttering near mine, and I take them and meet them and kiss them to stop their quavering, kiss them harder than I should. And she’s kissing back.
She’s kissing back.