~ * ~
54
Laying
Pistachio, strawberry, banana-date. Some kind of a rainbow mix. These are the flavours Wa’el brought to us, which we promptly put in the icebox and saved until after dinner. I think he chose well. But Sam lifts each of the containers and gives something of a girlish frown. “No chocolate?”
The three of us are sitting in a row on the cushions we lined up against the wall on the roof, with Sam in the middle.
“What is it with foreigners and chocolate?” I ask. I pass Sam the pistachio, which I think is one of the best they make. “You don’t like this one? It’s very healthy. Look at all the nuts.”
She takes it and lifts a spoonful into her bowl. “Yes, I’m sure all the green food-colouring is full of nutrients.” Amal looks at her like she doesn’t get it. Sam takes some and, probably realizing that she may have appeared to be impolite, offers up a sound of enjoyment. “It’s good.”
Amal is mixing all of the flavours together in her bowl, which is a surefire way not to be able to truly enjoy any of them. She is clearly more interested in Sam than the ice cream. “Chocolate isn’t such a favourite here,” I explain. “It’s not so common to find it, even. But the banana-date is good! Did you try it? Made from the best Iraqi dates.” She nods and takes a spoonful of it. Maybe our tastes are just different, like our mentalities. Our mouths start out the same but then get introduced to flavours predominant in our own corners of the world, eating our own spices and delicacies, shaping the words of our own languages, until we can never agree on what’s truly best. Not in our governments, not on our tongues.
“When you come to America someday, I’ll take you out for rocky road,” Sam declares. “That’s the best.”
“Rocky road,” Amal repeats. “The best,” she says, parroting Sam.
“Yeah, it’s great,” Sam says. “It’s this super-chocolatey mess with chunks of real chocolate and nuts. Oh, and marshmallows. It’s fabulous.”
Amal smiles. “This is favourite American ice cream?”
Sam gently swirls Amal’s silky ponytail. “It’s
this
American’s favourite ice cream!”
“Tell more things about America,” Amal implores.
“First eat your ice cream,” I say, pointing out that it’s melting. If Amal’s not going to eat it, I’d rather give it to Mum and Baba. They professed not to want any, which I think was a way of letting us enjoy ourselves on our own up on the roof. Before, this was a popular way for Baghdadis to spend a hot summer evening, when the houses refuse to cool down, even after dark. Now, many people are afraid to spend time up on the roof, not knowing what might be flying through the air, or who might try to shoot at you. But as far as I see it, and I think Baba tends to agree, it makes no difference. If you are so unfortunate as to have a bullet with your name on it, it’s going to get you even if you’re in your own living room.
“Why’s it called rocky road?” I ask.
Sam shrugs. “Never thought about it. But I guess the chocolate ice cream is the road, and all the lumpy things are like the rocks in it.”
“That’s a saying, right? As in, ‘It’ll definitely be a rocky road towards Iraq’s reconstruction.’”
Sam looks bemused, her lips like the wavy hieroglyphic for water.
“I heard you say it once on the phone. I think you were being interviewed by a radio station in America.”
“Oh.” She smiles at me in a way that makes me think she must find me terribly strange, committing things to memory the way I do. I cannot help it. Even when I’m not air-typing, the keyboard in my mind often keeps going, like one of those eerie player-pianos I’ve seen in old films. The keys rise and fall all on their own.
“How the life in America?” Amal pleads.
“What’s life like?” Sam smiles, looking uncertain how to answer. “It depends on where you live. Some beautiful areas, some terrible areas — sort of like Iraq. It’s a huge country.”
Amal’s face portends a thousand more questions. “America is very free, yes? You do, you say...whatever you like.”
“Something like that, but you still have to follow the law and pay your taxes.”
“Are you happy America coming to Iraq?”
“She means are you—”
“I know,” Sam sighs. “It’s a tough question. I don’t know. It wasn’t my idea to come here, but now that we’re here, I hope Iraq will be better off. I mean, you have to believe that, or...” Sam stops mid-sentence and stares towards the south, where there’s a dark smoke column rising against the sky, black-on-blue. “Right now, it’s not looking so good, is it?”
Amal shakes her head no, it isn’t.
“But I bet you’re glad Saddam is gone, no?”
Amal pushes out her lower lip. “Nabil says he was too bad. But me, Amal? My life was not bad before. I went to school, saw my friends, go shopping with Mum, no problem. Now, everything problem.”
Sam smiles like something hurts.
“I’m going to take the rest down to Mum before it melts,” I tell them, collecting the ice cream containers.
“I thought you said they didn’t want any,” Sam says.
“An Iraqi trying to be a good hostess says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”
Back on the roof again, I find Sam sitting behind Amal, plaiting her hair. Amal looks like she is in heaven. Nirvana, even.
I sit next to Sam. “Trading beauty secrets?”
“I wish I were as beautiful as this one,” Sam says, and I see Amal’s smile spread fast and wide. This is what she probably dreams of — having a big sister, instead of big brothers who are never around.
Sam finishes her work and presents the end to Amal. “Grab it,” Sam says. “You need to tie it with something, or it will fall apart.”
Amal pats the back of her head with her free hand, obviously impressed by the feel of the intricate pattern Sam has woven. “Sam made a Frenchy braid, Nabil!”
“I see. Beautiful.”
Amal jumps up to get an elastic-band. “We’ll meet you downstairs,” I call after her. But I don’t think she heard me, and I don’t think she wants to.
Sam looks enchanted. “She’s a darling.”
“I know. Very smart, too, but you probably couldn’t tell from the way she acted tonight.”
“No, I could tell,” says Sam, leaning her back up against the wall.
“You hardly ate the ice cream.”
“It was good,” she says unconvincingly. “Maybe I wasn’t in the mood.”
“You liked it better last time, when we went to Al-Faqma. Wa’el said it was closed so he went to Al-Ballout.”
The lines between Sam’s eyes emerge like fresh stitches. I want to eat my words. I put my hand on her forearm, near the elbow.
“Rizgar liked Al-Ballout.”
“I know,” I say.
“I still can’t believe it. I keep thinking it must be a mistake.”
“I know.”
“He’s going to come back any moment and just tell me he had to wait on some crazy line for gasoline, or went on a long drive to buy cigarettes where they’re cheaper.” Sam lets her eyes close, to stop the need to say more. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, she leans her head on my shoulder.
I am the happiest man in the world at this minute. It sounds terrible to say, because it ignores everyone’s pain and loss, hers and mine and Rizgar’s family’s, but that’s just what I feel. Stop everything, stay here. My hand in her hair the way I had dreamed, its thickness a deep, dense forest, an easy place to get lost.
She pulls away and sits up. “Are you sure we can’t go to visit his family here in the morning before we leave? At least to pay a condolence call.”
I sit forwards, too. I cannot concentrate on such radically different emotions at the same time. For Sam, they appear to be all tied up, one in the other.
“I don’t think so, Sam. Maybe we could try to find his family on our way through the north.”
“Really?” Sam looks hopeful, then washed over by a wave of fear. What would happen, I wonder, if word hadn’t got to Rizgar’s family yet. If we were the ones to have to tell them?
“Is that what you want? You want to see his family, even if it means taking another day to get to the border?”
Sam touches her own hair now, stretching out a coil. Were her hair straight, it seems, it would be twice as long. Many things about Sam are only half-visible.
“I guess I should just get out. But Rizgar—” she shakes her head and sniffles. “I don’t even know what’s right anymore.”
We sit for a while without speaking, listening to the crickets and to the last teenagers playing football down the street.
Amal returns, as I expected she would, showing off the bow she found for the end of the plait. Sam ties it on for her. “Gorgeous,” says Sam. “You’re a movie star.” With this, Amal beams like a shy girl being romanced.
“Amal, can you leave us here to talk for a while?”
She tuts, her face predictably heartbroken. “I thought—”
“We need to talk about our trip tomorrow. Maybe you can make sure Sam’s bed is made up nicely?” I already know it is, but better to give her a job to do, something that makes her feel connected to our guest.
Amal takes her leave, giving Sam a peck on her cheek to say thank you for doing her hair. Sam seems genuinely charmed.
When Amal disappears, I try to explain. “She doesn’t know, and I think Mum doesn’t. But Baba does.”
“Know what?”
“About what happened to us — with Mustapha and Ali and all.”
“Oh,” Sam says, as if I’ve just wrecked her efforts to expunge the events of yesterday from her mind. “Okay.”
“He doesn’t want us to go with Safin, and I agreed. We’ll go alone.”
Sam tenses, as if waiting for an elaborate defence. “That’s the sort of decision I would want to weigh in on.”
I stare out towards the palm trees, their towering trunks swaying in the hot evening breeze. I’ve had fantasies recently about marrying Sam. I daydreamed we would have a girl and name her Lena. It’s perfect. I know they have that name in the West. In Arabic it means small palm tree. She’d be like her mother, named after a tree.
“Please trust me with this, Sam. We discussed it round and round and we decided it was the absolute safest way to go. We don’t think it’s safe to go with him.”
“The jeep?”
“That’s only skirting the surface.”
Sam exhales a laugh through her stuffy nose. “Skimming the surface.”
“What?”
“You skim the surface. Or scratch it. You skirt an issue.”
If I spent my life with Sam, she would probably drive me crazy.
She is keen to make it up to me. “I do trust you. I do. If you say it’s safer, I trust you.”
“Good.”
“What about the story? Miles says they’re definitely running it tomorrow, remember?”
The possibilities spin through my mind. What if Ali reads the story and we’re still in reach? What happens when I don’t show up to give him the money?
“Is it going to mention Ali? Or Akram?”
“I don’t even know, I haven’t had a chance to read the thing yet.”
“Why can’t you tell Miles that the story should be published only when you’re out of Iraq?”
“Miles says he doesn’t have any choice. They’re afraid of how it will look later if it seems that we had the information and sat on it. It’s all mixed up with legal stuff, you know, the damage to Jackson’s reputation. But mostly, it’s about money. Every day the paper doesn’t settle this is a day they’ve got expensive lawyers on retainer. They’re incurring more and more legal fees.” She breathes in deeply, like it’s her first fresh lungful of air all evening. “It’s essentially a financial decision, not a journalistic one.”
We know where you live.
Ali said so. But does he? There’s no clear indication that the others — the package, the thugs of the so-called Neighbourhood Resistance Committee — have any connection to Ali. If they do, we’re all dead. And the alternative? Pick up the whole family and flee? Baba would never hear of it.
While I’m contemplating these options, like tree diagrams planting deeper and deeper roots in my head, we both grow quiet. The air is damp with humidity, carrying its own language in the form of things that hover: insects, dust, galaxies. “Look at the stars,” I say, gazing up at the night sky.
“Wow,” she sighs, her head leaning against the wall. “It’s amazing you can see so many stars in such a big city In Paris or New York, you’d never see a sky like this.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Maybe because in those cities everyone has their lights on at night.”
Sam turns to me. “You’re right. It’s an electricity thing.”
I can’t help it, my lips meeting hers, my hand back in her fiery hair, my other holding the silky curve where her neck meets her jaw. I hear the shock in her chest, almost like a contraction in her stomach that could be excitement or repulsion and how can I know which? And she kisses me back, and then she freezes, and in the stillness of her mouth I know that everything is not all right, and that there’s nothing to do but stop.
I still have her head in my hands, wanting to hold it with care, and when I pull my face away from hers, I can see her eyes are again full of tears. She lets me hold her as she cries soundlessly, and then she is done. I try to wipe her face with my sleeve, but she squirms for me to stop.