When Safin is finished with the letter, he puts a second sheet of paper behind it, folds it in three and hands it to Baba. Realizing his mistake, Safin smiles and hands the letter to me.
“Thank you,” I say. “I am so sorry that we couldn’t travel together, but I do hope we will have a chance to meet again, or to work together some other time.”
“Indeed,” Baba says. “You must come back to visit us.”
“Of course,” he says, blinking fast, as though still trying to absorb whether we are genuine, whether he had any choice but to give in to our modified plans.
Sam lifts a finger as if to excuse her interruption. “Uh, did... did you get the map he made?”
“The map!” I exclaim. Baba’s eyes close. In all our worrying about how we would break the news to Safin, we completely forgot.
Safin excuses himself and runs out to his car.
~ * ~
Mum has stuffed enough food for three days into shopping bags, unnecessary since I know Sam will want to eat in restaurants, and she places them by the door. “Tell her to remember all the food’s here,” Mum says. “Don’t forget.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Safin rushes back inside and spreads a hand-drawn map on the table, plus a list of directions. “It’s very easy,” he says. “You take the highway past Al-Kadhumiya all the way north. When it breaks off to the west, you drive on until you get to Samarra. It should be quiet there, so make a stop there if you need a bathroom or water or anything.”
“We have enough provisions to last us a week,” I say. I wink at Mum, who smiles back.
“Fine. So then you continue on to Tikrit — don’t stop there - and then to Al Baygi, and after that you want to turn right towards Kirkuk to avoid Mosul, because it’s very dangerous there. And so maybe it’s a bit longer, but I say go to Kirkuk, then Irbil, and stay in Irbil overnight if you like, where it’s safe, and where my family is.”
“He says we should stay overnight in Irbil. You said you liked it there, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam brightens. “Irbil’s great. There are some good hotels there, too.”
“Okay,” says Safin, pulling the conversation back to Arabic. “From there you can drive to Dahuk, and that’s also a very safe place to stay overnight, if necessary. And then from there it’s only another hour or so to Zakho, where the border crossing is.”
I wonder if Baba is thinking what I’m thinking. Mosul is dangerous to a Kurd, but not for an Arab. The itinerary he has outlined could add a whole extra day to our trip.
More time to be with Sam. More time for someone to catch up with us.
Sam pulls up the too-long sleeve of the
jupeh
to glance at her new watch. “Do you know it’s nearly seven now?”
“Yes,” I say. “We really should—”
“I will leave you, then,” Safin says, moving away from the table and glancing from face to face.
“Wait,” Sam says. She reaches into her bag and pulls out an envelope. She takes it in two hands and presents it to Safin, a curtain of sincerity pulled across her pale face. “Please take this.”
“What?” He looks at me and Baba. “What’s this?”
“She wants you to have it,” I say.
“It’s what I would have paid you for the trip up north, plus something extra that I would like you to give to Rizgar’s family.”
“I can’t accept it,” Safin tells me. “I can’t be paid for work I didn’t do.”
Sam gazes at Safin like she thinks he’s a hero. Perhaps he is, but I feel that this is a predictable response — the way any man of dignity would answer without thinking.
“Please,” she says. “Give it to his family then. And could you write down their address for us, too? Or telephone number, or some other way we can contact them?”
Safin scribbles out the information on one of the remaining sheets. He hands it to Sam, and she takes it and folds it, then holds it close to her heart. “Please,” she says, her eyes glossy again. “Please tell them how sorry I am — how sad I am about Rizgar. He was one of the most wonderful people I ever worked with.”
Safin nods as I translate this for him, and he offers a response in kind.
“He says Rizgar said the same about you. He said ‘the most’. Not one of the most.”
Sam smiles a sad smile, and looks at Safin with such warmth in her eyes that I almost think she will embrace him but of course she realizes this would be inappropriate, so she wraps her arms around herself instead.
As soon as Safin is gone, Baba and I open the letter to read it. It makes specific reference to Sam being an American journalist who is travelling through Kurdistan in expectation of writing articles in support of the cause of an independent Kurdish homeland in Iraq. The letter asks the reader to facilitate Sam’s passage so as to ease the process of decentralized power, leading to permanent Kurdish national and political rights.
When he’s done skimming, Baba’s eyes bulge.
“You asked him to write the letter,” I say.
“I didn’t know he’d write a letter like that.”
“Is there a problem?” Sam asks. She always seems to know when something is wrong.
“It’s fine,” I say. “We should go.”
“Wait,” Sam says. “The letter’s in Arabic?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Why of course? The letter’s written from one Kurd to another, intended for Kurdish officials in Kurdistan. Why wouldn’t he write it in Kurdish?”
Baba shrugs. “There are many different Kurdish,” he says in his broken English. “Maybe he speak one and the other man speak the another. Arabic is the language that unites all Iraqis,” says my didactic father. “It does not matter if you are Arab, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi’ite, Christian or Jew.”
Sam smiles at him widely. He smiles back and holds out his hand for her to shake. When she puts her hand in it, he pulls her closer and gives her small kisses on each cheek, the way you would a relative. “You are like a daughter now,” he says. “So you must take good care of our Nabil.”
Sam laughs out loud. “He usually insists on taking care of me.”
Mum approaches and treats her like someone we’ve known for a hundred years, putting her lips on Sam’s cheeks so many times that I think she has spent more time kissing Sam than I have. And then it is Amal’s turn. She approaches Sam and quickly throws her arms around her. In her hand is a gift the size of a book. When they let go of each other, Amal presents it to Sam, and suddenly I recognize it: a box of fancy stationery that Ziad gave Amal, part of a big package of presents he sent last Ramadan. It was delivered by a Baghdadi friend of his also living in France, who’d come back to visit.
Sam opens it up and holds up a page trimmed in pretty blue flowers that tell of a simpler life elsewhere, where people binge on rich food and wine all day and then
tsk
about how terrible it is in places like this. “It’s beautiful,” Sam nearly sings. “Thank you.”
“So you will write me from America. You will tell me about all the things there and about your life and the movie stars.”
“Amal.” Mum’s face admonishes her not to pressure Sam to write.
They walk us to the car and Sam gets in. I turn to her and notice she looks like a real
bint hallal,
innocent and proper as a religious teenager still under her father’s roof.
“Now you look like a Samira,” I say.
Sam smirks at herself in the rearview mirror. “Good. You can call me that.”
I put the car in gear and inch forwards. Amal stands on the path while Baba pulls open the metal gate for us. Mum hurries up to my window and pokes her head inside. She whispers a prayer in my ear, and then part of a sura from the Koran, I think from
Al-Nisa:
the part that pertains to women. “God bids you to deliver all that you have been entrusted with to those who are entitled to receive it.” My translation: get Sam home safely to the people who love her. Even if now, we love her too.
“Fi m’Allah,”
Mum says, kissing my cheek in little pecks.
“Ayouni! Fi m’Allah.
Bye-bye, Sam,” Mum calls in funny staccato syllables, as if even these simple words force her to stretch facial muscles she has not exercised in a long time. We drive out and pass the three of them, each smiling. When I glance at them again in the rearview mirror, the smile is gone from my father’s face and my mother is waving eagerly, the palm of her hand stained bright by the orange-red henna from Friday’s visit to the mosque. The image of that holy sunburst in her hand is still in front of me as we start rolling down the street.
~ * ~
57
Rolling
By the time we’re really on the road, it’s much later than we had planned last night, when Baba and I worked out the final details.
“Your parents are so sweet,” Sam says as we are passing by Mustansiriyah. Thoughts of Subhi, of the eager young Shi’ites doing the Hawza’s bidding, of Ibrahim something-or-other over at the Showja Market. All of that seems a whole epoch ago, before all of the trouble started. Before Akram and Mustapha and Ali, back when the most threatening people in Baghdad were faceless looters and criminals and over-eager American soldiers. Back when all I had to worry about was getting the words right. Interpreting — fixing, maybe — but not protecting. Certainly not escaping.
“Your sister, especially. She has such grace for a young girl. I think she gets it from your Mom.” She pauses. “Your Dad’s a total charmer, too.” Sam opens the mirror on the visor in front of her and looks at her face, drawn into a purposeful and serious pose. “You’d probably pass me on the street and think I was Iraqi, wouldn’t you?”
I grin. “Probably.” I wonder if she has any idea how worried my parents are. How, underneath all their impeccable hospitality, they have probably come to resent her. If she had never walked into my father’s hospital, into Noor’s mourning house, into all our lives, I would be safe at home with them now, waiting to go back to my quiet little teaching job.
“They like you very much,” I say, and after all, it’s true. Amal and Mum were obviously quite enamoured with Sam. But in my father’s face, I saw a duty to be kind, a sense of being impressed and sceptical at the same time. I wonder, would he have had this ambivalence before he knew she was Jewish? Or half-Jewish, or Jewish by virtue of her father, which according to Sam isn’t actually Jewish? But wasn’t Baba a bit cool towards Sam and her friends long before he knew anything about them, that first day, in the cardiology unit?
“What was that thing she kept saying?”
Damn. Three humvees just turned onto the road ahead, and everyone has suddenly slowed down. “What?”
“That thing, that word your mom kept saying as she was saying goodbye to you. Something with Allah’ in it.”
“Allah? Oh.
Fi m’Allah.
It’s an abbreviation we use. What you’re really saying is
fi iman Allah.”
“And...what’s that?”
“With faith in God. It’s like saying, with faith in God, we will see each other again.”
“Hmm.” Sam touches her hand to her scarf with an awkwardness, as though this were the moment when she’d like to feel the thickness of her hair, and now cannot. “That’s lovely,” she says.
The northern neighbourhoods grow more similar by the mile, spreading out like stones on a riverbed, grey-white and endless. The stretches of drab, sand-coloured settlement are separated by litter-filled roads and ageing cars.
My father’s car doesn’t look like it is from here. If we get stopped I will have to have a good story ready. If it’s a Shi’ite, I’ll tell him about the man we met in Sadr City. What was his name? It seems ages ago now. Hamid. No, Hatem. If it’s a Sunni, well then, can’t I just be myself? My father’s son? And why do I always need to work harder to pass as a Shi’ite anyway? Is it my size, physically bigger, or my skin, currently tan but hardly dark? Something about the way you carry yourself. That’s what one of my friends at university said.
“You’re quiet.”
“Just thinking,” I say. “I want to concentrate on the road to make sure I don’t take the one towards Baquba by mistake.”
“Right,” Sam replies, her attention trailing off to some horrible apartment blocks on her side of the road. They look as if the highway exhaust of the last half-century has never once been wiped away.
“Some of them might be nice inside,” I offer. “It’s usually the outside that looks worse.”
“Um-hmm.”
~ * ~
We’re hardly out of Baghdad and already there’s a checkpoint ahead with four young Sunnis manning it. They have propped a silver pole across two old oil drums. Sam’s eyes search the horizon, then me.
“I think you should put the scarf on even more.”
“More?”
I take the small lock that is jutting out from under the cloth around her left temple and push it into the scarf. Moments later I’m embarrassed for having touched her again. But she only smiles at me with her lips and eyes closed, and then looks back at the road. Her skin seems warmer than it should, given that we’re sitting in an air-conditioned car.
“If they ask, don’t say anything. We’ll pretend you’re a mute.”
“Fine.”
We are one car away and my mind is racing. What will I say if they ask us where we’re going?
The man at the window holds a Kalashnikov in both hands. I roll down the window and the smell of his oil-drum checkpoint comes in. He has probably been out here since last night.