“Here?” he asks, looking up at the building with its stately design, perched somewhat higher up than the average school. “They won’t be open now.”
“I know,” I say. “I have to pick something up, though. I’m a teacher here. I have a key.”
He shrugs and reaches out his right hand, and places it in mine with a little bit of a slap, with much more levity than I feel in my heart. Then he pulls me close to him and gives me a hug. I seem to be like a doll in his hands, falling into him with no resistance at all. “Take care, brother,” he says. “Like my father says, God is forgiving.”
I nod into his shoulder. Forgiving of what? Does he think I’ve done wrong? Does he think I should somehow feel responsible?
“Thank you for your help. I hope someday I can repay you,” I say.
“You already did,” he says. “You allowed my father to show all our brothers and cousins that not all of the Americans are horrible people, and not all of the Iraqis working with them are, either. And I think that’s what he’s been trying to tell us all along.”
We pat each other on the back and I leave the car, deposited into the hot afternoon air. I suddenly feel a dizzy dread. I wish I’d told him to drive me somewhere else, like Najaf, where I could pray for Sam, and be surrounded by crowds of people I don’t know, and not have to go home for quite some time.
I can’t expect the building to be open, and despite what I told Hassan, I haven’t carried the key to it in weeks. I lean my head against the window and look in, the darkness of the hallway ahead like a cavity beginning to rot around the edges.
I begin the walk home, trying to pretend nothing is wrong, trying to walk that walk like any man from Babel or Adel, Zayouna or Ummal. As I walk I can feel it, this strange thing pulsing in my body, a shaking, a feeling of shivering in the cold even though it is hot. I lift one of my hands and see it is trembling. I shake them both, shake them hard like you do after washing in a sink where there is no towel. Shed it, shake it off. But don’t cry, Nabil, for the love of God, don’t you let people on the street see you crying.
A poem, a poem will keep me focused. Especially an air-typed poem, which will give my fingers something to do, instead of shaking. There is one I love by the Persian poet Hafez, about the girl in red who was lost.
She’s gone underground.
She is red and disreputable.
If you find her, please bring her to Hafez’s house.
If you find Sam, please send her back to me.
Up Damascus Street, the shops are mostly shuttered but a few still open, their metal shutters pulled down to knee-height, so that it isn’t so easy to do a quick grab and run. Please bring her back to me.
Oh, Nabil. Silly. She’s never coming back. You had to know that all along. You had to know that for all the times she told you how much she cared about this country, that she was never, ever, going to be here for good. How did that American pop song go, the one that Christian guy at the CD shop on Arasat Street introduced me to when I was at university?
She’s got her ticket, think she’s going to use it, think she’s going to fly away.
That’s it. Tracy Chapman, the one with the dreadlocks.
She knows where her ticket takes her, she will find her place in the sun.
Her ticket out of here was always in her hand; it only depended on which day she chose to use it. She was always going to fly away, Nabil, always. And still my hands can’t stop their shaking, so much so that my air-typewriter is now far out of reach.
~ * ~
61
Shaking
I walk in to find Mum wrapping a large dish. When she sees me, it slips from her hands, hits the floor and breaks into pieces. Only now do I see that it’s one of her favourites, the one on which she always served her
tabeet
and sometimes a small
masghouf.
Amal’s face is blanched white. She blinks at the pieces, but then keeps moving, wrapping dishes with newspaper and placing them in a cardboard box on the kitchen table. Baba is sitting in his armchair. On the footstool sits a small suitcase, which he’s loading up with some of his medical reference books.
For a moment, I can’t find my voice. And then, when I do, my mouth feels as dry as the Ad-Dibdibah Desert. “What’s going on here?”
Mum rushes over and throws her arms around me. “
Al
-
Hamdulilah.
You came home. That’s all that matters.”
I hug her back and then let her go. But Baba and Amal haven’t budged — they’re still doing what they were doing when I walked in a minute ago. Amal is moving like a zombie. Baba glares at me with glassy eyes.
“Mama? Mum, what’s going on here?” my voice cracks.
“Can’t you see?” Baba says, in that tone that says I should know better than to ask. “We’re leaving. What did you think would happen? You left a mess for us when you ran off with that woman.”
I am stunned. That woman! This from my father who had said to Sam, You are like a daughter now.
“And you didn’t even call us to let us know you were okay,” Amal adds.
“How was I supposed to...do you have any idea what I’ve been...” I can’t seem to finish sentences. “What mess?”
“The mess that brought a couple of gunmen here looking for you and for her, threatening to kill the whole lot of us if we didn’t tell them where you were, or to pay your ‘debts’.”
“Oh no. Oh no. That’s the, that’s the people I told you about. You said you didn’t think they would find us. You said they sounded like amateurs.”
“Did I say that? Well, I guess I was wrong.” Baba rearranges the suitcase contents, taking a few tomes out. “They said you owe them $10,000 and that you promised to pay them by Monday. Well, three days went by, and they came to collect.”
I feel the heat rising in my body, sitting on my chest and moving straight to my head. “It’s not his fault, Amjad,” Mum says. “Don’t blame him. Let him have a rest and a glass of tea.”
“Woman, we don’t have time for drinking tea. We’re leaving this house in forty-eight hours! Everything of value is coming with us or going into storage, or you can just forget about ever seeing it again.”
“Don’t you snap at me,” she retorts, returning to the broken plate and collecting the pieces. “Maybe we can fix this.”
“Wait, Baba, tell me what happened. Who came? What did they want?”
“They wanted $10,000, I said I didn’t have it. They said they’d settle for seven. I told them I could get them five, if they gave me another few days.” He takes two books out, frowns at them, and puts them on the sofa. “They came back the next night and left a note under the front door. So I got them the five. And they might still be back for more.”
“You gave them $5,000?”
“What else could I do, do I have my own militia?” Baba stands and walks over to the mantle clock. He looks at it, sighs, and takes it down gingerly, as if it were a baby. “Now how do we pack this so it doesn’t break?”
“Baba-”
“You know, your mother’s right, it probably isn’t your fault, because it’s happening to several other families I know. Extortion. Once they know you have money, they’ll keep coming back for more. The Mutlak family had their grandson kidnapped, and the people who took him demanded $20,000. What could they do? They had the money and they paid it.” He raises his eyebrows. “Now they’re in Syria.”
“Couldn’t you...go to anyone for help?”
“To whom? The police? As if we still had a police force.” He brings the clock to the table and takes up some of the newspaper Amal was using to wrap dishes. “We’ll go broke like this. The hospital is falling apart. There’s a shortage of medicines, not enough electricity. I lost a patient last week because the cardiology unit had no electricity. Do you know, a man came and killed Dr Hamza on Tuesday because he failed to save the man’s brother? Shot him in the head, in cold blood, as he was getting out of his car. There isn’t even someone to report it to! The Americans say they’re going to rebuild the police force after they’ve finished disbanding the old one, but it’ll take a year. A year! Well, thanks very much, but that’s not good enough. Who can live like this?”
Mum brings the tea to me, her hands jittery. “Sit and drink,” she says. But the sofa is full of things they’re packing, and save for Baba’s armchair, there’s nowhere to sit. Instead, I find myself sinking towards the floor and finding a place there.
“Your mother doesn’t sleep. Your sister sits around all day with her mind going to waste. We’re leaving.”
“To where, Baba?”
He shrugs. “First, to Jordan. Then I suppose we’ll try to get to France to be with Ziad. Or maybe I’ll contact one of my old colleagues from Birmingham.” He hesitates. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Where do you want to go?”
I think about this for a minute, trying to imagine a new life in France, or in England. Then I try to picture Washington, or New York, or wherever Sam is now. The truth is that none of them seems right.
“I don’t really want to go anywhere.”
“No one wants to. But when you
have
to.”
“I don’t know, Baba. I think I might want to stay here. There’s a lot of important events to report. A lot of journalists could use my help. Or maybe I’ll go to work for an Iraqi paper, like you said I should.”
Amal suddenly emerges from her torpor. “Is Nabil allowed to stay? That’s not fair.”
My mother’s jaw drops. She shakes her head and looks to my father. Baba watches me, waiting for my reaction. “Nabil is twenty-eight years old. He’s a grown man. He can do whatever he wants. The rest of his life isn’t pending our permission.”
Later tonight, I will explain everything. I’ll tell them what happened, and they’ll understand. They won’t be angry anymore - at least not at me. But for now, in my room, I sit at the typewriter. Now, like Sam, I have a story that matters. I’ll do all the research necessary for the profile on Ali that Sam still wants to write. I’ll get it to her in America, somehow. Or maybe I’ll publish it here, under a pseudonym. Maybe I’ll compose a new collection of poetry that will capture what’s happening in Iraq, the tragedy that would cause a family like mine to leave.
But instead I sit in front of the blank paper, my fingers hovering over the keys, unable to produce a single sentence.
~ * ~
62
Hovering
Today is the
Arbaain
for Noor. That means it has been forty days since Noor left this world, and forty days since Sam came into it - into my little corner of the world, anyway. Forty days since the bullet came and sucked one person out of my life and injected a new person into it. It is in this little corner that you find me on the 18th of May 2003, or the 17th of Rabi al-Awaal in the year 1424, once again in Hurriyah, whose name, oddly enough, means freedom. I wonder if any of us has a clue as to what freedom actually looks like. I only know they were supposed to free Iraq, but it seems Iraq has made captives and refugees of us all.
As we line ourselves up inside the mosque, Baba and me alongside all the men in Noor’s family, something in me feels relief as much as grief. My family leaves Baghdad tomorrow, but Baba says not to tell a soul. Us being here, he says, is a good deed he wants to do before he goes. Everyone is ready to say their final goodbyes, to wave Noor on like a departing guest one last time, and then shut the gate. And then lock it. The words and the movements are our sad and wonderful blur of life and death. Sad because of why we’re here, wonderful because it forces us together, and I, for these forty days, haven’t felt a sense of being together with anyone. Anyone Iraqi.
Mum says it isn’t a coincidence that we were stopped in Samarra, that Sam was taken away from me there. She was pursued, went down, and then flew off into the sky. Mum thinks it’s a sign. After all, the twelfth Hidden Iman disappeared from a cellar in the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, it is believed. My mother would like to believe that the Mahdi is coming soon, and so any unusual occurrence in his hometown might be an omen. I would like to believe in something.
Salat az-zuhr,
the noonday prayer. Four
rakat,
four cycles of sacred speech and movement, and each of them silent. Some of the men mouth the words without speaking them aloud, some just think them in their minds. Feet slightly apart, hands to our ears with palms facing forwards, a calling, a receiving. It intones like an orchestra. “God is greatest,” we speak, almost in unison. I close my eyes to stop myself from looking at Baba, to see what he is doing, to see if he is saying something. If he is praying, too.
In the first bend to the floor my head feels full and hot, and by the second, washed out, clean, like something bathed at the seashore. It is good to rest my forehead against the cool tiles of the mosque floor, and only when I realize that I’m letting myself linger too long, out of sync, can I pull up again. When I prayed in the Shi’ite mosques with my mother, there was always a
turba,
a baked pottery tile to lay our foreheads on as we made
ruku,
as we bowed our heads down — a symbol of really touching our heads to the earth. Does it matter if you touch carpet and marble instead? Wouldn’t God be pleased just the same?
Standing again. We turn out our hands and close them over our chests. The imam makes his case.
Sami’a a-Llahu liman hamidah.
God listens to those who praise him. The others respond.
Rabbana wa laka-l-hamd.
Our Lord, and to Thee belongs praise.