One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (19 page)

And often, very often, I call her
“
sweetheart.
”

It troubles me even more that I can’t seem to remember having seen this girl among the children Bashar and Nadia presented to me in their new home here in Safwan. Was she older than Saleem, his eldest boy? Was she younger? I am amazed at the quality of the memories that surround her, the warmth, the happiness. But I am also amazed that I cannot recall her name.

Tragic things have happened to many, many children in Iraq. I think about asking Bashar what has become of the girl, but quickly I put the idea to the back of my mind. It would be the height of bad manners for me to mention such a thing as a dead child if the child’s father hasn’t been open in his grief. Truly, I think that Bashar is just the sort of man who might pretend or might even convince himself, in his sorrow, that the child herself had never even existed.

It might be, for Bashar, the only way to deal with such haunting despair.

23

Monday Night Dinner at the House of ash-Shareefi

LAYLA’S PACKAGE, HER GIFT,
burns against my ribs as if it were on fire during the whole length of the dinner at the house of my soon-to-be father-in-law. It is small enough not to cause my
dishdasha
to fold awkwardly over it, about as big as a book of poems. With me, to the dinner, I bring the first of my own gifts to Ulayya, which I set on the table in front of Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi so that he might present it to his daughter. Of course it is only men at the dinner, for, as at all such traditional gatherings, the women have their own area of the house in which to congregate and celebrate, secluded from the eyes of the male guests.

I am seated this evening at the right hand of the head of the ash-Shareefi family. By arranging the seats in this fashion, Ali proclaims me not only one of his own, but also ranks me as the man second only to him in the order of the affairs of his family. Ali has no surviving sons, and Ulayya is the eldest of the daughters. Since I am to be her husband, my position is such that I become something more like the eldest son of the family, the man who will continue ash-Shareefi’s legacy. This makes my rank greater than that of the uncles and cousins and various other men, business associates and honored townsfolk, who have been invited to the first of many parties that will build toward the marriage feast.

I discover from my conversations during the course of the evening that Ali had two sons, both of them older than Ulayya, and both of them tragically killed in the first war against the Americans.

“One of them fought for Saddam,” says the man on my right, the closest of the many ash-Shareefi cousins. “This man was like an uncle to me. His journey led him down into the heart of Kuwait when Iraq invaded. Of course history has denied Iraq the possession of Kuwait. America and its henchmen in Europe and the rest of the world fight even now to keep Kuwait separate from Iraq. Otherwise, why would there be a fence, guards, UN sanctions? The Kuwaiti princes hold a strange power over the West.”

“Oil,” I say.

Ali ash-Shareefi makes the circuit of the room, talking individually with each of his guests, sitting with them for long or short periods of time as their particular issues and concerns and words of congratulation merit. This leaves the seat to my left, Ali’s seat, empty for a long while. I am stuck listening to the cousin on my right. He tells me that ash-Shareefi learned from the survivors of the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait City that his eldest son was among those killed, exposed among the many tanks and trucks and other vehicles jammed on the road leading back from Kuwait City to Iraq, all of them nothing more than sitting ducks for the strafing and bombing of the American warplanes.

From this point the cousin’s narrative delves into the gruesome details of that strafing and bombing: the traffic jam that the big highway became, the blood that ran in the gutters of the roadway, soaking into the sand, the screaming, the explosions that could be heard outside town, the screeching sound of jet engines as planes passed over Safwan, circling in the Iraqi skies to return into Kuwait, to make a second or third pass over the backlogged highway.

“When the Americans finished,” he says, “the Kuwaitis had to bulldoze the charred hulks of our vehicles to the edges of the road.”

The man’s fascination with the slaughter disturbs me. His speech bothers me, physically bothers me. My stomach churns. I excuse myself from the dinner. I go outside, into the courtyard. I cross the courtyard to the bathroom.

When I emerge I am greeted by the black sunglasses–​wearing guard at the front gate, the man who said nothing to me on the first day of our acquaintance. He still says nothing. But he nods at me in a friendly way, and he takes from his pocket a red pack of Marlboros, a rarity in Iraq, American cigarettes. He offers me one. I don’t want to smoke but I accept. It is a matter of contract, of good form, of doing the right thing. I smoke the cigarette. Between shallow puffs I take my wallet from a pocket under my
dishdasha
and I show the man the previous year’s Cubs schedule, a glossy card with fine metallic blue English print on it. The man admires the artifact, so I give it to him, which seems to make him happy. Yet he doesn’t speak a word. I wonder if he is mute. Nevertheless, I enjoy the silence of standing in the courtyard with him, such a contrast with the overwhelming volume of noise and banter inside Ali’s
diwaniya
. I enjoy the warm blanket of the night sky, a few stars visible through the smog of oil smoke that covers our town.

When I return to my seat in the
diwaniya,
the cousin starts his story once again. Now, at least, he has returned to his first point, the history of Ali’s two sons.

He says, “And then, the real tragedy was Ali’s other son, his younger son, who also served as a soldier during the first American war.”

Here the cousin pauses a little. He is feeling emotional, I can tell. I reach out, put my hand on his arm. This steadies him.

“The elder son was like an uncle to me,” he says. “But the younger son, named after Ali himself, was like a brother to me, that is how close we were. And you, here, sitting in the place that should be his seat, you make me think of him very much.”

Again, the cousin pauses. His jaw clenches before he launches back into his story. “Ali the Younger was a soldier, too. However, he left Saddam’s forces before entering Kuwait during the war’s first days. He deserted, stealing back here to Safwan in the middle of the night. Ali hid him, kept him hidden by moving him from home to home as Saddam’s soldiers barracked in our town. Young Ali was our consolation during the time when news of so many deaths reached us: at least one boy had lived. Feelings ran high among us here in the south. The American forces would overthrow Saddam with our help, with Shia help. Then the Shia people would hold power for the first time in many centuries. The euphoria spread and the younger son joined the Shia resistance. Ali the Younger helped sabotage Saddam’s forces. He helped organize resistance and I helped him. I was his message boy. I was his cupbearer, his flag bearer. I was there beside him throughout all the resistance. But I was young, too young to do anything too dangerous.

“So when the American forces stopped in Safwan itself, having killed ash-Shareefi’s first son on the road south of town, when they signed a peace treaty with Saddam that left the dictator still in charge of our country, these glorious expectations of our resistance forces were shattered and we were left without any support. The Americans retreated into Kuwait and into Saudi Arabia. We Shia who plotted against Saddam continued our fight but without the warplanes of the Americans, without American tanks, without American soldiers to cover us. Saddam waited, but not very long. Soon the purge began. Saddam’s Republican Guard came into Safwan and into many of the other southern Shia towns. They cleaned out every man between maybe sixteen and forty years of age. Among them, Ali the Younger was lost. If it had been a matter of a trial or a stay in jail, I am sure Ali al-Hajj would have been able to use his influence to save his second son. But they took him and all our men of fighting age away that same night. We were no match for the soldiers. We never saw them again. Their bones must rest somewhere in the nameless desert west of here. What could we do? We were left with nothing more than old men and women and children.

“I went running into the street hoping to save them. I was the eldest and most experienced of the children of the resistance who remained. But my own father rushed after me. He grabbed me around the waist. He lifted me on his old shoulders with a strength I didn’t know he possessed, he being maybe sixty-five years of age then. He lifted me and took me, kicking, from the street so that I would not get in the way of the truck onto which they had loaded our men. And he beat me, my father, he beat me with a belt and a stick all the rest of that evening so that I could not walk, could not run, could not chase after my heroes into the desert. It was for my own good, that beating, though I didn’t know it at the time. I would not be alive otherwise.”

The cousin then lifts the back of his
dishdasha
and with it the back of the white undershirt he wears. His bare flesh is revealed to me in the soft light of the
diwaniya
. I see on him the permanent marks from that beating, savage puckering lines of scar tissue. The cousin notices my interest. He proceeds to describe the beating in more and more gruesome detail. I grow sick again at the thought of the gore. I force my attention away from him.

I think to myself: where do these paired tragedies leave Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi? Sons killed on each side of the war. Does he love the Americans less than he hates Saddam? Did he support them during their second war, when they fulfilled the promise of the first war and finally overthrew the Baathists?

During the remainder of the dinner, once he has returned to his seat next to me, I want to ask Ali these things, questions more important to me than any planning of engagement feasts or wedding parties, questions deeper and with more specific future consequences than the things that are asked of me by the others in the room.

Who is my family?

What jobs have I held?

What do I think are the prospects for mobile-phone and satellite-dish sales in Safwan?

What do I plan for the
mahar
and the
shabka,
the dowry and engagement gifts?

I lie profusely and wantonly. I don’t know what to say to these things and it seems more important to tell them what they want to hear than to tell them any sort of truth, especially when it comes to my past. I speak glibly, but beneath my laughter, beneath the little jokes I tell, I think continually about Ali al-Hajj’s relationship with the Americans. Where does he stand? I imagine he has chosen a very careful balance, a path between full support and full antagonism. He is a family leader at the height of his consummate skill, a man facing a real issue that has already claimed two of his sons, whereas I am somewhat new to this necessary sort of dithering and waiting and making-no-firm-​commitments.

In the center of the three tables arrayed in Ali’s
diwaniya,
a single musician has been playing, a well-known man from Basra City hired by Ali for tonight’s feast. He has a gruff but pleasant voice, a deepness that contrasts with the sweet love songs he has been commissioned to sing. He plays an
aoud,
strumming it sparingly as an accent between the graveled ululations of his voice. Ali looks at me during a pause between the man’s songs.

“The packages,” he says. “The packages arranged through Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah…”

He does not finish the statement. The room is too quiet, everyone watching us, everyone trying to overhear what we say. The cousin on my right leans especially close, feeling that he has been excluded from this bit of the conversation. Ali wants me to respond to his half-formed question, but I feign misunderstanding. Ali tenses his mouth, forming additional words of clarification, but he waits to speak again until the music resumes, until the music provides cover. In a very short time, the awkward pause ends. The singer intones deeply, like the rumble of a distant convoy heading north, a song of love newly awakened after a long time asleep, a song like a fairy tale. The man’s voice contains the presence of cobwebs, the brittleness of spiders, the thorns of brambles grown up around a slumbering castle. I let my hand float up in front of me. I let my fingers sway in the air and I snap them together in cadence. I show the crowd of men at the tables around me that I am enjoying myself.

While I do this Ali leans toward me. I try to focus on the dancing movements of my hands and arms. I try to ignore him. I don’t want to discuss what Seyyed Abdullah’s packages contain. The cover of the music is enough, yes, to disguise our conversation, but the men in the room will read the conspiracy on our faces as surely as if we were speaking to them aloud.

But Ali leans close, speaks directly into my ear, saying: “I can order the same items for you that Seyyed Abdullah obtains.”

This is too much. He is too close. I have no recourse but to confess to him the truth, to let him in on the plan Seyyed Abdullah and I undertake. Ali has let me come so near to him. I feel guilty that I haven’t told him my truths. I mumble something. I start to say, “Bombs…”

But Ali hushes me, saying: “We are men here, all men. In the circle of men such things are not forbidden. Better, I say, to enjoy your whiskey with dear companions and good food and the
sheesha
than to drink and to smoke alone.”

At this he laughs and produces a silver flask, highly ornamented with the same inlaid patterns and jewels that decorate the
khanjars,
the daggers worn by southern Gulf peoples. He unscrews the lid of his flask and passes it to me. Gratefully, I drink. Gratefully, I feel my load lighten both from the burning of the alcohol and from being absolved from any sort of confession. Ali guesses at only the least harmful part of the contents of Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah’s packages, the whiskey, the smuggled whiskey.