War Porn (15 page)

Yet what good was hardening your heart when they'd soon be huddled together praying for mercy? What did you gain by adding trouble to trouble? It was almost enough to make her want to forgive him—but the thought of his smug smile enraged her all over again, and she reminded herself that to show weakness with men was to submit to endless trampling.

“What are you doing?” she yelled at Nazahah. “Cut thin, thin! Shred the cabbage, don't chop it!”

“Yes, mother,” Nazahah said. She knew Mother wasn't really mad, not at her, anyway. Thurayya doted on her daughters, and her corrections usually took the form of good-humored exasperation or gentle scolding. Only in the most extreme circumstances did she lose her temper, and when that happened there was no mistaking. Mother would volcano, throwing plates, screaming, turning the house topsy-turvy until the violator collapsed in a shamble of tears. The last time that happened was when Maha got caught with a French magazine—Heaven knows where she got it—full of shirtless male models. “That was so worth it,” Maha said after, her face still puffy and red. They had, Nazahah couldn't deny, been exceptionally beautiful men.

Nazahah often enough found herself a target for her mother's irritation, but never her rage. She did what she was told, said please and thank you, and hardly argued with anyone. Her eldest sister, Warda, was well behaved, too, though stubborn as a mule, very much in her mother's mold. It was poor Maha who was doomed to be the sower of strife: daring, cruel, walking through life with a feather on her head, always fighting the flies in front of her face. She terrorized Nazahah, who cowered before her older sister like a beat dog.

Nazahah's comforts lay elsewhere. On turning thirteen, she'd fallen in love with God, and since then she'd floated through her days awestruck, contemplative, the world around her a tremulous vision. Every thing, every moment quivered with weight and substance, perfection, symmetry, and beauty, since all was the will of God, the one and only: every thrush, every wren, every cloud, every fear, every slice of cabbage, every word her mother shouted, every shifting emotion vibrating though the house, even the coming war. All. Her only problem was reconciling Michael Jackson, whom she understood to be somehow vaguely yet irrevocably not halal, possibly even haram. She would not let him go, however, and solved her conundrum by ignoring it. Michael and Fatimah sat side by side on her tiny shrine, holding the Prophet between them in harmony.

“Wake up,” her mother snapped, slapping the table. “You'll cut your fingers off.”

Nazahah smiled at her mother.

“When you finish the salad, go see if your brother-in-law needs anything out front,” Thurayya said. “I'm going upstairs to check on your sister.”

Maha was Thurayya's lamentation. She was too pretty by half, for starters, and she knew it. Then her temper! And the airs she put on! Thurayya's plan was to get her married as quick as possible. They needed someone from the right kind of family, though, someone attractive, with good prospects
. . . 
and young. Maha was picky—haughty—frankly, impossible. There was no shortage of available men, but the problem was that they needed a real Prince Charming, someone handsome and brave, sweet enough to treat her well but strong enough to control her. God willing!

Thurayya went up to the girls' room, where Maha lay on her bed listening to a bootleg CD of Brandy's
Never Say Never
and flipping through an Egyptian movie magazine. She watched her daughter daydream, wondering where she got her pride and her insolence, but loving her for it too. Maha would be a queen someday, when she found her prince. Thurayya smiled, then said, “Daughter.”

Maha flipped the pages of her magazine.

“Maha! Go downstairs and help your auntie with lunch.”

“But Mom . . .”

“No buts! Downstairs!”

Thurayya watched Maha stomp down the stairs, then circled back to her bedroom, where Mohammed was showing Qasim how to work his AK-47. Qasim held the weapon's barrel awkwardly in his crudely bandaged left hand and struggled to pull back the charging handle. The weapon kept slipping from his grip.

“Here,” Mohammed said, “put the barrel on your foot and let the weapon pull down—not on the ground! On your foot. If you get dirt in the barrel, it'll blow up in your face.”

Qasim tugged on the charging handle, and this time it slid back and clacked home. Mohammed found himself wishing, again, as he often did, that the boy had served his time in the military instead of getting the deferment Faruq had wrangled for him.

“Are you staying for lunch, my dearest husband, great and wise lord of the home?” Thurayya asked.

Mohammed frowned. “No. Is Ratib still working on the well?”

“I don't know anything about wells, my noble sheikh of infinite courage. I'm just a silly woman who isn't even given due respect in her own house.”

Qasim turned in time to catch Thurayya's cold glare as she left.

“We need to talk,” Mohammed said to Qasim. “But first we have to finish cleaning out the office. Go start up the van.”

Qasim rode the bolt forward on the Kalashnikov and handed the rifle to his uncle, then headed downstairs. So he'd snapped at her—so what? Was he supposed to feel bad now, or pretend women got to boss him around? What could she do about his stupid hand? It was fine. Okay, it was oozing pus, developing a yellow crust around the hot, raw wound, and it hurt more every day. It might even be infected, but he was sure it would heal soon. A little bite, nothing he couldn't handle. He certainly didn't need a gaggle of women honking over him.

He started the van and slid his bandaged hand over the wheel, letting himself slide into the pain aching up his arm. He would master the pain. That would be manly.

Mohammed got in the passenger side.

“You can drive with your hand like that?” he asked.

“Yes, Uncle. It's nothing. The bandage is just to keep it clean.”

“Let's go, then. First stop is Zubair's, then we'll go get Othman.”

Qasim honked the horn and Siraj ran over and opened the gate, then stood aside while the van backed into the street. As they drove off, Mohammed noticed a black Mercedes pull out and follow them.

Mohammed had two offices, one in the Karrada, where he met with clients and handled paperwork, and one in a warehouse out in Baghdad Al-Jidida, where he kept the trucks and machinery. Earlier that week, they'd gone out to the warehouse and secured the outer wall with barbed wire and spikes, bricked up the windows, and locked up the equipment. Mohammed's chief foreman, Yaqub, lived near there; he promised Mohammed he'd keep an eye on things. The Karrada office, on the other hand, Mohammed had decided to empty. He, Othman, Qasim, and two employees with a pickup spent the afternoon hauling out all Mohammed's files and personal effects and as much furniture as they could manage, then securing the building.

Qasim laid mortar, bricking a window, while Mohammed sat at his desk going over outstanding contracts. Othman double-checked the file cabinets to make sure they were empty.

“I think,” Othman said, “it's a great opportunity. I think they really mean democracy.”

“Nonsense,” said Mohammed, not taking his attention from his papers.

“It'll be like Russia, I think.”

“Russia, huh?”

“Iraq's a great nation, my friend, but we sow and weep under the lash of a tyrant. Our wheat is salted with tears of oppression. After the war, we'll be free to farm how we like. Our fields will sprout with joy.” Othman's fine, soft hands spread to mimic tears falling on the wheat, then sprang up to show the new harvest.

Qasim thought the poet a silly old man, but Othman had been Mohammed's best friend since they were boys. The two men were oil and water, Harun al-Rashid and Jafar,
Don Panza and Sancho Quixote. Whereas Mohammed was an engineer, a pragmatist, and a nationalist, Othman was a poet, romantic and cosmopolitan. Whereas Mohammed had never left Iraq, Othman had traveled to Cairo, Paris, and Moscow, and had spent two years in exile in Beirut. Mohammed built houses and offices; Othman wrote poetry and had translated Hart Crane's
The Bridge
and Lautréamont's
Les Chants de Maldoror
. Mohammed was broad-shouldered, with a square, handsome face that in a good light looked like Omar Sharif's; Othman was dumpy and pear-shaped, with a long, sloping nose—he looked more like Nour El-Sherif. He wore thick glasses, through which he peeped out at the world with eyes that always seemed to be laughing.

“You're a poetizing fool,” Mohammed said, slamming down his pen and sitting up. “Iraq is a great nation
because
we have a strong leader. You'd rather have madness, revolution after revolution, like the sixties? You'd rather a plague of crusaders? Because that's what they'll be, Othman, these Americans, just like the British. A plague. They're going to come in like pharaoh and put their foot on the neck of Iraq.”

“They'll take Saddam's foot
off
the neck of Iraq, is what they'll do,” Othman said, “and you'd see that if you weren't so old and set in your ways.”

“Set in my ways? Listen, brother, I know you're an ignorant old skirt chaser who doesn't know from a handful of lentils, but you must have been taught a little of your nation's history.”

“I know ‘His watchdogs have corrupted the land,'”—Othman recited, quoting his teacher al-Bayati—“‘stolen the people's food, raped the Muses, raped the widows of the men who died under torture, raped the daughters and
widows of his soldiers who lost the war, from which, like rabbits in clover fields, they had run away, leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants . . .'”

“Then you know we're a nation of peasants,” Mohammed interrupted, setting his contracts to one side. “A nation of ignorant hill people in the north, dull-minded farmers in the south, and superstitious tribesmen in the west. We are, like most Arab nations, a backward and troubled people. And yet we've modernized more than any other. We beat the Iranians, we beat back the Americans, we've kept our nation together and hauled our peasants screaming and wailing into the twentieth century. And how, my brother, did this happen?”

“The curse of oil?”

“No. By having a strong leader. A strong leader who believes in
unity
, who believes in a powerful, secular state—a
nation
—that can stand up to the Zionists and lead the Arabs into the future. We're an Islamic
civilization
, not merely a
people
or a
religion
, and it takes a strong leader to keep us moving together. Without Saddam, Iraq will shatter into a thousand pieces.”

“I read Aflaq too, my educated friend.” Othman perched his wide rump on the edge of Mohammed's desk, offered Mohammed a cigarette from his pack of Miamis, then lit one himself. “Of course we must put sectarian squabbling behind us. On that, I walk with you today and tomorrow and the day after. But for our Father Leader and Daring and Aggressive Knight, the Hero of National Liberation, unity was always only a word. Four thousand times, he played the Kurds against the Sunnis and the Fivers against the Twelvers. He doesn't heal the rifts between Muslims—he manipulates them. Whereas in a democratic Iraq, an Iraq where every voice can be heard, with the Americans here to help . . .”

“To take our oil, you mean. What does your Al-Bayati write? ‘The hourglass restarts, counting the breaths of the new dictator . . .'”

“They want us to modernize. You see how they are with the Persians. With the Wahhabiyya.”

“Speaking evil from the left side of their mouth while flattering out of the right. Denouncing the mujahedeen with one hand and shoveling cash at them with the other. Yes, I see. The Zionists and the Persians have always conspired together.”

“You're too cynical. You always have been. You've always been too willing to accommodate yourself to power.”

“You didn't seem to mind much when I used my ‘accommodation' to get you out of jail.”

“For which I am forever grateful, my friend,” said Othman. “You saved me.”

“And I would do it a thousand times. But to save you, I had to have power. Brother Othman, listen: power must be held. It must be used. Listen: this has
nothing
to do with democracy. We're under attack from the Zionist crusaders because we stood up against them—because bin Laden stood up against them. It's the same as it was with Kuwait. Someone dares to stand up to America, and they're going to punish whoever they can put their hands on. Listen: Saddam is the only thing that has kept our nation together for the last thirty years. When the Kurds took up arms against us, who stood against them? When the ayatollahs started rioting and rebelling even here in Baghdad, who stood against them? When the Persians bombed our cities and cut us off from the Shatt al-Arab, who stood against them? And when the Kuwaitis started murdering innocent Iraqis and then that snake George Bush, who I spit on, invaded our lands and butchered our brothers, when the entire world lined up to see us broken—who stood against them?”