One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Read online

  I realize Layla stares at me. She knows I have drifted away. To cover my lapse, I start to ask her for another song or dance, or both if she knows more, even if it must be pop music. But, as if she has heard a sound in the distance, a call for her to come home, she turns and says over her shoulder: “I’ll come see you tomorrow evening once again.”

  Then she runs toward the north, across the road into the desert on the far side of the highway overpass.

  I finish shutting my shop and I walk into Safwan. I mention Layla to my friend Bashar when I reach his café. He laughs, sits at the table with me for a moment, clasping my hand.

  “Do you believe in genies?” he asks, one eyebrow raised.

  “She’s no genie, Bashar.”

  “Perhaps you need a companion tonight. I know any number of widows in town. So many widows now. Many have been eyeing you from afar—an eligible, educated man like you makes quite a catch.”

  I smile, pick up the menu, scan it to the bottom, and order tea and hummus and falafel. When he brings my food, only a few minutes later, the image of Layla’s pop-music dance disappears from the forefront of my mind. I eat, enjoying the noise of the crowd in the evening and the passing of cars and carts and scooters and bicycles on the main street. The heat of the day dissipates into the night sky, rising above the noise of the town, passing through the tangle of electrical wires and clothes-drying lines that loop and arch over the street, freeing itself at last to journey up to the empty and quavering stars.

  Somewhere a few doors away, from a balcony overlooking the street, a man sings in a fine gravelly old-fashioned tenor. It’s something sad, filled with longing and distance and loss, but I can’t quite place the words. Farsi perhaps, a Persian song. Too much of that language slipping into the dialect used by these far-southern Iraqis. Certainly it isn’t a sacred song, or I would hear somewhere in it the warbled and elongated sound of the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful, Praise Be Unto Him.

  3

  Wednesday

  LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING, this evening, just as she promised. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as a golden sunset reflects its light against the overpass where the highway from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger highway from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect. The convoys do not rest today. Just as always, they slow as they approach the off-ramps and the on-ramps between the north-south highway and the military bypass around the western edge of Safwan. Three Humvees accompany each convoy: one in the front, one in the middle, one to bring up the rear. From my store in the market, at the next highway intersection southeast from the American bypass, I can actually see the faces of the American soldiers in their vehicles. They wear dark sunglasses and helmets. They stare into the desert and into the town as they turn the corner away from me, heading north to Baghdad or south to Kuwait. Each Humvee has a big machine gun and small machine gun mounted on a turret on its roof, manned by one of the soldiers whose body protrudes through the turret opening. Some of these soldiers I name in my imagination, a little game I play with myself to take my mind off the boredom of my work. However, I quickly run out of suitable American names, so I have Dave and then I also have Dave Junior and also Dave-Who-Is-Shorter-Than-Dave-Junior and additionally several Patricks, a Robert or two, a Winston. Maybe Winston is more of a British name? I wonder.

  My feelings toward the Americans are mixed. I don’t hate them. I feel sorry for them, exposed and prominent as they are, noticeable as they are. Giving them names makes them seem more real to me, more human. I know that naming them is something I shouldn’t do. It will only increase my feelings of guilt. I should cling to the various jihadist slogans—Evil Empire, Great Satan, etc. But my mind, so lulled by the rhythm of the days in this market, cannot help but indulge in this name-giving diversion.

  Today marks the third day of Layla’s visitations. Also the twenty-first day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. I sold four mobile phones and fifteen mobile-phone cards with a hundred minutes apiece on them. One man, a Shareefi, inquired about purchasing a satellite dish for his niece’s home. The inquiry calls to mind certain hints that Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah has made, to the effect that I could easily expand my business to sell satellite dishes and other electronics. The extra profit from such sales would be most welcome. The conversation with the man from the Shareefi family seems promising. I resolve to order some satellite-dish sales brochures.

  The guard for the overpass goes into his tent for tea. He is not as tired today as he seemed yesterday and he has spent most of his time pacing from his tent across the intersection and back. At the farthest point in his patrol he is only about fifty meters from my shop. His tent is much nearer, maybe only fifteen meters, perched like the nest of a roc on a little flat space between the precipice of the overpass embankment and the road itself.

  The guard at last ceases pacing. He enters his tent to make tea. As he fools with his tea set, a British patrol approaches, four dun-colored Land Rovers brimming with soldiers. The British bring more soldiers with them than the Americans, wherever they go. The Americans have more stuff; the British bring more people—different styles of war. Maybe all the British are actually robots, which would mean they have the same amount of stuff as the Americans, just more cleverly disguised so that they might fool a simple mobile-phone merchant into considering them people. Meaningless speculation, robots and whatnot. I chide myself and bring my mind back into focus. The patrol moves off the road from Basra into Safwan, taking the exit ramp that passes just behind my shop. I guess they are on their way to a meeting with the town council down near Bashar’s café in the city center. The guard on the overpass does not even notice the vehicles as they turn in succession before him. After all the pacing and watchfulness today, he does not notice. He just continues making his tea with his back turned toward the patrol. I can hardly believe it. It fits with all the other negative things I must report to Sheikh Seyyed Abdullah.

  When the British patrol clears through the market and passes beneath the blue-tiled arch into Safwan, it disappears from my view. I look down. Layla stands in front of my shop.

  “Hello, girl,” I say. “Masah il-kheir. A fine evening!”

  “It is,” she says. “Do you have a son?”

  “No,” I say. “Why?”

  “The honorific,” she says. “I am calling you father of someone. Who is this Saheeh you speak of when you tell me Abu Saheeh is your name?”

  “No son,” I say. “Just a joke.”

  Layla looks disappointed but she does not reply. She merely turns her head to the side as if examining me. I come out the side door of my shop. Expecting her in the shade under the awning, I find nothing there.

  I turn around and look back into the stall, where the shelves now display several styles of phones and headsets, stacks of brochures for calling plans, and new phone cards in their plastic sleeves. A Shasta orange soda on the storefront sill attracts a swarm of bluebottle flies. Layla has vaulted through the window and over the counter. She stands inside the shack. Brushing flies away from the soda, she picks up the can and shakes it. Some liquid remains in the bottom. She looks at me and I nod to let her know she may drink.

  “What will we talk about today?” I ask. I lean in through the sill as though I am the customer and she the owner of the store. “More stories of America and Americans? How about the soldiers you’ve met? Let’s talk about them.”

  She shakes her head no as she drinks.

  “TV stars?” I say. “Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

  “No,” she says, wiping the corner of a lip now colored brighter orange than any henna. “No. Not Americans. Not TV. Not movies or aliens.”

  “Then what?”

  She puts the can on the dirt floor, raises a small bare and calloused foot above it. I notice the same circlet of bird bones and dollhouse keys around her ankle as I had seen the first day we met. Maybe my initial guess at her age was wrong. She is older than ten. Maybe twel
ve, maybe even thirteen or fourteen. Too old for a street urchin. Too old to run wild. Nearly ready for the hijab. Nearly ready for marriage. She is just small-boned. Malnourished. A waif. It makes me feel uncomfortable to see her up close, and to better comprehend her true age, this nearness to womanhood.

  With her bare foot Layla crushes the can, retrieves it from the dust, and stashes it into an inside pocket of her caftan.

  “I want to talk about you,” she says. “About Abu Saheeh. About Father Truth.”

  “Me? You think I am more interesting than Americans? More interesting than Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

  “Yes,” she says. “I think you’re a spy.”

  I laugh, heartily. More heartily than I have laughed for months.

  “Like Peter Sellers?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “The Pink Panther.”

  She frowns, doesn’t get it, hasn’t seen the movie. Probably hasn’t seen the cartoon, either. Not in vogue for the youth now. Certainly not shown on our local broadcast TV, the Egyptian station Nile Drama. She waits until I have finished laughing and wiping my eyes. I feel young for laughing, still suppressing giggles that threaten to surge from belly to throat. But I feel old for thinking of Peter Sellers. I am forty-two. I vaguely remember that a new Pink Panther movie has come out from America, a remake. I wonder who stars in it? Arnold Schwarzenegger? I try to think of the names of other, more modern actors. Tom Cruise? Jack Black? Rufus Wainwright?

  “Peter Sellers is an actor,” I say. “I’ve always thought I look a bit like him, the mustache. Or maybe he looks a little bit like an Iraqi. But he’s no Schwarzenegger, no Tom Cruise. Not handsome. Not someone you’d like.”

  Suddenly a little angry, Layla strikes a pose far too mature for her, hip thrust forward, chin high. It reinforces my opinion that she is likely older than I had supposed. Is it fourteen? Just a frail, bird-boned fourteen-year-old? Her mother should be ashamed, letting her out of the house at such an age and dressed in nothing more than rags! Rags, when she should be veiled to preserve her family’s honor!

  A ray of sunlight catches Layla’s face, the last of the day, now long and trembling as it passes on an almost impossibly flat and honey-colored route over the crest of distant Jebel Sanam, the Camel’s Hump Mountain, then between the western buildings of Safwan. The ray enters the market. It flows around hastily strung electric wires, antennas for the shops, it aches and yearns and tunnels and breathes and darts this way and that way until at last it pierces through my open shop door to perform its final and glorious mission: outlining Layla in gold.

  She’s beautiful, more beautiful than anything I’ve seen for months. Not a warm beauty. Not a beauty that makes the heart melt. Hers is, instead, a cold calamitous tragedy of beauty. I sober in the presence of her, my good humor irradiated as if the belly laugh I gave myself had met its opposite in her slightly troubled and impious gaze. She is not tall; shoulder height for me. She is not yet shaped like a woman; no womanly curves. She hasn’t eaten enough to suitably fatten herself. In fact, she may never have curves. From afar she seems the very avatar of the Iraqi street urchin I initially thought her to be: gangly, dirty, barefoot, wearing frayed blue jeans and an even dirtier greenish knee-length caftan. An accent of blue trapunto stitching on the hem of the caftan shows that it was nicely made, most likely an import from Kuwait, one of the many that flow across the civilian border station to the east of the American military crossing point. Layla has a small sharp nose set between rounded cheeks. Her face, darkly bronzed from sun and dust, merges into a mass of curly hair bleached from brown to the same hennaed honey-gold the sunset casts into the market. Most striking, though, as I noticed before, shining through that grubby facade, are those blue iceberg eyes.

  I wonder if she might be the bastard girl child of an American soldier from their first war here. Not impossible. The war ended with a treaty of peace signed just outside this very town. Not impossible for an American soldier to have met and to have known her mother in that way. But impossible to ask, impossible for me to determine; rude, even, to mention the idea of her foreign eyes in this conservative and hierarchical society.

  “I am no spy,” I say at last, breaking the spell.

  “But what if you were?” she says. “What would you spy on?”

  “Not a market like this. Not a town Allah has forsaken like this, three wars in two decades. No men my age left, except those who were wise enough to flee to Iran during the latest troubles. I am a commodity here.”

  “A what?”

  “So many widows,” I say, remembering Bashar’s hint.

  “Ah,” she says.

  She doesn’t blush or turn away. Like every girl, she has grown up around the conversation of women, around the jokes and veiled references. She knows what I mean.

  “You’re looking for a wife.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t know if I’m looking for anything at all, other than customers for these mobile phones. I know it is time for me to shut shop, though. And time for me to get my dinner. And time for you to run home.”

  At that, as quickly as she had come, Layla leaves. I reach under the awning and unfasten the tin shutter. It swings down and clicks into place over the window. I lock the side door and the tin shutter. Then I take my time walking the few hundred meters of road from the market into Safwan proper. I reach Bashar’s café, order tea and a flatbread with tomato and shawarma and hummus and oil, and sit among people who enjoy the coming night and the noise of the streets and the same song of a hot summer wind, though tonight without the meditations of that lonesome Persian song.

  * * *

  Later that night, I lift the bottle to my lips.

  Memories from the very earliest days of my life churn and boil in the blissful vapidity that soon overwhelms me, flowing outward from the heat of the drink. These are sensory impressions: polished mahogany woodwork; the aroma of cigars and my father’s narjeela, his water pipe, in his private rooms, his salon, his study; arguments or laughter piercing outward into the silence of the other chambers of our big old house, places where I played amid warm shafts of light, rooms where I hid and spied and tried my best to orbit my father in the nearest possible ellipse.

  This was Baghdad in the 1960s.

  Vaguely and strangely, among the earliest of my memories I recall bits and pieces of discussions far too political to belong among a young boy’s formative remembrances: the names of the leaders of the coup of 1968—General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Salah Omar al-Ali, and Saddam Hussein; hot words about a nationalist movement to unite all Arab lands under a single banner; varied expressions of hope and dismay over the possibility that the Baathist party’s control of Iraq might ensure all Sunni Muslims continuing prosperity in a land where the less affluent Shia formed the vast majority.

  More clearly than these things, I remember myself a year or two later, dressed in a starched school uniform: white shirt, pressed slacks, thin straight necktie. I remember that I was a good student, not from any particular award received from school itself, but from the impression my older brother, Yasin, left on me.

  Many nights after school he would be summoned into my father’s bedroom, upstairs on the colonnaded second floor of our big empty house, and my father would beat him with a cane or a belt or with his hand. School wasn’t Yasin’s best subject. At fifteen years of age, he failed his entrance exams for secondary school, a shame on our family.

  On the night Yasin brought home the news of this failure, my governess, Fatima, sent me upstairs to wait outside my father’s room with a warm rag so that I might apply it to Yasin’s back. The beating lasted five minutes, maybe ten, but it seemed like an eternity to me as I listened in the darkness of the hallway from behind the locked bedroom door. I was amazed that Yasin did not cry.

  I knew I would have.

  When the door at last opened, before Yasin came out, I heard my father say to him, “Allah’s blessing that I do not have t
wo such failures as you to scourge my name. Your brother, praise be, has no such handicap.”

  Yasin exited the room, back bowed. I offered him the warm towel but he stiffened, gazed directly into my eyes with his flat black expression, and spat on the floor before walking away from me.

  He didn’t take the towel.

  4

  Thursday

  LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING, again this evening, as is becoming quite usual. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as a golden sunset reflects its light against the overpass where the highway from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger highway from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect. As always, the American convoys pass north, pass south, just far enough away from me that they shimmer from the heat. The wheels of the lumbering vehicles disappear in this mirage so that their chain of chassis looks like a snake gliding over the road. The noise from the convoys reaches me through the mirage, distant and rumbling. Twenty go north. Sixteen return south. One convoy passes over the bridge of my intersection, much closer to me than the bypass. It heads southeast toward Umm Qasr and the big American prison called Camp Bucca that is located just off the road between Safwan and Umm Qasr. The convoy is made up of buses rather than semis. The buses are guarded by the normal three Humvees, one in back, one in the middle, one in front. A short convoy, four buses in total, compared to the normal thirty-plus semis. A different sort of convoy. I make a little notch on the doorpost of my shop, the fifth such notch since I arrived here and began my game of convoy counting.

  Today marks the fourth day of Layla’s visits. Also the twenty-second day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. The toughs from Hezbollah have stopped at my shop, as they have at every shop in the new market here on the north side of town. They are a gang of youths with green headbands, though their leader, Hussein, is close to my own age, maybe forty. He has a hawklike face, the classic Semitic hooked nose, and deep-set eyes underscored with purplish semicircles. He is a short man, though wiry, and the young men in his gang are all short and wiry as well. It seems to me that Hussein has collected a half dozen imperfect copies of himself.