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.
Sujud, prostrating myself on the ground. My body feels stretched out, spent, ready to stay here. Subhana Rabbiya-l-Alla. Glory to my God the Most High. The third, and then a fourth. Sitting again, my eyes half open to watch Noor's brother for direction, and my mind drifts.
During the taxi ride here, I gave my father more of the details of how his car had been written-off. About Sheikh Mumtaz, about Sam's broken ribs and torn spleen. I didn't even remember that there was such a thing as a spleen, I said. Baba said of course there is, Nabil, didn't you pay any attention to anything when you took biology? He must have forgotten that I had almost failed on account of my squeamishness, on account of the fainting. He doesn't know that I used to juggle the teacher's words and invert them, make derivatives of them and add suffixes or prefixes until nothing made sense, so that I could pretend he was speaking some language I couldn't understand. I imagined myself a visitor in a foreign country, pretended I was an anthropologist in the field, studying the ways of the local people. Maybe I have always wanted to be somewhere I don't belong, grappling with a foreign language that I would intuit over time. To be forever ten years old and discovering some new tongue and opening the possibility of never having to go home. Maybe I still want to be somewhere that is not here.
Stupid words fill my head, rhymes like the ones that young American photographer was making up one day while we were waiting for an American press conference at the Convention Centre to start. Back when the very sight of them running our government from within was one of the most shocking things I had ever seen. Qabil. Before the story, before Sam.
Torn spleen, beauty queen, ugly stories made pristine...what did they call that thing black Americans do when they put their poetry to a beat? Rap music. Maybe because it feels like it's rapping you in the head. But I like that it involves improvisation, sort of like a maqam.
Sam said she thought it was a duty to come here and report. Not a duty to her country, but to the truth. I wonder if that's only half the truth. Maybe she, too, likes to be in places where she doesn't belong.
My mind is swirling and I know I have lost where I am supposed to be. I realize that the imam must have been talking about Noor because everybody is saying, Rahim-ha, rahim-ha. God be merciful to her. The imam's voice sounds like the violin Ziad had learned to play, but not entirely well: melancholy, haunting, slightly out of key.
The imam doesn't stop for my lack of attention. "Ali said: Every day an Angel of Heaven cries: *O people there below! Produce offspring to die; build to be destroyed; gather ye together to depart!"*
Miles said Sam would be just fine. A torn spleen, broken ribs, going home soon. Nothing fatal. I think of Sam's lovely body, the bones holding it up somehow broken, and not easily fixed. No real treatment for that other than rest and time, Baba told me when I explained what happened. Not fixable, and somehow, my fault. If only I could have protected her. If only she could have landed on me in the car, instead of the other way around.
And so I remain here, unscathed. Only scarred. From the corner of my eye, in the outer ring of the mosque, behind the columns where the women sit, I catch a bright face. Noor's? I could swear it is. I turn to see it, but it's gone, dissolved into the face of someone who cannot yet be fourteen. Somebody else's light.
At Noor's house, the meat of a large lamb slaughtered in honour of her Arbaain lies on the table. Another lamb's meat is passed out to the poor in a nearby neighbourhood. I don't have an appetite but Baba pushes me, and I manage to eat some quuzi, the whole animal stuffed with rice and almonds and raisins. A dish I used to love.
What would Sam think if she saw this feast on a day of mourning? I wonder if her people, Christians or Jews, whatever they are, prepare all this food when they are thinking about someone who has died. It seems like the least appropriate moment to eat. And yet, this is the way we honour our dead - by showing how thankful we are that we are alive. By making sure the people around us will not go hungry.
Halfway through our taxi ride home, Baba breaks the silence.
"While you were gone, Cousin Saleh stopped by," he says, speaking in a whisper, as if the driver might eavesdrop. "He wondered where you were and why you stopped coming."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you were on an out-of-town trip. That I didn't know more." Baba stares out of the window at the Ministry of Defence, riddled with blackened craters caused by US missile strikes at the start of the war in March. The building, with its high, sloping sides leading to a flat plateau, looks like it was meant to recall the age of the ziggurat, when our ancestors thought a temple built this way could connect heaven and earth. Baba looks at the ravaged building as if noticing it for the first time, though I know he's passed this way before. Being a passenger sometimes forces you to see more than you do as a driver.
"Maybe you should stay with Saleh," Baba says. "You shouldn't stay in the house on your own."
"I don't know, Baba. I'm not sure Saleh was such a great help after all."
"No?" he asks, lowering his eyelids as if he senses that this is an understatement.
"No."
"Oh, and he says his wife is pregnant."
"Mashallah. That's good news."
"I'd like to see you start a family." He senses the imposition. "Eventually, I mean. Anyway, I don't think you should stay in the house alone."
"Oh, I'll be fine. I'll figure something out. If you're really worried, I can stay with Wa'el next door."
"I don't worry. I plan."
"Are you really leaving tomorrow?"
Baba pushes out his bottom lip. "Well, I might put it off a day or two, just to make a few arrangements. Put things in storage. I need to finalize things with a driver. But we are leaving, Nabil. Are you sure you want to stay?"
"I'm sure," I say. My fingers twitch to type out a fuller, more complex response. Instead, I look him in the eye as I never have before. "I'm absolutely sure."
"That's what I'd hoped you'd say."
At home, I head straight for my room. I can feel Amal following me there, hovering at the door. I invite her in and ask her to close the door after her.
I lie back on the bed. She shows me the sea-green sweater she is knitting, a look-alike of an English prep-school jumper, in miniature. She says it's for Ziad's son, who will be two years old soon. Harun, our nephew, my parents' first grandchild. We have yet to lay eyes on him. A funny name, choosing Harun. Harun al-Rashid, who died in the year 809, was Baghdad's most famous rebuilder. He, if anyone, was the great fixer of Baghdad. Maybe our little Harun will come home some day to build us up again. Sometimes it feels that it will take that long, a quarter of a century at least, to imagine a time when we will be rebuilt.
It can be very cold in France in the winter, Amal reminds me, as if she knows this from first-hand experience. This being late May, and already the thermometer inching towards 40-degrees Celsius, I cannot muster much sympathy for them. It'll be a nice colour for Harun, I tell her. In the pictures they sent, he appears to take after his mother, who has green eyes.
"Nabil, did you ever ask her if she would marry you?"
I glare at her a moment, then up at the ceiling. "You know I didn't."
"I don't mean Noor. I mean Sam."
"What? No." I can't figure out how my sister seems to look past my clothing and flesh and bones, directly into my brain. "Of course not."
"Didn't you think of it?"
No answer. My eyes on the window. Anything to avoid looking at her, letting her see any more than she already does.
"Well I think you should have. You obviously love her," she shrugs. "Maybe she loves you, too. How many times in a lifetime do you think that happens? You should have at least told her."
I take my desk chair and sit on it backwards, the way I'd once seen Sam do while we were in her suiteroom at the Hamra. It seemed terribly unfeminine to me, and at the same time, kind of sexy. I rest my elbows on the edge of the chair, my hands on them, the way Sam did. I watch my sister's face, the eagerness in it masking the pale hue she has developed since she stopped going out, since the first bombs fell on Baghdad - in this war, that is. Since our lives were transformed into something else entirely.
"Don't ask me anymore about Sam. This is a day for thinking about Noor."
"But you're thinking about Sam as much as you are about Noor. Maybe more."
"How do you know what I'm thinking? There's no one in the whole world who knows what it feels like to be in my shoes today."