Fives and Twenty-Fives Page 6

  “It’s a daisy chain, Doc. A kill zone. They didn’t see it. They were looking at the dirt. We get Staff Sergeant Thompson, now. Gunny stays where he is.”

  I stopped fighting. Closed my eyes and went limp. He eased his grip, stood, and picked me up by my body armor. “Watch your feet, all right? Slow, now.”

  But I didn’t walk. I just stood there and looked at my feet. The lieutenant went and got Thompson while I stood there. I don’t even know who came and pulled me back, but when they did, I saw the shape in the road with a dark sheen all around it. Ten minutes had gone by, at least.

  That was the last time I saw his body. Later in the day, after the Marines had cleared the other bombs, Personnel Recovery Platoon came out to gather him up. Put all the pieces of him in a bag.

  Battalion folded the bomb disposal team, sent Staff Sergeant Thompson home to learn how to walk again, and put me in Lieutenant Donovan’s platoon.

  As the Duke and Dauphine tie up the raft to work over another town, Jim complains about having to wait in the boat. He is concerned that he might be discovered. So, the Duke disguises Jim in a calico stage robe and blue face paint. He places a sign on Jim that reads, “Sick Arab—But harmless when not out of his head.”

  The idea that simple blue face paint could convince the town people that Jim was Arab, not African, is shocking to readers in the Arab world. The scene once again shows the author’s contempt for his countrymen, and their ignorance of foreign cultures.

  Dodge

  As we are deprived of electricity for heat, the night’s chill crawls into every corner of our flat. It has been an hour, at least, that we are without power. Quite a long while for a blackout. This makes me suspect it is intentional. That President Ben Ali has contrived to deny the city of welcoming streetlights. They are hoping to keep people indoors, and the protests small.

  I laugh to myself, imagining Ben Ali at his desk in the palace, with comically large switches labeled PHONES, INTERNET, and ­ELECTRICITY, all set to OFF.

  I have begun to think that my extravagant French coat was meant for a woman. It has strange frills and soft fabric on the sleeves which does not feel masculine. It keeps me warm, but not quite warm enough to avoid the occasional, distracting shiver. Because I do not have my computer with which to record new, important thoughts concerning Huck, I have taken to a notebook. I write by means of a small candle, but it flickers and throws light everywhere but the page. In frustration, I blow out the candle and go back to the window.

  I detect a faint draft of tear gas sneaking through the rusted window frame. The crowds are close now. I hear their chanting more clearly and see flickers of light against the building walls and in alleyways. It is too early for sleep, and without power there is not much to do but listen.

  Perhaps it is boredom which sends me to wander the streets and watch the crowds pass. Or perhaps it is more than a diversion. Perhaps it is a sensible precaution. If the secret police do come, what better place to hide than in the crowd? Better to be out there than in this flat, where the secret police know the Americans addressed a letter to one Kateb al-Hariri.

  Locking our front door behind me, I feel my way along the walls of the dark hallway until I reach the stairs, then continue down each step with a toe outstretched.

  Then I bump into our neighbor on the dark landing. One of the older, bearded men who watched me retrieve the post earlier in the day. My shoulder is buried in his chest, like he set his feet wide apart to occupy the maximum amount of space and force this collision. He must have heard me coming.

  “Excuse me, uncle,” I say, stepping back away from him, “I did not see you.”

  “Much pardon,” he says, making no move to clear a path for me. “I hope I did not startle you. Remind me, nephew. Your name? Fadi, is it?”

  An icy shudder, separate and distinct from the chill night air, radiates from my heart into the back of my throat.

  “Yes,” I manage. “My name is Fadi.”

  “Ah! Fadi. It is good to know your neighbors, yes? Especially in uncertain times like these?”

  He lights a cigarette and I see his face clearly. Lines deeper than usual for a man of his age. Skin worn by rage, now still and creased with the deadly confidence of faith. He searched through the post and saw my letter from the Americans. I am sure of it.

  I step delicately past him, over to the next set of steps. I work to appear calm. “Yes, uncle. Excuse me. I must go and find my flatmates.”

  “Of course. And peace be upon you, Fadi.”

  “And with you.”

  I hurry down the steps, wondering what name I will take the next time I flee, remembering the first.

  The Americans still called me by my real name on the first night I lived with them at their Government Center, but said the word to me as if it were a lie.

  “So . . . Kateb, is it?” an American would say that first night, gently nudging me to admit that I was a terrorist. Like it would be a fun secret to share between just us two.

  Even after covering my face, stuffing me into their Humvee, and taking me away from my friends at the lake, they treated me as though it had been my idea to come hide on their base at Ramadi. My elaborate trick.

  But in those first interrogations I showed that I was not a complete fool, so they brought me into a large room with a tiled floor and too many lights. Old Iraqi men sat on cots in the room too bright for sleep, staring at their feet. Marines guarded every door, but smiled as though we were guests.

  The Americans kept us two days in Ramadi, herding the elderly men and me as old bedouins would their goats. To the dining tent for meals, three times daily. Back to the administration tent for paperwork. Again to the hot, wooden huts for interrogation. Always in the shadow of the concrete walls where no one from the town could see us.

  Bremer walls, the Americans called those. The taller kind. Large at the bottom and thin at the top.

  The Americans asked us all the same questions, always. Screening questions, they called them.

  They asked me if I was Shiite or Sunni.

  I told them that I did not know, and that this had troubled me my whole life. Very confusing.

  They asked me who was my father.

  I told them I was an orphan, which was how my sectarian confusion had begun.

  They asked me how an orphan could have learned to speak English so well.

  I told them the orphanage had a fine library.

  They asked me how I expected them to believe such an obvious lie.

  I shrugged.

  They mused that I must have a fine family, indeed, risking so much in not revealing them. Moreover, they said I was obviously a privileged Sunni, raised in wealth by a father who was almost certainly a secular Baathist, and, unlike the Shiite rabble flocking to the new Iraqi Army, a man with whom the Americans could work. Just give us your father’s name, they said. Don’t be afraid. We can protect you, and your family.

  I said nothing and sat perfectly still, expecting they would send me back to the lake and its consequences. Or perhaps to Abu Ghraib.

  But I somehow passed these tests, because on the third morning they gave me an identification card, like the old men. Signed by an American, these cards, with our pictures and names. Treasure to the old men, but not me. I doubted them, still.

  They put us on a truck after that, where the old men suffered. Their vests did not fit properly. The marines had dressed them one at a time like babies, pulled the vests around their distended bellies.

  They laughingly asked, “Can you still breathe?”

  They laughingly asked, “Too tight?”

  Then they shoved the heavy armor plates in and laughed some more, asking, “How about now? Can you breathe now?”

  Always laughing and smiling, the Americans.

  But my vest fit well, skinny as I was, and I was the same age as the marines. When they spoke to me, they forgot themselves. Forgot where they were. They said things like, “Hey, man. Grab that helmet for me?”
<
br />   “Hey, man,” they said. Like we were all just school chums, like even in my own country I was some sort of exchange student.

  It probably helped that I wore my Metallica T-shirt and old jeans. I kept the Mark Twain rolled up in my back pocket. Everywhere I went, every time they searched me, I had to flip through the pages to show it was just a book, not a way to hide things. Each time an American searched me, he would smile and ask, “You really read this book?”

  No, I would say. Just for luck, man.

  The old men wore their best business clothes, ancient stains showing through those well-ironed shirts. They wore leather shoes, rotting and stiff but brushed clean nonetheless. Wedding bands sat loose on their fingers.

  These wedding bands caused me to smile and shake my head. Acting like Europeans, those old men. A myth they had come to believe about themselves in Saddam’s time, before the wars and the bombs and the arrival of the Islamists had reminded them, truly, of who we were. A silly, desert people. A people whom Europeans viewed with amusement.

  Under their poorly fitting helmets, the old men kept their sparse hair neatly combed. They scowled and smoothed their mustaches. With dignity, they thought. Academics and professionals. Men of skill. Men who had always mattered—and always known it.

  We exited the American compound through a twisting gate and accelerated onto a bridge over the Euphrates River. Once we reached the highway, tucked between the other American trucks, we slowed to a reasonable speed.

  Swaddled in their flak jackets, the old men squirmed. Worried that someone on the truck might recognize them, some infiltrator, they stared at their feet. The truck took a sharp turn and the old men leaned forward for balance. Their flak jackets drifted up and pinched the fat of their necks. Their helmets bounced and slipped over their eyes. We all chewed on dust blowing in from the road.

  Sitting near the tailgate, I imagined pretty girls on either side of me. I leaned back and draped my arms over the bench, pretending to touch them. This helped me to remain calm. I knew what bombs did to these trucks. I had seen that bloody mess. The Americans, with all their guns, could not defend us from those bombs. They could not defend themselves. And who better than we Iraqis who rode willingly in the back of an American truck would our countrymen rather see turned to a bloody mess?

  I tapped my foot, hummed to myself, and fidgeted as the drive wore on. Then I decided it was foolish, all of us taking pains to not look at each other. So I spoke to the ridiculous old men.

  They would not let me, not at first. They turned away, cleared their throats, and looked at the sky. I became angry about this, so I sat up and shouted over the noise of the engine, “Shaku maku! Assalamu alaikum!”

  The old men shifted in their seats.

  I spread my arms wide and shouted in English, “What’s up, my uncles?”

  Nothing. I leaned back and sighed. “We are all doomed. Yes, my uncles? This is true? Should we be bored as well?”

  Someone groaned, so I sat up once again.

  “You agree, uncle? Yes? Then I say we introduce ourselves. I’ll start. My name is Hans Blix. They sent me here to ask if any of you have any weapons of mass destruction. Maybe at home? Maybe in your garden? Even the smallest weapon of mass destruction would help.” Funny, I thought.

  The oldest man, the one with the mustache of pure gray, spoke. He stared straight ahead and asked in high Arabic, “Did you learn English from television?”

  I smiled and answered in English, “Yes, uncle. Absolutely. You?”

  “Maybe you’d like us to think that.” The old man kept to his Arabic. “To me, you sound like a child of Mansour. Was it Baghdad University where you learned?”

  “Why? Do you recognize me? Were you a professor?”

  “I recognize men in the morgue. Until then we are strangers.”

  “Then what better time to introduce ourselves, uncle?”

  Finally, the old man turned to face me. “These jokes, young man,” he said in English. “These are the jokes of a bachelor. The jokes of a childless man. You should keep these jokes to yourself.”

  I nodded. “I understand, my uncle. Apologies.” I put my hand over my heart. “I will think of some Saddam jokes. This is okay, now? Yes?”

  No one laughed.

  The convoy bounced around Lake Habbaniyah, vast and green. The long route around, too. We crept into the shadows of the Taqaddum plateau, the long-forbidden place where Saddam had kept his air base. We turned sharply at the dusty cliffs before drifting back to the river, the green fields, the palm trees, and the reeds.

  Finally, the truck made a hard left onto a paved road, almost hidden, and we started up the maze of bluffs. The river fell away. The engine noise grew frantic and the tires slipped once before finding their grip on the road. A gate appeared and the flat mess of the old air base grew beyond it.

  The eyes of the old men became wide. They were pulled to the edge of the bench and then to their feet, straining to see through the veil of dust and exhaust into the place where the great man had kept his fighter planes and bombs. Where friends of theirs had long ago been taken in the night and made to disappear. Where the Americans now lived, gazing down at the river and their spoils.

  I kept to my seat and stared back over the tailgate to the river winding north, to the ribbons of green holding fast to the bank and to the dirt and the horizon besieged by it. Then the truck kicked, turned a corner, and the river was gone.

  We stopped again for a young marine to come aboard the truck and check our new identification cards. Sweat poured down his pale face, but he did not bother with it. The green canvas of his chin strap soaked it up.

  The old men offered their identification with both hands, thumbs and forefingers gripping the corners. They held the cards just below their faces and peered over like schoolboys, nodding and trying to smile like Americans. All teeth and no shame.

  The marine put a gloved finger on each card while using his other hand to steady the rifle slung across his chest. The old men dug through the documents we had been given at Ramadi for something more to offer the young marine, even after he had passed them, satisfied.

  I waited my turn and, as he approached, pulled the card from my hip pocket and held it over my head, slow and cool.

  The marine tapped my card with one finger, put his hand over his heart, and said, “Shukran.”

  “That is right, man. My name is MCA, and I have a license to kill.” I heard that once on a Beastie Boys album and had always thought it sounded cool. It made the young marine laugh, anyway.

  The truck jumped into gear and idled through the gate. We passed a line of American trucks waiting to leave the way we came in. A dozen cargo trucks and several Humvees. Men, and a few stern women, leaned against them. Tan jumpsuits covered them head to foot. I watched them put on their hoods and helmets and seal themselves inside their armor, wondering what they were going out there to do. Kill someone? Someone I might know?

  Our convoy broke apart. The escorts with the mounted machine guns sped away toward their own corner of the plateau. Our truck turned a corner and arrived in America. Men in desert camouflage strolled with rifles draped across their backs. Fat civilians in collared shirts and khaki pants pushed through the hot wind with their heads down.

  We passed helicopters parked in neat rows behind razor wire and an empty field becoming a city as we watched. A heavy crane unloaded metal living quarters, five meters square, from a line of waiting flatbed trucks and arranged them into neat rows. Carried five to a truck, these boxes looked able to accommodate two beds, keeping the lucky Americans inside well cooled with individual air conditioners. Those Americans without nice, air-conditioned boxes lived in long, plywood huts with a dozen others.

  A dump truck followed the crane with gravel, which foreign laborers, Pakistanis I imagined, raked into walkways while armed guards watched them from all around. The field hummed with generators, compressors, air movers.

  A cargo plane took off. I smelled the exha
ust, felt the heat of its engines, and missed the river.

  Eventually, we came to a cluster of concrete bunkers, isolated behind their own wire and gate on the far side of the base. These deep bunkers were made for surviving bombs. An American in khaki pants and sunglasses opened the gate for us. Our truck stopped and the brakes exhaled. The old men ripped open their tight flak vests and gasped, their lungs for the first time in hours free to inflate fully.

  The tailgate fell away and a man called out in Arabic, “Leave your flak jackets and helmets on the truck. They go back to Ramadi. You get new ones here.”

  I stripped off my gear and jumped to the ground, taking the six-foot drop like a boss, slapping the dirt. The Americans would teach me to say that—like a boss—and laugh when I said it inappropriately.

  “Help each other from the truck,” the man yelled. “If you need more help, wave to a marine.”

  I put my hands in my pockets and smelled the air. I stepped away from the truck, walked in tight circles, kicking dirt clods and small rocks as Americans crowded the tailgate to help the old men down.

  “Don’t wander. Line up here, in front of me. I need to check you in.”

  I searched the crowd for the voice, imagining an Arab in an ankle-length shirt. I assumed he would have an olive complexion, at least.

  “Directly to my front! Have your identification ready!”

  There I found him, with his expensive sunglasses and his marine’s uniform. He looked just like an American, and not much older than me. He waved a clipboard over his head. But despite his uniform, I could tell instantly that he was not a marine. Dark hair spilled out from under his hat, and his trouser legs hung straight to his bootheels. Real marines would tuck the loose trouser fabric neatly away above their boots. And they always trimmed their hair very, very short.

  I walked alone toward him while the old men shimmied over the tailgate on their bellies, looking for the courage to let go.

  “Let me see your identification,” the man said in English.