Baghdad Central (37 page)

“Baba!”

Khafaji holds his daughter and begins to sob. They stand clutching each other in the middle of the room. Khafaji strokes her hair. Mrouj tries to soothe her father. When her legs begin to give out, Khafaji realizes that she is helping him to stand. She sits down on the bed and pulls the covers over her lap. She looks around, searching for something but not finding it.

“Thank God you're back safe,” Mrouj says.

“The doctor says you're improving.”

“I am.” She reaches for a folder, flips through pages. “Let's talk about these.”

She looks around some more, then shakes her head. “Baba, did you move the stuff on my bed? It was just here.”

“I was tidying up,” Khafaji protests. “I put it over there.”

“I had them all organized. Let me see if I can put them back in order.”

She shuffles the papers for a minute, then says, “OK. I found it. You know what they say?”

“Of course.”

Mrouj calls his bluff. “So what do they say?”

“You were right, Mrouj. It wasn't about the sex.”

She throws a Manila envelope onto the bed. “The girls weren't interpreters. This tells of a plot to overrun the Green Zone.”

Khafaji nods. “Good.”

Mrouj holds her finger in the air and spends another minute sorting through the folders before she finally says, “My notes. These are what I was looking for.”

She scans them and begins, “Not surprisingly, it's mostly about your friend.”

“She's not my friend.”

“Fine. This woman who was running a ring. Only it wasn't a sex ring.”

“It was something else. She's into organizational structure.”

“Yeah, but not just in a theoretical way. For her, organization is everything.”

“It's the means to every end.”

“Right. Listen to this. It's from her paper, ‘The Static and the Dynamic'. Here it is: ‘Loose ends turn structure into network'.”

“What does that mean?”

Mrouj laughs. “I don't know, but it does seem like a comment on the plot she was hatching.”

“She's a loose end.”

“No, this woman of yours is a gatherer of loose ends. That's what she is.”

“She's not my woman,” Khafaji protests, but Mrouj changes the subject.

“Baba, it's your turn to listen. The first memos here outline the main goal of the organization during the first months. To befriend and collect information on senior officials and CPA staff. But things changed when Citrone came into the picture.”

“You mean when they fell in love?”

“Baba, just listen! Citrone's money was key. It helped them immensely. But what was more important was that he offered security. The houses were safe. Unbreachable. Untouchable. There was no safer place to be than in those houses.”

“And it worked —”

“It worked as long as he bought a story. Zubeida tells him the girls need protection. She tells him this is a conservative Muslim society and we don't have sex and we don't talk about sex and we kill girls who have sex and so on.”

“So, her houses are protected, thanks to Citrone.”

“Doubly protected. The US Army keeps the Iraqis away. And the CPA keeps the Army away.”

“You could use these safe houses for anything, then…”

“You could. And so could the Resistance. And they were.”

“As long as no one finds out —”

“Baba!” Mrouj says. “This is my story to tell, so let me tell it. Someone does find out, only too late – but that comes afterwards. They start using these houses to move fighters in and out of the city. That was back in September. By then, they had dozens of legit CPA IDs for the girl interpreters. Who knows, maybe a few men were even dressing up in
abayas
and started posing as translators? In any case, by October, they
are moving through checkpoints with ease. At least that's what your Professor is reporting.”

“So who's she reporting to?”

Mrouj says nothing for a moment, then answers, “We don't know, do we?”

“We're lucky she's doing everything the old-fashioned way. Duplicate and saving a copy. Or triplicate.”

“So we have no way of knowing whether these reports arrived? Or whether they were being read, and by whom.”

“No, we know there is an ongoing conversation.”

“An argument. Some just want to keep them as safe houses. Others are thinking about how to use them as forward bases. Launch attacks from the inside. They realize they'd better do it soon, since it looks like the wall is going to close up.

“That was proposed by the missing girl, Zahra Boustani. Here, you should read the last communiqué. It's signed by her.” She hands the document to Khafaji. The language is telegraphic:
General Command. Inside American compound. Key offices and personnel (see memorandum, 10/07/03). Sizeable team, including explosives unit, sniper units. Probable martyrdom. Successful attack = American withdrawal
.

“Ridiculous, but plausible,” Khafaji admits.

“There's more, Baba. But this is what I managed to put together.”

“I didn't expect you to do all this.”

“Maybe if you'd brought me something better to read I wouldn't have.” She grins. For the first time in months, her smile suggests strength.

“Speaking of which, I found Nazik.”

“So why didn't you bring it?”

“Tomorrow. I promise.”

*

The sunset disappears behind dark clouds as Khafaji leaves the hospital. He lights a cigarette. He wraps his scarf tight around his neck and walks with his hands in his pockets. He looks over at the CPA palace, then turns and walks toward the front gate. As he leaves the Green Zone, he lights another cigarette and takes a deep breath.

By the time Khafaji walks up to the gate on his street, night has fallen. He enters the foyer and it's pitch black. He strikes a match to light the way. The electricity turns on just as he arrives on the first floor. Abu Ali opens the door and looks over the railing. He sees Khafaji, smiles and waits for him at the top of the stairs. When Khafaji finishes his climb, Abu Ali invites him in for tea. Khafaji accepts, mostly because he's too exhausted to say no. The first thing he hears when he walks in is the sound of the television. Then Umm Ali's sobs. She wipes her eyes and stands when she sees Khafaji. “God's grace! How are you? How is Mrouj? Are you fine? We were so worried.”

“We're fine. It was all a case of mistaken…” Khafaji starts to explain, but realizes they don't care. They never cared. They're just neighbors. Abu Ali is already flipping through the channels. One shows US officers presenting details of the capture. Blueprints of the house. Images of helicopters hovering over palm orchards. The picture of a table of evidence: piles of guns, grenades, explosives, money. An American officer points at each item with a small wooden stick. Khafaji almost laughs when he notices the familiar red duffel bags behind the table.

Eventually they watch the clip of a bearded man being pulled from a small hole in the ground. The third time they see him, he looks more animal than man. He is half-asleep or drugged. Umm Ali leans forward and starts yelling at the screen, “What kind of man are you?”

She shouts and tears roll down her cheeks. “Goddamn you, Saddam! You couldn't even defend yourself! Look what you put us through!” She falls back on the couch and sobs. Khafaji drinks his tea in silence. The footage repeats over and over in loops. They continue sipping tea and watching as Abu Ali flips through the channels. In another clip, an American doctor in latex gloves inspects Saddam's thick mat of hair, then prods his mouth with a small stick. Umm Ali leans forward and yells at the screen again. “You couldn't even stand up and fight, could you?”

Khafaji finally turns away and puts down his tea. He puts his hands on his knees as if to leave, but the screen won't let him go. They watch different channels as if this were something happening somewhere else to other people. They watch it some more. Each time Jaafar pours more tea, and each time Khafaji sips it. Each time Saddam Hussein is pulled out of his hole for the cameras, Umm Ali curses him. Each time he sticks out his tongue for the doctor, she curses him louder. Then she goes back to wailing and sobbing on the couch. Today is the end of something. Khafaji decides to leave before he starts crying too.

Khafaji says, “Thank you for the tea. Goodnight.” Abu Ali only manages to wave to him. Ali walks in as Khafaji leaves. He greets Khafaji then whispers, “I need to speak to you in private.”

“Sure. Come over, I was just leaving.”

“I'll be right there. I just have to get something to show you.”

Khafaji opens the door to his apartment and smiles when he sees the books sitting there in a pile. He goes to the kitchen to get a knife. When he cuts the string, the books tumble across the floor.

Ali knocks on the door, and Khafaji calls out, “Come in,
it's open.” Ali walks in, his face blank. He looks at Khafaji and says nothing. After a long pause he waves some pages of paper in the air, then drops them onto the table.

Khafaji gets up. He looks at Ali, picks up the pages. They are printouts of pictures. Photographs. It takes a while for him to understand what they mean.

Khafaji is looking at an image of Checkpoint Three. He sees a crowd of people waiting at the gates. Khafaji sees an American soldier pointing at the lens. In the bottom right corner, he reads the date and time of the photograph.

Khafaji looks up at Ali, puzzled. Then worried. In the next image, Khafaji sees the weeping woman. Then he sees his own face clear as the day the photo was taken. In the next photograph, there he is again. Each has its own time-date stamp. Khafaji begins to shake, and throws them on the ground.

“What is it you do for them?” Ali's voice is rough. He clears his throat and waits. Khafaji says nothing.

“Pictures mean nothing, Brother Muhsin. And in any case, I don't take you for a collaborator.” Khafaji looks at the carpet and says nothing.

Khafaji breaks the silence. “What do you want?”

“Patience.”

“I don't understand.”

“Just be patient, that's all, until we understand the situation better. We have no problem with you working for the Americans. On the contrary, we might welcome the idea.”

“I've resigned.”

“I think you should stay on.”

“I said I resigned.”

“Don't rush. Like I said, be patient. We'll give you time before we let you know what we have decided.” Ali turns toward the door.

As he reaches the hallway, he adds, “I'm glad to see you found your books again.”

Then he walks out.

Khafaji ignores the hours as they go by. He ignores the darkness and the solitude, and they ignore him. Outside, a burst of gunfire tries to interrupt the silence, but dies too quickly.

A book lies open in Khafaji's lap. Nazik al-Malaika's diwan. He only had to touch the cover before the lines came back to him.
That voice, your voice, will return. To my life, to the years' audition. Haggard with the scent of a sad evening… It will return with a strange lyrical echo. Filling night and streams with lullaby sounds
. He recites the lines to himself. The words fill the empty apartment and come back to him like someone else's voice. Mrouj's voice. Zubeida's voice. Suheir's voice. And other voices too.

It is early morning when the electricity jolts on again. The explosion of light kills the soft halo that Nazik's language had cast around Khafaji as he sat in the dark. He puts the book down. Water begins to hiss in the pipes, and he runs to the bathroom to fill the tub. In the kitchen he fills the kettle. Then he fills bottle after bottle from the tap. When he finishes with that, he finds a small Turkish coffee cup and walks to the cabinet in the dining room. He removes the bottle from its hiding place and pours himself a shot of Black Label. Two more bottles. Two more weeks.

Khafaji walks through the apartment turning off light switches one by one. First the bedroom. Then the bathroom. Then the kitchen and dining room. He sits down in his reading chair and sets the whisky beside him. He takes a sip and feels the heat flowing down his throat, then spreading through his veins and across his chest.
Once, the tongues of fire licked at
our house and spread and spread, chewing at the door, setting fire to the tassels on the curtains. It consumed our cheeks, our lips, our fingertips…
Outside, a small clicking noise begins to sound. Tick. Tick. Tick. Soft, imperceptible at first, then growing louder and louder. Tick. Tick. Tick. Ssss. Unmistakable. The sound of rain falling from the sky. Drops hitting every surface under the skies. The balconies, the windowsills, water tanks on the roofs, cars, men, and the thirsty streets and the dusty heaps of garbage. Slowly at first, the parched surfaces crack and spit like drum skins. Then louder, more violently, with the slapping, tossing sound of creeks and rivers. The skies open up and a cold torrent drops onto Baghdad. Washing away the dust from the trees and buildings, washing the dirt from the concrete and roads. Below, Khafaji hears men shouting as they rush indoors. Across the city, thunder begins to crash and rumble. Lightning flashes against the window, then vanishes back across the night.