Fives and Twenty-Fives (20 page)

“You speak English,” she says. “Did you speak English for them instead of fighting?”

“Sometimes. But most of the time just for myself. For business.”

She turns away, disappointed.

Instantly, I find myself wishing I had told her a lie. Still, I do not blame this pretty girl for her disgust in me. I have disappointed many others before you, I think to myself.

I woke to waves lapping against the bank, opened my eyes, and looked east. I felt the morning sun on my face, listened to Abu Abdul’s rooster, and felt good, for the first time in weeks, months even. Mundhir and Hani had left, and by the touch of their cool blankets I knew they had been awake for some time. I walked up the path to the mud farmhouse, smelling fire and a fresh pot of tea. Haji Fasil came outside with another pot, this one filled with rice.

“Good morning, Haji Fasil.”

“Peace be with you, Kateb.”

“And you, as well.” I yawned, sat down on a fallen eucalyptus log, and warmed my hands by the fire. “I know you have a stove, Haji. Why this fire?”

“It seems the right time for it. I enjoy a fire. Spring is coming and this is most likely the last cool morning until next year.” He handed me tea in a metal cup.

“Are you sure this is not just a show for the city boys? Are you not teaching us a lesson about our bedouin roots?”

“No, of course not.” He wiped his hands on his long shirt. “Besides, I’m sure you do not need any lessons. You look like children of the Party, to me. Baathist fathers? Yes. I’m sure you boys spent each summer at an oasis outside Ramadi. Living in tents, shooting rabbits for sport. Perhaps, as a boy, you once shook the hand of Saddam? How exciting.”

I did not answer. No need to discuss all that, not just yet. I stared out across the lake and waited for the air to thin. “Hani and Mundhir had gone before I woke this morning. Are they off somewhere with Abu Abdul?”

“Mundhir, yes. He walked down the peninsula with Abu Abdul to retrieve the fishing boat. Hani went into town with your car.”

“Did he say what he was doing with it?”

“Yes. He is buying goods at the market. Trinkets to sell to the Americans as they pass by.” Haji Fasil pulled a knife from under his shirt and began cutting basil on a stump.

I nodded slowly to hide my fury, trying to pretend that it had been our plan all along. “Ah. How much money did he take?”

“All of it, I presume. But this should not worry you. Rich boys can always get more money from their fathers. Yes? Where is your father, Kateb?”

I stood, brushed off my jeans, and ignored his question. “Thank you for the tea, Haji Fasil.” I turned back toward the lake.

Haji Fasil stopped me. “Abu Abdul did not lose his tongue to cancer. You know this, yes?” He pointed the knife at me and raised his eyebrows.

I stopped, turned around. “Yes, I figured that.” So, it was time to talk.

“We are from Halab.”

I sat back down.

Haji Fasil continued chopping basil and spoke as if he were telling me the recipe for his rice. “After the first war with the Americans, Abu Abdul and I joined the uprising. Saddam’s helicopters came and slaughtered us. We had families, then. Wives and children. All dead. I ran away. The Mukhabarat found Abu Abdul and cut out his tongue. I escaped.”

I nodded and took a sip of my tea.

“You three boys were young children then.”

“Yes.”

“Living in Baghdad? Mansour, I suppose? Big houses? Gardens, fancy cars?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “All of that. University, too.”

“And now you are running away.”

I nodded and pushed dirt around with my toe. “We . . . ,” I began, like I, too, had a story to tell. “We are running away,” I said simply.

“Oh, how it feels to run!” Haji Fasil diced faster. “I remember it.” The knife became a blur. “But how will you run without money to fuel your car?” Haji Fasil stuck his knife in the stump and pushed the basil into the rice. “And if Hani cannot make a quick profit on these goods, quickly turn your dinar into dollars, I imagine you will be forced to sell your car. And I wonder what will become of it? After it is turned into a bomb, I mean. Driven into a checkpoint? Left by the side of the road? This all depends on the buyer, I suppose. You Sunnis are becoming more fond of martyr attacks. More like Sadrists all the time.”

“I am not one of them,” I said, the edge on my voice sharper than I had intended.

“You are not Sunni?” Haji Fasil took a step in my direction. “Do you think me stupid?”

“No, Haji Fasil. I am not a terrorist. I am a student. I do not care for any of this.”

“Yes? And what do you study, child?”

“English.”

“You fool.” He went back to the fire and hung the pot over the low flames. “What does your Baathist father say about that? What does your mother think about a son who does not fight for the Party?”

“My mother died long ago. Cancer. Which is how I knew you were lying about Abu Abdul’s scar. My father raised my older brother and me while working for the Ministry of Agriculture.”

“Ah, the son of a simple farmer. How pleasant.”

“An engineer. He designed the Grand Canal.” I pointed to the stagnant ditch in the distance, leeching slowly from the depths of Lake Thar Thar.

“A rather poor engineer, then.”

“He could never finish it. He could never procure the necessary pumps after the first war. The Americans would not allow it.”

“Is that why you learned English? To help your father with the Americans?”

“No. My father wanted me to study English, yes. But only so I could go abroad for secondary school. My father still hoped, even after the first war, so I still learned. I grew quite fond of American books, and of their music, too.”

“And your friends? Hani? Mundhir? What do they study?”

“Hani studies business. And Mundhir . . . Mundhir is not a student. We met him in Karada when we were finishing second-level school. Hani and I organized rock music shows in Baghdad for our university friends. Mundhir was our security.”

Haji Fasil stirred his rice. “May God be merciful on all three of you. You are such fools for coming here.” He went back to the stump and pulled out his knife.

I was tired of him, tired of his knife. Sick of the way it watched, like the third member of our conversation. I stood and took a step toward him. “Have you
seen
Baghdad lately, Haji? Do you think I left my garden and my bloody Mercedes to come here? I have not seen my father in a year, if you must know. I sleep in my dead professor’s office. I work diligently at a thesis he will never read. This place?” I waved my arm over the beach and the lake. “This place, Haji Fasil, is paradise. Look, your family is dead and I am sorry. But I did not kill them. Mundhir and Hani did not kill them. You want Iraq? It is yours now. You can have it.”

He took a step toward me and scowled. I did not move, but prepared myself.

Haji Fasil just smiled and patted my cheek. “Brave boy. Who wants Iraq?
I
want fish. Fish to serve over this rice. And they might have it.” He pointed his knife out at the lake.

I turned around and saw the boat. A little
kitr
with a ratty triangular sail. Abu Abdul worked at the sheets while Mundhir rowed.

“We will have family breakfast, if God wills it.”

And God did. Heaping bowls of delicious rice and fish. And toward the end of breakfast, Hani returned with the car. He came bouncing down the dirt path, wearing a wide grin. The shocks labored under the weight of the merchandise he had purchased. Boxes piled high on the backseat, and the trunk so full it would not latch. He had to tie it down with a length of twine.

I walked out to meet him, trying not to show my anger.

“So, you went shopping,” I said to him through the open window of the driver’s door.

“Wait until you see what I found,” he said distractedly. “We will be rich.”

“Did you not think to discuss this with Mundhir and me, first?”

“Discuss what?” Hani scoffed. “Turning our pitiful pile of dinar into something we can actually use? No. We need dollars for Jordan, and for the long term. This is necessary. And besides, you were sleeping.”

“But what if we need to leave quickly, Hani? What if we need to keep moving west in a hurry?”

Hani looked puzzled. “But what about your father? He might be nearby, yes? Perhaps sheltering with old friends in Ramadi? Should we not try to find him the next few days?”

“Yes,” I said, defeated. “Of course.”

The matter settled for the moment, Hani insisted the first order of business, before unloading the car, was to clean the beach. Mundhir and I walked the twenty meters of beach and picked out shards of glass and bits of rotting wood while Haji Fasil and Abu Abdul cleaned fish and hung them in the smokehouse.

Hani moved about the grounds inspecting the little mud huts to see which were in usable condition. He quizzed Haji Fasil on business: What did customers pay for rice? Where did he get his rice in the first place? How did he create profits? I listened from my place under the eucalyptus tree and began to understand how Haji Fasil operated.

Haji Fasil was a middleman. That was his skill. His little farm was the neutral ground, and from it he could go anywhere, shuttle goods between enemies, blend with any faction. Kurds from the north with rice imported from Turkey sold to Haji Fasil at a discount because they were afraid to travel any farther south. Sunnis traveling from Ramadi with cooking oil imported from Jordan sold it to him at a discount because they were afraid to travel any farther east. Shia traveling from Baiji with diesel from the refinery sold to him at a discount because they were afraid to travel any farther west.

On this sharp edge, Haji Fasil found a way to balance. He could be Sunni, Shia, or a Kurd on any given day. His arbitrage came on the premium of fear. That was his business, and why he had not turned his farm into a market. His profits depended on merchants who could not mingle for fear of decapitation. He took that risk for them.

Hani was impressed, but believed that Haji Fasil had forgotten one important customer: the Americans.

Only after Hani had laid out his goods in the afternoon did I fully understand. The farm was to serve as a branch franchise on behalf of several merchants from Dra Dijlia, selling soft drinks, pirated Hollywood DVDs, and assorted Iraqi souvenirs, all on consignment. At the end of a week, we would repay the suppliers, take our share of the profits in dollars, and decide whether to reinvest our earnings into additional inventories. After the first week, Hani hoped to be self-sufficient, with sustainable cash flows.

Mundhir unloaded the drinks from the trunk and put them into a fishing net that he lowered into the lake, so the cans could be kept somewhat cool. Just before dusk, Hani arranged the movies and souvenirs on display racks fashioned from old, broken chicken cages and staged the racks where they could be seen from the road.

Haji Fasil went about his work befuddled, yet sufficiently amused to let Hani continue. At dinner, he asked Hani how he intended to run his marketplace. “Americans have passed by here many times. They never stop.”

“Yes, but now we have an advantage, Haji Fasil. Kateb speaks English.”

I put down my rice. “Hani, we can travel up the river to Syria in three days, no problem. Or the Rutbah highway to Jordan, if need be. But we are wasting time here. Worse, we are risking our lives.”

“Think of it as a test run for Tunisia. If we can attract Americans to this little beach resort, we will surely have no problems there.”

“I never agreed to Tunisia either! Also, this is a beach resort, now? Last I checked it’s five mud-brick houses on a shitty lake.”

“Kateb! You’ll offend our host.”

Haji Fasil said, “No, he is right, Hani. This is not the Al Rasheed.”

Mundhir returned from the boat with Abu Abdul close behind. “Abu Abdul has tarps. I can rinse off the fish guts tomorrow and rig them on poles for shade.”

“You too, Mundhir?” I threw up my arms. “This is foolishness. If we do business with the Americans, we will die.”

“Actually, I think you’ll be fine,” Haji Fasil offered. “This is a no-man’s-land. We do what we like.”

Hani smiled. “Do you hear that, Kateb? All we need now is a sign.” With that, he produced a can of paint from behind the log. “For which, we need
you
.”

For an hour, I refused. I went down to the water to read my book. Made notes for my thesis. Only when the sun went down and the moon rose over the lake did I go back to Hani, busy sorting through DVDs by the light of his lantern. “What do you want the sign to say?”

He smiled and retrieved a sheet of plywood, lowering the lantern for me. “I want it to be inviting. We need a name that says, ‘There is no war here. This place is safe. Come and relax. Come and spend your money.’”

I got on my knees and dipped the brush in black paint. “You are insane.”

“The Thar Thar Hotel and Casino, perhaps? Can you translate that?”

“That’s what you want the sign to say?”

“Kateb. Kateb, my friend.” He knelt with me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I want you to write what
you
think would work. Be a part of this! Participate, Kateb! This is our future!”