Free One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) by Benjamin Buchholz

miles, a great length of important road.
     * * *
    The year 1980 was a glorious year for Iraq, to be followed quickly by seven years of ignominy. Saddam Hussein launched his surprise attack on Iran in September of 1980 and, at first, Iraq’s armies trampled over unaware Iran like a second blitzkrieg. I had just turned seventeen. I wanted to go to war. I wanted to join Saddam’s Republican Guard. I wanted to be among the first of our conquering armies to set foot in Tehran.
    My father offered Yasin his blessing when Yasin signed up for Saddam’s army. I think he felt ashamed that Yasin had not yet found a calling in life. At least this would be something, a career, a chance to distinguish himself, something better than spending his nights on the town, wasting his money in idleness. My father allowed Yasin to join, but he forbade me.
    “You are meant to do better things,” he said. “And Yasin is a man now, old enough to make his own decisions.”
    When Yasin came home on leave after military training, when he came home clothed in pressed military fatigues with a body and a face hardened from the rigors of military discipline and physical training, I nearly cried with envy. He stood straighter when he walked. He spoke more clearly and more decidedly. And when he looked at my father, he looked less like a beaten child and more like the grown man my father said he had become.
    “The war will be over in three weeks,” Yasin boasted.
    “Don’t be so sure,” my father replied.
    “We have the latest Soviet tanks on the ground, the latest MiGs in the sky,” said Yasin.
    “But they have religion,” my father said, a thing I didn’t understand at all until our initial gains, trumpeted in the headlines of every Iraqi newspaper—capturing the Shatt al-Arab in Basra and Qasr-e Shirin in the north, entering Khuzestan and Abadan and Ahvaz, laying siege to Kermanshah deep in Iranian territory—until these gains were repulsed by Iran’s human-wave tactics. Our papers said nothing about the turning of the tide at the end of 1980, but rumor spoke of the fearlessness of Iranian martyrs who came to the front lines with death shrouds wrapped around their shoulders, ready, joyfully ready to enter heaven. These martyrs would walk into our machine-gun fire until our machine guns ran out of ammunition.
    After Yasin left for the war, we did not hear from him, not by letter, not by phone, not by telegram. For all I know, my father may have received notice of his death or capture through some private channel. He may even have had some communication with Yasin. If so, he kept his information to himself.
    He never again spoke Yasin’s name in my presence.

8

Monday
    I WATCH FOR LAYLA’S VISIT this evening, as I do most evenings. As the sun sets behind the overpass, I wonder if she will return tonight, appear magically when I least expect her. Or, alternatively, I wonder if our customary meeting has been halted by my harsh words, like the breaking of a charm, or halted by Ulayya’s intrusion, like the freezing of time under the influence of a curse. I lose track of the convoys, at least superficially. They become something more like background noise. My little game of counting their comings and goings has been supplanted by other games, reminiscences, and my wandering mind cannot be controlled from thinking about Layla, about Layla, about Layla and Ulayya.
    Today marks the eighth day since Layla’s visitations began. Also the twenty-sixth day of business for me since I moved to Safwan. A good day. A normal day. I sold a few items. I chatted with a few customers. I held off my impatience for the setting of the sun and the shutting of my shop by watching the guard, Mahmoud, as he watched me, watched my shop, pointedly walking down the overpass bridge at hourly and semihourly intervals to see behind my shack, to crane his neck this way and that, demonstrating, with astounding subtlety, his diligence. I am a new factor in town. I’m