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

starting to show a little authority. I don’t belong to Hezbollah. Need he know anything more? I brought him a box of ammunition this morning, but it is, of course, the good word with the police he really craves, the potential that I might even pay the bribe required to get him on the police force.
    As if to prove his loyalty, Mahmoud again rises from his stool and walks the length of the bridge, checking on me, checking on my store, though I am in the store myself. Could the man truly be so thick-witted? Could he think I mean for him to watch over the store while I inhabit it? I question myself for having struck any sort of deal with him. Yet he can see all four ramps of the overpass from where he sits, a much better view than the view from my shop, looking up from the market.
    Mahmoud doesn’t look at me. He never looks at me directly. He is trying to be sneaky about his attention to me. He now shoulders his Kalashnikov instead of leaving it at his tent or carrying it listlessly at his side. He walks back and forth with it like a tin soldier on parade. As he returns to his tent, an American convoy approaches the overpass from the north. It is Monday, just at sunset. I note the time, seven forty-two. Three gun trucks, Humvees, topped with .50-caliber machine guns in turrets operated by gunners with dark face-shielding sunglasses. Robots, all these Davids and Patricks and Winstons. That’s more like it: robots. Less human. Less need for me to feel any sort of remorse, watching them, watching their movements, recording their habits.
    The vehicles of this convoy shepherd four coach buses. I observe the convoy as it passes. The buses have opaque windows with blinds drawn tight. I let my eyes linger on the vehicles until they are out of sight to the south, heading toward Umm Qasr and Camp Bucca, just ten kilometers farther down the road. After I can no longer see the convoy, I can still hear it, even above the sounds of the market, above the braying of goats, the clucking of chickens, the banter of men, the passing of automobiles, the sigh of the wind. The diesel rumble of Humvees: a distinctive, marrow-numbing sound. I make a notch on the door frame of my store, the sixth such notch.
    A group of schoolgirls in black uniforms passes my shop. They all have backpacks. They all have hair tied modestly with modest-colored ribbons. The eldest cover their heads—some cover even their faces—with plain, modest scarves. In the countryside, here in the south, where the old traditions prevail, girls of such age are considered old enough to marry. I avoid looking at them directly. They wait under the bridge of the overpass, where their families, mostly from outlying tomato farms, pick them up.
    I imagine Layla among them, cleaned, looking proper, looking, perhaps, contrite after a good stern lecture from her father about religion and blasphemy and cleanliness and robots. The imaginary Layla shyly waves at me from amid the group.
    A little Toyota truck arrives under the bridge. The schoolgirls jump into the back, onto the open, sand-swept bed of the truck. The truck turns a half circle in the middle of the road without coming deeper into the market, without coming closer to me. I watch it disappear. Unlike the sounds of the convoy, the sound of its small engine is soon overwhelmed by the noise around me.
    Does Layla attend school? I don’t know the answer. I picture her years from now, that spark of creativity gone, maybe with the sound of an American movie from a little black-and-white TV droning unheeded on a kitchen shelf above her as she completes her house chores, a good wife but nothing like the sparkling thing she is now. What a shame to think ahead on the life she must lead.
    I shut and lock my shop for the night.
    I walk into Safwan and eat dinner with Bashar. He does not mention Ulayya directly. But as he sits with me he shows me a list of other names, potential brides, women I should meet. It is a new tactic for him. I notice