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

how pointedly he avoids mentioning Ulayya. She is an absence in his recommendations. He wants me to notice the absence and mention her myself.
    “Let us not talk of women,” I say instead. “Have you found the movie?”
    “Yes,” he says, looking disappointed. “A friend’s cousin from Kufa has a copy on disk and will bring it down tomorrow. Will you come to my house to watch it?”
    “I will be delighted to watch the movie at your house. I have no DVD player.”
    I tip him an extra thousand dinar, which is just a few dollars now that Iraqi currency is so much inflated. He takes away my empty teacup and, with it, the remains of my dinner.
    After Bashar has gone, as well as all through the time he and I spoke, I keep my eyes open for some hint of the boy who works for him, the boy who visits Mahmoud on the bridge. But I do not see this boy tonight in Bashar’s café.
    * * *
    I don’t talk about the war with Iran.
    I refrain from thinking about it if possible. My father kept me from going to the war for as long as he could by obtaining an exemption for college study. I would have preferred to join the army immediately, like Yasin. I itched to join. But my father’s word was law. He sent me to Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and I took a bachelor’s degree.
    When, after I graduated in 1984, my draft notice arrived at our house, my father did not immediately share it with me.
    He called Abdel Khaleq.
    And Abdel Khaleq told Nadia.
    And Nadia was the first to inform me.
    “There’s nothing my father can do about it,” she said after rushing to my house with the news.
    She had just turned seventeen and her roly-poly face with its button nose now graced a figure dark and willowy. She wore American-style blue jeans, a T-shirt splattered with paint, and an assortment of golden bangles on her wrists. Iraqi culture, like its army, had become a secular place, a more westernized place, especially for wealthy families like ours. All the girls at that time dressed like Cyndi Lauper, all the boys like Tom Selleck in the role of Magnum—Ray-Bans and Hawaiian-print shirts. Thick mascara bled onto Nadia’s cheeks from eyes wept red and swollen.
    When I didn’t respond, Nadia added, “Father says every young man must serve.”
    I wanted to share her feeling of disappointment, though truly—not yet knowing the horror of war—I felt no sort of disappointment at all. Quite the opposite. I pictured myself wearing a pressed uniform like Yasin’s. I pictured myself beside Yasin as we turned back the Iranian hordes, turned them back to the very gates of Tehran.
    I didn’t want to reveal my excitement, so I sadly said: “This will delay our wedding.”
    “Yes,” she said. “Father told me it will be two years until we can reschedule.”

9

Tuesday
    LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING, like most evenings, this evening once again. And this evening I am at least a little glad, I admit, to see her. After two days of her absence I had begun to doubt whether she would ever return and whether I would ever hear the song again, the alien song. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as the sun sets behind Jebel Sanam and casts its light against the overpass where the road from Basra to Kuwait and the even larger road from the port of Umm Qasr to Baghdad intersect.
    Before her arrival, I concentrated sincerely on the convoys, focused my mind on them. In the greater resolution of this focus, each of the soldiers in the Humvees looked less robotic, more alive, more real. I counted my Dave and my Dave Junior and my Dave-Who-Is-Shorter-Than-Dave-Junior. I saw one of my Patricks. I noticed that Winston was not wearing his sunglasses. The color of his eyes appeared darker than I expected: brown rather than the American blue all Americans supposedly have. I think about Layla’s blue eyes, rare in the south of Iraq but not wholly unknown. What freak of nature made them blue? How strong was the gene in her, the gene of