Out of Mesopotamia Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About Salar Abdoh

  About Akashic Books

  Copyrights & Credits

  This book owes a debt of gratitude to Ibrahim Ahmad—

  editor, friend, interlocutor. And it is dedicated to the

  noble people of the Land Between the Two Rivers.

  To see both blended in one flood,

  The mother’s milk, the children’s blood . . .

  —Richard Crashaw, “Upon the Infant Martyrs” (1646)

  1

  Nasif held an index finger to his lips, hushing himself and me. I didn’t see this but felt it, because he did it often, especially when the Afghans of his company got excited. The men who wanted to kill us were glued to the ground somewhere out there. Nasif was a sure shot and I was as good as blind in the dark. Like a lot of people there, his was a nom de guerre—for reasons of security, they said, though I was certain it was of no consequence what false name a soldier used. In fact, we had to call him not just Nasif, but Abu Nasif. But I’ll make it simple here, as there were entire armies of men in the battlefields of Mesopotamia who were called Abu-something. This purely Arabic designation, Abu—father—did not suit the majority of them, though; they were too young to be fathers. So when they died, which was often, the title turned into a butterfly, transitory, and it went on to perch on somebody else who was new to the war and still breathing.

  Usually not for long.

  Together, Nasif and I made a questionable night watch. But those specters, I was sure, were out there, digital contours inside Nasif’s neck-breaking night vision gadget in the vast Syrian blackness. I’d only seen them in daytime, as body parts or dead. At nights I’d hear them. Until now I had done everything to come farther west. Begged mostly. Because I wanted to report on the fight at its fiercest. But my half blindness made me a liability. Not a huge one, because honestly this war was on the side of clumsy. And now I just wanted to go back east again, back to Iraq, where it was safe. This safeness was relative. It only meant that over there you knew who your enemy was. Here, in Syria, it was different. Here lurked true evil.

  I sat back. Nasif, who had been ghostly silent for the last hour, had an affected Afghan accent. Sometimes when we were alone he would forget and shift into his regular Persian of the northeast of Iran. There was a noticeable difference. Yet I didn’t bother calling him out on his act. He did it because the Revolutionary Guards, who were in charge of all logistics and combat operations, were not so keen on just any Iranian getting up to come way out here. There had to be some form of control. Our Afghan mercenaries they could control. There was a command structure. Regular military accountability. There were paychecks and leaves. With Iranians it was different. Pay for combat was the last thing these guys came here for. Mostly they came because they wanted martyrdom. I will try to convey what this means: this fucking hunger for martyrdom that grips a man, or woman, and won’t let them go. I will fail entirely at explaining it, of course, because in the end it’s the one thing that is unexplainable. But I’ll try anyway. Because I’ve seen it, tasted it from a safe but close enough distance.

  I figured that Nasif, who had bought himself a counterfeit Afghan identity and practiced the accent to pass muster, was now in his element here in nowhereland, ready to die and have a street or a traffic circle named after him back home.

  And die, he would. Very soon. Yet he would never be graced with the glory of a thoroughfare dedicated in his real name, or even the fake one. Nasif’s calculations were wrong; he would not become a celebrated martyr.

  In the meantime, while he was still alive, I questioned his sanity.

  And my own.

  The enemy was so close now I could hear them breathe God is great even before they said it; sometimes you actually hear a man say Allahu akbar before the utterance. You can feel the fear in him; he’s pumping himself up, charging every fiber of his wasted life, knowing the chances that he’ll get to you are not very good. Because you are almost as determined as he is. Almost. You feel him and hate him. There were men here who said this particular enemy was just misled, deluded. They said, “Kill them because you have to, but don’t hate them. They are, after all, fellow believers who only went astray.” But being evenhanded is not an easy thing. I hated a lot of things. I hated not being here more than I hated being here.

  This was a dilemma.

  But the bigger dilemma was our makeup, ours and the enemy’s. They had descended like locusts on this land to establish God’s rule while carrying out suicide attacks on civilians just about everywhere else. They were unforgiving in both pursuits, and they came from every continent. From day one they possessed a fearsome arsenal that seemed to have materialized out of thin air, and they went by a variety of names. Western news agencies mostly just called them the Islamic State. I’ll stick to enemy.

  Enemy spoke a Babel of languages. We, on the other hand, who were there to stop them, mostly just spoke Arabic and Persian. The Afghans among us were formidable warriors, maybe by virtue of how much fighting they’d known since the beginning of time. But they were hired hands in the end. They did not get dreamy-eyed about martyrdom like the Iranians did. The Iranians, us, who hired the Afghans for the job and shared the wistful and fragile sounds of Persian with them, did get dreamy-eyed. In fact, there was a degree of dreaminess about the Iranians that sometimes made you think the world would go to sleep one day and simply forget to wake up.

  We were also hitting outside of our comfort zone. Syria and Iraq were deep Arab lands that may have needed us just then to stop the enemy. But they didn’t want us. They didn’t love us. Yet we were there, equipped with some bullshit reason about protecting the holy sites of Mesopotamia from the desecrations of the common enemy. This made us suspect, even to ourselves. And often I wondered if our pretense was not worse than that of the Americans, who variously dropped bombs on the enemy and on us and put it all down to saving civilization.

  At least the Americans, for all their bluster and spine-chilling gunships, did not cram belief down anyone’s throat.

  We did.

  Or we tried.

  * * *

  Lately, the red house had been a favorite obsession for the enemy. By now the initial suspicion that the regulars had for me had settled into a stolid acceptance, even deference. The Iraqi Arabs who were there called me Doctor, the Iranians called me Professor, while the Afghans preferred Commander. None of this was said with irony. We were all getting shot at equally and dying at farcical rates; distrust under these circumstances doesn’t have a place and the mortars and DShK rounds make no distinction. Nasif had come a week before our night watch, asking for volunteers for the red house. The enemy was desperate to get it back, and there was something absurd about this desire of theirs. Even more absurd was their drive to get back the town of Khan-T in which the red house sat. Maybe they thought they could relink with the road to Aleppo from there and pause their recent losing streak. Whatever it was, they were dying for it, which suited us.

  Nasif said, “The red house is empty.”

  The rage in his voice was contained but icy. In that simple statement I saw all the strangeness of this war. What were we doing here? Vultures perched on Mesopotamia’s tired bones. I glimpsed Moalem, who was my age, a hardened veteran of the Iran-Iraq War of thirty-
odd years earlier, wheezing and writing in his notebook. He couldn’t write a war diary if his mother’s life depended on it. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. More than anyone he’d warmed up to me, reminiscing about how the Karbala-4 battle of back in the day was the mother of all battles—though he should have said mother of all defeats. He lost two cousins and three dozen comrades in that bleak epic. Maybe it was there where he was gassed; I never asked him about it and he didn’t offer details. Moalem wheezed and gradually died over these thirty years, yet he kept at it. War for him was a kind of essence. He breathed it. Without it he ceased to be. Moalem too, like Nasif, would soon be dead. I would not be here at Khan-T when it happened. They’d bring me four of his notebooks filled with daily minutiae of war in Syria, tasking me to edit them into something comprehensible for publication. They were mostly banal observations about weapons: The 120 mortar. The 60. The lethal, unavoidable Kornet, which they said eventually killed him. Lot of scribbling about his faith and the faith of his companions in those pages. He wrote about fasting for days on end when there was not much else to do here, about going to Damascus to pay his respects at the Zaynab shrine. He wrote about martyrdom and never let up on that subject. Martyrdom was our shibboleth; we distinguished each other’s sincerity by the way someone talked too little or too much about it. We knew who was lying and who was telling the truth when they prayed for martyrdom. We were adept at intuiting when a guy was ready to leave this world. A certain light, a halo even, would surround him. He became extra kind. His prayers turned heroic. He cried a lot. This was not always the case and maybe not all of these things happened at the same time. But they happened enough times that my martyr radar was strong; I knew when a man was finally tired and felt like he’d done his share of protecting the holy places and was ready to leave this world.

  How could I go back to Tehran and order coffee on Karim-Khan Avenue after this experience? How to contemplate leaving this geography?

  I slowly became, then, the keeper of the cemetery of words in this war. It was work that fell on me because these men thought one had to know something special to be able to scribble stuff down and send it as dispatches. I could live with this. It was not unlike the job of the regiment typist falling on the only dummy who took a three-week course in working a keyboard.

  Nasif’s news about the red house halted us. The words blanketed the room like debris after an attack. Seconds crawled by and I recalled an image of a white SUV blowing up at a checkpoint back in the Diyala Province right after Fallujah’s recapture the year before. Did no one teach that militia boy never to let the driver open the passenger door, since there was a high probability it was rigged? That blast remained on loop in my dreams for the past year, and there was always the voice of someone, I don’t know who, shouting dir balak—be careful—just before everything turned purple. And now that same purple blanketed the room with Nasif’s announcement. The Afghans who had abandoned the red house, God bless them, were tired. A few of them may have been here for the love of our supreme martyr Imam Husayn, but like I said, most were strict mercenaries. Granted, they were mercenaries of the best kind, because they also believed in what they did and they’d been seasoned in the killing fields of their own country. But they would not put themselves on the line without pay. When a man takes money for his faith, he tends to get tired after a while; he wants a decent bed now and then, a warm meal, maybe a flight back to the city of Mashhad where his family are permanent refugees from Afghanistan. This is really why the red house was empty and why Nasif felt obliged to right this terrible wrong.

  Grabbing his AK and taking another off a coat hook for me, Moalem cursed under his labored breath. “Professor, come! I’ll take one lion over ten goat hearts.”

  He stomped out and I followed. Two middle-aged men with enough health problems that the last place on earth they should be was this dogfight. Just yesterday Moalem and I had finally gotten to the gist of it: our prostates. I told him that massaging mine, as the doctor had suggested, helped a little. Moalem laughed, shook his head, and told me to keep my fingers to myself, that there are different pains in the world. There was not a weapon this man couldn’t handle, while I struggled even with the old reliable AK. It took Moalem a good ten minutes just to remind me the proper angle to get the magazine in. “Otherwise, even Imam Husayn can’t help you!”

  Mortar rounds fell near the red house. The enemy could have and should have taken a tank to the place. But their illogical conviction, much like ours, that somehow the tall red house would give them an advantage over the rest of Khan-T, kept them from completely destroying the building. When we got there, for a moment I thought that the place was crawling with them. I imagined them lurking, laughing, waiting for us to walk into their trap. The enemy, they were haters of everything, but they reserved a unique hatred for us Iranians, convinced that we personified sacrilege, the worst of the worst, Muslims who did not follow the path of the Prophet and his companions, who did not even pray properly or the requisite number of times per day. They were especially horrified at our annual self-flagellations for the martyr Imam Husayn and his family. We were idolaters at heart, they thought. Magians. Zoroastrian fire-worshippers. Off with our heads. Their loudspeakers seldom quit reminding us of our special place in hell.

  A creepy silence had suddenly taken hold, as if it were just me and Moalem there while the entire town of Khan-T—sitting dumb and empty and destroyed somewhere in between the main cities of this broken country—watched us; two improbable “lions” who must take a dozen pills and eye drops between them just to be able to see and breathe from one day to the next.

  At times like this irrational worries visit a man; I thought about the cell phone in my pocket and all the digital photographs on it. What if the enemy took the phone and found its pictures? I didn’t say to myself: So what! I’ll be dead by then and it won’t matter. Rather than pay careful attention to our surroundings, I fixated on this useless thought. Moalem, the old pro that he was, was already clearing the red building one floor at a time. He imagined I was doing my job too, which was to hover close to a slit in the concrete and watch for enemy movement.

  The photographs in my phone were an unlikely combination of portraits of Kurdish female fighters from up north and highlighted pages with scribbled notes in the margins from a torn copy of a book I had found at another ruin called Ayn al-Hosan, the Eye of the Horse, in Iraq near the Syrian border. I want to linger for a little bit on this torn-up book, or portion of a book; it summarized not the futility of our predicament here, but the way it actually gave each man his purpose, a shape to a life that otherwise would be meaningless, toiling away at hollow jobs back home. We would all die here, sooner or later. It was what we did. I use “we” generously, however, and when I say it I don’t mean myself. I mean the fighters. They did not have to be here. Not one of them. They came voluntarily, even if they were paid, even if they knew Syria’s bad faith would eventually send them home—if they didn’t fall into enemy hands—in a casket.

  It was a book entitled Remembrance of Things Past. What was it doing at the Eye of the Horse? It defied explanation. Could it have been a prank? But no: someone had traveled from Tehran to Iraq carrying an English translation of a Frenchman’s book in his pack. Why? I had an inkling: once I’d read an American writer who said that you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. In this war, nothing—nothing at all—made sense. People appeared and disappeared, ancient animosities suddenly boiled over, heads were cut off with such fierce regularity that it made you doubt the proper digits of your century, and there were so many sides and fronts and realignments that when you managed to grab a sliver of reliable Internet long enough to read a foreign paper, where they referred to the simple men you marched alongside as men who committed atrocities, you began to doubt everything, especially yourself: Am I a part of some beastliness? Where is this inhumanity they point to? It’s not here, no. Not in Khan-T where Moalem and I are trying to hold onto a goddamn
useless red building.

  I have to keep on telling this story then, like the American writer said. A story about how, among a thousand and one other unreasonable things, I also came across the very last segment of Marcel Proust’s masterwork, near the Iraqi/Syrian border. I could tell from the cover that it had come from a much larger tome. But perhaps in the interest of traveling lightly the owner had cut the volume up, then taken Scotch tape to bind the cover back over the parts he was reading. The cover depicted a drawing of a woman, and what strikes me even now is that she looked a lot like the veil-less Kurdish female fighters I’d photographed up in the northwest when I’d gone there from Erbil. This synchronicity was all the more unsettling because next to many of the highlighted sentences the book owner had included bits and pieces of his own story.

  But at some point this partial book had also fallen into enemy hands. I imagine they were not able to understand the English translation. Someone had written in Arabic next to the uncharacteristically undefaced woman’s face on the cover, Send to Council for research. I could just see the Council poring carefully over Marcel Proust’s baroque paragraphs, looking for enemy ciphers and hidden agendas.

  After taking photos of all the pages, including the highlights and margins, I buried the book at the Eye of the Horse. I had no reason to bury it. But I did. Which gave birth to a whole series of events that came later.

  Now, from my hide site at the red house, I discerned movement but could not tell if it was far away or just on the other side of the line that divided our position from theirs. The sardar’s voice echoed in my ear from two days earlier, telling his troops they needed to hold the line. There were so many lines here I could not tell them apart. Sometimes I thought the lines were just imaginary markers in the heads of the various sardars. Losing them would not make much of a difference and keeping them just piled on the casualties. For a moment I felt unbearably alone, in a red building that may or may not be attacked any moment, with a weapon I was not comfortable using, and a retired soldier who should be home with his family and an oxygen tank. I called to Moalem who answered immediately and came down.