Out of Mesopotamia Read online

  I pointed down the road.

  Moalem prayed under his breath and looked at me. I knew that look. It’s too late for us, it said. There was some tenderness too to that face. A feeling of finality. It was as if we were underwater and I was hearing a voice bubbling up to say that they have a BMP and they’ll probably be here in a few minutes. Moalem started to talk rapidly into the walkie-talkie, giving gera, positions, that I didn’t understand, and before long our batteries were pounding near the BMP. The tank stopped, like an animal unsure of itself, then scurried and disappeared behind a building. But the little figures kept coming. I had long run out of disposable contact lenses for my left eye, which could see nothing without them. As a result, my right eye tired easily and would burn when it had to focus for longer than a minute. This was not going to be a heroic death; it was going to be a blind one. And I was still thinking that I didn’t want the photos of the Kurdish women falling into enemy hands. They were our posters of this war, those unsullied faces carrying rifles while smiling into my camera and a thousand other cameras that had captured and beamed their images around the world. These women humored me even though they knew sooner or later they might have to fight us too, like they fought the Turks and the Syrians. They were beloved by the world. They were darlings. There was a freshness to their gazes and to their perfect suffering that was completely disarming. They were everything we were not. They were beautiful. They were angels.

  A wave of nostalgia and self-pity washed over me and I started to take my phone out to erase those photographs.

  Moalem shook me. “What are you doing?”

  I saw my confusion mirrored in his face. I want to delete the darlings of this war. I want to save them from the unforgiving hands of our enemy. Moalem pushed me across the room, telling me to shoot in short bursts.

  “We have to let them know someone’s here and they’re not coming to an empty building.”

  He ran to the other side and proceeded to do the same. It was a poker game and each side bluffed miserably. I started to shoot from my position, squandering shots so quickly that I muddled through two magazines. The little figures were still out there. But we’d slowed their progress. Moalem took turns shouting into his wireless while continuing to take aim. Why had this traveler brought Marcel Proust with him to the war? I clicked in my next-to-last magazine and started talking to myself. Moalem looked irritated with me.

  “Because he thought that here, right here, he’d finally have time to read the whole damn book!” I screamed.

  “What?” Moalem shouted back under the measured snap-snap of his firing.

  I wished that I had at least read all the highlighted parts of the book. But I’d left that task for when I thought I’d have more leisure time. Maybe when I next went back to Tehran for a break.

  Moalem now thought he saw the BMP rear its head from behind a different building. Another set of shouts into the walkie-talkie. More guns pounding the space between us.

  “They are scissoring us!” Moalem yelled. It was an expression I’d heard men say countless times, and there was something satisfying about the notion of getting scissored. It had a certain finality to it. We were about to get totally cut off from our rear.

  I had no more ammunition.

  And so I daydreamed:

  It’s another one of those holy evenings in Tehran, a south side working-class neighborhood where a childhood friend stirs enormous pots of food to give to the poor. His relative, a no-nonsense Quds commando—arguably the most-feared commando unit, besides the Israelis, in the Middle East—asks me politely not to take pictures of him, then tells me about the last time he was scissored. He recounts it with a straight face while his two little girls hover at his knees. Between the realization that every last man in his unit is dead and that he has run out of ammo (as I have now), and the three weeks he spent in a coma in a Moscow hospital bed, there is an entire arc of a life. This man does not live because he’s highly trained—if you’re out of ammo you’re out of ammo. He lives because he’s lucky and the rest of his unit that night wasn’t. Yet he still would not know what PTSD was if you sat him in a classroom and tried hammering it into him. It doesn’t enter his world. It is as if he’s taken an anti-PTSD vaccine that makes him impervious. We both know that soon he’ll be returning to the Syrian nightmare, but we don’t talk about it. PTSD is not an option he was ever offered; it does not apply to the calculus of his life. Getting scissored for him is just another thing.

  Back in Khan-T, a figure came right out into the open, and from the way he stood next to an ugly, dilapidated faux-Greek column, even I could tell he was aiming an RPG at us. I prayed that Moalem would shoot the son of a bitch already. And Moalem did—but not before the departed cleared his round. I didn’t hear a blast, just the sound of something solid hitting somewhere above us and out of my field of concern. A dud? I glanced behind us and saw that Nasif had finally arrived with ten of the Afghans. They fanned out across the red building. Carrying a heavy 12.7 mm, Nasif looked me hard in my one good eye and barked, “Feed me rounds, Ostad, Professor!”

  The dance lasted less than ten minutes. It was deafening, like always. And when it was done, all I knew was that something in our dynamic had changed. The plucky, formidable Afghans who had been guilted into coming back to their positions were kissing Moalem. Then they were doing the same to me. Meanwhile, there were three more dead bodies in no-man’s-land.

  The BMP retreated but survived intact.

  And I, who didn’t have the patience to read Marcel Proust’s beautiful book, would learn in the days and weeks and months ahead to content myself with those highlighted passages. In one passage, for instance, the writer observes how some men confront death with complete indifference not because they are more courageous but because they are lacking in imagination.

  Later, I’d look back on this moment at the red house as a rite of passage. Moalem had never had much imagination, and during this half-hour interval mine was also mostly—but not entirely—suspended. Otherwise, Moalem and I would both be dead. None of the young men kissing me now had an inkling of any of this. They only knew that somehow we—two old-timers pushing middle age—saved the day by just being here. They needed to believe in our courage to believe in their own. It was an acceptable fiction.

  Afterward, Moalem came up to me, smiling. “Saleh, when I finally have the good fortune to be martyred, you must take all of my notebooks. Qabul? You accept?” I nodded at what he thought was his generosity. What he was really doing was taking his first cautious steps toward inevitable martyrdom. He had set his feet in that vortex and there was no turning back from it.

  * * *

  I’d begun wearing diapers. I did not want to be in a situation in Syria where I had to piss and couldn’t. Nasif, who was driving us to Damascus, had caught me with my pants down one day when I was relieving myself. It was sniper territory, with a grown man’s diaper hanging in the balance. He pretended not to see it and said nothing because what is there to even say? But the whole thing made us both uncomfortable and I felt even worse for Nasif, who had to act as if there was nothing unusual happening.

  In Damascus we were given plenty of rope, even though there were entire neighborhoods that remained off-limits. Two wrong turns could still be fatal. This put us on slight edge. And Nasif suggested that we go to the Zaynab shrine first, then he’d drop me off to catch a ride to Beirut. I’d first been to the Zaynab just before the war began. With a woman whose love bled us both. When she took my photograph by the citadel, I knew I was going to leave. The realization came at a moment of perfect beauty, as the Damascene sky shifted at sunset to a deeper shade of blood orange that made partings not just possible but necessary.

  It was this same Damascene sky that I now glimpsed again after so long. I looked to the side of the road that lead to the Zaynab, not nearly as crowded as that first time, and saw a group of young men, Iranians, sharing some bread and cheese next to one of the shrine’s many trinket stands. I knew th
eir kind. They were me. And Nasif. They’d sold the shirts off their backs and somehow made it way out here to be Defenders of the Faith and Protectors of the Holy Places. But nobody let them into the inner sanctum of bloodletting. They didn’t have the right connections with the Guards, or lacked the skills, or were just plain unlucky. They’d come here because they had nothing else going on. They came because there was something to be said about defending the faith even if, like me, you haven’t much faith to begin with. I wanted to go over and kiss them. Martyrs by default, martyrs because of the poverty of their options, they were here to be immortalized as heroes. They wanted to enter the chronicles of sacrifice.

  There’s a passage in his book where Marcel Proust calls such men fictions in the midst of daily life.

  Pointing at them, I said to Nasif, “Can’t you take them to Khan-T with you?”

  Without even looking their way, he dropped the Afghan accent and spoke soberly: “I don’t have the authority.”

  “Who gave us the authority to be here in Syria? We’re trespassers and you know it.”

  “Don’t talk like that. This is war.”

  “That hasn’t escaped me. Which is why we need the boots and the bodies.”

  We had become brothers of sorts, but he knew that I knew he was powerless to take those boys in. If he did, he’d have to do it for every caravan of lost souls coming here to have a go at the enemy. He didn’t have the logistics for it, never mind the authority.

  “I am tired of this war, Saleh. I want to go home, get married, settle down. I don’t get paid nearly enough to do this. And even if I did, money isn’t the reason I came here.”

  I was shocked. I’d thought he was counting down his days on earth.

  “Why did you come then?”

  He was in love.

  “With an Afghan girl. I thought if I joined the Afghan units here, I’d either die, which would be a blessing, or come back a real man. Then no one would be able to deny me the woman I want.”

  “They would not let you marry her?”

  “Worse. She got asylum and moved to Sweden with her family. Can you believe it? Sweden! I don’t even know where that is. I mean, I know—but what is Sweden to me? It may as well be another planet. But you can help me. This is why I am telling you now.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a small wooden prayer bead. “It belonged to my best friend, Asghar. We were together at Samarra. Please give it to his wife.”

  Unconvinced, I turned to him. He looked like a kid who wasn’t telling the entire truth. I reminded him that he’d been in Syria for more than six months. Asghar, from what I recalled, had taken a bullet in the head at Makhoul, in Iraq, a year ago.

  “Why give me this now?”

  “Because I want you to go khastegari and ask for her hand for me.”

  “You want to marry the martyr’s wife?”

  He nodded.

  “What about Sweden?”

  “I don’t know any Sweden.”

  “Why her?”

  “She is my best friend’s widow. It would be like marrying my brother’s widow. It is the right thing.”

  “This logic leaves me unmoved. But all right.”

  “I am grateful. I am your slave.”

  “But what if they don’t give her to you?”

  “She’s a widow. They might or might not. And, well, this is why I am asking you. You are honorable. They read your stories about the martyrs in the paper.”

  I did not bother telling him that half the outlets I’d written for over the years were long out of business and had nothing to do with martyrs.

  He went on: “They know you are a friend to us. They cannot say no to your face.”

  “And the widow? What if she doesn’t want it?”

  “She wants it.”

  He said this turning away, embarrassed. And I knew that there was a love story here somewhere, but one so twisted that to bring it to the tip of the tongue was to commit sacrilege. This man had probably seen the widow once or twice. At most. Perhaps on leave with the martyr when they served in Iraq together. Now, in the absence of his dead friend, there was only him left and the widow.

  He gave me an address in the Abdulabad District in south Tehran.

  “Nasif, you are still a soldier, serving in one of the most dangerous places on earth. What if you make her a widow twice over?”

  “Then she will be twice blessed.”

  Bullshit! None of us ever thought about how these once-, twice-, thrice-blessed mothers, wives, daughters, felt when they went down the street to buy bread in the morning. Ours was the laziest of paths, simply to die; theirs was calamity, followed by the backbreaking grind of daily life. Ours was fantasy; theirs raising that fatherless boy who’ll grow up to be the spitting image of his father.

  I stuffed the prayer bead, which smelled vaguely of Egyptian musk, into my pocket and punched the widow’s address into my cell phone.

  2

  The next fortnight I spent drunk, my only contact with reality the scene from the living room window where it seemed every five minutes scavengers would dip into the large trash container in front of the synagogue, and of course the synagogue folk themselves who came every other day in their skullcaps in the early morning to take loving care of the trees and flowers of their holy place. It was probably some special time of year for them as they arrived even earlier than usual and I could hear the haunting cadence of their utterances as the sun rose above the filthy sky of Tehran with the old, grime-ridden stock exchange building in the distance. The telephone buzzed ceaselessly for the first few days but I did not have the heart to answer. The war had ruined me, and the simplest tasks were beyond me now. Washing clothes, getting food, even making tea seemed like chores that had to be negotiated in my head before being discarded. There was no agency on my part. I had gotten used to channeling daily work into rituals of prayer. The more I remained unsober, the more I prayed, believing that in this way I was staying true at least to the men I had left behind across two borders in Iraq and Syria.

  Until finally one day a number flashed on the screen that couldn’t be avoided: it just said 1234.

  I’ll name him H, short for Handler. He was a heavyset man. Kind, despite his job. A man who couldn’t fully wrap his will around being a state interrogator. It wasn’t his style. Mostly when he called me in we’d discuss literature. He didn’t understand why you couldn’t put literature in the service of some greater good, like teaching young men to be more devout or more committed to the state. There was a purpose to everything in his accounting. A guy didn’t write stories just for the sake of writing them; they had to strive for something bigger, more meaningful. So our “literary interrogations” ultimately had a ceiling. There was a point beyond which we could not speak to each other. And that was all right. In the grand scheme of things H was still preferable to a lot of people in Tehran. He didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was. An agent of the state. His job was to make sure you didn’t stray far from certain parameters. He didn’t want to have to recommend that you be blacklisted. H wasn’t that kind of person. He was, ultimately, a good man. A good man in a questionable job who at least read all of my writing, and diligently. What more can a writer ask for?

  “Saleh, if you go to Syria again without permission, I’ll have to take away your journalist’s license. Your clearance does not extend beyond Iraq.”

  “What’s the difference? There is war in both places. In fact, it’s the same war, isn’t it?”

  “There are rules. And rules of engagement.”

  My body, sore from the drinking marathon, shook involuntarily. He fished a shopping bag from a brown briefcase and then took out something from the bag and slapped it on the table. It was the Marcel Proust I’d buried in the ground at the Eye of the Horse.

  “You want to explain this?”

  “It’s a book by a great writer.”

  “You’ve read him, this Marcel Proust?”

  “Bits and pieces. Not really
.”

  “Then who is this man named Daliri?”

  “The original owner of the book, I assume. He wrote his name on the inside jacket. And those are his notes in the margins of the book.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  “I think it’s about the passage of time and that we’re all dying. No, that we’re all dead.”

  “Do you not feel well?”

  “I feel horrible. I haven’t stopped my evil drinking since I came back. But you already know that. You know everything.”

  “You are a writer and a reporter. Why did you pick up a gun in Syria?”

  “I hate my job. I wanted to do something that counts.”

  “Like shooting people?”

  “Not randomly. At our enemy.”

  “Who is our enemy?”

  “You know, the people who want to kill us.”

  A jolly, round-faced man with glasses knocked on the door and stuck his head inside. I’d seen him before, one of those nondescript types in a gray suit who’d probably wanted to create great works of art at one time but, out of necessity, instead ended up working at the Bureau of Censorship. H left the room to talk to him. The Proust sat like a slab of gray decayed meat on that table. It wasn’t lost on me that had my interrogator been someone other than H, this book that I had buried in Iraq might be used as material evidence. For what? For anything. For being born. These things have a life of their own and when you fall into the sick orbit of suspicion by the state, anything goes. Anything. Just a thin line between farce and the utter ruination of a man. Always there. Always waiting. And so I stared at the Proust with wavering solemnity and the full breadth of my hangover and sickness.

  If H would let me, I’d simply stay here, ask for a cell in the ministry to sleep in, and never leave. I needed shelter from many things.