One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) (9 page)

11

Wednesday Evening

SEYYED ABDULLAH’S HOUSE IS
not far from my own. It looks toward the border of Kuwait, toward the American military crossing point on the border, just as my house does. Yet his house is on the far side of the military road, in the older, original part of the town, and it is surrounded by the winding type of alleyway and the mud-brick sort of hovels that make old movies about Baghdad or Damascus or Cairo picturesque. His house, like mine, is also a two-story affair. But that is where the similarity ends. Whereas mine is empty as a tomb, his is as peopled as a bazaar. Whereas mine is bare—bare rooms, bare ground, bare walls—his is clothed with the trappings of a well-established man. Whereas mine is without family, his teems with family. He has taken a third wife recently and he dotes upon her, making it generally known in town that the pick of new jewelry smuggled from Kuwait should be hers; likewise the pick of perfumes and of flowers harvested by children from the banks of the Shatt al-Arab canal near Umm Qasr. His children from his first two marriages play underfoot. They stream from the gutters and over the railings of balconies that look inward on his bowered courtyard. They are like living rain or handfuls of sand tumbling along a dune face. Most pointedly, whereas my house lacks visitors, his visitors queue outside his
diwaniya
even on, or especially on, a shut-in stormy evening such as this.

I hold back the image of my brother from the forefront of my mind as Seyyed Abdullah approaches to greet me. The resemblance between them is close, uncanny: tall, dark, smilingly feral. I almost pull back from Safwan’s sheikh when he puts his hands on my shoulders, as we exchange our greeting kisses.

“I am sorry to have kept you so long,” he tells me as he leads me inside his
diwaniya,
takes me from the group of anxious supplicants as though he is the embodiment of a saving angel. The others, those not fortunate enough to merit his personal greeting, these others huddle under the half-shelter of the courtyard, rags to their mouths to keep the last wisps of the gritty sandstorm from their lungs.

“I am sorry to have kept you so long,” he says again, “but I have so much business, so many people to see.”

“You must not apologize to a simple mobile-phone salesman,” I say.

He laughs at this, a good-natured laugh. Despite his position of authority in town, despite his autocracy, Seyyed Abdullah is a good-natured man. In fact, his humor and disposition support his authority rather than detract from it. He is the type of man who makes the best of companions and the worst of enemies. I feel the humor radiating from him. It contradicts the resemblance to my brother that clings to him in my mind. No man fears to come to Seyyed Abdullah with problems. His effectiveness as a mediator is both academic—he knows the law and the traditions and the histories that exist between the families and tribes of his town—and personal: he pronounces judgment and reward with candor, goodwill, and very little in the way of personal pride, though he is proud and wealthy and educated.

As we enter his
diwaniya
through a massive set of green-painted double doors, we must indeed appear to those within the room to be brothers, our features so similar, our arms linked together. As my eyes adjust to the light of the room, I see on the couches lining the walls several other men, most of them in
dishdashas,
different from Seyyed Abdullah’s neat, dark, silken suit and coat. The men smoke from two big
narjeelas
that dominate the middle of the room, braided glittering rubber pipes extending from the central hookahs like tentacles. The men talk among themselves. They are relaxed and friendly, though they all look at their sheikh when he enters.

“Come, come,” Seyyed Abdullah says.

“Really,” I say, “no special favors. Nothing.”

“As you wish,” he says. “You know everyone here?”

I nod in affirmation, although in truth I do not know one of the men, a fat policeman who does not wear his uniform shirt but betrays his occupation by his shined black shoes and his flat blue polyester pleated pants, the cuffs of which show under his
dishdasha
. Seyyed Abdullah notices my glance at this man and he shrugs, as if to tell me not to worry. I exchange some mild pleasantries with the seated men. The nearest of them rises to his feet, intent on shaking my hand. I motion to him that it is not necessary for him to stand, but I take his hand anyway. We embrace, and he sits, and I sit next to him.

“Will you take food?” the man asks me.

“No,” I say, though I am almost painfully hungry after the day of unexpected fasting.

“Smoke?”

“No,” I say.

“Are you sure you will not take food with us?” Seyyed Abdullah says, still hovering over me until he is certain of my comfort and my reception. “We have platters and platters coming, albeit slowly. It will be a fine evening.”

As if this were his cue, a young man steps into the
diwaniya
with a tray. I want to eat very much, having eaten nothing all day, but to seem too eager would be poor manners. The food is only partly the reason I visit, should be none of the reason at all if I were visiting purely for the sake of business and not because the sandstorm had caught me without food in my house. I shake my head no at this second offer of food, but I do not shake it very emphatically. Seyyed Abdullah waves the boy with the tray into the room and the boy sets the food in front of me. The man with whom I sit selects a sticky sugared date and then settles back onto the couch. He arranges his
dishdasha
over his knees, plucking at it, and listens as Seyyed Abdullah and I talk. I notice that the serving boy wears a pistol on the belt of his blue jeans. He thinks the blousing of his T-shirt hides the weapon but its hilt shows plainly, a hard angular outline of gunmetal under cloth. Seyyed Abdullah notices me looking at the outline of the gun.

“These are difficult times,” he says. “One in my position cannot be too careful.”

“The Wild West,” I say. I think of Jed Clampett and black gold. I think of Mahmoud, the sleeping guardian of the overpass. “Do you know the boy who guards the overpass?”

“Small in size, although maybe twenty years of age?” asks Seyyed Abdullah. “From the family of al-Jorani? His uncle on his mother’s side owns a farm north toward Az Zubayr.”

“Yes,” I say. “He has been given no bullets from the police. How is he to guard the overpass without bullets?”

True, I have bought him a package of ammunition, but I’d rather fix the problem, have the police themselves provide the bullets.

“Must a guard be seen to be a guard?” says the man sitting beside me.

Seyyed Abdullah turns away, rather too quickly, as the man beside me says this. I understand the idea of invisible guards, the true way to have something stay guarded. What worries me is the very visible presence of this guard and the possible reasons why he is not better supplied. It is not just a matter of a lack of money for bullets. I want to ask why they bother posting a guard on the bridge at all, if there are truly invisible guards for the market and for the overpass. But I know the Americans like to see guards. Are these town leaders embarrassed to have given the Americans such a simple thing, embarrassed to let the Americans feel like they are protected? And if a guard like Mahmoud is to be seen and to be uniformed, why not equip him with bullets anyway? Might he mistakenly interfere with the real guards or with the business, legal or otherwise, these town leaders undertake in the markets and on the highways? Have they purposefully selected Mahmoud for this job, knowing he will conduct his duties in a slipshod and inattentive fashion? I ask none of these questions. Instead, I take a small sesame-crusted pastry from the tray and lean back on the couch. I feel like I have embarked on business too quickly by asking about Mahmoud’s situation. I tell myself to enjoy the food, to enjoy a smoke with the men, to enjoy the evening. The time for questions will come. Or it won’t come. Either way, as Allah wills.

As I eat, Seyyed Abdullah moves farther away from me, makes a trip around the room, seeing to his guests. There are five other men in total: the mayor, who sits against the far wall and has loosened the tie of his Western-style suit beneath his over-draping
ghalabia
;
the fat unnamed policeman, who pretends not to have heard my remark about Mahmoud’s bullets; the manager of the electric utility, who has but one leg; a prominent farmer from the north of town, upon whose lands most of the little farmers like Mahmoud’s uncle and probably also Layla’s family work their living; and, last, my companion. All these men are older than me, each in his sixth or even seventh decade. They represent the generation too old to have been intimately involved in the rising against Saddam at the end of the first American war. They were spared the cleansing afterward, the cleansing that must have claimed their sons and nephews and younger brothers. The man sitting with me is the eldest of the group, white-haired, with a lined but smiling face.

“You are from the Shareefi clan?” I ask him, though I know it to be true. My couch mate, as if by providence, or as if by the quick and artful arrangement of Seyyed Abdullah, is the head of the Shareefi clan, Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi, who is a trader with connections in Riyadh, Tehran, Port Said, Kuwait City. An influential man. Head of the family of that woman, Ulayya, who has made herself known to me.

“Yes,” he says. He looks at me for a long while and then exhales from the tube of the
narjeela
that he has plucked from the low table holding our food. “You are the new mobile-phone and satellite merchant in the north bazaar?”

“The only such merchant in either bazaar, actually.”

“You are not from Safwan? Not from Basra Province?”

“No,” I say.

“You are Shia?”

“Yes, from Kufa originally, though Baghdad was my home for the recent past. I am from the family of ash-​Shumari, but from the more southern, Shia branch.”

This is a lie, of course. No sense, though, causing him alarm. I tell the lie well, quickly, nonchalantly. Our tribe, ash-Shumari, is well known to be split in half. Such things happen: families on each side of the war, families divided by antitank ditches etched in the desert.

Al-Hajj ash-Shareefi puts the
narjeela
tube into his mouth again and then inhales. I think our interview has concluded. I pick up another pastry and eat it. I think about introducing myself to the policeman: perhaps a more direct appeal to the police to fix the situation with Mahmoud would work best, although I am sure Seyyed Abdullah understood me about the bullets and I am sure he will take some sort of action. I expect, almost, to be introduced to the person responsible for the silent guardianship of the market and the overpass. Perhaps that person will stop at my store tomorrow, make himself known to me in order to restore my confidence in Seyyed Abdullah’s patronage. I decide not to talk to the policeman directly. The time will come for that, I’m sure. Mentally, I walk around the room, thinking about what I might say to the others if the chance were to arise. There is business to be done with the electric-​utility manager, especially if we are to have satellite dishes in town and other electrical appliances that work. There is business to be done with the mayor. He wants very badly to tax merchants like me in the highway market, but we are all squatters on land supposedly owned by the Ministry of Transport, by the government in Basra Province and in Baghdad, not on land owned by the town. So how can he tax us? I should speak with the farmer, too, just to know him better, since his lands come so near to the market. An opportunity, there, for him to lease space as the market grows to the north along the road to Basra. Already I have noticed shops springing up on the far side of the interchange. Why doesn’t he parcel his nearby lands and allow the market to spread onto them, each tenant paying him a small fee?

I think of the important things these men control, the public and private functions each of them oversees, things upon which the future of this little town depends. But before I make any attempt to speak to these others, before I even finish eating, Ali al-Hajj ash-Shareefi speaks privately to me again.

He tugs my sleeve and leans very close. I smell
narjeela
smoke on his breath, sweetened with a little apple scent,
bukhoor.
“You have met my daughter in the souk?”

“As Allah willed, I believe that I have indeed been so fortunate. It was a meeting between a merchant and a buyer, though, nothing inappropriate…”

I start to ramble, a little embarrassed. But the old man waves his hand in the air to show me he is unconcerned.

“She is widowed,” he says.

This brings the real issue immediately to the forefront of our conversation.

I take a second to reply, then carefully say: “So I understand.”

“She is a good girl, a good Muslim. Shia, of course.”

“These things, too, I understand.”

“And did you look upon her?”

“Only when she asked about purchasing a satellite connection for her house. She was quite discreet in her questioning of me.” This is something of a lie, and I think back to the meeting, how Ulayya did everything possible within the limits of her black draping clothes and veiling
hijab
to show me the contours of her body and the beauty of her face. “She seemed interested in buying a satellite dish for her house,” I say.