The pounding in Khafaji’s head wakes him up. The water is back on, and he soaks his head under the cold tap until it stops hurting. He looks at his face in the mirror. Some of the swelling has gone down, but he looks like someone else. He shaves carefully and slowly until his scalp is as bare as his chin and lip. He takes a quick shower and fills as many bottles as he can find. He fills the tub as well, just in case.
Khafaji walks back to Mrouj’s room and quietly, slowly opens the door. When he sees the empty room, it all comes back to him. Including the deal he made. He goes to the kitchen and puts the kettle on. While he waits for the water to boil, he notices the balcony doors wide open. He looks out over the homes around him. Even more satellite dishes have attached themselves to balconies and walls and roofs since last time he looked, each dish bowing toward the same Mecca. The rising sun fills each with the same crescent shadow.
He brings the tea tray into the living room, and looks at the papers the Americans gave him. Checkpoint Three. He decides to clean up the mess instead of going out. For forty-five minutes Khafaji stacks books into piles against the bookcases, then decides to leave the rest for later. He finishes the last cup of tea before going back into the kitchen to get the broom. He brushes splinters and glass off the carpet and then sweeps the floor tiles until everything is relatively neat. He takes the broom and the dustpan back into the kitchen and suddenly realizes he’s hungry.
Khafaji hears a knock on the door just as he is spooning olives out of the jar. He wipes his hand, and walks back to the front room. The smell of woody cologne fills his nostrils even before he opens the door. A young man is standing there on the landing. His features are soft, his cheeks are rosy, his forehead is bright, his beard soft and neatly trimmed. His heavy green jacket is the kind they issue during winter, with a kuffiyyeh twisted around his shoulders. Khafaji’s headache returns, and he can do nothing but grimace. The man’s voice is as gentle as his face. “God’s grace, brother. Peace be upon you.”
“Good morning.”
“Brother Muhsin? I’m Ali.” Ali extends a hand that is not soft at all.
“Ah!” Khafaji tries to smile. “Welcome, Ali! Welcome. I’m glad you’re home safe!”
Somewhere below, Khafaji hears young men talking together in gentle voices. It sounds like Persian.
“Thank you, Brother Muhsin! You have been kind to my family. I am grateful for that. They’ve told me such nice things about you. Thank God you’re home safe too!” But Khafaji notices that Ali’s eyes are rock hard. Like pieces of onyx. Khafaji looks into them and sees nothing but his own reflection in black. The pause is heavy, so Khafaji tries to smile some more. Ali’s grip turns iron. Khafaji hears the sound of boots on stairs.
“When the Americans came, they told my parents who you were. We don’t think it’s true what they said.”
“No. It’s not true. They were looking for —”
Ali interrupts him, “What they said couldn’t be true, because here you are, back safe and sound. Still. We can’t have any problems. I hope you can understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Brother Muhsin, after everything that’s happened, you need to leave.”
“God’s grace! Peace upon you!” a voice sings out from the stairs. Khafaji turns to see two young men with soft beards and army fatigues. Ali calls out, “And upon you peace,” and waves at them. They disappear downstairs.
Ali begins to speak again in his gentle voice. “The point is, Brother Muhsin, we don’t know who you are. And we can’t afford trouble in this building.”
“By what right do you —” Khafaji begins, but the throbbing in his head stops him short.
Ali’s voice softens. “Just look at yourself. You’re a mess, Brother. Anyway, it’s not my decision. This is best for all of us.”
Khafaji tries to pull his hand away. “How dare you, this is my home! You are the guests here, not me.” Ali’s hand won’t let him go.
“Yes, that may have been true. But look around you. In this country, who can tell hosts and guests apart any more?”
Khafaji tries to look strong, but the pain in his head finally gets the better of him. He clenches his jaw, and stands there for what must be minutes – although he knows he’s lost. Before he surrenders, Khafaji remembers that every defeat is a negotiation.
“Could I ask one favor, then?”
“Of course, Brother.”
“It would be inhumane to kick me out on the street. I need to find a place. One week.”
“We’ll give you till Sunday.” The answer is so quick that Khafaji realizes that he’s up against a plan. Ali continues, “But when you go, you’ll leave everything in the apartment as it is.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Don’t talk like that, Brother Muhsin. My parents say you are a polite man, a cultured man. You can take your clothes, but that’s all. Agreed?”
The phone rings, and Khafaji says, “I’m going to get that.”
The phone rings again.
“Agreed?” Khafaji feels his fingers begin to crack.
The phone rings again.
“Agreed.” Ali finally lets go of Khafaji’s hand.
Khafaji hears Nidal’s voice on the line just as the door shuts. The first minute of the conversation is devoted to frustration and disappointment. It even gets loud. But then Nidal finally hears what Khafaji has to say.
“They busted down the door and came in. They detained me, and then they realized they made a mistake.”
“They just let you go?”
“After giving me a haircut. And destroying the place.”
“What?! Are you OK? What about Mrouj?”
“They took her to Ibn Sina.”
“Why?”
“For treatment.”
“No, I mean, why would they do that?”
Khafaji says nothing.
“Can we visit?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s in Tashree. In the American Zone.”
“What about you?”
“They gave me a pass so I can go see her. I’m going right now.”
“We’ll send something to her when we see you. So are you OK?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ve got to shave more often now is all.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Any word about Sawsan?”
“No.”
“By the way, I went to see that professor…”
“And?”
“Nothing. Did Sawsan ever say what she was doing?”
“No.”
“I’m supposed to talk to the driver. I haven’t found anything. You’ll tell me if you hear…”
“Of course. We’ve decided, you know. Maha’s agreed. As soon as…” His voice trails off. “So let’s not wait. To see each other, huh?”
“Give me a day to rest.”
“Can Maha send you something to eat?”
“I’m fine. I’ll call.”
He hangs up, and puts his face under the faucet again. Eventually, the cold water dulls the throbbing in his head. He finds the papers they gave him, puts on his shoes, and goes out. In the foyer below, he hears the soft voices again, and wonders again if they’re speaking Persian. When he reaches the ground floor, they stop talking.
“God’s grace. Peace upon you!” someone calls out in a friendly tone.
“Good morning,” Khafaji manages to answer as he finds himself walking through a picket of young men. All in the same uniforms. All with the same neat beards. All sipping from cups of tea. Two sit at the front door, cradling AK-47s in their laps. As he walks past, they get up and almost salute. At the end of his street he nods when the young soldiers greet him at the gate. As Khafaji goes by, he watches them wave back toward the entrance of his building.
He turns the corner and starts to walk faster through garbage. It is everywhere. Piling up in vacant lots. Heaped around gates and entrances and walls. Spilling across streets, filling up alleys. Concrete and broken brick. Plaster, metal, paper and rubbish. Piles of white cement. Dry bread, tin cans, empty bottles, and broken glass. Fish bones and chicken bones. Mounds of soggy stuff, wet matter, rotting meat. Khafaji stumbles over the carcass of a dog. He covers his face with a handkerchief, but the stench cuts through. His toe catches on something, and a thick curtain of flies draws back to reveal more dogs. Khafaji jumps over them and runs as fast as he can. He stops to light a cigarette. The old tobacco smells and tastes like cardboard. He gags for a moment, then forces himself to finish the cigarette.
Khafaji tries to wipe off his shoes with a piece of newspaper. He looks around and decides to give up. The whole city – every street, every heap of trash, every square foot – is covered in a sea of plastic soda bottles. Each filled with two liters of nothing. Thin plastic shopping bags collect around every corner and hang on every tree branch. Khafaji smokes the rest of his cigarette.
Things move heavier than they used to. Lorries move so heavily you can feel them in your feet before they appear. Somewhere downtown helicopters thump over city streets. Whenever he hears the sound of a patrol, Khafaji puts himself behind one of the concrete pillars of the covered sidewalk, or behind a parked car. He continues walking, through one checkpoint, then another, with no apparent direction. Every few yards, he squeezes between cars, some parked, some long abandoned. Once, as he reaches down to remove a plastic bag caught on his shoe, he realizes where his feet are taking him. Home.
Occasionally, Khafaji sees a face he recognizes. Or imagines he recognizes. As he walks across Andalus Square, he imagines he sees more and more. He says hello to old neighbors he sees on the street, but no one replies. No one recognizes him. He turns the last corner and, for the first time in years, he stands in front of the house that once belonged to them.
The house still belongs to them. Khafaji admits that even if they hadn’t lived there in years, it is still their home. He buried Suheir and moved away. He locked the doors behind him. But he never sold the place. And it never stopped being their home.
Nothing has changed. It’s the same home. The same jagged brown bricks. The same black iron gate leading to the same interior garden. The same tinted glass windows. The same jasmine vines and bougainvillea Uday and Mrouj planted. Khafaji smiles to himself. He avoided it for so long. He never went back because he knew how much of a cliché it would be. Was he really supposed to stand here and cry like the old poets did?
But here he is, on a bright early morning, weeping at the sight of the home he’d once shared with her, weeping at the memory of the life they’d lived together. Why is it so jarring to see your old home just as you left it? Why is it so disturbing to see that nothing has changed after all these years? Because it means you are not necessary, Khafaji thinks. It means that things go on as they were, with you or without. As if you never lived, as if your life never happened.
Khafaji looks at the house and tries to take comfort in the fact that he still knows everything about it. He knows which windows stick. He knows how to find the children when they hide in the crawl space under the stairs. He knows how to keep the bathroom faucet from dripping. He knows how to restart the air conditioners at the circuit breaker.
It takes Khafaji longer to notice the changes. The garlands of razor wire glittering along the tops of the walls and coiled around the front gate. The sandbags in the driveway. The black GMC in the driveway. The men drinking tea at the gate. The camouflage of their clothing. Their matching black boots. Their guns. The man at the window of the master bedroom on the second floor. The man who steps back into the shadows.
At this point, Khafaji knows he shouldn’t have come. It’s sad when you revisit a place you left behind. It’s dangerous to revisit that place when someone else has come along and made it theirs.
Khafaji must have been glaring at the men sitting at the gate, because one by one they stand up and reach for their weapons. Khafaji doesn’t wake up really until he hears the clatter of cups and a glass crashing to the ground – only then does he turn and start walking away, like an actor stumbling across the wrong stage. He walks and walks. And with each step, he manages to forget something.
He forgets and forgets until he remembers Mrouj.
Then he remembers his nine o’clock appointment at Checkpoint Three. He sticks his hand out until an old Peugeot station wagon pulls over. Then he walks over and opens the door.
Khafaji looks in skeptically, not sure if this is a taxi at all.
The man’s voice booms like a cannon, “Where can I take you?”
He adjusts the mirror and turns to look at Khafaji. Khafaji is surprised to see an unmistakable twinkle in the man’s bloodshot eyes. His ragged beard is white, stained brown and yellow around the mouth. A pair of skinny legs and gnarled feet poke out from beneath an old dishdasha. A pair of old leather sandals nestles by the clutch.
“Tashree. I can get off at the Convention Center.”
“Tashree? The Convention Center. OK. Get in.”
The man jams the stick shift on the steering column and they begin to roll forward. He looks at Khafaji again. “I know you, don’t I?”
“I don’t think so.”
They careen down the road for a minute.
“Traffic’s all fucked up on Jadariyya Bridge because of something that happened. We’ll go the long way and cross on Ahrar. We’ll get there faster, just you watch.”
Cafés glide by on the right and the river bends off to the left. With the window rolled down, the cool morning wind feels like aftershave. Khafaji sees a heron fishing along the bank. Still as statues, he remembers, they wait to pounce on unlucky fish. They wait for hours, never moving, and then strike so fast no one ever sees it. Not the fish, at least. The epitome of patience and survival. And death.
The man taps Khafaji’s arm again, then swerves to miss a car in their lane. He sticks his arm out at the driver.
“Fucking bumpkins. They treat their Mercedes like their donkeys. Back in the village, you know, they fuck tailpipes when their wives are menstruating. Really, swear to God! I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” He laughs at his own joke, licks his lips and slaps the steering wheel.
A minute goes by, and Khafaji doesn’t know what to say. The man sticks out his hand. “I’m Karl Abdelghaffar.”
Khafaji shakes his hand, but his eyes never leave the road in front of them.
“You don’t remember meeting me? Did you ever meet someone else with my name? I know you never have. My father, God rest his soul, loved his teacher. Old Sheikh Marx, he called him. He was a commie back in the day when they existed. God have mercy on them! They were real men.”
Karl Abdelghaffar swerves around another car, then adjusts the rear-view mirror again. “My father was the smartest in his class. He could read the future. Knew what was going to happen before it did. I’ll give you an example. When it came time for me to go to school, he sent me off to Cairo. Why? I’ll tell you. He knew what was going to happen. By the time I graduated, he was arrested.”
The man rubs his beard and cries out, “God rest your soul, Father!” Khafaji nods and tries to look serious.
“He also knew that names aren’t destiny. If they were, I’d be dead twenty times over by now. God have mercy on the old man. And God protect the Revolution.”
He stares so intensely that Khafaji begins to worry. Finally, he shakes his head. “I talk too much, I know. My kids tell me that all the time. If you don’t like it, I can drop you off here.”
He licks his lips again before Khafaji finally laughs. Then he slaps the steering wheel.
While they move through the traffic, Karl Abdelghaffar goes on. Worked as a driver. Retired after the war. Married. Five children, three boys, two girls. Four grandchildren, all girls, thank God. Pictures taped to the dashboard.
“I took up taxi driving not for the money, but to stay out of the house. Thank God, we’re all doing OK. Everyone lives nearby. Thank God. My sons didn’t want me to drive. I told them: it’s either this, or I take a second wife! And anyway, it’s my right to see what’s happening with my own eyes. You know what I’m talking about? I’ve seen some things you won’t believe. And they’re getting weirder. Now everyone is gearing up for the war that never really happened. Even me. Even you.” He taps his chest and looks at Khafaji.
“You think you know me?”
“I used to work at the Directorate. I used to drive you jerks around.”
“That was a long time ago. You might be mistaken.”
“You’re a lot older than you used to be. And balder. But it’s you. You and I used to talk about poetry. I wouldn’t forget that.”
Khafaji rubs his head and looks out the window.
When a military convoy approaches on the other side of the road, Karl Abdelghaffar quickly turns right, then left again down a side street toward the river. Each time they encounter traffic, Karl turns and avoids it. At Rashid Street, near the taxi station, they hit a checkpoint before heading across the bridge. They pass the Mansour Melia, the Television Station, the Museum, the ministries, some wrecked, some intact.
Karl suddenly breaks into verse and Khafaji can’t help smiling.
And thou awakest them, they slumber still
If thou arousest them, they sounder sleep
Praised be God, Who fashioned by His will
Mankind like stones, that they may ever keep
Like stones their beds, and drouse until their fill.
It takes no effort for Khafaji to answer with the next stanza:
Begone and depart, Baghdad! Depart from me,
In no way am I of thee, not mine art thou
Yet, though I suffered often and much of thee,
Baghdad, it pains me to behold thee now
Upon the brink of great catastrophe!
Karl slaps the steering wheel and chuckles. “Mashallah! You remember Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi – I knew it was you. What a day, and it’s not even noon yet!”
The intersection of 14th of July and Damascus is a vast expanse of concrete. Somehow it’s comforting to see so much rubble and garbage here too. And hundreds of blue barrels, arranged in rows and clusters. Some abandoned on their side. Some wrapped in coils of razor wire that sparkle in the light. And all wrapped in crowds of people.
“I can’t believe you said Tashree when you got in. Who were you trying to fool? It’s called the Green Zone now. You work for them, huh? The servants’ entrance is over there, if you want to get in line with the other donkeys. Word of advice: get here earlier if you want to get into the barn at all. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be at my café across the way. Dijla Café.”
Khafaji pulls out his wallet.
Karl pushes his hand back and says, “No. I won’t take it. You’ve already paid, far as I’m concerned.”
Khafaji tries to give him money, but Karl insists, “You can owe me a cup of tea. At my café, any time.” He reaches into his pocket and finds a tattered piece of paper. Then he scribbles out a phone number. “That’s my home number. I don’t have a cellular phone.”
“Neither do I, old man.” Khafaji smiles and they shake hands.
Crossing the road is not so simple. Khafaji picks his way through barrels and wires. He wends around cars and dodges children playing on the abandoned vehicles. Khafaji draws a long arc around the intersection and arrives at a corridor of wire and concrete. And a billboard: STOP HERE! SHOW IDENTIFICATION! TAKE INSTRUCTIONS FROM GUARDS. Unconsciously, Khafaji’s hand touches the documents in his pocket. For a moment, he imagines he’d forgotten them. Behind a wall of shimmering razor wire, a line of cars. Soldiers poke out from behind sandbags and concrete blast walls. And every five feet or so on every concrete wall, the Great Leader’s monogram. Sad. Haa.
At the end of the corral begins the queue. Or rather, the wedge of men and women between concrete and coils of sharp wire. Shreds of plastic shopping bags flit in the air. Dozens of people crowd at the gate, waving papers and trying to get the attention of the soldiers at the gate. One by one, they turn back or disappear inside. A hundred or more others wait and lean against the wall and sit in the shade. Most hold ragged envelopes and folders in their hands.
Khafaji strides forward, waving his papers in front of him, but the others push him back.
“Excuse me, I’m here for —”
The man next to him pushes him back and shouts, “What do you think we’re here for?”
Khafaji sits down against the wall. The stench of urine pushes him back to his feet. The woman next to him won’t look anyone in the eye. At some point, she begins to sob softly. Then she begins to sing to herself, “God save us, God save us, God save us.” She is clutching two photos, one of a middle-aged man, the other of a teenage boy with faint moustache. The faded images could have been taken yesterday. Or decades ago. You can’t tell. Eventually, her weeping becomes a wail. It is only when she begins to beat her breast that other women step in. The sobbing doesn’t stop, even as she begins telling stories about a husband and son who disappeared five years ago.
A photographer comes over and begins to take pictures of the woman and the crowd around her. Someone on the wall shouts at him, “Imshi minna! Imshi minna!” He holds up his camera and calls out, “Journalist! Press! It’s OK!” He waves a badge hanging on his neck. Khafaji watches him walk off. He stops here and there to take a photograph. Of children playing on old parked cars. Of barbed wire. Of chaos.
When the woman’s weeping exhausts everyone, she turns to Khafaji. By now he is sitting on the ground, feet stretched out, and leaning hard into the wall. He pretends to sleep. He keeps his eyes closed as long as he can. He focuses on the rumbling in his stomach. It helps him ignore everything around him. The crowd at the gate begins to thin as one by one people give up.
Khafaji thinks about poetry. He tries to recall a line, any line from Nazik. But he can’t. Instead, Rusafi spills out, like it did in the taxi.
Though I spoke until I could scarcely express
Scoldings as sharp as the thrusting of swords
Those sleepers never stirred, my words useless
To move a people sleeping like children
Rocked in the cradle of foolishness.
Like a dull blade in the shaking grip of an old man, the lines slash harmlessly at Khafaji’s memory.