With their older brothers both on the same soccer team, Omar and Shafiq went to watch a game against the boys from Amara.
White lines had been painted on the field, with the goals clearly marked and closely guarded. When the action began, the boys cheered and yelled and grinned and wrestled each other with rambunctious glee. Omar’s brother Anwar was quick with a pass, stepping lightly on the ball and then kicking it in an unexpected direction, while Shafiq’s brother Naji seemed to be all over the field.
As the game drew to a close tied at one all, the sweating players moved more aggressively, each hoping to capture victory. Naji loudly shouted while he kicked, a move Shafiq knew from watching him in the yard was intended to distract and unsettle the defense. “Yellah! Imshee! Yellah!” he said as he weaved between players and approached the goal, his body so lean his white tank top caught the air around him like a sail. “Yellah!” he shouted, setting up a pass that would have led to the final score.
Suddenly, a man in a suit stepped onto the field, thrust his chest toward Naji and shouted, “Ya Heskel, calm down! Just calm down, little Heskel.”
The other players fell silent.
The ball was taken out of play.
And Shafiq felt as though he’d been kicked in the gut.
Ya Heskel. The worst kind of certain foreboding told Shafiq that the man in the suit—a coach from the opposing team—had not mistaken Naji for their cousin Heskel. Shafiq was filled with dread, especially when he realized that the insult—equivalent to the slur, “Hey, you Jew!”—had been excreted from the mouth of the authority figure.
Shafiq watched the rest of the game in a daze, and when it ended in a frustrating tie, the lack of satisfaction all around matched his pensive mood. Slowly he turned to find Anwar facing him. Naji was in a corner toweling off his sweaty body as Omar’s brother crouched down so that he was eye level with his neighbor.
“You…okay?” he asked. The teen was tender but cautious.
“Oh, yeah,” Shafiq shrugged.
Anwar punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Some people are stupid,” he sneered in the direction of the coach. “Next time we’ll shellac them.”
Shafiq, smiling at the expression, understood that Anwar was not talking only about the match. As he realized this, a vague memory was coaxed from his mind. Just old enough to go to school in a homemade jumper with a white shirt underneath, playing gingerly in the yard one afternoon, and seeing a pudgy bully push a small Jewish boy. Shafiq cowered at the scene, looking down and feeling his cheeks go red and fearing that his loud heartbeat—that his fear itself—would be palpable to those around him. But the taunt did not hang in the air for long. “Give me your hand!” shouted Sayed Mustapha, who had rushed over, grabbed the bully by the collar and forced him to present his knuckles.
Shafiq strained to remember more as he walked home in the comforting company of his brother and their friends. Yes, now he recalled the principal’s words: “This pain is nothing,” he had told the child as he smacked the back of his hand with a ruler, “compared to the suffering you will experience if you do not learn to respect your fellow countrymen.”
Shafiq had buried the memory again by the next week when he sat with Omar listening to their mothers gossip while they ate feta-and-date sandwiches in the yard.
“I know a crooked marriage broker,” Omar’s mother, Salwa, said.
“Really?” Shafiq’s mother, Reema, wanted details.
The boys were resoundingly unimpressed. “Can she match the king of England with a Midaan girl?” Omar asked with typical sass.
Shafiq laughed loudly—too loudly in trying to cover his affection for the sometimes-tearful, onetime-soccer-ball-punting, always-captivating Marsh Arab maid.
“Don’t you boys have anything else to do?” asked Salwa, shooing them.
Not really, but off they went. It was a short bike ride over to Shafiq’s father’s warehouse in the commercial district on the port, where at the very least they stood a chance of finding his Kurdish business partner, a grown man with the heart of a twelve-year-old.
They were so focused on the route they hardly stopped to notice a distant wail, but something in the sound rattled Shafiq. He felt an anxiety that reminded him of the war spreading across the world, the headlines that made him recoil: “Germany Organizes Afrika Corps” or “Somaliland Port In Flames” or “Yugoslavia Joins The Axis.”
Pumping his legs on the bike, Shafiq thought about how his family’s afternoon lunches had gone from banter about his cousin Heskel and his aunt Yvette to arguments over Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
The worst was talk about the Nazi Erwin Rommel, nicknamed “Desert Fox.” That nom de guerre just hit too close to the arid Middle East.
Then came reports of fighting in Tobruk. The Nazis were gaining ground among the Arabs. This frightening advance was confirmed when Shafiq saw, in the magazine Akhbar El-Youm, a picture of the Libyan port city. It foreshadowed a Basra he never wanted to experience: tranquil palm trees shading menacing Italian soldiers.
How far can a submarine go? Shafiq kept reminding himself that Basra was on the Persian Gulf, not the Mediterranean, but that was small comfort with the war moving closer…
The eerie cry was still seeping into his nerves when he and Omar approached the port, pedaling through the roads clogged with donkeys carting goods and men loaded with merchandise that was trafficked in and out of the warehouse.
As usual, Roobain sat outside the large entrance in one of two beat-up wicker chairs that comprised his informal office.
“Hey, Baba!” called Shafiq as he kicked down the bike rest. “Where’s Sayed Barazani?”
Roobain nodded toward the door.
The boys rushed into the wide warehouse, where their noses filled with the strong scent of spices coughed up in dust clouds from large burlap bags on the wide, open floor. Mingling with the aroma of coriander and cumin were the smooth, perfumed smells of European soaps stored by the crate. Sacks of wheat, rice, nuts and dried fruits jostled for space against barrels of olives and tins of oil.
Shafiq and Omar weaved through the haphazardly stacked goods until they found Sayed Barazani. Roobain said his partner, who had started as a stock boy, had a character as sturdy as his build. Neither he nor Sayed Barazani were ever educated, but both had the wisdom to value honesty. “A trustworthy man is the best investment,” Shafiq’s father used to say. He rewarded his staff in accordance with this philosophy, never growing rich but never suffering a fall precipitated by greed.
“So, are you ready for a challenge?” Sayed Barazani asked the boys, gaps showing where a few teeth had been lost.
There was no need to answer that question. Omar and Shafiq shoved each other with excitement as they followed Sayed Barazani toward the giant balance used to weigh all the varied objects that came in through the warehouse. Bigger than any man, it towered over the center of the floor like an arbiter of might and right.
“Let’s bet—who weighs more, the two of you put together or me?”
“Us.” “We do!” Omar and Shafiq tripped over each other answering.
“I have to go deal with a delivery, but you guys clear off the scale and I’ll be right back to beat you,” he ordered with a wink.
The moment Sayed Barazani disappeared, Shafiq felt a shift in his sense of security, as though that disturbing wail were echoing still. But he shook it off and joined Omar, who had already started moving the square iron weights off of the four-foot platforms on either side of the balance.
“Jump on!” Sayed Barazani urged when he got back. They did, Omar reaching up and pressing on Shafiq’s shoulders as the plate they stood on fell slowly. The two huddled close, trying to increase their weight.
“Jump,” Omar suggested.
But no matter how hard the boys tried to tip their side of the scale, when Sayed Barazani stepped on it fell in his direction, pulling down their hopes of winning the challenge.
“But,” Omar laughed as their side floated up, “we’re bigger than you!”
“Yeah!” Shafiq protested. “Get us down from here!”
“I can’t!” Sayed Barazani said with a dramatic wave of his arm that suddenly sent an old rusty wrench flying out of his sleeve.
Shafiq and Omar wasted no time climbing down to grab it.
Sayed Barazani aped a guilty face. “Okay,” he confessed. “So I added a little weight.” From his pockets, he retrieved bags of almonds and pistachios, which he handed to the boys. And then he pulled a long copper pipe from the back of his shirt.
“I guess you get to keep all this, since I cheated.” He laughed, showing the gaps in his smile.
“Really?” Shafiq couldn’t wait to get his hands on the smooth pipe. It was junk to most people, but to these boys, what a score.
“Wow!” said Omar, aiming the wrench like a gun.
“Guess I couldn’t fool you.” Sayed Barazani grinned.
Shafiq held the pipe like a rifle. It reminded him of the sticks they used to march with in boy scouts, chanting nationalistic slogans about Iraq.
By the time they were wending their way out of the crowded warehouse, both boys felt richer than kings.
The distant moan was long forgotten.
But the anxiety it inspired returned again as they crossed the small estuary that marked the edge of their neighborhood. Dark drops were trailing in the dirt: oil, wine…or blood.
And then a shout in the distance.
“My finger was corrupt, so I cut it off!”
The boys dismounted their bikes and started walking stealthily forward along the dusty street. With a stab of dread, Shafiq saw a man who had literally sliced his own finger entirely off of his hand, which was soaked in blood that dripped past his sleeve and down his shirt.
“I cut out the bad—so send me to jail!” came the soul-shattering cry. “At least I have HONOR!”
The last word boxed at Shafiq’s ears. “Do you think…?” he asked Omar. Honor plus blood equaled more than just an amputated finger, that much they knew.
“Allah yistir,” Omar replied.
God forbid, indeed.
The boys stopped at a café, blending into the crowd. Shafiq put the copper pipe down at his feet, and Omar also kept the wrench close. They strained to glean what it all meant.
As the murmurs grew louder, the story came together.
“The reason he went right past here was so everyone would see.”
“He wants witnesses.”
“Then, straight to the police.”
“Shouting about his rotten finger.”
“And had he cut it off?”
“Didn’t you see? Completely severed the pinky. Waved his bleeding hand in the air to prove it.”
“The law is on his side.”
A pause.
Long pause.
Too long.
But finally someone asked: “And the daughter?”
“Dead.”
Horror twisted through Shafiq.
And swelled grotesquely when he heard another man declare, “It was the honorable thing to do.”
Shafiq tried hard to picture the man’s daughter, who was his neighbor. He struggled to call up an image of her, as though that would make her exist just a bit longer, but the more he attempted to remember her, the more the sight of the man’s bloody stump obscured the memory of the girl he had killed. It seemed somehow more unjust that she had been so indistinct, as though her anonymity should have saved her.
“Well.” The silence was broken with a simple explanation: “He had to protect the family’s reputation.”
“Of course.”
Shafiq wanted to be twice his real age so he could ask a question, but he was too young to rightfully even listen. Still, he couldn’t resist whispering to Omar, “What did she do?”
Omar shrugged. The man sitting next to him, though, curved a hand around his belly.
That evening, lying in bed on the rooftop, Shafiq tried again to remember the dead girl, but it was impossible to conjure an image of her; she had never left the house unveiled or alone.
But she had had a secret lover!
And now she was dead. Killed.
He looked up at the stars—which glittered as they always had despite the dramatic day—and soothed his spinning mind by connecting the sparkling celestial bodies into shapes and inventing stories to go with them, in awe of Allah’s great designs. He thought about the murdered king, and the bloody British trying to steal Iraq’s riches. He imagined there were peaceful places in the world untouched by war and prayed Basra would stay safe. He remembered the barber’s son and bullies past and present, and said a prayer for the girl who had been killed on his block by her own father. And he thought about his principal, Sayed Mustapha, who had said it was up to them: the Arab youth.
Love of country was a much safer choice than love of women; that much was clear.
Shafiq fell asleep resolved to serve Iraq.