When my son was an infant I memorized every detail of his body. I unfolded his softly curled hands and examined the fine lines of his palms. The creases were something a potter might leave in clay. His legs fit neatly into the hollows of his chest and his back curved like the spine of an aquatic animal, as if nostalgic for his pose before birth. At first, I did not know how his toenails would survive the air, how objects so small had the capacity to grow. His hair was soft, like the fuzz of a graying dandelion. It bore no resemblance to his father’s coarse blackness or my dark brown color, and it occurred to me that even a newborn’s hair is the product of residency in his mother’s belly.
As my son has grown, so has his hair toughened into this world, but I could not bear to throw those first downy cuttings away. Instead, I sealed them in an envelope and identified its contents with a black pen. I keep it in a desk drawer, where his milk-teeth are soon to join it. Light of my eyes. You are shedding your toddler’s skin.
He still enjoys sitting on my lap when I am working. He watches the marks my pen makes with wide, solemn eyes. He is learning the alphabet and sometimes holds a pencil inexpertly in his hand to write out the characters of his name. He can also write the names of his parents. Mommy is a caterpillar that wanders across the piece of paper. Daddy, the unsteady footprints of a baby bird.
Last week he stopped and pointed to the English letters that bled from my pen. “What are you writing?” he wanted to know.
I was translating verses from a long-dead poet, and had just finished a line about warm bread in our children’s hands. “I am putting our language into their language,” I told him. “So that they can understand it.”
He considered this. “Why don’t they just learn our language?” he asked.
The suggestion was so undeniably logical that I laughed. “Our language is very difficult for them,” I said and could see him considering my words. His father has the same expression on his face when he thinks very seriously about something. And his father does not understand why I spend the hours at my desk, either.
“They don’t pay you for that,” he tells me. “They don’t care about our poetry.”
“It’s important to me, habibi,” I tell him. “It makes me happy.”
But he only grins, a little bitterly, and shakes his head. “You think that if they read our poetry, it will change things.”
I do not tell him, but that is precisely my hope. How could anyone read the words of those poets—the ones who lived on mountaintops but loved the world, those who spoke gently about love—and remain unmoved? It is my own response to those words, across a gap of centuries, which encourages me. So I sit at my desk until my neck aches and my eyes begin to blur, stalking words in English. Their movements have a ferocious beauty I can recognize and I occasionally stumble upon patterns so correct and beautiful, that tiny bumps appear on my arms.
Sometimes at night there is the sound of gunfire and I stuff cotton in my ears. I frequently write by candlelight—as the old masters must have done, I remind myself—because electricity is a force that seems to die on a daily basis. When I blow the candles out, I sit for a moment until my eyes become accustomed to the dark. But the strange gnawing follows me even there. Will some young girl take a flashlight to bed, I wonder, and weep over these words, the way that I did with Sylvia Plath when I was fourteen?
When I crawl into bed beside my husband, he draws the blankets over my shoulders. He presses his lips to my forehead, and tells me, tiredly, “You are dreaming, habibti.”
I AM an interpreter for Battalion One of the Liberation Forces.
In the beginning I traveled with them around the city, patrolling the Zones of Confrontation and helping communicate with civilians we met. On the first day, they gave me a Kevlar vest and showed me how to fasten the straps. It took me a long time to get used to wearing it. It was summer, and I sweated so profusely beneath the armor that I felt as though my body were shriveling like a raisin. I needed a hand up into their vehicles, mechanized monsters that looked like the bastard children of jeeps and tanks. My husband, who is a doctor, would massage my neck in the evenings so that I could even hold my head upright the next day.
We patrolled the city, the place where I was born and which I have known since childhood, but whose streets were suddenly alien. I was dismayed to realize that I was forgetting the way those streets looked before, as if my remembered city had been as steadily eroded as the real one had been bombed. Instinctively, my imagination added whitewash and repaired gardens but I was unsure whether the resulting picture was recollection or pure invention. It was like the face of a family member who has died, whose features you have sworn to commit to memory but which begin to fade almost immediately.
During that first week, we passed an old woman standing by the side of the road. Black smoke poured from a shop behind her. I caught a quick glimpse of her face, through a tiny window in the vehicle’s door. It was like a snapshot, a single moment of clarity in an otherwise blurred landscape. Tears had cut paths through the soot on her face and she was holding something in her hands. Before I could see the object more clearly, we had passed her. Since then, I have wondered what it was. A singed pillow? I ask myself, as I lie in bed at night. A half-burned ledger for her family’s business? Sometimes I believe that I saw a tiny, charred hand with delicate white branches on its palm. It seemed to wave at us grotesquely, but had clearly been clenched in the moment of death.
“What was that?” I cried out to the sergeant, twisting around in my seat and forgetting that there were no windows in the rear of the vehicle. Somewhere behind me, down the slow unfurling of days, a woman stands on the street holding an unidentifiable bundle in her arms, weeping.
Sergeant Brandt has twin daughters at home, in Minnesota. He carries a picture of them wherever he goes, and showed it to me one day when our vehicle was crawling through the city. They are five years old and sprawl on an oddly shaped sled in the photograph.
“It’s a Flying Saucer,” he explained. “Plastic, so they don’t hit their heads on anything sharp.”
He was the first to ask about my family and, thereafter, always asked after Ali. Once, he even gave me chocolate to take home to him. Ali put it experimentally on his tongue, but then grimaced and spat it out into my hand. I ate the bar myself, though I didn’t tell Brandt this, and remembered Boston, where I lived for several years as a little girl.
He had also seen the woman beside the road, I am certain of it. He didn’t answer me but his voice was strange when he radioed our coordinates.
MY MOTHER takes care of Ali during the day. She has been living with us since the first days of the war, or, as she calls it, the “benevolent occupation.” She doesn’t like that I am working for the Americans. “Is it for this that you studied literature,” she asked me once, while I learned a vocabulary list in which words like “APC,” “AWOL,” and “Air-to-Ground” swam in front of my eyes.
It isn’t that she dislikes the Americans. Quite the contrary, she has always remembered Boston fondly. She likes to reminisce about Filene’s Basement and Newbury Street. Even the monstrous snow has become a thing of beauty to her.
“Do you remember, Sara?” she asks me. “How the banks would be piled so high on either side of us that we had to walk single file, and couldn’t see anything but the sky above us?”
It isn’t dislike but fear that makes her wary of my work. Threats have been made against “collaborators,” and we do not tell our neighbors where I go every day. But we have all accepted the situation, even my husband, whose hospital wages are no longer enough to feed us. After the first few weeks, when medicines became more widely available, he became slightly less desolate. He has brought some supplies home—bandages, antibiotics, and several bags of plasma.
My mother dreads my work, but silently. She is afraid that I will be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think she has fantasies of our moving to the countryside, where she was born, living off of fruit trees and goat milk. But we have heard that things are bad in the country, as well.
She loves her grandson, and so the two of them chatter to each other all day long. Sometimes around noon I look at my watch and know that she is cooking something on the stove, and that Ali’s toys are spread on the dining room table.
“Clear that away!” she will tell him in mock severity, the way she did with me when I was his age. “There isn’t enough food to share with your friends.”
And he will shout to her, happily, “But, grandmother, they’re hungry too!”
And she will bring an empty pot to the table, and pretend to feed his toys with a wooden spoon. “Time for us to eat,” she’ll tell him when she has finished.
MY HUSBAND and my mother are much happier since I have stopped accompanying the patrols. Now, I go to work each day in the “safe zone,” a lengthy process and the most frightening part of my day. Although I have an identity card with my name and picture on it, I have to wait in line to cross into that enclave, which is cordoned off from the rest of the city. I keep my identity card firmly tucked in my blouse until I reach the soldiers at the gate. They have begun to recognize me but, still, we must go through the formalities. They swipe my card in a machine, look from my picture to my face and back again and I am allowed to walk past the checkpoint. I once had a nightmare that the rest of the city fell away while I was in there. That I returned to the gate in the evening and the city was simply gone. The “safe zone” was an island surrounded on all sides by water and my family floated out there, somewhere beyond the guard shack.
Two weeks ago, a car bomb exploded near that checkpoint and several people were killed. One of them was an interpreter, just like me. We had spoken a handful of times. Her husband was also happy that her work was confined to the “safe zone.” The minute I heard the news, I knew there would be reports on the radio and asked to telephone my mother to tell her I was unharmed. She had already heard the news and was beside herself. “Sara,” she whispered hoarsely into the receiver but did not say anything more. We are lucky that the telephone wires were working that day. I never told my husband about the other interpreter.
MY WRITING desk is my decontamination chamber. It is sufficient for me to pick up my translations where I last left off, and I am clean again. I dream of preparing a compilation of poems from my country, and write lists of whose work to include. It is a tricky business, as I have learned. Some of my favorite poems do not lend themselves to translation. Others about which I am ambivalent suddenly reveal themselves in unexpected ways in English. Each poem dies in its conversion from Arabic, and is reborn in slightly different form. In this way, I both murder and resuscitate.
My family has no idea about the nature of my other work. It is partly shame that prevents me from telling them that I work in a prison and interpret during interrogations, and partly concern for their own well-being.
Several nights ago I turned from my desk at home to find my husband watching me from the doorway. “When I am in the hospital,” he told me, “I like to think of you sitting here.”
But, of course, when he is at the hospital, I am sitting light years away.
I was told that some of the detained would be former members of government, others would be insurgents. A few might be civilians. My identity would be protected, I was assured. I am allowed to view the prisoners, first, through a one-way window, to make sure that I do not know them, to prevent any form of recognition. As of yet, I have recognized no one. And so, in the seemingly airtight room, I spend days repeating the interrogators’ questions in Arabic, then the answers in English.
I no longer work with Brandt and his men, but with intelligence collectors. They are tougher men than Brandt’s soldiers. They don’t grumble to me about cancelled leaves or the heat. It is as if they do not notice these things.
At first, I thought naively that they, too, felt shame. That this was at the root of their hardness, but I have changed my mind. These men are consumed by the mission of their work. I cannot put my finger on it, but their eyes make me uneasy. Every day when we finish, I am absurdly relieved when they tell me, “You can go now.” In the moments before they say these words, as they lean back in their chairs or straighten the papers in front of them, I expect them to pass judgment. I have the irrational fear that they will tell me I can’t go home.
My husband thinks that I am translating documents and something in my stomach contracts painfully every time he comments on my sallow skin. “Don’t they have windows in those American buildings?” he asks me. “You look like you need a day in the sunshine.”
Last week we had a day off together for the first time in months. We spent it in our tiny garden, drinking coffee, reading newspapers, and chasing Ali between potted plants.
At one point he caught my hand and held it against his cheek, the way he used to do when we were first married. There is a lot of silver in his hair, now. It appeared almost overnight, and I smoothed his hair with my hand. For the first time since this all began, I felt like crying.
THE NARROW windows in the interrogation rooms are too high for me to look through. They block out the light and the air in the rooms is stale. Once, a prisoner asked what the weather was like outside. “Is the sun shining, sister?” he asked. “Are the pomegranates growing on the trees?”
The man was a civilian, and quite young. He had violated a curfew he said, by taking food to his mother. His eyes reminded me of my son’s. I translated his words. It is a requirement that I translate everything, but he looked at me reprovingly. “I’m not asking them,” he told me. “I’m asking you.”
A MONTH after I left Brandt’s unit, a pregnant woman in distress flagged them down. From the vehicle, they couldn’t see that she had wrapped explosives around her belly, underneath her clothes. Two of the soldiers walked quickly towards her. The men who stayed with the vehicle said they knew the minute the two realized their mistake. In the split-second before the detonation, they stiffened as if a current of electricity had shot through their bodies, from their feet to their heads. Chunks of shrapnel, pavement and bone flew like horizontal rain at the others. One large piece partially severed Brandt’s right arm, below the elbow. The doctors at the base had to amputate it, and Brandt went back to Minnesota and his twin daughters. Although I did not get to tell him good-bye, I often think of him. I picture how his left hand pulls the sleigh with the two shrieking girls through the snow behind him. The stump of his right arm carves the air in front of him.
STARS ARE flames in the bowl of night.
No, I think, and scratch it out violently.
At night, stars light up the sky like flame.
I draw horizontal black lines through this one. The ink makes the paper so moist that the tip of my pen tears it like damp tissue.
Stars, like flame, in the firmament.
I stare at the sheet of paper, then shred it with my shaking fingers. I blow out the candle.
THE WOMAN in the interrogation room is as old as my mother. She was a minor figure in the old government and I can vaguely remember seeing her on television. As she sits at the table, her face is a controlled mask. She refuses to answer any of their questions.
“What is your name?” she finally asks me.
I look at her dumbly, then translate her question.
“None of your fucking business what her name is!” the interrogator shouts in the woman’s face.
“None of your fucking business what her name is,” I tell her.
She is silent for a moment, considering me. A cold feeling starts in my chest.
“You are their robot,” she spits out finally. “You are their tool.”
“I am your robot,” I tell the chief interrogator. “I am your tool.”
Yet another prisoner begs me to get word to his wife. “She must be beside herself,” he says, then tells me her name. “At night they beat us,” he adds, quietly. “But don’t tell my wife this.”
I have to be very careful. Sometimes other translators stand behind the observation windows to make sure that we are interpreting exactly. I choose my words for the interrogators very carefully. One of them slams his fist on the table. “Your wife thinks you are dead!” He does not seem to register the part about the beating.
“I will try,” I tell the man quickly. Then, “Your wife thinks you are dead.”
I open my eyes wide, and hold my breath. If he smiles, it is over. But his face betrays nothing.
But I cannot find her family name in any of the city’s old phonebooks and no one I ask has heard of her. I do not see her husband again.
THERE HAVE been more suicide attacks and my husband comes home from work with tired eyes. “Almost all of them civilians,” he tells me, but will not speak more about it, only tells me, “Dead civilians. Missing civilians. Civilians in their jails.”
I lower my eyes.
Only our son seems unaffected. When there is water, he splashes happily while I bathe him before bedtime. But in the middle of the night he has started crawling into our bed again, and the three of us lie side by side, looking at the ceiling. There are sporadic mortar attacks at night. Shells fall randomly on houses and in gardens, without rhyme or reason. The first night that Ali fell asleep between us, I rose to carry him back to his own bed, but my husband’s whisper stopped me.
“It’s better this way,” he told me. “This way, none of us would be left behind.”
MY MEMORY is playing strange tricks on me. It is as if the words I knew are being supplanted by the new words I must learn. As if there is only so much room in my head for vocabulary, which is strange because I was a girl who loved words the way other children love dolls. I twirled them around my tongue in rhymes and wrote their names with pebbles in the dirt.
Brandt’s men taught me American slang and I taught them basic Arabic phrases. The interrogators know an odd word in Arabic, but to a specific end. They are not unfriendly, but I can see a certain suspicion in their eyes when they regard me. There are rumors of “terrorist moles” who have infiltrated the “safe zone,” and there have been any number of “troubling incidents.”
“How come you don’t cover your hair?” one of them asked me once while we took a break.
“I’ve never covered my hair,” I told him with a small smile. “I spent part of my childhood in Boston.” I regretted the words as soon as they were out, as if they could explain it.
But he broke into a sudden smile. “Hey, I’m from Boston.”
I looked at him, smothering a smile. “Why don’t you wear a Red Sox hat?” I asked.
He looked at me with a blank expression, then nodded slowly.
I think I have pinpointed what differentiates these men from Brandt’s men. On the city streets, those soldiers had depended on me as much as I depended on them. Without me, they were lost in a morass of language that made no sense to them. In these small rooms, however, I am incidental, and as much at their mercy as the prisoners.
Their commanding officer has the same quiet confidence that Brandt had, and the men listen to him without question. He even tells about his young wife in Georgia and that she is pregnant with their first child. I tell him about my Ali, and he looks at the photograph I carry with me.
“A good-looking kid,” he tells me.
But I often remember that prisoner’s words. At night they beat us. I think about this when I sit in the interrogation rooms, when I eat my lunch in the mess hall. I look around at the very young faces, the faces of men not so much older than my son when you consider it, and the same age as many of the people they are questioning. At night they beat us.
The commanding officer is a good man. His young wife smiles out from the photograph he shows me, and her arms are wrapped around her enormous belly. But there is one face that turns over and over in my mind, and I can barely concentrate in the interrogation room because of the noise it makes. At night they beat us. He had not even flinched at those words.
IN THE end, I have been reduced to my lowest common denominator and it is only my voice that they care about. I am a verbal alchemist. I turn our language into their language, and back again. Usually, they do not even look at me. They certainly would not care that I am withering in the interrogation rooms, that the sheaves of paper on my desk have gone untouched for days.
“Go work,” my husband will tell me after dinner, giving me a gentle push.
But I shake my head each time. You were right, I want to tell him.
Conversely, I am often the prisoners’ only focal point. There are days when I think I can’t stand their eyes anymore. On my way home, I decide a hundred times not to return. But we need the money. And I need to see my son’s face as he sneaks a hand into my purse to find the piece of fruit I have taken for him from the mess hall every day.
I have several times dreamed that my husband is under interrogation. That he looks at me in horror.
“How could you, habibti?” he asks me, near tears.
But their rules are such that I am unable to respond.
Sometimes I am the one they interrogate. I am seated at the table opposite them, and my hands are folded so tightly in my lap that my fingernails draw blood from my palms. Sometimes I am holding poems, translated into English. I will give you these pages, I think, suddenly optimistic again. And you will understand. You will understand.
But when I look down I realize that my blood has disfigured the writing. It has added dots and dashes that make the script unintelligible even to me. Sometimes I realize that it is not poetry that I am holding, but my son’s first attempts at penmanship, in a language they cannot understand. Mommy is a wandering caterpillar, I want to tell them. Daddy, the delicate trail left by a baby bird.