By Courtney Sender
Here is what hurts: I am only sixteen, but you treat me like I’m beautiful. I catch your prayer mat facing the room I share with my sister, Lamea.
“Fatehah,” I whisper, because it is night and you are a man, a guest of my father’s, a second or third cousin. “Mecca is that way.”
You know, of course, your sin: the dark corridor, the blood-red prayer mat, your arms prostrated at my bare feet, eyes raised in reverence as if I am the sands of Saudi Arabia.
“I’ve painted a vase for you, Ihab.” Your voice is impossible, heavy with intention, all air. “It’s with your Abbi.” You mean: I plan to marry you, Ihab. I kneel before you on the ground; it’s true I’m facing Mecca, but I am not praying. “Your Abbi will give you the vase soon,” you say. You rise onto your knees. Only one person could fit between your chest and my chest. A thin person. My heart throbs an exquisite pain down my torso.
“Do you have no fear?” I say, nodding at your mat just as my father clears his throat, loudly and haltingly, from the room beside us. We both jump up, you rolling the mat in your arms, and I retreat to my place beside Lamea without turning to see you one last time.
The next morning—this morning—you are arrested.
* * *
I stand at the edge of my village hours after you have gone, staring at the lush green hills far north of these square bleached houses, trying to imagine what hurts. I begin with memory: the dust of that monstrous olive truck in your eyes. Your gray hand rubbing your red eyes. Your wrists, shackled behind your back by the well-scrubbed American soldier who did not offer his handkerchief as he loaded you into the truck.
I screamed at him, long and piercing. I ripped my throat ragged. But he drove you away, and here is where I lose reality: I imagine my hand, reaching out to you. I imagine your grainy hair in my fingers, your sweating forehead under my thumb. I imagine your eyes squeezing shut, then blinking open, white and clean. I imagine wiping grains of wet sand from your cheekbones.
I am not like you: I am bad at letting pictures be pictures. I want to turn them to lullabies.
A pebble nicks my ankle. I seek its origin and find the green-clad soldier I screamed at, walking toward me beside a low rock wall. My toes dig into the dirt, prepared to run. He will strike me for yelling at him. He will shoot me. He will shoot you, wherever you are now.
Though he stops within shouting distance, he does not shout. His strange, slow voice carries through the dry air of the windless afternoon.
“Do you know English, little yeller?” he says.
I nod. He nods, a replica of mine. “Some of you do,” he says. I do not tell him that an English teacher used to travel north to us, before Baghdad was bombed and looted. That she gave me a tape player, so I could listen to Jay-Z and Celine Dion.
“You look young,” he says, “but—” He furrows his thin, yellow eyebrows in imitation. “I’ve never heard anyone scream like that. I wished I could make you stop.”
I watch his long rifle, holstered over his shoulder. If he points it at my throat, to silence me, I will run zigzag across the open sand and duck behind a heap of rubble that used to be the front of Mahdi Jasem’s house.
But the soldier only laughs, and I cannot hear malice in the sound. “I came back,” he says. “To see if you’re still screaming.” I have been told that my voice is deep and beguiling; it occurs to me that he has returned to flirt with the girl who raised it at him. “You’re what, Old Yeller, sixteen?”
I have not seen an American so close before. He is neat and full-shouldered, no paler than I am under this sullen sun, but a different quality of dark: his is yellow-crusted and impermanent, mine gray and deep.
You never flirted with me. You watched and listened to me when my family had a dinner, you prayed to me last night, you dishonored Allah. You are lost to this soldier, who knows where to find you.
“Almost eighteen,” I lie. “Where is my prisoner?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Which one?” He lays a hand on my cheek, one finger slipping beneath my hijab. No man but my Abbi has touched me since I donned it three years ago. You will, someday, if I can get you back. “They all look the same.” He finds my earlobe. Fondles it. He adds, in a tone I hear as sadness, “And they are ours.”
* * *
My parents say I should accept the offer of the soldier in green.
“America’s not paving our streets in gold, Ihab,” says my Ummi. She is kneading flour into dough. She speaks deeply and quietly, one crooked tooth sticking out between her lips. My voice is the replica of hers. “You’ll come back rich and taken care of.”
My older sister, Lamea, says, “And.” She pauses, choking on the stutter that halts her speech, her throat convulsing but her glower steady. “And this?” She takes my hijab roughly between her forefinger and thumb. My father is in the corner, praying.
“She will keep that, of course.”
Lamea says I won’t.
Wordlessly, my Abbi rises and hands me a ceramic jug—the vase you left for me. You painted a snow scene on its brushwork surface, though we have never seen snow.
I say: “Of course I will remain a devout follower of Allah, and all that entails.”
I think: I will do what I must. I am the club that beats the walls of your captivity.
* * *
We hold the official ceremony in a tarp tent on the floors of Baghdad. Before I set out for the city, my Ummi kisses my forehead with such ferocity that I know she fears I will be killed in the ruined streets of Baghdad, or that the soldier will not bring me back as promised.
A chaplain with a shaved white head officiates from a book that must be a Bible. My husband wipes blonde dust from his uniform. He promises to love and to cherish me, and I only nod when my turn comes to say the same. Because these men do not know the extent of my English, they force nothing more. They do not know what it is to love and cherish. You do, and this is why you’ve been arrested; I do, too; the vow I make is to save you.
It is July 27, 2003. My husband accompanies me back home. He is from Nebraska, where we will hold the real wedding on the first of August.
* * *
I have never been on a plane before. My Ummi says it will have carpet, like a palace. My Abbi says I will feel its wings flapping. I say nothing; I have asked only one question about the plane. The answer is I cannot bring your vase.
On my last night at home, I sit late into the night memorizing the picture you brushed onto the ceramic—star-shaped snowflakes over black roofs and thick dots of desert. It has not snowed in Baghdad in anyone’s living memory, and in your conjured world you’ve smudged a thumbprint into the foreground. I wonder: an accident? A signature? When our men are taken away, we do not know where they go. We do not know if they’ll come back. I study the thumbprint for the message you have buried in the sand.
Just before dawn, I worry that Lamea will turn your work to shards. I wake her, to warn her. “Keep this intact,” I say.
Lamea has not loved me in years. She says, “What do you care? You.” Her voice catches. She gulps against her tongue’s resistance. “You’ll never be back.”
Part Two
My husband’s name is Edward Gibbs.
At my second wedding, he is not supposed to see me. But I am retching with nerves in the vestibule of a church; his yellow-haired, thin-waisted older sister, Kimberly, worries that I will vomit on my new white dress. She strokes my forehead, where my hijab has been replaced with a veil and my hair straightened, then curled, and twisted back into a loose knot. She says, “What do you need?”
I do not know how to express my longing for my Ummi’s crooked tooth. It is not the time to explain that I need to know where you are and how to get you out.
“What is this place?” I say. I mean these four square feet that I am crouching on, hardwood floor beneath tall spires, triangles of stained glass light across my hands. But I also mean Nebraska: its long planes of grass greener than any green in Iraq; lines of yellow dragged through fields like fingernails through a scalp. The architecture in Nebraska is new and bright. Nothing but Edward’s hair is the sandy color of sunbaked centuries.
Her hand on my forehead, Kimberly twists her head away from me. Tight tendons rise from the back of her neck as she calls: “Edwie!”
Edward comes, in a neat black suit and emerald tie. He kneels beside me and holds my hand. “My poor Ihab,” he says. My stomach jumps to my ribs as the base of my throat convulses.
“Happiest day of her life, huh, Ed?” says a gruff voice: Edward’s father, Frank. The stump that was his left arm is hidden under a tied-off shirtsleeve.
“Maybe you want to welcome Ihab to the family,” Edward suggests.
Frank grunts. “Family is who you’re born to,” he says, and his thin white hair flutters as Kimberly guides him away.
“He hates me,” I whisper to Edward.
“He’ll come around,” Edward says. “He hasn’t been happy exactly since Vietnam, but he was a hero then.” Edward’s cheeks glow with pride. Because the story calms me, he tells others: In high school, after their mother left, Edward decided to join the army. His unit is the 239th Infantry Brigade. He grew up loosening apple skins from his teeth with a piece of straw.
I think of you, minced lamb and almonds caught in your bottom teeth, nudging your
gums with a strip of blunt wood. I wonder whether you have tasted lamb again, and whether you’d have teeth to chew it.
I know the way to find out is to stop gagging, to stand, to smile, to gain Edward’s trust. I will promise myself to him under a god that isn’t ours—I pray you understand this.
I say, “I do.” The pastor only has to ask me once. I know that you would ask three times, four times, that you would have my parents make the Imam hoarse with asking.
My parents are not here. Only I am here, in the muzzle of Nebraska.
* * *
I do not have a honeymoon; I have, one week after my wedding, a T-ball game. You will laugh, when I tell you what T-ball is. We will be sitting on the stone floor of my Abbi’s house, and my Ummi will serve goat with lemon and garlic, and even a plate of dates, because we have just been married. The thick dark hair on your knuckles will brush my skin; we will hold hands, as we almost did that night outside my room. (That night: your palm flat on your chest, my hand—its own mind—cupped in the air on top of yours, so close I felt heat, a hair on your hand, and then my Abbi coughed.)
I will tell you: “T-ball! Edward said his Abbi should get to know me, so the best way to do this is, we should hit a big heavy baseball off a stick!”
My Abbi will laugh at the foolishness of this other Abbi. He won’t know that Frank sat sullenly on a park bench and refused to pitch to me, although Edward told me that, even one-armed, he’d once been the best Little League coach in town.
My Ummi will say, in the deep voice that sounds like mine, “And his Ummi?”
“He doesn’t have one,” I will say. “She died.” I will not say, She divorced his father and moved to Los Angeles. She left Edward before his fourteenth birthday and never contacted him again, and married a man who plays dead bodies in horror films. Ummi will smile and serve me extra goat, because I never had another Ummi.
Lamea will choke on her tongue. “And Kim?” she will say. Lamea will always be
asking about Kimberly, always angry that the name has so many twists and consonants that it is easier to refer to her familiarly.
“Kimberly caught the balls we hit off the stick,” I will say, and you will laugh at the image of a woman in a hijab catching balls; you will forget that Kimberly’s hair would be blonde and in the open. I will not remind you.
No one will say, And EdwardI And I will not tell how I swung and swung into the air above the ball until finally, Kimberly adjusting my grip high up the neck of the bat, I felt a beautiful clunk that sent the ball flying, and I let out a little cheer, and Edward clapped, and how a group of teenage boys in low-slung jeans yelled, “Foul ball, Towelhead,” and how Frank snorted with laughter, and how Edward picked the ball up off its stand and threw it high in the air, and how when it fell he swung and smashed it into the shoulder of the biggest boy, and how after that he told his father to leave, go home, and how I said, “I don’t want to go back to the park,” and how that evening Kimberly came over with a bottle of dye that she emptied over my forehead, and how my hair turned a blackish yellow out in the open when I tucked my hijab in the closet.
* * *
The August air in Nebraska wants to spit, or cry, but it can do neither. After T-ball tonight, I cannot sleep in it. Even Edward wakes, with a jerk and a small cry.
“Nightmare,” he mutters, as if he knows I am awake to hear him. Without the kuh-kuh-kuh of Lamea’s breathing, I hear Nebraska’s crickets better than Iraq’s. “My dad used to have nightmares.”
Edward touches my hip, more gently than I have been taught to expect. I lie on my back as he rolls onto me, and pushes into me, and rolls off of me. A week of marriage, and still this hurts and sometimes bleeds—though I don’t cry, and the blood now is gauzy and pink. The problem is I think of you, and my insides clench like a fist; each time, Edward must make room like the first time.
Edward’s short blonde hair is spiky but soft on my chest. He says, “Sing to me.”
I remember a song for Allah that my Ummi used to sing to Lamea and me, and I begin to hum. I unclasp my lips. “Tifli habibi,” I sing, my dear baby, and I am glad to hear my Ummi’s deep voice in mine.
I feel Edward’s body go tense in the sheets. “English,” he says.
“I don’t know any lullabies.”
He teaches me a bouncing, thoughtless melody, and I repeat it: “Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop.” Edward’s snores sound like a flag flapping.
I slink quietly to the desktop computer in the living room, beneath a photo of a very small Edward and Kimberly wearing backpacks. I dial the internet, the way Edward has taught me. It is incredible: everything is available here, nothing is closed, except by my inability to conceive of what to search for.
And yet your name thrown to the internet yields nothing. I search Lamea, my Ummi, my Abbi. Screens of nothing. I look up “Iraqi lullabies,” because I want to see them even if I cannot sing them. The first hit—they call it a hit here, a struck target—is called Lullabies from the Axis of Evil. ‘Axis’ means “an imaginary line about which a body rotates.” I imagine you, an axis shot from the middle of your brain to the pit of your stomach, twisting on a dangled rope.
I imagine myself cutting you down, lowering you fully clothed into a warm bath.
Edward wakes from yet another nightmare. “Ihab!” he calls, his voice panicked, and I know he is reaching for my absent body in the bed.
“Here,” I say, shutting the screen. “Right here.” I shuffle down the carpeted hall to the bathroom. I run a shower. The blonde dye washes out in streaks.
* * *
On September 11, 2003, buildings burn In Memoriam on the news. Edward says, “Your friends killed the millennium.”
None of his friends have married someone with skin darker than a sheet of canvas. It is just a comment.
When the newscast blacks into a commercial for Toaster Strudels, Edward mixes strawberry ice cream, milk, and chocolate syrup in a blender, and sets this sweet extravagance before me on the glass coffee table. He takes the untouched Sam Adams from my armrest on the black leather couch.
“Should snow soon,” he says. He is on nine-month leave, so he will see the whole range, heat to snow to heat, before he returns to Baghdad. I will stay here. I don’t want to see Iraq again, I am told.
The people on TV jump from wounded buildings, their bodies like rice spilling into water. I imagine your belly, bloated like rice.
“Do you remember that prisoner…” I say. I realize with a shock of guilt that I cannot recall precisely what you did on the day of your arrest. What can I say to identify you—that prisoner with the artist’s hands?
“The records aren’t here, Ihab, thank Christ.” He has told me that your records would be with the 239th Infantry, in Baghdad. “Besides I don’t remember shit besides you yelling at me.” He squeezes my thigh. He would never say I cried. “That voice like a snakecharmer.”
The sound of my voice is no less substantial a reason to care for me than yours. It is the same reason. Edward likes Fox News, but so does everyone here. You might like him.
* * *
“Ihab!”
Edward shakes me in the early purple of an October morning. I am awake immediately, my chest pounding; I think of Lamea, afraid of snipers in huge green trucks. But his voice is smooth and deep, and soon I understand that I am in Nebraska, where Lamea is not. There is nothing to be afraid of here.
“What’s wrong?” I say, but Edward covers my eyes. He is giddy as a child as he leads me through the single story of our house. I hear the creak of the front door; we do not lock our doors in Nebraska, though my Ummi had predicted we would. The front porch is cold under my feet, and Edward’s fingers slacken and lift away from my eyelids.
Everything floats. The world is lit by a dim white candle, dripping soft wax from the sky. “Snow?” I ask.
Edward nods, watching me with a smile at his lips. I want to laugh, to run into the yard and spread my arms wide. I want to sing some light, tinkling tune of my invention, a snow song. Instead, I force myself to see your dappled naïve artwork. You didn’t know that snowflakes are only white specks, too small to be stars.
“When I was a kid,” Edward says, “I used to pray for snow days.” I do not ask to whom he prayed, or what snow days are. Edward shows me how to catch a dot of snow in my open mouth. When I press my bare hand to the earth, the ground crunches and the snow lifts with my palm, leaving a cartoon of a handprint, no lines or messages.
“Do you like it?” Edward says. His blue eyes are wide, hoping.
I imagine breathing on the short hairs at the back of your neck, telling you about snow. I smile, because Edward wants me to, and doing what Edward wants will save you.
Part Three
In April, the night before Edward leaves me, he says, “Fucking hell.” I am folding his clothes into a camouflage duffel bag in our bedroom, sliding a note into the pocket of his jeans. I crease the paper once, then twice. He says, “Fuck me.”
“What?” I say. I rise from the bedroom floor and wind down the hallway to the living room. For a moment, I savor the softness of the carpet under my heels. I am not thinking about you, and for this I am sorry. If I had known, I would have been thinking of nothing but you. I would have sliced off my feet rather than enjoy a softness on them.
Edward points to the TV, which is not tuned to Fox News.
I am a good wife. I never judge my husband, or hate him or complain of him. But if
neither his god nor mine will shield my eyes, he should have smashed the television screen. He might have preserved my innocence a while longer. But I have seen these things, and I cannot unsee them:
A female soldier holding a leash, a man like a dying dog at the end of it—collared, worse than a dog, naked, writhing. A male soldier, smiling like Allah has blessed him, beside the blindfolded corpse of a swaddled dead prisoner. These soldiers embracing, thumbs raised above their fists, an engagement photo before a tower of unclothed human bodies stacked like clambering rodents.
And then, and worst of all: A cardboard box, a man’s bare feet curled over it; his arms spread like the prophet Jesus, draped in black cloth like a bat; his head bound in a rag, wires coiling from his fingertips.
This is where I have to stop. That man could be you. What savagery could make him stand like that, unsupported, not falling on his knees? What threat made this the favored choice? What scraps of protection could he not beg from Allah?
“Goddamnit,” Edward says. His forehead is red with sweat. I am staring at the ceiling. I cannot speak. “This’ll make my life hell.”
The phone rings, and Edward lunges for it, though I have never picked up the phone. “Dad,” he says. “320th MP Battalion. Yes, we saw.” A long pause. “I’ll call you from Kim’s.” Edward does not invite me to Kimberly’s house down the block, and I do not want to come; I barely hear the door click closed behind him.
When I imagined pain for you, I did not imagine this. I lacked the expansiveness of vision to imagine this. All of my imagining was coated with knowing you were not handed to Saddam. You were with Americans—with Edward—who were coarse and rough and proud, who feared and resented us, who killed us, but who did not know how to hate like this.
My mind now is stretched on a rack. I see horrors that must be real, because my imagination trails reality like a goat its shepherd, seeing only after, seeing less. Whatever I can dream of must have happened to you.
* * *
“Fatehah Hassan,” I say to Edward at the Omaha Airport. It feels like the hundredth time I have spoken your name to him, but now I must brand it in his memory. Now he is going back where he can free you. “Can you find him? His records?”
I do not know which prison you are in. Maybe you are safe. Maybe you are dead. No part of me believes either. You are not safe, and you are not dead, you are in pain and have no one to soothe you.
Edward says you sound like a hiss. “Hassssan,” he says. He is especially unsympathetic today—we both are—because neither of us slept last night; he rolled and kicked when he came home late from Kimberly’s, haunted by nightmares I did not care to soothe. “You’re more concerned about some Paki at Abu Ghraib than about me?”
He calls it Abu Grab. I imagine claws on your spine. I wish I could imagine myself pulling them off you, but I am weak. I imagine you naked. In all my visions, you were never naked. I never saw your real-life skin except your face and neck and hands. Now, I imagine your buttocks, scarred and written on. I do not want to imagine your buttocks. I do not want to imagine your chest, hairy and hollow. I want your face, your flat nose, your kind eyes; I want your hands, your lithe thumbs, your narrow wrists. I imagine your head covered in electric probes. I imagine your fingers snapped off. I am not allowed to see the parts of you I want to see. This is its own torture, infinitely more bearable than yours.
“Why should I find a guilty man?” Edward says.
He kisses me hard on the lips, leans me backward like I am a picture, and joins the security line. His exit, I think, he wants to be dramatic. Instead, he waits. I wait too, only because my legs have turned to cornstalks that I cannot move.
The question of your guilt has never occurred to me. I probe my memories with a frightened finger, sure now that knowing is always worse than not knowing: why were you arrested? I am ashamed, because I thought that you were punished for making me Mecca. The Americans did not arrest you over Mecca.
I hail a taxi back to my empty house.
* * *
Without Edward, I own this house. My Abbi would not believe it if he could watch me step through the doorway, a woman alone, and unwrap a Toaster Strudel.
In the living room, strawberry crumbs fall between the black leather couch cushions. I watch what I have done, the luxury of letting crumbs fall in a couch, and I drop the packet.
Were you friends with Saddam? Fatehah Hassan, my intended husband, my mangled future: Did you sit cross-legged on his palace floor, politely drink his coffee, trail your left hand on his silk and satin napkins? It seems unlikely; this power might have changed you, given you the strength to ask my parents if you could have me. Of course, I cannot know. Perhaps you plotted torture. Perhaps you planned to kill my parents and carry me off. (You wouldn’t have had to; Edward never even consulted my parents, and still they told me, Go.) But you cared for goats and painted pictures, and you listened to me with your thick eyebrows raised high and wondering. What time would you have had to plot?
My eyelids ache for each other. I do not wish to sleep in Edward’s and my bed. As I fall asleep on the couch, the question of your guilt doesn’t haunt me for long. I knew you innocently; you are innocent.
But me—Edward will not save you. Did I truly think he could? In my nine months in Nebraska, the only safety I have guaranteed is my own.
* * *
When next I hear from Edward—two days later, April 19, 2004; he has made me an email account and password, Ihab8103—he assures me he is not at Abu Ghraib, he making milkshakes for the troops beneath the streets of Baghdad. I know this second image is supposed to be a joke. I wonder if he is arresting other people’s husbands.
The chimes of the phone are the first sound I’ve heard for days. It is my house, after all, and my phone. I live in America; I have the right to lift it from its cradle.
“Hello?” I say.
“You might as well make yourself useful,” Edward’s father grunts. “Cook for other military wives. Don’t just sit home answering phones.”
I do not like the feeling that Frank’s voice kindles in me. I do not like understanding what it is to hate.
* * *
It is August again. I wake at six to the snarl of a lawnmower outside the living room window; Edward’s father has hired a man to slice off the top of my grass, because we don’t live in a jungle, here, this is America. Without Edward, he can say these things.
I call the taxi company. “An hour early today,” I say, and soon a heavy brown car lumbers to the red flag on my mailbox. The driver is Ted, an actual Pakistani who drives me to the airport in silence. I watch Kimberly’s slim vinyl house give way to a black highway that sizzles between glossy green exit signs, wondering after Ted’s real name.
Within twenty minutes, I am sitting in the orange lights of the food court and listening, above the babble of families, to the roar of planes that bring other people closer to you.
“In international news,” says the pretty blonde newscaster beside the blue Departures screen, “the victims in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been identified today.” My heart lurches; I knock over the water bottle with which I pay my morning’s rent at these plastic tables. A businessman nearby sighs loudly as the water spills, and when he moves he leaves his Wall Street Journal. I read the prisoners’ names. You are not among them.
“Ihab?”
My heart flies—airport security must have noticed me. They will pat me down or strip-search me. But the hand that lands on my shoulder is lithe and familiar, the hair in my vision thin and yellow.
“Kimberly!” I say. “What are you doing here?”
Frank must have told her to follow my cab. “What are you doing here?”
“Taking a break,” I say, but I’m sure she knows I have not made myself useful. The truth is I’ve been sleeping on the couch, wondering what good wives of American soldiers do with a vacant house. I go at seven to the airport, I watch the news until noon, and I take a taxi home. I buy rice, beans, garlic, onions, and lentils from the corner grocery; I deny myself lamb or chicken or fish, because I know you are denied them. I don my hijab in the house, face north of the sunrise, and beg Allah to forgive both you and me. I miss my parents, and I even miss Lamea. I miss heat that is dry.
I search Edward’s things. Drawer by drawer, I learn: from a slash of blue ribbon, that he once won something called a Spelling Bee; from a gold-plated purple heart, that he keeps his father’s medals; from a stiff, smeared paper program, that it rained at Kimberly’s high school graduation; from a 49th MP patch, worn and red, that he switched units before we met.
“I’ve been calling you,” Kimberly says. “You should come over for dinner.” I tell her that I will, and she laughs and says, “I didn’t tell you when!”
A whole year in Nebraska, and still I am not used to the smallness of these invitations. There are pinpricks of time when I am allowed to visit an American, and I must always be aware of when to leave.
A jet engine rumbles to life outside. “You know what, Ihab?” she says. “We’re sisters, aren’t we? I’ll go here with you whenever you want.”
Sisters. Kimberly lives by herself in a big house; the invitation must be as much to quell her solitude as to quell mine. Life here gives us so much freedom we are lonely.
Because it is a charity that I can do, each morning, we go.
* * *
On New Year’s Eve, Kimberly pours me champagne. I hand back the glass, but she says, “I won’t tell,” and casts her eyes conspiratorially upward, as if together we can keep secrets from God.
I taste it. It is the crystal of snow, alive. I sip it as the sparkling comet drops into Times Square on her TV and the night slips into 2005.
“Do you miss Edward?” she says.
I giggle. “He’ll be home next week.”
“To a drunk wife?”
I have not laughed like this since Lamea and I were children, singing clumsily together while we helped our Ummi make stew. “Miss Kim!” I say, because she teases me for my formality.
“Did you love someone else, before him?” she says. I stop laughing abruptly. I am nervous. “I thought you might be mad at him. You seem to long for something else.”
“Home.”
She nods. I sleep on her couch, too dizzy to walk to my house. She adds a blanket to me so late that the blue of night has lost its grip, and she is right: I am angry at Edward. The prisoners’ faces have become yours; their captors’ have become his.
* * *
The trials begin with the new year, when Edward returns before his final tour.
“Welcome home,” Frank says on our porch. White snowflakes dot his white hair.
Edward extends his hand, opening our front door with the sole of his shoe. “Damn cold out here, Dad,” he says. I hear his eagerness to exchange the war stories I am dreading.
Frank shakes his head. “Just on my way to Kim’s,” he says, and when Edward circles both his arms around my shoulders, I wonder if it is intentional mockery. I clutch our cold railing, calculating the degrees of distance I’m allowed from Edward, as Frank leaves, his arm swinging like one undone loop of a bow under our ice-dimmed porchlight.
Edward locks the door. He bows his forehead to it and presses his arm to the wood above his head. I don’t want to be alone with him. I say, “What do you know about the Abu Ghraib trials?”
“Christ almighty,” he says. The heel of his hand slaps the door. “I can’t talk about this forever.”
We’ve barely talked about it.
He guides me to the bedroom, where the pillows are arranged exactly as they were the day he left. In the months past, imagining your bones stripped skinless, I have forgotten how thick and urgent his body is. He pushes into me over a patchwork quilt his mother sewed. I listen to the mattress rattle, and I hope the jury will not be afraid to talk about your suffering forever.
Part Four
It is September, 2005. Edward is in Baghdad. The trials are over. The woman at the end of the leash has been sentenced to three years in prison; the man beside the corpse has gotten ten. The blonde newscaster said that people have been in jail for twenty years, for selling marijuana. For stealing a car.
I ask Kimberly if, in America, it is worse to steal a car than to destroy a life.
“Depends whose car you stole,” she says.
We are driving from the airport to her office, where she has found me a job ordering and tracking supplies. I am very good at this job. The man on the other end of the phone loves when I order new paperclips. “Scheherazade,” he calls me. “Tell me a story.”
“Once upon a time,” I begin, and he laughs because he taught me this. “Do you want a story or not?” I say. He laughs some more, bright against my ear. “A hundred scotch tapes, then,” I say. “The end.”
Kimberly jokes that Supply Guy is in love with me. I tell her that he is just bored.
We pull into the parking lot. Kimberly unlocks my door, but I say, “Those soldiers from Abu Ghraib. All that suffering, and only three years.”
“Ihab,” she says. “Listen to me.” Her fingers claw through her thin blonde hair. Her nails leave white trails where I can see her scalp. “Once someone’s stabbed you,” she continues, “what good is it to punish him, to make your bleeding stop?”
We walk to the revolving door. She presses the button for the elevator up, and I press it down. Hers arrives first. Before she enters the car, I hug her. She is very thin, almost frail. I hope she can feel that I understand her clearly: What we need is a doctor, not a judge.
* * *
The weather forecast is gray but mild on December 31, 2005, when Edward comes back for good. In preparation I have ironed his suit, plugged in the floorlamp in our bedroom, and cautiously re-stacked the back corner of the lowest drawer in his nightstand, where last night I found an old cassette labeled “Edwie, Kimmy, & Frank” in round, neat print. I played the tape on Edward’s stereo: a long pause, ribbon running, then a woman’s crackling voice, strumming a guitar in minor chords and wailing a sad song I did not recognize. The voice was deep and full, and I was drawn along its mournful swells until it stopped in the middle of a high note. I flipped the tape. “XO, Mom,” read the back.
I replaced the tape immediately, feeling guilty.
“Where’re my cufflinks?” Edward says. He is digging through the back of our bedroom closet, giddy with the idea of cufflinks and Al’s Steakhouse. I watch him, reconciling myself to the fact that he will always be here, undoing my carefully stacked suitcases.
A camouflage duffel bag spills open. Edward stuffs a set of boots back in, then an old pair of jeans. A piece of paper falls from the pocket. He unfolds it once, then twice.
The joy drains from his face. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” His fingers turn to angry quotation marks in the air. “Do no harm?”
He crumples the paper and flings it at me. As I unfurl the note, I remember what it will say, in my handwriting: your name, Fatehah Hassan; then—the best I could do, before Edward left me the first time, to take care of both you and him—Do no harm, and have no harm done to you. It is the wish I make for you now, too.
“Am I some kind of Nazi fucking medic, Ihab? That’s how you see me?”
“No,” I say, but his rage weakens my denial. “Well, what should I think?” My voice throbs. “I’ve seen the photos from Abu Ghraib.”
He shifts his weight backward, as if I’ve pushed him. “Ihab,” he says, his eyebrows low over his darkened blue eyes. “Ihab. You know me.”
He tells me Abu Ghraib was bad, but it was a one-time stupid fluke. He tells me to think of the horrors it tried to prevent. He tells me that those soldiers are those soldiers; they aren’t his fellow soldiers and they aren’t him.
“That’s like saying you crashed those planes,” he says. He reminds me that he saved me from a war zone. I screamed, he tells me, and he saved me. He reminds me that he loves me. He reminds me that it has not been easy on him, to love me. That it would be easier to love a girl from Nebraska.
“You know me, Ihab,” he says. “That’s not me.”
He cries.
Edward, this thick strong American far too his own to be mine, this green-clad soldier with the gun—he is indicted by his little brown-skinned girl, and he cries.
I never imagined that I could make him cry. My poverty of imagination has not been remedied. I want to sing to him. I want to soothe him. I want to show him that it’s true: here I am, Nebraska sturdy at my feet: he has saved me.
* * *
That night, I discover something.
I am on my back; Edward is curled around my side, his head on my chest. He is rubbing the front of his boxers against my thigh, and I am lying still as ever, hoping as ever that he will rise onto me when he wants to, that he will be quick, that he will fall asleep so I can worry over you.
But Edward says, “Sing to me,” and I recall his tears and I have made my promise, and as I pull my mind from you I examine what I am pulled from: a blurry picture of brown-gray skin, like Lamea’s or my parents’ or even mine.
What do I think of, when I think of you? Is it you at all? I try now to hear your voice, the particular heaviness of it, but I imagine more than I remember. The heat I conjure between our hands—it is a heat I’ve learned from Edward. In my mind you are not you at all, Fatehah Hassan. You are a memory I think I have.
“Sing to me,” says Edward, and I forget myself. I sing to him in Arabic.
And I find that it is very late at night, the trees black shadows in the window, and Edward is too tired to think or protest, and he does not roll onto me. Minor chords stretch like yawning cats into the corners of the room. Still, Edward remains on his side.
I understand that he is lulled: his hand slides slowly up and down my side, it does not push into me—and, slowly, I want him to push into me.
I feel myself shift my weight to one hip. For the first time, I turn to face him. I pull him toward me. I can charm myself.
* * *
“Scheherazade,” Supply Guy says. “You seem happy.”
“I apologize,” I tell him. “No more sad stories for you. Just a pack of paper clips.”
“Just one?”
I smile. “Fifty. A new year’s commission.”
Supply Guy laughs. “Happy 2007!”
Kimberly exits the elevator beside my cubicle. She smells the bouquet of daisies that Edward gave me in the car this morning. “I made ravioli last night, Miss Kim.” I say. “You should pick some up.” Edward taught me yesterday to roll ricotta cheese between pockets of pinched dough. I blew flour onto his nose, and he tossed spoonfuls back at me, each scoop turning to a cloud above the counter. We drew white doodles on each other’s faces.
Kimberly says, “A regular American housewife.” She and I have not met alone in a year, since Edward came home. I have been busy not searching online. Not reading the news. A postcard from my parents last week told me nothing. I assumed this meant they were allowed to tell me nothing, but Edward kissed the back of my neck and said, “They seem happy.”
They do.
* * *
In March, 2007, the woman who held the leash gets out of prison. She was there for barely two winters. I need one morning away from Edward; when I call Kimberly, she says, “Let’s go to the airport.”
We sit before our old TV screens, a Civil War movie broadcast to a new Starbucks. Kimberly doesn’t seem to notice the terrible blare of the jet engines as she approaches the counter, orders two of the usual, and tips the barista, an old woman who says, “You take care now, Kimmy.”
“You know that lady, Miss Kim?” I ask, and Kimberly nods. “You still come to the airport? But I don’t go anymore.”
“I’ve come for thirteen years, Ihab,” she says, a shadow of Lamea’s disgust in her voice. I’d thought Kimberly joined my routine those three years ago: first to track me, then to keep me company. I never dreamed that I’d joined hers.
“Why?”
She raises her chin to the TV screen, where ketchup-colored blood blooms from a soldier’s chest.
“My mother caught a plane away from here when I was seventeen,” she says. “Sometimes it’s nice to feel so close to doing the same.”
I want to ask her if it’s Edward that’s kept her here, or her father, but she is studying the laughable body on the TV—its medal-bedecked chest is still breathing; its girlfriend will wipe off the red stain—and I don’t want to expose the divided loyalties beneath our lives.
Unprompted, she says, “We always knew one of us would have to stay here with Dad.” She sips the scalding coffee. “I figured it would be Edwie.”
I understand that I have trapped her in Nebraska; because I was what Edward brought home from Iraq, not a medal, Frank won’t even enter our house. I wonder whether it hurts Edward to have bound his sister here. I wonder whether he is used to this particular nauseous pain in his stomach, this feeling of being a jailor.
* * *
On August 1, 2007, Edward and I celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary. Kimberly joins us at Bellissimo for dessert, but when Edward claims he isn’t hungry I excuse myself for the bathroom, where I open my cell phone.
“Frank,” I say, my finger tracing the spirals of graffiti etched into the wooden door. “Edward would love it if you came out. Your whole family is here.”
“Family is who you’re born to,” Edward’s father says. During the silence that follows I expect him to hang up, but instead he says, “Remember that, Ihab.”
When I return to the table, the candles have already melted into waxy puddles on the cake. Neither Edward nor Kimberly accepts a slice.
* * *
Kimberly becomes like water, slipping from my grip. When Edward cannot drive me to work, she claims strange hours and I take a cab. Edward is scarcely better, constantly tired; by the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, working from home for the day, I begin to feel I am the only one alive in the Gibbs family.
I send Edward to the supermarket for breadcrumbs and call Supply Guy about a stapler.
“We’re switching to online ordering,” he says. “I’ll email you the site.”
“But what will happen to you?”
I boot up our living room computer and navigate to my email, imagining his round, faraway shoulders shrugging. “Thank you for talking to me all these years, Scheherazade.”
“Ihab,” I say.
“Ihab,” he says. “Hal.”
“Thank you for talking to me, Hal.” I am surprised to feel the strain in my throat as I hang up.
I begin to type Ihab8103, the password Edward gave me, but then I stop. I listen for sounds, knowing the house is empty. I shouldn’t do this, but—I type e.gibbs as my username. Perhaps I can find the answer to his strange stupor. I try a password. Edward8103.
The page flashes red. I breathe out, glad not to have betrayed his trust. I rise to check the turkey defrosting in the sink, but I pause over the photo of Kimberly and Edward as schoolchildren. Bending over the desk chair to the keyboard, I type: Edwie8103.
Edward’s interface looks like mine, a long list of dull subject lines. I scroll idly through emails from 239th Infantry buddies, all How are you? and Hangin in. I drag the mouse to the left side of the screen. I hover over Trash, then click. I search “kimgibbs.”
The very first email is from Edward, to his father and Kimberly. Dated August 1, 2007. The subject line reads, “Damage control.”
I click the message. It is only one line long: “49th photos about to leak.”
“Had to happen sometime,” Edward’s father has replied. “We knew you couldn’t keep her forever.” One minute later, Frank had sent a second email: “It’s not a proud time for me to be a father, Ed.”
I feel a dull panic as I walk to our bedroom and wrench open Edward’s nightstand drawers. I tear through his mother’s cassette, his old photos. I am searching for something I remember, and I find it. I can picture myself, younger, reading the worn red cloth, learning about this man who was my husband. It is a badge labeled 49th MP—Edward’s squadron before he met me.
I fear a secret that can undo me. I can hear nothing but the volley of my heart. I call Kimberly.
Part Five
“Miss Kim,” I say, rocking on my knees before the nightstand. “If there were pictures about to leak, what would they be?”
I hear the ring of registers at our corner grocery. Outside my bedroom window, the thin, stripped trees in our backyard shiver in the November wind. Kimberly’s voice is measured but pitched high. “Where did you hear about leaked photos?” she says.
The base of my throat constricts. I had wanted her to say, Photos of the troops playing baseball. Photos of a twenty-one-gun salute.
I say, “What would they be?”
“I don’t know,” she says. I am kneading the 49th MP patch like dough. “I can’t tell you,” she corrects herself. “Edward’s scared you won’t stay here.”
My torso sways over the carpet. “If I left,” I say, reckless words, “that means you could leave too.” I bend at the waist, my chest flat on the floor, my hand holding the phone to my temple. “We could meet at the airport and leave.”
“My dearest sister,” Kimberly says, and the chatter behind her fades. What she explains—her voice crackling with wind, rising from the shoulder of the road as cars speed by—is that there will be more reports, more torture from more prisons I have never heard of. There will be more pictures, because there were more horrors. There were more victims and more perpetrators, but these will be worse, because Edward’s squadron was among them.
So it was him. It was Edward, after all, who locked hostages in hells like Abu Ghraib. I lie listening to Kimberly’s words, and the love I have for Edward shatters.
* * *
Waiting on the carpet for my husband, I think of you in ways I can’t control. You’ve prayed at my feet and I’ve done what feet do: I’ve walked away from you. The trials are not the end. The name Abu Ghraib means nothing. The name Fatehah Hassan means nothing. It is one of hundreds. You are one of thousands.
The front door opens, then shuts. I find Edward on the couch, wearing boxers and a pair of socks. I see the black cushions as the black roofs of Baghdad, his white chest as white snow. My life is just the pictures you have painted on the world.
Edward beckons me to lie beside him, because I have been stupefied for years. I do: I lie beside him. His heart beats my cheek. His skin is a familiar toxin.
He says, lazily, “Sing to me.”
I open my mouth. I have no voice. I have forgotten you and all your suffering. I have lulled myself to sleep.
“Ihab,” Edward says. His arms wrap around me. “Sing me those voodoo songs of yours.”
I open my mouth. I don’t know what poison will pour from me. A branch clatters on the roof. I have a roof that Edward gave me.
I scream.
Edward jumps up and away from me. “Goddamnit, Ihab!”
“What?” I say. “You love me when I scream.” I stand, slowly and deliberately, gathering the scraps of an old outrage I’ve been losing since your arrest. Does Edward think he redeemed himself, by saving me? Does he think he doesn’t deserve his nightmares? Does he think I yelled Little girl lost to Allah, and this man replied Little girl found? Does Edward think, because he answered me, I am not screaming still?
I walk to him. I slide off his shorts and take his hips in my hands. I have never been so forward. “You married me because I screamed at you,” I say. My fingertips glide low across his stomach. I turn my wrist. I feel him pulse into my palm. I feel calm and powerful. I am a people. I am still screaming.
“It thrills you, doesn’t it, making us scream?” I clutch him. The pulsing grows. “I’d like to try it too.”
I ball my hand into a tightening fist, and he is in the middle of it. He winces.
“Stop,” he says.
“Scream,” I say.
“Ihab,” he says. He is warning me. His voice is low and dangerous. He is a torturer. He is a liar. He has lied me to sleep.
“Scream,” I say, and with all the might I can call to my arms I dig my nails into the center of my fist, where he is throbbing red and blue.
He screams. He tosses me into the wall. His skin is under my fingernails. He keeps yelling. The sound is music.
* * *
When Edward and I divorce, I am not a citizen. I don’t care. I am twenty-one now, an old woman, and with my dying will I will find you. I step off the plane in Baghdad already searching. Lamea meets me at the gate, not carrying your vase. My ticket reads January 11, 2008. I embrace her with the full force of four years.
Lamea leads me outside. When her face hits the air, her head snaps back at the neck, and I gladly anticipate the automatic rifle that will separate finally my head from my heart. Then I hear a spluttering exclamation, and I realize that Lamea is laughing.
“Ukhti,” I say, “my sister, the years have undone you.”
But when I step outside, Nebraska lands lightly on my nose. I crane my neck too, so I can see the sparkling black roofs of the buildings, the stippled sandy desert at the bottom of my sight. Your gentle vision lives: it is snowing in Baghdad.