I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  “Are you awake?”

  Difficult question. From the looks of things, I was in paradise. There was no heat, no dust, no gunfire, and just inches away from my face was a gorgeous girl about my age with eyebrows that connected in the middle. My eyes were open, but I didn’t believe what I was seeing. She asked me the same question again, and this time I detected a slight lisp. I looked closer and could see that one of her upper teeth, one next to her two front teeth, was a little bit behind its neighbor. She was perfectly imperfect. And she was dressed all in white.

  “Dadna?” I whispered.

  She smiled at me like a mother whose child just uttered its first word, bursting with pride.

  “Don’t worry, you are in Masjed Soleyman Hospital.” Her words danced, as if her voice had its own soundtrack. “You’ve been here two weeks. I’m your nurse. My name is Mina Fadaei.”

  I looked to my left and right and saw soldiers splayed out on cots, filling up the large room.

  “They took most of the shrapnel out, but there’s still a piece in your brain. Are you in pain?”

  It was hard to keep her beautiful face in focus because there was a bandage over my left eye. I reached up and felt the top of my head, which was covered in gauze.

  “Not when you’re here,” I said. Corny, I know. But if this was the reward for getting wounded, I was starting to think it might have been worth it. She rolled her eyes expertly, and I realized I wasn’t the only flirt in the building. I tried to laugh but immediately winced in pain. She set a cup of water next to my bed. I reached for it but needed help drinking. She tipped the cup to my lips and waited for my reaction.

  “Do you need cooler water? Warmer? Should I bring you juice?”

  Her question sent my mind spinning. No one had ever paid that much attention to my needs, so in all my fifteen years, I’d never considered what temperature of water I preferred. It was too strange to have someone trying to kill you one week and someone trying to bring you a perfect cup of water the next. I knew she was just doing her job, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was a special question for me alone. I imagined she asked everyone else if they wanted water, but only me what kind of water I wanted. I told her I would like whatever she brought me.

  “I’ll surprise you then,” she said.

  Over the following days I tried to stay awake so as not to miss her rounds, and when I failed and fell back asleep, I dreamed of her. She became my motivation to recover quickly, but I feigned a slow recovery to stay near her longer. Eventually, though, it was obvious I needed no more nursing, and I had to return to my medic work. But now I had a goal in life. Mina was going to be mine.

  After that, every time a patient needed to be driven to Masjed Soleyman Hospital, I was the first to volunteer. I found every excuse possible to make trips to her hospital, and when I didn’t have patients, I still sometimes drove there, feigning some need to deliver or pick up supplies. She began looking forward to my visits, which evolved into lunches in the hospital cafeteria. I learned that she was nine months younger than me and had gone to school on the opposite side of my hometown. Over the next year, we talked about our families, describing each relative in exacting detail, and when I told her the horrible things that had happened in my house, she wasn’t scared away. She had an understanding heart, so much so that she seemed to understand my parents, too, because she kept encouraging me to make things right with them.

  “Maybe one day,” I always said.

  “You know one day never comes, right?” she would ask.

  I became expert at changing the subject. My favorite way to divert her was to start talking about what we wanted to do when the war was over. She had it all planned out. She was going to enroll at Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in Ahvaz and become a doctor. She was so serious about it, she even pestered the Masjed Soleyman surgeon until he finally agreed to let her watch in the operating room once a week.

  “He didn’t think I could handle it, but it doesn’t bother me at all,” she said.

  Her eyes lit up the same way mine did when she talked about opening the human body, figuring out its parts, same as like the engine of a car. She laughed when I told her I threw up the first time I saw someone’s insides, and how after the boy survived surgery I knew that I wanted to be a doctor. I was envious of her fortune to learn at the elbow of a hospital surgeon, like her own private master class. Maybe I should consider medical school, too.

  “We could go together!” she said.

  As soon as the words came out of her mouth, my vision of the future opened up to make room for a second person. I imagined walking to class together with our heavy medical textbooks, then I saw us wearing surgical scrubs and working side by side on the same patient, and the most beautiful image of all was us sitting down for dinner inside the home we shared to talk about what happened during our days.

  It was this magical future that I envisioned while I worked. I especially needed good thoughts when I was assigned to morgue duty, which all the medics agreed was the grossest task in the grossest job in the Basij. From dawn to dusk, ambulances brought dead bodies that were dry as wood or swollen and smelly, their fixed stares and open mouths twisted in absurd expressions, and we had to search for dog tags to try to figure out who they were. If they were Iranian, we tried to contact their families and send them home. Iraqi—we buried them. But not before first relieving them of their valuables. Iraqis loved gold, and it was a little secret among the medics that any jewelry you came across was finders keepers. Everyone was pocketing wallets and watches and rings, and eventually I gave in to temptation and a few pieces of jewelry made their way into my possession, too. But the worst part of working in the morgue was when the ambulances delivered only parts of dead bodies, and you had to try to match hands and feet and limbs to get a whole person. You had a better chance of success if the soldier had used a Magic Marker to write his name on his forehead and all his limbs, a precaution in case he was torn apart, so you would have clues to put the pieces together again. It was a gruesome puzzle only a psycho killer could love.

  I don’t know how Ahad-Amin did it, but he always stayed upbeat, as if all this stuff around him was just a video game and he could press “stop” any time he wanted to. Once, he was delivering two wounded Iraqis to the hospital, and he waved me over to the back of his ambulance like he had a big surprise for me. He told me one man’s name was Jasem. The other’s was Salem, which rhymes with a Persian word for “healthy.”

  “C’mere, Zahed, watch this.”

  He flung open the doors and approached Jasem. “Are you healthy?” he asked.

  “No, I’m Jasem,” he answered.

  Ahad-Amin smiled. “I know you are Jasem. But are you healthy?”

  The man pointed at the other passenger. “Salem. Salem.”

  Ahad-Amin made a big show of scratching his head and seeming confused. “You are not healthy?”

  “No! No! I’m Jasem!”

  The more we laughed, the more flustered the patients got, until they were screaming and pointing at each other trying to clarify, “Jasem! Salem!” which only made things funnier, until Jasem muttered something in Arabic to Salem, which I’d bet all my stolen gold meant “assholes.”

  I teamed up with Ahad-Amin whenever I could. We spent so much time in the ambulance together, roving and looking for wounded soldiers, that over the months he became like another brother to me. War was making me darker, and I gravitated toward his lightness; it reminded me how ridiculous everything was.

  One afternoon we were bumping along yet another pitted, unpaved road when something caught my eye. “Hey, is that somebody waving over there?” I asked, pointing toward the horizon, where I could just make out the shapes of two people on the ground. He yanked the ambulance to the left, and as we got closer we could see they were Iraqi, and one of them was on his knees frantically waving us down for help. The other soldier was crumpled on the ground with a bloodied shoulder.

  “Watch out, ther
e’s a trench there,” I said. Even though he didn’t need reminding that one should not drive huge ambulances over deep ditches, Ahad-Amin didn’t answer. He parked next to it and I got out to see what was going on. I took only three steps before I felt a sharp poke in my abdomen, almost like a bee sting, followed by a second one an inch away from the first. I clutched my stomach and felt hot blood seeping through my fingers and had the odd sensation that I was looking at someone else’s hand, someone else’s blood. Just before I toppled, I had a split second to see the barrel of a rifle sticking out of the doorway of a nearby bunker. It was a setup. The man who had waved us down was now on his perfectly good legs running away.

  “Sniper!” I screamed.

  It felt like flames of propane were bursting from my wounds as I crawled toward the trench. I heard the metal ring of bullets hitting the side of the ambulance and air hissing out of the tires, then the shattering of glass. Ahad-Amin flung himself out of the ambulance and was crouching behind it, using it as a shield, as he frantically called for backup. He saw me struggling toward the trench and started to make his way down the side of the ambulance toward me.

  “Don’t move!” I yelled. “We’ll both be killed.” Then I rolled myself into the trench and curled into a ball. My breath sped up, and I started to get cold. The sniper seemed to be enjoying this, taking potshots, then waiting long enough to make us think he’d run out of ammunition, then starting up again. It seemed to take too long, ten or fifteen minutes, until I finally heard jeeps roar up and machine-gun fire answer the sniper. By the time I felt hands lifting me out of the trench, I was shivering. I could still see, but I couldn’t speak, as if my brain had a rubber band around it and the words were being squeezed inside. I couldn’t thank the men who were carrying me, and I couldn’t shout to Ahad-Amin how glad I was that he wasn’t dead. But by the terrified look on his face, perhaps I was the one who was dead. Well, I thought, it’s a blessing that the sniper only got one of us. I heard the whir of helicopter blades getting louder and hoped they were airlifting me out. I’d never been in a helicopter before, and felt a sudden thrill at taking a ride in one, just before I passed out.

  When I woke up, I was back in Masjed Soleyman Hospital, only this time I had my own room. That’s when I knew something really bad must have happened, because only the severely injured were separated from the rest. I heard someone snoring softly at the foot of my bed.

  “Mina?”

  She bolted upright and came to my side. Her skin looked raw, as if she’d been sleeping in snow.

  “Have you been crying?” I asked.

  “The doctors said you probably weren’t going to wake up.”

  “How long have I . . . ?”

  “Fifty-six days,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  I looked down at my stomach and saw a forest of rubber tubes.

  “What’s all this stuff coming out of me?”

  “Doctors had to take out a meter of your intestines, your appendix, and your gallbladder because they were damaged. It’s OK; you can still function without them.”

  I almost said, “As long as my heart still works,” but I stopped myself from being such a cheeseball.

  By my calculations, that made three times that I’d slipped out of death’s clutches. The minefield, the mortar, and now this. And that didn’t count all the bombs and bullets that had somehow missed me in between. More than a dozen boys from my hometown were now dead, yet for some reason I’d made it all the way to my seventeenth birthday. The odds weren’t in my favor, and I knew that pretty soon I’d run out of lives. But as a good Basij soldier, that shouldn’t have worried me, because I wasn’t supposed to fear death. But having Mina cry over me put things in a new perspective. Four years before, I joined the military because I didn’t know what to do with my life. Now I knew.

  “Mina, I’d like to ask you something, but I’m too embarrassed.”

  She quickly looked down at her feet and said something so quietly that I could barely hear her. “I . . . I want to tell you something, too,” she said.

  We each waited for the other to take control, sitting there in a silence that got more awkward by the second. My embarrassment and her shyness spread out and filled the room like vapor. Then I got an idea.

  “Can you bring us some paper? We can each write it down and exchange papers at the same time.”

  I scribbled, “Mina would you like to marry me?” folded it four times, and placed the note in her palm. She curled her fingers around it, turned, and extended her note to me behind her back and then scurried to the other side of the room to read hers in private. Carefully, I opened her note, and when I saw the words “Will you ask for my hand?” my heart did a somersault. Mina read mine, and all the blood must have rushed to her head because I’ve never seen her skin turn that shade of red. Then she walked out of the room without looking at me. The needle scratched and the wedding music cut out in my head. Had she changed her mind? Was she afraid? Twenty agonizing minutes passed until I heard her footsteps coming, and I told myself that whatever expression she wore when she walked in the room would tell me immediately what her answer was. I sat up in bed, my whole body a coiled spring. She opened the door with a megawatt smile.

  What would happen next, I visualized like this: her saying yes, and me catapulting from my sickbed and tumbling into her arms for our first kiss.

  Instead, it went like this:

  Mina remained in the door frame and folded her arms.

  “Okay, I accept. But on one condition,” she said.

  My spine slumped a little bit, but then I shook it off. Nothing was asking too much; whatever she wanted, I’d make happen. I waited for her to continue.

  “You have to make peace with your parents first. And they must accompany you when you ask my father for my hand.”

  Except that. The last time I’d seen Baba and Maman, I’d left with a permanent scar on my heel.

  “Mina,” I pleaded. “It’s been four years; there’s too much distance now.”

  “Without their permission, my father will refuse.”

  I heard myself promising I would try. The war wasn’t going to be the death of me—this girl was.

  When I returned to my street, I was no longer the scrawny kid with black fingertips stained by engine grease. I had a mustache and the beginnings of a beard, and mean eyes that gave me a look that made people instinctively know not to pry. I leaned forward slightly and hobbled, on account of the soreness in my stomach from surgery. Even so, I was at least a foot taller, and my muscles tugged at the seams of my outgrown uniform. I must have been unrecognizable, because no one approached me, or maybe I just looked too scary; either way, it was all right with me. I did not want to cause a scene; I just wanted to leave the military and marry Mina and start my new life. This home visit was an errand, nothing more. But as I neared my house, my feet kept walking. I found myself knocking instead on Mostafa’s door.

  “Are my eyes telling lies?” Mostafa gasped, pulling me toward him to plant kisses all over my face. Then he took a step back and braced himself against the door.

  “Wait. Where’s Omid? Why isn’t he with you?”

  “Omid is still crazy, but he’s fine,” I said. “I’m here with good news.”

  Mostafa waved me inside and poured me tea from a silver samovar on a low glass table. I heard him shuffling for sugar in the kitchen, and when he returned, he placed the steaming cup down along with some walnut-stuffed dates and sat on a cushion across from me.

  “You two shouldn’t have run off like that. Without telling us,” he said, blowing on his tea.

  “We were young and stupid. We didn’t think you’d let us go. Did you get Omid’s note? He said he spotted your delivery truck one time, and he left it under the wiper.”

  “I got it.” Mostafa sighed. “I couldn’t have stopped you anyway, but my heart was so heavy.” His eyes floated over me. “You look bad.”

  “Just got out of the hospital. Sniper shot me, but not enough ti
mes, apparently.”

  “Have you finally come home?”

  Mostafa listened intently as, for once, I told him a story. I started with the morning Omid and I fled. I told him everything, making sure he knew his words had guided me when I decided to save the Iraqi soldier. We drained the samovar as I told him about my life as a medic, walking through the minefield, and getting shot by a sniper. Then I told him about Mina, and that I was ready to end my voluntary service in the Basij for her.

  “You know how you told me once to give my heart to the one I love, and don’t ever doubt?” I asked.

  Mostafa put his calloused hand over mine.

  “Soldier and nurse fall in love. Oldest story in the book,” he said.

  I explained Mina’s requirement, that I somehow smooth things over with my wicked parents and get them to go with me to ask her father for her hand. I asked Mostafa if he had any words of wisdom for that sort of situation.

  “Not really,” he said, getting to his feet and putting on his sandals. “But I do think we should start by inviting your parents over for tea.”

  “Now?” I protested, but before I could say anything more he was out the door.

  I heard my father’s voice and stood when he came through the door. He had a lot more gray hair than I remembered, and seemed smaller to me, but maybe that’s because I had grown. He froze, like a photograph, and only his eyes moved, like lasers, scanning me up and down. His voice was a dry blade of grass, rasping in the wind. He was nothing to be afraid of, and the sight of his weak body infuriated me because nobody so insignificant should hold a child in such terror. He’d duped me into thinking he was all-powerful.

  “Son . . .”

  He reached for me, but I ducked out of his embrace. Partly I was protecting my surgical wounds, but the truth was, I still shook when his hands got too close to me.

  “Are you OK?” he asked.

  “What kind of question is that?” I hollered. “After the way you’ve treated me, now you suddenly want to know if I’m OK? You have no idea what I’ve been through!”