I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  “Zahed.”

  A woman’s voice. I peeked out to find Mostafa’s wife, Fatemah, and Omid with a tray of food. The kindness made me embarrassed, and my tears came before I could hide them.

  “You did a bad thing, but your mother and father did something worse,” she said, laying a warm hand on my shoulder. “Your parents and I have discussed it, and we think you should live with us for a while.”

  She was pretty, like Raquel Welch times a thousand. My mouth was so dry, but I managed a raspy “Thank you.” My wish to be safe was stronger than my wish not to be pitied. Omid stayed behind as I nibbled at the rice.

  “That was stupid to steal from your father,” he said. I shrugged my shoulders. There was nothing to say, anyway. Everyone knew what went on in my house. I gave up on the rice, and Omid took my tray and then turned back in the door frame. “Don’t worry. If you are lonely, tell me, and I will bring my mattress and sleep in this room with you.”

  When my foot eventually healed, Mostafa asked if I’d like to help him make deliveries in his truck. School was still closed because of the bombing, so I had nothing better to do. His trips sometimes were as long as three weeks, hauling produce and construction supplies between the ports and the major cities. I always wondered what adventures he was having on the road in his red Mack truck and what it would be like to sleep in the bunk beds in the cabin behind the driver’s seat. I could hear that truck’s rumble coming from way down the street, and loved watching Mostafa part the sea of kids with it, its radiator grille gleaming like shark teeth.

  Mostafa tugged at his mustache as he waited for me to speak. He had tanned skin and a rough beard, yet eyes that were kind and welcoming. He kept his hair long, and started each morning before the mirror carefully combing it to the side with oil that smelled like mangoes. I always thought he would make a good judge, because he had a face that people automatically trusted. I told him that I wanted to see what there was in the world beyond Masjed Soleyman. That I would do anything to put distance between my father and me.

  We left the next day for Bandar Abbas, a port city on the Strait of Hormuz, fourteen hours away. We stopped in several cities along the way to pick up and deliver water pipes and concrete and shipping containers. My job was to help Mostafa tie our cargo down with straps, to change the cassette tapes, and to fry onions and meat on a camp stove propped between my feet on the passenger side. That first night, after I ran out of jobs and darkness took away the view, I lulled myself to sleep watching a silver necklace with the word Allah sway from the rearview mirror. I only woke when the truck grumbled to a halt. When I opened my eyes, Mostafa was pouring bottled water over his face, arms, and feet and scrubbing with a towel.

  “Where are we?”

  “Time to pray,” he said.

  “What?”

  He went to the sleeping cabin and unrolled a small rectangular carpet, kneeled down on it, and indicated for me to do the same next to him.

  “That’s the doorway to Allah’s house in Mecca,” he said, pointing to an archway woven into the silk fibers. “Your head goes there.”

  “That’s OK; you go ahead,” I said. I watched him recite Arabic verses from the Koran and kneel forward, placing his head on a small, round piece of clay. We had never prayed in my house, and I didn’t understand a word he was saying, but whatever he was doing, he looked like he really meant it. In the distance, I heard a wolf howl. The night was so, so black, and I said my own secret prayer for Mostafa to hurry up so we could get back on the road. My prayer was answered in about ten minutes.

  “Talk to me so I can stay awake,” Mostafa said as he accelerated through the gears.

  “OK,” I said, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Instead I just fiddled with my slingshot. “Why do you pray like that?” I asked finally.

  “I was not always a good Muslim, Zahed.”

  “Mmmm?”

  “I was a man without God. So I know things that, if I tell you, will save you a lot of trouble. Listen to me; I never want to see you smoking, doing drugs, or gambling. I do not want you to do anything wrong, so you must pray.”

  I wasn’t so sure about religion, but I respected Mostafa. He bought me clothes and shoes. And he gave me a small salary for helping him with deliveries. He treated me like a son, so I listened to his stories from the Koran and from the Bible. Mostly they were boring, but I did like the ones about the Prophet Solomon because that guy could speak to animals and control the wind.

  “Zahed, if somebody steals from you, you should forgive them because they might have been in need. If someone speaks behind your back, say nothing because you must be the bigger person. When you fall in love, give all your heart to your beloved and don’t ever doubt.”

  Maybe he was trying to tell me that he understood why I stole from Baba. I wasn’t sure, but I nodded anyway.

  “But if someone hurts your feelings intentionally, be merciless!” he said.

  “Merciless!” I shouted, pulling the rubber back on my slingshot and pretending to aim at his temple. In one swift move he whisked my weapon from my grasp and hid it under his enormous thigh.

  “Be careful with that thing,” he said.

  Over the next year, I watched him pray several times a day. I wasn’t sure if I would keep my promise to pray, but I was certain of this: I felt happy with Mostafa and wanted to be with him. And where else was I going to go? It didn’t look like my school was coming back anytime soon, unless you counted the tent where students were now supposed to pick up math and grammar worksheets and do them on their own. No classmates I knew even bothered. My life was better now, traveling with Mostafa, but how much longer could I keep saying thank you—for the meals, for the clothes, and for the lessons from the Koran? Eventually I would need a future that was my own. How would I ever become a man if I was always somebody’s sidekick?

  One day our route took us to a military camp near Darkhovin, close to the Iran-Iraq border, where soldiers were fighting. I still didn’t understand why Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini had started the war almost eighteen months before. Khomeini said we were in a jihad against Iraq to save Islam, but I didn’t have much use for a holy war. The battle was something adults talked about into the night, but to me it was something out there, something make-believe, like Sholay. Now I was going to see it for myself. We were going to visit a real battle zone to deliver produce and bullets to the Basij, a militia of volunteer boy soldiers, some of whom were thirteen, the same age as me.

  I had no idea they’d be carrying Kalashnikovs, semiautomatic pistols, and even machine guns, but there they were, walking as casually as if they were carrying a book. I felt like a little boy next to them. They had hard jaws already, but when one looked me in the eye as I handed him a box of ammunition, I tried to start a conversation by asking his name.

  “What do you want from me?” he replied. His voice was fast and direct, like a boxer landing punches.

  “How did you come to the front?” I asked.

  “I forged a permission letter from my father.”

  “That’s it?”

  He nodded.

  “In the village, I was nothing. This,” he said, sweeping his hand over the cluster of barracks encircled by barbed wire, “this is where my life finally started.”

  I couldn’t get that soldier out of my mind after that. It took Mostafa and me almost a week to get back, and when we finally reached the house, I practically flung myself out of the passenger-side door. Omid was eagerly awaiting my report from the front lines. I told him about the rows of tents and campfires, the hundreds of boys who already had muscles and mean stares, and described the guns in fearsome detail. For good measure, I threw in a few explosions that didn’t actually happen.

  His eyes widened, and he admitted that he already had a secret plan to run away and join the Basij. It was all I needed to hear. I leaned toward Omid and lowered my voice: “Why don’t we leave tomorrow?”

  TWO

  NAJAH

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p; I didn’t need an alarm clock to wake me up at four in the morning; the army trained me to sleep with one eye open, at the ready. At least I could thank the military for that. Oh, and the relentless jogging in formation and hiking into the mountains of Kurdistan had turned my body into something I could count on. Otherwise, eight tedious years patrolling the Iraqi border for opium smugglers was a duty that was finally, joyfully receding into my past.

  I was a free man now, at twenty-six. And my kingdom was Shula, one of the crummiest neighborhoods of Baghdad, where in 1979 cars were still brought to a standstill by muddy potholes in the rainy season and family wealth was determined by which households could afford shoes. But in the predawn before you could really see it, Shula was almost beautiful.

  Guided by moonlight, I walked down the middle of the dirt road, my arms wrapped around a fifty-pound bowl of uncooked falafel paste my sister Samera had prepared the night before. By now, I knew the way to her husband’s restaurant by sound and smell. I followed the incense wafting from the homes toward the low murmurings of the men bowing inside the mosque for the predawn prayer, then took a left at the scent of fish-shaped samoon loaves baking, then a right at the sound of the trickling wastewater in the open trenches lining the street. The shushing of the date palm fronds in the breeze told me I was near the bus stop, which meant only a few more steps to reach my castle.

  The metal retracting door clacked as I pushed it up, and with a flick of a switch the outdoor floodlight lit up the deserted street like a theater stage. That sudden explosion of light was the best part of my daily routine, like an invisible emcee promoting a show to an audience that had yet to arrive: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Najah Aboud and his Bruce Lee Restaurant!”

  There was no name on the awning, but customers had started calling it that after I redecorated the walls with Bruce Lee movie posters. Men and schoolboys alike were taken with the martial arts hero, and the posters of him twirling nunchucks and flexing his abs were good for business. Long after they finished their falafel sandwiches, people stayed late into the night drinking rivers of tea and rehashing the plots of Fist of Fury or Enter the Dragon. Having seen all of Bruce Lee’s movies, I was only too happy to join in.

  That wasn’t the only change I made since my brother-in-law handed me the keys and offered me half the profits if I would save this albatross on a dead-end street. All this place needed was a few fresh ideas—and breakfast.

  I set the falafel down in the kitchen and turned on the propane burners to heat water for tea. I slid a tape in the cassette player, and the speakers crackled with the lulling sound of a man’s voice reciting the Koran. This cheap tape was my fishing lure, drawing the hungry faithful out of the mosques after their early morning prayer. It also worked on people waiting at the bus stop, soldiers on their way to duty, and the insomniacs. It didn’t take long before even the classier people from the side of town with paved streets began crossing the park to pick up a few sandwiches before they caught their shuttle bus to jobs at the airport and government offices downtown.

  “Hey, Basrawi, need some help?”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw one of my regulars—a neighborhood boy who sometimes helped me prepare breakfast in exchange for a meal. Nobody knew my real name; I was just “the guy from Basra.”

  “You’d be a great help, son, if you pulled the tables outside,” I said. “The village woman should be here any minute.”

  The baker came in next, asking me how many loaves of samoon I’d need that day. I’d doubled the bread order since I took over a couple months before, but I was starting to run out again before closing time.

  “Give me a thousand.”

  He cocked an eyebrow and put his hands on his hips.

  “I can give you all I’ve got now, but I’ll have to bake more.”

  “How about if I pay you in advance, for your trouble?” I offered.

  Like clockwork, the old woman appeared at four fifteen, carrying a huge bowl of clotted water buffalo cream. My young helper stacked a pyramid of flaky kahi pastry next to her geymar cream and then fetched a jar of honey and the teapot. My breakfast menu followed one simple rule: give the people what they want. And everybody loves geymar and kahi, the comfort food they grew up eating. The boy barely had time to get the teacups on the table before hands began grabbing breakfast.

  I hustled back to the kitchen to brew more tea, and while it was heating, I brought a falafel sandwich to the village woman to thank her for the geymar. She always tried to refuse, but I never let her. She had a beautiful daughter, after all.

  After the breakfast rush, I turned on the radio news, just in time for the retirees who were waking up and wanting to find out the latest reports about the Iranian Revolution. There were a lot of hot words flying between Iraq and Iran these days, now that Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini were each in charge of their own country. Like all the rulers who came before them, they were arguing about their shared border or, more precisely, over control of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, where the Tigris and the Euphrates came together and flowed as one down to the Persian Gulf. Whoever controlled that joint flow controlled the ships that carried Middle East oil to the rest of the world. And oil was power, and power was money. Now the two lifetime enemies were stirring up ancient ethnic and religious rivalries to try to intimidate the other into giving up claims to that precious waterway.

  The war of words consumed my customers, but I tried my best to ignore it. I’d done my time in the military and was trying to enjoy life as an apolitical civilian. When the talk got too political, I took refuge in the kitchen. The Baathists had spies everywhere, and you never knew who was listening. Saddam made this perfectly clear just days after he became president. He called a televised meeting of several hundred of the most senior government people in Iraq, then announced he’d uncovered a plot against his regime. He ordered an informant to take the podium, and the man read aloud the names of the conspirators who were sitting in the audience. One by one, the accused were led, shaking and sweating, out of the room by the secret police, while Saddam chuckled. I don’t know if those men are alive or dead, and I don’t want to know. But everyone saw the video, and the implication of it was loud enough to silence a culture that used to revel in political debate. Fear was the cement that held people together now. I’d even heard stories of children turning in their own parents for treason.

  I was pulling a sack of chickpea flour out of the storage closet when my older sister Samera arrived for her shift.

  “Your produce girl is here,” she said.

  I dropped the sack right where I stood and brushed the dust from my shirt.

  “Do I look OK?” I whispered.

  She rolled her eyes and went back to chopping cucumbers. I grabbed a falafel sandwich from the counter and smoothed my hair. This time the produce girl had a box of eggplants, and I could tell she chose them carefully. Not one was bruised or wrinkled.

  “These were the rejects; my father was just going to throw them away,” she said, pushing the box toward me. “Take them.”

  “I must give you something,” I said, brushing my fingertips against hers as I handed her the sandwich.

  Her smile faded quickly. Something was wrong.

  “I overheard some girls at the marketplace,” she whispered. “Are you seeing other girls besides me?”

  I had to think quickly. There were several girls who flirted with me, and they were all pretty; it was hard to choose only one. I talked to many girls, and yes, sometimes I held their hands or touched their hair in the privacy of the supply closet. But nothing more. I knew not to ruin their reputations or put them in danger with their male relatives. Women were not allowed to talk to men outside the family, but as a shopkeeper I could get around that somewhat. I was pushing the boundaries, sure, but I had been in the military so long that I had missed out on some things like the scent of a woman. I was doing my best to catch up quickly.

  “That sounds like a pretty big story,” I said.
“I’m perfectly happy talking to you.”

  “Only me?”

  “Only, only,” I said. A line was starting to form behind her. I winked at her, and she blushed and scurried out the front door. Crisis averted, I retreated to the safety of the kitchen with the box of eggplants. But it wasn’t a true sanctuary—Samera was waiting for me with accusation in her eyes.

  “Don’t mess this up, Najah,” she said, pointing the knife at me. “That girl is our secret ingredient.”

  The falafel at Bruce Lee Restaurant had a purple hue and a smoky flavor that customers said they couldn’t find anywhere else. That’s because one day I thought I could stretch the product by chopping the eggplant skins and putting them in the falafel instead of the trash. I wasn’t trying for a new culinary twist on falafel, but suddenly I had a secret ingredient that added a dash of mystique to my sandwiches and helped me save a little money. Samera was right; it was good to keep the produce girl happy.

  Nobody was more surprised than me that I had a natural talent for business. Of all eight kids, I was the one who didn’t walk or talk until age three. I skipped class to go fishing or to play soccer so often that my parents finally gave up and let me drop out after elementary school. Now, to everyone’s utter shock, I was supporting the family. I kept two big plastic containers under the counter, one for bills and the other for coins. After we closed the restaurant at midnight, Samera and I used cups to scoop all the money into two equal piles. We cleared nearly eight hundred dollars a day. It was more money than I’d ever known, and when I looked at it, I had that same sensation of total protection I felt as a child holding my father’s hand as we crossed the street, like I had an invisible force field surrounding me. Even after paying for rent and supplies, there was enough to send to my divorced father in Basra to clothe and feed my five younger siblings, to hire four employees, and to buy myself suits and a Rolex watch. Then I did something I’d only dreamed about. I took my first vacation.