I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  “Well, if I’m going to be a man, I need a man’s name.”

  “Amjad,” I said.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “Only the best. It means ‘magnificent one.’ ”

  For the next two hours, we felt what it would be like to be man and wife, together in public without anything to hide. She wrapped her arms around my torso and pressed in, turning her head to the side and resting it against my shoulder blade. I felt her thighs squeezing my hips as we leaned into the curves and I pushed back into her to keep our body heat together. I think Alyaa enjoyed being a man. She could laugh out loud, sit with her legs wide apart, and spit freely. We roamed every street and dirt alley in town, even waving when we passed a few of my unsuspecting friends. I finally brought the motorcycle to rest near a grove of trees not far from her house and helped her change back into her clothes.

  “Can we do that again?” she asked.

  “Once we are married, we can ride every day.”

  I watched her walk toward her home until she was out of view, then headed home. Karima was watering Dad’s beloved white rose bushes when I rumbled up. She set the water bucket down and put her hands on her hips.

  “What are you doing home in the middle of the day?” she asked.

  “When does Dad get back?”

  “Tomorrow, why?”

  “Karima, I need you to talk to him. I want his blessing to ask for Alyaa’s hand.”

  “Why don’t you talk to him yourself?”

  “He listens to you.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  My eyes welled up with tears, and I couldn’t get out the words. “This morning, I . . . I mean, we . . . we . . . started hugging and kissing and then, dot, dot, dot. You fill in the blanks.”

  She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, Najah, no. What have you done?”

  I hung my head. “It’s all my fault. I feel like I sucked out her soul.”

  Karima put a finger under my chin and tilted my head up until she was looking into my eyes. She gave me a pitying look and made a clucking noise, like a pigeon.

  “Why couldn’t you wait? Chht. Now look at you, lovesick. Chht-chhht. I will bring it up, when the time is right.”

  I hugged her tight and told her I’d always remember her kindness. If anyone could make this right, she could.

  The route I took through downtown was jammed with more than just the usual traffic, a knot of honking cars and buses and scooters. I cut out of line, steered around the backup, and discovered that the road was blocked by military police, and a parade of some importance was coming through. At the head of the parade were police cars with sirens blaring, and a crowd had gathered to investigate the fuss. As the motorcade got closer, I felt the low rumble of flatbed trailers carrying military tanks, and everyone around me started applauding.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the man nearest me.

  He lifted his fist in triumph and said, “Our men are heading to war, ho!”

  When the convoy got closer, I recognized my own tank crew. It was my unit that had been mobilized. I dropped the motorcycle right where it was and jumped on the trailer as it passed, grabbing the outstretched hands of my cheering buddies.

  “Where the hell were you, Aboud?”

  “Overslept.”

  “My ass. It was a girl, wasn’t it?”

  I ignored them, lit a cigarette, and turned to wave back at the crowd, my worries about missing curfew suddenly replaced by the larger fear of what would happen in battle. And that fear was engulfed by the sheer terror of what would happen to Alyaa if I couldn’t get back soon to marry her.

  “Allahu Akbar!” the crowd roared.

  I waved back robotically. Yes, God sure was great.

  “Where are we going?” I asked the gunner.

  “Khorramshahr.”

  Our biggest war prize so far, Khorramshahr was on the Shatt al-Arab in Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan Province, and we’d captured it a year ago, within days of the war. The Iranians were making increasingly aggressive pushes here and there to try to take some of the neighborhoods back. They were outgunned by us, of course, but there were so many of them, and they just kept coming, kamikaze-like, with their pistols and shoulder rocket launchers, that they were starting to make inroads. Our mission was to maneuver the tanks into a backup position, to provide a line of defense behind the foot soldiers.

  At first, war felt more conceptual than real. I steered the tank where the commander ordered, and we turned the cannon to the requested direction and fired, never knowing if we were hitting anything. The shells sailed for nearly three miles, making it blind warfare, safe from guilt. Technically, I was in combat, but we were really just firing into the abyss. The Iranians didn’t fire back, and sometimes weeks would go by until we got another order to fire the tanks. In the downtime, we cleaned the tanks and maintained the engines. The gas needed refilling, the wheels and air filters needed constant cleaning to get the sand out, and the decade-old engines were always in need of a tune-up. We parked the tanks over trenches, so we had an escape route in case we came under fire. This also had the dual benefit of providing a little shade, and a place to have a drink in privacy. As the weeks stretched into months, I worried constantly about Alyaa. My leaves were a thing of the past now that I was deployed, and the only thing that relieved my stress was arak, the clear, eighty-proof kind made from dates; it was a popular escape for soldiers. Officers drank arak, too, and looked the other way when we did, as long as it didn’t interfere with our work. I drank it until I felt her arms around me again and the wind in my hair and heard her squeals of joy over the roar of my motorcycle.

  For six months, I visited Alyaa in drunken memories, until one day I was sent in a truck with four others to the armory to bring more ammunition to the fighters positioned in the trenches. The road was studded with potholes, and the driver overcorrected after dipping into an especially deep pit and flipped the truck. We were all able to crawl out with only some bruising, nothing serious. But when the field ambulance arrived, we suddenly all complained mightily of broken ribs and ringing ears and torn ankles, so that we were all sent to the hospital. Nurses bandaged my perfectly good ankle and sent me home for four days to recover, exactly as I’d hoped.

  When the bus dropped me off in Basra, I kept the bandages and hobbled on crutches to Alyaa’s house. I watched from a distance and didn’t see anyone inside, so I decided to knock on her door and if anyone answered, I’d pretend I was looking for someone else. My knocks went unanswered. I tried the knob, and it twisted. I pushed it open a little and listened. Nothing. “Hello?”

  My call echoed in the empty house. I swiveled around and spotted an old woman across the street and ran to her.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, do you know where the family is that lives in that house?”

  She studied my uniform, my miraculously recovered foot, and the crutches I held under my armpits and shook her head.

  “Dunno,” she said, and kept walking.

  I was frantic. I stopped a few more people and even checked with a shopkeeper, but no one had any information. Something bad had happened to her, I just knew it. She had given up on me and moved away. Or somebody had found out about us, and God knows what horrible things had happened to her. I ran home and almost crashed into my father, who was just coming in from work.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  I tore off the bandages and threw the crutches on the ground.

  “It’s fake,” I said, not stopping to explain. “Did Karima talk to you about my fiancée?”

  He raised one eyebrow and shook his head. He decided not to pry and instead indicated for me to sit next to him on the sofa. His formality was foreboding.

  “A woman cannot have a normal life if she only sees her husband two or three times a year,” he said. “Son, the timing is not right. It’s for the girl’s security that I can’t agree to this. Your mother feels the same way.”

  That was it, then.
I was boxed in. I couldn’t even run away with Alyaa because I couldn’t find her.

  “Whatever you think is best,” I said, and walked out the front door. I went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of arak to help me crawl out of my own skin. I took a few shots and, emboldened, took another stroll past her house. No one was there, so I circled back home. I had another drink, took another walk, and fell into a routine of fifteen-minute checks on her house, becoming more fearless with each pass. My drunken vigil lasted four days. I paced back and forth between her home and mine, crazy with worry that she had been killed by a relative or her mother had moved to escape the humiliation. I didn’t sleep, and I couldn’t eat despite Karima’s pleadings to put something in my mouth. I felt like a walking dead person when I boarded the bus back to Khorramshahr.

  My battalion had quadrupled in size during my phony sick leave. I came back to a whirlwind of more than a thousand people shouting and speed-walking this way and that, rushing from meetings and double-checking things on clipboards. Most of the newcomers were special forces types, commandos and snipers. Every day the commander told us to be ready for an attack, that the Iranians were pushing back hard and converging on us. He sent mine specialists into neighboring Shalamcheh to bury explosives in a protective ring around Khorramshahr and ordered us to move our tanks into position behind the minefields, driving at night with the lights off so as not to arouse suspicion. We moved into place and dug a network of new trenches and filled sandbags to build bunkers. After all that hurry-up, we waited. Then we waited some more. Out of sheer boredom, we cleaned the tanks and checked the fluids. When that was done, we cleaned the gears and the air filters. Before we knew it, a whole winter had gone by.

  I had given up on ever getting another leave, and I was certain I’d never see Alyaa again, when two soldiers approached my tank. I was underneath it, telling my problems to another bottle of arak.

  One of them knocked on the tank to get my attention.

  “Hey, Aboud, you’re from Basra, right?”

  I crawled out, a little clumsily, and confirmed it.

  “Captain got a telegram. The electricity went out in his house in Basra, and he needs you to get your weapon and guard the electrician. Show the driver how to get there.”

  I sat in the back of the jeep with the electrician and we chatted about our families. I told him about my brothers and sisters, and showed him the camera I got for them at the commissary, one of the new ones where the photo came out right after you took it. As we crossed the Shatt al-Arab river into Basra, we had warmed up enough that I felt safe asking him for a favor.

  “All right if the driver drops me off at the bakery and picks me back up at five in the morning after you’ve finished the wiring?”

  We shook on it, and as soon as the jeep pulled away, I found a spot on the sidewalk where I could sit and keep vigil over Alyaa’s shuttered house. As the hours passed, I felt my mind melting at the edges. Like a madman, I started talking to strangers who passed, babbling incoherently about lost love. I considered throwing a rock or piece of wood at her window but was too afraid. I finally gave up and went home to drink again until morning pulled me out of night. And by the time the bottle was empty and the last stars were fading into day, I weaved my way back to Alyaa’s house with a brilliant new plan. I was just going to bang on her door and ask her mother—no, tell her mother—that we were getting married. Enough of this hiding like a mouse. I was a man about to go to war, damn it, so why was I wilting before an elderly woman with one eye?

  I marched straight for the door, for God and everyone to see, and when I was about to cross the street, Alyaa appeared in the door frame. Her hand flashed out from her abaya and she curled a finger, beckoning me. Something wasn’t right, like she knew I was coming. I shook my head no; it was too risky. Come this way, I signaled back. We stood at an impasse, furiously signaling each other. She won. I walked over to her, looking over my shoulder, sure this was a trap. What if her brother was waiting for me inside with a knife?

  I noticed immediately that she wasn’t the same girl. She looked defeated, with the sagging face of a woman twice her age. She couldn’t even raise her eyes to look at me.

  “What’s wrong? Did your brother die?” I asked.

  “No, I am the one who died,” she wept. “You killed me.”

  “I would never lay a hand on you,” I said. “I’d kill half the Arab nation if necessary to protect you.”

  I reached out to hold her hand, but she pulled back. My precious Alyaa sensed only danger emanating from me now. I realized she could probably smell the alcohol on my breath, and I stepped back and closed my mouth.

  “I can’t talk to you here,” she said. “Go home. I’ll meet you in the courtyard.”

  I walked backward, stumbling a little, so I could keep her in my sight until she closed the door. Then I swiveled toward home, my vision blurred. Was she going to leave me? Had she already married the other man? Did someone threaten to kill her? I staggered home, dry heaving with dread.

  As Alyaa came down my street, it looked like she was carrying something under her abaya. I darted into the secluded alley across from my house and she ducked in behind me, chuffing as if tears were coming out of her heart instead of her eyes. She came so close that her forehead was touching my nose, then pulled aside her abaya to reveal a baby, only a few weeks old, staring directly at me.

  Sparks zinged up my spine and my vision and hearing sharpened, like an animal that has just sensed it is being hunted. Of all the possible scenarios I’d been fixating on, I’d forgotten to include this one. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway: “Who is that?”

  “Your son.”

  He gurgled and reached for me with one tiny starfish hand.

  “Is this real? Are you telling me the truth?” I asked.

  “He is ours,” she said.

  I felt guilty, broken down. I had destroyed both our lives for one moment of passion.

  “Who knows about him?”

  “Only my mother.”

  “But where did you . . . how . . . ?”

  She had given birth at an aunt’s house, nearly two hundred miles north. The ruse she and her mother had agreed on was that the boy was the aunt’s but had breathing problems and needed to be closer to the sea.

  “Don’t you want to kiss your son?”

  My lips were quivering as I bent forward. His skin smelled just like his mother’s. I felt his feet wiggling underneath her cloak. He had strong legs, like mine.

  “What is his name?”

  “Amjad.”

  He was indeed magnificent. And terrifying. From the miracle of his fingernails that were no bigger than sesame seeds to the way his stare hooked into me, as if he already knew his flesh was mine.

  “Do you love him?” she asked.

  Her question stirred a latent protective instinct in me.

  “He is my son; nobody else will claim him. I will speak to my captain, and I promise, we will be married in two weeks.”

  “That is my dream.”

  I kissed them both one more time. Then I remembered the camera was still in my bag.

  “Stay where you are,” I said.

  I stepped back so I could get her face and our baby’s in the frame. She turned away, saying, “It’s too dangerous for me.”

  “I won’t ever show anyone. It’s for me to keep close to my heart.”

  I pulled the photo out of the camera, waved it in the air until the image appeared, then tucked it safely inside my slim pocket Koran. I squeezed her hand and put my lips to the forehead of our impossibly perfect son.

  “Soon,” I whispered.

  When I got back to Khorramshahr, I bypassed the captain’s secretary and barged right into his office. He looked startled and covered some papers he was reading on his desk.

  “You can’t just come in here, soldier!” Storm clouds gathered on his brow.

  “Sir, I’m not going to talk to you like a soldier talking to a captain. I’m goin
g to talk to you man to man. I have no connections, I don’t have money, I have no other support; all I have is my honor. I’m facing a big problem.”

  The captain studied me, then came around the desk and rested his palm on my shoulder.

  “Najah, you are a good soldier, and everyone around here likes you. Stop shaking now. Tell me your story.”

  I confessed all of it, and he murmured supportively, and then I asked him if he would help me marry Alyaa. If he wouldn’t help me, I was prepared to desert. In the silence before he responded, I heard the second hand of my watch as loud as a spoon scraping on brick.

  “Do you want me to talk to her family or your father?” the captain asked.

  “Both.”

  He snapped his fingers, as if to say this was an easy assignment.

  “OK. Give me ten days. You and I will go back to Basra. I will get you married.”

  FIVE

  THE MEDIC

  To get Khorramshahr back from the Iraqis, we had to trick them. They had more tanks and rocket launchers than us, because they had lots more countries giving them money, but so what? We didn’t let that stop us, because even though the Basij had junkier weapons and never enough ammunition, we had more spirit. Plus, we were creative.

  We used water. I was still a few miles away in Shalamcheh, but to hear the commander tell it, it was something straight out of the Koran, like when the Prophet Nuh built an ark and all the pagans who refused to worship Allah were washed away. During the past year while Saddam’s troops were busy occupying Khorramshahr, our combat engineers were busy digging a canal to take water from the Shatt al-Arab and shoot it like a fire hose right back at them. It took a really long time to move all that dirt, but eventually all that separated the Iraqi garrison from the waiting deluge was a thin dirt berm packed with explosives. Then one morning during the rainy season, the floodgates were opened on the dams upstream and the new canal filled with water. Our guys waited until just before dawn, and shazam! Total water wipeout.