Elegy on Kinderklavier (18 page)

Bajh had also been invited. Araz caught sight of him across the wide living room, his white taqiyah standing out, his hands clasped behind his back, not drinking, his face half-serious, half-amused as he met Araz's eyes. Araz had to wait to speak with him, a whole hour wasted between the host's little speech about loyalty as a new government coalition was formed (delivered pointedly in Bajh's direction) and the nattering of Asti's husband, who was an uneasy, very poor man whom the other men allowed because he supplied the alcohol. Asti helped his little shifting operation in the market sometimes, selling the residents of the Chevalier's slum aged cans of Turkish beer and crumbles of the hash bricks that Asti wheedled out of their supplier and split between Araz and herself.

When Bajh finally did come over, he turned to Araz as if continuing a conversation that had been interrupted only minutes ago.

“So I go on these walks,” he said, and smiled playfully. “I find they clear my mind.”

And so they walked, not just that night but each night they could escape early from the biweekly meetings in the Kurdish politician's house, which were becoming tenser and tenser, and eventually on days when there were no meetings at all. They rounded the city, Bajh showing up in the square in front of the Chevalier or Araz waiting patiently for Bajh to get out of one of the Sura study sessions he led a few days a week at the mosque. They walked in the cool spring nights and the humid, breezy afternoons. In the north of the city there was a small laundromat (everyone used washers now, due to the city's new, larger electricity ration), and sometimes they followed its scent of jasmine and linen as it wafted out into the fields, mostly abandoned now, until it mixed with the smell of the real flowers that grew in the fallow tangles. They didn't talk all the time, but
sometimes Bajh asked about what it had been like in England, and Araz told him about the sallow-faced, Yemenite Muslim chaplain at Darlington because he thought Bajh would like to hear about that. Other times Araz asked about what it had been like in the town while he'd been gone, but Bajh had difficulty answering this, and the conversation usually devolved into Bajh simply listing the fates of people they'd known as children. If they'd started out in the afternoon they came back to the slum just before last prayers, Bajh returning to the golden bulbs of the minarets' spires, Araz to the fuzzy, colored lights strung over the market in the square at dark.

The days began to slip away from Araz. His money, which had been mostly exhausted just getting back to the town, dwindled to nothing; the lease on his flat was the only thing remaining, a final parting gift from the man in Kensington. Araz reclaimed consciousness each morning to the distant calls and chittering insults of the other residents of the Chevalier as they stirred. The hotel had become a sort of refuge in the slum. Aging Syrian prostitutes with thick black eye makeup mixed with the fey boys who put on dance shows in the square on weekends. There was Araz, the half-foreigner, on the fourth floor, and Asti and her husband, the alcohol seller, on the first. The days became hourless. Araz was not even able to say when his and Asti's hash sessions got earlier and more frequent, eventually lasting more or less all day. Neither could he say when the visitors started appearing in his living room. Of this especially, scenes became inseparable from their own recurrent memory, causing them to surface, reexperienced, with the whim of Araz's boredom or moods.

The visitors were almost always from the mosque, members of the “security force” that people were already calling the “Imam's Army,” referring, of course, to no real or local imam but the lost imam, the yet-to-come imam: the army, then, of no man. Araz saw
them sometimes as he and Bajh inspected the city near the mosque: teenagers mostly, lying on the ground behind ancient, bulky-looking machine guns, aiming them into the empty twilight. Then Araz would see them again the next day, in late afternoon or night, before or after final prayers, hedging back and forth in his doorway. They were timid as they had sex with him, or, if the only way they could bring themselves to do it was in a fell swoop of violence, sometimes they were rough. Araz didn't care, didn't ask questions. He made them do it in front of the long, dusty mirror he'd propped against the wall, so they had to look down at the awful geography of his back.

The Kensington man had refused to look at the sea of mottled skin while they had sex, but Araz knew from his experiments at Darlington what it looked like. Whoever was behind him would try and fail to ignore the scarred field, the landscape of it, blotchy with faded yellows and vermilion, the swells and vales of it, uncanny membrane that both resembled and did not resemble skin. A failure to look away was sharpened by the final discovery of the flesh near Araz's hip that had taken on the grid imprint of a medical wrapping left on too long in the early weeks. One visitor, older than most, lay on his side on the floor and cried afterward, until Araz threw him a towel and told him to stop embarrassing himself.

Though he asked for and required nothing, the visitors brought Araz little gifts: food, clothes, or sometimes just money, placing whatever they'd brought on the small table in the entryway where Araz left it all untouched, taking only the money to use with Asti to get new and purer supplies from her husband's connection. Araz ate little and slept less and lost weight. Each time after a visitor left, Araz lay with his back against the cool, dirty tile of the floor and felt the swelling in his chest, the one he'd had since he'd first seen Bajh again: the feeling that the world was accelerating around him, not in time but in pitch, in intensity, a terrible inertia, as if together he and
Bajh were approaching some small apocalypse. Araz felt a terrible drive in himself to be owned by his desire, to continue until nothing of it was left, until he had no money, until there was no one left to sleep with, until the not-skin of his ruined back stretched taut over his ribs. He imagined, lost in his drugged reveries, that the entire town was wasting away just as his own body was, until all that would be left in the slum's square on the last day would be himself, barely there, and Bajh, in perfect condition, the leveled buildings and fields presenting him like a statue.

•

The city seemed to be holding its breath. On their walks, the people in the streets no longer joked or called to Bajh and Araz as they passed. Bajh also grew quiet in the Kurdish meetings and during their perambulations.

One afternoon at the end of their walk, Bajh offered to come up to Araz's flat with him to wash the mud from their feet—this instead of obeying their unspoken rule of doing it separately: Bajh at the mosque's ablution fountain, Araz in the communal bathroom at the end of his hall. Araz watched Bajh as he made his way through the halls and stairwells of the Chevalier. Those who saw him were silent at first, standing tensely in their doorways or stilled with laundry baskets in their hands, their eyes guarded. But Bajh was kind, oblivious, respectfully greeting everyone he saw and making conversation with anyone he could until, by the time they reached the second floor, the hallways were alight with his presence.

In the flat, after they'd washed the dirt from their feet, Bajh stood and watched while Araz changed his splattered clothes. Araz turned away from him as he pulled off his long shirt and watched Bajh watch
him in the mirror. Araz stood still. Bajh's gaze had dropped to the middle of Araz's bare back and was hovering there sadly. He stepped forward and stood close behind Araz. Araz closed his eyes and imagined what Bajh's breath would feel like on his shoulders then, if he still had any sensation there. Bajh reached out gently in the space between them and traced very lightly the longest blooming ridge of scar tissue. He leaned forward and down in an awkward sort of bow, and Araz could feel the cool weight of Bajh's forehead pressing against the back of his neck.

“Oh, Araz,” Bajh said quietly. “What on earth are you doing here?”

•

Araz was drinking tea in a café at the edge of the slum's market square on the afternoon of the dog's head, and so he saw it happen. It unfolded so easily that it was almost unsurprising, like watching something many times imagined suddenly happen in real life. Though no one could have imagined it, really. A group of chanting, jumping children dressed in the uniforms of the religious school came singing and dancing into the square. At first among the vendors there was the air of pleasant excitement, as if this was some new version of the occasional Saturday-night parades in which the teenaged boys from the Chevalier formed a dancing line, dressed as famous women from history. But then, as the commotion progressed into the center of the market, Araz could see people pulling away. When the group of children arrived at the unmarked alcohol table, which Asti was manning while her husband made a trip out of town, the severed head sailed into the air out of the blob of little bodies, appearing to do so of its own accord. It hit Asti on the shoulder, the dog's blood
streaking across her dress, and fell loudly to the table in front of her, its glassy eyes gazeless, muzzle hanging slackly open. She looked down at it, and as she did they threw cups of dirty, red-dyed water on her—apparently they'd been unable to gather whatever was left of the animal's blood.

“Praise be for the death of the dogs!” they were singing. “Praise be to Allah who saves us from the nastiness of the dogs who corrupt us with their filth!”

That night, Araz helped Asti undress and clean herself. Her voice was even and quiet as she told Araz the plan she and her husband had decided upon on the phone.

In the dim light of the room, Araz could see the queer geometry of her burn scars, almost symmetrical, worst up and down the middle of her torso and getting less and less pronounced farther away from her heart, until her hands were almost normal. On her stomach were chunks of uneven, missing flesh where infection had been excised, and her bra hid the irregular shapes of her mangled breasts. Helping her like this was not for Araz to do, but her husband had begged him on the phone, and Araz did not blush.

There was a quiet after she'd changed and had explained the plan, as she leaned into her small mirror and tried to fix her hair. Araz looked at her face, the snarl of taut, shining pink skin.

That night the whole Chevalier was quiet, possibly out of respect, which only had the unintended consequence of making Asti's cries of pain and the strange pattern of her husband's crashing blows and apologetic sobs even louder, until they seemed to fill every open space in the hotel, drifting up through the decaying floors and ceilings to where Araz lay, flinching. Their plan had been simple: they would contend to anyone who would listen that the husband had no idea that Asti was doing something so terrible as selling alcohol in the market, and that he'd punished her severely with a brutal
beating, hoping this would be enough for the powers that were in the mosque, those who had sent the children.

The next morning the men came for him anyway, dragging Asti's husband out by his shirt and hair just before first light, not even looking at the proposed penance of Asti's swollen face and beaten body but kicking him right past where she lay on the couch and beating him into the back of a white pickup truck. It would be half a day before someone thought it was safe enough to go into the flat, where they found that Asti's husband had, in his fear, done his part too well, leaving Asti still drifting in and out of consciousness. A few of the older women were left to care for her, and it would be another ten days before someone found her husband's body, partially submerged in an irrigation ditch, half his face missing from the exit wound, shot through the back of the head.

•

In the weeks that followed, the city became populated by shadows. Only small caravans of speeding vehicles chanced the street. Bajh was missing; people were saying that word had come from the imam in Baghdad that, of all the lieutenants, Bajh had been chosen as the new security commander of the district. Word had also come from the north that the Kurdish parliament would be joining the new government after all, ceding, as part of the agreement, its claim to all towns bordering the Shi'a territories to do with as the religious liked. The mosque gathered its boys from the city. Araz's visitors dwindled to almost none, until finally there was only one boy left: a skinny, affectionate, nervous teenager with a ghost of a mustache who called himself a soldier and came only in the dead of night. Sometimes the boy fell asleep afterward in Araz's bed, and Araz, lost in the waves of the hash, would get up very
close to the side of the boy's face, trying to focus hard enough on some tiny part of it, his canthus, say, to transform it into Bajh's so that he might be there with him, even falsely, just for a few minutes.

When the men came for Araz, he did not resist. The two men, their faces obscured by the black wraps of masks, had to carry him down the stairs. They bound his hands and laid him with a surprising gentleness in the bed of the pickup, and Araz wondered briefly if they knew him.

At the bank of the river, Araz fell on the wet ground. He could feel its cold firmness beneath him, yielding slightly to the shape of his body. Above the men's faces, the sky wheeled with sharp stars. One masked man went back to the truck; the other watched him go. Araz heard the door slam, the engine start. In a sudden motion, the man above Araz lifted his gun and fired a single shot. Araz felt the sting of dirt against his cheek, and his head filled with a pure ringing. The man put his gun down and hefted Araz up, Araz realizing only with the slosh of blood rushing to his head that he was uninjured, that the man had fired just to the right of Araz's ear, deafening him. Then there was the sensation of falling backward and the splash of cold wetness as Araz was dropped into the river.