The Marsh Birds (2 page)

It was more. The mosque seemed to be able to be in the future as much as the past and to swallow the pain of the present. He stayed almost all day in that vast expanse of marble calm and shade.

He felt very pleased for a while. He prayed too when the adhan rang out and the great hall of pillars on the far side filled with rustling, sniffing, coughing, sweating people. He flowed in with them, washed and knelt with them on the carpet. He flowed out again into the marble expanse as if that great monument were living, breathing them all in and out in huge, measured breaths.

Then he remembered Ali and his panic slowly welled back up like a returning tide. It drove him back outside into the noisy now of the city, to his step across from the ancient souq.

When his certainty ebbed away, it was usually with the memory of the man called Ali and his strange kiss.

First the van, and men holding him, not unkindly, and his voice screaming in the darkness, drowning the distant dulled natter of automatic fire.‘Stop Stop Stop, Wait Wait W-w-w-wait a little bit!' His voice breaking into a scream and their voices coming from here and there in the fear-filled muttering darkness.‘No. Go!— No headlights!' Dhurgham screamed and cried and shook the van with all his strength. He even bit the man holding him. A hairy face came up close to him in the darkness.‘Sorry, habibi,' a cool voice said, and he felt the swoosh of something through the air behind his head but not the impact.

He was under carpet, its fibres on his face and the heavy wool smell in his nostrils. He half heard words in the darkness—
with only the boy, and him asleep under the rug, no need
. He drifted down and away again.

He came to in daylight with a terrible headache. There were three men in the van. The man who had spoken to him in the dark caught his eye and said, ‘Good morning, ya Ibni. I'm Ali. Don't talk. Your family will follow if they can.'The men were tight-lipped but kind. They sounded like Syrians, or at least not like Iraqis. Dhurgham huddled in the van, thinking, trying to remember all that had happened. They were already in Syria, Ali said.

The journey was long, hot, unremarkable. He felt as though his body had been left behind, as though he was still in the dim marshes, and this daylight and interminable vibration were a strange dream. He couldn't think clearly and he had too much to think about to pay the road any attention. Then the anxiety grew on him that it was up to him to pay them. He sidled up to Ali and tried to whisper in the most manly way he could about the amount. ‘It's all sorted by your father, habibi,' Ali said, and Dhurgham felt inordinately comforted.

They drove into Damascus in a fug of tension. Dhurgham stared out of the window at the teeming foreign city, his mind numb. He realised dully that he was a very long way from home.

They dropped Dhurgham on the street at a place they called a ‘safe house'. Ali got out with him and pressed a small wad of Syrian money into his hands. Dhurgham was too surprised and shy to say anything, although he knew he should have protested to be polite. Then Ali kissed him on the forehead, holding Dhurgham's head for two long seconds against his lips, and leapt back behind the wheel. Then they sped away and that was the last time he saw them or their van.

Dhurgham looked at the shuttered windows and high walls of the safe house.

He didn't hesitate. He turned and caught the first passing taxi to the Great Mosque.

Dhurgham knew he was the littlest and liked it. In his family, this made him all-powerful. He didn't know that he didn't know much. He didn't think much about his mother's moods, her asthma, or his father's work, absences, worries. Had he thought about it, he would have said that he liked his father to have worries. He himself had none, not yet, and his father having them meant that his father was doing all the necessary things. Dhurgham would have been concerned if his father had suddenly appeared worry-free, as if that might reveal a lessening of his father's status and responsibilities. He loved Ahmad, the other adult male in their household, in fact spent far more time with Ahmad than he did with his father; but, as Ahmad had far fewer and much less mysterious worries, he was clearly less involved in the troubles of maintaining the world than his father. Ahmad was their part-time caretaker, doorman and handyman.

Dhurgham's favourite place as a little boy was Ahmad's narjeela-repair workshop out the back of the café Hassan Ajmi on al Mutanabbi Street in old Baghdad. Everyone needed narjeela repairs but not many paid for them. For a while Ahmad got chickens in payment from his regulars, then copper wire, eggs, car radiators and miscellaneous junk that began to pile up around their house and disappear as theft became widespread. Ahmad never refused anything he was offered, even when an Ishtar freezer and a troop-carrier chassis joined the junk filling the street.‘People need a smoke,' he said.‘Even if there is no proper tobacco.' But Hassan Ajmi was always crowded: their tobacco was excellent. It came, via a complicated series of transactions, from the son of the President.

Ahmad hadn't always worked in a narjeela-repair workshop. Dhurgham's father said it was a hobby. But from the first year of the embargo, Ahmad had become known as the best hubble-bubble repairer in Baghdad. The shop was a small alcove squeezed at the back of the café and partly jutting into the neighbouring bookshop. The workshop had a rug, a gas burner with a bright blue flame, a coffee pot, tools, resin and wax spots and lumps scattered about. The shelves in the darkness were packed with disassembled pipes, stems, bowls and stands, and the walls were hung with the polished and finished pieces, waiting, sometimes for months, to be collected. Early in the war, when adults were still shocked to inaction and children still charmed by the changes around them, the spice souq some streets over was hit by a stray missile, missing al Mutanabbi Street but flattening the spices with what was to be the sweetest smelling bomb of the war. ‘Following its nose,' Uncle Mahmoud said, imitating a missile. This had left an open space that soon became a shanty souq and a thieves' market with surprising supplies. Ahmad managed to get all he needed somehow.

The hot resin smells rising from the dish on the burner, the smell of beeswax against the polished coconut bowl, the scent of lemon brass polish, the smell of coffee and sweet moist tobacco, and the smell of Ahmad's deft fingers slightly singed: these were the smells of Dhurgham's kingdom when he was very small. He himself had a special spot, a red Turkoman rug on a box to the left of the burner, and, sitting there, he thought the men who frequented the café to smoke and chat would see that he was lordly, that he owned this, his domain and, to a certain degree, theirs. He answered them with his deepest voice in measured phrases, no abbreviations, when they called greetings to him, but he hated it when they smiled and called him a little prince, turning him into a little boy who should sit still while Ahmad worked. At other times, Ahmad gave him a sweet-smelling rag and let him polish the burnished coconut bowls of the finest pieces, and he sat there proud, the worker, doing real work.

The workshop was both palace-like and cave-like: glittering layers in the darkness—brown bowls, scrolled brass, ornate cut tin and wood necks and plush velvet hoses and silver worked mouthpieces—all, except for the ones he polished, covered in dust. He loved the feel of the hot wax on his finger and the crisp cap it formed on his fingertip when it cooled. He loved the smell of the apple tobacco Ahmad sucked from an ancient narjeela and breathed in gentle curlicues from his nostrils. And he loved Ahmad's narjeela. It had horses and riders, European knights and Bedu warriors fighting in the gold and silver base and crown of the bowl, and it had three swords for feet. The long pipe was old and worn, mangy even, like an old dog, but the mouthpiece was ebony inlaid with pure silver. When he was very young, he had wished his father had a hubble-bubble like this one, and that his father did something as manly as smoke it in a narjeela-repair workshop. One day he said as much to Ahmad, who gave him a look and said,‘Your daddy is the one on this horse, Dhurgham, not the one smoking the pipe.' And he touched a singed finger to the leading warrior, who was standing high in his stirrups. Dhurgham tingled with a sudden anxiety and pride. Then he swung his legs and secretly revelled in the vast universe of troubles that his father kept at bay, leaving him, Dhurgham, free altogether, and Ahmad only frowning slightly over a glowing burner.

His father's body, whether on the horse on the narjeela, or seated with a sinewy forearm draped over a raised knee, was both warmth and distance, both the tight embrace and the far perimeter of Dhurgham's world. That thrumming body was as permanent to him as the arch of stars at night and spanned his world with the same certainty and grandeur.

On the eighth day, instead of straining to see each new person, he shut his eyes, thinking,
They will see me, regardless
. And he felt their eager desire, their longing for him, their eyes reaching through the spangled air for his sweet familiar form, for
him
. Whenever he shut his eyes, the world sped up, urgent with pain and reunions. He tried imagining them approaching, he unaware; then he would fling his eyes open, ready to be startled, to sob a little to please his mother, to struggle a little bit in her embrace, to hold his sobs back to impress his father. He sobbed into his sleeve without control at that and his eyes opened.

The world slowed to normal. They were never there among the flapping desperate footsteps that he could hear with his eyes closed.

Once, with his eyes shut, he drifted away from the false patter of feet approaching that never came near and found himself thinking of his yellow and red truck. He had not had batteries for it for most of his life, since before the war, but it was nonetheless his favourite. He saw it on the top step by the bathroom, on the landing leading to his and Nooni's rooms. He could see the darkened doorway to Nooni's. His door was shut because he had left a mess tumbled about in there. He had been delighted when his mother said,
Just leave everything as it is
. Not even his bed was made.

He could see that little kid's mess, his clothes, his Pokémons, his old Winnie Dubdoub, his Spiderman poster; and the truck, alone in the empty house
for days now, nearly two weeks
. Ahmad wouldn't even have put it away, because when they locked up, Ahmad wasn't there, and his uncle had said that Ahmad had gone home to his village for good. No one was there. It was empty, silent, just the yellow and red truck and his mess and Nooni's dark room. He began to cry again, his head down in the crook of his elbow.

‘Who will fill the tank, Nooni, if Ahmad is gone?'

‘You will, silly. Build up your strength. A hundred buckets should take you five minutes!'

‘Who will look after the orchard?'

‘You!'

‘Who will sweep?'

Nura tapped him in the chest with a forefinger.

Ahmad leaving was the most serious thing that had happened since the end of the war. He said as much to Nura, who laughed at him.