Had I imagined her moment of anguish? I wasn’t sure.
“I remember the day he did that,” she said. It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Shaba’s tooth. “Some of our guards were playing tetherball and asked Elijah to join. He was so bad, but tried so hard. There was a lot of blood. It took many towels to clean his face.”
“You must miss him a lot,” I said.
She shook her head. “It was a long time ago.”
Rana went to swirl the teapot. When she returned, she asked about California. I told her I hadn’t appreciated it growing up, but missed it now: the sand, the ocean. Impressing her mattered more than the truth. Her eyes seemed to light up at the mention of the beach. I started to tell her I’d take her someday, if she wanted, but coughed instead. That wasn’t possible. I turned toward the window, where the rain was being replaced by drips of sunlight. There were shouts and the sound of a soccer ball being kicked around. I didn’t need to look out to know that Washington and the jundis were playing with the kids.
“You sure they won’t say anything?” I asked. “We don’t want to get anyone in trouble. I know you’re taking a huge risk talking to us. To me.”
“Who is there to tell?” A caustic sound slipped out of her, something between a groan and a laugh. She had a point. We hadn’t come across anyone else living in the area. “And they have fun playing with the soldiers,” she continued. “They understand for that to continue, their father doesn’t need to know.”
“At least let me pay for information,” I said. “It’s been good. Found ten rockets at the canal yesterday.”
She waved away my offer. “Just talk I hear. Glad it helps.”
She moved to the kitchen counter again to pour herself a glass of chai. Impulsively, she started running in place, bouncing on her toes and lightly punching at the air, her sandals slapping against the floor. She stopped midstride and laughed at herself. “I can’t believe I did that with you here,” she said. “You must think I’m strange.”
“Not at all,” I said, though I did, a bit. “A workout?”
“Tae Bo? My cousin had videos of a black man who did this.” It took everything in the world right then for me not to laugh; apparently the nineties weren’t yet dead. “When you’re alone too much, these things happen. And exercise is important, I want to stay—petit?”
“Pe-tite.”
“Pe-tite.” She returned to her chair and smiled, her blocky, stained teeth reminding me of where we were.
Her chai was lighter than Saif’s, more beige than wheat gold, and watered down. While the drink cooled, she nibbled on a plate of goat cheese and crackers. I asked about her family.
“My family,” she said.
I nodded. “I’ve told you about mine.”
“It’s boring,” she said. “But all right.” Before I could tell her that I knew that wasn’t true, she began talking, her raspy voice leaving little space for interjection.
“My parents married when my mother was fourteen. He was much older. They were cousins. Most women would’ve been happy to marry the future sheik of the al-Badri tribe. He promised a good life. But she wanted more than that. She wanted someone to make her laugh, someone to recite poetry to make her cry. My father was a good sheik. But good sheiks don’t do things like that.
“She gave birth to six children, but Karim and I were the only ones to survive the first year. So we were close. The three of us, at least. My father was always away, working. We rarely saw him. He was a figure, a shadow we feared.”
“What was he like on the arch?” I asked. “Stern? Omniscient?”
She knocked at her forehead again. “Om-niss-ent?”
“Someone who knows everything.”
“No, not at all! They only called him the Cleric after he died. Here, people become perfect after death. Especially old men. Especially old men like my father.”
I laughed while she sipped her chai, a coy shine on her face. I asked about her brother.
“Karim was four years older. My protector, he thought. Especially after our mother died. I think that’s the reason…” She trailed off. “He never stopped thinking of himself that way.”
“What else?” I said.
“He cared too much. Like Elijah.”
She continued about her childhood, about how her mother had been a religious woman but had kept her and Karim away from the mosque, because children of a sheik weren’t supposed to mingle with townspeople. Geography had been her favorite subject as a girl, because of the maps. And though it was embarrassing to admit now, she’d had a crush on one of Saddam’s sons for the longest time. It was all fine background, but not why I was there. I wanted her to get to the point. There’s the past we wish defined us, I thought, and there’s the past that actually does.
She was talking about her mother insisting she learn the oud. “What about Rios?” I interrupted. “Elijah, I mean.”
She looked up from the carpet and tilted her head. “Almost there, Lieutenant Porter. It was at those music lessons that we met.”
“Oh.” I forced another cough. “My bad. Go ahead.”
“I’d seen him from a window, coming to meet my father. He was already famous by then. And when the American trucks went through town, calling out a number for the people to call and tell them where al-Qaeda was, I thought, ‘I could call and speak to an American.’ That was exciting to me then. So I called the number and said I’d only speak to him.”
“I thought you two met in your father’s sitting room.”
She laughed curtly. “No Iraqi would allow that. Especially not my father. We talked on cell phones. First about information. Later about other things. Then he started coming to my music lessons, paying the instructor for his silence.”
Goddamn Alia, I thought, and her bullshit story. She’d made me look stupid.
“And Rios, I mean Elijah, he taught you English?”
She nodded. “I’d studied some before. But it’s because of him that I’m good at it. He spoke Arabic, though his dialect was bad. So we learned from each other.”
The air in the room felt humid, and I felt clumsy and jealous all at once. I pointed outside, changing the topic.
“Your boy, how was he…” I pointed to my own earlobe and drew an imaginary line down my neck. “Hurt.”
She bit into a cracker and shrugged. “Sky bomb,” she said. “We were lucky.”
I stared at a carpet stain between my feet. The soldiers called her eldest Scowls, which only made him scowl more. Now I knew why. Ahmed also had sharper features and paler skin than his clever-faced younger brother, something I thought about a lot. Too much, probably.
I’d spent a lot of time fantasizing about how Rana and Shaba had fallen in love, using Alia’s version of events as a template. I knew every scene, every line of that desert ballad by heart. Sometimes I was there, observing silently in a corner. Other times I became a participant, toasting to their eternal love with the dead sheik. Sometimes I even replaced Rios, and it was Jack Porter who held hands with a moony young woman in her father’s courtyard. Still other times, I didn’t replace Rios so much as I became him, speaking fluent Arabic and darkly brooding over the future of my new country. But it hadn’t happened that way. None of it had. It’d happened on the phone.
“What’s your dream?” Rana asked suddenly, bringing me back to her hut.
“Huh.” It wasn’t that I’d never chewed over the question. It was that where I came from, a person wasn’t supposed to have just one answer. “Seek greatness, I guess.” Then I smirked, hoping that got me out of the question.