“Gene-a-ration,” he said to her, sounding out the syllables. “Gene-a-ration.”
“No,” I corrected. It’s gen-a-ration.”
“Yeah, that’s what I say.”
Rana’s voice slipped back into rutted English. “My father’s grandfather is buried here, too. Three gen-a-rations of al-Badri sheiks rest beneath us. Or gene-a-rations.”
Walking along the pit’s edge, she indicated which marker belonged to each dead sheik. Then, grabbing both her boys’ shoulders, she leaned down and told them of the powerful, wise men whose blood flowed in their veins. Karim looked into the pit with the clean smile of a child, feeling the gaps between his teeth with his fingers, but his older brother nodded darkly, as if he’d felt the ghosts guiding him through the world all along. Now he knew their names.
Leaving Snoop and Washington in the back of the crypt, I walked to the far right of the pit, where Rana had indicated her father had been buried. I did my best to make the moment feel surreal. Here lay Sheik Ahmed. I fought off a seditious yawn and asked about the marker next to Sheik Ahmed’s.
“For my brother,” Rana said. “He wanted to be buried in the garden outside, with the others, but our father wouldn’t allow it.”
“Oh.” I stared at the small rise in the ground and wondered how it fit a prince of al-Qaeda. “I shouldn’t have asked in front of your children.”
She moved to my side like wind wrapped in black, touching my arm. I turned to look at her through the veil. “They will have his mind. They will have his kindness, his caring for other people. They will not have his anger.” She folded her arms and looked down at the remains of her family. “So they must learn about him.”
Rana let go of my arm and moved to the floor, tucking her legs under her and facing the pit, telling Ahmed and Karim to do the same. Snoop followed suit. I turned around and shrugged at Washington, who shrugged back. We joined the others in Muslim prayer, something Karim found humorous, as he kept sneaking furtive smiles at Snoop. His brother ended that with a quick smack of the head.
Rana muttered in impenetrable Arabic for a full minute, Snoop and Ahmed joining her for bits and pieces. She bowed quickly, producing a small bottle of rosewater from an unseen pocket and sprinkling it down upon the ground beneath us. Once the bottle was empty, she returned to her knees.
“How do the Irish bury their dead?” she asked me.
“It’s similar,” I said. Closing my eyes, I probed my mind until I found something suitably nondenominational. “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God, may Allah, hold you in the hollow of His hand.”
When I opened my eyes, they again fell upon the graves of the legendary sheik and his defiant son, two smeared moons of cinder in the dirt. I thought of Shaba’s burned carcass and grinning skull. I’ve found you all, I thought. Now what?
I joined the others on my feet.
A solemn quiet filled the crypt, a draft of wind whistling through the room from the window. Karim started puckering his lips. Ahmed told his brother to stop, which only made him do it more. Ahmed then put him in a headlock and punched him in the ribs. Rana was still staring into the pit. She asked her boys to go play outside. Washington and Snoop followed of their own volition.
“Elijah was supposed to come here,” she said, once we were alone. “But al-Qaeda would not give us his body.”
“Why not?” I asked, even though I knew why.
She sighed, the swamp blossom scent of her perfume coming with it. “Life was impossible back then. First came the Collapse. Then the Shi’a death squads and the civil war. It didn’t matter to them that Elijah had become Muslim. It didn’t matter that this was his home. It didn’t matter that we were to be married.” Her voice turned to chrome. “Only the war mattered.”
I waited for tears that didn’t come. She patted my hand with her left one, sending quivers like light up my arm. “Wish I’d met him,” I said. “Like his tattoo about liberating the oppressed.”
She let go of my hand. “He only had one tattoo. It didn’t say that.”
“De Oppresso Liber?” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Latin. On his chest.”
Even through the veil, I could see her eyes turning to splinters. “He had a tattoo on his chest. It said”—she knocked her forehead as she searched for the pronunciation—“ ‘In-fi-del.’ He said it was a joke for Americans.”
“Oh.” Fucking Chambers, I thought. What a goddamn fraud. “I see.”
“He was a man, like any other.” She sighed again. “And I loved him very much.”
We looked into the pit for another minute or so. Then we left.
The noon sky had grayed out, hinting at rain. Snoop and Washington sat nearby, leaning against a pile of rocks they had to know was a grave. Rana asked where her children were.
“That way,” Washington said, pointing over a ridge that led deeper into the graveyard. “Was playing tag.”
I wanted to chew them out for letting the boys wander, but Rana didn’t seem bothered. She walked up the ridgeline, calling their names. After a few moments, Karim’s head poked up from the other side of the ridge.
“What?” Rana’s voice flexed in worry. “Where’s your brother?”
She began running before the words were even out of her youngest’s mouth.
We followed, moving up and through rolling knolls, dodging headstones and crevices of dirt, unable to catch her. By the time I got to the knoll she’d stopped at, gasping for breath, she had sat Ahmed up against a dark boulder shaped like a dinosaur egg. The young boy’s face was as faint as the land, and he seemed disoriented.
Rana grabbed his arms, running her hands down them like a tailor. “No,” she said. “No.”
A pair of matching bite marks glowed like juice stains on Ahmed’s wrist. His mother began slapping his cheeks, which caused him to smile vaguely.
The others ran up, Karim pointing to a small batch of camelthorn and shouting. Snoop pulled out a long Bowie knife I’d never seen before and started hacking into the brush. The brush rasped in anger, causing Snoop to push Karim back and stomp into it between hacks. Washington directed his rifle at the camelthorn, but Snoop shook him off, reaching into the bush and pulling out a thick beige rope two feet long with a bloody anvil for a head.
“Viper,” Snoop said, throwing it down, then following it to the ground. He began to saw off the snake’s mashed-in head with his knife. “These have powerful poison.”
Rana lifted her son’s hand to her mouth and began trying to suck the poison out, then spitting, then sucking from the bite again. “I don’t think that actually helps,” Washington offered, but his words were ignored.
I walked over to the camelthorn and watched Snoop work. The viper had two horns that crested a broad, flat head, and a set of scales that alternated among yellow, brown, and gray rectangles. Snoop held up the snake head when he was done.
“Doctors will want this,” he said.
“Washington, radio the vehicles and tell them we’re en route,” I said. “They need to be ready to move.”
Rana had tipped Ahmed’s head back against the boulder, slowly pouring the contents of another rosewater bottle into his throat. Karim stood nearby, tugging at his black bangs, his eyes filling with long tears. Still conscious, Ahmed kept spitting up the water and saying something about bad smells. He started running his fingers over the pink scar on his neck until his mother said to stop.
I looked down at the now shaking boy. His wrist was beginning to swell. Too scared to scowl now, he suddenly looked like his father had in the mukhtar’s photo, plain-faced and grim. He’s Shaba’s blood, I thought. He’s Shaba’s son. And it’s up to us to save him.