Zahira's Jihad: Book Three in the St. Martins Series

Prologue

On the edge of the Al Rusafa district of Baghdad, there is a small park where during the day mothers bring their children to play, and in the evenings young women and young men stroll in groups hoping to meet one another and enter on new and exciting lives. Lovers who have pledged to one another stroll there too, and in bad times in the city, there is a sense of hope in the green among the trees.

Each Thursday in the morning, a women cloaked in a sky blue abaya comes and unrolls a small and beautiful carpet near the trees. It’s colors glint like jewels in the sunlight, and she studies its designs thoughtfully, then sits down on the carpet with her abaya folded aroud her. Before long a child will catch sight of the blue figure and calling to her friends will run to the woman and sit at her feet. When enough children have gathered the woman begins to speak and tells the children ancient fables of clever animals and exciting tales of fabulous jinn. Then when midday comes, she holds up her hands saying "Ma’assalama, Go in Peace," and the children reply in kind. The women rolls up her carpet and fades away into the trees.

The storytelling woman returns to her place as the sun is setting. Again she unrolls her carpet and sits down near the trees. Now it is the young people who come to sit by her, the girls first, murmuring and laughing and dropping down near her feet, the boys more hesitant, joking and calling with each other, but drifting, drifting toward the girls and the story teller. Soon the sun is nearly down, burning on the edge of the horizon, slipping below the trees, shooting last golden rays upward.

A hush falls over the group and the woman greets the young men and young women.

"As’salamu alaikum."

And peace be also unto you, the young people respond.

The storytelling women lifts her head and sweeps her blazing eyes over them. Well my young friends, I have a story for you this evening.

Tell us, tell us, the girls trill, and the boys stand still and attentive like the young men they will soon be.

This is the story of Zahira, a daughter of Baghdad—like yourselves, she nods to the girls. "A student she was, proud of her heritage and a young woman who loved her country.

Ahhhh, the girls sigh and wrap their arms around their knees.

And it is the story, too, of Fahad, a son of Iraq—like yourselves, she nods to the boys. A student as well, who suffered the scourge and embrace of Allah.

Ommm, the boys murmur in their throats, shift their feet, then settle.

So now I begin the tale. Listen carefully for it is a story of shame and pride, of fear and joy, of love and betrayal and of life and death. It is the story of the higher jihad.

Book One – Summer 2006

    In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

                  When the sky is cleft asunder;

                  When the stars are scattered;

                  When the Oceans are suffered to burst forth;

                  And when the graves are turned upside down; –

                  Then shall each soul know what it has sent forward

                  And what it has kept back.

Surah 82: The Cleaving Asunder

  1

Gasping, Zahira Hannan Athar slammed the heavy carved door behind her, tore off the black abaya and hurled it at the potted ficus that stood in the corner of foyer.

Women are prisoners here. Trapped. We can’t move. We can’t do anything! She spat the words. Her breath whistled through clenched teeth as her angry glare seared the small space from the floor, rich with blue-patterned tiles, to the long, pearl-inlaid, rose-wood table against the wall, to the ugly cape now shrouding the plant. The heavy garment hung there, traditional, black, and to her, reeking with the odors of the piled garbage behind the house. Caught over the branches, it took on the sudden image of a bent old women, crouching, head down, eyes on the dusty ground.

"I’m a prisoner! she repeated. And if they had their way, those goons would have me a slave."

Yes. We are all prisoners. The doors were to have opened in the name of freedom. But they have clanged shut on us, and we are prisoners here in our precious Baghdad, once jewel of the arts, and center of learning and thought. Zahira’s father’s voice, gentle, yet strong, able to weave a sixty-student lecture class into a community of passionate scholars of neo-Assyrian art, spoke from the living room. He advanced toward her, hands out in a gesture of near supplication.

The sadness in his eyes lanced her heart, and regret at her outburst drenched her. Dr. Mussarat Athar, professor of Assyrian art at Baghdad University, a man world-renown for his work in dating artifacts recovered from the plains of Nineveh, stood before her, humble and aging, and her anger drained away. He had lost more weight, she realized, and his hair, all gray now, lay sparse on his domed head. His beard and mustache, meager but perfect in their framing of his mouth and jaw, had lost their silver sheen.

"Ab", she said, holding out her own hands.

Trouble? he asked and his eyes mirrored the word.

She shook her head, unwilling to bring the frightening encounter to life again by describing it, but more, wanting to protect him because she knew beyond all doubt how he feared for her. But the images of what had just happened rose in her of their own accord like a hot bile. She saw again the vicious faces of the two men in their mid-twenties, perhaps a year or two younger than she, their jaws chiseled hard, cheeks hollowed and mouths disembodied from the faces–obscene little animals in the depths of their beards. The taller one had seized her arm.

"Bint! Allah demands that you cover your hair and face," he hissed and pressed his nails into her flesh.

And that you do not come out alone, said the other in a dog-like growl. He thrust his face into hers, and she pulled back, but the first one held her even more tightly and she gasped with the pain of it.

In the instant she was certain that they would drag her to a local Sharia, an Islamic-law-based kangaroo court—it would be hidden away in some windowless shack in the crowded and now poorer section of the Mansur neighborhood. The imam—self styled, but with a following of others like the two who detained her—would intone the law in Arabic, then pronounce against her, charging her with shamelessness and immodesty and transgression of the principals of the Prophet. Her heart raced as if to its own explosion, and she could not breathe.

The shots, sudden and staccato, cracked in the air, and the man holding her jerked his head in a wild move to look back down the street where a broader avenue crossed. A large American army truck rolled into view and an explosion burst in the air. Smoke emanated from somewhere on the wider street beyond the truck.

"Qybah!" The man holding her cursed. He shook her, rage in his eyes, then released her arm to thrust a hand against her chest. He crushed her left breast with hard fingers and spat in her face.

She staggered against the wall of the house she had been hurrying past when he seized her. The second man lunged toward her, then stopped and jerked his head at his companion. They would rape her. Here, in a doorway, on her own street.

But the man holding her shook his head and pointed back toward the cross street. The men exchanged fierce glances, hesitated for a moment. The one holding her shoved her hard against the wall then the two of them jogged up the street away from her. Rigid, she watched the truck grind across the intersection, on its way she was sure to a chaos of corpses, twisted metal and concrete rubble—a bloody, suicide-bomb aftermath with bits of flesh flung wide. She pressed shuddering against the wall, struggled for breath, fought the urge to massage the fire in her arm and her breast.

As her breathing slowed, she pulled her belly taught, a girdle to stiffen her back, and hold hard the gut retching that threatened. She clutched the abaya around her, dragged it low at her forehead to shadow her eyes and held a handful of it up to cover her mouth. Within her, terror and anger ignited in a fuel that drove her feet swiftly to the door of her own home three blocks up the street. Seeking her doorway with desperate eyes, she saw that the street lay empty now, her tormenters vanished. Behind her the sounds of mourning rose shrill and knife-like, carried to her even at this distance. Who, she wondered in horror, was dead. Friends they knew? Neighbors? Shopkeepers? Children?

She reached her door and put out a hand to claw at it, to cry out for someone to come. But in the same instant the anger inside her consumed the terror, and she dragged her keys from the pocket of her blue jeans and opened the door. The rage bloomed and throbbed in her, shaking her hand so that at first, she could not get the key into the lock, but she succeeded at last and smashed the door inward.

Now with it slammed behind her and the hated cloak discarded, she could see the two of them in the mirror over the table, her father in his worn tweed jacket and pleated trousers too big for his slender frame and she in front of him in black turtleneck, jeans and sandals.

"You are breathless. Tell me, Ibna, Did someone trouble you?"

"Ab, she said again. I’m all right. It was an army truck, some shots, then an explosion—"

Yes. I heard it, even back in my study. I was so afraid, my Zahira. I was so afraid. He took her hands, held them in his own but with little strength in his grip.

I’m safe. I’m home now. She fought the longing to throw herself into his arms as she had when she was a little girl and had hurt herself at play or quarreled with a friend, fought not to sob, not to tell him what had happened and how terror lurked beneath her heart like a waiting panther. She gripped his hands more tightly, forced a smile. Let us go in and have tea.

His eyes narrowed and he looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. Yes. Tea.

He turned for the interior of the house, and she followed, using each breath to summon up a demeanor of calm and confidence. Above all things, she must not engender further suffering in her father.

They sat in silence in his study surrounded by books and artifacts from his archeological expeditions and drank the tea, dark, hot and sweet with orange and lemon slices floating on the surface. The steaming citrus fragrance comforted her, and as the moments passed, memory of the encounter in the street blurred, faded, and she was at peace here in this house she loved so well with this father who had always been her companion and guide, yet who’d understood as she grew that she was her own person. That she had such a father—one who respected her and held her close to his heart. That she had this home to return to! That she had the wonders of the city still, the shops with goods from all over the Middle East and Asia, the gold markets, the bookstores and art galleries, the mosques with their glittering domes, the beauty of the smooth-haired, dark-eyed children and yes, the men and women too, laughing, crying, calling to one another in the rich coffee sounds of Arabic. May Allah the Merciful be pleased, she thought, to let it somehow come right again. And she had to laugh at the prayer, she who never prayed even as she knew that every day, five times a day, others were doing it for her.

Her father broke the silence.

Zahira. There is something I want to talk with you about.

His words brought instant warning. When he spoke in this simple, yet formal way, it meant that a challenge loomed. Something henceforth would change, would be different, and she would have new responsibilities, a new role to play. It had happened that way when her mother died. She had been only seven years old, and the family had left the city during the first Gulf War for the mountains of Kurdistan where they had a summer home just outside of Irbil. She had known nothing of the war, had seen nothing of the fear in the neighborhood around her, had delighted only in the fact that they were going to the place of happy days and cool nights when her parents would sit on the stone verandah by a fire, and she would listen to them talk. Academics, they talked and talked under the stars, and although she understood little of what they said, there was a lilt in their voices and tones of excitement, wonder, exploration—a kind of music that even now she could not put into words, but a thrumming of hope that seemed to go with nights under northern starry skies.

When her mother’s cousin who lived with them and looked after her would lead her gently to bed, she would fall asleep hearing through the open window her parents voices, and the sound would carry her in a net of love to the land of dreams. But her mother had been stricken with a sudden fever, an influenza turned virulent that had swept over her like a demon and had erased her from the land of the living. It had happened without warning. One day the three of them were together and the next, the house was hushed, the cousin rocking her and her father wailing in a way she had never heard before or since. At the end of that day, he had come out from the bedroom, taken her hand and led her to the doorway where looking in, she could see her mother lying still and silent on the bed.

From here, Zahira. You must say good bye from her here. But send her your love as she sends you hers and know that as Allah wills it, you and I will be with her one day in Paradise.

She had understood none of it, wondered in fact who Allah was after all. Some powerful man that everyone spoke of? A man like the butcher in the meat market, perhaps, with his great, gleaming blade. She had seen that butcher, hulking and strong, seen him raise the blade over his head, then bring it down, flashing in the sunlight to strike through the fine glistening membrane that covered the dark red meat of the quarter of a lamb that lay on the block before him. Was Allah like that, a giant with a flashing sword, hidden by clouds somewhere in the sky when the call to prayers sounded, or lurking in the darkness of the caves out at her father’s dig where echoes played with wind song among the rocks?

It was all too much and sobs had shaken her, frightening her with their assault on the center of her body. Her father had gathered her up in her arms, carried her out to the verandah and lit the fire within the circle of stones. Behind her she sensed movement, knew now but not then that her cousin and others were washing her mother and wrapping her in white cloths.

"There, my precious ibna, her father had said, holding her close by him in the large wicker chair. We will warm ourselves and then, there is something I want to talk with you about."

Please, my daughter, he said now so many years later. This is very difficult, but I entreat you—yes, a strong word, ‘entreat,’ but it is what I mean. I entreat you to listen to me with an open mind and heart.

What could he be trying to say? Her mind stumbled over possibilities. That she should give up her studies and not leave the house at all? That they leave Baghdad for Syria as so many others had done? Or perhaps … Her heart leapt at the thought. Perhaps he would say that they must go north. The summer house was still there. They could stay there, and she could go into the university in Irbil. She turned to him, breath quickening with hope.

I want you to leave Baghdad, he said, and the hope surged up in her like a fountain. With it surged, too, a great gush of relief and in the instant she felt bathed clean of the frightening street, the man’s cutting grip on her arm, the rank, animal smell of him and the convulsing beat of her own heart. She leaned forward as her father continued.

You may remember my cousin Nadira and her husband Hafiz. Hafiz Manjira, a good man who is a dealer in oriental carpets. They moved to Adana in Turkey when you were young because of the excellent climate for business—

Turkey? she asked drawing back.

He held up a hand. Let me finish, my bright-eyed one. Let me finish. Elbows on the desk, he clasped his hands in front of him and spoke as if musing. They had no children. Hafiz made a great deal of money and took on a Turkish partner. This man was eager to sell carpets in the United States, particularly along the eastern corridor of that country where the market is excellent. He asked Hafiz to go there to open an outlet for their business. Hafiz and Nadira agreed to go for the business, yes, but more for the possibility of infertility treatments that Nadira might obtain there.

Foreboding drummed in her like a train accelerating down an incline.

And … were the treatments … successful? Did your cousin conceive, have a child?

He put his hands down on the desk and shook his head as he held her eyes with his own. Unfortunately, no. They tried every technique the Americans have developed but nothing. There was no child.

A sigh heaved through her. Of regret? Yes. But for what?

Strangely, her father went on, they were happy there, and when Nadira developed myasthenia gravis, she became part of a US National Institutes of Health study of the disease. This makes the latest treatments available to her and enables her to continue with her advocacy for the preservation of the treasures of the Fertile Crescent. She does this via the Internet, writing articles, sending information to museums and encouraging funding for preservation projects. Hafiz conducts his carpet import from an installation near the Port of Baltimore, but he and my cousin live in small town in the state of Maryland. It is a part of the state called the Eastern Shore, and it is on a peninsula that extends into the Chesapeake Bay. He turned, rotated the globe that stood to the left of his desk and pointed to what looked like a tiny hand with a downward pointing finger just over a third of the way down the east coast of the United States.

Whatever she had felt at the story of these relatives, unknown up to this point, transmogrified into resistance that flowed in her like lava. Inside her, it undulated and glowed and filled her throat.

"My God, Ab! You want me to leave Baghdad and go to the United States?"

He nodded. Yes. I want you to go to Nadira and Hafiz until it is safe to return. They have a beautiful home and will welcome you as your aunt and uncle.

She could not speak, could only feel the lava bubbling, its acrid fumes rising within her to choke her throat.

Zahira. Please. Listen to me, he pled, fully aware, she knew, of her resistance. It would not be permanent, and it would be an opportunity for you—to see this world that some believe is a Manichean opposite of the view of life we in the Cradle of Civilization cherish. Are they really Satans—those Americans with their thirst for oil and goods and unbridled sexuality? Or are they people, of different ways, but people all the same?

What he was saying made no sense. Opportunities? Satans? Thirst for oil and sexuality? She looked at him in bewilderment, but then with a sudden, acute sense of shock her mind cleared. He was ill. That was it. He was ill, losing his grip mentally. She bit the edge of her hand.

I am not deranged, Zahira, he said, reading her as he so often could. I have not taken leave of my senses. As a matter of fact, never have my senses been so acute. I believe it is because of the danger here. I can breathe it and taste all around us. I am sure, for instance, that you have been accosted in the street and will not tell me. He grasped the arms of his chair and leaned back, eyes searching back and forth, seeking, she was sure some way to advance his perspective.

"But Ab, she whispered. I cannot leave Iraq. It is my home, where I belong. I know your fear. Believe me, I know it, but we can live with it—together, for the sake of what we have here."

He shook his head, a slow, damning motion. "No. Not with it. We must outlive it. We must survive, whole and ready to return and rebuild. That is what I hope for you. At the personal level, you are all I have left, and I want you to survive for me. But at the level of our culture and history you are among those who must survive for our future, who must return and rebuild."

Let me go to Irbil then. It is safer there, and I can enroll at the University of Salhaddin—complete my masters degree there, and a doctorate. We can go together, to the summer house and then, when this is over, we can come back and do as you say, work toward the rebuilding. She could hear the pleading in her own voice, like a child begging for a special gift, and it shamed her. Why couldn’t she insist, simply say to him. I understand your fear and to stay safe, I will go to Irbil. But she couldn’t. Something in her had to have it come from him. Somehow, in spite of his impeccable fairness, he was first and she was second. The thought was disaster, and she fled from it.

It will not do, he said. There is no safe way to get to Irbil now. There are thousands of refugees, on the move, and many who barely survive in tents with nearly nothing are mad with fear. More, it would take months for you to secure enrollment at the university, sit for the examinations. And you know this yourself, Zahira, the curriculum is outdated by at least twenty years, there are no current reference materials, no supplies—

She stood up, sure that her only recourse to identity was refusal. She could not let him force her to go, no matter how gently he framed his entreaty. It was her life, and she knew what she wanted to do with it, what she wanted to become—here in her own country with her own people. I cannot do what you ask. I cannot even talk about it. Leave Baghdad? Go to the West? I cannot conceive of such a journey.

He nodded, his eyes dark pools of sadness. I understand. But again, I entreat you not to close your mind. You and I have always celebrated the life of the mind and the use of the mind to think clearly, creatively and above all critically. What do we have here in this precious land? What has our history led us to? Where will we go from here and how?

I don’t know, she said baffled and saddened. I cannot answer those questions in this moment. But I will find the answers, find them here in my own homeland.

He clasped his hands again, so tightly that she could see the whites of his knuckles. "It comes to me, Ibna—and I say this with the greatest of humility—that these questions and the path to their answers it is what the Prophet calls ‘the higher jihad.’ This jihad, again as you know well, is not holy war. It is the struggle of the self that each of us must engage. And the goal of this struggle is a life at one with the highest principles of the cosmos in which we dwell."

She stared at him. This kind of talk was unlike him—a deeply philosophical man, yes, but not an openly religious one. If only she could call him pompous or sanctimonious, could curse him for tearing at her heart and soul this way. But she could not do it.

"I will … think on these things, Ab … as best I can. But I cannot, will not, leave Baghdad. If I have to stay in the house like a prisoner, I will. But I cannot leave Baghdad."

  2

He leapt up the steps two at a time to the large, second-floor apartment with its filigreed, wrought-iron, street-facing balcony and saw the door half open above him.

They would be there. All of them. Noor’s family and his, waiting for him. His heart surged at the thought of all that was to come. There would be joy even in these bad times, one last celebration before they would all have to find refuge somewhere else.

Noor! he called. My beloved! I am here.

He crested the landing, paused to draw breath, images of what lay ahead flashing in his mind. They would be sitting there, the two families, talking quietly and looking out over the balcony. They could not sit outside as they would have in earlier times; it was too dangerous. But they would celebrate there in the living room. He imagined it all in an instant, the faces, the movements, the sounds and flavors. His father would have arranged the chairs on either side of the teak-framed glass doors, and his mother would have laid out the sticky sweets rolled in white shreds of coconut and the succulent lumps of fruits and the tiny slices of spiced lamb on triangles of khubz. When he entered the room his mother would say it. "Alhamdulilla! Yahia is here!"

He would go to Noor, through the sound of the family greetings, drawn by her glowing face, her eyes dark and sweet, and her hair in a shimmering fall on her shoulders. And silence would settle in the room as they joined hands and looked at one another. Then his father would stand and speak.

This is my son, Yahia, he would say to Noor’s father, and he wishes to take your daughter Noor to wife. Does this find favor with you and your family?

May Allah be pleased, you do our family great honor, Noor’s father would reply. And in the words of the Prophet, may his name be praised, ‘It is he who created you from a single person, and made his mate of like nature, in order that he might dwell with her in love.’

Their fathers would clasp hands, their mothers would kiss and even perhaps—though they were all secular Muslims and not given to using more than the simplest traditional phrases—the women would trill, echoing forth that lovely lilting sound of celebration. The sound would sing through the apartment, and his young brother Amir, all smiles and braces on his teeth, might open the balcony door a bit so that the trilling would sing out into the street and across the way.

He and Noor would sit down, side by side, and the two families would be as one. They would enjoy the food together, drink the strong honey tea, look out across the balcony where the palm fronds brushed the tiled roof of the house across the street and the sky gleamed white blue.

Noor, he called again as he put a foot forward to cross the landing and step into the room.

But in the instant, his heart stopped. Without thought or image he knew with a knowledge that hollowed his soul. In the space of a heartbeat, all that he had been, or was, or would be, dissolved, and hung vaporous in a void. The winds of Satan’s breath rushed roaring into his nostrils, and he could not see.

The sun rays slanted long through the balcony. How long had he … He did not know, knew only that his vision had returned and that he was standing transfixed before them—all swept to the floor except Noor who sat still in the chair his father had placed for her.

Why did the sun bars glint that way on the blood still oozing from his mother’s head. She clutched his father’s hand, the nails, bright painted like blood drops themselves, pressed into the sun-browned skin of the man who had given him life. And on his father’s other side, Amir, half-curled like the child he was, like one sleeping. The blood darker there, not lit by the sun, soaking black into the patterned skirt of Noor’s mother, her blood wending its way in turn toward her husband, body hurled back against the wall, his face shot away.

Without moving his head, he let his eyes follow the circle of blood that linked the two families and ringed his precious Noor, his bride to be. She sat still upright in her chair, eyes closed, hands crossed on her breast, the hole left by the bullet dark and perfect in the center of her forehead.

Go to her. Cradle her. Say her name. Kiss life into her lips—oh beloved lie!

The front door smashed inward against the wall. His mind sighed with relief at the quick savage slash of bullets driving into the floor, the voices harsh with fatigue.

Now I come to you my darling. He took her hands in his own and stood tall.

Stand clear! Lay down your weapons!

He knew the language, should know the words, but his brain lay like a dead animal in his skull and he waited for the hot fire of death in his back.

The hand fell on his shoulder. He drew away from Noor, looked up into the American marine’s face, streaked with dust beneath a netted helmet pulled low. A moan thrust itself out of him, the brain animal resurrected, and he moved to shield Noor’s small body with his own.

The marine, bulky in camouflage and laden with gear, pushed him aside and stared at Noor’s hands, leaned to inspect the bullet hole.

Three others entered the room, M-16s held low, yet aimed. The marine stepped back, goaded him with his rifle to stand again in front of Noor then signaled with a jerk of his head to the others. They began to work their way over the room, prodding the corpses with their weapons, keeping back as they thrust and lifted, as if turning rags they knew emitted a fatal disease.

Who are they? Yours? Harsh, hopeless fatigue clawed in the Marine’s words—words that Yahia recognized but still made no sense to him. They must have been killed by a Shi’ia death Squad—from al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. We’ve had reports they’re in this neighborhood. Christ man! If you’d give us some help we might find them. Who the hell are you?

Shit, sergeant. He doesn’t speak any English. Or he’s pretending not to. The marine standing near the balcony doors where Yahia’s mother lay shook his head, heavy on his neck, pointed at Yahia’s parents with his gun. Slaughtered. Holding hands.

The marine in front of him leaned forward. Ma ismouk?

He swallowed. Arabic yes. But what did it mean? Had he lost all language?

Ma ismouk? The marine said it again. "Inta fahamt?" he added with an exhausted shake of his head.

His tongue, aching and huge in his mouth, spoke for him. Yes. I understand. You want my name. It is Djebbar—Yahia Djebbar.

"Neem—?"

Who are they? They are my people. My family.

You speak English pretty fucking good. The second marine looked toward him with a cocked eyebrow.

Again his tongue spoke for him. I am studying to be an interpreter. At the university.

You found them like this? The marine in charge jerked his head toward the corpses. The three others drew near to their leader, stood a pace back from him, waiting.

Yes.

The marine in charge looked around the room, returned his glance to the bodies and shook his head again. Look. I’m sorry, but we can’t do anything here. They’re all dead, no life in any of them, and we’ve got to go, got to keep searching. The bastards may still be in the neighborhood. He paused, then, Who will help you?

From some recess in him, he summoned the strength to answer. I don’t know. Someone. A neighbor …

You have family—

He had no more words. Shook his head. In the name of God, his heart pled, let them go. I cannot let them see me weep.

The marine read it in his eyes. Right. We’ll notify the authorities. But remember. You’ve got to turn in the names. So there’ll be a record.

Mute, he nodded.

The sergeant turned for the door and the others shuffled in behind him, equipment clanking as they moved with weary steps. At the door, the sergeant signaled the others to go out before him, then waited, listening as they left. When they could be heard on the stairs, he pulled himself straight and with a slow gesture raised his arm and saluted.

"Allah y sallmak," he said and turned away.

Yahia watched them from the balcony. They came out into the street, shuffling still, but alert with their weapons. Perhaps, he thought, they would look up, see him there and shoot him, and he would be free. But they ignored him and moved with a half sideways motion down the street, using the rifles to nudge a shutter here, a doorway there. Four of them in the heat and the dust and the emptiness.

Infidels. The word rolled to his mind’s edge, then dropped into its darkest pool. Unfaithful. To what? He pressed his back against the rough wall of the house and slid inch-by-scabrous-inch down to a crouch.

He hugged his arms around his knees and let the weeping come. The sound of his voice rose and fell in the empty street, and the palm fronds across the way stirred in a light breeze and brushed the roof top. When there were no more tears and the leaden pain had seeped through his entire body, he pulled himself up and went into the house.

He laid Noor between her parents and fifteen-year-old Amir between the man and woman who had been his own father and mother. Then he went for the sheets, struggling to strip them from the beds and returning to cover the corpses. The call to evening prayer sounded through the open balcony doors, distant, fluting and gentle on the breeze. He knelt, facing east toward the balcony, touched his head to the floor, but he did not know the words, had never learned them. He stood, knowing he must get help but could find in his empty mind no name, no friend, no person he could call.

The room darkened as the sun sloped behind him in the west, and stars and a crescent moon pricked the cobalt sky above the house across the street. He went out on the balcony to look down again into the street, empty still, the marines gone. They had forgotten him. Dredged as they were in carnage, the massacre here had meant nothing to them, and they had failed to report it to the authorities. Perhaps they were dead, ambushed by the death squad that had done its demonic work here. He was alone, and there was no one who would give him aid, no one who would take this burden from him.

And if someone did come? People with stretchers, lifting his dead and carrying them away, the soft sounds of their feet on the floor. The thought of it filled him with a sense of disaster. If they took his mother and father and Amir away, and Noor and her family too, who would he be? The answer plummeted like a crystalline drop in his mind. Without his people, he would be nothing—an emptiness without form or content.

Nothing. He turned the word over in his mouth, felt it lay its breath across his tongue. He said the word again, and it gave him a strange peace so that he moved without thought, like a ghost drifting through the rooms of his home to his father’s study.

The edge of the round door of the wall safe gleamed in the gathering dusk over his father’s wide polished wooden desk, its perimeter inlaid with an intricate pattern of triangular metal and bone. He touched the pattern, rubbed it with his fingertips and remembered the day the desk had come from Iran.

I will use it to write the teaching materials for the new keratoprosthesis procedure, his father had said. They will use it all over the world to transplant artificial corneas at a reasonable cost, and we in Iraq will have made a contribution.

But the intricate procedure that could restore sight to so many, a procedure his father had worked on for the last ten years of his professional life as a surgeon, would not soon be recorded in a form that could be used in medical schools. Perhaps someone on his father’s team would do it eventually, but who and when? Probably not for years to come.

He reached toward the safe. The door was open an inch or so, and he pulled it further. Without surprise, he studied its empty chamber. His father’s papers, the money he had kept for the family’s escape from the systematic persecution of professional people in Baghdad, his mother’s jewelry, gone, all of it. They must have forced him to open it before they killed him.

For an instant, the image of hands with cracked skin over the knuckles and fingers with blackened nails holding the creamy skin of his mother’s arms, crushing the silk of her scarf flooded him. He could see her eyes pleading, her mouth parted in pain, could see all too clearly how they would have done it. He gripped the edge of the desk, ground his teeth until the pain forced the image from his mind.

He breathed in, then out. Why had he come into this room? Again his brain lay stuporous. He clawed at his head. What was it? What had he meant to do? He banged his head down on the desk, banged it again.

At last, it came to him.

The desk. Had they broken into it as well, robbed him of his chance to escape, his chance to end the pain that corroded him. He stood, felt along the face of the drawers, not daring to look, pushing his fingers over the wood, feeling the locks.

He let out a cry. They had not attacked the desk. No side drawers had been splintered open, no lock gouged out of the satin wood of the long central drawer.

The key. He banged his head again. Where was the key? His father had shown him years ago, and he, half attending, had smiled and thanked him, sure he would never need to open his father’s desk. But he had been wrong and now he must find the key.

He straightened, spun, cast frantic eyes around the room, then closed them, struggled to call up the image of that afternoon when his father had shown him the hiding place for the key. But no image came. He opened his eyes, scanned the room again, now in despair. His eye came to rest on the alabaster vase with its carved filigree of vines. Was that the place? But he could not remember.

He crossed to the vase, stood before it trembling. At last, he reached up and took hold of it. He could hear his breathing, a rasping sound, like an animal at bay. He tipped the vase, cool in his grasp and poured the key out into his hand. His heart accelerated and sweat started on his brow. He set the vase back in its niche in the bookcase and returned to the desk to open the central drawer. Now the rest of the drawers would open.

He drew out the second drawer, heavy with hanging files. Surely there was no room for anything else. But he reached across the top of the files, then over and down to the small space behind them. His heart leapt as his questing fingers felt the soft but heavy bag. His hand, now a creature with a certainty of its own, eased the bag up and over the files, laid it on the desk top and slid the drawer silently closed. He sucked in breath, then hefted the bag, grunting with gut satisfaction at its weight and walked with it back to the room where his family lay.

Darkness flowed through the room, filling the corners and blurring the edges of the furniture. But the dead in their white shrouds, framed by the lighter square