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Basim and I had become close friends during my military service. Without contacts and favors that could get you a posting close to your family, a soldier’s fate was like a throw of the dice. After two months of grueling training, the hand of coincidence, or absurdity, landed me in southern Iraq. I was ordered to report to a small unit in al-Samawa, away from Baghdad and everything I’d ever known. The unit was an antiaircraft missile unit temporarily stationed at the al-Samawa cement plant. It was 270 kilometers south of Baghdad, halfway to Basra. The trip took three hours by car.

I was far away from everything, but contrary to my expectations, the distance wasn’t a bad thing at all. I missed Reem, of course, and there was no way to contact her. Army life was not easy, but our commanding officer was a kind and easygoing man, and we didn’t have many duties. The cement factory had been looted after the 1991 war. After my first leave, I returned to the unit from Baghdad with lots of books to kill the time. I also brought sketchbooks and a tiny radio to listen to music and the news at night. There was a TV in our unit, and we could watch the Baghdad channels and sometimes Kuwaiti TV, but the transmission was weak and I preferred the radio. I didn’t miss Baghdad that much. I loved the serenity of the local landscape. I spent most of my time reading, drawing, and contemplating. That’s why Basim called me “the intellectual” and always addressed me as “Professor Jawad.”

I rediscovered the beauty of stars at night. I never realized that so many of them could crowd the sky. I used to love gazing at them as a child when we slept on the roof during the summer. This is what happens to city people when we are far from our false glitter. I found myself shepherding the stars every night.

It was there that I met Basim. I didn’t know it at first, but he would become the star that lit the place for me. He was from al-Samawa and would ask the C.O., Lieutenant Ahmad, for permission to go downtown Thursday evening and return on Friday night. The C.O. would approve, especially since Basim used to get us things we needed, cigarettes, tea, and sugar. The army’s supply system was irregular and less efficient than it had been in the 1980s. Basim’s father, Hajj Muhammad al-Sudani, was rich and owned a few shops at the al-Samawa suq. Basim had studied history at al-Basra University. He had a great sense of humor and was full of curiosity and joie de vivre. You heard his laughter everywhere he went.

He used to tease me for being a city boy who knew nothing about the desert, for knowing only about the capital. More than once during those first few weeks he invited me to be a guest at his family’s home, but I used to thank him and decline. After he repeated the invitation a few times, I realized that he was sincere, so I finally agreed. He promised me a tour of the town and a visit to the remains of the ancient city of al-Warkaa close by. Basim was fascinated by the local history and landscape and took pride in them. He told me about Lake Sawa. I’d seen the name in geography books, but I knew little about it. He took me there in his car during the first month of my service.

At first, on our way there, I did not see the blue and thought we were lost. How could a lake exist amid all this desert? I couldn’t see anything on the horizon, but he said that it was difficult to see from a distance, because the lake was five meters above its surroundings and it had a naturally formed wall of gypsum. There was no river feeding it. Its only source was water from deep below the ground. Basim said that it was the same spring from which the water had burst forth when the flood covered the earth in Noah’s time. Then the water receded and what was left became Sawa.

“Did you read that in history books at al-Basra University?” I joked.

“Popular history has its own truth,” he said. “You’re just jealous because Baghdad has no lake.”

“The Tigris is more than enough for Baghdad,” I said.

He told me that Sawa was the only lake in the world fed entirely by groundwater. It was mentioned in Yaqut al-Hamawi’s Encyclopedia of Cities and dated back to pre-Islamic times. An ancient city there, Ales, had been an encampment for the Persians. During the Islamic conquests, the Persians and Arab tribes had fought nearby. Sawa was also mentioned in the historical archives of the Ottomans. During their era, it was situated at the al-Atshan River, before a massive flood changed its course in 1700. So even rivers change course. I was a river trying, perhaps in vain, not to flow where the map wanted it to go.

Basim turned off the paved road to the right and drove on a gravel road for five minutes before stopping. He opened the door and said, “Come, Mr. Intellectual, you will thank me forever for introducing you to Sawa.”

I got out and went around the car and walked by his side. The sun was about to drop to the horizon and was clad in orange. I noticed that the sky near the horizon was bluer. The road we were walking on sloped and I could see the calm surface of the lake. We stood at the edge.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” he said.

The lake’s beauty was gripping. Its balmy blue was therapeutic, especially for a soul thirsting in the harshness of the desert day and night. Its shore was covered with calcifications that looked like cauliflowers with cavities carved by the salts that filled the lake’s waters forming a wall on all sides.

I asked Basim about the fish in the lake. He said it had only one kind, and it was not edible. We squatted and I extended my hand to dip it in the water. It was very cold, as cold as the water I applied now to the body of this man who looked like Basim’s twin. I felt guilty. Here I am washing a dead man’s body while my thoughts are wandering in the fissures of my memory. Did father do this as well, or did he focus on his rituals all day long? Is that possible? Here I am, carrying them out in a semimechanical way.

We used to escape to the lake whenever we had a chance, to sit on its shore and chat. Once, while we were driving around in Basim’s car, I saw gutted buildings near the lake. He called them tourist relics. In the late 1980s, the Ministry of Tourism had built a number of apartments and a restaurant in an effort to encourage tourism in the area. The spot became a mecca for family and school trips, but the place was looted and abandoned after the 1991 war. I asked him to take me there. The sight was sad. Nothing was left except the concrete skeletons of the apartment buildings that had been built steep to provide a lake view. They looked like fossils of mythic animals crouched at the lake’s feet.

American fighter jets hovered over our unit all the time. We heard in the news about antiaircraft batteries being bombed after the no-fly zone was imposed in northern and southern Iraq after 1992. The no-fly zone was supposed to prevent the regime from oppressing citizens, but these fighter jets would kill innocent civilians and even herders. I never knew whether it was out of sheer idiocy, or whether it was a game, using Iraqis for target practice. Our C.O. stressed that we should ignore the jets and try not to incite the enemy. We were not to lock onto a target and give the pilot a pretext to attack us. Soldiers were ordered to maintain a defensive posture and respond only if attacked. This is how we had many months of peace.

We were awakened at dawn one day by the sound of a massive explosion which shook the factory (as we called our unit). Two more explosions followed. Then we heard the sounds of rocks and pebbles falling on the ceilings and windows and the whizzing of a fighter jet overhead. I got out of bed, quickly put on my uniform, boots, and helmet, and darted outside with the others. I remembered that Basim had been assigned to the night guard shift outside the southern building near the missile battery. Thinking of him, I felt a lump in my throat.