Mustafa lived with his father, Abu Mustafa, in a two-bedroom apartment in Baghdad’s Rusafa district, east of the Tigris.
Abu Mustafa was a retired BU history professor. For a long while after the death of Mustafa’s mother, he had chosen to live alone, the better, he said, to entertain the rich Baghdad widows who find elderly bachelors irresistible. The line about the widows wasn’t entirely a joke—Abu Mustafa had always appreciated the company of women—but Mustafa knew he also enjoyed being on his own, free to socialize when he wanted to, to visit with family and friends, and then relax, at the end of the day, with his books and his own thoughts.
Mustafa had helped find and pay for the apartment, which was in an older building convenient to the riverside promenade and the shops and cafes along Sadoun Street. The neighborhood was religiously mixed, which, at the time they’d first got the place, hadn’t been a problem. Since 11/9, though, hate crimes were up all over the city, and you didn’t have to be Christian to find yourself in trouble. Mustafa’s father was Sunni; his mother had been Shia. Asked what that made him, Mustafa had always replied, “A Muslim, of course.” But to some Baghdadis, who’d seen God’s judgment in the fall of the towers, that was no longer a good enough answer. Almost every day now the news carried a report of some Muslim getting roughed up, or worse, for belonging to the “wrong” sect.
Mustafa worried about his father becoming the target of some idiot who thought “God the All-Merciful” was code for “God the Head-Basher.” He worried, as well, about his father’s declining faculties. Sometimes when Abu Mustafa went out these days, he had trouble finding his way home. He blamed his confusion on mysterious changes to the city—once-familiar landmarks that had been altered, or that weren’t where they were supposed to be. No doubt some of this was due to new construction, but when Abu Mustafa began talking about the streets being laid out differently, Mustafa knew something more was going on.
Abu Mustafa dismissed any suggestion that he move to a quieter, “less confusing” neighborhood, so the family had come up with an alternate plan. Mustafa’s uncle Tamir and aunt Rana took an apartment in the same building. They had eight children, so there was always a spare niece or nephew available to keep an eye on Abu Mustafa. Mustafa himself, after protracted negotiations, moved into his father’s spare bedroom. The face-saving cover story was that this was for Mustafa’s convenience, to shorten his commute to work.
Mustafa and his father got on OK, as long as Mustafa was careful not to be overly protective. It wasn’t always easy. Recently, Abu Mustafa had developed an animus towards air-conditioning. At first Mustafa thought it was the sound that bothered him, and he offered to pay to have the apartment refitted with a quieter system. But Abu Mustafa said it wasn’t the noise; the problem was that the air-conditioning was wrong.
“What do you mean, wrong? You think it’s a sin to be comfortable?”
“I didn’t say sin!” Abu Mustafa grew flustered. “It’s not immoral, it’s just . . . wrong.”
Two or three times a week now—invariably on the hottest nights—Mustafa would wake up sweating because his father had shut off the AC. Then, last week, there’d been a new development: Mustafa had awakened to find the air-conditioning still running, but his father’s bedroom empty. After a frantic search, he discovered that Abu Mustafa had taken a mattress pad and gone up to the apartment building roof to sleep in the open air—the way Baghdadis had used to do, long ago, before the city was electrified.
“What’s the matter?” Abu Mustafa asked, puzzled by Mustafa’s concern. “You think I’m going to fall off?”
“In your sleep, anything is possible,” Mustafa said. “It’s not safe up here.”
“God willing, it’s as safe as anywhere in the city. And I like it up here. Even with the city lights, you can still see the stars. The stars are as they should be.”
Talking to Farouk from his hospital bed, Mustafa had been embarrassed, but he didn’t feel true shame until he saw his father in the hospital waiting room. As Abu Mustafa embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks, Mustafa felt his eyes welling up, and he apologized through tears for his carelessness in nearly getting himself killed. Of course, Abu Mustafa forgave him; but he knew he’d be reminded of it the next time he told Abu Mustafa to be careful. So for that, as much as for his own sake, Mustafa resolved to be less foolish in the future.
It was not the first time in his life he had made that particular pledge.
Mustafa spent the next day resting at home, but he asked Samir and Amal to come by and update him on the investigation.
It was Amal’s first time at the apartment, and like many first-time visitors, she was drawn to the bookshelves that covered every free centimeter of wall space. While Samir went into the kitchen to help Abu Mustafa make tea, and Mustafa relaxed on a couch by the window, Amal stayed on her feet, moving from shelf to shelf.
“How many languages does your father know?” Amal asked.
“Half a dozen well, and another half dozen well enough to muddle through. Which sounds impressive, unless you’d met my mother.”
“What was she, a translator?”
“Restless,” Mustafa said. “She always wanted to travel around the world, but North Africa on holiday was as far as she ever got. So she took foreign language courses, scores of them. As a boy I was her study partner.”
Amal had come to a shelf filled with photographs instead of books. “Is this her?”
Looking where she pointed, he said: “Yes. That’s from the honeymoon—she and my father took a boat trip on the Nile.”
“She’s beautiful,” Amal said.
“She was,” Mustafa agreed. “That next picture, in the silver frame, that’s my uncle Fayyad and my sisters, Nawrah, Qamar, and Latifa.”
“Do your sisters live in Baghdad?”
“Nawrah and Qamar live in Fallujah. Latifa lives in Palestine; her husband manages a beach resort in Haifa.”
Next in line were Mustafa’s own wedding pictures. Amal glanced at them but didn’t say anything.
“Yes,” Mustafa said, broaching the subject for her. “My two wives. That’s Fadwa on the left, Noor on the right. I’m sure the office gossips have told you all about them by now.”
“It’s not my place to gossip about my colleagues.”
“You’re kind, but it’s OK. I’m used to it . . . You know, I heard the speech your mother gave in the Senate last month, about the Marriage Reform Act. I thought she was very courageous to challenge the House of Saud the way she did.”
“ ‘Courageous’ is not the word her own colleagues would use,” Amal said. She continued, choosing her own words with care: “My mother feels strongly that polygamy, however much tradition defends it, is fundamentally unfair to the women involved.”
“Your mother is right,” said Mustafa.
The most famous photograph of Amal’s mother had been taken just after sunrise on the morning of November 10, 2001. Mayor Al Maysani had been up all night directing the emergency response, shuttling about the city from trouble spot to trouble spot; she’d been to Ground Zero twice already, but as dawn broke she set out again, intending to get her first clear look at the site in daylight.
She left her command post at City Hall and stepped out onto Haifa Street. Eschewing her official car, she headed north on foot, trailed at first only by a handful of aides and security people. Within a block, others began to fall in behind her: exhausted cops and firefighters, paramedics and EMTs, as well as scores of ordinary Baghdadis who, out of stubbornness or shock, had ignored the evacuation order.