Qasim sat up again. The call to prayer had begun. His hands, chanting dull mantras of pain, told him he was being punished for his pride. God had struck at him for his stubbornness and would kill him if he kept at it. He had no choice. He had to return to Baqubah. If he stayed, he’d be destroyed.
Slowly, painfully, shakily he dressed, then opened his suitcase and threw in his clothes, his photo of Lateefah, his Discman, a few CDs, his dissertation—now a clutch of disordered pages—and all the books he could fit. His other things he stacked in the corner, to send for later.
He hauled his suitcase down the stairs in the three good fingers of his less-bad hand. In the living room, he saw Othman sitting on the couch in the dark watching CNN with the sound off. Othman turned to him. Christiane Amanpour spoke on the screen. Qasim watched her smooth, pale face, her eyes bleeding tears, distant and accusing. “Why?” she asked him. “Why did you leave me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Qasim,” Othman said.
“Please tell my uncle…”
Othman stood and came around the couch.
“Please tell my uncle I took…”
“Let me help you with your suitcase.”
“I… I have to… I have to.”
“Yes, Qasim. Of course. Let’s have some breakfast first.”
“No. I have to get the car before the… before the dogs, I mean. While it’s still black.”
“We’ll go soon, but first come, sit. I’ll get you breakfast.” Othman led him gently around to the sofa.
“No, now!” He waved his hand, stinking in its scummy bandage.
“Yes, of course. We’ll go soon. Just sit. We’ll eat first, then go. Just sit. Then we’ll go.”
“I have to go,” Qasim said, sitting and dropping his suitcase. Pain washed over him in broken pink waves.
Othman left to put on the kettle and when he returned, Qasim had passed out. TV light dappled his wasted face.
Mohammed came downstairs and found Othman and Qasim asleep on the couch. CNN was on, silently running a story about a hijacked Cuban plane. Something stank. Mohammed kneeled to examine Qasim’s hand: the bandage was dirty and loose, a mess of gauze, crusted pus, and filth. He took it gently up and Qasim jerked awake with a shout.
“Let me see your hand,” Mohammed said.
“I… It’s… I have to go to Baqubah. I need the Toyota.”
“You’re not going anywhere with your hand like that.”
Qasim pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. “You’re not… going to stop me,” he said. “You always want to stop me.”
Qasim tried to push past him, but as Mohammed stood to hold his shoulders, he fell back on the couch. Mohammed knelt, taking Qasim’s bandaged hand on his knee and unwrapping it. He gagged on the stench of the infected flesh.
“Help me carry him out to the car,” Mohammed said to Othman.
On their way toward Yarmouk Teaching Hospital, which should have been a ten-minute drive, Mohammed and Othman had to go through three different checkpoints, each time arguing with the clean-faced recruits and fat reservists that they had a medical emergency and needed to be allowed to pass. Other than the Hizbis, the city seemed evacuated, estranged from itself. There was almost no traffic. Trenches had been dug in parks, berms built up in front of schools. No buses ran and all the cigarette stands stood empty.
The hospital was quiet too. The nurse told them it might take a while: “We’re running a skeleton crew, to let our staff rest. The full shifts start at midnight.” A few others waited in the lobby: a young boy, crying, his head resting in his mother’s lap; a fat old man wheezing like faulty bellows; two or three bandaged and broken; others with less visible afflictions. Guardians of the Nation played on Iraq TV in the corner. Twice orderlies rolled stretchers through to the ER, one man bleeding from a gunshot wound to his chest, another trembling and hyperventilating, his leg broken in a Z.
At last the nurse came for Qasim. Dr. al-Amman, quiet, short, sleek as an otter, said little to Mohammed and Othman as he dispassionately examined Qasim’s hands. He examined the splint set on his smashed little finger. He jabbed Qasim’s rotting hand with anesthetic and, with the help of a nurse, began to cut away dead flesh. Qasim was awake but delirious, and Mohammed and Othman helped hold him down. The doctor cut away the gangrenous bits and dropped them in a bucket while the nurse soaked up blood with a sponge. It did not take long. Finished, he slathered on topical antibiotic and had the nurse wrap the hand.
“He should be fine. There’s no indication of rabies, but we’ll run blood tests. We’ll call you—Insha’Allah—within the next few days. It appears to be a localized infection, but it may have gone further up the arm, so I’m going to prescribe some very strong antibiotics—he’s not allergic, is he? Good. He needs to take the antibiotic with every meal, three times a day. He can’t miss one single pill. Don’t cut the pills up, don’t sell them to someone else, don’t hoard them. Unless he takes every single pill, the infection will spread and kill him. Do you understand?”
“Doctor, I’m no thief,” Mohammed said.
“Very good. He may be delirious for a week or so while the antibiotic kills the infection. Make sure he gets plenty of water and bed rest. The hand should be unwrapped every other day and washed. Boil some salt water for five to seven minutes, then let it cool. When it’s room temperature, use it to wash his hand, gently. A proper scab must form. I’ll prescribe some topical antibiotic as well. Put that on the wound, then wrap with a new bandage. With proper care and regular cleaning, he’ll be okay. There is some deep tissue damage, so his hand will likely be permanently weakened, but functionality will return in time.”
Driving home, Othman pointed to the horizon. Thick black clouds of smoke ribboned up from the greenbelts around the city, where the army was burning oil in big pits. Beyond them loomed a distant bruise, thickening across the sky.
The sandstorm came later that afternoon, choking the city with oily grit, turning the world beyond the windows to a howling red void. It lasted until after well after nightfall. As soon as it had blown over, Othman went up on the roof to replace the satellite dish, but now there was no signal. Ratib thought the storm might have knocked out the local retransmitter, but Othman was sure it was Saddam and his flunkies, the stupid bastards, he muttered, blinding us in our moment of darkness.
They attached the aerial to the TV and tuned in to the local station replaying the same programs from earlier in the day, the same state demonstrators cheering, ministers pontificating, Saddam speechifying. “Shut it off,” Othman said.
“Nothing to do but wait,” said Ratib, slumping into an armchair.
“I can’t believe it’s happening again.”
“I was in the south last time.”
“You could feel it. The air would hum and you could feel it in the back of your neck. You could feel them coming.”
“It was fast in the south. Everything was fast. You’d be sitting there for hours, bored out of your mind, and all at once the earth would explode. There’d be a whistling, you wouldn’t hear it until later, after the explosion you’d remember—I heard whistling. But before, nothing. They hit us with jets and artillery. Those rockets they shoot.”
“I helped dig people out of the rubble. After every raid, as soon as the explosions finished, we went down to the mosque—this was when I lived off Asmai Street, in Adhamiyah. When I worked for the Iraqi Film Commission. Anyway, after a raid, we’d meet down at the Abu Hanifa. We had boys, some of the men’s sons, and if we didn’t know where the damage was, we sent them out as runners. Then we’d go dig. It was awful.”