It was hard with all the fear in the house to feel the nearness of God. More and more, she spent her time alone, writing out prayers on slips of paper, reading the Qur’an and books on the Sira and the Hadith, and a book from the seventies about pan-Islamism. She drew secret pictures of the Prophet and Michael Jackson riding together on Buraq, the white, winged, woman-faced horse that carried the Prophet on the Isra and Miraj. She pictured the Prophet and Michael Jackson walking together in the desert, holding hands, Fatimah (looking suspiciously like Nazahah herself) walking behind them. She imagined they spoke together of the jagged beauty of palm trees and the buzz of bees, the way honey dripped clear and gold on flatbread, her father’s smell when he’d been smoking—and of how the purity of God’s mercy would conquer all, how great God was to have given us such a world, with red tomatoes and green reeds and the great brown Dijlah, the wonder of the muezzin’s call and the glory of “Thriller,” the perfection of breakfast at breakfast time, tea at teatime, and bed at bedtime. Nazahah prayed in ecstasies of gratitude that she was alive and that God had made the world and that the world was so perfect and full.
And more bombs fell. The lights went out. The electricity went out. The water stopped running. It came back on. It shut off again. They began to leave candles everywhere, and matches. They went to bed just after sundown, even though they knew they wouldn’t sleep through the night, and arose at dawn, lethargic and anxious from the night’s thundering bombardments. There was nothing else to do, with the power off and on, but lie in their misery and fear. Allahu akbar, cried the muezzin, la ilaha illallah. Day and night, bombs, rockets, and missiles crashed down into Baghdad, erupting in plumes of smoke, strewing metal and the screaming wounded. And they watched CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC. And they saw their city burning. They watched their husbands, sons, and brothers shot, captured, shamed, dishonored. They watched Umm Qasr fall. They watched Basra fall. They watched an-Nasiriyah fall. They watched Karbala fall. They huddled around a map, listening to the rumors on the news, trying to see how far the Americans had come.
Thurayya was calm and patient, the burden of her family a gratifying weight. She was their center, their mother. She made sure the men went to get bread, the generator was full of benzine, and the house clean and orderly and quiet. She was confident and assured, as if all her life she’d worked toward this moment, to take the family in hand and guide them through these hours of danger while the world outside was consumed in flames. She had what she needed, she had what she loved, and she would sustain them. She baked flatbread and made dinner. She told Maha to sweep and Abdul-Majid to wash his face. She leaned against her husband’s broad back and felt his skin on her hands, and was happy knowing he was a brave, good man and that after the war passed, he would go out as he had the last time and rebuild their lives yet again. She had him here, now, and she lay with him at night in the darkness and was not afraid.
It wasn’t like last time, when her daughters were still children and Mohammed was away, called up in the reserves. When she couldn’t sleep at night for fear that he would die and she wouldn’t even know. When her nightmares had woken the children and her days were a torment of waiting. She and her daughters had stayed with her mother, still alive then but deathly sick, in a tiny back room in her brother’s house. She could still sometimes smell the stench of her mother’s illness—it shamed her to think of, shamed her that she hadn’t been strong enough for both her mother and her daughters at the same time. But all she could do back then was wait, pray, write her husband, and keep busy. Sometimes she would shake so hard from fear her teeth chattered—not for herself, not even for her daughters, but for Mohammed. Every night she prayed for him to live. Every day she prepared herself for his death.
When he came back, she vowed never to let him leave her, and he hadn’t. He never took a business trip that kept him away more than one night. One night they could be apart, but no more. She wouldn’t allow it. She had him. She had her home. She was in her home, with her husband and her daughters and her sister, and all would be well. They could go through a hundred bombings and a thousand tribulations, and she would stand strong and guide her household with a firm and loving hand. Mohammed was there and she was strong. She was full of love and forbearance for all, even her son-in-law Ratib, even her no-good runt nephew Qasim, who was, under her care, healing, fighting off the infection, growing stronger—he could eat solid foods now and even sit up and read. She was motherly even with Othman, toward whom she had always been polite but distant, for reasons she refused to think about too much but had to do with the sparkle in the old poet’s eye. She gathered the household in her hands and set it to order. Even Maha, even Khalida she took in hand and set to work. There was chaos outside, but her family, her girls and her men, would sustain.
More bombs fell. There were rumors the Americans were coming from the east. From the west. From the south. They’d taken the Karbala Gap. They hadn’t taken the Karbala Gap. They were in Baghdad. They weren’t in Baghdad. The city choked on smog and explosions, lies and ash. The power went out for good, phones and water too. They ran the TV on the generator. The satellite came and went. They passed rumors from their neighbors at nighttime and rumors from their dreams at dawn. They began to hear artillery fire, big guns and mortars, distant thumps and nearer crashes.
One night, the Hizbis all left. The trenches and guard points around the city emptied, leaving ghost uniforms and boots and helmets, as if the men had evaporated where they stood. There were rumors US Marines had been seen in Al-Rusafa, on the east side of the Dijlah. Rumors the Kadhimaya Mosque had been bombed by stealth jets. Rumors Saddam had ordered the Fedayeen underground. Rumors Saddam was dead.
Suddenly, tanks in the streets. Humvees running down the avenues, heavy guns lobbing explosive rounds at houses and shadows. Rifles, machine guns, now the chatter of small-arms fire peppered their days and nights.
They quit going out. They locked the gate. They spoke to their neighbors through a crack in the second-story window. They didn’t go onto the roof. More explosions, more shooting. One night they listened to a tank roll down their street. They heard it stop. They heard the whine of its turret and heard its gun fire, the sound of hell cracking open, then again, feeling it throb in their bellies, knees, and thumbs. They bowed their heads and prayed. Allahu akbar, la ilaha illallah. They heard a machine gun go tock-tock-tock, then the tank rolled away. It’s target had been an empty house. Two gaping holes like blank eye sockets watched the street.
And more bombs fell. Allahu akbar, cried the muezzin, la ilaha illallah.
The blind man sat listening to the thunder, rubbing the stub of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It was late. “Ah-ham,” he muttered.
Trouble had come again, as it had before and before and before. He remembered the British biplanes of his youth, when he’d first joined the army, the way you could hear the click of the bomb releasing—poisonous gray eggs tumbling into the Kurdish lines. And then… He remembered the Tommies in their pointy helmets, marching the road to Baghdad. Before them, the Turk—but he could only faintly summon the Turk. Until the Revolt and the Great War, the press of world events had seemed distant.