October 5 - A fragment

When the smoke cleared, Reyam screamed. Where her house had been was a heap of ashes, charred wood, piles of rubble that had once been plastered stone walls. Nothing resembled the place where she had nursed her children, where she prepared her family’s food over the kerosene stove, where she and her sister gossiped as they embroidered, about the new ways their husbands had found to tickle their toes or nip at their ears. Nothing that spoke of something she called Home.

She rushed forward but found she couldn’t go anywhere. Her body was jerked back roughly by a hand, and she turned in dismay to regard the American soldier who gripped her arm. The veil had slipped back from her forehead and she bowed her head. Not in shame. It was a boy’s face attached to that soldier’s body, not a man’s, and the thought was disconcerting, angering, so she couldn’t stomach it. She looked down so she wouldn’t spit in his face.

He said something. It sounded polite. He called her ‘miss’; he knew a little respect anyway. She still wanted to spit.

“He’s saying it’s not safe yet, Reyam,” said her cousin. He had run over from across the street where he lived with her sister Roza at the sound of the blast. “There could be another blast, this bombing could be connected to another. You’ve heard the stories.”

Of families rushing in to salvage the tatters of belongings and the limbs of loved ones only to be blown up themselves; yes, she had heard the stories. She watched the smoke turn from thick black to a watery gray and she wailed. She and Roza wailed on the sidewalk while the American soldiers – all of them no more than boys – stomped in, there heavy boots accomplishing what little destruction the bomb itself had managed not to inflict.

“They’ll patrol the area more heavily now,” Roza said, nodding to the khaki and camouflage; it made fragmented shapes of the figures before them, not people. Discombobulated shapes.

Reyam did spit this time.

“I don’t want their patrols near my house.” She didn’t have a house. Her argument was as thin as the last tendrils of smoke.

Roza shook her head. “You are too stubborn, little sister. You will come live with me now, and the same will not happen again. Not with more patrols in our neighborhood.”

Roza saw things rose red, with all they had endured; Reyam saw them as they were. Some time later – she had lost track – the soldiers left the shell of her house – what had been her house – moving away to something more pressing than the pieces of her life. No one bothered to find her, express regret, tell her it was safe to enter now.

She picked her way onto the rubble, things crunching under her feet – shards of pottery, glass from picture frames, pebbles that bit through the soft soles of her shoes to the flesh within. There had to be something intact, something to save.

With a low cry, she fell to her knees in front of shards she recognized from their vivid blue. The vase had been a gift from her grandmother, passed down from her grandmother before. Ancient, and beyond price. How many times had Ammar begged her to peddle it – to the Americans, to the museum. She would clutch it close to her breast. “Never, never,” she would moan in response to her husband. “They can take our country and our pride, but I will keep this legacy.”

Here it was in shards. She picked up one fragment, rounded, smooth in her palm like the soft swell of a budding breast.

“Come, come,” Roza was saying, tugging insistently at her arm and looking fearfully over one shoulder. A few packs of errant teenagers were loitering at the entrance to the alley across the street, talking for now, but they would be looters, and they would be looking for whatever they could find, and they wouldn’t have regard for the woman who had once had a home here.

“Come, come,” Roza insisted again, dragging Reyam away and wishing that her husband hadn’t gone to the center of the city to find out news of which group had planted this bomb. It didn’t matter to her, either way; they were all parts of the same whole.

“Do they know they leave only fragments?” Reyam asked mournfully, as she was led away.

* * * * *

Diane peered down from the balcony of her hotel room – if it could be called that – it had a cot, a chipped wash pitcher, white walls pockmarked where the plaster was peeling, but it still took in guests, and it was close enough to the Green Zone that she felt a modicum of safety here. She could see the last wisps of oily smoke drifting towards the sky from a distance of perhaps a kilometer away; the cloud had been thick and black, hours ago, but little was left. She should be out there finding information, typing up an article, relaying it back to the bureau office in New York of the journal she worked for. She didn’t want to go out because she knew she would see Enrich again and she didn’t trust herself to look on his face. Breathing in, she wrapped her arms around chest as if suddenly cold, but that couldn’t be because it was never cold in Baghdad.

“Dean?” she called to her boyfriend. Where had he gone? She hadn’t heard him make a noise in the small room since she came up from the café downstairs several minutes ago. She tapped on the door to the bathroom, pitted and pock-marked, and when there was no answer, pushed it open tentatively with one toe.

“Dean?”

He was sitting on the toilet, but his pants were up, and he didn’t raise his head, which was bent over a sheaf of lined notebook paper. His hands were clenched so tight that the paper was crumpled at the edges.

“Oh no,” she said.

His eyes met hers, vacant eyes with everything snuffed out of them, and she flinched away from that stare.

“How could you?” he asked.

“It’s just a fantasy, just a poem,” she tried. About Enrich, yes, but nothing had actually happened between them yet. She had met the UN worker from Germany when she was reporting on advances in water safety and the recent cholera epidemic a month ago. Enrich had been put in charge of the project, and had taken her to a café where they talked for hours beyond the interview.

They saw each other five nights running before she admitted it.

“I am with a man,” she had had to say quietly. “My boyfriend, Dean. He followed me here, just to be with me.” She had laughed. “To Baghdad! You can’t turn your back on a man who loves you enough to follow you to a war zone.”

“I understand,” said Enrich, leaning forward to caress her cheek. He ordered them each another Coke.

She had written the poem when she returned to the hotel room that night, Dean sleeping on the cot, his mouth hanging open vulnerably.

I left the love of my life for a man with big hands…

It was a hypothetical, a fantasy. If I write it, she had thought, then I won’t be tempted to act on it anymore.

And here was Dean with the papers in his lap, fat tears at the corners of red-rimmed eyes. She was sure she had hidden it where he wouldn’t look.

“Promise me it’s not true.”

“It’s not true,” she promised.

He shoved the papers towards her violently and she took a step back; she had thought he meant to hit her, but instead he waved the papers back and forth in mid-air.

“Then rip it up.”

A weight sank into her belly.

“Dean, no.”

His expression became even flatter. “You said it’s not true, so rip it up.”

“Dean, it’s my writing. Don’t ask this of me. I’m a writer, that’s what I do.”

“Rip. It. Up.” She took the papers, if only because then he couldn’t rip them. He folded his arms. “I’ll watch.”

She half-raised her hands to perform the task, her eyes falling on the lovely lines of the poem she had crafted, everything it meant to her about Enrich, the way she wanted to lie with him at night, not just watch his body on a chair in a café. She tried again, failed again.

With a yell, Dean surged forward and grabbed the papers from her hand. He ripped it once, twice, three times, more; bits of paper floated down onto the dingy floor of the bathroom, and he threw the rest into the toilet.

Diane gave a strangled yelp, thought only a moment before darting her hand into the brownish liquid and fishing the pieces out. She could tape the shreds back together. She could puzzle it together again.

She turned from where she knelt and saw Dean watching.

“And now you’ve proven to me that it’s true,” he said quietly.

“Dean, no.” She stood with the dripping papers in her hand, reached out her other hand towards him, but he slapped it back down.

“Don’t say my name. Don’t say a word. I followed you here because I loved you, do you understand that? I have nothing but fragments left of my life without you.”

The walls of the hotel shook. Somewhere outside, there had been another explosion. Far away, if the extent of the rattling was any indication, another neighborhood, another place.

“I need to find out what that was,” she said lamely. He just stood there, blocking the doorway, so she pressed past Dean’s body and out of the bathroom.

* * * * *

Maria was old enough that she didn’t do much now except watch the neighbors from her stoop. The back and forth, the to and fro of the younger generation, that was what kept her living now because her own motion had stopped, because there wasn’t anything left to her existence, except to wake, and watch, and sleep, and wake again. She understood these things now, in a way that didn’t trouble her anymore. Hadn’t she lived? Hadn’t she loved? It was twenty-three years now since John had died, and she had never remarried, never taken another lover. Two mornings ago, she had woken up and realized she couldn’t remember John’s face, and that scared her. She clutched onto the shower curtain until the panic subsided and she could picture his face again, but she recognized that it was blurring. How could she even be sure it was still John she recalled in her mind’s eye? The pictures of him, too, had worn with time, so no reality was left. There was comfort in the fact; it meant it was almost time for her now, too.

She had seen these things come and go. Her two children never visited anymore; Sam was running a hedge something-or-other in Chicago that had nothing to do with the green kind of hedges as she envisioned them. Money and stocks and “hedging one’s bet,” that’s what it was about. Clarice was a lawyer in San Francisco, who spent her days litigating and her nights with her lesbian lover. Maria shook her head; these things had troubled her once, but she was old enough now to let the untied loose ends drift off their own way.

She had seen the couple down the road divorce, from this very front stoop. Heard the arguments, the acceleration, the climax, the denouement. She had seen the children of the neighborhood go off to college and never return, while their parents kept a watch from the porch as if expecting the car at any moment, and later, as technology changed, the cell phone call. She had heard the wails of the young wife last week when the army sergeant pulled up in his shining car and handed her a folded flag, a flag that was meant to signify: Your husband has died for his country.

For what?

The wife had wailed for days.

“Do they know?” she asked herself. “Do they know the way they create only fragments?”