• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 414 0

in a dried husk of beehive, all industry and motion and joy drained away, abandoned rooms rising into the sky overhead. Thin natural light filtered through streaked windows; dusty stairways rose to dead ends at locked doors; darkened corridors disappeared into shadows. I passed the security guards at the front doors, tugged open my bag to show the contents and stayed silent, wondering who they were, who their friends were. The footsteps of the armed gunman echoed behind mine in the great halls. He talked quietly to the guards and they didn’t take his gun away. The bodyguard was skinny and owl-eyed, and every time I looked at him I had a queasy urge to run until I lost him. I hated having him there and so I pretended he had nothing to do with me, this poor man who’d been paid to kill people for my protection. Still the knowing itched at the back of my thoughts.

The Babylon Hotel had a lobby café where nobody ever came to take your order, a men’s barber shop, and a women’s beauty salon. The beauty parlor was a gaudy grotto stuffed with cloth flowers and cans of cheap hairspray the size of rocket launchers. Upstairs there was a grubby, smoky restaurant cut from a 1970s disco hall, with deep round pod seats and low tables. There was also a sad little gift shop where I bought, that summer, a baseball cap embroidered with the Iraqi flag and this promise: TOMORROW WILL BETTER.

I didn’t really expect Ahmed to show up. Somebody would talk him out of it. Something would go wrong. The meeting was a risk for both of us, based on ill-advised mutual trust. He could get spotted and tarred a traitor. As for me, I had to trust he hadn’t sold me off to somebody in the neighborhood: I know where you can find an American. She will be waiting for me at two on Friday. But there he was, grinning a shy grin and loping my way, the same jeans and T-shirt hanging off his skinny frame. His girlfriend swished behind in skirts, tinkling in costume jewelry and ramped up on high heels, polite smile under her makeup.

“I’m so happy you came,” I cried in relief.

“Me too.”

“Let’s have some tea.”

We climbed up to the disco restaurant, and I began to extract, piece by piece, the story of Ahmed.

What did Ahmed think when he heard the war was coming? He didn’t know what to make of it. A dust storm tinted the air blood red for two days straight. Ahmed’s family thought it was an omen. The neighbors said it was the end of the world. His family had fled Baghdad for Karbala when the invasion began. They got so scared they dug pits in the yard, planning to hide underground if the fighting grew too intense. Ahmed dug for twelve hours without stopping, hollowing out useless craters, working just to feel his muscles ache, to create the illusion of action and control. “Everyone was afraid. The women, the children. You had to do something to make them less afraid, even if it’s a lie. You have to do something.

“I was entirely sure they’d kick Saddam Hussein out, and I was glad. I was sure it would make a difference in five or ten years. Maybe our kids will face a different life, not like our life.”

Ahmed had sailed through high school on smarts and taught himself perfect English by listening to BBC radio, but there was no money for college. He had to find work and prop up his family. His father, he told me that first afternoon in the Babylon Hotel, had “political problems.” In Iraq, political problems can mean anything. Politics are power, machismo, tribal pull, wasta. Even a casual squabble with the wrong person can swell ominously into a political problem. Ahmed’s father had a disagreement in the 1960s with a man Ahmed called, capital letters in his voice, “a Tikrit Guy”—a man from Saddam’s hometown and tribe. Ahmed’s father had shot the Tikrit Guy in the leg, and the grudge had never faded because grudges were a national sport. The Tikrit Guy had hounded Ahmed’s father for years, pulling strings to punish him at every turn. Ahmed’s father was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured three times under the old regime.

The second time, Ahmed’s mother had sold everything