Taylor Smith - Slim To None

Her first thought was for Yasmin, her twelve-year-old granddaughter, who’d been sleeping in the twin bed next to hers, but she could neither move nor see if the child was safe. No sound came from the other bed. Zaynab struggled and moaned, but the man holding her down was unyielding.

She turned her attention to the ghostly, nearly featureless head looming over her. The room should have been pitch-black, and yet was not. In a dim, reddish glow, she made out a pair of dark eyes, intently fixed on her. When Zaynab whimpered, the head gave a sharp, warning shake, and a whispered command sounded from that awful lipless face. “Shhh, grandmother! Be still.”

The old woman went limp, her terrified gaze darting left and right in that red spectral glow. There’d been no electricity in town for weeks now, ever since Salahuddin’s men had seized control of the area, taking advantage of the power vacuum left after the American invasion. No one knew whether Salahuddin had cut the power lines and telephone communications or whether the foreign forces had done it. All anyone knew was that the country was sliding into anarchy. This was what some people had feared would follow if Saddam were ever overthrown. No one loved the dictator, but in a nation rife with ugly ethnic divisions, the devil one knew was perhaps preferable to whatever supposed savior might follow—for some, anyway. Zaynab had known too much grief in her sixty-two years to believe in anyone anymore.

People said Salahuddin was the spiritual “younger brother” of Osama bin Laden, but Zaynab had her own take on the opportunist who was now terrorizing her town. After all, she’d known the little monster all his life. He was about the same age as her own children, but unlike Mumtaz and Ahmed, Salahuddin had dropped out of school at sixteen, becoming a drunk and a thug who was suspected of several sexual assaults. He had wormed his way into the inner circle of Qusay Hussein, but inevitably fell afoul of the dictator’s family and landed in jail. Some people said it was during his time in prison that he adopted the jihadist cause. Whatever the case, after he was released, Salahuddin disappeared—to Afghanistan, some said, to fight the Soviet invaders of that country.

He’d shown up back in Al Zawra only a few months earlier, calling himself “Sheikh” Salahuddin. Whether or not he was a follower of bin Laden, Zaynab thought, he certainly didn’t need the blessings of Al Qaeda to launch a so-called holy war. He had always had delusions of grandeur and been given to spouting the worst kind of hateful nonsense. Since he’d taken over the town, nothing had been working.

Zaynab tried to make out where this dim red glow in the room was coming from. Out of frugality and fear of fire, she was always careful to extinguish candles and oil lamps before she and Yasmin went to bed. Even on bright, moonlit nights, she kept the curtains drawn close against the dangers that lurked outside. But now, the room was a patchwork of black shadow and crimson light. The armed invaders—from her pinioned position on the bed, she could make out at least two others dressed in full military camouflage—were carrying shielded torches.

As Zaynab turned her gaze back to the soldier holding her down, a sense of weary inevitability and terrible sadness overcame her resistance. Of course these men had been sent to kill her and her granddaughter. Why not? Everything else had already been taken from her. Now, why not her precious granddaughter and her own useless life?

The soldier took away the hand on her shoulder, lifting one finger in warning. Zaynab felt too beaten down to move as he reached up, yanking off the balaclava that had obscured all features but those dark eyes.

Zaynab squinted, then blinked through her tears. This was not one of Salahuddin’s hooligans. In fact, it was no man at all. It was a young woman with the dark eyes of the forty-two virgins who were said to welcome devout men into paradise. Was she dead, then? And did the houris come to faithful women, too? How was it possible that the angels of paradise were dressed like soldiers, in camouflage shirts and trousers? Had things gotten so bad that even heaven was beleaguered by battling forces?

The dark-eyed soldier-angel leaned close and whispered urgently in the old woman’s ear. “Shhh, grandmother! Don’t be afraid. Mumtaz has sent me.”

Mumtaz? Zaynab puzzled. But…how? She is far off in London.

It had been ten long years since Zaynab had last seen her daughter. Mumtaz’s husband had been a professor of mathematics at the University of Baghdad. Zamir was not a political creature, never had been. He might never have fled the country had Saddam not turned his murderous gaze in the direction of Iraq’s intellectuals. Mathematics, Zamir always said, did not concern itself with the shifting winds of human ambition, but with the unassailable logic of formulas that could be tested and proven. But then, as one after another of his colleagues fled or was imprisoned or killed for daring to express any opinion at all that distinguished him from a dumb rock, Zamir, too, found himself challenged. Perhaps he had some warning or premonition of danger. Whatever the case, Zamir defected while attending a mathematicians’ conference in Paris, taking Mumtaz with him.

When they didn’t return, Saddam’s soldiers came to Al Zawra, questioning Zaynab and her son for days about what they knew. In the end, the soldiers must have been convinced by their protestations of innocence, for they’d finally gone away and left the family alone. Mumtaz and Zamir had ended up in London, Zaynab had heard through intermediaries. Now, apparently, there were two young grandsons she had never laid eyes on. It broke her heart to think of them growing up among strangers, far from the land of their people, but at least they were safe there. Perhaps they were the lucky ones.

Was it possible Mumtaz had now sent a message through this dark-eyed warrior houri who spoke strangely accented Arabic?

As if reading her mind, the woman-in-man’s-clothing nodded. “Yes, Mumtaz, your daughter,” she murmured.

She was not an Iraqi, certainly, nor was her Arabic the Cairo dialect heard in movies and on imported television programs.

“Mumtaz heard about what happened to her brother,” the warrior-woman said. “To your son, Ahmed, and his wife, Fatima.”

Zaynab’s son and daughter-in-law had been killed two months ago in a shoot-out at their café near the central marketplace. A newly appointed official named by the American civil administrator had arrived from Baghdad and began taking afternoon coffee breaks at the café, talking to merchants and other local people, listening to their concerns about the uneasy security situation. He’d seemed like a good enough man, but Salahuddin, sensing a challenge to his authority, had issued a fatwa against what he called the “agent of the infidels.” In addition to the official and his bodyguard, Salahuddin’s men had gunned down six civilians in the café that day, including Zaynab’s son and daughter-in-law—Yasmin’s parents. Then, they had burned the café to the ground.

With her son dead, Zaynab had needed to find a way to support herself and Yasmin. Their family had once been prosperous, but it had fallen on hard times in recent years. During the time of international sanctions when goods grew increasingly scarce, they had sold off jewelry and anything else of value in order to purchase goods on the black market. By the time the café was destroyed, drying up even that modest source of income, there was nothing of value left to trade away and no one with money left to buy it in any case. In the end, Zaynab had taken to selling tea from a trolley in the marketplace.

And still, she worried. Hiding behind a scrim of false piety to justify his ambition, greed and brutality, Salahuddin had been issuing one restrictive command after another, and his bearded enforcers beat or arrested anyone who did not obey. If the rumors were true and he decided to forbid women to go out in public at all unless accompanied by a male relative, she and her poor granddaughter would starve to death. They no longer had any living male relative except her son-in-law in far-off London.