Roy Scranton - War Porn

“Wake up,” her mother snapped, slapping the table. “You’ll cut your fingers off.”

Nazahah smiled at her mother.

“When you finish the salad, go see if your brother-in-law needs anything out front,” Thurayya said. “I’m going upstairs to check on your sister.”

Maha was Thurayya’s lamentation. She was too pretty by half, for starters, and she knew it. Then her temper! And the airs she put on! Thurayya’s plan was to get her married as quick as possible. They needed someone from the right kind of family, though, someone attractive, with good prospects… and young. Maha was picky—haughty—frankly, impossible. There was no shortage of available men, but the problem was that they needed a real Prince Charming, someone handsome and brave, sweet enough to treat her well but strong enough to control her. God willing!

Thurayya went up to the girls’ room, where Maha lay on her bed listening to a bootleg CD of Brandy’s Never Say Never and flipping through an Egyptian movie magazine. She watched her daughter daydream, wondering where she got her pride and her insolence, but loving her for it too. Maha would be a queen someday, when she found her prince. Thurayya smiled, then said, “Daughter.”

Maha flipped the pages of her magazine.

“Maha! Go downstairs and help your auntie with lunch.”

“But Mom…”

“No buts! Downstairs!”

Thurayya watched Maha stomp down the stairs, then circled back to her bedroom, where Mohammed was showing Qasim how to work his AK-47. Qasim held the weapon’s barrel awkwardly in his crudely bandaged left hand and struggled to pull back the charging handle. The weapon kept slipping from his grip.

“Here,” Mohammed said, “put the barrel on your foot and let the weapon pull down—not on the ground! On your foot. If you get dirt in the barrel, it’ll blow up in your face.”

Qasim tugged on the charging handle, and this time it slid back and clacked home. Mohammed found himself wishing, again, as he often did, that the boy had served his time in the military instead of getting the deferment Faruq had wrangled for him.

“Are you staying for lunch, my dearest husband, great and wise lord of the home?” Thurayya asked.

Mohammed frowned. “No. Is Ratib still working on the well?”

“I don’t know anything about wells, my noble sheikh of infinite courage. I’m just a silly woman who isn’t even given due respect in her own house.”

Qasim turned in time to catch Thurayya’s cold glare as she left.

“We need to talk,” Mohammed said to Qasim. “But first we have to finish cleaning out the office. Go start up the van.”

Qasim rode the bolt forward on the Kalashnikov and handed the rifle to his uncle, then headed downstairs. So he’d snapped at her—so what? Was he supposed to feel bad now, or pretend women got to boss him around? What could she do about his stupid hand? It was fine. Okay, it was oozing pus, developing a yellow crust around the hot, raw wound, and it hurt more every day. It might even be infected, but he was sure it would heal soon. A little bite, nothing he couldn’t handle. He certainly didn’t need a gaggle of women honking over him.

He started the van and slid his bandaged hand over the wheel, letting himself slide into the pain aching up his arm. He would master the pain. That would be manly.

Mohammed got in the passenger side.

“You can drive with your hand like that?” he asked.

“Yes, Uncle. It’s nothing. The bandage is just to keep it clean.”

“Let’s go, then. First stop is Zubair’s, then we’ll go get Othman.”

Qasim honked the horn and Siraj ran over and opened the gate, then stood aside while the van backed into the street. As they drove off, Mohammed noticed a black Mercedes pull out and follow them.

Mohammed had two offices, one in the Karrada, where he met with clients and handled paperwork, and one in a warehouse out in Baghdad Al-Jidida, where he kept the trucks and machinery. Earlier that week, they’d gone out to the warehouse and secured the outer wall with barbed wire and spikes, bricked up the windows, and locked up the equipment. Mohammed’s chief foreman, Yaqub, lived near there; he promised Mohammed he’d keep an eye on things. The Karrada office, on the other hand, Mohammed had decided to empty. He, Othman, Qasim, and two employees with a pickup spent the afternoon hauling out all Mohammed’s files and personal effects and as much furniture as they could manage, then securing the building.

Qasim laid mortar, bricking a window, while Mohammed sat at his desk going over outstanding contracts. Othman double-checked the file cabinets to make sure they were empty.

“I think,” Othman said, “it’s a great opportunity. I think they really mean democracy.”

“Nonsense,” said Mohammed, not taking his attention from his papers.

“It’ll be like Russia, I think.”

“Russia, huh?”

“Iraq’s a great nation, my friend, but we sow and weep under the lash of a tyrant. Our wheat is salted with tears of oppression. After the war, we’ll be free to farm how we like. Our fields will sprout with joy.” Othman’s fine, soft hands spread to mimic tears falling on the wheat, then sprang up to show the new harvest.

Qasim thought the poet a silly old man, but Othman had been Mohammed’s best friend since they were boys. The two men were oil and water, Harun al-Rashid and Jafar, Don Panza and Sancho Quixote. Whereas Mohammed was an engineer, a pragmatist, and a nationalist, Othman was a poet, romantic and cosmopolitan. Whereas Mohammed had never left Iraq, Othman had traveled to Cairo, Paris, and Moscow, and had spent two years in exile in Beirut. Mohammed built houses and offices; Othman wrote poetry and had translated Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. Mohammed was broad-shouldered, with a square, handsome face that in a good light looked like Omar Sharif’s; Othman was dumpy and pear-shaped, with a long, sloping nose—he looked more like Nour El-Sherif. He wore thick glasses, through which he peeped out at the world with eyes that always seemed to be laughing.

“You’re a poetizing fool,” Mohammed said, slamming down his pen and sitting up. “Iraq is a great nation because we have a strong leader. You’d rather have madness, revolution after revolution, like the sixties? You’d rather a plague of crusaders? Because that’s what they’ll be, Othman, these Americans, just like the British. A plague. They’re going to come in like pharaoh and put their foot on the neck of Iraq.”

“They’ll take Saddam’s foot off the neck of Iraq, is what they’ll do,” Othman said, “and you’d see that if you weren’t so old and set in your ways.”

“Set in my ways? Listen, brother, I know you’re an ignorant old skirt chaser who doesn’t know from a handful of lentils, but you must have been taught a little of your nation’s history.”

“I know ‘His watchdogs have corrupted the land,’”—Othman recited, quoting his teacher al-Bayati—“‘stolen the people’s food, raped the Muses, raped the widows of the men who died under torture, raped the daughters and widows of his soldiers who lost the war, from which, like rabbits in clover fields, they had run away, leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants…’”

“Then you know we’re a nation of peasants,” Mohammed interrupted, setting his contracts to one side. “A nation of ignorant hill people in the north, dull-minded farmers in the south, and superstitious tribesmen in the west. We are, like most Arab nations, a backward and troubled people. And yet we’ve modernized more than any other. We beat the Iranians, we beat back the Americans, we’ve kept our nation together and hauled our peasants screaming and wailing into the twentieth century. And how, my brother, did this happen?”