Elliot Ackerman - Dark at the Crossing

“Someone might steal it,” Jamil replied, reluctantly stepping into the street.

“Haris will sleep in the car,” added Amir.

“I’d rather not.”

“Then who will?” asked Amir.

“No one’s sleeping in the car,” said Daphne. She turned toward Jamil, grasping both his shoulders and looking him in the eye. They were the same height — he still had more growing to do. “You’re nervous about leaving tomorrow, right?”

Slowly Jamil nodded. His black hair fell over his forehead. He did nothing to fix it, and his aspect wilted to a boy’s. Watching this, Haris knew it had been wrong to bring him.

“Are you afraid of going back home?” asked Daphne.

“I’m afraid nothing’s left,” said Jamil.

“Your family?”

“I have none.”

“What happened?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, it doesn’t. You don’t have to come.”

“I have to come.”

“Then don’t be afraid.”

“Why?”

Listening to their exchange, Haris thought Daphne’s words were meant for herself as much as for Jamil. She took his hand in hers and led him toward the door. As they entered the restaurant, the man who tended the döner barely looked up, as if not expecting customers. Plastic tables and chairs littered the empty dining room. Framed prints of snowy alpine scenes hung from the walls. In the back was a desk, and next to it a carpeted stairway, the steps threadbare and worn into troughs at the centers from years of footsteps. A heavyset woman sat behind the desk, leaning over a magazine. When she finished reading her page, she glanced up, her chair and the desk creaking against her weight. Looking at the four of them, she held Daphne in a particularly disapproving stare.

Daphne removed her sunglasses from where they rested on top of her hijab.

At first, Haris couldn’t believe this was the regional headquarters. None of it made sense. It looked like any number of inns with a restaurant on the bottom and rooms up top. But when he glanced at the stairway running to the second floor, he noticed the scattered portraits of bearded young men, each one taken in front of a black flag with the Shahadah scrawled in lashes of white calligraphy. Seeing their faces, Haris stroked his own. Beneath his hand, he felt the beginnings of the beard he’d grown over the last few days. The expressions in the photos were all the same — eagerness mixed with fear, the two emotions canceling each other out, blending into a blank, hollow look. For years, in many American newspapers, the official portraits of dead soldiers had run weekly. He remembered when he’d seen Jim’s. They’d used his boot camp photo from about a decade before. Jim’s look matched those on the stairs.

Haris read the Shahadah on the black flag to himself, mouthing the words: I bear witness that there is no god but God and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

The men on the stairs were shaheeds, martyrs. It occurred to Haris that martyrdom was an American conception. When taken in the pure Arabic, shaheed meant something different. The translation wasn’t “he who sacrifices himself,” although that was often part of it. The literal meaning was “he who bears witness.” Standing at the desk, waiting to check into their rooms, Haris considered Amir, Daphne, and even Jamil. Watching them, he no longer felt like a voyeur in their war — he was their witness.

The woman behind the desk shut her magazine. Amir explained they’d come to meet a man, but left his name unsaid. Without hesitation the woman replied: “Athid told me you’d soon arrive. He’ll be here in the morning.” She shuffled out from behind her desk, clutching a large key chain by its fob. She pointed to Daphne and Jamil. “You two will be in Room 206”—then she pointed to Haris and Amir—“and you two in 207.” It seemed futile to argue about sleeping arrangements. To have a room here meant adherence to certain conventions. That night Jamil would be Daphne’s son, and Amir and Haris brothers.

They followed the woman up the staircase. As they went, a single thought pierced Haris’s mind: If I am a shaheed for these three, then who is a shaheed for me? He climbed toward his room, and with each step he felt the blank, hollow gazes of the portraits against his back.

In Room 207there was one bed. Amir offered to flip Haris for it. Haris wanted to save his luck for other things, so he let Amir have the bed. Lying on the floor beneath a single, thin blanket, he dozed but didn’t quite sleep. He passed the night in that liminal space between dream and thought, watching the seam of light beneath the door. Above him, on the bed, Amir’s breaths fell in a shallow, tidal rhythm. Haris’s half-waking mind turned to water, the Euphrates, its banks, his home:

He walks its length. Beneath his bare feet the sharp marsh grass bends in the wind, brushing at his shins. Cement-walled shanties, coarse and hastily poured, dot the river’s way. The sun burns beneath the horizon. Haris searches for cooking fires behind the shanty walls, at first finding none, only clear sky, empty and blue in the morning. Then in the distance ahead, smoke twists upward from a courtyard. A woman steps out a door. To Haris she is unrecognizable, being both one of and none of the women he has known through his life. She strides with her shoulders thrown back, her chest out, toward a familiar riverbank of his youth. She wears a black tulle robe that shines translucent in the quickening light. The wind blows against her, and instead of hiding her body, the robe’s folds cling to her hips, legs, stomach. Haris can see all of her. He wants to call out, to discover who she is, but can’t find the courage. She bends down along the bank, resting her palms on the water, which lies broken, cracked by the wind. Her shoulders begin to tremble as she holds her hands on the surface. Then she stands and slowly walks back toward her home. It seems she has gone to the water for no purpose but to touch it, to ensure it still runs its course. As she disappears inside, a shudder rushes through Haris — he has lost sight of her. He scrambles up to the house. He wants to see her face, to help her back down to the river, to tell her how and where it runs. When Haris opens the door, the shanty is empty. He scours the dirt floors and crumbling walls for any sign of her. There is none. Standing in the kitchen, he sees a wood-burning stove. He puts his hand to its steel side — it is cold. He sits in the threshold of the front door, looking out at the river and beyond it, to the sun, which now crests the horizon, but it isn’t a bright sun. It is dark like a shadow.

When Harris awoke in Room 207, a shadow fell across the door, obscuring the light from the hallway. Slowly the doorknob twisted, the latch unclutched. Haris turned his head away, shutting his eyes. He pretended to sleep. On his shoulders, he felt two hands pressing down. Tempted as he was to jerk around or flinch, he didn’t. The gentle pressure was Daphne’s way of waking him. He rolled his head toward her. Hanging across her face, cupping at her cheeks, were the blond tips of her hair. She nodded behind her, toward the hallway.

Together they walked out of the room. Between Rooms 207 and 206, a wooden bench leaned against the wall. Just down the corridor, Haris could see the portraits of the shaheeds. Daphne’s gaze followed his. Then the two sat on the bench. Haris leaned over his knees, wiping the sleep from his eyes. She said nothing. Neither did he. In the sitting and the silence was the intimacy of all to come, the journey they’d share. Haris leaned back, his arm pressing against Daphne’s. She rested her head on his shoulder. She pulled a cigarette from her pack. Lighting it, she inhaled once and passed it to Haris. He hadn’t smoked since Iraq, since his days with Jim, and he hadn’t wanted to start here, but he couldn’t refuse Daphne. He took a drag and passed it back. In this way, and leaning on each other, they finished the cigarette.