Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

Umbrella in front of her like a pike, Rana pointed to a crypt made of sun-dried brick with a porcelain-green dome, but my eyes drifted left, down the hill. In a depression lay lines and lines of markers, uniform and ordered. Plastic flowers rested next to the markers, the nearest adorned with portraits of young men holding rifles and wearing bandoliers of ammo across their chests.

“For Sunni insurgents,” Snoop said. “The sign calls it the ‘Garden of Martyrs.’ ”

A pair of gravediggers were planting shovels into the ground on the far end of the depression. I waved at them. One waved back. I squinted my eyes hard until the markers fell out of focus and I tried to see the soft green hills and marble heads of the garden of martyrs back home.

It didn’t work.

As we neared the al-Badri crypt, the mounds thinned into a pathway. A square of brown grass surrounded the crypt. Rana leaned down and pulled a few blades from the ground, shaking her head in frustration. A splintered wood door about my height led into the crypt itself. Rana produced a key and pushed it open. I instructed Snoop and Washington to stay back, pushing Ahmed forward to join his mother and brother, but Rana waved us to the fore.

“My father thought well of Americans.”

The crypt smelled of sour earth and incense. Removing my helmet and gloves, I ducked down into it, finding a wide, circular room that could’ve fit twice our number. A shuttered window at the top of the circle allowed for gashes of air. The floor of mosaic tiles fell into a pit in the center of the room, round cinder tombstones marking the graves. I looked up at the underside of the dome. It’d been painted with the golden-black eagle of Iraq, wings tucked, talons clutching a scroll.

Rana asked Snoop something in Arabic.

“Gene-a-ration,” he said to her, sounding out the syllables. “Gene-a-ration.”

“No,” I corrected. It’s gen-a-ration.”

“Yeah, that’s what I say.”

Rana’s voice slipped back into rutted English. “My father’s grandfather is buried here, too. Three gen-a-rations of al-Badri sheiks rest beneath us. Or gene-a-rations.”

Walking along the pit’s edge, she indicated which marker belonged to each dead sheik. Then, grabbing both her boys’ shoulders, she leaned down and told them of the powerful, wise men whose blood flowed in their veins. Karim looked into the pit with the clean smile of a child, feeling the gaps between his teeth with his fingers, but his older brother nodded darkly, as if he’d felt the ghosts guiding him through the world all along. Now he knew their names.

Leaving Snoop and Washington in the back of the crypt, I walked to the far right of the pit, where Rana had indicated her father had been buried. I did my best to make the moment feel surreal. Here lay Sheik Ahmed. I fought off a seditious yawn and asked about the marker next to Sheik Ahmed’s.

“For my brother,” Rana said. “He wanted to be buried in the garden outside, with the others, but our father wouldn’t allow it.”

“Oh.” I stared at the small rise in the ground and wondered how it fit a prince of al-Qaeda. “I shouldn’t have asked in front of your children.”

She moved to my side like wind wrapped in black, touching my arm. I turned to look at her through the veil. “They will have his mind. They will have his kindness, his caring for other people. They will not have his anger.” She folded her arms and looked down at the remains of her family. “So they must learn about him.”

Rana let go of my arm and moved to the floor, tucking her legs under her and facing the pit, telling Ahmed and Karim to do the same. Snoop followed suit. I turned around and shrugged at Washington, who shrugged back. We joined the others in Muslim prayer, something Karim found humorous, as he kept sneaking furtive smiles at Snoop. His brother ended that with a quick smack of the head.

Rana muttered in impenetrable Arabic for a full minute, Snoop and Ahmed joining her for bits and pieces. She bowed quickly, producing a small bottle of rosewater from an unseen pocket and sprinkling it down upon the ground beneath us. Once the bottle was empty, she returned to her knees.

“How do the Irish bury their dead?” she asked me.

“It’s similar,” I said. Closing my eyes, I probed my mind until I found something suitably nondenominational. “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God, may Allah, hold you in the hollow of His hand.”

When I opened my eyes, they again fell upon the graves of the legendary sheik and his defiant son, two smeared moons of cinder in the dirt. I thought of Shaba’s burned carcass and grinning skull. I’ve found you all, I thought. Now what?

I joined the others on my feet.

A solemn quiet filled the crypt, a draft of wind whistling through the room from the window. Karim started puckering his lips. Ahmed told his brother to stop, which only made him do it more. Ahmed then put him in a headlock and punched him in the ribs. Rana was still staring into the pit. She asked her boys to go play outside. Washington and Snoop followed of their own volition.

“Elijah was supposed to come here,” she said, once we were alone. “But al-Qaeda would not give us his body.”

“Why not?” I asked, even though I knew why.

She sighed, the swamp blossom scent of her perfume coming with it. “Life was impossible back then. First came the Collapse. Then the Shi’a death squads and the civil war. It didn’t matter to them that Elijah had become Muslim. It didn’t matter that this was his home. It didn’t matter that we were to be married.” Her voice turned to chrome. “Only the war mattered.”

I waited for tears that didn’t come. She patted my hand with her left one, sending quivers like light up my arm. “Wish I’d met him,” I said. “Like his tattoo about liberating the oppressed.”

She let go of my hand. “He only had one tattoo. It didn’t say that.”

“ De Oppresso Liber ?” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Latin. On his chest.”

Even through the veil, I could see her eyes turning to splinters. “He had a tattoo on his chest. It said”—she knocked her forehead as she searched for the pronunciation—“ ‘In-fi-del.’ He said it was a joke for Americans.”

“Oh.” Fucking Chambers, I thought. What a goddamn fraud. “I see.”

“He was a man, like any other.” She sighed again. “And I loved him very much.”

We looked into the pit for another minute or so. Then we left.

The noon sky had grayed out, hinting at rain. Snoop and Washington sat nearby, leaning against a pile of rocks they had to know was a grave. Rana asked where her children were.

“That way,” Washington said, pointing over a ridge that led deeper into the graveyard. “Was playing tag.”

I wanted to chew them out for letting the boys wander, but Rana didn’t seem bothered. She walked up the ridgeline, calling their names. After a few moments, Karim’s head poked up from the other side of the ridge.

“What?” Rana’s voice flexed in worry. “Where’s your brother?”

She began running before the words were even out of her youngest’s mouth.

We followed, moving up and through rolling knolls, dodging headstones and crevices of dirt, unable to catch her. By the time I got to the knoll she’d stopped at, gasping for breath, she had sat Ahmed up against a dark boulder shaped like a dinosaur egg. The young boy’s face was as faint as the land, and he seemed disoriented.

Rana grabbed his arms, running her hands down them like a tailor. “No,” she said. “No.”

A pair of matching bite marks glowed like juice stains on Ahmed’s wrist. His mother began slapping his cheeks, which caused him to smile vaguely.