much?” Umm Naji asked.
“For all of it, just a thousand dinars,” said Fatima.
“I think some new scarves would be nice,” said Umm Naji. Fatima smiled at Leila; this meant their mother approved of the purchase. Umm Naji bent her head to her own embroidery, and she murmured a folk tune that she’d sung to the girls when they were children; the lyrics were of the love of a humble shepherd boy for a beautiful princess. Umm Naji’s voice was sturdy and soft, and the quiet mood was so congenial that for a moment Leila wondered why she wanted to risk this home for a hazardous career. What if her father was right? Perhaps the best thing to do was to marry, move out to a tiny village in the surrounding countryside, and wait out the imminent civil war. Never leave the house, get pregnant, raise babies on small cups of rice and the milk from scrawny goats. It would make her family happy.
Umm Naji looked up from her needlework and saw Leila’s daydreaming. “You are not working today, either?” Umm Naji asked.
“No,” said Leila. “No supplies yet, like yesterday. They will arrive tomorrow, and then we can get back to work.” Today would be a temporary supply glitch, and tomorrow her parents would think her back at work at Al-Razi Hospital. She prayed they never visited the pharmacy to look for her, but—as the Americans would say—she would cross that bridge when she got to it.
For all its danger, this job at the American base sparked the flame of that old hope: medical school in the West.
Tamir returned from his day’s activities, which were never discussed with the ladies of the household, and accompanying him were six new strangers, plus the ever-present Abdul-Hakam, the imam at the Al-lah Al-Hasib Mosque where Tamir worshipped. Leila swore there were more strangers in the house in the past year than in all previous years combined. All the men were the same: curt, conservative, demanding food and shelter and no questions asked. As had become the routine, Leila and Fatima prepared a large tray meal for the men, and then Leila listened from her loose-brick listening post.
“The martyr brigades are forming across the country,” said the gravelly voice of a stranger. “With the proper discipline, we might accomplish something.”
“It is with the grace of Allah we’ll do this,” said the imam. “The country will be purged of infidels and Shiites—”
“No,” Tamir said. “The Americans must go first.”
At this, Leila bit her lip. She sent a silent prayer up to Allah, and the angels, or whatever other deity might be listening, that her father would never discover her new job.
“My friends, you know what to do,” said Tamir. “You are each in charge of your own cell. Discipline, remember. Never stay in one place.”
As he continued, Leila backed away from her eavesdropping spot, blinking her eyes fast. Her head buzzed with disbelief—her father was a mujahideen, how could it be true? Tamir could not be plotting, not for real. It must be some religious metaphor. Among scholars of the Quran, jihad was a term of spiritual struggle…but she could not explain away the men’s very temporal words. Cells. Brigades. Martyrs. The evidence was in the false thunder that assaulted Mosul every day. Leila winced and something cold settled in her stomach. This was the price of her eavesdropping, yet she knew that she would listen again.
As she passed by the door to the courtyard, she remembered a past conversation with him, or perhaps it was an amalgamation of many views formed in subtle ways over the years.
It did not matter which. The point to Leila was that she no longer knew what to think.
Tamir al-Ghani, judge of Saddam’s regime, had been forward thinking when it came to politics. He, and his fathers before him, had been part of Mosul’s power structure for so many years that he had space to be more liberal in some of his views.
He and Leila sat in the courtyard; Umm Naji had brought them their shai. Leila was in high school and that day she had gotten in a near argument with her tutor about the economic loans given by the West to other countries. Leila followed Tamir’s thinking, that modernization was the key to success. The teacher, a nervous woman with beady eyes, always suspicious, had told Leila to defer to the government in such matters.
“But, Baba,” Leila said to Tamir, “you are the government, so I told her I would turn to you.”
Tamir smiled. “Daughter, governments are made of people, and every person has his own opinion. Sometimes he hides what he thinks because he is afraid.”
“So how do I know when I can speak out?”
Tamir pulled on his beard and seemed to consider this. “Well. First, make sure your position is strong. Because you are a woman, you must find a husband who agrees with your politics. This way, you will have support for your thoughts.” He smiled. “But not yet.”
“Does Mama agree with you in everything?” Leila asked.
This made her father chuckle.
“Everything that matters,” said Tamir. He pinched Leila’s cheek.
“I would never marry a man unless he thought the way we do, and you approved of him,” Leila said.
“I trust your judgment,” said Tamir. “We are not like our fundamentalist neighbors. Every person should be given a chance to decide for himself, including marriage.” Leila’s mother, after all, was a Kurdish woman, so Tamir was indeed a representative of free thinking in his version of Iraq.
“But,” he continued, “you understand that things are not black-and-white. All things take time, especially good things and great changes.”
Leila held her tongue between her teeth as she remembered the things her father used to say. It was most uncomfortable to be confronted with a new Tamir, a harsher version of the man whom she’d so admired and respected. Leila wished it were not so. If the Americans had let them alone, they might have come to their own way of peace in Iraq, and Tamir would still be wise and kind and would never need to talk of bombs and weapons.
The country was on shifting sands, and there were a million degrees of insurgency, of sympathizers and participants and innocent bystanders. There was no universal formula for determining loyalty to tribe or family or religion. Leila did not even know the heart of her own father. Was he a mere pretender, talking about the fight against an occupying force? Or had he taken it further and orchestrated attacks against the Americans? Leila hoped he had the sense to stay out of the worst of it.
When she went up to bed that night, Leila lay in the dark of her room, her bedcovers pulled up to her chin. In just two days, her life had changed so quickly. The light from the waxing moon filtered through a gap in her curtains, and Leila stared up at the light spot on the opposite wall. She was in a fog and nothing was certain. There was nothing to hold on to anymore.
Just before she drifted into a fitful sleep, Leila heard voices and footsteps in the courtyard. She heard the clink of a chain, and the creaking of a metal door. There was an old well in the courtyard, gone dry years ago and covered over with a dusty metal hatch. Why was it being opened in the middle of the night? She did not have time to contemplate it, for sleep came seconds later.
Chapter 5
Leila looked at her reflection on the wall mirror in her bedroom, trying to shake the last remnants of sleep. It was seven in the morning, several weeks after beginning the job with the Americans, and the cool glare of sunshine poked through her curtains and created a smattering of light dots on the far wall. She liked her east-facing window into the courtyard, for the morning light served to awaken her. It was the innocent part of the day, never punctuated by the brief moments of terror when her father asked her a question, or when she heard the backfire of a car or the clattering of AK-47 rounds fired into the sky at a nearby wedding. Leila always thought the bullets were made for her.
She reached over and chose a tube of mascara, expertly sweeping it over her long eyelashes in a thin layer so that her parents would not notice. She dusted her cheeks with light pink