she rolled another sheet of dough. “He’s such a cute child.”
Leila said nothing but nodded in agreement, pretending to love the little fiend. Mohammed was on her bad side ever since his last visit, when he unraveled her favorite scarf with his tiny, monstrous little hands. To be fair, that was three years ago. Leila was not opposed to children, but she never cooed over them the way Fatima did.
They finished with the dough and started dressing the whole lamb for roasting. Tamir had brought it home yesterday from the butcher’s shop, a child-sized bundle dripping with blood. The lamb would be spiced with rosemary and sage, rebundled, and left to marinate in its juices.
The rice was measured, the spices inventoried, and the dough for flatbread prepared ahead of time and put in the refrigerator. At seven in the evening, the women took a break to have makeshift chicken shwarma, cutlets of leftover chicken wrapped in flatbread with yogurt and cucumber. After that, Leila took her leave from the kitchen and went upstairs to review the material for her interview the next morning.
The head of pediatrics at the Al-Razi Hospital was a woman doctor by the name of Amina Dahbawi. Leila had introduced herself to Dr. Dahbawi upon her return from Cairo University and expressed an interest in gaining work experience. It paid off three weeks ago, when Dr. Dahbawi sent her an e-mail requesting further interviews. If Leila made a favorable impression, she might be hired. Leila wanted more experience in surgery or physical therapy, but Dr. Dahbawi was the highest-ranking female doctor in Mosul. It would be inappropriate for Leila to approach one of the male doctors, so it would be upon Dr. Dahbawi’s recommendation that Leila be transferred to one of the other stations.
It was the sole opportunity in Mosul that Leila could think of. With every day bringing new bombings, injuries, and shootings, it would give Leila an experience of practical hands-on healing as well as humanitarian effort.
Butterflies flew into her abdomen as she got into bed that night. Leila did not sleep well for the second night in a row, tossing and turning over the events of the day to come. Cousin Abdul was arriving. She had to bake bread. She had to go to the hospital and talk to the doctors; would they laugh in her face? Had the recent events at the Rasul house been real or imaginary? Had Leila dreamed up the past day? Did she miss her interview? Leila’s mind turned in turgid circles of nonsense, creating a half-asleep insomnia that prevented deep dreaming.
Leila got herself out of bed at seven in the morning and dressed in a professional black pantsuit, her only set of business clothes. She chose a contrasting dark taupe color for her head scarf, modest but of good quality. She took a folder with her résumé and university transcripts, and letters of recommendation from the staff at the university medical center in Cairo where she had interned. Leila rifled through the pages, triple-checking the contents; she could not think of anything else she might need.
With care, she packed her large square leather handbag with the folder, some cosmetics, a small bottle of water, and her on-the-go first aid kit. It paid to be prepared on the dangerous streets of Mosul. She would call a taxi to take her to the hospital, although cars were not necessarily safe; with her dressed as a professional woman, there was the chance she might be snatched and held for ransom. The insurgency did not seem to care who they targeted, American or Iraqi or Martian, so long as they wreaked havoc.
She arranged the taxi with a cousin named Sami, who was a driver. His small white car smelled funny but was clean, which was more than could be said about many taxis. She almost made it out the door.
“Leila!” her father’s voice echoed through the front hall.
“Father, I have to go!” Leila said, as the taxi horn sounded outside. “Remember? My interview at the hospital?”
“I don’t remember,” Tamir said, narrowing his eyes.
“I told you, Father, a week ago,” said Leila.
“Your cousin Abdul arrives today. Your mother needs your help here. Reschedule the interview.”
Leila’s eyes widened. This could not be happening. It was her chance, now or never, and her father wanted her to reschedule? “Father, I can’t. They’ll hire someone else.”
“Leila, I don’t like the idea of you working at the hospital. All those men, strangers, foreigners…”
Leila was frantic, but knew she couldn’t let him hear that in her voice. “It’s mostly children, Father, who’ve been burned or shot! Young people! Besides, don’t you want your family to be upstanding in the community? If I work at the hospital, it will only add prestige to our name. It’s a humanitarian effort.”
Tamir was silent. He took in Leila’s fine tailored suit and leather handbag.
“Please, Father? There’s no guarantee I’ll even get the job. It’s just an interview. I’ll be back well before lunch, and I’m going in Sami’s taxi.”
“Unescorted?”
“This is Iraq, Father! We are progressive, you’ve said it many times. We are not Saudis.”
“The Saudis,” grumbled Tamir. “Nothing but trouble.”
“Right. And they don’t let their women out of the house. I follow the Iraqi way. Your way, Father.”
Tamir paused, and for the second time in two days Leila held her breath for permission. As Allah is my witness, I want to move away from home, she thought to herself.
“Fine,” said Tamir. “If you are not back before noon—”
“I will be!” Leila said, before her father could set a more concrete threat. “Thank you! Wish me luck!”
She was already out the door before Tamir could say anything further.
Chapter 3
Leila sat on a yellow plastic molded chair in the hallway of Al-Razi Hospital. Overhead, the narrow fluorescent lights flickered on and off, the power supply as unreliable in this neighborhood of the city as everywhere else. The hospital had generators, but they were used for long-term power outages. Leila raised her head and watched the lights, counting the small black specks of dead flies and roaches that rested on their glass undersides. The smell of antiseptic was strong, disguising the underlying stench of sickness, of blood, of urine, and the fetid aftermath of human injury.
The Al-Razi Teaching Hospital in Mosul was one of the city’s largest, with over four hundred beds and a good emergency ward. It was formerly called Saddam Hospital, but that went out the window in 2003, gone to dust like all the other relics of the old regime. It changed in name, but not in function, and three years later the hospital retained its status as one of the more prestigious medical centers in the city of almost two million residents.
That did not mean things were easy for the staff of Al-Razi Hospital. Even before the war, the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq guaranteed a shortage of medical supplies, food, even basics such as bedsheets and syringes and aspirin. It was a constant struggle for the doctors and nurses to heal people, often with nothing but their bare hands. With the American invasion, things looked better for a brief time. Pharmaceuticals in neat little plastic packs came from the Americans, and despite some minor structural damage during the bombing campaign, the hospital stayed up and running.
These days, it was a matter of overwhelming casualties and not enough specialists. Supplies ran short again. The sheer number of munitions lying around meant injuries of innocents, often children, playing with explosives or in the wrong place at the wrong time. They came in with missing limbs, fragments of metal studded along their little bodies, eyes and fingers and legs ripped to shreds. The only thing to do was to stop the bleeding, bandage the wounds, give out antibiotics against infection. The children, when they survived, reemerged from Al-Razi Hospital carrying permanent handicaps.
For a generation, Mosul would be a city of beggars.
In the face of such hopelessness, the hospital worked. It took in patients, treated them, and discharged them back to whence they came. The staff noticed that the violence went in cycles; Friday,