One Hundred and One Nights (9780316191913) Read Free

somethin’ wasn’t right here
    Oh baby baby, I shouldn’t have let you go
    And now you’re outta sight, yeah
    Show me how you want it to be
    Tell me baby because I need to know now, oh
because
    My loneliness is killin’ me
    I must confess I still believe
    When I’m not with you I lose my mind
    Give me a sign, hit me baby one more time.
    “That is good,” I say. “Very good! I like the little dance move at the end the most.”
    “You believe in dance moves?”
    “Yes, definitely.”
    “You believe in mobile phones?”
    “Why not? Of course I do. They work. I sell them. They provide money so I can live. What’s not to believe?”
    “I believe in mobile phones and dance moves and pop music,” she says. “I believe in almost anything. My mother says I dream too much and believe in things too much. My mother doesn’t like me hanging around with the American patrols because she says they give me ideas.”
    “You should listen to your mother,” I say.
    “Bah,” she says. “The Americans are interesting. They all live next to Sharon Stone. They have in-ground swimming pools. Each American is a prince.”
    “I thought they were robots,” I say.
    “Robot princes,” she says.
    She should laugh as she says it, a nice little joke, tying up all her bits of scattered philosophy in one neat bundle. I smile but when I look at her I see she is not joking. She speaks in earnest, her teeth clamped shut. Her eyes, I notice, are blue rather than the usual shades of brown and sometimes green common to the people of southern Iraq. The blue pierces through the dust-streaked and darkly tanned skin of her face like a desert wind piercing a traveler at night, a traveler exposed at the top of a dune ridge.
    I realize Layla stares at me. She knows I have drifted away. To cover my lapse, I start to ask her for another song or dance, or both if she knows more, even if it must be pop music. But, as if she has heard a sound in the distance, a call for her to come home, she turns and says over her shoulder: “I’ll come see you tomorrow evening once again.”
    Then she runs toward the north, across the road into the desert on the far side of the highway overpass.
    I finish shutting my shop and I walk into Safwan. I mention Layla to my friend Bashar when I reach his café. He laughs, sits at the table with me for a moment, clasping my hand.
    “Do you believe in genies?” he asks, one eyebrow raised.
    “She’s no genie, Bashar.”
    “Perhaps you need a companion tonight. I know any number of widows in town. So many widows now. Many have been eyeing you from afar—an eligible, educated man like you makes quite a catch.”
    I smile, pick up the menu, scan it to the bottom, and order tea and hummus and falafel. When he brings my food, only a few minutes later, the image of Layla’s pop-music dance disappears from the forefront of my mind. I eat, enjoying the noise of the crowd in the evening and the passing of cars and carts and scooters and bicycles on the main street. The heat of the day dissipates into the night sky, rising above the noise of the town, passing through the tangle of electrical wires and clothes-drying lines that loop and arch over the street, freeing itself at last to journey up to the empty and quavering stars.
    Somewhere a few doors away, from a balcony overlooking the street, a man sings in a fine gravelly old-fashioned tenor. It’s something sad, filled with longing and distance and loss, but I can’t quite place the words. Farsi perhaps, a Persian song. Too much of that language slipping into the dialect used by these far-southern Iraqis. Certainly it isn’t a sacred song, or I would hear somewhere in it the warbled and elongated sound of the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful, Praise Be Unto Him.

3

Wednesday
    LAYLA VISITS IN THE EVENING , this evening, just as she promised. She stands in shadow under the awning of my little store, my shack, as a golden sunset reflects its light against the