![]() ![]() He smiled after the second line like a pupil looking for affirmation from his teacher. “One who tastes sugar with the night-bird,” he said, “Do you know Rumi?” he asked, as if he were referring to a friend we both had in common. ![]() “But this is not something that leaves you,” he said, one hand on the wheel, the other casually holding a cigarette, as if he were not using an Army-issued vehicle to transport a political refugee-and a citizen of his country’s mortal enemy-to a small, private airfield a few hundred miles outside of Baghdad, but had simply gone for a leisurely moonlit drive. “What do you mean?” he asked, as the jeep moved at top speed across a desert that felt less like the barren terrain of a foreign country, and more like the surface of the moon in an old science fiction film. Still trying to imagine what mysterious string had been pulled to secure me that particular driver, I paused before answering, It was not until I was within twenty feet of it that I saw the automobile, a squat jeep that looked like a miniature bungalow on wheels, behind which a young driver, twenty, maybe twenty-one, sat, his Iraqi soldier’s cap tilted to one side, a thin cigarette between his lips that he had yet to light, a rifle on the dash that, when I slid into the passenger’s seat, was a similar make and model to the one that my wife, six months prior, had been killed by. Son.” As if each word were its own complete sentence. The man didn’t speak for the entirety of the drive but when, a half mile from the border, after he had maneuvered the car into a small valley whose steep walls on either side hid the car from view, he had checked his watch, and then nodded into the darkness and said, “Now. And then a car belonging to a man whose name I never learned, but who Hassan’s father had served in the war with, and who had owed him a favor. Next I took a bus from Abadeh to Masjed Soleyman, where I sat next to a young girl who kept repeating passages from the 27th Sura in her sleep, as if she were trying to encourage Moses and Lot and Lot’s wife into joining us on that already crowded vehicle. It had begun with Hassan driving me from Shiraz to Abadeh in that old BMW his uncle had left him when he passed. I landed in Los Angeles after three days of traveling. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |