Baba gives Adnan his keys, assigns me the front passenger seat, and takes the back seat, where he holds Noor’s head in his lap. As we drive, I watch him put one hand against her neck while his other hand periodically feels her wrist for signs of life. Her small, limp hand is stark against her long, red fingernails. The hand my parents suggested I take in marriage, is now pale and clamped between my father’s thick fingers.
We speed through the darkened streets of a neighbourhood I’ve known my whole life, through intersections which have never seemed as empty as they do now. And then on to the main road, with a few frenetic cars rushing by, gunning to get somewhere. Who goes out in the middle of an air raid? It’s silly that my parents were so keen to sit with Noor and her parents in the first place, in the middle of this. But I knew it was their mark of
sumud,
their own form of steadfastness. Defiance through denial, by continuing life as normal.
Closer to the hospital, I now see who does go out. Even from a block away, we are stuck behind a queue of cars funnelling towards the entrance.
“To hell with it. Just go around them, up the kerb,” Baba orders.
Adnan hesitates.
“It’s
my
bloody hospital! I’m not going to wait in line while she dies in my lap!”
Adnan veers on to the pavement and accelerates, passing fifteen, maybe twenty cars. There are no tears in his eyes, only fear. I hear Noor make a small gasp for air, and I want Baba to be doing something more to save her life. More than twenty years as a doctor, and it comes down to this? Taking a pulse? Giving driving directions? My father, one of the best cardiologists in Baghdad, unable to do anything? At this minute he must be ticking off Noor’s vital signs in his mind, assessing her chances of survival, and not sharing them with us.
I say nothing, only speaking to God in my mind, asking that He take care of Noor. And we are overtaking all the other cars as if we have a different passport, a special licence that indicates to the world that we don’t need to wait in line. Mercedes beats Toyota, Subaru, Fiat. People stare their stares of anger and shock and brokenness, but no one tries to stop us, and so I turn away from searching their faces for responses. My stomach feels like it is contracting from the rest of my insides, trying to hide, trying not to face all the other people pushing get to the hospital in their battered cars, trying to save someone else’s life. I wonder how many more Noors there are out there at this very moment, with families praying for them, with mothers sobbing and fathers speechless, with holes in their windows. We all wanted to believe that this war might blow over us like a sandstorm, a force of nature that cannot hurt you if you just seal up the windows properly and stay inside. If only you refuse to go out there and meet it face to face — exactly the opposite of what Saddam told us to do.
The entrance to the emergency room is a communal nightmare, a realization that a hundred other people are all having the exact same bad dream. There are lot of people who don’t look right, wandering around in search of doctors, desperate for information about what is happening with their loved ones, men shouting and women crying. One heavy-set woman covered in a billowing abaya stands wailing like a black ghost near the admissions desk, hitting her forehead with her open palms again and again, and I wonder where her family is and why no one is waiting with her and trying to comfort her. A boy in a corner is screeching and rocking himself back and forth and I don’t even know where we’re supposed to go. I’ve been to this hospital many times and yet it feels like a place I have never been before, because it’s so much more crowded and messy and it looks like they’ve been bringing injured people in for days and not cleaning up afterwards. Instead of that clean, antiseptic smell that’s always in the air, there is a stench of burnt flesh and blood. I see a family carry in a man whose lower half seems to have been completely crushed but he’s still shouting and my head is too hot and spinning and—
~ * ~
It takes a while for my eyes to focus, to come back. I am cold and the sound is weird, like a stuffed-up buzzing in my ears. My hands grope for something familiar. I’m lying on a plastic-upholstered sofa, I now realize, in one of the doctor’s offices down the corridor from the emergency room.
“You’re all right. Don’t worry.” Baba’s voice. “You just passed out again.” He puts his hand against my cheek and holds my face for a moment, then messes my hair like he is sending a small child away.
~ * ~
2
Sending
Again. I hate
again
, but I’m relieved to know what’s happened. What am I doing lying down when all of these sick and broken people are heaving in that bloody room down the corridor, now a comfortable distance from me, where I can hear them but can’t smell them the way I did before? I wonder, if my father weren’t a doctor here, would I be lying on this sofa, or would I have been left out there with all the screaming, reeling families?
It has been several years since I’ve passed out. Baba behaves as if it happened only yesterday.
“Drink,” he says, handing me a glass of water. I wonder whose office this is. Baba would normally be in cardiology, on the fifth floor. I feel the rip of cleaning chemicals in my nose, an odour I have hated since I was a child — the smell of coming to visit my father at work. I passed out a few times then, too, until Baba decided to stop bringing me to see him at the hospital. I sensed disappointment in his decision, which seemed like a punishment. I feel a tinge of it now, just a few little particles of it floating in the air, invisible but irritating, like the chemicals.
When I try to sit up, he holds my shoulder and pushes me gently back down to the sofa. “Lie a little longer.”
I look up at him. He seems older, so much older, the dark lines under his eyes turned from ashes to charcoal.
“Where’s Noor?” I ask.
My father breathes in and purses his heavy lips to one side. “She’s in the operating theatre now. They will try, Nabil. But we need to be realistic. I...” he pauses. “I just don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so?”
“I don’t think you should have too much hope.”
I close my eyes again, trying to say a prayer for the sick, in my mind, on Noor’s behalf. I am ashamed. I cannot remember the words.
When I open my eyes, my father is gone. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, at the cheap, corky tiles that were once white but are now a crusty grey, with a film like the kind that accumulates on unwashed cars. I used to love to write on dirty car windows when I was a child. I always loved to use words I wouldn’t be held responsible for later.
The building shakes from something that must have landed nearby, and somehow all I want to do is close my eyes once more. It is only when I hear a woman speaking English that I finally sit up and listen. Her voice grows louder and she sounds upset, like she wants someone to answer her, and she’s shouting now because no one has. But there are not, I would imagine, too many people in this hospital who can understand English well, and now the woman’s voice becomes more pronounced, as if she thinks that by speaking slowly and loudly, yelling even, people will begin to understand.
“My friend, Jonah Bonn was brought here. Jonah Bonn. We think he was brought here. Please, check your lists for him. Can you check that for us? Do you understand me?”
I walk into the middle of the corridor and see her standing there, the foreign woman talking so loudly, and even if I had not heard her it would be clear that she wasn’t an Iraqi because her hair is almost lit by the colour of fire, a strange red I have never seen before and am sure does not occur in this part of the world. She is with another foreign woman who looks Chinese or Japanese, and a tall, freckle-faced man stands behind them. His face is half-covered by his hair, and he looks like he has not slept in weeks and needs to exert great effort to hold up his eyelids. His eyeballs bulge bigger and then recede as the woman speaks, and then he shuts his eyes tight and winces. He leans against the wall next to him. I can’t help but wonder, why is he letting the women engage in all the talking?
The red-haired woman looks at the nurse she has cornered and tilts her head to one side. She makes a face like she’s about to cry and then is suddenly in control again.
“He was making a film,” she says. Shouts, really. “TV film? You know, camera, film for TV? Like CNN? Al-Jazeera?” She makes a gesture of holding up an old-fashioned camera, peering through a hole in her clenched left fist and cranking her right.
“No, no, no,” the hospital nurse says. “No film here. You need take permission. Go, ministry...take permission.”
The red-headed woman drops her forehead into her upturned hand. “Oh God, please! We don’t want to film. What I’m trying to tell you is that we’re looking for our friend, our colleague. A reporter, you know, journalist?
Sahafi
? Jonah Bonn. Maybe you have him here?”
The nurse shakes her head and shrugs, looking to me.
“He was working with a man with a big camera and then he disappeared,” the foreign woman pleads, moving her hands with the words, as if they will do the interpreting. “He worked for... he
works
for...oh, Jesus.” She speaks very slowly now. “We believe...he, Jonah, here,” she says, jabbing her two pointer-fingers towards the floor. She leaves out the verb, which annoys me, as if speaking English loudly and poorly is going to make the nurse understand. The foreign woman’s face is starting to turn a shade of red that white people sometimes get when they are angry.
She puts a thumb and forefinger in the inner corners of her eyes. The freckled man behind her places his hand on her back and moves it across her shoulder blades. “This is useless, Sam. Forget it.” He moves in front of her and hunches down to put his face in front of hers, his hands tucked into his armpits. “Let’s go ask at the Red Cross or something. We can try Yarmouk Hospital.”
I rush to catch the nurse, who had said “sorry, sorry”, several times and begun to walk away, and ask her to wait just one moment more.
“Excuse me,” I say calmly, as though they are just lost tourists seeking directions. “Can I help you with something?”
The red-headed woman looks up at me and before I can say more, she begins to cry. And then she turns her crying into a laugh that I think is meant to cover up the crying.
“I’m losing it. Oh Lord,” she says, looking up at the ceiling and releasing a few tears that roll towards her hairline. She wipes her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. Her friend, the small Asian lady, puts her hand on the woman’s shoulder.
“Sam...Sam, don’t worry. We’ll find him.” The Asian woman’s English sounds perfect and American, and I realize that I am surprised. She turns to me. “Look, we’re here covering this war and our friend’s been missing for three days and we heard he might have been brought here.” She says those words, “covering this war” as if we started it.
The red-haired one, I guess she’s called Sam, though that sounds like a name for a man, dabs at her face. All that’s left is an afterglow on her cheeks and some runaway smudges of mascara under her eyes. She turns to me. “Please,” she says, lowering her voice from the tone she had taken a minute earlier. “Can you help us?”
“Yes, of course, please. I would be more than happy to help you,” I say. I hate my choice of words. Awkward, formal. Maybe I’m out of practice.
Happy?
“Are you all right?” I ask her. “Can I get you something to drink?”
Her eyes roll over me with suspicion. They are eyes of a strange colour that I’ve never seen before, sort of a golden sand or straw instead of a regular brown or blue or green.
“No, thanks,” she says. “I’m fine. We just want to find my friend. He’s about five-foot-eleven and we know he was near the Rashid Hotel and he was wearing...” And I don’t entirely hear everything she is saying because I wonder why a woman like this is not somewhere in America, safe at home with her family, why she’s standing in a corridor in my father’s hospital, talking at me with those strange eyes, almost the colour of the marmalade I loved when we lived in England. It had a kind of sweetness and a bitterness at the same time.
“Jonah Bonn,” I repeat to the nurse on the admissions desk. “Please, these people are guests in our country and it’s really important that we find their friend.”
“What nationality?”
“American.”
The nurse raises her chin and her eyes narrow a little bit and I know she’s saying she doesn’t really care if there’s a dead American in the hospital.
“Listen, I’m Dr al-Amari’s son and I, we, would really appreciate it if you would check.” I want to sound like she should listen to me, like she should feel she has no choice, but I still sound like I’m asking.
“Here,” she says, handing me a stack of paper attached to a clipboard. “See if he’s there.” The only foreign names I can find are of two Frenchmen.
~ * ~
“Come with me,” I say, and the three of them follow me towards the lift at the end of the corridor.
“Pretty modern hospital. Not bad,” says the freckled man, and I realize I do not even know their names.
“Sorry,” I turn to them when we reach the elevator, pressing the button more times than necessary. “I’ve forgotten my manners. My name is Nabil al-Amari.”
“June Park,” says the Asian woman. She’s small and lithe and, some men would argue, just as pretty as the other one, but terribly thin for my liking.