Читать книгу The Nightingale - Morgana Gallaway - Страница 11

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 blush. She dabbed on some glossy lipstick, then blotted it with a tissue so that it was not obvious; it gave her the coloring of a desert dusk, pink lips and dark eyes. The ritual reminded her of the freedom of her university days, of wearing makeup and dressing like a Westerner, of having debates in English with the American exchange students in Cairo. It was a sunny, relaxed memory.

The Quran instructed against women adorning themselves for beauty, but her application of makeup was natural and unnoticeable, or so she hoped. Someday, Leila thought, the world of Arab women would catch up with the rest, and they could all wear beautiful fashions and high-heeled shoes. Until then, Leila’s tiny rebellion was a dash of color on the face beneath her hijab.

She yawned, and stretched, and pulled her long hair into its tight bun to go with the head scarf. It was Thursday, the last day before her weekend. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were off, as Friday was the Muslim holy day and Sunday the Christian. Leila was sorry, for her work at the American base meant life had finally taken an interesting turn.

Her first day at the 67th Combat Support Hospital had been like stepping into a small piece of America, fresh and efficient and clean. People—strange men!—shook her hand: the doctors, the nurses, all big smiles and welcomes. The immersion was complete, for there was not another woman in sight wearing the hijab, or a sentence, a word, written in Arabic.

In comparison to most of the hospitals in Mosul, the American facility was large and well equipped, three stories high, with a radiology department, a pharmacy, and an operating room. When she first arrived, Leila had been given the tour by a female army nurse who held the rank of second lieutenant; the woman had been briskly cheerful, full of facts, and with a quick double pat on Leila’s arm, had left her to fend for herself. Overwhelmed, Leila had sat down on a square wooden chair with a black leather cushion and tried to take deep breaths when her new boss showed up.

“Miss al-Ghani?”

Looking up, Leila found a short man with a paunchy middle and thin glasses perched on his nose. She stood. “Yes?”

“Dr. Harding Peabody,” he said, jutting out a hand and giving a quick, tight smile. “You’ll be working with Dr. Whitaker and me in the surgery.”

“Hi,” said Leila, shaking the offered hand. “Fursa saeeda—er, nice to meet you,” she said, flustered that she’d spoken in Arabic first. It would take practice to remember to think and speak in English.

Dr. Peabody told her that she would be working primarily as a medical assistant, but that she would act as a translator whenever there was an Arabic-speaking patient. He explained that it was hospital policy to always keep someone fluent in Arabic on staff. That sounded just fine to Leila; she was glad they needed her particular set of skills.

The rest of the day had been an orientation, but it served more to disorient Leila than anything else. She’d felt on the brink of doing something wrong all day. The soldiers were intimidating; when she and Dr. Peabody visited the main ward, a soldier recovering from a broken ankle had looked Leila up and down, then winked. When he saw the furious blush rise on her face, he’d given her a broad smile. She was not used to innocent flirtation.

However, the staff was understanding (Leila was not, she learned, the first female Iraqi translator to work at the hospital) and the first strange day passed without incident. At the end of it, Leila felt as though a million things had happened, the impressions crowding in around her, so when she arrived home she’d been truly relieved to make the tea, serve the meal, and listen to Fatima chat about the children at the nursery.

Each day at the Combat Support Hospital grew more routine, as Leila’s rational mind told her it would. The mysteries of the American hospital were decoded and Leila began to adjust to the foreign behavior, the laughing nurses, the soldiers who tried to flirt with her. Leila found herself enjoying the job more each day. On the cusp of her third weekend, she had grown to like her job so much that she wished she could work every single day. She was addicted to the thrill of her learning curve in the American hospital.

She descended the staircase when her outfit was in place, modest and decent. Her thick fringe of eyelashes felt like a luxury. “Good morning, Mother,” Leila said, popping into the kitchen for a bite of bread before she went.

“Good morning,” said Umm Naji. “You are up early.”

“I want to get to work on time, and I never know about traffic,” said Leila.

“Leila, do you think you could stay at home a bit more? It’s not safe out there. Surely the pharmacy can spare you. Perhaps work only three days a week.”

“I can’t, Mama,” said Leila.

Umm Naji sighed. “Your father was talking to me again,” she said. “You know that more civilians die every day. There is no law. And the Americans pick up people off the streets! They disappear into the prisons!”

Leila had seen this for herself, the “detainees,” as they were called. Some were guilty of insurgency. Others suffered from sheer bad luck. But they were taken to the military base, then whisked away in unmarked planes that took off from the airstrip, with five or ten or twenty Iraqi passengers who might never again be seen by their families. She ignored the operations for the most part; her job was surgical assistant and translator. When she kept her sphere of attention limited to her duties at the hospital, she slept better at night.

The kettle of water on the gas threatened to boil over, and Umm Naji grabbed a tattered cloth to touch its handle and move it away. “Tea?” she asked.

Leila nodded, and reached up to the top shelf of the cabinet to grab two small clear glasses. She put them on the metal tray, and dropped sprigs of fresh mint into them. Her mother poured the tea, hot and black and sweet.

“You are looking well, Leila,” said Umm Naji, peering at her daughter.

Leila dropped her eyes, praying her mother did not notice the makeup. That would be fatal to her budding career, as Umm Naji would tell Tamir, and then Leila might be banned from leaving the house. “Thank you, Mama,” said Leila. “And Fatima looks well, too.”

“Yes, Fatima,” said Umm Naji. “Today, Khaled’s relatives are coming for tea. I believe they will want to talk to Mr. al-Ghani!” Umm Naji tittered with laughter, rocking in her chair.

Leila sighed with relief. It sounded like the mashaya, when the men in the families met to finalize the wedding plans. If it was, all attention would be on Fatima, and off her. “How exciting!” Leila said, raising her eyebrows and sipping the tea that cooled in her glass.

“It is,” said Umm Naji. She laughed to herself and said, not unkindly, “Maybe someday soon, we will have good news for you, Leila.”

Leila glanced at her watch. “Oh! I must go.” She leapt up and kissed Umm Naji on the cheek. Umm Naji waved her off, in jolly spirits, and Leila slipped out of the house unnoticed by her father.

The month of December was cold in Mosul. The air would not warm up until midday, and even then it would be tepid sunshine, kept in check by the breeze sweeping down from the mountains. Leila’s breath fogged about her as she pedaled her bicycle down the fine paved road. She hoped the road stayed intact and that the mujahideen had the sense not to destroy it with IEDs. It was such a joy to feel the tires of the bicycle clip along the smooth surface.

Once she entered into the rabbit warren of old city streets, Leila had to slow her pace and ring her bell to warn pedestrians of her passage. The gentle ding of her bicycle bell sounded over and over, merging with the goats’ bells and the car horns and the clatter of the city morning. A large truck rumbled past, spewing toxic black clouds from its dripping exhaust pipes, and Leila coughed. Mingled with the chemical scents were the earthy odors of trampled, stale animal dung; the succulent roasting of meat, already turning round and round in the shwarma stands; and the deep rich wafts of coffee from the roadside, where old men stood next to tall gleaming Turkish coffeepots. She turned down a random street that would take her on a new route to the Al-Razi Hospital.

Every morning she left her bicycle chained up to the metal rack outside the big concrete building. She walked a block, went past a security checkpoint, and waited for the bulky square minibus to take her into Logistics Support Area Diamondback. It left at precisely eight forty-five every morning.

Today she was fifteen minutes early, and she sat on a concrete guard barrier in front of the hospital. She smiled and nodded to three other girls who chattered together in a tight group. They were cleaners at the base, from poor families in the Assyrian sector of Mosul. For them, the risk of attack was worth the steady salary. There were other employees who took the bus as well: civilian translators who worked with the Americans, some kitchen workers who washed dishes in the army mess hall, and the two Iraqi policemen who rode back and forth on the bus as protection.

The police would be useless against the normal mode of terrorist attack, the roadside bombs or the random spray of bullets. But appearances must be maintained, and the police stood in stolid discipline, checking the same identification cards of the same employees day in, day out. The police were both young men, fresh as cream, and they took their job seriously, never showing informality. As she boarded the bus that morning, Leila handed over the plastic laminated card with her picture, and her name and title written in both English and Arabic. As usual, the policeman took it, inspected it, checked her face against her picture, and handed back the card.

Leila sat toward the front of the bus, and she felt the vibration through the scuffed leather seat as the bus’s engines started up. The other familiar passengers boarded the bus just as the second hand on Leila’s watch marked a quarter to nine and the wheels started rolling. She smiled to herself. She had always heard the Germans were sticklers for punctuality, but the Americans? She supposed militaries everywhere were the same. They loved hours and minutes and numbers. In a war zone it must be a reassuring element of control to mark the time like that.

The journey took about twenty minutes, allowing for traffic and terrorist incidents. Leila stared out the window, past the buildings, at the green-brown emptiness of the hills beyond. She felt far away from the rest of the world. In her head, she replayed the rap music she’d listened to last night: Tupac Shakur, the dead American rapper. Judging by his lyrics, there was lawlessness even in the promised land.

As they drew closer to the base, anticipation grew in the pit of Leila’s stomach. It was dangerous business, and she lived with the constant threat of discovery by her father, but Leila loved her job. The American surgeons were professional and helpful in their advice to her, and the practical experience was a thousand times better than pill-counting in the Al-Razi pharmacy. Just last week Leila had assisted Dr. Peabody in a delicate surgical operation to repair an American soldier’s left lung that had been lacerated by shrapnel from an explosion. Their field hospital lacked the full facilities of a major trauma center, but they’d done their best to keep the soldier alive until he could be lifted off to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Leila later heard that he was in recovery, and she felt good about it.

It was beyond her required duties to help in surgery often, but the doctors with whom she worked, Whitaker and Peabody, allowed it whenever her translation skills weren’t needed. They were supportive of Leila’s medical ambitions.

Diamondback Road, the long straightaway to the airport and base, was bereft of traffic, aside from an outgoing patrol convoy of Humvees. The road was colored in flat tones of brown, the distance measured in bumps and rattles of the vehicle. During the journey Leila felt the weariness and the danger all at once…as though the terror were a thread woven into the fabric of time itself, a corrupt thread that was a shade darker than the clear blue sky and the bright sandy ground.

She clasped her hands in her lap as the bus slowed to go through the security checkpoint into the American base. This took almost twenty minutes, and bomb-sniffing dogs went all around the bus. Leila and the others stood and got out, walked through the metal detectors, and then segregated into two lines, men and women. Leila spread her arms wide for the female military police to pat her down. When the check was complete, they got back on the bus and continued through to the base.

Leila heard from one of the other women that security had not always been so tight. When the Americans first arrived, the base had been relatively open, even to the point of Turkish merchants gathering outside the gates, selling trinkets and fine carpets at a discount to the soldiers and contractors. It all changed on the twenty-first of December, two years ago, when a suicide bomber wearing a shrapnel IED exploded himself inside the mess hall at midday. Over twenty people had been killed, both soldiers and civilians. Leila had been in Cairo for her last year at the university at the time, but the other women said that relations with the Americans turned to high distrust after the bombing. Leila could not blame them.

The overall impression of Logistics Support Area Diamondback was that it was flat. There weren’t many bi-level structures; the buildings of size were the hangars and the mess hall, which was really a glorified tent shaped like a great sharp-ridged sand dune. The rest of the base hugged the ground like the interloper it was, trying and failing not to cause offense. Across the straight-edged road, Forward Operating Base Marez lurked, filled with soldiers.

After she got off the bus and showed her pass for a third time, Leila walked across the base to the hospital. The loose gravel crunched beneath her feet as she passed a row of white prefab trailers, squat and square. The wind, cool off the water of the adjacent Tigris River, threatened to steal her hijab. With one hand she held her scarf in place and kept walking past the residential trailers. Leila imagined they had once looked new and shiny, but now they were coated with an ever-present layer of thin dust. The odd one was pockmarked with tiny rusted brown holes from stray mortars. Between the exterior walls, wires were strung, floating with towels and brown T-shirts and socks that never quite got clean. Leila liked the miscellany because it reminded her of Mosul City itself; it reminded her that human beings occupied the base, not frightening and pristine robot soldiers.

After three weeks at work on the base, she’d learned what she always suspected: that Americans were not devils or supernatural tormentors or evil people. They became sick and injured just like anyone else, and in addition, most of them were nice. Polite. Smiling.

On the way past the Special Forces compound, however, Leila shivered; the concrete building was protected by rows of razor-wire fence and a sign outside that demanded NO PHOTOGRAPHY in stern red letters. A hand-painted skull-and-crossbones symbol also hung on the outermost fence, teeth bared, giving Leila the impression of a deadly clubhouse. She’d helped set a dislocated shoulder of one of the men of the 10th Special Forces the previous week; his name had been Nisson and he was of Asian descent, with cool black eyes and a hard demeanor.

At nine-thirty, Leila finally entered the hospital. She retrieved her lab coat from her own locker; the locker had her name written in black plastic block letters and she closed it with an authoritative clang. For a moment, Leila imagined herself as a doctor in an American hospital, safe and sound. Then she heard the dull thump of a mortar series from outside, and the illusion was shattered.

“Good morning, Leila!” said Dr. Peabody, the surgeon, when she walked into the main ward.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said.

“How are you today?”

The Americans always asked her “how she was.” Leila smiled. “I am well,” she said.

“Busy day today,” said Peabody.

“Is it?” Leila said. There had been rumors about another gun battle in the city.

“Ah yes. There are two Iraqi detainees at the moment, and they’ve been pretty uncooperative. One has a leg injury, from which he’ll recover. The other has some nasty shrapnel embedded in the lungs; he was messing with his own IED when it happened. Both are in the visitors’ ward. You can start there today—just follow the smell,” Peabody said. And she did.

Hours later, among the trays of medical supplies, the ubiquitous IV drips and wall charts, the shining linoleum floor, Leila stood at the foot of one of the occupied beds in the ward. Two wounded insurgents lay at opposite ends of the room, each looking mutinous and resentful. Leila wrote fast on her clipboard.

From behind her, a man cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. His blue eyes were lowered out of courtesy, but as Leila glanced up she still recognized him. It was the soldier from the house raid at the Rasuls’ house two months ago, the handsome one.

“Yes?” she said, astonished that her own voice could sound so cool and clear.

“Captain James Cartwright,” he said by way of introduction. Up close, she could see on his uniform the insignia of the 10th Special Forces, like the compound she’d walked past on her way to the hospital. “Are you the translator?” he asked.

She nodded. “I am Leila al-Ghani,” she said.

The captain studied the floor and let the moment slide a little too long. Leila glanced back down at her clipboard. Clearing his throat again, he spoke. “Yes,” he said, “we’ve met before, haven’t we?”

Leila nodded.

Clearly, the soldier remembered the raid. “Sorry about that. Please, call me James.”

Leila met his eyes once more. “It was not your fault, I am sure,” she said. “You follow your orders.”

James nodded. “So you work here now?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have been here three weeks.”

“Really? I haven’t seen you,” said James.

With a lift of her eyebrows, Leila’s mouth twitched in amusement; it sounded like Captain James was on the lookout for pretty Iraqi girls. The impression was unintentional, she was certain, but she could not help smiling again.

“Sorry—er—I mean, I didn’t know we had a new translator.”

“I work with the surgeons,” she said. “Here in the hospital. I am on loan from the Al-Razi civilian hospital in the city.”

“Ah,” said James. He glanced over at the wounded prisoner, who stared back and forth between James and Leila. The prisoner’s brown face betrayed both curiosity and loathing. “Does he speak any English?” James asked, nodding at the wounded man.

“No,” said Leila. “Not that he has revealed, anyway.”

“Right,” said James. “I’m supposed to question him. But I think I’ll need your help, if you’re willing.”

Leila shrugged. “It is my job,” she said, not liking it, but she felt James knew what she meant. It was his job, too. He pulled up two metal folding chairs that rested on the wall for himself and Leila and then turned to the bedridden insurgent. Leila cleared her throat. There was no room for fellow-Iraqi allegiance here; she had a job to do and she would do it well. “What is your name? Ma ismuka?”

The man said nothing.

“He is called Hazim,” Leila volunteered, glancing at the chart. “He has not given a family name.”

“Hazim,” James said. “My name is James.”

Leila translated this in a staccato burst. Hazim turned his head away.

“We have treated you of your wounds,” said James, “and given you medicine. We want you to heal, and go in peace. It is a matter of hospitality.”

Hazim mumbled something in return.

“He says he thanks you for the treatment, but he has done nothing to be held here,” Leila said.

“Is he part of the insurgency? Is that how he wounded his leg?” James asked.

Leila shook her head. “He says the Strykers shot him for no reason.” She sighed. “It is impossible to know the truth.”

It went like that for about twenty minutes. James asked a question about Hazim’s company or family or activities in Mosul. Leila translated. The answers were vague and contradictory and they had to repeat themselves many times, hoping to catch Hazim with the truth. She wondered if it was Hazim’s guilt or a general coyness that molded his answers.

At the end of the session, the only solid information was that Hazim was from Tikrit, he’d been in Mosul for five months, and he was visiting a “cousin.”

“It’s always a cousin,” said James, rubbing his eyes.

“That is the way of this country.” said Leila. “I have over eight hundred cousins.”

“Eight hundred!”

“More on my father’s side,” said Leila. “He is Arab. My mother has a smaller family, and they are Kurdish. Only three hundred cousins on that side.”

James shook his head in total disbelief. “Are they all first cousins?”

Leila laughed. “No,” she said. “Just cousins.”

“Your mother is Kurdish?” he asked.

“Yes, from Dohuk,” said Leila. “Most of her family is still there.”

“Huh,” said James, stealing another look at Leila’s face, and she noticed the motion of his eyes. “I think that’s all he’s going to tell us,” James said, regarding their wounded terrorist. A pause hung in the air and then James forged ahead. “Do you translate all the medical terms, then?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am the translator, and also surgical assistant. My degree is biomedical science.”

“Oh!” said James, impressed. “Where did you go to college?”

“The Cairo University,” Leila said. “I graduated last year. But because of the war, and my father, I cannot go back for my doctor’s degree.” She sighed. Pity she did not want, yet her situation was beginning to demand it.

“Your father?” he asked.

Feeling bad for weaseling out of his interest, Leila glanced at him, then looked away again. “It is nothing,” she said. “If you are finished here, I must go. The bus takes us back into the city at six o’clock.”

James barely had time to say, “It was nice to meet you!” and Leila was out the door.