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THE HEART OF BAGHDAD
by Olivia Rosane / más+menos 9

When his brother told him how a group of fundamentalists had shot the engineer, just for being a woman and refusing not to work, Yasir glanced over at his three year old daughter stacking blocks on the tile floor and knew he had no choice. He lifted the phone to his ear, thanked Allah it was working that day, and dialed his sister’s law firm in New York.
“All right,” he grumbled into the receiver, “You win.”
“Oh Yasir, I’m so relieved,” she answered in her American English as polished and hard as diamond, English she had perfected after twenty years of first studying and then living abroad. “Don’t worry, I know people in immigration,” she assured, “I can make this happen.”
Yasir sighed and looked out the window as the date palm, pride of his garden, caught the glowing ball of the setting sun between its fronds. He could almost forget the war and occupation—this unreal three-month-old reality-- when he looked only at that tree, when he shut from sight the roads cracked with the weight of American tanks and the neighbor’s house hollowed with the force of an errant American bomb. He could stare at it and think only of thirty years of reading in its shade.
“There were never fundamentalists in Iraq before the invasion,” he mumbled. “Maybe the Americans will leave and life will return to normal.
“Yasir . . .” his sister’s voice warned exasperation.
“I just worry,” he said, “about my little girl growing up so far from home.”
Across the rough connection, his sister’s voice softened. “New York will become her home, and yours too. Like they say in the states, home is where the heart is.”
The electricity chose that moment to flicker out; the ceiling fan flailed and died, and the June heat crouched behind him like dread. Home is where the heart is, he scowled. It was just the sort of phrase the Americans would use—the kind that took all the bitterness of leave-taking and exile, dipped it in grease, drenched it in sugar, and sold it to little children for a dollar. Yasir shook his head against his sister’s words. Even if the American invasion were forcing him to abandon his home, he would not allow the injustice to be softened by a manufactured American cliché.
So, the midnight before he was to leave Iraq, a leave-taking that had taken nine months to arrange, he broke one of the empty picture frames still hanging on his living room wall (all the pictures has been placed at the bottom of suitcases), doused the sharpest piece he could find with rubbing alcohol, and used it to cut out his heart. In its place he stuffed a crumpled up cleaning rag that sucked up the blood from his veins and rung it out again through his arteries. The thumpthump! that used to sound in his chest was replaced by slurpspit! slurpspit!, and every time the new, wetter rhythm sent the blood to his fingertips, it sent also a sharp joy. Gently, he wrapped his heart in his late mother’s favorite shawl and buried it beneath the date palm. Now, no matter what the Americans did or said, his heart and home would remain in Iraq.
That knowledge was Yasir’s only comfort in his new location. He arrived in New York City in early March, his favorite time of year in Iraq, when it was possible to enjoy the noonday sun without a jacket yet without sweat. But in New York the March air was so cold he feared his blood would freeze each time he stepped from his small Washington Heights apartment. Icy gusts would blow up from Riverside Park and rattle the small stand where he worked selling falafels on the corner of 116th and Broadway, and the cold would numb his hands so thoroughly that he wouldn’t even notice when the cooking oil burned him until his wife asked about the red spots on his fingertips at night. Even colder were the customers who visited his stand. He missed the fierce connection of his Baghdad bakery, where the need to negotiate prices with his customers forced them to stare into each other’s eyes and fling their hands in each other’s faces. Yet here college girls in indecently short skirts and ridiculous furry boots ordered while laughing to friends about drunken parties, professors in wool coats ordered while debating abstract philosophies with themselves, mothers in pea coats and leather boots ordered while yelling into cell phones at invisible nannies. And none of them ever smiled in his direction.
“Stop complaining,” said his wife one Saturday afternoon as they huddled on a bench in Riverside Park, watching their daughter play in the remnants of a capricious April snowfall. “We were lucky to get out.”
“Lucky, lucky? Choosing between death and exile does not make you lucky, Farrah!” he said, stamping his foot and sending snow crystals flying.
Farrah sighed and pulled her scarf tighter around her head. “At least Safia is happy,” she said, motioning with her head to where their daughter was lying besides a girl with blonde pigtails and a bright pink snowsuit that said Barbie in silver letters across the front. The two were flapping their arms and legs back and forth in the snow and punctuating their movements with occasional shrieks.
“Look Daddy,” shouted Safia, rising to her feet and waving her ridiculous purple mittens. “I made a snow angel. Brittany taught me!”
Yasir did not like that a girl with the name of a immodest American celebrity was teaching his daughter how to make Christian symbols in an alien icy substance that he was sure, despite his sister’s insistence to the contrary, would give her pneumonia. But then Safia’s lips parted into an upside down crescent as bright as the snow around her, and he smiled back, before he could think to frown.

As one year passed and faded into another, Yasir learned to anticipate certain changes in rhythm of New York seasons. Even though he always shivered with the early spring rains that turned the streets into rivers, he learned to search for the first hint of green in the bare branches of Riverside Park. Even though he felt smothered every time the heat from the subway station rose up through steel grates to mingle with the already humid summer air, he learned to wonder through the park on summer nights, Safia’s hand in his, and wink with her at the fireflies. Even though he hated autumn’s sudden rush to darkness—hated setting up and closing his stand without a hint of natural light---he learned to look for the first glint of orange in the trees. And even though stepping outside in winter never ceased to feel like stepping into a robe of needles, he learned to look forward to that one snowfall a year that would erase the division between street and sidewalk and force the dirty, busy streets to take a day for ablutions and for rest.

Not too slowly, the pictures from Iraq, unpacked and tacked to the wall behind his couch, were joined by others: Safia playing tag on the sidewalk with children from their neighborhood—Dominicans, African Americans, Caucasians and Jews—without fear of roadside bombs or sectarian strife; Yasir playing chess on the sidewalk with an elderly man from Nigeria, also Muslim, who lived downstairs; Farrah trading recipes on the stoop with Carmen, a round and smiling Dominican mother of four. Other documents joined the pictures as well: Safia’s report cards from elementary and then middle school overflowing with plusses and As, her results from the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test which guaranteed her a spot at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School.
But bitterness still managed to sneak in like winter air under the windows. On Safia’s first day of high school she came home slamming her math book down on the kitchen table and fuming about some moron behind her in the lunch line who had asked if she was hiding a bomb under her headscarf. The slurpspit! of Yasir’s heart sped into one angry hiss.
“What’s his name,” he shouted, “I’ll get him expelled.”
But Safia, suddenly calm, walked over to her father and loosened his fists with her keyboard-calloused fingertips.
“Don’t worry Dad,” she said, “He’s just ignorant. I’ll just have to organize some sort of informational meeting after school on Muslim culture.”
The “sort of informational meeting” morphed over the course of that year into a multi-cultural extravaganza. One night in late May, Yasir and his wife took the one-line downtown to Safia’s high school for the “Festival of Origins” Safia and her closest high school friends had organized. They sat at lunch tables eating ethnic food prepared by Safia’s peers. (Yasir recognized his wife’s Kubba faithfully rendered by his daughter, even if the almonds lacked the crisp sweetness of almonds in Iraq). As they ate, student after student stepped up to the microphone to talk about Guatemala, Italy, Poland, Morocco . . . Tears stung Yasir’s eyes as he heard his daughter speak in passionate abstractions about the cultural legacy of the Babylonian empire and Baghdad during its golden age as the capital of the Muslim empire, about the five pillars of Islam and the true meaning of Jihad, about the injustice done to her country by sanctions, invasions and civil war. Yet to his surprise the tears were not tears of sorrow—they did not morn the fact that Safia did not know the silhouette of the Baghdad skyline or the bone-deep pull of the call to prayer. Instead his tears formed in wonder at the form of his daughter standing with scarf wrapped around a head held high in an American cafeteria, and the faces of America students and teachers turned towards her in respect.

Thumpthump! Something hard hammered against Yasir’s ribcage; a current of fear pulsed in his stomach. Thumpthump! There it was again. A wave of heat swelled in his body and dispersed, leaving him shivering with beads of cold sweat trickling down his forehead. It can’t be what you think it is. He consoled himself. That’s not possible.
But all the way home on the subway, as he watched Safia and Farrah gush over the night’s success, the same Thumpthump! kept nagging at his chest, and Yasir knew there was only one way to calm the fear it sent shivering through his veins.

In the twelve years since he´d left, Iraq had faded from the front pages of the papers and joined the ranks of countries from which bad news is no longer news. Still, it was considered safe enough to travel to Baghdad since even violence had given up on it. The Americans had retreated within the heavily guarded walls of their theme-park embassy and the fundamentalists contented themselves with exerting their power over unarmed, rural villages.
-Why are you going; it´s still not safe! His wife scolded.
-Why can´t I come with you? His daughter whined.
But Yasir just shook his head as he hailed a cab for the airport and said this was something he had to do by himself.
The streets of Baghdad were dustier than he remembered—in some places concrete had surrendered to dust completely so that even he began to doubt if this or that road had ever been paved. When he turned the corner onto his former street, his blood quickened with the thought of seeing once again the proud outline of his date palm against the sky. Yet when it appeared, it seemed to spike the sky with a strange malignancy. Against his will, he wished to see the tall, soft silhouette of a leafy maple. Yasir shook the thought from his head and walked faster towards the date palm. As he neared he saw that his home had crumbled to the ground and that three homes of cardboard and corrugated tin had squatted in its place. He glanced guiltily at men and women with wide eyes and skinny limbs slouched in makeshift doorways and swatting at flies and couldn´t fight the relief that his Safia wasn´t one of them. Their eyes followed him as he approached the date palm, lifted a newly-purchased shovel from his shoulder, and began to dig, but none of them said a word.
Yasir dug in fits and starts—alternately driven on and stopped short by the pressure of those silent eyes on his back, the hammer of the summer heat that lacked the cushion of New York´s humidity, the strange hard pounding in his chest . . .
Finally, his shovel brushed against something soft. Yasir dropped it as if burned and knelt down besides the hole he had made. He squeezed his eyes shut, reached his hand inside, and brought something soft into the light. Shaking, he opened his eyes. In his hands was nothing but a crumpled dishrag.
Yasir considered cutting out his heart again, this time without replacing it. But suddenly he was so tired and the only thing he could think of was reading with his wife and daughter on a bench by the Hudson River while a breeze ruffed the trees above their heads . . . Sobbing, Yasir touched his forehead to the ground.