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You've been on the floor since the radio died, because the floor is the only thing in this house that has never once lied to you. Your back is against the wall under the shuttered window, knees up, bare heels on tile so cold it feels damp even though you've checked twice and it isn't. An hour ago, maybe more, the radio said Tadmur, then it said the Temple of Bel, and then it said some word you didn't catch because the generator in the alley coughed at the exact wrong moment the way it always does, the bastard, and when the generator settled there was only hiss. You didn't need the word anyway.
You'd felt it before the radio said anything, a lurch under your left ribs like missing a stair in the night, and then the quiet. Tadmur has hummed in you for two thousand years, faint and old and stubborn, the way you can hear your own blood in a pillow, and now where she used to be there's a pocket of nothing so exact you could press your thumb into it.
So you count, because counting is the thing you do. The fountain in the courtyard drips out of its cracked basin, one drop and a wait and one drop, and you've timed it so many times you know it runs slower when the air is hot. The generator. A dog three houses down that barks at nothing, which is rich coming from a dog. Somewhere east, a thud you decline to name.
The thought that finally gets its teeth in you is small and ugly, and you're embarrassed by how small it is: the whole world got to see it. Every country with a television, every city with a phone, all of them got the dust going up and the columns coming down, and you, whose body it was, got a radio with a cough. You've been blind three years, long enough that color has become a rumor you heard once from someone unreliable, and you have no idea what Tadmur is shaped like in pieces. You're grieving something you have to take on faith, which is very pious of you, and you laugh once at the wall, and the laugh comes out with a hinge in it.
The courtyard gate complains, and then the footsteps come, heavy then light, heavy then light, a big body favoring its right side since last summer, since Mosul went out of him like a pulled tooth. Your first feeling is irritation, clean and immediate, because of course he shows up now, of course he always turns up on the days you're on the floor with snot on your lip like a kicked kid, and you can't even check if there's snot on your lip, so you wipe your face on your knee just in case. Your second feeling is the one you refuse to have.
Your third is his smell, which arrives a full second before he does: diesel, cardamom, those cigarettes that taste like burnt cardboard even secondhand, and the cologne, ya Allah, the cologne, something sweet and aggressive he must buy by the liter from a stall that also sells phone chargers. Under all of it there's smoke, and it's the wrong kind of smoke. Cigarettes sit on the front of a shirt. This is in the weave of him, in his hair, greasy and heavy, the smoke of things burning that were never meant to burn.
"Shlonak", he says from the doorway. His voice sounds like it's been dragged behind a truck.
"Blind," you tell him. "Same as yesterday. You smell like a perfume shop lost a fight with a tanker."
He laughs, and halfway through the laugh it catches, a small snag like a boot on a loose tile, and you hear it and decide you didn't. The floor takes his weight beside you with a grunt from him and a creak from his bad knee, and you feel the warmth of a large body land about thirty centimeters from your shoulder. Paper rustles. Bread, still warm, the yeasty sweet breath of it filling the room.
A thermos cap squeaks. "I brought khubz. And chai. It's chai, I swear to God, don't make the face."
"What face."
"The face you're making."
"I don't know what face I'm making, habibi", that's sort of the entire situation."
He's quiet. The fountain drips twice. Then the little clink of an istikan on tile, and he says, "Right side. Next to your knee. Hot, careful," and you hate him, briefly and completely, for the careful. So you reach without listening, the way you always do, sweeping your hand along the floor as though the tile owes you something, and your knuckles meet the glass at a bad angle and the glass skids and tips and shatters. It's such a stupid sound. Thin and bright and finished, a sound like a small bell giving up.
A whole temple went this afternoon and you held yourself together with your teeth, and it's a three-lira tea glass that does it. Your chest folds in on itself. You're angry first, khalas, shu hayda, fucking glass, and then you're crying, ugly and wet and loud, and then you're furious that you're crying, which only makes you cry harder, and somewhere in all that you've put your palm flat down on the tile and something bites into the meat of it.
"Wait, wait, stop, agolak stop moving." His hand finds the back of your neck and stays there, heavy and warm, and with the other he takes your wrist and turns your palm up. You feel his breath on it.
He's picking glass out of you with fingertips too thick for the job, muttering in that Iraqi drawl, flattened vowels, zein, zein, khalas, it's out, while you answer him in your own sharp Shami, ya'ni shu, I'm fine, leave it, and the two dialects rub against each other like two coats on a crowded bus. He presses his thumb into the cut to stop the bleeding. It hurts, and the hurt is so simple and so local that you're grateful for it.
"Let me see you," you say when you can talk again. You both know what that means. He lets go of your wrist and you put your hands on his face.
You read him the way you'd read a map of a city you used to live in. Forehead first, broad, the skin of it greasy with sweat and ash. Eyebrows, thick, one of them broken by a little ridge of scar you know from 2003. His nose, which is too big, and which you have told him is too big, often. Cheekbones.
Stubble gone past stubble into a short rough beard that scrapes your fingertips like fine sandpaper. You follow his jaw down to his throat and feel him swallow under your fingers, then go lower, into the collar of his shirt, and there's something new on his collarbone, raised and tight and still a little hot, a scar that hasn't decided what shape it'll be yet. Then another one, at the top of his shoulder, ropy. Then a third.
You start counting and lose count, and start again, and lose it again, and that's when you notice your fingertips are wet. You drag them back up to his cheeks and they're soaked. He's been crying the whole time without making a single sound, which is so much worse than the noise you made that you want to hit him for it.
"You son of a dog," you say, and your voice wrecks itself on the last word.
"I know."
"They bulldozed it, you know. The line between us. Last year. Big ceremony, big flags, they filmed it."
"I know. I felt it." His forehead comes down against yours. His breath is tobacco and cardamom and something bitter underneath. "Felt like someone took a belt off me."
You laugh into his mouth, almost. "Funny people. They knock down the border between us, and then they'd throw us off a roof for this." You can feel those roofs, if you let yourself. Up in Raqqa, out in the north of you, the places they've taken: bodies going over the edges of buildings for loving wrong, and each one lands somewhere in your chest like a dropped coin. You haven't told anyone that you feel every single one, and you don't tell him now. His hand on your neck tightens, which means he already knows.
The air turns. It happens through your skin first, the courtyard breathing out its heat and the tile under you going a degree colder, and you know the sun's going down the way you know your own name. Maghrib. Your body leans toward the minaret two streets over out of thirty-something years of habit, waiting for the cracked old voice of it, and the minaret gives you nothing, same as it's given you since spring. Beside you, Iraq shifts his weight. He's thinking about praying.
He still prays, still makes wudu, still turns toward Mecca with his bad knee crackling, and you, who stopped sometime around the second year of this, sit there and feel the absence of the adhan like a missing step on a stair you've taken a thousand times. You haven't touched your own face in a mirror's worth of years, since the war took your eyes and you stopped bothering, so you honestly couldn't say what your face does when you sin. Maybe it does nothing. Maybe it looks exactly like it does when you pray.
God, the imams used to say, sees everything, sees the ant on the black rock on the black night, and you used to find that comforting, and now it sits in your gut like a stone you swallowed by accident. If He's watching this room He's the only one who gets to, and you can't work out whether that makes Him the one witness to how gently Iraq is holding your neck right now or the one judge of it, or whether up there those are the same job. It's petty to be jealous of God. You're jealous anyway.
He got to see Tadmur go. He gets to see Iraq's face, the wet of it, whatever shape grief makes on a jaw that big, and you've got ten fingertips and a cut palm and a guess.
You don't finish the thought, because Iraq kisses you. He does it clumsily, the way he does everything that matters, his nose bumping yours first like a man feeling for a light switch in a stranger's house, and then his mouth is on your mouth, chapped and hot and tasting of cardboard cigarettes and sweet tea and salt. You say astaghfirullah straight into him, a little breath of it, and he swallows it,
and you open your mouth and kiss him back hard enough to click teeth.
He gets you up off the tile by more or less scooping you, one arm under your knees and one behind your back, which you'd bite him for on any other day because you're a whole country, thank you, with borders and a flag and a national debt, and he's carrying you like a sack of rice from the souq. His limp makes the trip lurch, heavy then light, and your stomach swings with it.
The thin mattress takes you with a sigh of old foam. Then it tilts, deep, as he kneels onto it, and that tilt tells you exactly how much bigger he is than you, the whole slope of the world rolling you toward him. You pull at his shirt.
It smells worst of all, that wrong smoke, and you drag it over his head and throw it somewhere and hope it lands in the fountain. His skin underneath is a different smell entirely, sweat and warm bread and him, and you put your face against his chest and breathe it until your head swims.
Clothes come off in the wrong order, awkward, his belt buckle clacking on tile, your shirt stuck on your elbow so you're half tied up and swearing in Shami while he laughs, really laughs this time, the snag gone out of it.
Then he settles over you, slow, his weight coming down in stages, forearms on either side of your head, belly, then hips, and his chest hair scrapes your nipples and you feel his heart through both your ribcages at once, a thick hard thudding you can hear with your ear and feel with your sternum at the same time, like a drum you're inside. His cock lies down against yours.
You know it instantly, the heft of it, hot and heavy along the crease of your thigh, the smooth bare ridge of the cut head sliding up against your own, and your body does the arithmetic you've been doing on everything all day and comes back with a number that makes your hole clench on nothing. Thicker than you. Heavier. Of course. He's bigger in everything else, the greedy bastard.
He rocks. Barely, at first,
just the drag of him along you, both of you leaking, and the slick starts small and spreads until there's a quiet wet sound every time his hips roll, a soft tch, tch of skin on skin that you could pick out of a storm. "Hhah," you breathe, "mm, ahh, ya Allah," and his beard drags down your throat, scratching, his mouth open on your pulse. "Habibi," he says, the Iraqi way, the b gone soft and swallowed, "ya rouhi, fadwa ilak, fadwa ilak". He'd die for you, he says, which is such a stupid thing for a country with that many holes in it to promise.
You're hard as a fist. There's a temple in your east that's still smoking, still settling, dust you'll never see coming down on stones you'll never touch, and here you are rutting up into a big Iraqi cock like it owes you money, and the absurdity of it rises up through your chest and comes out as a laugh, cracked and wet. He goes still, then he laughs too, his forehead dropping onto your shoulder, his whole body shaking over yours with it.
The two of you lie there laughing with your dicks pressed together and tears on both your faces, and it's the most naked you've ever been in your life.
"Wait," he says, and his weight lifts, and the mattress rights itself, and you lie there cold and furious about it. Heavy then light across the tile, toward the kitchen. A cupboard. The scrape and dull tonk of the olive oil tin. Heavy then light back again, and you track every step of it with your whole skin.
The oil is cool and smells green and peppery. His finger circles you first, slow, slicking you, then pushes in, thick knuckle and patient, and while he works you open you hear him breathing something under his breath, Arabic too low and fast to catch, the cadence of a dua. You don't know if he's asking God to forgive him or asking God to make him gentle.
Two fingers. Your heel digs into the back of his thigh.
Then his cock, the blunt hot head of it nudging against your oiled hole, and the pressure builds, and builds, and you breathe out, and something gives. He stops. He stops every centimeter, every bloody centimeter,
waiting with his whole big body trembling over you, and you grab his forearm to hold onto something and find a scar there too, long and ridged, and you hold onto it like a railing on a staircase in the dark. "I'm blind, habibi, I didn't turn into a teacup," you hiss. "Yalla".
And he listens, and pushes, and the next stretch of him knocks the breath clean out of you, "hhn, ahh, ahhh," your mouth open against his jaw. You're stretched wide around him, full, stuffed, more of him in you than you thought would fit in a body that's spent all day coming apart, and the thought that arrives is stupid and cruel and lovely: for once today something is filling a hole in you instead of making one.
You know how deep he is by everything except sight.
His beard rasping your shoulder. His hips settling flush against your ass. His breath, ragged and hot, right in your ear. He starts to move, long and slow, rocking more than fucking, the mattress creaking a small dry eek each time, the wet slip of oil, and out in the courtyard the fountain keeps dripping completely out of time with the two of you, which irritates you so much you almost tell him to speed up just to match it. Your brain is like that.
You're crying again. You notice it late, the wet running into your ears, and you honestly can't tell if it's Tadmur or the slow fat drag of his cock over the place inside you that makes your toes curl, and you decide, with great dignity, that you don't give a shit which. He kisses the tears off your cheekbones and then kisses your mouth, and you taste your own salt on his lips.
"God forgive me," he whispers, buried all the way inside you, at the worst and best moment he could have picked.
"He's not looking," you whisper back. "He's busy today." It's half a joke and it's the most blasphemous sentence you've ever said, and you both feel it land in the room like a dropped plate, and he makes a broken sound, "mmh, habibi, mmh," and thrusts harder.
His big hand finds your cock, oil-slick, and closes around it, and that's the end of you. You come with a cry that cracks down the middle, "ahh, ah, ahhh," spilling hot between your bellies, clenching down on him so hard he groans like he's been hit. Three more thrusts, deep, ragged, and he follows you,
hips jammed tight, and you feel it happen inside you, his cock throbbing, pulsing, emptying, and you count the pulses the way you counted his scars. Six. Seven. You get all of them. You don't lose a single one.
Afterwards he goes still in a way you recognize. You've felt this stillness on him before, at the end of Ramadan nights and on the morning after Mosul, and it means the shame has found him and sat down. He eases out of you slowly, careful even now, and you're left sticky and hollow and leaking. The mattress tilts up, and he goes, heavy then light, to the basin. The tap squeals. Water runs.
You hear the laurel soap lift off its dish and the slick hush of him lathering it between his palms, and the smell of it rises through the room, bitter and clean, Aleppo in a bar. He's making wudu.
He's going to wash you off himself and pray. You lie there full of him and you don't say a word to stop him, because you understand it in your bones, and for a second you're so jealous of God it makes your teeth hurt.
The water stops. He doesn't pray.
Heavy then light, back across the tile, and the mattress dips, and his wet soapy hands find your hand, the cut one, and turn it palm up. He washes it.
Slowly, his thumb working the lather into the little wound and then into each finger one at a time, knuckle, nail, the webbing between, while the laurel smell soaks into everything. Neither of you says anything about it.
Then he lies down behind you, all that heat and bulk, and pulls you back against his chest, and you hook your leg over his so there's no telling where you stop and he starts. Outside, the minaret stays quiet. Somewhere east there's another thud, and you both pretend very hard that you didn't hear it.
You turn in his arms, put your clean palm flat over his chest, and start counting his heartbeats, one and one and one, and you let yourself rest against him.