“Let’s go for a drive,” Fazoul said suddenly when the conversation had arrived at a natural stopping place.
“Mind if I use your washroom?” Clyde said. Here, if he’d been among fellow Americans, he would have made a lame crack about how the tea was getting to him.
“Not at all,” Fazoul said.
On his way to the toilet Clyde happened to pass by the open door of the unit’s single bedroom. He glimpsed a picture on the bedside table: a family portrait of a handsome young man, a beautiful young woman, and four children. While he was peeing, his mind was working on this image, and when he finished, he walked past the bedroom more slowly and took along, hard look at the photograph. The handsome young man, he realized, was Fazoul before whatever terrible thing had happened to him. The young woman was not Farida, however.
He was startled by a noise within the room. Fazoul emerged from the closet carrying a plastic grocery sack with something heavy in it and saw Clyde.
“My first wife,” he explained, “and our children.”
Clyde looked at Fazoul. He could not bear to ask the question.
“All dead,” Fazoul said gently. “Saddam came to our village with gas.”
Clyde’s head swam and tears welled up in his eyes. He turned around in the doorway and staggered down the narrow hall and out into the cold night air, terrifying a solitary trick-or-treater dressed up as a commando. Fazoul gave him a few moments alone out there, then came out of the house quietly and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Khalid,” he said. “We will see to it that Desiree has nothing to fear from that man. I am personally committed to it.”
Not until Fazoul spoke these words did Clyde understand that he was in the grip of two emotions: not just shock over what had happened to Fazoul, but fear for what might happen to himself and his family.
The teenaged girl jumped out of the car, exchanged pleasantries with Fazoul, and skipped off into the night.
“She watched her mother getting gang-raped by the Iranians when she was five years old,” Fazoul said.
“Nice girl,” Clyde said. It was all he could think of.
They climbed into the Murder Car and sat there for a few minutes while Clyde collected his wits. Then he started the engine, shifted it into drive, and let the idle pull them forward. Maggie stirred in her seat and said “bvab bvab bvab.”
“Did you say ‘Iranians’?” Clyde said a couple of minutes later, as they were pulling out of the maze of Stanton Court and onto a main street.
“We have bad luck with real estate,” Fazoul said. “We have always been transhumant people, which means that we follow our flocks. We have a problem with fixed borders. So we are equally despised by the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Chinese, Russians, Kazakhs, Armenians, Azeris, and so on.”
“That’s a tough situation to be in,” Clyde said.
“Not for long,” Fazoul said.
“What do you mean?”
“Technology is making borders irrelevant. The governments who still value their borders refuse to understand this basic fact. We are way ahead of them. Of course,” he added sheepishly after a brief pause, “governments and borders are still very important for the time being, as the Kuwaitis could testify.”
“Did you want to drive any particular place?”
“The interstate would be good.”
“North or south?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Clyde headed south out of town, hooked up with New 30, and took it east to the interstate. He had got the clear impression that Fazoul wanted to get away from the city, so instead of heading north, which would have taken them through the outskirts of Nishnabotna, he turned south, following the signs for St.Louis.
Fazoul made himself comfortable and said nothing for several minutes. Every so often he would reach out and adjust the rearview mirror mounted on the outside of his door, apparently looking back at the lights of the twin cities. Clyde checked the mirror, too, trying to figure out what Fazoul was looking at. The only thing visible at this point were the blinking red lights on the water tower and the radio tower.
They drove for another ten minutes or so. Since Fazoul didn’t seem to be in much of a talking mood, Clyde turned up the radio a few notches. He kept it tuned to an all-news clear-channel station out of Des-Moines and reflexively reached for the volume knob whenever he heard the jingle that preceded a newscast.