The Second Saladin

25

Her name was Leah; she never asked him his. After the first day she began to call him Jim. He never questioned it.

She was a tall, strong woman with furious wide eyes and a flat nose and long fingers that were miraculously pink inside. Her hair was cut short as a boy’s and she had three wonderful wigs — red, yellow and jet black — which she wore depending on her mood. Her skin was brown, almost yellow, and she was a proud woman with a grave and solemn air until she had a few glasses of wine, which she did every night, when she laughed and giggled like a loose-limbed girl. She worked in the basement of a place called Rike’s and he never understood what Rike’s was, except that it had to do with clothes because she brought him some: a suit like an American businessman’s, a raincoat, a dapper hat.

“They for you, baby,” she said.

He looked at the clothes. He could not have clothes, a wardrobe, because he had to move quickly. He could have no luggage, no luxuries. Wealth was of no interest to him. He turned to look at the black woman, whose face was eager.

“They are beautiful, Leah. But I cannot wear them.”

“But why, baby? I want you to look good. You a fine-looking man, tall and strong.” She’d had several glasses of wine.

“Leah,” he said. “I cannot stay much longer. I have to go on.”

“Why you in such a hurry, Jim?”

“Ah.” He was evasive. He almost thought he could trust her but he knew he’d never be able to explain. It would take so long and go back so far. “I have a special place to go. Someone special to see.”

“You up to something,” she said, and laughed explosively. “You up to something sly. I seen that look before. I been seeing that look for years and years and years. Somebody ’bout to take something from some other body. Just you don’t git caught, hear?”

That was Leah: she would not judge. He fit into her life as smoothly as if she’d practiced all this, as though she’d taken bleeding men home time and time before. She asked nothing except his company, and if he never went out, if he had no past and would not speak of the future except in the most guarded and general terms, then she would accept that.

“Why, Leah? Why you help me? I can give you nothing.”

“Baby, you remind me of somebody. ‘Dey take my wallet’” — she imitated his voice — “and up that hill you go, like to get yourself killed dead. And one minute later you comes down. Never seen nothing like it since my brother whipped Sheriff Gutherie’s boy Charlie back in nineteen fifty-eight in West Virginia. Everybody says, ‘Bobby, he’s going smack you, boy.’ Bobby, he just say, ‘He took my money,’ and Bobby go on up to the house and he kick that boy bad and he get every last cent back. Nobody seen nothing like that ’round there in years and years.” She laughed again at the distant memory.

Bobby sounded like another Jardi.

“A brave man. A soldier, this brother Bobby?”

“Oh, Bobby, he was somethin’. He won the West Virginia High School four-forty-yard dash in ’fifty-seven. My baby brother, oh, he was somethin’. White people say he robbed them. He got sent to prison, up in Morgantown. Somebody stick a knife in him. He wasn’t in that place no more than three weeks when they killed him.”

“A terrible thing,” said Ulu Beg. He had been in a prison in Baghdad for a long time, and knew what things happened in prison. “God have mercy on him.”

“Mamma died after that and I came to Dayton and here I been ever since. I been at Rike’s twenty years now. It ain’t the life I wanted, but it sure is the life I got.”

“You must be strong. You must make them pay.”

“Make who pay, Jim? Can’t make nobody pay nothin’.” She took some more wine.

The apartment was small and dark, in an old building with garbage and the smell of urine in the halls. The lights had all been punched out and people had written all over the bricks. Ulu Beg had recognized the English word for freedom scrawled in huge white letters. Everybody who lived there was black; when he looked out the window he could only see black people, except occasionally in the police cars that prowled cautiously down the street.

“Don’t worry none about them, baby,” she had said. “They ain’t comin’ in here.”

“Say, Jim,” she said now, “just who are you? You white? You look white, you walk white, you talk funny white. But you ain’t white. I can tell.”

“Sure, white.” He laughed now himself. “Born white, die white.”

“But you ain’t no American.”

“Many peoples come to America. For a new life. That’s me — I look for the new life.”

“Not with no gun, Jim. I looked in your bag.”

He paused a second. “Leah, you shouldn’t have.”

“You on the run? Running to or running from, Jim? It don’t matter none to me. Have some wine. You going to waste somebody’s ass? It don’t matter none to me. Just don’t get caught, you hear, because they put you away in a bad place forever and ever, Jim. You the strangest white man I ever did see.”

He stayed a long week. He made love to her every night. He felt full of power and freedom with the black woman in her small apartment in a ramshackle city in the fabulous country of America. He rode her for hours. He lost himself in the frenzy of it, sleeping all day while she worked, then taking her when she returned. He had her once in her kitchen.

“You a crazy man. I’m pushing the damn broom ‘round Old Man Rike’s store all day thinkin’ ’bout crazy Jim.”

“You’re a fine lady, Leah. American ladies are fine. They are the best thing about America.”

“You know another?”

“A long time ago,” he said. “A real fighter, like you, Leah.”

“A white girl?”

“White, yes.”

“No white girl know nothin’ ’bout no fighting.”

“Oh, this one did. Johanna was very special. You and Johanna would be friends, I think.” An odd vision came to him — he and Leah and Jardi and Johanna and Memed and Apo. They’d be at a meadow, high in the mountains. Thistles were everywhere, and the hills were blue-green. Amir Tawfiq was there too; they were all there. His whole family was there; everybody was there. His father, also Ulu Beg, hanged in Mahābād on a lamppost in 1947, he was there too. There were partridges in the trees, and deer too. The hunting was wonderful. The men hunted in the day and at night the women made wonderful feasts. Then everybody sat around in the biggest, richest tent he had ever seen and told wonderful stories. Jardi talked about his own crazy father, the Hungarian doctor. Johanna told of her sister Miriam. Leah told of her brother Bobby, and even as these people were mentioned they came into the tent also and had some food and told some stories and raised a great cheer. Kurdistan ya naman, they cheered, Kurdistan ya naman.

“Jim? Jim?”

“Ah?”

“Where you been? It sure wasn’t Dayton.”

“It’s nothing. Tomorrow I will go. I have to go. I stay too long; I must move on.”

She looked at him, her eyes furious and dark.

“You go off someplace with that gun, they kill you. No lie, they kill you, like my brother Bobby.”

“Not Jim,” he said.

“Baby, don’t go. Stay with Leah. It’s nice here. It’s so nice.”

“I have to go on. To meet a man.”

“To the bus station? Cops catch you sure.”

“No cops catch Jim.”

“Sure they do. Where you going?”

“Big city.”

“Big-city cops catch you in a bus station sure. I know they will.”

“I have to go.”

“Jim,” she said suddenly, “take my car. Go on, take it. It just sit there.”

An awkward moment for him.

“I cannot drive an automobile,” he said.

She threw back her head in laughter, sudden and light and musical.

“You some dude, baby, you some old dude.” She laughed again. “Hon,” she said, “you the strangest white man I ever heard of. You so strange you almost ain’t white.”

And so she said she’d drive him.