Slim To None. Taylor Smith
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in the front room,” Ladwell told him. Then he turned back to Hannah. “They can’t bring much. Tell them that.”
“I think they get it that this is no luxury cruise we’re offering.”
“They should pack only what they can carry themselves. We’re going to be moving out at a brisk clip and there’s no such thing as chivalry here. No one’s going to carry their stuff. We’ll be busy enough trying to keep them alive till we get to the LZ.”
“I’ll make sure they understand.”
Ladwell grunted and headed out of the room.
Hannah turned to the woman and girl and switched back to Arabic. “The men will wait in the living room. You should hurry and get dressed now. We have a long walk ahead of us, and we don’t want to be running into anyone.”
“We are walking to London?” Yasmin said.
“No, just into the hills to the west of here. It’s about two kilometers. We’ll be picked up there and flown out. I’m sorry,” Hannah added to Zaynab. “I wish we didn’t have to make you walk, but it was too risky to drive in case of roadblocks.”
“No matter. I am strong,” the old woman said. “We both are. Come, Yasmin, hurry. Here are your things.”
An ornately carved wooden bureau stood between the two narrow beds. Hannah set her flashlight down on top of it, pointing it toward the large oval mirror hanging above to add a dim, red-tinged light for Zaynab and Yasmin to see by. The mirror was gilt-framed and, like the ornate bureau itself, said something about the comfortable and relatively privileged life that this family had once lived. At the same time, the mirror’s silver backing was crackled. This, like the peeling blue paint on the walls and the chipped and broken ceramic tiles on the floor, was mute testimony to years of declining family fortunes. In a country where the average annual income wouldn’t cover an American family’s cable TV service, these people had obviously been among the country’s small, educated elite, part of that group who should have helped this ancient and cultured nation move into the future. Such people, however, were just the type to attract the attention of a paranoid dictator.
Yasmin turned her back modestly as she lifted her faded nightdress over her head. Hannah caught a glimpse of birdlike shoulder blades and a pronounced rib cage, the bones jutting too sharply to indicate anything but malnutrition. This child had lived almost her entire lifetime under the sanctions mounted against Saddam’s regime after the Gulf War of the early nineties. The dictator and his cronies had kept themselves amply fed, clothed and entertained throughout that time, Hannah thought angrily, but Iraq’s children hadn’t been so well provided for. Things could only have gotten worse for poor Yasmin after the death of her parents, despite her grandmother’s best efforts.
“Here,” she murmured to the grandmother, who’d been pulling clothes from the bureau, “let me fold these while you get yourself ready. You won’t be able to take much, I’m afraid.”
“We have little enough.”
The old woman shut the drawer, then turned to a tall armoire. When she opened it, the scent of cedar wafted through the room. Hannah caught a glimpse of a man’s dark suit on a hanger—the dead son’s, no doubt—and of two black abayas, or burqas, draped on hooks at the side of the closet.
Zaynab caught her looking at the black shrouds, and she fingered the fabric. “My mother used to dress in full hijab, but in my lifetime, only peasants and uneducated women still did. I never used to wear one of those—my late husband never demanded it, thankfully. I dressed modestly, always wore a kerchief on my head, but I saw no reason to stumble around half-blind. After they killed my son and his wife, though,” she added bitterly, “it was the only way to go out safely into the streets. Even Saddam’s hooligans and this latest bunch, Salahuddin’s men, will not generally harass a woman in hijab. We are invisible. I made Yasmin cover up, too. Not even a child is safe these days.”
“I didn’t like it. It was hot,” Yasmin said.
“You won’t need it where you’re going,” Hannah told her.
Zaynab pushed the robes aside. “Good.” She withdrew a long gray skirt and flowered blouse from the armoire, then headed back to her bed to get ready.
Hannah busied herself folding the clothing on the bureau—a few pairs of thin socks and underthings, a child’s sweater and T-shirt. Yasmin came over and shyly added her folded nightgown to the pile. Hannah gave her a smile.
The girl had on a white cotton blouse and dark pleated skirt that had seen better days. The blouse was clean, but worn and patched, and a little small for her. The skirt had obviously been let down at least a couple of times, by the look of the fold lines at the hem. Even so, it ended an inch or two above her knee, shorter than girls in this part of the world normally wore. Hannah doubted it was a fashion statement. Yasmin’s outfit looked like a school uniform that had been worn long past its serviceable time, after being subjected to all the abuse that children everywhere put their clothes through.
She thought of Gabriel, her son, and the many knees he had taken out of pants, crawling around with his cars when he was little, and later, tumbling off bikes. These days, it was his skateboard that put rips in his clothing and beat down the treads in his sneakers. But Gabe never had to wear pants that had been patched or rehemmed. At eight years old, in fact, his wardrobe cost more than Hannah’s, outfitted as he always was in trendy fashions from the upscale children’s boutiques of L.A.’s Westside and the Beverly Center. Gabe couldn’t care less about style, of course, but it was important to Cal that his son be as much a credit to him as his trophy wife, so Gabe’s stepmother kept him turned out in relentlessly preppy fashion.
“Can I take my pictures?” Yasmin asked, pulling a small, leather-bound album from the bureau’s top drawer. From the way she clutched it in her thin arms, Hannah could only guess at the memories it contained.
“Absolutely,” she said. The girl looked relieved.
Zaynab finished buttoning the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse. Then, she picked up a brush off the bureau and pulled it gently through her granddaughter’s wavy black hair. “We are lucky that Mumtaz sent for us,” she said quietly. “Yasmin hasn’t been able to go to school this past while.”
“You lost your teachers?”
“No, but when Salahuddin took charge, he banned school for girls.” She grimaced. “I’ve known him since he was a boy, you know. I knew his parents. His mother died in childbirth. The father was a brute, and Salahuddin turned out to be a lout just like the old man, drunk and stupid. Then he went to prison and found Allah, they say. Nonsense, I say. Holy warrior—feh! Then he comes back here, calls himself ‘sheikh’ and starts issuing fatwas. I’m surprised he didn’t close the school altogether, because even the littlest boys are smarter than he is.”
“Ouch, Grandmother!” Yasmin protested. “Too hard!”
“Oh, sorry, little one,” Zaynab said, setting aside the brush she’d been wielding like a rake. She kissed the top of the girl’s head. Then, she glanced back at Hannah. “Even before he outlawed school for girls, it wasn’t safe for Yasmin. People! It wasn’t enough that she’d lost her mother and father. At school, the children, even the teachers, some of them…” The old woman shook her head bitterly. “The things they said. The things they did. That’s what thirty years of Saddam has turned my countrymen into—cowering pack dogs who tremble before the leaders, then turn around and bare their fangs at the weak and defenseless. We have become a nation of cowards.”
“Are we ever coming back here?” Yasmin asked Hannah.
Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. That will depend, I guess. I think everyone hopes things will get better here one day.”
The grandmother looked around, as if the finality of what they were about to do had suddenly hit her. “This used to be a beautiful country, you know.”
“I know,” Hannah said.
“I don’t