I listen to a woman's voice singing in a language I have forgotten, drinking tea I can not name. In a place I can not pronounce. Yet for all that I spent years here.
The air is full of the strange smells that are now as foreign to me, as I am to this place. Yet they are so very familiar at the same time. Haunting smells filled with old half-forgotten memories.
The stones around me are pitted with the turn of centuries and worn smooth by the hands of man. Hearing a bell I look towards the onion topped towers glittering with their golden caps. I at one time thought I would never see them again in my life. Then I got the letter.
As a voice begins to chant on a loud speaker in the distance, the people around me unroll small carpets and kneel down. I stop what I'm doing in respect to their traditions. I know that while they don't expect foreigners to kneel and pray they do object to us doing anything that distracts them from their duties to their God.
Looking up I see my guide reappear. He moves uncaring among the praying people. He wipes his face with the side of his head wrap then seeing me he moves to my table. If he could see the looks he's getting behind his back he wouldn't look so arrogant.
As he leans over my table I see the edges of a silver chain around his neck. I know it ends in a small cross. A Christian in the land of Islamic is an outcast, but that was just what I needed, to find what I need to find.
Seeing people start to rise I get to my feet. I press my old dog tags into my chest through my shirt so they don't make a sound. It's an old habit I can't break. A man near by me sees this and thinks I'm attempting the greeting of his land. He smiles at me and touches heart, lip, and forehead.
I smile back. If only he knew.
I follow my guide through the crowded streets. The city brings back hundreds of memories. These streets were empty then. The building's windows were blown in. The stones bullet ridden. I can still at times almost smell the burning cars.
Old habits have me checking my six and looking for my buddies' blind spots. My buddies aren't here though. They're back home cooking barbecues and playing with grand children. Well... not all of them, but most.
I follow this maggot in white as he worms his way into smaller and smaller streets. They're choked with people going anywhere, but here. As we pass a tile-surrounded doorway I remember this place. Twenty years ago is a long time, but some things you don't forget... no mater how hard you try.
I look around, but see little of the hideous damage that was done in this little stinking bit of hell. But that was twenty years ago. The violence of my war was either repaired or absorbed into the damages of the more recent conflict.
He turns into a cul-de-sac I wouldn't have entered without sending a grenade in first. I feel my nerves go taunt as the idea of a trap again resurfaces. American heads taken on video make good news stories around here.
He points to a cloth-covered doorway.
"She in here. My money?' he asks in broken English.
I hand him a third of what I owe him.
"The rest when I come out." I tell him patting my pocket. "If it's her."
"Oh it's her American. It's her. I ask around. Daughter of Alarazara." He nods showing me coffee stained teeth. All three of them.
Alarazara. My god that name. She had been so beautiful a woman, and I so very young and stupid a man. I should have known that there was no way I could live in her world, or she in mine.
But I was in love.
And a fool.
As I pass through the curtain door wood beads clatter together. Standing by a bowl of sand lighting sticks of incense. I see her. I could step back outside and pay him. I know her at a glance. She looks just like her mother.
Like her mother she only speaks a few words of English, and after twenty years my Arabic is horribly rusty. Working as much by gesture as words though we make a simple exchange. For my money she will dance for me. I can see puzzlement that I don't want more than that, but she doesn't know what I know.
Taking a seat in a surprisingly comfortable chair I lean back and watch her. She turns on some music, the old battered radio was probably a gift from a soldier, it looks US military issue. She slowly begins to move herself to the music.
The old amazement that anybody can move like that comes back. Her body seems to bend on hinges most people don't have. I smile and finger my goatee beard between my thumb and forefinger. Last time I watched a woman do this I was clean shaven.
