The Nightingale
Morgana Gallaway
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
For my parents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgments
I would never have written this book were it not for my father, James, who was a police advisor in Mosul, Iraq, in 2004. His vast knowledge and expertise have been a tremendous help to me; if there are any errors in accuracy, they are mine and not his. Dad, you were (and are) one of the “good guys.” Huge thanks also to my mother, Molly, for your proofreading skills, constant support, and boundless love and encouragement.
Thank you so much to my agent, Dan Lazar, for taking a chance on an unknown kid; your enthusiasm and ideas shaped this story into something very special.
Many thanks to my editor, Danielle Chiotti, for your dedication, hard work, and the way you made this novel feel like itself.
To the families of Wadi Musa, Jordan, for your lovely welcome and my peek behind the closed doors of the Arab woman’s life. I did not spend as much time with all of you as I’d have liked. One of you in particular inspired me to undertake a full study of the Arab culture, on the chance that I would join it.
To A.D. the translator, whom I never knew personally, and who would have had a bright future.
Journalist Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats gave me the first inkling that the war in Iraq is not what it seems, and provided some interesting plot bunnies. Other sources of inspiration came from several Internet blogs, including but not limited to “Xymphora,” “Smoking Mirrors,” and the Alex Jones Web site. Also helpful were the Web sites of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
For some nice details on weddings, I consulted the blogs of two Iraqi women, both of whom are incredibly interesting to read, and I thank them for sharing their thoughts with the world: “Rosebaghdad” and “Neurotic Iraqi Wife.”
For further atmosphere of Mosul and the American operations there, I found Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq to be a wonderful resource; also Mike Tucker’s Among Warriors in Iraq, about the U.S. forces in Mosul and Fallujah. On Arab culture, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, by David Pryce-Jones, was invaluable.
Street descriptions in Mosul are courtesy of the ever-helpful Google Earth.
Chapter 1
The road to the market was long and dusty, but at least it was paved. The fresh asphalt was the only extravagance that Leila al-Ghani could find in Mosul in recent days. Her shoes had started to wear out along the length of the road, back and forth on trips from her flat-roofed home in the Wahdah neighborhood. A breeze came skittering down the street, flapping her dress about her legs, and she reached up with a hand to readjust her head scarf. The pins kept it attached to her hair, so her black locks couldn’t peek out, but as always, wearing the hijab and the long modest dress somehow made Leila more aware of her body, not less.
In a way, Leila was grateful for the walk. In Mosul, vehicles were unsafe—they could trigger the explosives, the IEDs, hidden on the roadside, or provoke a burst of gunfire from some idiot bunch of self-appointed mujahideen. At least the horror of antipersonnel land mines had not made their way to her home city, with their hair triggers that the light weight of a foot would ignite. Regardless, the walk gave her a chance to clear her head.
Leila’s father disapproved of these walks—a woman walking alone in Mosul was a transgression of its own. Before the war, she could go wherever she liked and even wear Western-style clothing without fear of reprisal. The family had been secure then, with her father’s job as a judge and Baathist party official and their high standing in the community. Leila had been a princess of one of Mosul’s finest families.
Now she wondered how they would all get through this year alive.
It was just after ten in the morning, the best time to do the shopping, for all the stalls would be open but the noontime rush had yet to start. It was a chilly day, moving toward the outright cold of the winter months. Mosul was high in elevation, rising on the Levant plains toward the mountains of Kurdistan and Iran. Leila’s corner of the world—for this was how she thought of Mosul, her corner—was the first to develop agriculture some ten thousand years ago. Now the world thought them uncivilized, barely capable of ruling themselves.
Of course, Leila thought, there’s reason to think that. Civilized people don’t blow themselves up every day.
The midmorning call to prayer lifted through the air from the loudspeakers atop the minaret tower at the Al-lah Al-Hasib Mosque, a scant thirty meters away to Leila’s left. It had yet to be blown up, though Leila was glad she was not a man and not beholden to attend mosque, or to pray at certain times of the day. She could pray whenever she wanted—or not at all—and no one would notice. Truth be told, she had stopped praying six months ago when her cousin Inaya had her arms cut off by mujahideen, all because Inaya’s husband had been seen chatting with an American soldier. In an insane world, it seemed impossible to believe in the good presence of Allah.
The call to prayer was loud, wailing, and grated on Leila’s ears. Leila once again adjusted her scarf into place and emerged from the long, asphalt-paved street into the main market area of Mosul.
It was a chaotic scene, with motorbikes zipping through with honking horns and goods being off-loaded from trucks and donkeys. Large, colorful billboards advertised soda drinks, mobile phones, and grocery stores; fresh new promise in a world that seemed dusty dark. Most of it was only that: promise. The sim cards for the mobiles were unreliable, and the grocery stores usually had empty shelves with a few mean little bags of rice or crates of onions. The soda drinks were all right; Leila was almost addicted to Diet Coke, thanks to her university years in Egypt, and once a week treated herself to a three-hundred-milliliter bottle of it. Not today, however; today she needed to haul a sack of flour back home, down the sand-edged road.
The way was filled with people: men in white robes with their red- or black-checkered kaffiyeh headdresses, loose about their heads; Iraqi men in Western clothes, jeans and baseball caps; women in groups of two or three, dressed in modest dark colors with scarves pulled tight about their hair, as Leila’s was. Leila noticed a Western man with a gray mustache bartering with a shopkeeper. This one was a journalist,