Chapter 7

We left the greenhouses and continued our tour of the farm. The only thing really unique about the place was the water system. I had to give it to old Hassan, he might have been a miserable excuse for a human being, but he was a hell of an engineer. The source of the farms water was a very deep Artesian well. The well was tapped by a four-inch continuously coupled black iron pipe over eleven hundred feet long. Since Artesian wells are under pressure from the rock around them, there was no need for a pump. The wellhead was in a small concrete building that was filled with a maze of pipes and valves. The pressurized water went from the wellhead toward the house through one set of pipes and into large underground tanks through another.

The pipe running to the house split into two runs, one went to supply cold water to the house, the other went to a two hundred gallon, thin flat black tank that sat on the roof. The sun heated the water in the roof top tank for household use. The two underground tanks provided the irrigation water for the garden and the greenhouses. In addition to the well system, Hassan had installed all the usual desert water collection systems. There was a cistern well on each side of the house to catch run off from the roof and a gray water tank to hold the water from the sinks, shower and bath. The gray water was used to irrigate a small thousand square foot garden located on the side of the house.

We were headed back to the greenhouses so I could check out Hassan’s drip irrigation system, when it hit me. I stopped dead in my tracks, deep in thought. When I finally looked up Basheera was looking at me questioningly.

“I need to talk to Jamilah right now,” I stated.

Basheera shrugged, “Okay, Neeko,” she replied.

Once inside, I pulled Jamilah aside.

“Have you women been giving me hashish?” I asked forcefully.

Jamilah cocked her head to the side as if I’d asked a stupid question.

“Of course, Neeko, Hasheesh is very good for pain. We sprinkled it on your food as a spice. Did you think your pain just magically disappeared after only one day? We did not give you any this morning, because you were walking without the cane. Are you in pain? Do you wish some now?”

I stood there, my mouth agape, digesting what she said. I didn’t know squat about drugs, hell I hadn’t even had so much as a beer since I was fifteen. I was all set to be pissed off because I thought they drugged me to make me complacent. Then I recalled that cancer patients and other people in chronic pain were even prescribed cannabis in some states. I backtracked trying to keep my foot from getting further into my mouth.

“Umm, no, I’m fine now. Thank you for doing that for me, though. I was asking because sometimes drugs have bad side effects for a person with a head injury,” I said lamely.

“Oh, we didn’t know that!” she exclaimed. “We would never hurt you, Neeko, we ... care about you,” she said, her voice faltering at the end.

I hugged her to me, she shied away a little because we were among other people but I held her tight.

“I feel the same way about you, Jamilah,” I said.

All the other women were looking at us curiously now, they were not used to such public displays of affection. I left the greenhouse and went back to my cell, I was tired from walking around and my ankle and knee were bothering me a little. I decided I’d best not try to overdo things.

Adara came downstairs to keep me company as I rested on my pallet. As I sat there I had this nagging little thought about my time in the cubbyhole under the stairs. I closed my eyes and tried to put myself back in there, it took a couple of minutes but it finally came to me. I had been lying on my side facing outward the entire time I was cooped up in there. It should have been hot and stuffy just from my body heat and breathing, but it wasn’t. The panel in front had been so closely fitted, noise and light couldn’t penetrate it, so I doubted if much air could either. Well the air had to come from some place and I wanted to know where.

“Hey, Adara, come give me a hand please,” I said.

Adara looked up from the book she was reading.

“Help you do what?” she asked.

“I want to check out the space I hid in yesterday.”

Adara stood up and we moved into the basement proper. Adara showed me how to pull the bottom shelf forward so the back panel could pivot upward. We propped the panel on one of the storage bins from the bottom shelf and I closely examined the cramped space. I felt around some and even rapped the back wall with my knuckles to see if it was hollow. That turned out to be dumb because the wall was concrete. Adara laughed at me when I went “Ouch” then went to find me a candle. She was back in two minutes with one of the candles scattered around the house and a box of matches. I lit the candle and slowly moved it along the back wall. I went back and forth twice, but couldn’t see anything.

I was about to give up, when I noticed the candle flicker every time I passed the section of the end wall where my feet had been. After that, it only took a minute to figure out that the end wall was plywood covered in concrete, and a minute more to find the latch that allowed me to uncover another opening. I peeked into the opening and then turned to Adara.

“Go get your mother and Basheera please,” I said.

It took about fifteen minutes for Basheera and Jamilah to arrive. They were very curious about what I found. Before I showed them, I asked what they knew about the cubbyhole. Jamilah told me that Hassan had showed it to them all and made sure they knew how to open it. He explained that as part of his important but unspecified duties for the Baath Party, he had made enemies who might come after him. She said in all the time they’d been living there, she had never seen Hassan near it. But she qualified that statement by saying the basement was pretty much off limits to the women except for punishment anyway.

I nodded and let them look into the opening. On the other side of the opening, was a tunnel that seemed to be made out of three-foot diameter culvert sections. Just on the other side of the opening, was a cardboard box. I reached through, grabbed it, and then handed it to Basheera. They rummaged through the box making excited noises as they pulled out a couple of stacks of currency. One stack contained about fifty Iraqi two hundred fifty dinar notes while the other was a much thicker stack of Jordanian notes from five to fifty dinars. They also found a stack of documents that Jamilah said belonged to someone named Fayez bin Faisal, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin.

Suddenly both women became silent, as they pulled a photograph out of the box. The photo was of Hassan sitting next to a woman with two teenaged girls standing behind them. The photograph was a studio portrait and all four people were wearing expensive western style clothing. The photo showed Hassan to be a soft looking overweight man in his fifties, the woman beside him was much younger but even smiling she had a hard, predatory look. The two girls were not that attractive, even dressed up. The women put everything except the Iraqi money and the photograph back in the box and handed it to me. I sat it back inside the tunnel and turned to face them. I didn’t know what I could possibly say that would help. Basheera seemed calm as she rattled off something to Jamilah that I only caught a few words of.

“Close this place up, Neeko, we will explore the tunnel later. Stay down here until we come get you,” Jamilah said curtly.

Adara gave me a confused look but I smiled and shrugged. The women marched out of the basement as I was putting the access cover back on the tunnel. I closed the wooden panel behind the shelves, sat the storage containers back in place and went back to my cell to wait. Hassan had turned out to be leading the double life I suspected but I took no joy in being right about it. Instead, I was concerned for the women. It had to hurt to find out their marriages were counterfeit, regardless of how they felt about Hassan. It also had to royally piss them off that they had been duped for all these years, stuck in the middle of the desert while Hassan played rich family man in Jordan.

It was a long hour before Zahrah came downstairs for me. She led me up to the big front room, where all the other women were sitting around on pillows. It was a far cry from the smiling, joking bunch I had breakfast with. I sat down and looked at Jamilah.

“Neeko, finding that picture was a shock to us all. Hassan tricked and disgraced us and has brought shame on our daughters. We are now not widows, but the bereft concubines of an honorless devil. May Allah send him to the deepest pits of hell!” she spat.

I looked from woman to woman and I was saddened by their dejected expressions. I put a little sternness in my voice.

“Hey, cheer up. Things may not be as bad as you think they are. We are the only ones who know about this, right? I mean, it’s not something Hassan would spread around. That being the case, the farm is now yours, because we know there are no relatives of Hassan’s to claim it, other than you. I will help you sell the hashish so you can start a real farm. I’m sure that you will have no trouble selling your produce at the market. As soon as the men around here see what beautiful and desirable women you are, potential husbands will be fighting over you.”

The women looked at one another and a few tentative smiles broke out.

“You mean you still think we are fit to be wives, even though we have been so shamed?” Basheera asked.

“You weren’t shamed! You were tricked. You did nothing wrong. It was Hassan who acted despicably. I’m going downstairs. While I am gone, I want you to start making plans on how you want things to be, here. I am tired and am going to take a nap. We can discuss this more at dinner.”

I smiled to myself, as excited conversation broke out behind me as I retreated to the basement. I didn’t have any doubts about the women’s ability to come up with a plan. I plopped down on my pallet once I made it to my cell and started thinking about my situation. I knew that I was no longer a prisoner of the Widows of Hassan in the physical sense. I could walk out of here anytime I wanted. My status had changed when they had hidden me from the Ba’athists yesterday. The farm wasn’t my prison, it was my safe haven. There was no way I could move fifty miles across the desert to the nearest American base with Sheik Omar’s forces around. My only option was to sit tight and wait until the Army mounted some sort of operation in the area. I fell asleep thinking that being forced to stay didn’t hurt my feeling even a little bit.

I slept for about an hour before Adara came in and woke me.