With my wife out of town, I went to Hector’s place in the city. We were going to go to V&T’s, a place we have gone since our university days. But it was so bitterly cold that we had the pizza delivered.
I saw his two girls. How they have grown! They were just going to bed when walked in. Whey they saw me they wanted to stay up – and did! It made it hard to just sit and talk. Hector would start to say something interesting and then they would run into the room and demand his attention.
Cassandra is two. She is always talking, informing her father that he has no shoes on, that my bag is just like his bag, that I am tall and on and on. She has large eyes – she looks like she will be a beauty some day. Her parents give in to her tears.
Victoria is four. She looks like a little girl now, not a baby any more. She started school. She loves her teacher and does everything she asks. Unlike at home where she acts up.
I lifted them up over my head. They loved that.
His wife Alexandria seemed worn out and about to fall over. She is always like this, but that is because I always see her at the end of a long day with the children. A pity. It means I do not get to know her. I just found out that she used to live in Lagos and went to school in London. Her father was a banker.
His building was built a hundred years ago for the well-to-do of New York but then the area became poor. The flat he lives in became divided into single-room flats with a common bathroom. They covered over the beautiful woodwork and doors with dry wall and white paint.
Last month he started tearing open the walls and uncovering the beauty that stood inside them all those years.
He wants me to bring Leo and Francisco to the city. It has been almost ten years since he saw them. Yes, that is too long. My wife does not get along with him and does not like the city.
We were talking about Iraq. I said it will end badly. All that America’s enemies have to do is to keep the blood running in the streets for one more year. Then the Democrats will win in 2008 and pull America out. Iraq will become a bloodbath and Iran will step in.
Hector said terms like “Iraq” and “Iraqi army” are fictions. Iraq no longer exists. The army fights for Maliki, not for the country. Maliki is just another warlord, like al-Sadr. Even “civil war” has become a fiction with Shiite fighting Shiite. The bloodbath is already here.
I write this because I know that some day we will know how Iraq and his children turn out. May they be well.
See also:
Abagond 
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