The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (11 page)

I was still excited after the match and told my parents all about it and about the stadium. Father got fed up and said “Enough! You are giving me a headache with your Zawra’. God!”

My uncle took me to Zawra’ games many times, and once he took me to Madinat al-Al’ab park. He and Father loved each other, but sometimes they would argue passionately about things I couldn’t understand. I was ten when he visited us the last time. He would always hug and kiss me upon arrival and departure. But that time I glimpsed a sadness and clouds in his eyes when he kissed me goodbye, saying: “Don’t forget your uncle.”

“No, I won’t forget you, but don’t you forget me,” I responded.

He laughed and kissed me again on my forehead. He hugged everyone tightly, especially Father.

Afterward, I asked Father about my uncle. He said that Sabri had gone to Beirut. I missed him and asked often when he would return. My mother would say, “He can’t. He’s busy there.” I would ask about his work and when he would be finished. She never gave a straight answer, sometimes saying, “Ask your father.” But Father evaded my questions too. Months later, while doing my homework, I heard on the nightly news that a number of Communist officers in the army had been executed. I heard Father tell my mother, “That’s the fate of Sabri’s people. They won’t leave any of them alive. Thank God he escaped.” I understood then that Uncle Sabri was a Communist. I asked Father, “What does it mean, being a Communist?”

“None of your business, son.”

“Uncle Sabri’s a Communist?”

He shushed me. “Stop asking questions. I told you it’s none of your business.”

When my brother Ammoury came back home, I asked him about Uncle Sabri and what communism meant. He said the Communists and Ba’thists were sworn enemies and Uncle Sabri had fled because the regime was arresting Communists. Two years later, when I was in middle school, we were all given papers to fill out to join the Ba’th Party. There were questions about relatives living abroad, and a separate sheet on which to list the names of relatives who belonged to the Communist Party or the Da’wah Party. I wrote in my uncle’s full name: Sabri Hasan Jasim—Communist.

We would receive letters from him once every year or two. He would always include a line for me alone, like “kisses to my handsome Jawad. Is he still a loyal Zawra’ fan cheering on my behalf?” I wrote a letter of my own to him, and we included it in the family letter. I wrote about school and Zawra’s performance in the league and its new star players. I told him that I missed him very much and was waiting for him to come back.

He once called us on the phone to let us know that he was all right. Father was summoned to the directorate of secret police and was interrogated for three hours because of that one call. He wrote to my uncle after that asking him never to call again. I used to think of Uncle Sabri a lot, especially when I heard the news about the civil war in Lebanon. After his letters from Beirut, we received two from Cyprus. Then we heard that he’d gone to Aden, and we received letters with Yemeni stamps on them. He had started working as a teacher there. A civil war erupted there as well, and he had to go to Germany, where he was given asylum. He would send us money from time to time, especially in the late 1990s, when the embargo suffocated us.

After my father’s death I sent a letter to Uncle Sabri in Berlin, at the last address we had for him. I told him that phone lines were all down after the bombing and we had no idea when they would be repaired. One day three months later, my mother was fluttering her hand fan, saying: “We thought the Americans would fix the electricity. How come they’ve only made things worse?” The absurdity of the situation could be expressed only with equal absurdity.

There was a knock at the door, and I quipped, “Maybe that’s the electricity at the door waiting for your permission to come in.” She laughed for the first time in weeks. I looked out the window and saw a white-haired man with sunglasses standing at the door as a taxi idled. He had turned to the other side so I could see only his back and shoulders. I went to the door and asked, “Who is it?” “Sabri,” he said. “Open the door. It’s Sabri.”

The years had turned his hair white, leaving only some darker ash on his sideburns and eyebrows. I yelled in disbelief: “Uncle Sabri!” He hugged me tight and laughed: “Oh my, Jawad. You’re taller than I am.” We both cried as we kissed each other seven or eight times. He held my face in his hands as he used to do so often two decades before and repeated my name “Jawad” as if he, too, was in disbelief. My mother came to the door and said, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe my eyes.”

They embraced and she thanked God for his safe arrival, but chastised him: “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming, Sabri, so we would prepare something.”

“Prepare what? I’m not a stranger. I came to see you.”

We took his suitcase out of the car and brought it inside. He paid the taxi driver and asked him to come back eight days later at six in the morning. Then he took out another small bag from the back seat and slung it over his shoulder. We went in and my mother led him toward the guest room. He said, “What is this? Am I a guest? I want to sit where we used to.”

We sat in the living room. My mother offered him food, but he asked only for some water. He took off his sunglasses and put them on the table. He took out another pair of plain glasses from his pocket and put them on. He said that he was late because he had gotten lost and couldn’t find the house: “Baghdad has changed so much.” He had tried to call us from Amman, but the phone was dead. He looked at the black-and-white photographs of Ammoury and my father on the wall and said, “May God have mercy on their souls.”

My mother brought a tray with a jug of water and a glass. She apologized that the water might not be cold enough and complained again about the electricity. She had changed into a black dress from the nightgown she had been wearing when he arrived. He thanked her and drank the whole glass. He offered his condolences to her, and she started to cry, saying: “He left me all alone.”

My uncle told her, “All alone? How can you say that? Jawad is here for you.”

He asked us about Father’s death. My mother rushed to narrate the story she’d told before dozens of times. When she finished, he said, “May God have mercy on his soul. He is in peace now. The most important thing is that he didn’t suffer.”

I asked him about his trip here and when he would return.

He asked me jokingly, “Are you already sick of me and want me to leave?”

I laughed and said, “On the contrary. I hope you stay here for good and never go back.”

He said that unfortunately he couldn’t stay for more than a week because he had to go back to work. I asked him about his work. He said that he had studied German for four years and had been working recently as a translator for an Arabic-language German satellite channel. He had traveled from Berlin to Frankfurt and then on to Amman, where he spent a night before taking a taxi. They had left at four in the morning so that they would enter Iraq early and be able to drive through the desert highway in daylight. Driving in the dark meant risking being robbed by the many gangs and thieves operating there.

“We entered Iraq at dawn and it was a painful sight. The man welcoming me back to my country after all these years of wandering and exile was an American soldier who told me: ‘Welcome to Iraq!’ Can you imagine?” He said that the soldier had written his own name, “William,” in Arabic on his helmet. “I told him: This is
my
country.” Uncle Sabri shook his head and said that he was against the war and had demonstrated against it like millions in Germany and all over the world, but he never thought the Americans would be so irresponsible and inept. The border checkpoint with Jordan had only three soldiers and only one Iraqi official, who was wearing slippers and stamping passports. He asked the official who decided who was allowed in and who was not, and he said the American officer decided. “I just stamp.”

“There was no search. Nothing,” Sabri said. “Whoever wants to enter Iraq can do so very easily. So if the border checkpoint is like that, imagine how easy it is to enter from other points. Anyone coming now from Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran can enter.” He said that one of the Iraqi officials at the border asked him for a sum of money, and when my uncle asked why he should pay, the man answered “Why not?” The driver said just to ignore him.

I told him that bribery had become endemic during the last years of the embargo and now was part of any transaction.

He said this was a process of erasure. Dictatorship and the embargo had destroyed the country. Now we had entered the stage of total destruction to erase Iraq once and for all. He took out his
passport and said that even the name of the state no longer existed. The stamp simply read, “Entry-Traybeel Border Point.” As if Iraq had been wiped off the map.

My mother said that if Iraqis themselves were not protective of their own country and were looting and destroying it, what should one expect strangers to do?

He said that Iraqis didn’t always loot and burn public property and that even Europeans looted and burned when there was no police or law around.

I said that Europeans don’t destroy museums and national libraries.

“True,” he said, “but Europeans were never subject to an embargo which starved them and took them back a hundred years. They didn’t have a dictator who put his name on everything so that there was no longer any difference between public property and him.”

“Didn’t they have Hitler?” I said.

He said the Americans hadn’t supported Hitler the way they had Saddam and that they’d helped rebuild Germany after the war with the Marshall Plan.

My mother told him that we didn’t want to spend all our time on politics and its headaches and that he hadn’t changed in that respect even though white hair covered his entire head. He told her that that wasn’t white hair, but snow from Germany which couldn’t be washed away. We all laughed.

She asked whether he was craving any particular food that he hadn’t tasted in years.

“Everything you cook is lovely, but Kubba is the best,” he said. They both laughed. He brought out a box of sweets he’d bought from Amman and said “Here, this is for you.”

I asked whether there was anything particular he wanted to do. He said he wanted to spend most of the time with us, wanted to visit my sister and her kids, but also to roam around Baghdad a bit and visit his favorite spots and look for old friends. He asked whom he might hire to drive him for a week.

I told him that a neighbor had a taxi. I reminded him of the curfew after sunset.

I told him that he would be sleeping in my room. I carried his suitcase upstairs.

The next morning I heard him singing while he shaved:

So unfair of you

To be gone for so long.

What will I tell people

When they ask about you?

You left my heart burning

Reeling from your absence

So unfair of you and so cruel.

What will I tell people

When they ask about you?

How could you ever

Let me down and betray me?

Never think my heart will heal

Never think the pain will go away.

What will I tell people

When they ask about you?

I told him that we should be singing that song, reproaching him for his long absence.

“So I’m the traitor?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “you just forgot about us.”

He laughed and said, “I forgive you, Jawad. Wait until I tell you what happened to me.”

After breakfast I left him chatting with my mother and made a deal with Hamid, the taxi driver. His only condition was not to drive anywhere outside of Baghdad, because the roads were dangerous.

Our first stop was the book market on al-Mutanabbi Street. Hamid dropped us off there. I asked him to come back for us three hours later. My uncle pored over the titles of books. After a long conversation with one of the booksellers about what he was looking for, the seller told him he had lots of poetry and history books in his warehouse across the street. My uncle told me to wait while he and the bookseller went there.

I wandered the neighborhood alone. I loved the street. It had a lot of booksellers with a surprising wealth of great titles, all the books stacked without regard to subject or genre. A timid wind blew that morning and became more self-confident around noon. It, too, leafed through books and magazines and turned pages angrily, as if it were dissatisfied with what it read and could find nothing it liked.

Many booksellers put rocks or pieces of brick on the magazines to keep them in place. Some had laid out long boards to secure a row of books without hiding their titles. Books on Shiite theology, which were previously banned, had the lion’s share. New newspapers had multiplied. It was difficult to keep up with names. The lack of any law regulating publication meant that anyone with the money and the desire could start a newspaper.

In addition to newspapers, there were back issues of foreign magazines and many new Arabic magazines with glossy covers. Seduction flowed from the eyes of the female singers and movie stars on the covers. These were a few centimeters away from equally glossy posters of turbaned clerics with stern and angry faces. My uncle returned, showing me what he had found: first editions of some of al-Jawahiri’s poetry collections and one of Sa’di Yusif’s, together with some Jurji Zaydan novels and Neruda’s autobiography.

On our way to al-Shahbandar café we saw a young man standing in front of a set of booklets and pamphlets piled on a box on the ground. He was tall and clean-shaven, in his early thirties with curly brown hair. He wore a white shirt and gray pants. We drew closer. The pamphlets bore the logo of a Revolutionary Workers’ Party, of which I hadn’t heard. Some of the booklets were writings by Trotsky, Lenin, and Gramsci. My uncle greeted him and started asking him about the party’s links to the Communist Party.

The young man was critical of the Communist Party for many reasons, chief among them its mistaken decision to join the governing council that had been announced a few days before. That was a recognition of the occupation and a legitimization of its project. The young man spoke passionately and confidently, prefacing his
sentences with “dear” or “brother,” and used his right hand to illustrate main points.