The Iraqi Christ (5 page)

I heard many rumours that reports on Christ had been submitted to the Supreme Command. But the chaos of those days and the defeat of our army, which was crushed like flies, prevented the authorities paying any attention. There were many stories about the president’s interest in magicians, the occult and people with prodigious powers. They claim it was at his suggestion that so many books on parapsychology were unexpectedly translated in Iraq in the eighties, because he had heard that the advanced countries were developing telepathic techniques and using them for espionage. The president thought that science and the occult were one and the same, they just used different methods to reveal the same secrets. Christ was not boastful about his premonitory powers and did not consider them unusual. He used to tell stories from history about mankind’s ability to foretell the future. I came to the conclusion that Daniel’s melancholia made it impossible for him to take pleasure in the talent he possessed. Even his interest in radar did not bring him pleasure. His ideas about happiness were mysterious. I understood from him that he was frightened by some inner gloom. He thought his talent was just another sign of how impotent and insignificant we are in this mysterious world. He told me that at an early age he read a story by an Iraqi writer whose personality was simultaneously sarcastic and fearful. The hero in the story was swallowed by a shark after a fierce battle in the imaginary river of time. The hero sits trapped in the darkness there and thinks alone: ‘How can I reconcile my private life with my awareness that a world is collapsing in front of my eyes?’
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‘That’s a question that has weighed on my life. It has kept me awake like an open wound,’ said Christ.

When we woke up the next day the American forces had reached the outskirts of Baghdad. A few hours later they brought down the statue of the dictator. It was a surreal shock. We put on civilian clothes and went back to our families. It was just another war of the blind in which no one in our squadron fired a single shot. After it was all over,
 
I met Daniel several times. He had gone back to live with his elderly mother. When chaos broke out in the country, I visited him in their house in Baghdad. I wanted to speak to him about going back to the army. He said he had hated the dictator but he would not contribute to an army under the auspices of the occupier. After that I didn’t meet him again. I myself returned to the army, and Daniel went back to looking after his mother. He had two sisters who had migrated to Canada years before and his other relatives had left the country one by one, driven away by wars and the madness of sectarian fanaticism. Of his large family, only his mother remained. I found out that Daniel spent most of his time at home reading novels and encyclopaedias, following the news and caring for his mother, who had lost her hearing, her sight and her memory. Old age isolated her from the world. The old woman was incontinent. Christ would change her nappies every few hours. His mother’s death would sever the thread that tied him to the place. He didn’t plan to emigrate. In a long letter, his older sister implored him to leave the country, but Christ was as stubborn as his mother. Both of them rejected the devil’s temptation – to abandon their lost paradise.
 

After mass one Sunday, Christ took his mother to a local restaurant famous for its kebabs. He liked the cleanliness of the place and the way it set aside seats for children. The restaurant had changed greatly. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been there. Christ chose an empty table in the corner and helped his mother to sit down. The waiter’s good humour cheered him up. The man would mix up the names of the dishes with the names of daily instruments of slaughter. The customers laughed and loved him. He would call out orders such as ‘One explosive, mind-blowing, gut-wrenching kebab. One fragmentation stew. Two ballistic rice and beans.’

Christ asked for one and a half orders of kebab with hot peppers, a glass of ayran
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and a cold juice. The waiter came back with the order and made a joke about inquisitive people. Christ smiled politely. He picked up his mother’s fingers gently and placed them down to feel the hot kebabs and the grilled tomatoes. Then he put them back in place on the edge of the table. He picked up a tasty morsel and pressed it into her mouth, smiling at her with extraordinary, selfless love.

A young man asked if he could sit down at Christ’s table. Stocky in build and with a hard expression on his face, he was probably about twenty. He ordered a kebab with extra onions. He was actually quite handsome but was scratching his neck incessantly like someone with scabies. His eyes shifted from table to table. Daniel moved the plate of salad closer to his mother’s fingers and left her to feel out the vegetables on the plate. He prepared another mouthful for her. The young man watched them stealthily. He seemed eccentric. He kept chewing his piece of meat and trying to swallow it, as tears streamed from his beautiful eyes. Daniel was wary of him. He leaned forward and asked if he could help. He repeated the question but the young man kept his eyes on his plate and did not seem to have heard Daniel. He kept chewing and his tears flowed. He took out a handkerchief, wiped away his tears and cleaned his nose. He looked around the restaurant, then stared into Christ’s eyes. His features changed to reveal another face, as though he had taken off a mask. He grasped the flap of his jacket and pulled it aside like someone baring his chest.
 

‘It’s an explosive belt. One word from you and I’ll blow myself up,’ the young man said, with a threatening glance towards the old woman.
 

I was killed by friendly fire, myself. We were on a joint patrol with the American forces after the invasion. Someone opened fire on us from a house in the village. The Americans responded hysterically, thinking we had opened fire on them. I was shot three times in the head. I met Christ in our next world, and we were overjoyed. He told me how he was inexplicably drawn to that young man in the kebab restaurant. It wasn’t just terror that had paralysed him, but also some mysterious desire for salvation. For some moments he stared into the young man’s face. The man leaned towards him and asked him to stand up and go to the bathroom with him. At first he didn’t budge from his place, as if turned to stone. Then he kissed his mother’s head and stood up.

The young man led the way to the toilets. He closed the door and kept the tip of his finger on the button on the explosive belt. With his other hand he pulled a pistol out of his belt and pointed it at Daniel’s head. The young man was practically hugging Christ by this point, wrapping his arms around him because the space was so tight. He summed up what he wanted – Daniel should wear the explosive belt in his place, in exchange for him saving the old woman’s life.

The young man was in a hysterical state and could hardly control himself. He said there would be someone filming the explosion from outside the restaurant and that if he didn’t blow himself up they would kill him. Daniel said nothing in response. They started to sweat. One of the customers tried to push the toilet door. The young man cleared his throat. Then he again promised Christ he would take the old woman safely out of the restaurant, but if Daniel didn’t blow himself up he would kill her. Half a minute of silence passed, then he agreed with a nod of his head and stared blankly into the young man’s eyes. The young man asked him to undo the belt and wrap it around his own waist. It was a difficult process because the room was so narrow. The young man withdrew cautiously, leaving Christ in the toilet with the explosive belt on. Then he rushed towards the old woman in the corner of the restaurant. He tapped her gently on the shoulder and took hold of her hand. She stood up and followed him like a child. The restaurant had started to fill up and the noise level was rising, as people laughed and the cutlery clattered like a sword fight.

Christ fell to his knees. He could hardly breathe and he pissed in his trousers. He opened the bathroom door and crawled into the restaurant. Someone met him at the door and ran back shouting, ‘A suicide bomber, a suicide bomber!’
 

Amidst the panic, as men, women and children trampled on each other to escape, Christ saw that his mother’s chair was empty and he pressed the button.

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As Ingmar Bergman once asked in an interview.

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Ayran – a cold beverage of yoghurt mixed with iced water and sometimes salt.

Before the egg appeared, I would read a book about law or religion every night before going to sleep. Like my rabbit, I would be most active in the hours around dawn and sunset. Salsal, on the other hand, would stay up late at night and wake up at midday. And before he even got out of bed he would open his laptop and log on to Facebook to check the latest comments on the previous night’s discussion, then eventually go and have a bath. After that he would go into the kitchen, turn on the radio and listen to the news while he fried an egg and made some coffee. He would carry his breakfast into the garden and sit at the table under the umbrella, eating and drinking and smoking as he watched me.

‘Good morning, Hajjar. What news of the flowers?’

‘It’s been a hot year, so they won’t grow strong,’ I told him, as I pruned the rose bushes.

Salsal lit another cigarette and gave my rabbit an ironic smile. I never understood why he was annoyed by the rabbit. The old woman Umm Dala had brought it. She said she found it in the park. We decided to keep it while Umm Dala looked for its owner. The rabbit had been with us for a month and I had already spent two months with Salsal in this fancy villa in the north of the Green Zone. The villa was detached, surrounded by a high wall and with a gate fitted with a sophisticated electronic security system. We didn’t know when zero hour would come. Salsal was a professional, whereas they called me duckling because this was my first operation.

Mr Salman would visit us once a week to check how we were and reassure us about things. Mr Salman would bring some bottles of booze and some hashish. He would always tell us a silly joke about politics and remind us how secret and important the operation was. This Salman was in league with Salsal and didn’t reveal many secrets to me. Both of them made much of my weakness and lack of experience. I didn’t pay them much attention. I was sunk in the bitterness of my life, and I wanted the world to be destroyed in one fell swoop.

Umm Dala would come two days a week. She would bring us cigarettes and clean the house. On one occasion Salsal harassed her. He touched her bottom while she was cooking dolma. She hit him on the nose with her spoon and made it bleed. Salsal laid off her and didn’t speak to her after that. She was an energetic woman in her fifties with nine children. She claimed she hated men, saying they were despicable, selfish pricks. Her husband had worked in the national electricity company, but he fell from the top of a lamp post and died. He was a drunkard and she used to call him the arak gerbil.

I built the rabbit a hutch in the corner of the garden and took good care of him. I know rabbits are sensitive creatures and need to be kept clean and well-fed. I read about that when I was at secondary school. I developed a passion for reading when I was thirteen. In the beginning I read classical Arabic poetry and lots of stories translated from the Russian. But I soon grew bored. Our neighbour worked in the Ministry of Agriculture and one day I was playing with his son Salam on the roof of their house, when we came across a large wooden trunk up there with assorted junk piled up on top of it. Salam shared a secret with me. The trunk was crammed with books about crops and irrigation methods and countless encyclopaedias about plants and insects. Under the books there were lots of sex magazines with pictures of Turkish actresses. Salam gave me a magazine but I also took a book about the various types of palm tree that grow in the country. I didn’t need Salam after that. I would sneak from our house to the roof of theirs to visit the library in the trunk. I would take one book and one magazine and put back the ones I had borrowed. After that I fell in love with books about animals and plants and would hunt down every new book that reached the bookshops, until I was forced to join the army.
 

The pleasure I found in reading books was disconcerting, however. I felt anxious about every new piece of information. I would latch onto one particular detail and start looking for references and other versions of it in other writings. I remembered, for example, that for quite some time I tracked down the subject of kissing. I read and read and felt dizzy with the subject, as if I had eaten some psychotropic fruit. Experiments have shown that chimpanzees resort to kissing as a way to reduce tension, fatigue and fear among the group. It’s been proven that female chimpanzees, when they feel that strangers have entered their territory, hurry to their mates, hug them and start kissing them. And after long research, I came across another kiss, a long tropical kiss. A kiss by a type of tropical fish that kiss each other for half an hour or more without any kind of break. My memory of those years of darkness under sanctions is of devouring books. The electricity would go off for up to twenty hours a day, especially after that series of U.S. air strikes on the presidential palaces. I would snuggle into bed at midnight and by the light of a candle I would stumble upon another species of kiss: by insects called reduvius, though they don’t actually kiss each other. These only like the mouths of sleeping humans. They crawl across the face till they reach the corner of the mouth, where they settle down and start kissing. When they kiss they secrete poison in microscopic drops, and if the person sleeping is in good health and sleeping normally, he’ll wake up with a poisonous kiss on his mouth the size of four large raindrops put together.

I ran away from military service. I couldn’t endure the system of humiliation there. At night I worked in a bakery. I had to support my mother and my five brothers. I lost the urge to read. For me the world became like an incomprehensible mythical animal. A year after I ran away, the regime was overthrown and I was free of my fear of punishment for my earlier desertion. The new government abolished conscription. When the cycle of violence and the sectarian decapitations began, I planned to escape the country and go to Europe, but then they massacred two of my remaining brothers. They were coming back from work in a local factory that made women’s shoes. The taxi driver handed them over at a fake checkpoint. The Allahu Akbar militias took them away to an undisclosed location. They drilled lots of holes in their bodies with an electric drill and then cut off their heads. We found their bodies in a rubbish dump on the edge of the city.