The Iraqi Christ (6 page)

I was completely devastated and I left home. I couldn’t bear to see the horror on the faces of my mother and brothers. I felt lost and no longer knew what I still wanted from this life. I took a room in a dirty hotel until my uncle came to visit me and suggested I work with his sect. To exact revenge.

The summer days were long and tedious. It’s true that the villa was comfortable, with a swimming pool and a sauna. But to me it seemed like a palatial mirage. Salsal took a room on the second floor, while I was content with a cover and a pillow on the sofa in the middle of the large sitting room where the bookcase stood. I wanted to keep an eye on the garden and the outer gate of the villa, in case anything unexpected happened. I was stunned by the size of the bookcase in the sitting room. It had many volumes on religion and on local and international law. Along the shelves, animals made of teak had been arranged in shapes and poses reminiscent of African totems. The animals also separated the religious books from the law books. As soon as it fell dark, I would grab a bite to eat and go and surrender myself to the sofa, reminisce a little about the events of my life, then take out a book and read distractedly. The world in my head was like a spider’s web that made a faint hum, the hum of a life about to expire, of breaths held. Delicate, horrible wings flapping for the last time.

I found the egg three days before Mr Salman’s last visit. One day I woke up at dawn as usual. I fetched some clean water and food and went to inspect my friend the rabbit. I opened his hutch and he hopped out into the garden. There was an egg in the hutch. I picked it up and examined it, trying to understand the absurdity of it. It was too small to be a chicken’s egg. I was anxious so I went straight to Salsal’s room. I woke him up and told him about it. Salsal took hold of the egg and stared at it for a while, then laughed sneeringly.

‘Hajjar, you’d better not be pulling my leg,’ he said, pointing his finger towards my eye.

‘What do you mean? It wasn’t me who laid the egg!’ I said firmly.
 

Salsal rubbed his eyes, then suddenly jumped out of bed like a madman, firing curses at me. We headed to the villa gate and checked the security system. We inspected the walls and searched the garden and all the rooms. There were no signs of anything unusual. But an egg in a rabbit hutch! Our only option was to think that someone was playing tricks on us, sneaking into the villa and putting the egg next to the rabbit.
 

‘Perhaps it’s a silly stunt by that whore Umm Dala. Damn you and your rabbit,’ said Salsal, but then went quiet.

Both of us knew that Umm Dala was sick and hadn’t come to visit us for the past week. We were doubly afraid because we didn’t have any guns in the house. We weren’t allowed to have guns until the day of the mission. They were worried about random searches because the Green Zone was a government area and most of the politicians lived there. We were living in the villa on the pretence that we were bodyguards to a member of parliament. Salsal threw a fit and asked me to slaughter the rabbit, but I refused and told him the rabbit had nothing to do with what had happened.
 

‘Wasn’t it your bloody rabbit that laid the egg?’ he said angrily as he went up to his room.

I made some coffee and sat in the garden watching the rabbit, which was eating its own droppings. They say the droppings contain vitamin B produced by tiny organisms in its intestines. After a while Salsal came back carrying his laptop. He was mumbling to himself and cursing Mr Salman from time to time. He looked at his Facebook page and said we had to be on alert 24-7. He asked me to spend the night in his room on the second floor because it was good for monitoring the gate and the walls of the villa.

We turned off all the lights, sat in Salsal’s room and every now and then took turns in making a tour of inspection around the villa.

Two nights passed without anything suspicious. The villa was quiet, sunk in silence and calm. While I was staying in Salsal’s room I learned he was registered with Facebook under the pseudonym War and Peace and had posted a charcoal drawing of Tolstoy as his profile picture. He had more than a thousand Facebook friends, most of them writers, journalists and intellectuals. He would discuss their ideas and pose as an intelligent admirer of other Facebook people. He expressed his opinions and his analysis of the violence in the country with modesty and wisdom. He even tried it on with me, rambling on about the character of the Deputy Minister of Culture. He told me how cultured and humane and uniquely intelligent he was. At the time I wasn’t interested in talking about the deputy minister. I told him that people who work in our line of business ought to keep their distance from too much internet chat. He gave me his sneering professional look and said, ‘You look after your egg-laying rabbit, Hajjar.’
 

When Mr Salman finally visited us, Salsal exploded in anger in front of him, and told him about the rabbit’s egg. Mr Salman ridiculed our story and dismissed our suspicions of Umm Dala. He assured us the woman was honest and had worked with them for years. But Salsal accused him of betrayal and they began to argue, while I sat watching them. From their argument I gathered that in the world of sectarian and political assassinations, people were often betrayed because of greater interests. In many cases the parties in power would hand over hired killers to each other for free, as part of wider deals over political positions or to cover up some large-scale corruption. But Mr Salman denied all Salsal’s accusations. He asked us to calm down, because the assassination of the target would take place in two days. We sat down in the kitchen and Salman explained the plan to us in detail. Then he took two revolvers with silencers out of his bag and said we would be paid right after the operation and that we would then be moved to somewhere else on the edge of the capital.
 

‘A rabbit’s egg. Ha, duckling. You’re a real joker now,’ Salman whispered to me before he left.

On the last night I stayed up late with Salsal. I was worried about the rabbit, because it looked like Umm Dala would be on a long holiday. The rabbit would die of hunger and thirst. Salsal was busy with Facebook as usual. I stayed close to the window, watching the garden. He said he was having a discussion with the Deputy Minister of Culture on sectarian violence and its roots. I gathered from Salsal that this minister had been a novelist in Saddam Hussein’s time and had written three novels about Sufism. One day he and his wife were at a party at the home of a wealthy architect overlooking the Tigris. His wife was attractive, stunningly so, and cultured like her husband. She had a particular interest in old Islamic manuscripts. The Director of Security, a relative of the president, was a guest at the party. After the party was over, the security chief gave his surveillance section orders to read our friend’s novels. A few days later they threw him in jail on charges of incitement against the State and the Party. The Director of Security bargained with the novelist’s wife in exchange for her husband’s freedom. When she rejected his demands, the security chief had one of his men rape the woman in front of her husband. After that the woman moved to France and disappeared. They released the novelist in the middle of the nineties and he went off to look for his wife in France, but could find no trace of her. When the dictator’s regime fell, he went home and was appointed Deputy Minister of Culture. The story of the novelist’s life was like the plot of a Bollywood film, but I was surprised how many details of the man’s life Salsal knew. I felt that he admired the man’s personality and sophistication. I asked him what sect the man was. He ignored my question. Then I tried to draw him out on the identity of our target, but Salsal replied that a novice duckling like me wasn’t allowed to know such things. My only task was to drive the car and it was Salsal who would fire the shot with his silenced revolver.

The next morning we were waiting in front of the car park in the city centre. The target was meant to arrive in a red Toyota Crown and as soon as the car went into the car park Salsal would get out of our car, follow him inside on foot and shoot him. Then we would drive off to our new place on the edge of the capital. That’s why I had brought the rabbit along with me and put it in the boot of the car.
 

Salsal received a text on his mobile and his face turned pale. We shouldn’t have had to wait for the target more than ten minutes. I asked him if all was well. He shouted out a curse and slapped his thigh. I was worried. After some hesitation he held out his mobile phone and showed me a picture of a rabbit sitting on an egg. It was a silly Photoshop job. ‘Do you know who sent the picture?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘The Deputy Minister of Culture,’ he said.

‘What!!?’

‘The deputy’s the target, Hajjar.’

I got out of the car, my blood boiling at Salsal’s stupidity and all the craziness of this pathetic operation. More than a quarter of an hour passed and the target didn’t appear. I told Salsal I was pulling out of the operation. He got out of the car too and asked me to be patient and wait a while longer, because both of us were in danger. He got back in the car and tried to contact Salman. I walked to a shop nearby to buy a packet of cigarettes. My heart was pounding like crazy from the anger. As soon as I reached the shop the car blew up behind me and caught fire, burning the rabbit and Salsal to cinders.

Fear also has a smell, as you know.

The man smelled of smoked fish as he spoke, spraying saliva from his mouth.

‘That was last winter. I was coming back from one of my routine jaunts around the city centre. Jaunts intended to “pick up a living”, as we say in the home country. I was gathering what I could from various, out-of-the-way bars: casual conversation, a fuck, a free beer, a joint, anarchic talk about political matters, an argument with another drunk, or a chance to annoy others on the pretext of being drunk, just for fun. The important thing was that the day should include a human touch, however small. You know. And on the day the wolf appeared, I met a strange young woman. An owl of ill omen, as we would say. Do you believe there are faces that bring bad luck? There are faces you meet that are like the symbols in dreams. You’re an artist and your imagination makes it easy for you to understand what I mean, doesn’t it? You artists are farmers tilling the fields of dreams. Do you like that? Yes, I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert. Imagine there’s an Indian painter in Delhi working on some subject that’s also taking shape in the dream of a man who’s asleep in Texas. Okay, fuck that. But would you agree with me that all art comes together in this way? Perhaps love and unhappiness too. If, for example, a poet wrote about loneliness in Finland, then his poem could be the dream of someone asleep in some other part of the world. If there was a special search engine for dreams, like Google, all dreamers would find their dreams in works of art. The dreamer would put a word, or several words, from his dream into the Dream Search Engine, and thousands of results would appear. The more the search is narrowed down, the closer he gets to his dream and eventually he finds out it’s a painting or a piece of music or a sentence in a play. He would also find out which country his dream was in. Yes, you know. Maybe life... okay, fuck that.
 

‘The young woman had a surprising face. It looked like the needle of an electric sewing machine had pricked it for many hours. Her complexion was peppered with dozens of little holes. She told me she was Spanish. Then, five minutes later, she told me her mother was Egyptian and her father Finnish. She only knew three words of Arabic, all of them related to sexual organs or blasphemous phrases including the word “shit”. The whore drank three glasses of beer on my account and went to wait in a dark corner. What do you think she’s waiting for? Definitely another prick who’ll spend more on her. I lost twenty euros in the slot machine. I felt exhausted and hungry. Then I waved at the woman with the ill-omened face, a sarcastic theatrical wave, and before leaving, as if addressing vast throngs, I shouted: “Long live life!”

‘On the way home, I couldn’t get the woman’s face out of my mind. I had the impression I had met her in some street market in the country. I don’t know why, but I imagined her sitting wrapped in a black cloak selling green and red peppers. I’m certain that three or four signs of bad luck had conspired to put me in this mess. But anyway, listen, you won’t believe what happened next. As usual, as soon as I got back to my flat, I took off all my clothes. I was on my way to the bathroom when I saw the thing running towards me from the sitting room. I jumped into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I was like someone who’d seen the Angel of Death. It was a wolf. A wolf, I swear. But you’ll say that maybe it was a dog. After looking through the keyhole several times, I spotted it again and I knew very well what it was. I was really shaking. There was a terrifying silence for some minutes. After looking through the keyhole several times, I could see it – I was sure it was a wolf. I could hear it panting, then I saw it sniffing my trousers and underpants at the front door. After that it sat down and started to stare sadly at the bathroom door.

‘A wolf in the city centre, in a block of flats, and in
my
bloody flat! I sat on the toilet seat and began to think: no one but me had a key to this flat, I live on the fourth floor, and even if we assume, okay, that it could fly and had come in through the balcony, the door between the sitting room and the balcony was always closed. I pissed without noticing I was doing it. I sat there as if paralysed, naked on the toilet seat with a wolf in my flat. How absurd! I began to blame and curse myself. Why did I strip off like a whore whenever I came into the flat? If I’d had my mobile with me, I would have called the police and it would all be over. What kind of shitbag am I? An unemployed drunk, cruising the bars to pick up a living. And from whom? From wrecks no less rotten than me; people from under whose feet the new world of glitter has pulled the carpet, like, for example, that fat woman in her late thirties looking for a casual fuck with an immigrant refugee who doesn’t have a screw left that’s not loose. We’re the ones who don’t have delicious tight arses. We just have arseholes to shit from. But fuck that.