The Last of the Angels (31 page)

On the third day, Dervish Bahlul returned to the city of Kirkuk, where everything had changed. It almost seemed that the world was engaged in a perpetual feast or festival that carried on night and day. Khidir Musa had donned a military uniform, placing a red badge over his wrist, after being appointed commander of the popular defense forces of the republic. He moved between the many coffeehouses that the volunteers, who were armed with sticks, knives, and ropes, had made their headquarters, asking them to keep their eyes wide open because the English might attack again from the Habaniya or Shu‘ayba camps, where their forces were stationed—as had happened seventeen years before. The city of Kirkuk did not actually witness the kind of bloodbaths that Baghdad did, even though people went out into the streets once they heard the news that the republic had been proclaimed. They only attacked the American Cultural Center, which cultured people and greengrocers looted of most of its books. The intellectuals had known the value of these books for some time, and the grocers found them to be an inexhaustible source of paper, which they needed to make packets for the tea and spices they sold.

The Communists emerged from their many cellars, lifting high their banners, which dazzled people with slogans that many did not comprehend. The sight of the red flags with the hammer and sickle left people with the lasting impression that the Communists had directed the revolution. Thus many people began to boast to each other that they had always been Communists. This claim upset many others, who believed that they had been responsible for the revolution. So the city split into the Communists, who generally sat in coffeehouses playing chess or reading the newspaper
al-Nur
—which Khalid Bakdash published in Damascus and which was sold as if it were a rare commodity at the al-Jabha coffeehouse in Kirkuk—and the Turanian Turkmen, whose watchword was Iraqi-Turkish unification, versus the Baathists and the Arab nationalists, who went into the street to demand an immediate Arab union.

This upset the Kurdish nationalists and prompted them to advocate the creation of a state of Greater Kurdistan. The Armenians from the Tashnag Party held up a placard demanding punishment for the killer Turks and the incorporation of Armenia into Turkey. The Assyrian Christians, to whom the English had promised their own state in northern Iraq, began to sing gleefully in the streets, “Telkeef won its independence; Muhammad's religion is nonsense.” This state of affairs scared the Afterlife Society's members, who placed all the blame on the Communists, attacked their coffeehouses, and set fire to their placards, on which they had written, “No more dowry after this month; throw the qadi in the river.” The Afterlife Society distributed to young Turkmen golden medals to place on their chests. These displayed black cats with their fangs bared to eat the white doves of peace on the medals that the Communists usually affixed to their chests or hung from their necks.

In the first months following the revolution, when emotions escaped reason's grasp, the Communists ruled most of Kirkuk's working-class neighborhoods, which they declared to be autonomous democratic people's republics, and many security agents and policemen joined their ranks. These men would frequently parade through the city streets in orderly processions, chanting loudly, “Ask the police: What do you want? A free nation and a happy people.” Zeal motivated security agents from time to time to arrest bystanders who did not applaud, charging them with conspiring against the republic. They would beat these people until they finally confessed to conspiracies they had been hatching in secret against the foremost lieutenant colonel, who was opposed by another lieutenant colonel who himself wanted to be the foremost lieutenant colonel. Then he was arrested and beaten until he tearfully agreed to accept an appointment as ambassador to Bonn. That made singers mock him, gloating in a popular song that was broadcast three times a day, “He's going to be ambassador to Bonn. He's weeping for the offense.”

The man, however, would not leave the Bonn-Cologne Airport where his plane landed. He would reboard the same plane that had transported him and be arrested again because his wife, who had a saucy tongue and who was feared by the women of his community, had stormed into the Ministry of Defense, where she had begun to curse the foremost lieutenant colonel and his mother, who used to borrow money from her and then not repay it.

The foremost lieutenant colonel delivered the other lieutenant colonel to a loud-voiced military judge who spoke exclusively in verse. He confronted the defendant standing in the cage: “What do you say, you dusty cur? / Have you come to weep or to purr?”

The public prosecutor, however, intervened to save the session from an ode that might have lasted for hours or even days because each verse would normally be followed by a poem by one of the popular poets, who came in droves to the court, and would be accompanied by the public's applause, the women's trilling, and the reverberating chants of the peasants. The prosecutor announced that the foremost traitor, who was standing before the seat of justice, was too insignificant to defend his many crimes against the people's rights and that his tears were merely those of a crocodile living in brackish waters. He proposed executing him in Tahrir Square so he could serve as a lesson to future traitors.

The people were enchanted by these festivities, which became their sole entertainment. Each community established its own special people's court, which was convened at any hour of the night or day. This madness spread to the Chuqor community too, and so Hadi Ahmad, the young man who had been blinded in his left eye during the Battle of Gawirbaghi some years before, was named head of the people's court that had yet to find anyone to try, although many conspiracies had been discovered in other locations. People were astonished to see Hadi Ahmad, who never let the machine gun leave his shoulder, lead his aged father and two neighbors to the open space in al-Musalla and force them to dig their graves with mattocks prior to their execution on charges of mocking the revolution. The three men were rescued only when the women of the Chuqor neighborhood caught Hadi Ahmad off-guard and attacked him, biting his hands and shoulders until he dropped the machine gun and fled, cursing and threatening to get them back.

The revolution had really enchanted people. They changed and did things no one would have expected. Many began to sleep by day and stay up nights. The young men grew long beards, and senior citizens tinted their hair with henna. Virgin mothers gave birth to many babies who spoke and astonished people with their wise sayings at the moment of their arrival in this world. Children of some ethnic groups grew extra teeth. This phenomenon excited the interest of physicians, who drafted comprehensive studies about the event, which was not unprecedented.

With the new freedom, which took people by surprise, the wardens of the prisons were forced to open their locked gates. Former prisoners quit the jails and returned to their cities, which welcomed them like legendary heroes whose exile had ended. Hameed Nylon and his men, who entered Kirkuk carrying red flags, stood in a central city square where people had gathered and presented vivid displays of the torture they had endured in the prisons and concentration camps where they had resided. Hameed Nylon removed his blue and white striped shirt, revealing his hairy chest and scarred back, where whips and burning cigarettes had left their marks on his flesh. The other men who had been with him in prison staged realistic, dramatic demonstrations of the forms of torture common in Iraq. Some interrogators came out of the truck where they were being detained and stood before their trembling victims, who were forced to endure the experience one final time. Some young women in the crowd of spectators volunteered to join the victims, many of whom had their hands bound with ropes. The interrogators beat them with switches made from a skein of wire, paying no attention to the spurting blood that stained their hands. Although they felt embarrassed, the victims found themselves screaming and pleading with the interrogators to stop beating them, but to no avail because the interrogators had regained their former spirit, which had never really deserted them.

This spectacle, which was presented in the open air, was thrilling and entertaining and the crowd demanded to see everything. Thus the interrogators were forced to bring out their leg vises and to beat their victims on the soles of their feet. Then there were the bottles that they rammed up their victims' anuses, and the nail-pulling pincers. They even brought out ceiling fans, which they hooked up to the light poles. They tied their victims' hands behind their backs and, lifting them off the ground, fastened them to the fans, which they ran at full speed until the victims' shoulders were dislocated. The interrogators beat them with batons while they turned, striking them at random and chortling with laughter. The clothes of the women volunteers were torn to shreds and they were raped in front of all those present, and yet they did not utter a single word about their secret cells. Then the interrogators forced those who had collapsed because they were incapable of enduring the torture to stand in a line and howl: once like stray dogs on a moonlit night and again like hungry wolves or jackals that grew excited on nearing the edges of villages.

This demonstration of human frailty caused the crowd, which was smitten with the heroism that had propelled the revolution, to lose their nerve and attack the devastated traitors, whom they beat until the victims' howls mingled with their own curses, which arose from every direction: “We'll cut off the hands of any traitor who betrays his people.” Only Hameed Nylon's eloquent intervention, amplified by a megaphone, saved the situation. He thanked the people for their zeal and pointed out that their anger ought to be directed against the interrogators, not the victims, who had sacrificed everything they had of value for the sake of the nation's freedom.

The moment the interrogators heard these provocative words, they took to their heels. People with sparks flying from their eyes caught up with them and killed them with blows from sticks and feet, then they stripped them of their clothes, fastened ropes to their feet, and dragged them from one street to the next. Children pursued them, singing and cheering, in imitation of the grown-ups. Some men who were fastened to vehicles that dragged them regained consciousness and began kicking, trying to escape from the ropes. Three or four of them succeeded in freeing their legs, rose, and ran off naked through the streets, exciting the laughter of the crowd, which stopped pursuing them. Others were hanged from trees or fastened to electric and telephone poles.

The city of Kirkuk, for its part, had become addicted to death like other cities, in keeping with the desires of the lieutenant colonel, whose thoughts changed from time to time. He was influenced by a spring of light that flowed from his spirit like inspiration falling on him from the heavens and that took the form of stern directives provided to the security agencies, which ran death squads of every type and variety. When it seemed that the lieutenant colonel was turning Communist, the squads began to patrol the cities, delivering anyone whose chest was not decorated with a hammer and sickle to butchers who hanged them by their feet with meat hooks beside the carcasses of their lambs. When the lieutenant colonel turned against the Communists, as frequently happened, the other factions attacked them and took them prisoner, forcing their own mothers and fathers to slay them with knives and bayonets. Many, however, were burned alive at civic parties, where women handed around chocolates, candy, and bonbons to the crowd, which always cheered the prevailing tendency.

After some months, the lieutenant colonel, who had filled the city with his portraits and statues, changed course again and issued a number of papers, each of which attacked one of the factions, saying that the lieutenant colonel himself stood above all of them. Laws were issued that forbade anything that was not linked to the name of the lieutenant colonel, who had dedicated his entire life to the people's benefit. These laws forced popular singers to insert his name into songs of love and romance. They would flirt with their beloved, who refused to sleep with a man who did not love the foremost lieutenant colonel. Women would experience painless childbirth if the midwife recited to them the lieutenant colonel's teachings and sage maxims, published in countless tomes and distributed to school children, government employees, and labor unions, and popularized in the poetry collections of the poet Abd al-Ta'ib Abd al-Gha'ib, who in his odes pioneered the notion that the lieutenant colonel was seated on the cusp of eternity with his legs spreading over history.

To tell the truth, all the factions were stricken by something close to languor in their charred spirits. When members of the Afterlife Society attacked the Communists, they shouted first of all, “Long live the lieutenant colonel, the foremost Muslim, the victor over Communism and internationalism!” The Communists replied to them with the slogan “Long live the foremost lieutenant colonel, the victor over reactionaryism!” When the Baathists differed with the Nationalists, they yelled loudly, “Long live the foremost lieutenant colonel, the founder of the Arab Socialist Baath Party!” to drown out the cries of “Long live the foremost lieutenant colonel, leader of Arab Unification and liberator of Palestine!” The Kurds usually intimidated the Turkmen with the slogan “Long live our brother the foremost lieutenant colonel, unifier of Kurdistan!” They responded with the slogan “Long live the foremost brother lieutenant colonel, liberator of the Turks from the rabble!” The conflict was not limited to this war of slogans, which hid behind the lieutenant colonel's name. People began to kill each other in plain daylight with bullets, daggers, and axes and to set fire to their foes' homes during the night. Fire would devour them and frequently spread to neighboring houses too, reducing them to ashes.