The Last of the Angels (4 page)

The next day Burhan Abdallah's father took his hand and led him to al-Musalla Elementary School for Boys, which faced the cemetery, after buying him gray shorts, a shirt, and shoes from a shop that belonged to a relative in al-Qurya Souk. He told his son, “If that donkey wanted this, we won't deny its request.” His mother sensed that her hopes of her son becoming a police officer were beginning to be realized. Although the boy, who was wearing shorts for the first time in his life—and this was the only pair of shorts he had to wear, even in the winter when he shivered from the stinging cold—was greeted with insults and sarcasm by most of the neighborhood children, who chased after him when he returned from school, he felt proud of himself. He carried in his hand the book that had been given to him, notebooks, and orange pencils, the fragrance of which enchanted him, and paid no attention to these children, not returning their abuse or quarreling with them. From then on, he had an obscure sense of power that never left him.

He spent the whole afternoon in his house—renouncing the temptation to play in the neighborhood with the other children—after devouring a flat loaf of bread so hot that it burned his fingers, since his mother had just plucked it from the oven, which was flaming in a corner of the courtyard near a small plot where he had planted sunflowers with large blossoms. In his mind's eye, he reviewed what had happened to him that morning in school. The principal had told his father, who had addressed the man as “effendi,” “You should have started your son in school before now.”

His father had replied, “Effendi, the boy was with the mullah. I wanted him to finish memorizing the Qur'an. You know how important that is.”

Then the boy had surprised the principal with a challenge: “Effendi, you can examine me. I know how to read.”

The principal's eyes had twinkled as he reached to pluck a book from the table. He had opened it to a certain page, saying, “Fine. Take this and read!”

The boy had read several sentences with ease and fluency. Then the principal had called the school messenger and had instructed him, “Take this boy to First B and tell the teacher he's a new pupil.” He had left without even a word to his father, who was thanking the principal.

After the boy Burhan Abdallah came home from school, he read the book the teacher had given him through to the final page as he paced back and forth in the court between the door to the large room and the well, which was located on the other side by an open booth leading to a recently constructed room, which was rented to a man and his wife—Faruq and Gulbahar—who had only been married for two months. Gulbahar spent most of her days in her family's house in the nearby community of Piryadi, and so would not return till evening. Faruq, for his part, left early each morning and did not return till nightfall—almost as if he did not reside in the house. Finally Burhan Abdallah stopped by the opening to the well, which was enclosed by a wall approximately a meter high. He cranked the rather tall winch, which was fastened to one side, arm over arm, as the water bucket's rope twisted slowly but surely at the center of the winch, raising the bucket filled with water ever so gently toward the top. It was light at first but grew heavier as it rose higher. The hardest part was clinging with his left hand to one of the winch's arms while pulling the bucket out—once it reached the lip of the well—with the other hand. His mother had warned him that the bucket was heavy and might drag him back down with it toward the bottom, but he had always been able to pull the bucket out, deliberately not filling it too full of water to make it easier to lift. He poured the cold water into another pail and carried it over to sprinkle on his small garden. His mother had told him, “Don't overdo the water. The plants don't need a lot of water during the winter.” Since he saw that his mother was preoccupied with her work at the oven, he slipped unobserved to the upper room to open his box and the valley of the angels.

He remained cloistered there until late afternoon and did not descend until he heard through the two windows, which were open to the street, the commotion that kids were making as they played in the neighborhood. Then he joined three other children in a game they called “The Duped Jew.” One child would fetch a banknote from his house, unbeknownst to his mother or family, of course. They would pierce one side of it, pass a fine thread through the hole, and then cover the thread, which they stretched all the way to their hiding place, with dirt. They would wait until they saw a Jew approaching in the distance. Then they would leave the banknote in the middle of the street while they hid in some corner. They were sure that Jews always search the ground for something as they walk, since they do not raise their eyes toward the heavens except to pray for God to send destruction and every conceivable and inconceivable calamity down on the Muslims. The Jew's eyes would normally spot the banknote from afar and glow with delight and greed. He would speed his steps toward the abandoned money, glance right and left, and then lean over to grab it. Before his fingers could touch the money, however, the laughing children would yank it away. Then the Jew would see the practical joke and raise his hands to the heavens to incite God to slay them or else mumble some incomprehensible words. If the children could not lay their hands on a banknote, they would amuse themselves by digging in the center of the street a small ditch that they would fill with water and cover, topping it off with dirt, in hopes that a Jew would pass by on his way home from his shop in the souk and plunge into it. Adults usually drove them away when they did that or chased them, cursing, back to their homes.

This time the children placed the money in the middle of the street and waited for a long time without any Jew passing. Finally the children gave up, took the money, and headed to the abandoned building used as a gym, where they watched weightlifting exercises practiced by young wrestlers in a zurkhaneh pit. After that they stood behind some young men who were gambling, playing Twenty-One with cards, but one who had lost some of his money sent them packing: “Scram! I can't bear to have people look over my shoulder.” So Burhan Abdallah went home, where he found his father, his maternal uncle Khidir Musa, and Hameed Nylon standing in front of the house, conversing. The moment his father saw him, he asked his son, “So, how was school?”

The boy replied tersely, “Super.”

Abdallah Ali proudly told the other two men, “Burhan has started school.”

Khidir Musa complained, “Then I've lost him. I wanted him to work with me.” The boy snapped resentfully, “I'm not going to be one of your lambs.”

His maternal uncle teased him by cursing him, but Hameed Nylon laughed and said, “I like this boy; he's self-confident.”

The boy, however, had gone inside and climbed to the upper room again in the pale evening light, which was still entering the two windows.

Many days passed without anything unusual happening in the Chuqor community. Everything went according to the norm. The men left for their jobs in the morning, and numerous disputes flared between the women concerning the children. These were normal quarrels, and the men tried to stay out of them, despite the many words of abuse the women flung at each other while standing in front of the doors of their homes or poking their heads out through the curtains of their doors. Each day, Arab salt vendors, leading their donkeys, would pass through the neighborhood as did Turkmen vendors with thick mustaches that covered their mouths. The latter came from the nearby village of Tis‘in and sold bottled rose water. The children, who were excited by these men's mustaches, would follow them, shouting, “Uncle, where's your mouth?” Then a vendor would seize his mustache with a hand, hold it back, and expose his mouth, saying, “What's this? Your mother's cunt?”

There were blacksmiths and cutlers whose machines with turning, knife-sharpening stones would emit sparks whenever a knife touched them. There were men who bought scrap metal and vendors with small blocks of ice in the summer. From time to time, Bedouins came. These were poets who sat in front of the door of each home as they played their fiddles and recited odes in praise of the householder, whose name they had known since childhood. They would not leave their station until the master of the house had displayed his generosity toward them. There were Turkmen and Kurds who came with monkeys and bears to present dramatic performances in the neighborhood. The monkeys would pinch the women and provoke them. The bears would make people laugh by imitating old ladies walking. Even the Gypsies, whose women fastened red kerchiefs around their heads, would circulate through the community, offering sieves for sale. Mothers would warn their children to stay away from them, since they would not hesitate to kidnap children, especially girls, whom they would teach to sing and dance in their tents, which they erected on fields at the city's outskirts. Of all these, the appearance of Hanna the Christian, who was charged with killing stray dogs, caused the greatest commotion in the neighborhood when he chased this dog or that with the rifle he always carried on his shoulder.

One evening, almost everyone in the Chuqor community went out to al-Musalla Square, where a large vehicle had stopped. Written in Arabic on the side was, “British Information Agency.” A sheet of white fabric was stretched over the wall of the school, and in front of it on the ground in the open air sat hundreds of men, women, and children, who had come from the neighboring communities to watch a film about the war. The film was an old newsreel from the British War Office about the Allies' victorious battles against Germany and the Axis nations. The sight of tanks and aircraft firing excited many people, especially the women, some of whom trembled with fear. Even though the war had been over for some time, people went home with sarcastic and derisive smiles on their lips at this “British propaganda,” since they believed that Hitler's armies were still inflicting losses on the British, punishing them. Some said that Yunus Bahri had broadcast that very day on “Here Is Berlin” that the English had lost the war.

Once, the Chuqor headman, Salman, who lived in the Arab section, came to Hameed Nylon's house in a Jeep with three policemen and a police officer. They searched the two rooms over the entryway without discovering anything incriminating, but carted Hameed Nylon off to the police station anyway. His wife Fatima kept on weeping and wailing, since she did not know what to do. Her neighbor Qadriya came and took her home with her in an attempt to calm her. Many neighborhood women gathered there, for they were scared.

A rumor spread through the community that Hameed Nylon had been trafficking in arms, but many discounted this, claiming the affair must inevitably relate to the flirtatious Englishwoman. Others rejected this theory, since many months had passed since that incident. Three or four whispered, “Perhaps he's a Communist. Who knows?” But they quickly dismissed this idea from their minds: “No, no; he's too bright to be a Bolshevik.” They were right, for Hameed Nylon returned that very evening, cursing all the English, everywhere. Someone had fired a few shots at the woods in the English enclave of the oil company—from outside the fence—and that had caused the company's police to make inquiries and to investigate anyone they could think of, based solely on conjecture.

Two or three weeks after this misadventure, Khidir Musa took his wife and their three daughters to al-Hawija so that he could work as a butcher there. His sister Qadriya began to make critical remarks about him to her husband, Abdallah Ali, saying that her brother had fled there because he was scared when he saw the police take Hameed Nylon to the police station, but that his fear was certainly unjustified. Now, Khidir Musa, who saw no point in life besides making money, had mapped out this project months earlier, believing that it would make him rich and prosperous. No one, certainly, missed Khidir Musa or his wife Nazira, but the transfer of the old lady Hidaya to the home the couple had left vacant seemed ill-omened to many, who sought God's protection against the evil caused by cunning witches. Fatima, who was forced to live in the same building with the old woman, was one of these.

Actually, this crone had scarcely moved from the Jewish neighborhood to the Chuqor community when the curse moved with her. Men began to beat their wives in an unprecedented fashion. Indeed, many quarrels broke out among the men themselves for no real reason, and many children contracted typhoid, malaria, and trachoma. Other people lost their jobs. And prices rose, while folks became increasingly impoverished. They substituted barley bread for wheat bread and brown sugar—and finally dates—for the white sugar slabs they broke into lumps small enough for a person to hold between his thumb and index finger while he drank tea. The worst, however, was what happened next.

For the first time in the city's history, the government inaugurated a cabaret on al-Awqaf Street and filled it with female dancers and singers, whom the neighborhood women referred to as whores in every discussion they had of this new plague, which lured many of the neighborhood youth, who would pounce on the last penny in a house or sell anything they could lay their hands on—with no regard for the needs that women felt after being beaten—so they could head for the Bliss Cabaret in hopes that this dancer or that would smile at them. They had to content themselves, naturally, with drinking a bottle or two of beer, since they did not have the wherewithal to keep pace with the tribal chiefs, who would offer whiskey to the dancers and light their cigarettes with five-dinar notes—according to rumors in the Chuqor neighborhood, which was writhing with hunger.

One summer night, the whole community was awakened. Some people were content to stand at the ledges of their roofs watching the spectacle from there, calling down in a loud voice to this person or that in the street, as others abandoned their beds. Even the women left the white-curtained sleeping areas on the roofs and went out to say to one another, “This is what we've been expecting.” Everyone had been sound asleep on rooftops open to a sky strewn with stars and traversed from time to time by shooting stars, trailing behind them long tails of light, when they heard in the night a shrill shriek that came from the cul-de-sac adjoining the mosque. The wailing was followed by a hullabaloo, loud screams, and gunfire. Some at first believed it was a clash between thieves, but the sight of a police car parked at the entrance to that alley apparently eliminated this possibility, since the police were not particularly interested in what the thieves did and could not be expected to come to the Chuqor community to chase robbers. Moreover, everyone knew that the police always received their cut from each heist. Thus the matter concerned something else, unrelated to the thieves, and this was in fact the case, for the police had arrested Abbas Bahlawan, who owned an automobile repair shop in the Rafidayn Garage and who would not eat rice unless arak was poured all over it—so the women said—although this claim was highly exaggerated, since all it amounted to was that he added a little arak to the broth normally eaten with rice, not for a buzz, as he himself said, but to add aroma. Thus Abbas Bahlawan was led away, handcuffed, after policemen had been forced to chase him from one roof to another and to fire on him to frighten him. He finally surrendered, inebriated enough to curse the government in front of the throngs of the Chuqor neighborhood: “This is a shitty government that protects prostitutes.” No one, however, paid any attention to what he said.