The Sirens of Baghdad (10 page)

Two helicopters flew over the village, sweeping us with searchlights. There was something apocalyptic about the rumbling of their rotors.

The sun rose. Soldiers escorted us to an area behind the mosque, where a large tent had just been pitched. We were interrogated separately, one by one. Some Iraqi officers showed me photographs; several of them had been taken in the morgue or at the scene of the carnage and showed some of the faces of the dead. I recognized Malik, the “blasphemer” from the other day at the Safir. His eyes were staring and his mouth was wide open; blood ran out of his nose and formed tiny rivulets on his chin. I also recognized a distant cousin, curled up at the foot of a streetlight, his jaw shattered.

The officer asked me to name all the members of my family. His secretary noted down all my declarations in a register, and then I was set free.

Kadem was waiting for me on the street corner. He had a nasty gash on his arm, running from the top of his shoulder to his wrist. His shirt was stained with sweat and blood. He told me that the GIs had smashed his grandfather’s lute—a fabulous lute of inestimable value, a tribal and even national heirloom. I only half-listened. Kadem was crushed. Tears veiled his eyes. His monotonous voice disgusted me.

We sat for long minutes leaning against a wall, empty, panting, holding our heads in our hands. Light slowly grew in the sky, and on the horizon, as though rising from an open fracture, the sun prepared to immolate itself in its own flames. The first noisy kids could be heard; soon they would overrun the square and the open lots. The roar of the trucks signaled the withdrawal of the troops. Some old men left their patios and hurried to the mosque, eager to learn who had been arrested and who had been spared. Women wailed in their doorways, calling out the names of husbands or sons whom the soldiers had carried off. Little by little, as despair spread from one hovel to the next and the sound of sobbing rose above the rooftops, Kafr Karam filled me with a flood of venom. “I have to get away from here,” I said.

Kadem stared at me in alarm. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Baghdad.”

“To do what?”

“There’s more to life than music.”

He nodded and pondered my words.

All I had were the clothes I was wearing—namely, an undershirt that had seen better days and a pair of old pajama pants. No shoes. I asked, “Can you do me a favor, Kadem?”

“That depends.”

“I need to get some stuff from home.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I can’t go back to my house.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t, that’s all. Will you get my things for me? Bahia will know what to put in my bag. Tell her I’m going to Baghdad to stay with our sister Farah.”

“I don’t understand. What happened? Why can’t you go back home?”

“Kadem, please. Just do what I’m asking you to do.”

Kadem guessed that something very serious had taken place. I’m sure he was thinking in terms of rape.

“Do you really want to know what happened, cousin?” I cried. “Do you really insist on hearing about it?”

“That’s all right, I get it,” he grumbled.

“You don’t get a thing. Nothing at all.”

His cheekbones quivered as he pointed a finger at me. “Watch it,” he said. “I’m older than you. I won’t permit you to talk to me like that.”

“I’m afraid I no longer need anyone’s permission for anything, cousin.” I looked him straight in the eye. “And what’s more, I don’t care a rotten fig about what happens to me from this moment on. From this second. Are you going to pick up my fucking stuff for me, or do I have to leave like this? I swear, I’ll jump on the first bus I see in just this undershirt and these pajama pants. Nothing matters anymore, not ridicule, not even lies….”

“Come on, get a hold of yourself.”

Kadem tried to grab my wrists. I pushed him away. “Listen,” he said, breathing slowly so he could keep calm. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll go to my house—”

“I want to leave from here.”

“Please. Listen to me, just listen. I know you’re completely—”

“Completely what, Kadem? You don’t know a damn thing. It’s something you can’t even imagine.”

“All right, but let’s go to my house first. You can take some time and think about this calmly, and then, if you’re still sure you want to leave, I’ll personally accompany you to the nearest town.”

“Please, cousin,” I said in a toneless voice. “Go get me my bag and my walking stick. I’ve got to say a few words to the good Lord.”

Kadem saw that I was in no condition to listen to anyone at all. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go and get your things.”

“I’ll wait for you behind the cemetery.”

“Why not here?”

“Kadem, you ask too many questions, and I’ve got a headache.”

He gestured with both hands, beseeching me to take it easy, and then he went away without looking back.

I wandered around the cemetery for a bit. Everywhere I looked, I saw the
abominable thing
I’d glimpsed in the hall the previous night. Twice I had to crouch down and puke. My body swayed unsteadily on my heels as the spasms overwhelmed me. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was something that sounded like a wild beast’s death rattle. After a while, I sat down on a little mound and started digging rocks out of the ground around me and throwing them at a scrawny tree whose dusty branches were hung with plastic packets. Every time I snapped my arm, I let out a grunt of rage. I was chasing away the cloud of ill omen that was gathering over my thoughts; I was plunging my hand into my memory of the previous evening in order to tear out its heart.

The whole place stank in the morning heat. A decomposing corpse, no doubt. That didn’t bother me. I kept on excavating rocks and hurling them at the little tree, so many rocks that my fingers were bleeding.

Behind me, the village was getting out of the wrong side of the bed. The voices of the fed up could be heard here and there—a father speaking roughly to his kid, a younger brother rising up against an older one. I didn’t recognize myself in that anger. I wanted something greater than my misery, vaster than my shame.

I’d just finished stoning the little tree when Kadem came back, slipping among the graves. From a distance, he showed me my bag. Bahia was following him, her head wrapped in a muslin scarf. She was wearing the black dress of farewells. “We thought the soldiers had taken you away,” she said, her face waxen.

Apparently, she hadn’t come to dissuade me from leaving. That wasn’t her style. She understood my motives and obviously approved them all, without reservations and without regrets. Bahia was a daughter of her tribe. In the ancestral tradition, honor was supposed to be the domain of men, but even so, she knew how to recognize it and require it.

I snatched the bag out of Kadem’s hand and started digging around inside it. Although my sister clearly noticed the violence of my movements, she didn’t reproach me in any way. She merely said, “I’ve put in two undershirts, two shirts, two pairs of trousers, some socks, your toilet bag—”

“How about my money?”

She reached into her bosom, drew out a little packet, carefully folded and tied with string, and handed it to Kadem, who immediately turned it over to me. “I don’t want any money but mine,” I said to my sister. “Not a penny more.”

She said, “There’s nothing in there but your savings, I promise you. I packed a cap for you, too,” she added, repressing a sob. “Because of the sun.”

“Very good. Now turn around so I can change.”

I put on a pair of pinstriped trousers, my checked shirt, and the shoes my cousin had given me. “You forgot my belt,” I said.

“It’s in the outside pocket of the bag,” Bahia said. “Along with your pocket light.”

“Very good.”

I finished getting dressed, and then, without a glance at my sister or my cousin, I grabbed my bag and started down the steep path in the direction of the main trail. Don’t turn around, an interior voice admonished me. You’re already gone. There’s nothing for you here. Don’t turn around. I turned around—and saw my sister, standing on the mound, looking ghostly in her windblown dress, and my cousin, with his hands on his hips and his chin against his chest. I retraced my steps. My sister pressed herself against me. Her tears wet my cheeks. I felt her frail body shudder in my embrace. “Please,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

Kadem opened his arms to me. We flung ourselves against each other. We hugged for what seemed like a very long time.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you to the next town?” he asked in a strangled voice.

“It’s not worth the trouble, cousin,” I said. “I know the way.”

I waved at them and hurried off toward the trail without turning around.

BAGHDAD

8

I walked to the crossroads about ten kilometers from the village. From time to time, I looked back in hopes of seeing a vehicle coming my way, but no cloud of dust rose from the trail. I was in the middle of the desert, alone and infinitesimally small. The sun rolled up its sleeves. The day would be a scorcher.

The junction featured a makeshift bus shelter. Formerly, the bus that served Kafr Karam used to stop at that shelter. Now the place seemed to have been abandoned. Pieces of torn metal dangled down over the bench from a hole in the corrugated-tin roof. I sat in the shade and waited two hours. There was no sign of movement anywhere on the horizon.

I continued on my way, heading for an access road normally used by the refrigerated trucks that furnished the isolated communities of the region with fruits and vegetables. Since the embargo, such vehicles made far fewer trips, but it sometimes happened that an itinerant grocer went down that road. It was a hell of a hike, and I was crushed by the ever-increasing heat.

I noticed two black spots on a small hill overlooking the access road. They turned out to be two young men in their early twenties. They were squatting in the sun, immobile and impenetrable. The younger-looking of the two gave me a sharp look; the other drew circles in the dust with a stick. They were both wearing grimy white sweatpants and wrinkled, dirty shirts. A large bag lay at their feet like some fresh-killed prey.

I sat on a little sand mound and pretended to busy myself with my shoelaces. Every time I raised my eyes to look at the two strangers, a peculiar feeling came over me. The younger of the two had a disagreeable way of bending over his companion to whisper into his ear. The other nodded and kept working his stick. Just once, he shot me a glance that made me uncomfortable. After about twenty minutes, the younger one got to his feet abruptly and started walking in my direction. His bloodshot eyes grazed me, and I felt his hot breath lash my face. He moved past me and went to urinate on a withered bush.

I made a show of consulting my watch and continued on my way at a quicker pace. A desire to turn around tormented me, but I resisted. After I got far enough away, I checked to see whether they were following me. They were back on their hillside, crouched over their sack like two carrion birds watching over a carcass.

A few kilometers farther on, a van caught up with me. I stood on the side of the trail and waved my arms. The van nearly knocked me down as it passed in a din of scrap metal and overworked valves. Glancing into the cabin, I recognized the two individuals of a little while ago. They were looking straight ahead.

By midday, I was exhausted. Sweat steamed off my clothes. I veered toward a tree—the only one for miles around—standing atop a rise in the ground. Its bare, thorny branches cast a skeletal shadow, which I quickly occupied.

Hunger and thirst accentuated my fatigue. I took off my shoes and lay down under the tree in such a way that I could keep the dirt road in sight. Hours passed before I made out a vehicle in the distance. It was still nothing but a grayish dot sliding through the glare, but I was able to identify it from the irregular flashes of reflected light it gave off. I immediately put my shoes back on and ran toward the trail. To my great disappointment, the dot changed direction and gradually slid out of sight.

According to my watch, it was four o’clock. The nearest village was about forty kilometers to the south. To reach it, I would have had to leave the dirt road, and I didn’t much like the idea of just wandering. I went back to the tree and waited.

The sun was going down when a new glinting dot appeared on the horizon. I considered it a good idea to be certain the dot was coming my way before leaving the shelter of my tree. And along came a rattling old truck whose fenders had been torn off. The truck came toward me. I hurried to intercept it, praying to my patron saints not to let me fall. The truck slowed down. I heard its brake shoes grind and scream.

The driver was a small, dehydrated fellow, with a face that looked like papier-mâché and two arms as thin as baguettes. He was transporting empty crates and used mattresses.

“I’m going to Baghdad,” I said, climbing up on the running board.

“That’s not exactly next door, my boy,” he said, looking me over. “Where do you come from?”

“Kafr Karam.”

“Ah, the asshole of the desert. I’m going to Basseel. Not the most direct route, but you can find a taxi there to take you to the city.”

“Suits me fine.”

The driver considered me suspiciously. “You mind if I take a look inside your bag?”

I handed it to him through the window. He set the bag on the dashboard and went through its contents carefully. “Okay,” he said. “Get in on the other side.”

I thanked him and walked around the front of the truck. He leaned over and opened the passenger door, whose exterior handle was missing. I settled into the seat, or, to be more precise, what was left of it.

The driver took off in a racket of shivering metal.

I said, “Would you have any water?”

“There’s a goatskin bag right behind you. If you’re hungry, look in the glove compartment. There’s some of my snack left.”

He let me eat and drink in peace. Then a troubled look came over his emaciated face, and he said, “Don’t be annoyed at me for going through your things. I’m just trying to avoid problems. There are so many armed men on the roads….”

I said nothing. We traveled several kilometers in silence.

“You’re not very talkative, are you?” the driver said. He’d probably been hoping for a little company.

“No.”

He shrugged and forgot about me.

After we reached a paved road, we passed some trucks going full speed in the opposite direction and a series of banged-up Toyota taxicabs loaded with passengers. Lost in thought, my driver drummed on the steering wheel with his fingertips. The wind rushing in through the open windows tangled the thick lock of white hair on his forehead.

At a checkpoint, soldiers ordered us off the road and onto a freshly bulldozed track. The new trail was fairly well laid out, but bumpy, and it included some turns so tight that it wasn’t possible to go faster than ten kilometers an hour. The truck bounded in and out of deep fissures, nearly snapping its suspension. Soon, however, we caught up with other vehicles that had been diverted by the soldiers at the checkpoint. A large, groaning van was parked on the edge of the trail with its hood up; its passengers—some women swathed in black and several children—had left the van to watch the driver grapple with the motor. No one stopped to lend them a hand.

“You think the highway’s too messed up to drive on?” I asked.

“We wouldn’t have a pleasant trip,” the truck driver replied. “First, they’d go over us and the truck with a fine-tooth comb, and then they’d let us bake in the sun and maybe even spend the night in the open. Obviously, there’s a military convoy on the way. To foil suicide bombers in cars and trucks, the soldiers divert every vehicle onto the desert trails, ambulances included.”

“So we’re going to make a big detour?”

“Not so big. We’ll get to Basseel before nightfall.”

“I’m hoping to find a taxi to take me to Baghdad.”

“A cab, at night? There’s a curfew, strictly enforced. As soon as the sun goes down, all Iraq must go to ground. I hope you’ve got your ID papers at least.”

“I do.”

He passed his arm over his mouth and said, “You’d better.”

We turned onto an old trail, wider and flatter than the one we’d been on, and accelerated, making up for lost time. Raising clouds of dust, the other vehicles were soon far ahead of us.

The driver gestured with his chin toward a military installation on a nearby hilltop. “I supplied this outfit with provisions,” he said. “Before.”

The barracks were open to the four winds, the ramparts collapsed. Looters had carried off the doors and windows from every building, including the huts. The main compound, which must have housed the unit’s headquarters and administration building, looked as though it had gone through a seismic episode. A jumble of blackened beams was all that was left of the roofs. The shattered facades bore the marks of missile strikes. An avalanche of papers had escaped from the offices and was piled up against the wire fence behind the sheds. The carcasses of various bombed-out military vehicles were sprawled in the parking area, and a water tower mounted on metal scaffolding, apparently blown off its base, lay on top of the charred watchtower it had crushed. On the front wall of one of the modern barracks, automatic-weapons fire had blasted away fragments of a portrait of Saddam Hussein, chubby-cheeked and smiling a carnivore’s smile.

“It seems our guys didn’t fire so much as a shot,” the driver said. “They ran like rabbits before the American troops arrived. The shame!”

I gazed at the desolation on the hilltop. Sand was insidiously invading everything. A scrawny brown dog came out of the sentry box in front of the main entrance to the barracks. The dog stretched, sniffing the ground on the way to a pile of rocks, and disappeared behind them.

Basseel was a small town wedged between two enormous rocks, polished by time and sandstorms. The town lay curled up in a basin, which in the summer heat recalled a Turkish bath. Its hovels of clay and straw clung desperately to several hillsides, the hills separated from one another by a labyrinth of winding alleyways barely wide enough for a cart. The main thoroughfare, an avenue cut into a riverbed—the river having disappeared long ago—traversed the town like the wind. The black flags on the roofs indicated that this was a Shiite community; the residents wished to distance themselves from the doings of the Sunnis and to line up on the side of those who were burning incense to the new regime.

Ever since the checkpoints started to proliferate on the national highway, slowing traffic and transforming quick trips into interminable expeditions, Basseel had become an obligatory overnight stopping place for frequent travelers. Bars and cheap eating places, their locations marked by strings of paper lanterns visible for kilometers at night, had grown up like mushrooms on the outskirts, while the town itself lay plunged in darkness below. Not a single streetlight illuminated the alleys.

About fifty vehicles, most of them tanker trucks, were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on a makeshift parking lot at the entrance to the town. One family was bivouacked a little apart, near their truck. Kids wrapped up in sheets were sleeping here and there. Off to one side, some truck drivers had built a fire and were sitting around a teapot, chatting; their swaying shadows merged in a kind of reptilian dance.

My benefactor managed to slip in among the haphazardly parked vehicles and stopped his truck near a little inn that looked like a bandits’ hideout. In front of it, there was a small courtyard with tables and chairs, all of them already occupied by a pack of dull-eyed travelers. Above the hubbub, a cassette player was spitting out an old song about the Nile.

The driver invited me to accompany him to a small restaurant located nearby but practically hidden by an arrangement of tarpaulins and worm-eaten palms. The room was filled with hairy, dusty people crowded around bare tables. Some were even sitting on the floor, apparently too hungry to wait for an available chair. This entire fraternity of shipwreck survivors sat hunched over their plates, their fingers dripping with sauce and their jawbones working away: peasants and truck drivers, worn out from a grueling day of checkpoints and dirt roads, trying to regain their strength in order to face whatever trials the morrow might bring. They all reminded me of my father, because they all carried on their faces the unmistakable mark of the defeated.

My benefactor left me standing in the doorway of the restaurant, stepped over a few diners, and approached the counter, where a fat fellow in a djellaba took orders, made change, and berated his workers, all at the same time. I looked over the room, hoping to see some acquaintance. I didn’t recognize anyone.

My driver came back, looking crestfallen. “Well,” he said, “I’m going to have to leave you now. My customer won’t be here until tomorrow evening. You’re going to have to manage without me.”