The Sirens of Baghdad (11 page)

I was asleep under a tree when the roar of engines woke me up. The sky wasn’t yet light, but already the truckers were nervously maneuvering their vehicles, eager to leave the parking area. The first convoy headed for the steep road that skirted the town. I ran from one vehicle to another, searching for a charitable driver. No one would take me.

As the parking area gradually emptied, a feeling of frustration and rage overcame me. When only three vehicles remained, my despair verged on panic. One of them was a family truck whose engine refused to start, and the other two were old crates with nobody in them. Their occupants were probably having breakfast in one of the neighboring joints. I awaited their return with a hollow stomach.

A man standing in the doorway of a little café called to me. “Hey! What’re you doing over there? Get away from my wheels right now, or I’ll tear your balls off.”

He gestured as though trying to shoo me away. He took me for a thief. I walked over to him with my bag slung across my back. As I drew nearer, he put his fists on his hips and gazed at me with disgust. He said, “Can’t a man drink his coffee in peace?”

A beanpole with a copper-colored face, he was wearing clean cotton trousers and a checked jacket over a sweater of bottle-green wool. A large watch was mounted on the gold bracelet that encircled his wrist. He had a face like a cop’s, with a brutish grin and a way of looking at you from on high.

“I’m going to Baghdad,” I told him.

“I couldn’t care less. Just stay away from my wheels, okay?”

He turned his back on me and sat at a table near the door.

I went back to the stony road that skirted the town and sat down under a tree.

The first car that passed me was so loaded down that I didn’t have the nerve to follow it with my eyes as it bounced off in a northerly direction.

The truck that wouldn’t start a little while ago almost brushed me as it went down the trail, clattering metallically. The sun came up, heavy and menacing, from behind a hill. Down below, closer to town, people were emerging from their burrows.

A car appeared, some way off. I got up and stretched out my arm, prominently displaying my thumb. The car passed me and kept going for a few hundred meters; then, just as I was preparing to sit back down, it rolled to a stop. I couldn’t figure out whether the driver was stopping for me or having a mechanical problem. He honked his horn and then stuck his hand out the window, motioning to me. I picked up my bag and started running.

The driver was the man from the café, the one who had taken me for a thief.

As I approached the car, he said without prologue, “For fifty dinars, I’ll take you to Al Hillah.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, glad to get out of Basseel.

“I’d like to know what you’ve got in your bag.”

“Just clothes, sir,” I said, emptying the bag onto his hood.

The man watched me, his face masked in a stiff grin. I lifted my shirt to show him I wasn’t hiding anything under my belt. He nodded and invited me to get in with a movement of his chin. “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

“From Kafr Karam.”

“Never heard of it. Pass me my cigarettes, will you? They’re in the glove compartment.”

He flicked his lighter and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. After looking me over again, he pulled away.

We drove along for half an hour, during which he was lost in thought. Then he remembered me. “Why are you so quiet?” he asked.

“It’s in my nature.”

He lit another cigarette and tried again. “These days, the ones who talk the least are the ones who do the most. Are you going to Baghdad to join the resistance?”

“I’m going to visit my sister. Why do you ask me that?”

He pivoted the rearview mirror in my direction. “Take a look at yourself, my boy. You look like a bomb that’s about to go off.”

I looked in the mirror and saw two burning eyes in a tormented face. “I’m going to see my sister,” I said.

He mechanically returned the rearview mirror to the proper angle and shrugged his shoulders. Then he proceeded to ignore me.

After an hour of dust and potholes, we reached the national highway. My vertebrae had taken quite a pounding, and I was relieved to be on a paved road. Buses and semi-trailers were chasing one another at top speed. Three police cars passed us; their occupants seemed relaxed. We went through an overpopulated village whose sidewalks were jammed with shops, stalls, and people. A uniformed policeman was maintaining order, his helmet pushed back on his head, his shirt soaked with sweat in the back and under the arms. When we got to the center of the village, our progress was slowed by a large gathering, a crowd besieging a traveling souk. Housewives dressed in black scavenged among the stalls; bold though they were, their baskets were often empty. The odor of rotten vegetables, together with the blazing heat and the swarms of flies buzzing around the piles of produce, made me dizzy. We witnessed a serious crush around a bus halted at a bus stop on the far side of the square; although the conductor was frantically dealing out blows with a belt, he was unable to hold back the surge of would-be passengers.

“Just look at those animals,” my driver said, sighing. I didn’t share his attitude, but I made no comment.

About fifty kilometers farther on, the highway widened from two lanes to three, and after that, the traffic rapidly grew thicker. For long stretches, we crept along bumper-to-bumper because of the checkpoints. By noon, we weren’t yet halfway to our destination. From time to time, we came upon the charred remains of a trailer, pushed to the shoulder of the highway to keep it clear, or passed immense black stains, all marking places where a vehicle had been surprised by an explosion or a barrage of small-arms fire. Shards of broken glass, burst tires, and metal fragments lined the highway on both sides. Around a curve, we passed what was left of an American Humvee, lying on its side in a ditch, probably blown there by a rocket. The spot was made for ambushes.

The driver suggested that we stop and get something to eat. He chose a service station. After filling his tank, he invited me to join him at a sort of kiosk that had been turned into a refreshment stand. An attendant served us two passably cold sodas and some skewers of dubious meat in a gut-wrenching sandwich dripping with thick tomato sauce. When I tried to pay my share, the driver refused with a wave of his hand. We relaxed for about twenty minutes before getting back on the road.

The driver had put on sunglasses, and he was steering his car as though he were alone in the world. I had settled into my seat and soon let myself drift away, lulled by the rumble of the engine….

When I woke up, traffic was at a standstill. There seemed to be a terrible mess up ahead, and the sun was white-hot. People had left their vehicles and were standing on the roadway, grumbling loudly.

“What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is, we’re screwed.”

A low-flying helicopter passed overhead and then suddenly veered away, making a terrifying racket. It flew to a distant hill, turned, and hovered. All at once, it fired a pair of rockets; they whistled shrilly as they sped through the air. We saw two masses of flames and dust rise over a ridge. A sudden shiver ran along the highway, and people hurried back to their vehicles. Some nervous drivers made U-turns and sped away, thus provoking a chain reaction that reduced the traffic jam by half in less than ten minutes.

His eyes glinting with amusement at the panic that seized our fellow travelers, my driver took advantage of their defection and rolled forward several hundred meters. “Not to worry,” he reassured me. “That copter’s just flushing out game. The pilot’s putting on a show. If it was serious, there’d be at least two Cobras up there covering each other. After eight months as a ‘sand nigger’ for the Americans, I know all their tricks.”

All of a sudden, the driver seemed engaged. “I was an interpreter with the American troops,” he went on. “‘Sand niggers’—that’s the name they give their Iraqi collaborators…. In any case, there’s no way I’m turning around. Al Hillah’s only a hundred kilometers away, and I don’t feel like spending another night out in the open. If you’re afraid, you can get out.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Traffic returned to normal about an hour later. When we reached the checkpoint, we started to understand a little about what had produced the terrible mess. Two bullet-riddled bodies lay on an embankment, each of them clothed in bloodstained white sweatpants and a filthy shirt. They were the two men I’d seen near Kafr Karam the previous day, crouching on a mound with a big bag at their feet.

“Another little blunder,” my driver grumbled. “The American
boys
”—he said the word
boys
in English—“they shoot first and verify later. That was one of the reasons why I quit them.”

My eyes were riveted on the rearview mirror; I couldn’t stop looking at the two corpses.

“Eight months, man,” the driver continued. “Eight months putting up with their arrogance and their idiotic sarcasm. Real American GIs have nothing to do with the Hollywood marketing version. That’s just loud demagoguery. The truth is, they don’t have any more scruples than a pack of hyenas let loose in a sheep barn. I’ve seen them fire on children and old people as though they were cardboard training targets.”

“I’ve seen that, too.”

“I don’t think so, kid. If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much. Me, I’ve gone off the deep end. I have nightmares every night. I was an interpreter with a regular army battalion—angels compared to the Marines—but it was still pretty hard to take. Plus, they got their kicks making fun of me and treating me like shit. As far as they were concerned, I was just a traitor to my country. It took me eight months to realize that. Then, one evening, I went to the captain and told him I was going home. He asked me if something was wrong. ‘Everything,’ I said. In fact, the main thing was that I didn’t want to have anything more to do with those bleating, dim-witted cowboys. Even if I’m on the losing side, I’m worth more than that.”

Some policemen and soldiers made vigorous gestures in our direction, urging us to get a move on. They weren’t checking anyone; they were too busy trying to free up the congestion on the highway. My driver stepped on the gas. “They think all Arabs are retarded,” he muttered. “Imagine: Arabs, the most fabulous creatures on earth. We taught the world table manners; we taught the world hygiene and cooking and mathematics and medicine. And what do these degenerates of modernity remember of all that? A camel caravan crossing the dunes at sunset? Some fat guy in a white robe and a keffiyeh flashing his millions in a gambling casino on the Côte d’Azur? Clichés, caricatures…”

Upset by his own words, he lit a cigarette and ignored me until we reached Al Hillah. He was plainly eager to get rid of me; he drove directly to the bus station, stopped the car, and held out his hand. “Good luck, kid,” he said.

I took my packet of money—still tied with string—out of my back pocket so I could pay him. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I owe you fifty dinars,” I said.

He rejected my money with the same backhand gesture he’d made at the service station a few hours ago. “Keep your little nest egg intact, my boy,” he said. “And forget what I told you. Ever since I went off the deep end, I talk nonsense. You never saw me, all right?”

“All right.”

“Good. Now fuck off.”

He helped me get my bag, made a U-turn, and left the bus station without so much as a wave.

9

The bus, a backfiring old relic stinking of burned oil and overheated rubber, seemed to be on its last legs. It didn’t roll so much as crawl along, like a wounded animal on the point of giving up the ghost. Every time it slowed down, I felt a tightness in my chest. The sun was blazing hot, our progress had been interrupted three times (two blowouts and one breakdown), and the spare tires, as smooth and worn as the two flats, didn’t look very encouraging.

When the driver, who was clearly exhausted, stowed his jack the second time, he reeled a little. One of his hands was bandaged—the result of a recalcitrant tire—and he seemed generally to be in a bad way. I didn’t take my eyes off him; I was afraid he might pass out on the steering wheel. From time to time, he put a bottle of water to his lips and drank at length, without paying any attention to the road; then he went back to wiping his face on a towel he kept hanging from a hook on the back of his seat. Although probably around fifty, he looked ten years older, with sunken eyes and an egg-shaped skull, hairy at the temples and bald on the crown. He insulted his fellow motorists continually.

Silence reigned inside the bus. The air-conditioning didn’t work, and the heat inside was deadly, even though all the windows were open. Sunk in their seats, the passengers were mostly dozing, except for a few who gazed absently at the fleeting landscape. Three rows behind me, a young man with a furrowed brow insisted on fiddling with his pocket radio, spinning the dial from one station to another and filling the air with static. Whenever he found a song, he’d listen to it for a minute and then start looking for another station. He was seriously getting on my nerves, and I couldn’t wait to get out of that coffin on wheels.

We’d been rolling along for three hours without interruption. Fixing the two blowouts and patching the burst radiator hose had put the driver well behind schedule, and we’d had to cancel the planned stop for a snack at a roadside inn.

The previous day, after my benefactor dropped me off at the station, I’d missed the Baghdad bus by a few minutes and had to wait for the next one, which was supposed to leave four hours later. It arrived on time, but there were only about twenty passengers. The driver explained that his bus wouldn’t leave without at least forty passengers on board; otherwise, he couldn’t cover his expenses for the trip. So we all waited, praying for other passengers to show up. The driver circled the bus, shouting “Baghdad! Baghdad!” Sometimes, he approached people loaded down with baggage and asked them if they were going to Baghdad. When they shook their heads, he moved on to the next group of travelers. Very late in the afternoon, the driver came back to the bus and asked us to get off and retrieve our luggage from the baggage hatch. There were a few protests, and then everyone gathered on the sidewalk and watched the bus return to the depot. Those who were local residents went home; the rest of us spent the night in the bus station. And what a night! Some thieves tried to rob a sleeping man, but their victim turned out to be armed with a cudgel, and they couldn’t get near him. They retreated for a while but then returned with reinforcements, and since the police were nowhere to be seen, the rest of us witnessed a disgraceful thrashing. We remained apart from the scene, barricaded behind our suitcases and our bags, none of us daring to go to the victim’s aid. The poor fellow defended himself valiantly. For a while, he gave as good as he got, blow for blow. In the end, however, the thieves knocked him to the ground and assailed him with a vengeance. Then they relieved him of his belongings and left, taking him with them. By then it was about three o’clock in the morning, and nobody slept a wink after that.

Another military roadblock. A long line of vehicles advanced slowly, gradually squeezing closer to the right side of the road. There were road signs in the middle of the highway, along with large rocks marking the boundaries of the two lanes. The soldiers were Iraqis. They were checking everyone who went through, inspecting automobile trunks and bus hatches and baggage; men whose looks the soldiers didn’t like were gone over with a fine-tooth comb. They came into our bus, asked for our papers, and compared certain faces to the photographs of the people they were looking for.

“You two, off the bus,” a corporal ordered. Two young men stood up and walked down the aisle with an air of resignation. Outside, a soldier searched them and then told them to get their things and follow him to a tent pitched on the sand about twenty meters away.

“All right,” the corporal said to our driver. “You can shove off.”

The bus coughed and sputtered. We watched our two fellow passengers, who were standing before the tent. They didn’t look worried. The corporal hustled them inside, and they disappeared from our sight.

Finally, the buildings on the outskirts of Baghdad appeared, wrapped in an ocher veil. A sandstorm had blown through, and the air was laden with dust. It’s better this way, I thought. I wasn’t eager to see what the city had become—disfigured, filthy, at the mercy of its demons. In the past, I’d really loved Baghdad. The past? It seemed like a former life. Baghdad was a beautiful city then, with its great thoroughfares and its posh boulevards, bright with gleaming shop windows and sunny terraces. For a peasant like me, it was truly the Elysian fields, at least the way I imagined them from deep in the boondocks of Kafr Karam. I was fascinated by the neon signs and the store decorations, and I passed a good part of my nights ambling along the avenues in the refreshing evening breeze. Watching so many people strolling down the street, so many gorgeous girls swaying their hips as they walked on the esplanades, I had the feeling that all the journeys my condition prevented me from taking were there within my reach. I had no money, but I had eyes to gaze until I got dizzy and a nose to inhale the heady scents of the most fabulous city in the Middle East, set astride the beneficent Tigris, which carried along in its meanders the enchantment of Baghdad’s legends and love songs. It’s true that the shadow of the Rais dimmed the lights of the city, but that shadow didn’t reach me. I was a young, dazzled student with marvelous prospects in my head. Every beauty that Baghdad suggested to me became mine; how could I surrender to the charms of the city of houris and not identify with it a little? And even then, Kadem told me, I should have seen it before the embargo….

Baghdad might have survived the United Nations embargo just to flout the West and its influence peddling, but the city assuredly wouldn’t survive the affronts its own misbegotten children were inflicting on it.

And there I was, come to Baghdad in my turn to spread my venom there. I didn’t know how to go about it, but I was certain I’d strike some nasty blow. It was the way things had always been with us. For Bedouin, no matter how impoverished they may be, honor is no joking matter. An offense must be washed away in blood, which is the sole authorized detergent when it’s a question of keeping one’s self-respect. I was the only boy in my family. Since my father was an invalid, the supreme task of avenging the outrage he’d suffered fell to me, even at the cost of my life. Dignity can’t be negotiated. Should we lose it, all the shrouds in the world won’t suffice to veil our faces, and no tomb will receive our carcasses without cracking.

Prodded on by some evil spell, I, too, was going to rage: I was going to defile the walls I’d caressed, spit on the shop windows I’d groomed myself in, and unload my quota of corpses into the sacred Tigris, the anthropophagous river, once greedy for the splendid virgins who were sacrificed to the gods, and today full of undesirables whose decomposing remains polluted its virtuous waters….

The bus crossed a bridge and traveled alongside the river. I didn’t want to look at the public squares, which I imagined devastated, or at the sidewalks, teeming with people I already no longer loved. How could I love anything after what I’d seen in Kafr Karam? How could I appreciate perfect strangers after I’d fallen in my own self-esteem? Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn’t really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition! I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I’d awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life.

I wasn’t returning to Baghdad to relive happy memories, but to banish them forever. The blooming innocence of first love was over; the city and I no longer had anything to say to each other. And yet we were very much alike; we’d lost our souls, and we were ready to destroy others.

The bus stopped at the station square, which had been occupied by a horde of ragged urchins with crafty faces and wandering hands: feral, garbage-eating street kids whom the bankrupt orphanages and reform schools had dumped onto the city. They were a recent phenomenon, one whose existence I hadn’t even suspected. The first passengers had hardly stepped out of the bus when someone cried out, “Stop, thief!” A group of kids had gathered around the hatches and helped themselves amid the crowd. Before anyone realized what had happened, the band was already across the street and moving fast, their booty on their shoulders.

I pinned my bag tightly under my arm and got away from there in a hurry.

The Thawba clinic was several blocks from the bus station. I decided to walk there, as I was stiff from sitting so long. There were a few cars scattered across the clinic’s parking lot, a little square surrounded by bashed-up palm trees. Times had changed, and so had the clinic; it was merely the shadow of its former self, with scary-looking windows and a tarnished facade.

I walked up the outside staircase and came to a security officer, who was cleaning his teeth with a match. “I’m here to see Dr. Farah,” I said.

“Let me see your appointment slip.”

“I’m her brother.”

He asked me to wait on the landing, entered a small, windowed office, and spoke to the clerk, who shot a suspicious look in my direction before picking up the telephone. After two minutes or so, I saw him nod his head and make a sign to the officer, who came back and escorted me to a waiting room furnished with exhausted sofas.

Farah came in about ten minutes later, radiant in her long white apron, her stethoscope dangling on her chest. She was carefully made up, but she’d put on a little too much lipstick. She welcomed me without enthusiasm, as if we saw each other every day. Her work, which allowed her no rest, had probably worn her out, and she’d obviously lost weight. Her kisses were fleeting and accompanied by a lifeless embrace.

“When did you get here?” she asked.

“Here in Baghdad? Just a few minutes ago.”

“Bahia phoned me to announce your visit the day before yesterday.”

“We lost a lot of time on the road. With all those military roadblocks and the obligatory detours—”

“Did you have to come?” she asked, a hint of reproach in her voice.

I didn’t understand right away, but her unwavering stare helped me to see the light. She wasn’t acting like that because she was exhausted or because of her work; my sister was simply not overjoyed to see me.

“Have you had lunch?”

“No.”

“I’ve got three patients to attend to. I’m going to take you to a room. Then, first thing, you’re going to have a nice shower, because you smell really strong. After that, a nurse will bring you something to eat. If I’m not back by the time you’re finished, just lie down on the bed and rest until I come.”

I picked up my bag and followed her along a corridor and then upstairs to the next floor. She let me into a room furnished with a bed and a night table. There was a little television set on a wall bracket and, behind a plastic curtain, a shower.

“Soap, shampoo, and towels are in the closet,” Farah said. “The water’s rationed—don’t use more than you need.” She looked at her watch. “I have to hurry.”

And she left the room.

I stood where I was for a good while, staring at the spot where my sister had vanished and wondering if, somehow, I had made a bad choice. Of course, Farah had always been distant. She was a rebel and a fighter, the only girl from Kafr Karam who’d ever dared to violate the rules of the tribe and do exactly what she wanted to do. Her audacity and insolence obviously conditioned her temperament, making her more aggressive and less conciliatory, but the welcome I’d received disturbed me. Our last meeting had been more than a year ago, when she visited the family in Kafr Karam. Even though she didn’t stay as long as she’d said she would, there wasn’t a moment when she seemed disdainful of us. True, she rarely laughed, but nothing had suggested she’d receive her own brother with such indifference.

I took off my clothes, stood under the shower, and soaped myself from head to foot. When I stepped out, I felt as though I had a new skin. I put on some clean clothes and stretched out on the sponge mattress, which was covered with an oilcloth spread. A nurse brought me a tray of food. I devoured it like an animal and fell asleep immediately afterward.