The Sirens of Baghdad (13 page)

For two weeks, I wandered around in rubble, without a penny and without a goal. I slept anywhere and ate anything and flinched at every explosion. It was like being at the front, with the endless rolls of barbed wire marking off high-security areas, the makeshift barricades, the antitank obstacles against which suicide bombers occasionally detonated their cars, the watchtowers rising above the facades of buildings, the caltrop barriers lying across roadways, and the sleepwalking people who had no idea where to turn but nevertheless, whenever an attack was carried out, rushed to the scene of the tragedy like flies to a drop of blood.

Baghdad was decomposing. After spending a long, tortured time docked in repression, the city had broken from its moorings and gone adrift, fascinated by its own suicidal rage and the intoxications of impunity. Once the tyrant had fallen, Baghdad found much that was still intact: its forced silences, its vengeful cowardice, its large-scale misery. Now that all proscriptions were removed, the city drained the cup of resentment, the source of its wounds, to the dregs. Exhilarated by its suffering and the revulsion it aroused, Baghdad was trying to become the incarnation of all that it couldn’t bear and rejecting its former public image. And from the grossest despair, it drew the ingredients of its own agony.

Baghdad was a city that preferred exploding belts and banners cut from shrouds.

I was exhausted, demoralized, appalled, and nauseated, all at once. Every day, my contempt and my rage rose another notch. One morning, I looked in a shop window and didn’t recognize myself. My hair was bushy, my face wrinkled, my eyes white-hot and hideous, my lips chapped; my clothes left a lot to be desired; I had become a bum.

Now I was sitting on the sidewalk across from the checkpoint. I don’t know how many hours I’d spent in that position when a voice barked, “You can’t stay there.”

The speaker was a cop. It was a few moments before I realized he was addressing me. With a scornful wave, he signaled to me to clear off. “Let’s go, let’s go, move on.” I got to my feet, a little dazed by my nagging hunger. When I reached out a hand for support, I found only empty air. I drew myself up and staggered away.

I walked and walked. It was as though I were marching through a parallel world. The boulevards opened up before me like giant maws. I went reeling along amid the crowd with blurry eyes and shooting pains in my calves. Now and then, an exasperated arm pushed me away. I straightened up and continued on aimlessly.

A crowd gathered around a vehicle burning on a bridge. I passed through the throng easily.

The river lapped at its banks, deaf to the clamor of the damned. A gust of sand-laden wind stung my face. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.

“Hey!”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have the strength to turn around; one false move, and I’d collapse. It seemed to me that the only way to stay on my feet was to walk, to look straight ahead, and, especially, to avoid all distractions.

A horn sounded—once, twice, three times. After an interval, running footsteps came up behind me, and then a hand grabbed my shoulder.

“Are you deaf, or what?”

A pudgy form straddled my path. My clouded vision prevented me from recognizing the interloper right away. He spread out his arms, inadvertently displaying his oversized belly. “It’s me,” he said.

It was as if an oasis had emerged out of my delirium. I don’t think I’ve ever known such a sensation of relief or felt so happy. The smiling man before me brought me back to life, revived me, became at once my only recourse and my last chance. It was Omar the Corporal.

“You’re amazed, aren’t you?” he exclaimed with delight, turning in a circle in front of me. “Check this outfit. A real knockout, right?”

He smoothed the lapels of his sport jacket and fingered the crease in his trousers. “Not a drop of grease, not a wrinkle. Your cousin is impeccable. Like a brand-new penny. You remember, in Kafr Karam? I always had oil or grease stains on my clothes. Well, since I’ve been in Baghdad, that doesn’t happen anymore.”

All of a sudden, his enthusiasm subsided. He’d just realized that I wasn’t well, that I was having trouble staying upright, that I was on the point of fainting.

“My God! Where have you been?”

I stared at him and said, “I’m hungry.”

11

Omar took me to a cheap eating place. All the while I ate, he said not a single word. He saw that I wasn’t in a position to understand anything at all. I bent over my plate, looking only at the wilted fries, which I devoured by the fistful, and the bread, which I tore apart ferociously. It seemed to me that I wasn’t even taking the trouble to chew the food. The giant mouthfuls flayed my throat, my fingers were sticky, and my chin was covered with sauce. Other customers seated nearby gawked at me in horror. Omar had to frown to make them turn their eyes away.

When I’d finished stuffing myself, he took me to a shop to buy me some clothes. Then he dropped me off at the public baths. I took a shower and felt a little better.

Afterward, with a hint of embarrassment, Omar said, “I assume you have nowhere to go.”

“No, I don’t.”

He scratched his chin.

Overly sensitive, I said, “You’re under no obligation.”

“It’s not that, cousin. You’re in good hands—it’s just that they’re not completely free. I share a little studio flat with an associate.”

“That’s all right. I’ll manage.”

“I’m not trying to get rid of you. I just need to think. There’s no chance I’m going to abandon you. Baghdad wastes no pity on strays.”

“I don’t want to bother you. You’ve done enough for me already.”

With an upraised hand, he asked me to let him give the matter some thought. We were in the street; I was standing on the sidewalk, and he was leaning against his van, his arms crossed and his chin resting on an index finger, his great belly like a barrier between us.

“That’s the way it’ll have to be,” he said abruptly. “I’ll tell my roommate to beat it until we find you something. He’s a nice guy. He’s got family in Baghdad.”

“You’re sure I’m not causing you trouble?”

He straightened up with a thrust of his hips and opened the passenger door for me. “Get in, cousin,” he said. “Things are going to be tight.”

As I hesitated, he grabbed me by the shoulder and shoved me into the van.

Omar lived in Salman Pak, an outlying neighborhood in the southeastern part of the city. His flat was on the second floor of a flaking apartment building that stood on a side street overrun by packs of children. The outside steps were falling into ruin, and the doors were halfway off their hinges. In the stairwell, miasmal odors lingered, and the mailboxes hung askew; there were empty spaces where some of them had been wrenched away completely. The cracked stairs mounted into an unhealthy, pitch-black darkness.

“There’s no light,” Omar explained. “Because of thieves. You replace a bulb, and the next minute they rip it off.”

Two little girls, quite young, were playing on the landing. Their faces were revoltingly dirty.

“Their mother’s a head case,” Omar whispered. “She leaves them there all day long and doesn’t care what they do. Sometimes, pedestrians have to bring them in from the street. And the mother doesn’t like it at all when someone advises her to keep an eye on her kids…. The world’s full of lunatics.”

He opened the door and stepped aside to let me enter. The room was small and meagerly furnished. There was a double mattress on the floor, a wooden crate with a little television set on it, and a stool against the wall. A padlocked closet faced the window, which overlooked the courtyard. That was it. A jail would offer its prisoners more amenities than Omar’s studio apartment offered his guests.

“Behold my realm,” the Corporal exclaimed, gesturing theatrically. “In the closet, you’ll find blankets, some cans of food, and some crackers. I don’t have a kitchen, and when I want to shit, I have to suck in my gut to get to the toilet.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the tiny bathroom. “The water’s rationed. It comes once a week, and not much at that. If you’re not here or you forget, you have to wait for the next distribution. Grumbling does no good. In the first place, it’s boring, and in the second, it only increases your thirst. I have two jerricans in the bathroom. For washing your face, because the water isn’t drinkable.”

He opened the padlock, took off the little chain, and showed me the contents of the closet. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ve got to run if I don’t want to get fired. I’ll be back in three hours, four at most. I’ll bring some food and we’ll talk about the good old days. Maybe we can conjure them up again.”

Before he left, he advised me to double-lock the door and to sleep with one eye open.

When Omar returned, the sun was going down. He sat on the stool and looked at me as I lay on the mattress, stretching. “You’ve been asleep for twenty-four hours,” he announced.

“You’re kidding!”

“It’s true, I assure you. I tried to wake you up this morning, but you didn’t budge. When I came back around noon, you were still in a deep sleep. You even slept through our local explosion.”

“There was an attack?”

“We’re in Baghdad, cousin. When it’s not a bomb going off, it’s a gas cylinder blowing up. This time, it was an accident. Some people got killed, but I didn’t look at the figures. I’ll bring myself up-to-date next time.”

I wasn’t feeling great, but I was happy to know I had a roof over my head and Omar at my side. My intensive two-week Introduction to Vagrancy course had done me in. I wouldn’t have been able to hold out much longer.

“Will you tell me why you’ve come to Baghdad?” Omar asked, scrutinizing his fingernails.

“To avenge an offense,” I said without hesitation.

He raised his eyes and gave me a sad look. “These days, people come to Baghdad to avenge an offense they’ve suffered elsewhere, which means they tend to mistake their targets—by a lot. What happened in Kafr Karam?”

“The Americans.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

He nodded. “I understand,” he said, getting off his stool. “Let’s go for a little walk. Afterward, we’ll have a bite in a restaurant. It’s better to chat on a full stomach.”

We walked the length and breadth of the neighborhood, talking about trifles, leaving the main subject until later. Omar was concerned. A nasty wrinkle creased his forehead. He shuffled along with his chin on his clavicle and his hands behind his back, as though a burden were wearing him down. And he wouldn’t stop kicking whatever tin cans he found along the way. Night fell softly on the city and its delirium. From time to time, police cars passed us, their sirens wailing, and then the ordinary racket of a densely populated quarter returned, a din so banal as to be almost imperceptible.

We ate in a little restaurant on the square. Omar knew the owner. He had only two other customers; one of them, with his wire-rimmed glasses and his sober suit, looked like a young leading man, and the other, a dust-covered driver, never took his eye off his truck, which was parked in front of the restaurant, within reach of a pack of kids.

“How long have you been in Baghdad?” Omar asked.

“About two and a half weeks, more or less.”

“Where did you sleep?”

“In squares, on the banks of the Tigris, in mosques. It depended. Generally, I lay down wherever I was when my legs gave way.”

“For pity’s sake! How did you wind up in such a fix? You should have seen your mug yesterday. I recognized you from a distance, but when I got closer, I had my doubts. You looked as though some fat whore had pissed on you while you were eating her out.”

There he was in all his glory, the Corporal of Kafr Karam. Oddly enough, his obscenity didn’t repulse me as much as usual. I said, “I came with the idea of staying with my sister, at least for a while, but it wasn’t possible. I had a little money with me, enough to make it for a month at most. By then, I thought, I’ll have found some kind of place. But the first night, I slept in a mosque, and in the morning, my money and my belongings were gone. After that, I’ll let you guess.” Then, trying to change the subject, I asked, “How did your roommate take the news?”

“He’s a good guy. He knows what’s what.”

“I promise not to take advantage of your hospitality.”

“Don’t talk shit, cousin. You’re not causing me any hardship. If I were in your situation, you’d do the same thing for me. We’re Bedouin. We don’t have anything to do with these people here….”

He put his joined hands over his mouth and stared at me with great intensity. “Now will you explain to me why you want revenge? And what exactly do you intend to do?”

“I have no idea.”

He swelled his cheeks and let out an irrepressible sigh. His right hand moved over the table, picked up a spoon, and started stirring the cold soup still left in his bowl. Omar guessed what I had in mind. There were legions of peasants streaming in from the hinterlands to swell the ranks of the fedayeen. Every morning, buses discharged contingents of them at the Baghdad stations. Various motivations activated these men, but they all shared a single, blindingly obvious objective.

“I’m in no position to oppose your choice, cousin. No one owns the truth. Personally, I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong, and so I can’t lecture you about anything. You’ve suffered an offense; only you can decide what’s to be done about it.”

His voice was full of false notes.

“It’s a question of honor, Omar,” I reminded him.

“I don’t want to quibble over that. But you have to know exactly what you’re getting into. You see what the resistance does every day. It’s killed thousands of Iraqis. In exchange for how many Americans? If the answer to that question doesn’t matter to you, then that’s your problem. But as for me, I disagree.”

He ordered two coffees to gain time and gather his arguments; then he went on. “To tell you the truth, I came to Baghdad to do some damage. I’ve never been able to get over the way Yaseen insulted me in the café. He disrespected me, and ever since, when I think about it—which is to say several times a day—I start gasping for air. You’d think Yaseen made me asthmatic.”

Evoking the shaming incident in Kafr Karam made Omar ill at ease. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. “One thing I’m sure of: My ass is going to have that offense stuck to it until the insult is washed away in blood,” he declared. “There’s no doubt about it—sooner or later, Yaseen will pay for it with his life.”

The waiter placed two cups of coffee next to our plates. Omar waited to watch him withdraw before reapplying the handkerchief to his face and neck. His plump shoulders vibrated. He said, “I’m ashamed of what happened in the Safir. Staying drunk did no good, none at all. I decided I had to get lost. I was all psyched up. I wanted to turn the country into an inferno from one end to the other. Everything I put in my mouth tasted like blood; every breath I took stank of cremation. My hands were itching for a gun—I swear, I could feel the trigger move when I curled my finger. While the bus was taking me to Baghdad, I imagined myself digging trenches in the desert, making shelters and command posts. I was thinking like a military engineer—you see what I mean? And I happened to arrive in Baghdad the day a false alert caused an enormous crush on a bridge—you remember—and a thousand demonstrators got killed. When I saw that, cousin, when I saw all those bodies on the ground, when I saw those mountains of shoes at the site where the panic took place, those kids with blue faces and their eyes half-closed—when I saw that whole mess, caused to Iraqis by Iraqis, I said to myself, right away, This is not my war. It was a clean break, cousin.”