The Sirens of Baghdad (3 page)

For many people, our village was nothing but a hamlet sprawled beside the road like roadkill—by the time they caught a glimpse of it, it had already disappeared—but we were proud of it. We’d always been wary of strangers. As long as they made wide detours to avoid us, we were safe, and if sandstorms occasionally obliged them to take refuge in Kafr Karam, we received them in accordance with the recommendations of the Prophet, but we never tried to hold them back when they started packing their bags. We had too many bad memories.

Most of the inhabitants of Kafr Karam were related by blood. The rest had lived there for several generations. Of course, we had our little idiosyncrasies, but our quarrels never degenerated into anything worse. Whenever trouble loomed, our village elders would intervene and calm everyone down. If the injured parties deemed an affront irreversible, they stopped speaking to one another, and the matter was closed. Aside from that sort of thing, we liked meeting in the square or the mosque, shuffling along our dusty streets, or basking in the sun beside our mud-plaster walls, which were disfigured here and there by an expanse of chipped, bare cinder blocks. It wasn’t paradise, but—since penury resides in the mind, not the heart—we were able to laugh aloud at every jest and to draw from one another’s eyes whatever we needed to cope with the nuisances of life.

Of all my cousins, Kadem was my best friend. In the morning, when I left my house, I always headed in his direction. I invariably found him behind a low wall on the corner of the butcher’s street, his behind glued to a large rock and his chin in his hand; he and the rock were one. He was the most disgusted creature I knew. As soon as he saw me coming, he’d pull out a packet of cigarettes and hold it out to me. He knew I didn’t smoke, but he couldn’t help making the same welcoming gesture every time. At length, just to be polite, I accepted his offer and put a cigarette in my mouth. He presented his lighter immediately and then indulged in a little silent laughter when the first puffs made me cough. After that, he went back into his shell, his eyes staring into space, his features impenetrable. Everything, from evenings spent in the company of friends to wakes, made him tired. Discussions with him tended to veer off in unexpected directions, sometimes ending in absurd rages whose secret he alone knew.

“I have to buy myself a new pair of shoes.”

He shot a quick glance at my footwear and went back to studying the horizon.

I tried to find some common ground, some topic we might develop; he wasn’t having any.

Kadem was a virtuoso lutenist. He made a living by playing at weddings. At one point, he had an idea of organizing an orchestra, but fate shattered his prospects. His first wife, a girl from our village, died in the hospital from a banal case of pneumonia. At the time, the UN “oil for food” program was foundering, and there was a shortage of basic medications, even on the black market. Kadem suffered a great deal from the premature loss of his young spouse. In the hope of assuaging his grief, Kadem’s father forced him to take a second wife. Eighteen months after the wedding, a virulent attack of meningitis made him a widower once again. As a result, Kadem lost his faith.

I was one of the few persons who could approach him without immediately making him uncomfortable.

I crouched down beside him.

In front of us stood the Party’s community antenna, inaugurated amid fanfare thirty years previously and fallen into disrepair for lack of ideological conviction. Now the building was sealed, and behind it, two convalescing palm trees tried to look their best. They had been there, it seemed to me, since the beginning of time, their silhouettes twisted, practically grotesque, and their branches dangling and withered. Except for dogs who stopped beside them, lifting their legs, and a few birds of passage looking for a vacant perch, no one paid any attention to those palms. They intrigued me when I was a little boy. I never understood why they didn’t sneak away under cover of darkness and disappear forever. An itinerant charlatan told a story about them; he said the two trees were actually the product of an immemorial collective hallucination that the mirage forgot to carry off when it faded away.

“Did you hear the radio this morning? It looks like the Italians are packing it in.”

“Fat lot of good that’ll do us,” he growled.

“In my opinion—”

“Weren’t you on your way to buy a pair of shoes?”

I raised my arms to the level of my chest in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right. I need to stretch my legs.”

He finally deigned to turn toward me. “Don’t take it like that. These news stories give me a headache.”

“I understand.”

“You shouldn’t hold it against me. I spend my days boring myself to death and my nights losing my mind.”

I got up. Just when I reached the end of the wall, he said, “I think I have a pair of shoes at home. Pass by the house in a little while. If they fit you, they’re yours.”

“All right. See you later.”

He was already ignoring me.

2

In a square transformed into a soccer pitch, a bunch of boys shrieked as they kicked a well-worn ball. Their attacks were chaotic, their fouls breathtaking. They looked like a flock of sparrows fighting over a kernel of corn. All at once, a little runt managed to extract himself from the melee and took off like a grown man in the direction of his opponents’ goal. He dribbled around one adversary, blew past another, swerved toward the sideline, and sent a no-look pass to a teammate behind him, who charged the goal at full speed and fired a lamentably wide shot before falling on the sharp gravel and cutting his behind. Without warning, an abnormally tall boy who’d been quietly squatting against a wall sprang to his feet, ran for the ball, picked it up, and sprinted away as fast as he could. Puzzled at first, the soccer players quickly realized that the intruder was stealing their ball and set off en masse in pursuit, calling him names.

“They didn’t want him on their teams,” the blacksmith explained, sitting with his apprentice on the doorstep of his workshop. “So he’s playing the spoilsport.”

The blacksmith smiled tenderly and his apprentice looked distracted as the three of us watched the tall boy disappear behind a block of houses, with the others on his heels.

“Have you heard the latest news?” the blacksmith asked me. “The Italians are leaving.”

“They haven’t said when.”

“The important thing is they’re getting out,” he said, and then he launched into a long analysis that soon branched off into some imprecise theories about the renewal of the country, freedom, et cetera. His apprentice, a puny fellow as dark and dry as a nail, listened to him with the pathetic docility of a dazed boxer between rounds, nodding at his trainer’s instructions while his eyes are lost in space.

The blacksmith was a courteous man. When called upon at impossible hours to repair a small leak in a tank or an ordinary crack in some scaffolding, he always came without grumbling. Tall, strapping, heavy-boned, he had bruises all over his arms and a face like a knife blade. His eyes sparkled with metallic glints identical to the sparks he sent flying from the tip of his blowtorch. Jokers pretended to wear a welding mask when they gazed upon his countenance. Actually, his eyes were damaged and watery, and his vision had been growing increasingly cloudy for some time. The father of half a dozen children, he used his workshop much more as a refuge from the pandemonium that reigned in his home than as a place for tinkering with metal. His oldest son, Sulayman, a boy nearly my age, was mentally retarded; he could remain in a corner without budging for days on end, and then, without warning, he’d throw a fit and start running and careen along until he passed out. No one knew what it was that came over him. Sulayman didn’t talk, didn’t complain, was never aggressive; he lived entrenched in his world and ignored ours totally. Then, all at once, he’d give a cry—always the same cry—and take off across the desert without looking back. In the beginning, we’d watch him scamper off into the blazing heat, his father charging after him. As time passed, however, people realized that those headlong dashes were bad for Sulayman’s heart and that the poor devil was in increasing danger of dropping dead from a coronary. So the villagers organized a sort of rapid-response system designed to intercept him as soon as the alarm was given. When he was caught, Sulayman didn’t struggle; offering no resistance, he let himself be overcome and brought back home, his mouth open in a lifeless smile, his eyes rolled back in his head.

“How’s that boy doing?”

“He’s as good as gold,” the blacksmith said. “He’s been good for weeks. You’d think he was completely cured. And how’s your father?”

“Still under his tree…I have to buy a new pair of shoes. Is anyone going to town today?”

The blacksmith scratched the top of his head. “I thought I saw a van on the trail an hour ago, but I couldn’t say if the driver was going to town or not. You have to wait until after the prayer. In any case, it’s getting harder and harder to move around, what with all these checkpoints and the hassles that go with them. Have you talked to the cobbler?”

“My shoes are beyond repair. I need new ones.”

“But the cobbler’s got more to sell than just soles and glue.”

“His merchandise is old-fashioned. The shoes I want have to be soft and stylish.”

“You think they’ll be a hit with your audience here?”

“That’s not a reason not to get them. I wish someone could give me a ride to town. I want to get a nice shirt, too.”

“In my opinion, you’re going to wait a long time. Khaled’s taxi’s out of commission, and the bus stopped coming here a month ago, after a helicopter nearly wasted it.”

The kids had got their ball back and were returning in triumph.

“Our practical joker didn’t get very far,” the blacksmith observed.

“He’s too big to outrun them.”

The two teams reoccupied the pitch, lined up as before, and continued the game at the point where it had been interrupted. Right away, the shrieking began again.

I took a seat on a piece of cinder block and followed the match with interest. When it was over, I noticed that the blacksmith and his apprentice had disappeared and the workshop had closed. By now, the sun was beating down with both fists. I got to my feet and walked up the street in the direction of the mosque.

There was a crowd in the barbershop. As a rule, on Fridays, after the Great Prayer, the old men of Kafr Karam met there. They came to watch one of their number submit to the clippers wielded by the barber, an elephantine individual draped in a calf butcher’s apron. Before, when discussing things, they used to avoid certain subjects. Saddam’s spies were always on the alert. One inappropriate word, and your whole family would be deported; mass graves and gallows appeared everywhere. But ever since the tyrant had been caught in one rat hole and shut up in another, tongues had loosened, and the men of Kafr Karam—at least those with nothing to do—had discovered in themselves a stunning volubility. That morning, all the village sages were gathered in the barbershop, and since the discussion promised to be a lively one, there were also several young men standing outside. I identified Jabir, known as “Doc,” a grouchy septuagenarian who had taught philosophy in a prep school in Basra two decades ago and then spent three years languishing in Baathist prisons because of some obscure etymological controversy. When he left the dungeons, the Party informed him that he was forbidden to work as a teacher anywhere in Iraq and that the Mukhabarat had him in their sights. Realizing that his life was in danger, Doc returned to his natal village and played dead until the statues of the Rais were removed from the public squares. Doc was tall and looked rather lordly, even hieratic, in his immaculately clean blue djellaba. Next to him, hunched on a bench, Bashir the Falcon was holding forth at some length. He was a former highway robber who had scoured the region at the head of an elusive band before taking refuge in Kafr Karam, where his booty made him respectable. He wasn’t a member of the tribe, but the elders preferred giving him hospitality to suffering his raids. Facing him were the Issam brothers, two formidable old fellows, who were trying to destroy everyone else’s arguments; they had contradiction in their blood and were capable of totally rejecting an idea they’d advanced twenty-four hours previously should an undesirable ally adopt it. Beyond them, immovable in his corner, sat the eldest of the tribe; his distance from the others was a demonstration of his prominence. The wicker chair he occupied was carried by his supporters wherever he went, while he fingered his imposing beads with one hand and with the other grasped the pipe of his narghile. He never intervened in debates, preferring to voice his opinions only at the end, unwilling to let anyone usurp his right to the last word.

“They got rid of Saddam for us, all the same,” protested Issam two.

“We never asked them to,” the Falcon grumbled.

“Who could have done that?” asked Issam one.

“Exactly right,” his brother added. “Who could even spit without risking his hide? Without being arrested on the spot for an affront to the Rais and hanged from a crane?”

“If Saddam tyrannized us, it was because of our cowardice, large and small,” the Falcon insisted contemptuously. “People have the kings they deserve.”

“I can’t agree with you,” said a quavering voice. The speaker was an old man sitting on the Falcon’s right.

“You can’t even agree with yourself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth. One day you’re on one side, and the next day you’re on the other. Always. I’ve never heard you defend the same opinion two days in a row. The truth is, you don’t have an opinion. You climb on the bandwagon, and when another bandwagon shows up, you jump on that one without knowing where it’s going.”

The old man took refuge behind a look of grim outrage.

“I don’t mean to offend you, my friend,” the Falcon said in a conciliatory tone. “If I were disrespectful to you, I wouldn’t forgive myself. But I can’t let you unload our faults onto Saddam’s shoulders. He was a monster, yes, but he was our monster. He came from among us, he shared our blood, and we all contributed to consolidating his megalomania. Do you prefer infidels from the other side of the world, troops sent here to roll over us? The GIs are nothing but brutes and wild beasts; they drive their big machines past our widows and orphans and have no qualms about dropping their bombs on our health clinics. Look at what they’ve made of our country: hell on earth.”

“Saddam made it a mass grave,” Issam two reminded him.

“It wasn’t Saddam; it was our fear. If we had shown a minimum of courage and solidarity, that cur would never have dared become such a tyrant.”

“You’re right,” said the man under the barber’s clippers, addressing the Falcon in the mirror. “We let ourselves be pushed around, and he took advantage of the situation. But you won’t make me change my mind: The Americans freed us from an ogre who threatened to devour us raw, all of us, one after the other.”

“Why do you think they’re here, the Americans?” the Falcon went on obstinately. “Is it Christian charity? They’re businessmen, we’re commodities, and they’re ready to trade. Yesterday, it was oil for food. Today, it’s Saddam for oil. And what do we get out of all this? If the Americans had an ounce of human kindness, they wouldn’t treat their blacks and their Latinos like subhumans. Instead of crossing oceans to come to the aid of some poor, emasculated ragheads, they’d do better to put their own house in order. They could do something about the Indians they’ve got rotting away on their reservations, kept out of sight like people with some shameful disease.”

“Absolutely!” the quavering old man cried out. “Can you imagine American GIs getting themselves blown up thousands of kilometers from home out of Christian charity? Not very likely.”

Eventually, Jabir’s voice made itself heard. “May I say a word?” he asked.

A respectful silence filled the shop. When Doc Jabir prepared to speak, it was always a solemn moment. The former philosophy professor, whom Saddam’s jails had elevated to the status of a hero, seldom joined the debates, but his rare interventions always served to put things in their proper place. His voice was loud, his gestures precise, and his arguments irrefutable.

“I have a question,” he intoned gravely. “Why did Bush attack our country?”

The question passed around the room without finding a taker; the others figured it was a trap, and no one wanted to be the subject of ridicule.

Doc Jabir coughed into his fist, certain that he had everyone’s attention. His ferrety eyes searched his audience for a hostile look; then, finding none, he began:

“Because they wished to rid us of a despot, their former flunky, but now a compromising figure? Because our sufferings had finally touched the hearts of the vultures in Washington? If you believe that fairy tale for one second, then you’re irredeemably screwed. The USA was extremely worried about two things that might interfere with its hegemonic projects. One: Our country was very close to acquiring full sovereignty—that is, a nuclear weapon. In the new world order, only nations that have a nuclear arsenal are sovereign; the others may be potential hotbeds of tension or providential sources of raw materials for the great powers, but from now on, that’s all. The world is run by the forces of international finance, for which peace is equivalent to layoffs. It’s all a matter of living space. The second thing the USA knew was that Iraq was the only military force in the region capable of standing up to Israel. Bringing Iraq to its knees would make it possible for Israel to dominate the Middle East. Those are the two real reasons that led to the occupation of our country. Saddam was nothing but an excuse. If he seems to give the Americans’ aggression legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion, that doesn’t mean using him is any less of a diabolical ploy. Their trick is to create a diversion in order to conceal the essential objectives of the exercise, which are to prevent an Arab country from acquiring the means of its strategic defense and therefore from protecting its integrity, and, at the same time, to help Israel establish definitive authority over this part of the world.”