The Sirens of Baghdad Read online

  The sunlight ricocheted off the ground and hurt my eyes. Between two hovels, I caught a glimpse of my cousin Kadem, still in the spot where I’d left him, huddled on his big rock. I waved at him, he failed to notice me, and I proceeded on my way.

  The cobbler’s shop was closed, but in any case, the aging shoes he had for sale were suitable only for the elderly; if some of his wares had been languishing in their cardboard boxes for years on end, it wasn’t because money was tight.

  In front of the building’s large iron door, which was painted a repulsive shade of brown, Omar the Corporal was playing with a dog. As soon as he saw me, he waved me over, simultaneously aiming a kick at the animal’s hindquarters. The dog yelped and ran away. Omar turned to me and said, “I’ll bet you’re in heat, that’s what you are. You came here looking for a stray ewe, right?”

  Omar was a walking disease. The young people of the village appreciated neither his crude language nor his sick innuendos; people avoided him like the plague. His time in the army had corrupted him.

  Five years previously, he’d gone off to serve in the ranks as a cook; shortly after the siege of Baghdad by the Americans, he’d returned to the village, unable to explain what had happened. One night, he said, his unit was on full alert, locked and loaded; the next day, there was no one left. Everyone had deserted, the officers first. Omar came home hugging the walls. He reacted very badly to the defection of his battalion and sought to drown his grief and shame in adulterated wine. This was probably the source of his coarseness; having lost his self-respect, he took a malicious pleasure in disgusting relatives and friends.

  “There are decent people around here,” I reminded him.

  “What did I say that wasn’t Sunnite?”

  “Please…”

  He spread out his arms. “Okay. Okay. A guy can’t even fart around anymore.”

  Omar was eleven years my senior. He’d signed up for the army after a disappointment in love: The girl of his dreams turned out to be promised to someone else. Omar hadn’t known a thing about it; neither had she, for that matter. It was only when he’d gathered up his courage and charged his aunt with soliciting his beloved’s hand that his illusions had collapsed around him. He’d never recovered from that.

  “I’m freaking out in this shithole,” he moaned. “I’ve knocked on every door, and nobody wants to go to town. I wonder why they’d rather stay cooped up in their crappy shacks instead of enjoying a little stroll on a nice avenue with air-conditioned shops and flowers on the café terraces. What’s there to see around here, I ask you, except lizards and dogs? At least in town, you go to a café, you sit at a table on the terrace, and you can watch the cars pass and the girls slink by. You feel that you exist, dammit! You feel you’re alive. Which is not the feeling I get in Kafr Karam. Here, it’s more like slow death, I swear to you. I’m suffocating. I’m dying. Shit, Khaled’s taxi isn’t even running, and the bus hasn’t come near these parts for weeks.”

  Omar’s torso resembled a big bundle on short legs. He was wearing a threadbare checked shirt too tight to hide his large belly, which hung down over his belt. His grease-stained pants weren’t much to look at, either. Omar inevitably had black blotches on his clothes. No matter how fresh and clean they were, he always found a way to stain them with some oily substance a minute after putting them on. You’d have thought his body secreted it.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the café.”

  “To watch some cretins play cards, like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and tomorrow, and twenty years from now? That’s a way to lose your mind. Damn! What could I have done in a former life to deserve rebirth in a dirty little dump like this?”

  “It’s our village, Omar. Our first fatherland.”

  “Fatherland, my ass. Even the goddamned crows avoid this place.”

  He sucked in his big belly to stick his shirt into his pants, took a deep breath, and said with a sigh, “In any case, we have no choice. The café it is.”

  We went back toward the square. Omar was furious. Every time we walked past a car, no matter how decrepit, he started griping. “Why do these jackasses buy these crates if they’re just going to park them in front of their shacks and let them rot?”

  He held himself back for a minute and then returned to the charge. “How about your cousin?” he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of Kadem, who was sitting by the low wall at the other end of the street. “How the hell can he stay in that one spot without moving, dawn to dusk? His brain’s going to implode one of these days, I promise you.”

  “He just likes to be alone, that’s all.”

  “There was a guy in my battalion who behaved just like that. He always stayed in a corner of the barracks, never went to the club, never hung out with friends. One morning, he was found in the latrines, hanging from a ceiling light.”

  “That won’t ever happen to Kadem,” I said as a shiver ran down my back.

  “How much you want to bet?”

  The Safir café was run by Majed, another cousin of mine, a gloomy, sickly man who seemed to be wasting away. Dressed in blue overalls so ugly they looked as though they’d been cut out of a tarpaulin, his head covered by an old military cap pulled down to his ears, he stood behind his rudimentary counter like a failed statue. Since the only reason his customers came to his place was to play cards, he no longer bothered to turn on his machines, contenting himself with making a thermos of red tea at home and bringing it to the café; often, he was obliged to drink the tea alone. His establishment was frequented by unemployed young people, all of them flat broke, who arrived in the morning and stayed until nightfall without ever having put their hands in their pockets. Majed had often dreamed about chucking it all, but then what? In Kafr Karam, the general dereliction defied belief; anyone who had anything resembling employment held on to it stubbornly so as not to risk going on the skids.

  Majed gave Omar a bitter look when he saw him arrive. “Here comes trouble,” he grumbled.

  Unconcerned, Omar briefly considered the young men seated at tables here and there. “It’s like a barracks when everyone’s been consigned to quarters,” he declared, scratching his behind.

  He noticed the twins, Hassan and Hussein, standing in front of a window in the back of the room and watching a card game. The players were Yaseen, Doc Jabir’s grandson, a brooding, irascible young man; Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law; Adel, a tall, strapping, and rather stupid fellow; and Bilal, the son of the barber.

  Omar approached the table, greeted the twins in passing, and took up a position behind Adel.

  Annoyed, Adel shifted in his chair and said, “You’re in my light, Corporal.”

  Omar took a step backward. “The real shadow’s in your thick skull, my boy.”

  “Leave him alone,” Yaseen said without taking his eyes off his cards. “Don’t distract us.”

  Omar sniggered scornfully but held his tongue.

  The four players contemplated their cards with great intensity. At the end of a lengthy mental calculation, Bilal cleared his throat. “It’s your play, Adel.”

  Adel thrust out his lips and kept pondering his hand, indecisive, taking his time.

  “Look, are you going to play?” Salah asked impatiently.

  “Hey,” Adel protested. “I’ve got to think.”

  “Stop exaggerating,” Omar said. “You tossed away your last gram of brain when you jerked off this morning.”

  The atmosphere in the café turned leaden. The young men sitting near the door vanished; the others didn’t know which way to turn.

  Omar realized his blunder and swallowed hard, waiting for all hell to break loose.

  The players at the table kept their heads bent over their cards, as though petrified, except for Yaseen, who folded his hand, delicately placed it to one side, and fixed his eyes, white with indignation, on the former corporal. “I don’t know what point you think you’re making with your filthy language, Omar, but thi
s is going too far. In our village, the young, like the old, respect one another. You were raised here, and you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Shut up! Shut your big mouth and keep it shut,” Yaseen said in a monotone that contrasted violently with the fury blazing in his eyes. “You’re not in the mess; you’re in Kafr Karam. We’re all brothers, cousins, neighbors, and relatives here, and we watch what we do and how we act. I’ve told you a hundred times, Omar: no obscenity. Keep your disgusting soldier’s lingo to yourself.”

  “Come on, I was just joking.”

  “Well, look around, Omar. See anyone laughing? Do you?”

  The former corporal’s throat quivered.

  Yaseen pointed a peremptory finger at him. “From this day on, Omar, son of my uncle Fadel and my aunt Amina, I forbid you—I forbid you—to utter a single curse, to say a single improper word—”

  “Whoa,” Omar said, interrupting Yaseen, much more to save face than to chastise him. “I’m your elder by six years, and I won’t let you speak to me that way.”

  “So stop me!”

  The two men measured each other, their nostrils quivering.

  Omar turned aside first. “All right,” he growled, violently stuffing his shirt into his pants. Then he turned on his heels and headed for the exit. At the door, he stopped and shouted, “You know what I think?”

  Yaseen cut him off. “Disinfect your mouth before you tell me.”

  Omar shook his head and disappeared.

  After Omar’s departure, the uneasiness in the café intensified. The twins went away first, heading in different directions. No one felt like resuming the disrupted card game. Yaseen got up and left next, closely followed by Adel. There was nothing left for me to do but go back home.

  Shut up in my room, I tried to listen to the radio, thinking it might serve to dissipate the acute embarrassment I’d felt ever since the scene in the Safir. I was doubly uncomfortable, first for Omar, and then for Yaseen. Of course, the Corporal deserved to be called to order, but he was older than Yaseen, whose severity toward him upset me, as well. The more pity I felt for the deserter, the fewer excuses I could find for his cousin. Actually, if relations in the village were turning ugly, it was because of the news coming out of Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra, while we floated along, light-years away from the tragedy depopulating our country. Since the beginning of hostilities, despite the hundreds of attacks and the legions of dead, not even a single helicopter had flown over our sector, not so far, nor had any patrol violated the peace of our little town. This feeling that we were excluded from history had developed into a genuine case of conscience. The older people seemed to be resigned to it, but the young men of Kafr Karam took it very hard.

  The radio couldn’t distract me, so I lay down on the bed and put the pillow on my face. The suffocating heat made everything worse. I didn’t know what to do. The village streets distressed me; my little room baked me. I was dissolving in my displeasure….

  That evening, the beginnings of a breeze stirred the curtains. I got out a metal folding chair and sat in the doorway of my room. Two or three kilometers from the village, the Haitems’ orchards flourished amid stones and sand, the only green patch for miles around. The trees shimmered defiantly in the haze of the sun, which was going down in a cloud of dust. Soon the horizon caught fire from one end to the other, accenting the contours of the hills and valleys in the distance. On the arid plateau that fled breathlessly southward, the dirt road recalled a dried-up riverbed. A group of youngsters was returning from the orchards, empty-handed and unsteady on their feet; apparently, the little marauders’ expedition had come to a sudden end.

  “Here’s a package for you,” my twin sister, Bahia, announced, placing a plastic bag at my feet. “I’ll bring you your dinner in half an hour. Can you hold out that long?”

  “No problem.”

  She flicked some dust off my collar. “You didn’t go to town?”

  “I couldn’t get anyone to drive me there.”

  “Try again tomorrow, and be more persuasive.”

  “I promise. What’s this package?”

  “Kadem’s little brother dropped it off for you a minute ago.”

  She went into my room to check that everything was in order and then returned to her cooking.

  I opened the plastic bag and drew out a cardboard box held together with adhesive tape. Inside the box was a superb pair of brand-new black shoes and a piece of paper with a few lines written on it: “I wore them twice, once on each wedding night. They’re yours. No hard feelings. Kadem.”

  3

  A hostage to its own emptiness, Kafr Karam was unraveling a little more with each passing day.

  At the barbershop, in the café, by the walls, people chewed over the same subjects. They talked a lot and did nothing at all. Their indignation grew less and less spectacular; temperamental outbursts cut some arguments short, while other debates were prolonged by soporific speeches. Little by little, people stopped listening to one another, but something unusual was nevertheless taking place. For the older villagers, the hierarchy remained inflexible, but among the young, it appeared to be undergoing a curious change. After the dressing-down Yaseen had inflicted on Omar the Corporal, the privileges of primogeniture started looking rather shaky. Of course, most people decried what had happened at the Safir, but it inspired a minority made up of hotheads and rebels-in-waiting to assert themselves.

  The elders pretended to know nothing about this incident, which—even though it was not bruited about on the public thoroughfares—nonetheless made the rounds of the village. Otherwise, things followed their usual course with pathetic lethargy. The sun continued to rise when it felt like it and go down as it wished. We remained candied in our little autistic happiness, gaping wide-eyed into space or twiddling our thumbs. It seemed as though we were vegetating on another planet, cut off from the tragic events that were eroding the country. Our mornings featured trivial, routine sounds, our nights unsatisfactory sleep; dreams serve no purpose when all horizons are bare. For a long time, the shadows of our walls had held us captive. We had known the most abominable regimes and survived them, just as our livestock had survived epidemics. Sometimes, when one tyrant had been cast out by another, the new tyrant’s henchmen had descended on us like hunting dogs flushing out game, hoping to get their hands on some prey that could be sacrificed in the public square as a way of bringing the rest of us back into line. Very quickly, however, they grew disenchanted and returned to their kennels, a little shamefaced, but delighted not to have to set foot again in a godforsaken hole where it was hard to distinguish the living from the ghosts that kept them company.

  But as the ancestral proverb says, If you close your door on your neighbors’ cries, they’ll come through your windows. Likewise, when bad luck is roaming around, no one is safe. It’s no use trying to avoid mentioning it, no use believing it happens only to others or thinking all you’ve got to do to keep it away is to stay very still in your corner; too much restraint will eventually set it off anyway, and one morning, there it is, standing on your threshold and having a look around….

  And what had to happen happened. Bad luck turned up among us, without any fanfare, almost on tiptoe, hiding its hand. I was having a cup of tea at the blacksmith’s shop when his little daughter came running in and cried, “Sulayman! Sulayman!”

  “Has he run away again?” the blacksmith asked in alarm.

  “He cut his hand on the gate…. He doesn’t have anymore fingers,” the little girl said between sobs.

  The blacksmith leaped over the low table between us, kicking over the teapot as he passed, and ran to his house. His apprentice rushed out to overtake him, signaling to me that I should follow. A woman’s voice, crying out, reached us from the end of the street. A crowd of kids was already gathering in front of the wide-open patio gate. Sulayman held his wounded hand against his chest and laughed silently, fascinated by his own bleeding.


  The blacksmith commanded his wife to be quiet and to find him a piece of clean fabric. The cries stopped immediately.

  “There are his fingers,” the apprentice said, pointing at two bits of flesh on the ground near the gate.

  With amazing composure, the blacksmith gathered up the two severed phalanges, wiped them off, and placed them in a handkerchief, which he slipped into his pocket. Then he bent over his son’s wounds.

  “We have to get him to the health center,” he said. “If we don’t, the blood’s going to drain right out of him.” He turned to me. “I need a car.”

  I nodded and rushed over to Khaled’s house and burst in on him as he was fixing his little boy’s toy in the courtyard.

  “We need you,” I announced. “Sulayman cut off two of his fingers. We have to get him to the hospital.”

  “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m expecting guests at noon.”

  “It’s urgent. Sulayman’s losing a lot of blood.”

  “I can’t drive you. If you want, take my taxi. It’s in the garage. I can’t go with you. Some people are coming here in a few minutes to ask for my daughter’s hand.”

  “All right, give me the keys.”

  He abandoned the toy and invited me to follow him into the garage, where a battered old Ford was parked.

  “You know how to drive?”

  “Of course.”

  “Help me get this crate out into the street.”

  He opened the garage doors, whistled to the kids lounging in the sun, and asked them to come and give us a hand. “The car’s got an obstinate starter,” he explained to me. “Sit behind the wheel. We’re going to push you.”

  The kids rushed into the garage, amused and happy at having been called upon for assistance. I released the brake, put the gearshift in second, and let the enthusiasm of my bratty assistants propel me along. By the time we’d gone some fifty meters, the Ford had reached a negotiable speed. I released the clutch and, at the end of some quite impressive bucking, the engine roared to life with all its banged-up valves. Behind me, the kids raised a shout of joy identical to the one they used to greet the return of electric lights after a long power cut.