The Sirens of Baghdad Read online

  Around midnight, other young insomniacs joined the group at Sayed’s. He received them all with a great deal of deference and entertained them in a large room whose floor was covered with wicker mats and cushions. While everyone else was sipping tea and digging into baskets of peanuts, Yaseen couldn’t stay still. He looked like a man possessed by the devil. Trying to pick a quarrel, he stared extravagantly at the others, who were sitting or reclining here and there. As no one was paying any attention to him, he absolutely turned on his most faithful companion, Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law.

  “I saw you crying at the cemetery,” Yaseen said.

  “It’s true,” Salah admitted, ignorant of where the conversation was heading.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you cry?”

  Salah frowned. “According to you, why do people cry? I felt grief, all right? I cried because Sulayman’s death caused me pain. What’s so shocking about that, crying over someone you loved?”

  “I understand that,” Yaseen insisted. “But why the tears?”

  Salah felt that things were escaping him. “I don’t understand your question.”

  “Sulayman’s death broke my heart,” Yaseen said. “But I didn’t shed a single tear. I can’t believe you would make such a spectacle of yourself. You cried like a woman, and that’s unacceptable.”

  The word woman shook Salah. His cheeks bulged as he gritted his teeth. “Men cry, too,” he pointed out to his leader. “The Prophet himself had that weakness.”

  “I don’t give a damn!” Yaseen exploded. “You didn’t have to behave like a woman,” he added, heavily emphasizing the last word.

  Outraged, Salah rose suddenly to his feet. He stared at Yaseen with wounded eyes for a long time, then gathered up his sandals and went out into the night.

  There were about twenty people gathered in the big room, and rapid looks darted in all directions. No one understood what had gotten into Yaseen or why he’d behaved so despicably to the blacksmith’s son-in-law. A sense of ill-being settled over everyone there. After a long silence, Sayed, the master of the house, coughed into his fist. It was his duty, as the host, to set things straight.

  He gave Yaseen a scathing look and began: “When I was a child, my father told me a story I didn’t completely grasp. At that age, I didn’t know that stories had a moral. This was the story of an Egyptian strongman who reigned like a satrap over the seedier districts of Cairo. He was a downright Hercules. He looked as though he’d just been cast in some ancient Greek bronze foundry. He had an enormous mustache that looked like a ram’s horns, and he was a leader as hard on himself as he was on others. I don’t remember his name, but the image I formed of him is intact in my memory. I thought of him as a kind of Robin Hood of the working-class suburbs, as ready to roll up his sleeves and lend a hand as to swagger around the square and lord it over porters and donkey trainers. When there was a disagreement between neighbors, they came to him and submitted to his arbitration. The decisions he made could not be appealed. However, although he was a strong man, he wasn’t a silent one. He was conceited, irascible, and demanding, and since no one questioned his authority, he proclaimed himself king of the outcasts and shouted from the rooftops that there was nobody in the world who dared to look him straight in the eye. His words didn’t fall on deaf ears. One evening, the chief of police summoned him to the station. No one knows what happened that night. The next day, when the strongman returned home, he was unrecognizable, his head bowed, his eyes elusive. He wasn’t bearing any wounds or any traces of blows, but he had an evident mark of infamy in the form of his suddenly sunken shoulders. He shut himself up in his hovel until his neighbors began to complain about a strong odor of decomposition. When they kicked his door in, they found the strongman stretched out on his straw mattress. He’d been dead for several days. Later, a cop described the strongman’s meeting with the chief of police: Before the chief could reproach him for anything at all, the strongman had thrown himself at the chief’s feet to beg his pardon. And he never got up again.”

  “And so?” Yaseen asked, on the lookout for insinuations.

  A mocking smile quickly crossed Sayed’s face. “That’s where my father ended the story.”

  “That’s just rubbish,” Yaseen grumbled, conscious of his limitations when it came to deciphering hidden meanings.

  “That what I thought, too, at first. As time passed, I was able to find a moral in the story.”

  “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

  “No. That moral’s mine. It’s up to you to find one that suits you.”

  With this, Sayed got up and went upstairs to his room. Seeing that the evening was over, most of the guests collected their sandals and left the house. The only people still in the room were Yaseen and his “Praetorian guard.”

  Yaseen was beside himself; he thought he’d been too vague, and he felt that he’d made a bad showing in front of his men. There was no way he was going to go home without getting to the bottom of this matter. He sent away his companions with a nod of his head, went upstairs, and knocked on Sayed’s bedroom door.

  “I don’t understand,” Yaseen said.

  “Salah didn’t understand what you were getting at, either,” Sayed replied. The two of them were standing on the landing.

  “I looked like a chump. You and your fucking story! I bet you made it up. I bet all that stuff about a moral was a lot of nonsense.”

  “You’re the one who talks nonsense, Yaseen. Constantly. And you behave exactly like that strongman from Cairo.”

  “Well, if you don’t want me to set this place on fire, you’d better enlighten me. I can’t stand being talked down to, and nobody—nobody—is going to make a fool of me. I may not have enough education, but I’ve got pride to spare.”

  Sayed wasn’t intimidated. On the contrary, his smile grew wider in direct proportion to Yaseen’s raving. After a pause, he said in a monotone, “The man who feeds on others’ cowardice nourishes his own; sooner or later, it devours his guts, and then his soul. You’ve been acting like a tyrant for some time now, Yaseen. You shake up the order of things. You no longer respect the tribal hierarchy. You rise up against your elders and offend people close to you; you even like to humiliate them in public. You shout everything you say, whether yes or no, so loudly that no one in the village can hear anything but you anymore.”

  “Why should I concern myself about them? They’re worthless.”

  “You behave exactly the way they do. They stare at their navels; you stare at your biceps. It comes to the same thing. No one has any cause to envy or reproach anyone else in Kafr Karam.”

  “I forbid you to associate me with those imbeciles. I’m no coward.”

  “Prove it. Come on, what’s stopping you from turning words into deeds? Iraqis have been fighting the enemy for a long time. Every day, our cities crumble a little more, blown up by car bombs and ambushes and bombardments. The prisons are filled with our brothers, and our cemeteries are gorged with our dead. And you, you lounge around your godforsaken village, you get your hackles up, and you cry out your hatred and indignation from the rooftops; then, once your spleen is vented, you go back home, slip up to your room, and turn off the light. Too easy. If you really think what you say, translate talk into action and make those goddamned Americans pay for what they’ve done. If not, calm down and back off.”

  Then, according to my twin sister, Bahia—who had the story from the very mouth of Sayed’s sister, who’d heard the whole conversation through the door—Yaseen withdrew ungraciously, without uttering another word.

  Sulayman’s death threw Kafr Karam into confusion. The village didn’t know what to do with the corpse it was carrying. Its last feats of arms dated back to the war with Iran, a generation earlier; eight of its sons had returned from the front in sealed caskets, which no one had the authority to open. What had the village buried back then? A few planks, a few patriots, or a part of its dignity? Sulayma
n’s end was an entirely different matter, a horrible and vulgar accident, and people couldn’t make up their minds: Was Sulayman a martyr, or just a poor bugger who had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time? The elders of the village called for calm. No one was infallible, they said. The American colonel had demonstrated genuine sorrow. His only mistake was in broaching the subject of money with the blacksmith. In Kafr Karam, one never speaks of money to a person in mourning. No compensation can lessen the grief of a distraught father at his son’s fresh grave. Had Doc Jabir not intervened, the talk of indemnity would have veered into confrontation.

  The weeks passed, and little by little, the village rediscovered its gregarious soul and its routines. The violent death of a simpleminded person arouses more anger than grief, but, alas, you can’t change the course of things. God’s concerned about being fair, so he gives His saints no help; the devil alone takes care of those who serve him.

  As a man of faith, the blacksmith adopted an attitude of fatalistic resignation. One morning, he could be seen opening his shop and taking up his blowtorch again.

  The discussions in the barbershop resumed, and the young people went back to the Safir to kill time with dominoes when the card games grew stale. Bashir the Falcon’s son Sayed didn’t stay among us long. Urgent business called him back to town. What business? Nobody knew. However, his lightning sojourn in Kafr Karam had made an impression; the young were seduced by his frank talk, and his charisma had compelled the respect of young and old. Our paths were to cross again later on. He would be the one to raise me in my own esteem, to train me in the basics of guerrilla warfare, and to open wide for me the gates of the supreme sacrifice.

  Soon after Sayed’s departure, Yaseen and his band reoccupied the square. Sullen and aggressive, they were the reason why Omar the Corporal dropped out of sight. Since the incident in the café, the deserter had become a shadow of his former self and spent most of his time shut up in his little house. When he was forced to show his face outside, he crossed the village like the wind and went to drown his shame far from provocations, only to return—generally on all fours—when the night was well advanced. Often, some kids would spot him getting sloshed in the back of the cemetery or find him in an alcoholic coma, his arms crossed and his shirt open on his giant belly. Then one day, without a sound, he slipped away and was seen no more.

  After Sulayman’s funeral, which I didn’t attend, I stayed in my room. Memories of the awful scene tormented me without letup. As soon as I fell asleep, the black GI’s screams would assail me. I dreamed of Sulayman running, his stiff spine, his dangling arms, his body leaning sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other. A multitude of minuscule geysers spurted from his back. At the moment when his head exploded, I woke up screaming. Bahia was at my bedside with a potful of wet compresses. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a nightmare. I’m here….”

  One afternoon, my cousin Kadem paid me a visit. He’d finally made up his mind to detach himself from his rock, and he brought me some cassette tapes. At first, he was embarrassed—he didn’t want to disturb me in my condition. By way of breaking the ice, he asked me if the shoes he’d given me were my size. I told him they were still in the box.

  “They’re new, you know.”

  “I do,” I said. “And more than that, I know what they mean to you. I’m deeply touched. Thanks.”

  If I wanted to get back to normal, he said, I shouldn’t stay shut up in my room. Bahia agreed with him. I had to overcome the shock and resume a normal life. But I wasn’t very eager to go out into the street; I was afraid someone would ask me for the details of what had happened at the checkpoint, and I dreaded the thought of the knife twisting in my wound. Kadem rejected this notion. “All you have to do is tell them to buzz off,” he said.

  He continued to visit me, and we spent hours talking about everything and nothing. It was thanks to him that one evening I screwed up my courage and agreed to leave my lair. Kadem proposed taking a walk far from the village. Halfway between Kafr Karam and the Haitems’ orchards, the plateau made a sudden descent, and a vast dry riverbed strewn with little sandstone mounds and thorny bushes split the valley for several kilometers. The wind sang in that spot like a baritone.

  It was a fine day, and in spite of a veil of dust hanging over the horizon, we enjoyed a superb sunset. Kadem handed me the headphones attached to his Walkman. I recognized the voice of Fairuz, the Lebanese singing star.

  “Have I told you I’ve taken up my lute again?” he asked.

  “That’s excellent news.”

  “I’m composing something at this very moment. I’ll let you hear it when it’s finished.”

  “A love song?”

  “All Arab songs are love songs,” he said. “If the West could only understand our music, if it could even just listen to us sing, if it could hear our soul in the voices of Sabah Fakhri and Wadi es-Safi and Abdelwaheb and Asmahan and Umm Kulthum—if it could commune with our world—I think it would renounce its cutting-edge technology, its satellites, and its armies and follow us to the end of our art….”

  I enjoyed Kadem’s company. He knew how to find soothing words, and his inspired voice helped me lift up my head. I was happy to see him revived. He was a magnificent fellow, one who didn’t deserve to waste away sitting beside a little wall.

  “I was just about to go under,” he admitted. “For months and months, my head was like a funeral urn. The ashes were obscuring my vision, coming out of my nose and ears. I couldn’t see any way out. But then Sulayman’s death brought me back. Just like that,” he added, snapping his fingers. “It opened my eyes. I don’t want to die without having lived. Up until now, all I’ve done is put up with things. Like Sulayman, I haven’t always understood what was happening to me. But there’s no way I’m going to wind up like him. When I heard about his death, I asked myself, What? Sulayman’s dead? Why? Did he really exist? And it’s true, cousin. The poor guy was just about your age. We saw him in the streets every day, wandering around in his own world. And sometimes running after his visions. And yet, now that he’s gone, I wonder if he really existed…. On my way back from the cemetery, I was automatically heading for the little wall and my rock, when I found myself entering my house. I went up to my room, searched the depths of the storage closet, located the trunk with the brass fittings—it looked like a sarcophagus—opened it, took my lute out of its case, and, I swear, without even tuning up, I started composing. I was carried away—it was as though I were under a spell.”

  “I can’t wait to hear you.”

  “I just have to add a few finishing touches and I’ll be ready.”

  5

  Life in Kafr Karam resumed its course, empty as fasting.

  When you’ve got nothing, that’s what you make do with. It’s a question of outlook.

  Men are pathetic, narrow creatures, blood brothers of Sisyphus, built for suffering; their vocation is to undergo life until death ensues.

  The days went their way like a phantom caravan. They came out of nowhere, early in the morning, without charm or panache, and in the evening they disappeared, surreptitiously, swallowed up by darkness. Nonetheless, children continued to be born, and death still took care of keeping things in balance. At the age of seventy-three, our neighbor became a daddy for the seventeenth time, and my great-uncle passed away in his bed, an old man surrounded by his loved ones. What the desert wind carries away, memory restores; what sandstorms erase, we redraw with our hands.

  Khaled, the taxi owner, had agreed to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to one of the Haitem family, whose orchards stood a few hundred meters beyond the village limits. This was a first. Some even declared it a practical joke. Usually, the Haitems—wealthy, taciturn people—sought their daughters-in-law in town, among urbane families whose girls would have good table manners and know how to receive high society. Their sudden decision to turn to us was a cause of some consternation in certain quarters, but generally it was taken as a good augu
ry that the Haitems were returning to their roots. Although they had snubbed us for a long time, we weren’t going to be coy now that one of their scions had fallen for a maiden from our village. And in any case, a prospective marriage, whether rich or poor, made everything worthwhile. At last we could look forward to a happy event that would compensate for the chronic emptiness of our daily lives!

  There was an innovation at the Safir: a television set, complete with parabolic antenna. This was a gift from Sayed, who expressed the hope “that the young men of Kafr Karam would not lose sight of their country’s tragic reality.” Overnight, the seedy café was transformed into a veritable mess hall for unstable soldiers. It was enough to make the proprietor, Majed, tear out his hair. His business was already going down the drain; if, on top of that, his customers were going to arrive with their gargantuan snacks and their packs, the game was clearly up. As for the customers, they weren’t bashful. At dawn, without having bothered even to wash their faces, they’d come knocking on his door and ask him to open the café. It was as if they were camped in the street. Once the TV was on, they’d surf through the channels—taking humanity’s pulse, as it were—before moving on to Al-Jazeera and staying put. By noon, the little place was teeming with overexcited young men. The air was filled with commentary and invective. Every time the camera offered another look at the national tragedy, the protests and death threats shook the neighborhood around the café. Supporters of preventive war were hooted at, anti-Yankees were applauded, and the people hired to be members of parliament were hissed for being opportunists and flunkies for Bush. Yaseen and his band, in the best seats, seemed to be the guests of choice. Even when they came late, they always found their chairs empty. Behind them were two or three rows of sympathizers, and in the back of the room, the small fry. Majed had no idea what to do. With his chin in his hands and his thermos standing neglected on the counter, he gazed with wounded eyes at the crowd of idlers who were causing incredible commotion and wrecking his furniture.