The Sirens of Baghdad Read online

  For a while, my cousin Kadem and I were regulars at the Safir. The experience changed our ideas a bit. Sometimes a trivial remark would bring the house down, and then there was nothing better than an off-the-wall observation to raise it up again. And to see that whole damned, gaping crowd bust a gut when one of them made a fool of himself was excellent therapy, far more effective than we could have suspected. But comedy grows tiresome in the long run, and the wise guys who seized any occasion to amuse the gallery started getting on people’s nerves. As might have been expected, Yaseen was obliged to set things straight.

  We were all watching the news on Al-Jazeera. The announcer led us to Fallujah, the scene of ongoing battles between American troops, aided by Iraqi security forces, and the local resistance. The besieged city had sworn to die rather than surrender. Disfigured, smoke-filled Fallujah fought on with touching combativeness. There were reports of hundreds of dead, mostly women and children. The crowd in the café was silent and heartsick, helpless witnesses to a genuine slaughter: on one side, extravagantly equipped soldiers, supported by tanks, drones, and helicopters, and on the other side, a populace left to shift for itself, held hostage by a group of ragged, starving “rebels,” armed with filthy rifles and rocket launchers and scampering around in all directions. It was then that a young fellow with a beard cried out, “These American infidels will live to regret what they’ve done. God will bring the sky down on their heads. Not a single GI will leave Iraq intact. Let them swagger as much as they want—they’ll wind up like those old-time infidel armies the Ababil birds reduced to mince meat. God’s going to send the Ababil birds against them!”

  “Bullshit!”

  The bearded fellow stiffened, swallowing hard. Then he turned to the blasphemer. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  The man with the beard was stunned. His face was flushed and quivering with anger. “Did you say ‘bullshit’?”

  “You got it! Bullshit! That’s exactly what I said. Not one syllable more, not one syllable less: BULL SHIT. Is that a problem for you?”

  Everyone in the room had turned their backs on the TV to see just how far their two young companions were willing to go. “Do you realize what you’re saying, Malik?” the bearded one asked.

  “As far as I can tell, you’re the one who’s talking rubbish, Harun.”

  The crowd stirred. Yaseen and his band followed with interest what was happening behind them. Harun, who considered Malik’s blasphemous insolence beyond all bounds of decency, seemed to be on the verge of an apoplectic fit. “Come on, I was talking about the Ababil birds,” Harun whined. “They’re from an important passage in the Qur’an.”

  “I fail to see the connection with what’s going on in Fallujah,” Malik said, not backing down. “What I see on that screen is a city under siege. I see Muslims buried in its ruins, I see fugitives at the mercy of a rocket or a missile, and, all around, I see faithless, lawless brutes trampling on us in our own country. And you—you talk to us about Ababil birds. Can you even get an inkling of how ridiculous that is?”

  “Keep quiet,” Harun warned him. “The devil’s in you.”

  “Right,” Malik said with a disdainful sneer. “When you get out of your depth, blame the devil. Wake up, Harun. The Ababil birds are as dead as the dinosaurs. We’re at the dawn of the third millennium, and some foreign sons of bitches are here in our land, dragging us in the mud every day God sends. Iraq is occupied, my friend. Look at the TV. What’s the TV telling you? What do you see there, right under your nose, while you so sagely stroke your little beard? Infidels subjugating Muslims, demeaning their leaders, throwing their heroes into cages where sluts in fatigues pull their ears and their testicles and pose for posterity. What’s God waiting for, you think, before He falls on them? They’ve been here for some time now, mocking Him where He lives, in His sacred temples and in the hearts of His faithful. Why doesn’t He flick His little finger, when those bastards are strafing our souks and bombing our celebrations and shooting our people down like dogs on every street corner? What’s become of the Ababil birds? In the old days, when the enemy army invaded the holy land, the Ababils reduced the invaders to a pulp, so where can those birds be now? My dear Harun, I’m just back from Baghdad. I’ll spare you the details. We’re alone in the world. We can count on no one but ourselves. Heaven will send us no reinforcements, and no miracle’s going to rescue us. God’s got other fish to fry. At night, when I’m lying in my bed and I hold my breath, I can’t even hear Him breathing. The night, all night, every night, belongs to them. And in the day, when I raise my eyes to heaven to implore Him, I can’t see anything except their helicopters—their very own Ababil birds—burying us with their fiery droppings.”

  “There’s no more doubt: You’ve sold your soul to the devil.”

  “I could offer it to him on a silver platter and he still wouldn’t want it.”

  “Astaghfirullah.”

  “Exactly. At the moment, GIs are profaning our mosques, manhandling our holy men, and bottling up our prayers like flies. How much more provocation does He need, your God, before He loses His temper?”

  “What did you expect, you imbecile?” Yaseen thundered. All eyes turned toward him. He stood with his hands on his hips, eyeing the blasphemer scornfully. “What did you expect, big mouth? Eh? You thought the Lord was going to ride down on a white horse, burnoose flying in the wind, to cross swords with these animals? We are His wrath!”

  His outcry had the effect of an explosion inside the café. A few gulps were all that could be heard.

  Malik tried to withstand Yaseen’s stare but couldn’t stop his cheeks from twitching.

  Yaseen struck his chest with the flat of his hand. “We are the wrath of God,” he said in cavernous tones. “We are His Ababil birds. And His thunderbolts, and His chastisements. And we’re going to blow these Yankee bastards sky-high; we’ll trample them until their shit comes out of their ears and their calculations spurt from their assholes. Is that clear? Now do you understand? Now do you see where God’s wrath is, you little prick? It’s here, it’s in us. We’re going to send those devils back to hell, one by one, until they’re all gone. It’s as true as the sun rises in the east….”

  Yaseen crossed the room while people feverishly got out of his path. His eyes devoured the blasphemer. He was like a python moving inexorably upon its prey. He stopped in front of Malik—they were practically nose-to-nose—and squinted a little to concentrate the fire of his gaze. Then Yaseen said, “If I ever hear you expressing the smallest doubt about our victory over those mad dogs, I swear before God and all the guys in this room, I’ll tear your heart out with my bare hands.”

  Kadem pulled me by my shirt and signaled with his head for me to follow him outside.

  “Quite a bit of electricity in the air,” he said.

  “Something’s snapped in Yaseen’s brain. I don’t think ten straitjackets could hold him.”

  Kadem held out his pack of cigarettes.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Take one,” he insisted. “You need a change of air.”

  When I gave in, I noticed that my hand was trembling. “He scares the shit out of me,” I confessed.

  Kadem flicked his lighter under my cigarette before applying the flame to his own. Then, throwing back his head, he blew his smoke out into the breeze. “Yaseen’s a half-wit,” he said. “As far as I know, there’s nothing stopping him from jumping onto a bus and going to Baghdad to wage some war. That number he does is going to get tiresome after a while. It may even cause him some serious problems. Shall we go to my place?”

  “Why not,” I replied.

  Kadem lived with his sickly, elderly parents in a little stone house backed up against the mosque. We climbed the stairs to his quarters on the upper floor. The room was large and well lit. There was a double bed surrounded by carpets, a “Made in Taiwan” stereo set dwarfed by two gigantic speakers, a chest of drawers flanked by an oval mirror an
d an overstuffed chair.

  In the corner nearest the door, mounted on a stiff sheepskin, stood a lute—the noblest and most mythical of musical instruments, the king of the Oriental orchestra, the instrument that could elevate its virtuosos to the rank of divinities and transform the shadiest dive into Parnassus, abode of the Muses. I knew the fantastic history of this particular lute, which had been made by Kadem’s grandfather, a peerless musician who delighted Cairo throughout the 1940s before conquering Beirut, Damascus, and Amman and becoming a living legend from the Mashriq to the Maghrib. Kadem’s grandfather played for princes and sultans, warlords and tyrants; he bewitched women and children, mistresses and lovers. It was said that he was the cause of innumerable conjugal conflicts in the uppermost circles of Arab society. And indeed, it was a jealous army captain who put five bullets in his belly while he was performing under the filtered lights of the Cleopatra, Alexandria’s trendiest nightclub, toward the end of the 1950s.

  Facing the lute, as if committed to a permanent exchange of influences, was a picture in a carved frame, enshrined on the night table: a photograph of Faten, my cousin’s first wife.

  “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Kadem asked as he hung his jacket on a nail.

  “She was very beautiful,” I acknowledged.

  “That picture has never moved from its place. Even my second wife left it where she found it. It bothered her, that’s for sure, but she proved to be very understanding about it. Only once, during the first week of our marriage, did she ever try to turn it to face the wall. She didn’t dare get undressed under that immense gaze. But then, little by little, she learned to live with it…. Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea.”

  “I’ll go down and get some.”

  He made a sudden dash down the stairs.

  I stepped closer to the picture. The young bride was wide-eyed and smiling while the wedding festivities went on behind her. Her radiant face outshone all the paper lanterns put together. I remembered when she was a young teenager and she’d leave her house to run errands with her mother; we youngsters would race all the way around the block just so we could watch her pass by. She was sublime.

  Kadem returned with a tray. He put the teapot on the chest of drawers and poured two steaming glasses of tea. Then, to my surprise, he said, “I loved her the first time I saw her.” (In Kafr Karam, one never spoke of such things.) “I wasn’t yet seven years old. But even at that age, and even though I had no real prospects, I knew we were meant for each other.”

  His eyes overflowed with splendid evocations as he pushed a glass in my direction. He was floating on a cloud, his brow smooth and his smile broad. “Every time I heard someone playing a lute, I thought of her. I really believe I wanted to become a musician just so I could sing about her. She was such a marvelous girl, so generous, so humble! With her at my side, I needed nothing else. She was more than I could have ever hoped for.”

  A tear threatened to spill out of one eye; he quickly turned his head and pretended to adjust the lid of the teapot. “Well,” he said. “How about a little music?”

  “Excellent idea,” I said approvingly, quite relieved.

  He rummaged in a drawer and fished out a cassette, which he slipped into the tape player. “Listen to this,” he said.

  Once again, it was Fairuz, the diva of the Arab world, performing her unforgettable song “Hand Me the Flute.”

  Kadem stretched out on his bed and crossed his legs, still holding the glass of tea in one hand. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “No angel could sing better than that. Her voice is like the breath of the cosmos….”

  We heard the cassette through to the end, each of us in his own private universe. Street noises and children’s squeals failed to reach us. We flew away with the violins, far, very far from Kafr Karam, far from Yaseen and his outrages. The sun shined its blessings down on us, covering us with gold. The dead woman in the photograph smiled upon us. For a second, I thought I saw her move.

  Kadem rolled himself a joint and dragged on it rapturously. He was laughing in silence, beating time with one languorous hand to the singer’s unfaltering rhythm. At the beginning of a refrain, he started singing, too, thrusting out his chest. He had a magnificent voice.

  After the Fairuz cassette was over, he put on others, old songs by Abdel Halim Hafez and Abdelwaheb, Ayam and Younes, Najat and other immortal glories of the tarab alarabi.

  Night surprised us, completely intoxicated as we were with joints and songs.

  The TV that Sayed had donated to the idle youth of Kafr Karam proved to be a poisoned chalice. It brought the village nothing but turmoil and disharmony. Many families owned a television set, but at home, with the father seated on his throne and his eldest son at his right hand, young people kept their comments to themselves. Things were different in the café. You could boo, you could argue about any subject whatsoever, and you could change your mind according to your mood. Sayed had hit the bull’s-eye. Hatred was as contagious as laughter, discussions got out of control, and a gap formed between those who went to the Safir to have fun and those who were there “to learn.” It was the latter whose point of view prevailed. We started concentrating on the national tragedy, all of us together, every step of the way. The sieges of Fallujah and Basra and the bloody raids on other cities made the crowd seethe. The insurgent attacks might horrify us for an instant, but more often than not they aroused our enthusiasm. We applauded the successful ambushes and deplored skirmishes that went wrong. The assembly’s initial delight at Saddam’s fate turned to frustration. In Yaseen’s view, the Rais, trapped like a rat, unrecognizable with his hobo’s beard and his dazed eyes, exposed triumphantly and shamelessly to the world’s cameras, represented the most grievous affront inflicted on the Iraqi people. “By humiliating him like that,” Yaseen declared, “they were holding up every Arab in the world to public opprobrium.”

  We were at a loss as to how to assess the ongoing events; we no longer knew whether a given attack was a feat of arms or a demonstration of cowardice. An action vilified one day might be praised to the skies the next. Clashing opinions led to incredible escalations, and fistfights broke out more and more frequently.

  The situation was degenerating, and the elders refused to intervene publicly; each father preferred to give his offspring a talking-to in the privacy of his home. Kafr Karam was reeling from the most serious discord in its history. The silences and submissions accumulated through many years and various despotic regimes rose like drowned corpses from a muddy river bottom, bobbing up to the surface to shock the living.

  Yaseen and his band—the twins Hassan and Hussein, the blacksmith’s son-in-law Salah, Adel, and Bilal, the barber’s son—disappeared, and the village entered a period of relative calm. Three weeks later, persons unknown set fire to the disused pumping station, a deteriorating structure some twenty kilometers from Kafr Karam. There was a report that an attack on an Iraqi police patrol had resulted in some fatalities among the forces of order, along with two vehicles destroyed and various weapons carried off by the attackers. Rumor raised this ambush to the status of a heroic action, and in the streets people began to talk about furtive groups glimpsed here and there under cover of night, but no one ever got close enough to identify or capture any of them. A climate of tension kept us all on the alert. Every day, we awaited news from the “front,” which we figured was coming soon to a neighborhood near us.

  One day, for the first time since the occupation of the country by the American troops and their allies, a military helicopter made three passes over our area. Now there was no more room for doubt: Things were happening in this part of the country.

  In the village, we prepared for the worst.

  Ten days, twenty days, a month passed. We could see nothing on the horizon—no convoy, no suspicious movements.

  When it looked as though the village was not going to be the target of a military raid, people relaxed; the elders returned to their barbershop antiphony, the young resumed their tumu
ltuous meetings at the Safir, and the desert regained its stultifying barrenness and its infinite banality.

  The order of things seemed to have been reestablished.

  6

  Khaled Taxi was in his mid-thirties. Wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses, his hair oiled and slicked back, he was prancing around in the street and looking impatiently at his watch. Despite the ferocious heat, he’d squeezed himself into a three-piece suit that, in a former life, had known better days. A tie fit for a clown costume—garish yellow streaked with brown—spread across his chest. Now and again, he reached inside his jacket and took out a tiny comb, which he passed through his mustache.

  “Are they coming?” he shouted up to the terrace, where his fourteen-year-old son was stationed as a lookout.

  “Not yet,” the boy replied, keeping his hand over his eyes like a visor, even though the sun was behind him.

  “What the hell are they doing? I hope they haven’t changed their minds.”

  The boy stood on tiptoe, carefully studying the horizon to show his father how conscientious he was.

  The Haitems were making them wait. They were an hour late, and still no cloud of dust was rising from the midst of their orchards. The part of the wedding procession that was due to set out from Kafr Karam was ready: Five automobiles, polished and beribboned, were parked and waiting across from the bride’s patio, their doors wide open because of the heat. With an exasperated gesture, the man keeping an eye on the cars shooed away the flies that were buzzing around his head.

  For the umpteenth time, Khaled looked at his watch. Disgusted at what he saw, he went up to the terrace and joined his boy.