The Sirens of Baghdad Page 8

  The Haitems hadn’t invited many people from Kafr Karam. They’d presented a rather short list of handpicked guests, among them the eldest of the tribe and his wives, Doc Jabir and his family, Bashir the Falcon and his daughters, and five or six other notables. My father was not eligible for this honor. Although he’d been the Haitems’ official well digger for thirty years—he’d dug all the wells in their orchards, installed the motorized pumps and the rotary sprinklers, and laid out a great many irrigation channels—he had remained, in the eyes of his former employers, a mere stranger. This casual ingratitude had offended my mother, but the old man, sitting under his tree, couldn’t have cared less. And in any case, it wasn’t as though he owned clothes he could wear to such a party.

  Evening crept up on the village. The sky was sprinkled with a thousand stars. The heat nevertheless promised to maintain its siege until late in the night. Kadem and I were on the terrace at my house, sitting on two creaking chairs, a teapot between us. Like our neighbors, we were gazing out toward the Haitems’ orchards.

  Swirls of dust lifted by the wind occasionally traversed the whitish trail, but no vehicle turned onto it.

  Bahia appeared regularly to see if we had need of her services. I found her a bit nervous and noticed that she kept coming back upstairs to bring us biscuits or fill our glasses. Her little game intrigued me, and soon, by watching the looks she gave us, I realized that my twin sister had her eye on our cousin. She blushed violently when I caught her smiling at him through the window.

  Finally, the Haitems’ procession approached, and the village went into a frenzy of car horns and ululations. The streets were jammed with unruly kids; only after much supplication was the first flower-laden Mercedes allowed to pass through the crowd. The Haitems had spared no expense. The ten vehicles they sent were all luxury cars, excessively decorated; they looked like Christmas trees, with their multicolored sequins and spangles, their bright balloons and long ribbons. All the drivers wore identical black suits and white shirts with bow ties. A photographer brought in from the city immortalized the event, his video camera on his shoulder and his every step accompanied by a swarm of children; flashes went off wildly all around him.

  Superb in her white dress, the bride issued forth from her family home and was greeted by bursts of celebratory rifle fire. As the procession made a small detour past the mosque before returning to the dirt road, a powerful movement rippled through the crowd in the square. Kids ran behind the vehicles, shouting at the top of their lungs, and the entire throng accompanied their virgin to the outskirts of the little town, joyously kicking stray dogs as they went.

  Kadem and I were standing against the railing of the roof terrace. We watched the procession moving away—he captivated by his memories, and I amused and impressed at the same time. Off in the distance, in the growing darkness, we could glimpse the party lights amid the black mass of the orchards.

  “Do you know the groom?” I asked my cousin.

  “Not really. I saw him at the house of a friend, a fellow musician, about five or six years ago. We weren’t introduced, but he seemed like an unpretentious guy. Not a bit like his father. I think he’s a good match for her.”

  “I hope so. Khaled’s a good man, and his daughter’s adorable. Did you know that I had my eye on her?”

  “I don’t want to know about it. She belongs to someone else now, and you have to put such things out of your head.”

  “I was just saying—”

  “You shouldn’t have. Just thinking about it’s a sin.”

  Bahia appeared again, her eyes glowing. “Will you stay for dinner with us, Kadem?” she chirped in a quavering voice.

  “I can’t, but thanks anyway. The old folks aren’t well.”

  “But no, you’re staying for dinner,” I said peremptorily. “It’s almost nine o’clock. Don’t insult us by leaving just as we’re about to sit down.”

  Kadem hesitated, pressing his lips together. Bahia’s hands tormented each other as she awaited his response.

  “All right,” he said, yielding. “I haven’t tasted my aunt’s cooking in a long time.”

  “I did the cooking tonight,” Bahia declared, crimson-faced. Then she dashed down the stairs, as happy as a child at the end of Ramadan.

  We hadn’t finished eating when we heard a distant explosion. Kadem and I left the table to go and have a look. Some neighbors, soon joined by the rest of their family, appeared on their terrace, too. Down in the street, someone asked what was going on. Except for the tiny lights shining through the orchards, the plateau appeared serene.

  “It was a plane,” someone cried out in the night. “I saw it come down.”

  The sound of running footsteps moved past the house in the direction of the square. Our neighbors started leaving their terrace, eager to hear the news in the street. People came out of their houses and gathered here and there. In the darkness, their silhouettes loomed together distressingly. “A plane crash,” people said, passing the words around. “Ibrahim saw a burning plane crash to the ground.” The square was teeming with curious villagers. The women stayed behind their patio doors, trying to gather bits of information from passersby. “A plane crashed, but very far from here,” they were told reassuringly.

  Suddenly, two automobile headlights emerged from the orchards and zoomed toward the trail. The car bore down on the village at top speed.

  “This is bad,” Kadem said, watching the vehicle bound and pitch as it hurtled toward us. “This is very bad.”

  He made a dash for the stairs.

  The car nearly fishtailed as it bounced onto the smaller trail leading to Kafr Karam. We could hear the blasts of its horn, indistinct but disturbing. Then the headlights reached the first houses of the village, and the horn blasts catapulted pedestrians against walls. The car crossed the soccer pitch, braked in front of the mosque, and skidded a good distance before stopping in a cloud of dust. The driver leaped out while people were still running toward him. His face was distraught and his eyes white with terror. He pointed at the orchards and babbled unintelligible sounds.

  Another car roared up. Without taking the trouble to get out, the driver shouted to us, “Get in, quick. We need help at the Haitems’. A missile came down on the party.”

  People started running off in all directions. Kadem pushed me into the backseat of the second car and jumped in beside me. Three other young men piled in around us, and two more sat up front.

  “You’ve got to hurry,” the driver shouted to the crowd. “If you can’t get a ride, come on foot. Lots of people are buried under the rubble. Bring whatever you can—shovels, blankets, sheets, medicine kits. Don’t dawdle. Please, please, come quick!”

  He made a U-turn and gunned the car in the direction of the orchards.

  “Are you sure it was a missile?” one of the passengers asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the driver, obviously still stunned. “I don’t know anything. The guests were having a good time, and then the chairs and tables blew away, like in a windstorm. It was crazy…. It was…I can’t describe it. Bodies and screams, screams and bodies. If it wasn’t a missile, then it must have been lightning from heaven.”

  A bad feeling came over me. I didn’t understand what I was doing in that car, tearing along in the dark, nor was it clear why I’d accepted an opportunity to see horror up close, me, when I wasn’t yet over my last awful shock. Sweat poured down my back and rolled off my forehead. I looked at the driver, at the other men in the front seat, at those with me in the back, including Kadem, who was gnawing his lips, and I couldn’t believe I’d agreed to go with them. A voice inside me cried, Where are you going, you poor fool? I couldn’t tell whether my body was rising in revolt or being slammed about by the ruts in the trail. I cursed myself, grinding my teeth, my fists clenched against the fear that was rising like a solid mass in my belly. Where are you running to, stupid? I asked myself. As we approached the orchards, the fear grew so large that a kind of torpor numbed my l
imbs and my mind.

  The orchards were sunk in a malignant darkness. We raced through them. The Haitems’ house looked intact. There were shadowy figures on the staircase leading to the entrance, some of them collapsed on the steps, their heads in their hands, and others leaning against the wall. The focal point of the tragedy lay a little farther on, in a garden where a building, apparently the hall the family used for parties, was burning at the center of a huge pile of smoking debris. The force of the explosion had flung chairs and wedding guests thirty meters in all directions. Survivors staggered about, their clothes in rags, holding their hands out in front of them like blind people. Some mutilated, charred bodies were lined up along the edge of a path. Cars illuminated the slaughter with their headlights, while specters thrashed about in the midst of the rubble. Then there was the howling, drawn out, interminable; the air was full of pleas and cries and wails. Mothers looking for their children called out into the confusion; the more they went unanswered, the louder they shouted. A weeping man, covered with blood, knelt beside the body of someone dear to him.

  A wave of nausea cut me in half the moment my foot hit the ground; I fell on all fours and puked my insides out. Kadem tried to lift me up, but before long he left me and ran toward a group of men who were busy helping some injured people. I crept over to a tree, put my arms around my knees, and contemplated the delirium. Other vehicles arrived from the village, filled with volunteers and shovels and bundles. Anarchy added a dimension of demented activity to the rescue operation. With their bare hands, people lifted burning beams and sections of collapsed walls, searching for a sign of life. Someone dragged a dying man to a spot near me and begged him, “Don’t go to sleep.” When the injured person started slipping weakly into unconsciousness, the other slapped him several times to keep him from fainting. Another man came up and leaned over the body. “Come on, there’s nothing more you can do for him.” The other kept slapping the injured man, harder and harder. “Hold on,” he said. “Hold on, I’m telling you.” The third man said, “Hold on to what? Can’t you see he’s dead?”

  I got to my feet like a sleepwalker and ran toward the fire.

  I don’t know how long I was there, yanking, heaving, and turning over everything around me. When I came out of my trance, my hands were bruised and my fingers lacerated and bleeding; I sank to my knees, wretchedly sick, my lungs polluted with smoke and the stench of cremation.

  The sun rose on the disaster.

  Wreaths of smoke from the blasted hall rose into the sky like burnt offerings. The air was heavy with horrid exhalations. The dead—seventeen of them, mostly women and children—lay under sheets at one side of the garden. The injured sprawled here and there, groaning and surrounded by medical workers and relatives. Ambulances had reached the scene a short while before, and the stretcher-bearers didn’t know where to begin. Although the level of confusion had subsided, agitation grew as the true extent of the tragedy became apparent. From time to time, a woman screamed, setting off a new round of cries and wailing. Men went around in circles, stunned and lost. The first police vehicles arrived. The officers were Iraqis, and their leader was immediately taken to task by the survivors. The situation degenerated; then, when people started throwing things at the cops, they jumped back into their cars and sped away. An hour later, they returned, reinforced by two truckloads of soldiers. An extremely stout officer asked to speak to a representative of the Haitem family. Someone flung a rock at the fat officer, and the soldiers fired their weapons into the air to calm everyone down. At that moment, some foreign television teams turned up. A grieving father shouted at them, indicating the carnage. “Look! Nothing but women and children! This was a wedding reception! Where are the terrorists?” He grabbed a cameraman by the arm, showed him the corpses stretched out on the grass, and said, “The real terrorists are the bastards who fired the missile at us.”

  My hands bandaged, my shirt torn, and my pants stained with blood, I left the orchards on foot and walked home like a man stumbling through fog.

  7

  I was an emotional person; I found other people’s sorrows devastating. Whenever I passed a misfortune, I bore it away with me. As a child, I often wept in my room after locking the door, for fear that my twin sister—a girl—would catch me shedding tears. People said she was stronger than I was, and less of a crybaby. I didn’t hold any of it against her. I was made that way, and that was all there was to it. A delicate porcelain creature. My mother tried to put me on my guard. “You have to be tougher,” she’d say. “You must learn to give up other people’s troubles—they’re not good for them, and they’re not good for you. You’re too badly off to worry about someone else’s fate.” Her warnings were in vain—we aren’t born wise; we learn wisdom. Me, I was born in misery, and misery raised me to share. All suffering confided in mine and became my own. For the rest, there was an arbiter in heaven; it was up to Him to tweak the world as He saw fit, just as he could freely choose not to lift His little finger.

  At school, my classmates considered me a weakling. They could provoke me all they wanted; I never returned their blows. Even when I refused to turn the other cheek, I kept my fists in my pockets. Eventually, the other kids got discouraged by my stoicism and left me in peace. In fact, I wasn’t a weakling; I simply hated violence. Whenever I watched a schoolyard brawl, I hunched my shoulders around my ears and got ready for the sky to fall in on me. Maybe that’s what happened at the Haitems’ place: The sky fell in on me. I told myself I’d never be free of the curse that had destroyed the wedding party and turned joyous ululations into appalling cries of agony. I told myself our fates are sealed: We’re united in pain until the worst of pains separates us. A voice knocking at my temples kept repeating that the death stinking up the orchards was contaminating my soul, and that I was dead, too.

  In the Haitems’ orchards—that is, in the land of the blessed, the filthy rich who disregarded the rest of us—I saw with my own eyes how incongruous our existence is, how flimsy our certainties, how precarious our knowledge. Chance had led me there.

  You can’t walk on hot coals without burning your feet.

  I didn’t remember ever having borne a grudge against anybody, anybody at all, and yet there I was, ready to bite something, including the hand that tried to soothe me—except that I held myself back. I was outraged, sick, tormented by a thousand thorns, like Christ at the height of His suffering, but my way of the cross wound in a circle I didn’t understand. What had happened at the Haitems’ wedding party wasn’t anything I could figure out. You don’t pass from jubilation to grief in the blink of an eye. Life, even though it often hangs by a mere thread, isn’t a conjuring trick. People don’t die in bulk between dance steps; no, what had happened at the Haitems’ made no sense.

  On the evening news, there was talk of an American drone alleged to have detected some suspicious signals coming from in or around the reception hall. The nature of these suspicious signals was not revealed. Instead, there was a suggestion that terrorist movements had previously been reported in this sector. When the local residents rejected this assertion altogether, the undaunted American hierarchy tried for a while to justify the missile strike by offering other security-related arguments; in the end, however, tired of looking ridiculous, the Americans deplored the mistake and apologized to the victims’ families.

  And that was the end of that—one more news item destined to travel around the world before falling onto the scrap heap, replaced by other enormities.

  But in Kafr Karam, anger had unburied the war hatchet: Six young men asked the faithful to pray for them. They promised to avenge the dead and vowed not to return to the village until the last “American boy” had been sent back home in a body bag. After the customary embraces, the young men went out into the night and soon merged with the darkness.

  A few weeks later, the district police superintendent was shot to death in his official car. That same day, a military vehicle was blown up by a homemade bomb.

&nbs
p; Kafr Karam went into mourning for its first shaheeds, its first martyrs—six all at once, surprised and cut down by a patrol as they prepared a fresh attack.

  The tension in the village was reaching deranged proportions. Every day, young men vanished from Kafr Karam. I never stepped into the street anymore. I could bear neither the reproachful looks from the elders, startled to see me still around when all the brave lads of my age had joined the resistance, nor the sardonic smiles of the youngsters, which reminded me of the way my classmates used to smile when they called me a weakling. I shut myself up in my room and took refuge in books or in the audiocassettes Kadem sent me. As a matter of fact, I was indeed angry, I held a bitter grudge against the coalition forces, but I couldn’t see myself indiscriminately attacking everyone and everything in sight. War wasn’t my line. I wasn’t born to commit violence—I considered myself a thousand times likelier to suffer it than to practice it one day.

  And then one night, the sky fell in on me again. At first, when the door of my room flew open with a crash, I imagined another missile. Then came shouted insults and cones of blinding light. I didn’t have time to reach for the lamp switch. A squad of American soldiers barged into my privacy. “Lie back down! If you move, I’ll blow you up!” “Stand up!” “Lie down!” “Stand up! Hands on your head! Don’t move!” Flashlights nailed me to the bed; weapons were aimed at me. “Don’t move or I’ll blow your brains out!” Those shouts! Atrocious, demented, devastating. Capable of unraveling you thread by thread and making you a stranger to yourself. Hands seized me, pulled me from my bed, and flung me across the room. Other hands caught me and crushed me against the wall. “Hands behind your back!” “What have I done? What is it?” The GIs smashed my wardrobe, overturned my dresser drawers, and kicked my things in all directions. A booted foot stamped my old radio into fragments. “What’s going on?” “Where are the fucking weapons, shithead?” “I have no weapons. There aren’t any weapons here.” “We’ll see about that, motherfucker. Put this asshole with the others.” A soldier grabbed me by the neck; another kneed me in the groin. I was swept up into a tornado and tossed from one tumult to another, caught in a waking nightmare like a sleepwalker assailed by poltergeists. I had the vague sensation of being dragged across the roof terrace and rushed downstairs; I couldn’t tell whether I was tumbling or gliding. A similar upheaval was taking place on the top floor. My nephews’ weeping cut through the surrounding racket. I heard Bahia grumble before falling silent all at once, struck by a fist or a rifle butt. Pallid and half-dressed, my sisters were penned up at the other end of the hall with the children. The eldest, Aisha, pressed a couple of her kids against her skirts. She was trembling like a leaf, unaware that her naked breasts were hanging out of her blouse. On her right stood my second sister, Afaf, the seamstress, swaying and clutching her clothing. She’d been snatched from her sleep so abruptly that she’d forgotten her wig on her night table; her bald head, as pitiful as a stump, shone under the ceiling lights. Mortified, she ducked and hunched her shoulders as if she wanted to take refuge in her own body. Bahia was standing firm. A nephew in her arms, her hair disheveled, and her face drained of blood, she silently defied the weapon pointed at her; a bright red thread dripped down the nape of her neck.