The Sirens of Baghdad Page 9

  I felt faint. My hand searched in vain for something to hold on to.

  Hellish insults erupted from the end of the hall. My mother, ejected from her room, immediately collected herself and went to help her invalid husband. “Leave him alone. He’s sick.” Soldiers brought out the old man. I’d never seen him in such a state. With his threadbare undershirt hanging loosely from his thin shoulders and his stretched-out drawers fallen nearly to his knees, he was the very image of boundless distress, walking misery, an affront personified in all its absolute boorishness. “Let me get dressed,” he moaned. “My children are here. It’s not right; what you’re doing isn’t right.” His quavering voice filled the corridor with inconceivable sorrow. My mother tried to walk in front of him, to spare us the sight of his nakedness. Her terrified eyes implored us, begging us to turn away. I couldn’t turn away. I was hypnotized by the spectacle the two of them presented to my eyes. I didn’t even see the brutes who surrounded them. I saw only a distraught mother and a painfully thin father in shapeless underwear, his eyes wounded, his arms dangling at his sides, stumbling as the soldiers shoved him along. With a final effort, he pivoted on his heels and tried to go back to the bedroom to fetch his robe—and the blow was struck. Rifle butt or fist, what difference does it make? The blow was struck, and the die was cast. My father fell over backward; his miserable undershirt flapped up over his face, revealing his belly, which was concave, wrinkled, and gray as the belly of a dead fish…. And I saw, while my family’s honor lay stricken on the floor, I saw what it was forbidden to see, what a worthy, respectable son, an authentic Bedouin, must never see: that flaccid, hideous, degrading thing, that forbidden, unspoken-of, sacrilegious object, my father’s penis, rolling to one side as his testicles flopped up over his ass. That sight was the edge of the abyss, and beyond it, there was nothing but the infinite void, an interminable fall, nothingness. Suddenly, all our tribal myths, all the world’s legends, all the stars in the sky lost their gleam. The sun could keep on rising, but I’d never be able to distinguish day from night anymore. A Westerner can’t understand, can’t suspect the dimensions of the disaster. For me, to see my father’s sex was to reduce my entire existence, my values and my scruples, my pride and my singularity, to a coarse, pornographic flash. The gates of hell would have seemed less catastrophic! I was finished. Everything was finished—irrecoverably, irreversibly. I had been saddled, once and for all, with infamy; I’d plunged into a parallel world from which I’d never escape. I found myself hating my arms, which seemed grotesque, translucent, ugly, the symbols of my impotence; hating my eyes, which refused to turn away and pleaded for blindness; hating my mother’s screams, which discredited me. I looked at my father, and my father looked back at me. He must have read in my eyes the contempt I felt toward everything that had counted for us and my sudden pity for the person I revered above everything, despite everything. I looked at him as though from atop a blasted cliff on a stormy night; he looked at me from the bottom of disgrace. At that very instant, we already knew that we were looking at each other for the last time. And at that very instant, when I dared not turn a hair, I understood that nothing would ever again be as it had been; I knew I’d no longer consider things in the same way; I heard the foul beast roar deep inside me, and it was clear that sooner or later, whatever happened, I was condemned to wash away this insult in blood, until the rivers and the oceans turned as red as the cut on Bahia’s neck, as my mother’s eyes, as the fire in my guts, which was already preparing me for the hell I knew was waiting….

  I don’t remember what happened after that. I didn’t care. Like a piece of wreckage, I let myself drift wherever the waves took me. There was nothing left to salvage. The soldiers’ bellowing didn’t reach me anymore. Their weapons, their gung-ho zeal hardly made an impression. They could move heaven and earth, erupt like volcanoes, crack like thunder; I could no longer be touched by that sort of thing. I watched them thrashing about as though I were looking through a picture window in a microcosm of shadows and silence.

  They scoured the house. Nary a weapon; not so much as a puny penknife.

  Rough hands propelled me into the street, where some young men were crouched with their hands on their heads.

  Kadem was one of them. His arm was bleeding.

  In the neighboring houses, orders were shouted, sending the residents into hysterics.

  Some Iraqi soldiers examined us. They carried lists and pages printed with photographs. Someone lifted my chin, shined his light in my face, checked his papers, and went on to the next man. Off to one side, guarded by overexcited GIs, suspects waited to be taken away. They lay facedown in the dust, their hands bound behind them and their heads in bags.

  Two helicopters flew over the village, sweeping us with searchlights. There was something apocalyptic about the rumbling of their rotors.

  The sun rose. Soldiers escorted us to an area behind the mosque, where a large tent had just been pitched. We were interrogated separately, one by one. Some Iraqi officers showed me photographs; several of them had been taken in the morgue or at the scene of the carnage and showed some of the faces of the dead. I recognized Malik, the “blasphemer” from the other day at the Safir. His eyes were staring and his mouth was wide open; blood ran out of his nose and formed tiny rivulets on his chin. I also recognized a distant cousin, curled up at the foot of a streetlight, his jaw shattered.

  The officer asked me to name all the members of my family. His secretary noted down all my declarations in a register, and then I was set free.

  Kadem was waiting for me on the street corner. He had a nasty gash on his arm, running from the top of his shoulder to his wrist. His shirt was stained with sweat and blood. He told me that the GIs had smashed his grandfather’s lute—a fabulous lute of inestimable value, a tribal and even national heirloom. I only half-listened. Kadem was crushed. Tears veiled his eyes. His monotonous voice disgusted me.

  We sat for long minutes leaning against a wall, empty, panting, holding our heads in our hands. Light slowly grew in the sky, and on the horizon, as though rising from an open fracture, the sun prepared to immolate itself in its own flames. The first noisy kids could be heard; soon they would overrun the square and the open lots. The roar of the trucks signaled the withdrawal of the troops. Some old men left their patios and hurried to the mosque, eager to learn who had been arrested and who had been spared. Women wailed in their doorways, calling out the names of husbands or sons whom the soldiers had carried off. Little by little, as despair spread from one hovel to the next and the sound of sobbing rose above the rooftops, Kafr Karam filled me with a flood of venom. “I have to get away from here,” I said.

  Kadem stared at me in alarm. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  “Baghdad.”

  “To do what?”

  “There’s more to life than music.”

  He nodded and pondered my words.

  All I had were the clothes I was wearing—namely, an undershirt that had seen better days and a pair of old pajama pants. No shoes. I asked, “Can you do me a favor, Kadem?”

  “That depends.”

  “I need to get some stuff from home.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, I can’t go back to my house.”

  He frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t, that’s all. Will you get my things for me? Bahia will know what to put in my bag. Tell her I’m going to Baghdad to stay with our sister Farah.”

  “I don’t understand. What happened? Why can’t you go back home?”

  “Kadem, please. Just do what I’m asking you to do.”

  Kadem guessed that something very serious had taken place. I’m sure he was thinking in terms of rape.

  “Do you really want to know what happened, cousin?” I cried. “Do you really insist on hearing about it?”

  “That’s all right, I get it,” he grumbled.

  “You don’t get a thing. Nothing at all.”

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nbsp; His cheekbones quivered as he pointed a finger at me. “Watch it,” he said. “I’m older than you. I won’t permit you to talk to me like that.”

  “I’m afraid I no longer need anyone’s permission for anything, cousin.” I looked him straight in the eye. “And what’s more, I don’t care a rotten fig about what happens to me from this moment on. From this second. Are you going to pick up my fucking stuff for me, or do I have to leave like this? I swear, I’ll jump on the first bus I see in just this undershirt and these pajama pants. Nothing matters anymore, not ridicule, not even lies….”

  “Come on, get a hold of yourself.”

  Kadem tried to grab my wrists. I pushed him away. “Listen,” he said, breathing slowly so he could keep calm. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll go to my house—”

  “I want to leave from here.”

  “Please. Listen to me, just listen. I know you’re completely—”

  “Completely what, Kadem? You don’t know a damn thing. It’s something you can’t even imagine.”

  “All right, but let’s go to my house first. You can take some time and think about this calmly, and then, if you’re still sure you want to leave, I’ll personally accompany you to the nearest town.”

  “Please, cousin,” I said in a toneless voice. “Go get me my bag and my walking stick. I’ve got to say a few words to the good Lord.”

  Kadem saw that I was in no condition to listen to anyone at all. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go and get your things.”

  “I’ll wait for you behind the cemetery.”

  “Why not here?”

  “Kadem, you ask too many questions, and I’ve got a headache.”

  He gestured with both hands, beseeching me to take it easy, and then he went away without looking back.

  I wandered around the cemetery for a bit. Everywhere I looked, I saw the abominable thing I’d glimpsed in the hall the previous night. Twice I had to crouch down and puke. My body swayed unsteadily on my heels as the spasms overwhelmed me. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was something that sounded like a wild beast’s death rattle. After a while, I sat down on a little mound and started digging rocks out of the ground around me and throwing them at a scrawny tree whose dusty branches were hung with plastic packets. Every time I snapped my arm, I let out a grunt of rage. I was chasing away the cloud of ill omen that was gathering over my thoughts; I was plunging my hand into my memory of the previous evening in order to tear out its heart.

  The whole place stank in the morning heat. A decomposing corpse, no doubt. That didn’t bother me. I kept on excavating rocks and hurling them at the little tree, so many rocks that my fingers were bleeding.

  Behind me, the village was getting out of the wrong side of the bed. The voices of the fed up could be heard here and there—a father speaking roughly to his kid, a younger brother rising up against an older one. I didn’t recognize myself in that anger. I wanted something greater than my misery, vaster than my shame.

  I’d just finished stoning the little tree when Kadem came back, slipping among the graves. From a distance, he showed me my bag. Bahia was following him, her head wrapped in a muslin scarf. She was wearing the black dress of farewells. “We thought the soldiers had taken you away,” she said, her face waxen.

  Apparently, she hadn’t come to dissuade me from leaving. That wasn’t her style. She understood my motives and obviously approved them all, without reservations and without regrets. Bahia was a daughter of her tribe. In the ancestral tradition, honor was supposed to be the domain of men, but even so, she knew how to recognize it and require it.

  I snatched the bag out of Kadem’s hand and started digging around inside it. Although my sister clearly noticed the violence of my movements, she didn’t reproach me in any way. She merely said, “I’ve put in two undershirts, two shirts, two pairs of trousers, some socks, your toilet bag—”

  “How about my money?”

  She reached into her bosom, drew out a little packet, carefully folded and tied with string, and handed it to Kadem, who immediately turned it over to me. “I don’t want any money but mine,” I said to my sister. “Not a penny more.”

  She said, “There’s nothing in there but your savings, I promise you. I packed a cap for you, too,” she added, repressing a sob. “Because of the sun.”

  “Very good. Now turn around so I can change.”

  I put on a pair of pinstriped trousers, my checked shirt, and the shoes my cousin had given me. “You forgot my belt,” I said.

  “It’s in the outside pocket of the bag,” Bahia said. “Along with your pocket light.”

  “Very good.”

  I finished getting dressed, and then, without a glance at my sister or my cousin, I grabbed my bag and started down the steep path in the direction of the main trail. Don’t turn around, an interior voice admonished me. You’re already gone. There’s nothing for you here. Don’t turn around. I turned around—and saw my sister, standing on the mound, looking ghostly in her windblown dress, and my cousin, with his hands on his hips and his chin against his chest. I retraced my steps. My sister pressed herself against me. Her tears wet my cheeks. I felt her frail body shudder in my embrace. “Please,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

  Kadem opened his arms to me. We flung ourselves against each other. We hugged for what seemed like a very long time.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you to the next town?” he asked in a strangled voice.

  “It’s not worth the trouble, cousin,” I said. “I know the way.”

  I waved at them and hurried off toward the trail without turning around.

  BAGHDAD

  8

  I walked to the crossroads about ten kilometers from the village. From time to time, I looked back in hopes of seeing a vehicle coming my way, but no cloud of dust rose from the trail. I was in the middle of the desert, alone and infinitesimally small. The sun rolled up its sleeves. The day would be a scorcher.

  The junction featured a makeshift bus shelter. Formerly, the bus that served Kafr Karam used to stop at that shelter. Now the place seemed to have been abandoned. Pieces of torn metal dangled down over the bench from a hole in the corrugated-tin roof. I sat in the shade and waited two hours. There was no sign of movement anywhere on the horizon.

  I continued on my way, heading for an access road normally used by the refrigerated trucks that furnished the isolated communities of the region with fruits and vegetables. Since the embargo, such vehicles made far fewer trips, but it sometimes happened that an itinerant grocer went down that road. It was a hell of a hike, and I was crushed by the ever-increasing heat.

  I noticed two black spots on a small hill overlooking the access road. They turned out to be two young men in their early twenties. They were squatting in the sun, immobile and impenetrable. The younger-looking of the two gave me a sharp look; the other drew circles in the dust with a stick. They were both wearing grimy white sweatpants and wrinkled, dirty shirts. A large bag lay at their feet like some fresh-killed prey.

  I sat on a little sand mound and pretended to busy myself with my shoelaces. Every time I raised my eyes to look at the two strangers, a peculiar feeling came over me. The younger of the two had a disagreeable way of bending over his companion to whisper into his ear. The other nodded and kept working his stick. Just once, he shot me a glance that made me uncomfortable. After about twenty minutes, the younger one got to his feet abruptly and started walking in my direction. His bloodshot eyes grazed me, and I felt his hot breath lash my face. He moved past me and went to urinate on a withered bush.

  I made a show of consulting my watch and continued on my way at a quicker pace. A desire to turn around tormented me, but I resisted. After I got far enough away, I checked to see whether they were following me. They were back on their hillside, crouched over their sack like two carrion birds watching over a carcass.

  A few kilometers farther on, a van caught up with me. I stood on the side of the trail a
nd waved my arms. The van nearly knocked me down as it passed in a din of scrap metal and overworked valves. Glancing into the cabin, I recognized the two individuals of a little while ago. They were looking straight ahead.

  By midday, I was exhausted. Sweat steamed off my clothes. I veered toward a tree—the only one for miles around—standing atop a rise in the ground. Its bare, thorny branches cast a skeletal shadow, which I quickly occupied.

  Hunger and thirst accentuated my fatigue. I took off my shoes and lay down under the tree in such a way that I could keep the dirt road in sight. Hours passed before I made out a vehicle in the distance. It was still nothing but a grayish dot sliding through the glare, but I was able to identify it from the irregular flashes of reflected light it gave off. I immediately put my shoes back on and ran toward the trail. To my great disappointment, the dot changed direction and gradually slid out of sight.