The Last of the Angels (25 page)

Then he stretched out in the coffin, asking the men to turn off the light on their way out because he wanted to sleep. The men withdrew silently. He listened to the sound of their footsteps retreating into the darkness, and then closed his eyes and fell asleep.

M
ullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri was carried to his house in the very same coffin in which he had died so that his widow could weep for him and the Chuqor community could bid him farewell. When one of them was snatched away, their emotions remained disturbed and unsettled until they witnessed the death. Women of the Chuqor community normally mourned the deceased for three days, while consuming many pastries made with dates. The family of the deceased would distribute these even to strangers who chanced to pass by the door of the home, believing that the sweets would leave a final pleasant memory of the deceased in people's hearts.

The very first day that the mullah's death was announced, a professional mourner arrived from the Shatirlu community. She was renowned throughout the entire city for her skill in composing elegies that made even the hardest of hearts grieve and women's eyes fill with tears for the dead, to whom she would attribute every virtue, whether accurately or not. Her brilliance, however, lay in portraying scenes that her imagination devised. Although this funeral performer had never seen the mullah, she learned everything about him from the community's women and from his widow, who gave her ten dinars, saying, “I want you to make the whole city weep for him.” So the mourner drew from the bag in which she carried her equipment a loudspeaker, which she herself set up outside the door. Then she began to wail and to strike her face while she enumerated the mullah's merits to a monotonous beat. The women who filled the home's courtyard began their lamentations: striking their faces, tearing their garments, exposing their chests, and rubbing dirt on their heads.

The men of the Chuqor community lined up in the street in front of the mullah's house and proceeded to listen to the qualities that the lamenting praise-singer allotted to the departed mullah until many of them felt a twinge of conscience for not having sufficiently appreciated the mullah during his lifetime. Custom decreed that the deceased should be washed in the mosque, where prayers were said for him.

This was followed by his funeral and burial, all in the same day. Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri, however, was not merely someone like those who died every day. His son Bakr told the men wishing to limit his funeral to a single day, “Don't forget that he's a director general. The government will inevitably come once the news reaches them. Who knows: the king himself may come. Don't forget he knew him personally. And Kirkuk's citizens who loved him have a right to a final viewing of his pure body.”

Abbas Bahlawan and Mahmud al-Arabi, who were sensible of the favor that Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri had done them, suggested that the mullah and his coffin should be placed inside a glass box for a period of three days and displayed to the inhabitants of Kirkuk and to the visitors who came from all over the world to the shrine of Qara Qul, so that everyone could be blessed by seeing him lie in state. The two men, who enjoyed great respect in the Chuqor community in deference to their role in defending the community against aggressors, said, “It's true that the mullah was a man like us, but he was chosen to be custodian of the tomb of Qara Qul and his caliph on this earth. And who will forget that the mullah himself had his own miracles? Remember the miracle of the deluge that Kirkuk experienced after a long drought back when the mullah led a procession from the Chuqor community to the plain of al-Musalla, beseeching God to send rain to the city? Then the skies filled with clouds even before he finished his prayer. Kirkuk had not experienced rain like that since Noah's flood.”

The points raised by the two men started people thinking once more about the life of the man they had lost. They began racking their memories for everything the mullah had said or advocated during his life. They remembered his rain sermon, his sermon about resisting the English, and his coffin sermon. They remembered his wisdom in deciding to use a coffin as his desk, unlike other administrators who supervised the activities of their subjects while seated on swivel chairs. They remembered his wisdom in utilizing the gold wheelchair when he went to the coffeehouse. His son Bakr said, “I believe he died because he saw the Unknown open up before him.” The Chuqor men remembered that the mullah, before his death, had kept repeating, “I saw everything.” They confirmed that the curtain screening the Unknown had lifted before his eyes, causing him to lose the ability to speak and his eyes to roam in terror. Even without falling ill, the man had died in response to a call that originated in the Eternal.

The coffin containing the mullah's body was placed in a sealed glass box, which was filled with ice blocks brought from the ice plant that his family owned, to keep the corpse from decaying or decomposing while exposed on a high bench that was built on the street in front of his mosque. The box was surrounded by tens of colored lamps that blinked on and off once some workmen drew electrical power from a pole at the corner of the street.

This affair, which was an entirely new observance for the city of Kirkuk, attracted thousands of people coming to see the mullah, who almost looked like he was sleeping. He was covered with the Iraqi flag and his turban had been placed on his chest. Actually, all that showed of the mullah were his pale, elongated face and his sunken eyes, above which bushy eyebrows met in the middle. His long, white beard had been combed and trimmed with scissors to look neater, since the mullah had paid especial attention to this while alive. People passed by the box, casting at it what they termed their “final look,” although many circled around to take another peek. The children took particular delight in this. They would pass by, imitating their parents, whose tears flowed as they stood before the box.

As always happens, Muslim religious scholars disagreed this time too about placing the mullah inside a glass box and displaying him to people. Some thought that Islam forbids turning a Muslim believer's remains into a spectacle for people—as if he were a monkey in a zoo. Something like this would inevitably lead to error. These men said that their hunch was confirmed when some people began to claim that the mullah had winked or smiled while in his coffin. Indeed, the women who persisted in paying their respects throughout the three nights, striking their faces and weeping, reported that at dawn after the second night they had seen the mullah lift his head, adjust his position a little, and then fall asleep. Of course none of the men believed these women, whose mental and spiritual horizons were limited.

The anger of the ulema intensified when they heard that the Chuqor community was thinking about embalming the mullah's corpse and leaving it inside a glass box so that future generations could look at it too. They emphasized that this would turn the mullah into an idol worshipped by the people and that this was not something that would please God or His Messenger. What made things worse was that the Communists began to noise it about that the mullah was a nationalist symbol in the struggle against English imperialism and that embalming him would consecrate this symbolic status and establish a place for him in the people's hearts. They asserted that embalming leaders was a mark of civilization and would necessarily spread throughout the world and that the Russians were the first to set this precedent, which they copied from the pharaohs, when workers and peasants embalmed both of the great leaders, Lenin and Stalin. This custom would certainly be followed by all other leaders. The attorney for Qara Qul's widow issued a statement that opposed embalming. In it he slandered Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri and referred to the suit filed against him for misappropriation of wealth not belonging to him. A number of members of the Afterlife Society, even without investigating the matter, sought refuge in a mosque where they said they would starve themselves to death unless the government intervened to stop the embalming operation.

This groundless and fabricated commotion, which rested on certain rumors that were possibly fomented by Qara Qul's widow, forced the mullah's family to issue a statement celebrating Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri and announcing that an oratorical and poetic festival would be held prior to the mullah's funeral and burial in the courtyard of Qara Qul's agency. The governor allocated a prize of a hundred dinars to be awarded to the finest poem recited during the festival. Poets came from throughout Iraq and from Syria, Egypt, and the Sudan—countries renowned for poets who composed panegyric verse. Tucked in their pockets, they brought protracted odes. Even though Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri was buried on the third day that he was displayed in the glass box—after the ice had melted and his body had begun to decompose and smell—the celebration lasted for seven more days so the poets could deliver their elegies, from which the newspapers published excerpts together with photographs of the guests of honor seated in the front row flanking the governor, who was always at the center.

There was something approaching a fracas when the awards committee, consisting of the governor, the head of the municipality, the director of public safety, and the minister of religious endowments, relying in their judgment on the amount of applause that each poem received and also bearing in mind the geographical distribution of the countries from which the poets hailed, declared a tie among four poets. These were Abd al-Ta'ib Abd al-Gha'ib, Salman al-Safin (who was known as the people's poet because he worked at the People's cigarette factory in al-Atifiya, Baghdad), Ayman Sultan al-Ayman from Syria, and an Egyptian psychiatrist named Girgis Rami. Even the winning poets rejected this unfair division, and each of them sent a telegram to the governor requesting his just intervention to award the whole prize to that one poet himself.

Verbal battles broke out between the winning poets and the losers, one of whom alleged that Abd al-Ta'ib Abd al-Gha'ib was a Satanist and therefore ineligible to eulogize a Believer of Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri's stature. Others accused al-Safin of being a spiteful Communist and also demented as a result of his lengthy stays in prison. Some of the losing poets said that the winning Syrian poet was an Isma‘ili esotericist accustomed to writing panegyric poems in honor of just about anyone, moving from ruddy- to olive-to dark-complexioned patrons in search of a living. The Egyptian poet Ahmad Rami, who did not participate in the festival, denied that there was any relationship between him and the winning poet Girgis Rami, declaring in his Egyptian accent, “He's a clown of a doctor, with Umm Kulthum as my witness.” Only then did the prize committee realize their error, which they saw no way to rectify. They had named Girgis Rami as one of the winners thinking that he was the poet Ahmad Rami, with whom the governor himself spent the first Friday night of every month, placing before himself a bottle of arak and submerging himself in the voice of Umm Kulthum as she sang one of Rami's masterpieces. The poets' row did not quiet down until Khidir Musa donated three hundred more dinars, and each of the four poets received the hundred dinars that had brought him to Kirkuk.

This affair upset the young Burhan Abdallah, who had believed that poets were a sophisticated group. Now he saw them as they really were: beggars who would praise even the devil himself in exchange for a handful of dinars. They were jesters who moved their hands and feet on any dais, declaiming the most inane words. Khidir Musa jestingly asked his nephew Burhan Abdallah, “Do you still want to be a poet after everything you've seen of these poets, Burhan?” Burhan Abdallah replied a bit smugly, “There's always a distinction, Uncle, between a poet and a beggar, and all of these were beggars, not poets.” What the boy said, however, was empty puffery because the shock caused him to stop writing poetry for many years, until he was inspired by reading a copy of the Holy Bible he had chanced upon. Burhan Abdallah then found that the life of the mullah had contained many spiritual lessons that deserved to be related as part of the evolving history of mankind. For that reason, he closed his eyes and began to imagine the mullah as another messiah planting his upright stalk of wheat. Words got mixed together in his head until he no longer distinguished between past and present: “As it is inscribed in the prophets, here I descend before your eye my imam who prepares the way for you. ‘The voice crying in the wilderness: grow a healthy stalk of wheat.' The mullah traveled from one district to another. All the people of the Islamic region and of the Chuqor community went out to him. With him, they washed their sins away in the Khasa Su River. The mullah was wearing ‘camel's hair, and a leather girdle around his waist; and his food was locusts and wild honey.' At that time he saw the mountains split apart and ‘the Spirit descending upon him like a dove.' So he shuddered and his heart split asunder. The spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels fed him manna and quail. He threw a net into the water and told the fishermen who gathered around him, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.'”

This gospel-style introduction to the life of the mullah made Burhan nervous instead of confident about his abilities to discover the message that Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri had brought to the Chuqor community. He asked himself what the mullah had really seen. It was hard for him to know what was true, for the secret had gone with the mullah to his grave. He was sure, however, that the mullah would not have died had he not seen what he ought not to have seen. Is this man's destiny then? His sorrow reached an extreme because he too wished to see what he did not and to uncover the secret of all secrets. Yet he did not feel prepared to die. Death resembled sleep, except that one never awoke again.

Burhan Abdallah's heart was troubled by doubt. “Does the mullah deserve to have me record his story? Can I make him into an exemplary model for people to discuss? I can't turn him into an angel because he revered money.” He smiled to himself: “I've begun to rant too—just like the mullah. The mullah saw everything, but what did he really see? Perhaps he saw angels descending from the heavens or multi-colored devils with tails and beards dancing in front of hell. Perhaps he did not see anything, and the void swallowed him.”