The Sirens of Baghdad (4 page)

The conclusions landed like sudden blows, and Doc’s audience sat openmouthed. Satisfied, he savored for a moment the effect produced by the pertinence of his arguments; then, confident that he’d scored a knockout, he cleared his throat arrogantly and rose to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he declared, “in the hope of seeing you again tomorrow, enlightened and improved, I leave you to ponder my words.”

Whereupon he dramatically smoothed the front of his djellaba and, with exaggerated hauteur, left the barbershop.

The barber, who had paid no attention, eventually noticed the silence that had fallen around him. He raised an eyebrow, but then, incurious, he returned to cutting his customer’s hair.

Now that Doc Jabir had withdrawn, all eyes turned toward the eldest. He moved about in his wicker chair, smacked his lips, and said, “That’s one possible way of looking at things.” Then, after a long moment of silence, he added, “It’s true that we’re reaping what we sowed: the fruit of our broken oaths. We’ve failed. In the past, we were ourselves, good, virtuous Arabs with just enough vanity to give us a bit of guts. Instead of improving over time, we’ve degenerated.”

“And where have we gone wrong?” the Falcon asked testily.

“In our faith. We’ve lost it, and we’ve lost face along with it.”

“As far as I know, our mosques are full.”

“Yes, but what’s become of the believers? They go to prayers mechanically, and then, as soon as the service is over, they return to the world of illusions. That’s not faith.”

A supporter of the eldest handed him a glass of water. The old man took several sips, and the sound of his swallowing resounded in the shop.

“Fifty years ago, when I was in Jordan at the head of my uncle’s caravan—about a hundred camels in all—I stopped in a village near Amman. It was the time of prayer. I went to a mosque with a group of my men, and we set about performing our ritual ablutions in a little paved courtyard. The imam, an imposing personage dressed in a flaming red tunic, came up to us and asked, ‘Young men, what are you doing here?’ ‘We’re washing ourselves for the prayer,’ I replied. He inquired further: ‘Do you think your goatskins will suffice to cleanse you?’ I pointed out to him that it was our duty to perform our ablutions before entering the prayer hall. He took a fine fresh fig from his pocket and washed it meticulously in a glass of water; then he peeled it open before our eyes. Inside, the beautiful fig was crawling with maggots. The imam concluded his lesson by saying, ‘It’s not a question of washing your bodies, but your souls, young men. If you’re rotten inside, neither rivers nor oceans will suffice to make you clean.’”

Overcome, everyone in the barbershop nodded.

“Don’t try to make others wear the hat we’ve fashioned for ourselves with our own hands. If the Americans are here, it’s our fault. By losing our faith, we’ve also lost our bearings and our sense of honor. We ha—”

“There we are!” the barber cried out, shaking his brush above the crimson nape of his customer’s neck.

The other men in the shop froze in indignation.

Blissfully unaware that he’d just rudely interrupted the revered eldest and scandalized his listeners, the barber kept on carelessly waving his brush.

His customer gathered up his old eyeglasses, which were held together with bits of tape and wire, adjusted them on his lumpy nose, and looked at himself in the mirror facing him. “What do you call this?” he moaned. “You’ve sheared me like a sheep.”

“You didn’t have all that much hair when you came in,” the barber pointed out impassively.

“Maybe not, but you’ve gone too far. You’ve practically scalped me.”

“You could have stopped me.”

“How? I can’t see a thing without my glasses.”

The barber made a slightly embarrassed face. “Sorry. I did my best.”

At this moment, the two men realized that something wasn’t right. They turned around and received with full force the outraged looks of everyone gathered in the shop.

“What’s the matter?” said the barber in a little voice.

“The eldest was instructing us,” someone told him reproachfully, “and not only were you two not listening but on top of it you start squabbling about a bad haircut. It’s inexcusable.”

Made aware of their boorishness, the barber and his customer both placed a hand on their mouths, like children caught saying dirty words.

The young people who’d been standing around the entrance to the shop left on tiptoe. In Kafr Karam, when sages and important men start quarreling, teenagers and bachelors must depart from the scene. For propriety’s sake. I took the opportunity to pay a visit to the cobbler, whose little shop stood about a hundred meters away, nestled in the side of a ghastly building hidden behind some facades so ugly, they seemed to have been erected by djinns.

The sunlight ricocheted off the ground and hurt my eyes. Between two hovels, I caught a glimpse of my cousin Kadem, still in the spot where I’d left him, huddled on his big rock. I waved at him, he failed to notice me, and I proceeded on my way.

The cobbler’s shop was closed, but in any case, the aging shoes he had for sale were suitable only for the elderly; if some of his wares had been languishing in their cardboard boxes for years on end, it wasn’t because money was tight.

In front of the building’s large iron door, which was painted a repulsive shade of brown, Omar the Corporal was playing with a dog. As soon as he saw me, he waved me over, simultaneously aiming a kick at the animal’s hindquarters. The dog yelped and ran away. Omar turned to me and said, “I’ll bet you’re in heat, that’s what you are. You came here looking for a stray ewe, right?”

Omar was a walking disease. The young people of the village appreciated neither his crude language nor his sick innuendos; people avoided him like the plague. His time in the army had corrupted him.

Five years previously, he’d gone off to serve in the ranks as a cook; shortly after the siege of Baghdad by the Americans, he’d returned to the village, unable to explain what had happened. One night, he said, his unit was on full alert, locked and loaded; the next day, there was no one left. Everyone had deserted, the officers first. Omar came home hugging the walls. He reacted very badly to the defection of his battalion and sought to drown his grief and shame in adulterated wine. This was probably the source of his coarseness; having lost his self-respect, he took a malicious pleasure in disgusting relatives and friends.

“There are decent people around here,” I reminded him.

“What did I say that wasn’t Sunnite?”

“Please…”

He spread out his arms. “Okay. Okay. A guy can’t even fart around anymore.”

Omar was eleven years my senior. He’d signed up for the army after a disappointment in love: The girl of his dreams turned out to be promised to someone else. Omar hadn’t known a thing about it; neither had she, for that matter. It was only when he’d gathered up his courage and charged his aunt with soliciting his beloved’s hand that his illusions had collapsed around him. He’d never recovered from that.

“I’m freaking out in this shithole,” he moaned. “I’ve knocked on every door, and nobody wants to go to town. I wonder why they’d rather stay cooped up in their crappy shacks instead of enjoying a little stroll on a nice avenue with air-conditioned shops and flowers on the café terraces. What’s there to see around here, I ask you, except lizards and dogs? At least in town, you go to a café, you sit at a table on the terrace, and you can watch the cars pass and the girls slink by. You feel that you exist, dammit! You feel you’re alive. Which is not the feeling I get in Kafr Karam. Here, it’s more like slow death, I swear to you. I’m suffocating. I’m dying. Shit, Khaled’s taxi isn’t even running, and the bus hasn’t come near these parts for weeks.”

Omar’s torso resembled a big bundle on short legs. He was wearing a threadbare checked shirt too tight to hide his large belly, which hung down over his belt. His grease-stained pants weren’t much to look at, either. Omar inevitably had black blotches on his clothes. No matter how fresh and clean they were, he always found a way to stain them with some oily substance a minute after putting them on. You’d have thought his body secreted it.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the café.”

“To watch some cretins play cards, like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and tomorrow, and twenty years from now? That’s a way to lose your mind. Damn! What could I have done in a former life to deserve rebirth in a dirty little dump like this?”

“It’s our village, Omar. Our first fatherland.”

“Fatherland, my ass. Even the goddamned crows avoid this place.”

He sucked in his big belly to stick his shirt into his pants, took a deep breath, and said with a sigh, “In any case, we have no choice. The café it is.”

We went back toward the square. Omar was furious. Every time we walked past a car, no matter how decrepit, he started griping. “Why do these jackasses buy these crates if they’re just going to park them in front of their shacks and let them rot?”

He held himself back for a minute and then returned to the charge. “How about your cousin?” he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of Kadem, who was sitting by the low wall at the other end of the street. “How the hell can he stay in that one spot without moving, dawn to dusk? His brain’s going to implode one of these days, I promise you.”

“He just likes to be alone, that’s all.”

“There was a guy in my battalion who behaved just like that. He always stayed in a corner of the barracks, never went to the club, never hung out with friends. One morning, he was found in the latrines, hanging from a ceiling light.”

“That won’t ever happen to Kadem,” I said as a shiver ran down my back.

“How much you want to bet?”

The Safir café was run by Majed, another cousin of mine, a gloomy, sickly man who seemed to be wasting away. Dressed in blue overalls so ugly they looked as though they’d been cut out of a tarpaulin, his head covered by an old military cap pulled down to his ears, he stood behind his rudimentary counter like a failed statue. Since the only reason his customers came to his place was to play cards, he no longer bothered to turn on his machines, contenting himself with making a thermos of red tea at home and bringing it to the café; often, he was obliged to drink the tea alone. His establishment was frequented by unemployed young people, all of them flat broke, who arrived in the morning and stayed until nightfall without ever having put their hands in their pockets. Majed had often dreamed about chucking it all, but then what? In Kafr Karam, the general dereliction defied belief; anyone who had anything resembling employment held on to it stubbornly so as not to risk going on the skids.

Majed gave Omar a bitter look when he saw him arrive. “Here comes trouble,” he grumbled.

Unconcerned, Omar briefly considered the young men seated at tables here and there. “It’s like a barracks when everyone’s been consigned to quarters,” he declared, scratching his behind.

He noticed the twins, Hassan and Hussein, standing in front of a window in the back of the room and watching a card game. The players were Yaseen, Doc Jabir’s grandson, a brooding, irascible young man; Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law; Adel, a tall, strapping, and rather stupid fellow; and Bilal, the son of the barber.

Omar approached the table, greeted the twins in passing, and took up a position behind Adel.

Annoyed, Adel shifted in his chair and said, “You’re in my light, Corporal.”

Omar took a step backward. “The real shadow’s in your thick skull, my boy.”

“Leave him alone,” Yaseen said without taking his eyes off his cards. “Don’t distract us.”

Omar sniggered scornfully but held his tongue.

The four players contemplated their cards with great intensity. At the end of a lengthy mental calculation, Bilal cleared his throat. “It’s your play, Adel.”

Adel thrust out his lips and kept pondering his hand, indecisive, taking his time.

“Look, are you going to play?” Salah asked impatiently.

“Hey,” Adel protested. “I’ve got to think.”

“Stop exaggerating,” Omar said. “You tossed away your last gram of brain when you jerked off this morning.”

The atmosphere in the café turned leaden. The young men sitting near the door vanished; the others didn’t know which way to turn.

Omar realized his blunder and swallowed hard, waiting for all hell to break loose.

The players at the table kept their heads bent over their cards, as though petrified, except for Yaseen, who folded his hand, delicately placed it to one side, and fixed his eyes, white with indignation, on the former corporal. “I don’t know what point you think you’re making with your filthy language, Omar, but this is going too far. In our village, the young, like the old, respect one another. You were raised here, and you know what I’m talking about.”

“I didn’t—”

“Shut up! Shut your big mouth and keep it shut,” Yaseen said in a monotone that contrasted violently with the fury blazing in his eyes. “You’re not in the mess; you’re in Kafr Karam. We’re all brothers, cousins, neighbors, and relatives here, and we watch what we do and how we act. I’ve told you a hundred times, Omar: no obscenity. Keep your disgusting soldier’s lingo to yourself.”