The Sirens of Baghdad (9 page)

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.

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.

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.