Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

  “Are you going to go?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” they replied in unison.

  “Don’t do anything weird. Act normal. Arrest him and come back as quickly as possible. I want you to be tough. Off you go, and God be with you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The two fat young men gave him another firm, sharp salute then hurried off.

  The brigadier went back to his tea and found it had gone cold. He reached for a file on the table and looked through it again. It contained a prediction by the team of astrologers and fortune-tellers in the Tracking and Pursuit Department. It had landed on his desk a quarter of an hour ago, which meant he urgently needed to prepare a team to arrest the criminal—the One Who Has No Name, as the laconic senior astrologer had dubbed him.

  He would spend the night in the office, waiting for the hit squad to come back, in the hope that this would be the end of the story, the end of the headache, the anxiety, the tension. Then he would be in an excellent position with respect to the Americans and the parties in power, both of which looked at him with suspicion. He might be promoted or be able to come out into the limelight, from the dark, mysterious shadows where he had been lurking for the past two years.

  What would the criminal look like, the brigadier wondered. Deep in thought, he paced around his large office. This man who could take bullets without dying or bleeding, how horribly ugly would he be? How would he be arrested if he wasn’t afraid of death or of gunfire? Did he really have extraordinary powers? Would he breathe fire at his men and burn them to ashes? Or did he have hidden wings to take off and fly away from his pursuers? Would he suddenly disappear before their eyes as if he had never existed?

  He knew he would have the answers to these questions in two or three hours.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE RECORDINGS

  1

  MAHMOUD SLID OPEN the window overlooking the balcony of his second-floor room in the Dilshad Hotel. The warm air hit his face, and he saw the heat rising from the asphalt on Saadoun Street. The harsh glare of the sun, reflecting off the passing cars, hurt his eyes. Just seeing from above the effect of the heat on what was happening below was enough to discourage him from leaving the hotel.

  Mahmoud had finally managed to move from the Orouba Hotel to the Dilshad, with encouragement from Saidi, who wanted his assistant to live in better conditions, apparently in preparation for bigger assignments.

  Mahmoud closed the sliding window, shutting out some of the street noise and the rumble of the traffic. He picked up the remote for the air-conditioning and set the thermostat to seventy-five degrees. Settling into a wooden chair, he rested his elbows on the round coffee-colored table, brought his digital recorder to his mouth, and as he had often seen in American movies, he pressed Record. He wanted to go over the details of what had happened over the previous two days, especially his strange conversation with Hadi the junk dealer.

  Hadi seemed willing to answer any of Mahmoud’s questions. He was eager to convince Mahmoud that his story was true. His manner was different from his usual one, when he had an audience. Typically he’d seem relaxed and cheerful while knowing deep down that others didn’t believe what he was saying, the fact that they didn’t believe him seemingly part of the ritual he enjoyed while telling the story. When he was telling Mahmoud the story of the Whatsitsname, he wasn’t enjoying it. It was more like he was fulfilling an obligation or conveying a message.

  The Whatsitsname had visited Hadi on the very night that several murders took place in the Bataween area, after Aziz had warned him to stop telling his story about the body he had sewn together. The story was no longer funny: it now aroused suspicions, Aziz thought. Hadi was drinking his last glass of arak when the Whatsitsname appeared at the door to his room. When Hadi saw him standing a few feet away, he thought it was just a bad dream. If the dream came true before his eyes, the creature’s intentions would not be good. It would have come to kill him.

  The first sentence the Whatsitsname spoke confirmed Hadi’s fears: he really was visiting him that night in order to kill him.

  “You’re responsible for the death of the guard at the hotel, Hasib Mohamed Jaafar,” the Whatsitsname said. “If you hadn’t been walking past the hotel—the guard wouldn’t have come out to the gate. He might have stayed close to the sentry box, which was relatively far from the outer gate, and from a distance opened fire on the suicide bomber driving the garbage truck. The explosion might have caused him some injuries, or the blast might have thrown him, but he definitely wouldn’t have died, and the next morning he could have gone home to his wife and his little daughter. While having breakfast with them, he might have considered giving up his dangerous job and selling sunflower seeds on the sidewalk in Sector 44.”

  The Whatsitsname seemed intent on carrying out the mission for which he had come. Hadi argued with him, plucking up all his courage to defend himself. In a sense Hadi was his father; he had brought him into the world, hadn’t he?

  “You were just a conduit, Hadi,” the Whatsitsname replied. “Think how many stupid mothers and fathers have produced geniuses and great men in history. The credit isn’t due to them but to circumstances and other things beyond their control. You’re just an instrument, or a surgical glove that Fate put on its hand to move pawns on the chessboard of life.”

  Such eloquent talk! Everything Hadi had done—things that no one in his right mind would have undertaken—made him just a conduit, just a paved road that Fate’s car could speed along on.

  The argument went on for some minutes, and that in itself showed the Whatsitsname wasn’t quite sure of what he was doing. If he had decided to kill Hadi, he wouldn’t have spoken to him in the first place. He would have come in and, as with the four beggars, have squeezed his throat with his strong, steady hands until Hadi gave up the ghost. Then he would have thrown Hadi’s lifeless body onto his dirty bed. He would have left him there and gone, and people would have found Hadi’s body maybe a month later because so few people had visited Hadi since the death of Nahem Abdaki, and no one liked him much or would miss him.

  The Whatsitsname looked at the Throne Verse on the far wall of the room. He needed to do something to distract himself and give his brain a chance to decide a course of action. He kept looking at the Throne Verse and at the cardboard edge that was hanging down. He took a few steps toward it and pulled at the cardboard edge. The other corners that were pasted to the wall came off too. The whole frame broke into pieces and came off the wall easily, as if it had been waiting for ages for someone to come along and pull it down. Hadi couldn’t remember why or when Nahem had put up the verse, but it had been there since they built the room. The Whatsitsname threw the inscription aside, and a dark hole appeared in the wall behind where it had been, about a foot and a half high and a foot across. The next morning Hadi would find out what was in the hole.

  Time was passing slowly for Hadi in the awkward company of the Whatsitsname, but the course of events suggested to Hadi that his creation wasn’t sure what his mission was that night. The Whatsitsname turned to him and admitted he was confused, because the soul of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar was demanding revenge, and he had to kill the person who had caused Hasib’s death.

  “It was the Sudanese suicide bomber who caused his death,” Hadi said confidently, trying to exploit the situation to his own advantage.

  “Yes, but he’s dead. How can I kill someone who’s already dead?”

  “The hotel management, then. The company that ran the hotel.”

  “Yes, maybe. But I have to find the real killer of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar so his soul can find rest,” said the Whatsitsname, pulling up a wooden crate and sitting on it.

  2

  Mahmoud picked up the latest issue of al-Haqiqa magazine and read a paragraph of Ali Baher al-Saidi’s weekly column:

  There are laws that human beings are unaware of. These laws don’t operate around
the clock like the physical laws by which the wind blows, the rain falls, and rocks fall down mountains, or like other laws that human beings can observe, verify, and define because they apply to things that recur. There are laws that operate only under special conditions, and when something happens under these laws, people are surprised and say it’s impossible, that it’s a fairy tale or in the best case a miracle. They don’t say they’re unaware of the law behind it. People are deluded and never admit their ignorance.

  Mahmoud imagined that this passage might summarize the Whatsitsname’s ideas about the reasons he existed. But Hadi adhered to a more imaginative formula—that the Whatsitsname was made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim. He was a composite of victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace. He was created to obtain revenge on their behalf.

  The Whatsitsname talked about the night he met the drunk beggars. He said he tried to avoid them, but they were aggressive and charged toward him to kill him. His horrible face was an incentive for them to attack him. They didn’t know anything about him, but they were driven by that latent hatred that can suddenly come to the surface when people meet someone who doesn’t fit in. They fought for half an hour, trying to hit him with their fists or get hold of his neck to strangle him. In the darkness, one of them grabbed one of his friends by the neck and, given new strength by his delirium, finished him off. Then he noticed that another beggar had done the same thing. The two dead beggars were victims of acts of stupidity, and the two surviving beggars were criminals, so the Whatsitsname strangled them to avenge the beggars they had killed. Because they had been secretly planning to do the same thing to him, and because the four of them would have failed in any attempt to kill him anyway (and this is the underlying significance of what happened on that strange night), they were intent on suicide but hadn’t found a good way to commit it until the Whatsitsname appeared, strolling down the dark lane in Daniel’s old clothes.

  Daniel, or the Whatsitsname, was just a means by which they went to their deaths, which was a fate that appealed to them at every serious drinking session they had, including the one they had had that night.

  They had died because they wanted to die, and that explained the strange posture they were in when the locals found them the next morning, in a square, with each one strangling one of the others.

  Mahmoud recorded all this on his digital recorder, aware that he was paraphrasing the words that Hadi had attributed to the Whatsitsname and that he was adding his own personal gloss as well.

  “It’s hard to convince anyone of this nonsense, but organized nonsense of this kind stands behind all the crimes committed,” said Mahmoud. He then resumed a renarration of the strange details. The Whatsitsname had been planning something completely different, instead of getting involved in fights with people who weren’t his enemies in the first place. He had no doubts about his ability to survive, however hard the others tried to kill him, but he wasn’t looking for stardom or a chance to show off or display his strength. Nor did he intend to frighten people. He was on a noble mission and had to carry it out with as few complications as possible, so after the incident with the four beggars and another incident in which a police vehicle accidentally hit him in the street near the Liberty Monument, he decided not to move around in the open and to avoid people as much as possible.

  There he was, sitting on an upturned wooden crate in Hadi’s room, seeing and hearing how stories about him had spread through the neighborhood and other parts of Baghdad. The stories portrayed him as a dangerous criminal, but really he was nothing like that.

  He had killed Abu Zaidoun to avenge Daniel Tadros, and he had killed the officer in the brothel because he was responsible for the death of someone whose fingers Hadi had taken for the Whatsitsname’s body. He would keep on doing his work till the end.

  “What is the end?” asked Mahmoud. “When can it stop?”

  After a moment’s silence, Hadi replied, “He’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him.”

  “And what will he do after that?”

  “He’ll collapse and go back to how he was before. He’ll decompose and die.”

  Hadi himself was on the Whatsitsname’s list. But the Whatsitsname’s time wasn’t unlimited, and he had to complete his mission quickly. He should really have stood up right then, strangled Hadi on his bed, and made him vomit onto his pillow all the arak he’d drunk, but the Whatsitsname didn’t have the resolve for that. With his foxlike intuition, Hadi sensed this and took advantage of it.

  “Leave me till the end,” he said. “I don’t want to live anyway. What’s living to someone like me? I’m nothing, whether I live or die. I’m nothing. Kill me, but at the end. Make me the last one.”

  The Whatsitsname just looked at Hadi from his dark eye sockets. His silence was enough to reassure Hadi that he wouldn’t die that night.

  3

  The day after the Whatsitsname’s visit, Hadi had met up with Mahmoud and told him he had given the digital recorder to the Whatsitsname. Mahmoud immediately had visions of the junk dealer selling the recorder in the Harj market in Bab al-Sharqi. But ten days later Hadi belied Mahmoud’s doubts by giving the recorder back to him. So he wasn’t a thief or a liar. Now, in his comfortable new room at the Dilshad Hotel, Mahmoud turned on the recorder and found that the memory was completely full.

  After Mahmoud had given the recorder to him, Hadi had been sitting as usual in the courtyard outside his room. He brought his bed out into the open air and thrown himself down on it to look at the few stars visible in the night sky. Meanwhile, close to midnight, while Mahmoud was trying to sleep under the roar of the ceiling fan in his wretched room in the Orouba Hotel, gunfire broke out.

  That was nothing exceptional or strange about that, but the shooting sounded as if it was nearby. Hadi was worried that a bullet falling from the sky could kill him.

  It was a terrible mistake by the team from the Tracking and Pursuit Department, which was led by two young officers in pink shirts. Brigadier Majid had made it clear to them that they should keep a low profile, but, accompanied by one of the astrologers from the department, they had been able to identify the location of the criminal and had gradually tightened the noose around him until they spotted him in a dark alley. Forgetting that he couldn’t be killed by bullets, they fired at him and ran after him as he climbed walls and jumped from roof to roof. One of the officers managed to intercept the criminal and grab hold of his clothes. They wrestled for a few minutes, with the officer hoping that the rest of the team would soon arrive to handcuff the criminal, but the Whatsitsname won the upper hand. He grabbed the throat of the officer, whose eyes almost popped out of their sockets. When the Whatsitsname saw that the rest of the team was closing in on him, he smashed the officer’s head against the wall. The officer collapsed, and the Whatsitsname ran off, disappearing from sight.

  Half an hour later there was no sound of gunfire or any other sounds, for that matter. Hadi came out of his room, which was hot and full of damp smells, to lie down again in the courtyard, but he saw someone sitting on his bed. It was his friend the Whatsitsname.

  For a moment Hadi thought the Whatsitsname had finished his task and had only Hadi left to take revenge on. But before he could speak, the Whatsitsname told him the area was surrounded by police and men from the special intelligence unit. He would stay at Hadi’s place for a while until he was sure they were gone.

  The Whatsitsname was discovering new things every day, he told Hadi. He had found out, for example, that each piece of dead flesh that made up his body fell off if he didn’t avenge the person it came from within a certain amount of time. But if he did avenge someone, then that person’s piece would fall off anyway, as if it was no longer needed.

  Hadi felt so at ease that he sat next to the Whatsitsname on the b
ed, where he could smell his putrid body. He told the Whatsitsname he was prepared to help in any way he wanted. The Whatsitsname said he needed to replace the parts that were falling off, so he needed new flesh from new victims. Hadi said he would try to help, starting the next day, but in fact he had other ideas. It would be good, he thought, if the Whatsitsname’s body fell to pieces quickly so that he could be done with him and with the terror he inspired.

  The Whatsitsname turned to Hadi. “That’s not everything,” he said. “What’s worse is that people have been giving me a bad reputation. They’re accusing me of committing crimes, but what they don’t understand is that I’m the only justice there is in this country.”

  Hadi suddenly remembered Mahmoud’s digital recorder. He stood up and offered the Whatsitsname a drink, which he declined. He went into his room, lit the paraffin lamp, brought out his drinking stuff, and poured himself a glass of arak. He looked at the Whatsitsname and said, “You should do an interview with the press to explain your cause.”

  “An interview? I’m telling you I don’t want to draw attention to myself, and you suggest an interview with the press!”

  “You’ve already drawn attention to yourself,” Hadi said. “You should defend yourself, to win some friends to help you in your mission. Right now, you’re everyone’s enemy.”

  “But who could I do the interview with? You mean I should just walk into the television station? What kind of nonsense is that?”

  “I can do the interview,” said Hadi, taking out the recorder. He tried to turn it on but couldn’t remember how to. The Whatsitsname, sitting on Hadi’s bed, took the recorder and fiddled with it as Hadi tried to enjoy a glass of warm arak without ice or mezes. Then more gunshots broke out, and the Whatsitsname stood up.