Selling the house and the old furniture wasn’t easy. Elishva was thinking of those young men who had visited her several times and asked to buy the house to save it from demolition and convert it into a cultural center or something, but they had stopped coming ages ago. So there was only Faraj, the real estate man.
Faraj was aware of the strange news that Elishva’s son had reappeared. Maybe the son had been a prisoner of war in Iran and had just come back. Maybe he had lost his memory, as in those foreign films. But the guys who worked with him assured him that the old woman’s son was still young, whereas he should have been in his forties by now.
“Perhaps they put him in a freezer for twenty years, and now they’ve thawed him out and brought him back to his mother,” said Hammoudy, Faraj’s youngest son. His father gave him an unexpected slap on his cheek, which silenced everyone.
As usual, Faraj was inclined to anticipate the worst and prepared himself psychologically to face it. Then, twenty-four hours after Daniel had arrived, the young man turned up in Faraj’s office with Nader Shamouni, offering to sell him Elishva’s house.
4
Faraj asked to come to the house to examine the structure before agreeing on a final price. In the meantime Elishva had summoned Hadi from next door and told him she wanted to sell all the furniture. Hadi was stunned into silence for about thirty seconds. He waited for the old lady to finish what she was saying, but she had summed everything up in one sentence. He had been certain that this Assyrian woman hated him deeply, so what had suddenly changed?
He inspected the contents of the house with her. There was plenty of furniture and furnishings—beds made of iron and brass, ornate knickknacks and unusual wooden tables. Everything was antique, except for the stove and some of the appliances. Doing some quick calculations, Hadi worked out that he didn’t have enough cash to buy all these things, but he could borrow from some friends because this was a unique opportunity.
Hadi wanted the old lady to give him a price for taking everything in one lot, whereas she wanted to haggle over every single item. After an hour of discussion, he managed to persuade her to accept his offer, and then he left the house to collect the money he needed from his friends.
The old woman’s only condition was that he wasn’t to remove the furniture while she was there. She didn’t want to see her house disappear before her eyes but wanted to remember it as it had always been, tidy and clean and smelling of the people who had lived in it and passed through it.
The night before her departure, the old lady stayed up late in the parlor. She sat on the sofa facing the picture of Saint George and spoke to him at length, the light from the decorative glass sconces in the corners of the room creating a sacramental ambiance. The saint said nothing. He had performed his miracle and his role was over—that’s how the old woman finally understood it. One thing occurred to her. She had packed up everything that carried the family’s memories, even her children’s baby clothes. The only thing left was her favorite picture of her favorite saint, but she felt she couldn’t take it in its heavy wooden frame.
She got up and, watched by Nabu the cat, stood on the sofa against the wall where the picture was hanging, lifted the picture to free the thick string from the hooks, then took it away, leaving a pale square and some cobwebs on the wall. She put the picture facedown on the floor and set about bending the little clips that held the back to the picture frame. When she took out the picture, it was thin and bent easily in her hand. It had lost some of its former grandeur, but now she could see the saint’s face up close—his fine eyebrows and glistening red lower lip. She thought of rolling the picture into a tube and adding it to her other treasured possessions, but then she had another idea. She went into her room and fetched some large sewing scissors, then went back and knelt next to the picture. She pushed Nabu away when he tried to jump onto her lap, and started to cut into the picture, making a long straight line across until the tips of the scissor blades were close to the saint’s head. Then she cut in a circle, making a kind of halo around his beautiful face. When the circle was complete, she removed the face. This was the part she liked. She threw a glance at the rest of the picture and felt a pang in her heart. With a hole where the face had been, the picture now felt hostile toward her. She left it where it was and, followed by Nabu, took the face to her bedroom.
5
To mark Elishva’s departure, Umm Salim staged a major weeping and wailing performance in the lane. She started early in the day, and many of her neighbors saw her white arms for the first time when she raised them in the air in lamentation as Elishva and her grandson drove off down the lane. When she raised them, her wide sleeves fell back, revealing the dazzling whiteness of her fine round arms, a complexion more likely to be seen on a young woman than on one her age. Some wondered aloud why Umm Salim had worn such loose sleeves if she wasn’t pleased with herself and how white her arms were.
Before closing the front door, Elishva called after Nabu, but the cat escaped up the stairs. She shouted after him again, and the cat looked toward her and gave an undulating meow, as if to say he wasn’t a coward like her and wasn’t going to leave the house, then he disappeared at the turn on the stairs. Elishva locked up the house and handed the key to a young man who worked for Faraj.
Umm Salim predicted that disaster would befall the lane because of Elishva’s departure. She noticed Hadi the junk dealer and some young men moving furniture from the old lady’s house to his house and was reminded of April 2003, when people looted the houses of officials from the old regime. She shouted at Hadi and his helpers, thinking they were robbing the old woman’s house, and didn’t stop swearing until her friends managed to get her into her house and close the door behind her.
Hadi moved all of Elishva’s furniture to his house, leaving behind just some rubbish, including a portrait of Saint George with the face cut out. When Hadi saw the picture, he was frightened, thinking it might be magic or some strange ritual act.
The door to Hadi’s house stayed open, with people coming and going to see what there was to buy. By midday Hadi had sold half the stuff to people living in the area and felt he would make a good profit. He looked up at the wall between his house and the old lady’s and saw the mangy cat looking down at him in silence, as still as a statue. For a moment he felt the cat was looking at him with the old lady’s eyes. He picked up a small piece of brick and threw it at the cat but missed, and the cat didn’t budge from its position.
By the end of the day Hadi was quite exhausted. As he fought to keep his eyes open, a lively apparition was making its way along the walls of the houses. It leapt onto the dilapidated wall of Hadi’s house and then over to the roof of Elishva’s house. It went down the stairs and found Nabu in the inner courtyard. The cat let out a drawn-out howl.
The creature, on the run from the security agencies and wanted by many parties, went down on its knees and examined the remains of the picture of Saint George. He lifted it up and saw the hole where the head was missing, then folded the picture carefully several times until it was about the size of a school exercise book. He looked around at the room and felt pangs of sadness. He would never again see the old lady who had contributed to his birth and given him the name of her missing son. He felt closer to her than to other people and felt that he had helped to keep the memory of her son alive. Now that she was gone, he had lost one of his reasons for existing. She had left him without realizing that she was leaving one of the last threads that linked her with her late son.
The creature sat down and leaned back against the wall. Nabu came by and rubbed up against his boots, leaving some of his shedding hairs, then curled up in a ball at his feet, drawn to him by his warmth.
They stayed like that till morning.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE EXPLOSION
1
AT HALF PAST five in the morning, while the Whatsitsname was fast asleep with Nabu the cat
on the floor of Elishva’s old parlor, Brigadier Sorour Majid was having disturbing dreams in his office at the Tracking and Pursuit Department. The senior astrologer strode down the corridors, woke up the guard sleeping outside of Brigadier Majid’s office, and knocked loudly on the door.
Brigadier Majid woke up with a start. When he saw the senior astrologer standing in front of him, he guessed it was an urgent matter that couldn’t be put off till sunrise. The senior astrologer put a pink piece of paper in front of him, and before the brigadier had a chance to read it, the old astrologer said, “He’s here. In this house in Bataween. You have to act immediately, before he wakes up.”
Brigadier Majid summoned the vehicles and got dressed in haste. Finally he would arrest this criminal, silencing his detractors. They might make him interior minister or defense minister or director of intelligence, he said to himself. He climbed into the four-wheel-drive truck with tinted windows. Two small cars set off with him at high speed through the streets of Baghdad, which was almost deserted at that hour. The old astrologer was in the backseat with Brigadier Majid. He wanted to see the face of this dangerous criminal before it was disfigured by punches and slaps from Brigadier Majid’s assistants. He had never before had any trouble conjuring up people’s faces, but the features of the One Who Has No Name had always eluded him. That’s what made him more mysterious and more dangerous than all the others. He thought about this until they reached Saadoun Street, where there was a major commotion—police cars and American military vehicles lined up against the sidewalk by the Orfali Mosque and the photography shops, and more police cars at the roundabout near the Liberty Monument. When they reached Tayaran Square, they were sure that Bataween was being sealed off.
“What’s going on?” Brigadier Majid shouted. He got out of the vehicle and spoke with some officers, showing them his identity card, but they wouldn’t let him through. There was a search underway for a suspected car bomber in a white, late-model Opel, which was parked close to Elishva’s house.
The senior astrologer didn’t get out of the four-wheel drive. His appearance would arouse suspicion—his strange clothes, his tall conical hat with a tassel, his long hair, his thick beard carefully combed, its pointed ends held together by a hair clip. In the best of times they would have laughed at him or thought he was an actor in a children’s theater. He looked out from the car’s open window.
The suicide bomber was sitting in the lane in the white Opel, completely surrounded. That’s what Abu Salim could see from his window in the wooden mashrabiya balcony. He should go downstairs to warn the rest of the family to get out of the house, or at least move into one of the back rooms. The house was bound to collapse if the suicide bomber blew himself up.
But Abu Salim didn’t do anything. He had woken up from his doze to the sound of megaphones ordering the suicide bomber to get out of the car with his hands up. He had gone up one floor, looked out the window, and was surprised to see the car right under his balcony, but he still saw no need to act. He didn’t even notice he was barefoot.
In the meantime Abu Anmar had managed to leave the area in his new truck before they imposed the security cordon. Faraj the real estate agent had come out of his house and stood looking across the street at the hotel he had just bought. He was planning to go to the bakery just down the lane, to buy bread and a bowl of clotted cream, when the bomb went off.
2
Hadi saw the dark wooden panel of the Jewish carving fly through the air and the wooden candelabra break loose from it and shatter. Or maybe he imagined it during his long hospital stay.
Everything in his house was thrown into chaos in the fraction of a second it took for the full force of the explosion to strike. Not only was the driver wearing a suicide belt but the car itself was also rigged with explosives. The explosion rocked the whole neighborhood—cracks would later be found in the Liberty Monument—but the most serious impact was on the old houses in Lane 7, some of which had been built in the 1930s.
Elishva’s house collapsed. So did Hadi’s. Elishva’s things and some other wooden furniture caught fire in Hadi’s courtyard, and the fire spread to Hadi’s bed. The fact that Hadi had survived was seen as a miracle, reminding everyone of the lies he had been telling for years about how he had survived falling down mountains and flying through the air after explosions. He had indeed defied death this time.
The blast threw Faraj many feet in the air, resulting in a serious injury and some bruising on his face. The facade of Umm Salim’s house was destroyed, while the walls inside were cracked. Fortunately, most of the family was asleep inside and survived. As for Abu Salim, he crashed to the ground with his balcony, suffering leg and arm fractures and wounds and scratches, but he didn’t die. He was taken to the nearby Kindi Hospital, where he raved at the journalists who came to take pictures of the injured and to listen to their accounts of the incident. He was like a broken record, going on and on about everything he had seen from his balcony over the years—the people coming and going at the six houses within his view, the whores who went in and out of the printing press next to Elishva’s house, the thieves who climbed over the walls. A week later he had a special visitor: a well-dressed man in his forties, with a digital recorder, who sat on the chair nearby, greeted him in a friendly manner, and asked him to speak. Abu Salim asked him who he was, and he said, “I’m the writer.”
“Writer of what?”
“I write short stories.”
“What would you like me to tell you?”
“Tell me everything.”
3
The senior astrologer saw from behind the partially open window of the four-wheel drive how Brigadier Majid got past the guards who had closed off Lane 7. This made him anxious. He opened the door and got out, his long, thick beard swinging from side to side as he hurried along. When he reached the guards, he called out to the brigadier.
“What are you doing, sir? Do you want to die?”
“I have to arrest this criminal myself,” said the brigadier.
“You’ll be killed, sir. Come back—I implore you. Come on. Let me read the cards.”
He saw the senior astrologer crouch on the ground and then sit cross-legged, as he did in the offices of the Tracking and Pursuit Department. He took a large pack of playing cards from his pocket and started shuffling them like a professional. Then he threw them on the pavement, set some of them aside, and removed others. He picked up one card and looked at it closely, as if he had discovered something. The brigadier crouched down next to him. The guards standing at the end of the street didn’t know what was going on but were intrigued and took their eyes off the suicide bomber’s car for a few moments.
The astrologer pulled out a new card, looked at it intently, and said, “The One Who Has No Name is not in the house.”
“What do you mean? So why did you bring us here? Where is he?”
“He was here until a quarter of an hour ago. He went over the roofs. I don’t know exactly where he went. Maybe he hasn’t left Bataween yet. But he has left the house—that’s for sure.”
“But I want to be certain,” said the brigadier. He stood up and turned toward the lane and the white Opel.
“It will cost you your life,” said the old astrologer, quickly gathering his cards and putting them back in the pocket of his long gown.
“There’s something else,” said the astrologer, expecting Brigadier Majid to turn toward him. “This car bomb—in a way we’re responsible for it.”
The brigadier turned round at that and walked up to the old astrologer. “How so?” he asked.
“We have to go back to the department immediately. It’s one of my assistants—the junior astrologer. He moved the car to this place with the intention of killing the Criminal Who Has No Name, but now the criminal has escaped, and the suicide bomber doesn’t know why he was sent here.”
“What do you mean? What kind of nons
ense is that?”
“We must go back now,” the astrologer insisted, walking back toward the four-wheel drive. Then the car bomb exploded.
Brigadier Majid and the astrologer were engulfed in a thick cloud of dust. They jumped into the car and went back to the office, where the brigadier summoned his whole team and opened an inquiry into the incident. He discovered that the suicide bomber had originally intended to go to the police academy and blow himself up in the middle of a gathering of new officers, but something made him drive to the backstreets of Bataween instead. The astrologers broke out into an uproar, ignoring the brigadier as they exchanged insults. Within an hour the brigadier realized the inquiry he had opened wouldn’t do any good—it might even put him and his department in the firing line from other branches of the government—so he closed it down and temporarily suspended the activities of the astrologers.
Two weeks later a committee of senior officers in military and general intelligence came to question him in the presence of an American liaison officer. While he had been dreaming of being promoted to director of intelligence, he now found himself facing the possibility of early retirement.
4
Mahmoud was asleep in his room when a powerful tremor in the distance shook the hotel. He opened his eyes for a few seconds, then went back to sleep. Around half past eight he heard about the horrific incident from a young man who worked at the hotel.
“There’s now water from damaged sewage and drinking-water pipes spilling into Saadoun Street and the Bab al-Sharqi tunnel. They say dozens of houses have been flattened. There’s a crater in the middle of Lane 7, a huge crater, and some people say they saw a stone wall at the bottom of it.”
Frankenstein in Baghdad Page 22
