One magic book said that a man could vanish from sight if he recited the Qur’anic sura called “al-Nas” a hundred and fifty times without stopping, so he did that and went into the courtyard to test the result. He was deeply saddened when he heard his mother ask, “Why are you staring at me that way, like an idiot?” He felt sure that he was still visible. He went back inside and recited the sura once more, but to no avail. He gave up finally, believing that there was some catch he did not know how to resolve.
From another book he learned a method by which a person could master other people. It combined magic and hypnotism: “Walk behind anyone on the street and focus your mind and eyes on the nape of his neck until you sense that you control him. Then order him to turn right or left or even toward the rear. In fact, you can order him to stop, turn around, and head off in another direction.” Burhan Abdallah actually realized better results here than with his previous experiment, for occasionally one of his subjects would turn—after he had exerted a tremendous effort—even if in a direction other than the one the youth had chosen. When this attempt proved less than fruitful, he switched to hypnotism. After assembling a number of his classmates, who used to meet every afternoon in one room or another, he chose one of them for his subject and hypnotized him by having him focus on the tip of his index finger, which he moved back and forth before his subject’s eyes as he repeated close to his ear, “You feel sleepy. Relax. Sleep. You will do everything I suggest.” This would continue at times for up to an hour. Then the subject would fall asleep or pretend to sleep in the quiet of the darkened room. Next, Burhan Abdallah would instruct him to identify what was passing by on the street at that instant. His subject would open his mouth to say, perhaps, “I see a soldier walking past.” One or two of them would then rush to the street to see whether he had been telling the truth.
Finally, for fifty cents, he purchased a telescope from a shop in the souk and started to observe regions of the pure blue sky from a position on the roof in hopes of seeing one of the flying saucers that visit our terrestrial world from other solar systems.
One of the books he purchased from a vendor who spread his books out on the ground by the wall of the mounted police headquarters furnished accounts from pilots, priests, policemen, teachers, and housewives who had witnessed with their own eyes foreign bodies coming from non-terrestrial cultures. In fact, the American Air Force had itself pursued these flying saucers more than once, but in vain, for these alien visitors always escaped. The book also contained stories about people who were able to contact these visitors, but, to tell the truth, Burhan Abdallah realized it was often a matter of luck whether someone saw a flying saucer or not, even with a telescope.
When these experiments with sorcery, hypnotism, and contacting alien solar systems failed, Burhan Abdallah climbed to the upper room to ask the assistance of the three angels, who were journeying through time on their way to the Chuqor community. He said, “I’ve come to request the secrets of power.”
One of the three old men smiled: “Power? What do you mean by that?”
The boy replied calmly, “For a rope to stand up straight when I tell it to, for the sun to rise at night, for the cock to bray and the ass to bark, should I so desire.”
The three shaykhs laughed and sat down to rest beneath a leafy tree. Then one said, “Now you’re asking for the impossible, Burhan. You’re asking to be God.”
Burhan Abdallah was perplexed. He answered skeptically, “I would like to have miracles like the others. The Messiah walked on water. Moses cast down his staff, which turned into a slithering serpent. The supreme master flapped his hands like a sparrow and flew.”
The three old men gazed silently at the boy. Then one of them said pensively, his head bowed, “We’re just three tired old men who travel through time with nothing in our bags but spring, which we are carrying to Chuqor.” Then the three men rose, hoisted their sacks to their shoulders, and departed like ghosts that had emerged from the past. The boy Burhan Abdallah returned even more bewildered than before.
Notwithstanding the despair pervading Burhan Abdallah’s heart, in a month or less, his life underwent a radical transformation that made him forget his previous, unsuccessful experiments, for his father, Abdallah Ali, decided to run electricity into the house. Indeed he also purchased a large, wooden-cased radio, which he turned on every day at full blast to humor the neighbors, who wished to listen to the songs and the sermons. The residents of the Chuqor community were also delighted when the municipality paved the street. Their cheerful thanks, however, soon turned to curses against the municipality when it asked them to pay the cost of the paving, calculated according to a house’s front-footage on the street. Eventually people submitted to their destiny after the municipality agreed to allow payment by installments. People were habitually so tardy in these payments that the municipality finally despaired of receiving them and decided to write them off.
Burhan Abdallah realized in an obscure way that times were changing, for the gramophones with the seated dog on the speaker disappeared from coffeehouses to be replaced by radios set on a high shelf at the front. These almost always broadcast the songs of Lami‘a Tawfiq and Khudayr Abu Aziz. By night, the voice of Abd al-Basit filled the whole city’s space, illuminating the spirits of the poor with Qur’anic verses, which he would chant over and over again until it seemed that his voice flowed from a spring in eternity. One summer night, many people in the Chuqor community looked down from their rooftops and some of them even went down to the street to hurry to the home of Izzat, a young man who was his elderly parents’ only child and who ran a neighborhood shop with them. His aged parents were quarreling, insulting each other in loud voices, and revealing each other’s defects in a way that other people should not be hearing. Concerned citizens hurried to hush them up and to make peace between them but were flabbergasted to find the couple seated in front of their house, begging their son to let them into their locked home. People asked in astonishment, “Who are quarreling so loudly on the roof?” Izzat’s mother replied, “I don’t know. It’s a devil. I quarreled with the old man this noon, and here the devil is repeating our quarrel, word for word, tonight.” Thus people became acquainted with the tape recorder, which entered the Chuqor community through a public quarrel between two senior citizens.
The tragic disappearance of Khidir Musa caused his sister Qadriya, who had forgotten all her previous slanders against him, to weep for him each day. Nazira, his wife, awaited his return for three months, but then donned mourning clothes. The shaykhs of the Chuqor community said a special prayer reserved for missing persons for his spirit. This constituted an announcement that the man, who had set off to search for his two lost brothers, could be forgotten.
This period of forgetfulness did not last long, however, for less than a year after the disappearance of Khidir Musa, people saw a zeppelin hovering over the city one morning. This was definitely the first blimp that Kirkuk had ever witnessed. Its appearance over the city stirred people’s curiosity and also the fears of the governor, the police chief, and the commander of the Second Division, who initiated the necessary defensive maneuvers for fear that the zeppelin was the vanguard of a hostile attack. Somehow news reached the correspondent of one of the foreign news agencies, and thus the news spread, bringing a state of alert to the armed forces, which anticipated further developments. People kept running from one street to another, following the track of the blimp, which soared high over the city. Finally the zeppelin landed in al-Musalla garden, where thousands of people congregated, surrounding the spot but at the same time fearful to come too close. Their fears faded, however, when they saw three men leave the zeppelin and wave to the crowds. As they swarmed closer, those who hailed from the Chuqor community shouted, “Here’s Khidir! He’s back! But, by God, what a difference!”
They saw that the livestock dealer Khidir Musa, who had never in his whole life worn anything but a jilbab, was attired in a stylish, navy-blue suit, sported a hat
, and wore prescription glasses. Khidir Musa stood before the throngs and delivered a brief statement in which he explained that he gone to search for his two brothers—Ahmad and Muhammad—who had been lost for many years. He had discovered them in their exile and brought them home. Khidir Musa’s two brothers gazed smilingly at the people’s faces. Once the governor and the police chief arrived in person, Khidir Musa asked them calmly, “Could we discuss this affair somewhere else?” The three men from the zeppelin climbed into the cars of the governor and police chief, who disappeared from sight as policemen surrounded the blimp, preventing people from reaching it.
After three or four hours, the three brothers returned in the governor’s own automobile, which was escorted by a police cruiser, to the Chuqor community, which welcomed them with a party the likes of which the neighborhood had never seen. Attached to the electric poles were banners and placards that read, “The Chuqor community welcomes the return of its absent sons.” The truth is that half the inhabitants of Kirkuk came to this forgotten neighborhood to see the three men from the blimp. Thus many women and children were trampled underfoot, and even the police were unable to hold back this human wave that swept everything before it.
The police chief asked Khidir Musa to say a few words and to ask the mob to disperse, since the continued presence of this throng in the Chuqor community could lead to disturbances that would be hard to control. Given the difficulty of finding a location in the neighborhood that could accommodate this horrific crush of human beings, Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri suggested that Khidir Musa should give his speech from the mosque’s minaret, which was equipped with four loudspeakers. Thus Khidir Musa climbed the minaret and delivered a short, stirring oration in which he thanked the governor, the police chief, and the other officials for their fine welcome for him and his brothers. He also thanked the citizens of the Chuqor community and of the city of Kirkuk for their elevated sentiments and declared that he had returned with his two brothers to the homeland after a long absence to work for its uplift and betterment. Then he requested that the crowd disperse so that he and his two brothers could get some sleep after the long, exhausting trip that they had made by zeppelin. Grudgingly, people began to depart, although some dragged their feet sluggishly—especially those who had come from distant neighborhoods to listen to the story of the shepherd who had returned with his two brothers from Russia in a blimp that had carried them thousands of kilometers.
All the same, the true story of this adventure was on every tongue by the next day, since people had relayed it without feeling a need to embellish it with imaginary touches, which were deemed unnecessary. Why would they add anything when the truth was even more thrilling than fiction? In any event, Khidir Musa himself was forced to narrate his story time and again, without ever growing bored, and the newspaper Kirkuk published it first. Then it appeared in a condensed and distorted fashion in al-Zaman, a newspaper published in Baghdad. Finally, journalists arrived from America, England, Germany, and France, seeking to buy his story. Thus Khidir Musa’s old taste for money returned. He sold his story, all at the same time, to several different newspapers and to an American magazine that offered him ten thousand dollars in exchange for rights to his memoirs, provided he would soar over the city of Kirkuk once more in the zeppelin and allow them to take photographs. He agreed after the governor—in whose office the negotiations took place—told him that this sum was more than thirty thousand dinars. Khidir Musa, who earned more than fifty thousand dinars in one fell swoop, after presenting suitable financial tributes to the governor, the police chief, and the head of the municipality, decided to be magnanimous this time and divided twenty thousand dinars among his two brothers and his two sisters Qadriya and Salma, his wife Nazira and her mother the old witch Hidaya, Hameed Nylon and his wife Fatima, and even young Burhan Abdallah, who collected a hundred dinars from his uncle. Khidir Musa also distributed five thousand dinars among the households of the Chuqor community, without omitting any, in appreciation for the festive welcome they had afforded him and his brothers. He only kept back for himself half of the sum that had landed on him from the sky, as he put it. Financial gain was not all that accrued to him, for he suddenly became a person of note in Kirkuk. The governor even offered to move him into one of the city’s more prestigious neighborhoods. But he declined, explaining that he could not desert the community in which he had been born.
Khidir Musa actually recounted the story, which brought him renown and wealth before anyone else had heard it—while he and his brothers were seated on the ground in the Chuqor community, and supplied details then he did not mention even to the newspapers and the foreign magazines that paid him so liberally. As residents of the Chuqor community laughed, the livestock dealer explained how he had tricked his wife Nazira and managed to escape from her as she pursued him from one place to another. He had headed first toward the Kurdish mountains, proceeding on foot until he reached the Hajj Umran valley, where he contacted the Barzan tribe’s chief, who presented him with a mule and provided him a companion for his difficult journey to Russia. Thus Khidir Musa, with his guide, followed the very same secret mountain trail that Mullah Mustafa Barzani had traversed years before during his retreat with his army of Kurdish peasants as they made their way to Russia amid savage battles with the Iraqi and Iranian armies that pursued him. Finally, after an arduous trip, Khidir Musa and his guide reached the Russian border, where they saw the red flag with its hammer and sickle fluttering above a Soviet border control post. The guide headed for it and knocked on the closed door. The man in charge welcomed both of them, thanks to the guide, who had brought him presents of the type Barzanis customarily presented each time they crossed the border. The man running the control post demonstrated his generosity by bringing out three bottles of vodka, which he placed before them and invited them to share. They gently declined, even though he persisted and insisted. Finally the man said, “Never mind; I’ll drink your share.” So he swallowed the contents of the three vodka bottles before saying good-bye to Khidir Musa and his guide al-Barzani, without ever showing any sign of intoxication. He even performed a Caucasian dance for them with feet as steady as a bear’s.
The two men traveled for three more days until they reached a village where Kurdish refugees lived under a form of self-government, according to the Soviet system. Since the livestock dealer from Iraq was in a hurry, he took the train the next day, heading for Tashkent. He carried with him only a letter of introduction from the commissar of the Kurdish Kulkhuz to the mufti of Tashkent and a few rubles that men of the village had slipped into his pocket. Khidir Musa arrived in Tashkent in the morning and found that the people there spoke the same language as in the Chuqor community. Before proceeding to the mufti’s residence, he entered a coffeehouse to drink a tumbler of tea. The proprietor of the coffeehouse refused to allow him to pay once he discovered that Khidir Musa was from Iraq. He asked him to bring him a copy of the Holy Qur’an whenever he visited Tashkent again. Indeed, the man was so gracious that he left his work at the coffeehouse, which belonged to the state, and accompanied him to the mufti’s residence, which would have been difficult for a foreigner like Khidir Musa to find on his own. The mufti was extremely happy, once he had read the letter from his friend the Kulkhuz commissar, and joked, “He should at least have given you a lamb to bring me.” Then he offered Khidir Musa a position as muezzin in the great mosque of Tashkent, since God had granted the Arabs the gift of correct pronunciation of Arabic words. Khidir Musa accepted the offer, which was a perfect fit for his aptitudes. He explained to the mufti that he had been motivated to come to Tashkent by a desire to find his brothers, who had been prisoners of the Russians. The mufti then promised to contact his friend the police chief, who would search for them in all possible locations.
Khidir Musa spent many rough months in exile while waiting each day for news the police chief might send him. Had it not been for the hope that filled his heart, he would have returned to Iraq again. He co
uld not, however, return empty-handed, for that would have made him the laughingstock of the whole Chuqor community. For this reason, he held firm in the mosque’s lodge where he lived. His only consolation was climbing up to the minaret’s balcony five times a day to deliver the call to prayer, inviting believers to pray.
Out of the blue, one day at noon, the mufti entered the mosque accompanied by the police chief and trailed by two old codgers. Khidir Musa rose to greet the men. In a flash of recognition he identified the two men, who gazed at him in astonishment. He embraced them even before asking anything, for they were his spitting image. The Turkmen mufti said, “We’ve brought you your two brothers. What more than that can you ask for?” His brothers, who took him to their home, where they lived together, told him how they had been imprisoned and brought to Tashkent, where they had witnessed the horrors of the civil war, which had lasted for several years. After that—like other fellow-countrymen—they had been forbidden to leave the country, although they had never lost hope of returning one day to the Chuqor community. For this reason they had refused to marry, since they were unwilling to trade their homeland for a spouse.
They now had to plot their return. The police recognized their status as foreigners and lifted all travel restrictions on them. Khidir Musa wanted to take them back by the secret route he had followed through the mountains of Kurdistan, but the police chief vetoed that idea, declaring that should they fall into the hands of the Iranian or Iraqi border patrols—and this was always a possibility—they would be shot as spies, even before anyone bothered to listen to their story. Worse still, they did not have Iraqi passports. The police chief was forced to consult the bureau of secret intelligence, and the mufti presented their case to the central committee, of which he was himself a member, in hopes of finding a solution to the brothers’ problem. The issue was extraordinarily complicated, and the central committee was forced to meet three times, without finding a solution. Thus it was required to seek assistance from the intelligence bureau, which was able to consider anything, even minutiae.
The Last of the Angels Page 9
