There was new life in Tawuq and the neighboring villages, which had heard that the revolution was paying salaries to combatants. Shaykhs of advanced years convened meetings in villages after receiving news of the revolution that had sprung from nowhere. Some suggested that they should contact their aghas and ask permission to enlist in the revolution. The villagers, however, categorically refused this proposal: “What connection do our aghas have to this matter that concerns our livelihood?” The meetings broke up, leaving the decision to individuals to do as they saw fit. That was exactly what many had been expecting because fighters had initially come individually, sneaking away to the base camp under the cover of darkness and then in groups, after people became convinced that the salaries paid by the revolution were more profitable than growing onions and tomatoes and better than working for the government itself. This truth tempted many policemen, municipal workers, soldiers, and students from seminaries and caused them to come and ask to enlist. Even county managers and lieutenants fled from their service and came to Hameed Nylon, who received them graciously and then sent them back to their posts to work as undercover agents. He promised that they would receive an extra salary from the revolution while they sat at their bases.
Confronted by this crush of humanity, Hameed Nylon was finally forced to call a temporary halt to new enlistments, rejecting even recommendations from his fighters and endorsements that potential recruits brought from village headmen whose names Hameed Nylon had already added to the roster of salaries to be paid at the end of each month. In reality, this was a step that had to be taken to keep matters from getting out of hand because the number of combatants had grown so large that some sought out their women at night or went missing for days at a time without anyone noticing. The villagers also continued their traditional practice of stealing from nearby villages, which they would attack at night. This caused Hameed Nylon to imprison them in a mud hut he had constructed at the end of the valley. In fact he was forced to flog those who returned to theft after being released. He knew this might scare them but not do much to change their value system, which had been passed down through many generations.
Then Hameed Nylon withdrew to study the page of revolutionary teachings, which he did not know how to implement. These abstract ideas rarely had much bearing on what he needed most. This was how to organize the revolution and to move onto the offensive. There was some useful advice along the lines of: “Depend on the people and consolidate your relationship with the peasants” and “Respect your elders” or “Strike the enemy and then flee.” Everyone knew these things, however. Hameed Nylon had consolidated his relationship with the peasants even more than Mao Tse-tung had. “I pay them salaries that they never in their whole lives dreamed of.” He plunged into deep reflection as he thought about the meaning of “Strike the enemy and then flee.” Then he told himself, “Perhaps it’s necessary for us to do that now, but we won’t do that forever. The day will come when we march forward and liberate Iraq: village by village and city by city.” Thus Hameed Nylon decided that—like all the other revolutionary leaders whose names people repeat—he himself would write the instructions for his revolution.
He shut himself up in the room the villagers had built for him from stones and plaster. As the red flag fluttered overhead, he filled some notebooks with his thoughts on revolution in just a few days. Then he sent these with one of his secret couriers to Burhan Abdallah in Kirkuk to be rewritten in a refined literary style. This was a new undertaking for Burhan Abdallah, who had always been preoccupied by learning life’s secret and brooding about the stories of prophets and leaders, but had never gained access to what he considered the essence, which must be a treasure house for all the answers. He repeated to himself, “The answers are always deceptive and corrupted and shade into each other until it becomes hard for a person to rediscover an answer after the initial moment.” He thought, “There’s no essence that contains the answers. There’s merely an eternity that precedes the questions. Inquiry is mankind’s destiny in this world.” Burhan Abdallah withdrew to a corner of the Umm al-Rabi‘ayn Garden, stretched out on the damp grass, and began to look over Hameed Nylon’s teachings about revolution. These were new ideas not contained by the old books. They attempted to get to the reality inside people’s hearts, rather than to something external, and called them to become the masters of the world. He thought, “Fine. I’ve always wanted to write a book about life. This will be my first attempt to compose the book I want. Although it’s not my book, it will become part of me.”
His creativity was molded by the clamorous thoughts that Hameed Nylon had jotted down and by the imagery used by oil workers at Baba Gurgur, bakers in the Chuqor community, goldsmiths in the new souk, soldiers in the barracks, and bicycle rental agents on the street opposite the citadel. Burhan Abdallah spent days thinking about drafting this book, which he wanted to be a guide to revolution, about which he actually knew nothing, although he could imagine it. He drew inspiration from the language of the gospels, which contained eternal admonitions for mankind. Thus he climbed to his house’s upper room, where he secluded himself for a week.
When he descended, he had drafted the book, which he called The Guide. Hameed Nylon found this title unsatisfactory and changed it to The Pocket Guide to Revolution. Then he sent it to Turkey with a Turkmen student—from Sari Kahiya—who was studying veterinary science in Istanbul.
Ten thousand copies were printed at the Yildizlar Press. The type in them was tiny—too small to be read by the naked eye. The miniature book, which was not much bigger than a matchbook, reached Hameed Nylon less than two months later, along with ten thousand magnifying glasses manufactured by the German firm Carl Zeiss. These were sent in a separate shipment for fear the censors would detect the link between the book and the magnifying glass. Hameed Nylon really demonstrated his judiciousness in outwitting the security men because the employees of the censorship office assumed when they saw the book’s cover, which was decorated with Islamic designs, that it was one of those prayer books that are normally placed inside a scrap of cloth and then attached near the elbow to protect the person wearing it from harm. These were widespread in Iraq.
Thus the book slipped past the censors and created a big stir among career leftists, who almost exploded from envy and jealousy—not because Hameed Nylon had contrived a way they had not devised to trick the security agents, but because he had composed a book in lofty literary language quite unlike the lackluster style of the political tracts that the political parties released from time to time. Although they made a show of mocking and ridiculing it, they spent their nights obsessively reading the book that Hameed Nylon’s agents sold with the German magnifying glass for a hundred fils. Others, who were enchanted by the book’s message, translated it to Kurdish and Turkish. Imams in the mosques subsequently took quotations from it to include in the sermons they delivered at the conclusion of the Friday prayer—naturally without any mention of the source.
This book, which listed as its author Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Mustafa, made Hameed Nylon swagger with pride and conceit because he had realized in only a few months what had escaped Iraq’s political parties as a whole since the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I and the English army’s entry into Iraq under the command of General Maude, who had said he came as a liberator, not a conqueror. Hameed succeeded in gaining the Kurdish tribes first. Then, capitalizing on his influence among the Arabs of al-Hawija, he gained the Ubayd and Jibur tribes, which abandoned their internecine wars and announced their loyalty to the revolution, believing that King Faisal II himself supported it.
Even after the first shot of the revolution was fired, several months passed without the revolution’s squadrons engaging in any actual battles with the government forces, which had not paid any attention to this revolution, except for a few small skirmishes that occurred from time to time between night watchmen or guardhouse policemen who refused to hand over their weapons to the rebels. The situation angered Ha
meed Nylon to some extent. He had expected that the government would respond to him in a fashion worthy of the revolution he had announced. The government maintained its silence even when he sent a group of his men to fire—from a distance—on a school for mounted policemen at the edge of the city. A mule was killed then and a policeman was wounded in the thigh.
When Hameed Nylon observed the government’s determination to ignore him—not even issuing a communiqué—he felt ever more rebellious and decided to go on the offensive. He had his men set up roving ambushes for vehicles that carried paying customers between cities. The concept his men adopted was actually borrowed from a scene that had stuck in his mind from an American film Hameed Nylon had seen. The idea was guaranteed success every time. One of his men would stretch out beside the road and hold his breath, pretending to be dead. Then passing vehicles would stop. Drivers and passengers would get out and hurry to lend a helping hand. At that, five or six men brandishing weapons would emerge from behind boulders, trees, and hills to capture the passengers, whom they forced to raise their arms. Then they would search their pockets and impound a fifth of any sum over five dinars as an alms tax for the revolution. If a person’s pocket was empty or only contained a few dirhems, they would give him a dinar as assistance from the revolution for the poor, after reading him a page or two from The Pocket Guide to Revolution. Then they would shake hands with them, bid them farewell, and wish them a safe trip. After two or three months, however, Hameed Nylon was compelled to stop these operations, which cost the revolution thousands of dinars because the scent of dinars attracted villagers, who began to travel every day between the mountainous towns in wooden buses, exhausting themselves to fall into the revolution’s ambushes. Indeed some proprietors of vehicles allowed them to ride for free in exchange for half the amount they gained from each ambush staged by the revolutionaries.
When Hameed Nylon saw that the government was deliberately overlooking his revolution, he decided to strike where the pain would be excruciating. One night he himself led nine of his men armed with rifles and slipped into the city of Kirkuk, where they knew every alley. They reached the other side of the city by crossing the Khasa Su River, which was nearly dry. Its colored pebbles glittered in the light from the stars that filled the sky. They were heading for the Arafa region, where the English enclave was surrounded by barbed wire. Hameed Nylon knew every house in this neighborhood, where engineers, administrators, and English intelligence officers lived with their families. For this reason, he had no difficulty reaching the region, which was filled with trees and expanses of green grass. He was able to surprise the neighborhood, without anyone noticing. He did not, however, wish to shed even a drop of blood. The police guardhouse was located at the beginning of the street leading to the neighborhood and beyond the railroad line over which passed the trains linking Kirkuk and Erbil. Most of these policemen were nomadic desert Arabs who had dedicated themselves to serving the English, who were not stingy with presents. If alerted, they would start firing, and this could lead to an unnecessary massacre. Hameed Nylon, however, had no difficulty worth mentioning in taking control of the guardhouse, where the three policemen were snoring in their sleep without having posted a guard at the door. He put the manacles hanging on the wall on their wrists and feet and tied them to their camp beds almost before they woke up. Then he left three of his men there and went with the others, slipping between the trees, into the English neighborhood, which always remained illuminated.
After half an hour, Hameed Nylon and his men returned, clustered around four men and a woman who were plainly English. Their hands were tied with ropes and their mouths were gagged with scraps of cloth to keep them from speaking. They walked with staggering steps and offered no resistance. They seemed indifferent to what was happening around them because they had drunk so much whiskey, the reek of which made the villagers, who were unfamiliar with this dizzying odor, sniffle. Hameed Nylon, who—like his men—had wrapped green cloth around his head, so that only his piercing eyes were visible, and who—unlike his men, who had buried their bodies inside dark, baggy Kurdish pants—was wearing a military uniform, issued his orders to the three villagers who had their rifles trained on the policemen, who were shackled to their beds. “Excellent! Raise our flag over the guardhouse and collect all their rifles and revolvers, because the time has come to withdraw.” The street was totally empty and a pervasive silence, which was occasionally broken by the barking of a distant dog, ruled over the city. Hameed Nylon cast a thoughtful glance at the street, and then they all slipped in a single procession toward the Khasa Su River, crossing the dirt embankment over which the train passed. Inside the guardhouse they left behind a few copies of The Pocket Guide to Revolution, to which Hameed Nylon had appended delicate dedications for the governor of Kirkuk, the chief of police, and the director of public security. He had signed these with his nom de guerre: Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Mustafa.
The men, together with the five prisoners, traversed the Khasa Su over small pebbles partially buried in sand and waded through shallow water from time to time, without exchanging a single word. The Englishwoman stumbled more than once because of her high-heeled shoes, which skidded on the pebbles and sank into the sand. She pulled them out with a nervous wriggle of her feet. Then she bent over and picked up both shoes. Hameed Nylon smiled in the starlight and told her affectionately in English, “That’s better. Now you can enjoy this outing.” The night breezes that stung their faces and carried with it the scent of the countryside had dissipated all the influence of whiskey in the heads of the prisoners, who noticed, apparently for the first time, that they had been kidnapped. They stopped walking and shook their heads, making sounds that were muffled because of the rags bound around their mouths. The villagers shoved them with the butts of their rifles, but Hameed Nylon told them comfortingly, “Don’t worry. No one will harm you. We’ll treat you like guests. You’ll see that we are more humane than you think.”
Then he stepped forward and untied the knot in the cloth placed over the Englishwoman’s mouth, asking her, “How are you, Mrs. McNeely?”
The woman shook her head in disgust but said coquettishly, “Oh, thank you Mr. Hameed.” Then she asked him gently, “What do you want to do with us?”
Hameed answered reassuringly in his own special way, “Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” He added conceitedly but with a light sarcasm that was hard to detect, “In my capacity as commander of the revolutionary army, I have the honor to inform you that you are now my guests.”
Addressing her words to her husband, who was walking behind her with his mouth lightly gagged, Helen McNeely said, “George, did you hear? Our friend Mr. Hameed has become the leader of a revolution.”
Silence reigned again in the darkness that revealed less and less of the city, which was sinking into the night’s abyss like a legendary specter whose pulsations, which blended with boundless nature, were wafted along by the wind. They crossed the Khasa Su at the far side of the city, moving from it to fields that were fragrant with the scent of grass and earth. This daring operation led by Hameed Nylon caused the city’s authorities to lose their nerve and to swear to take revenge, after the prime minister contacted and cursed them in language that was anything but polite, threatening to cut off their heads if the kidnapped Englishmen did not return unharmed. At noon ten armored Jeeps crammed full of policemen shouldering rifles set forth, heading toward the village of Tawuq, which the government held responsible for this attack.
The police chief, who led this operation, knew that there was no hope of discovering the kidnapped Englishmen because these villagers would not open their mouths no matter what the consequences. He would be forced, all the same, to demonstrate the government’s brutality and strength first, before negotiating with these simpletons, who—he was sure—knew exactly what had happened. The force surrounded the village and then entered it, encountering no resistance. Many people even stayed huddled in their homes as though the affair was none of thei
r business. This unjustifiable nonchalance caused the policemen to fly off the handle. Thus they burst into the houses that did not even have the doors latched and forced all the men and women out onto the dirt road that ran through the village, amid the barking of the dogs that gathered in a circle around all the people. The policemen waved their rifles in the faces of the villagers, who calmly continued smoking. When they grew tired of standing, some of them squatted down on the ground. Finally the police chief drew his revolver and fired into the air, causing the dogs to retreat in alarm. “We have come to inform you that the government has decided to kill all of you after you kidnapped the five Englishmen. But I will overlook everything if you return them to us. You’ve already created enough problems for us.”
Silence reigned for a time until an old man, who was clearly the village’s headman, stepped forward. “May God preserve the King for us. I believe that the King would not order us killed. We are poor villagers and have nothing to do with the English, may God curse them. We are Muslims and follow the way of God and His Messenger.”
The police chief, who was trying very hard to restrain his rage, replied, “I’m talking about the Englishmen you kidnapped last night. All I want is the truth. Show me where they are and I’ll pardon you.”
The headman shook his head apologetically, “This is a matter I’m hearing about for the first time. What need do we have of Englishmen that would lead us to kidnap them? Our village needs an imam to watch over it, not damned English infidels.” The man stopped for a moment and looked the police chief in the eye. “Perhaps the revolutionaries did that. But the village has no tie to the matter. You must know the places where they are hiding.” Then he waved his hand beyond the village. “They are there in the mountains. That’s all we know.”
The Last of the Angels Page 25
