The Sirens of Baghdad

by Yasmina Khadra

  According to my watch, it was four o’clock. The nearest village was about forty kilometers to the south. To reach it, I would have had to leave the dirt road, and I didn’t much like the idea of just wandering. I went back to the tree and waited.

  The sun was going down when a new glinting dot appeared on the horizon. I considered it a good idea to be certain the dot was coming my way before leaving the shelter of my tree. And along came a rattling old truck whose fenders had been torn off. The truck came toward me. I hurried to intercept it, praying to my patron saints not to let me fall. The truck slowed down. I heard its brake shoes grind and scream.

  The driver was a small, dehydrated fellow, with a face that looked like papier-mâché and two arms as thin as baguettes. He was transporting empty crates and used mattresses.

  “I’m going to Baghdad,” I said, climbing up on the running board.

  “That’s not exactly next door, my boy,” he said, looking me over. “Where do you come from?”

  “Kafr Karam.”

  “Ah, the asshole of the desert. I’m going to Basseel. Not the most direct route, but you can find a taxi there to take you to the city.”

  “Suits me fine.”

  The driver considered me suspiciously. “You mind if I take a look inside your bag?”

  I handed it to him through the window. He set the bag on the dashboard and went through its contents carefully. “Okay,” he said. “Get in on the other side.”

  I thanked him and walked around the front of the truck. He leaned over and opened the passenger door, whose exterior handle was missing. I settled into the seat, or, to be more precise, what was left of it.

  The driver took off in a racket of shivering metal.

  I said, “Would you have any water?”

  “There’s a goatskin bag right behind you. If you’re hungry, look in the glove compartment. There’s some of my snack left.”

  He let me eat and drink in peace. Then a troubled look came over his emaciated face, and he said, “Don’t be annoyed at me for going through your things. I’m just trying to avoid problems. There are so many armed men on the roads….”

  I said nothing. We traveled several kilometers in silence.

  “You’re not very talkative, are you?” the driver said. He’d probably been hoping for a little company.

  “No.”

  He shrugged and forgot about me.

  After we reached a paved road, we passed some trucks going full speed in the opposite direction and a series of banged-up Toyota taxicabs loaded with passengers. Lost in thought, my driver drummed on the steering wheel with his fingertips. The wind rushing in through the open windows tangled the thick lock of white hair on his forehead.

  At a checkpoint, soldiers ordered us off the road and onto a freshly bulldozed track. The new trail was fairly well laid out, but bumpy, and it included some turns so tight that it wasn’t possible to go faster than ten kilometers an hour. The truck bounded in and out of deep fissures, nearly snapping its suspension. Soon, however, we caught up with other vehicles that had been diverted by the soldiers at the checkpoint. A large, groaning van was parked on the edge of the trail with its hood up; its passengers—some women swathed in black and several children—had left the van to watch the driver grapple with the motor. No one stopped to lend them a hand.

  “You think the highway’s too messed up to drive on?” I asked.

  “We wouldn’t have a pleasant trip,” the truck driver replied. “First, they’d go over us and the truck with a fine-tooth comb, and then they’d let us bake in the sun and maybe even spend the night in the open. Obviously, there’s a military convoy on the way. To foil suicide bombers in cars and trucks, the soldiers divert every vehicle onto the desert trails, ambulances included.”

  “So we’re going to make a big detour?”

  “Not so big. We’ll get to Basseel before nightfall.”

  “I’m hoping to find a taxi to take me to Baghdad.”

  “A cab, at night? There’s a curfew, strictly enforced. As soon as the sun goes down, all Iraq must go to ground. I hope you’ve got your ID papers at least.”

  “I do.”

  He passed his arm over his mouth and said, “You’d better.”

  We turned onto an old trail, wider and flatter than the one we’d been on, and accelerated, making up for lost time. Raising clouds of dust, the other vehicles were soon far ahead of us.

  The driver gestured with his chin toward a military installation on a nearby hilltop. “I supplied this outfit with provisions,” he said. “Before.”

  The barracks were open to the four winds, the ramparts collapsed. Looters had carried off the doors and windows from every building, including the huts. The main compound, which must have housed the unit’s headquarters and administration building, looked as though it had gone through a seismic episode. A jumble of blackened beams was all that was left of the roofs. The shattered facades bore the marks of missile strikes. An avalanche of papers had escaped from the offices and was piled up against the wire fence behind the sheds. The carcasses of various bombed-out military vehicles were sprawled in the parking area, and a water tower mounted on metal scaffolding, apparently blown off its base, lay on top of the charred watchtower it had crushed. On the front wall of one of the modern barracks, automatic-weapons fire had blasted away fragments of a portrait of Saddam Hussein, chubby-cheeked and smiling a carnivore’s smile.

  “It seems our guys didn’t fire so much as a shot,” the driver said. “They ran like rabbits before the American troops arrived. The shame!”

  I gazed at the desolation on the hilltop. Sand was insidiously invading everything. A scrawny brown dog came out of the sentry box in front of the main entrance to the barracks. The dog stretched, sniffing the ground on the way to a pile of rocks, and disappeared behind them.

  Basseel was a small town wedged between two enormous rocks, polished by time and sandstorms. The town lay curled up in a basin, which in the summer heat recalled a Turkish bath. Its hovels of clay and straw clung desperately to several hillsides, the hills separated from one another by a labyrinth of winding alleyways barely wide enough for a cart. The main thoroughfare, an avenue cut into a riverbed—the river having disappeared long ago—traversed the town like the wind. The black flags on the roofs indicated that this was a Shiite community; the residents wished to distance themselves from the doings of the Sunnis and to line up on the side of those who were burning incense to the new regime.

  Ever since the checkpoints started to proliferate on the national highway, slowing traffic and transforming quick trips into interminable expeditions, Basseel had become an obligatory overnight stopping place for frequent travelers. Bars and cheap eating places, their locations marked by strings of paper lanterns visible for kilometers at night, had grown up like mushrooms on the outskirts, while the town itself lay plunged in darkness below. Not a single streetlight illuminated the alleys.

  About fifty vehicles, most of them tanker trucks, were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on a makeshift parking lot at the entrance to the town. One family was bivouacked a little apart, near their truck. Kids wrapped up in sheets were sleeping here and there. Off to one side, some truck drivers had built a fire and were sitting around a teapot, chatting; their swaying shadows merged in a kind of reptilian dance.

  My benefactor managed to slip in among the haphazardly parked vehicles and stopped his truck near a little inn that looked like a bandits’ hideout. In front of it, there was a small courtyard with tables and chairs, all of them already occupied by a pack of dull-eyed travelers. Above the hubbub, a cassette player was spitting out an old song about the Nile.

  The driver invited me to accompany him to a small restaurant located nearby but practically hidden by an arrangement of tarpaulins and worm-eaten palms. The room was filled with hairy, dusty people crowded around bare tables. Some were even sitting on the floor, apparently too hungry to wait for an available chair. This entire fraternity of shipwreck survivo
rs sat hunched over their plates, their fingers dripping with sauce and their jawbones working away: peasants and truck drivers, worn out from a grueling day of checkpoints and dirt roads, trying to regain their strength in order to face whatever trials the morrow might bring. They all reminded me of my father, because they all carried on their faces the unmistakable mark of the defeated.

  My benefactor left me standing in the doorway of the restaurant, stepped over a few diners, and approached the counter, where a fat fellow in a djellaba took orders, made change, and berated his workers, all at the same time. I looked over the room, hoping to see some acquaintance. I didn’t recognize anyone.

  My driver came back, looking crestfallen. “Well,” he said, “I’m going to have to leave you now. My customer won’t be here until tomorrow evening. You’re going to have to manage without me.”

  I was asleep under a tree when the roar of engines woke me up. The sky wasn’t yet light, but already the truckers were nervously maneuvering their vehicles, eager to leave the parking area. The first convoy headed for the steep road that skirted the town. I ran from one vehicle to another, searching for a charitable driver. No one would take me.

  As the parking area gradually emptied, a feeling of frustration and rage overcame me. When only three vehicles remained, my despair verged on panic. One of them was a family truck whose engine refused to start, and the other two were old crates with nobody in them. Their occupants were probably having breakfast in one of the neighboring joints. I awaited their return with a hollow stomach.

  A man standing in the doorway of a little café called to me. “Hey! What’re you doing over there? Get away from my wheels right now, or I’ll tear your balls off.”

  He gestured as though trying to shoo me away. He took me for a thief. I walked over to him with my bag slung across my back. As I drew nearer, he put his fists on his hips and gazed at me with disgust. He said, “Can’t a man drink his coffee in peace?”

  A beanpole with a copper-colored face, he was wearing clean cotton trousers and a checked jacket over a sweater of bottle-green wool. A large watch was mounted on the gold bracelet that encircled his wrist. He had a face like a cop’s, with a brutish grin and a way of looking at you from on high.

  “I’m going to Baghdad,” I told him.

  “I couldn’t care less. Just stay away from my wheels, okay?”

  He turned his back on me and sat at a table near the door.

  I went back to the stony road that skirted the town and sat down under a tree.

  The first car that passed me was so loaded down that I didn’t have the nerve to follow it with my eyes as it bounced off in a northerly direction.

  The truck that wouldn’t start a little while ago almost brushed me as it went down the trail, clattering metallically. The sun came up, heavy and menacing, from behind a hill. Down below, closer to town, people were emerging from their burrows.

  A car appeared, some way off. I got up and stretched out my arm, prominently displaying my thumb. The car passed me and kept going for a few hundred meters; then, just as I was preparing to sit back down, it rolled to a stop. I couldn’t figure out whether the driver was stopping for me or having a mechanical problem. He honked his horn and then stuck his hand out the window, motioning to me. I picked up my bag and started running.

  The driver was the man from the café, the one who had taken me for a thief.

  As I approached the car, he said without prologue, “For fifty dinars, I’ll take you to Al Hillah.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, glad to get out of Basseel.

  “I’d like to know what you’ve got in your bag.”

  “Just clothes, sir,” I said, emptying the bag onto his hood.

  The man watched me, his face masked in a stiff grin. I lifted my shirt to show him I wasn’t hiding anything under my belt. He nodded and invited me to get in with a movement of his chin. “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

  “From Kafr Karam.”

  “Never heard of it. Pass me my cigarettes, will you? They’re in the glove compartment.”

  He flicked his lighter and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. After looking me over again, he pulled away.

  We drove along for half an hour, during which he was lost in thought. Then he remembered me. “Why are you so quiet?” he asked.

  “It’s in my nature.”

  He lit another cigarette and tried again. “These days, the ones who talk the least are the ones who do the most. Are you going to Baghdad to join the resistance?”

  “I’m going to visit my sister. Why do you ask me that?”

  He pivoted the rearview mirror in my direction. “Take a look at yourself, my boy. You look like a bomb that’s about to go off.”

  I looked in the mirror and saw two burning eyes in a tormented face. “I’m going to see my sister,” I said.

  He mechanically returned the rearview mirror to the proper angle and shrugged his shoulders. Then he proceeded to ignore me.

  After an hour of dust and potholes, we reached the national highway. My vertebrae had taken quite a pounding, and I was relieved to be on a paved road. Buses and semi-trailers were chasing one another at top speed. Three police cars passed us; their occupants seemed relaxed. We went through an overpopulated village whose sidewalks were jammed with shops, stalls, and people. A uniformed policeman was maintaining order, his helmet pushed back on his head, his shirt soaked with sweat in the back and under the arms. When we got to the center of the village, our progress was slowed by a large gathering, a crowd besieging a traveling souk. Housewives dressed in black scavenged among the stalls; bold though they were, their baskets were often empty. The odor of rotten vegetables, together with the blazing heat and the swarms of flies buzzing around the piles of produce, made me dizzy. We witnessed a serious crush around a bus halted at a bus stop on the far side of the square; although the conductor was frantically dealing out blows with a belt, he was unable to hold back the surge of would-be passengers.

  “Just look at those animals,” my driver said, sighing. I didn’t share his attitude, but I made no comment.

  About fifty kilometers farther on, the highway widened from two lanes to three, and after that, the traffic rapidly grew thicker. For long stretches, we crept along bumper-to-bumper because of the checkpoints. By noon, we weren’t yet halfway to our destination. From time to time, we came upon the charred remains of a trailer, pushed to the shoulder of the highway to keep it clear, or passed immense black stains, all marking places where a vehicle had been surprised by an explosion or a barrage of small-arms fire. Shards of broken glass, burst tires, and metal fragments lined the highway on both sides. Around a curve, we passed what was left of an American Humvee, lying on its side in a ditch, probably blown there by a rocket. The spot was made for ambushes.

  The driver suggested that we stop and get something to eat. He chose a service station. After filling his tank, he invited me to join him at a sort of kiosk that had been turned into a refreshment stand. An attendant served us two passably cold sodas and some skewers of dubious meat in a gut-wrenching sandwich dripping with thick tomato sauce. When I tried to pay my share, the driver refused with a wave of his hand. We relaxed for about twenty minutes before getting back on the road.

  The driver had put on sunglasses, and he was steering his car as though he were alone in the world. I had settled into my seat and soon let myself drift away, lulled by the rumble of the engine….

  When I woke up, traffic was at a standstill. There seemed to be a terrible mess up ahead, and the sun was white-hot. People had left their vehicles and were standing on the roadway, grumbling loudly.

  “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on is, we’re screwed.”

  A low-flying helicopter passed overhead and then suddenly veered away, making a terrifying racket. It flew to a distant hill, turned, and hovered. All at once, it fired a pair of rockets; they whistled shrilly as they sped through the air. We saw two masses of fla
mes and dust rise over a ridge. A sudden shiver ran along the highway, and people hurried back to their vehicles. Some nervous drivers made U-turns and sped away, thus provoking a chain reaction that reduced the traffic jam by half in less than ten minutes.

  His eyes glinting with amusement at the panic that seized our fellow travelers, my driver took advantage of their defection and rolled forward several hundred meters. “Not to worry,” he reassured me. “That copter’s just flushing out game. The pilot’s putting on a show. If it was serious, there’d be at least two Cobras up there covering each other. After eight months as a ‘sand nigger’ for the Americans, I know all their tricks.”

  All of a sudden, the driver seemed engaged. “I was an interpreter with the American troops,” he went on. “‘Sand niggers’—that’s the name they give their Iraqi collaborators…. In any case, there’s no way I’m turning around. Al Hillah’s only a hundred kilometers away, and I don’t feel like spending another night out in the open. If you’re afraid, you can get out.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Traffic returned to normal about an hour later. When we reached the checkpoint, we started to understand a little about what had produced the terrible mess. Two bullet-riddled bodies lay on an embankment, each of them clothed in bloodstained white sweatpants and a filthy shirt. They were the two men I’d seen near Kafr Karam the previous day, crouching on a mound with a big bag at their feet.

  “Another little blunder,” my driver grumbled. “The American boys”—he said the word boys in English—“they shoot first and verify later. That was one of the reasons why I quit them.”