The Sirens of Baghdad

by Yasmina Khadra

  “He’s right,” I said to Omar. “This is his place, after all. He’s been very patient.”

  Hany’s eyes were still fixed on his associate. He didn’t even see the hand I put out to bid him farewell.

  Omar’s irritation was audible as he stepped between me and his roommate and said to him, “Fine. You want to come back? The door is open. But this guy is my cousin, and I’m not about to kick him out. If I don’t find him a place this evening, I’ll sleep with him on a bench, tonight and every night until he’s got a roof over his head.”

  I tried to protest. Omar pushed me onto the landing and slammed the door behind us.

  First, we went to an acquaintance of Omar to see if there was any chance she might accommodate me for two or three days, but the two of them were unable to reach an agreement; then he fell back on his employer, who suggested I could sleep in his warehouse. Omar accepted the offer as a possible last resort and continued knocking on other doors. When they all rang hollow, we went back to the warehouse and acted like night watchmen.

  By the end of the week, Omar had grown less and less talkative. He retreated inside himself and stopped paying attention to what I said to him. He was unhappy. The precariousness of our situation hollowed his cheeks and left its traces deep in his eyes. I felt responsible for his listlessness.

  One morning, he asked me, “What do you think of Sayed, the Falcon’s son?”

  “Nothing much, one way or the other. Why?”

  “I’ve never been able to figure out that boy. I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s got a household-appliances shop in the city center. Would you be willing to go and see if he’s in a position to give you a hand?”

  “Of course. Why do you seem bothered?”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m trying to get rid of you.”

  “If I had such a thought, I wouldn’t forgive myself.” I patted him on the wrist to reassure him. “Let’s go see him, Omar. Right away.”

  We took the van and headed for the center of Baghdad. An attack on a district police station caused us to turn back and drive around a large part of the city in order to reach a wide and very lively avenue. Sayed’s store stood on a corner next to a pharmacy, in the extension of a small, still-intact public garden. Omar parked about a hundred meters away. He was uneasy.

  “Well, we’re lucky,” he said. “Sayed’s at the cash register. We won’t have to hang around the premises. You go and see him. Pretend you happened to be walking by and you thought you recognized him through the window. He’s sure to ask what brings you to Baghdad. Just tell him the truth: You’ve been living in the street for weeks, you don’t have anywhere to go, and your money’s all gone. Then, he’ll either come up with something for you or make up a bunch of crap to fend you off. If you get situated, don’t even think about visiting me at the warehouse. Not anytime soon, in any case. Let a week or two pass. I don’t want Sayed to know where I stay or what I do. I’d appreciate it if you never said my name in his presence. Me, I’m going back to the warehouse. If you don’t come back this evening, I’ll know you’ve been taken on.”

  Rather eagerly, he pushed me out of the van, showed me his thumb, and quickly rejoined the vehicles slaloming around pedestrians.

  Sayed was making entries in a register. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves, and beside him, a little fan whirled its noisy blades. When he noticed my indecisive silhouette in the doorway, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and squinted. We’d never been very close, and it took him a little while to situate me in his memory. My heart started racing. Then his face lit up in a broad smile.

  “I don’t believe it,” the Falcon’s son cried, spreading his arms in welcome.

  He folded me in a long embrace. Then he asked, “What brings you to Baghdad?”

  I told my story almost exactly the way Omar had suggested. Sayed listened to me with interest, but otherwise his face was expressionless. It was hard for me to tell whether my distress touched him or not. When he raised his hand to interrupt me, I thought he was about to kick me out. To my great relief, he put it on my shoulder and declared to me that my cares were his from that moment on; should I care to, he said, I could work in his store and live in a little storeroom on the upper floor.

  “I sell television sets here, parabolic antennas, microwave ovens, et cetera. Naturally, everything that comes in and everything that goes out must be recorded. Your job would be to keep those records up-to-date. If memory serves, you attended the university, right?”

  “I was a first-year humanities student.”

  “Excellent! Bookkeeping’s nothing more than a question of honesty, and you’re an honest boy. For the rest, you’ll learn it as you go along. As you’ll see, it’s not all that difficult. I’m really very happy to welcome you here.”

  He led me upstairs to show me my room. It was occupied by a young night watchman, who was relieved to be assigned to other duties, which meant he’d be able to go home after the store closed for the day. I liked the accommodations: There was a camp bed, a TV set, a table, and a wardrobe where I’d be able to keep my things. Sayed advanced me some money so I could go have a bath and buy myself a toilet kit and some clothes. He also invited me to a meal in a real restaurant.

  That night, I slept like a stone.

  At 8:30 the next morning, I raised the store’s rolling shutter. The first employees—there were three of them—were already waiting on the sidewalk outside. A few minutes later, Sayed joined us and performed the introductions. His workers shook my hand without displaying much enthusiasm. These were young city dwellers, mistrustful and little inclined to conversation. The tallest of them, Rashid, worked in the rear of the store, an area to which he had sole access. His job was to supervise deliveries of incoming merchandise and store it properly. The eldest of the three, Amr, was the deliveryman, and the third, Ismail, an electronics engineer, was in charge of after-sale service and repair.

  Sayed’s office served as the reception area. He sat as though enthroned, facing the large shop window, and ceded the rest of the store to product display. Metal shelving ran the length of the walls. Small-or large-screen television sets with Asian brand names, accompanied by satellite dishes and every kind of sophisticated accessory, took up most of the available surface area. There were also electric coffee machines, food processors, grills, and other cooking appliances. Unlike the furniture dealer’s enterprise, Sayed’s store, located on an important commercial avenue, was constantly filled with shoppers, who jostled one another on the display floor all day long. Of course, the majority of them were there just for the sake of gawking; nonetheless, a steady stream of customers carrying purchases exited the store.

  I was fine until the afternoon, when I returned to the store after a cheap lunch and Sayed informed me that some “very dear friends” were waiting for me in my room on the upper floor. Sayed led the way. When he opened the door, I saw Yaseen and the twins, Hassan and Hussein, sitting on my camp bed. A shiver went through me. The twins were overjoyed to see me again. They jumped on me and pounded me affectionately, laughing all the while. As for Yaseen, he didn’t get up. He remained seated on the bed, unmoving, his spine erect, like a cobra. He cleared his throat, a signal to the two brothers to cut out the hilarity, and fixed me with the gaze that no one in Kafr Karam dared to withstand.

  “It took you a while to wake up,” he said to me.

  I failed to grasp what he meant by that.

  The twins leaned against the wall and left me in the center of the little room, facing Yaseen. “So how are things?” he asked.

  “I can’t complain.”

  “I can,” he said. “I pity you.”

  He fidgeted, successfully liberating the tail of his jacket from under his behind. He’d changed, Yaseen had. I’d have thought he was ten years older than was actually the case. A few months had been enough to harden his features. His stare was still intimidating, but the corners of his mouth were furrowed, as if they’d cracked under the pressure
of his fixed grin.

  I decided not to let him upset me. “Are you going to tell me why you pity me?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You think you’re not pitiful?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “He’s listening. Finally, he can hear, our dear well-digger’s son. Now, how shall we aggravate him?” He looked me up and down before going on. “I wonder what goes on in your head, my friend. You have to be autistic not to see what’s happening. The country’s at war, and millions of fools act as if everything’s cool. When something explodes in the street, they go back inside and close their shutters and wash their hands of the whole affair. The trouble is, things don’t work that way. Sooner or later, the war will knock their houses down and surprise them in their beds. How many times did I tell you and everybody else in Kafr Karam? I told you all: If we don’t go to the fire, the fire will come to us. Who listened to me? Hey, Hassan. Who listened to me?”

  “Nobody,” Hassan said.

  “Did you sit around waiting for the fire to come?”

  “No, Yaseen,” Hassan said.

  “Did you wait until some sons of bitches came and yanked you out of your bed in the middle of the night before you opened your eyes?”

  “No,” Hassan said.

  “How about you, Hussein? Did some sons of bitches have to drag you through the mud to wake you up?”

  “No,” Hussein said.

  Yaseen looked me over again. “As for me, I didn’t wait, either. I became an insurgent before someone spat on my self-respect. Was there anything I lacked in Kafr Karam? Did I have anything to complain about? I could have closed my shutters and stopped up my ears. But I knew that if I didn’t go to the fire, the fire was going to come to my house. I took up arms because I didn’t want to wind up like Sulayman. A question of survival? No, just a question of logic. This is my country. Scoundrels are trying to extort it from me. So what do I do? According to you, what do I do? You think I wait until they come and rape my mother before my eyes, and under my roof?”

  Hassan and Hussein bowed their heads.

  Yaseen breathed slowly, moderating the intensity of his gaze, and then spoke again. “I know what happened at your house.”

  I frowned.

  “Oh, yes,” he continued. “What men consider a grave is a vegetable garden as far as their better halves are concerned. Women don’t know the meaning of the word secret.”

  I bowed my head.

  Yaseen leaned back against the wall, folded his arms over his chest, and gazed at me in silence. His eyes made me uncomfortable. He crossed his legs and put his palms on his knees. “I know what it is to see your revered father on the floor, balls in the air, thrown down by a brute,” he said.

  My throat clamped shut. I couldn’t believe he was going to reveal my family’s shame! I wouldn’t stand for it.

  Yaseen read on my face what I was shouting deep inside. It meant nothing to him. Jerking his chin toward the twins and Sayed, he went on. “All of us here—me, the others in this room, and the beggars in the street—we all know perfectly well what the outrage committed against your family signifies. But the GI has no clue. He can’t measure the extent of the sacrilege. He doesn’t even know what a sacrilege is. In his world, a man sticks his parents in an old folks’ home and forgets them. They’re the least of his worries. He calls his mother ‘an old bag’ and his father ‘an asshole.’ What can you expect from such a person?”

  Anger was smothering me. Clearly recognizing my condition, Yaseen raised the bidding. “What can you expect from a snot-nosed degenerate who would put his mother into a home for the moribund, his mother, the woman who conceived him fiber by fiber, carried him in her womb, labored to bring him into the world, raised him step by step, and watched beside him night after night like a star? Can you expect such a person to respect our mothers? Can you expect him to kiss the foreheads of our old men?”

  The silence of Sayed and the twins increased my anger. I had the feeling they’d pulled me into a trap, and I resented them for it. If Yaseen was meddling in a matter that was none of his business, well, that was pretty consistent with his character and his reputation; but for the others to act as his accomplices without really getting completely involved—that enraged me.

  Sayed saw that I was on the point of imploding. He said, “Those people have no more consideration for their elders than they do for their offspring. That’s what Yaseen’s trying to explain to you. He’s not chewing you out. He’s telling you facts. What happened in Kafr Karam has shaken all of us, I assure you. I knew nothing about it until this morning. And when I heard the story, I was furious. Yaseen’s right. The Americans have gone too far.”

  “Seriously, what did you expect?” Yaseen growled, annoyed by Sayed’s intervention. “You thought they’d modestly avert their eyes from the nakedness of a handicapped, terrorized sexagenarian?” He made a little circle with his hand. “Why?”

  I had lost the power of speech.

  Sayed took advantage of my tongue-tied state to land a few blows of his own. “Why should they turn away? These are people who can catch their wives in bed with their best friends and act as though nothing’s wrong. Modesty’s a virtue they’ve long since lost sight of. Honor? They’ve distorted its codes. They’re just infuriated retards, smashing valuable things, like buffalo let loose in a porcelain shop. They arrive here from an unjust, cruel universe with no humanity and no morals, where the powerful feed on the flesh of the downtrodden. Violence and hatred sum up their history; Machiavellianism shapes and justifies their initiatives and their ambitions. What can they comprehend of our world, which has produced the most fabulous pages in the history of human civilization? Our fundamental values are still intact; our oaths are unbroken; our traditional points of reference remain the same. What can they understand about us?”

  “Not very much,” Yaseen said, getting up and approaching me until we were nose-to-nose. “Not very much, my brother.”

  Sayed went on. “They know nothing of our customs, our dreams, or our prayers. They’re particularly ignorant of our heritage and our long memories. What do those cowboys know about Mesopotamia? Do you think they have a clue about this fantastic Iraq they’re trampling down? About the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens, Harun al-Rashid, the Thousand and One Nights? They know nothing of these things! They never look at this side of history. All they see in our country is an immense pool of petroleum, which they intend to lap dry, even if it costs the last drop of our blood, too. They’re bonanza seekers, looters, despoilers, mercenaries. They’ve reduced all values to the single dreadful question of cash, and the only virtue they recognize is profit. Predators, that’s what they are, formidable predators. They’re ready to march over the body of Christ if they think it’ll help fill their pockets. And if you aren’t willing to go along with them, they haul out the heavy artillery.”

  Yaseen pushed me toward the window, crying out, “Look at them! Go ahead, take a look at them, and you’ll see what they really are: machines.”

  “And those machines will hit a wall in Baghdad,” Sayed said. “Our streets are going to witness the greatest duel of all time, the clash of the titans: Babylon against Disneyland, the Tower of Babel against the Empire State Building, the Hanging Gardens against the Golden Gate Bridge, Scheherazade against Bonnie Parker, Sindbad against the Terminator….”

  I was completely bamboozled. I felt as though I were in the thick of a farce, in the midst of a play rehearsal, surrounded by mediocre actors who’d learned their roles but didn’t have the talent the text deserved, and yet—and yet—and yet, it seemed to me that this was exactly what I wanted to hear, that their words were the very words I was missing, the ones I’d sought in vain while the effort filled my head with migraines and insomnia. It made no difference whether Sayed was sincere, or whether Yaseen was speaking his real thoughts to me, speaking from his guts; the only certitudes I had were that the farce suited me, that it fit me like a glove, that the secret I’d chewed on fo
r weeks was shared, that my anger wasn’t unique, and that it was giving me back my determination. I found it difficult to define this particular alchemy, which under different conditions would have made me laugh out loud, but now it gave me great relief. That bastard Yaseen had pulled a nasty thorn out of my side. He’d known how to touch me in exactly the right spot, how to stir up all the crap that had filled my head ever since the night when the sky fell in on me. I had come to Baghdad to avenge an offense. I didn’t know how to go about it, but from now on, my ignorance was no longer a concern.

  And so, when Yaseen finally opened his arms to me, he seemed to be opening up the path that would lead me to retrieve what I wanted more than anything else in the world: my family’s honor.

  13

  Yaseen and his two guardian angels, Hassan and Hussein, didn’t return to the store. Sayed invited all four of us to dinner at his house to celebrate our reunion and seal our oath; then, after the meal was over, the three companions bade us farewell and disappeared. It would be a while before I saw them again.

  I resumed my work as night watchman, which meant I opened the store for the other employees in the morning and closed it behind them in the evening. Weeks passed. My colleagues hardly warmed to me. They said “Good morning” when they arrived and “Good evening” when they left, but nothing in between. Their indifference exasperated me. I tried for a while to gain their confidence; eventually, however, I started ignoring them, too. I still had enough pride to stop myself from foolishly smiling at people who offered no smile in return.