The Sirens of Baghdad

by Yasmina Khadra

  Hussein stopped his jalopy at the entrance to a suburb that had been severely damaged by missile fire. The hovels looked deserted. Only after we crossed a kind of line of demarcation did I realize that the townspeople were holed up indoors. Later, I would learn that this was the sign of the fedayeen’s presence. To avoid attracting the attention of soldiers or the police, the local people were ordered to keep a very low profile.

  We walked up an alleyway until we reached a grotesque three-story house. The other twin, Hassan, and a stranger opened the door for us. Hussein performed the introductions. The other man was the home owner, Tariq, a pallid individual who looked like an escapee from an operating room. We went to table at once. The meal was sumptuous, but I failed to do it justice. Shortly after nightfall, we heard the belch of a distant bomb. Hassan looked at his watch and said, “Good-bye, Marwan! We’ll meet again in heaven.” Marwan must have been a suicide bomber.

  Then Hassan turned to me. “You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you again, cousin.”

  “There’s only you three in Yaseen’s group?”

  “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  “What happened to the others?”

  Hussein burst out laughing. His brother tapped him on the shoulder to calm him down. He said, “Who do you mean by ‘the others’?”

  “The rest of your band in Kafr Karam. Adel, Salah, Bilal.”

  Hassan consented to answer me. “Salah’s with Yaseen at the moment. It seems that some splinter group’s trying to take over from us. As for Adel, he’s dead. He was supposed to blow himself up in a police recruiting center. I was against sending him on such a mission from the start. Adel wasn’t all there, you know? But Yaseen said he could do it, so they put an explosive belt on him and off he went. By the time Adel got to the recruiting center, he’d forgotten how to detonate the thing, even though it was quite simple—all he had to do was press a button. Nevertheless, Adel got confused, and then he got pissed off. He removed his jacket and started pounding on the explosive belt with his fists. When the other guys in the recruitment line saw what Adel was wearing around his waist, they got the hell out of there, and so the only potential recruit left in front of the center was Adel, still trying to remember how to make his bomb explode. Of course, the cops shot him to pieces. Our Adel disintegrated without hurting a soul.”

  Hussein guffawed, writhing in his chair. “Only Adel could go out like that!”

  “How about Bilal?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows where he is. There was this important guy, a leader of the resistance, and Bilal was supposed to drive him to Kirkuk. The bigwig waited for him at the prearranged meeting place, but Bilal never showed up. We still don’t know what happened to him. We’ve looked in the morgues, the hospitals, everywhere, even in the police stations and army barracks where we’ve got people, but…nothing. No trace of the car he was driving, either.”

  I stayed at Tariq’s place for a week, enduring Hussein’s outbursts of incongruous laughter. He was a bit cracked, Hussein was. There was something broken in his mind. His brother entrusted him with domestic errands only. Hussein whiled away his unoccupied hours settled in an armchair, watching TV and loitering until the next time he was sent out to buy supplies or pick somebody up.

  One single time, Yaseen authorized me to go on a mission with Hassan and Tariq. We were to transfer a hostage from Baghdad to a cooperative farm. We left in broad daylight. Tariq knew all the shortcuts and back roads and circumvented every checkpoint. The hostage was a European woman, a member of an NGO, kidnapped from the clinic where she worked as a physician. She’d been shut up in the cellar of a villa not far from a police station. We took her out of there with no problem, right under the cops’ noses, and delivered her to another group headquartered on a farm about twenty kilometers south of the city.

  After this accomplishment, I thought I’d earned a higher level of trust, and I expected to be sent on a second mission shortly. I expected in vain. Three weeks dragged by, and still no sign from Yaseen. He visited us from time to time and talked at length with Hassan and Tariq, and sometimes he shared a meal with us; but then, Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law, came by to pick him up, and I was left unsatisfied.

  15

  I slept badly. I think I dreamed about Kafr Karam, but I’m not sure. I lost the thread the second I opened my eyes. My head was stuffed with indistinct images, fixed on a screen that smelled of burning, and I woke up with the odor of my village in my nose.

  From my deep, echoless sleep, I kept only the stabbing pain that racked my joints. I wasn’t overjoyed to recognize the room where I’d been wasting away for weeks, waiting for I knew not what. I felt like the smallest in a set of Russian nesting dolls; the room was the next-size doll, the house the next after that, and so on, with the foul-smelling neighborhood as the lid. I was inside my body like a rat in a trap. My mind raced in every direction but found no way out. Was this, I wondered, claustrophobia? I needed to come unglued, to explode like a bomb, to be useful somehow.

  I staggered to the bathroom. The terry-cloth towel, filthy beyond expression, hung from a nail. The windowpane had last been touched by a cleaning rag several decades ago. The place smelled like stale urine and mildew; it made me nauseous.

  On the dirty sink, a battered piece of soap lay next to an intact tube of toothpaste. The mirror showed me the haggard face of a young man at the end of his rope. I looked at myself the way you look at a stranger.

  There was no water. I went downstairs. Hussein was sunk in his armchair, watching an animated film on TV and chuckling as he nibbled roasted almonds from a plate beside him. On the screen, a band of alley cats, fresh from their garbage cans, were mistreating a terrified kitten. Hussein relished the fear the little animal embodied, lost in the suburban jungle.

  “Where are the others?” I asked him.

  He didn’t hear me. I went to the kitchen, made myself some coffee, and returned to the living room. Hussein had switched channels and was now absorbed in a wrestling match.

  “Where are Hassan and Tariq?”

  “I’m not supposed to know,” he grumbled. “They said they’d be back before nightfall, and they’re still not here.”

  “Has anyone called?”

  “No one.”

  “You think something’s gone wrong?”

  “If my brother had run into problems, I would have felt it.”

  “Maybe we should call Yaseen and find out what’s up.”

  “Forbidden. He’s always the one who does the calling.”

  I glanced out the window. The streets were bathed in the bright morning light. Soon people would emerge from their miserable houses and kids would invade the neighborhood like crickets.

  Hussein manipulated the television’s remote control, making a sequence of different broadcasts flash by on the screen. None of the programs interested him. He fidgeted in his chair, but he didn’t turn off the TV. Then, abruptly, he said, “May I ask you a question, cousin?”

  “Of course.”

  “You mean it? You’ll answer me straight out?”

  “Why not?”

  He threw back his head and laughed that absurd, cringe-inducing laugh of his, which I was really starting to loathe; as usual, it seemed to have no cause and come from nowhere. It was all I heard, day and night, because Hussein never slept. He was in his armchair round the clock, clutching the remote control like a magic wand, changing worlds and languages every five minutes.

  “So you’ll be frank?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  His eyes gleamed in a funny way; I felt sorry for him. He said, “Do you think I’m…nuts?”

  His throat tightened on the last word. He looked so wretched, I was embarrassed.

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “That’s not an answer, cousin.”

  I started to avert my eyes, but his dissuaded me. “I don’t think you’re…nuts,” I said.

  “Liar! In hell, you’re going to
hang from your tongue over a barbecue. You’re just like the others, cousin. You say one thing and think the opposite. But don’t kid yourself—I’m not crazy. I’ve got a full tank and all the accessories. I know how to count on my fingers, and I know how to read people’s eyes to see what they’re hiding from me. It’s true that I can’t stop myself from laughing, but that doesn’t mean I’ve flipped out. I laugh because…because…well, I don’t know exactly why. Some things can’t be explained. I caught the laughing bug watching that simpleton Adel get all frazzled because he couldn’t find the button to blow himself up. I wasn’t far away, and I was observing him as he mingled with the other candidates in front of the police recruiting center. At that moment, I was in a panic. And when the cops fired on him and he exploded, it was as if I disintegrated along with him. He was someone I really liked. He grew up on our patio. I sincerely mourned him, but then the mourning was over, and now, whenever I picture him stabbing at his explosive belt and cursing, I burst out laughing. It was so insane…but that doesn’t make me a nutcase. I can count on my fingers, and I can tell what’s right and wrong.”

  “I never said you were a nutcase, Hussein.”

  “Neither have the others. But they think it. You imagine I don’t see that? Before, they used to send me on real missions. Ambushes, kidnappings, executions—I was at the top of the list. Now they let me buy provisions or pick up someone in my old car. When I volunteer for a serious job, they tell me not to bother, they’ve got all the guys they need, and they don’t want to expose our flank. What does that mean, ‘expose our flank’?”

  “They haven’t given me anything to do yet, either.”

  “You’re lucky, cousin. Because I’m going to tell you what I think. Our cause is just, but we’re defending it very badly. If I laugh from time to time, maybe that’s the reason why.”

  “You’re talking rubbish, Hussein.”

  “Where’s it getting us, this war? Can you see the end of it?”

  “Shut up, Hussein.”

  “But I’m speaking the truth. What’s going on makes no sense. Killing, killing, and more killing. Day and night. On the squares, in the mosques. Nobody knows who’s who anymore, and everyone has it in for everyone else.”

  “You’re raving….”

  “You know how Adnan, the baker’s son, died? The story is, he flung himself heroically against a checkpoint, but that’s a crock. He was sick of all the slaughter. He’d been in action full-time, sniping one day, blowing things up the next. Targeting markets and civilians. And then one morning, he blew up a school bus, killed a lot of kids, and one of the bodies wound up in a tree. When the emergency units arrived on the scene, they picked up the dead and wounded, put them in ambulances, and took them to the hospital. It was only two days later that people on the ground began to smell the dead kid decomposing up in the tree. Adnan happened to be in the area that day—just by chance—and he saw the volunteers pulling the kid out of the branches. I’m telling you, Adnan did a U-turn on the spot. He completely flipped. He stopped being the dedicated warrior we all knew. And one night, he put on a belt stuffed with loaves of bread—baguettes, all around his waist, so they looked like sticks of dynamite—and he went to a checkpoint and started taunting the soldiers. After a bit of that, he suddenly opened his coat and revealed the harness he was wearing, and the soldiers turned him into a sieve. As long as the belt didn’t explode, they kept firing. They used up all their clips and their comrades’ clips, too. Adnan was reduced to a pulp. Afterward, you couldn’t tell the chunks of flesh from the chunks of bread. And that’s the truth, cousin. Adnan didn’t die in combat; he went to his death of his own free will, without a weapon and without a battle cry. He simply committed suicide.”

  There was no chance that I was going to stay in Hussein’s company one minute longer. I placed my cup on the low table and made for the door.

  Hussein stayed in his armchair. He said, “You haven’t killed anyone yet, cousin. So get the hell out. Set your sails for another horizon and don’t look back. I’d do the same thing if I didn’t have a battalion of ghosts holding on to my coattails.”

  I looked him up and down, trying to make him dissolve with my eyes. I said, “I think Yaseen’s right, Hussein. Running errands is all you’re good for.”

  And I hastened to slam the door behind me.

  I went to look at the Tigris. Turning my back on the city, I fixed my gaze on the water and tried to forget the buildings on the other bank. Kafr Karam occupied my mind. I imagined the sandy stadium where youngsters chased soccer balls; I saw the two recovering palm trees, the mosque, the barber clipping away at the skulls of his clientele, the two cafés majestically ignoring each other, the clouds of dust swirling along the silver-gray desert trails, and then I saw the gap where Kadem and I listened to Fairuz, and the horizons, as dead as the seasons…. I tried to retrace my steps, to return to the village; my memories refused to follow me. The images blurred, stopped, and disappeared under a great brown stain, and Baghdad caught up with me again, with its streets bled white, its ghost-populated esplanades, its ragged trees, and its tumult. The sun beat down like a brute, so close that you could have reached it with a fireman’s hose. I think I’d walked across a good part of the city, but I remembered nothing of what I might have encountered, seen, or heard. I’d been wandering around ever since I left Hussein.

  As the river didn’t suffice to drown my thoughts, I started walking again, without any notion of where to go. I was lost in Baghdad, my obsession drowned out by the roar of the void, surrounded on all sides by whirling shadows—a grain of sand in a storm.

  I didn’t love this city. For me, it represented nothing. Meant nothing. I traversed it like a land accursed. We were two incompatible misfortunes, two parallel worlds that ran side by side and never met.

  On my left, under a metal footbridge, a broken-down van attracted a group of children. Farther off, near the stadium—now fallen silent—some American trucks were leaving a military installation. In the roar of the convoy, Kafr Karam reappeared. Our house was in shadow, and I could see only the indefinable tree, under which no one was sitting anymore. There was nobody on the patio, either. The house was empty, soulless and ghost-free. I looked for my sisters, my mother…and found no one. Except for the cut on Bahia’s neck, I saw no face or furtive shape. It was as though my loved ones, once so dear to me, had been banished from my memory. Something in me had broken and collapsed, burying all trace of my family….

  A bellowing truck made me jump back up on the curb. “Wake up, asshole!” the driver shouted. “You think you’re in your mama’s backyard?”

  Some pedestrians stopped, ready to gather other rubber-neckers around them. It was crazy, but in Baghdad the smallest incident attracted a huge crowd of spectators. I waited for the truck driver to continue on his way before I crossed the street.

  My feet were burning. I’d been pounding the pavement for hours.

  I sat down at a table on a café terrace and ordered a soda. I hadn’t eaten all day, but I wasn’t hungry. I was just worn-out.

  “I don’t believe it,” someone behind me said.

  What joy I felt, what relief, when I recognized Omar the Corporal. His new overalls were stretched tightly across his belly.

  “What are you doing in these parts?”

  “I’m drinking a soda.”

  “You can get a soda anywhere. Why here?”

  “You ask too many questions, Omar. I can’t think straight.”

  He spread his arms to embrace me and pressed his lips insistently against my cheeks. He was genuinely happy to see me again. Dropping into a chair, he mopped his face with his handkerchief. “I’m sweating like a Camembert,” he said breathlessly. “But I’m truly happy to find you here, cousin. Really.”

  “Likewise.”

  He hailed the waiter and ordered a lemonade. “So,” he said. “What’s new?”

  “How’s Hany?”

  “Oh, him. He’s a lunatic. You never know what y
ou’re getting with him.”

  “Is he still planning to become an expatriate?”

  “He’d get lost in the countryside. That one is a certified city dweller. If he loses sight of his building, he cries for help. He was playing games with me, know what I mean? He wanted to make sure I cared about him…. What’s up with you?”

  “Are you still with your old warrant officer?”

  “Where else could I go? With him, at least, when things get tight, I know he’ll advance me some cash. He’s a nice guy. And you still haven’t told me what you’re up to around here.”

  “Nothing. All I do is go in circles.”

  “I see. Look, I don’t have to tell you, you can always count on me. If you want, I could talk to my boss again. We might be able to work something out.”

  “You wouldn’t be thinking about paying a visit to Kafr Karam, would you? I’ve got a little money I want to send to my family.”

  “Not anytime soon. Why don’t you just go back home—I mean, if you think there’s nothing for you in Baghdad?”

  Omar was trying to sound me out. He was dying to know whether he could bring up certain delicate subjects again without making me mad. What he read in my face made him recoil. He lifted up his hands and said in a conciliatory voice, “It was just a question, that’s all.”

  According to my watch, it was a quarter past three. “I have to go back,” I said.

  “Is it far?”

  “A fair distance.”

  “I could give you a ride. You want? My van’s in the square, close by.”

  “No, I don’t want to trouble you.”

  “You won’t be troubling me, cousin. I’ve just dropped off a sideboard, and now I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “Well, I’m warning you, it’s ’way out of your way. You’re going to have to go the long way around.”

  “I’ve got plenty of gas.”

  He downed his lemonade in one swallow and signaled to the cashier not to let me pay. “Put this on my tab, Saad.”