The old man died and left me really helpless. Day had broken and snowflakes fell from the mouth of the hole. The Russian’s body looked ghostly. I wanted to reach back to other times I might have lived in, the traces of which are scattered to places I previously thought imaginary. My consciousness was moving like a rollercoaster at a funfair. I watched the snowflakes swirling. The vision of the soldier had disappeared. My eyes were open and my mind was asleep. I may have been sleeping for hundreds of years. I imagined a dead cell. Am I really just in my mind or in every cell in my body? A strong smell of flowers filled the hole. I closed my eyes but then a young girl fell into the hole. She was carrying on her back an electronic bag tied around her chest with many straps, and to her thighs were tied metallic phosphorous clusters. In her hand she was holding something that looked like an electronic gauge.
‘Who are you?’ she asked me, panting. There were wounds disfiguring her pretty face.
‘I’m a djinni. What happened to you?’
I felt as if my voice went back to ancient times.
‘A blood analysis robot was chasing me,’ she said.
She was sucking her finger, which was swollen like a mushroom.
‘That’s normal,’ I said apathetically, then crawled towards the corpse of the old man.
The Fifth Floor Window
They were both in their forties. They had colon cancer, while I had lung cancer. We were in the Medical City hospital in central Baghdad. The day before, they had taken Hajj Saber away. Poor guy. He died and escaped his torment. The cleaning woman came and changed the sheets on his bed. Salwan and I watched her as she arranged the bed carefully. She went through his little cupboard. She took out some towels and a bag of oranges his daughter Fatma had brought him the day before he died. The cleaning lady offered them to us. Salwan told her he wouldn’t eat a dead man’s oranges. Then he asked her irritably about the doctor and whether he would come by the ward any time soon.
‘There isn’t a single doctor available,’ she answered, severe as usual. ‘They’re all in the emergency department. Haven’t you seen the massacre from the window of your palace?’
Salwan had his very own rocking chair that he’d brought from home. He would put it close to the window and watch the courtyard outside the emergency department day and night. We were on the fifth floor. The courtyard never rested. Ambulances and cars would rush in and out like crazy. Sometimes carts would come, drawn by donkeys or horses, loaded with mangled bodies. It was hard to tell the dead from the living. It was a bleak year. Civil war. Infiltrators from abroad. Secret agents from all over the world. Adventurers. They were all making their way together down the river of hell that was Baghdad.
The doctors checked us with their white coats spattered with blood. The hospital was vast, with hundreds of patients lying in bed after bed. Salwan accused the doctors of negligence in the way they cared for the patients. They told him they couldn’t even handle the emergency department because there weren’t enough paramedics there. It was an exceptional situation. The country was being torn apart. But Salwan wasn’t convinced. He held them responsible for the declining health of his fellow colon cancer victim – this was a retired pilot in a nearby bed who wouldn’t stop groaning. On several occasions he had begged them to end his life. Salwan was frightened of his colon because it would soon get to the same stage as the pilot’s, with the same excruciating pain. We were stuck between the pilot’s groans and the bloody scenes outside the window. It was closed. We couldn’t hear the screams of the injured and the lamentations of the bereaved in the courtyard of the emergency department. All we could hear were the pilot’s groans, which sounded like cemetery music composed to accompany the drama we could see through the window.
Salwan’s psychological state was constantly deteriorating. He was speaking but he was deaf to what anyone else said. All he could hear was the Angel of Death shuffling towards him. I learned that he’d been a carpenter all his life. His wife was barren. In his late forties, he took a second wife who was young. She made him happy with a handsome boy. The two wives would visit him regularly. They would sit on the end of the bed like squabbling crows. Salwan shared his insults equally between them, all without understanding a word of what they said. He was drowning in the depths of despair, like the wreckage of a ship.
That day Salwan was extremely tense. He woke up at dawn. A batch of human offerings had arrived when the first ray of sunlight touched the world of man: someone had blown himself up in the mosque during dawn prayers. Salwan lit a cigarette and walked up and down the ward muttering to himself. The nurse came in and asked him to put out his cigarette. He kicked up a ruckus, cursed the doctors, the suicide bombers and the cancer, and repeatedly damned the pilot for moaning, which gave him insomnia, he said. He didn’t put out his cigarette until his shouting had woken everyone up. I got out of bed and fetched the teapot from the kitchen. We sat down together near the window drinking tea with biscuits. There hadn’t been many people praying. The courtyard fell pretty quiet, except for the rain that was pelting down. I wanted to soothe his fears but I couldn’t get the words straight in my mouth. Meanwhile he went on insulting Saddam Hussein and in my turn I cursed the Occupation. He asked me about the scorpion tattoo on the back of my hand and I told him it was a relic of my adolescence. I was in this gang at the time and we got together one drunken night on a piece of wasteland and decided that each of us would get a scorpion tattoo and we would be the Scorpion Crew. Salwan smiled. Suddenly his bad mood lifted and he too started to share memories of scorpions. He said that in his childhood he lived in a village that was full of poisonous snakes and scorpions. He talked about a girl called Parveen, and how they went hunting scorpions together:
‘“Come here, Parveen, there’s a black scorpion here!”
‘Parveen would steal an empty bottle of tomato paste that her mother used to fill with water and keep in the fridge. I would remove the laces from my father’s old army boots that were stored under the stairs. We would meet at the corner of the lane and set off towards the distant wheat fields. We would fill the bottle with water from the streams in the valley and embark on our search for scorpions. They weren’t hard to find, because we could easily tell the scorpions’ holes by their small size. They were round and went into the ground at an angle, and at the edge of the hole there would always be the little pile of soil they had dug out. The procedure was this: we poured water from the bottle into the scorpion’s hole and the hole would soon fill up. In fact, pissing on the hole was usually enough to bring out the scorpion. We would piss when the water ran out. There were two stages to catching the thing: knowing that it would suffocate if it stayed in the hole, the scorpion tried to get out, but realising we were there waiting for it, it would only stick its head out. So, first we would dig underneath the scorpion with a spoon and throw it far from its hole. The scorpion would be terrified by this sudden attack and would scuttle about in search of a safe place under a stone or in another hole but... no way! Stage Two was to corner it and goad it into its new home – the tomato paste bottle. And in this house it would see all kinds of horrors and wonders. We’d cover the mouth with a plastic bag and tie it up with my father’s boot laces.
‘“Parveen, found one!”
‘“Argh, it’s yellow again!”
‘We were looking for a black one because they were rare, and we could have fun watching a battle between a black one and a yellow one.’
Salwan walked as far as the pilot’s bed and then came back, then stared into my eyes for several moments.
‘The government executed Parveen’s father for collaborating with the Kurdish peshmerga!’
‘Do you have any gum?’ I said. I noticed his nervous fingers.
He shook his head and returned to his bed. Then he pulled his blanket over him. I sat there thinking about my childhood, then about the situation with my wife and children. The operation would be in a week. They were going to cut out part of my lung. I didn’t know if I would
survive. How I longed to go back to reading! There was nowhere I longed to be more than the university campus. I was preparing a master’s on fantasy literature. I was interested in why the country’s literature did not include this distinctive genre. I had this great passion for studying and writing, which they explained in my household through the story of the umbilical cord. When I was born, and at my father’s request, my elder sister buried my umbilical cord in the courtyard of her primary school. My father attributed my brother Adel’s academic failure to the fact that my mother buried his umbilical cord in the garden of our house. I used to tease Adel saying, ‘Instead of becoming a botanist or a farmer, you turned out unemployed.’
‘We’ll never know,’ Adel replied. ‘I’ve heard you say a thousand times this world is contradictory and mysterious, and there may be some connection between the garden and the bad luck that dogs me!’
Then he would give a laugh and swear that my father had told all his relatives and neighbours and colleagues at work the story about burying the umbilical cord.
The doctor visited the ward later that afternoon. He was a cheerful young man and performed a miracle when he drew a smile out of Salwan. He patted him on the shoulder and promised him that the specialist would be coming soon. After that, Salwan went back to looking out of the window. I heard him muttering to himself once more. The pilot’s groans started to grow louder again, begging childishly for someone to spare him the pain of continuing to live. Salwan lost his temper. He started insulting and making fun of the pilot, and then accusing him: ‘How many people did you kill with your warplanes? See how lucky you are! Hidden away in hospital when they’re assassinating your colleagues, slaughtering them one by one.’
Salwan was right. But he wasn’t right to add to the pilot’s torment. After the fall of Baghdad an organised campaign to assassinate pilots had started. They said Iranian intelligence was taking revenge on them for their raids during the Iran-Iraq war. The nurse came in to help the pilot and warned Salwan to behave himself. Salwan and the pilot had been in the ward the longest. When I arrived they were close friends, chatting and joking all the time. But as soon as the pilot’s health collapsed, Salwan went crazy because the pilot’s colon reminded him what was also in store for him.
That night Salwan sat close to the pilot’s bed. They were whispering to each other. I was lying in bed reading Palomar by Italo Calvino. Mr Palomar was thinking, ‘But how can you look at something and set your own ego aside? Whose eyes are doing the looking? As a rule, you think of the ego as one who is peering out of your own eyes as if leaning on a windowsill, looking at the world stretching out before him in all its immensity.’ Salwan gave me a strange look then went back to whispering with his friend. He stood up and put his hand on the pilot’s shoulder, as though trying to reassure him about something. After a while he moved the wheelchair close to the bed and asked me to help him sit the pilot in it. After that, Salwan pushed the wheelchair to the window. I went back to bed and watched him. I thought the pilot wanted to share the view. Salwan came over to my bed. He wanted to say something but he stepped back and spun around, sunk in thought. I was suspicious of his behaviour. His face was pale and he looked like death was about to grab him.
I think that a view like the one from the window has an irresistible power. It pulls one towards committing a crime. The mind can also be addicted to, and live off, the carrion of fear. Perhaps my mind was just a hyena looking for carrion. I had turned to stone in my bed, like the Baghdad statues, pale, exhausted by fountains spitting blood. Salwan pushed the pilot’s chair back a little. He picked up a chair and with three violent blows in succession he smashed the window pane. He brought the pilot’s chair up to the window frame, then went back to his bed and dived inside it.
The pilot climbed up onto the window sill with difficulty. He was screaming with pain and the broken glass was shredding the palms of his hands. With a great effort he pushed his body through the window and fell forwards into that courtyard of bloody battle.
The Iraqi Christ
We were meant to camp in an old girls’ school and some of the soldiers decided the best place to spend the night was the school’s air-raid shelter. Daniel the Christian picked up his blanket and other bedding and headed out into the open courtyard.
‘Of course, Chewgum Christ is crazy,’ remarked one of the soldiers, a man as tall as a palm tree, his mouth stuffed with dry bread.
‘Perhaps he doesn’t want to sleep with us Muslims,’ suggested another soldier.
The young men were monkeys. They didn’t know the truth about Daniel. They were too busy masturbating on the benches in the classrooms where the girls used to sit. Just one missile and they would shortly be charred pricks. In absurd wars such as this one, Daniel’s gift was a lifesaver. We had been together in the Kuwait War and if it hadn’t been for his amazing powers we wouldn’t have survived. Aside from his gloomy nature, Daniel could hardly be considered ordinary flesh and blood. He was a force of nature.
I spread out my blanket close to him and lay on my back, like him, staring into space.
‘Go to sleep, Ali, my friend. Go to sleep. There’s no sign tonight. Go to sleep,’ he said to me, and started snoring straight away.
Daniel was always chewing gum. The soldiers baptized him Chewgum Christ. I often imagined that Daniel’s chewing was like an energy source, recharging the battery that powered the screen in his brain. His life’s dream was to work in the radar unit. He had completed secondary school and volunteered to join the air force, but his application was rejected, maybe because his father had been a prominent communist in the seventies. He loved radar the way other men love women or football. He collected pictures of radar systems and talked about signals and frequencies as though he was talking about a romp in the hay with some girlfriend. During the last war, I remember him saying, ‘Ali, humans are the best radar receivers, compared with other animals. You just need to practise making your spirit leave your body and then bring it back, like exhaling and inhaling.’ He had tattooed on his right arm the radar equation:
After Daniel’s hopes of joining the air force were dashed, he volunteered for the medical corps. But he did not give up his passion for radar, and anyone who knew him would not have been surprised by this obsession, because Chewgum Christ was himself the strangest radar in the world. I remember those terrifying nights during the war over Kuwait. The soldiers, as frightened as ducklings, would follow him wherever he went. The coalition planes would be bombing our trenches and we wouldn’t be able to fire a single shot back. We felt we were fighting some ultimate, almighty force. All we could do was dig more trenches and scamper from place to place like rats. In the end we camped near the desert. All we had left was our faith in God and the powers of Daniel the Christian. One night we were eating in the trench with the other soldiers when Daniel started complaining of a stomach ache. The soldiers stopped eating, picked up their weapons and prepared to stand, all of them looking at Daniel’s mouth.
‘I want to lie down in the shade of the large water tank,’ Christ said finally.
The soldiers joined him as he left the trench, jostling to keep close to him as if he were a shield against missiles. They sat around him in the shade. Just thirty-five minutes later three bombs fell on the trench. It wasn’t the only time. Christ’s premonitions saved many soldiers. In Daniel’s company the war played out like the plot of a cartoon film. In the blink of an eye, reality lost cohesion. It fell apart and you started to hallucinate. What could one make, for example, of the way a constant itching in Daniel’s crotch foretold that an American helicopter would crash on the headquarters building? Is it credible that three successive sneezes from Daniel could foretell a devastating rocket attack? They fired them at us from the sea. We soldiers were like sheep, fighting comic book wars.
I heard many rumours that reports on Christ had been submitted to the Supreme Command. But the chaos of those days and the defeat of our army, which was crushed like flies, prevented the aut
horities paying any attention. There were many stories about the president’s interest in magicians, the occult and people with prodigious powers. They claim it was at his suggestion that so many books on parapsychology were unexpectedly translated in Iraq in the eighties, because he had heard that the advanced countries were developing telepathic techniques and using them for espionage. The president thought that science and the occult were one and the same, they just used different methods to reveal the same secrets. Christ was not boastful about his premonitory powers and did not consider them unusual. He used to tell stories from history about mankind’s ability to foretell the future. I came to the conclusion that Daniel’s melancholia made it impossible for him to take pleasure in the talent he possessed. Even his interest in radar did not bring him pleasure. His ideas about happiness were mysterious. I understood from him that he was frightened by some inner gloom. He thought his talent was just another sign of how impotent and insignificant we are in this mysterious world. He told me that at an early age he read a story by an Iraqi writer whose personality was simultaneously sarcastic and fearful. The hero in the story was swallowed by a shark after a fierce battle in the imaginary river of time. The hero sits trapped in the darkness there and thinks alone: ‘How can I reconcile my private life with my awareness that a world is collapsing in front of my eyes?’3 ‘That’s a question that has weighed on my life. It has kept me awake like an open wound,’ said Christ.
When we woke up the next day the American forces had reached the outskirts of Baghdad. A few hours later they brought down the statue of the dictator. It was a surreal shock. We put on civilian clothes and went back to our families. It was just another war of the blind in which no one in our squadron fired a single shot. After it was all over, I met Daniel several times. He had gone back to live with his elderly mother. When chaos broke out in the country, I visited him in their house in Baghdad. I wanted to speak to him about going back to the army. He said he had hated the dictator but he would not contribute to an army under the auspices of the occupier. After that I didn’t meet him again. I myself returned to the army, and Daniel went back to looking after his mother. He had two sisters who had migrated to Canada years before and his other relatives had left the country one by one, driven away by wars and the madness of sectarian fanaticism. Of his large family, only his mother remained. I found out that Daniel spent most of his time at home reading novels and encyclopaedias, following the news and caring for his mother, who had lost her hearing, her sight and her memory. Old age isolated her from the world. The old woman was incontinent. Christ would change her nappies every few hours. His mother’s death would sever the thread that tied him to the place. He didn’t plan to emigrate. In a long letter, his older sister implored him to leave the country, but Christ was as stubborn as his mother. Both of them rejected the devil’s temptation – to abandon their lost paradise.
The Iraqi Christ Page 3
