Without thinking, he stretched out his arm to grab the “familiar of his fear” by the neck, but when he opened his eyes, he couldn’t see anything between himself and the ceiling.
2
Mahmoud said he was in love with his boss’s woman and wanted to sleep with her. But Hadi said that was nothing to be embarrassed about.
“I told you my terrible secret. I told you about the Whatsitsname and what he has done. If the police get wind of it, it might be the end of me. I want you to tell me a real secret in return.”
Mahmoud didn’t say anything for a long while. He peered around at the wreckage of the house where Hadi lived. He thought back to some old memories. Then he made up his mind.
“I’ll tell you something. I don’t think my family were originally Arabs. We weren’t Arabs or Muslims,” he said.
“Then what were you?”
“I think my great-grandfather or my great-great-grandfather was a Sabean who converted to Islam for the woman he loved. My father wrote all this down in his diaries, but my brothers and my mother burned them after he died.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“It’s a big problem. We’re not real Arabs.”
“I was saying in the coffee shop that my great-grandfather was an Ottoman officer, but now I don’t know whether that was just a lie.”
“And the story you told me just now, isn’t that a lie too?”
“No. I’d be upset if you thought that.”
“Give me some evidence that your story’s true. I’ll believe you if you give me some evidence.”
“What exactly do you want?”
“Let me meet this Whatsitsname.”
“No, impossible. He might kill you.”
“Put me somewhere in the middle of all this, so I can have a look at him.”
“I don’t know when he’ll show up. He might never come again.”
“What then? You’re avoiding the subject.”
“Not at all. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”
“Take a picture of him. I’ll give you a camera.”
“Impossible. He’d kill me.”
Mahmoud stood up from the wooden chair in the courtyard of Hadi’s dilapidated house. Mahmoud hadn’t expected the conversation to go this far. The evening before, in the lobby of the Orouba Hotel, he had been in a different mood. When Hadi left the hotel, Mahmoud had given him ten thousand dinars for dinner and a bottle of arak, and had made an appointment for the next day to exchange confessions of dangerous secrets. Mahmoud had made the arrangement very lightheartedly, and had then stayed on for a quarter of an hour, talking to Abu Anmar in the lobby.
The next day, after dozens of people died on the Imams Bridge, Mahmoud forgot about everything. Saidi had left him in charge of the next issue of the magazine and gone off to Erbil that morning with a delegation of politicians and economists for something to do with oil. Saidi had said he was depending on him and that he had great confidence in him, that everything would be fine and he had complete authority.
The streets were mostly blocked because of tight security for the religious ceremonies in Kadhimiya, so Mahmoud walked to the magazine offices. No one had arrived yet, except for the old janitor. He found Saidi’s second cell phone connected to the charger. He turned on the phone and found fourteen missed calls, half of them from the number 666.
What would happen if Mahmoud called that number now? He could tell her that he had taken her previous call and found out what kind of relationship she and Saidi had, and that he was now offering her some advice: “Forget Saidi, because he has no memory. He’s just a man of pleasure. You can try your luck with other men if you like. Try your luck with me, you devil woman.”
He struggled with himself over whether to call her, just to hear her voice, especially as he hadn’t seen her for about ten days. He finally persuaded himself to wait till she called again—she had already called seven times that day. He would answer her call and reveal his identity to her.
He didn’t find much that he could do. The janitor wanted to make him some tea or coffee, but he made it clear he didn’t want any. He asked the janitor to lock the doors so they could both leave. He took his stuff from Saidi’s table and looked at Saidi’s phone. He had an overwhelming desire to do something stupid. Something stupid but minor. He would listen to Nawal al-Wazir’s voice, nothing more. He wouldn’t tell anyone. No one would ever know.
He picked up the phone, found the list of recent calls, and selected 666. He heard ringing on the other end, and the blood started coursing through his veins and his heart beat faster and stronger. The ringing continued for several seconds, and then she picked up: “Hello, hello?”
It was her voice, with those sensuous cadences that so agonized him. But he couldn’t answer. He couldn’t control his throat or his lips or even blink. He was transfixed, frozen.
“Hello?” said Nawal. “Baher,” she added. “Who is it that comes and uses your phone in your office?”
“I don’t know,” came Saidi’s voice in the background. “Please give the phone to me. Hello, hello? Is that you, Abu Jouni?”
Mahmoud hung up, turned off the phone, and tossed it on the editor’s table as though it had given him an electric shock.
So she was with him now. A political and economic conference, huh! But she was a film director? Maybe she’d gone to film some footage for her next film, which they chatted about so much. Maybe it was a film about the links among money and politics and oil, and about getting out of Baghdad to escape the religious rituals that brought life to a standstill. Maybe she was adding some realistic bed shots to include in her great film.
Mahmoud turned and saw the old janitor, Abu Jouni, watching him, or waiting for him to finish his business so they could go out and lock up the building from the outside.
He didn’t speak for a whole hour and walked back. He ate at a restaurant on the way. He thought of calling his friend Farid Shawwaf and bringing up Nawal al-Wazir in passing, but then he thought that if he did that, he would make a laughingstock of himself. So he’d call his friend Hazem Abboud, the photographer. But Hazem would ridicule him for talking endlessly about Nawal, as he had done that time they went to the brothel together.
“It’s all to do with your cock,” Hazem would say, trying to shock him and to deny the emotional aspect of his attachment to Nawal. “Find a permanent flesh hole for it.”
Mahmoud reached Aziz’s coffee shop and found Hadi, who reminded him of the agreement they had made the previous evening. Mahmoud ordered a tea and, out of a desire to forget everything, surrendered himself to Hadi’s crazy story. Hadi was speaking quietly, stopping and looking around every now and then. He wasn’t behaving his usual way when playing the role of the old storyteller. Now he was speaking as if he were revealing a secret. Then, when he came to a critical point in his story, he asked Mahmoud to come home with him so that they could speak more openly.
When he had finished narrating the new details in his story of the Whatsitsname, it had quite an effect on Mahmoud. For half a minute Mahmoud went over in his head everything that Hadi had said. It was a truly appalling story, and this crazy old man couldn’t have made it up all by himself. It included things that were too complicated for the simple mind of this junk dealer. Hadi woke Mahmoud from his reverie. “Now you,” he said. “Tell me your dangerous secret.”
3
Mahmoud did tell him a real secret. He had never told anyone, not even his close friend Hazem Abboud, of his suspicion about his family’s origins. He had never had occasion to mention it, or else he simply wasn’t brave enough to. Anyway, it was a real secret that was buried inside him, and he couldn’t remember the last time anyone in his family in Amara had spoken about it. So he was honest with Hadi, even if Hadi didn’t seem to appreciate the significance of his confession. For the rest of the day Mahmoud kept thinking about
what Hadi had said. He promised himself he would play back the recording on his digital recorder, in his hotel room, so he wouldn’t forget the details. He believed that emotions changed memories, that when you lost the emotion associated with a particular event, you lost an important part of the event. So he had to write down things that he thought were important or record them on his little recorder when the emotions that went with them were still strong.
He recorded almost everything on the Panasonic recorder, which he had bought from a shop in Bab al-Sharqi about six months earlier. The recorder struck him as being an evolutionary advance over the school notebooks in which his father, Riyadh al-Sawadi, used to write his diaries. In the end, on the eve of his death, his father had filled twenty-seven notebooks of a hundred pages each. On a few rare occasions, Mahmoud had looked at some of the pages. But then his mother had done the unthinkable: she put them all deep in the oven, poured paraffin over them, and set them on fire. She then made twenty-seven loaves of flat bread, baking them gently on the ashes of his confessions. His father had written down everything. He had written the naked truth in black ink, in elegant handwriting of the kind you would find in a calligraphy book. There were passages about the times his father had masturbated when he was married, about the women he dreamed of sleeping with, some of them old women from the neighborhood. What he said in his diaries couldn’t be squared with the way people saw him in the Jidayda district of Amara. He was highly respected and revered, but maybe that wasn’t an image Mahmoud’s father liked very much. It was an image that had been imposed on him and that he had finally managed to live with, but only by expressing his real self in his secret confessions.
When Mahmoud’s brothers looked at the notebooks, they were shocked and embarrassed. Mahmoud heard them say things about origins and changing religion and so on. He wasn’t sure what he heard, and the subject was completely closed once the ashes of the twenty-seven notebooks had cooled down in their mother’s oven. But Mahmoud sometimes remembered some of what his father had written and tried to piece it together with scraps of information that had been suppressed forever, in an attempt to understand things, even if there was no longer any way to verify the information. One of those things was the family name Sawadi, which Mahmoud’s father, an Arabic teacher, had invented, completely ignoring the usual name that indicated tribal affiliation. Many people started referring to the family house as the house of the Sawadi clan. But Mahmoud’s father’s death meant death for the invented family name as well, because Mahmoud’s brothers reverted to their tribal name, which they were proud of. But Mahmoud, outraged by the ruthless way they had tried to expunge their father’s life story, retained the Sawadi name and established it as the name by which he was known in newspapers and magazines.
4
Mahmoud got up from the wooden chair Hadi had placed for him in the courtyard of his run-down house and looked up at the sky, which was growing darker as sunset approached. He took a long breath and told Hadi he wouldn’t believe his story until he provided some material evidence that the Whatsitsname he’d been talking about really existed.
Mahmoud put his hand in his pocket, pulled out the digital recorder, and gave it to Hadi, saying he should do an interview with this creature. He should turn on the recorder and ask him what he was doing, where he was going, and where he was living.
Mahmoud invited Hadi to examine the recorder. He explained how to turn it on and off. Hadi spent five minutes recording and then playing his voice back, checking that he had understood the instructions.
“Mind the batteries. They run out very quickly,” Mahmoud said before leaving, unsure what exactly he had just done—this junk dealer would probably sell the recorder the next day. Perhaps it was the effect of the exhausting day, or the effect of Hadi’s strange story and the promise of hearing more details. What if Hadi produces real evidence that a mythical creature of this kind existed? Would he really believe it?
Mahmoud walked toward the Orouba Hotel, thinking about Saidi and his female devil Nawal and his friends and his father who had been dead for ten years.
When he reached the hotel, he found that someone had put a small generator on the sidewalk. Abu Anmar had brought it; it was enough to power the fans and lights in the four hotel rooms that were occupied, as well as the reception area and the private room that Abu Anmar lived in.
Mahmoud went up to his room and lay flat on his bed for a full hour. His feet hurt from all the walking. He closed his eyes to the swirl of air from the ceiling fan. Out of his memory streamed a clear image of his father, wearing a dishdasha and sitting in the parlor at home. He had on his glasses, and there was a large wooden board on his crossed legs. On the board he had an open notebook, and he devoted hours to writing in it silently.
When Mahmoud opened his eyes in the pitch dark, he didn’t know how much time had passed. He went downstairs and then to a nearby restaurant for dinner. When he came back he saw Luqman, the Algerian who lived in the hotel, sitting in the lobby with another old guest, as well as Abu Anmar and Andrew, the teenager who helped his old mother Veronica with the weekly cleaning. They were all watching television; the little generator was purring outside. Mahmoud said hello to them and sat down to watch too. What a surprise it was when he saw his friend Farid Shawwaf on the screen, in a gray suit, black shirt, and red tie. He looked smarter than Mahmoud had ever seen him before.
Abu Anmar raised his fat hand and ordered the boy to go and get four cups of tea from the tea stand in the street.
Everyone in the lobby was watching the talk show on television anxiously and in silence. It was a big disaster, the biggest disaster that had struck Iraq so far, as Abu Anmar put it. About a thousand people had been killed, either from drowning or being trampled to death, and no one knew who the culprit was. The government spokesman came out smiling as usual to announce that an attempted suicide bombing on the Imams Bridge had been prevented and that the criminal had escaped.
“If the criminal had blown himself up, there would have been thousands of victims today,” the spokesman said. A loud, rumbling fart echoed through the lobby and even outside. Soon everyone realized it was just the horn of a truck driving down Bataween’s main street, warning off a child who had run out in front of it.
The host of the talk show returned to his guests after showing a clip of the government spokesman, and Farid Shawwaf, smartly dressed, jumped in to express his view. “As I said earlier, responsibility for this incident lies with the government, which installed concrete barriers on the bridge itself. It should have carried out the searches at the entrance and exit of the bridge so it wouldn’t get crowded there.”
The host put up his hand to interrupt Farid, turned to his other guest—a bald old man with a small white beard—and asked him the same question: Who was responsible?
“It’s definitely some al-Qaeda cells and remnants of the old regime,” the man said. “Even if they didn’t personally carry out this crime, they are responsible for it because there have been criminal incidents in their name in the past, so the mere mention of their name is a factor in creating insecurity and confusing people.”
The host cut in: “Some people say the person responsible is the one who started the rumor that there was a suicide bomber on the bridge.”
“No, I don’t think he is to blame,” replied the older man. “No one knows who started the rumor, but the idea was very much in the air. Perhaps the person thought there was a suicide bomber and warned the others with good intentions.”
The host turned to Farid to give him a chance to elaborate. “Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I’d go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing—fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of anot
her group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end.”
5
Brigadier Majid was watching the talk show on television and was impressed by the way Farid Shawwaf was dressed—the gray suit with black shirt and red tie. Maybe he should send one of his staff to go and buy him a similar outfit, but he doubted there would be an occasion to wear clothes like that, because for most of the week he lay low in his office like a prisoner.
He flicked through all the Iraqi television channels and saw they were still preoccupied with the incident on the Imams Bridge. Something told him they were all wrong and that the real culprit was still at large. He might even be arrested that very night.
He took a sip of tea. There were a few light taps on the door, and two fat young men with short hair came in, both wearing pink shirts and black linen pants. They saluted him and stood at attention.
The brigadier took another sip of tea, then turned to them and spoke with great insistence, because his big coup might take place that night. He had summoned the men only to give himself the satisfaction of feeling he was in control of the operation, and the conversation between them was devoid of content.
Frankenstein in Baghdad Page 11