The Last of the Angels

by Fadhil al-Azzawi

  Smiling, the deputy lieutenant said, “Never mind about your student; it’s not that big a deal.” Then he apologized for upsetting the mullah and, escorting him to the door, said, “I hope you won’t meddle in politics from now on. If you feel you need to say something, curse Communism; that’s the only party a person is allowed to curse in this country.”

  Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri, however, after being humiliated in this fashion, definitely did not meddle in politics again, not even to curse Communism, for if the commissioner himself was a Socialist, who could guarantee that the police chief was not a secret supporter of Communism? As a matter of fact, Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri was wrong about certain points, especially about his student Aziz Shirwan, whom he had proposed to the deputy lieutenant as a secret agent. The mullah knew that this young Kurd, who had come from Sulaymaniya to study Islamic jurisprudence with the mullah, lived in the mosque and knocked on doors each afternoon in hopes of receiving a loaf of flat bread or a section of one—since people deemed it a religious duty to feed him. He did not know that he was not merely a Communist but had transformed the mosque itself into a secret drop point for Party mail. He had thought about fleeing when the security men led the mullah away but had returned and decided against it when he learned the truth. He reassured the distraught mullah by telling him that security men often try to exert pressure on religious figures to frighten them.

  From that day forward, Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri enjoyed unprecedented respect, for people began to speak of him as a stalwart nationalist who held firm to the principles of his faith. Indeed, some people spread a rumor that he had slapped the police chief himself and had proceeded to open the prison gate and set the prisoners free without anyone daring to stop him. Mullah Zayn al-Abidin actually felt proud when he heard these rumors, which he greeted with a crafty smile. He declined to comment on them, although he became more cautious and adhered to the deputy lieutenant’s advice to avoid wading into politics. Instead, he turned his attention to the gender of angels: were they male or female? His opinion—which differed from that of many Muslim religious scholars—was that angels are female and that there are no male angels. He supported this opinion by reference to the fact that a male inevitably possesses a penis, which would not be something an angel would need, since they naturally do not copulate. If they are not males, then logically they must be females. At any rate, a sound intellect would reach this conclusion. Hameed Nylon—once during a discussion overheard by men in the coffeehouse—replied, “If we follow your logic, we should conclude that the angels are eunuchs, for what need would a female angel have for genitals if there are no male angels?” His view was convincing, although all the men present rejected it, since they scorned eunuchs. Then Hameed Nylon smiled and told the mullah, “I agree with you, mullah, for God’s taste is too refined to create male angels resembling us ugly men when He could make them like the heavenly maidens who delight the heart.” The men guffawed, but the mullah said, “Damn you, Hameed. You turn everything into a joke.” All the same, Hameed Nylon’s argument made an impact on Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri, who began to search for irrefutable arguments for his position.

  Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri’s assertion to Deputy Lieutenant Husayn al-Nasiri that there were no Communists in the Chuqor community was credible, for there were no Kakaiyeen with the thick mustaches that were considered a sure sign of Communism. People were right to believe this, for Communists in the city during World War II had deliberately adopted Stalin’s mustache as a symbol of their nationalist struggle. That made the job easier for security agents, who recognized and pursued them. Of course, law student Aziz Shirwan, Hameed Nylon, and all the other men in the community had mustaches, since a man would not be considered manly without one. Thus the worst insult exchanged in a quarrel was for one man to threaten another, “I’ll shave off your mustache!” Their mustaches, however, were thin, not thick, and more like two strokes under the nose from a draughtsman’s brush than anything else. Indeed, the mustache of the oil worker Abdallah Ali, who was thin, brown, and lanky, was trimmed on both sides to look almost like Hitler’s. Thus it was impossible for anyone to imagine that these men were connected to politics in any way.

  Except for the law student Aziz Shirwan, who was already a Communist when he moved to the neighborhood, and for Faruq Shamil, who met Communists in the print shop where he worked—and in any case he had moved into the Chuqor community from elsewhere—there were no dyed-in-the-wool Communists in the neighborhood. The others—including Hameed Nylon, who had begun to transport passengers between Kirkuk and al-Hawija in an old, wood-sided vehicle that belonged to a Jew named Shamu’il, who had a shop selling watches in al-Awqaf Street and who was the sole agent for Swiss Felca and Nivada watches—were preoccupied with a single thought: a union that would defend the rights of its members. The police considered unions to be simply another face of Communism and pursued them mercilessly. Hameed Nylon, however, believed firmly that had there been a public union for oil workers, Mr. McNeely and his prostitute-wife, Helen, would not have been able to toss him out on the street like a rat. Indeed, he was so touched when he learned that the clandestine union had issued a flyer defending him that his eyes were bathed in tears. When Najat Salim showed him the flyer, he read it again and again. Then he hid it carefully in a bag at home. That same day, he asked Najat Salim to introduce him to these folks. Najat Salim asked him, “Why should I introduce you? They are closer than you think.” Hameed Nylon was perplexed. So Najat Salim said, “Let’s go have tea at the union.” He led Hameed to the room where Faruq Shamil lived with his wife Gulbahar, right next to his own house. Hameed Nylon burst out laughing and ruffled the evening calm of the Chuqor neighborhood, exclaiming, “What an ass I am!”

  Thus Hameed Nylon found his way to the trade union, for although Faruq Shamil did not work for the oil company, he was a member of the cell that directed the work of the city’s unions. At this session, Faruq Shamil told him to attempt—circumspectly—to interest working men in the Chuqor neighborhood in joining the unions and to put them in contact with the leadership of the workers’ movement in the city. Hameed Nylon disappeared then for a full week. When he returned, he brought with him a list of the names of twenty-one individuals in the Chuqor community—including four oil workers—who wished to join a union. Hameed Nylon apologized that he had not had enough time to contact more people. The men admittedly belonged to diverse professions and included an officer at the rank of second lieutenant, a policeman, three soldiers, and a dervish known in the neighborhood for sticking skewers through his cheeks and swallowing glass. He was a member of the Qadiriya Brotherhood and affiliated with a Sufi lodge located in the Kurdish regions of the city. Faruq Shamil was puzzled to find the name of the thief Mahmud al-Arabi on Hameed Nylon’s roster as well. He asked Hameed gravely, “What did you say to get a person like the thief Mahmud al-Arabi to side with the union?” Hameed Nylon replied, laughing, “Oh, it was easy with Mahmud. I suggested that he should head a union that would embrace all the thieves of Kirkuk, and that was exactly what he wanted.”

  Hameed Nylon had scarcely joined the union and contacted the oil workers when a marked difference was observed in their relationship with the firm, which they held responsible for the injustices they felt, especially after it sacked several employees whom it considered saboteurs. These men eventually fell into the hands of the police, who tortured them with special German-made, nail-pulling pincers that the minister of the interior had purchased himself during his annual holiday in Turkey. This gross attack led the workers to call a strike, since they felt their personal honor had been impugned.

  During the week preceding the oil workers’ strike, neighborhood men, who as a matter of course met each afternoon in front of their homes, noticed a stranger in a dishdasha riding into the community on a bicycle. He traversed the community several times, going back and forth, before stopping in front of the mosque to watch the young men gathering. They had s
potted him: “Look! He’s an undercover agent come to spy on us.” Hameed Nylon wanted to challenge and beat the stranger, but Faruq Shamil stopped him: “That’s not how it’s done, Hameed. Wait just a moment.” Faruq Shamil went home. He was gone a few minutes and then returned, laughing. He did not even look at the man, who had taken a seat on the mosque’s bench, withdrawing from his pocket a dark loaf of military-issue bread, which he proceeded to gnaw on greedily.

  A few moments later, the men standing there heard Gulbahar’s voice screaming at the man with the bike, “Dog, scamp, for days now you’ve been annoying women in our community. Don’t you have an ounce of shame or honor?” Before the man could swallow the morsel he was chewing, she pulled off her sandals to beat him. Suddenly the women who had been sitting in front of their homes burst out screaming. Other women left their chores indoors to attack the man, who cried as he fled, “No, by God, I’ve done nothing.” Blows landed on his head from every direction, and the children took part in the screaming and drubbing too. One even caught the man off guard from behind and attempted to sodomize him with a metal rod as punishment for his insolence toward the women of the community. It was Abbas Bahlawan who rescued him by grabbing hold of him as if he were a scared rat. Then he slapped him a few times, until he fell into the narrow, open sewer that passed through the neighborhood, lifted him again, and gave him a kick that sent him sprawling on his face and made his nose bleed profusely. He tried to flee, but the children seized him and he fell once more. Abbas Bahlawan raised the bicycle into the air and threw it so far that it broke. He grasped the man and lifted him up, threatening, “If you enter this community again, you can kiss your ass good-bye.” The man swore, “I’ll never set foot in this community again so long as I live.” Then Abbas Bahlawan turned toward the women and children to say, “Let him go. You’ll never see his filthy face again.” The man—whose dishdasha was ripped and soiled with muck and blood—left, dragging his bicycle, which was too damaged to ride. He actually was never seen there again.

  The day of the strike, Hameed Nylon stood with more than twenty workers on the train tracks that connected the city and the company to prevent frightened and hesitant workers from going to work, calling them cowards and stooges of the English. Many brawls broke out between strikers and non-strikers during which the food in the men’s lunch buckets spilled onto the ground and some men used their cutlery to defend themselves. That first day the police stood at a distance, watching the workers fight one another, ready to intervene at an opportune moment. Hameed Nylon, along with three other workers, retreated to the rear, back to the mouths of the alleyways leading to the main thoroughfare. Whenever he saw an oil worker in his blue uniform, he greeted him, saying casually, “Go home. They’ve sent us home today. Enjoy your holiday, brother.” The worker would ask in astonishment, “Holiday? What holiday?” Then Hameed Nylon would respond quickly, “Don’t you know? The king is visiting Kirkuk today.” This was the way he approached the unsophisticated. For those who seemed more on the ball, he would pretend to be fleeing, after having escaped with his life, claiming that battles had erupted between the police and the workers and that the police were arresting people—indeed, that they were firing indiscriminately on any worker they encountered. He advised them to go back home. Many believed him without even asking any more questions. In fact, his reasoning was only rarely rejected, even by workers who knew what was happening. He would tell these men that the strike’s goal was to increase their salaries and to realize gains for them and that it was in their self-interest to join the strike in defense of their own welfare—if nothing else—instead of weakening the operation and harming others. In any event, they would not be held accountable, even if the strike failed, because they could always claim to their bosses that the striking workers had prevented them from getting to work. His spiel was quite seductive: “Share our victory, or, in the event of a failure, blame it all on us.”

  Seventeen days of the strike passed without bringing a settlement. True, work at the firm was crippled once the number of strikers increased, but no one thought of yielding to the workers. That would have been, quite simply, a violation of principle and was therefore intolerable to the police chief, the governor, and the minister of the interior. Mr. Tissow, the head of the firm, actually would have liked to bargain with the strikers because he himself had once been a member of the Labour Party when he was a student at Cambridge University, but the governor told him politely, “I understand your humane sentiments, Mr. Tissow, for you Englishmen are fond of democracy, but how can you practice democracy with donkeys?”

  The translator whom the governor had brought along was apparently less than fluent in English and became confused, substituting “monkeys” for “donkeys,” so that Mr. Tissow then smiled and replied, “Your Excellency, you should address this question to Darwin.”

  As a matter of fact, the issue was bigger even than the governor himself, although he attempted to project an image of being a decisive man of action, for the minister of the interior contacted him by telephone and ordered him to suppress the strike at any cost. The minister of the interior had himself received a comparable order from the prime minister, who had decided to resort to force on the advice of the British High Commissioner, who unfortunately was a member of the Conservative Party and hated workers because his party had lost the most recent election to them.

  The workers met every day, from early in the morning, in Gawirbaghi, which was a parched garden not far from the offices of the oil company. There they recited poems by Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Ma‘ruf al-Rasafi, and other less well-known poets. Naturally, half the inhabitants of Kirkuk found their way to Gawirbaghi—especially the women and children—not to show their support, which was assumed, but because the strike was a thrilling song fest, which lasted from morning till evening and which differed from any Kirkuk had ever witnessed. The strikers’ children and wives brought them food, even from the furthest communities in the city. The women’s trills, which rang out continually, re-energized those men who were quaking with fear inside. Thus they came to see the affair as a question of personal honor, as if it were a clash with a hostile tribe.

  The first hours of the seventeenth day of the strike passed like the others. The workers delivered harangues and chanted slogans in the garden. Men, women, and children gathered round to watch. Security men, who were circulating on their bicycles, observed them. Children sat on the branches of olive trees that grew here and there. Even the armored police vehicle was still parked where it had been: at the head of the street leading to the garden. Everything seemed normal until noon, when someone arrived to say that large numbers of mounted policemen were massing at the beginning of the street. Fear drove the workers to greater zeal and they shouted even louder, although everyone expected some face-saving resolution. Finally a Jeep with a rifle-mount appeared. In the back stood three policemen and a lieutenant. The crowd surrounding the area fearfully moved back at first, although they soon returned cautiously when the lieutenant, from his place in the open Jeep, began to address the workers: “We warn you to evacuate the area, end the strike, and return to your jobs. You are the victims of a Communist plot. The Communists are exploiting you and deceiving you. The Communists are friends of the Jews and wish to get you into trouble. Unless you disperse now, the police will intervene.”

  Even before the lieutenant had concluded his threatening oration, cries and curses resounded in the garden: “Scum, return to your masters and kiss their asses!” Many people broke branches from the trees and trimmed them into staffs in preparation for a battle. A worker somewhere started a chant that others repeated: “Strike till death!” At that, the Jeep retreated amid the worker’s guffaws and catcalls, “The cowards are fleeing.” It was, however, only a few minutes before the armored vehicle returned, followed by a large number of mounted policemen armed with truncheons. Only then did most of the onlookers grasp the danger of the situation. They raced off in every direction, while continuing t
o watch the spectacle with interest. Others stayed where they were because they felt allied with the workers, or perhaps because they had misunderstood the situation.

  Silence reigned over the strikers who had held their ground. They grasped green tree limbs as if these would suffice to ward off the danger confronting them. Suddenly an intermittent round of gunfire resounded. The striking workers lowered their heads amid the universal turmoil and screaming. The first round was followed by a second and a third. The workers looked about and sought shelter behind the trunks of the garden’s few trees. Terror-stricken onlookers mixed together with the strikers till they formed a single bloc. Just then, the ground shook from the hooves of the horses that had reached the garden. Their riders, truncheons in hand, were oblivious to any of the crowd of humans who fell beneath their horses’ hooves. Occasional shots were fired by policemen and security agents. A number of workers clashed with policemen who had fallen off their horses. In this battle, Hameed Nylon, who—like all the strikers—had concealed his identity by winding a cloth around his head, although short, demonstrated bravery that surprised even himself. From inside his shirt he drew out a dagger, which he carried in defiance of the union’s instructions, and began to stab the bellies of the horses from the rear till they were writhing with pain and threw their riders or fell down with them. A Kurdish dervish, who had come from Erbil to present a display of his supernatural powers in a nearby Sufi lodge, seized a policeman who had fallen to the ground, dragged him behind some trees, and then butchered him, after reciting the opening prayer of the Qur’an for his soul.