The Last of the Angels

by Fadhil al-Azzawi

  The battle ended with the flight of the striking workers, who left behind them thirteen slain, including a child—struck by a bullet—who remained lodged where he had been sitting in the branches of a tree, two women, and a vendor of cooked broad beans, who had fallen in a heap over his cart. More than twenty of the wounded were placed under arrest. Others managed to escape from the hands of the police and security agents. Of the attackers, three policemen were killed, including the one slaughtered by the dervish. All the attackers listed themselves as wounded in order to receive the ten-dinar bonus that the minister of the interior had earmarked for casualties.

  Many from the Chuqor community and from those recruited by Hameed Nylon witnessed the carnage only to emerge unscathed, with nothing more than bruises, which this person or that received, but Hadi Ahmad received a blow to the head. He was a ten-year-old boy whose father owned a portable camera of the old-fashioned type that ends with a black cloth into which the photographer sticks his head while the customer sits against a plain sheet placed in front of a wall—on the quay at the head of the stone bridge opposite the barracks—while he too is shrouded in black as he faces the moving lens. The blow that the boy received from the truncheon of a mounted cop left him unconscious. Had Abbas Bahlawan not plucked him up and carried him home, he would certainly have died beneath the horses’ hooves. When he regained consciousness, the sight in one of his eyes was gone. Worse than that, he had suffered some neural trauma and permanently lost his sense of equilibrium, a condition that stumped all attempts by imams and physicians to find a cure. His left eye, however, quickly regained its sight, thanks to the genius of a young ophthalmologist who had studied in Turkey after despairing of gaining entrance to the Medical College in Baghdad, first because his marks did not average more than fifty and second because he was an Arts Faculty graduate. All this, however, did not prevent the doctor from venturing on an experimental treatment that American ophthalmologists would only adopt forty years later. This Turkmen physician realized that the boy Hadi Ahmad had suffered a detached retina, which needed to be lifted and reattached in its previous location. The challenge did not lie in lifting the retina, for even a nurse could do that, but in reattaching it where it belonged. Since there seemed to be nothing to lose because that eye was sightless, no matter what, he had a simple idea that not even the devil could have dreamed up. This was to fix the retina back in place with a normal adhesive. That resulted in another miracle for the Chuqor neighborhood, although this time it was a medical one, for after half a minute the boy rose and could see better than ever, since the doctor had placed the retina precisely where it belonged, bypassing some of nature’s shortcomings.

  The bloodbath was followed by a wave of arrests, including those of all the leaders of the strike. The police turned the facts upside down, asserting that the strikers had launched the attack and had fired on the lieutenant when he came to ask them to evacuate the area. The Chuqor neighborhood escaped these arrests, however, since the police focused on suspects already known to them, and these were not from the Chuqor community. All the same, Hameed Nylon disappeared, without his absence exciting any suspicion, for his wife Fatima claimed that he had traveled to Lebanon on business and that he would be gone for several months. Some people in the neighborhood spread a rumor that he had gone to Turkey, where he had enlisted in the Turkish division sent to Korea in order to plunge into the war on the Americans’ side against the Communist revolutionaries. Others said he was actually fighting for the Communists against the Americans.

  The massacre in Gawirbaghi Garden scared the striking workers, who returned to their jobs at the oil company the next day as if nothing had happened, although they avoided each other’s eyes for fear their hearts’ shame would show. They had lost their battle and had no alternative to returning to work, without any preconditions and most of all without a union.

  At the same time as the workers acknowledged their defeat, Mr. Tissow undertook to comply with all the demands the workers had advanced during the strike, except for recognition of the union. That, he said, was an issue for the regional authorities, not for the Iraq Petroleum Company. He declared that he did not want the workers and the company to be separated by an iron curtain like the one the Communists had erected in Europe. He appropriated this phrasing from Winston Churchill, who had originated it a few months earlier. The magazine Qarandal, published in Baghdad, reported it for the first time, attributed to the firm’s director general.

  In point of fact, Mr. Tissow adopted his conciliatory posture after holding a private meeting with British Intelligence at the Iraq Petroleum Company. The meeting was also attended by Mr. John Brown, who was known as “the Arab” and who served as a political attaché at the British Embassy, which was located in Baghdad on the Tigris River on the Karkh side. Mr. Brown had assigned exceptional importance to the oil workers’ strike—even more than the Iraqi government itself—affirming that the strike was considered a link in the chain of an international Communist conspiracy, led by Stalin himself, to end British influence in the world and to establish people’s dictatorships like those Communism was then founding in Eastern Europe, in Greece, which borders the Middle East, in Iran’s Kurdistan, which touches Iraq, in China, where Mao Tse-tung controlled most of the territory, and likewise in Korea and Vietnam. Mr. Brown explained that the Iraqi government was totally isolated, “But thank God for this nation’s tribal structure, for citizens here normally follow their chiefs, and the chiefs are in the pocket of our friend Mr. Nuri al-Sa‘id. This is the only guarantee of our presence in this country now; there’s nothing else.” Then Mr. Brown revealed that the central headquarters of British Intelligence in London possessed information that indicated the probability that some of the firm’s British employees had themselves played a role in inciting the Iraqi workers to strike. He offered a list of names of English employees who were associated with the British Communist Party or who had been active in left-wing politics in Britain. At the end of his remarks, Mr. Brown said, “If it was possible to tolerate a situation like this for tactical reasons in wartime, it’s not possible now.”

  At this meeting, which lasted more than two hours, they finally decided it was necessary both to impose covert surveillance on leftist English employees until they could be transferred back to England and to contact the Iraqi authorities to explain that the best posture to take toward the strikers was a conciliatory one, rather than a severe one, for fear of arousing nationalist feelings—especially since many Iraqis held Britain responsible for the massacres that Jews were committing against Arabs in Palestine.

  Afterwards Mr. Tissow escorted his guest Mr. Brown and the members of the British Intelligence team attached to the firm to a banquet held at the British Club. A dance followed, but Mr. Brown did not attend, because he felt tired after his strenuous trip from Baghdad to Kirkuk. He was unaccustomed to the intense heat, which affected his chronic low blood pressure. Thus he retired for the night apologetically, expressing his wish that Mr. Tissow enjoy himself.

  The following day, Governor Ahmad Sulayman was puzzled when Mr. Tissow, emphasizing the danger of doing anything to increase tensions at that time, requested that he treat the imprisoned workers leniently and even release them after a trial that would merely be a formality. The governor, who was trying to suppress his own rebellious emotions, looked at him: “If the workers learn of your humane stance, none of them will dare open his mouth to call for a strike.”

  Mr. Tissow smiled proudly, “Yes, Your Excellency, we place flowers every day on the tomb of Karl Marx in London.”

  The governor contacted the police chief, relaying to him Mr. Tissow’s desire that he go easy on the incarcerated prisoners. The police chief said, “I don’t know if that will be possible, for two have already died of torture and others are as good as dead.”

  The governor quickly responded, “That makes no difference. You can add those to the other fatalities and claim they died in hospital as a result of their wounds,
but keep your men from beating the others. Indeed, provide medical care for them before you present them in open court. Then release them, which will affirm that we are actually democratic.”

  Thus the court, which was convened six weeks later, found no grounds for conviction of the strike’s leaders and pronounced them innocent of all the charges directed against them. In fact, the court displayed such exceptional impartiality that it issued an order for the arrest of the lieutenant and the three policemen who were with him in the armored vehicle, charging them with planning the massacre. The police chief, however, later tore up this order himself, telling the head of the court, “It’s true that we asked you to be impartial in issuing your verdict, but not to the point of sending my men to prison.” The security men were upset when they saw the strike leaders hug each other in delight at being liberated. They approached them to whisper, “Don’t think that you’ve escaped from our hands. We’ll find a way to crush your skulls if you so much as breathe again.” The workers, however, displayed no reaction to this provocation; they were puzzled by the spirit of impartiality that had suddenly descended on the government. There was something suspicious about the matter, but they attributed it to the government’s retreat in the face of public pressure. They were content to save their skins, which still bore scars from the whips.

  As a matter of fact, the only one from the Chuqor community who attended this trial, which was held in the first courtroom on the second floor of the Palace of Justice and which lasted for seventeen days, was Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri, who wanted a closer look at the Communists. The trial helped him form a somewhat more positive impression of these people, whom he termed atheists. He returned, saying that the only difference between them and other people was their blindness and adherence to a heresy called Communism. He declared that any type of heresy is an error, especially a godless heresy. All the same, he explained to the men attending his study session in the mosque that as a point of fact Communism was not a creation of Stalin’s thought, as Communists claimed, but an invention of Ahmad ibn Qarmat, who had established the first communist society while attempting to destroy the Islamic state.

  Between the failure of the oil workers’ strike and the general Jewish migration to Palestine two or three years later, no events excited the interest of the Chuqor community except for their support of the execution in Baghdad of the Jewish spy Adas, which the people supported, and the parade the Chuqor community mounted, with drums and tambourines, to mark the return of three of its sons: soldiers who had gone with the Iraqi army to combat the Jews in Palestine. They were the very same soldiers whom Hameed Nylon had recruited for the union drive.

  The three told many tales, which were transformed with time into legends. They said that the Jewish army would not have been able to stand up for even a few days to the Iraqi forces, which were advancing on Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv, had it not been for the treachery of Nuri al-Sa‘id, who ordered the military commanders, each time, to withdraw from any site they occupied. In fact, they swore they had witnessed Jews holding up pictures of Nuri al-Sa‘id and chanting his name. The crowd laughed each time they mentioned the terror that overcame the Jews whenever they heard any reference to the Iraqi army, since they believed that the Iraqis were cannibals. Iraqi forces had once taken prisoner a number of Jewish Hagana and placed them in detention. Then the Iraqi commander had come and examined them, one after the other, finally choosing five of them saying, “Take these five and slaughter them. Then prepare them for cooking today: three for lunch and two for supper.” These terrified Jews were led away to two isolated tents: ingredients for lunch in one tent and those for supper in the other. The Iraqis allowed supper to escape so they would carry the frightening news to the Jews, namely that the Iraqis ate their prisoners, which was precisely the message the Iraqi commander wanted conveyed to the Jewish soldiers.

  An earlier event that had roused the entire city, not just the Chuqor community, was the crash of a small, two-passenger airplane, for this was the first time a plane had crashed in Kirkuk. It fell on some trees in the garden of the Officers’ Club and demolished a side of the outer wall, leaving its right wing visible from the street. Children used it as a see-saw, clinging to it despite the presence of a police guard, who occasionally was obliged to visit a nearby coffeehouse to pee or drink tea. Hadi Ahmad—the boy whose retina the ophthalmologist had reattached with glue—managed to slip inside the plane through its wrecked door. There he found a compass, which he carried around his neck for years to come as a good luck charm, not even removing it when he entered the public bath.

  After the return of the three soldiers to the Chuqor community from the Palestine War, the Iraqi government expelled Jews from the country, placing them and their suitcases in open trucks that conveyed them through the desert to Transjordan and from there to Israel. Many wept, asking to stay, saying, “Iraq is our homeland,” but the police arrested such refuseniks, charging them with spying and Communism, and then transported them in police vehicles that dropped them off beyond the nation’s borders. The only persons to escape from this expulsion were some young Jewish women who were in love with young Muslim men: they eloped after professing Islam.

  The whole Chuqor community welcomed the Jewish woman Hayat Sasson, who had changed her name to Hayat Yusuf, after she married Najat Salim, who had completed the training program at the oil company and acquired a first-rate post there. He had gained an excellent command of English from his passionate reading of English-language editions of Maxim Gorky’s works, which the Eugene Bookstore, located near Cinema al-Alamein, imported without ever arousing the suspicions of the police, who, naturally, did not know any English. The women of the Chuqor community, accompanied by their children, had gone to view the Jewish/Muslim woman and to welcome her. On the morning of the wedding day, Najat Salim’s mother and some other women danced. Seized by a musical euphoria, they partnered the male dancer, a Turkmen known professionally as “Sprout,” who shook his midriff to the rhythmic music of his troupe, which consisted of a drummer and a folk oboist. The women were not embarrassed to be around male dancers like these, who attended women-only parties dressed in women’s outfits and sporting rouge and powder on their faces. From time to time a woman would stick a coin in his hand and tell him a name. Then he would stop dancing, yell very loudly, “A tip!” and announce the name of the donor’s family. His companion would begin drumming again, and he would swivel his hips swiftly to the music.

  During this party, someone came in to say that Hayat’s parents were standing outside the house and wanted to spirit away their daughter. Then Najat’s mother went out and threw stones at them, scolding them. She said, “Hayat’s become a Muslim; there’s no hope for you now.” Thus they were forced to withdraw, weeping. When the children wanted to pursue them, Najat’s mother stopped them. She said, “Come back to the wedding. They’re Hayat’s parents, in spite of everything.”

  Trucks came every morning to the Jewish community, who opened the doors of their houses to Muslims, selling everything they could, from household furniture to cooking pots and tea tumblers. Burhan’s mother bought an iron bed for half a dinar, and the boy usurped it the moment it arrived in their house. Although he fell off it repeatedly while he slept, he finally got the knack of sleeping on it. In fact, it became his favorite place to write and read, and he prevented the others from getting on it.

  Hameed Nylon appeared again after an absence of more than three months, as if he had suddenly emerged from the belly of the earth. He affirmed that he had been in Lebanon, although there was no indication that he had made his fortune there, for he returned to work on the Kirkuk-to-al-Hawija route, driving a Jeep that transported Arabs along with their sheep, goats, and chickens. As a matter of fact, he kept the secret of his disappearance even from his wife Fatima. When the strike that the government had met with a hail of bullets had failed, he had ridden off heading toward Chamchamal, which lies between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniya. From there, he had made hi
s way on foot, without a guide, to the nearby mountains. He was searching for Khula Pees, a Kurdish brigand who had killed three policemen and had then sought refuge as an outlaw on a mountain, where men with problematic relationships with the government had followed him. When the police had tried to pursue him later, he had killed tens of them, forcing them to retreat, humiliated and defeated. Hameed Nylon went from one mountain to another in search of him and finally discovered him one day in front of a cave at the head of a valley. Starting with this first meeting, he attempted to persuade the brigand to transform his gang into a people’s liberation army modeled after that of Mao Tse-tung, but this robber, who was illiterate and near-sighted, after staring at Hameed Nylon for some time, asked, “What would I gain from that?” Hameed Nylon replied with the astuteness of a person who can read other men’s minds, “You’ll become the people’s hero.” The thief smiled and retorted, “But I already am the people’s hero.” After that, none of Hameed Nylon’s efforts during the three months he spent with the thief panned out. In the man’s head, there was only one idea, which was to kill the greatest number of policemen he could.

  This was the first time that Hameed Nylon had ever failed to sell a person one of his ideas. He considered proclaiming a liberating, armed rebellion in the style of Mao Tse-tung, whom he greatly revered, but realized that he did not possess even a single rifle with which to fire the revolution’s opening shot. Thus, Hameed Nylon retraced his steps home, but without losing hope, since a trip of a thousand miles begins with a single step, as Mao Tse-tung had said. This was a phrase that Faruq Shamil had frequently repeated to him.