by Ali Bader
The question is: Did Kamal Medhat know that the state was aware of his previous incarnation? I doubt it.
The artist’s house in Al-Mansour
His house in Al-Mansour stood a mere two hundred meters from the statue of Abu Jaafar al-Mansour, the second Abbasid Caliph. The house had a beautiful brick façade and high windows in the style of the seventies. When Faris and I entered, we went through a corridor that led us straight to the library that was packed with books. In front of the dining table was a teak cupboard, which was used for household utensils. On some of the shelves, however, he’d also placed more books, while there was a stack of novels on the floor. There was also a table near the chair in which he used to sit looking out of the window. I found two books on the table. The first was the memoirs of the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli and the second was a selection of poems by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, translated into English under the title Tobacco Shop. The book was open at the poem called Tobacco Shop and was filled with explanatory notes written in pencil by Kamal Medhat. It’s clear that he’d depended on more than one book in his commentary on the poem. I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, but I took the book and the pencil with me when I left.
There were many newspapers in the bedroom. It was clear that he’d spent most of his time in the dining room. But the door leading to the sitting room at the back remained shut throughout the days of the war.
There was a photograph of a fifty-year-old Nadia al-Amiry, looking beautiful with her blonde hair in two plaits that she curved around her ears. She wore a dark blue blouse and had put a ball of wool on the table. She was half-hidden behind the teapot. Kamal was standing close by with his plastic-rimmed glasses, his light beard and his sad eyes behind semi-dark lenses, smiling at her. Nadia al-Amiry herself looked straight ahead. Kamal Medhat was slightly stooped over the book he was absorbed in reading. With his grey hair and huge hands, he looked more like a worker than a musician.
My mobile phone rang. It was Faris. He said that he’d managed to locate Fawzeya, who was living in Al-Wishash City, the poor district right behind Al-Mansour City.
‘How do we get to her?’ I asked him.
‘Easy. I arranged a meeting with her at ten in the morning.’
The taxi came on Thursday morning. He said we had to wait for an hour or two, until we heard the explosion, before setting off. But I ran out of patience as we sat in the living room waiting for something to happen. Since nothing occurred, we started on our way. Near the bridge we heard the sound of the explosion and our legs shook.
We had to cross the bridge towards Al-Karkh. This was no easy matter, for nobody could predict what would happen. We didn’t know what our fate would be this time. After crossing Al-Jumhuriya Bridge in the direction of Al-Karkh, I was overwhelmed by a strange feeling, a mixture of depression and regret. I wondered what had brought me there and why I’d accepted this assignment in the first place. At that moment, it wasn’t the fear of death that was uppermost in my mind, but the terror of the torture I might be submitted to.
We reached a poor neighbourhood located right next to a classy district. There were some low buildings standing close to some small farms, in the middle of which ran a canal. It wasn’t easy to enter the city. There were potholes and barricades, as well as a group of armed men with rifles. Faris got out of the car and talked to them. He gave them a piece of paper he’d obtained the day before. It was a letter from a militia leader describing the importance of our mission and requesting them to allow us in.
I don’t know if he actually offered the militia leader money to facilitate the mission, but Faris had included a sum of money in the budget. We then walked along the street. Stagnant water filled the potholes that had taken over the street. The houses standing behind the wealthy district of Al-Mansour graphically illustrated the gulf separating the classes. The militias of the poor Sunni and Shia areas were fighting over Al-Mansour, which was inhabited by the middle and upper classes.
We stopped in front of a very poor house whose façade had been practically destroyed, and knocked on the door. Fawzeya came out to greet us, wearing a wide pair of trousers and a black shirt. She’d covered her hair with a scarf. She lived with three of her sisters and her mother on the salary provided by Kamal Medhat. She was grieving, but was one of our most important sources of information.
She invited us to sit down, and we sat on plastic chairs opposite her. In front of us was a broken wooden table. She told us that he’d had a strange feeling two days before the event, when he’d received a death threat.
This was new information for us. She described his behaviour in detail.
He’d been sitting in the large chair with his eyes open. She thought it was one of his many ways of meditating. But his state of bewilderment seemed like a person who didn’t belong to this world. She came up to him and asked him what was wrong. He told her that he’d received a threat. His voice was hoarse as he said it. Then he sat by the window until night fell and the whole house was dark. In the darkness, she saw his large eyes, grey hair and peaceful face, as he held a coffee cup.
His frizzy hair seemed ashen and his bones were fragile with premature ageing. He still felt unsteady because of the insomnia. ‘I know they’re going to kill me,’ he added gravely.
I asked her why she thought they wanted to kill him. ‘Perhaps because of the American who visited the house,’ she said.
Faris and I blanched. ‘An American visited him? What American?’ we asked.
‘I don’t know. An American visited him at night and left.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘It was night time and dark.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I was in the house and saw him.’
‘Did the threat say that they saw him with the American?’
‘It didn’t say anything about his …’ she said.
(We learned later that it was his son Meir.) Then she told us how he’d emerged from the bedroom the next day in his pyjamas. He’d placed the dish of shaving soap on the marble sink beside the washbag containing his shaving kit. There was also a candle in case of power cuts, which happened frequently. He’d put on his square-lensed glasses with the black plastic frames, which he always kept in the pocket of his pyjamas, and trimmed his beard, which he never shaved completely.
After shaving, he’d paced to and fro in the room, trying hard not to look at himself in the mirror. He’d brushed his teeth using English toothpaste, clipped his fingernails and toenails, wrapped himself in a blanket and gone to sleep.
The visit by the stranger and his guards the night before was the last visit he’d ever received. For quite some time, he’d been mistrustful of everybody. He’d placed important papers, photographs and newspapers in two boxes. She was the only one who’d believed him when he’d said that he was really going this time.
‘Did you love each other?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She had trampled on the traditions of an ultra-conservative society. They were not lovers in secret, but in the open. It was a public scandal. She had shown him increasing love and affection as his sight dimmed and his flesh became loooser. He smoked heavily. She sat beside him and talked to him while he listened to her in his pyjamas, always with a book in his hand. By day, the only sounds to be heard in the silent house were her voice and his laughter.
We left Fawzeya to her grief and loneliness and decided to go to the department of forensic medicine to arrange for the burial of Kamal Medhat’s body. We had an appointment with the doctor in the morning.
When we went in, the doctor was expecting us: Mustafa Shaker had already been in touch with him. I handed him the letter.
He gave me a piece of medical gauze to cover my nose. We followed him. He stopped and pulled hard on a handle. Kamal Medhat’s body lay before us. Faris and I saw his open mouth and his crushed forehead, which was loosely covered with sticking plaster. One eye was open and looked reddish and cloudy.
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We filled out the hospital forms and took him from the morgue. He was registered as my father. We had to take him straight to the cemetery. But which one? The Jewish cemetery in Al-Habibeyya, the Shia cemetery in Al-Najaf, or the Sunni cemetery in Al-Karkh?
‘Where should we bury him?’ asked Faris.
‘The nearest one,’ I said.
It was Al-Karkh. So we got out of the taxi and headed to the administrative office of the cemetery.
Faris knew the undertaker and said that he also dealt with militants. He treated us as if we were Sunni. We sat in the office, a simple room with Quranic verses mounted on the walls and a wooden cupboard with some files. The man in charge wanted to know what kind of grave and shroud we required. There was a tomb of alabaster and another just in the ground with a tombstone. There was also a tomb and headstone of brick. We said alabaster.
The undertakers placed him in the coffin and lifted it up. A sheikh sat at the head of the grave, reciting verses from the Quran. They removed the blood-stained wrappings. I saw him as he looked in the photograph sent by Farida Reuben. They removed the plaster from his head, revealing a hole in the forehead. His nose was delicate and straight. A young man brought a sponge and a bar of soap. They poured buckets of water over him as they sprayed white camphor.
They buried him and threw earth over him. It was only then that I felt the tobacco keeper was actually dead.
The following day, we went to a US prison near the airport to meet a leader of one of the militias that controlled the Al-Mansour area. I wanted to meet one of the men who’d murdered or slaughtered more than a hundred people in that vicinity. Kamal Medhat was reputed to be one of them.
We got out of the car. I shook hands with the head of the guards and others who were lower in rank. They were cleanshaven young men armed with machine guns. We told them about our mission, but they didn’t allow us to enter. Instead, they threatened to kill us if we didn’t leave within a few seconds.
We got in the car and headed back. We passed by a concrete block next to which was a small café. I asked the driver to stop so that we could have a cup of tea. I felt bitterly thirsty and thoroughly exhausted. In fact, I felt paralyzed, disgusted and suspicious of almost everyone.
It was time to realize that I wouldn’t arrive at any conclusion regarding the militias and armed factions that were attacking and destroying the country. I’d wanted to reach some conclusion, or understand those who’d kidnapped and killed him. I filled the saucer with cigarette butts while I tried to analyse some of the forces in control of the area. I went over in my head all I had heard or seen. There were accusations of American, Iranian and Arab involvement in violence in Iraq. One heard of all kinds of attacks by militias, armed groups or the US Army: rape, kidnapping, torture and fatal beatings.
Where was the truth? The stories of the Sunni and the Shia didn’t make any sense at all. I told Faris Hassan that the future would demonstrate that all our assumptions were baseless.
‘But the rift still exists,’ he said.
‘True, but only because of the violence, nothing else,’ I replied.
But who directed the violence?
Society was collapsing. Women were fetching water from stagnant pools to wash their clothes and dishes. There were many ways to die, cholera not the least of them, but what euphemisms could be used for those who formed gangs to kidnap and murder? Utter anarchy reigned, for there were powers with licence to kill: the US Marine Corps, private security firms, Shia militias, Sunni militias, organized crime and an enfeebled state that had no presence in many districts. So how could we discover the fault lines of the conflict? How could we define the identity of the enemy? Sectarianism? Imperialism? Foreign Intervention? Was it the desperate defence of private wealth, the class system, international law, or the conflicts of governments? How could one label what was happening?
All the reports that Nancy Awdeh and I had read were vague, flimsy and based on non-existent evidence, most of which was contradictory or incomprehensible. The available evidence disproved all the claims that had been made by the US State Department. The Iraqi army’s weaponry, estimated in tons, had been left out in the open to be plundered. There was an intricate network of militias and armed groups, similar to the right-wing Latin American death-squads that had been supported by the US against the left. Although there was nothing to prove that the US was backing particular militias in Iraq, there was no real desire to eliminate them entirely. There was only the desire to create a balance of forces. And what was the cost of creating such a balance? There was talk of wars of interest among several countries being fought out on the streets of Baghdad. But who could tell which faction was fighting which? Were the Shia killing Shia or the Sunnis killing Sunnis? The killings only succeeded in eroding our feeble national memory.
After another day of research, Faris Hassan came along and announced that our work had entered the danger zone. He’d received a signal indicating that a decision had been taken to kidnap and liquidate me.
I told him that I’d always felt it would come to this. Immediately, I jumped up and called a friend of mine who worked at Iraqi Airways to book seats for Faris and myself on the next flight out of Baghdad. I changed my trousers and shirt, and ran to pack the essentials into my small black leather bag that I would carry over my shoulder. I tied everything else up with string, leaving behind a great many things that I no longer needed. I was very selective of what I put in my bag, for I was extremely agitated and tense.
Faris said that he would go and negotiate with the militias.
‘Don’t. Don’t go to them! I’ve already booked a flight for you,’ I screamed at him.
But as usual, he insisted on meeting them because he knew them and had had dealings with them in the past.
After midnight, I received word from the friend working at Iraqi Airways that the flight had been booked. At dawn, I came downstairs to the lobby. I asked the security guard of the building to keep all the stuff I didn’t need in the left luggage office. The guard had worked before at one of the American bases, and I liked talking to him, for he was one of a kind. With his worn, pallid face, bulbous nose, large fat lips and thick glasses he looked like a Bollywood actor. As I was speaking with him, I noticed for the first time the presence of foreign women workers in the Green Zone. They looked like overdressed Pigalle café whores. They walked with great pride and gazed around them from beneath the edges of their urinal-shaped hats.
I left the guesthouse, got on the minibus and sat at the back. I hid my camera in my bag. The driver was a dark young man called Marwan, a resident of Al-Karkh. He was brave and experienced. Nermine had told me I could depend on him.
Baghdad’s image fluctuated before my eyes: war, expulsion, kidnapping, terrorism, failure and occupation. The picture moved like a chain swinging to the right and left. I uttered a few incomprehensible words. I thought of a myriad of things during the hour it took the minibus to reach the final checkpoint of the Green Zone, near the Arch of Triumph. The vehicle took a little turn into a dusty road. At a checkpoint, a man in civilian clothes stood examining car documents. His face was expressionless and his eyes were rigid, inattentive and careless. On the road, we saw a lot of tanks and armoured vehicles that had been damaged by missiles, a sign that the area had witnessed numerous battles.
As soon as we’d turned onto the airport road, I felt that we were being followed. A car was pursuing us along the narrow street. Marwan had already spotted it in the wing mirror and quickly decided to take evasive action. When we left the narrow street, we were overtaken by another car with three men in it. Their machine guns were directed at our car. This prompted Marwan to take another narrow street to avoid our tyres being targeted. At the end of the street, we saw a corpse thrown onto the pavement, its intestines hanging out, its head severed and placed beside it. As we turned onto another road, we saw more corpses stretched out in the middle of the street. Marwan drove over them as though going over a small ramp. When I looked
back, I saw that the corpses had burst open. Fluids and blood were spurting out, as if from a hosepipe.
‘It’s nothing. Just a body!’
After an hour, I arrived at the airport feeling utterly drained. I completed the procedures quickly. When the plane was high in the air, I cast a quick look at Baghdad. It was covered with a pall of dust and its river had the colour of mud. I began to repeat the last words of ‘Tobacco Shop’: Eat your chocolate, little girl. Eat your chocolate! Believe me, there are no metaphysics in the world beyond chocolate. Believe me, all the religions in the world do not teach more than a sweetshop. Eat, dirty girl, eat!
My whole body was shaking.
2006-08
Baghdad – Tehran – Damascus
A Note on the Translator
Amira Nowaira is a professor of English Literature at Alexandria University. She has previously translated Susan Bassnett’s book Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (with Azza El-Kholy - Blackwell Publishers, 1993), Iqbal Qazwini’s Zubaida’s Window (Feminist Press, 2008) and Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Where the Streets Had a Name (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2010). She lives in Alexandria.