The Sirens of Baghdad

by Yasmina Khadra

  “I’m not in Kafr Karam,” she said. “I’m in Baghdad.”

  “I’m your brother. You don’t shut your door in your brother’s face.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I looked her up and down. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I didn’t recognize her anymore. She was nothing like the image of her I had in my head. Her features meant nothing to me; she was someone else.

  “You’re ashamed of me—that’s it, isn’t it? You’ve renounced your origins. You’re a city girl now, all modern and all, and me, I’m still the hick who spoils the decor, right? Madame is a physician. She lives by herself in a chic apartment where she no longer receives her relatives, for fear of becoming the laughingstock of her neighbors on the other side of the landing—”

  “I can’t let you stay with me because I live with someone,” she said, interrupting me curtly.

  An avalanche of ice landed on me.

  “You live with someone? How can that be? You got married without letting the family know?”

  “I’m not married.”

  I bounded to my feet. “You live with a man? You live in sin?”

  She gave me a dry look. “What’s sin, little brother?”

  “You don’t have the right. It’s…it’s forbidden by, by…Look, have you gone mad? You have a family. Do you ever think about your family? About its honor? About yours? You are—you can’t live in sin, not you….”

  “I don’t live in sin; I live my life.”

  “You don’t believe in God anymore?”

  “I believe in what I do, and that’s enough for me.”

  10

  I wandered around the city until I could no longer put one foot in front of the other. I didn’t want to think about anything or see anything or understand anything. People swirled around me; I ignored them. I don’t know how many times I stepped off a sidewalk, only to be blown back by a blaring horn. I’d emerge from my personal darkness for a second and then plunge into it again as though nothing had happened. I felt at ease in my black thoughts, safe from my torments, out of reach of troublesome questions, alone inside my rage, which was digging channels in my veins and merging with the fibers of my being. Farah was ancient history. As soon as I left her, I’d banished her from my thoughts. She was nothing but a succubus, a whore, and she had no more place in my life. In our ancestral tradition, when a relative went astray, that person was systematically banished from the community. When the sinner was a woman, she was rejected all the more swiftly.

  Night caught up with me on a bench in a hapless square next to a car wash. Suspicious characters of every stripe were loitering about, spurned by angels and devils alike, beached on that square like whales cast out of the ocean. There was a bunch of dead-drunk bums shrouded in rags, urchins stoned on shoemaker’s glue, destitute women sitting under trees and begging with their infants on their laps. This part of town hadn’t been like this when I was in Baghdad before the invasion. The neighborhood wasn’t fashionable then, but it was tranquil and tidy, with well-lit shops and innocuous pedestrians. Now, it was infested with famished orphans, tatterdemalion young werewolves covered with sores, who would stop at nothing.

  With my bag pressed against my chest, I observed a pack of cubs prowling around my bench.

  A snot-nosed brat sat down beside me. “What do you want?” I asked him. He was a kid of about ten, with a slashed face and streaming nostrils. His tangled hair hung down over his brow like the nest of snakes on Medusa’s head. He had disturbing eyes and a treacherous smile playing about his mouth. His long shirt reached his calves, his trousers were torn, and he was barefoot. His damaged toes, black with dirt, smelled like a dead animal.

  “I’ve got a right to sit here, don’t I?” he yapped, meeting my eye. “It’s a public bench; it’s not your property.”

  A knife handle protruded from his pocket.

  A few meters away, three little rascals were feigning interest in a patch of grass. In reality, they were observing us on the sly, waiting for a sign from their comrade.

  I got up and walked away. The kid on the bench hissed an obscenity in my direction and lifted his shirt to show me his crotch. His three pals sneered and stared at me. The eldest of them wasn’t yet thirteen, but they stank of death like carrion.

  I walked faster.

  A few blocks farther on, shadows rose up out of the darkness and charged at me. Taken by surprise, I flattened myself against a wall. Hands clutched my bag and tried to tear it away from me. I kicked out, struck someone’s leg, and retreated into a doorway. The would-be muggers came at me with increased ferocity. I felt the straps of my bag giving way and started dealing blows blindly. At the end of a desperate struggle, my assailants released their grip and ran away. When they passed under a streetlight, I recognized the four wolf cubs of a little while ago.

  I crouched down on the sidewalk, clutching my head, and took several deep breaths to get my wind back. “What country is this?” I heard myself pant.

  When I stood up, I had the impression that my bag was lighter. And in fact, one side of it had been cut open, and half of my things were gone. I put my hand on my back pocket and was relieved to find that my money was still there. That was when I started running toward the city center, jumping aside every time a shadow passed me.

  I ate at a place that served grilled meats. I sat at a table in the corner, far from the door and the windows, with one eye on my brochettes and the other on the steady stream of customers entering and leaving. I recognized no one, and I grew irritated every time somebody’s eyes settled on me. I was uncomfortable in the midst of all those hairy creatures, who filled me with suspicion and dread. They didn’t have very much in common with the people of my village, except perhaps for their human form, which did nothing to temper their brutish aspect. Everything about them filled me with cold animosity. I had the feeling I’d ventured into enemy territory—or, worse, into a minefield, and I expected to be blown to pieces at any moment.

  “Relax,” the waiter said, putting a plate of fries in front of me. “I’ve been holding out this plate to you for a good minute, and you just stare right through me. What’s wrong? Have you escaped a raid? Or maybe survived an attack?”

  He winked at me and went to take care of another customer.

  After eating my brochettes and my fries, I ordered more, and then more after that. I’d never been so hungry, and the more I ate, the more my hunger increased. I consumed two baskets of bread and a good twenty brochettes, to say nothing of the fries, and washed everything down with a one-liter bottle of soda and a pitcher of water. My sudden appetite scared me.

  To put an end to this gorging, I asked for the check. While the cashier was giving me my change, I asked, “Is there a hotel near here?”

  He raised an eyebrow and looked at me askance. “There’s a mosque at the other end of the street, behind the square. It’ll be on your left as you step out. They provide accommodations for transients at night. At least you’ll be able to rest easy there.”

  “I want to go to a hotel.”

  “You’re obviously not from here. All the hotels are under surveillance. And the police give the managers so much shit that most of them have closed their places down. Go to the mosque. The police don’t show up there very often, and besides, it’s free.”

  “If I were you, that’s what I’d do,” the waiter said as he slipped past.

  I picked up my bag and went out into the street.

  Actually, the mosque was on the ground floor of a two-story warehouse wedged between a large disused store and another building. A large room in the warehouse had been transformed into a prayer hall. The neighborhood had a cutthroat look I disliked right away. The meager light from a streetlamp picked out the boarded-up fronts of two grocer’s shops, one across from the other. It was eleven o’clock at night, and except for the cats rummaging around in the piles of garbage on the sidewalks, there wasn’t a living soul in sight.

  The prayer hall had been evacuated and the home
less people lodged in another room large enough to accommodate about fifty persons. The floor was covered with old blankets. A chandelier cast its beams upon various shapeless masses curled up here and there. There were about twenty wretches on the floor, all of them sleeping in their clothes, some with their mouths open, others in a fetal position; the place smelled like rags and feet.

  I decided to lie down in a corner alongside an old man. Using my bag as a pillow, I fixed my eyes on the ceiling and waited.

  The chandelier went out. Snores came from all sides, intensified, and then became intermittent. I listened to the blood beating in my temples and heard my breathing accelerate; waves of nausea rose from my stomach, ending in stifled belches. Once only, the image of my father falling over backward flashed through my head; I immediately drove it out of my mind. I was too badly off to burden myself with disturbing memories.

  I dreamed that a pack of dogs were chasing me through a dark wood where the branches had claws and the air was loud with screams. I was naked, my arms and legs were bloody, and my hair was streaming with bird droppings. Suddenly, the undergrowth parted, revealing a precipice. I was about to step into the void, when the muezzin’s call woke me up.

  Most of last night’s sleepers, including the old man beside me, had left the room. Only four miserable wretches remained in tattered heaps on the floor. As for my bag, it wasn’t there anymore. I put my hand on my back pocket; my money had disappeared.

  Sitting on the sidewalk with my chin in my hands, I watched uniformed policemen checking cars. They asked for the passengers’ papers as well as the drivers’ and inspected all of them carefully; sometimes they made everyone get out of the car and then began a systematic search, sifting through the contents of the trunk and looking under the hood and the chassis. The previous evening, in this same spot, the interception of an ambulance had turned dramatic. The physician on board the ambulance had tried to explain that the case was an emergency, but the policemen didn’t want to hear about that. Eventually, the doctor became upset, and a police corporal punched him in the face. Things degenerated from there. Threats were answered by insults, blows were struck by both sides, and finally the corporal pulled out his pistol and shot the doctor in the leg.

  This part of town had a bad reputation. Two days before the ambulance incident, someone had been murdered in the exact spot where the police roadblock now stood. The victim, a man in his fifties, had come out of the shop across the way with a shopping bag in his arms. As he was getting ready to climb into his car, a motorbike pulled up beside him. Three shots, and the fellow collapsed on the pavement, his head resting on his purchases.

  A few days before that, in the same place, a young deputy in the Iraqi parliament had likewise been cut down. He’d been driving his car when a motorbike caught up with him. There was a volley of shots, and the windshield suddenly seemed to be covered with spiderwebs. The vehicle skidded onto the sidewalk and flattened a female pedestrian before crashing into a lamppost. The hooded killer hurried over to the car, opened the door, pulled out the young deputy, laid him on the ground, and riddled him with bullets at pointblank range. Then, without haste, the gunman got back on his motorbike and roared away.

  The police had no doubt taken over the neighborhood with the intention of stopping the killing. But the city was a sieve; it leaked everywhere. Murderous attacks were the order of the day. When the authorities plugged one hole, they freed up others that were more dangerous. Baghdad was no longer an urban center; the lovely city I remembered had become a battlefield, a firing range, a gigantic butcher’s shop. Several weeks before the Allied bombardments began, people had still believed a miracle was possible. All over the world, in Rome and in Tokyo, in Madrid and in Paris, in Cairo and in Berlin, there were mass demonstrations and marches—millions of strangers converging on their city centers to say no to war. Who listened to them?

  For two weeks, I wandered around in rubble, without a penny and without a goal. I slept anywhere and ate anything and flinched at every explosion. It was like being at the front, with the endless rolls of barbed wire marking off high-security areas, the makeshift barricades, the antitank obstacles against which suicide bombers occasionally detonated their cars, the watchtowers rising above the facades of buildings, the caltrop barriers lying across roadways, and the sleepwalking people who had no idea where to turn but nevertheless, whenever an attack was carried out, rushed to the scene of the tragedy like flies to a drop of blood.

  Baghdad was decomposing. After spending a long, tortured time docked in repression, the city had broken from its moorings and gone adrift, fascinated by its own suicidal rage and the intoxications of impunity. Once the tyrant had fallen, Baghdad found much that was still intact: its forced silences, its vengeful cowardice, its large-scale misery. Now that all proscriptions were removed, the city drained the cup of resentment, the source of its wounds, to the dregs. Exhilarated by its suffering and the revulsion it aroused, Baghdad was trying to become the incarnation of all that it couldn’t bear and rejecting its former public image. And from the grossest despair, it drew the ingredients of its own agony.

  Baghdad was a city that preferred exploding belts and banners cut from shrouds.

  I was exhausted, demoralized, appalled, and nauseated, all at once. Every day, my contempt and my rage rose another notch. One morning, I looked in a shop window and didn’t recognize myself. My hair was bushy, my face wrinkled, my eyes white-hot and hideous, my lips chapped; my clothes left a lot to be desired; I had become a bum.

  Now I was sitting on the sidewalk across from the checkpoint. I don’t know how many hours I’d spent in that position when a voice barked, “You can’t stay there.”

  The speaker was a cop. It was a few moments before I realized he was addressing me. With a scornful wave, he signaled to me to clear off. “Let’s go, let’s go, move on.” I got to my feet, a little dazed by my nagging hunger. When I reached out a hand for support, I found only empty air. I drew myself up and staggered away.

  I walked and walked. It was as though I were marching through a parallel world. The boulevards opened up before me like giant maws. I went reeling along amid the crowd with blurry eyes and shooting pains in my calves. Now and then, an exasperated arm pushed me away. I straightened up and continued on aimlessly.

  A crowd gathered around a vehicle burning on a bridge. I passed through the throng easily.

  The river lapped at its banks, deaf to the clamor of the damned. A gust of sand-laden wind stung my face. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.

  “Hey!”

  I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have the strength to turn around; one false move, and I’d collapse. It seemed to me that the only way to stay on my feet was to walk, to look straight ahead, and, especially, to avoid all distractions.

  A horn sounded—once, twice, three times. After an interval, running footsteps came up behind me, and then a hand grabbed my shoulder.

  “Are you deaf, or what?”

  A pudgy form straddled my path. My clouded vision prevented me from recognizing the interloper right away. He spread out his arms, inadvertently displaying his oversized belly. “It’s me,” he said.

  It was as if an oasis had emerged out of my delirium. I don’t think I’ve ever known such a sensation of relief or felt so happy. The smiling man before me brought me back to life, revived me, became at once my only recourse and my last chance. It was Omar the Corporal.

  “You’re amazed, aren’t you?” he exclaimed with delight, turning in a circle in front of me. “Check this outfit. A real knockout, right?”

  He smoothed the lapels of his sport jacket and fingered the crease in his trousers. “Not a drop of grease, not a wrinkle. Your cousin is impeccable. Like a brand-new penny. You remember, in Kafr Karam? I always had oil or grease stains on my clothes. Well, since I’ve been in Baghdad, that doesn’t happen anymore.”

  All of a sudden, his enthusiasm subsided. He’d just realized that I wasn’t well, that I was havin
g trouble staying upright, that I was on the point of fainting.

  “My God! Where have you been?”

  I stared at him and said, “I’m hungry.”

  11

  Omar took me to a cheap eating place. All the while I ate, he said not a single word. He saw that I wasn’t in a position to understand anything at all. I bent over my plate, looking only at the wilted fries, which I devoured by the fistful, and the bread, which I tore apart ferociously. It seemed to me that I wasn’t even taking the trouble to chew the food. The giant mouthfuls flayed my throat, my fingers were sticky, and my chin was covered with sauce. Other customers seated nearby gawked at me in horror. Omar had to frown to make them turn their eyes away.

  When I’d finished stuffing myself, he took me to a shop to buy me some clothes. Then he dropped me off at the public baths. I took a shower and felt a little better.

  Afterward, with a hint of embarrassment, Omar said, “I assume you have nowhere to go.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He scratched his chin.

  Overly sensitive, I said, “You’re under no obligation.”

  “It’s not that, cousin. You’re in good hands—it’s just that they’re not completely free. I share a little studio flat with an associate.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll manage.”

  “I’m not trying to get rid of you. I just need to think. There’s no chance I’m going to abandon you. Baghdad wastes no pity on strays.”

  “I don’t want to bother you. You’ve done enough for me already.”

  With an upraised hand, he asked me to let him give the matter some thought. We were in the street; I was standing on the sidewalk, and he was leaning against his van, his arms crossed and his chin resting on an index finger, his great belly like a barrier between us.