by Kanan Makiya
Alongside me walked emaciated, filth-encrusted children, men and women of every walk of life, the crippled and the blind, all of them wailing and sobbing and tearing their clothes, tears pouring down their cheeks, not caring who saw them, some beating their chests with fists, a few grabbing and pulling tufts of hair from their heads. It was too overpowering. Their tears were infectious; I too ended up crying, not knowing why or for whom.
Softer now, perhaps because I was crying, or perhaps because he had been harsh earlier, Uncle pulled my face to his, palms on both my cheeks, and looked me up close in the eyes.
“It is all right to cry, son,” he said. “Cry because of the injustice and cruelty of the Imam’s death. Cry for how he died. Cry for how he was denied water, and how brutally he was cut down with his family by an army ten times their number. That story is the history of the oppressed; it tells what they feel, and its truth is the truth of the poor and the afflicted wherever they may be in the world. They have no names, they have no graves, and they have no nationality. Cry for them nonetheless. But when you cry, remember to cry also because we pledged allegiance to the Son of ʻAli. We asked him to come to us hundreds of miles across the desert. And when he came, we abandoned him; we let the grandson of the Prophet and his family perish at the hands of our enemies. Cry to repent for all that, my son. Cry out of remorse. Cry because that is our Shiʻa inheritance. Cry because he died for us, and we were born laden with guilt.” And suddenly he let go of my face and grabbed my arm, pointing to the sidewalk farther down the road.
“Look over there! You see that barefooted old man sitting by the side of the road weeping inconsolably…and, over there, that old woman in black tearing at her clothes, beseeching Husain, looking up at the sky…her tears flowing! They cry for him…and they cry for their miserable lot in this unjust world. Cry with them to be sure, but above all cry for them…and then ask yourself what you are going to do about it!”
The Tyrant’s downfall primed a whole people for change; all that was missing was a trigger, and the Sayyid’s march had just provided it.
Still, there was a body in my alley. I had seen it only yesterday…stabbed repeatedly, and lying a stone’s throw from the holiest shrine of our most blessed Shiʻa faith. Whose body was it? Surely he was a person, with a name, someone with a family and a lineage of some sort? I asked everyone. “I don’t know,” people whispered—always they whispered, always they did not know; they might as well have said, “I don’t want to know. Don’t ask!”
But Uncle knew. Mother knew. Many people seemed to know…and no one would speak to me of what had happened. It was as though nothing had happened; it was all a figment of my imagination. And being a young man, who believed like everyone else in his neighborhood that four thousand Jews were warned to absent themselves from work in New York on September 11 by the true engineers of the fall of the Twin Towers—the Israeli Mossad—because no Arab was capable of such an act, for such a young man…it was enough to be told by his uncle that the dead man in the alley was an American agent.
Mother
Mother had rules about what should and should not be said to others. I got into trouble as a young boy overhearing her talking late at night, knowing as she instinctively did that I had parked myself behind a door, or at the top of the stairs. No one in my family talked in a normal voice about important things; they whispered. In fact, if you saw or heard someone whispering in the house, it was safe to assume the subject was important. I learned more about her loneliness from such whisperings than I ever did from normal conversation. She said we Iraqis were made up of two kinds of whisperers, the ones who whisper out of fear of being overheard—the good ones—and the ones who whisper behind people’s backs to the authorities. I was taught never to indulge in the second kind of whispering, and not to intrude upon the first. She trusted no one, not even Uncle or her sister. I had to be sheltered from the world, not thrust into it. Not knowing was my shelter. That was the rule Mother would not break about the dead body in the alley.
She had other rules. Saturday, for instance, was the only day of the week on which clothing could be washed; Mondays, no travel was permitted outside the city; Tuesday afternoons, nothing new could be purchased; Wednesdays, she had to prepare fish, even if the dictates of economy meant it had to be a tiny piece; Friday was the only day of the week on which the cutting of fingernails and toenails was permitted, the cuttings then collected and carefully buried in the garden. “Why bury them, Mother?” I asked, wanting to just throw them in the trash and rid myself of the silly task. “Because it is a part of your body which your Creator made from that earth, to which it must return, as a sign of respect to Him.”
Her rules were practical, born of hardship and pain, giving structure to her days.
She was the kind of person who made sacrifices on other people’s behalf, but never let on that she was doing so, and even denied it. It turned her melancholy into bitterness, and then into cynicism. The mere perception of a slight, or well-intentioned stupidity, gave rise to artfully aimed barbs. She was a self-educated woman, but had a way with words.
Fighting petty battles with her sister in a building whose walls leaked noise didn’t help matters. The lack of privacy was the greatest source of tension; our second-floor bedroom doubled as a study during my adolescence, or when the kitchen was occupied. It was a place to sleep, do homework, or receive friends and was equipped with a mini washroom and kitchenette where Mother kept several jugs of water and had assembled two makeshift shelves to store biscuits and tea. The communal kitchen, by contrast, was the setting for arguments, which if they turned into a major conflagration Uncle would have to resolve. He ended up making everyone unhappy. He tried where Mother was concerned, but she never seemed to forgive him. For what, was a mystery.
—
The hardest part about my mother’s life was losing my father, her husband, her first cousin, and her childhood sweetheart; she lost him after too few years of marriage. If survival is a matter of learning to forget, Mother was incapable of it; her memories kept her caged.
Legion were the things that she did not know about Father since his disappearance. She did not know if he was dead, or languishing in some camp; she did not know why he had disappeared if he was alive, or where he was being incarcerated; she did not know the crime he was accused of. And knowing such things was important, because to each type of disappearance and crime there corresponded a different way of living out the rest of your life. She did not know what to tell me, because the less I knew the easier it was to live; she did not know what others knew, if anything, because no one talked about such things; and she did not have a body to bury and mourn—all of these things my mother did not, indeed could not, know.
She wore black from the day after he disappeared until her own death. If she bought a new item of clothing, not only would its color be black, but she would also wait until the period of mourning for our Imam Husain came around to wear it for the first time. She would continue to do that, she said, until either my father or his body was found.
The only way I knew to make her happy was through neat handwriting, perfectly executed sums, and being at the top of my class at school. With Father gone, there was no one who might extend to her a gesture, or a kindness. She needed the small and the trivial and the inconsequential to live. But no one gave it to her. All was work and duty and obligation. I regret not doing more for her. I bought her something practical once—a teapot to replace the one I broke—but never something pretty and perfectly useless, which would have made her face light up.
She approved of my best friend, Haider, knowing that we had a great deal in common: neighborhood, street, mosque. Most important, we were both born in the year of the Tyrant’s Great Purge and ascension to power, and, because of him and the Great War that followed his ascension, we both grew up without fathers. If she was wary of Haider, it was because she sensed a lack of centeredness about him that troubled her. But not when we were still boys, when
she would wake me up for dawn prayers and see me rush off to the mosque, knowing that Haider would be there, and to breakfast afterward at the teahouse nearby, where we’d eat coarse bread dipped in smoked water buffalo cream from neighboring Hillah. Her greatest joy was to receive the extra eighth of a kilo of smoked cream and fresh hot bread, which I would carry back for her own breakfast.
As I got older, books were a kind of consolation. I remember reading Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky because Mother said Father was fond of Russian writers and an old teacher, who had studied in the Soviet Union, found an Arabic translation. It lay around the house for months, but I only finished reading it after going on the march to Karbala, which I kept a secret from Mother.
Perhaps to assuage the guilt I felt at giving her the slip and lying about the march, I asked if she would like me to read the opening lines from Notes from Underground. She was delighted at first, but then I began: “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
“Enough!” she shouted. “Why do you want to read about such a man?”
“Because it is a great book. I want to write like the underground man; I want to sound like him.”
“Your father loved him,” she said, “but then again he liked all things Russian. I have kept other of his books safe all these years; it is time you started to read them.”
“I want to know who the dead man in the alley was,” I said to her, taking advantage of the pleasant mood and closeness that had grown up between us talking about my father and his books. It was a question I returned to with Mother over and over again; Uncle would brook no further discussion of it. But Mother was more pliable where I was concerned. Nonetheless, she did not rise to the bait, not then, not ever, answering me every time the same way:
“There are things it is better not to know.”
Worn down by my persistence, she reached out for the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, which was lined with Father’s books, books I had not known were his. Unerringly, her hand picked out a slim volume from the middle of the shelf. It was as if its precise location had been implanted in her mind.
“Read this, and perhaps we will talk,” she said, handing it to me. “I bought this book for him during one of his furloughs; it meant the world to him. He used to read and reread it to his friends in the trenches.”
Dog-eared and worn, the volume she handed me was more like a pamphlet than a book. The author was Egyptian, and the book was entitled The Tragedy of al-Hallaj. On the blank inside front page, in clear and precise letters, the name of my father was inked, and underneath it the phrase “Najaf, 1988.”
“Why 1988?” I asked.
“It is the date your father was released from the army after serving eight years in the war with Iran. We were elated that year, thinking all good things were beginning. He destroyed his military clothing and anything that reminded him of those eight years, with the exception of this book that you now have between your hands.”
“Were good things beginning?”
“The good times were short-lived; they called him back to army service the following month.”
“Why didn’t Haider’s father return in 1988?”
“We heard he had been captured. Some said he deserted during the war. All I know is that he ended up in Iran. He returned briefly in 1991, and fled again after the Uprising…Do you remember your father?”
“Images, snippets of conversation…I can picture him sitting on the chair in your bedroom smoking for hours on end, just looking out of the window. It was as though he were in some other place.”
“War is a terrible thing.”
“But then he just disappeared again…”
“He went into hiding after they called him up for service a second time…He said he would not fight for the Tyrant anymore, even though they gave him medals for bravery. Didn’t you know that?”
“I did not. Where did he hide?”
“Here, in Najaf, in the basements of houses in the Old City. There is an entire labyrinth of them under our feet. He would not say exactly where he was hiding, for our own protection. But he and I met secretly from time to time. He would stand on corners and watch you go to school, you know…”
“I never saw him…”
“We couldn’t risk you seeing him. Something could have been said by mistake.”
“But I remember him after the Kuwait invasion.”
“Yes, things changed. The regime had bigger problems to deal with after the Tyrant invaded Kuwait and once the American armada began to gather in Arabia. He started to come home unexpectedly, and spend hours at a time with you.”
“And during the Uprising in 1991? I remember him then.”
“He was home for three weeks,” she said, the tears welling up. “That was the longest stretch I had with him under one roof. And then he disappeared…”
“What happened?”
She would not answer.
An Execution in Baghdad
The seventy-five wrinkled, yellowing, and poorly assembled pages of the book my mother gave me fell apart when I first opened them, and had to be pasted back together after reading. They told an ancient story, one a thousand years old: the story of the arrest, trial, and public crucifixion for heresy of a teacher and mystic known as Hallaj. He was mutilated, then hung while still alive on a tree in a public square in Baghdad, and finally decapitated, his head put on display on a wall of the prison before being dispatched to the provinces to convince his supporters he was dead. His torso was burned, its ashes cast into the Tigris to subdue the rising waters, which in outrage at the crucifixion threatened to flood Baghdad. When the waters subsided, as some of the great teachers tell it, Hallaj’s ashes surfaced, writing on the clean glass-like surface of the water “I am the Absolute Truth,” the words for which he was crucified.
The first reading of my father’s book confused me, but I was drawn to strange statements attributed to Hallaj, the ones underlined by Father in light pencil, such as “He who kills me would have fashioned from my dust a story and an ideal.” There were other sentences on love. Hallaj loved God so much he could barely put up with living, and would cry inconsolably. Did the good Hallaj love God too much, to the point of wanting to lose himself in Him? Was that his heresy? Strangely, he said he loved God as hard as he did to escape death, but the moment he perfected his ability to love Him that much, he would die anyway. Trying to understand that conundrum filled me with excitement.
I imagined Father sitting in the trenches of the Fao Peninsula, fighting off waves of young Iranians, fellow Shiʻa, intent on martyrdom. In between bouts of fighting he would read passages from this tattered old book, which would then get rolled up and slipped into his army fatigues as he prepared for the next onslaught. Snatches of verse on love were underlined, not once but twice, with a pressure on the pencil so heavy its tip started to rip through the pages. I imagine Father reading, perhaps crying alongside Hallaj at night when he was alone. And then I saw the faces of the men and women among whom I had walked, in rags, wailing and beating their chests for Husain on the road to his shrine in Karbala. Were they the same people whom Hallaj had cried for all those centuries ago? I had cried. Everyone had cried. So many people…so much time passed…all crying at the injustice of their patrimony.
But in spite of all the tears, the story of Hallaj would have lifted Father’s spirit out of its mud-splattered attachment to the terrible trenches of that never-ending war. Just as mine had been uplifted during the march to Karbala. How wonderful it must have been to look into the soul of such a man!
I missed my father at times like this. I turned to look into the face of the young man in the wedding photograph standing in its imitation silver frame on Mother’s dressing table. The distance separating us, father and son, slipped away. The photograph had been there for as long as I could remember: he looking at her in a smart tailored suit, crisply pressed tie, stiff black leather shoes; she looking at him in her embroidered bright white wedding dress; th
e secret was in their eyes.
Car Bomb
The explosion came on the hottest Friday of an already scorching August. The walls of our house swayed and shook from the force. Mother leapt to the swaying kitchen cupboard. A teapot fell to the ground and shattered.
Tearing myself away, I ran toward the smoke and sound, fifteen minutes from our house. It was like scenes from Hell: brick facades sheared away; the stalls of hawkers of drinks, sandwiches, and trinkets splintered into firewood; sidewalks streaked with grime and blood; burned, mangled, and dismembered bodies littering the streets; people running about aimlessly, or sitting in the road weeping inconsolably—no human being can forget such sights.
Loudspeakers wailed, To God we do belong, and to Him we do return.
Prayers had ended at 5:00 p.m.; it was shortly afterward, at a moment teeming with departing worshippers and pilgrims, that a car packed with explosives had detonated meters from the entrance to the Shrine of the Imam, instantly killing the most senior Sayyid of the House of Hakim and 125 people who had come to pray behind him; it was the Sayyid’s own car, and the bomb had been placed under his seat. Who was capable of such a deed?
The Sayyid, ranked an Ayatollah by some, was newly arrived from exile in Iran. He had led the prayers that day. It was his first sermon in Najaf since his escape from the Tyrant’s clutches twenty-three years ago. Two weeks before, also in August, a car bomb had been set off at the Jordanian embassy, and then another massive blast had shredded the headquarters of the United Nations offices, killing at least sixteen people and wounding one hundred others. But that was in Baghdad; no one expected the same hands to be capable of reaching into the holiest city of Shi‘ism and plucking out a returning exile, at that time the most well-guarded symbol of clerical authority in Iraq.