The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  To pave the way for the Sayyid’s return, Haider’s father, Abu Haider, had returned earlier from Iran, to which he had fled twice before: first as a deserter during the Great War with Iran; and second in 1991, after the Uprising that followed the humiliating defeat of the Tyrant in the first Gulf War, when thousands of men of the House of Hakim carrying portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini snuck back into cities in the south to participate. Haider remembers a home in turmoil and a swarthy bearded fellow wrestling with him on the sofa…him squealing in delight. But it lasted three weeks, and Abu Haider was gone, fleeing back to Iran just as the tanks of Saddam’s Republican Guard rolled into Najaf, blasting at everything in sight.

  Haider and I had that in common, the disappearances of our fathers; only his returned, whereas mine never would. The second return of Abu Haider in 2003 was very different: a huge, much heralded occasion. Now a senior commander of the Brigades of the Full Moon, Abu Haider was in charge of security in Najaf, only he had just failed in his duty to the House to which he was so devoted.

  The Ayatollah’s body vaporized. A single stone from his prayer beads was found; proof, someone exclaimed loudly, that he had died in the explosion. The House of Sadr insisted the death be confirmed. Supporters of the House of Hakim, on the other hand, all returning exiles from Iran like the Ayatollah himself, were convinced that he did not die. They said he had been seen speeding away from the scene with two bodyguards in a light blue sport utility vehicle. They said he would return when the time was right, like the long-awaited Rightly Guided One on the eve of the Day of Judgment.

  —

  Mother taught me to see the world as it really was, to look a fact in the eye and face up to its consequences, whomever it offended. I saw evil that day, the day of the car bomb. I saw right walled off from wrong, leaving no room for doubt. I saw the kind of evil that replicates itself in the hearts of others; victims or perpetrators, all would be touched. I knew that in my neighborhood there would be boys, friends of mine, who would say the Ayatollah didn’t die, and there would be others who would say he deserved to die, having worked with an enemy during wartime, and then acquiesced in a foreign Occupation for power and personal gain. To me, on that day, none of it mattered. But it would.

  I remembered the bloodied corpse I had seen in the alley a stone’s throw away from where the epicenter of the bomb had struck. I recall wondering about the difference between a man whose leg had been blown clean off at the thigh and one whose torso had been punctured a hundred times with knives. I was seeing things I had not seen before. A part of me was undergoing burial while another was assimilating into the chaos all around.

  Uncle and some of the same men who were with him in the alley on April 10 were at the scene of the explosion, off to a side to avoid getting in the way of the rescue effort but not participating in it. They were exchanging stories. I remember being taken aback because there was no shock in their faces, no sense of outrage. I pretended to be doing something else while I sidled closer, straining to listen.

  There were stories of men who had just been released from Saddam’s prisons; stories of boys who had heeded the call to arms by our Sayyid; stories of other young men who had refused to join and were being viewed as traitors because they were selling their services as laborers or translators to the Occupier; there were stories of martyrs and informers, of new aspiring politicians strutting about like peacocks, of leaders who were secret agents or collaborators, and lots of stories about the Occupation itself, how powerful or how weak it was, and why it had been imposed on us, was it about oil or revenge.

  A story that caught my attention told of a love-besotted local Romeo from Najaf who had eloped to Baghdad with a young girl because her parents disapproved of him. The group was plotting to pick up his trail by way of relatives in the capital, and speaking of what they would do to the pair once they got hold of them.

  Another told of a mysterious Egyptian who offered a young taxi driver from the city of Kut three hundred American dollars to toss a hand grenade at any passing Humvee and then run away and get lost in the market. That is all he had to do. Three hundred dollars for tossing a grenade and running away! The discussion centered on the ethics of doing this, given that the would-be grenade thrower was motivated solely by greed, and in the case in question, the young man had enthusiastically embraced the American army upon its entry into Baghdad. “What does that say of his moral character?” said one man who was having a heated exchange with Uncle, who knew the man. “How can you trust him in a fight?”

  “Trust has nothing to do with it,” replied Uncle. “You now know what it takes for that man to fight for you.”

  By far the most important story the men kept on returning to was the disappearance of my father during the Great 1991 Uprising. He had last been seen on a Friday in March in the courtyard of the Imam ‘Ali Shrine, Uncle said, just as the tanks of the Republican Guard, with the words “No More Shiʻa After Today” painted on them, rolled in from all directions, firing indiscriminately. The golden dome took a hit that day. I was barely twelve years old at the time. That was the last time Father was seen, Uncle said.

  But hadn’t he been seen on every one of the last thirteen anniversaries of the intifada in the holy city of Qum, Iran? interjected a member of the group. “That is what I heard.”

  Not possible, replied another; “he wasn’t a Believer.”

  “He wouldn’t go to Iran,” replied a third.

  “He died a martyr, blown to smithereens by a tank he was trying to destroy,” said a fourth. “I know a man who saw it happen.”

  That was the first time I heard any of these stories. I looked up to Uncle to see how he would react. But he was quiet, smiling as though barely interested, neither confirming nor contradicting, turning toward the growing crowd of onlookers gathered at the scene of the explosion.

  His friends kept on bandying theories as to what had happened to his brother, with the misguided expectation of drawing him out. But he wouldn’t be drawn, maintaining an inscrutable silence that slowly turned him into the center of the gathering.

  Suddenly Uncle turned to me. “Are you a patriot, son?” he said.

  “Of course,” I replied, taken aback. I couldn’t see what being a patriot had to do with the evisceration of an Ayatollah.

  “The House of Hakim you see scurrying about over there sided with our enemy, Iran, during the Great War. Your father, may he rest in peace, fought Hakim’s Brigade during the battles over the Fao Peninsula in the last year of the war. Those people,” he said with a dismissive nod of his head in the direction of the wreckage and frenzy and blaring ambulance sirens, “could have killed him.”

  “Who wanted the Ayatollah dead and organized such a terrible way of killing him?”

  “Only the Iranians,” he said. “No Iraqi has the required skills.”

  “But why would they want to kill him? He depended on them; his organization wants to extend the Islamic revolution into Iraq.”

  “The Ayatollah was distancing himself from Iran in his sermons and becoming an ally of the Occupier. They did not like that.”

  “So was he a patriot?” I asked Uncle, confused by all the combinations of friend and foe that were surfacing.

  “Of course not!” he said. “But your father was. He fought for Iraq, not Saddam.”

  “Wasn’t it Saddam who attacked the Islamic Republic?”

  “Your father had no choice in the matter. He had to fight for his country; that was the patriotic thing to do.”

  “What if he had refused to fight on either side?”

  “He would be a coward—a disgrace to country and God.”

  Uncle

  In a variety of roles and guises, Uncle runs like a tangled skein through my life; it is impossible to keep track of all of them: guardian, provider, teacher, and in the end commander. The uncle in whose house I was raised, the one who intervened on my behalf over and over again, the real father who stood in for the one I entertained in my imagina
tion, the mentor that took me in hand during my activist years, this extraordinary man lived a life of secrets. So many, even he could no longer pick them apart, separating fact from fiction. How then can I be expected to do so? Uncle not only had secrets but also loved to stock up on them, his and especially other people’s, deploying them like clues, which he would drop like breadcrumbs, because he knew that if you put the secret together in your own mind you’d be more convinced by it than if he told you the whole story, only you never really could put it all together because there were never enough clues, a fact he relished greatly.

  Behind his back, his enemies accused him of arrogance bordering on spitefulness. I remember him taking his sweet time pulling out of his parking space at the city’s municipal office. He had noticed another car waiting for the space, and wanted to show the other driver who was boss, knowing that he was wasting his own time as well as that of the other driver.

  Uncle’s reputation meant that he never had any real friends, but then he never seemed to want to have them either. After I began working for him, I realized that much of what Uncle appeared to be outside the house was based on what others around him said he was; he never had to say it. He surrounded himself with minions at work, whom he could abuse one moment and shower with gifts the next. In company he was a joy to watch: rollicking, jovial, and gesticulating wildly at one moment, dripping with erudition the next.

  No doubt I was the son Aunt had never been able to give him. But even I was never sure of the extent of his feelings toward me. Did they stand in a category apart from all the others? For years I thought so. Or was I sometimes a pawn in a complicated piece of intrigue whose purpose only he understood? I look back, for instance, at how he won me over to the Sayyid’s army, working his way around my mother’s objections by persistence and persuasion. He favored me throughout my service, making me privy to tidbits of insider information, which he liked to toss my way and I liked to catch.

  During my first few years in the Army of the Awaited One, I didn’t even consider the question of whether or not I was being used, for no activist was as fortunate as I to have been blessed with such a mentor. Even after everything fell apart on that terrible day of the hanging in December 2006, when Uncle was forced to disown me because it was he who had vouched for me in the first place, even denounce me as a traitor to the Sayyid’s cause, he did so gently, just enough, as the expression goes, to whiten his face among his comrades in the Sayyid’s inner circle, but not enough to expose him as an opportunist or toady, not even to the Sayyid he stood by and served so well. Uncle was a staunch Iraqi patriot, and if there were matters he hid from me, or did not want to disclose, perhaps it was for a good reason, I said to myself, for a higher purpose that I would in due course come to understand. In those years I trusted him implicitly in a way that had nothing to do with ideology but often in politics ends up so doing.

  Uncle didn’t much care for virtue. He valued intelligence akin to his own—cunning, calculating, and street-smart—and was contemptuous of people who were not quick-witted or well-read. There was nothing Uncle hadn’t read, or at least read enough of to make you think he had read it all. Often I would find a book or two chosen to impress—a work of philosophy, or a biography of some Iraqi politician whom he admired—left open to a certain page when I went to visit him in his office. I would leave the room on such days in awe of the man: What other politician would know about, much less read, such books?

  Later, I took to wondering if they had been left there for my benefit; even so, I would say to myself, what difference did it make? The books were in good taste, and knowing which ones to leave out for this person, or remove entirely for another, showed good judgment and a highly attuned sense of character. Haider, for instance, never stumbled upon books when he went to Uncle’s office; he was regaled with tales of bravery and chivalry from days long gone instead. Once in my presence, speaking to Uncle, Haider said that he thought Iraqis were much nicer than other people, especially Iranians, whom he particularly despised after the scandal surrounding his father erupted.

  “Of course we are nicer,” Uncle said with a twinkle in his eyes. “But we are nicer because we have no rules. That is how we get things done.”

  Inauspicious Birds

  Perched on top of the roof of the balcony of our second-floor bedroom, my aunt saw a flock of crows, the foulest and most inauspicious creatures on the face of the earth, she wailed, beating her chest with her fists.

  “But very intelligent,” said my mother calmly, “and they outlive us,” trying to dampen the hue and cry that her sister was creating because of the ill omen that had descended on her balcony. “Does not the crow seek the most excellent of fruit such as can only be found in a house as richly endowed as yours?” she said to her sister.

  “I saw two of them fly away, circle the whole neighborhood, and return to the rest of the flock a few minutes later,” my aunt cried. “They chose us! Woe upon our house! Woe to us! What have we done to deserve this?”

  Next morning, a crisp, cold winter day, Mother did not feel well, waking up with a different kind of headache that told her something was unusually wrong. All day, until the doctor and an acquaintance from the neighborhood passed by, her sister and neighbors fussed over her, arguing over which of the six different flavors of pomegranate juice available in Najaf would best relieve her symptoms: the sweet kind that relaxes the bowels, or the sour kind that has the opposite effect. Aunt won the argument by opting for the juice from the tree in our courtyard, because it was between sweet and sour, and, she said, it was good for inflammation of all organs of the body.

  I was sitting on my bed, on the other side of our shared room, watching as the doctor conducted a perfunctory examination that uncovered strange bruises on my mother’s back that she could not explain, and which the doctor instantly dismissed, assuring her that there was nothing seriously wrong, nothing that a good rest and a glass of boiled milk would not cure by the morning.

  The bruises grew in the course of the week and then disappeared, leaving strange configurations on her skin; then, remarkably, they returned. Her gums turned white, and she was soon too exhausted to stand up, having to crawl on all fours to move around. Still she would not go to the hospital. It was filthy, she said, and would kill her for sure; anyway, they had no medicines, and whatever they had had been doctored on the black market and couldn’t be trusted. On this, for once, she and Uncle were in agreement.

  By the end of the week I am certain she knew she was dying. The dying know before anyone else.

  “Your grandfather, son…”

  “Yes, Mother. What about him?”

  “Talk to him. Know him better. He was good to me…he worshipped your father.”

  I had never really been close to Grandfather. He was truculent with everyone in the house except her, especially Uncle. But why did Mother mention him now of all times? “Of course, Mother,” I told her. “Don’t worry about such things. I will talk to him.”

  “Your uncle…”

  “Yes, Mother?”

  But she couldn’t bring herself to say whatever it was she wanted to say.

  “Yes?” I said, egging her on as gently as I knew how.

  “He…is a complicated man.”

  I tried to brush it off. “I know, Mother,” I said with a laugh. “He is all politics. Half the time I never know what is on his mind. Why, only the other day, he pressed me about my patriotism and was worrying about Iranian infiltrations in the country.”

  She didn’t like to hear that. I could have kicked myself. No politics; that was the rule. Her face turned anxious. She must have been puzzling through Uncle’s reasons for bringing up the subject.

  “Your father loved God, son,” she said.

  “Of course he did.”

  “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  “Why should they do such a thing?”

  “Because his God was not that of other men. His God was not your uncle’s God.”
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br />   “Mother! There is only the One God. Your fever is speaking.”

  “Your father was different.”

  “Different from whom?”

  “Other men. Talk to your grandfather…” And that was the last thing she said before drifting into sleep.

  The next night, she called me over to her side and asked me to remove a chain from around her neck. Attached to the chain was a small key, the key to the top drawer of her chest next to her bed.

  “This now belongs to you. You will open that drawer after I am gone,” she said. “There are a few trinkets of mine that I would like you to have—perhaps your wife in the future may like them—and there is a letter that has been waiting for you to read for thirteen years.” Of course I wanted to open the drawer right away, but she would not allow it.

  We talked late into the night. She said that we people of Iraq belonged to an unfortunate race, a people who had missed out on love. In love’s place, she said, fear ruled. Every crisis, no matter how big or small, was an occasion for a new fear. A deep, impassable chasm, she used to say, walled off those who were afraid from those who were loved.

  She herself was afraid. She understood tyranny, and how to live in its shadow; she had learned to cope with pain and sorrow; she had even found a way to manage loss and uncertainty. But anarchy posing as freedom was something alien and terrifying to her; it obeyed no rules and, she said, released the beast lurking in men. The war, the fall of Baghdad, the escape of the Tyrant, the insurgency, but above all the emergence of a bewildering number of parties contending for the hearts of the young and the impressionable—men like me—all this terrified her.

  Fear is why she cooked a piece of fish on Wednesdays. Fish, and only on Wednesdays, she used to say, blessed the entire household. Before sunset, also only on Wednesdays, to further ward off the evil eye, she would put three pieces of red-hot coal into an aluminum bowl and sprinkle a handful of dry harmel seeds over them, until a gentle popping sound could be heard. As the smoky aroma filled the room, the bowl would be turned in circles around my head three times, the smoke gently blowing into my face while she slowly recited a verse from the Quran.