The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

  Say: “I take refuge with Thee,

  Lord of Creation,

  From the evil of the slandering whisperer,

  Who whispers in the hearts of all,

  Be they jinn or men.”

  —

  Everyone in Uncle’s household, and the stream of visitors from the neighborhood who came to pay their respects to him—because they were not coming for Mother’s sake—treated what was happening to her as a temporary affliction, mere unpleasantness, repeating the bland reassurances of the doctor, who visited two or three times a week, taking her temperature, checking her pulse, measuring her blood pressure, even as her sister, Uncle’s wife, and the neighbors continued fussing over her.

  Everyone was living a lie: the lie that Mother would get better if only she kept on being told she would get better. Her sister, the neighbors, other visitors, even Grandfather, needed to keep on repeating this lie, which they knew was a lie; it was as though they too had an obligation to keep up the pretense of normalcy. I was miserable and angry with all of them. Family life in our world was governed by a strict set of unwritten rules; speaking the truth to the sick and the dying was not among them. Lying was. But there were times and ways of lying, rules even in lying that had to be adhered to.

  The doctor must have confided the truth of Mother’s condition to Uncle—that was a rule—and it was understood between them that no one else needed to know. I was the next man in line after Uncle, and should also have been told. But wasn’t. Everyone else could be lied to. All anyone knew was that everything was going to be all right. That way, when she died, the doctor could say he knew all along she was going to die, but was trying to make her feel better and put her mind at peace. If by some miracle she lived, he would boast about how he had been right all along. Did it even cross that stupid doctor’s mind to order a simple blood test, or draw her blood himself and send it to the laboratory? Perhaps it did, but he knew her case was hopeless; why waste Uncle’s money?

  Mother died late on a Thursday afternoon, a month after the headache had made its first appearance; the attending physician at the morgue diagnosed her with acute leukemia.

  I continue to see her every day, even after she passed away. It is the same dream. Her hair is going gray, although she is still young. She is seated in the bedroom we shared in Uncle’s house, on a rickety old chair that she refused to discard even though it was barely capable of supporting her slim frame. It belonged to Father—that and his library and some old clothes that she kept clean and well pressed were all that he had left her.

  In the dream, she never sees me. Her face is heavy, lined with sorrow. I am calling out, “Mother…Mother…Mother,” but she does not hear. I keep on calling, my anxiety mounting, and my voice getting louder and louder until it seems the whole house must wake up. On a bad night, the walls of the room begin to tremble and sway as if some terrible beast had grabbed the house by its foundations and were shaking it to and fro. If only she would look in my direction, I say to myself in the dream. But she does not hear, and she does not turn her tired face toward me.

  When, finally, I awake in terror, she is there beside me on the same frail chair, stroking my hair, telling me it was just a nightmare. And there she stays until I fall back asleep. But then she is gone, and there is only the darkness of the night to wake up to.

  I often wonder how it was when she died, when she drew her last few breaths lying in pain on her bed. What is it like knowing your very last breath is just about to be drawn? Could death at that singular moment in the span of our lives be pleasurable—not that the causes of it ever are pleasurable, but rather the moment itself, perhaps only milliseconds long, the moment or moments immediately preceding death, when you know for sure you are going to die, and including, of course, the actual tiny sliver of time in which death itself consists, since it has to occupy some space of time—could pleasure, or call it happiness, finally have visited Mother in that minuscule little sliver of time?

  I like to think so. I like to imagine she lost her fears, and all the bitterness and anger of late. I like to think she finally accepted that her fear, like all our fears, was very down-to-earth—the knock on the door, the barbed piece of gossip, the inquisitive questioning of a neighbor; it certainly never had the face of the dead man she took so gently with her to bed every night, and whom she slept with in her dreams; I like to think all of those things, and to know Mother finally had a taste of what it meant to live.

  Whatever happens in the final moments of our lives, I hope I can meet death the way she did, with the sort of self-assurance and inner calmness in which is hidden a kind of immortality.

  Goodbye, Mother. Goodbye.

  The Letter

  I opened the locked drawer in my mother’s chest late that evening, after her body had been ritually washed, wrapped, placed in a simple coffin, and returned home to await burial the following day; she was downstairs in the living room, wrapped in the same white shroud Uncle had carried with him during his pilgrimage to Mecca to be blessed. The female mourners, who had spent the late afternoon by her side reading from the Holy Book, had left, and the house was quiet, not a sound to be heard except the scraping of wood as I gently pulled the drawer open. Tomorrow we would carry her in a procession of mourners, headed by Uncle and myself, to visit the Imam one last time in his Shrine, after which she would be taken to the cemetery to be buried, a journey that Mother and I had watched from our second-story balcony window hundreds of times.

  The letter was from my father, and written from the camp in which he had been incarcerated after being captured. The paper looked like it had been intended for rolling cigarettes; the handwriting, tiny and neat—a lot of care has to go into calligraphy that small. Beside its manila envelope was a fountain pen whose cylinder had been gutted. So this was how it had been smuggled out; tightly rolled up inside the barrel of the fountain pen. Mother must have lightly ironed the sheets, because I found them crisp and flat, folded once lengthwise to fit in the envelope I had removed them from. The top sheet was dated April 1991; I would have been twelve at the time he wrote them. I fondled the thin sheets, turning them around in my hands gently; they were as fragile as dry onion leaves. It took me a while to gather up the courage to read the words.

  MY DEAR WIFE,

  I scratched your name on my fingernail last night with a nail; my pencil I spare for this letter, which I will use until its lead is finished. The writing by itself brings you closer to me. How strange? It is as though you are next to me even now, and we are talking. Do you remember when I would return on furlough, hold you in my arms, and you would talk, and talk and talk…sweet nothings just to calm me down, all the while running your fingers in my hair? To be honest I cannot recall the words; the sounds I do remember, rippling and bubbling like a mountain stream. Nothing can replace those times.

  I will not ask questions you cannot answer— How are you? How is our son? Has he returned to school yet? How are you coping? Is my brother treating you right? How is my father coping with his rheumatism? Know that I think about them endlessly instead. I write against all odds, but in the hope that these words do by some miracle find you. God willing, they will. I want to believe that they will. Care has been taken to avoid clues that could lead my jailors to you. And yet the messenger, who bears it, is one of them. Trust him if he chooses to reveal himself; he may not. We served together on the front, and bonded like brothers. Still, writing is foolhardy; I know it, but I can’t help myself. Hallaj says, “Love, so long as it hides, feels itself in great danger, and is only reassured by exposing itself to risk.”

  Know, my dear, that by the time this letter reaches you, I will be gone to a better place. I do not want you to be sad, but even less do I want you to entertain false hopes. My last remaining pleasure in this world is to believe you will receive this letter and be safe. Then I can go to my Maker in peace, your name etched on my fingernail.

  Ever
ything about this wretched country of ours has let me down, everything except you; you are the only good thing that happened in my otherwise wasted life. Ours is a nation of sick and spite-filled men, of selfish men, of hollow men, of treacherous men who would whisper ill of their fathers and brothers, and sell them to the devil for a pittance.

  Know, my dear, that I was betrayed, my location revealed to the police; it beggars the imagination to think they would have found me on their own. But I have no proof. Who could have betrayed me? I do not know, but he had to know me well. The two good men I was with escaped ten minutes before they came bursting through the door; thank God for little mercies; they were looking for them too. How did they know we were three? I had to have been betrayed. Trust no one, my love. Too many Iraqi souls have withered and fallen from the tree; the rest were poisoned from the well.

  In the darkest days of our war against Iran, you would not have found me saying such things, but what I have seen and experienced in these last three weeks exceeds all the horror I lived through for eight years on the front; I am in the darkest corner of hell, and it is called Radwaniyya, a prison, if you can call it that, just outside Baghdad’s airport. I wish that you did not have to know such a place existed. But there are things that must not be forgotten. It pains me to have to relate them to you, but I have no one else. Years from now, at the right time, you will know what to do with this knowledge. Use it, my love, only when it is safe for you to do so; and when our son is of age allow him to read this letter; he will want to know how his father died.

  We were brought here by the busload, from Najaf, Basra, Amarah, Kut, and other towns and villages. As we left the prison bus, we were faced with a dozen or so starving dogs. There was no way to exit the bus without running the gauntlet of these terrible dogs, followed then by prison guards standing behind them wielding wooden truncheons a meter long. Just imagine the mad rush of prisoners to the doors of the entry hall. No one escaped an injury of some kind: a broken rib, a cracked skull, and one or two dog bites at least. But it was the horror of it that I was left with! One woman who was on the bus with me lost an eye.

  This greeting is what the prisoners inside called our “entry tax” into Radwaniyya. The real tax, our formal “reception,” as the guards called it, consisted of a dozen or so of them inside, all armed with truncheons, herding us into a corner and flailing out in all directions at the huddled, cowering, and screaming prisoners. To slip away meant to make it to a different corner of the same locked hall, only to be followed by guards and a still more concentrated beating, from which there was not even the relative protection provided by the huddled mass of bodies. They beat us this way for thirty minutes or so, until their arms were too tired to raise the truncheons.

  When I say “guards,” perhaps you think I am talking of men; I am not. They are all boys, teenagers, not one of them in his twenties. Imagine what happens to a boy who spends a year or so of his most formative years doing this kind of work? He is changed forever. Think of these boys—I see them now in the distance—and keep our son away from such evil, even if you have to send him away from you.

  On that first day, I saw something worse: the face of a man, desperately thirsty, asking for water. The guard takes a hosepipe and shakes out a few drops. In his desperation for more, the man reaches out to hold the hose so as to suck in a bit more; it is as though he has organized a rebellion, or cursed Saddam Hussein to his face. In the blink of an eye, five of these teenage guards descended on him, beating him all over. When he fell to the ground, he was kicked in his ribs, on the liver, around his testicles, on the head…until finally he lay prostrate, barely alive. I thought this was the end of his sufferings, only I was wrong. The sick minds of these teenagers endlessly innovate; in fact, they are rewarded for innovation in the delivery of pain. One of them took the hose and stuffed it into the mouth of the prostrate man; he shoved it deep, very deep, so that the force of the water would not push it out. I witnessed this terrifying scene and all I could think was, what place was this that I had entered? Where was I? Was this really happening in Iraq? Did anybody know what was being done? The hose was turned on full blast, and water poured into the poor man’s stomach, which inflated until it started emptying out of every orifice—nose, ears, and mouth. Ten minutes later his limbs fluttered, and he went still.

  Once again, my dearest, I apologize for inflicting these stories on you. But somebody must know what happened here; the world must know; it is my only way of fighting back. How could those Americans who came halfway across the world to push him out of Kuwait stand by and let him do these things to our people? That is where we were headed, the three of us, before they caught me: to the American lines, less than a kilometer away from the house in which they caught me, to ask for help, or at the very least access to the regime’s ammunition warehouse, which they were standing guard over.

  Upon arrival in Radwaniyya, I befriended a man—call him Qassim. He is a professor at one of our prestigious universities, better not to mention which one. Four of his relatives had been executed by the regime, and for this reason alone they arrested him in his house. Yesterday we were all paraded before the Tyrant’s cousin, who was in charge of the southern sector, dragging our heavy shackles behind us. After he left, the heavy interrogation began. They started on poor Qassim, with all of us watching, accusing him of participating in the Uprising. He denied he had anything to do with it, whereupon they began to beat him with long sticks, electricity, the whole works.

  The chief interrogator, a man of the Shiʻa like us, was perhaps the most brutal man I encountered at Radwaniyya. He was huge, with a large paunch—terrifying to behold—and on that day he was wearing an olive green uniform. If you tried to read the features on his face, you would think some evil force had deformed it. The man looked like a monster; there is no other way to put it. That day he approached the guards softening up poor Qassim; he came with his personal guard, one aide in particular had been assigned to carry his own personalized meter-long truncheon, which had an ornate, bulbous decorated metal head at its end. He asked how the interrogation was going.

  “He is refusing to confess, sir,” replied the guard in charge of Qassim.

  “Did he kill?” asked the chief interrogator.

  “I suspect he has,” replied his junior, “but I have not been able to extract a confession from him.”

  “Hand me my stick,” the chief said to his aide. He then shouted at the prisoner, “Are you going to confess?”

  Poor Qassim was so far gone I doubt he even heard the question. He raised the stick with the bulbous metal end on it and brought it down on the man’s head with great force. “One,” shouted his accompanying guard in unison; they had done this before. Again, he struck; “two,” they shouted; and finally a third time. “He’s dead,” they all cried out for our benefit. Qassim lay prostrate on the concrete floor. Blood was everywhere, on the chief interrogator’s shirt, on my face, all over the guards standing by.

  Tomorrow it will begin again. Perhaps it will be my turn, perhaps not. At any rate, you must assume I am dead. Nor will you ever find my corpse. The rule in Radwaniyya is that you do not lift a corpse and carry it away; it has to be dragged by the ankles to the main door, and then left to pile up, two, four, six, and sometimes even ten in a big heap. At the end of the day, a garbage truck circles around and men toss the bodies into it. Then, with all the prisoners looking on, because the barred windows are so low, the truck drives up to a hill, a hill of corpses, and cans of white powder are sprinkled over each fresh load of corpses tossed on top. The hill grows higher and higher by the day.

  As God is my witness, I saw these things.

  Radwaniyya means death, but the strange thing about the way we are dying here is that it makes me think about things I did not think about before. I always thought of myself as an Iraqi, but every prisoner here is from among us Shiʻa, and was brought here because he was a Shiʻa. Amid the danger all around me, I feel safe with my fellow prisoners; there
are several thousand of us. I feel relieved to be among them, to be in a group I can call my own and whose fate I am about to share. I find myself overwhelmed with tenderness toward them. As you know better than anyone, these are not feelings I ever had before.

  But, among our guards are some Shi‘a, not many, like that chief interrogator brute, senior aide to the Tyrant’s cousin; they are, would you believe it, without exception the most brutal men in the prison. Isn’t that strange? Are they trying to prove something to their Sunni lords and masters? I don’t know. I just know this is not the Iraq I used to know. Then there are Sunni guards, like the man bringing this letter to you, who secretly do us little kindnesses, in tiny doses, when nobody is looking. Such is life in Radwaniyya Prison.

  Our people have changed; the violence all around and for so long has changed them. They were not like that before; those who rule have turned them into brutes. Forgive them, my dear, and teach our son to forgive them. Teach him not to seek revenge for what was done to his father; teach him never to act out of hate. A brighter day will come, and he will live to see it. Hope is not something that is logical or reasonable. But I am filled with it for him in spite of everything. You too must live for it, my dearest. Survive for it! A Russian poet wrote:

  Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.

  I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books

  much loved, and in children’s games I shall rise

  from the dead to say the sun is shining.

  Now, my piece of pencil is all used up, I surrender this letter to fate; its messenger beckons. Still, I am left with your name, scratched on my fingernail; it is enough.