by Kanan Makiya
“My father fought for his country against Iran during the Great War, and that is why he named me al-Muntassir, the Victorious One, after our great victory.”
“Why did you ask to shorten it to Muntassir?”
“It was pompous; it was my father’s victory, not mine.”
“And the fighting in Karbala…was it worth it?”
“I was not going to let the Iran my father had fought and defeated occupy our mosques. I wanted to feel that my life was worth something.”
“And did you succeed?”
“No doubt about it,” he said. “My comrades made it out safely, you know. I managed to divert attention away from them. I am proud of that.”
“Why didn’t you pull the trigger?”
“I had a strange thought when the grenades were being tossed.”
“What?”
“The pomegranate juice you brought reminded me of it just now. I remember thinking it was not right to call a hand grenade a ‘pomegranate,’ the way we Iraqis do in Arabic. A thing that takes life should not be confused with one that grows in Paradise and is in the Holy Book as a giver of life and sweetness.”
“How true! I never thought of that before.”
He should never have been there. He had the spirit but not the heart for killing. How many men like Muntassir were there among us? I wondered. Perhaps better training would have deadened a part of his heart; then at least he might have survived.
I stayed up with him all night watching as his face changed color; his breathing got more ragged until by the end he was struggling for air. But he never lost control, and told me at some point toward the end that he had seen death. I asked him if he was frightened. “No,” he said. “I think I will be going to a better place.” I told him I was sure of it, and that I would never forget him.
His eyes kept turning to the worn-out boots on the floor. His heart, I thought, was like those boots: worn down from proximity to death; that brought his death and his boots into some kind of alignment. Perhaps that is what it means to die. The last thing he said was, “I want you to have my boots.”
Muntassir died of asphyxiation; his blood replacing air in his lungs. My impotent face was the last thing he saw of this world. The Sheikh read the opening verses of the Holy Book over him in the small hours of the morning, and said, “He wanted you to have these,” handing me a plastic bag with Muntassir’s black leather boots. I asked him how he knew. He said Muntassir had told him, before my arrival.
—
It is hard to live rightly in circumstances of war and violence, but, for reasons I do not claim to understand, I feel Muntassir succeeded. I was humbled by his death, not shocked, as I had been back in April when I stumbled upon the corpse near our house, nor angered, as I had been when I saw the carnage that accompanied the car bomb that killed the Sayyid from the House of Hakim in Najaf. There was no glamour or drama in death this time around, no desire for revenge, no spirit for the good fight; death passed us by that night, leaving only emptiness behind.
I took the plastic bag of personal effects from the Sheikh, including my friend’s oversize black leather boots. It did not matter that I did not know how to put them to good use. They would remain his boots, and those of his father before him: the wearing down, the scuffing on the leather, and the endless replacement of heels…these actions no longer belonged to specific times and places, separated by the different wars of a father and his son; they summed up the only tiny little shreds of dignity and honor attached to the story of Iraq. That was reason enough to keep Muntassir’s boots. In time, I would need them more than he did; but not for battle: I needed them to cling to, the way a drowning man needs a piece of driftwood.
2004
Bad Blood
Muntassir died because of a rivalry gone sour between two great clerical families of Iraq: the House of Hakim, which fled to Iran, and the House of Sadr, which stayed in Iraq. In Najaf, the rivalry was made worse with the return of Abu Haider from Tehran.
This second return from exile in Iran of Haider’s father, in May 2003—the first had been during the Great Uprising of 1991—was the subject of much gossip in the neighborhood. Haider was delighted at first, and proudly retold stories of his father’s feats abroad, his rise in the ranks of the Brigades of the Full Moon, which was in those days the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an organization established by the House of Hakim in Tehran and blessed by Ayatollah Khomeini himself.
But in the winter of 2004, word reached Haider’s mother from a most unlikely source that there was another family in Tehran, and two children by Abu Haider’s new, considerably younger Iranian wife, about whom nothing had been said in the preceding months.
The source of the startling news was my grandfather on my father’s side, Uncle’s father, who lived with us in our house in the Mishraq quarter, and to whom Mother had been devoted. I had not, I am ashamed to say, made good on my promise to Mother, lying on her deathbed, to talk to Grandfather. His crinkled leathery face, like an illegible old map, put me off; I was afraid I would be rudely turned away. How did this surly old man find out about Abu Haider’s second wife? I don’t know to this day, but it was certainly he who told our local Sheikh, who in turn visited Haider’s mother, who in turn let her brothers know, and they all lost no time spreading it around the neighborhood, something Grandfather knew would happen.
Abu Haider did not deny the story—a useless exercise, as it was supported by considerable evidence. On the contrary, he vigorously defended his God-given right to marry again, the right of any good Muslim Believer in conditions of hardship and exile, to whom adultery is forbidden, but who is, thanks be to God, still endowed with a healthy sexual appetite, as Abu Haider most certainly was. Anyway, had not the Prophet allowed a man four wives? All of this poured salt onto wounds that were opening up inside Haider’s household.
Rapidly the halo surrounding Abu Haider after his return dimmed, until through his refusal to concede any measure of indiscretion on his side it was extinguished forever. Family tensions became woven into political ones, coming to a head during the fighting over Karbala’s shrine, when dear Muntassir lost his life. Thus did the tensions in Haider’s household escalate to the point of threatening the fragile balance between the two main houses of Iraqi Shi‘ism in Najaf: the Houses of Hakim and Sadr.
Abu Haider had high expectations upon his return from Iran, which were not shared by his wife, Haider’s mother, or her family, who owned the house they all lived in a few doors away from our own. He had expected to be received as the conquering hero, the man whose self-sacrificing efforts on behalf of the “struggling downtrodden Shiʻa,” as he liked to put it, had brought about the fall of the Tyrant in Baghdad. In the euphoria of his return, he was given the benefit of the doubt.
It did not last for long. Abu Haider, it began to be said, had not lived through the hardship of life in Iraq under the dual weight of tyranny and sanctions; he had not lost a loved one during the eight-year war with Iran, the country he had taken refuge in. There was no way Haider’s mother and her family were going to let Abu Haider lord it over them now, and in their own household, after finding out he had spent twelve years getting married, siring new heirs, and living the good life as a high-ranking member of an organization funded by an enemy of Iraq, Iran, whose people said of Arabs that they were “eaters of locusts while the dogs of Isfahan drank cold water.” Our whole street bristled with talk like that, and sided with Haider’s mother, turning their backs on Abu Haider, even walking out of whatever shop or teahouse he happened to be in.
Both Uncle, whose allegiance was only to the House of Sadr, and my grandfather hated Abu Haider. The two leading Sayyids from the Houses of Sadr and Hakim, the most learned clerical families in our city, hated one another, even though—or perhaps it was because—they both came from Najaf, but, whereas our Sayyid had stayed and suffered in Iraq as his father had done—only assuming his father’s mantle after the latter was murder
ed by the Tyrant—the Sayyid from the House of Hakim had fled to Iran to establish an organization that would spread the tenets of a revolution started in Iran and led by an Iranian. The rivalry between the two Houses had evolved into a major conflagration between two deeply divergent conceptions of the nation itself: one indigenous, familiar, and indubitably Iraqi, the other imported and foreign, which in practice would mean the permanent rule of foreign jurists over Iraqi ones.
Grandfather’s hatred was a mystery to me, made deeper after I found out that he had gone out of his way to spread the news about Abu Haider’s second marriage. Grandfather had never been a pious man, rarely visiting the local mosque, not even for Friday prayers, and was forever denouncing clerics for being thieves and charlatans, refusing on principle, he said, to give them alms or donations of any sort. What moved my toothless and withered grandfather, whom I had never seen do anything other than glower from his regular perch in the living room, to actively seek to undermine the position of my best friend’s father in the neighborhood?
—
The week following the outbreak of the scandal, Haider and I visited the Sheikh of the local mosque we attended, a man aligned to the House of Sadr and with whom we had studied the Quran throughout our adolescence. He had played a role in the dissemination of the story; perhaps he could shed light on the matter.
We found him sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions in his usual alcove in the mosque, chain-smoking as usual, and eating from a bowl of sugared almonds, which he gestured to us to share. What did Grandfather have against Abu Haider? we asked him.
“Bad blood,” he said. “There is much bad blood between your two grandfathers. It began long before Abu Haider’s return. Your grandfather,” he said, looking at me, “knew I was under an obligation to let Haider’s mother’s family know.” Then, turning to Haider, he apologized if he had been the cause of any distress. But, he said, he was under an obligation that had to be fulfilled.
This was the first time either Haider or I had heard of “bad blood” between our respective households.
“Tell us the story, O Sheikh; as God is my witness I never heard about it before,” said Haider, who had taken the news that he had siblings in Tehran very badly.
“Your grandfathers were both Communists as young men, and the best of friends. Between them, they ran our neighborhood.”
Ran the neighborhood…and Communists to boot? I wondered. How long ago? I wanted to know.
“Oh…let’s see. It must have been at least thirty, forty years ago. They were in their twenties; I was a few years older, a student at the seminary at the time. So it must have been in the 1960s. I remember them both stirring things up, especially after the most senior Ayatollah of those days from the House of Hakim issued his famous ruling, in the late 1960s, saying that all Communists were atheists, and to be shunned. He was trying to diminish the influence the Communists then had among most of our young men. He ruled it a sin to work with them. That Ayatollah was the father of the Sayyid who, you both no doubt remember, was blown up last August in a car bomb.”
“Do you mean the Sayyid who returned from Iran last summer just after my father did?” Haider asked.
“Yes. Your father always worked with the House of Hakim, most of whom fled to Iran in the early 1980s—those who remained, that is, after Saddam executed about eighty members of their family.”
“Are you sure my grandfather was a member of the Communist Party?” I asked, still unable to imagine him in that light; not that I had any idea what a Communist was, but I had read in a history book that after the overthrow of the monarchy there had been a party called the Iraqi Communist Party.
“Card-carrying,” replied the Sheikh, picking up the bowl of sugared almonds and insisting we each take another, “along with your grandfather, may God rest his soul,” he said, nodding in Haider’s direction. “Both were very committed to social justice and the poor, and excellent organizers, as well as being inseparable.”
“So what happened?” Haider asked, crunching on a particularly noisy almond; it is impossible to eat the sugarcoated variety without making a noise.
“Saddam happened! That’s what happened. May he rot in hell! He ran the secret police in those days, the ‘Instrument of Yearning,’ I think they used to call it.”
“What a strange name,” I said in a low voice.
“He coined that name during their years in the wilderness, before the Baʻth came to power in 1968.”
“What were they yearning after?” I asked, now completely distracted by the strangeness of the name.
“Power, of course—what else? And that was the problem with Communists in those days, including both of your grandfathers. They did not understand power; Saddam did. His Baʻth Party was a small organization, whereas the Communists could mount demonstrations in the hundreds of thousands. Yet it was the Baʻth, not the Communists, who seized power and captured the state.”
“How did my grandfather die?” asked Haider.
“Your grandfather,” he replied, “was killed fighting the Baʻth in the marshes near ʻAmarah. You see, as soon as the Baʻth engineered their coup, they offered the Communists a deal: enter our government and we will give you a few ministers; refuse to do so and we will cut you down, every last one of you. The condition included the Communists accepting the leadership of the Baʻth Party, something the Soviet Union was pressing them to do, but it was hard for them to do so. They fought bitterly about it inside their party; I remember your grandfathers going at it tooth and nail in a teahouse not far from here. It ended badly, with your grandfather and his group denouncing their comrades as fascist appeasers and traitors to the cause, and splitting off from the party and disappearing from the cities, where they knew the police would hunt them down. That ended everything between them.
“Meanwhile, your grandfather,” the Sheikh said, looking at me, “accepted the condition and entered the civil service, working for one of the new Communist ministers.”
“And mine hid out in the marshes?” asked Haider.
“He didn’t just hide out; he and his comrades took up arms, modeling their struggle after Mao Tse-tung and going to live among the peasants.”
“Are you saying that my grandfather still bears a grudge about all that to this day?” I asked, unable to picture the old man caring about anything other than himself.
“He went further. He forced his sister to break off her betrothal to his former best friend, making her deeply unhappy for the rest of her days. I know because my father oversaw the original marriage contract. Bad blood feeds on itself; it never goes away.”
We thanked the Sheikh profusely for being so forthright; he in turn insisted on pressing into both of our hands little bags of sugared almonds, of which he seemed to have an endless supply. “It has been a happy week,” he said by way of explanation. “Many marriages; lots of bags of sugared almonds…But, my sons, don’t let this news spoil your day. There is no virtue in going down the road your grandfathers took.”
Foreigner Iraqis
Haider returned yesterday from a trip to Baghdad with a strange story: in the office of the Iraqi national security advisor, an educated man who had lived and worked in London for decades, he had seen an enormous bust of Saddam Hussein wearing a helmet such as British officers stationed in Iraq wore during World War One. This gigantic object had been carefully placed in a corner, so that its dull, vacant eyes, sphinxlike with no irises, stared at the face behind the desk.
“There are Iraqis like us,” Haider said, “and in Baghdad there are Foreigner Iraqis.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.
“They hate Saddam differently.”
“You are not making sense.”
“We had his picture on our walls because we had to: a nosy neighbor, gossip reaching the ears of the police, that sort of thing. We wouldn’t dream of having it around otherwise.”
“So…”
“Saddam was our whole life; he was our wo
rld. We didn’t need his face to be reminded of that. We hate his pictures and his statues, like we hated him and his regime. Our hatred is natural. As soon as he is gone, we want nothing around that reminds us of him.”
“And how do they hate Saddam?”
“He lives not in their hearts but in their heads as an idea, a fixation they cannot rid themselves of, even though he has nothing to do with their lives. They say they love us, their ‘people,’ the Shiʻa, but that is only because they lived far away, not among us. Do we look at one another and marvel at how wonderful we Shiʻa are? That would be stupid. We are who we are and move on. While we look forward to the future, they look backward to their ideas.”
“Hmm…I see. But why call them ‘Foreigner Iraqis’?”
“Because they are simultaneously foreigners and Iraqis, and yet they are neither at the same time. They look like us, because they were born among us, but they no longer feel or think like us. They no longer dress, or eat, or have the same habits we do.”
“You are describing hybrid beings.”
“I am,” Haider said excitedly. “That is a good way to put it. They arrive with the Occupier; live in Baghdad in heavily guarded compounds; they remember a fairy tale of life as it ‘used to be’ outside of their offices; they avoid us ordinary Iraqis, whom they appear to fear, never once showing up at the scene of a terror attack.”
“Come to think of it, I have never seen them visiting victims in a hospital or assisting their stricken families.”
“They are revolutionaries in words alone, men whose lack of standing in the community has to be compensated for by the equally foreign thugs they hire to protect them.”
“You are saying a Foreigner Iraqi is a deeply unsatisfied person; he has an inextinguishable longing to be somewhere else, longing to escape where he is, wherever that may be in the world, and never belonging to the place that he goes to.”