The President's Gardens

by Muhsin al-Ramli

  The arrival of this letter was a cause for celebration, and they invited the whole village to a feast. Zaynab decided to slaughter her biggest bull for the occasion, but Ibrahim and Tariq insisted on helping with the costs and the organizing. The village celebrated, and everyone perused the letter, including those who couldn’t read or write.

  Afterward, Ibrahim started renting Abdullah’s house to the schoolteachers sent out to the village from the city, and he worked to get the field ready for planting again. He kept the accounts with the utmost exactitude, ordering his wife to hide away Abdullah’s share—his “portion,” as he put it—in a safe place in their bedroom where no one’s hand would touch it. She hid the paper money he gave her in a box containing her simple jewelry—necklaces, bracelets, rings, and earrings of gold and silver—some of which she had inherited from her mother and the rest of which were wedding gifts.

  As for Ibrahim’s friendships, his bond with Tariq was of course the strongest, and the two of them spent entire weekends together. They were not together more because Tariq worked during the week as a teacher in one of the distant villages, having completed his studies at the religious institute in Mosul. His grades in school didn’t qualify for anything higher than that institute, and the choice was also in keeping with his father’s wishes.

  According to his habit of adapting to any given situation, Ibrahim began observing the norms required by social custom: consoling the sick, burying the dead, visiting neighbors to congratulate them on births and marriages, taking part in the crop harvest, and things like that. He was content in the security this way of life provided, feeling that his village, peaceful and gentle—and indeed, forgotten—was the most lovely place in the world. Playing in the evenings with his Qisma was magical. When she laughed with delight, he felt all his present cares and the weariness of the past fall from his shoulders like someone stripping off a robe heavy with mud. He felt a cleanliness and a lightness, as though his fingers were touching the honey of life every time he touched her.

  What he could not have taken into account was that Iraq would invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and that the drums of war would beat again, louder this time, with a greater violence and cruelty.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Storms of Destruction

  The village, the country, and the entire world woke up to a shock: Iraqi tanks in the streets of Kuwait City at dawn. And if Abdullah Kafka had been in the village café at that moment with the men circled around the television, mouths agape, he would have said, “It’s no more surprising than the first shit of the day. The world is a jungle. Always has been. Any animal might pounce and tear apart any other at any moment. There are no surprises—animal behavior is entirely predictable. People always do the same stupid things and then call them surprises, no matter how self-evident and obvious. Just like they say a person changing his mind is a surprise, or they say someone dying is a surprise, as though he hadn’t actually been waiting for death from the moment he was born!”

  The government conscripted everyone of Ibrahim’s age, as well as those younger and older. They cut short his rest and forced him to leave his daughter just when she had become as close to him as could be. He had to abandon his field in the middle of the planting season and report to his former army unit, following orders that were announced on the radio.

  The journey weighed on his spirit. A chaotic fog swirled in his mind, and he couldn’t think clearly. A muddled confusion, shards of anxiety, a choking grief, a vast unknown: it was like being trapped in a nightmare. He reached his unit headquarters and entered it as naturally as if he had left just the day before, not almost two years ago. It was as though peace were the exception, a dream, while war was the customary state of affairs.

  In this whirlpool where the real and the imaginary swirled together, what was truly present? What was seen and felt and lived? What was lived without being seen or felt? Ibrahim was brought back to reality when he ran into Ahmad al-Najafi. They threw themselves upon each other in the warmest embrace. Each played the role of fireman, wrapping his arms around the other to pull him out of the inferno. This meeting, comforting intimacy amid the rough press toward the coming unknown, eased the brutal shock that came with returning to that hateful place.

  Getting registered and equipped only took a few hours. And before they knew it, they found themselves just as they used to be, in their khaki uniforms and equipped with pistol, AK-47, ammunition belt, helmet, bayonet, water canteen, and a gas mask in its special bag, sitting in the column of trucks that set off in the noontime blaze from Camp Rashid in Baghdad for the south, the broiling heat and choking humidity increasing the farther they advanced toward the bottom of the country, the farther they penetrated into the desert, the deeper they plunged into the war.

  Ibrahim and Ahmad passed the time by exchanging stories of what they had accomplished and experienced during the last two years. Because the road was long, they drew out the details and repeated them until their tales brought them a confidence and a closeness, a union of their identities and spirits, forged in an atmosphere of unreserved brotherly affection.

  Only the racket coming from the younger soldiers riding with them in the back of the truck interrupted their side-by-side whispering. One of the men would start to sing and the others would join in, either singing or clapping. Then one or more would volunteer to dance in the middle. Or they would exchange the latest jokes—sexual or irreverent—and they would all burst out in hysterical laughter. Indeed, all their movements and tones of voice betrayed this same hysteria, though no one alluded to the war, politics, or the fate awaiting them.

  If they passed a village and saw a young peasant woman, they rained upon her whistles, catcalls, and flirtatious remarks that were more frightening than flattering. It would end with some of them making crudely explicit comments as they pulled away and she receded into the distance, perhaps muttering that they could go to hell. But if it was an old woman they encountered, or a group of old women, the soldiers would raise their voices together with some snippet from a familiar military hymn or popular song from the radio, twirling their rifles in the air in place of the traditional dancing staff. The poor old woman would raise her arms to the sky and beseech the Lord to preserve these poor young men. Perhaps she would also cry, for certainly she would be a mother or grandmother, like so many of the brokenhearted, wearing black in mourning for one or more lost sons. She would recede farther and farther into the distance, a black spot against a horizon of black earth, until she was swallowed up by the swirling dust or a desert mirage.

  Over the months of the occupation, their unit’s home was the desert, near the Saudi border. This annoyed the youngest soldiers because they had heard about the army divisions in the cities enjoying the luxuries of electricity, air conditioning, water, plentiful food, and plunder. They heard about officers and soldiers getting rich by stealing gold, jewelry, cars, appliances, furniture, and whatever they wanted from markets, government buildings, and private houses. Moreover, their loved ones visited them and returned home with whatever they could carry.

  Their unit, on the other hand, had only the burning sun and the sand, not to mention a face-off against the amassed armies of the world, against a scarcity of water, the burning of hot winds, and a desolate horizon. They had to dig trenches for themselves and sow the dunes with land mines whose locations they would forget the next day on account of terrain that seldom showed any distinguishing features. This went on until Ahmad al-Najafi grew upset in Ibrahim’s presence after hearing about others getting rich off plunder, given that he had been supporting his family through his labor as a mechanic in an old workshop in Najaf’s industrial district. “How will I feed all these mouths now?!” he asked.

  Ibrahim replied, “I see it as a sign of God’s favor upon us that He did not send us to the cities to tempt us to feed our families through ungodly theft as He did those others.”

  Ahmad kicked his heel into the side of the sand dune they were sitting on that e
vening and said in frustration, “The war has stolen my life, so why shouldn’t I steal from it?”

  Ibrahim wrapped his arm around the shoulder of his companion to comfort him and said, “Everything is fate and decree. Who knows what will work out better or worse in the end? For as the Qur’an says, ‘Maybe you hate something, and it is the best for you, and you love something that is worse—God knows, and you do not.’”

  Ahmad wasn’t fully satisfied with Ibrahim’s words, and he threw himself back on the cold evening sand, letting out a hot, weary sigh as he said, “I’m sad this time, Ibrahim. Sa-a-ad. There’s a hollow feeling in my chest. Maybe it’s anxiety. Maybe it’s fear. I don’t know exactly, but my heart hurts and it knows there’s worse to come.”

  Later, after the defeat and the chaotic, disastrous retreat, Ibrahim remembered this speech of Ahmad, and he said to himself, “Dear God above! There really are people whose pure hearts warn them of their fate, who sense when their end is nigh.” He wept then. He would weep many bitter tears for that memory, one that would affect his life and even the nature of his death.

  Aircraft began their incessant bombing, day and night. The sand rose like surging fountains, with smoke billowing darkly above their heads. One traditional method of camouflage they used was to build counterfeit artillery pieces, tanks, and other conspicuous installations out of tin or cardboard. Meanwhile, they smeared the real things with mud and hid them in dugouts between the sand dunes, in ditches, and under brambles. They used motorcycles, camels, and carrier pigeons to transmit their messages since radio signals would be intercepted, given that the adversary, composed of the armed forces of nearly thirty nations, had the most modern technology as well as the most highly developed training and weaponry. Though at the end of the day, no matter how advanced the weapons deployed, the main goal of war remains the same: for one side to kill the other.

  On February 24, 1991, the allied forces began their land assault, setting off from the sands of Saudi Arabia. The desert, which had been abandoned for centuries, was transformed into a sea of fire and iron. The scene was nothing short of apocalyptic, revealing the power of this small creature, man, to change the face of the natural world in a shocking and awe-inspiring way.

  Throughout eight years of war against Iran, Ibrahim and Ahmad had never seen a battle like this. The skies rained down hell, the earth vomited it back up, and near Al-Jahra, northwest of Kuwait City, the simple Iraqi soldiers who resisted fought in despair and died. Thousands of others abandoned the trenches waving every white thing in their possession—handkerchiefs, turbans, papers, plates, underwear—as a sign of surrender. Injured soldiers cried for help as the sand entered their wounds and filled their screaming mouths. As soon as the roaring machines that sprang out of the shimmering desert arrived at the front line, they began to cut the white flags down with bullets and crush the bodies of the wounded beneath tires and tracks.

  When Ibrahim and Ahmad saw what was happening, they slipped away along a shallow valley between the dunes toward the rear bunkers, which they found transformed by the bombs into pits filled with shredded bodies, limbs scattered in every direction. They came across the motorcycle of one of the letter carriers, whose disemboweled corpse lay nearby with the bag still hanging round his neck. They got on and followed animal trails and the small paths combed into the sand dunes by the wind. When they turned to look back, they could see iron creatures plowing through the trenches and burying dozens of Iraqi soldiers alive. Their cries for mercy rose even above the roar of the iron and the sound of hidden mines exploding in the sand.

  Every other unit they came upon in the rearguard was retreating in chaos without waiting for official orders to fall back, which were not announced until the next day. After some indeterminate time and distance, the motorcycle ran out of fuel. They got off and abandoned it, along with their rifles and ammunition belts. Content to keep only their pistols and water canteens, they picked a direction and began running to get away however they might.

  They traveled as far as they could that night. During the day, they rested or continued walking in the shade of foothills and thorny shrubs, or they dug into the sand to hide. They didn’t know exactly how much time had passed. Perhaps two days and two nights? But at dawn they spied the international highway connecting Kuwait and Basra. It looked like a gypsy’s clothesline, swarming with long lines of cars, military vehicles, various kinds of carts, and thousands of people, both soldiers and civilians, everyone fleeing as fast as possible. Some had driven their vehicles off the road in order to get around the others. There were some whose cars had broken down and were negotiating however they could with the closest car, cart, or any other object that was moving down the road and had room for them, room for hope. There were those who had met their end and those who waited.

  This column of humanity and machinery was so long that Ibrahim and Ahmad couldn’t make out its beginning or its end. They intended to catch a ride with someone or hang on to the side of any vehicle that offered itself, but before they got there, formations of airplanes—among which they recognized the giant American bomber, the B-52—arrived and began raining fire upon the travelers.

  What they saw was a true hell in all its horrors. In their entire lives, they had never seen, nor would they ever see again, an event as terrifying as this, a madness incarnate. Severed body parts and scraps of metal were scattered amid tongues of flame and the thunder of explosions. The road was transmogrified into an explosion of fire, smoke, limbs, blood, destruction, ashes, death. It was a highway of death, on which and around which everything that moved was ground together in flames.

  They stayed where they were, stretched flat on the ground, looking down at this terror and scarcely believing what they saw. Ahmad said, “It’s a depravity for them to kill people as they retreat and surrender!”

  Ibrahim said, “It was depravity to invade our brothers and our neighbors.”

  Ahmad said, “You know we aren’t the ones who did that, and that anyone who refused was sentenced to death.”

  The road became a line of flame stretching through an empty, desolate land. Ibrahim and Ahmad kept saying it was the end of the world. Only a few people escaped: those who were some distance off the road, those whom the bombs missed, or those whom chance spared.

  Whenever the air attacks lessened as the planes came and went, the two of them continued toward Iraq, parallel to the road but some distance away. At nightfall when the bombing ceased, they were getting closer to Iraq and found thousands of corpses, burned and charred, on both sides of the road. They searched in the darkness for water and something to eat and found a little without too much trouble. They encountered many others doing the same thing, and they banded together to continue the journey. Other groups joined as well, but there was no talking apart from restrained murmurs and curses. Some wanted to cry, while others wanted to save the wounded. Some were trying to start the vehicles that hadn’t been too badly damaged. When the throng swelled into a crowd, they knew they had reached the border crossing of Safwan. Ibrahim and Ahmad traded their pistols for cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. After a wait and without remembering exactly how, they crossed the border into Iraq.

  But the hell of the bombardment continued over the heads of those retreating even on the road inside Iraqi territory. They were traveling in the direction of Basra when a plane rained death upon them. Ibrahim and Ahmad threw themselves to the ground along with everyone else, and Ibrahim saw Ahmad about fifty yards to his right falling and crying out with a bleeding hole in his belly. It was only a fleeting glance before what seemed like a mine exploded underneath him. Ibrahim lost consciousness even before knowing how he was injured, as though the bombs had gone off inside his head. He was only aware of the color yellow, a color that burned in his head until it turned to black and he was melting like a drop of butter on the hot sand. His body seemed to fade ever further into the distance, or else it was seeping into the sand or the sea, into the smoke or nonexistence. He thought he wa
s dying, and he focused what remained of his mental faculties on the face of his daughter and the voice of his father.

  When Ibrahim opened his eyes, he felt a violent thirst. His body was in a pile of other dead bodies, as though the land were no longer big enough to contain them all. He raised his head and looked to the left. Not far away, two dogs were eating a human body. He swung his gaze the other way. Another dog with the head and face of a human was coming toward him. He tried to get up but couldn’t. One of his arms had fallen asleep underneath him. The dog with the human face calmly approached him among the corpses, and the monstrosity of the sight terrified him. When the dog turned away, Ibrahim realized it did not have human features, but rather it was carrying someone’s severed head in its jaws, the face turned forward. The dog carried the head away. Ibrahim turned to the right and began calling, “Ahmad! Ahmad! Where are you, Ahmad?” He didn’t know whether the sound could be heard or whether the cry choked up within him.

  Away at a distance, behind the two snapping dogs, he spied three youths riding on donkeys. They dismounted and bent down, searching among the corpses before returning to their mounts. They are real people, he said to himself. No, they are angels. He called out at the top of his voice, not knowing whether anyone could hear him. He couldn’t feel his legs: another corpse was on top of them, or else they were buried in the earth or gone altogether. A nightmarish weight crouched upon his chest, suffocating him with a paralyzing weakness. But he kept calling to Ahmad and the three boys. He was still screaming “Ahmad!” when he lost consciousness a second time.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Journey of a Single Step

  Ibrahim opened his eyes and found himself in a strange bed, in a strange house. He was a stranger in a strange land, a strange world. A woman’s face was looking down into his own. She reached her hand out to his forehead and smiled gently. He felt as though she were his mother, with the obvious difference that she could see and wasn’t blind, given that she was staring directly into his eyes.