He shaved and took out his one suit, which, ever since his wedding day, he had reserved for use on important occasions—he had only worn it two or three times. Qisma ironed the suit and sprayed it with cologne, she polished his shoes until they shone, she cleaned his prosthetic foot, and she made several adjustments to his outfit. As his wife watched, Ibrahim kept reviewing with Qisma the answers he would give to the different questions they were likely to ask.
He didn’t expect, however, that they would ask him nothing at all, and that he would begin his work the very first day. After passing through numerous military and civilian checkpoints and through various rooms to be searched, photographed, fingerprinted, and examined medically, he arrived in a spacious hall, fine in all its details, where he was made to sit with perhaps fifty others, men and women of different ages. A colonel entered the room, surrounded by a group of military men.
The colonel, with his thick mustache and stern features, addressed them: “We know all about each of you, maybe even more than you know about yourselves. That’s why we chose you from the thousands of applicants who write to us every day. That means you are the elite, devoted to the leader, the party, the revolution, and the country. Your records are clean and honorable, giving evidence of your loyalty, and most of you were heroes in the days of the war. Therefore, you are worthy of trust. What is expected of you is that you continue in this devotion, and that you assume a position of responsibility.”
This laudatory tone of voice changed abruptly to one more severe and threatening: “You will work in private places that demand absolute secrecy and discretion. So it is incumbent upon you that you follow this principle: ‘See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing.’ If anyone among you so much as breathes a word of his work outside this place, we will cut out his tongue. The cook who breaks a plate? We’ll break his head. The gardener who cuts off a rose? We’ll cut off his head. The cleaner who falls short in his cleaning? We’ll make him fall short in his life.”
It was a long address, bristling with commands, threats, and promises. He kept telling them that they knew everything, that there were cameras everywhere, watching their every movement, catching even a black ant on a dark rock during an even darker night. Everyone had to stick to the job he was assigned and follow orders blindly, without poking his nose into what didn’t concern him. Things here ran more precisely than the most precise of clocks, and whoever disturbed this precision even in a small way: woe unto him!
Afterward, they were transported in cars with windows so tinted it was impossible to see out, arriving at some place they estimated to be a little less than an hour away. Never in his life had Ibrahim ridden in a car—or any other vehicle—that was so clean, comfortable, and fast, gliding along like a boat on a river. When they got out, they found themselves under large open roofs like those found in army training camps. But these were painted, cleaner, crowded with fancy cars and guarded by soldiers.
Nearby was a wall that stretched off to no apparent end and rose approximately thirty feet. They were led to a giant black gate in the wall. There was a small door set into the iron gate, also black, wide enough to admit one person at a time. Lining up behind a soldier, they went through the small door—the large gate remained closed—into a passage with several metal detectors that led to a large hall. On both sides of the hall were a vast number of doors, and there was a desk at one end, behind which sat a smartly dressed soldier. He asked each of them their name and then gave them their individual ID cards and badges, together with a key with a numbered keychain.
He said to them, “From this moment on, each one of you must remember his number.”
Ibrahim looked at the key and read his number: 42. He repeated it over and over to himself until he had memorized it.
The soldier added, “You each have a room here, corresponding to your number. In that room, you’ll find a uniform and the tools appropriate for your jobs. That’s where you’ll change clothes when you arrive and before you leave. Understood?”
They nodded their heads, and a few of them murmured, “Yes, sir.”
Upon hearing that, the soldier said, “You address everyone here with ‘comrade,’ not with ‘sir.’ Except the officers, and yes, you say ‘sir’ to them. Understood?”
This time, they all responded in a loud voice, “Yes, comrade!”
He said, “Now go. Find the number for your room, get ready, and wait until someone comes to show you your work. Understood?”
Ibrahim found room 42 on the right, nearly in the middle of the hall. He opened the door and went inside. He closed the door behind him and began looking around. It was a small room with a chair, a mirror, a clothes stand, and a wardrobe with two doors. Inside the wardrobe he found three blue work uniforms and three pairs of shoes, all the same size and style. There was a box of yellow latex gloves, a small trowel, a small scythe, several sickles (called makzoom in their dialect) of various sizes and shapes for cutting grass and plants, a box of bags, three hats, and other things he couldn’t identify since he had never before seen their like.
He began taking off his clothes, which he hung on the hooks of the clothes stand. At that moment, he remembered what he heard about cameras watching everything, and that even if you didn’t see a camera in the room, it might be hidden behind a hole the size of an ant’s ass, as someone had put it. So he tried to preserve his modesty and resolved never to forget the cameras even for a moment, and to act cautiously, with the knowledge that someone was watching him at all times.
He put on one of the uniforms and saw it was exactly his size. The shoes and the hat too. He looked in the mirror and saw that he looked very sharp. Then he sat down and waited, listening to the nervous beating of his heart.
After a while, someone knocked on the door and pushed it open before Ibrahim even had a chance to say anything. Ibrahim found himself standing before a young man who filled the entire doorframe. He was extremely handsome and wore an impeccable olive-colored military uniform without any rank indicated on the shoulder or arm. Ibrahim blinked his eyes rapidly as his whole body tensed up. The young man said, “Finished? Are you ready?”
Ibrahim had indeed finished adjusting his uniform, but before he could reply, the young man entered and pulled out a basket from under the chair. He began rummaging in the drawer as he went on talking: “Your job is to be a gardener, and more precisely, to take care of a rose garden. Each day, get your basket ready with a pair of gloves, a scythe, shears, a garbage bag . . .” He went on naming the things as he took them out and tossed them into the basket. When he had finished, he stood up and said, “At six in the evening, when the day is done, put everything back where you found it, change your clothes, and leave. You’ll find the car that takes you back to the Alawite Garage in the center of Baghdad. Ookey? You get me? Now come on.”
Ibrahim followed him, carrying the basket, and they left the hall through a different side door. When he got outside, what Ibrahim saw would never have occurred to him as possible except as a vision of heaven.
It was a dream made real. Or else it actually was a dream. A wide-open space with no boundaries in sight, covered with gardens, fountains, palaces, and statues. Everything was arranged with precise care: the paths among the greenery, the avenues of trees, the hills, the ponds, the arrangement of the buildings, the colors. Even the light and the air seemed complicit in this stunning feat of landscaping.
The young man’s voice startled him from his dumbstruck reverie, calling, “Hey, come on, Uncle Ibrahim! Come and take a ride with me!”
There was a small open cart nearby with two seats and a cargo bed in the back. The young man took the basket from Ibrahim and pointed at the seat next to him. Then he began driving the vehicle, which glided away as though skating on ice, making no sound at all as it carried them along the clean paved paths laid out around the flower beds and the ponds.
Every time they went past a fountain, Ibrahim smelled a different perfume in the air. When the young man saw Ibrahim’s wide
eyes and heard him sniffing at the air breathlessly in an attempt to determine what was going on, he explained, “The water in these fountains is mixed with perfume, half and half. Each fountain has its own perfume, mostly French. Sorry, what do people call you—Father of . . . ?”
“Qisma.”
“In that case, welcome, Abu Qisma! Welcome, uncle, to the President’s gardens! Listen. Every day I’ll bring you to your job. It’s my responsibility to supervise you, and, God willing, everything will be perfect. You get me? It’s obvious you’re a good man. I had a good feeling about you the moment I saw you. My name is Sa’ad.”
Sa’ad brought him to what would be his place of work. It was a small, round house with mud walls, architecturally striking and beautifully made. The house stood on a circular platform in the middle of a lake and was connected to the shore by a narrow bridge about two hundred feet long. The balconies, doors, and shutters of the house were all made of wood and decorated with intricate carvings. A garden ten feet wide encircled the house, filled only with roses. Every type of rose you could imagine, precisely arranged, and absolutely stunning in their colors and size. There were white chairs, and a white metal fence separated the garden from the water, about three feet below. The water was so clear and blue that it seemed to glow. Plants, moss, fish, turtles, crocodiles, and hundreds of other creatures were easily visible in its depths. There were also various kinds of ducks, swimming calmly in groups around wooden houses built especially for them in the middle of the water, not far from the house on the island. On the far side of the lake were towering trees planted close together.
Ibrahim’s main task was to care for these roses. He had to water them, keep them clean and orderly, watch for any that fell over or were broken by the wind, and keep an eye out for dust and any leaves that fell off. “You also have to keep turning the house to follow the sun, so that it’s always shining down on the main entrance. You get me?”
Ibrahim stood there at a loss, staring blankly into the face of young Sa’ad. How could he possibly do that? “Excuse me—what? How?”
Sa’ad laughed. “Oh, don’t worry! Listen. You seem to think you have to move the house around with your bare hands. Not at all! Come with me.”
Sa’ad, still laughing, led him to a panel of buttons in a corner of the house and explained how to use it. “Listen. You just push this one, or this one, or this one, and the house turns automatically. Look.”
The house started to turn, with the two of them standing on the edge of its marble floor. The rose garden and the chairs turned with them. Sa’ad added, “It’s mounted on a circular iron base, which is the thing that moves. Look over there at the fence on the edge of the island.”
And indeed, Ibrahim noticed that the entire circle was moving, with only the fence staying fixed in place.
“It’s possible to move just the rose garden or just the house in the middle. There are circles inside the circle—you get me? His Excellency the President sits here, for example, and they move the garden in front of him however he likes. Your job includes cleaning the outside of the house, the chairs, and the rails of the fence. Everything here you can see and touch—it’s your job to look after it, keep it clean, keep it all in order. As for inside the house, that’s not your concern. That’s someone else’s job. And I, of course, will come by every hour and a half or so. Ookey?”
When the young man left, Ibrahim stood there a long time, motionless, dumbstruck. It was enough just to take in the details of this place where he found himself, the breathtaking gardens spreading around him on the far shore: gardens and palaces and boats anchored across the lake; the chirping and warbling of birds, birds as diverse and magical as the flowers. He walked around the island looking for something to do, such as cleaning the rails of the fence. But everything was already clean and orderly, and there was nothing left to be done. Little by little, he began to notice some bits of straw or some dirt, trifling things like that. Later on, he realized that noticing such things was the key to keeping this place immaculate.
When that day came to an end, Ibrahim felt as though he had lived an entire lifetime, one completely different from his own. The day had seemed very long, longer even than those fear-laden days during the war when they would lie in wait to make an ambush. Unending surprise at what he saw, heard, and smelled was his predominant impression from this life in a day. When he returned to the din of the city, and from the city to his house, he remained silent. The wonder and strangeness of it all, his inability to comprehend it or articulate the experience, weighed heavily upon him and made him feel that he had stepped out of time and space and existed as a creature from somewhere else, untethered from the reality of this world and even from his own body. But once more, Ibrahim’s habit of submission and fateful acceptance, so deeply rooted in his soul, carried him through.
As the days passed, he recovered his sense of reality, and little by little he was able to work things out and bring some sort of mental order to the circumstances he suddenly found himself in. He was able to adapt to this system and his new way of life. What was particularly helpful in that process was the ease that young Sa’ad felt with him, and how Sa’ad came to spend most of his day chatting with Ibrahim, punctuating every other sentence with one of his phrases: “Listen!” or “You get me?” or an “Ookey?” spoken in English.
Sa’ad had found in Ibrahim a good, simple, trustworthy person to whom he could confide all the ideas and stories that crowded his mind. So he talked to Ibrahim about his humble family, which consisted of himself, one sister, and his widowed mother. He told Ibrahim about how he had had to leave school and work in clubs and dance halls as a lowly waiter, rising by degrees to become the most competent expert, able to taste, distinguish, and serve various kinds of beverages, no matter what the setting or where the drink was from. After developing his knowledge through so much study and practice that he almost drove himself crazy, he became so good that he only needed to smell any open bottle to determine the type of drink it was, its provenance, the alcohol content, and what it was made of. Indeed, most of the time he was even able to specify the exact year of the vintage.
Baghdad’s most famous nightclubs and luxury hotels began competing to employ him. His reputation spread until the most prominent businessmen, the elites, and government officials all knew him. In the end, they brought him in to assume responsibility for the drinks of the President himself. The government sent him to London to take a month-long intensive course. He studied under eminent waiters, some of whom had worked in the palaces of the Queen of Britain and the kings and queens of Sweden and Spain. Sa’ad’s expertise grew all the more, and he performed better than even the best-known experts due to his specialized knowledge of drinks native to the Orient.
Sa’ad would sometimes tell Ibrahim about that month when he had lived like a king in London, but most of the time he would talk about his experiences in Iraq, moving between the President’s palaces, working at the bars and serving the President’s guests, choosing which special drinks to import for the President, as well as which occasions were most appropriate for each, depending on the season, the meal, the mood, and various other factors.
What prompted Sa’ad to speak was bitterness. They had replaced him with someone else, a Russian with many degrees and certificates, even one in medicine, who also had a team of assistants. Whereas formerly Sa’ad was always traveling with the President in his planes and his boats, always receiving presents and money, and constantly enjoying surprises that filled his youthful soul with delight, he was now demoted to a supporting role and set to work supervising the gardens. His new job brought virtually no surprises. So he filled his time by reliving memories of his former life, what he had known and still knew, and found compensation for his loss in the wide eyes and baffled expressions of this simple peasant, Ibrahim. So Sa’ad spent most of his time each day with Ibrahim, talking about things he had seen or heard about. He sometimes took Ibrahim on his rounds through the gardens, far beyond hi
s station at the house with mud walls. As Ibrahim’s surprise and wonder increased with everything he saw and heard, so grew Sa’ad’s eagerness to tell him more.
CHAPTER 17
Stories of the People’s Palaces
Sa’ad’s eyes blinked rapidly, and his whole body bristled with excitement. “Listen, brother!” he said. “I even worked in the yakht.”
When he saw Ibrahim’s confused and inquiring look, he realized that Ibrahim didn’t know the meaning of the word yakht. “Look—it means a boat for the sea, big as an oil tanker. It’s in the port of Umm Qasr, and it’s called the Victor. Yes, even the yacht has a name. It’s more than three hundred feet long, and I’ve heard that it cost fifty million dollars. Every window is bulletproof glass. It has a helicopter pad, a swimming pool, a theater, a bar, a garden, a doctor’s clinic, and the best electronic equipment in the world. Hundreds of specially trained soldiers from the Republican Guard protect it. It was made in Finland to match the tastes of His Excellency the President. The wood is of the highest quality, the furniture is inlaid with gold and silver, and the hall in the center can hold more than two hundred people.
“When the President goes down there in a small plane, or one of his sons or his guests, the entire harbor, both water and sky, is transformed into a hive of activity, and you see intensive patrols by security forces in every direction. Speedboats crisscrossing the water as though stung by a bee! You get me?
“Well, as for the rooms, there are five magnificent bedrooms reserved for the President and his family. And the restaurant on this yacht is kept stocked with the very best in food and beverages. I was the one who picked out the beverages. There’s a gymnasium too, you know. Even the corridors—leading to all those rooms, halls, upper decks, and the balconies overlooking the water and the horizon—are beautiful. They have carpets spread everywhere, delicately woven by hand, thread by thread, and the walls are covered with paintings and other decorations. Precious objects hang from the ceilings, each one a masterpiece in its own right. I remember a gold one made to look like the World Cup trophy.
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