The President's Gardens

by Muhsin al-Ramli

  He led Ibrahim through the building, which resembled the previous one in its design. Coming out the other side, they entered spacious gardens and vast open spaces. There was a cart like the one in which Sa’ad used to drive him around.

  “I’ll teach you how to drive it yourself. It’s very easy.”

  They got in, and the officer began explaining how it worked: “You press this button to turn it on, then you press this pedal with your foot, and it goes automatically. There’s nothing for you to do besides guide it with the steering wheel. Here, you try it. Now I’ll show you the way. That’s easy too. Do you see that hill? That mountain, I mean? Just go toward it, following any of the paths you like.”

  There were countless intersecting paths winding among fountains, gardens, towering trees, canals, small lakes, and arched bridges. The closer one came to the high hill, the taller the trees became. The top of the hill—or “the mountain”—was covered with trees, and he saw small, man-made waterfalls tumbling down it. At the very top was a small palace with wide balconies looking out in every direction, projecting its power to each horizon. Between the forests surrounding the hill were wide-open spaces where nothing had been planted. In some of them, Ibrahim saw groups of donkeys, camels, and dogs wandering around. Two people had brought them straw from somewhere on a cart that resembled his own.

  The officer guided Ibrahim to a building with two rooms, a small guardhouse, and told him, “There’s no key. You just press here and the door opens for you.”

  Ibrahim found himself in a narrow chamber with a chair and a rug. There was a refrigerator and a large wardrobe against one wall and shelves with flashlights and toolboxes on the other. As for the back wall facing the door, it was empty apart from a large photograph of the President laughing. There was one additional door that led to the bathroom.

  “This is where you’ll be working. Here you’ll find the clothes you need, and here in these boxes are your tools. If you need anything else, just let us know.”

  Ibrahim noticed that his work equipment was somewhat different from what he had had before. They appeared to be the tools of a real farmer and not a gardener. He found two large shiny shovels with sharp edges, a box filled with new pairs of gloves still in their bags, a heavy plowing hoe, a pickax, and other tools for excavating. There was also a standard wheelbarrow in the corner.

  The officer said to him, “Good. You’ll come here every day, put on the work clothes, and wait. If someone comes, he’ll tell you what you have to do, and if no one comes, you stay here until the end of your shift and then you leave. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Ibrahim got back home, he reviewed everything the officer had told him and taught him. He went over it all several times and tested himself on how to drive the cart, the paths he had taken, where the small house was, the button that opened the door. He also tried to guess the nature of his new work. Without a doubt, it was Sa’ad who had recommended him to his superiors. Did they now intend to treat him like a real farmer with a real shovel and not just a gardener who spent his day brushing dirt off flowers he didn’t even know the names of? Would caring for those donkeys, camels, and dogs be part of his work, like the two men he had seen? In a way, he felt that his new job might suit him better, for it seemed solitary and free from any concrete responsibilities. On top of that, the fact that it took place late at night meant he was a peripheral figure, one who would be kept away from the eyes of direct supervisors, with no expectation that the President or anyone else might visit.

  For all he reassured himself, Ibrahim’s heart didn’t cease to contract whenever he left for work. The feeling got worse with each passing day. Indeed, his breath nearly failed him when he first realized—and then felt with his hands—the true purpose of his new job.

  On the first night, around three in the morning, a military ambulance stopped in front of the door of his guardhouse. Two soldiers got out and greeted him. Then they dragged two corpses out of the back door of the ambulance and threw them on the ground.

  They said to him, “You’re new? Fine. It’s up to you to bury these bodies in any spot among the open spaces found here, in the areas between the trees. It’s not important how you bury them—vertically, horizontally, standing up, or at any depth whatsoever. The important thing is that you bury them without leaving any visible trace on the ground. Meaning you smooth out the surface however it was, or you make it like it is here, as you see it now—there are bodies buried right here. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Say ‘comrade.’ You only say ‘sir’ to the officers.”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  Then they left.

  Ibrahim’s life was changed utterly. His new existence was heavier, sadder, and darker, and not just because the night became his work day and the daytime was his night to sleep. If Ibrahim had originally been a man of few words, he was now entirely mute for fear that uttering even a single word might hint in some small way at the nature of his work and what he saw, heard, and thought there. He began avoiding people’s gazes so that no one could read anything in his eyes or see this shame he felt.

  Ibrahim rarely saw Qisma now, due to the difference in their working hours. He avoided getting to know anyone new and sought to evade every encounter. If by chance he ran into a neighbor in the street, or had no choice but to talk with a shopkeeper, he rarely uttered a full greeting or responded clearly. His words were obscure mutterings that hinted at—rather than expressed—a meaning. Ibrahim became more isolated, more introspective, and more solitary. By not seeing others, even as hardly anyone ever saw him, he sank further inside himself with each new corpse he put in the ground. It was as if he were digging his own grave, a grave without any relief or respite, where he saw nothing besides darkness and confusion.

  In the first few days of his work—or rather, the first nights—the horror of being alone with these bloody corpses in the shadows of thick, towering forests made him shiver. But with the passage of time, he got used to it. His heart resumed its regular rhythm, the trembling of his arms and his legs faded, and he started carrying the corpses like any other sack. He would put them in the wheelbarrow and push them around, looking for a place to bury them. He no longer feared to look in the faces of the slain, no matter how disfigured, and by reading those faces, to learn how they were killed. In his world, these nighttime bodies regained their dominant essence of humanity, and he sometimes felt he was one of them.

  Even the driver who picked him up at his house was silent like him, and they exchanged no words beyond a greeting. They were usually content with a nod of the head, a glance, or nothing at all. It seemed that this man too had seen or lived through things he didn’t want to talk about. Like an old married couple, old friends, or prisoners sharing a cell who had exhausted their supply of words, they were equally content not to trouble one another. They didn’t even ask each other’s names. It was a rare and harmonious relationship.

  It was extremely uncommon that a night would pass without a corpse. The number would range from one a night to up to ten on occasion. He learned that the corpses killed by bullets belonged to soldiers, while the ones that were hanged were civilians. This was the general rule, though exceptions to it became the more fundamental rule. The one thing the corpses all shared was evidence of torture before the spirit left the body. All of them had been subjected to cruel—sometimes inventive—methods of torture. He forced himself to guess these more innovative methods once he had become familiar with the standard repertoire, which included whipping, beating, piercing, electric shocks, cigarette burns, and so on.

  As far as was possible, Ibrahim would try to restore dignity to the torn disarray of the bodies and close their open eyes. How often he read expressions in those eyes! It was almost as though he could hear them speak. Some were frozen in the last moment of confusion, watching in terror as the killer approached for the final blow. Some seemed to be holding back words, while the longing of others burst forth
: desire for parents, for children, or even for an opportunity to speak, for a mouthful of water or a breath of air. Some of the faces seemed happy, betraying a remarkable calm that Ibrahim seldom found in the faces of the living. Perhaps because their final thoughts were that at last the torture had come to an end.

  He saw corpses with slit throats and others pierced with bullets like a sieve. Their oozing blood would soak him when he picked them up. He found no more than one bullet hole in the head or heart of some corpses. The holes in others were made by an electric drill, nails, or by the point of a sword. He saw all manner of burns, from cigarettes or electrical shocks, and bodies that had been impaled on a stake. Some of them had genitals cut off, fingernails pulled out, tongues removed, ears clipped, noses mutilated, fingers broken, scalps swollen where tufts of hair had been ripped out, eyes gouged out, skin flayed in strips, or lines scored with razor blades. Others had been skinned alive.

  Ibrahim began trying to guess the pretext for each execution, based on the method of torture employed. Whoever’s tongue was cut out must have uttered something the government didn’t like. Whoever’s ears were cut off may have heard something against the government without making a denunciation. Whoever’s genitals were removed . . . maybe it was something to do with honor or a breach of it, either in word or deed, or in revenge for an insult, or a criticism of someone’s courage or manliness, or perhaps in the course of an interrogation. Whoever’s fingers were broken or whose hand was missing may have stolen something or written something. But why had some of them died under the rending teeth of beasts of prey—lions, tigers, crocodiles, or even dogs? The faces of these corpses preserved a terror that was impossible to describe.

  Ibrahim’s life went on like this, as though he lived in a different world, or even on a different planet altogether: isolated and savage, nothing to see besides darkness and death, human flesh and blood. He no longer counted the days as they went by, nor did he calculate when his holidays would arrive or how his savings were piling up. One night, he thought he would leave this work. Anything would be better than this, even begging on the streets of the capital, pleading for the charity of others. But they wouldn’t let him leave this job of his own volition. They would surely kill him to cover their tracks and to erase the memory of these corpses by eliminating any witnesses.

  Ibrahim couldn’t even find within himself the courage to express this desire to them, they who measured everything with grandiose words he didn’t understand. Words like treachery, honor, dissent, nobility, loyalty, weakness, courage, power, fealty, transgression, and so on: big words connected to a homeland that was defined by the President. The definitions and connotations of these words, at least as they understood them, escaped Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s problem was that he was never sick, so it was impossible to fake an illness because they would investigate and find him out, prosecuting him for dissent or treachery or conspiring against the homeland.

  But he began to find a certain equilibrium in the idea that he was performing an important role, indeed a humanitarian one. It might not be directed toward the living, but it was nevertheless a service to the dead. To the greatest extent possible, he conducted burials that befitted these corpses. He organized their remains and laid them out with the dignity owed to a deceased human being. In his heart, he recited the Qur’an over them, along with simpler words of his own; the final recompense that must be offered to a human being, regardless of how he had lived his life, or the reason and manner of his death.

  When he had been thrown into the wars, it had hurt him badly to see bodies—even those of enemies—abandoned on the battlefields, bloated, disintegrating out in the open at the mercy of the elements. He used to think of them, and also of their families, who waited and received no answer beyond the word “lost,” and suffered agonies of hope as everything connected to “the lost” was put on hold. It pained him to see human corpses mangled by the teeth of wolves, dogs, fish, vultures, and other beasts of the field, the sky, and the deep.

  In this land too, in these broad yet secret expanses within the city, he would sometimes discover earlier corpses thrown in however which way by those who had buried them—head down, lying on their stomachs, sitting or rolled up, their limbs wrapped around them or splayed out. Whoever held this position before him must have dug any kind of hole and not cared how he threw in the bodies before piling some earth on top of them. Ibrahim would rebury these corpses, even if was just their bones, in a proper manner, laying them out on their backs or their sides, straightened out, with their heads on a pile of earth for a pillow. He felt as though they sighed with relief, and he would hear them thank him. Then Ibrahim would feel a gentle sense of relief himself.

  Ibrahim was still consumed by guilt over his inability to do anything for the body of his friend Ahmad al-Najafi. This was therefore an opportunity to ease the pangs of a conscience that still haunted him. Faced with all this suffering and wanting another taste of that blessed sense of relief, Ibrahim came up with the idea of making a record of all the unknown corpses. He would name them, provide a description, and specify their resting place so they wouldn’t remain simply “lost” or “missing,” like the hundreds he had seen and the thousands he had heard about in the wars and the mass graves.

  He remembered the big blue notebook he had bought to write letters to his wife. As soon as he got home, he took it out and shut himself up in his room, sprawled out on the bed. He began recalling all the corpses he had buried since the beginning, trying to specify the places and dates of their burial. He ran through his memory of the days, trying to place each corpse in its own time. He was content to record the most salient feature of the body: an approximate age, for example, or certain distinguishing marks, like a mole on the cheek, the size of the nose, the shape of the ears, a tattoo on the arm, whether they were bald or going gray, how many feet tall they were, how big were the feet themselves, whether the toes were crooked and twisted. And if he didn’t find anything in particular, he described their clothing, for most of the slain came to him in their own clothes.

  He drew maps of those open spaces, specifying locations by how far away they were, and in which direction, from that man-made presidential hill. He indicated the exact burial site of each corpse. Many had names he recognized, for they included ministers, officials, soldiers, and celebrities he knew from television. He had hoped to find the body of the musician Nabil among them, but he never saw it. Perhaps they took it somewhere else, or maybe they left it as food for the crocodiles brought from Africa, and for the fish and the fat water vipers.

  The notebook was so secret that Ibrahim would hide it inside the house, leaving clues to remind himself where it was. He bought more notebooks, and over time, he was forced to buy many of them. Their covers were of different colors, and he numbered those of the same color in a series. He created a complete world for himself, set apart from the outside world, and abandoned himself within it. The more he was engaged in it, the less time he had for thinking, reflecting, and remembering, which he found even more exhausting.

  Later on, as a way to deal with corpses that were so disfigured that there was no particular distinguishing mark to be found, he began taking something small from each, such as a shirt button, a watch, a ring, or a scrap of fabric from their trousers or shirt. Sometimes even a piece of the body itself: a dangling fingernail or a lock of hair plucked out along with a bit of the scalp. He put these things into small bags with numbered slips that corresponded to numbers in the notebooks, where he recorded the usual details—the date and place of burial, a description of the corpse, its clothes, and what torture it had been subjected to. Then he organized these bits and pieces into shoeboxes or any other cardboard boxes that came with the things he bought. Most helpful of all were the documents he occasionally found in their pockets—some kind of ID card or a doctor’s prescription, a tax receipt, or a water or electricity bill—for these provided him with all the necessary information apart from the date and place of burial.

/>   CHAPTER 23

  Nisma’s Wedding

  Ibrahim’s absorption in this self-created world, on the margins of the world of the living and amid the debris of human cruelty, gradually took him away from the things that occupied the living. He began to feel that he had more in common with the dead than with those still alive: he belonged more to their world. For the dead didn’t cheat you, they didn’t lie to you, and they didn’t hide things from you. They didn’t try to extract anything from you, had no hidden agenda, and played no games. They made no demands, nor did they impose anything. They were the mild-tempered. If you showed them respect, they thanked you, and if you neglected them, they didn’t blame you.

  A habitual silence became firmly rooted as his primary mode of communication, including with his daughter, Qisma. The few times they met—in the living room or kitchen before she left in the mornings or in the evenings before he did—they hardly exchanged a word. Each could tell from the other’s footsteps where they were going, be it the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, or outside. They each created a private world, set apart in their rooms, which the other didn’t enter because it wouldn’t have crossed their mind to do so and because there was no need.

  This difference in their schedules cemented their isolation to the point where Ibrahim was only just able to hang on to the fact that she was his daughter, his child, not just some strange woman existing in the flesh before him. That is how he saw her: as a stranger living in the next room. The most he could say about her was that her features resembled those of his wife. She was a living memorial to the face and bearing of her mother. And that, in any case, was better than just having photographs hung on the wall.