The silence, isolation, and independence combined to form a more peaceful type of coexistence. It was what each of them needed in order to root themselves more firmly in the different worlds they had brought into existence. It carried over even to money, which he would leave for her every month in an envelope on the television stand. In turn, she knew what he wanted when she went shopping. His needs were simple and didn’t change, never going beyond the food and drink she would have bought anyway, for he seldom bought clothes or any of the things that other people seemed to need.
Qisma formed her world just as she wished, without any interference, impediments, or criticism. She arranged it according to her fancy—or at least, that is what she believed. She became acquainted with an officer, the brother of one of her friends in the institute, and she would go out with him wherever he liked, or wherever she did. She was like all the other young women of her age and circle. A romantic relationship, dates, drinking juice in the corners of cafés, love songs and views on love to exchange, holding hands, sweet nothings repeated, passion stirred up by provocative looks, waves of frustration and satisfaction, and something to show off in front of her female colleagues. Dreams, more dreams, and lots of talking. Lots of talking, just as there is when any man and woman agree that they love each other.
Like Qisma, the officer was ambitious, only more so, and Qisma reinforced these ambitions within him. He loved keeping up appearances, or “fulfilling the duties of their station,” as they preferred to call it. He dressed in an olive-colored uniform, with a pistol at his hip and stars on his shoulder. He had a car in the latest model and a swagger in his step. He wore cologne—lots of it—the most famous and expensive brands, as well as gold watches or gold chains around his neck. He was graceful. He always paid the closest attention to shaving, trimming his mustache, and polishing his shoes. He observed his appointments with exactitude and showed deep concern for scheduling the hours of each day. He dreamed of more money, more status, and more power. He had great confidence in himself, in his masculinity, and in the firmness of his reality. His friends flattered him.
He was an officer in the Republican Guard, enrolled among the bodyguard. He told Qisma that he defended His Excellency the President. She told him that her father also worked close to His Excellency the President. Of course, he didn’t inform her within which rank or degree of the bodyguard he served—there were said to be seven circles, or sometimes more, according to people who knew the leadership structure. But this didn’t matter much to Qisma. What mattered far more was that they agreed that they would join the highest echelon of society in terms of money and status, and they would be able to buy whatever they wished. For that reason, she too didn’t inform him of her father’s actual work as a gardener in the presidential palaces. When it came down to it, she didn’t want to know about it either. She realized that, no matter what happened, her father would never rise above the rank of subordinate, a marginal man under the orders of others.
Her officer often spoke to her about his admiration for the person of His Excellency the President: his manliness, his strength, his firmness, his wisdom, and his intelligence in exploiting situations and the entire country—its people, animals, plants, lands, natural resources, water, air, everything—for his benefit. For that reason, he emulated the President and imitated him in everything: his appearance and his voice, the way he moved or held still, what he supported and opposed, and his style of thinking and speaking. He became a carbon copy of the President, lacking nothing but the President’s power. However, the officer’s competitors were legion, for people like him multiplied boundlessly in that period. Meanwhile, the government presented that model in every form of media, as though it wanted everyone to be yet another image of the singular Leader, the Commander of Necessity, the exemplar in everything.
For a period of months, apart from detached, formulaic salvos—words limited to greetings and questions about where to find salt, spices, or sugar in the kitchen, or to say they were out of something, or that something was broken, or that an electrical switch or a doorknob had been fixed—Ibrahim and Qisma only exchanged words approximately twice. To be more exact, it was she who spoke and he who listened.
The first time, Qisma complained about a rotting odor coming from Ibrahim’s room, saying that he couldn’t go on neglecting to clean it. She left the house, muttering. It was then that Ibrahim noticed this smell for the first time, perhaps because he was used to the putrid smell of corpses, their blood mixed with urine and feces, the flesh already rotting from long periods of imprisonment and torture. On top of that, Ibrahim had been ordered not to clean the manure off the ground where he buried the bodies.
Ibrahim left the house and came back inside several times, sniffing with the earnestness of a police dog. He walked from the front door to his room more than once in order to locate the smell. The remains of very small bits of flesh attached to fingernails, scraps of skin, and pieces of clothing had begun to rot. Looking through his archives, his record of the identities of the dead, Ibrahim hastened to clean where he thought that would be sufficient and to bury in the yard whatever was impossible to clean, keeping only what was dry and not liable to rot. When he was done, he cleaned and organized his room a second time. He even went so far as to leave the window and door open for an entire day. Then he sprayed it every day with the last bottle of his wife’s perfume.
The second time was when Qisma informed him that she had gotten to know a man, the brother of a friend of hers in the institute. She had fallen in love with him, and he would be coming to get engaged to her next Friday evening. Her father had to be there, and he must not object. She dropped this news just like that, all at once. Qisma stressed that Ibrahim must dress up, look his polished best, and be welcoming and agreeable. If not, she would proceed to do as she pleased and get married to this man with or without her father’s permission.
Ibrahim said nothing except to ask her age. Qisma told him that she had passed twenty years. They smiled at each other, though each held a different thought behind the smile.
The following day, Qisma bought Ibrahim a shirt and tie, shoes, and a new suit because she knew he would wear the one suit he had, the cut of which no longer matched the current style, just as its fabric had become threadbare. They spent all of Thursday together cleaning the house, rearranging the simple furniture, and shopping. Ibrahim went to the barber for a haircut for the first time in his life, for he would always just cut his own hair. When Friday morning came, they spent it preparing a special meal of various grilled meats, juices, fruits, and desserts. After that it was time to try on the new clothes. Each of them asked the other for their opinion and comments. Those few hours were the most pleasant Ibrahim had ever spent with his Qisma, the time he was closest to her. He felt as though he were a child and she his mother, arranging his clothes, combing his hair, adjusting his tie, telling him how to sit on the couch when the special guests arrived. He felt as elated as a young boy, delighting in his mother’s care and satisfied in his sense that she was satisfied with him, or an obedient child, happy that his obedience pleased her. At each touch from his daughter, Ibrahim felt a downpour of tenderness.
Qisma informed Ibrahim what she had told the man who would become her husband about her father, that he held an important position and a critical role within the presidential palaces, overseeing the administration of the President’s gardens. As they were getting ready, Qisma also chose a moment to inform her father, so he wouldn’t be surprised, that she had chosen a name for herself—Nisma, not Qisma—and that is what everyone had known her by ever since they had come to Baghdad.
Qisma asked her father to behave according to what she had told her future husband about him. Ibrahim had to convince him “that this is actually who you are, but that you treat the matter lightly, and that you don’t know how to exploit the situation and show it off like others would.” She told Ibrahim that this point was important to her and to her future with the man who would become her h
usband because it would make him treat her with greater respect and maybe even with a kind of fear. Or at least as an equal, and not just as the daughter of a farmer and former soldier who had come to the capital from a remote village. Ignoring the real nature of her father’s work, she wanted to give a certain obscure majesty to his position, just as the social game had taught her to do and just as her officer did. For ever since she had first become aware of things, Qisma had recognized that her father was bound by silence and submission, incapable of expressing anything. She was so used to it that she despaired of Ibrahim being able to talk about anything at all.
Ibrahim worked hard to remember everything Qisma charged him with, and he focused his attention on carrying it out exactly as she wanted. The young man came in his olive uniform with its two stars denoting the rank of first lieutenant. His parents came with him in their elegant clothes of the popular Baghdad style. Ibrahim received them at the door and welcomed them, leading them into the living room. They all repeated the traditional words that are exchanged on occasions like this as though they were performing memorized roles in a dramatic reading. Words like honor, dignity, protection, blessing, and happiness: “It’s an honor for us to request the hand of your daughter,” “We swear she will find dignity and happiness in her life with us,” “She will be in safe hands,” and so on. The young man kept referring to the fact that he was in the President’s bodyguard, without specifying, of course, to which of the seven—or seventy—circles he belonged.
Ibrahim was used to this kind of officer, both minor and major. Looking alike and always aiming to resemble each other, they spoke rigid, traditional words with a flourish as though they were the ones who chose the words and fashioned these phrases. Ibrahim couldn’t see what set this officer apart from all the others, and by force of habit, he nearly addressed him as “sir” at times before regaining his focus and recalling what Qisma had set out for him. The officer said, with that same air, that he wanted to hold the wedding the following Friday, for he was a practical man, everything was ready, and there was really no point in wasting time on a long engagement. His parents nodded their heads in support.
Between the time they left and the wedding night—which was celebrated in the Sheraton Hotel in the middle of Baghdad—Ibrahim scarcely saw Qisma. Even on the night of the wedding, which baffled him with its noisy spectacle of drinks, food, guests wearing shiny clothes and perfume, music, and dancing. He didn’t have time to admire Qisma in her wedding dress. Everyone was greeting everyone else. Everyone was laughing, eating, drinking, dancing, moving here and there. It was a great mass of people dressed up like dolls, a different world that had no relation to his private world of the dead, and no relation either to the world of normal living people, the people in the streets with their despair and poverty. It was like a dream, or like a game, a whirl of overpowering perfume, feasting, and flattering small talk. As though there were no such thing as death. As though there were no such thing as other people, no other world beyond this hall.
Ibrahim felt entirely out of place here, as he watched the scene unfold from a chair in the corner, stealing glances between the gaps in the people standing about to catch a glimpse of his Qisma, who had now become someone else’s Qisma. She appeared to be a different woman, someone he didn’t know, with her face made up and her arms covered in henna tattoos, glittering in a white dress and a golden tiara. So much white, like a burial shroud. She was smiling, happy, and in harmony with everything around her, and Ibrahim couldn’t connect her with that child he had fathered in a mud house and carried on his shoulders or on the back of a donkey to the nearby fields where she played in the mud of the irrigation ditches.
This was the first and last time Ibrahim ever entered a grand hotel like that. All the times he had heard about it in advertisements or seen its towering edifice from afar, or all those nights he spent as a soldier sleeping in the public squares imagining who stayed there, it hadn’t seemed relevant to him; it was reserved for others, people higher than himself. Likewise, he had never in his life attended a party like this, which existed on a different plane altogether. So as soon as he returned home at the end of the night, he hastened to fold it up in his memory because it didn’t correspond to any of the other pages of his life. It was something foreign, something that passed through him but had no connection. He contented himself with remembering the last thing Qisma—or Nisma—said to him before the cavalcade of cars took her away into the night.
“Take care,” she had said. “If you need anything, let me know.”
It seemed that she said it in the same way everyone said it, a polite formality, without meaning or intending anything by it, and without her telling him how to do it: she didn’t give him an address or a telephone number. He justified this by telling himself that she must simply have forgotten, overwhelmed with the details of her wedding. But she didn’t do it in the following days either.
He wished he had embraced her, held her to his chest, kissed her forehead or her hand, or that she had done something of this sort. He kept exonerating her: perhaps she had forgotten in all the excitement, or she was worried about messing up the arrangement of her clothes, her makeup, or her hair. He excused her, and he buried that wish of his in some grave. There was no limit to the dead wishes he had been forced to bury in his depths, one after the other.
She disappeared from his life and didn’t come to visit. She was content to call on the phone after a month, exchange the usual greetings with him, and disappear again. And Ibrahim returned to his solitude, to his world of the dead and their records. He even felt a kind of liberation, a sense of leisure and a greater absorption in his solitary world, which existed by itself and for itself in his bedroom, and from there spread all over the house, taking over new corners for its archives and tokens.
CHAPTER 24
The Flower-Eaters
A creature from the North Pole will die if transferred to the desert, and vice versa. Man may be the only creature able to adapt to life in any place and circumstance. Ibrahim had lived in deserts and mountains, in hot and cold climates, in sadness and fear and joy. He had lived through conditions as diverse as could be imagined. All of that had been demanded of him. He didn’t remember ever having made a decision that was his own choice, taken by his own desire or volition, the kind of decision that Qisma used to demand of him.
They had never given him the opportunity to choose or to want, so he got used to adapting himself, and now here he was, adapting himself to his role as a gravedigger. Indeed, he became a professional at it, and the trust of his superiors firmly settled upon him. For his own part, Ibrahim no longer had any other activity in life, and he was unable to detach himself from this work. The secret records of the buried were Ibrahim’s sole independent undertaking, the one thing he did purely from his own desire—and against the wishes of his superiors, no doubt, though he wasn’t able to reveal it to anyone. On the contrary, keeping his archive a secret demanded all the more effort and caution. Therefore, this desire of his, which Qisma, ironically, was utterly blind to, was of no use to him. But in any case, it was his own desire, his own world. He was undertaking something that would have a use, and through this act, the enduring pain in his conscience was relieved. He began developing the archives further, taking advantage of his solitude in the house and his near complete freedom from any obligation to anyone.
Later on, he set about inventing symbols and new shapes for writing. He arrayed all the letters of the alphabet on one side of a page, and across from each of them he made up a different shape, devising a new form of writing with an invented alphabet even though it spoke the same language. Then he carried out a series of exercises until he had memorized them backward and forward. His motivation was twofold: he wanted more secrecy and also to elaborate on additional details without relying on abbreviated hints and nonlinguistic symbols, which he might forget with the passage of time, and which he sometimes found incapable of capturing what he had witnessed and wanted to
record. For whenever he thought that he had come to know every possible style of torture and killing, a corpse would surprise him by what it had been subjected to. When it came to torture, they were inventive and artistic to a degree that could scarcely be imagined. He started wondering about the secret behind that and what it all meant, remembering and now understanding more of Abdullah Kafka’s wonderings. Were there people who enjoyed torture? Why did they invest so much time, money, and effort creating all these torments, given that the goal and the end result were to be rid of someone, make him disappear and murder him? Why didn’t they just kill him and be done with it? He was unable to find a logical answer to that, and, according to his habit, he would explain things as he always did, that every person has their own business, and certainly there were many things—both in people and in the world—that he didn’t and would never understand.
When Ibrahim rewrote in his new code all the records he had previously made, it consumed a full month and required the purchase of multiple notebooks. He discovered he had recorded information for more than two thousand corpses, among whom the number of women did not exceed 10 percent. They were of different ages, from children ten years old to men older than eighty. Some of the people he buried were famous, though he didn’t know any of them personally apart from young Sa’ad, his first supervisor in these gardens, who had recommended him for this very position. Recognizing his body had been easy because they had not tortured him much, nor the corpses that accompanied him, three other men the same age, wearing the same olive suits. Even though they were new corpses, they were already somewhat bloated. The smell of alcohol emanating from them overwhelmed any other smell. Apparently, they had been forced to drink an enormous amount of it since their swollen stomachs would gurgle with liquid whenever he moved them. Then they were hanged with regular ropes, the fibers of which still stuck to their necks.
The President's Gardens Page 24