Ibrahim dug a separate grave for them since they were the only corpses that had arrived, as it were, in one piece. He recited the opening sura of the Qur’an for their souls without stopping to think long whether that was allowed from a religious standpoint or not, given that they went to the afterlife with their bellies and veins full of liquor. But he did wonder to himself whether this news would somehow reach Sa’ad’s mother and sister so they wouldn’t keep wondering, being miserable and humbling themselves with questions and bribes in a quest to seek him out, a quest that wouldn’t get them anywhere. He couldn’t come to any conclusions, and he satisfied himself by thinking that it was perhaps his good fortune that Sa’ad had not told him his home address or any other information that would lead Ibrahim to his family. There was nothing he could do and nothing to torment his conscience.
One rainy night, they dumped seventeen corpses at his feet, and two hours later brought nine more. He stood in front of them, every fiber of his being uttering a protest. The bodies were covered in mud, manure, blood, and rain. One of Ibrahim’s hands held a flashlight, and the other his artificial foot, which had been transformed into a swollen lump by the mud and grass that stuck to it. He had pulled it off because it kept sinking in the ground every time he put his weight on it. Ibrahim appeared old, contemptible, and despairing to a degree that would inspire the compassion even of the trees, the stones, and the rain. After watching him for a while, they said in a supportive tone, “It’s okay. Manage as best you can right now, and we’ll inform your superiors so they can send someone to help as soon as possible.”
Ibrahim didn’t finish until dawn, when he returned to the guardhouse tool shed. It was a long walk back since he had been forced to dig graves in different clearings in the forest of tall, rough, fruit-barren trees that circled the man-made hill with its delicate waterfalls and its shining palace wearing balconies on its head like a crown. As soon as he sank onto the chair to catch his breath, worn out and not yet washed, he plunged immediately into a deep sleep.
It was already noon when Ibrahim awoke. He looked around. The picture of the President stared back in his face. He immediately got up and went to the bathroom. He showered and stood for a long time under the water, clearing his mind of everything. It was equally cleansing in body and mind. He felt relaxed, and even thought about sleeping some more. When he had dressed in his usual clothes, he sat back on the chair and decided that he had no choice but to remain there until the coming dawn. But he felt a sharp hunger and he only had a bottle of water, so he got up and opened the door. The sky was perfectly clear.
Ibrahim saw herds of donkeys and camels occupying the clearings, feeling assured in the warm sunshine. The two shepherds were sitting near them. Each of them had a staff in his hand, and they were talking. Meanwhile, the dogs gathered a little farther on under the shade of the nearby trees. Ibrahim walked toward the shepherds, who had turbans wrapped around their heads and were wearing the kind of long, close-fitting robes that were pulled on over one’s head like a shirt. They got up when they saw Ibrahim approaching. Ibrahim greeted them and asked them to sit back down, which they did. He sat with them on a large tree trunk lying nearby, one that Ibrahim knew well from the many times he had rested on it while he worked. When Ibrahim told them he was famished and didn’t have any food, they instantly relaxed. They became more natural and visibly more comfortable, their faces free from confusion or tension. One of them took out a piece of bread, some cheese, an onion, cucumbers, and a few tomatoes from the cloth bag beside him, while the other set off with a bowl to bring back milk from the nearest camel.
Ibrahim found them to be simple, good-hearted, and entirely unaffected. They had a powerful connection with the land, even more so than he, for the upheavals of his life and all the times he had been pulled far from his village and the fields had weakened his identity as a farmer. It quickly became apparent that they were Bedouin. Their movements, their faces, and their accents made that clear. Ibrahim felt an almost immediate familiarity with them, an intimacy he hadn’t enjoyed for months, since he no longer sat or spoke with anyone. Their straightforward manner awoke in him a desire to be direct and open too, if only for a few moments. He wanted it badly, and he gave in to that wish, especially when he saw one of them smash the onion on his knee with a single blow of his fist and offer it to him.
They told Ibrahim they were brothers—twins—and that they had come from the desert. They had been caring for “the Pres’dent’s own,” that is, the President’s animals, for years and in various places. Their father had been doing this work since he was their age, and he now tended larger flocks near Lake Habbaniyah—he had arranged for them to be appointed to this role. They had another brother and also cousins who were shepherds in other cities, palaces, gardens, and deserts, looking after sheep, goats, cows, and gazelles. They told him that this work saved their families from having to travel in search of pasturage, as they used to. As a result, they now had houses—palaces actually—on the outskirts of Hadar.
“This is my brother. His name is Fahd, and my name is Jad’an. As for our older brother, his name is Tariq.”
Ibrahim recalled the Bedouin Jad’an, who had spent a month in the village after the harvest season every year, together with his daughter Fahda, with whom Tariq had conducted a risky love affair. Could they be related? He gave them all the details he remembered, and they told him that this was their grandfather, and they were the sons of his daughter Fahda. “She is the one that gave us these names.” As for their grandfather, he had died years ago.
They told Ibrahim that they had never been to the city. The President loved their father and them too, and they loved him very much. They saw the President as the very embodiment of manhood. “He’s like us, cousin, from the countryside, from the desert. And like us, he loves animals more than he loves people. He’s not some fancypants like other fake city-dwellers. Do you see his house? That one, up on top of the hill? He often goes there to leave his cares behind and sits for hours watching over his flocks. Sometimes he comes down to ride the camels with us, or he milks them, or we ride donkeys, and we race and laugh. And he doesn’t get angry with us when we beat him. He loves to drink camel milk and eat gazelle meat.”
They addressed Ibrahim as “cousin,” and when they talked about the President, it came out in their dialect as “Mr. Pres’dent” or “the Exalted Reader.” Each time, they added phrases such as “God preserve him,” or “May God grant him long life.” They were so open and spontaneous that it was impossible to doubt their sincerity or their belief that what they said was true. Ibrahim thought they alone would be able to say and do what they wanted in complete freedom when they were with the President. As for the rest of the millions in this country laced with fear and doubt, their hearts pumped caution through their veins that chilled any sense of security.
Regarding the pleasure the President took in watching his donkeys, camels, and dogs roaming here above the bodies of his victims, it didn’t occur to Ibrahim that this behavior was a careful study in the humiliation of his adversaries, even after they were dead. The President took delight that they ended like this, their fates unknown to their loved ones, buried haphazardly with no gravestones, no witnesses, as though they themselves were nothing, and would forever be nothing. It was as though they had never existed, down there under the manure of donkeys and camels and the urine of dogs. Abdullah Kafka explained all that later when Ibrahim returned to the village and told him about what he had seen and lived through.
The Bedouin asked Ibrahim about his work, and he didn’t tell them he buried corpses here under their feet, but instead described his first job, caring for the flowers. They remarked in all seriousness, “Oh-ho! You know what, cousin? We consider your work to be much harder than ours.”
When Ibrahim asked them why, they said, “The flowers and the trees are incredibly varied. There are many strange kinds, and we’ve never seen anything like them in all the regions we’ve come to know. It would b
e hard to tell this one from that, or the name of one from another, or how to treat each one. As for these animals, we know them individually, as well as we know ourselves. Do you know all these flowers of yours so well?”
Ibrahim replied honestly. “Not at all! I’m like you, a simple farmer and villager, and I’ve never seen things like this in my life. But I do what I can.”
“Do you know, cousin,” Jad’an said to him, “if they put us in charge of them, by God, we’d eat them!”
At this, the three of them burst out laughing together, startling the nearby donkeys. “Yes! By God, cousin,” Fahd said, “back home, we know all the plants, and we know which can be eaten and which can’t. But here! I swear to you, every time we pass near them and see all this sweetness and how big they are—juicy like the cheeks of young girls—our mouths begin to water! But our problem is that we don’t know which ones can be eaten and which can’t.”
Then the two of them began reciting Bedouin poetry about flowers, women, and love. They also broke into a few songs.
Ibrahim asked them about the dogs gathered here, and they raised their hands dismissively, saying, “As for those dogs, a dog like them looks after them.”
When they saw that he didn’t understand, they pointed out an individual he hadn’t seen before. He was crawling around on all fours, living among the dogs as though he were one of them. The Bedouin told Ibrahim they had known him since he first came here, and that he never spoke, just howled and barked. “He truly deserves his punishment. When he caused the death of a dog belonging to the little mistress, she was very sad and gave her judgment that he live the rest of his life as a dog among the dogs.” By little mistress, they meant the President’s youngest daughter.
The Bedouin told Ibrahim they were both getting married at the same time during the coming festival of Ramadan to two sisters, cousins of theirs, and that “the Reader” had promised to give them a thousand camels at the wedding.
Ibrahim didn’t know how long he had spent with these two young Bedouin when he returned at last to the guardhouse. Before he left, they gave him more of the bread and onion, along with some pickles, cheese, and camel milk. They also invited him to attend their weddings, embraced him, and said they hoped to see him again, listing all the places where they might be found and the many pens, passages, and tunnels that the herds passed through.
“God willing!” Ibrahim replied. He didn’t tell them that his shifts began at midnight, and that he hadn’t understood most of what they explained to him to prove they knew all the gardens’ secrets. But he did grasp that there was a whole other world beneath his feet, an unending network of tunnels.
Ibrahim sat on the single chair in the guardhouse and went through the details of his meeting with the two Bedouin men, whom he had started calling “the flower-eaters.” He couldn’t keep from smiling every time he thought of how they had burst out laughing when they said they would eat all the flowers if they only knew what they were.
That meeting broke something frozen inside him. The company of those two men from the desert was a balm that revived a soul he thought had dried out and withered, never again to feel anything. That meeting was the pumping on the chest of a drowned man to force out the water and bring back breath and life. Suddenly, Ibrahim decided he would try to get close to people again, that he would start going to coffee houses, playing dominoes, buying books, stopping at the fruit and nut stands, sitting with shopkeepers, bakers, barbers, and the man selling propane canisters in his neighborhood. He thought he would try to arrange to see Qisma. Things like that. He wouldn’t have to tell anyone about the nature of his work. He had to draw a line between his work and his private world where he archived the dead, on the one hand, and the relationships he was going to pursue, on the other. He felt renewed, excitement twitching restlessly inside him. He longed to respond to that desire.
Ibrahim took pleasure in thinking like that—dreaming, really—until the military ambulance pulled up at midnight. Four people got out this time and proceeded to unload six corpses. Pointing at the two new assistants, the driver said, “These guys are under your orders. Teach them the job.”
The driver took off with the other man, leaving Ibrahim with the corpses and the two young men he had pointed at. They were in the prime of their youth, taking pride in their health and their bulging muscles. Ibrahim began to explain the nature of the work. He took them into the guardhouse and acquainted them with its features. Then he told them how to move the bodies, bury them, and leave the surface of the ground level like it was before. He found the young men to be vigorous, exuberant even. It didn’t cost them any effort to dig the graves and carry the bodies, the way it did for him. It was as though they were playing some kind of game as they tossed the corpses into the graves like bags of trash. No different!
That upset Ibrahim, and it was then that he decided to take at face value what the driver had said: “These guys are under your orders.” At first, he had thought it was just something that was said and hadn’t treated them that way. So now he tried it out. He stopped them and said in a harsh voice, “Human beings are not buried like that. No matter the reason for their death, there must still be respect for the dead.”
They immediately complied and stopped playing around. Ibrahim began explaining to them how to gather the limbs of the corpses, no matter how torn up they were, and to arrange them in their proper places as best they could. Then they must lower them into the grave gently, as though still alive, and turn their face toward the Ka’aba, and so on. In this way, over time, the young men became his obedient subordinates, and Ibrahim only needed to direct them, without being forced to do anything himself.
The young men were transformed into consummate professionals. As a result, Ibrahim’s supervisors began transferring him by helicopter from time to time to other cities and different gardens and palaces belonging to the President. He saw that most of them were located on elevated places or beside rivers and lakes. Each one was a different world, astonishing in its design and atmosphere. They would leave Ibrahim there for a day or two so he could train other young men to the same professional standards he had established. Through it all, Ibrahim never stopped recording the descriptions and the locations of the corpses he saw being buried, no matter what city they were in. Every time he returned home, he would dedicate a new notebook to the city he had just visited.
Just as before, whenever Ibrahim thought that he had seen everything, the corpses would continue to surprise him with the new ways they had been tortured and killed. Among them was the one that took more than two pages to describe, more than he had previously written for any corpse. It was delivered one night when he was with his first students in the gardens on the outskirts of Baghdad. They received nearly forty corpses, all at once, all subjected to unimaginable torments. The two boys turned pale at the horror of it. But the corpse that caught Ibrahim’s eye was one that had had every single bone crushed and its skin slowly stripped away, piece by piece. The skin of the feet had been peeled off like socks. The skin of the head and face removed like a hat and a mask. The skin of the chest like a shirt coming off. Skillfully stripped and flayed, limb by limb, piece by piece. It was hard for Ibrahim to close its eyes due to the extreme terror found in them—every time he tried, they burst wide open again as though they were prisoners shrieking out. But the thing that most captured his attention and formed the essential basis for identifying the corpse—and without which it would have been impossible to record anything useful—was the right arm. It was entirely untouched. And when Ibrahim examined it in the light of his flashlight, he found that the arm bore a tattoo in the shape of a heart, and in the middle was the name of the President.
CHAPTER 25
The Fall of the Capital and the Return
Ibrahim was now teaching gravediggers rather than digging directly with his own hands. He started to find more time for himself, since they granted him a day’s leave after he returned from each trip to the palace gardens in an
other city. Having traveled between military camps, trenches, and different fronts during the wars, he crossed the country moving between the palaces. Once again he had no choice in the matter.
With the extra time he had, and given that he was less tired than he used to be upon arriving home, Ibrahim began going out to walk at night, traversing Baghdad’s alleys, bridges, and markets. He had exchanged his artificial foot for a new one, better designed and made for him by the private hospital in which his wife had died. He was thinking more and more about Qisma. He didn’t want to bother her, nor would he demand anything of her or meddle in her life. All he wanted was to see her and reassure himself that she was okay. He also wanted to give her some of the money that was piling up for him, however much she wanted, seeing as he had no expenses.
But this sense of relaxation was short-lived. By early 2003, it became clear that Iraq was under serious threat of invasion, and with each day that passed, the international community became increasingly committed to the catastrophe they were poised to unleash. The number of bodies delivered for burial each night mounted, forcing Ibrahim to pitch in to help the two young men. Sometimes, they didn’t finish until morning. Things got even worse—groups of soldiers came with other groups of soldiers, blindfolded and hands bound. They would dig a long trench, or they would bring a bulldozer to make a pit without measuring it out. They would line up the blindfolded men at the edge of the pit and open fire. The dead would fall like autumn leaves, even though it was spring. Then they would order the bulldozer to cover them in soil, and they went off to repeat it all somewhere else, without stopping to confirm that these men were actually dead. They brought another round . . . and another. The majority of the dead at that time were soldiers and high-ranking officers. The soldiers who served as executioners would yell various insults before opening fire; dirty, angry, hysterical words, the least of which were: “Traitors! Cowards! Weaklings! Dogs!”
The President's Gardens Page 25