Qisma said it was this last possibility that seemed most plausible to her because she had met with the families of her husband’s companions in that special unit, and they talked to her about the same thing. Their brother or their husband had been imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government, and they had all disappeared at the same time. They were going through the exact same thing as her and like her they had still learned nothing about their relatives.
She also believed the story about the coup because her husband actually had wanted to become president. He admired the President greatly and modeled himself on him, though at the same time he hated him and felt him to be a personal adversary. Her husband believed himself to be more worthy of the presidency: he at least had obtained his diploma, while the President had not; he was in the military and a real officer, while the President had weaseled out of the mandatory military service; he was a native of the capital, Baghdad, while the President was from an obscure village; he was from a well-known and deeply rooted Baghdad family, while the President didn’t know his own father. For all these reasons, he considered himself to be more worthy and more deserving than the President, ready to take his place.
“On the other hand, my husband admired the President for having achieved what he had and for ruling the country and mastering its people despite having been a nobody and an orphan, with no qualifications to speak of. My husband hated the President, but he also admired him, to the point of loving him. After all, he did insist on naming our son after him. And when he first entered the military college, before I knew him, he tattooed the name of the President on his arm, encircling it with a heart, just like lovers do.”
At that moment, Ibrahim started asking his first questions in rapid succession: “On which arm?”
“The right.”
“Was it in exactly this area?”
“Yes.”
“This big?”
“Yes.”
“And what was the precise date he went missing?”
She told him the date. It was just before the night he had buried the body with the shattered bones and all the skin peeled off except for the tattooed forearm, which hadn’t been hurt at all. For the first time, Ibrahim told Qisma in general terms about his work. He went into more detail about his archive of information about the missing. He told Qisma that he had buried a body with the tattoo she had described to him, without saying anything about how the body had been skinned like a sheep that had been slaughtered.
They set off in Qisma’s car for Baghdad. On the way, Ibrahim told her some more of what he had been through. But he hesitated and held back many of the details in the fear that he would cause further damage to the image she had of him and perhaps lose her all over again. He was surprised to find that her reaction was the exact opposite of what he had expected. Qisma praised him for keeping records about those corpses, describing what he had done as important and heroic work, an unparalleled act of nobility and humanity.
Ibrahim experienced a release within his soul. It had torn his heart that she had considered him worthless and rejected him. The words of praise he had just received produced elation beyond any other words he had heard in his life because they came from his daughter. Greedy for her approval, Ibrahim began telling Qisma more, hoping to win more of her approval. He brought up the time she had called his attention to the offensive odor emanating from his room, and he explained what had caused it. “That was the very beginning, and since then, I have been keeping records of thousands of bodies in Baghdad and in other cities where I’ve overseen burial sites.”
When they arrived at his house in Baghdad, Ibrahim watched as Qisma laid her child on the couch in the living room and pressed on ahead of him into his bedroom. He followed her inside and began taking the records out of their hiding-places, and he showed her the shoeboxes filled with bags of identity cards, hair clippings and small items he had taken from the dead. Qisma began leafing through the notebooks he threw on the bed. She was struck to find them written in a strange language she had never seen before. He explained that it was a script that he had invented himself, and no living soul in the world but him knew how to read it. At that, Ibrahim read in Qisma’s eyes a wondrous look of surprise and admiration that renewed his pride and elation. He pulled out the notebook he expected would contain the date of her husband’s disappearance, and he began to read out the gist of what he had written, skipping over many of the unpleasant details. But Qisma insisted, so he started again as she broke into sobs that shook her whole body.
At night, after they had eaten dinner and put the child to bed, she took a small notebook of phone numbers out of her bag. She pulled over the telephone, setting it in front of her on the couch. She noticed that the telephone indicated “SAVED MESSAGES.” She listened to them and discovered they were from her, the only two calls she had made to him while he was gone. She had said nothing in messages beyond greeting him and letting him know that she was fine. She asked Ibrahim if he had listened to them, and he replied that he didn’t know how to use the answering machine. Indeed, he couldn’t recall ever having used the telephone; it happened so seldom he had forgotten. He asked her if she had left her telephone number or address in those two messages. With a painful stab of shame and regret, she told him she had not.
Qisma began making dozens of calls, one after another, to her husband’s family and acquaintances, as well as to the families of his companions who had disappeared with him. She also called the families of other missing persons, the people she had gotten to know during her search, sharing what she had discovered with them and telling them all to come in the morning. Ibrahim sat next to her, watching the way she spoke and remembering those nights when she would isolate herself with the phone, lying on the couch, half naked, no doubt talking to him, her poor officer.
Neither Qisma nor her father slept that night. They kept preparing maps and organizing the specific details of the corpses connected to the families Qisma had called. And so they all went together in a caravan of cars: more than a hundred people from sixty families. They all took part in the digging and brought away with them the remains of their dead, their grief mixed with the relief that came from knowing their final fate. Then they headed off to their own cemeteries to rebury their loved ones in a fitting manner, in clear and well-marked graves.
Soon, the news spread through the city, and people flocked to Ibrahim’s house. With Qisma’s help, he provided them with the relevant information. It went on like that for just under a month, a long, exhausting month during which he gave out most of the information he had about those who were buried in Baghdad and its suburbs. Only a very little remained, apart from the notebooks relating to the other cities. Ibrahim and Qisma were overwhelmed by fatigue after receiving so many people at all hours of the day and night, so Qisma took Ibrahim to her house so they might rest a little. He found it to be magnificent, with impressive furniture and balconies overlooking the river. They slept there and sat on the balcony, sipping tea and staring at the water for a long time until they felt refreshed. After two days, they locked up the house and went back to the village. But families of the missing from various cities around the country began following them, inquiring after Ibrahim and turning up at his house in the village. Qisma agreed to organize things for them, and because the rest of the archive remained in Baghdad, she set a precise time and place when her father would undertake a visit to each city, carrying his records, ready to hand over whatever information he had.
More than once, Tariq came to Ibrahim at night, trembling, sweating, and confused—afraid for him. In private, he warned Ibrahim, advising him to stop what he was doing, and indeed, to deny it. Tariq explained that it had reached his ears from contacts among the resistance and elements of the former regime that people intended to kill Ibrahim because they considered him to be slandering the image of the former President and the period of his rule. They said that Ibrahim was in league with traitors and that the claims he was making were based on lies
he had invented. Moreover, even if it were true, and he was leading the people to actual graves, they would still kill him because, in their view, that was a betrayal of the trust and confidence the former regime had bestowed upon him.
The next night, Tariq came in the same state of agitation to inform Ibrahim that it had reached his ears from his connections in the new government that they or their supporters intended to kill Ibrahim in order to purify the country of all adherents of the former regime, anyone who was a sympathizer and participated in its crimes in any form whatsoever. What Ibrahim had done provided decisive proof that “You were in the inner circle and deeply trusted by them, counted among the leadership of the dying dictatorial regime.”
Tariq pleaded with him, “Stop what you’re doing, Ibrahim! Indeed, deny it, deny all knowledge of it! You have to flee to some secret place, somewhere safe, until this storm passes. If you want, I’ll arrange that for you. They’ll kill you, Ibrahim! They’ll kill you, brother. If one side doesn’t kill you, the other side will. Your blood will be shed in vain by the death squads, just as is happening all over this country every day.”
But even though he believed him, Ibrahim didn’t follow Tariq’s advice. He couldn’t stop himself from going down this path, not after everything he had gone through and everything he had done in preparation for a moment like this, a moment he had never expected to arrive. He felt it was all a gift God had given for his benefit. He had never thought he would be so useful to people, and as a result, he felt an even deeper sense of peace when he saw their faces light up with immense gratitude, indebtedness, and tears of relief when the hard search for lost loved ones came to an end. For that reason, he refused to take any gifts or the large sums of money they offered him. His conscience was finally clear. His self-recriminations for having left the body of his friend Ahmad al-Najafi in the desert could be laid to rest. The most important aspect of it all was the respect and esteem he was surprised to receive from the person who meant the most to him, his daughter, Qisma. That was something he had never expected. So he decided to keep going until he had delivered the last bit of information he possessed to its rightful owners, even if he had to search them out himself.
On the second day of Ramadan, in the year 2006, he agreed with eight other villagers to rent a van to go to Baghdad. They planned to meet in the main street in front of the village café, and each of them had his own reasons for visiting the capital. Some of them were young men seeking opportunities for work or wanting to register in the security forces, who were the only ones hiring at that time. Older men were making the trip to arrange their pensions, and others were seeking lost loved ones, new and old, in the city.
They set off an hour after midnight, just as they had agreed, so that they would arrive at dawn and could take care of their affairs early in the day, before the heat became too intense, since they were fasting. But before the sun came up, their severed heads were returned in banana crates to the same place they had set out from.
CHAPTER 27
Remarriage
In this country where no bananas were grown, the village awoke to the heads of nine of its sons in banana crates. Along with each head was an ID card to identify the person since some of their faces were completely disfigured, either by torture preceding the beheading or something similar after the slaughter. Their characteristic features were no longer sufficient to distinguish them. One of these cards bore the name Ibrahim Suhayl.
The first person to notice the crates was the herdsman, Isma’il. All traces of sleep fled his eyes, and he began screaming at the top of his lungs. His donkey jumped, his flock of sheep froze, and the pigeons and sparrows launched from treetops and rooftops. The last silver light of dawn had filled the street, and the sleeping village was calm and still, apart from the crowing of a rooster and the barking of a distant dog, responding to another dog in some yet more distant corner. Some people rushed toward him from some of the village houses—then all the people from all the houses, after someone raised the alarm over the mosque loudspeakers.
It was on the third day of the month of Ramadan, 2006. According to history, that was when something called America had occupied a country named Iraq.
When they informed Abdullah Kafka that the head of Ibrahim was among the nine, he replied, “It is finished! He has attained his rest. For this time he has truly died, leaving us to the chaos of fate and the futility of waiting for our own deaths, we the living dead.”
Abdullah fell silent, frozen as a stone. Then he began to smoke and smoke and smoke. And for the first time, the people saw tears stream from his unblinking eyes. He didn’t wipe them away, and he didn’t stop smoking.
And when the news reached their third, Sheikh Tariq, he felt faint and nearly collapsed. He sat down quickly, propping up his spirit—so as not to kill himself—by reciting the many religious sayings he had learned by heart. He wept and asked God’s forgiveness; he wept and cursed the devil so as not to be driven to despair; he wept and wept until his tears wet the edges of his red, henna-dyed beard.
Questions from the onlookers saved Tariq from succumbing to an even longer bout of sobbing. “What do we do, O sheikh? Do we bury the heads on their own, or do we wait until we come across their bodies and bury them together? They were killed in Baghdad, or on the road to Baghdad, and now Baghdad is a chaos choking on anonymous corpses, buried explosives, car bombs, foreigners, and deceit. It might be impossible to find their bodies.”
Tariq said, “It’s best to bury the heads, and if it happens that their bodies are discovered, they can be buried too, either with the heads, or separately, or in the place where they are found. Our sons and brothers are not better or more venerable than the prince of martyrs, Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, whose head they buried in Egypt or Syria while his body stayed in Iraq. Make haste to bury the heads, for the way to honor the dead is to bury them.”
Only Qisma, the widow who became an orphan that early morning, opposed them and wanted the head of her father, Ibrahim, to be kept unburied until his body was found. But her resistance was in vain when the men refused and rebuked her, saying, “Hold your tongue, woman, and cease this madness! What do you know about such things?”
They pushed her away to where the women were gathered. Only her neighbor, fat Amira, supported her, screaming that she wanted to preserve her husband’s head in the freezer until they located his body.
Qisma wavered a long time: she would take one step forward and fall two steps back. But in the end she resolved the matter and decided to go to the house of Abdullah Kafka. Her relationship with Ibrahim’s brother had been nearly severed when she got married. Besides, he had the burden of a large family on his shoulders, and a herd of sheep and goats. Abdullah would be the most appropriate person to help her in the search for her father’s body. He was her father’s closest friend, and he was the only one to whom her father had revealed his secret at a time when the mere knowledge of it would lead to execution. She remembered what her father once said to her: “Tariq and Abdullah are my closest friends, but I love Abdullah more.” And Abdullah also had no family or work to hold him back, and he wasn’t afraid of anything, not even of death itself.
In these ways, Qisma shored up her conviction that the decision to approach him was sound, despite the doubts and rumors, followed by scandal, that would result if a young widow were seen entering the house of an unmarried man at the far edge of the village. But she hadn’t wanted to broach the issue with him in front of the villagers, the very people who had dragged her away on the burial day and rebuked her, together with fat Amira. And given that Abdullah Kafka spent most of the time at the café, often from when it first opened at sunrise, and he didn’t leave until the door was locked after midnight, the only choice was to seek him out at dawn. It was not easy for her to make such a risky decision. But it was not the first of its kind in her life.
She passed bitter nights of broken sleep, when hot tears of sorrow for her father alternated with racing thoughts
of what she wanted to do. Then she made up her mind to proceed. She wasn’t sure why she carried her baby with her, even though he was fast asleep. He stirred uneasily but kept sleeping as she lay his head on her shoulder as though tucking in a corner of her shawl. Perhaps it occurred to her that bringing him would dispel doubts should someone happen to see her, or that she could somehow protect herself with him. Or maybe she thought that when Abdullah saw the baby, he would be more sympathetic toward her, even though she was aware of his wrath at the baby’s name, given that the baby’s father, a native of Baghdad, had wanted his son to bear the name of the President.
Would he possibly agree to accompany her to the burning city of Baghdad to search for one corpse amid the thousands, when he was the one who hadn’t stirred from his seat in the café to attend the burial? Would he tell her what she wanted to know—more about her father—when he was the one who remained silent nearly all the time? She had turned these two questions over in her mind as she tossed in bed, recalling everything she could about her father and feeling guilty for having fought with him and gone away for years despite being his only daughter.
At the same time, she was impelled by the challenge to prove to everyone that a daughter too is worthy of carrying her father’s name and can defend it, along with his memory; that it is not only the male child who carries the father’s name and continues his line, as was said. She realized now, more than ever before, the extent to which her father, Ibrahim, had suffered on behalf of his parents and his siblings. And also for her and because of her. She felt that more now that she had become a mother and a widow, like him, who, as a father and a widower, had refused to get remarried after the passing of her mother, both to spare her a stepmother who would harass her and for the sake of his secret work.
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