He asked us about Father’s death. My mother rushed to narrate the story she’d told before dozens of times. When she finished, he said, “May God have mercy on his soul. He is in peace now. The most important thing is that he didn’t suffer.”
I asked him about his trip here and when he would return.
He asked me jokingly, “Are you already sick of me and want me to leave?”
I laughed and said, “On the contrary. I hope you stay here for good and never go back.”
He said that unfortunately he couldn’t stay for more than a week because he had to go back to work. I asked him about his work. He said that he had studied German for four years and had been working recently as a translator for an Arabic-language German satellite channel. He had traveled from Berlin to Frankfurt and then on to Amman, where he spent a night before taking a taxi. They had left at four in the morning so that they would enter Iraq early and be able to drive through the desert highway in daylight. Driving in the dark meant risking being robbed by the many gangs and thieves operating there.
“We entered Iraq at dawn and it was a painful sight. The man welcoming me back to my country after all these years of wandering and exile was an American soldier who told me: ‘Welcome to Iraq!’ Can you imagine?” He said that the soldier had written his own name, “William,” in Arabic on his helmet. “I told him: This is my country.” Uncle Sabri shook his head and said that he was against the war and had demonstrated against it like millions in Germany and all over the world, but he never thought the Americans would be so irresponsible and inept. The border checkpoint with Jordan had only three soldiers and only one Iraqi official, who was wearing slippers and stamping passports. He asked the official who decided who was allowed in and who was not, and he said the American officer decided. “I just stamp.”
“There was no search. Nothing,” Sabri said. “Whoever wants to enter Iraq can do so very easily. So if the border checkpoint is like that, imagine how easy it is to enter from other points. Anyone coming now from Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran can enter.” He said that one of the Iraqi officials at the border asked him for a sum of money, and when my uncle asked why he should pay, the man answered “Why not?” The driver said just to ignore him.
I told him that bribery had become endemic during the last years of the embargo and now was part of any transaction.
He said this was a process of erasure. Dictatorship and the embargo had destroyed the country. Now we had entered the stage of total destruction to erase Iraq once and for all. He took out his passport and said that even the name of the state no longer existed. The stamp simply read, “Entry-Traybeel Border Point.” As if Iraq had been wiped off the map.
My mother said that if Iraqis themselves were not protective of their own country and were looting and destroying it, what should one expect strangers to do?
He said that Iraqis didn’t always loot and burn public property and that even Europeans looted and burned when there was no police or law around.
I said that Europeans don’t destroy museums and national libraries.
“True,” he said, “but Europeans were never subject to an embargo which starved them and took them back a hundred years. They didn’t have a dictator who put his name on everything so that there was no longer any difference between public property and him.”
“Didn’t they have Hitler?” I said.
He said the Americans hadn’t supported Hitler the way they had Saddam and that they’d helped rebuild Germany after the war with the Marshall Plan.
My mother told him that we didn’t want to spend all our time on politics and its headaches and that he hadn’t changed in that respect even though white hair covered his entire head. He told her that that wasn’t white hair, but snow from Germany which couldn’t be washed away. We all laughed.
She asked whether he was craving any particular food that he hadn’t tasted in years.
“Everything you cook is lovely, but Kubba is the best,” he said. They both laughed. He brought out a box of sweets he’d bought from Amman and said “Here, this is for you.”
I asked whether there was anything particular he wanted to do. He said he wanted to spend most of the time with us, wanted to visit my sister and her kids, but also to roam around Baghdad a bit and visit his favorite spots and look for old friends. He asked whom he might hire to drive him for a week.
I told him that a neighbor had a taxi. I reminded him of the curfew after sunset.
I told him that he would be sleeping in my room. I carried his suitcase upstairs.
The next morning I heard him singing while he shaved:
So unfair of you
To be gone for so long.
What will I tell people
When they ask about you?
You left my heart burning
Reeling from your absence
So unfair of you and so cruel.
What will I tell people
When they ask about you?
How could you ever
Let me down and betray me?
Never think my heart will heal
Never think the pain will go away.
What will I tell people
When they ask about you?
I told him that we should be singing that song, reproaching him for his long absence.
“So I’m the traitor?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “you just forgot about us.”
He laughed and said, “I forgive you, Jawad. Wait until I tell you what happened to me.”
After breakfast I left him chatting with my mother and made a deal with Hamid, the taxi driver. His only condition was not to drive anywhere outside of Baghdad, because the roads were dangerous.
Our first stop was the book market on al-Mutanabbi Street. Hamid dropped us off there. I asked him to come back for us three hours later. My uncle pored over the titles of books. After a long conversation with one of the booksellers about what he was looking for, the seller told him he had lots of poetry and history books in his warehouse across the street. My uncle told me to wait while he and the bookseller went there.
I wandered the neighborhood alone. I loved the street. It had a lot of booksellers with a surprising wealth of great titles, all the books stacked without regard to subject or genre. A timid wind blew that morning and became more self-confident around noon. It, too, leafed through books and magazines and turned pages angrily, as if it were dissatisfied with what it read and could find nothing it liked.
Many booksellers put rocks or pieces of brick on the magazines to keep them in place. Some had laid out long boards to secure a row of books without hiding their titles. Books on Shiite theology, which were previously banned, had the lion’s share. New newspapers had multiplied. It was difficult to keep up with names. The lack of any law regulating publication meant that anyone with the money and the desire could start a newspaper.
In addition to newspapers, there were back issues of foreign magazines and many new Arabic magazines with glossy covers. Seduction flowed from the eyes of the female singers and movie stars on the covers. These were a few centimeters away from equally glossy posters of turbaned clerics with stern and angry faces. My uncle returned, showing me what he had found: first editions of some of al-Jawahiri’s poetry collections and one of Sa’di Yusif’s, together with some Jurji Zaydan novels and Neruda’s autobiography.
On our way to al-Shahbandar café we saw a young man standing in front of a set of booklets and pamphlets piled on a box on the ground. He was tall and clean-shaven, in his early thirties with curly brown hair. He wore a white shirt and gray pants. We drew closer. The pamphlets bore the logo of a Revolutionary Workers’ Party, of which I hadn’t heard. Some of the booklets were writings by Trotsky, Lenin, and Gramsci. My uncle greeted him and started asking him about the party’s links to the Communist Party.
The young man was critical of the Communist Party for many reasons, chief among them its mistaken decision to join the governing council that had been annou
nced a few days before. That was a recognition of the occupation and a legitimization of its project. The young man spoke passionately and confidently, prefacing his sentences with “dear” or “brother,” and used his right hand to illustrate main points.
My uncle told him that he himself had left the Communist Party eight years before, because he was against its practices, dubious alliances, and new trajectory. Then he asked the young man where he was from.
“Al-Thawra,” he answered.
I teased him, saying “You mean al-Sadr City.”2
“No, dear, al-Thawra City.”
My uncle asked him about the popularity of Marxist ideas in al-Thawra City after all these years.
The man sounded optimistic and said that his party had active cells and good numbers there, but that the embargo had dealt a severe blow to political activism because it had destroyed the entire social fabric. “Were it not for the embargo,” he said, “the regime wouldn’t have survived.”
My uncle was not as optimistic as this young bookseller. He asked him what he thought about the rise of sectarian discourse and how religious thinking had struck deep roots during the years of the embargo. The man responded that compared with other countries in the region, the history of secularism in Iraq was well known, and that religious parties had no solutions to offer, just obscurantism. Islamic movements had failed anyway in the Arab world, he said.
A devout man who was listening to the conversation started to argue with the young man. My uncle took this as an opportunity to leave. He took some of the booklets and gave the young man some money as a donation. The man thanked him and invited us to visit the party’s temporary headquarters, in the Rafidayn Bank at the beginning of Rashid Street. My uncle asked, “Are you the ones who looted the bank?”
The man laughed and said, “No, we arrived too late.” My uncle joined in the young man’s laughter.
After we had left, I asked what he thought of what the bookseller had said.
The young man was too optimistic, especially about secularism, Uncle Sabri said, then acknowledged that perhaps it’s necessary to be optimistic. He added that he was reminded of one of his favorite quotes from Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect. Optimism of the will.” He himself was rather pessimistic about sectarianism. What had taken place, he said, was not just an occupation but the destruction of a state more than eighty years old. War and occupation were the final blows, but the process had begun with the destruction of the infrastructure during the 1991 war. Then there was the embargo, which had destroyed the social fabric, and now the void created by the occupation was being filled by these sectarian parties because they had institutions. Their rhetoric touched people’s hearts and they knew how to exploit the political climate. But, my uncle added, the history of secularism in Iraq runs deep. The Da’wa Party, for example, was founded in Najaf, because with the spread of communism even in Najaf and Karbala, people were confusing Shiite with Shiyu’i (Communist), which terrified the religious clerics.
We had reached al-Shahbandar café. I asked: “Did you see all the posters of clerics and all the theology books being sold?”
He said, “Of course, after long years of suppression there is a thirst, but perhaps it will be quenched.”
We entered the café, found two empty seats, and ordered tea. There was a French TV crew conducting interviews with intellectuals. I saw the famous theater director Salah al-Qasab sitting a few meters away. They approached him, but I heard him decline more than once to be interviewed. The journalist insisted and asked him through the translator: “What do you have to say about what has happened?”
“Film the streets of Baghdad. That’s what I think,” he answered.
Ten minutes later my uncle saw a man with a stack of newspapers under his arm. He was handing out copies of Tariq al-Sha’ab, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. They hugged and chatted for fifteen minutes and then Sabri came back with a copy. He told me that the man was an old comrade whom he’d last seen in Beirut in 1982.
I searched for a familiar face, but I didn’t see any of the people I usually saw here. My uncle started reading the newspaper. There were announcements about public funerals for the party’s martyrs who had been executed years ago. There was an announcement in big letters about a major demonstration in three days to commemorate the anniversary of the 14th of July revolution. It called on all the party’s friends and supporters to assemble at Liberation Square to march to Firdaws Square. My uncle asked whether I was interested in taking part.
“Sure,” I said. “First, to be with you and second, to go to a demonstration freely for the first time in my life, without being forced to do so. I have to do it for the sake of variety at least.” We both laughed.
I looked at my watch and reminded him that it was time to meet our driver. We got out and passed by the young commie again. He greeted us from a distance and we smiled back. My uncle asked Hamid to drive him to the new headquarters of the Communist Party, which was at the insurance building at al-Andalus Square.
“I thought you said you had divorced the party?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I just want to get some news about my comrades … ask about some of them and see who’s been back. I won’t be long,” he said.
I was feeling sleepy so I told him I’d take a nap in the back seat until he came back. When he returned, his smile had disappeared. I asked what was wrong. “Nothing,” he said.
The next day the electricity was back on long enough to see on TV the official announcement of the formation of the governing council under the aegis of Paul Bremer. The council was a hodgepodge of names supposedly representing the spectrum of Iraqi society, but we had never heard of most of them. What they had in common was that each name was preceded by its sect: Sunni, Shia, Christian … We were not accustomed to such a thing. My uncle was furious when he saw the secretary general of the Iraqi Communist Party sitting with the other members. He’d heard at the headquarters that the party had polled its cadres and that they’d voted to be part of the council, but he still couldn’t believe his eyes.
He waved his hand and said, “Look at him, for God’s sake. They put him there as a Shiite, and not because he represents an ideological trend or a party with its own history of political struggle. What a shame that this is what it all comes down to. Now an entire history of resisting dictatorship and rejecting war is being trashed. Communists will be like all these other fuckers and crooks. Look at them. Each has a belly weighing a ton.”
Nevertheless, we went to Liberation Square on the morning of July 14th. My uncle said he wanted to commemorate the revolution and the sacrifices of Communists despite what had become of the party in recent years. Hundreds had gathered under the Liberty Monument. I had not stood under it or passed by it for a long time. It was a bit dirty, because of all the pollution and negligence. It looked like it desperately needed maintenance and restoration, but it still had that aura. I remembered Mr. Ismael and my dreams of becoming a great artist—which had all now evaporated.
There were many Communists present, of course, and the organizers wore red ribbons around their arms. But many others seemed to be sympathizers, or perhaps found themselves closer to the Communist Party than to any of the other sectarian parties. There were even a few veiled women. Perhaps many were attracted by the slogan on many of the placards carried by some: “No to Occupation, Yes to Democracy.” There were other banners as well, many red flags, and posters of Abdilkarim Qasim, who was the first prime minister after the pro-British monarchy was toppled in 1958. I was used to reading his name in the context of condemnations by the Ba’thists because he had supposedly been a dictator. That Saddam had participated in a failed assassination attempt on Qasim’s life had been one of those heroic epics repeated to us hundreds of times, so it was quite strange for me to see Qasim’s image being paraded about, not to condemn him, but in celebration of his memory.
My uncle was one of those who believed that, despite his mistakes, Qasim was the fi
rst indigenous Iraqi to rule the country in the twentieth century and that he had accomplished important feats. He said as he pointed to the American soldiers who were monitoring the spectacle from a Humvee that the Americans had been against Qasim and had helped the Ba’thists overthrow him.
The mood was festive. A group played popular music and many danced. I even saw a woman in her sixties applauding and dancing along. My uncle said that she was a veteran Communist who’d returned from exile in London. He knew her because of the articles she regularly published on leftist websites. Passing cars were honking to salute the demonstration. My uncle seemed enthusiastic despite his dismay with the party for its decision to enter the governing council.
I told him that seeing the demonstration one would think that the Communist Party could win the elections in a landslide and rule the country. When I heard some of the demonstrators chanting “Fahad, Fahad, your party isn’t dead and will live forever,” I asked him who this Fahad might be. He was shocked.
“Fahad was the founder of the party,” he said. “He was executed by the monarchy and famously said right before being executed, ‘Communism is stronger than death and higher than the gallows.’ You have to read Batatu’s book on Iraq. It’s the most important and encyclopedic account of Iraq’s modern history.”
I promised that I would look for it and he said he would send me a copy if I couldn’t find one. After about an hour, the crowd began to move toward Firdaws Square. The demonstration was well organized. When we were marching down Sadoun Street, Uncle Sabri kept looking back to get an idea of the numbers. When we reached Firdaws Square, the crowd had swelled. American choppers hovered over us.
Later events proved any optimism about secularism misplaced. In the weeks following that big demonstration, many other rallies were organized by other parties. They were saturated with religious and sectarian symbols. The sectarian stamp became normal and began to acquire unusual impact. In time the Communist Party’s popularity dwindled, and its performance in elections was dismal; its secularism meant that it would be the last horse in the sectarian race. No one would place bets on it.
The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 9