‘At the crack of dawn my father would get up. He would usually find me asleep in my place. He would put his hand on my forehead and I would wake up to the touch of his hand. “Go inside, son. Perform your prayers. May God prosper you.” He was well aware I was drinking arak, but religion to him didn’t mean the words of any prophet, any holy law or prohibitions. Religion meant love of virtue, as he would put it, to anyone with whom he was discussing questions of Islamic law. I will never forget the day he broke down in tears at the football ground. He frightened the children and I was embarrassed and disturbed that he was crying. The Baath Party members had executed three young Kurds close to the football pitch. They tied them to wooden stakes and shot them dead in full view of the local people. Before they did it, they announced over loudspeakers, “These people are traitors and terrorists who do not deserve to eat from the bounty of this land, or drink its water or breathe its air.” As usual, the Baathists took the bodies and left the stakes in place to remind everyone of what had happened. My father had come to the square to take me to the cinema. He was crazy about Indian films. When he saw that one goal was missing an upright he realised we had taken the stakes to make the goals. Traces of blood had dried on the wood. My father broke down when one of the children said, “We’re still missing one goalpost. Maybe they’ll execute another one and we can have the stake.”
‘One summer evening we were invaded again. My uncle knocked frantically on the door. My mother was counting money and putting it in an empty tomato paste jar. My father and I were playing chess. He could beat me easily, but first he enjoyed giving me the pleasure of taking his pawns. He would sacrifice them and his other pieces without taking anything in return, keeping only his king and queen. Then he would start to destroy my pieces with his black queen until he had me in checkmate.
‘My father went out to the yard to greet my uncle. My mother threw on her shawl and followed. They all stood near the septic tank in anxious discussion, but in low voices. I watched them from behind the window pane. I was still dizzy from drinking the day before. I was waiting for night to come to get drunk again. My mother rushed to fetch something from under the stairs. My father and my uncle worked together to empty a barrel full of pickled cauliflower. My mother came back with a hammer and a nail. My father laid the barrel flat on the ground and started to punch holes in it at random with the nail. He didn’t have his artificial leg on. He was hopping around the barrel on one leg as if he were playing or dancing. My uncle parked the pick-up outside the front door and loaded it with the barrels of pickles. Then my father came into the living room sweating.
‘“Listen, son,” he said, “there’s no time. Your uncle has information that the police and the party are going to search all the houses from dawn. Your uncle has loyal friends in the village of Awran. Stay there a few days till things calm down.” I climbed into the empty barrel and my mother closed the lid tight. My father and my uncle lifted me on to the pick-up.
‘My father was right. They were brothers after all, and they could read each others’ minds. My uncle drove through the streets like a madman to save my life. He managed to reach the outskirts of the city safely but all the roads to the provincial towns and villages had military checkpoints. His only option was to take the back roads. He chose a road through the wheat fields to the east of the city. Maybe in his panic he mistook the road. Even the city children knew the chain of rugged and rocky hills that lay beyond the wheat fields. Maybe images of the people tortured in his department had unhinged his brain. Maybe he imagined his colleagues dissolving him in tanks of sulphuric acid and the headline Security Officer Helps Nephew Escape in Pickle Barrel. As he drove through the wheat fields, he was barely in control of the steering wheel. The bumps were about to break my ribs and only dust kicked up by the truck crept in through the holes in the barrel. The barrel stank like the dead cats on the neighbourhood rubbish dump. Did my uncle pull out fingernails, gouge out people’s eyes and singe their skin with branding irons in the vaults of the Security Department? Maybe it was the souls of his victims that drove him into the ravine, maybe it was my own evil soul, or maybe the soul that preordained everything that is ephemeral and mysterious in this transitory world.
‘Seven barrels lay in the darkness at the bottom of the cliff like sleeping animals. The pick-up had overturned after my uncle tried to take a second rocky bend in the hill. The barrels rolled down into the ravine with the truck. I spent the night unconscious inside the barrel. In the first hours of morning the rays of sunlight pierced the holes in the barrel, like lifelines extended to a drowning man. My mouth was full of blood and my hands were trembling. I was in pain and frightened. I started to observe the rays of the sun as they criss-crossed confusingly in the barrel. I wanted to escape the chaos that had played havoc with my consciousness. I felt as if I had smoked a ton of marijuana: a fish coming to its senses in a sardine tin, a dead worm in an abandoned well, a putrid foetus with crushed bones in a womb the shape of a barrel. Then my mind fixed on another image: my brother sinking to the bottom of the septic tank and me diving after him.
‘The bleating sounded faint at first, as though a choir was practising. One goat started and then another joined in, then all the goats together, as if they had found the right key. The rays of the sun moved and fell right in my eye. I pissed in my pants inside that barrel, appalled at the cruelty of the world to which I was returning. The goatherd called out to his flock and one of the goats butted the barrel.’
1 Houri – one of the beautiful virgins of the Quranic paradise.
2 ‘Arak’ – a traditional, anise-flavoured distilled spirit
The Hole
1
I was stuffing the last pieces of chocolate into the bag. I had already filled my pockets with them. I took some bottles of water from the storeroom. I had enough tinned salmon – so I hid the remaining tins under the pile of toilet paper. Then, just as I was heading for the door, three masked gunmen broke in. I opened fire and one of them fell to the ground. I ran out the back door into the street, but the other two started to chase me. I jumped over the fence of the local football field and ran towards the park. When I reached the far end of the park, down by the side of the Natural History Museum, I fell into a hole.
‘Listen, don’t be frightened.’
His hoarse voice scared me.
‘Who are you?’ I asked him, paralysed by fear.
‘Are you in pain?’
‘No.’
‘That’s normal. It’s part of the chain.’
The darkness receded when I lit a candle.
‘Take a deep breath! Don’t worry!’
He gave an unpleasant laugh, full of arrogance and disdain.
His face was dark and rough, like a loaf of barley bread. A decrepit old man. His torso was naked. He was sitting on a small bench, with a dirty sheet on his thighs. Next to him there were some sacks and some old junk. If he hadn’t moved his head like a cartoon character, he would have looked like an ordinary beggar. He was tilting his head left and right like a tortoise in some legend.
‘Who are you? Did I fall down a hole?’
‘Yes, of course you fell. I live here.’
‘Do you have any water?’
‘The water’s cut off. It’ll come back soon. I have some marijuana.’
‘Marijuana? Are you with the government or the opposition?’
‘I’m with your mother’s cunt.’
‘Please! Is the place safe?’
He lit a joint and offered it to me. I took a drag and examined him. He looked suspicious. He smoked the rest of the joint and tuned a radio beside him to a station that was playing a song in a strange language. It sounded like some African religious beat.
‘Are you foreign?’
‘Can’t you tell by my accent? I’m speaking your language, man! But you can’t speak my language because I was in the hole before you. But you’ll speak the language of the next person who falls in.’
‘Ah, man. I hat
e the way you talk.’
He looked away, leant his tortoise-like neck forward and lit another candle. I could see the place more clearly now. There was a dead body. I examined it by the candlelight, a bitter taste in my mouth. It was the body of a soldier and there was an old rifle nearby. His legs were lacerated, possibly by some sharp piece of shrapnel. He looked like a soldier from ancient times.
‘It’s true, it’s a Russian soldier.’
He read my thoughts and on his face there was an artificial smile.
‘And what was he doing in our country? Was he working at the embassy?’
‘He fell in the forest during the winter war between Russia and Finland.’
‘You really are mad.’
‘Listen, I don’t have time for the likes of you. I wanted to be polite with you, but now you’re starting to get on my nerves. I’m in a shitty mood today.’
I began to examine the hole. It was like a well. Its walls were of damp mud but the pores in the mud gave off a sharp, acrid smell. Maybe the smell of flowers! I lifted up the candle to try to see how deep the hole was. At the mouth, the lights in the park were visible.
‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked me in his disgusting voice.
‘We’re always in His care. Pray to Him, man, to spare us the disasters of life.’
He rounded his hands into the shape of a megaphone and started to shout hysterically: ‘O Lord of Miracles, Almighty One, Omniscient One, God, Great One, send down a giraffe and a monkey as long as it’s 180 centimetres tall! Make something other than a human fall in the hole! Make a dry tree fall in the hole! Throw us four snakes so we can make a rope out of them!’
As if the craziness of this tortoise-like old man was what I needed! I humoured him with his sarcastic prayer and said that if another man fell down the hole it would be easy to get out of it, because it wasn’t deep.
‘You’re right, and here’s a third man!’ he said, pointing at the Russian soldier.
‘But he’s dead.’
‘Dead here, but not in another hole.’
The old man suddenly pulled out a knife. I watched him warily, in case he attacked me. He crawled on his knees towards the body of the soldier and started cutting out chunks of flesh and eating it. He paid no attention to me, as if I didn’t exist.
2
That night I had picked up my revolver before heading out to the shop. I’d closed the place down months before, when the killing and looting started to spread across the capital. I would drop by the shop now and then when it was hard to get food or water from any of the shops near our house. The economy had quickly collapsed and things had grown even worse due to the strikes. There were signs of an uprising and chaos spread in the wake of the government’s resignation. The first protests began in the capital, and, within a few days, panic and violence swept the country. Bands of people occupied all the government buildings. They formed interim committees and attempted to govern. However things suddenly turned sour again. People said that it was businessmen who backed the organised gangs that managed to take control of the northern part of the country. The rich and the supporters of the fugitive government were convinced that the new faith-based groups would come to power and impose their obscurantist ideology. That’s what the spokesman for the northern region said, and he also threatened that the region would secede. The extremists in the faith-based groups took no interest in speeches by politicians or revolutionaries. They were working silently behind the scenes, and in one shock assault they seized control of the country’s nuclear missile base. ‘Mankind has led us into ruination so let’s go back to the wisdom of the Creator.’ That was their motto.
As for the army, it fought on several fronts. In the country’s main port, soldiers with machine guns killed more than fifty people who were trying to rob the main bank. People started to confront the army, which they began to see as the enemy of change. There was plenty of weaponry. Our southern neighbours were said to have given weapons to civilians. In the capital some sensible people called for calm and for a way out of the storm that was sweeping the country. The army surrounded the missile base and began negotiating with the extremist leader, who was living among armed tribes in another country. He was a colonel who had been expelled from the army because of his extremist ideas. It was also said that he had a slogan tattooed on his forehead: Purge the Earth of Devils.
The old man chewed the meat and went back to his place as if he’d just finished eating a sandwich. He wiped his mouth with a dirty towel, pulled out a book, and began to read. I took out a bar of chocolate and devoured it nervously. The old man was quite loathsome and disgusting.
He looked up from his book and said, ‘Listen, I’ll get straight to the point. I’m a djinni.’ He put out his hand for me to shake.
I looked at him inquisitively.
What was it my grandfather had said in his last few weeks? He kept raving in front of the pomegranate tree (all he could do in this world was suck pomegranates and stare at the tree).
How I wanted to get up and kick the old man. I noticed he was looking at me spitefully and smiling in a way that suggested contempt. Then he said, ‘You seem to be braver and less disgusting than this Russian. Listen, I’m not interested in you and the people who visit the hole. All I’m looking for in your stories is amusement. When you spend your life in this endless chain, the pleasure of playing is the only thing that keeps you going. Wretches like this Russian remind me of the absurdity of the game. The romance of fear transforms the chain into a gallows. As soon as our friend the Russian fell in the hole, it terrified him that I was in it. He aimed his rifle at my head. And when I told him I was a djinni, he almost went crazy. He had one bullet. If it didn’t kill me, he would die of fright, and if he didn’t fire it he would remain hostage to his own paranoia.’
‘Very well, and what happened?’
‘Ha! I told him I knew all the secrets of his life, and to make him more frightened I said I knew Nikolai, his aunt’s youngest son. The soldier was disturbed when he heard the name. I talked about how he and Nikolai raped a girl in his village. He broke down and fired a bullet at my head. It’s a silly chain, full of your human stories. Would you believe sayings such as this?’ He read from his book: ‘“We are merely exotic shadows in this world.” Trite talk, isn’t it? Life is beautiful, my friend. Enjoy it and don’t worry. I used to teach poetry in Baghdad. I think it’s going to rain. One day we might know one of the secrets or how to get out. There’s no difference here. What matters is the music of the chain.’
I shouted, ‘You’re eating a corpse, you disgusting old man!’
‘Ha! You’ll eat me too, and they’ll eat you or use you as material for their batteries or for drinking.’
I punched him in the face and shouted again, ‘If you weren’t an old man, I’d smash your skull in, you bastard!’
He paid no attention to what I said. All he said was that there was no need for me to be upset, because he would leave the hole soon and I would fall into another hole from another time. He said his book would stay with me. It’s a book full of hallucinations. It had detailed explanations of the secret energy extracted from insects to create additional organs to reinforce the liver, the pancreas, the heart and all the body’s other organs.
3
Before leaving the hole, the old man told me he was from Baghdad and had lived in the time of the Abbasid Caliphate. He had been a teacher, a writer and an inventor. He suggested to the caliph that they light the city streets with lanterns. He had already supervised the lighting of the mosques and was now busy on his plan to expand the house lighting system by more contemporary methods. The Baghdad thieves were upset by his lanterns, and one day they chased after him after dawn prayers. Close to his home the lantern man tripped on his cloak and fell down the hole.
One of the things this Baghdadi told me was that everyone who visits the hole soon learns how to find out about events of the past, the present and the future, and that the inventors of the game ha
d based it on a series of experiments they had conducted to understand coincidence. There were rumours that they couldn’t control the game, which rolls ceaselessly on and on through the curves of time. He also said: ‘Anyone who’s looking for a way out of here also has to develop the art of playing, otherwise they’ll remain a ghost like me, happy with the game… Ha, ha, ha. I’m fed up with trying to decipher symbols. There are two opponents in every game. Each one has his own private code. It’s a bloody fight, repetitive and disgusting. The rest is memory, which they can’t erase easily. In your day, experiments with memory were in their infancy. The scientists went on working for more than a century and a half after those first attempts – the purpose of which was to discover the memory centres in rats’ brains. It turned out that the rats remembered what they learned even if their brains had been completely destroyed in the laboratory. Those would be amazing experiments if they were applied to humans. Is memory a winning card in this game that we play so seriously till it’s all over, or should we merely have fun? Everyone that falls down here becomes a meal or a source to satisfy the instincts, or energy for other systems. We who…. damn, who are we? No one knows!’
The Iraqi Christ Page 2