“Either you kill me or you make me feel remorseful,” Jibran demanded.
“How could I make you feel remorseful?”
“Cast a spell on me, or give me some magic potion. Treat me. Make me cry a lot and feel guilty!”
“That’s impossible. There’s nothing that can make someone cry unless it comes from inside—from deep inside.”
“If the person’s empty inside, what can we do then?” Jibran asked.
“I don’t know—and I don’t believe you wrote the report. No one would do that and then come to confess.”
“You have to believe me,” Jibran begged. “I don’t have any proof for what I’m saying, but I’m your main enemy. You have to hate me and try to take revenge on me. I wish you would do it tonight—right now, if you like.”
“I don’t know. I’m tired and I need a drink.”
“I don’t really enjoy it that much, but shall we have a drink together?”
“As you like,” the magician agreed.
They drank until midnight, and then Hannoun gave him a poisonous herbal mixture. He told him it would kill him instantly, as soon as he mixed it with water and drank it. Jibran thanked him profusely and went home happy. At home, he found that his wife had set his table. She had bought him a full bottle of mastic-flavored arak from Abu Edward the Christian’s store on the main street in Bawateen. She had prepared the jajiki for him and had put on the Saadi al-Hilli tape. She was as obliging as a slave-girl. She waited for him to sit down at his table and made sure he didn’t need her for anything else before heading to bed. Jibran mixed the dark herbal mixture with water in the glass and drank it. It took a few minutes before he became drowsy; he either had drunk too much with Hannoun or the poison was working. He put his forehead on the table and stretched out his arms on it, then sank into a lethal coma.
The last thing Hannoun had said to him was: “If you’re incapable of feeling remorse, this stuff will kill you. It’s a serious test.” It appeared Jibran wasn’t capable of feeling remorse.
* * *
Hannoun told the whole story to Jumaa, who listened in amazement, but he also added some magical elements to his account. He told Jumaa that he had sent a kind of djinn to the judge—to strangle him in his bed. Then he cast a spell that forced the officer to stay seated behind the steering wheel of his car—until the car bomb drove up and exploded next to him. Hannoun told him that he continued to summon all his enemies—the ones who tortured him in prison, spat at him, and even slapped him just once during an interrogation or in detention. He had counted eight enemies in total. The magician swore that he contacted them one by one using telepathy, and by taming the djinn. He slipped them the herbal powder—the same powder that provided a sense of remorse to those who were capable of feeling it and killed those who weren’t. One man managed to pass the test, and after that, he spent most of his days weeping and wailing near the tomb of Sheikh Abdel Qader al-Gilani, a twelfth-century holy man. Hannoun’s other seven foes died.
That one man who passed the test was Jibran—and now Hannoun believed his life was over. He hadn’t expected to take his revenge so quickly.
“Haven’t you ever thought, even for a moment, that perhaps they didn’t deserve to die?” asked Jumaa.
“I didn’t kill them. They killed themselves. Deep down they didn’t want to feel remorse.”
“You gave them a poison that killed them . . . so you killed them. Don’t you have any pangs of remorse?”
“No, why should I feel remorse?” Hannoun argued. “It’s only fair.”
“I feel guilty now, because I sat and listened to the story.” Jumaa paused for a moment. “You’re a criminal, Hannoun. I should tell the police. But then I’d be betraying you as a friend, and as my neighbor in this lodging house. And if I don’t tell them, I’ll feel guilty because I’ll be covering up for you, and you might commit more crimes—”
“No!” the magician interrupted. “First, I’m not a criminal; and second, the story’s over. I’m telling you because it’s over.”
“You’ve implicated me, Hannoun. You shouldn’t have told me anything. We used to just laugh, sing along with Saadi al-Hilli, and drink Zahlawi arak and wine. Why did you raise this bizarre subject? How will I be able to sleep now?”
“I could give you a herbal mixture that might help you sleep . . .”
“No, I don’t want anything from you.”
Jumaa went through a real ordeal after this. He was convinced that the man he’d been socializing with for a long time was deranged. But he wasn’t deranged in the normal sense. Apparently, the most severe forms of madness are those where the victim looks like an ordinary person with placid features.
* * *
Two days after Yasser questioned his elder brother’s wife in their house, his brother’s youngest daughter—the most adventurous of Jibran’s daughters—came to visit him. She sat in the reception room and, before drinking the juice that Yasser’s wife put in front of her, she told Yasser that she knew how her father had died. She didn’t want to tell anyone about it for fear of the scandal it might cause.
“They were herbal stimulants, sexual stimulants,” she said. Out of modesty and shame, she didn’t look into her uncle’s eyes. Then she told him that her father hadn’t had any problems—no suicidal tendencies, no sense of despair or frustration. He was an ordinary person who enjoyed his simple pleasures, especially sitting at the table and drinking. But his wife used to nag him about the trouble he had getting an erection and his lack of interest in sex. So, along with the nagging, she advised him to go and see a man in the area who was famous for selling a herbal mixture that helped to treat erectile dysfunction. That man was Hannoun the Magician. She had heard about him and his expertise from some women in the neighborhood. Since it wasn’t far away and he wanted to keep his wife quiet, Jibran went to Hannoun and drank the herbal mixture that very night, but instead of curing his impotence, it killed him.
Yasser remembered what Hannoun had said to him: Your brother was killed by someone close to him. Yasser had just corroborated this version of events. Yes, Jibran had been killed by his stupid wife, but without her intending it, of course. That was the whole story as far as Yasser was concerned—and in the police files, the case had already been closed for weeks.
Even so, he wanted to be doubly sure, so he went back to Hannoun to ask him about the herbal mixture that had killed his brother.
* * *
When Yasser went into Jumaa’s room as usual, his friend seemed surprised by the visit. Jumaa didn’t look comfortable; in fact, he looked uneasy and put out. They chatted awhile about the mild weather, about how the summer had ended so soon, about the news reports on victims of the terrorist attacks, the new transitional government, and how the Americans were arresting young people accused of terrorism. But what caught Yasser’s attention was that Jumaa then paused. He offered to get a shisha ready for Yasser to smoke, but Yasser declined. Jumaa went to the brazier and turned over the glowing coals, choosing a big one that he then put at the top of the shisha. He sucked deep on the pipe several times until thick white smoke came out. Yasser told his friend the latest developments in the story of his dead brother.
Jumaa was silent for a while, but after smoking the shisha for a bit, he felt brave enough to tell his friend what had been happening with Hannoun over the previous few days. Yasser was surprised, and grew convinced that Hannoun was a damaged man who had killed his brother and others by the same method. Now he just needed to prove it.
The two of them went to see Hannoun shortly before sunset and found people sitting around, waiting to receive their amulets, their spells, or their folk medicine. When the room was clear of customers, Yasser explained to the magician that he couldn’t feel the sensation of remorse, and wanted some type of treatment for it. From behind Yasser’s back, Jumaa made a gesture that Hannoun understood—that it would be best to get rid of this man before he exposed him.
“Here’s a herbal mixture. It’
s like a test: if you’re incapable of feeling remorse, it will kill you,” Hannoun told him.
“How can I tell whether I’m capable of feeling remorse or not? I don’t want to die.”
“You have to be ready to face death in order to feel the remorse that you want to feel,” the magician explained.
“Yes,” Yasser replied, as he took the paper packet that contained the dark herbal powder.
He went straight to the police lab to have it analyzed to see if it matched the substance that was found in the possession of the seven dead men—and in the bottom of Jibran’s glass.
* * *
Jumaa was sitting with Hannoun when night fell. They were confident that no more customers would come in. Jumaa poured a fresh drink into Hannoun’s glass.
“What’s this?” Hannoun asked. “It tastes strange.”
“This is mao-tai. The Chinese national drink.”
“Where did you get it?”
“My boss brought it today and gave me a bottle.”
They drank the mao-tai—then Jumaa looked at the old magician. He was about to say something. He felt . . . sorry for him.
Hannoun noticed his intense expression. “Is something the matter?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m waiting for you to get drunk,” Jumaa joked.
“You’ll have a long wait.”
“Did you realize that Yasser, the young man who visited us today, is a police officer? He took that herbal stuff from you to have it analyzed in the lab.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because it might be poisonous. What kind of idiot would drink something when he doesn’t know what it is?”
“We’re all idiots. Life’s a big trick that’s been played on us,” the magician muttered.
They chattered away, slowly sinking into a stupor of mild intoxication.
“I told you: my life’s over now. I’ve taken revenge on all my enemies. That was what mattered most to me. Now, whenever death comes, I’ll welcome it.”
“That’s crazy talk. What kind of idiot would throw his life away?”
“You’re talking a lot about idiots tonight, but you’re one of them,” Hannoun replied.
“Of course I’m an idiot. I’ve wasted my life on stupid things. I haven’t done anything honorable.”
“If that’s how it is, then don’t talk about idiots,” Hannoun warned, an edge to his voice.
“You don’t want me to talk about idiots because I might upset the big one—which is you.”
“Do you have any regrets, Jumaa?” Hannoun suddenly asked, his eyes glistening as though he were about to cry.
“Yes, I regret my whole life . . . everything in my life. It’s just been one mistake after another.”
“Great!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because while you were bringing another piece of charcoal for your shisha, I slipped that herbal powder into our drink—the mao-tai,” the magician whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we can now find out together what it tastes like for the first time—a taste mixed with the powder of remorse.”
“You’re crazy! How could you do that?”
“It’s the only lesson I can give you,” Hannoun said. “As for me . . . I don’t feel remorse and it seems I can’t. I’m very proud of what I’ve done and I don’t want to go through hell in prison again because of your friend the detective. I’ve experienced enough torment. I probably won’t wake up tomorrow morning. But you—if you’re sure you can feel remorse, you’ll be a new person tomorrow morning. Cheers!”
And with that, Hannoun swallowed what was left in his glass.
Translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright
PART II
Where Is the Trust?
Baghdad on Borrowed Time
by Salar Abdoh
Gejara
I was tired of the artist types who needed my services. The trouble was, they were the ones neurotic enough to want to pay for those services in the first place. Either a husband suspected a wife or a wife suspected a husband. There was hardly a variant to this. I would’ve had to shut my business down if I told them the truth: If you suspect it, it’s probably not your imagination.
They could not believe that there was an actual private detective agency in this city. They imagined themselves to be playing a role in a film. And to get on my good side, they’d say exactly the same thing, every time: “Have you ever read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett? I love those writers . . .” It was always in that order: Raymond first, Dashiell second—not the other way around. It was their way of saying they understood my world. It was silly. And because I didn’t want to give them a lecture on the million sentences that had been added to the craft since those gentlemen wrote what they wrote, I would simply state my exorbitant daily rate, plus the very hefty extra expenses, and watch them swallow and pretend to be considering it before they said yes. It wasn’t like I had a whole lot of competition in my line of business here.
So imagine my surprise one day when in walked a guy who spoke Persian with an Arab accent. I knew him for what he was right away—reluctant military. Retired now and ready to forget all the corpses he’d seen in his life.
“What brings you to Tehran?” I asked him.
“This,” the military man said, softly. He laid a blown-up photograph on the desk.
It was an image of the sort of thing you saw back when Saddam attacked Iran in the 1980s—a wall of names and inept political propaganda: Long live Saddam Hussein. Our leader, and father, and friend. President of the lionhearted people of Iraq. Beneath the dedication were a half-dozen names.
I looked up at the man. “You are . . . ?”
“Abu Habiba.”
“You spent the war on our side, I assume.”
“I fought against Saddam,” he said. “If that’s what you mean.”
“Badr Brigade?” I asked.
He nodded. “Seventeen years of it. I went back to Baghdad when that accursed man finally fell.”
There was so much fatigue in his voice, so many lost years. Not a drop of relish in mentioning the dictator’s inglorious demise. He seemed too tired to relish anything. Abu Habiba’s eyes roamed a bit, finally resting on my window overlooking Karim Khan Avenue. I had rented this hole-in-the-wall office for its centrality, but all you could really see from here were cars swooshing over the bridge and honking their horns.
“I researched you,” he admitted. “You’ve been to Iraq. Do you know Baghdad well?”
When there’s no reason to lie, tell the truth. It takes less effort. I knew Baghdad just enough. A decade earlier, the family of an Iranian MIA, going back two decades, had hired me to go to there and look for their missing boy. The boy would be older than me now, if, by some chance, he were still alive. This had been in 2006, and Baghdad back then was a nightmare you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. The Americans were receiving a bloody nose from the insurgency every day. It was a dogfight, neighborhood by neighborhood. One time, on a side road off Umreidi Street, I came face-to-face with my own mortality. After that, I wasn’t sticking around. Why? Because as my driver and I turned the corner, we almost drove headlong into an American Stryker vehicle that had its gun trained at the building thirty feet away from us. The arrival of our taxi in the middle of an about-to-go-down gun battle between the Americans and the Sadr militia makes for a good tale in retrospect, but back in those days, it was just about the worst thing that could happen to you in Baghdad.
I want to give you a complete picture of those moments, so you’ll understand why at first I wasn’t keen on going back, even ten years later: the beastly looking armored carrier sat there idling, then its gun turret slowly turned until my driver and I were dead center in its line of fire; the wind raised swirls of garbage off the street; shattered windowpanes dangled precariously from crooked frames of crooked homes; flapping doors squeaked like the cry of the devil; if one side or the other didn’t kill you, the hea
t would. It was a High Noon moment, I thought. Gary Cooper or John Wayne could’ve walked out of that building with a shotgun and a six-shooter. Instead, I looked to the building and saw one of the Sadr militiamen staring at me like a demon: What the fuck are you doing here, you fool?
That was when I softly called my driver’s name: “Haider!”
Haider was frozen. We were about to be blown to pieces in a corner of Baghdad, and Haider seemed to be having a stroke.
“Haider!” The guns of the Stryker were still trained on us. They also seemed to be saying the very same thing—Are you mad? This is a gunfight. Get lost! Then I saw the drip of sweat rolling off Haider’s face. He wasn’t dead—he was in shock and couldn’t speak. “Easy, brother. Just back the car out slowly and get us away from here. Don’t make a sudden move. Don’t turn one way or another. Don’t plead for our lives. Just back the car out the same way we came. That’s it . . . There you go. Slowly does it. Nice and slow . . .”
And that was the last time I was in Baghdad. It was enough for a lifetime. All the money in the world couldn’t get me back there again—or so I thought. But I was bored with all the adulterers of Tehran and ten years had passed, after all.
I brought my attention back to Abu Habiba. “I don’t come cheap,” I warned.
“Do it for your heart,” he said.
* * *
It wasn’t the Baghdad I’d known in 2006. In Karrada, I went back to Abu Ali’s and had myself a teman wa marag. Iraqi men tore into flatbread and rice, while posters of Imam Hossein and Ayatollah Sistani watched over them. This was a thoroughly Shia establishment, and had been targeted at least twice that I knew of. Once by the Americans and once by al-Qaeda associates who had eventually been caught a little farther north in Diyala. I didn’t think Abu Ali would recognize me after so long. But he did. He still looked like the grand old uncle of the entire world. Flowing white beard, honest eyes, and a great big smile that exuded unshakable faith.
“You didn’t find your missing Iranian all those years ago, so you decided to abandon us altogether!” Abu Ali shouted, his voice hard.
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