* * *
I was aware that my mother possessed a reasonable degree of courage, but I feared for her, because she could encounter the dagger-carrying murderer while he was still high on the ecstasy of having killed. I imagined that the man who had flashed the victory sign would not hesitate to stab whoever stood in his way. Since I did not dare to stop my mother, who occupied my father’s position after his passing, I followed her with shaky footsteps and a violently beating heart. I stood there watching her from the stool at the door, and saw her wave her hands in the direction of a man smiling and pacing around in circles in a way I had not seen before.
The man took a few footsteps closer to my mother, until his features became visible beneath the light of the sole lamp on the wide, dusty street. Then he brandished his dagger threateningly, as he bellowed with laughter. He was short and thin, with a bushy mustache and narrow eyes; I couldn’t make out his other features because he had wrapped a large red kaffiyeh around his head in a conical shape. He also had on a faded robe that he had secured in the middle with a broad sash. I could see the severed hand, which looked plump and pale yellow and was covered in dried blood. I saw it clearly, and I realized that it had to be the hand of a woman who was still young. But I did not hear the voice of the man—the killer—who retreated gradually, farther and farther away, after having made sure that he’d scared my mother and deterred her sufficiently.
It seemed he had successfully carried out his mission, and that he didn’t need to speak anymore; there would be those who would talk about him later and he would be celebrated in his clan’s accounts when they entertained their guests. Until now, I have not been able to determine the exact distance that separated him from me at the time, but I still remember the short, sudden flash of his eyes and the ring of his laughter on that cold, gloomy morning. For an instant, he seemed cheerful to me. He reminded me of my maternal uncle—the witty man who lived in the adjacent house. Where was he? Was he still fast asleep after staggering home drunk? Where had the other men gone? Did they also prefer to stay warm in the arms of their wives, or had they gone to work early? Perhaps they had heard of the incident from their wives and had taken recourse to silence, instead of confronting this strange, evil man. But at that moment, I saw no trace of the women in the neighborhood. So why had my mother risked her life? Was she more courageous than the other women, or even the men?
* * *
Later on, my mother told me that the victim’s husband was a worker in a state-run leather tannery; he was on the night shift during the day of the incident, and returned home only after he learned of his wife’s murder; he took her things and left for some unknown destination. Since then, no one had seen the bereaved husband—he remained without a name or face until he completely disappeared from people’s memories. My mother knew that the killer was named Sarheed—he was a vegetable seller who came from a small village on the outskirts of Baghdad. It was an unusual name, and it never left my mind. Sarheed.
I was greatly surprised that I was the only one among my siblings to take an interest in the affair. I felt relieved, because the murder did not have any noticeable impact on them, as opposed to my mother and me; her face would often be overcome with anxiety, and she would then sit in dreary silence.
I tried more than once to recall the features of that murdered woman who used to be our neighbor once, but I would never succeed in picturing her. There only remained in my mind the vision of the severed hand and the imagined cry of the victim when her brother pounced upon her, after she opened the door to him and before her husband returned from his night shift. How lonely and isolated she must have been in that dusty, deserted, impoverished alleyway! The killer doubtless took advantage of the increasingly shrill voice of the call to prayer to attack his sister; she had possibly arisen from her bed at that moment to say the dawn prayer or to greet her husband returning from work.
I remembered a story that my mother had once told me about a female relative who was attacked and devoured by wolves when she was alone in the desert. Her son and brother had gone to look for a horse of theirs that had run off in a far-flung wadi and left her alone near a palm tree. A pack of wolves discovered the woman clad in black, waiting for her son and brother to return—and just like that, they feasted on her. And when the two men returned, they found nothing of the woman except her bones lying in the sand.
* * *
That night, I dreamed that two masked thieves, armed with sticks, had made an opening in the room of the house where we slept, and began to empty out the clothes from the wardrobe into a burlap bag. I noticed that they had just grabbed my new checkered dishdasha; I had it made for Eid. I could see myself hearing their roars of laughter, which resembled Sarheed’s, then I saw my mother wake up in panic and attack the two thieves with the lid of a cooking pot, trying to wrest the bag back from them. But one of them took her by surprise with a blow from his stick and a round iron piece became fixed in her head—we called it the sakhriya—so my mother teetered and fell unconscious to the concrete floor, with her blood spurting out profusely like water from a fountain. The thieves got away with our clothes, nonchalantly laughing at that late hour of the night.
I leaped up awake and out of bed, trembling and looking around my room, terrified. I glimpsed my mother standing by my head, watching me with exhausted, drooping eyes. Then she started to wet my face with cold water, wiping my hair with her hands. But I didn’t tell her about the nightmare, Sarheed, or the blow of the sakhriya. Still, I asked myself, If Sarheed had been rich and well-off, would he have gone and killed his sister? Why do the rich not kill their sisters to wash away their dishonor? Do all of them lack honor and shame, or are honor and killing reserved for the poor alone?
The thought seemed to be much larger than my capacity to absorb it at the time, not to mention that a fever was about to split my head in two, and I began to see frightening visions that seemed as if they were coming from the Day of Judgment. A feeling struck me like a thunderbolt that honor was the only wealth the poor had that could not be squandered or frittered away. At that moment, the word honor became absolutely strange and mysterious to me. For, in truth, who was honorable? I felt an instinctive sympathy for that woman who had lost her life because she had rebelled against her community and dared to fall in love with a man who did not belong to her tribe, choosing to elope with him to that derelict corner of Baghdad. And had this not suddenly occurred to me, I never would’ve remembered the demise of the woman in love who had once lived next door to us.
* * *
After that night, I decided to pursue the trail of the killer, whatever the cost of this adventure may be; I began to search for the location of his village, his tribal origins. These people and their way of life kept me occupied for many long years—out of curiosity, and not with the sole aim of investigation alone, because the more details of their life I discovered, the stranger and more mysterious they became to me. In reality, they were poor Iraqis like me, but their temperament seemed to be extremely rough and completely different from that of other farmers.
One day, I decided to actually go along with my brother to the village; perhaps I would see Sarheed’s face at least, or the secret behind the crime would be revealed to me. Had the country’s situation not been stable at the time, I wouldn’t have dared to take the step of foolishly searching in the killer’s village. So, many long years after the crime, I would actually go to the mud village of al-Wawiya, or “The Foxes,” located on the outskirts of Baghdad, where the killer was said to have come from.
I searched an entire day for his home and any sign of him. I saw many men around his age. Some of them bore his features, yet everyone I asked denied any knowledge of him.
One person mentioned to me that his name itself would guarantee identifying him as soon as anyone spoke it, like magic. Saying this was tantamount to conclusive evidence that he was not in that village, to the point that one of the men threatened me with an ax, yelling: “You are not wanted he
re!” He regarded me closely and accused me of having gone there to cover up some crime of my own.
I stared at his face and saw that it closely resembled Sarheed’s. Stunned, I could only utter: “Sarheed?”
He held the ax up and said that if I did not leave the village immediately, he would strike my head with it. He started brandishing the ax just like Sarheed had done.
* * *
I returned home frustrated, but my determination to carry out my mission actually increased, so I reviewed all the old facts about the incident that were available to me. I became aware that the crime had never been repeated, as there had been no other honor killings of women in all of al-Thawra City, as if the community had abruptly forgotten this custom. How did Sarheed have the audacity to commit his crime with such boldness? And did he do it simply because the victim was a defenseless woman?
Every time I tried to penetrate the killer’s psyche, hidden aspects of Sarheed’s mentality and his way of thinking were unveiled to me. While I would often catch myself red-handed having thoughts of revenge—like a killer—I began to realize from another angle that murder was an absolute crime, one which could not be reversed. Perhaps at the time, Sarheed wanted to divide his own guilt among the members of his tribe, to share the responsibility for his offense and make them all participants in a crime that made up a part of their traditions and customs; maybe he wanted to unburden himself of the sense of guilt, since he had killed his own sister, whom he perhaps had felt some affection for, or even loved once. And maybe he was a person of sound mind, a man with a family; what he did was trivial, like picking ripe vegetables from the fields of the al-Wawiya village. In this sense, he did not commit the alleged crime on his own but in fact made the members of his tribe complicit. Therefore the victim’s murder went unavenged.
From the gossip of the neighbors, it became clear that the lover had eloped with Saleema—just like that, people made up a name for the victim—and taken her to al-Thawra City, where he rented a small two-room house. No one at the time could say with certainty whether the man had married Saleema or had remained her lover until her demise. In those days, I could sense that the neighbors were steering clear of talking openly about the affair, before lowering a heavy veil of forgetfulness over it as time passed. Yet to this day, I shudder every time the image of the slaughtered woman and her severed hand appears before my eyes. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the door, frightened, and listen closely to the street—silent except for the wind, which would start blowing lightly, then howl every now and then. I would tremble with fear whenever the door moved or there was a commotion in the street or I heard the voice of a man talking or laughing loudly late at night. And sometimes when my uncle would visit us at night and I’d hear the creaking of the iron door, my heartbeat would quicken and I would feel as if the blood had frozen in my veins, so much so that I was afraid to shake his hand lest he detect my fear and the quivering of my limbs.
* * *
The front doors of houses in al-Thawra City did not lock either from the inside or the outside, since we all had a great sense of safety in the sprawling, poor neighborhood—as if we were part of a single family. One night, it so happened that I was returning from my job as a lottery-ticket seller in central Baghdad. I reached al-Thawra City somewhat late, so the streets were deserted. I began to look at the high facades of the houses, and I listened closely in the hope of hearing within them a human voice that would make me feel at ease in the stillness and desolation of the night—and when no voice calmed me, I remembered Saleema on the morning of her death.
All of a sudden there appeared a mature, svelte woman with a shapely figure; her face seemed to be white; she had supple limbs, making it easier for the killer to sever her hand without difficulty. I also remembered that her corpse had not been taken to its final resting place, nor was a wake held for her. No one had asked about her afterward. Perhaps the Baghdad municipality had buried her somewhere set aside for “impure” souls, without any gravestone. What would they write on her gravestone anyway? Here lies the remains of Saleema, the Baghdadi who was butchered at dawn to protect her tribe’s honor?
Our street seemed long to me at that late hour, and was devoid of lighting, other than a few iron pillars upon which uncovered lamps had been hung; those sickly yellow lights made the street even more depressing and deserted. I heard a faint voice whispering behind me, a strange voice that was near one moment then distant the next. So I quickened my pace, without looking back, but the voice came closer and closer; I began to hear the fall of footsteps behind me that hurried one moment and then slowed down the next. Stones were being tossed at me from behind, landing between my feet; I tried to gather my strength in order to walk straight, and I looked over at the facade of a house. I found it serene and asleep, with its lights extinguished—on its outer wall was an iron hand hanging by a scrap of cloth: the Hand of Fatima. Residents would usually put this up to drive away the envious and the evil eye. But this time, it was the hand of Saleema herself—the murdered woman—her youthful severed hand. I envisioned the blood trickling and dripping from it, with a strange serenity, onto the yellow dust of the street.
The voice of someone calling out arose behind me again as the stones were being thrown more frequently. I thought that even if I fell on my face in the dust, no one would come to my aid in this neighborhood of the dead, and maybe no one would hear my voice calling out for help in the first place. A cold sweat ran down from my neck and seeped onto my chest before it turned into a cold gust of air that blew from under my thin shirt. Then I pictured that folklore creature who abducted children before they could reach their mother’s bosom, and would take them to the river to bathe them, before spiriting them to the remote marshlands; that djinn who took on different shapes and sizes depending on the nature of his task, which usually ended with killing the abducted. Our community used to call it tantal; when they described it to us children on long winter nights, they would say it had a form that was at once devilish and cartoonish, filling our little hearts and minds with horror and alarm. This mythical creature, as they told us, would come, sometimes with great agility, and knock on closed doors, pretending to be humble, good-hearted, and innocent; it would ask for water or a loaf of bread. When it saw a child alone in the house, it would deviously entice him little by little to walk a few steps, before lifting him on its back and flying far away, or running with him to the river, while making itself impossible to be seen or touched.
I was on the verge of collapsing in the middle of the street in terror. I found myself unconsciously taking off my sandals, and the stone-throwing from behind abruptly came to a halt.
The moment I reached home, I began to hyperventilate and walk around the house restlessly, before flinging myself into bed. I wrapped myself in the covers and my body began to shake. My mother was sitting with my uncle, quietly talking about some matter. When she heard me drop into bed, she immediately came to me. She lit a lamp, then sat beside me and began to dry my sweaty hair with her thin, warm fingers. Then my uncle entered, overcome with anxiety, and asked me to tell him what had happened. So I told him, stammering, that I had seen the tantal, who pelted stones at me from behind and hissed loudly in my ears. This made my uncle laugh, and he said that all I had seen was Sarheed, whose image had haunted me for years. He told me that there was no such thing as a tantal or any other mythical creature. He said it was nothing but the image of a killer that had invaded my mind and did not want to let me go.
My uncle professed that he was capable of ousting this demon from deep inside of me once and for all. He then took out a revolver from under his long white robe and pointed it directly at my head, saying that my mother had ruined me by spoiling me rotten; he said that I was very different from my clever and courageous siblings even though they were younger than me. He went on, saying that their older brother had started to fear even his own shadow, imagining that his slipper was a slingshot in a nighttime battle. B
ut my mother rebuked him and ordered him to leave the room, along with his revolver. He fired a shot that boomed loudly, leaving me paralyzed at first; then I instinctively grabbed my head to make sure it was still intact.
“You’re going to kill him! What exactly do you want from him?” I heard my mother scream. “Would you act like this with him if his father was still alive? Where were you when your neighbor Saleema was killed right in front of you? Were you afraid of your own shadow? Where was your revolver then, huh? Get out of my house, I don’t want to see your face again!”
As he was on his way out in the middle of the night, he told her that the killer’s name was not Sarheed and that her son had been stricken by a bout of madness. He walked out with his revolver in his hand, and fired another shot as he roared with laughter in the dead of night.
But seriously, where was my uncle on the day the crime had happened? And why did he not talk about it? Did he know the killer from before? Or was he possibly an accomplice to the crime? Every time, I would reach the same conclusion, both simple and profound: the powerful only ever punish the weak.
* * *
At that moment, Sarheed the killer was roaming through the eighty residential sectors of al-Thawra City, alley by alley, in search of any trace of his runaway sister. He carried a large sack on his back, in which he collected empty bottles that he bought from residents, camouflaging his identity by this vocation that was widespread at the time, thereby not attracting any suspicion to himself. This simple occupation, in which he selected bottles and dishes that were fit to be recycled, made it possible for him to enter homes. I thought that maybe I too had once sold him empty bottles, as I would do that every now and then. I started to scrutinize the faces of the men who would call out, “Bottles for sale!” What were the faces like of the men more needy than us? Was Sarheed’s face any different than those of the other bottle-buyers? Or did they all resemble each other in that era, just like today? Perhaps he was able to find the victim’s address on his own, or someone led him to her house out of the goodness of their heart, or maybe out of wickedness. He may have described her features to this or that person and repeated her name hundreds of times, along with the name of her husband who had forcibly snatched her from her family in the harmonious village of The Foxes and brought her to this godforsaken place. At the time, she had not then changed her first name or family name or reincarnated herself under a different identity; she kept everything as it had been and lived as a stranger without any family or tribe or neighbors. Had they not heard her screams and cries for help when she was stabbed by her brother’s dagger? When I look back now at the details of the incident, I ask myself whether the murderer had been held at all liable under the law in the first place, let alone taken into custody! I knew that these murders could be judged as a crime committed against the people, but Sarheed had dodged even serving those six months against “the public interest,” and had gone back to his original vocation, selling vegetables in Bab al-Moatham Square.
Baghdad Noir Page 17