Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  I left the demolished post office in a rush. A mysterious agility carried me along the wet asphalt to another wall. I felt secure in my drunken state, so I didn’t falter. I got there and hid behind a concrete bus stop. I sat on the soaked ground and tried to warm myself up.

  The war of the eighties—a memory that refused to be forgotten, a stretch I’d never get across. A hidden rope tied those days to today. Every once in a while, we’d get permission to take a few hours downtown, which brimmed with life and women.

  I fled the Battle of East Basra, for death was a real presence among us. I didn’t see him hiding like we were in the trenches. He wasn’t wearing a helmet in fear of the hot shrapnel; he didn’t worry about losing his loved ones who were waiting for his letter. He was harsh—stuck out his tongue at us soldiers, and then left us to go play the same game with the Iranians. He didn’t care about sides or insignias. He went back and forth between us.

  After that, I came back and was held prisoner in the brigade. I repented and pledged to be brave in the face of death; I swore that next time I’d bore a hole into his skull and drive him from our lands, and from our heads, crammed with tons of questions . . . questions upon questions . . . until there was no room left for answers.

  When I joined the army, I left at midnight from the musty Allawi al-Hillah Hotel to the al-Nahdha Garage. The whole time I was overcome with an intense, childish envy. Everything was better than me. I even resented the utility poles for being part of the city; they didn’t care about bullets, whether from a pistol or an AK-47. No one wanted anything from them. They just stood there, lifeless. Not packed full of lofty or vulgar ideas, or anthems to mobilize.

  I stayed there for a few minutes, then got up and hurried over to the wall, like a military patrol. Where the wall ended, the row of closed shops began. There, I’d pick a place to hide away from those eyes. All I wanted was to be on Abu Nuwas Street at night, where I could experience the capital’s suspended carnival alone.

  * * *

  The children put aside their guns and start talking about this weird game with a funny name—it’s called Shabteet. The kids split into two teams, each team on opposite sides of a chalk line drawn on the cement. I follow their conversation and their smiles, which have nothing to do with violence.

  The chalk line stretches into my imagination, as a battlefront between two armies: the joys, giggles, panting, and anticipation in the kids’ game are the bullets, rockets, missiles, coffins, and losses in the adult one.

  Things get tense when the first kid from Team A crosses the white line into Team B’s area. If he can touch somebody from the B side and then get back to his own side, then the kid he touched is out, thereby killing part of the army. Like this, the kids on offense take turns, armed with silent determination. As for Team B, they defend by catching the kid who comes over and getting him out, either by making him laugh or forcing him to surrender. Then the armies switch places between offense and defense.

  What a lovely contest—no smoke or explosions. Whoever stays quiet wins. Whoever laughs loses.

  The sun curves away from its zenith, and light bursts in through the shop’s western-facing windows. The passing time has not helped fill the last gaps in remembering that rainy night. Answers are still missing, questions are bouncing around like the rats here in the shop. It’s always like this, lost answers to so many questions.

  * * *

  A bit of last night is coming back to me: the hotel boy’s earnest way of trying to talk me out of leaving at night—You can’t go out during the curfew, you’ll get killed. That’s what he said. I remember his fingers clutching my forearm. But I pushed him away and went down the dark staircase. I thought the door would be locked. I smiled. Instead of begging me, the boy could have just locked the door.

  A wind blew through the capital. Streets without footsteps, booze numbing fear, driving me forward. I wouldn’t delay in following this to its logical conclusion. Or to the end I had chosen for myself.

  The post office was leveled by an American missile in the last war, which left us with a bunch of dark holes for hiding in. Over there was Maidan Square and the Islamic Bank, and after them, dealers of Persian rugs, blankets, and other household items. It was too dark to see, but my memory read the signs and showed me the way. I wasn’t worried now about the shots ringing out, the bullets riddling my city’s body and sky. If a soldier or cop wanted to empty his cartridge into me, go ahead.

  I heard voices in the dark at al-Wathba Square. What was going on? Bullets whizzed, sparks and RPG-7 missiles thrashed the security building. But why fret? I knew beforehand the risks of going out—explosions, bullets, and screams. God is the greatest. Smoke mingled with the dark of night, and bits of light shone from intermittent streetlights. Then the scene changed color.

  The Department of Security was on fire. Ghosts flew toward me with bullets after them, zooming in all directions, striking the asphalt and storefronts. I remember jumping without thinking, as I ran with the others. Yes, I turned on my heels and went back the same way I’d come. The bullets were hunting us all.

  * * *

  The children leave the shop, as if their shift is over. Then there’s silence for about half an hour, before gunmen come in and take off their face masks. They greet me like we know each other.

  They tell me I’d been out cold since last night, that I slammed into some concrete ledge when the police and army were chasing them through al-Wathba Square. They start to ask me questions, but with kindness.

  “You were running with us,” says one of the gunmen. “Who do you work for?”

  “Who’s your boss?” another asks. “Were you on a mission to blow up the building last night too?”

  “Don’t be afraid, we’re all in the same boat,” they tell me.

  These new questions inform me that my memory is more sketchy than I thought. The more blanks I try to fill in the tale of the broken Baghdad curfew, the further I get from remembering it. It may have been eventful, with all sorts of horrors and outlandish details. But I’ll leave it to these guys with the masks to figure it out. I’m so tired that I can’t find my true memory. I don’t care if I have to borrow a memory from one of the fellows stuffing his face with dates, bread, and yogurt.

  I’m still tied up, and my headache gets worse with each question. I can’t answer any of them. My brain stops processing their words. I just follow their faces; their lips are angry now, their mouths hurling insults. Then they’re slugging me in the face. I just want one answer: “Where are the kids?”

  They smile and glance at one another, until a man with a shaved face says: “He’s still reeling from yesterday’s blow!”

  “What kids? This is an abandoned metal shop,” another gunman adds, sounding very annoyed.

  I realize I have a head injury from the concrete ledge on some wall, and that the tablet of my memory is incomplete, and that the children’s Shabteet game goes on—but with other rules; instead of silence and laughter, there’s noise, corpses, and machinations.

  Did I get to Abu Nuwas Street after midnight? Yes. I believe I did.

  Translated from Arabic by Robert James Farley

  PART IV

  Blood on My Hands

  Homecoming

  by Roy Scranton

  Shorja

  A tumult of hands, pain, and a mouth filled with sand—then he was being carried back behind a Humvee. The medic checked his ABCs, dragged a nearby rucksack to one side of his head, and dug a helmet in under the other. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, but his pupils were fine, and the ugly cut on his scalp seemed shallow—the skull appeared to be intact. The medic bandaged his head, stuck him with an IV, and told another wounded soldier, a corporal sitting up against the Humvee, to keep him awake. Then the medic moved off to another casualty.

  “You lucked out, Haider,” the corporal said as he lit a cigarette. “That IED killed your buddies, but that’s a victory wound you got there. You go home, everybody thinks you’r
e Ali Hussein. Some real Rambo shit.”

  Haider just grunted.

  The man patted his arm. “I know, I know. Things seem pretty shitty right now. But take heart: the good news is your little scrape doesn’t even hurt yet.”

  * * *

  Three days, two army trucks, and one taxi ride later, Haider was cursing Corporal Hamza’s good news. He paid the driver, his hands clumsy and his whole body stiff, and grabbed his gym bag out of the backseat. Squinting at the clogged traffic, he listened to the car horns vibrating through the roundabout on al-Jumhuriya Street. He wove around old Datsuns, new Chinese pickups, and the occasional BMW; he cut his way across and into the swift human currents of Rashid Street, his head pounding in the bright June light.

  He dodged a cart piled high with boxes, feet slipping on orange peels tossed in the street by the juice man, and ducked around a tray of river carp, slipping into the shade between the old buildings and the vendors’ umbrellas. Market life flashed around him, glowing with the strangeness of a dream: sacks of spice like pigments on a palette, dusky red-pepper powders, luminous ocher turmeric, and the muddy green of za’atar; plastic Chinese housewares in rows of lurid pink and neon green; a rainbow mosaic of tea boxes, multicolored powdered drink mixes, and purple-brown jars of date syrup; frilly dresses in electric blue, hazard yellow, and bloody violet, covered in dancing mermaids and Disney princesses; innumerable squat bottles like great chunks of jade, amber, and garnet; hand soaps, dish soaps, shampoos. It was always a change coming in from the field, but this was something else. The smells made him queasy, the colors knifed into his eyes, and the swirl of bodies gave him a feeling of vertigo—part euphoria and part fear. His head throbbed.

  He was relieved to turn off Rashid Street into al-Safafeer Market, practically empty these days, and leave the tumult behind him. It was quiet here. The street of the coppersmiths led off toward the river—the long, cool arcade gleaming within from the copper lamps, plates, pots, vases, and candelabra spilling into the otherwise vacant, brick-lined walk. The shining display always seemed enchanting at first, when you stepped into the souk, but nowadays it was mostly imported crap from India and China. Baghdad’s legendary smiths had become just that: legendary. Nobody wanted to pay for handmade work, so the old men sold what people would buy, while their sons left the souk’s backroom smithies in search of better prospects—like joining the army.

  “Haider!” a voice shouted from one of the stalls. “Peace be upon you.”

  “Upon you be peace, Uncle,” Haider responded, recognizing long-faced Sayid, one of his father’s old friends.

  “Are you home from the fight?” Sayid asked, stepping out into the arcade.

  It took Haider a second to understand the question, which echoed oddly in his ears. When he caught the gist he smiled. “Daesh gave me a birthday present,” he said, tapping his head. “Now I have a week of leave.”

  A complex look of concern flashed across Sayid’s face. “I’m glad you’re safe. Have you seen your father yet?”

  “I’m on my way there now.”

  “Listen, Haider,” Sayid said, glancing around the souk. “It’s none of my business, but Abu Bakr ran into some trouble. He’s not well. Up here, you know?” Sayid patted his forehead.

  “What happened?”

  “You should hear it from him, but there’s no need to get involved, okay? Sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sayid put his hand on Haider’s shoulder. “Just trust me, nephew, okay? Remember how your father gets sometimes. You don’t need to fix things. What’s done is done.”

  Haider looked at the old man with a measure of understanding. “God’s will,” he said.

  * * *

  Abu Bakr anxiously greeted his last living son from a wheelchair, as if hiding something. Haider’s mother stood behind the old coppersmith, her mouth rigid and compressed but her eyes full of emotion. They were surprised to see him home and wanted to hear about his wound, but Haider waved it off and asked them what had happened.

  “I’m not feeling so well,” Abu told him, laughing.

  “What’s wrong?” Haider asked.

  “It’s just arthritis,” Abu muttered.

  “A cursed man,” Haider’s mother added.

  “Nadia, please,” Abu said, grinning again. “It’s nothing.”

  “Father, would you let me see your legs?” Haider asked.

  “There is no reason for that, they’re fine,” Abu assured.

  “That’s because they’re gone!” Nadia snapped. “Gone! The old fool!” She slammed her tea glass down on the table and stormed out of the kitchen.

  Haider could see it now, under the blanket, how Abu’s legs ended at the knees. He’d thought that there was something wrong with the way they looked, but he hadn’t understood what. It took Haider all afternoon to get the story. This was the tale his father told him:

  Business had been going even worse than usual, so he went to his old friend Abu Lulu’ah to see if he had any work. Abu Lulu’ah told him that he had a job he could do, and he’d pay well for it, but it was dangerous. He needed a shipment driven to Rutbah, which was practically on the Syrian border, then another shipment brought back. It would be possible—if you took Route 9 south and looped around Habbaniyah to avoid the fighting around Fallujah, then took Route 1—eight or nine hours each way. Abu Bakr would need to use his own truck, since Lulu’ah couldn’t afford to lose a truck to Daesh, but he promised him a wad of US dollars.

  What would he be carrying? Let’s say it’s canned food.

  Who would he be delivering it to? Let’s call him al-Maeiz.

  Where would he meet the man? A pacha restaurant in Rutbah.

  So Abu Bakr drove out to Rutbah before dawn, heading south through the towns and farms along Route 8, the sky fading blue on his left as the sun broke like a soft-boiled egg over the horizon, milky white then golden yellow. Just north of Karbala, he turned his back on the sun and drove southwest over the Euphrates. The City of Martyrs shone like a holy vision in the clear, slanting light. Then he left the green farmlands of the river valley behind, heading northwest into the Sunni desert, nothing but sand, dirt, and dust for kilometers; past Lake Habbaniyah, a greasy gray patch floating on the brown earth; everything flat for kilometers, seemingly forever, desolate save for the occasional truck passing him going the other way; until, as the long hours wore on, the hills surrounding Wadi Houran rose in the west, rocky and austere, and the highway seemed to sink down, down, down toward Rutbah and the borderlands.

  He’d made great time and rolled into town around noon. Everything was quiet, no traffic and few people. He passed a tall man in a pink shirt smoking a cigarette on a street corner; the man’s beard was just long enough that he could’ve been a salafi, but just short enough that maybe he wasn’t—he was so studiously not watching the truck pass that Abu felt a rising fear. He relaxed when he found the pacha restaurant, but it was closed, and when he knocked no one answered. What now? Well, Abu Bakr figured, they’ll open soon enough, and in the meantime, thinking of the drive ahead, he might as well take a nap. He parked behind the restaurant, hung a towel in his window to give himself some shade, and curled up on the bench seat. The truck engine ticked as it cooled from the long drive, soothing the old man to sleep.

  He woke with a crash, the driver’s-side window shattered. When he jerked and tried to twist his body up, a rifle butt came through and slammed into his forehead. Everything went black-and-white, and the next thing he knew, he was grabbing at the steering wheel and looking down the barrel of an AK while someone tried to haul him out of the truck by his feet. He watched the barrel swing up past the face behind the gun—hard eyes and a long beard. Then the butt came down on his forehead again. This time when he came to, he was lying on the ground, bleeding in the sand, looking up at three men unloading the stuff from his truck into the pacha restaurant, while a fourth stood over him with the AK.

  Abu’s wor
ld spun with pain, but he lifted his hand. “Wait,” he pleaded. “Wait . . . al-Maeiz.”

  “Who told you that name, fat man?” the one standing over him asked.

  “Abu Lulu’ah sent me.”

  “Well, when you get home to Baghdad, you little Shi’ite bitch,” the gunman growled, “you tell your boyfriend that al-Maeiz says hello.”

  “But . . . the other one . . .”

  “The other one what, fat man?”

  “I’m supposed to bring something back,” Abu whispered, confused.

  “Is that what Abu Lulu’ah told you, fat man?”

  “Yes.”

  The gunman ratcheted the charging handle on his AK back and forth, chambering a round. “You want me to give you something to take back?”

  Abu Bakr looked away and eyed his truck. Both doors to the cab were open, both windows smashed in. They were almost done unloading.

  “God grant my life,” Abu said. “I have a wife and a son, only one son left. Please.”

  “You tell Abu Lulu’ah that al-Maeiz got his shipment and not to worry about anything else, okay?”

  The drive back seemed endless; Abu Bakr imagined a thousand different ways Lulu’ah would punish him. It was late when he finally returned, but he went to see Lulu’ah right away at his stall in the Shorja Market. The big man was there waiting, and listened to Abu Bakr’s story patiently. When he finished, Lulu’ah picked up a handful of pistachios and let them run through his fingers like prayer beads falling off a broken string. “What do you think . . . I should do with this thief?” he asked meditatively, watching the pistachios drop.

  Abu Bakr wasn’t quite sure what he meant, or whom he was talking to. His head ached and he’d been on the road for almost twenty hours. The young toughs sitting around the stall didn’t seem to hear Lulu’ah; neither did the kid whose job it was to watch the sweets; nor did the hatchet-nosed man who stood behind him—the one everybody called The Hawk. Abu hazarded a reply: “I don’t know, Uncle. I’m not even sure I saw al-Maeiz . . . I mean, those men might have done something to him.”