With her veined and wrinkled hand, Elishva would put the Nokia phone to her ear. Upon hearing her daughters’ voices, the darkness would lift and she would feel at peace. If she had gone straight back to Tayaran Square, she would have found that everything was calm, just as she had left it in the morning. The sidewalks would be clean and the cars that had caught fire would have been towed away.
Elishva no longer shared with anyone her belief that Daniel was still alive. She just waited to hear the voice of Matilda or Hilda because they would put up with her, however strange this idea of hers. The two daughters knew their mother clung to the memory of her late son in order to go on living. There was no harm in humoring her.
The shock of Nahem’s death changed Hadi. He became aggressive. He swore and cursed and threw stones after the American Hummers or the vehicles of the police and the National Guard. He got into arguments with anyone who mentioned Nahem and what had happened to him. He kept to himself for a while, and then went back to his old self, laughing and telling extraordinary stories, but now he seemed to have two faces, or two masks—as soon as he was alone he was gloomy and despondent in a way he hadn’t been before.
“I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash. It’s a human being, guys, a person,” he told them.
“But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,” someone objected.
“I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial,” Hadi explained.
Sitting in the coffee shop, he would tell the story from the beginning, never tiring of repeating himself. He immersed himself in the story and went with the flow, maybe in order to give pleasure to others or maybe to convince himself that it was just a story from his fertile imagination and that it had never really happened.
If the argument was interrupted, Elishva would argue with herself instead or grab hold of one of the women in the church to listen to her fiery sermon about how she refused to leave her home and move to a place she knew nothing about. Father Josiah encouraged her to stay, because he saw it as a religious obligation. It wasn’t good that everyone should leave the country. Things had been just as bad for the Assyrians in previous centuries, but they had stayed in Iraq and had survived. None of us should think only of ourselves. That’s what he said in his sermon sometimes.
Although he had clout in the neighborhood, he was still frightened by the Americans. He knew they operated with considerable independence and no one could hold them to account for what they did. As suddenly as the wind could shift, they could throw you down a dark hole.
But there were two fronts now, Mahmoud said to himself— the Americans and the government on one side, the terrorists and the various antigovernment militias on the other. In fact “terrorist” was the term used for everyone who was against the government and the Americans.
Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I’d go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing—fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re dying from the same fear of dying. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end.
“It was the Sudanese suicide bomber who caused his death,” Hadi said confidently, trying to exploit the situation to his own advantage.
“Yes, but he’s dead. How can I kill someone who’s already dead?”
“The hotel management, then. The company that ran the hotel.”
“Yes, maybe. But I have to find the real killer of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar so his soul can find rest,” said the Whatsitsname, pulling up a wooden crate and sitting on it.
The Whatsitsname talked about the night he met the drunk beggars. He said he tried to avoid them, but they were aggressive and charged toward him to kill him. His horrible face was an incentive for them to attack him. They didn’t know anything about him, but they were driven by that latent hatred that can suddenly come to the surface when people meet someone who doesn’t fit in.
The young madman thinks I’m the model citizen that the Iraqi State has failed to produce, at least since the days of King Faisal I.
Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, he thinks.
I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate—in other words, the flesh of criminals—but who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day.
‘Each of us has a measure of criminality,’ the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. ‘Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his aging mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a bouse with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.’
The Mantis’s brother had led a small gang that terrorized the locals until he was arrested and detained. The news of his arrest was greeted with great joy by many, including Mahmoud, who then wrote a newspaper article about the need to enforce the law against this criminal. He philosophized a little in the article, saying there were three types of justice—legal justice, divine justice, and street justice—and that however long it takes, criminals must face one of them.
Publishing the article won Mahmoud points for courage and for embodying the journalistic ideal of enlightenment in service of the public interest.
He turned to Mahmoud and said, “Brigadier Majid is one of the people you’ll have to get used to dealing with.”
Mahmoud said nothing but waited for further explanation because he didn’t plan to see Brigadier Majid and would try as far as possible to make sure that kind of meeting didn’t happen again.
“There are people like him in our world,” said Saidi, “and we have to learn how to deal with them tactfully, how to get along with them, how to accept that they exist.”
Yes, for a year or more he’s been carrying out the policy of the American ambassador to create an equilibrium of violence on the streets between the Sunni and Shiite militias, so there’ll be a balance later at the negotiating table to make new political arrangements in Iraq. The American army is unable or unwilling to stop the violence, so at least a balance or an equivalence of violence has to be created. Without it, there won’t be a successful political process.
Anyway, the best way to protect yourself from evil is to keep close to it. I humor him so he doesn’t stand in the way of my political ambitions, and so he doesn’t put a bullet in the back of my head, fired by one of those fat guys with shaved heads, in response to an order from the Americans.
She looked at the picture of the saint hanging in front of her, his lance raised and the dragon crouching beneath him. She wondered why he hadn’t killed the dragon years ago. Why was he stuck in that posture, ready to strike, she wondered. Everything remains half completed, exactly like now: she wasn’t exactly a living being, but not a dead one either.
In his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill, and as fast as the list shrank it was replenished with new names, making avenging these lives an endless task. Or maybe he would wake up one day to discover that there was no one left to kill, because the criminals and the victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before.
“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.”
He told her it would be about the evil we all have inside us, how it resides deep within us, even when we want to put an end to it in the outside world, because we are all criminals to some extent, and the darkness inside us is the blackest variety known to man. He said we have all been helping to create the evil creature that is now killing us off.
There were people who had returned from long journeys with new names and new identities […]. There were people who had survived many deaths in the time of the dictatorship only to find themselves face-to-face with a pointless death in the age of “democracy”—when, for example, a motorbike ran into them in the middle of the road. Believers lost their faith when those who had shared their beliefs and their struggles betrayed them and their principles. Nonbelievers had become believers when they saw the “merits” and benefits of faith. The strange things that had come to light in the past three years were too many to count. So that Daniel Tadros Moshe, the lanky guitarist, had come back to his old mother’s house wasn’t so hard to believe.
Some claimed it was part of the wall of Abbasid Baghdad and was the most important discovery in Islamic archaeology in Baghdad for many decades. Others ventured to speak, rather boldly, about the “advantages of terrorism,” which had enabled this important discovery. But the Baghdad city authorities ignored all this and took everyone by surprise by filling the large hole with soil. The spokesman for the city authorities said, “We do not take half measures. We’re going to preserve these remains for future generations, and they can judge for themselves how to deal with them. If they decide to demolish the whole Bataween district, that’s their business, but for now we have to repave the street.”
Mahmoud thought back to his theory about the three kinds of justice, but he wasn’t convinced it was valid. It was anarchy out there; there was no logic behind what was happening. He took a deep breath and gave a long sigh. What mattered now was that he had broken free of a worry that had been weighing heavily on him.
But what if one percent of his story were true? Isn’t life a blend of things that are plausible and others that are hard to believe? Isn’t it possible that Saidi reaching out to Mahmoud was one of those hard-to-believe things?
That’s why Mahmoud didn’t send a hostile response to Saidi’s message, or any other kind of response. He left things in a gray area, like the sky that day, trying to use Saidi’s own style against him, leaving him uncertain.
