Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

“Oh, Araz,” Bajh said quietly. “What on earth are you doing here?”

•

Araz was drinking tea in a café at the edge of the slum’s market square on the afternoon of the dog’s head, and so he saw it happen. It unfolded so easily that it was almost unsurprising, like watching something many times imagined suddenly happen in real life. Though no one could have imagined it, really. A group of chanting, jumping children dressed in the uniforms of the religious school came singing and dancing into the square. At first among the vendors there was the air of pleasant excitement, as if this was some new version of the occasional Saturday-night parades in which the teenaged boys from the Chevalier formed a dancing line, dressed as famous women from history. But then, as the commotion progressed into the center of the market, Araz could see people pulling away. When the group of children arrived at the unmarked alcohol table, which Asti was manning while her husband made a trip out of town, the severed head sailed into the air out of the blob of little bodies, appearing to do so of its own accord. It hit Asti on the shoulder, the dog’s blood streaking across her dress, and fell loudly to the table in front of her, its glassy eyes gazeless, muzzle hanging slackly open. She looked down at it, and as she did they threw cups of dirty, red-dyed water on her — apparently they’d been unable to gather whatever was left of the animal’s blood.

“Praise be for the death of the dogs!” they were singing. “Praise be to Allah who saves us from the nastiness of the dogs who corrupt us with their filth!”

That night, Araz helped Asti undress and clean herself. Her voice was even and quiet as she told Araz the plan she and her husband had decided upon on the phone.

In the dim light of the room, Araz could see the queer geometry of her burn scars, almost symmetrical, worst up and down the middle of her torso and getting less and less pronounced farther away from her heart, until her hands were almost normal. On her stomach were chunks of uneven, missing flesh where infection had been excised, and her bra hid the irregular shapes of her mangled breasts. Helping her like this was not for Araz to do, but her husband had begged him on the phone, and Araz did not blush.

There was a quiet after she’d changed and had explained the plan, as she leaned into her small mirror and tried to fix her hair. Araz looked at her face, the snarl of taut, shining pink skin.

That night the whole Chevalier was quiet, possibly out of respect, which only had the unintended consequence of making Asti’s cries of pain and the strange pattern of her husband’s crashing blows and apologetic sobs even louder, until they seemed to fill every open space in the hotel, drifting up through the decaying floors and ceilings to where Araz lay, flinching. Their plan had been simple: they would contend to anyone who would listen that the husband had no idea that Asti was doing something so terrible as selling alcohol in the market, and that he’d punished her severely with a brutal beating, hoping this would be enough for the powers that were in the mosque, those who had sent the children.

The next morning the men came for him anyway, dragging Asti’s husband out by his shirt and hair just before first light, not even looking at the proposed penance of Asti’s swollen face and beaten body but kicking him right past where she lay on the couch and beating him into the back of a white pickup truck. It would be half a day before someone thought it was safe enough to go into the flat, where they found that Asti’s husband had, in his fear, done his part too well, leaving Asti still drifting in and out of consciousness. A few of the older women were left to care for her, and it would be another ten days before someone found her husband’s body, partially submerged in an irrigation ditch, half his face missing from the exit wound, shot through the back of the head.

•

In the weeks that followed, the city became populated by shadows. Only small caravans of speeding vehicles chanced the street. Bajh was missing; people were saying that word had come from the imam in Baghdad that, of all the lieutenants, Bajh had been chosen as the new security commander of the district. Word had also come from the north that the Kurdish parliament would be joining the new government after all, ceding, as part of the agreement, its claim to all towns bordering the Shi’a territories to do with as the religious liked. The mosque gathered its boys from the city. Araz’s visitors dwindled to almost none, until finally there was only one boy left: a skinny, affectionate, nervous teenager with a ghost of a mustache who called himself a soldier and came only in the dead of night. Sometimes the boy fell asleep afterward in Araz’s bed, and Araz, lost in the waves of the hash, would get up very close to the side of the boy’s face, trying to focus hard enough on some tiny part of it, his canthus, say, to transform it into Bajh’s so that he might be there with him, even falsely, just for a few minutes.

When the men came for Araz, he did not resist. The two men, their faces obscured by the black wraps of masks, had to carry him down the stairs. They bound his hands and laid him with a surprising gentleness in the bed of the pickup, and Araz wondered briefly if they knew him.

At the bank of the river, Araz fell on the wet ground. He could feel its cold firmness beneath him, yielding slightly to the shape of his body. Above the men’s faces, the sky wheeled with sharp stars. One masked man went back to the truck; the other watched him go. Araz heard the door slam, the engine start. In a sudden motion, the man above Araz lifted his gun and fired a single shot. Araz felt the sting of dirt against his cheek, and his head filled with a pure ringing. The man put his gun down and hefted Araz up, Araz realizing only with the slosh of blood rushing to his head that he was uninjured, that the man had fired just to the right of Araz’s ear, deafening him. Then there was the sensation of falling backward and the splash of cold wetness as Araz was dropped into the river.

He did not know how long he floated. He felt the motion of the river’s current, the clinging of his clothes in the water. He felt like nothing in the water — weightless, directionless, as if with the next gurgle of the river pushing around a snag he would find himself without a body. Above him the sky shifted. Eventually he felt himself bump gently to a stop, beached on a sandbar. He rolled awkwardly and sat up, working his hands loose.

From his path along the irrigation levee, Araz could see the dim, colored glow of the fire leaping and hovering in front of the city’s constellation of lights as he made his way back. The leaves of the old crops left in the fields rustled in the cool dark. The wind stung the deep cuts around Araz’s wrists where he’d worked the plastic zip-tie handcuffs free. The ringing was still there, though it had quieted and moved outside his head so that it was like he was rediscovering it in each stretch of field or huddle of abandoned farm buildings.

The square, when he found it, was lit by the flames, bright as if at midday. There were people everywhere, small knots of religious men cheering, others racing to and from various places carrying water, bandages. Araz looked around. There were people clustered around bodies where they lay on the ground. Araz recognized one of the dancing boys, a huge portion of his thigh missing, the skin and flesh flensed to the bone, a jagged edge of fat glistening yellowish into the wound.

As Araz stepped away from the boy, he felt a light grip on his neck. He turned a little to see Bajh standing beside him. Bajh let go. His face was calm and flat, completely without affect. He did not seem surprised to see Araz, and Araz knew then that Bajh had saved him. Together they turned, watching the figure of the Hotel du Chevalier unmade into its skeleton frame, now only a darkness at the base of the riot of color, the smoke an oily blackness listing in the night, the air above them turned to a sucking, gasping maw. The two stood and watched the towering face of the building, roaring with its burning: huge, almost regal, raging, unconsumed. Suddenly a bolt of brilliant fire bloomed high above the hotel’s roof, and Bajh and Araz hushed with everyone else in awe. And that age was gone forever between them.