Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

The blacksmith commanded his wife to be quiet and to find him a piece of clean fabric. The cries stopped immediately.

“There are his fingers,” the apprentice said, pointing at two bits of flesh on the ground near the gate.

With amazing composure, the blacksmith gathered up the two severed phalanges, wiped them off, and placed them in a handkerchief, which he slipped into his pocket. Then he bent over his son’s wounds.

“We have to get him to the health center,” he said. “If we don’t, the blood’s going to drain right out of him.” He turned to me. “I need a car.”

I nodded and rushed over to Khaled’s house and burst in on him as he was fixing his little boy’s toy in the courtyard.

“We need you,” I announced. “Sulayman cut off two of his fingers. We have to get him to the hospital.”

“I’m awfully sorry, but I’m expecting guests at noon.”

“It’s urgent. Sulayman’s losing a lot of blood.”

“I can’t drive you. If you want, take my taxi. It’s in the garage. I can’t go with you. Some people are coming here in a few minutes to ask for my daughter’s hand.”

“All right, give me the keys.”

He abandoned the toy and invited me to follow him into the garage, where a battered old Ford was parked.

“You know how to drive?”

“Of course.”

“Help me get this crate out into the street.”

He opened the garage doors, whistled to the kids lounging in the sun, and asked them to come and give us a hand. “The car’s got an obstinate starter,” he explained to me. “Sit behind the wheel. We’re going to push you.”

The kids rushed into the garage, amused and happy at having been called upon for assistance. I released the brake, put the gearshift in second, and let the enthusiasm of my bratty assistants propel me along. By the time we’d gone some fifty meters, the Ford had reached a negotiable speed. I released the clutch and, at the end of some quite impressive bucking, the engine roared to life with all its banged-up valves. Behind me, the kids raised a shout of joy identical to the one they used to greet the return of electric lights after a long power cut.

When I reached the blacksmith’s patio, Sulayman’s hand was already completely bound up in a terry-cloth towel, and there was a tourniquet around his wrist; his face showed no sign of pain. I found this strange. I couldn’t believe that a person would show such insensibility after he’d just sliced off two of his fingers.

The blacksmith put his son in the backseat and sat beside him. Disheveled and sweating, his wife arrived on the run, looking like a desperate madwoman; she handed her husband a stack of dog-eared pages held together by a rubber band.

“It’s his medical record. Someone will surely ask you for it.”

“Very good. Now go back inside and try to behave. It’s not the end of the world.”

Tires squealing, we left the village, briefly escorted by an urchin band. Their shouts pursued us across the desert for a long time.

It was about eleven o’clock, and the sun sprinkled false oases all over the plain. A couple of birds flapped their wings against the white-hot sky. The trail proceeded in a straight line, pallid, vertiginous, and quite unusual on that stony plateau, which it bisected like a gash from one end to the other. The dilapidated old Ford bounced over the deep potholes, rearing up here and there and giving the impression that it was commanded by nothing but its own frenzy. In the backseat, the blacksmith, clutching his son tightly so he wouldn’t strike his head, said nothing. He was letting me drive as best I could.

We passed an abandoned field, a disused pumping station, and then emptiness. The naked horizon spread out to infinity. Around us, as far as we could see, there was not so much as a hut, not a machine of any sort, not a living soul. The health clinic was sixty kilometers west of Kafr Karam, in a newly built village with paved roads. The new village also boasted a police station and a preparatory school, the latter — for reasons that escaped me — studiously avoided by our people.

“You think we’ve got enough gas?” the blacksmith asked.

“I don’t know. There’s not a working gauge on this dashboard.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. We haven’t passed a single vehicle. If we break down, we’re screwed.”

“God won’t abandon us,” I told him.

Half an hour later, we saw an enormous cloud of black smoke rising in the distance. By this time, we were only a few hundred meters from the national highway, and the smoke intrigued us. After we passed a small hill, we could finally see the highway and the burning semitrailer. It lay across the road, its cabin in the ditch and its tank burst open; gigantic flames were devouring it.

“Better stop,” the blacksmith advised me. “This must have been a fedayeen attack, so it can’t be long before the military shows up. Go back to the access ramp and take the old trail. I don’t feel like winding up in the middle of a fire-fight.”

I turned around. Once we reached the old trail, I started looking out for soldiers on their way to the scene. Hundreds of meters below us, running parallel to our trail, the national highway sparkled in the sun. It reminded me of an irrigation canal, perfectly straight and terribly deserted. Soon the cloud of smoke became a grayish smudge in the distance. Every now and then, the blacksmith stuck his head out the window and scrutinized the sky for helicopters. We were the sole sign of life in the vicinity, and we might be making a mistake. The blacksmith was worried; his face grew gloomier and gloomier.

As for me, I felt rather serene; I had an injured person on board, and I was on my way to the neighboring village.

The trail made a wide swerve to avoid a crater, climbed a hill, plunged down, and leveled out after a few kilometers. Once again, we could see the national highway, still straight and still disconcertingly deserted. The trail turned toward the highway and then merged with it. As soon as the Ford’s tires hit the asphalt, they changed their tone, and the engine stopped its incongruous gargling.

“We’re less than ten minutes from the village, and there’s not a vehicle in sight,” the blacksmith said. “Very odd.”

I didn’t have time to reply to him. A checkpoint was blocking our route with barriers on both sides of the roadway. Two individuals dressed in bright colors were on the shoulders of the road, holding automatic weapons at the ready. Facing us, erected on a mound, a makeshift sentry box was barricaded behind barrels and sandbags.

“Stay calm,” the blacksmith said, his breath hot on the nape of my neck.

“I am calm,” I assured him. “We haven’t done anything wrong, and one of us needs medical attention. They won’t give us any trouble.”

“Where are the soldiers?”

“They’re hunkered down behind the embankment. I see two helmets. I think they’re watching us through binoculars.”

“Okay. Slow down to a crawl. And whatever they tell you to do, do it.”

“Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

The first soldier to step out into the open was an Iraqi. He signaled to us to stop the car in front of a road sign that was standing in the center of the highway. I followed his instructions.

“Cut the engine,” he ordered me in Arabic. “Then put your hands on the steering wheel and keep them there. Don’t open the door, and don’t get out until you’re told to. Understand?”

He was standing well away from the car and pointing his rifle at my windshield.

“Understand?”

“I understand. I keep my hands on the steering wheel, and I don’t do anything without authorization.”

“Very good. How many are you?”