Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

A noncommissioned officer in the Iraqi police and the blacksmith were standing a little distance away and having a conversation, while an American officer, recently arrived in his Jeep, listened to the sergeant’s report. Apparently, they all realized that a mistake had been made, but they weren’t going to make a big deal of it. Incidents of this kind were commonplace in Iraq. Amid the general confusion, everyone sought his own advantage. To err is human, and fate has broad shoulders.

The black GI handed me his canteen. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to drink or wash my face, but in any case, I rejected his offer with a feverish hand. He put on a sorrowful expression — a vain effort, as far as I was concerned, because his new, compassionate persona seemed incompatible with his temperament. A brute is still a brute, even when he smiles; the eyes are where the soul declares its true nature.

Two male nurses, Arabs, came to comfort me; they crouched down, one on each side, and patted my shoulders. Their light taps resounded in my body like blows from a club. I wanted to be left alone; every sympathetic gesture carried me back to the source of my grief. From time to time, a sob shook me, but I did everything I could to contain it. I felt stricken by an incredible weariness; I could hear only my breath, emptying me, and in my temples the pulsing of my blood, its rhythm matching the lingering echoes of the detonations.

The blacksmith tried to claim his son’s remains, but the chief of police explained to him that there was an administrative procedure that must be followed. Such an unfortunate accident as this entailed a lot of formalities. Sulayman’s body had to be taken to the morgue and could not be released to his family until an investigation into the tragic error had been completed.

A police car took us back to the village. I didn’t completely grasp what was happening. I was inside a sort of evanescent bubble, sometimes suspended in a void, sometimes fraying apart like a cloud of smoke. I remembered clearly the mother’s unbearable cry when the blacksmith returned home. Immediately, a crowd gathered, dazed and incredulous. The old struck their hands together, devastated; the young were outraged. I reached my house in a lamentable state. The moment I stepped over the threshold and into the patio, my father, who was dozing at the foot of his indefinable tree, started in his sleep. He’d understood at once that something bad had happened. My mother didn’t have the courage to ask me what the matter was; she settled for putting her hands on her cheeks. My sisters came running with kids clinging to their skirts. Outside, the first howls began, somber lamentations heavy with anger and passion. My sister Bahia took me by the arm and helped me to my rooftop room. She laid me down on my pallet, brought me a basin of water, took off my filthy, vomit-stained shirt, and started washing me from the waist up. Meanwhile, the news spread through the village, and our entire family went to condole with the blacksmith and his household. After putting me to bed for the evening, Bahia left to join them, and I fell asleep.

The next day, Bahia came back to open my windows and give me clean clothes. She told me that an American colonel, accompanied by some Iraqi military authorities, had come to the village the previous evening to offer condolences to the bereaved parents. The eldest of the tribe received them at his home, but in the courtyard, to indicate to the colonel that he was unwelcome. The old man didn’t believe the colonel’s version of the accident, nor would he accept any justification for firing on a simpleminded boy — that is, on a pure and innocent creature closer to the Lord than the saints. Some television teams wanted to cover the event and proposed a feature story on the blacksmith so that people could hear what he had to say about the matter. On this point as well, the eldest held firm; he categorically refused to allow strangers to disturb his grieving village.

Three days later, a small van from the village, dispatched by the eldest himself, brought Sulayman’s body home from the morgue. It was a terrible moment. The people of Kafr Karam had never felt such gloom. The eldest insisted that the burial should take place with dignity and in strict privacy. Except for the villagers, only a delegation of elders from an allied tribe was allowed in the cemetery. After the funeral services were over, everyone returned home to ponder the blow that had robbed Kafr Karam of its purest creature, its mascot and its pentacle. That evening, old and young gathered at the blacksmith’s house and chanted verses from the Qur’an until late in the night. But Yaseen and his followers, who made an open display of their indignation, saw things differently and chose to meet at Sayed’s place. Sayed was Bashir the Falcon’s son, a taciturn, mysterious young man said to be close to the Islamist movement and suspected of having attended school in Peshawar during the rule of the Taliban. He was a tall fellow of about thirty or so, his ascetic face beardless except for his lower lip, where a tiny tuft of wild hairs, like the beauty mark on his cheek, embellished his face. He lived in Baghdad and never came back to Kafr Karam except for special occasions. He’d arrived the previous day and attended Sulayman’s funeral.

Around midnight, other young insomniacs joined the group at Sayed’s. He received them all with a great deal of deference and entertained them in a large room whose floor was covered with wicker mats and cushions. While everyone else was sipping tea and digging into baskets of peanuts, Yaseen couldn’t stay still. He looked like a man possessed by the devil. Trying to pick a quarrel, he stared extravagantly at the others, who were sitting or reclining here and there. As no one was paying any attention to him, he absolutely turned on his most faithful companion, Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law.

“I saw you crying at the cemetery,” Yaseen said.

“It’s true,” Salah admitted, ignorant of where the conversation was heading.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you cry?”

Salah frowned. “According to you, why do people cry? I felt grief, all right? I cried because Sulayman’s death caused me pain. What’s so shocking about that, crying over someone you loved?”

“I understand that,” Yaseen insisted. “But why the tears?”

Salah felt that things were escaping him. “I don’t understand your question.”

“Sulayman’s death broke my heart,” Yaseen said. “But I didn’t shed a single tear. I can’t believe you would make such a spectacle of yourself. You cried like a woman, and that’s unacceptable.”

The word woman shook Salah. His cheeks bulged as he gritted his teeth. “Men cry, too,” he pointed out to his leader. “The Prophet himself had that weakness.”

“I don’t give a damn!” Yaseen exploded. “You didn’t have to behave like a woman, ” he added, heavily emphasizing the last word.

Outraged, Salah rose suddenly to his feet. He stared at Yaseen with wounded eyes for a long time, then gathered up his sandals and went out into the night.

There were about twenty people gathered in the big room, and rapid looks darted in all directions. No one understood what had gotten into Yaseen or why he’d behaved so despicably to the blacksmith’s son-in-law. A sense of ill-being settled over everyone there. After a long silence, Sayed, the master of the house, coughed into his fist. It was his duty, as the host, to set things straight.

He gave Yaseen a scathing look and began: “When I was a child, my father told me a story I didn’t completely grasp. At that age, I didn’t know that stories had a moral. This was the story of an Egyptian strongman who reigned like a satrap over the seedier districts of Cairo. He was a downright Hercules. He looked as though he’d just been cast in some ancient Greek bronze foundry. He had an enormous mustache that looked like a ram’s horns, and he was a leader as hard on himself as he was on others. I don’t remember his name, but the image I formed of him is intact in my memory. I thought of him as a kind of Robin Hood of the working-class suburbs, as ready to roll up his sleeves and lend a hand as to swagger around the square and lord it over porters and donkey trainers. When there was a disagreement between neighbors, they came to him and submitted to his arbitration. The decisions he made could not be appealed. However, although he was a strong man, he wasn’t a silent one. He was conceited, irascible, and demanding, and since no one questioned his authority, he proclaimed himself king of the outcasts and shouted from the rooftops that there was nobody in the world who dared to look him straight in the eye. His words didn’t fall on deaf ears. One evening, the chief of police summoned him to the station. No one knows what happened that night. The next day, when the strongman returned home, he was unrecognizable, his head bowed, his eyes elusive. He wasn’t bearing any wounds or any traces of blows, but he had an evident mark of infamy in the form of his suddenly sunken shoulders. He shut himself up in his hovel until his neighbors began to complain about a strong odor of decomposition. When they kicked his door in, they found the strongman stretched out on his straw mattress. He’d been dead for several days. Later, a cop described the strongman’s meeting with the chief of police: Before the chief could reproach him for anything at all, the strongman had thrown himself at the chief’s feet to beg his pardon. And he never got up again.”