Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

He continued to visit me, and we spent hours talking about everything and nothing. It was thanks to him that one evening I screwed up my courage and agreed to leave my lair. Kadem proposed taking a walk far from the village. Halfway between Kafr Karam and the Haitems’ orchards, the plateau made a sudden descent, and a vast dry riverbed strewn with little sandstone mounds and thorny bushes split the valley for several kilometers. The wind sang in that spot like a baritone.

It was a fine day, and in spite of a veil of dust hanging over the horizon, we enjoyed a superb sunset. Kadem handed me the headphones attached to his Walkman. I recognized the voice of Fairuz, the Lebanese singing star.

“Have I told you I’ve taken up my lute again?” he asked.

“That’s excellent news.”

“I’m composing something at this very moment. I’ll let you hear it when it’s finished.”

“A love song?”

“All Arab songs are love songs,” he said. “If the West could only understand our music, if it could even just listen to us sing, if it could hear our soul in the voices of Sabah Fakhri and Wadi es-Safi and Abdelwaheb and Asmahan and Umm Kulthum — if it could commune with our world — I think it would renounce its cutting-edge technology, its satellites, and its armies and follow us to the end of our art….”

I enjoyed Kadem’s company. He knew how to find soothing words, and his inspired voice helped me lift up my head. I was happy to see him revived. He was a magnificent fellow, one who didn’t deserve to waste away sitting beside a little wall.

“I was just about to go under,” he admitted. “For months and months, my head was like a funeral urn. The ashes were obscuring my vision, coming out of my nose and ears. I couldn’t see any way out. But then Sulayman’s death brought me back. Just like that,” he added, snapping his fingers. “It opened my eyes. I don’t want to die without having lived. Up until now, all I’ve done is put up with things. Like Sulayman, I haven’t always understood what was happening to me. But there’s no way I’m going to wind up like him. When I heard about his death, I asked myself, What? Sulayman’s dead? Why? Did he really exist? And it’s true, cousin. The poor guy was just about your age. We saw him in the streets every day, wandering around in his own world. And sometimes running after his visions. And yet, now that he’s gone, I wonder if he really existed…. On my way back from the cemetery, I was automatically heading for the little wall and my rock, when I found myself entering my house. I went up to my room, searched the depths of the storage closet, located the trunk with the brass fittings — it looked like a sarcophagus — opened it, took my lute out of its case, and, I swear, without even tuning up, I started composing. I was carried away — it was as though I were under a spell.”

“I can’t wait to hear you.”

“I just have to add a few finishing touches and I’ll be ready.”

Life in Kafr Karam resumed its course, empty as fasting.

When you’ve got nothing, that’s what you make do with. It’s a question of outlook.

Men are pathetic, narrow creatures, blood brothers of Sisyphus, built for suffering; their vocation is to undergo life until death ensues.

The days went their way like a phantom caravan. They came out of nowhere, early in the morning, without charm or panache, and in the evening they disappeared, surreptitiously, swallowed up by darkness. Nonetheless, children continued to be born, and death still took care of keeping things in balance. At the age of seventy-three, our neighbor became a daddy for the seventeenth time, and my great-uncle passed away in his bed, an old man surrounded by his loved ones. What the desert wind carries away, memory restores; what sandstorms erase, we redraw with our hands.

Khaled, the taxi owner, had agreed to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to one of the Haitem family, whose orchards stood a few hundred meters beyond the village limits. This was a first. Some even declared it a practical joke. Usually, the Haitems — wealthy, taciturn people — sought their daughters-in-law in town, among urbane families whose girls would have good table manners and know how to receive high society. Their sudden decision to turn to us was a cause of some consternation in certain quarters, but generally it was taken as a good augury that the Haitems were returning to their roots. Although they had snubbed us for a long time, we weren’t going to be coy now that one of their scions had fallen for a maiden from our village. And in any case, a prospective marriage, whether rich or poor, made everything worthwhile. At last we could look forward to a happy event that would compensate for the chronic emptiness of our daily lives!

There was an innovation at the Safir: a television set, complete with parabolic antenna. This was a gift from Sayed, who expressed the hope “that the young men of Kafr Karam would not lose sight of their country’s tragic reality.” Overnight, the seedy café was transformed into a veritable mess hall for unstable soldiers. It was enough to make the proprietor, Majed, tear out his hair. His business was already going down the drain; if, on top of that, his customers were going to arrive with their gargantuan snacks and their packs, the game was clearly up. As for the customers, they weren’t bashful. At dawn, without having bothered even to wash their faces, they’d come knocking on his door and ask him to open the café. It was as if they were camped in the street. Once the TV was on, they’d surf through the channels — taking humanity’s pulse, as it were — before moving on to Al-Jazeera and staying put. By noon, the little place was teeming with overexcited young men. The air was filled with commentary and invective. Every time the camera offered another look at the national tragedy, the protests and death threats shook the neighborhood around the café. Supporters of preventive war were hooted at, anti-Yankees were applauded, and the people hired to be members of parliament were hissed for being opportunists and flunkies for Bush. Yaseen and his band, in the best seats, seemed to be the guests of choice. Even when they came late, they always found their chairs empty. Behind them were two or three rows of sympathizers, and in the back of the room, the small fry. Majed had no idea what to do. With his chin in his hands and his thermos standing neglected on the counter, he gazed with wounded eyes at the crowd of idlers who were causing incredible commotion and wrecking his furniture.

For a while, my cousin Kadem and I were regulars at the Safir. The experience changed our ideas a bit. Sometimes a trivial remark would bring the house down, and then there was nothing better than an off-the-wall observation to raise it up again. And to see that whole damned, gaping crowd bust a gut when one of them made a fool of himself was excellent therapy, far more effective than we could have suspected. But comedy grows tiresome in the long run, and the wise guys who seized any occasion to amuse the gallery started getting on people’s nerves. As might have been expected, Yaseen was obliged to set things straight.

We were all watching the news on Al-Jazeera. The announcer led us to Fallujah, the scene of ongoing battles between American troops, aided by Iraqi security forces, and the local resistance. The besieged city had sworn to die rather than surrender. Disfigured, smoke-filled Fallujah fought on with touching combativeness. There were reports of hundreds of dead, mostly women and children. The crowd in the café was silent and heartsick, helpless witnesses to a genuine slaughter: on one side, extravagantly equipped soldiers, supported by tanks, drones, and helicopters, and on the other side, a populace left to shift for itself, held hostage by a group of ragged, starving “rebels,” armed with filthy rifles and rocket launchers and scampering around in all directions. It was then that a young fellow with a beard cried out, “These American infidels will live to regret what they’ve done. God will bring the sky down on their heads. Not a single GI will leave Iraq intact. Let them swagger as much as they want — they’ll wind up like those old-time infidel armies the Ababil birds reduced to mince meat. God’s going to send the Ababil birds against them!”