Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

“Bullshit!”

The bearded fellow stiffened, swallowing hard. Then he turned to the blasphemer. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

The man with the beard was stunned. His face was flushed and quivering with anger. “Did you say ‘bullshit’?”

“You got it! Bullshit! That’s exactly what I said. Not one syllable more, not one syllable less: BULL SHIT. Is that a problem for you?”

Everyone in the room had turned their backs on the TV to see just how far their two young companions were willing to go. “Do you realize what you’re saying, Malik?” the bearded one asked.

“As far as I can tell, you’re the one who’s talking rubbish, Harun.”

The crowd stirred. Yaseen and his band followed with interest what was happening behind them. Harun, who considered Malik’s blasphemous insolence beyond all bounds of decency, seemed to be on the verge of an apoplectic fit. “Come on, I was talking about the Ababil birds,” Harun whined. “They’re from an important passage in the Qur’an.”

“I fail to see the connection with what’s going on in Fallujah,” Malik said, not backing down. “What I see on that screen is a city under siege. I see Muslims buried in its ruins, I see fugitives at the mercy of a rocket or a missile, and, all around, I see faithless, lawless brutes trampling on us in our own country. And you — you talk to us about Ababil birds. Can you even get an inkling of how ridiculous that is?”

“Keep quiet,” Harun warned him. “The devil’s in you.”

“Right,” Malik said with a disdainful sneer. “When you get out of your depth, blame the devil. Wake up, Harun. The Ababil birds are as dead as the dinosaurs. We’re at the dawn of the third millennium, and some foreign sons of bitches are here in our land, dragging us in the mud every day God sends. Iraq is occupied, my friend. Look at the TV. What’s the TV telling you? What do you see there, right under your nose, while you so sagely stroke your little beard? Infidels subjugating Muslims, demeaning their leaders, throwing their heroes into cages where sluts in fatigues pull their ears and their testicles and pose for posterity. What’s God waiting for, you think, before He falls on them? They’ve been here for some time now, mocking Him where He lives, in His sacred temples and in the hearts of His faithful. Why doesn’t He flick His little finger, when those bastards are strafing our souks and bombing our celebrations and shooting our people down like dogs on every street corner? What’s become of the Ababil birds? In the old days, when the enemy army invaded the holy land, the Ababils reduced the invaders to a pulp, so where can those birds be now? My dear Harun, I’m just back from Baghdad. I’ll spare you the details. We’re alone in the world. We can count on no one but ourselves. Heaven will send us no reinforcements, and no miracle’s going to rescue us. God’s got other fish to fry. At night, when I’m lying in my bed and I hold my breath, I can’t even hear Him breathing. The night, all night, every night, belongs to them. And in the day, when I raise my eyes to heaven to implore Him, I can’t see anything except their helicopters — their very own Ababil birds — burying us with their fiery droppings.”

“There’s no more doubt: You’ve sold your soul to the devil.”

“I could offer it to him on a silver platter and he still wouldn’t want it.”

“Astaghfirullah.”

“Exactly. At the moment, GIs are profaning our mosques, manhandling our holy men, and bottling up our prayers like flies. How much more provocation does He need, your God, before He loses His temper?”

“What did you expect, you imbecile?” Yaseen thundered. All eyes turned toward him. He stood with his hands on his hips, eyeing the blasphemer scornfully. “What did you expect, big mouth? Eh? You thought the Lord was going to ride down on a white horse, burnoose flying in the wind, to cross swords with these animals? We are His wrath! ”

His outcry had the effect of an explosion inside the café. A few gulps were all that could be heard.

Malik tried to withstand Yaseen’s stare but couldn’t stop his cheeks from twitching.

Yaseen struck his chest with the flat of his hand. “ We are the wrath of God,” he said in cavernous tones. “We are His Ababil birds. And His thunderbolts, and His chastisements. And we’re going to blow these Yankee bastards sky-high; we’ll trample them until their shit comes out of their ears and their calculations spurt from their assholes. Is that clear? Now do you understand? Now do you see where God’s wrath is, you little prick? It’s here, it’s in us. We’re going to send those devils back to hell, one by one, until they’re all gone. It’s as true as the sun rises in the east….”

Yaseen crossed the room while people feverishly got out of his path. His eyes devoured the blasphemer. He was like a python moving inexorably upon its prey. He stopped in front of Malik — they were practically nose-to-nose — and squinted a little to concentrate the fire of his gaze. Then Yaseen said, “If I ever hear you expressing the smallest doubt about our victory over those mad dogs, I swear before God and all the guys in this room, I’ll tear your heart out with my bare hands.”

Kadem pulled me by my shirt and signaled with his head for me to follow him outside.

“Quite a bit of electricity in the air,” he said.

“Something’s snapped in Yaseen’s brain. I don’t think ten straitjackets could hold him.”

Kadem held out his pack of cigarettes.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Take one,” he insisted. “You need a change of air.”

When I gave in, I noticed that my hand was trembling. “He scares the shit out of me,” I confessed.

Kadem flicked his lighter under my cigarette before applying the flame to his own. Then, throwing back his head, he blew his smoke out into the breeze. “Yaseen’s a half-wit,” he said. “As far as I know, there’s nothing stopping him from jumping onto a bus and going to Baghdad to wage some war. That number he does is going to get tiresome after a while. It may even cause him some serious problems. Shall we go to my place?”

“Why not,” I replied.

Kadem lived with his sickly, elderly parents in a little stone house backed up against the mosque. We climbed the stairs to his quarters on the upper floor. The room was large and well lit. There was a double bed surrounded by carpets, a “Made in Taiwan” stereo set dwarfed by two gigantic speakers, a chest of drawers flanked by an oval mirror and an overstuffed chair.

In the corner nearest the door, mounted on a stiff sheepskin, stood a lute — the noblest and most mythical of musical instruments, the king of the Oriental orchestra, the instrument that could elevate its virtuosos to the rank of divinities and transform the shadiest dive into Parnassus, abode of the Muses. I knew the fantastic history of this particular lute, which had been made by Kadem’s grandfather, a peerless musician who delighted Cairo throughout the 1940s before conquering Beirut, Damascus, and Amman and becoming a living legend from the Mashriq to the Maghrib. Kadem’s grandfather played for princes and sultans, warlords and tyrants; he bewitched women and children, mistresses and lovers. It was said that he was the cause of innumerable conjugal conflicts in the uppermost circles of Arab society. And indeed, it was a jealous army captain who put five bullets in his belly while he was performing under the filtered lights of the Cleopatra, Alexandria’s trendiest nightclub, toward the end of the 1950s.

Facing the lute, as if committed to a permanent exchange of influences, was a picture in a carved frame, enshrined on the night table: a photograph of Faten, my cousin’s first wife.