Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Kadem asked as he hung his jacket on a nail.

“She was very beautiful,” I acknowledged.

“That picture has never moved from its place. Even my second wife left it where she found it. It bothered her, that’s for sure, but she proved to be very understanding about it. Only once, during the first week of our marriage, did she ever try to turn it to face the wall. She didn’t dare get undressed under that immense gaze. But then, little by little, she learned to live with it…. Tea or coffee?”

“Tea.”

“I’ll go down and get some.”

He made a sudden dash down the stairs.

I stepped closer to the picture. The young bride was wide-eyed and smiling while the wedding festivities went on behind her. Her radiant face outshone all the paper lanterns put together. I remembered when she was a young teenager and she’d leave her house to run errands with her mother; we youngsters would race all the way around the block just so we could watch her pass by. She was sublime.

Kadem returned with a tray. He put the teapot on the chest of drawers and poured two steaming glasses of tea. Then, to my surprise, he said, “I loved her the first time I saw her.” (In Kafr Karam, one never spoke of such things.) “I wasn’t yet seven years old. But even at that age, and even though I had no real prospects, I knew we were meant for each other.”

His eyes overflowed with splendid evocations as he pushed a glass in my direction. He was floating on a cloud, his brow smooth and his smile broad. “Every time I heard someone playing a lute, I thought of her. I really believe I wanted to become a musician just so I could sing about her. She was such a marvelous girl, so generous, so humble! With her at my side, I needed nothing else. She was more than I could have ever hoped for.”

A tear threatened to spill out of one eye; he quickly turned his head and pretended to adjust the lid of the teapot. “Well,” he said. “How about a little music?”

“Excellent idea,” I said approvingly, quite relieved.

He rummaged in a drawer and fished out a cassette, which he slipped into the tape player. “Listen to this,” he said.

Once again, it was Fairuz, the diva of the Arab world, performing her unforgettable song “Hand Me the Flute.”

Kadem stretched out on his bed and crossed his legs, still holding the glass of tea in one hand. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “No angel could sing better than that. Her voice is like the breath of the cosmos….”

We heard the cassette through to the end, each of us in his own private universe. Street noises and children’s squeals failed to reach us. We flew away with the violins, far, very far from Kafr Karam, far from Yaseen and his outrages. The sun shined its blessings down on us, covering us with gold. The dead woman in the photograph smiled upon us. For a second, I thought I saw her move.

Kadem rolled himself a joint and dragged on it rapturously. He was laughing in silence, beating time with one languorous hand to the singer’s unfaltering rhythm. At the beginning of a refrain, he started singing, too, thrusting out his chest. He had a magnificent voice.

After the Fairuz cassette was over, he put on others, old songs by Abdel Halim Hafez and Abdelwaheb, Ayam and Younes, Najat and other immortal glories of the tarab alarabi.

Night surprised us, completely intoxicated as we were with joints and songs.

The TV that Sayed had donated to the idle youth of Kafr Karam proved to be a poisoned chalice. It brought the village nothing but turmoil and disharmony. Many families owned a television set, but at home, with the father seated on his throne and his eldest son at his right hand, young people kept their comments to themselves. Things were different in the café. You could boo, you could argue about any subject whatsoever, and you could change your mind according to your mood. Sayed had hit the bull’s-eye. Hatred was as contagious as laughter, discussions got out of control, and a gap formed between those who went to the Safir to have fun and those who were there “to learn.” It was the latter whose point of view prevailed. We started concentrating on the national tragedy, all of us together, every step of the way. The sieges of Fallujah and Basra and the bloody raids on other cities made the crowd seethe. The insurgent attacks might horrify us for an instant, but more often than not they aroused our enthusiasm. We applauded the successful ambushes and deplored skirmishes that went wrong. The assembly’s initial delight at Saddam’s fate turned to frustration. In Yaseen’s view, the Rais, trapped like a rat, unrecognizable with his hobo’s beard and his dazed eyes, exposed triumphantly and shamelessly to the world’s cameras, represented the most grievous affront inflicted on the Iraqi people. “By humiliating him like that,” Yaseen declared, “they were holding up every Arab in the world to public opprobrium.”

We were at a loss as to how to assess the ongoing events; we no longer knew whether a given attack was a feat of arms or a demonstration of cowardice. An action vilified one day might be praised to the skies the next. Clashing opinions led to incredible escalations, and fistfights broke out more and more frequently.

The situation was degenerating, and the elders refused to intervene publicly; each father preferred to give his offspring a talking-to in the privacy of his home. Kafr Karam was reeling from the most serious discord in its history. The silences and submissions accumulated through many years and various despotic regimes rose like drowned corpses from a muddy river bottom, bobbing up to the surface to shock the living.

Yaseen and his band — the twins Hassan and Hussein, the blacksmith’s son-in-law Salah, Adel, and Bilal, the barber’s son — disappeared, and the village entered a period of relative calm. Three weeks later, persons unknown set fire to the disused pumping station, a deteriorating structure some twenty kilometers from Kafr Karam. There was a report that an attack on an Iraqi police patrol had resulted in some fatalities among the forces of order, along with two vehicles destroyed and various weapons carried off by the attackers. Rumor raised this ambush to the status of a heroic action, and in the streets people began to talk about furtive groups glimpsed here and there under cover of night, but no one ever got close enough to identify or capture any of them. A climate of tension kept us all on the alert. Every day, we awaited news from the “front,” which we figured was coming soon to a neighborhood near us.

One day, for the first time since the occupation of the country by the American troops and their allies, a military helicopter made three passes over our area. Now there was no more room for doubt: Things were happening in this part of the country.

In the village, we prepared for the worst.

Ten days, twenty days, a month passed. We could see nothing on the horizon — no convoy, no suspicious movements.

When it looked as though the village was not going to be the target of a military raid, people relaxed; the elders returned to their barbershop antiphony, the young resumed their tumultuous meetings at the Safir, and the desert regained its stultifying barrenness and its infinite banality.

The order of things seemed to have been reestablished.

Khaled Taxi was in his mid-thirties. Wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses, his hair oiled and slicked back, he was prancing around in the street and looking impatiently at his watch. Despite the ferocious heat, he’d squeezed himself into a three-piece suit that, in a former life, had known better days. A tie fit for a clown costume — garish yellow streaked with brown — spread across his chest. Now and again, he reached inside his jacket and took out a tiny comb, which he passed through his mustache.