Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

A few meters away, three little rascals were feigning interest in a patch of grass. In reality, they were observing us on the sly, waiting for a sign from their comrade.

I got up and walked away. The kid on the bench hissed an obscenity in my direction and lifted his shirt to show me his crotch. His three pals sneered and stared at me. The eldest of them wasn’t yet thirteen, but they stank of death like carrion.

I walked faster.

A few blocks farther on, shadows rose up out of the darkness and charged at me. Taken by surprise, I flattened myself against a wall. Hands clutched my bag and tried to tear it away from me. I kicked out, struck someone’s leg, and retreated into a doorway. The would-be muggers came at me with increased ferocity. I felt the straps of my bag giving way and started dealing blows blindly. At the end of a desperate struggle, my assailants released their grip and ran away. When they passed under a streetlight, I recognized the four wolf cubs of a little while ago.

I crouched down on the sidewalk, clutching my head, and took several deep breaths to get my wind back. “What country is this?” I heard myself pant.

When I stood up, I had the impression that my bag was lighter. And in fact, one side of it had been cut open, and half of my things were gone. I put my hand on my back pocket and was relieved to find that my money was still there. That was when I started running toward the city center, jumping aside every time a shadow passed me.

I ate at a place that served grilled meats. I sat at a table in the corner, far from the door and the windows, with one eye on my brochettes and the other on the steady stream of customers entering and leaving. I recognized no one, and I grew irritated every time somebody’s eyes settled on me. I was uncomfortable in the midst of all those hairy creatures, who filled me with suspicion and dread. They didn’t have very much in common with the people of my village, except perhaps for their human form, which did nothing to temper their brutish aspect. Everything about them filled me with cold animosity. I had the feeling I’d ventured into enemy territory — or, worse, into a minefield, and I expected to be blown to pieces at any moment.

“Relax,” the waiter said, putting a plate of fries in front of me. “I’ve been holding out this plate to you for a good minute, and you just stare right through me. What’s wrong? Have you escaped a raid? Or maybe survived an attack?”

He winked at me and went to take care of another customer.

After eating my brochettes and my fries, I ordered more, and then more after that. I’d never been so hungry, and the more I ate, the more my hunger increased. I consumed two baskets of bread and a good twenty brochettes, to say nothing of the fries, and washed everything down with a one-liter bottle of soda and a pitcher of water. My sudden appetite scared me.

To put an end to this gorging, I asked for the check. While the cashier was giving me my change, I asked, “Is there a hotel near here?”

He raised an eyebrow and looked at me askance. “There’s a mosque at the other end of the street, behind the square. It’ll be on your left as you step out. They provide accommodations for transients at night. At least you’ll be able to rest easy there.”

“I want to go to a hotel.”

“You’re obviously not from here. All the hotels are under surveillance. And the police give the managers so much shit that most of them have closed their places down. Go to the mosque. The police don’t show up there very often, and besides, it’s free.”

“If I were you, that’s what I’d do,” the waiter said as he slipped past.

I picked up my bag and went out into the street.

Actually, the mosque was on the ground floor of a two-story warehouse wedged between a large disused store and another building. A large room in the warehouse had been transformed into a prayer hall. The neighborhood had a cutthroat look I disliked right away. The meager light from a streetlamp picked out the boarded-up fronts of two grocer’s shops, one across from the other. It was eleven o’clock at night, and except for the cats rummaging around in the piles of garbage on the sidewalks, there wasn’t a living soul in sight.

The prayer hall had been evacuated and the homeless people lodged in another room large enough to accommodate about fifty persons. The floor was covered with old blankets. A chandelier cast its beams upon various shapeless masses curled up here and there. There were about twenty wretches on the floor, all of them sleeping in their clothes, some with their mouths open, others in a fetal position; the place smelled like rags and feet.

I decided to lie down in a corner alongside an old man. Using my bag as a pillow, I fixed my eyes on the ceiling and waited.

The chandelier went out. Snores came from all sides, intensified, and then became intermittent. I listened to the blood beating in my temples and heard my breathing accelerate; waves of nausea rose from my stomach, ending in stifled belches. Once only, the image of my father falling over backward flashed through my head; I immediately drove it out of my mind. I was too badly off to burden myself with disturbing memories.

I dreamed that a pack of dogs were chasing me through a dark wood where the branches had claws and the air was loud with screams. I was naked, my arms and legs were bloody, and my hair was streaming with bird droppings. Suddenly, the undergrowth parted, revealing a precipice. I was about to step into the void, when the muezzin’s call woke me up.

Most of last night’s sleepers, including the old man beside me, had left the room. Only four miserable wretches remained in tattered heaps on the floor. As for my bag, it wasn’t there anymore. I put my hand on my back pocket; my money had disappeared.

Sitting on the sidewalk with my chin in my hands, I watched uniformed policemen checking cars. They asked for the passengers’ papers as well as the drivers’ and inspected all of them carefully; sometimes they made everyone get out of the car and then began a systematic search, sifting through the contents of the trunk and looking under the hood and the chassis. The previous evening, in this same spot, the interception of an ambulance had turned dramatic. The physician on board the ambulance had tried to explain that the case was an emergency, but the policemen didn’t want to hear about that. Eventually, the doctor became upset, and a police corporal punched him in the face. Things degenerated from there. Threats were answered by insults, blows were struck by both sides, and finally the corporal pulled out his pistol and shot the doctor in the leg.

This part of town had a bad reputation. Two days before the ambulance incident, someone had been murdered in the exact spot where the police roadblock now stood. The victim, a man in his fifties, had come out of the shop across the way with a shopping bag in his arms. As he was getting ready to climb into his car, a motorbike pulled up beside him. Three shots, and the fellow collapsed on the pavement, his head resting on his purchases.

A few days before that, in the same place, a young deputy in the Iraqi parliament had likewise been cut down. He’d been driving his car when a motorbike caught up with him. There was a volley of shots, and the windshield suddenly seemed to be covered with spiderwebs. The vehicle skidded onto the sidewalk and flattened a female pedestrian before crashing into a lamppost. The hooded killer hurried over to the car, opened the door, pulled out the young deputy, laid him on the ground, and riddled him with bullets at pointblank range. Then, without haste, the gunman got back on his motorbike and roared away.