Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

That night, I slept like a stone.

At 8:30 the next morning, I raised the store’s rolling shutter. The first employees — there were three of them — were already waiting on the sidewalk outside. A few minutes later, Sayed joined us and performed the introductions. His workers shook my hand without displaying much enthusiasm. These were young city dwellers, mistrustful and little inclined to conversation. The tallest of them, Rashid, worked in the rear of the store, an area to which he had sole access. His job was to supervise deliveries of incoming merchandise and store it properly. The eldest of the three, Amr, was the deliveryman, and the third, Ismail, an electronics engineer, was in charge of after-sale service and repair.

Sayed’s office served as the reception area. He sat as though enthroned, facing the large shop window, and ceded the rest of the store to product display. Metal shelving ran the length of the walls. Small-or large-screen television sets with Asian brand names, accompanied by satellite dishes and every kind of sophisticated accessory, took up most of the available surface area. There were also electric coffee machines, food processors, grills, and other cooking appliances. Unlike the furniture dealer’s enterprise, Sayed’s store, located on an important commercial avenue, was constantly filled with shoppers, who jostled one another on the display floor all day long. Of course, the majority of them were there just for the sake of gawking; nonetheless, a steady stream of customers carrying purchases exited the store.

I was fine until the afternoon, when I returned to the store after a cheap lunch and Sayed informed me that some “very dear friends” were waiting for me in my room on the upper floor. Sayed led the way. When he opened the door, I saw Yaseen and the twins, Hassan and Hussein, sitting on my camp bed. A shiver went through me. The twins were overjoyed to see me again. They jumped on me and pounded me affectionately, laughing all the while. As for Yaseen, he didn’t get up. He remained seated on the bed, unmoving, his spine erect, like a cobra. He cleared his throat, a signal to the two brothers to cut out the hilarity, and fixed me with the gaze that no one in Kafr Karam dared to withstand.

“It took you a while to wake up,” he said to me.

I failed to grasp what he meant by that.

The twins leaned against the wall and left me in the center of the little room, facing Yaseen. “So how are things?” he asked.

“I can’t complain.”

“I can,” he said. “I pity you.”

He fidgeted, successfully liberating the tail of his jacket from under his behind. He’d changed, Yaseen had. I’d have thought he was ten years older than was actually the case. A few months had been enough to harden his features. His stare was still intimidating, but the corners of his mouth were furrowed, as if they’d cracked under the pressure of his fixed grin.

I decided not to let him upset me. “Are you going to tell me why you pity me?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You think you’re not pitiful?”

“I’m listening.”

“He’s listening. Finally, he can hear, our dear well-digger’s son. Now, how shall we aggravate him?” He looked me up and down before going on. “I wonder what goes on in your head, my friend. You have to be autistic not to see what’s happening. The country’s at war, and millions of fools act as if everything’s cool. When something explodes in the street, they go back inside and close their shutters and wash their hands of the whole affair. The trouble is, things don’t work that way. Sooner or later, the war will knock their houses down and surprise them in their beds. How many times did I tell you and everybody else in Kafr Karam? I told you all: If we don’t go to the fire, the fire will come to us. Who listened to me? Hey, Hassan. Who listened to me?”

“Nobody,” Hassan said.

“Did you sit around waiting for the fire to come?”

“No, Yaseen,” Hassan said.

“Did you wait until some sons of bitches came and yanked you out of your bed in the middle of the night before you opened your eyes?”

“No,” Hassan said.

“How about you, Hussein? Did some sons of bitches have to drag you through the mud to wake you up?”

“No,” Hussein said.

Yaseen looked me over again. “As for me, I didn’t wait, either. I became an insurgent before someone spat on my self-respect. Was there anything I lacked in Kafr Karam? Did I have anything to complain about? I could have closed my shutters and stopped up my ears. But I knew that if I didn’t go to the fire, the fire was going to come to my house. I took up arms because I didn’t want to wind up like Sulayman. A question of survival? No, just a question of logic. This is my country. Scoundrels are trying to extort it from me. So what do I do? According to you, what do I do? You think I wait until they come and rape my mother before my eyes, and under my roof?”

Hassan and Hussein bowed their heads.

Yaseen breathed slowly, moderating the intensity of his gaze, and then spoke again. “I know what happened at your house.”

I frowned.

“Oh, yes,” he continued. “What men consider a grave is a vegetable garden as far as their better halves are concerned. Women don’t know the meaning of the word secret. ”

I bowed my head.

Yaseen leaned back against the wall, folded his arms over his chest, and gazed at me in silence. His eyes made me uncomfortable. He crossed his legs and put his palms on his knees. “I know what it is to see your revered father on the floor, balls in the air, thrown down by a brute,” he said.

My throat clamped shut. I couldn’t believe he was going to reveal my family’s shame! I wouldn’t stand for it.

Yaseen read on my face what I was shouting deep inside. It meant nothing to him. Jerking his chin toward the twins and Sayed, he went on. “All of us here — me, the others in this room, and the beggars in the street — we all know perfectly well what the outrage committed against your family signifies. But the GI has no clue. He can’t measure the extent of the sacrilege. He doesn’t even know what a sacrilege is. In his world, a man sticks his parents in an old folks’ home and forgets them. They’re the least of his worries. He calls his mother ‘an old bag’ and his father ‘an asshole.’ What can you expect from such a person?”

Anger was smothering me. Clearly recognizing my condition, Yaseen raised the bidding. “What can you expect from a snot-nosed degenerate who would put his mother into a home for the moribund, his mother, the woman who conceived him fiber by fiber, carried him in her womb, labored to bring him into the world, raised him step by step, and watched beside him night after night like a star? Can you expect such a person to respect our mothers? Can you expect him to kiss the foreheads of our old men?”

The silence of Sayed and the twins increased my anger. I had the feeling they’d pulled me into a trap, and I resented them for it. If Yaseen was meddling in a matter that was none of his business, well, that was pretty consistent with his character and his reputation; but for the others to act as his accomplices without really getting completely involved — that enraged me.

Sayed saw that I was on the point of imploding. He said, “Those people have no more consideration for their elders than they do for their offspring. That’s what Yaseen’s trying to explain to you. He’s not chewing you out. He’s telling you facts. What happened in Kafr Karam has shaken all of us, I assure you. I knew nothing about it until this morning. And when I heard the story, I was furious. Yaseen’s right. The Americans have gone too far.”