Yasmina Khadra: The Sirens of Baghdad

Omar was a walking disease. The young people of the village appreciated neither his crude language nor his sick innuendos; people avoided him like the plague. His time in the army had corrupted him.

Five years previously, he’d gone off to serve in the ranks as a cook; shortly after the siege of Baghdad by the Americans, he’d returned to the village, unable to explain what had happened. One night, he said, his unit was on full alert, locked and loaded; the next day, there was no one left. Everyone had deserted, the officers first. Omar came home hugging the walls. He reacted very badly to the defection of his battalion and sought to drown his grief and shame in adulterated wine. This was probably the source of his coarseness; having lost his self-respect, he took a malicious pleasure in disgusting relatives and friends.

“There are decent people around here,” I reminded him.

“What did I say that wasn’t Sunnite?”

“Please…”

He spread out his arms. “Okay. Okay. A guy can’t even fart around anymore.”

Omar was eleven years my senior. He’d signed up for the army after a disappointment in love: The girl of his dreams turned out to be promised to someone else. Omar hadn’t known a thing about it; neither had she, for that matter. It was only when he’d gathered up his courage and charged his aunt with soliciting his beloved’s hand that his illusions had collapsed around him. He’d never recovered from that.

“I’m freaking out in this shithole,” he moaned. “I’ve knocked on every door, and nobody wants to go to town. I wonder why they’d rather stay cooped up in their crappy shacks instead of enjoying a little stroll on a nice avenue with air-conditioned shops and flowers on the café terraces. What’s there to see around here, I ask you, except lizards and dogs? At least in town, you go to a café, you sit at a table on the terrace, and you can watch the cars pass and the girls slink by. You feel that you exist, dammit! You feel you’re alive. Which is not the feeling I get in Kafr Karam. Here, it’s more like slow death, I swear to you. I’m suffocating. I’m dying. Shit, Khaled’s taxi isn’t even running, and the bus hasn’t come near these parts for weeks.”

Omar’s torso resembled a big bundle on short legs. He was wearing a threadbare checked shirt too tight to hide his large belly, which hung down over his belt. His grease-stained pants weren’t much to look at, either. Omar inevitably had black blotches on his clothes. No matter how fresh and clean they were, he always found a way to stain them with some oily substance a minute after putting them on. You’d have thought his body secreted it.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To the café.”

“To watch some cretins play cards, like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and tomorrow, and twenty years from now? That’s a way to lose your mind. Damn! What could I have done in a former life to deserve rebirth in a dirty little dump like this?”

“It’s our village, Omar. Our first fatherland.”

“Fatherland, my ass. Even the goddamned crows avoid this place.”

He sucked in his big belly to stick his shirt into his pants, took a deep breath, and said with a sigh, “In any case, we have no choice. The café it is.”

We went back toward the square. Omar was furious. Every time we walked past a car, no matter how decrepit, he started griping. “Why do these jackasses buy these crates if they’re just going to park them in front of their shacks and let them rot?”

He held himself back for a minute and then returned to the charge. “How about your cousin?” he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of Kadem, who was sitting by the low wall at the other end of the street. “How the hell can he stay in that one spot without moving, dawn to dusk? His brain’s going to implode one of these days, I promise you.”

“He just likes to be alone, that’s all.”

“There was a guy in my battalion who behaved just like that. He always stayed in a corner of the barracks, never went to the club, never hung out with friends. One morning, he was found in the latrines, hanging from a ceiling light.”

“That won’t ever happen to Kadem,” I said as a shiver ran down my back.

“How much you want to bet?”

The Safir café was run by Majed, another cousin of mine, a gloomy, sickly man who seemed to be wasting away. Dressed in blue overalls so ugly they looked as though they’d been cut out of a tarpaulin, his head covered by an old military cap pulled down to his ears, he stood behind his rudimentary counter like a failed statue. Since the only reason his customers came to his place was to play cards, he no longer bothered to turn on his machines, contenting himself with making a thermos of red tea at home and bringing it to the café; often, he was obliged to drink the tea alone. His establishment was frequented by unemployed young people, all of them flat broke, who arrived in the morning and stayed until nightfall without ever having put their hands in their pockets. Majed had often dreamed about chucking it all, but then what? In Kafr Karam, the general dereliction defied belief; anyone who had anything resembling employment held on to it stubbornly so as not to risk going on the skids.

Majed gave Omar a bitter look when he saw him arrive. “Here comes trouble,” he grumbled.

Unconcerned, Omar briefly considered the young men seated at tables here and there. “It’s like a barracks when everyone’s been consigned to quarters,” he declared, scratching his behind.

He noticed the twins, Hassan and Hussein, standing in front of a window in the back of the room and watching a card game. The players were Yaseen, Doc Jabir’s grandson, a brooding, irascible young man; Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law; Adel, a tall, strapping, and rather stupid fellow; and Bilal, the son of the barber.

Omar approached the table, greeted the twins in passing, and took up a position behind Adel.

Annoyed, Adel shifted in his chair and said, “You’re in my light, Corporal.”

Omar took a step backward. “The real shadow’s in your thick skull, my boy.”

“Leave him alone,” Yaseen said without taking his eyes off his cards. “Don’t distract us.”

Omar sniggered scornfully but held his tongue.

The four players contemplated their cards with great intensity. At the end of a lengthy mental calculation, Bilal cleared his throat. “It’s your play, Adel.”

Adel thrust out his lips and kept pondering his hand, indecisive, taking his time.

“Look, are you going to play?” Salah asked impatiently.

“Hey,” Adel protested. “I’ve got to think.”

“Stop exaggerating,” Omar said. “You tossed away your last gram of brain when you jerked off this morning.”

The atmosphere in the café turned leaden. The young men sitting near the door vanished; the others didn’t know which way to turn.

Omar realized his blunder and swallowed hard, waiting for all hell to break loose.

The players at the table kept their heads bent over their cards, as though petrified, except for Yaseen, who folded his hand, delicately placed it to one side, and fixed his eyes, white with indignation, on the former corporal. “I don’t know what point you think you’re making with your filthy language, Omar, but this is going too far. In our village, the young, like the old, respect one another. You were raised here, and you know what I’m talking about.”

“I didn’t—”

“Shut up! Shut your big mouth and keep it shut,” Yaseen said in a monotone that contrasted violently with the fury blazing in his eyes. “You’re not in the mess; you’re in Kafr Karam. We’re all brothers, cousins, neighbors, and relatives here, and we watch what we do and how we act. I’ve told you a hundred times, Omar: no obscenity. Keep your disgusting soldier’s lingo to yourself.”