Yasmina Khadra - The Sirens of Baghdad

“Come on, I was just joking.”

“Well, look around, Omar. See anyone laughing? Do you?”

The former corporal’s throat quivered.

Yaseen pointed a peremptory finger at him. “From this day on, Omar, son of my uncle Fadel and my aunt Amina, I forbid you— I forbid you —to utter a single curse, to say a single improper word—”

“Whoa,” Omar said, interrupting Yaseen, much more to save face than to chastise him. “I’m your elder by six years, and I won’t let you speak to me that way.”

“So stop me!”

The two men measured each other, their nostrils quivering.

Omar turned aside first. “All right,” he growled, violently stuffing his shirt into his pants. Then he turned on his heels and headed for the exit. At the door, he stopped and shouted, “You know what I think?”

Yaseen cut him off. “Disinfect your mouth before you tell me.”

Omar shook his head and disappeared.

After Omar’s departure, the uneasiness in the café intensified. The twins went away first, heading in different directions. No one felt like resuming the disrupted card game. Yaseen got up and left next, closely followed by Adel. There was nothing left for me to do but go back home.

Shut up in my room, I tried to listen to the radio, thinking it might serve to dissipate the acute embarrassment I’d felt ever since the scene in the Safir. I was doubly uncomfortable, first for Omar, and then for Yaseen. Of course, the Corporal deserved to be called to order, but he was older than Yaseen, whose severity toward him upset me, as well. The more pity I felt for the deserter, the fewer excuses I could find for his cousin. Actually, if relations in the village were turning ugly, it was because of the news coming out of Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra, while we floated along, light-years away from the tragedy depopulating our country. Since the beginning of hostilities, despite the hundreds of attacks and the legions of dead, not even a single helicopter had flown over our sector, not so far, nor had any patrol violated the peace of our little town. This feeling that we were excluded from history had developed into a genuine case of conscience. The older people seemed to be resigned to it, but the young men of Kafr Karam took it very hard.

The radio couldn’t distract me, so I lay down on the bed and put the pillow on my face. The suffocating heat made everything worse. I didn’t know what to do. The village streets distressed me; my little room baked me. I was dissolving in my displeasure….

That evening, the beginnings of a breeze stirred the curtains. I got out a metal folding chair and sat in the doorway of my room. Two or three kilometers from the village, the Haitems’ orchards flourished amid stones and sand, the only green patch for miles around. The trees shimmered defiantly in the haze of the sun, which was going down in a cloud of dust. Soon the horizon caught fire from one end to the other, accenting the contours of the hills and valleys in the distance. On the arid plateau that fled breathlessly southward, the dirt road recalled a dried-up riverbed. A group of youngsters was returning from the orchards, empty-handed and unsteady on their feet; apparently, the little marauders’ expedition had come to a sudden end.

“Here’s a package for you,” my twin sister, Bahia, announced, placing a plastic bag at my feet. “I’ll bring you your dinner in half an hour. Can you hold out that long?”

“No problem.”

She flicked some dust off my collar. “You didn’t go to town?”

“I couldn’t get anyone to drive me there.”

“Try again tomorrow, and be more persuasive.”

“I promise. What’s this package?”

“Kadem’s little brother dropped it off for you a minute ago.”

She went into my room to check that everything was in order and then returned to her cooking.

I opened the plastic bag and drew out a cardboard box held together with adhesive tape. Inside the box was a superb pair of brand-new black shoes and a piece of paper with a few lines written on it: “I wore them twice, once on each wedding night. They’re yours. No hard feelings. Kadem.”

A hostage to its own emptiness, Kafr Karam was unraveling a little more with each passing day.

At the barbershop, in the café, by the walls, people chewed over the same subjects. They talked a lot and did nothing at all. Their indignation grew less and less spectacular; temperamental outbursts cut some arguments short, while other debates were prolonged by soporific speeches. Little by little, people stopped listening to one another, but something unusual was nevertheless taking place. For the older villagers, the hierarchy remained inflexible, but among the young, it appeared to be undergoing a curious change. After the dressing-down Yaseen had inflicted on Omar the Corporal, the privileges of primogeniture started looking rather shaky. Of course, most people decried what had happened at the Safir, but it inspired a minority made up of hotheads and rebels-in-waiting to assert themselves.

The elders pretended to know nothing about this incident, which — even though it was not bruited about on the public thoroughfares — nonetheless made the rounds of the village. Otherwise, things followed their usual course with pathetic lethargy. The sun continued to rise when it felt like it and go down as it wished. We remained candied in our little autistic happiness, gaping wide-eyed into space or twiddling our thumbs. It seemed as though we were vegetating on another planet, cut off from the tragic events that were eroding the country. Our mornings featured trivial, routine sounds, our nights unsatisfactory sleep; dreams serve no purpose when all horizons are bare. For a long time, the shadows of our walls had held us captive. We had known the most abominable regimes and survived them, just as our livestock had survived epidemics. Sometimes, when one tyrant had been cast out by another, the new tyrant’s henchmen had descended on us like hunting dogs flushing out game, hoping to get their hands on some prey that could be sacrificed in the public square as a way of bringing the rest of us back into line. Very quickly, however, they grew disenchanted and returned to their kennels, a little shamefaced, but delighted not to have to set foot again in a godforsaken hole where it was hard to distinguish the living from the ghosts that kept them company.

But as the ancestral proverb says, If you close your door on your neighbors’ cries, they’ll come through your windows. Likewise, when bad luck is roaming around, no one is safe. It’s no use trying to avoid mentioning it, no use believing it happens only to others or thinking all you’ve got to do to keep it away is to stay very still in your corner; too much restraint will eventually set it off anyway, and one morning, there it is, standing on your threshold and having a look around….

And what had to happen happened. Bad luck turned up among us, without any fanfare, almost on tiptoe, hiding its hand. I was having a cup of tea at the blacksmith’s shop when his little daughter came running in and cried, “Sulayman! Sulayman!”

“Has he run away again?” the blacksmith asked in alarm.

“He cut his hand on the gate…. He doesn’t have anymore fingers,” the little girl said between sobs.

The blacksmith leaped over the low table between us, kicking over the teapot as he passed, and ran to his house. His apprentice rushed out to overtake him, signaling to me that I should follow. A woman’s voice, crying out, reached us from the end of the street. A crowd of kids was already gathering in front of the wide-open patio gate. Sulayman held his wounded hand against his chest and laughed silently, fascinated by his own bleeding.