The Iraqi Christ

Sarsara’s Tree

Sitting on top of the hill under a tree… Typing my remarks about the River Nabi on a laptop… A giant sun roasts the village. Ants carry away the remains of a dead hornet. Other strange insects nibble at each other. My stomach hurts! The doctor says it’s an inflammation of the colon. My stomach swelled up three weeks ago as if I were pregnant. I’m writing a study for a local NGO that intends to rip off a foreign NGO that issues grants. My task is to exaggerate the truth. To spread panic about drought. To paint a bleak picture of the many villages that lie scattered along the banks of the River Nabi, which runs between my country and that of our hostile neighbours. We’ve been fighting ruinous wars with these neighbours since the dawn of history. The fragile peace we now have with them is just a dormant volcano. I’m currently contributing to a narrative that concludes with the volcano erupting once again. Without water blood will flow. Thirst will arouse that brutal, hostile memory. And it won’t be just humans that will perish, but also rare birds and insects and the flocks of animals that provide the local people with their sustenance, not to mention the rhythm of their lives.

This year I’ve toured six villages and recorded my dramatic observations on each one. Sarsara’s village, which faces the River Nabi, was my last fact-finding destination. This is the great river of whose banks poets have sung countless praises. Each, in his own language, offered to its sweet waters love, reverence, rituals, fabulous stories and reports of floods and drownings. What does our NGO want to prove? If the river runs dry it will be filled with the blood of those who love it. Water is love. The spectre of the future takes the form of a terrifying desert. We won’t go back to the jungle to fight. This time we’ll go to the desert and slaughter each other. Our new ice age will be a thirsty desert.

The birds don’t land on Sarsara’s tree and the insects don’t climb it. That’s what the teacher said and that’s what I noticed during the three hours I spent close by. I took some pictures of the tree and kept a twig from one of the branches.

I met the village teacher after fruitless meetings with some of the local people. They would talk like cartoon characters. They were pleasant and generous, but their vagueness was annoying. I had doubts about everything Mr Shamreen, the village teacher, told me. He may have been in collusion with our NGO. For all I knew, he may have received a bribe to make up stories about the drought. What he told me about Sarsara’s tree didn’t answer my questions about the harvests and the water problems. Sure, he was a friendly, educated man. But he struck me as somewhat devious. The local people consulted him on everything, large or small. When I visited him in his mud room, where he taught reading and writing, he had an adolescent boy with him. The boy had big eyes that sparkled brightly at me. The boy was consulting him about the purple flowers that surrounded the village like an arc every spring. He was asking why the bees avoided these flowers. Shamreen replied that the bees were upset because a distinctive star had disappeared from the firmament recently. And the bees would come back soon when they were sure that the star was safely on its path to a new life. The boy suggested they all support the bees in their sadness and in their work to look after the star by agreeing with the birds that the farmers and the birds would refrain from singing throughout the coming spring.

The local people spoke in this way about most aspects of their life. From what I gathered, they avoided bad luck by using a special language. They had invented this language after the Sarsara incident. Shamreen the teacher was the only one authorized to speak to outsiders in the common tongue. And this Shamreen decided to speak to me on condition that I didn’t interrupt him with lots of questions. In fact I wasn’t interested in their secrets or their fables. Most of the villages were teeming with fables and strange stories. And then, if Shamreen was honest in what he said, why would he reveal their secrets to me? All I hoped to do was finish writing the report and submit my resignation from this thieving NGO. Their main concern, after all, was to convince international institutional donors that global warming would have a decisive effect on the drought problem and that the complicated political relationship with our neighbours could lead to problems in the near future, especially as our country’s rivers have their sources in neighbouring states. As far as I was concerned, the picture was clear: corruption and mismanagement of water resources. Large amounts of water were wasted because of the outdated methods the farmers used when irrigating their fields. But our organisation would gain nothing from this analysis. It was only panic about drought that would bring the money in. Talking up nightmare scenarios is a commercial venture that generally succeeds.

Shamreen the teacher had been an adolescent when the old woman Sarsara went off on her last grazing expedition. She had already lost her only son when he was twenty. He had taken his boat and rowed far out into the river to catch fish. He wasn’t a skilled fisherman. Many of the village people go fishing from time to time, but most of them are wheat farmers and a few live by herding animals. Sarsara’s son, a herdsman, drowned in the river in mysterious circumstances. The people who lived in Shams village brought his bloated body back from the other bank of the river.

‘Is it possible that the people on the other bank killed him?’ I asked the teacher.

‘No, the people in Shams don’t interfere in human affairs,’ he said.

‘Don’t interfere in human affairs!’

‘Well, I don’t mean they’re not human. But they don’t interfere in matters of life and death… That’s another subject… I’m talking to you about the tree… I’ll get to that story,’ said the teacher.

Sarsara mourned for her son quietly, as if a sparrow had died at the sunset hour. We buried her only son in the village cemetery and went back to our daily concerns. Sarsara looked after her son’s sheep and started to live in seclusion, protected by an aura of respect. One day Sarsara went out to graze her animals in the direction of the southern pastures on the way to the desert. She loaded her tent and some provisions on her donkey and set off with twenty sheep and three dogs. This trip to the pastures would normally last three days. But Sarsara didn’t come back to the village for five years. A military intelligence unit found her in the middle of the desert, all alone in her tent with only a cockerel for company. When they asked her what she was doing in such a desolate spot, she couldn’t give a straight answer. All she said was that her son had died and she had this cockerel. Then she said that she sometimes received supplies of water and food from the bedouin nomads in the desert. The intelligence officer said he would take her to hospital to check her health first. Sarsara came straight back to him with a request.

‘I want to swim in the River Nabi,’ she said.

The intelligence unit took her to the city. They took care of her and checked all the villages on the banks of the River Nabi until they identified her village, which at the time was named after the river — Nabi village.

The villagers were delighted to see her back. Tears flowed and they embraced her like a spoiled child. But the old woman didn’t recognise them. She treated them as if they were apparitions. For her the river was the only truth. She pointed towards it, then ran like a cheerful little girl and jumped into it. She swam and sang old songs the ancestors had sung hundreds of years ago. The villagers accepted Sarsara’s new status gladly and with love. They left her to strip off, swim in the river, joke and play, and they took care of her food and clothing. But they couldn’t persuade her to live in either her old house or any other house. As soon as she tired of the river she would stroll back towards the cattle pen and sleep there. Only a few days after Sarsara came back the trees started to appear. They were suddenly springing up everywhere from underground. They were strange trees of a kind the villages along the river had never known. Poisonous weed-like trees. The trees sprouted out of the ground, then spread and grew within minutes to a height of more than a hundred feet. They were born dead, without leaves, and their thin branches were entangled like broken cobwebs. Every tree killed the ground for half a mile around it in a circle. The soil turned to rock and no form of life survived. It was a disaster. We didn’t have enough agricultural land to be able to deal with this sudden death of the soil. It wasn’t long before we got to the bottom of it. The old woman Sarsara was the reason why the death trees had appeared. The local people worked together cutting down the trees. We dug up the roots and burned them. We imprisoned the old woman in the cattle pen and had a long discussion on what we should do.

We asked Sarsara to stop this strange magic of hers, because the village was threatened with ruin. But she wasn’t listening. Whenever the old woman was alone and stared at the ground a tree would sprout up. She didn’t understand how serious it was. She was lost in her own world. Sarsara was almost killed when the mud roof of the cattle pen fell in on her. A tree had sprouted and broken through the roof, bringing down the wooden posts. A cow and a young calf were killed.

The villagers felt sorry for Sarsara. The women baked big loaves of bread and put a flower in the middle of every loaf. The boys and girls gave out the loaves to the local people, who prayed to heaven to spare them further misfortunes through the power of the bread and the flowers.

The village elders came up with a suggestion — to blindfold Sarsara with a piece of cloth. The experiment failed. Sarsara’s eyes glowed like burning coals and the piece of cloth didn’t stop trees sprouting. The women wept for her and the boys and girls grew more and more anxious about the state Sarsara was in. We performed the rites and bathed in the river together after midnight. We sang all the poems we could remember about the River Nabi. The young ones decided not to embrace or kiss their fathers until their fathers took the blindfold off Sarsara’s eyes.

We sent word for Hoopoe Marmour, who was wandering in the wilderness in search of himself. Marmour came from the village. He had abandoned us years earlier because of his struggle with God. He thought he was a hoopoe that had changed into a human while sleeping in a crow’s nest by mistake. But a hoopoe that had not followed the path of enmity towards the villagers. He would answer any call for help. From time to time he would check to see how the villagers were because he was a wise man despite his random ravings.

Mr Marmour arrived and the villagers were relieved. Marmour went for a walk around the village side by side with Sarsara and observed her closely. As soon as the first tree sprouted, Mr Marmour said that Sarsara imagined the tree and it sprouted and it was impossible to stop this.

After what Marmour said, the villagers gathered to consult. The women and children also took part in the meeting. The debate went on till the morning. When the first rays of dawn appeared most of the people in the village had agreed to get rid of Sarsara. But the women refused to burn the old woman alive. The children suggested sending her somewhere else with the migratory birds. Marmour had asked the villagers to be patient until he could understand how her imagination worked. The discussions went on three more days until they reached a final decision.

That night we brought torches with heavy hearts. The village was sunk in sadness and fear. We took Sarsara to the hill nearest the village. We left her alone and gave her enough time to look at the ground. Sarsara’s last tree sprouted, to immortalize her memory on the hill. We tied the old woman up, took her to the middle of the river in a boat and abandoned her to the waters of the Nabi.

Sunset had filled the village with a blood-red glow. The teacher advised me to stay the night because the road to the town was dangerous in the dark. He said there were armed gangs at large along the highway. I thanked Shamreen and told him I had to get home. My wife was expecting me and I had things to do early in the morning. I said goodbye to him and walked to the dirt road where I had parked the car. One thing was turning in my head: my wife naked in the shower… I would go in and press myself against her body. I was tired and I felt quite exasperated by Sarsara’s village.

I tried in vain to start the car. I retraced my steps to the teacher’s room to ask for help. I couldn’t find him. I didn’t know which house he lived in. I went to one of the nearby houses. I knocked on the door but no one answered. I pushed the door and started calling out. The house was empty. I headed to another house. The calm around me opened its mouth like a mysterious animal. Finally a young girl with dishevelled hair opened the door. ‘Are you thirsty…? Tonight the foxes are going to bring lots of presents,’ she said, as she took hold of my hand. I asked her where the teacher’s house was and told her I needed help because my car had broken down.

She led me by the hand to the cattle pen nearby. The girl went up to a grey cow and started to milk it into a small container. Then she left the cattle pen without taking any interest in me. I followed her outside into the darkness. The village seemed to be deserted. There was just the chorus of insects gradually growing louder, as though announcing that the night and the devils were descending. The girl was heading towards the dirt road where the car was parked. I followed her, trying to feel my way in the darkness that covered Sarsara’s village like an apocalypse.

The girl plucked a white flower from the side of the dirt road and threw it in the milk container.

‘It’s a windflower and it brings good luck,’ she said, offering me the container. ‘Don’t eat it. Chew it, then put it in a place you’ve forgotten to miss.’

I drank. Then I took out the wet flower and held it between the tips of my fingers. The girl opened the car door, pointed to the seat and then hurried off.

‘Hey girl, what’s your name?’

‘Sarsara,’ she shouted without turning back.

I checked the revolver was still in place under the seat and called my wife. As I spoke I turned the key to see if the car would start. It started immediately.

I noticed a man climbing the hill with a lantern in his hand. He hung the lantern on one of the branches of Sarsara’s tree and sat down next to it. Perhaps it was the teacher. I tasted the petals of the flower with the tip of my tongue, then chewed them warily. It tasted like milk with a slightly bitter sting. I drove off at speed between the ears of corn, listening to a Sufi song about turning in the womb of the one you love.

‘A place you’ve forgotten to miss!’

I continued on my way, thinking of places and funny incidents in my life.