The Iraqi Christ

The Song of the Goats

People were waiting in queues to tell their stories. The police intervened to marshall the crowd and the main street opposite the radio station was closed to traffic. Pickpockets and itinerant cigarette vendors circulated among them. People were terrified a terrorist would infiltrate the crowd and turn all these stories into a pulp of flesh and fire.

Memory Radio had been set up after the fall of the dictator. From the start, the radio station had adopted a documentary approach to programming, without news bulletins or songs, just documentary reports and programmes that delved into the country’s past. The station had become famous after announcing that it was going to record a new programme entitled Their Stories in Their Own Voices. Crowds gathered at the broadcasting centre from across the country. The idea was simple: to select the best stories and record them as narrated by the people involved but without mentioning their real names; then the listeners would choose the top three stories, which would win valuable prizes.

I succeeded in filling out the application form but made it inside the radio station only with great difficulty. More than once an argument broke out because of the crush. Old and young, adolescents, civil servants, students and unemployed people, all came to tell their stories. We waited in the rain for more than four hours. Some of us were subdued, others were bragging about their stories. I saw one man with no arms and a beard that almost reached his waist. He was deep in thought, like a decrepit Greek statue. I noticed the anxiety of the handsome young man who was with him. From a communist who was tortured in the seventies in the Baath Party’s prisons, I heard that the man with the beard had a story that was tipped to win, but that he himself had not come to win. He was just a madman, but his companion, one of his relatives, coveted the prize. The man with the beard was a teacher who went to the police one day to report on a neighbour who was trading in antiquities stolen from the National Museum. The police thanked him for his cooperation. The teacher, his conscience relieved, went back to his school. The police submitted a report to the Ministry of Defence that the teacher’s house was an al Qaeda hideout. The police were in partnership with the antiquities smuggler. The Ministry of Defence sent the report to the US Army, who bombed the teacher’s house by helicopter. His wife, his four children and his elderly mother were killed. The teacher escaped with his life but he suffered brain damage and lost his arms.

I personally had more than twenty stories teeming in my memory about my long years of captivity in Iran. I was confident that at least one of them would really be the clincher in the competition.

They took in the first batch of contestants and then announced to the crowds left behind us that they had stopped accepting applications for the day. There were more than seventy of us that went in. They had us sit down in a large hall similar to a university cafeteria. A man in a smart suit then told us we were first going to listen to two stories to understand the format of the programme. He also spoke about legal aspects of the contracts we would have to sign with the radio station.

The lights gradually dimmed and the hall fell silent, as if it were a cinema. Most of the contestants lit up cigarettes and we were soon enveloped in a thick cloud of smoke. We started listening to a story by a young woman, whose voice reached us clearly from the four corners of the hall. She told how her husband, a policeman, was held by an Islamist group for a long time and how, during the sectarian killings, the killers sent his body back decomposed and decapitated. When the lights came back on, chaos broke out. Everyone was talking at the same time, like a swarm of wasps. Many of them ridiculed the woman’s story and claimed they had stories that were stranger, crueller and more crazy. I caught sight of an old woman close to ninety waving her hand in derision and muttering, ‘That’s a story!? If I told my story to a rock, it would break its heart.’

The man in the smart suit came back on and urged the contestants to calm down. In simple words he explained that the best stories did not mean the most frightening or the saddest, what mattered was authenticity and the style of narration. He said the stories should not necessarily be about war and killing. I was upset by what he said, and I noticed that most of the contestants paid no attention. A man the size of an elephant whispered in my ear, ‘It’s bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story’s a story, whether it’s beautiful or bullshit.’

The lights went down again and we started listening to the second story:

‘They found her feeding me shit. A whole week she was mixing it with the rice, the mashed potatoes and the soup. I was a sallow child, three years old. My father threatened to divorce her but she took no notice. Her heart was hardened forever. She never forgave me for what I did and I will never forget how cruel she was. By the time she died of cancer of the womb, the storms of life had carried me far away. I escaped from the country some time after the barrel incident, abject, defeated, paralysed by fear. On the night I said goodbye to my father, he walked with me to the graveyard. We read the first chapter of the Quran over my uncle’s grave. We embraced and he slipped a bundle of cash into my hand. I kissed his hand and disappeared.

‘We were living in a poor part of Kirkuk. The neighbourhood didn’t have mains drainage. People would have septic tanks dug in their gardens for three dinars. Nozad the Kurdish vegetable seller was the only person in the neighbourhood who specialized in digging those tanks. When Nozad died his son Mustafa took on the work. They found Nozad burned to a cinder in his shop after a fire broke out one night. No one knows what Nozad was doing that night. Some people claim he was smoking hashish. My father didn’t believe that. For all kinds of disasters his favourite proverb was ‘Everything we do in this ephemeral world is written, preordained.’ So in my childhood I believed that ‘our life’ was tucked away somewhere in school books or in the shop where they sold newspapers. My father wanted to save my childhood with all the goodwill and love he possessed. He was gracious towards others and towards life in a way that still puzzles me today. He was like a saint in a human slaughterhouse. Disaster would strike us pretty much every other year. But my father didn’t want to believe that fate could bring such a mysterious curse. Perhaps he attributed it to destiny. We were liable to assault from every direction — from the unknown, from reality, from God, from people, and even the dead would come back to torment us. My father tried to bury my crime through various means, or at least erase it from my mother’s memory. But he failed. In the end he gave in. He left the task to the ravages of time, in the hope that this would efface the disaster.

‘I may have been the youngest murderer in the world: a murderer who remembered nothing of his crime. For me at least it was no more than a story, just a story to entertain people at any moment. What I noticed was that everyone would write, intone or sing the story of my crime as they fancied. At the time, my father wasn’t working in the pickle business. He was a tank driver and the war was in its first year. My mother was nagging my father for a third child but he refused because of the war, which terrified him. We were comfortably off. Every month my father would send enough money to cover food, clothing and the rent on the house. My mother would spend her time either asleep or visiting my aunt, with whom she’d talk all day about the price of fabric and the waywardness of men.

‘In the summer, my mother went off into a dream world. She didn’t listen, or talk, or even look. The midday heat would wipe her out. At noon she would take a bath and then sleep naked in her room like a dead houri¹. When night fell she would recover some of her vitality, as if she had come out of a coma. She would watch her favourite soap opera and news programmes in which the president awarded medals for bravery to heroic soldiers, thinking that perhaps my father might appear among them.

‘At noon one day, my mother dozed off with her arms and legs splayed open under the ceiling fan. My brother and I — he was a year younger than me — slipped off into the courtyard. There was nothing out there but a solitary fig tree and the cover of the septic tank. I remember my mother used to cry under the fig tree whenever one of our relatives died or some disaster struck us. The mouth of the tank was covered with an old kitchen tray held down by a large stone. We, my brother and I, had trouble moving the stone. Then we started throwing pebbles into the tank. It was our favourite game. Umm Alaa, our neighbour, used to make us paper boats that we would sail on the surface of the pool of shit.

‘They say I pushed my brother into the tank and ran off to the roof of the house to hide in the chicken coop. When I grew up, I asked them, “Might he have fallen in, and I run away out of fear?” They said, “You confessed yourself.” Perhaps they questioned me like the dictator’s police. I don’t remember anything. But they would tell their stories about it as if they were describing the plot of a film they’d enjoyed. All the neighbours took part in the rescue attempt. They couldn’t find the truck that used to come once a month to empty out the septic tanks in the neighbourhood. They used everything they could find to get the shit out of the tank: pots and pans, a large bucket and other vessels. It was an arduous and disgusting task, like torture in slow motion. It was the height of summer and the foul odours added to the horror and the shock. Before the sun went down, they brought him out — a dead child shrouded in shit.

‘My father was late coming back from the front. My uncle wrote him a letter and then took care of arrangements for the burial of my brother. We buried him in the children’s cemetery on the hill. It may have been the most beautiful cemetery in the world. In the spring, wild flowers of every colour and variety would grow there. From a distance, the graveyard looked like the crown of an enormous, coloured tree: a cemetery whose powerful fragrance spread for miles around. A week later our neighbour Umm Alaa opened the door and saw my mother. The intensity of the grief had driven her to distraction. She had put shit in a small bowl, and was mixing it into my food very slowly with a plastic spoon, then filling my mouth with it as she wept.

‘My father sent me to live with my uncle and I became a refugee of sorts. I would visit our house as a guest every Friday, escorted by my aunt to keep an eye on my mother. I felt like a ball that people kicked around. That’s how I spent six years, trying to understand what was happening around me. I had to learn what their feelings and their words meant, all the while wearing a chain of thorns around my neck. It was like crawling across a bed of nails. The septic tank was the bane of my childhood. On more than one occasion I heard how life apparently advances, moves on, sets sail or, at worst, crawls slowly forward. My life, on the other hand, simply exploded like a firecracker in the sky of God, a small flare in His mighty firmament of bombardment. I spent the remaining years of my childhood and adolescence watching everyone carefully, like a sniper hidden in the darkness. Watching and shooting. Against the horrors of my life I unleashed other nightmares, imaginary ones. I invented mental images of my mother and others being tortured, and in my school book I drew pictures of enormous trucks crushing the heads of children. I still remember the picture of the president printed on the cover of our exercise books. He was in military uniform, smiling, and under his picture were written the words: “The pen can shoot bullets as deadly as the rifle”.

‘There was a cart that brought kerosene, drawn by a donkey. It came through the lanes in the neighbourhood in winter. The children would follow behind, waiting for the donkey’s awesome penis to grow erect. I used to shut my eyes and imagine the donkey’s penis, gross and black, going into my mother’s right ear and coming out of the left. She would scream for help because of the pain.

‘A year before the war ended my father lost his left leg and his testicles. This forced my mother to take me back. My father decided to go back to the trade practised by his father and his forefathers: making pickles. They say my grandfather was the most famous pickle seller in the city of Najaf. The king himself visited him three times. I went back home and acted as my father’s dogsbody and obedient servant. I was happy, because my father was a miracle of goodness. Despite everything he had suffered in his life he remained faithful to his inner self, which had somehow not been warped by the pain. He had an artificial leg fitted and his capacity for love seemed to grow. He pampered my mother and showered her with gifts — golden necklaces, rings and lingerie embroidered with flowers.

‘My father tiled the courtyard and made a concrete cover for the septic tank. He left some space for the fig tree but it died from the brine he used in the pickles. My mother wept beneath it for the last time when I was sixteen. The government in Baghdad had built a road for the highway and removed the old cemetery. Her father’s grave had been there. For a long time we were sad about the loss of my grandfather’s bones.

‘The courtyard was full of plastic barrels for pickling, piles of sacks full of cucumbers, eggplants, green and red peppers, cabbages and cauliflowers, bags of salt, sugar and spices, bottles of vinegar and tins of molasses. There were also large cooking pots which were always full of boiling water, to which we would add spices, then all the vegetables one by one. My father wasn’t as proficient as his father, let alone his grandfather. He started trying out new methods. He had spent a large part of his life in tanks and had forgotten many of the family recipes for making pickles. The tank had cost him his balls, his leg and the trade of his forefathers.

‘I would sit opposite my mother for hours, cutting up eggplants or stuffing cucumbers with garlic or celery. Her tongue was as poisonous as a viper. The summer no longer bothered her. She had turned into a fat cow, burned by the sun, with a loose tongue, and smoked to excess. Noxious weeds had sprouted in her heart. People took pity on her, with words as poisonous as hers. “Poor woman,” they said. “An impotent husband and no children, just the bird of ill omen.” The bird, that was me, and I showed all the signs of ill omen. My father was busy all the time with the accounts and dealing with the shops in the market and moving barrels in the old pick-up. After sunset he would collapse from fatigue. He would have dinner, pray and tell us about his pickle problems, then take off his artificial leg and go to bed to tickle his grey-haired wife with his fingers.

‘When the war over Kuwait broke out, I was meant to join the army. My father and my uncle sat down to discuss the question of my military service. My uncle had never seen the horrors of the front in the Iran War. He was working in the security department in the city centre. My father made up his mind: he would not give me up to die. How can I let them kill my only son? My uncle argued with him, trying to explain how it would affect him in his branch of security if his nephew avoided serving the flag (“Do you want them to execute us all — us and the women?”). My father stuck to his position. My uncle threatened to arrest me in person if I didn’t join the army, but my father threw him out of the house. “Listen,” he said, “it’s true I’m a peaceful man, but this is my son, a piece of my flesh. If you persist in this, I’ll slit your throat.” My uncle had been drunk that night and raging like a bull. He left shouting further insults. My father stood up, performed his prayers and quickly calmed down. “God save me from the accursed devil,” he said. “He’s my brother. It was just drunken talk. I know him. He has a good heart.”

‘I was a prisoner in the house for three months. The streets were full of military police and all the security agencies. My father decided I shouldn’t work by day in case the neighbours noticed me. At night I would slip out into the yard like a thief, with a lantern in my hand. I would sit next to the sacks of eggplants, cucumbers and peppers, busy with my work and thinking about my life. I would mix arak² with water in an empty milk can so as not to get caught by my father, then get drunk and snack on the many varieties of pickle this tank driver had to offer. The alcohol would flow in my blood and I would crawl like a baby towards the septic tank, press my ear against the concrete cover and listen. I could hear him laughing. I would shut my eyes and imagine the feel of his bare shoulder. His skin was hot from all the playing and exertion. I no longer remembered his face. My mother had the only photograph of him and she wouldn’t let anyone else go near it. She hid it in the wardrobe. She put the picture in a small wooden box decorated with a peacock.

‘At the crack of dawn my father would get up. He would usually find me asleep in my place. He would put his hand on my forehead and I would wake up to the touch of his hand. “Go inside, son. Perform your prayers. May God prosper you.” He was well aware I was drinking arak, but religion to him didn’t mean the words of any prophet, any holy law or prohibitions. Religion meant love of virtue, as he would put it, to anyone with whom he was discussing questions of Islamic law. I will never forget the day he broke down in tears at the football ground. He frightened the children and I was embarrassed and disturbed that he was crying. The Baath Party members had executed three young Kurds close to the football pitch. They tied them to wooden stakes and shot them dead in full view of the local people. Before they did it, they announced over loudspeakers, “These people are traitors and terrorists who do not deserve to eat from the bounty of this land, or drink its water or breathe its air.” As usual, the Baathists took the bodies and left the stakes in place to remind everyone of what had happened. My father had come to the square to take me to the cinema. He was crazy about Indian films. When he saw that one goal was missing an upright he realised we had taken the stakes to make the goals. Traces of blood had dried on the wood. My father broke down when one of the children said, “We’re still missing one goalpost. Maybe they’ll execute another one and we can have the stake.”

‘One summer evening we were invaded again. My uncle knocked frantically on the door. My mother was counting money and putting it in an empty tomato paste jar. My father and I were playing chess. He could beat me easily, but first he enjoyed giving me the pleasure of taking his pawns. He would sacrifice them and his other pieces without taking anything in return, keeping only his king and queen. Then he would start to destroy my pieces with his black queen until he had me in checkmate.

‘My father went out to the yard to greet my uncle. My mother threw on her shawl and followed. They all stood near the septic tank in anxious discussion, but in low voices. I watched them from behind the window pane. I was still dizzy from drinking the day before. I was waiting for night to come to get drunk again. My mother rushed to fetch something from under the stairs. My father and my uncle worked together to empty a barrel full of pickled cauliflower. My mother came back with a hammer and a nail. My father laid the barrel flat on the ground and started to punch holes in it at random with the nail. He didn’t have his artificial leg on. He was hopping around the barrel on one leg as if he were playing or dancing. My uncle parked the pick-up outside the front door and loaded it with the barrels of pickles. Then my father came into the living room sweating.

‘“Listen, son,” he said, “there’s no time. Your uncle has information that the police and the party are going to search all the houses from dawn. Your uncle has loyal friends in the village of Awran. Stay there a few days till things calm down.” I climbed into the empty barrel and my mother closed the lid tight. My father and my uncle lifted me on to the pick-up.

‘My father was right. They were brothers after all, and they could read each others’ minds. My uncle drove through the streets like a madman to save my life. He managed to reach the outskirts of the city safely but all the roads to the provincial towns and villages had military checkpoints. His only option was to take the back roads. He chose a road through the wheat fields to the east of the city. Maybe in his panic he mistook the road. Even the city children knew the chain of rugged and rocky hills that lay beyond the wheat fields. Maybe images of the people tortured in his department had unhinged his brain. Maybe he imagined his colleagues dissolving him in tanks of sulphuric acid and the headline Security Officer Helps Nephew Escape in Pickle Barrel. As he drove through the wheat fields, he was barely in control of the steering wheel. The bumps were about to break my ribs and only dust kicked up by the truck crept in through the holes in the barrel. The barrel stank like the dead cats on the neighbourhood rubbish dump. Did my uncle pull out fingernails, gouge out people’s eyes and singe their skin with branding irons in the vaults of the Security Department? Maybe it was the souls of his victims that drove him into the ravine, maybe it was my own evil soul, or maybe the soul that preordained everything that is ephemeral and mysterious in this transitory world.

‘Seven barrels lay in the darkness at the bottom of the cliff like sleeping animals. The pick-up had overturned after my uncle tried to take a second rocky bend in the hill. The barrels rolled down into the ravine with the truck. I spent the night unconscious inside the barrel. In the first hours of morning the rays of sunlight pierced the holes in the barrel, like lifelines extended to a drowning man. My mouth was full of blood and my hands were trembling. I was in pain and frightened. I started to observe the rays of the sun as they criss-crossed confusingly in the barrel. I wanted to escape the chaos that had played havoc with my consciousness. I felt as if I had smoked a ton of marijuana: a fish coming to its senses in a sardine tin, a dead worm in an abandoned well, a putrid foetus with crushed bones in a womb the shape of a barrel. Then my mind fixed on another image: my brother sinking to the bottom of the septic tank and me diving after him.

‘The bleating sounded faint at first, as though a choir was practising. One goat started and then another joined in, then all the goats together, as if they had found the right key. The rays of the sun moved and fell right in my eye. I pissed in my pants inside that barrel, appalled at the cruelty of the world to which I was returning. The goatherd called out to his flock and one of the goats butted the barrel.’

¹ Houri — one of the beautiful virgins of the Quranic paradise.

² ‘Arak’ — a traditional, anise-flavoured distilled spirit