The Sirens of Baghdad

1

Every morning, my twin sister, Bahia, brought me breakfast in bed. “Up and at ’em,” she’d call out as she opened the door to my room. “You’re going to swell up like a wad of dough.” She’d place the tray on a low table at the foot of the bed, open the window, and come back to pull my toes. Her brusque, authoritative movements contrasted sharply with the sweetness of her voice. Since she was my elder, if only by a few minutes, she treated me like a child and failed to notice that I’d grown up.

She was a frail young woman, a bit of a fussbudget, a real stickler for order and hygiene. When I was little, she was the one who dressed me before we went to school. Since we weren’t in the same class, I wouldn’t see her again until recess. In the schoolyard, she’d observe me from a distance, and woe to me if I did anything that might “shame the family.” Later, when I was a sickly teenager and the first few scattered hairs began to appear on my pimply face, she took personal charge of keeping my adolescent crisis in check, scolding me whenever I raised my voice in front of my other sisters or spurned a meal. Although I wasn’t a difficult boy, she found my methods of negotiating puberty boorish and unacceptable. On a few occasions, my mother lost patience with her and put her in her place; Bahia would keep quiet for a week or two, and then I’d do something wrong and she’d pounce.

I never rebelled against her attempts to control me, however excessive. On the contrary, they amused me — most of the time anyway.

“You’ll wear your white pants and your checked shirt,” she ordered, showing me a pile of folded clothes on the Formica table that served as my desk. “I washed and ironed them last night. You ought to think about buying yourself a new pair of shoes,” she added, nudging my musty old pair with the tip of her toe. “These hardly have any soles left, and they stink.”

She plunged her hand into her blouse and extracted some banknotes. “There’s enough here for you to get something better than vulgar sandals. Buy yourself some cologne, too. Because if you keep on smelling so bad, we won’t need any more insecticide for the cockroaches.”

Before I had time to prop myself up on my elbow, she put the money on my pillow and left the room.

My sister didn’t work. Obliged to quit school at sixteen in order to become betrothed to a cousin who ultimately died of tuberculosis six months before the wedding, she was fading away at home, waiting for another suitor. My other sisters, all of them older than Bahia and I, didn’t have a lot of luck, either. The eldest, Aisha, had married a rich chicken farmer and gone to live in a neighboring village, in a big house she shared with her in-laws. This cohabitation deteriorated a little more each season, until finally, refusing to bear any more abuse and humiliation, she gathered up her four children and returned to her parental home. We thought her husband would turn up and take her back, but he never appeared, not even to see his children on holidays. The next sister, Afaf, was thirty-three years old and had not a single hair on her head. A childhood disease had left her bald. Because my father was afraid her classmates would make fun of her, he’d decided it would be wise not to send her to school. Afaf lived like an invalid, shut up inside a single room; at first, she mended old clothes, and later she made dresses my mother sold all over town. When my father lost his job after suffering an accident, Afaf took charge of the family. In those days, there were times when her sewing machine was the only sound for miles around. As for Farah, who was two years younger than Afaf, she was the only one who pursued her studies at the university, despite the disapproval of the tribe, which didn’t look kindly on the idea of a young girl living far from her parents and thus in proximity to temptations. Farah held out and received her diploma with flying colors. My great-uncle wanted to marry her to one of his offspring, a pious, considerate farmer; Farah categorically refused his offer and chose to work at a hospital. Her attitude caused the tribe deep consternation, and the humiliated son, followed by his mother and father, cut the lot of us. Today, Farah practices in a private clinic in Baghdad and earns a good living. It was her money that my twin sister put on my pillow from time to time.

In Kafr Karam, young men of my age had stopped pretending to be horrified when a sister or mother discreetly slipped them a few dinars. At first, they were a little embarrassed, and to save face they promised to repay the “loan” as quickly as possible. They all dreamed of finding a job that would allow them to hold their heads high. But times were hard; wars and the embargo had brought the country to its knees, and the young people of our village were too pious to venture into the big cities, where their ancestral blessing had no jurisdiction, and where the devil was at work, nimbly perverting souls. In Kafr Karam, we had nothing to do with that sort of thing. Our people think it’s better to die than to sink into vice or thievery. The call of the Ancients drowns out the sirens’ song, no matter how loud. We’re honest by vocation.

I started attending the university in Baghdad a few months before the American invasion. I was in heaven. My status as a university student gave my father back his pride. He was illiterate, a raggedy old well digger, but he was also the father of a physician and of a future doctor of letters! Wasn’t that a fine revenge for all his setbacks? I’d promised myself not to disappoint him. Had I ever disappointed him in my life? I wanted to succeed for his sake; I wanted to read in his dust-ravaged eyes what his face concealed: the happiness of seeing the seed he’d sown flourishing in body and mind. While the other fathers were hastening to yoke their progeny to the same laborious tasks that had made their own lives a torment, like those of their ancestors, my father tightened his belt to the last notch so I could pursue my studies. It wasn’t a sure thing that this process would lead to social success for either of us, but he was convinced that a poor educated person was less lamentable than a poor blockhead. If a man could read his own letters and fill out his own forms, he thought, a good part of his dignity was safe and secure.

The first time I set foot on the university campus, I chose to wear spectacles, even though I’ve always had excellent vision. I think they were the reason why Nawal noticed me in the first place; her face turned as red as a beet whenever our paths crossed after classes were over. Even though I had never dared address a word to her, the least of her smiles was enough to make me happy. I was just on the point of declaring myself and unveiling to her the prospect of a bright future, when strange fireworks lit up the sky over Baghdad. The sirens echoed in the silence of the night, buildings started to explode in smoke, and from one day to the next, the most passionate love affairs dissolved in tears and blood. The university was abandoned to vandals, and my dreams were destroyed, too. I went back to Kafr Karam, wild-eyed and distraught, and I didn’t return to Baghdad.

I had nothing to complain about in my parents’ house. I could be satisfied with little. I lived on the roof, in a remodeled laundry room. My furniture consisted of some old crates, and I put my bed together from an assortment of lumber I salvaged here and there. I was content with the little universe I’d constructed around my privacy. I didn’t have a television yet, but there was a tinny radio to keep my solitude warm.

On the courtyard side of the upper floor, my parents occupied a room with a balcony; on the garden side, at the end of the hall, my sisters shared two large rooms filled with old stuff, including religious pictures picked up from traveling souks. Some of these pictures showed labyrinthine calligraphy, while others portrayed Sidna Ali manhandling demons or thrashing enemy troops, his legendary double-bladed scimitar whirling like a tornado above their impious heads. Similar pictures were all over the house — in the other rooms, in the entrance hall, above doorways and windows. They were displayed not for decorative reasons, but for their talismanic powers; they preserved the house from the evil eye. One day, I kicked a soccer ball and knocked one of them off the wall. It was a lovely picture, verses from the Qur’an embroidered in yellow thread on a black background. It shattered like a mirror. My mother almost had a stroke. I can still see her, one hand against her chest, her eyes bulging, her face as white as a block of chalk. The prospect of seven years of bad luck would not have turned her so thoroughly pale.

The kitchen was on the ground floor, across from a closetlike space that served Afaf as a workshop, two larger rooms for guests, and a huge living room with French windows opening onto a vegetable garden.

As soon as I had put my things away, I went downstairs to say hello to my mother, a sturdy, open-faced woman whom neither household chores nor the weight of the passing years could ever discourage. A kiss on her cheek transferred a good dose of her energy to me. We understood each other completely.

My father was sitting cross-legged in the courtyard, in the shade of an indefinable tree. After the Fajr prayer, which he dutifully performed at the mosque each morning, he would return home to finger his beads in the patio, one arm hanging useless under the folds of his long robe; the collapse of a well he was scraping out had crippled him. My father had suddenly turned into an old man. His village-elder aura had vanished; his look of command had no more vigor and no more range. In days gone by, he’d sometimes join a group of relatives and friends and exchange views on some subject or other. Then, when malicious gossip started overtaking good manners, he’d withdraw. Now, he left the mosque right after the morning prayer, and before the town was fully awake, he was already installed under his tree, a cup of coffee within reach of his hand, listening intently to the ambient sounds, as though he hoped to decipher their meaning. My dad was a decent man, a Bedouin of modest means who didn’t always have enough to eat, but he was nonetheless my father, and he remained the object of my greatest respect. Every time I saw him at the foot of his tree, I couldn’t help feeling enormous compassion for him. He was certainly a brave and worthy person, but his unhappiness torpedoed the appearances he tried so hard to keep up. I think he’d never gotten over the loss of his arm, and the thought that he was living off his daughters was driving him further down.

I don’t remember having been close to him or ever nestling against his chest; nevertheless, I was convinced that if I should make the first move, he wouldn’t push me away. But how could I take such a risk? Immutable as a totem, my father let none of his emotions show. When I was a child, he was a sort of ghost to me. I’d hear him at dawn, tying up the bundle he carried to his workplace, but before I could reach him, he’d already left the house, and he wouldn’t be back until late at night. I don’t know whether or not he was a good father. Too reserved or too poor to give us toys, he seemed to attach little importance either to our childish tumults or to our sudden lulls. I wondered if he were capable of love, if his stature as begetter wasn’t going to transform him into a pillar of salt. In Kafr Karam, fathers were convinced that familiarity would detract from their authority, and so they had to keep their distance from their progeny. On occasion, I thought I caught a glimpse of a sparkle in my father’s austere eyes; then, suddenly, he’d pull himself together and clear his throat, signaling me to get lost.

That morning, although my father, sitting under his tree, cleared his throat when I solemnly placed my lips on the crown of his head, he didn’t pull his hand back when I seized and kissed it, so I understood that my company wouldn’t annoy him. But we couldn’t even look each other in the face. Once, some time previously, I had sat down beside him, but during the course of two hours, neither of us had managed to pronounce a syllable. He contented himself with fingering his beads; I couldn’t stop fiddling with a corner of his mat. Had my mother not come to send me on an errand, we would have stayed like that until nightfall.

I said, “I’m going out for a bit. Do you need anything?”

He shook his head.

I seized the chance to take my leave.

Kafr Karam was always a well-ordered little town. We didn’t have to go elsewhere to provide for our basic needs. We had our parade ground, our playgrounds (vacant lots, for the most part), our mosque (you had to get up early on Friday morning if you wanted a choice spot), our grocery stores, two cafés (the Safir, frequented by the young, and El Hilal), a fabulous automobile mechanic capable of fixing any engine, provided it was a diesel, a master blacksmith who occasionally doubled as a plumber, a tooth-puller (an herbalist by vocation and a bone-setter in his spare time), a placid, distracted barber who looked like a carnival strong man and took longer to shave someone’s head than a drunk trying to thread a needle, a photographer as somber as his studio, and a postal worker. At one time, we also had a cheap eating place, but seeing that no pilgrim ever deigned to stop in Kafr Karam, the restaurateur transformed himself into a cobbler.

For many people, our village was nothing but a hamlet sprawled beside the road like roadkill — by the time they caught a glimpse of it, it had already disappeared — but we were proud of it. We’d always been wary of strangers. As long as they made wide detours to avoid us, we were safe, and if sandstorms occasionally obliged them to take refuge in Kafr Karam, we received them in accordance with the recommendations of the Prophet, but we never tried to hold them back when they started packing their bags. We had too many bad memories.

Most of the inhabitants of Kafr Karam were related by blood. The rest had lived there for several generations. Of course, we had our little idiosyncrasies, but our quarrels never degenerated into anything worse. Whenever trouble loomed, our village elders would intervene and calm everyone down. If the injured parties deemed an affront irreversible, they stopped speaking to one another, and the matter was closed. Aside from that sort of thing, we liked meeting in the square or the mosque, shuffling along our dusty streets, or basking in the sun beside our mud-plaster walls, which were disfigured here and there by an expanse of chipped, bare cinder blocks. It wasn’t paradise, but — since penury resides in the mind, not the heart — we were able to laugh aloud at every jest and to draw from one another’s eyes whatever we needed to cope with the nuisances of life.

Of all my cousins, Kadem was my best friend. In the morning, when I left my house, I always headed in his direction. I invariably found him behind a low wall on the corner of the butcher’s street, his behind glued to a large rock and his chin in his hand; he and the rock were one. He was the most disgusted creature I knew. As soon as he saw me coming, he’d pull out a packet of cigarettes and hold it out to me. He knew I didn’t smoke, but he couldn’t help making the same welcoming gesture every time. At length, just to be polite, I accepted his offer and put a cigarette in my mouth. He presented his lighter immediately and then indulged in a little silent laughter when the first puffs made me cough. After that, he went back into his shell, his eyes staring into space, his features impenetrable. Everything, from evenings spent in the company of friends to wakes, made him tired. Discussions with him tended to veer off in unexpected directions, sometimes ending in absurd rages whose secret he alone knew.

“I have to buy myself a new pair of shoes.”

He shot a quick glance at my footwear and went back to studying the horizon.

I tried to find some common ground, some topic we might develop; he wasn’t having any.

Kadem was a virtuoso lutenist. He made a living by playing at weddings. At one point, he had an idea of organizing an orchestra, but fate shattered his prospects. His first wife, a girl from our village, died in the hospital from a banal case of pneumonia. At the time, the UN “oil for food” program was foundering, and there was a shortage of basic medications, even on the black market. Kadem suffered a great deal from the premature loss of his young spouse. In the hope of assuaging his grief, Kadem’s father forced him to take a second wife. Eighteen months after the wedding, a virulent attack of meningitis made him a widower once again. As a result, Kadem lost his faith.

I was one of the few persons who could approach him without immediately making him uncomfortable.

I crouched down beside him.

In front of us stood the Party’s community antenna, inaugurated amid fanfare thirty years previously and fallen into disrepair for lack of ideological conviction. Now the building was sealed, and behind it, two convalescing palm trees tried to look their best. They had been there, it seemed to me, since the beginning of time, their silhouettes twisted, practically grotesque, and their branches dangling and withered. Except for dogs who stopped beside them, lifting their legs, and a few birds of passage looking for a vacant perch, no one paid any attention to those palms. They intrigued me when I was a little boy. I never understood why they didn’t sneak away under cover of darkness and disappear forever. An itinerant charlatan told a story about them; he said the two trees were actually the product of an immemorial collective hallucination that the mirage forgot to carry off when it faded away.

“Did you hear the radio this morning? It looks like the Italians are packing it in.”

“Fat lot of good that’ll do us,” he growled.

“In my opinion—”

“Weren’t you on your way to buy a pair of shoes?”

I raised my arms to the level of my chest in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right. I need to stretch my legs.”

He finally deigned to turn toward me. “Don’t take it like that. These news stories give me a headache.”

“I understand.”

“You shouldn’t hold it against me. I spend my days boring myself to death and my nights losing my mind.”

I got up. Just when I reached the end of the wall, he said, “I think I have a pair of shoes at home. Pass by the house in a little while. If they fit you, they’re yours.”

“All right. See you later.”

He was already ignoring me.

2

In a square transformed into a soccer pitch, a bunch of boys shrieked as they kicked a well-worn ball. Their attacks were chaotic, their fouls breathtaking. They looked like a flock of sparrows fighting over a kernel of corn. All at once, a little runt managed to extract himself from the melee and took off like a grown man in the direction of his opponents’ goal. He dribbled around one adversary, blew past another, swerved toward the sideline, and sent a no-look pass to a teammate behind him, who charged the goal at full speed and fired a lamentably wide shot before falling on the sharp gravel and cutting his behind. Without warning, an abnormally tall boy who’d been quietly squatting against a wall sprang to his feet, ran for the ball, picked it up, and sprinted away as fast as he could. Puzzled at first, the soccer players quickly realized that the intruder was stealing their ball and set off en masse in pursuit, calling him names.

“They didn’t want him on their teams,” the blacksmith explained, sitting with his apprentice on the doorstep of his workshop. “So he’s playing the spoilsport.”

The blacksmith smiled tenderly and his apprentice looked distracted as the three of us watched the tall boy disappear behind a block of houses, with the others on his heels.

“Have you heard the latest news?” the blacksmith asked me. “The Italians are leaving.”

“They haven’t said when.”

“The important thing is they’re getting out,” he said, and then he launched into a long analysis that soon branched off into some imprecise theories about the renewal of the country, freedom, et cetera. His apprentice, a puny fellow as dark and dry as a nail, listened to him with the pathetic docility of a dazed boxer between rounds, nodding at his trainer’s instructions while his eyes are lost in space.

The blacksmith was a courteous man. When called upon at impossible hours to repair a small leak in a tank or an ordinary crack in some scaffolding, he always came without grumbling. Tall, strapping, heavy-boned, he had bruises all over his arms and a face like a knife blade. His eyes sparkled with metallic glints identical to the sparks he sent flying from the tip of his blowtorch. Jokers pretended to wear a welding mask when they gazed upon his countenance. Actually, his eyes were damaged and watery, and his vision had been growing increasingly cloudy for some time. The father of half a dozen children, he used his workshop much more as a refuge from the pandemonium that reigned in his home than as a place for tinkering with metal. His oldest son, Sulayman, a boy nearly my age, was mentally retarded; he could remain in a corner without budging for days on end, and then, without warning, he’d throw a fit and start running and careen along until he passed out. No one knew what it was that came over him. Sulayman didn’t talk, didn’t complain, was never aggressive; he lived entrenched in his world and ignored ours totally. Then, all at once, he’d give a cry — always the same cry — and take off across the desert without looking back. In the beginning, we’d watch him scamper off into the blazing heat, his father charging after him. As time passed, however, people realized that those headlong dashes were bad for Sulayman’s heart and that the poor devil was in increasing danger of dropping dead from a coronary. So the villagers organized a sort of rapid-response system designed to intercept him as soon as the alarm was given. When he was caught, Sulayman didn’t struggle; offering no resistance, he let himself be overcome and brought back home, his mouth open in a lifeless smile, his eyes rolled back in his head.

“How’s that boy doing?”

“He’s as good as gold,” the blacksmith said. “He’s been good for weeks. You’d think he was completely cured. And how’s your father?”

“Still under his tree…I have to buy a new pair of shoes. Is anyone going to town today?”

The blacksmith scratched the top of his head. “I thought I saw a van on the trail an hour ago, but I couldn’t say if the driver was going to town or not. You have to wait until after the prayer. In any case, it’s getting harder and harder to move around, what with all these checkpoints and the hassles that go with them. Have you talked to the cobbler?”

“My shoes are beyond repair. I need new ones.”

“But the cobbler’s got more to sell than just soles and glue.”

“His merchandise is old-fashioned. The shoes I want have to be soft and stylish.”

“You think they’ll be a hit with your audience here?”

“That’s not a reason not to get them. I wish someone could give me a ride to town. I want to get a nice shirt, too.”

“In my opinion, you’re going to wait a long time. Khaled’s taxi’s out of commission, and the bus stopped coming here a month ago, after a helicopter nearly wasted it.”

The kids had got their ball back and were returning in triumph.

“Our practical joker didn’t get very far,” the blacksmith observed.

“He’s too big to outrun them.”

The two teams reoccupied the pitch, lined up as before, and continued the game at the point where it had been interrupted. Right away, the shrieking began again.

I took a seat on a piece of cinder block and followed the match with interest. When it was over, I noticed that the blacksmith and his apprentice had disappeared and the workshop had closed. By now, the sun was beating down with both fists. I got to my feet and walked up the street in the direction of the mosque.

There was a crowd in the barbershop. As a rule, on Fridays, after the Great Prayer, the old men of Kafr Karam met there. They came to watch one of their number submit to the clippers wielded by the barber, an elephantine individual draped in a calf butcher’s apron. Before, when discussing things, they used to avoid certain subjects. Saddam’s spies were always on the alert. One inappropriate word, and your whole family would be deported; mass graves and gallows appeared everywhere. But ever since the tyrant had been caught in one rat hole and shut up in another, tongues had loosened, and the men of Kafr Karam — at least those with nothing to do — had discovered in themselves a stunning volubility. That morning, all the village sages were gathered in the barbershop, and since the discussion promised to be a lively one, there were also several young men standing outside. I identified Jabir, known as “Doc,” a grouchy septuagenarian who had taught philosophy in a prep school in Basra two decades ago and then spent three years languishing in Baathist prisons because of some obscure etymological controversy. When he left the dungeons, the Party informed him that he was forbidden to work as a teacher anywhere in Iraq and that the Mukhabarat had him in their sights. Realizing that his life was in danger, Doc returned to his natal village and played dead until the statues of the Rais were removed from the public squares. Doc was tall and looked rather lordly, even hieratic, in his immaculately clean blue djellaba. Next to him, hunched on a bench, Bashir the Falcon was holding forth at some length. He was a former highway robber who had scoured the region at the head of an elusive band before taking refuge in Kafr Karam, where his booty made him respectable. He wasn’t a member of the tribe, but the elders preferred giving him hospitality to suffering his raids. Facing him were the Issam brothers, two formidable old fellows, who were trying to destroy everyone else’s arguments; they had contradiction in their blood and were capable of totally rejecting an idea they’d advanced twenty-four hours previously should an undesirable ally adopt it. Beyond them, immovable in his corner, sat the eldest of the tribe; his distance from the others was a demonstration of his prominence. The wicker chair he occupied was carried by his supporters wherever he went, while he fingered his imposing beads with one hand and with the other grasped the pipe of his narghile. He never intervened in debates, preferring to voice his opinions only at the end, unwilling to let anyone usurp his right to the last word.

“They got rid of Saddam for us, all the same,” protested Issam two.

“We never asked them to,” the Falcon grumbled.

“Who could have done that?” asked Issam one.

“Exactly right,” his brother added. “Who could even spit without risking his hide? Without being arrested on the spot for an affront to the Rais and hanged from a crane?”

“If Saddam tyrannized us, it was because of our cowardice, large and small,” the Falcon insisted contemptuously. “People have the kings they deserve.”

“I can’t agree with you,” said a quavering voice. The speaker was an old man sitting on the Falcon’s right.

“You can’t even agree with yourself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth. One day you’re on one side, and the next day you’re on the other. Always. I’ve never heard you defend the same opinion two days in a row. The truth is, you don’t have an opinion. You climb on the bandwagon, and when another bandwagon shows up, you jump on that one without knowing where it’s going.”

The old man took refuge behind a look of grim outrage.

“I don’t mean to offend you, my friend,” the Falcon said in a conciliatory tone. “If I were disrespectful to you, I wouldn’t forgive myself. But I can’t let you unload our faults onto Saddam’s shoulders. He was a monster, yes, but he was our monster. He came from among us, he shared our blood, and we all contributed to consolidating his megalomania. Do you prefer infidels from the other side of the world, troops sent here to roll over us? The GIs are nothing but brutes and wild beasts; they drive their big machines past our widows and orphans and have no qualms about dropping their bombs on our health clinics. Look at what they’ve made of our country: hell on earth.”

“Saddam made it a mass grave,” Issam two reminded him.

“It wasn’t Saddam; it was our fear. If we had shown a minimum of courage and solidarity, that cur would never have dared become such a tyrant.”

“You’re right,” said the man under the barber’s clippers, addressing the Falcon in the mirror. “We let ourselves be pushed around, and he took advantage of the situation. But you won’t make me change my mind: The Americans freed us from an ogre who threatened to devour us raw, all of us, one after the other.”

“Why do you think they’re here, the Americans?” the Falcon went on obstinately. “Is it Christian charity? They’re businessmen, we’re commodities, and they’re ready to trade. Yesterday, it was oil for food. Today, it’s Saddam for oil. And what do we get out of all this? If the Americans had an ounce of human kindness, they wouldn’t treat their blacks and their Latinos like subhumans. Instead of crossing oceans to come to the aid of some poor, emasculated ragheads, they’d do better to put their own house in order. They could do something about the Indians they’ve got rotting away on their reservations, kept out of sight like people with some shameful disease.”

“Absolutely!” the quavering old man cried out. “Can you imagine American GIs getting themselves blown up thousands of kilometers from home out of Christian charity? Not very likely.”

Eventually, Jabir’s voice made itself heard. “May I say a word?” he asked.

A respectful silence filled the shop. When Doc Jabir prepared to speak, it was always a solemn moment. The former philosophy professor, whom Saddam’s jails had elevated to the status of a hero, seldom joined the debates, but his rare interventions always served to put things in their proper place. His voice was loud, his gestures precise, and his arguments irrefutable.

“I have a question,” he intoned gravely. “Why did Bush attack our country?”

The question passed around the room without finding a taker; the others figured it was a trap, and no one wanted to be the subject of ridicule.

Doc Jabir coughed into his fist, certain that he had everyone’s attention. His ferrety eyes searched his audience for a hostile look; then, finding none, he began:

“Because they wished to rid us of a despot, their former flunky, but now a compromising figure? Because our sufferings had finally touched the hearts of the vultures in Washington? If you believe that fairy tale for one second, then you’re irredeemably screwed. The USA was extremely worried about two things that might interfere with its hegemonic projects. One: Our country was very close to acquiring full sovereignty — that is, a nuclear weapon. In the new world order, only nations that have a nuclear arsenal are sovereign; the others may be potential hotbeds of tension or providential sources of raw materials for the great powers, but from now on, that’s all. The world is run by the forces of international finance, for which peace is equivalent to layoffs. It’s all a matter of living space. The second thing the USA knew was that Iraq was the only military force in the region capable of standing up to Israel. Bringing Iraq to its knees would make it possible for Israel to dominate the Middle East. Those are the two real reasons that led to the occupation of our country. Saddam was nothing but an excuse. If he seems to give the Americans’ aggression legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion, that doesn’t mean using him is any less of a diabolical ploy. Their trick is to create a diversion in order to conceal the essential objectives of the exercise, which are to prevent an Arab country from acquiring the means of its strategic defense and therefore from protecting its integrity, and, at the same time, to help Israel establish definitive authority over this part of the world.”

The conclusions landed like sudden blows, and Doc’s audience sat openmouthed. Satisfied, he savored for a moment the effect produced by the pertinence of his arguments; then, confident that he’d scored a knockout, he cleared his throat arrogantly and rose to his feet. “Gentlemen,” he declared, “in the hope of seeing you again tomorrow, enlightened and improved, I leave you to ponder my words.”

Whereupon he dramatically smoothed the front of his djellaba and, with exaggerated hauteur, left the barbershop.

The barber, who had paid no attention, eventually noticed the silence that had fallen around him. He raised an eyebrow, but then, incurious, he returned to cutting his customer’s hair.

Now that Doc Jabir had withdrawn, all eyes turned toward the eldest. He moved about in his wicker chair, smacked his lips, and said, “That’s one possible way of looking at things.” Then, after a long moment of silence, he added, “It’s true that we’re reaping what we sowed: the fruit of our broken oaths. We’ve failed. In the past, we were ourselves, good, virtuous Arabs with just enough vanity to give us a bit of guts. Instead of improving over time, we’ve degenerated.”

“And where have we gone wrong?” the Falcon asked testily.

“In our faith. We’ve lost it, and we’ve lost face along with it.”

“As far as I know, our mosques are full.”

“Yes, but what’s become of the believers? They go to prayers mechanically, and then, as soon as the service is over, they return to the world of illusions. That’s not faith.”

A supporter of the eldest handed him a glass of water. The old man took several sips, and the sound of his swallowing resounded in the shop.

“Fifty years ago, when I was in Jordan at the head of my uncle’s caravan — about a hundred camels in all — I stopped in a village near Amman. It was the time of prayer. I went to a mosque with a group of my men, and we set about performing our ritual ablutions in a little paved courtyard. The imam, an imposing personage dressed in a flaming red tunic, came up to us and asked, ‘Young men, what are you doing here?’ ‘We’re washing ourselves for the prayer,’ I replied. He inquired further: ‘Do you think your goatskins will suffice to cleanse you?’ I pointed out to him that it was our duty to perform our ablutions before entering the prayer hall. He took a fine fresh fig from his pocket and washed it meticulously in a glass of water; then he peeled it open before our eyes. Inside, the beautiful fig was crawling with maggots. The imam concluded his lesson by saying, ‘It’s not a question of washing your bodies, but your souls, young men. If you’re rotten inside, neither rivers nor oceans will suffice to make you clean.’”

Overcome, everyone in the barbershop nodded.

“Don’t try to make others wear the hat we’ve fashioned for ourselves with our own hands. If the Americans are here, it’s our fault. By losing our faith, we’ve also lost our bearings and our sense of honor. We ha—”

“There we are!” the barber cried out, shaking his brush above the crimson nape of his customer’s neck.

The other men in the shop froze in indignation.

Blissfully unaware that he’d just rudely interrupted the revered eldest and scandalized his listeners, the barber kept on carelessly waving his brush.

His customer gathered up his old eyeglasses, which were held together with bits of tape and wire, adjusted them on his lumpy nose, and looked at himself in the mirror facing him. “What do you call this?” he moaned. “You’ve sheared me like a sheep.”

“You didn’t have all that much hair when you came in,” the barber pointed out impassively.

“Maybe not, but you’ve gone too far. You’ve practically scalped me.”

“You could have stopped me.”

“How? I can’t see a thing without my glasses.”

The barber made a slightly embarrassed face. “Sorry. I did my best.”

At this moment, the two men realized that something wasn’t right. They turned around and received with full force the outraged looks of everyone gathered in the shop.

“What’s the matter?” said the barber in a little voice.

“The eldest was instructing us,” someone told him reproachfully, “and not only were you two not listening but on top of it you start squabbling about a bad haircut. It’s inexcusable.”

Made aware of their boorishness, the barber and his customer both placed a hand on their mouths, like children caught saying dirty words.

The young people who’d been standing around the entrance to the shop left on tiptoe. In Kafr Karam, when sages and important men start quarreling, teenagers and bachelors must depart from the scene. For propriety’s sake. I took the opportunity to pay a visit to the cobbler, whose little shop stood about a hundred meters away, nestled in the side of a ghastly building hidden behind some facades so ugly, they seemed to have been erected by djinns.

The sunlight ricocheted off the ground and hurt my eyes. Between two hovels, I caught a glimpse of my cousin Kadem, still in the spot where I’d left him, huddled on his big rock. I waved at him, he failed to notice me, and I proceeded on my way.

The cobbler’s shop was closed, but in any case, the aging shoes he had for sale were suitable only for the elderly; if some of his wares had been languishing in their cardboard boxes for years on end, it wasn’t because money was tight.

In front of the building’s large iron door, which was painted a repulsive shade of brown, Omar the Corporal was playing with a dog. As soon as he saw me, he waved me over, simultaneously aiming a kick at the animal’s hindquarters. The dog yelped and ran away. Omar turned to me and said, “I’ll bet you’re in heat, that’s what you are. You came here looking for a stray ewe, right?”

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.”

“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.”

3

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.

The blacksmith commanded his wife to be quiet and to find him a piece of clean fabric. The cries stopped immediately.

“There are his fingers,” the apprentice said, pointing at two bits of flesh on the ground near the gate.

With amazing composure, the blacksmith gathered up the two severed phalanges, wiped them off, and placed them in a handkerchief, which he slipped into his pocket. Then he bent over his son’s wounds.

“We have to get him to the health center,” he said. “If we don’t, the blood’s going to drain right out of him.” He turned to me. “I need a car.”

I nodded and rushed over to Khaled’s house and burst in on him as he was fixing his little boy’s toy in the courtyard.

“We need you,” I announced. “Sulayman cut off two of his fingers. We have to get him to the hospital.”

“I’m awfully sorry, but I’m expecting guests at noon.”

“It’s urgent. Sulayman’s losing a lot of blood.”

“I can’t drive you. If you want, take my taxi. It’s in the garage. I can’t go with you. Some people are coming here in a few minutes to ask for my daughter’s hand.”

“All right, give me the keys.”

He abandoned the toy and invited me to follow him into the garage, where a battered old Ford was parked.

“You know how to drive?”

“Of course.”

“Help me get this crate out into the street.”

He opened the garage doors, whistled to the kids lounging in the sun, and asked them to come and give us a hand. “The car’s got an obstinate starter,” he explained to me. “Sit behind the wheel. We’re going to push you.”

The kids rushed into the garage, amused and happy at having been called upon for assistance. I released the brake, put the gearshift in second, and let the enthusiasm of my bratty assistants propel me along. By the time we’d gone some fifty meters, the Ford had reached a negotiable speed. I released the clutch and, at the end of some quite impressive bucking, the engine roared to life with all its banged-up valves. Behind me, the kids raised a shout of joy identical to the one they used to greet the return of electric lights after a long power cut.

When I reached the blacksmith’s patio, Sulayman’s hand was already completely bound up in a terry-cloth towel, and there was a tourniquet around his wrist; his face showed no sign of pain. I found this strange. I couldn’t believe that a person would show such insensibility after he’d just sliced off two of his fingers.

The blacksmith put his son in the backseat and sat beside him. Disheveled and sweating, his wife arrived on the run, looking like a desperate madwoman; she handed her husband a stack of dog-eared pages held together by a rubber band.

“It’s his medical record. Someone will surely ask you for it.”

“Very good. Now go back inside and try to behave. It’s not the end of the world.”

Tires squealing, we left the village, briefly escorted by an urchin band. Their shouts pursued us across the desert for a long time.

It was about eleven o’clock, and the sun sprinkled false oases all over the plain. A couple of birds flapped their wings against the white-hot sky. The trail proceeded in a straight line, pallid, vertiginous, and quite unusual on that stony plateau, which it bisected like a gash from one end to the other. The dilapidated old Ford bounced over the deep potholes, rearing up here and there and giving the impression that it was commanded by nothing but its own frenzy. In the backseat, the blacksmith, clutching his son tightly so he wouldn’t strike his head, said nothing. He was letting me drive as best I could.

We passed an abandoned field, a disused pumping station, and then emptiness. The naked horizon spread out to infinity. Around us, as far as we could see, there was not so much as a hut, not a machine of any sort, not a living soul. The health clinic was sixty kilometers west of Kafr Karam, in a newly built village with paved roads. The new village also boasted a police station and a preparatory school, the latter — for reasons that escaped me — studiously avoided by our people.

“You think we’ve got enough gas?” the blacksmith asked.

“I don’t know. There’s not a working gauge on this dashboard.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. We haven’t passed a single vehicle. If we break down, we’re screwed.”

“God won’t abandon us,” I told him.

Half an hour later, we saw an enormous cloud of black smoke rising in the distance. By this time, we were only a few hundred meters from the national highway, and the smoke intrigued us. After we passed a small hill, we could finally see the highway and the burning semitrailer. It lay across the road, its cabin in the ditch and its tank burst open; gigantic flames were devouring it.

“Better stop,” the blacksmith advised me. “This must have been a fedayeen attack, so it can’t be long before the military shows up. Go back to the access ramp and take the old trail. I don’t feel like winding up in the middle of a fire-fight.”

I turned around. Once we reached the old trail, I started looking out for soldiers on their way to the scene. Hundreds of meters below us, running parallel to our trail, the national highway sparkled in the sun. It reminded me of an irrigation canal, perfectly straight and terribly deserted. Soon the cloud of smoke became a grayish smudge in the distance. Every now and then, the blacksmith stuck his head out the window and scrutinized the sky for helicopters. We were the sole sign of life in the vicinity, and we might be making a mistake. The blacksmith was worried; his face grew gloomier and gloomier.

As for me, I felt rather serene; I had an injured person on board, and I was on my way to the neighboring village.

The trail made a wide swerve to avoid a crater, climbed a hill, plunged down, and leveled out after a few kilometers. Once again, we could see the national highway, still straight and still disconcertingly deserted. The trail turned toward the highway and then merged with it. As soon as the Ford’s tires hit the asphalt, they changed their tone, and the engine stopped its incongruous gargling.

“We’re less than ten minutes from the village, and there’s not a vehicle in sight,” the blacksmith said. “Very odd.”

I didn’t have time to reply to him. A checkpoint was blocking our route with barriers on both sides of the roadway. Two individuals dressed in bright colors were on the shoulders of the road, holding automatic weapons at the ready. Facing us, erected on a mound, a makeshift sentry box was barricaded behind barrels and sandbags.

“Stay calm,” the blacksmith said, his breath hot on the nape of my neck.

“I am calm,” I assured him. “We haven’t done anything wrong, and one of us needs medical attention. They won’t give us any trouble.”

“Where are the soldiers?”

“They’re hunkered down behind the embankment. I see two helmets. I think they’re watching us through binoculars.”

“Okay. Slow down to a crawl. And whatever they tell you to do, do it.”

“Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

The first soldier to step out into the open was an Iraqi. He signaled to us to stop the car in front of a road sign that was standing in the center of the highway. I followed his instructions.

“Cut the engine,” he ordered me in Arabic. “Then put your hands on the steering wheel and keep them there. Don’t open the door, and don’t get out until you’re told to. Understand?”

He was standing well away from the car and pointing his rifle at my windshield.

“Understand?”

“I understand. I keep my hands on the steering wheel, and I don’t do anything without authorization.”

“Very good. How many are you?”

“Three. We—”

“Just answer my questions. And don’t make any sudden moves. Don’t make any moves at all, you hear me? Tell me where you’re coming from, where you’re going, and why.”

“We come from Kafr Karam, and we’re going to the health clinic. One of us is ill and he’s cut off a couple of fingers. He’s mentally ill, I mean.”

The Iraqi soldier aimed his assault rifle at different parts of me, his finger on the trigger and the butt against his cheek; then he took aim at the blacksmith and his son. Two GIs approached in their turn, tense and alert, their weapons ready to transform us into sieves at the least quiver. I kept my cool. My hands remained on the steering wheel, in plain sight. Behind me, the blacksmith was breathing hard.

“Watch your son,” I muttered. “Make sure he keeps still.”

“Shut up!” a GI shouted at me, looming up on my left from I didn’t know where. The barrel of his gun wasn’t far from my temple. “What did you just say to your pal there?”

“I told him to keep—”

“Shut your trap! And keep it shut!”

He was a gigantic black, crouched over his assault rifle, his eyes white with rage and the corners of his mouth wet with frothy spittle. He was so enormous, he intimidated me. His orders exploded like bursts of gunfire and left me paralyzed.

“Why is he yelling like that?” the blacksmith asked in a panicky voice. “He’s going to scare Sulayman.”

“Zip it!” the Iraqi soldier barked. I assumed he was there as an interpreter. “At the checkpoint, you don’t talk, you don’t discuss orders, you don’t grumble,” he recited, like someone reading an amendment. “You keep quiet and you obey every order completely. Understand? Mafhum? You, driver, put your right hand on your window and slowly open your door with your left hand. Then put both hands behind your head and get out, very slowly.”

Two more GIs appeared behind the Ford, harnessed like draft horses, wearing thick sand goggles over their helmets and bulging bulletproof vests. They approached us, aiming their rifles from their shoulders. The black soldier was hollering loudly enough to rupture a vocal cord. As soon as one of my feet touched the ground, he yanked me out of the car and forced me to kneel down. I let him manhandle me without resistance. He stepped back, pointed his rifle at the rear seat, and ordered the blacksmith to get out.

“I beg you, please don’t shout. My son is mentally ill, and you’re scaring him.”

The black GI didn’t understand very much of what the blacksmith was trying to tell him; the fact that someone would address him in a language he didn’t know seemed to infuriate him, and so now he was doubly angry. His lacerating screams made my joints twitch and prickle. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up or I’ll blow your brains out! Hands behind your head!” Around us, the impenetrable, silent soldiers kept a close eye on our slightest movements. Some of them were hidden behind sunglasses, which made them look quite formidable, while others exchanged coded looks. I was astonished as I looked down the barrels of the weapons pointed at me from all sides, like so many tunnels to hell. They seemed vast and volcanic, ready to bury us in a sea of lava and blood. I was petrified, nailed to the ground like a post, incapable of speech. The blacksmith got out of the car, his hands on his head. He was trembling like a leaf. He tried to speak to the Iraqi soldier, but a kick to the back of his knee forced him to kneel down. When the black GI leaned in for the other passenger, he noticed the blood on Sulayman’s hand and shirt. “Goddamn! He’s dripping blood,” the soldier shouted, jumping away from the car. “This asshole’s wounded.” Sulayman was terrified. He looked for his father. The soldier kept yelling, “Hands on your head, hands on your head!” The blacksmith cried out to the Iraqi soldier, “He’s mentally ill.” Sulayman slid across the seat and got out of the car in confusion. His milky eyes rolled in his bloodless face. The GI screamed out his orders as belligerently as before, reducing me another notch with every shout. You could hear nothing but him; he alone drowned out the din of all the earth. Suddenly, Sulayman gave his cry — penetrating, immense, recognizable among a thousand apocalyptic sounds. It was a sound so weird that it froze the American soldier. But the blacksmith had no time to hurl himself on his son or hold him back or stop his flight. Sulayman took off like an arrow, running in a straight line, so fast that the GIs were flabbergasted. “Let him go,” a sergeant said. “He might be carrying a load of explosives.” All weapons were now aiming at the fugitive. “Don’t shoot,” the blacksmith pleaded, partly in English. “He’s mentally ill. Don’t shoot. He’s crazy.” Sulayman ran and ran, his spine straight, his arms dangling, his body absurdly tilted to the left. Just from his way of running, it was evident that he wasn’t normal. But in time of war, the benefit of the doubt favors blunderers over those who keep their composure; the catchall term is “legitimate defense.” The first gunshots shook me from my head to my feet, like a surge of electric current. And then came the deluge. Utterly dazed, I saw puffs of dust, lots of them, bursting from Sulayman’s back, marking the impact points. Every bullet that struck the fugitive pierced me through and through. An intense tingling sensation consumed my legs, rose, and convulsed my stomach. Sulayman ran and ran, barely jolted by the projectiles riddling his back. Beside me, the blacksmith was shrieking like a maniac, his face bathed in tears. “Mike!” the sergeant barked. “He’s wearing a bulletproof vest, the little prick. Aim for his head.” In the sentry box, Mike peered through his telescopic sight, adjusted his firing angle, held his breath, and delicately squeezed his trigger. Bull’s-eye, first shot. Sulayman’s head exploded like a melon; his unbridled run stopped all at once. The blacksmith clutched his temples with both hands, wild-eyed, his mouth open in a suspended cry, as he watched his son’s body fold up in the distance and collapse vertically, like a falling curtain: the thighs on the calves, then the chest on the thighs, and finally the shattered head on the knees. An unearthly silence settled over the plain. My stomach rose, backed up; burning liquid flooded my gullet and spewed out through my mouth into the open air. The daylight grew hazy…And then, oblivion.

I regained consciousness slowly. My ears whistled. I was lying on the ground, facedown in a pool of vomit. My body had lost its power to react. I was in a heap next to the Ford’s front wheel, and my hands were tied behind my back. I had just enough time to see the blacksmith shaking his son’s medical record under the nose of the Iraqi soldier, who seemed embarrassed, while the other soldiers looked on in silence, holding their weapons at ease. Then I lost consciousness again.

By the time I recovered some of my faculties, the sun had reached its zenith. The rocks were humming in the broiling heat. They’d taken the plastic cuffs off my wrists and placed me in the shade of the sentry box. Still in the spot where I’d parked it, the Ford looked like a ruffled fowl; all four of its doors were open, its trunk lid hoisted high. On the ground beside it, there was a little heap consisting of the spare tire and various tools. The search had yielded nothing — no firearms, no big knives, not even a medical kit.

An ambulance with a red crescent on its side was waiting near the sentry box. The vehicle’s rear doors were open, revealing a stretcher that bore what was left of Sulayman. Two pathetic feet protruded from the sheet that covered him; the right foot was missing its shoe and displayed five toes, discolored by blood and dust.

A noncommissioned officer in the Iraqi police and the blacksmith were standing a little distance away and having a conversation, while an American officer, recently arrived in his Jeep, listened to the sergeant’s report. Apparently, they all realized that a mistake had been made, but they weren’t going to make a big deal of it. Incidents of this kind were commonplace in Iraq. Amid the general confusion, everyone sought his own advantage. To err is human, and fate has broad shoulders.

The black GI handed me his canteen. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to drink or wash my face, but in any case, I rejected his offer with a feverish hand. He put on a sorrowful expression — a vain effort, as far as I was concerned, because his new, compassionate persona seemed incompatible with his temperament. A brute is still a brute, even when he smiles; the eyes are where the soul declares its true nature.

Two male nurses, Arabs, came to comfort me; they crouched down, one on each side, and patted my shoulders. Their light taps resounded in my body like blows from a club. I wanted to be left alone; every sympathetic gesture carried me back to the source of my grief. From time to time, a sob shook me, but I did everything I could to contain it. I felt stricken by an incredible weariness; I could hear only my breath, emptying me, and in my temples the pulsing of my blood, its rhythm matching the lingering echoes of the detonations.

The blacksmith tried to claim his son’s remains, but the chief of police explained to him that there was an administrative procedure that must be followed. Such an unfortunate accident as this entailed a lot of formalities. Sulayman’s body had to be taken to the morgue and could not be released to his family until an investigation into the tragic error had been completed.

A police car took us back to the village. I didn’t completely grasp what was happening. I was inside a sort of evanescent bubble, sometimes suspended in a void, sometimes fraying apart like a cloud of smoke. I remembered clearly the mother’s unbearable cry when the blacksmith returned home. Immediately, a crowd gathered, dazed and incredulous. The old struck their hands together, devastated; the young were outraged. I reached my house in a lamentable state. The moment I stepped over the threshold and into the patio, my father, who was dozing at the foot of his indefinable tree, started in his sleep. He’d understood at once that something bad had happened. My mother didn’t have the courage to ask me what the matter was; she settled for putting her hands on her cheeks. My sisters came running with kids clinging to their skirts. Outside, the first howls began, somber lamentations heavy with anger and passion. My sister Bahia took me by the arm and helped me to my rooftop room. She laid me down on my pallet, brought me a basin of water, took off my filthy, vomit-stained shirt, and started washing me from the waist up. Meanwhile, the news spread through the village, and our entire family went to condole with the blacksmith and his household. After putting me to bed for the evening, Bahia left to join them, and I fell asleep.

The next day, Bahia came back to open my windows and give me clean clothes. She told me that an American colonel, accompanied by some Iraqi military authorities, had come to the village the previous evening to offer condolences to the bereaved parents. The eldest of the tribe received them at his home, but in the courtyard, to indicate to the colonel that he was unwelcome. The old man didn’t believe the colonel’s version of the accident, nor would he accept any justification for firing on a simpleminded boy — that is, on a pure and innocent creature closer to the Lord than the saints. Some television teams wanted to cover the event and proposed a feature story on the blacksmith so that people could hear what he had to say about the matter. On this point as well, the eldest held firm; he categorically refused to allow strangers to disturb his grieving village.

4

Three days later, a small van from the village, dispatched by the eldest himself, brought Sulayman’s body home from the morgue. It was a terrible moment. The people of Kafr Karam had never felt such gloom. The eldest insisted that the burial should take place with dignity and in strict privacy. Except for the villagers, only a delegation of elders from an allied tribe was allowed in the cemetery. After the funeral services were over, everyone returned home to ponder the blow that had robbed Kafr Karam of its purest creature, its mascot and its pentacle. That evening, old and young gathered at the blacksmith’s house and chanted verses from the Qur’an until late in the night. But Yaseen and his followers, who made an open display of their indignation, saw things differently and chose to meet at Sayed’s place. Sayed was Bashir the Falcon’s son, a taciturn, mysterious young man said to be close to the Islamist movement and suspected of having attended school in Peshawar during the rule of the Taliban. He was a tall fellow of about thirty or so, his ascetic face beardless except for his lower lip, where a tiny tuft of wild hairs, like the beauty mark on his cheek, embellished his face. He lived in Baghdad and never came back to Kafr Karam except for special occasions. He’d arrived the previous day and attended Sulayman’s funeral.

Around midnight, other young insomniacs joined the group at Sayed’s. He received them all with a great deal of deference and entertained them in a large room whose floor was covered with wicker mats and cushions. While everyone else was sipping tea and digging into baskets of peanuts, Yaseen couldn’t stay still. He looked like a man possessed by the devil. Trying to pick a quarrel, he stared extravagantly at the others, who were sitting or reclining here and there. As no one was paying any attention to him, he absolutely turned on his most faithful companion, Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law.

“I saw you crying at the cemetery,” Yaseen said.

“It’s true,” Salah admitted, ignorant of where the conversation was heading.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you cry?”

Salah frowned. “According to you, why do people cry? I felt grief, all right? I cried because Sulayman’s death caused me pain. What’s so shocking about that, crying over someone you loved?”

“I understand that,” Yaseen insisted. “But why the tears?”

Salah felt that things were escaping him. “I don’t understand your question.”

“Sulayman’s death broke my heart,” Yaseen said. “But I didn’t shed a single tear. I can’t believe you would make such a spectacle of yourself. You cried like a woman, and that’s unacceptable.”

The word woman shook Salah. His cheeks bulged as he gritted his teeth. “Men cry, too,” he pointed out to his leader. “The Prophet himself had that weakness.”

“I don’t give a damn!” Yaseen exploded. “You didn’t have to behave like a woman,” he added, heavily emphasizing the last word.

Outraged, Salah rose suddenly to his feet. He stared at Yaseen with wounded eyes for a long time, then gathered up his sandals and went out into the night.

There were about twenty people gathered in the big room, and rapid looks darted in all directions. No one understood what had gotten into Yaseen or why he’d behaved so despicably to the blacksmith’s son-in-law. A sense of ill-being settled over everyone there. After a long silence, Sayed, the master of the house, coughed into his fist. It was his duty, as the host, to set things straight.

He gave Yaseen a scathing look and began: “When I was a child, my father told me a story I didn’t completely grasp. At that age, I didn’t know that stories had a moral. This was the story of an Egyptian strongman who reigned like a satrap over the seedier districts of Cairo. He was a downright Hercules. He looked as though he’d just been cast in some ancient Greek bronze foundry. He had an enormous mustache that looked like a ram’s horns, and he was a leader as hard on himself as he was on others. I don’t remember his name, but the image I formed of him is intact in my memory. I thought of him as a kind of Robin Hood of the working-class suburbs, as ready to roll up his sleeves and lend a hand as to swagger around the square and lord it over porters and donkey trainers. When there was a disagreement between neighbors, they came to him and submitted to his arbitration. The decisions he made could not be appealed. However, although he was a strong man, he wasn’t a silent one. He was conceited, irascible, and demanding, and since no one questioned his authority, he proclaimed himself king of the outcasts and shouted from the rooftops that there was nobody in the world who dared to look him straight in the eye. His words didn’t fall on deaf ears. One evening, the chief of police summoned him to the station. No one knows what happened that night. The next day, when the strongman returned home, he was unrecognizable, his head bowed, his eyes elusive. He wasn’t bearing any wounds or any traces of blows, but he had an evident mark of infamy in the form of his suddenly sunken shoulders. He shut himself up in his hovel until his neighbors began to complain about a strong odor of decomposition. When they kicked his door in, they found the strongman stretched out on his straw mattress. He’d been dead for several days. Later, a cop described the strongman’s meeting with the chief of police: Before the chief could reproach him for anything at all, the strongman had thrown himself at the chief’s feet to beg his pardon. And he never got up again.”

“And so?” Yaseen asked, on the lookout for insinuations.

A mocking smile quickly crossed Sayed’s face. “That’s where my father ended the story.”

“That’s just rubbish,” Yaseen grumbled, conscious of his limitations when it came to deciphering hidden meanings.

“That what I thought, too, at first. As time passed, I was able to find a moral in the story.”

“Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“No. That moral’s mine. It’s up to you to find one that suits you.”

With this, Sayed got up and went upstairs to his room. Seeing that the evening was over, most of the guests collected their sandals and left the house. The only people still in the room were Yaseen and his “Praetorian guard.”

Yaseen was beside himself; he thought he’d been too vague, and he felt that he’d made a bad showing in front of his men. There was no way he was going to go home without getting to the bottom of this matter. He sent away his companions with a nod of his head, went upstairs, and knocked on Sayed’s bedroom door.

“I don’t understand,” Yaseen said.

“Salah didn’t understand what you were getting at, either,” Sayed replied. The two of them were standing on the landing.

“I looked like a chump. You and your fucking story! I bet you made it up. I bet all that stuff about a moral was a lot of nonsense.”

“You’re the one who talks nonsense, Yaseen. Constantly. And you behave exactly like that strongman from Cairo.”

“Well, if you don’t want me to set this place on fire, you’d better enlighten me. I can’t stand being talked down to, and nobody—nobody—is going to make a fool of me. I may not have enough education, but I’ve got pride to spare.”

Sayed wasn’t intimidated. On the contrary, his smile grew wider in direct proportion to Yaseen’s raving. After a pause, he said in a monotone, “The man who feeds on others’ cowardice nourishes his own; sooner or later, it devours his guts, and then his soul. You’ve been acting like a tyrant for some time now, Yaseen. You shake up the order of things. You no longer respect the tribal hierarchy. You rise up against your elders and offend people close to you; you even like to humiliate them in public. You shout everything you say, whether yes or no, so loudly that no one in the village can hear anything but you anymore.”

“Why should I concern myself about them? They’re worthless.”

“You behave exactly the way they do. They stare at their navels; you stare at your biceps. It comes to the same thing. No one has any cause to envy or reproach anyone else in Kafr Karam.”

“I forbid you to associate me with those imbeciles. I’m no coward.”

“Prove it. Come on, what’s stopping you from turning words into deeds? Iraqis have been fighting the enemy for a long time. Every day, our cities crumble a little more, blown up by car bombs and ambushes and bombardments. The prisons are filled with our brothers, and our cemeteries are gorged with our dead. And you, you lounge around your godforsaken village, you get your hackles up, and you cry out your hatred and indignation from the rooftops; then, once your spleen is vented, you go back home, slip up to your room, and turn off the light. Too easy. If you really think what you say, translate talk into action and make those goddamned Americans pay for what they’ve done. If not, calm down and back off.”

Then, according to my twin sister, Bahia — who had the story from the very mouth of Sayed’s sister, who’d heard the whole conversation through the door — Yaseen withdrew ungraciously, without uttering another word.

Sulayman’s death threw Kafr Karam into confusion. The village didn’t know what to do with the corpse it was carrying. Its last feats of arms dated back to the war with Iran, a generation earlier; eight of its sons had returned from the front in sealed caskets, which no one had the authority to open. What had the village buried back then? A few planks, a few patriots, or a part of its dignity? Sulayman’s end was an entirely different matter, a horrible and vulgar accident, and people couldn’t make up their minds: Was Sulayman a martyr, or just a poor bugger who had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time? The elders of the village called for calm. No one was infallible, they said. The American colonel had demonstrated genuine sorrow. His only mistake was in broaching the subject of money with the blacksmith. In Kafr Karam, one never speaks of money to a person in mourning. No compensation can lessen the grief of a distraught father at his son’s fresh grave. Had Doc Jabir not intervened, the talk of indemnity would have veered into confrontation.

The weeks passed, and little by little, the village rediscovered its gregarious soul and its routines. The violent death of a simpleminded person arouses more anger than grief, but, alas, you can’t change the course of things. God’s concerned about being fair, so he gives His saints no help; the devil alone takes care of those who serve him.

As a man of faith, the blacksmith adopted an attitude of fatalistic resignation. One morning, he could be seen opening his shop and taking up his blowtorch again.

The discussions in the barbershop resumed, and the young people went back to the Safir to kill time with dominoes when the card games grew stale. Bashir the Falcon’s son Sayed didn’t stay among us long. Urgent business called him back to town. What business? Nobody knew. However, his lightning sojourn in Kafr Karam had made an impression; the young were seduced by his frank talk, and his charisma had compelled the respect of young and old. Our paths were to cross again later on. He would be the one to raise me in my own esteem, to train me in the basics of guerrilla warfare, and to open wide for me the gates of the supreme sacrifice.

Soon after Sayed’s departure, Yaseen and his band reoccupied the square. Sullen and aggressive, they were the reason why Omar the Corporal dropped out of sight. Since the incident in the café, the deserter had become a shadow of his former self and spent most of his time shut up in his little house. When he was forced to show his face outside, he crossed the village like the wind and went to drown his shame far from provocations, only to return — generally on all fours — when the night was well advanced. Often, some kids would spot him getting sloshed in the back of the cemetery or find him in an alcoholic coma, his arms crossed and his shirt open on his giant belly. Then one day, without a sound, he slipped away and was seen no more.

After Sulayman’s funeral, which I didn’t attend, I stayed in my room. Memories of the awful scene tormented me without letup. As soon as I fell asleep, the black GI’s screams would assail me. I dreamed of Sulayman running, his stiff spine, his dangling arms, his body leaning sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other. A multitude of minuscule geysers spurted from his back. At the moment when his head exploded, I woke up screaming. Bahia was at my bedside with a potful of wet compresses. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a nightmare. I’m here….”

One afternoon, my cousin Kadem paid me a visit. He’d finally made up his mind to detach himself from his rock, and he brought me some cassette tapes. At first, he was embarrassed — he didn’t want to disturb me in my condition. By way of breaking the ice, he asked me if the shoes he’d given me were my size. I told him they were still in the box.

“They’re new, you know.”

“I do,” I said. “And more than that, I know what they mean to you. I’m deeply touched. Thanks.”

If I wanted to get back to normal, he said, I shouldn’t stay shut up in my room. Bahia agreed with him. I had to overcome the shock and resume a normal life. But I wasn’t very eager to go out into the street; I was afraid someone would ask me for the details of what had happened at the checkpoint, and I dreaded the thought of the knife twisting in my wound. Kadem rejected this notion. “All you have to do is tell them to buzz off,” he said.

He continued to visit me, and we spent hours talking about everything and nothing. It was thanks to him that one evening I screwed up my courage and agreed to leave my lair. Kadem proposed taking a walk far from the village. Halfway between Kafr Karam and the Haitems’ orchards, the plateau made a sudden descent, and a vast dry riverbed strewn with little sandstone mounds and thorny bushes split the valley for several kilometers. The wind sang in that spot like a baritone.

It was a fine day, and in spite of a veil of dust hanging over the horizon, we enjoyed a superb sunset. Kadem handed me the headphones attached to his Walkman. I recognized the voice of Fairuz, the Lebanese singing star.

“Have I told you I’ve taken up my lute again?” he asked.

“That’s excellent news.”

“I’m composing something at this very moment. I’ll let you hear it when it’s finished.”

“A love song?”

“All Arab songs are love songs,” he said. “If the West could only understand our music, if it could even just listen to us sing, if it could hear our soul in the voices of Sabah Fakhri and Wadi es-Safi and Abdelwaheb and Asmahan and Umm Kulthum — if it could commune with our world — I think it would renounce its cutting-edge technology, its satellites, and its armies and follow us to the end of our art….”

I enjoyed Kadem’s company. He knew how to find soothing words, and his inspired voice helped me lift up my head. I was happy to see him revived. He was a magnificent fellow, one who didn’t deserve to waste away sitting beside a little wall.

“I was just about to go under,” he admitted. “For months and months, my head was like a funeral urn. The ashes were obscuring my vision, coming out of my nose and ears. I couldn’t see any way out. But then Sulayman’s death brought me back. Just like that,” he added, snapping his fingers. “It opened my eyes. I don’t want to die without having lived. Up until now, all I’ve done is put up with things. Like Sulayman, I haven’t always understood what was happening to me. But there’s no way I’m going to wind up like him. When I heard about his death, I asked myself, What? Sulayman’s dead? Why? Did he really exist? And it’s true, cousin. The poor guy was just about your age. We saw him in the streets every day, wandering around in his own world. And sometimes running after his visions. And yet, now that he’s gone, I wonder if he really existed…. On my way back from the cemetery, I was automatically heading for the little wall and my rock, when I found myself entering my house. I went up to my room, searched the depths of the storage closet, located the trunk with the brass fittings — it looked like a sarcophagus — opened it, took my lute out of its case, and, I swear, without even tuning up, I started composing. I was carried away — it was as though I were under a spell.”

“I can’t wait to hear you.”

“I just have to add a few finishing touches and I’ll be ready.”

5

Life in Kafr Karam resumed its course, empty as fasting.

When you’ve got nothing, that’s what you make do with. It’s a question of outlook.

Men are pathetic, narrow creatures, blood brothers of Sisyphus, built for suffering; their vocation is to undergo life until death ensues.

The days went their way like a phantom caravan. They came out of nowhere, early in the morning, without charm or panache, and in the evening they disappeared, surreptitiously, swallowed up by darkness. Nonetheless, children continued to be born, and death still took care of keeping things in balance. At the age of seventy-three, our neighbor became a daddy for the seventeenth time, and my great-uncle passed away in his bed, an old man surrounded by his loved ones. What the desert wind carries away, memory restores; what sandstorms erase, we redraw with our hands.

Khaled, the taxi owner, had agreed to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to one of the Haitem family, whose orchards stood a few hundred meters beyond the village limits. This was a first. Some even declared it a practical joke. Usually, the Haitems — wealthy, taciturn people — sought their daughters-in-law in town, among urbane families whose girls would have good table manners and know how to receive high society. Their sudden decision to turn to us was a cause of some consternation in certain quarters, but generally it was taken as a good augury that the Haitems were returning to their roots. Although they had snubbed us for a long time, we weren’t going to be coy now that one of their scions had fallen for a maiden from our village. And in any case, a prospective marriage, whether rich or poor, made everything worthwhile. At last we could look forward to a happy event that would compensate for the chronic emptiness of our daily lives!

There was an innovation at the Safir: a television set, complete with parabolic antenna. This was a gift from Sayed, who expressed the hope “that the young men of Kafr Karam would not lose sight of their country’s tragic reality.” Overnight, the seedy café was transformed into a veritable mess hall for unstable soldiers. It was enough to make the proprietor, Majed, tear out his hair. His business was already going down the drain; if, on top of that, his customers were going to arrive with their gargantuan snacks and their packs, the game was clearly up. As for the customers, they weren’t bashful. At dawn, without having bothered even to wash their faces, they’d come knocking on his door and ask him to open the café. It was as if they were camped in the street. Once the TV was on, they’d surf through the channels — taking humanity’s pulse, as it were — before moving on to Al-Jazeera and staying put. By noon, the little place was teeming with overexcited young men. The air was filled with commentary and invective. Every time the camera offered another look at the national tragedy, the protests and death threats shook the neighborhood around the café. Supporters of preventive war were hooted at, anti-Yankees were applauded, and the people hired to be members of parliament were hissed for being opportunists and flunkies for Bush. Yaseen and his band, in the best seats, seemed to be the guests of choice. Even when they came late, they always found their chairs empty. Behind them were two or three rows of sympathizers, and in the back of the room, the small fry. Majed had no idea what to do. With his chin in his hands and his thermos standing neglected on the counter, he gazed with wounded eyes at the crowd of idlers who were causing incredible commotion and wrecking his furniture.

For a while, my cousin Kadem and I were regulars at the Safir. The experience changed our ideas a bit. Sometimes a trivial remark would bring the house down, and then there was nothing better than an off-the-wall observation to raise it up again. And to see that whole damned, gaping crowd bust a gut when one of them made a fool of himself was excellent therapy, far more effective than we could have suspected. But comedy grows tiresome in the long run, and the wise guys who seized any occasion to amuse the gallery started getting on people’s nerves. As might have been expected, Yaseen was obliged to set things straight.

We were all watching the news on Al-Jazeera. The announcer led us to Fallujah, the scene of ongoing battles between American troops, aided by Iraqi security forces, and the local resistance. The besieged city had sworn to die rather than surrender. Disfigured, smoke-filled Fallujah fought on with touching combativeness. There were reports of hundreds of dead, mostly women and children. The crowd in the café was silent and heartsick, helpless witnesses to a genuine slaughter: on one side, extravagantly equipped soldiers, supported by tanks, drones, and helicopters, and on the other side, a populace left to shift for itself, held hostage by a group of ragged, starving “rebels,” armed with filthy rifles and rocket launchers and scampering around in all directions. It was then that a young fellow with a beard cried out, “These American infidels will live to regret what they’ve done. God will bring the sky down on their heads. Not a single GI will leave Iraq intact. Let them swagger as much as they want — they’ll wind up like those old-time infidel armies the Ababil birds reduced to mince meat. God’s going to send the Ababil birds against them!”

“Bullshit!”

The bearded fellow stiffened, swallowing hard. Then he turned to the blasphemer. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

The man with the beard was stunned. His face was flushed and quivering with anger. “Did you say ‘bullshit’?”

“You got it! Bullshit! That’s exactly what I said. Not one syllable more, not one syllable less: BULL SHIT. Is that a problem for you?”

Everyone in the room had turned their backs on the TV to see just how far their two young companions were willing to go. “Do you realize what you’re saying, Malik?” the bearded one asked.

“As far as I can tell, you’re the one who’s talking rubbish, Harun.”

The crowd stirred. Yaseen and his band followed with interest what was happening behind them. Harun, who considered Malik’s blasphemous insolence beyond all bounds of decency, seemed to be on the verge of an apoplectic fit. “Come on, I was talking about the Ababil birds,” Harun whined. “They’re from an important passage in the Qur’an.”

“I fail to see the connection with what’s going on in Fallujah,” Malik said, not backing down. “What I see on that screen is a city under siege. I see Muslims buried in its ruins, I see fugitives at the mercy of a rocket or a missile, and, all around, I see faithless, lawless brutes trampling on us in our own country. And you — you talk to us about Ababil birds. Can you even get an inkling of how ridiculous that is?”

“Keep quiet,” Harun warned him. “The devil’s in you.”

“Right,” Malik said with a disdainful sneer. “When you get out of your depth, blame the devil. Wake up, Harun. The Ababil birds are as dead as the dinosaurs. We’re at the dawn of the third millennium, and some foreign sons of bitches are here in our land, dragging us in the mud every day God sends. Iraq is occupied, my friend. Look at the TV. What’s the TV telling you? What do you see there, right under your nose, while you so sagely stroke your little beard? Infidels subjugating Muslims, demeaning their leaders, throwing their heroes into cages where sluts in fatigues pull their ears and their testicles and pose for posterity. What’s God waiting for, you think, before He falls on them? They’ve been here for some time now, mocking Him where He lives, in His sacred temples and in the hearts of His faithful. Why doesn’t He flick His little finger, when those bastards are strafing our souks and bombing our celebrations and shooting our people down like dogs on every street corner? What’s become of the Ababil birds? In the old days, when the enemy army invaded the holy land, the Ababils reduced the invaders to a pulp, so where can those birds be now? My dear Harun, I’m just back from Baghdad. I’ll spare you the details. We’re alone in the world. We can count on no one but ourselves. Heaven will send us no reinforcements, and no miracle’s going to rescue us. God’s got other fish to fry. At night, when I’m lying in my bed and I hold my breath, I can’t even hear Him breathing. The night, all night, every night, belongs to them. And in the day, when I raise my eyes to heaven to implore Him, I can’t see anything except their helicopters — their very own Ababil birds — burying us with their fiery droppings.”

“There’s no more doubt: You’ve sold your soul to the devil.”

“I could offer it to him on a silver platter and he still wouldn’t want it.”

“Astaghfirullah.”

“Exactly. At the moment, GIs are profaning our mosques, manhandling our holy men, and bottling up our prayers like flies. How much more provocation does He need, your God, before He loses His temper?”

“What did you expect, you imbecile?” Yaseen thundered. All eyes turned toward him. He stood with his hands on his hips, eyeing the blasphemer scornfully. “What did you expect, big mouth? Eh? You thought the Lord was going to ride down on a white horse, burnoose flying in the wind, to cross swords with these animals? We are His wrath!”

His outcry had the effect of an explosion inside the café. A few gulps were all that could be heard.

Malik tried to withstand Yaseen’s stare but couldn’t stop his cheeks from twitching.

Yaseen struck his chest with the flat of his hand. “We are the wrath of God,” he said in cavernous tones. “We are His Ababil birds. And His thunderbolts, and His chastisements. And we’re going to blow these Yankee bastards sky-high; we’ll trample them until their shit comes out of their ears and their calculations spurt from their assholes. Is that clear? Now do you understand? Now do you see where God’s wrath is, you little prick? It’s here, it’s in us. We’re going to send those devils back to hell, one by one, until they’re all gone. It’s as true as the sun rises in the east….”

Yaseen crossed the room while people feverishly got out of his path. His eyes devoured the blasphemer. He was like a python moving inexorably upon its prey. He stopped in front of Malik — they were practically nose-to-nose — and squinted a little to concentrate the fire of his gaze. Then Yaseen said, “If I ever hear you expressing the smallest doubt about our victory over those mad dogs, I swear before God and all the guys in this room, I’ll tear your heart out with my bare hands.”

Kadem pulled me by my shirt and signaled with his head for me to follow him outside.

“Quite a bit of electricity in the air,” he said.

“Something’s snapped in Yaseen’s brain. I don’t think ten straitjackets could hold him.”

Kadem held out his pack of cigarettes.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Take one,” he insisted. “You need a change of air.”

When I gave in, I noticed that my hand was trembling. “He scares the shit out of me,” I confessed.

Kadem flicked his lighter under my cigarette before applying the flame to his own. Then, throwing back his head, he blew his smoke out into the breeze. “Yaseen’s a half-wit,” he said. “As far as I know, there’s nothing stopping him from jumping onto a bus and going to Baghdad to wage some war. That number he does is going to get tiresome after a while. It may even cause him some serious problems. Shall we go to my place?”

“Why not,” I replied.

Kadem lived with his sickly, elderly parents in a little stone house backed up against the mosque. We climbed the stairs to his quarters on the upper floor. The room was large and well lit. There was a double bed surrounded by carpets, a “Made in Taiwan” stereo set dwarfed by two gigantic speakers, a chest of drawers flanked by an oval mirror and an overstuffed chair.

In the corner nearest the door, mounted on a stiff sheepskin, stood a lute — the noblest and most mythical of musical instruments, the king of the Oriental orchestra, the instrument that could elevate its virtuosos to the rank of divinities and transform the shadiest dive into Parnassus, abode of the Muses. I knew the fantastic history of this particular lute, which had been made by Kadem’s grandfather, a peerless musician who delighted Cairo throughout the 1940s before conquering Beirut, Damascus, and Amman and becoming a living legend from the Mashriq to the Maghrib. Kadem’s grandfather played for princes and sultans, warlords and tyrants; he bewitched women and children, mistresses and lovers. It was said that he was the cause of innumerable conjugal conflicts in the uppermost circles of Arab society. And indeed, it was a jealous army captain who put five bullets in his belly while he was performing under the filtered lights of the Cleopatra, Alexandria’s trendiest nightclub, toward the end of the 1950s.

Facing the lute, as if committed to a permanent exchange of influences, was a picture in a carved frame, enshrined on the night table: a photograph of Faten, my cousin’s first wife.

“She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” Kadem asked as he hung his jacket on a nail.

“She was very beautiful,” I acknowledged.

“That picture has never moved from its place. Even my second wife left it where she found it. It bothered her, that’s for sure, but she proved to be very understanding about it. Only once, during the first week of our marriage, did she ever try to turn it to face the wall. She didn’t dare get undressed under that immense gaze. But then, little by little, she learned to live with it…. Tea or coffee?”

“Tea.”

“I’ll go down and get some.”

He made a sudden dash down the stairs.

I stepped closer to the picture. The young bride was wide-eyed and smiling while the wedding festivities went on behind her. Her radiant face outshone all the paper lanterns put together. I remembered when she was a young teenager and she’d leave her house to run errands with her mother; we youngsters would race all the way around the block just so we could watch her pass by. She was sublime.

Kadem returned with a tray. He put the teapot on the chest of drawers and poured two steaming glasses of tea. Then, to my surprise, he said, “I loved her the first time I saw her.” (In Kafr Karam, one never spoke of such things.) “I wasn’t yet seven years old. But even at that age, and even though I had no real prospects, I knew we were meant for each other.”

His eyes overflowed with splendid evocations as he pushed a glass in my direction. He was floating on a cloud, his brow smooth and his smile broad. “Every time I heard someone playing a lute, I thought of her. I really believe I wanted to become a musician just so I could sing about her. She was such a marvelous girl, so generous, so humble! With her at my side, I needed nothing else. She was more than I could have ever hoped for.”

A tear threatened to spill out of one eye; he quickly turned his head and pretended to adjust the lid of the teapot. “Well,” he said. “How about a little music?”

“Excellent idea,” I said approvingly, quite relieved.

He rummaged in a drawer and fished out a cassette, which he slipped into the tape player. “Listen to this,” he said.

Once again, it was Fairuz, the diva of the Arab world, performing her unforgettable song “Hand Me the Flute.”

Kadem stretched out on his bed and crossed his legs, still holding the glass of tea in one hand. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “No angel could sing better than that. Her voice is like the breath of the cosmos….”

We heard the cassette through to the end, each of us in his own private universe. Street noises and children’s squeals failed to reach us. We flew away with the violins, far, very far from Kafr Karam, far from Yaseen and his outrages. The sun shined its blessings down on us, covering us with gold. The dead woman in the photograph smiled upon us. For a second, I thought I saw her move.

Kadem rolled himself a joint and dragged on it rapturously. He was laughing in silence, beating time with one languorous hand to the singer’s unfaltering rhythm. At the beginning of a refrain, he started singing, too, thrusting out his chest. He had a magnificent voice.

After the Fairuz cassette was over, he put on others, old songs by Abdel Halim Hafez and Abdelwaheb, Ayam and Younes, Najat and other immortal glories of the tarab alarabi.

Night surprised us, completely intoxicated as we were with joints and songs.

The TV that Sayed had donated to the idle youth of Kafr Karam proved to be a poisoned chalice. It brought the village nothing but turmoil and disharmony. Many families owned a television set, but at home, with the father seated on his throne and his eldest son at his right hand, young people kept their comments to themselves. Things were different in the café. You could boo, you could argue about any subject whatsoever, and you could change your mind according to your mood. Sayed had hit the bull’s-eye. Hatred was as contagious as laughter, discussions got out of control, and a gap formed between those who went to the Safir to have fun and those who were there “to learn.” It was the latter whose point of view prevailed. We started concentrating on the national tragedy, all of us together, every step of the way. The sieges of Fallujah and Basra and the bloody raids on other cities made the crowd seethe. The insurgent attacks might horrify us for an instant, but more often than not they aroused our enthusiasm. We applauded the successful ambushes and deplored skirmishes that went wrong. The assembly’s initial delight at Saddam’s fate turned to frustration. In Yaseen’s view, the Rais, trapped like a rat, unrecognizable with his hobo’s beard and his dazed eyes, exposed triumphantly and shamelessly to the world’s cameras, represented the most grievous affront inflicted on the Iraqi people. “By humiliating him like that,” Yaseen declared, “they were holding up every Arab in the world to public opprobrium.”

We were at a loss as to how to assess the ongoing events; we no longer knew whether a given attack was a feat of arms or a demonstration of cowardice. An action vilified one day might be praised to the skies the next. Clashing opinions led to incredible escalations, and fistfights broke out more and more frequently.

The situation was degenerating, and the elders refused to intervene publicly; each father preferred to give his offspring a talking-to in the privacy of his home. Kafr Karam was reeling from the most serious discord in its history. The silences and submissions accumulated through many years and various despotic regimes rose like drowned corpses from a muddy river bottom, bobbing up to the surface to shock the living.

Yaseen and his band — the twins Hassan and Hussein, the blacksmith’s son-in-law Salah, Adel, and Bilal, the barber’s son — disappeared, and the village entered a period of relative calm. Three weeks later, persons unknown set fire to the disused pumping station, a deteriorating structure some twenty kilometers from Kafr Karam. There was a report that an attack on an Iraqi police patrol had resulted in some fatalities among the forces of order, along with two vehicles destroyed and various weapons carried off by the attackers. Rumor raised this ambush to the status of a heroic action, and in the streets people began to talk about furtive groups glimpsed here and there under cover of night, but no one ever got close enough to identify or capture any of them. A climate of tension kept us all on the alert. Every day, we awaited news from the “front,” which we figured was coming soon to a neighborhood near us.

One day, for the first time since the occupation of the country by the American troops and their allies, a military helicopter made three passes over our area. Now there was no more room for doubt: Things were happening in this part of the country.

In the village, we prepared for the worst.

Ten days, twenty days, a month passed. We could see nothing on the horizon — no convoy, no suspicious movements.

When it looked as though the village was not going to be the target of a military raid, people relaxed; the elders returned to their barbershop antiphony, the young resumed their tumultuous meetings at the Safir, and the desert regained its stultifying barrenness and its infinite banality.

The order of things seemed to have been reestablished.

6

Khaled Taxi was in his mid-thirties. Wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses, his hair oiled and slicked back, he was prancing around in the street and looking impatiently at his watch. Despite the ferocious heat, he’d squeezed himself into a three-piece suit that, in a former life, had known better days. A tie fit for a clown costume — garish yellow streaked with brown — spread across his chest. Now and again, he reached inside his jacket and took out a tiny comb, which he passed through his mustache.

“Are they coming?” he shouted up to the terrace, where his fourteen-year-old son was stationed as a lookout.

“Not yet,” the boy replied, keeping his hand over his eyes like a visor, even though the sun was behind him.

“What the hell are they doing? I hope they haven’t changed their minds.”

The boy stood on tiptoe, carefully studying the horizon to show his father how conscientious he was.

The Haitems were making them wait. They were an hour late, and still no cloud of dust was rising from the midst of their orchards. The part of the wedding procession that was due to set out from Kafr Karam was ready: Five automobiles, polished and beribboned, were parked and waiting across from the bride’s patio, their doors wide open because of the heat. With an exasperated gesture, the man keeping an eye on the cars shooed away the flies that were buzzing around his head.

For the umpteenth time, Khaled looked at his watch. Disgusted at what he saw, he went up to the terrace and joined his boy.

The Haitems hadn’t invited many people from Kafr Karam. They’d presented a rather short list of handpicked guests, among them the eldest of the tribe and his wives, Doc Jabir and his family, Bashir the Falcon and his daughters, and five or six other notables. My father was not eligible for this honor. Although he’d been the Haitems’ official well digger for thirty years — he’d dug all the wells in their orchards, installed the motorized pumps and the rotary sprinklers, and laid out a great many irrigation channels — he had remained, in the eyes of his former employers, a mere stranger. This casual ingratitude had offended my mother, but the old man, sitting under his tree, couldn’t have cared less. And in any case, it wasn’t as though he owned clothes he could wear to such a party.

Evening crept up on the village. The sky was sprinkled with a thousand stars. The heat nevertheless promised to maintain its siege until late in the night. Kadem and I were on the terrace at my house, sitting on two creaking chairs, a teapot between us. Like our neighbors, we were gazing out toward the Haitems’ orchards.

Swirls of dust lifted by the wind occasionally traversed the whitish trail, but no vehicle turned onto it.

Bahia appeared regularly to see if we had need of her services. I found her a bit nervous and noticed that she kept coming back upstairs to bring us biscuits or fill our glasses. Her little game intrigued me, and soon, by watching the looks she gave us, I realized that my twin sister had her eye on our cousin. She blushed violently when I caught her smiling at him through the window.

Finally, the Haitems’ procession approached, and the village went into a frenzy of car horns and ululations. The streets were jammed with unruly kids; only after much supplication was the first flower-laden Mercedes allowed to pass through the crowd. The Haitems had spared no expense. The ten vehicles they sent were all luxury cars, excessively decorated; they looked like Christmas trees, with their multicolored sequins and spangles, their bright balloons and long ribbons. All the drivers wore identical black suits and white shirts with bow ties. A photographer brought in from the city immortalized the event, his video camera on his shoulder and his every step accompanied by a swarm of children; flashes went off wildly all around him.

Superb in her white dress, the bride issued forth from her family home and was greeted by bursts of celebratory rifle fire. As the procession made a small detour past the mosque before returning to the dirt road, a powerful movement rippled through the crowd in the square. Kids ran behind the vehicles, shouting at the top of their lungs, and the entire throng accompanied their virgin to the outskirts of the little town, joyously kicking stray dogs as they went.

Kadem and I were standing against the railing of the roof terrace. We watched the procession moving away — he captivated by his memories, and I amused and impressed at the same time. Off in the distance, in the growing darkness, we could glimpse the party lights amid the black mass of the orchards.

“Do you know the groom?” I asked my cousin.

“Not really. I saw him at the house of a friend, a fellow musician, about five or six years ago. We weren’t introduced, but he seemed like an unpretentious guy. Not a bit like his father. I think he’s a good match for her.”

“I hope so. Khaled’s a good man, and his daughter’s adorable. Did you know that I had my eye on her?”

“I don’t want to know about it. She belongs to someone else now, and you have to put such things out of your head.”

“I was just saying—”

“You shouldn’t have. Just thinking about it’s a sin.”

Bahia appeared again, her eyes glowing. “Will you stay for dinner with us, Kadem?” she chirped in a quavering voice.

“I can’t, but thanks anyway. The old folks aren’t well.”

“But no, you’re staying for dinner,” I said peremptorily. “It’s almost nine o’clock. Don’t insult us by leaving just as we’re about to sit down.”

Kadem hesitated, pressing his lips together. Bahia’s hands tormented each other as she awaited his response.

“All right,” he said, yielding. “I haven’t tasted my aunt’s cooking in a long time.”

“I did the cooking tonight,” Bahia declared, crimson-faced. Then she dashed down the stairs, as happy as a child at the end of Ramadan.

We hadn’t finished eating when we heard a distant explosion. Kadem and I left the table to go and have a look. Some neighbors, soon joined by the rest of their family, appeared on their terrace, too. Down in the street, someone asked what was going on. Except for the tiny lights shining through the orchards, the plateau appeared serene.

“It was a plane,” someone cried out in the night. “I saw it come down.”

The sound of running footsteps moved past the house in the direction of the square. Our neighbors started leaving their terrace, eager to hear the news in the street. People came out of their houses and gathered here and there. In the darkness, their silhouettes loomed together distressingly. “A plane crash,” people said, passing the words around. “Ibrahim saw a burning plane crash to the ground.” The square was teeming with curious villagers. The women stayed behind their patio doors, trying to gather bits of information from passersby. “A plane crashed, but very far from here,” they were told reassuringly.

Suddenly, two automobile headlights emerged from the orchards and zoomed toward the trail. The car bore down on the village at top speed.

“This is bad,” Kadem said, watching the vehicle bound and pitch as it hurtled toward us. “This is very bad.”

He made a dash for the stairs.

The car nearly fishtailed as it bounced onto the smaller trail leading to Kafr Karam. We could hear the blasts of its horn, indistinct but disturbing. Then the headlights reached the first houses of the village, and the horn blasts catapulted pedestrians against walls. The car crossed the soccer pitch, braked in front of the mosque, and skidded a good distance before stopping in a cloud of dust. The driver leaped out while people were still running toward him. His face was distraught and his eyes white with terror. He pointed at the orchards and babbled unintelligible sounds.

Another car roared up. Without taking the trouble to get out, the driver shouted to us, “Get in, quick. We need help at the Haitems’. A missile came down on the party.”

People started running off in all directions. Kadem pushed me into the backseat of the second car and jumped in beside me. Three other young men piled in around us, and two more sat up front.

“You’ve got to hurry,” the driver shouted to the crowd. “If you can’t get a ride, come on foot. Lots of people are buried under the rubble. Bring whatever you can — shovels, blankets, sheets, medicine kits. Don’t dawdle. Please, please, come quick!”

He made a U-turn and gunned the car in the direction of the orchards.

“Are you sure it was a missile?” one of the passengers asked.

“I don’t know,” said the driver, obviously still stunned. “I don’t know anything. The guests were having a good time, and then the chairs and tables blew away, like in a windstorm. It was crazy…. It was…I can’t describe it. Bodies and screams, screams and bodies. If it wasn’t a missile, then it must have been lightning from heaven.”

A bad feeling came over me. I didn’t understand what I was doing in that car, tearing along in the dark, nor was it clear why I’d accepted an opportunity to see horror up close, me, when I wasn’t yet over my last awful shock. Sweat poured down my back and rolled off my forehead. I looked at the driver, at the other men in the front seat, at those with me in the back, including Kadem, who was gnawing his lips, and I couldn’t believe I’d agreed to go with them. A voice inside me cried, Where are you going, you poor fool? I couldn’t tell whether my body was rising in revolt or being slammed about by the ruts in the trail. I cursed myself, grinding my teeth, my fists clenched against the fear that was rising like a solid mass in my belly. Where are you running to, stupid? I asked myself. As we approached the orchards, the fear grew so large that a kind of torpor numbed my limbs and my mind.

The orchards were sunk in a malignant darkness. We raced through them. The Haitems’ house looked intact. There were shadowy figures on the staircase leading to the entrance, some of them collapsed on the steps, their heads in their hands, and others leaning against the wall. The focal point of the tragedy lay a little farther on, in a garden where a building, apparently the hall the family used for parties, was burning at the center of a huge pile of smoking debris. The force of the explosion had flung chairs and wedding guests thirty meters in all directions. Survivors staggered about, their clothes in rags, holding their hands out in front of them like blind people. Some mutilated, charred bodies were lined up along the edge of a path. Cars illuminated the slaughter with their headlights, while specters thrashed about in the midst of the rubble. Then there was the howling, drawn out, interminable; the air was full of pleas and cries and wails. Mothers looking for their children called out into the confusion; the more they went unanswered, the louder they shouted. A weeping man, covered with blood, knelt beside the body of someone dear to him.

A wave of nausea cut me in half the moment my foot hit the ground; I fell on all fours and puked my insides out. Kadem tried to lift me up, but before long he left me and ran toward a group of men who were busy helping some injured people. I crept over to a tree, put my arms around my knees, and contemplated the delirium. Other vehicles arrived from the village, filled with volunteers and shovels and bundles. Anarchy added a dimension of demented activity to the rescue operation. With their bare hands, people lifted burning beams and sections of collapsed walls, searching for a sign of life. Someone dragged a dying man to a spot near me and begged him, “Don’t go to sleep.” When the injured person started slipping weakly into unconsciousness, the other slapped him several times to keep him from fainting. Another man came up and leaned over the body. “Come on, there’s nothing more you can do for him.” The other kept slapping the injured man, harder and harder. “Hold on,” he said. “Hold on, I’m telling you.” The third man said, “Hold on to what? Can’t you see he’s dead?”

I got to my feet like a sleepwalker and ran toward the fire.

I don’t know how long I was there, yanking, heaving, and turning over everything around me. When I came out of my trance, my hands were bruised and my fingers lacerated and bleeding; I sank to my knees, wretchedly sick, my lungs polluted with smoke and the stench of cremation.

The sun rose on the disaster.

Wreaths of smoke from the blasted hall rose into the sky like burnt offerings. The air was heavy with horrid exhalations. The dead — seventeen of them, mostly women and children — lay under sheets at one side of the garden. The injured sprawled here and there, groaning and surrounded by medical workers and relatives. Ambulances had reached the scene a short while before, and the stretcher-bearers didn’t know where to begin. Although the level of confusion had subsided, agitation grew as the true extent of the tragedy became apparent. From time to time, a woman screamed, setting off a new round of cries and wailing. Men went around in circles, stunned and lost. The first police vehicles arrived. The officers were Iraqis, and their leader was immediately taken to task by the survivors. The situation degenerated; then, when people started throwing things at the cops, they jumped back into their cars and sped away. An hour later, they returned, reinforced by two truckloads of soldiers. An extremely stout officer asked to speak to a representative of the Haitem family. Someone flung a rock at the fat officer, and the soldiers fired their weapons into the air to calm everyone down. At that moment, some foreign television teams turned up. A grieving father shouted at them, indicating the carnage. “Look! Nothing but women and children! This was a wedding reception! Where are the terrorists?” He grabbed a cameraman by the arm, showed him the corpses stretched out on the grass, and said, “The real terrorists are the bastards who fired the missile at us.”

My hands bandaged, my shirt torn, and my pants stained with blood, I left the orchards on foot and walked home like a man stumbling through fog.

7

I was an emotional person; I found other people’s sorrows devastating. Whenever I passed a misfortune, I bore it away with me. As a child, I often wept in my room after locking the door, for fear that my twin sister — a girl—would catch me shedding tears. People said she was stronger than I was, and less of a crybaby. I didn’t hold any of it against her. I was made that way, and that was all there was to it. A delicate porcelain creature. My mother tried to put me on my guard. “You have to be tougher,” she’d say. “You must learn to give up other people’s troubles — they’re not good for them, and they’re not good for you. You’re too badly off to worry about someone else’s fate.” Her warnings were in vain — we aren’t born wise; we learn wisdom. Me, I was born in misery, and misery raised me to share. All suffering confided in mine and became my own. For the rest, there was an arbiter in heaven; it was up to Him to tweak the world as He saw fit, just as he could freely choose not to lift His little finger.

At school, my classmates considered me a weakling. They could provoke me all they wanted; I never returned their blows. Even when I refused to turn the other cheek, I kept my fists in my pockets. Eventually, the other kids got discouraged by my stoicism and left me in peace. In fact, I wasn’t a weakling; I simply hated violence. Whenever I watched a schoolyard brawl, I hunched my shoulders around my ears and got ready for the sky to fall in on me. Maybe that’s what happened at the Haitems’ place: The sky fell in on me. I told myself I’d never be free of the curse that had destroyed the wedding party and turned joyous ululations into appalling cries of agony. I told myself our fates are sealed: We’re united in pain until the worst of pains separates us. A voice knocking at my temples kept repeating that the death stinking up the orchards was contaminating my soul, and that I was dead, too.

In the Haitems’ orchards — that is, in the land of the blessed, the filthy rich who disregarded the rest of us — I saw with my own eyes how incongruous our existence is, how flimsy our certainties, how precarious our knowledge. Chance had led me there.

You can’t walk on hot coals without burning your feet.

I didn’t remember ever having borne a grudge against anybody, anybody at all, and yet there I was, ready to bite something, including the hand that tried to soothe me — except that I held myself back. I was outraged, sick, tormented by a thousand thorns, like Christ at the height of His suffering, but my way of the cross wound in a circle I didn’t understand. What had happened at the Haitems’ wedding party wasn’t anything I could figure out. You don’t pass from jubilation to grief in the blink of an eye. Life, even though it often hangs by a mere thread, isn’t a conjuring trick. People don’t die in bulk between dance steps; no, what had happened at the Haitems’ made no sense.

On the evening news, there was talk of an American drone alleged to have detected some suspicious signals coming from in or around the reception hall. The nature of these suspicious signals was not revealed. Instead, there was a suggestion that terrorist movements had previously been reported in this sector. When the local residents rejected this assertion altogether, the undaunted American hierarchy tried for a while to justify the missile strike by offering other security-related arguments; in the end, however, tired of looking ridiculous, the Americans deplored the mistake and apologized to the victims’ families.

And that was the end of that — one more news item destined to travel around the world before falling onto the scrap heap, replaced by other enormities.

But in Kafr Karam, anger had unburied the war hatchet: Six young men asked the faithful to pray for them. They promised to avenge the dead and vowed not to return to the village until the last “American boy” had been sent back home in a body bag. After the customary embraces, the young men went out into the night and soon merged with the darkness.

A few weeks later, the district police superintendent was shot to death in his official car. That same day, a military vehicle was blown up by a homemade bomb.

Kafr Karam went into mourning for its first shaheeds, its first martyrs — six all at once, surprised and cut down by a patrol as they prepared a fresh attack.

The tension in the village was reaching deranged proportions. Every day, young men vanished from Kafr Karam. I never stepped into the street anymore. I could bear neither the reproachful looks from the elders, startled to see me still around when all the brave lads of my age had joined the resistance, nor the sardonic smiles of the youngsters, which reminded me of the way my classmates used to smile when they called me a weakling. I shut myself up in my room and took refuge in books or in the audiocassettes Kadem sent me. As a matter of fact, I was indeed angry, I held a bitter grudge against the coalition forces, but I couldn’t see myself indiscriminately attacking everyone and everything in sight. War wasn’t my line. I wasn’t born to commit violence — I considered myself a thousand times likelier to suffer it than to practice it one day.

And then one night, the sky fell in on me again. At first, when the door of my room flew open with a crash, I imagined another missile. Then came shouted insults and cones of blinding light. I didn’t have time to reach for the lamp switch. A squad of American soldiers barged into my privacy. “Lie back down! If you move, I’ll blow you up!” “Stand up!” “Lie down!” “Stand up! Hands on your head! Don’t move!” Flashlights nailed me to the bed; weapons were aimed at me. “Don’t move or I’ll blow your brains out!” Those shouts! Atrocious, demented, devastating. Capable of unraveling you thread by thread and making you a stranger to yourself. Hands seized me, pulled me from my bed, and flung me across the room. Other hands caught me and crushed me against the wall. “Hands behind your back!” “What have I done? What is it?” The GIs smashed my wardrobe, overturned my dresser drawers, and kicked my things in all directions. A booted foot stamped my old radio into fragments. “What’s going on?” “Where are the fucking weapons, shithead?” “I have no weapons. There aren’t any weapons here.” “We’ll see about that, motherfucker. Put this asshole with the others.” A soldier grabbed me by the neck; another kneed me in the groin. I was swept up into a tornado and tossed from one tumult to another, caught in a waking nightmare like a sleepwalker assailed by poltergeists. I had the vague sensation of being dragged across the roof terrace and rushed downstairs; I couldn’t tell whether I was tumbling or gliding. A similar upheaval was taking place on the top floor. My nephews’ weeping cut through the surrounding racket. I heard Bahia grumble before falling silent all at once, struck by a fist or a rifle butt. Pallid and half-dressed, my sisters were penned up at the other end of the hall with the children. The eldest, Aisha, pressed a couple of her kids against her skirts. She was trembling like a leaf, unaware that her naked breasts were hanging out of her blouse. On her right stood my second sister, Afaf, the seamstress, swaying and clutching her clothing. She’d been snatched from her sleep so abruptly that she’d forgotten her wig on her night table; her bald head, as pitiful as a stump, shone under the ceiling lights. Mortified, she ducked and hunched her shoulders as if she wanted to take refuge in her own body. Bahia was standing firm. A nephew in her arms, her hair disheveled, and her face drained of blood, she silently defied the weapon pointed at her; a bright red thread dripped down the nape of her neck.

I felt faint. My hand searched in vain for something to hold on to.

Hellish insults erupted from the end of the hall. My mother, ejected from her room, immediately collected herself and went to help her invalid husband. “Leave him alone. He’s sick.” Soldiers brought out the old man. I’d never seen him in such a state. With his threadbare undershirt hanging loosely from his thin shoulders and his stretched-out drawers fallen nearly to his knees, he was the very image of boundless distress, walking misery, an affront personified in all its absolute boorishness. “Let me get dressed,” he moaned. “My children are here. It’s not right; what you’re doing isn’t right.” His quavering voice filled the corridor with inconceivable sorrow. My mother tried to walk in front of him, to spare us the sight of his nakedness. Her terrified eyes implored us, begging us to turn away. I couldn’t turn away. I was hypnotized by the spectacle the two of them presented to my eyes. I didn’t even see the brutes who surrounded them. I saw only a distraught mother and a painfully thin father in shapeless underwear, his eyes wounded, his arms dangling at his sides, stumbling as the soldiers shoved him along. With a final effort, he pivoted on his heels and tried to go back to the bedroom to fetch his robe — and the blow was struck. Rifle butt or fist, what difference does it make? The blow was struck, and the die was cast. My father fell over backward; his miserable undershirt flapped up over his face, revealing his belly, which was concave, wrinkled, and gray as the belly of a dead fish…. And I saw, while my family’s honor lay stricken on the floor, I saw what it was forbidden to see, what a worthy, respectable son, an authentic Bedouin, must never see: that flaccid, hideous, degrading thing, that forbidden, unspoken-of, sacrilegious object, my father’s penis, rolling to one side as his testicles flopped up over his ass. That sight was the edge of the abyss, and beyond it, there was nothing but the infinite void, an interminable fall, nothingness. Suddenly, all our tribal myths, all the world’s legends, all the stars in the sky lost their gleam. The sun could keep on rising, but I’d never be able to distinguish day from night anymore. A Westerner can’t understand, can’t suspect the dimensions of the disaster. For me, to see my father’s sex was to reduce my entire existence, my values and my scruples, my pride and my singularity, to a coarse, pornographic flash. The gates of hell would have seemed less catastrophic! I was finished. Everything was finished — irrecoverably, irreversibly. I had been saddled, once and for all, with infamy; I’d plunged into a parallel world from which I’d never escape. I found myself hating my arms, which seemed grotesque, translucent, ugly, the symbols of my impotence; hating my eyes, which refused to turn away and pleaded for blindness; hating my mother’s screams, which discredited me. I looked at my father, and my father looked back at me. He must have read in my eyes the contempt I felt toward everything that had counted for us and my sudden pity for the person I revered above everything, despite everything. I looked at him as though from atop a blasted cliff on a stormy night; he looked at me from the bottom of disgrace. At that very instant, we already knew that we were looking at each other for the last time. And at that very instant, when I dared not turn a hair, I understood that nothing would ever again be as it had been; I knew I’d no longer consider things in the same way; I heard the foul beast roar deep inside me, and it was clear that sooner or later, whatever happened, I was condemned to wash away this insult in blood, until the rivers and the oceans turned as red as the cut on Bahia’s neck, as my mother’s eyes, as the fire in my guts, which was already preparing me for the hell I knew was waiting….

I don’t remember what happened after that. I didn’t care. Like a piece of wreckage, I let myself drift wherever the waves took me. There was nothing left to salvage. The soldiers’ bellowing didn’t reach me anymore. Their weapons, their gung-ho zeal hardly made an impression. They could move heaven and earth, erupt like volcanoes, crack like thunder; I could no longer be touched by that sort of thing. I watched them thrashing about as though I were looking through a picture window in a microcosm of shadows and silence.

They scoured the house. Nary a weapon; not so much as a puny penknife.

Rough hands propelled me into the street, where some young men were crouched with their hands on their heads.

Kadem was one of them. His arm was bleeding.

In the neighboring houses, orders were shouted, sending the residents into hysterics.

Some Iraqi soldiers examined us. They carried lists and pages printed with photographs. Someone lifted my chin, shined his light in my face, checked his papers, and went on to the next man. Off to one side, guarded by overexcited GIs, suspects waited to be taken away. They lay facedown in the dust, their hands bound behind them and their heads in bags.

Two helicopters flew over the village, sweeping us with searchlights. There was something apocalyptic about the rumbling of their rotors.

The sun rose. Soldiers escorted us to an area behind the mosque, where a large tent had just been pitched. We were interrogated separately, one by one. Some Iraqi officers showed me photographs; several of them had been taken in the morgue or at the scene of the carnage and showed some of the faces of the dead. I recognized Malik, the “blasphemer” from the other day at the Safir. His eyes were staring and his mouth was wide open; blood ran out of his nose and formed tiny rivulets on his chin. I also recognized a distant cousin, curled up at the foot of a streetlight, his jaw shattered.

The officer asked me to name all the members of my family. His secretary noted down all my declarations in a register, and then I was set free.

Kadem was waiting for me on the street corner. He had a nasty gash on his arm, running from the top of his shoulder to his wrist. His shirt was stained with sweat and blood. He told me that the GIs had smashed his grandfather’s lute — a fabulous lute of inestimable value, a tribal and even national heirloom. I only half-listened. Kadem was crushed. Tears veiled his eyes. His monotonous voice disgusted me.

We sat for long minutes leaning against a wall, empty, panting, holding our heads in our hands. Light slowly grew in the sky, and on the horizon, as though rising from an open fracture, the sun prepared to immolate itself in its own flames. The first noisy kids could be heard; soon they would overrun the square and the open lots. The roar of the trucks signaled the withdrawal of the troops. Some old men left their patios and hurried to the mosque, eager to learn who had been arrested and who had been spared. Women wailed in their doorways, calling out the names of husbands or sons whom the soldiers had carried off. Little by little, as despair spread from one hovel to the next and the sound of sobbing rose above the rooftops, Kafr Karam filled me with a flood of venom. “I have to get away from here,” I said.

Kadem stared at me in alarm. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“Baghdad.”

“To do what?”

“There’s more to life than music.”

He nodded and pondered my words.

All I had were the clothes I was wearing — namely, an undershirt that had seen better days and a pair of old pajama pants. No shoes. I asked, “Can you do me a favor, Kadem?”

“That depends.”

“I need to get some stuff from home.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I can’t go back to my house.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t, that’s all. Will you get my things for me? Bahia will know what to put in my bag. Tell her I’m going to Baghdad to stay with our sister Farah.”

“I don’t understand. What happened? Why can’t you go back home?”

“Kadem, please. Just do what I’m asking you to do.”

Kadem guessed that something very serious had taken place. I’m sure he was thinking in terms of rape.

“Do you really want to know what happened, cousin?” I cried. “Do you really insist on hearing about it?”

“That’s all right, I get it,” he grumbled.

“You don’t get a thing. Nothing at all.”

His cheekbones quivered as he pointed a finger at me. “Watch it,” he said. “I’m older than you. I won’t permit you to talk to me like that.”

“I’m afraid I no longer need anyone’s permission for anything, cousin.” I looked him straight in the eye. “And what’s more, I don’t care a rotten fig about what happens to me from this moment on. From this second. Are you going to pick up my fucking stuff for me, or do I have to leave like this? I swear, I’ll jump on the first bus I see in just this undershirt and these pajama pants. Nothing matters anymore, not ridicule, not even lies….”

“Come on, get a hold of yourself.”

Kadem tried to grab my wrists. I pushed him away. “Listen,” he said, breathing slowly so he could keep calm. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll go to my house—”

“I want to leave from here.”

“Please. Listen to me, just listen. I know you’re completely—”

“Completely what, Kadem? You don’t know a damn thing. It’s something you can’t even imagine.”

“All right, but let’s go to my house first. You can take some time and think about this calmly, and then, if you’re still sure you want to leave, I’ll personally accompany you to the nearest town.”

“Please, cousin,” I said in a toneless voice. “Go get me my bag and my walking stick. I’ve got to say a few words to the good Lord.”

Kadem saw that I was in no condition to listen to anyone at all. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go and get your things.”

“I’ll wait for you behind the cemetery.”

“Why not here?”

“Kadem, you ask too many questions, and I’ve got a headache.”

He gestured with both hands, beseeching me to take it easy, and then he went away without looking back.

I wandered around the cemetery for a bit. Everywhere I looked, I saw the abominable thing I’d glimpsed in the hall the previous night. Twice I had to crouch down and puke. My body swayed unsteadily on my heels as the spasms overwhelmed me. I opened my mouth, but all that came out was something that sounded like a wild beast’s death rattle. After a while, I sat down on a little mound and started digging rocks out of the ground around me and throwing them at a scrawny tree whose dusty branches were hung with plastic packets. Every time I snapped my arm, I let out a grunt of rage. I was chasing away the cloud of ill omen that was gathering over my thoughts; I was plunging my hand into my memory of the previous evening in order to tear out its heart.

The whole place stank in the morning heat. A decomposing corpse, no doubt. That didn’t bother me. I kept on excavating rocks and hurling them at the little tree, so many rocks that my fingers were bleeding.

Behind me, the village was getting out of the wrong side of the bed. The voices of the fed up could be heard here and there — a father speaking roughly to his kid, a younger brother rising up against an older one. I didn’t recognize myself in that anger. I wanted something greater than my misery, vaster than my shame.

I’d just finished stoning the little tree when Kadem came back, slipping among the graves. From a distance, he showed me my bag. Bahia was following him, her head wrapped in a muslin scarf. She was wearing the black dress of farewells. “We thought the soldiers had taken you away,” she said, her face waxen.

Apparently, she hadn’t come to dissuade me from leaving. That wasn’t her style. She understood my motives and obviously approved them all, without reservations and without regrets. Bahia was a daughter of her tribe. In the ancestral tradition, honor was supposed to be the domain of men, but even so, she knew how to recognize it and require it.

I snatched the bag out of Kadem’s hand and started digging around inside it. Although my sister clearly noticed the violence of my movements, she didn’t reproach me in any way. She merely said, “I’ve put in two undershirts, two shirts, two pairs of trousers, some socks, your toilet bag—”

“How about my money?”

She reached into her bosom, drew out a little packet, carefully folded and tied with string, and handed it to Kadem, who immediately turned it over to me. “I don’t want any money but mine,” I said to my sister. “Not a penny more.”

She said, “There’s nothing in there but your savings, I promise you. I packed a cap for you, too,” she added, repressing a sob. “Because of the sun.”

“Very good. Now turn around so I can change.”

I put on a pair of pinstriped trousers, my checked shirt, and the shoes my cousin had given me. “You forgot my belt,” I said.

“It’s in the outside pocket of the bag,” Bahia said. “Along with your pocket light.”

“Very good.”

I finished getting dressed, and then, without a glance at my sister or my cousin, I grabbed my bag and started down the steep path in the direction of the main trail. Don’t turn around, an interior voice admonished me. You’re already gone. There’s nothing for you here. Don’t turn around. I turned around — and saw my sister, standing on the mound, looking ghostly in her windblown dress, and my cousin, with his hands on his hips and his chin against his chest. I retraced my steps. My sister pressed herself against me. Her tears wet my cheeks. I felt her frail body shudder in my embrace. “Please,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

Kadem opened his arms to me. We flung ourselves against each other. We hugged for what seemed like a very long time.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you to the next town?” he asked in a strangled voice.

“It’s not worth the trouble, cousin,” I said. “I know the way.”

I waved at them and hurried off toward the trail without turning around.