The Sirens of Baghdad

8

I walked to the crossroads about ten kilometers from the village. From time to time, I looked back in hopes of seeing a vehicle coming my way, but no cloud of dust rose from the trail. I was in the middle of the desert, alone and infinitesimally small. The sun rolled up its sleeves. The day would be a scorcher.

The junction featured a makeshift bus shelter. Formerly, the bus that served Kafr Karam used to stop at that shelter. Now the place seemed to have been abandoned. Pieces of torn metal dangled down over the bench from a hole in the corrugated-tin roof. I sat in the shade and waited two hours. There was no sign of movement anywhere on the horizon.

I continued on my way, heading for an access road normally used by the refrigerated trucks that furnished the isolated communities of the region with fruits and vegetables. Since the embargo, such vehicles made far fewer trips, but it sometimes happened that an itinerant grocer went down that road. It was a hell of a hike, and I was crushed by the ever-increasing heat.

I noticed two black spots on a small hill overlooking the access road. They turned out to be two young men in their early twenties. They were squatting in the sun, immobile and impenetrable. The younger-looking of the two gave me a sharp look; the other drew circles in the dust with a stick. They were both wearing grimy white sweatpants and wrinkled, dirty shirts. A large bag lay at their feet like some fresh-killed prey.

I sat on a little sand mound and pretended to busy myself with my shoelaces. Every time I raised my eyes to look at the two strangers, a peculiar feeling came over me. The younger of the two had a disagreeable way of bending over his companion to whisper into his ear. The other nodded and kept working his stick. Just once, he shot me a glance that made me uncomfortable. After about twenty minutes, the younger one got to his feet abruptly and started walking in my direction. His bloodshot eyes grazed me, and I felt his hot breath lash my face. He moved past me and went to urinate on a withered bush.

I made a show of consulting my watch and continued on my way at a quicker pace. A desire to turn around tormented me, but I resisted. After I got far enough away, I checked to see whether they were following me. They were back on their hillside, crouched over their sack like two carrion birds watching over a carcass.

A few kilometers farther on, a van caught up with me. I stood on the side of the trail and waved my arms. The van nearly knocked me down as it passed in a din of scrap metal and overworked valves. Glancing into the cabin, I recognized the two individuals of a little while ago. They were looking straight ahead.

By midday, I was exhausted. Sweat steamed off my clothes. I veered toward a tree — the only one for miles around — standing atop a rise in the ground. Its bare, thorny branches cast a skeletal shadow, which I quickly occupied.

Hunger and thirst accentuated my fatigue. I took off my shoes and lay down under the tree in such a way that I could keep the dirt road in sight. Hours passed before I made out a vehicle in the distance. It was still nothing but a grayish dot sliding through the glare, but I was able to identify it from the irregular flashes of reflected light it gave off. I immediately put my shoes back on and ran toward the trail. To my great disappointment, the dot changed direction and gradually slid out of sight.

According to my watch, it was four o’clock. The nearest village was about forty kilometers to the south. To reach it, I would have had to leave the dirt road, and I didn’t much like the idea of just wandering. I went back to the tree and waited.

The sun was going down when a new glinting dot appeared on the horizon. I considered it a good idea to be certain the dot was coming my way before leaving the shelter of my tree. And along came a rattling old truck whose fenders had been torn off. The truck came toward me. I hurried to intercept it, praying to my patron saints not to let me fall. The truck slowed down. I heard its brake shoes grind and scream.

The driver was a small, dehydrated fellow, with a face that looked like papier-mâché and two arms as thin as baguettes. He was transporting empty crates and used mattresses.

“I’m going to Baghdad,” I said, climbing up on the running board.

“That’s not exactly next door, my boy,” he said, looking me over. “Where do you come from?”

“Kafr Karam.”

“Ah, the asshole of the desert. I’m going to Basseel. Not the most direct route, but you can find a taxi there to take you to the city.”

“Suits me fine.”

The driver considered me suspiciously. “You mind if I take a look inside your bag?”

I handed it to him through the window. He set the bag on the dashboard and went through its contents carefully. “Okay,” he said. “Get in on the other side.”

I thanked him and walked around the front of the truck. He leaned over and opened the passenger door, whose exterior handle was missing. I settled into the seat, or, to be more precise, what was left of it.

The driver took off in a racket of shivering metal.

I said, “Would you have any water?”

“There’s a goatskin bag right behind you. If you’re hungry, look in the glove compartment. There’s some of my snack left.”

He let me eat and drink in peace. Then a troubled look came over his emaciated face, and he said, “Don’t be annoyed at me for going through your things. I’m just trying to avoid problems. There are so many armed men on the roads….”

I said nothing. We traveled several kilometers in silence.

“You’re not very talkative, are you?” the driver said. He’d probably been hoping for a little company.

“No.”

He shrugged and forgot about me.

After we reached a paved road, we passed some trucks going full speed in the opposite direction and a series of banged-up Toyota taxicabs loaded with passengers. Lost in thought, my driver drummed on the steering wheel with his fingertips. The wind rushing in through the open windows tangled the thick lock of white hair on his forehead.

At a checkpoint, soldiers ordered us off the road and onto a freshly bulldozed track. The new trail was fairly well laid out, but bumpy, and it included some turns so tight that it wasn’t possible to go faster than ten kilometers an hour. The truck bounded in and out of deep fissures, nearly snapping its suspension. Soon, however, we caught up with other vehicles that had been diverted by the soldiers at the checkpoint. A large, groaning van was parked on the edge of the trail with its hood up; its passengers — some women swathed in black and several children — had left the van to watch the driver grapple with the motor. No one stopped to lend them a hand.

“You think the highway’s too messed up to drive on?” I asked.

“We wouldn’t have a pleasant trip,” the truck driver replied. “First, they’d go over us and the truck with a fine-tooth comb, and then they’d let us bake in the sun and maybe even spend the night in the open. Obviously, there’s a military convoy on the way. To foil suicide bombers in cars and trucks, the soldiers divert every vehicle onto the desert trails, ambulances included.”

“So we’re going to make a big detour?”

“Not so big. We’ll get to Basseel before nightfall.”

“I’m hoping to find a taxi to take me to Baghdad.”

“A cab, at night? There’s a curfew, strictly enforced. As soon as the sun goes down, all Iraq must go to ground. I hope you’ve got your ID papers at least.”

“I do.”

He passed his arm over his mouth and said, “You’d better.”

We turned onto an old trail, wider and flatter than the one we’d been on, and accelerated, making up for lost time. Raising clouds of dust, the other vehicles were soon far ahead of us.

The driver gestured with his chin toward a military installation on a nearby hilltop. “I supplied this outfit with provisions,” he said. “Before.”

The barracks were open to the four winds, the ramparts collapsed. Looters had carried off the doors and windows from every building, including the huts. The main compound, which must have housed the unit’s headquarters and administration building, looked as though it had gone through a seismic episode. A jumble of blackened beams was all that was left of the roofs. The shattered facades bore the marks of missile strikes. An avalanche of papers had escaped from the offices and was piled up against the wire fence behind the sheds. The carcasses of various bombed-out military vehicles were sprawled in the parking area, and a water tower mounted on metal scaffolding, apparently blown off its base, lay on top of the charred watchtower it had crushed. On the front wall of one of the modern barracks, automatic-weapons fire had blasted away fragments of a portrait of Saddam Hussein, chubby-cheeked and smiling a carnivore’s smile.

“It seems our guys didn’t fire so much as a shot,” the driver said. “They ran like rabbits before the American troops arrived. The shame!”

I gazed at the desolation on the hilltop. Sand was insidiously invading everything. A scrawny brown dog came out of the sentry box in front of the main entrance to the barracks. The dog stretched, sniffing the ground on the way to a pile of rocks, and disappeared behind them.

Basseel was a small town wedged between two enormous rocks, polished by time and sandstorms. The town lay curled up in a basin, which in the summer heat recalled a Turkish bath. Its hovels of clay and straw clung desperately to several hillsides, the hills separated from one another by a labyrinth of winding alleyways barely wide enough for a cart. The main thoroughfare, an avenue cut into a riverbed — the river having disappeared long ago — traversed the town like the wind. The black flags on the roofs indicated that this was a Shiite community; the residents wished to distance themselves from the doings of the Sunnis and to line up on the side of those who were burning incense to the new regime.

Ever since the checkpoints started to proliferate on the national highway, slowing traffic and transforming quick trips into interminable expeditions, Basseel had become an obligatory overnight stopping place for frequent travelers. Bars and cheap eating places, their locations marked by strings of paper lanterns visible for kilometers at night, had grown up like mushrooms on the outskirts, while the town itself lay plunged in darkness below. Not a single streetlight illuminated the alleys.

About fifty vehicles, most of them tanker trucks, were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on a makeshift parking lot at the entrance to the town. One family was bivouacked a little apart, near their truck. Kids wrapped up in sheets were sleeping here and there. Off to one side, some truck drivers had built a fire and were sitting around a teapot, chatting; their swaying shadows merged in a kind of reptilian dance.

My benefactor managed to slip in among the haphazardly parked vehicles and stopped his truck near a little inn that looked like a bandits’ hideout. In front of it, there was a small courtyard with tables and chairs, all of them already occupied by a pack of dull-eyed travelers. Above the hubbub, a cassette player was spitting out an old song about the Nile.

The driver invited me to accompany him to a small restaurant located nearby but practically hidden by an arrangement of tarpaulins and worm-eaten palms. The room was filled with hairy, dusty people crowded around bare tables. Some were even sitting on the floor, apparently too hungry to wait for an available chair. This entire fraternity of shipwreck survivors sat hunched over their plates, their fingers dripping with sauce and their jawbones working away: peasants and truck drivers, worn out from a grueling day of checkpoints and dirt roads, trying to regain their strength in order to face whatever trials the morrow might bring. They all reminded me of my father, because they all carried on their faces the unmistakable mark of the defeated.

My benefactor left me standing in the doorway of the restaurant, stepped over a few diners, and approached the counter, where a fat fellow in a djellaba took orders, made change, and berated his workers, all at the same time. I looked over the room, hoping to see some acquaintance. I didn’t recognize anyone.

My driver came back, looking crestfallen. “Well,” he said, “I’m going to have to leave you now. My customer won’t be here until tomorrow evening. You’re going to have to manage without me.”

I was asleep under a tree when the roar of engines woke me up. The sky wasn’t yet light, but already the truckers were nervously maneuvering their vehicles, eager to leave the parking area. The first convoy headed for the steep road that skirted the town. I ran from one vehicle to another, searching for a charitable driver. No one would take me.

As the parking area gradually emptied, a feeling of frustration and rage overcame me. When only three vehicles remained, my despair verged on panic. One of them was a family truck whose engine refused to start, and the other two were old crates with nobody in them. Their occupants were probably having breakfast in one of the neighboring joints. I awaited their return with a hollow stomach.

A man standing in the doorway of a little café called to me. “Hey! What’re you doing over there? Get away from my wheels right now, or I’ll tear your balls off.”

He gestured as though trying to shoo me away. He took me for a thief. I walked over to him with my bag slung across my back. As I drew nearer, he put his fists on his hips and gazed at me with disgust. He said, “Can’t a man drink his coffee in peace?”

A beanpole with a copper-colored face, he was wearing clean cotton trousers and a checked jacket over a sweater of bottle-green wool. A large watch was mounted on the gold bracelet that encircled his wrist. He had a face like a cop’s, with a brutish grin and a way of looking at you from on high.

“I’m going to Baghdad,” I told him.

“I couldn’t care less. Just stay away from my wheels, okay?”

He turned his back on me and sat at a table near the door.

I went back to the stony road that skirted the town and sat down under a tree.

The first car that passed me was so loaded down that I didn’t have the nerve to follow it with my eyes as it bounced off in a northerly direction.

The truck that wouldn’t start a little while ago almost brushed me as it went down the trail, clattering metallically. The sun came up, heavy and menacing, from behind a hill. Down below, closer to town, people were emerging from their burrows.

A car appeared, some way off. I got up and stretched out my arm, prominently displaying my thumb. The car passed me and kept going for a few hundred meters; then, just as I was preparing to sit back down, it rolled to a stop. I couldn’t figure out whether the driver was stopping for me or having a mechanical problem. He honked his horn and then stuck his hand out the window, motioning to me. I picked up my bag and started running.

The driver was the man from the café, the one who had taken me for a thief.

As I approached the car, he said without prologue, “For fifty dinars, I’ll take you to Al Hillah.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, glad to get out of Basseel.

“I’d like to know what you’ve got in your bag.”

“Just clothes, sir,” I said, emptying the bag onto his hood.

The man watched me, his face masked in a stiff grin. I lifted my shirt to show him I wasn’t hiding anything under my belt. He nodded and invited me to get in with a movement of his chin. “Where are you coming from?” he asked.

“From Kafr Karam.”

“Never heard of it. Pass me my cigarettes, will you? They’re in the glove compartment.”

He flicked his lighter and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. After looking me over again, he pulled away.

We drove along for half an hour, during which he was lost in thought. Then he remembered me. “Why are you so quiet?” he asked.

“It’s in my nature.”

He lit another cigarette and tried again. “These days, the ones who talk the least are the ones who do the most. Are you going to Baghdad to join the resistance?”

“I’m going to visit my sister. Why do you ask me that?”

He pivoted the rearview mirror in my direction. “Take a look at yourself, my boy. You look like a bomb that’s about to go off.”

I looked in the mirror and saw two burning eyes in a tormented face. “I’m going to see my sister,” I said.

He mechanically returned the rearview mirror to the proper angle and shrugged his shoulders. Then he proceeded to ignore me.

After an hour of dust and potholes, we reached the national highway. My vertebrae had taken quite a pounding, and I was relieved to be on a paved road. Buses and semi-trailers were chasing one another at top speed. Three police cars passed us; their occupants seemed relaxed. We went through an overpopulated village whose sidewalks were jammed with shops, stalls, and people. A uniformed policeman was maintaining order, his helmet pushed back on his head, his shirt soaked with sweat in the back and under the arms. When we got to the center of the village, our progress was slowed by a large gathering, a crowd besieging a traveling souk. Housewives dressed in black scavenged among the stalls; bold though they were, their baskets were often empty. The odor of rotten vegetables, together with the blazing heat and the swarms of flies buzzing around the piles of produce, made me dizzy. We witnessed a serious crush around a bus halted at a bus stop on the far side of the square; although the conductor was frantically dealing out blows with a belt, he was unable to hold back the surge of would-be passengers.

“Just look at those animals,” my driver said, sighing. I didn’t share his attitude, but I made no comment.

About fifty kilometers farther on, the highway widened from two lanes to three, and after that, the traffic rapidly grew thicker. For long stretches, we crept along bumper-to-bumper because of the checkpoints. By noon, we weren’t yet halfway to our destination. From time to time, we came upon the charred remains of a trailer, pushed to the shoulder of the highway to keep it clear, or passed immense black stains, all marking places where a vehicle had been surprised by an explosion or a barrage of small-arms fire. Shards of broken glass, burst tires, and metal fragments lined the highway on both sides. Around a curve, we passed what was left of an American Humvee, lying on its side in a ditch, probably blown there by a rocket. The spot was made for ambushes.

The driver suggested that we stop and get something to eat. He chose a service station. After filling his tank, he invited me to join him at a sort of kiosk that had been turned into a refreshment stand. An attendant served us two passably cold sodas and some skewers of dubious meat in a gut-wrenching sandwich dripping with thick tomato sauce. When I tried to pay my share, the driver refused with a wave of his hand. We relaxed for about twenty minutes before getting back on the road.

The driver had put on sunglasses, and he was steering his car as though he were alone in the world. I had settled into my seat and soon let myself drift away, lulled by the rumble of the engine….

When I woke up, traffic was at a standstill. There seemed to be a terrible mess up ahead, and the sun was white-hot. People had left their vehicles and were standing on the roadway, grumbling loudly.

“What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is, we’re screwed.”

A low-flying helicopter passed overhead and then suddenly veered away, making a terrifying racket. It flew to a distant hill, turned, and hovered. All at once, it fired a pair of rockets; they whistled shrilly as they sped through the air. We saw two masses of flames and dust rise over a ridge. A sudden shiver ran along the highway, and people hurried back to their vehicles. Some nervous drivers made U-turns and sped away, thus provoking a chain reaction that reduced the traffic jam by half in less than ten minutes.

His eyes glinting with amusement at the panic that seized our fellow travelers, my driver took advantage of their defection and rolled forward several hundred meters. “Not to worry,” he reassured me. “That copter’s just flushing out game. The pilot’s putting on a show. If it was serious, there’d be at least two Cobras up there covering each other. After eight months as a ‘sand nigger’ for the Americans, I know all their tricks.”

All of a sudden, the driver seemed engaged. “I was an interpreter with the American troops,” he went on. “‘Sand niggers’—that’s the name they give their Iraqi collaborators…. In any case, there’s no way I’m turning around. Al Hillah’s only a hundred kilometers away, and I don’t feel like spending another night out in the open. If you’re afraid, you can get out.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Traffic returned to normal about an hour later. When we reached the checkpoint, we started to understand a little about what had produced the terrible mess. Two bullet-riddled bodies lay on an embankment, each of them clothed in bloodstained white sweatpants and a filthy shirt. They were the two men I’d seen near Kafr Karam the previous day, crouching on a mound with a big bag at their feet.

“Another little blunder,” my driver grumbled. “The American boys”—he said the word boys in English—“they shoot first and verify later. That was one of the reasons why I quit them.”

My eyes were riveted on the rearview mirror; I couldn’t stop looking at the two corpses.

“Eight months, man,” the driver continued. “Eight months putting up with their arrogance and their idiotic sarcasm. Real American GIs have nothing to do with the Hollywood marketing version. That’s just loud demagoguery. The truth is, they don’t have any more scruples than a pack of hyenas let loose in a sheep barn. I’ve seen them fire on children and old people as though they were cardboard training targets.”

“I’ve seen that, too.”

“I don’t think so, kid. If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much. Me, I’ve gone off the deep end. I have nightmares every night. I was an interpreter with a regular army battalion — angels compared to the Marines — but it was still pretty hard to take. Plus, they got their kicks making fun of me and treating me like shit. As far as they were concerned, I was just a traitor to my country. It took me eight months to realize that. Then, one evening, I went to the captain and told him I was going home. He asked me if something was wrong. ‘Everything,’ I said. In fact, the main thing was that I didn’t want to have anything more to do with those bleating, dim-witted cowboys. Even if I’m on the losing side, I’m worth more than that.”

Some policemen and soldiers made vigorous gestures in our direction, urging us to get a move on. They weren’t checking anyone; they were too busy trying to free up the congestion on the highway. My driver stepped on the gas. “They think all Arabs are retarded,” he muttered. “Imagine: Arabs, the most fabulous creatures on earth. We taught the world table manners; we taught the world hygiene and cooking and mathematics and medicine. And what do these degenerates of modernity remember of all that? A camel caravan crossing the dunes at sunset? Some fat guy in a white robe and a keffiyeh flashing his millions in a gambling casino on the Côte d’Azur? Clichés, caricatures…”

Upset by his own words, he lit a cigarette and ignored me until we reached Al Hillah. He was plainly eager to get rid of me; he drove directly to the bus station, stopped the car, and held out his hand. “Good luck, kid,” he said.

I took my packet of money — still tied with string — out of my back pocket so I could pay him. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I owe you fifty dinars,” I said.

He rejected my money with the same backhand gesture he’d made at the service station a few hours ago. “Keep your little nest egg intact, my boy,” he said. “And forget what I told you. Ever since I went off the deep end, I talk nonsense. You never saw me, all right?”

“All right.”

“Good. Now fuck off.”

He helped me get my bag, made a U-turn, and left the bus station without so much as a wave.

9

The bus, a backfiring old relic stinking of burned oil and overheated rubber, seemed to be on its last legs. It didn’t roll so much as crawl along, like a wounded animal on the point of giving up the ghost. Every time it slowed down, I felt a tightness in my chest. The sun was blazing hot, our progress had been interrupted three times (two blowouts and one breakdown), and the spare tires, as smooth and worn as the two flats, didn’t look very encouraging.

When the driver, who was clearly exhausted, stowed his jack the second time, he reeled a little. One of his hands was bandaged — the result of a recalcitrant tire — and he seemed generally to be in a bad way. I didn’t take my eyes off him; I was afraid he might pass out on the steering wheel. From time to time, he put a bottle of water to his lips and drank at length, without paying any attention to the road; then he went back to wiping his face on a towel he kept hanging from a hook on the back of his seat. Although probably around fifty, he looked ten years older, with sunken eyes and an egg-shaped skull, hairy at the temples and bald on the crown. He insulted his fellow motorists continually.

Silence reigned inside the bus. The air-conditioning didn’t work, and the heat inside was deadly, even though all the windows were open. Sunk in their seats, the passengers were mostly dozing, except for a few who gazed absently at the fleeting landscape. Three rows behind me, a young man with a furrowed brow insisted on fiddling with his pocket radio, spinning the dial from one station to another and filling the air with static. Whenever he found a song, he’d listen to it for a minute and then start looking for another station. He was seriously getting on my nerves, and I couldn’t wait to get out of that coffin on wheels.

We’d been rolling along for three hours without interruption. Fixing the two blowouts and patching the burst radiator hose had put the driver well behind schedule, and we’d had to cancel the planned stop for a snack at a roadside inn.

The previous day, after my benefactor dropped me off at the station, I’d missed the Baghdad bus by a few minutes and had to wait for the next one, which was supposed to leave four hours later. It arrived on time, but there were only about twenty passengers. The driver explained that his bus wouldn’t leave without at least forty passengers on board; otherwise, he couldn’t cover his expenses for the trip. So we all waited, praying for other passengers to show up. The driver circled the bus, shouting “Baghdad! Baghdad!” Sometimes, he approached people loaded down with baggage and asked them if they were going to Baghdad. When they shook their heads, he moved on to the next group of travelers. Very late in the afternoon, the driver came back to the bus and asked us to get off and retrieve our luggage from the baggage hatch. There were a few protests, and then everyone gathered on the sidewalk and watched the bus return to the depot. Those who were local residents went home; the rest of us spent the night in the bus station. And what a night! Some thieves tried to rob a sleeping man, but their victim turned out to be armed with a cudgel, and they couldn’t get near him. They retreated for a while but then returned with reinforcements, and since the police were nowhere to be seen, the rest of us witnessed a disgraceful thrashing. We remained apart from the scene, barricaded behind our suitcases and our bags, none of us daring to go to the victim’s aid. The poor fellow defended himself valiantly. For a while, he gave as good as he got, blow for blow. In the end, however, the thieves knocked him to the ground and assailed him with a vengeance. Then they relieved him of his belongings and left, taking him with them. By then it was about three o’clock in the morning, and nobody slept a wink after that.

Another military roadblock. A long line of vehicles advanced slowly, gradually squeezing closer to the right side of the road. There were road signs in the middle of the highway, along with large rocks marking the boundaries of the two lanes. The soldiers were Iraqis. They were checking everyone who went through, inspecting automobile trunks and bus hatches and baggage; men whose looks the soldiers didn’t like were gone over with a fine-tooth comb. They came into our bus, asked for our papers, and compared certain faces to the photographs of the people they were looking for.

“You two, off the bus,” a corporal ordered. Two young men stood up and walked down the aisle with an air of resignation. Outside, a soldier searched them and then told them to get their things and follow him to a tent pitched on the sand about twenty meters away.

“All right,” the corporal said to our driver. “You can shove off.”

The bus coughed and sputtered. We watched our two fellow passengers, who were standing before the tent. They didn’t look worried. The corporal hustled them inside, and they disappeared from our sight.

Finally, the buildings on the outskirts of Baghdad appeared, wrapped in an ocher veil. A sandstorm had blown through, and the air was laden with dust. It’s better this way, I thought. I wasn’t eager to see what the city had become — disfigured, filthy, at the mercy of its demons. In the past, I’d really loved Baghdad. The past? It seemed like a former life. Baghdad was a beautiful city then, with its great thoroughfares and its posh boulevards, bright with gleaming shop windows and sunny terraces. For a peasant like me, it was truly the Elysian fields, at least the way I imagined them from deep in the boondocks of Kafr Karam. I was fascinated by the neon signs and the store decorations, and I passed a good part of my nights ambling along the avenues in the refreshing evening breeze. Watching so many people strolling down the street, so many gorgeous girls swaying their hips as they walked on the esplanades, I had the feeling that all the journeys my condition prevented me from taking were there within my reach. I had no money, but I had eyes to gaze until I got dizzy and a nose to inhale the heady scents of the most fabulous city in the Middle East, set astride the beneficent Tigris, which carried along in its meanders the enchantment of Baghdad’s legends and love songs. It’s true that the shadow of the Rais dimmed the lights of the city, but that shadow didn’t reach me. I was a young, dazzled student with marvelous prospects in my head. Every beauty that Baghdad suggested to me became mine; how could I surrender to the charms of the city of houris and not identify with it a little? And even then, Kadem told me, I should have seen it before the embargo….

Baghdad might have survived the United Nations embargo just to flout the West and its influence peddling, but the city assuredly wouldn’t survive the affronts its own misbegotten children were inflicting on it.

And there I was, come to Baghdad in my turn to spread my venom there. I didn’t know how to go about it, but I was certain I’d strike some nasty blow. It was the way things had always been with us. For Bedouin, no matter how impoverished they may be, honor is no joking matter. An offense must be washed away in blood, which is the sole authorized detergent when it’s a question of keeping one’s self-respect. I was the only boy in my family. Since my father was an invalid, the supreme task of avenging the outrage he’d suffered fell to me, even at the cost of my life. Dignity can’t be negotiated. Should we lose it, all the shrouds in the world won’t suffice to veil our faces, and no tomb will receive our carcasses without cracking.

Prodded on by some evil spell, I, too, was going to rage: I was going to defile the walls I’d caressed, spit on the shop windows I’d groomed myself in, and unload my quota of corpses into the sacred Tigris, the anthropophagous river, once greedy for the splendid virgins who were sacrificed to the gods, and today full of undesirables whose decomposing remains polluted its virtuous waters….

The bus crossed a bridge and traveled alongside the river. I didn’t want to look at the public squares, which I imagined devastated, or at the sidewalks, teeming with people I already no longer loved. How could I love anything after what I’d seen in Kafr Karam? How could I appreciate perfect strangers after I’d fallen in my own self-esteem? Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn’t really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition! I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I’d awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life.

I wasn’t returning to Baghdad to relive happy memories, but to banish them forever. The blooming innocence of first love was over; the city and I no longer had anything to say to each other. And yet we were very much alike; we’d lost our souls, and we were ready to destroy others.

The bus stopped at the station square, which had been occupied by a horde of ragged urchins with crafty faces and wandering hands: feral, garbage-eating street kids whom the bankrupt orphanages and reform schools had dumped onto the city. They were a recent phenomenon, one whose existence I hadn’t even suspected. The first passengers had hardly stepped out of the bus when someone cried out, “Stop, thief!” A group of kids had gathered around the hatches and helped themselves amid the crowd. Before anyone realized what had happened, the band was already across the street and moving fast, their booty on their shoulders.

I pinned my bag tightly under my arm and got away from there in a hurry.

The Thawba clinic was several blocks from the bus station. I decided to walk there, as I was stiff from sitting so long. There were a few cars scattered across the clinic’s parking lot, a little square surrounded by bashed-up palm trees. Times had changed, and so had the clinic; it was merely the shadow of its former self, with scary-looking windows and a tarnished facade.

I walked up the outside staircase and came to a security officer, who was cleaning his teeth with a match. “I’m here to see Dr. Farah,” I said.

“Let me see your appointment slip.”

“I’m her brother.”

He asked me to wait on the landing, entered a small, windowed office, and spoke to the clerk, who shot a suspicious look in my direction before picking up the telephone. After two minutes or so, I saw him nod his head and make a sign to the officer, who came back and escorted me to a waiting room furnished with exhausted sofas.

Farah came in about ten minutes later, radiant in her long white apron, her stethoscope dangling on her chest. She was carefully made up, but she’d put on a little too much lipstick. She welcomed me without enthusiasm, as if we saw each other every day. Her work, which allowed her no rest, had probably worn her out, and she’d obviously lost weight. Her kisses were fleeting and accompanied by a lifeless embrace.

“When did you get here?” she asked.

“Here in Baghdad? Just a few minutes ago.”

“Bahia phoned me to announce your visit the day before yesterday.”

“We lost a lot of time on the road. With all those military roadblocks and the obligatory detours—”

“Did you have to come?” she asked, a hint of reproach in her voice.

I didn’t understand right away, but her unwavering stare helped me to see the light. She wasn’t acting like that because she was exhausted or because of her work; my sister was simply not overjoyed to see me.

“Have you had lunch?”

“No.”

“I’ve got three patients to attend to. I’m going to take you to a room. Then, first thing, you’re going to have a nice shower, because you smell really strong. After that, a nurse will bring you something to eat. If I’m not back by the time you’re finished, just lie down on the bed and rest until I come.”

I picked up my bag and followed her along a corridor and then upstairs to the next floor. She let me into a room furnished with a bed and a night table. There was a little television set on a wall bracket and, behind a plastic curtain, a shower.

“Soap, shampoo, and towels are in the closet,” Farah said. “The water’s rationed — don’t use more than you need.” She looked at her watch. “I have to hurry.”

And she left the room.

I stood where I was for a good while, staring at the spot where my sister had vanished and wondering if, somehow, I had made a bad choice. Of course, Farah had always been distant. She was a rebel and a fighter, the only girl from Kafr Karam who’d ever dared to violate the rules of the tribe and do exactly what she wanted to do. Her audacity and insolence obviously conditioned her temperament, making her more aggressive and less conciliatory, but the welcome I’d received disturbed me. Our last meeting had been more than a year ago, when she visited the family in Kafr Karam. Even though she didn’t stay as long as she’d said she would, there wasn’t a moment when she seemed disdainful of us. True, she rarely laughed, but nothing had suggested she’d receive her own brother with such indifference.

I took off my clothes, stood under the shower, and soaped myself from head to foot. When I stepped out, I felt as though I had a new skin. I put on some clean clothes and stretched out on the sponge mattress, which was covered with an oilcloth spread. A nurse brought me a tray of food. I devoured it like an animal and fell asleep immediately afterward.

When Farah returned, the sun was going down. She seemed more relaxed. She half-sat on the edge of the bed and put her white hands around one of her knees. “I came by earlier,” she said, “but you were sleeping so soundly, I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“I hadn’t slept a wink for two days and two nights.”

Farah released her knee and scratched her temple. A look of annoyance crossed her face. “You’ve picked a bad time to turn up here,” she said. “Right now, Baghdad’s the most dangerous place on earth.”

Her gaze, so steady a while ago, started eluding mine.

I asked her, “Does it bother you that I’m here?”

She stood up and went to switch on the ceiling light. This was a ridiculous thing to do, as the room was brightly illuminated already. Suddenly, she turned around and said, “Why have you come to Baghdad?”

Once again, there was that hint of reproach.

We’d never been very close. Farah was much older than I was, and she’d left home early, so our relations had remained rather vague. Even when I was attending the university, we saw each other only occasionally. Now that she was standing in front of me, I realized that she was a stranger, and — worse — that I didn’t love her.

“There’s nothing but trouble in Baghdad,” she said. She passed her tongue over her lips and continued. “We’re overwhelmed here at the clinic. Every day, we get a new flood of sick people, wounded people, mutilated people. Half of my colleagues have thrown up their arms in despair. Since we’ve stopped being paid, there are only about twenty of us left, trying to salvage what we can.”

She took an envelope from her pocket and held it out to me.

“What’s that?”

“A little money. Get a hotel room for a few days. I need some time to figure out where to put you up.”

I couldn’t believe it.

I pushed the envelope away. “Are you telling me you don’t have your apartment anymore?”

“I’ve still got it, but you can’t stay there.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t have you.”

“How do you mean? I’m not following you. At home, if someone needs a place to stay, we work something—”

“I’m not in Kafr Karam,” she said. “I’m in Baghdad.”

“I’m your brother. You don’t shut your door in your brother’s face.”

“I’m sorry.”

I looked her up and down. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I didn’t recognize her anymore. She was nothing like the image of her I had in my head. Her features meant nothing to me; she was someone else.

“You’re ashamed of me — that’s it, isn’t it? You’ve renounced your origins. You’re a city girl now, all modern and all, and me, I’m still the hick who spoils the decor, right? Madame is a physician. She lives by herself in a chic apartment where she no longer receives her relatives, for fear of becoming the laughingstock of her neighbors on the other side of the landing—”

“I can’t let you stay with me because I live with someone,” she said, interrupting me curtly.

An avalanche of ice landed on me.

“You live with someone? How can that be? You got married without letting the family know?”

“I’m not married.”

I bounded to my feet. “You live with a man? You live in sin?”

She gave me a dry look. “What’s sin, little brother?”

“You don’t have the right. It’s…it’s forbidden by, by…Look, have you gone mad? You have a family. Do you ever think about your family? About its honor? About yours? You are — you can’t live in sin, not you….”

“I don’t live in sin; I live my life.”

“You don’t believe in God anymore?”

“I believe in what I do, and that’s enough for me.”

10

I wandered around the city until I could no longer put one foot in front of the other. I didn’t want to think about anything or see anything or understand anything. People swirled around me; I ignored them. I don’t know how many times I stepped off a sidewalk, only to be blown back by a blaring horn. I’d emerge from my personal darkness for a second and then plunge into it again as though nothing had happened. I felt at ease in my black thoughts, safe from my torments, out of reach of troublesome questions, alone inside my rage, which was digging channels in my veins and merging with the fibers of my being. Farah was ancient history. As soon as I left her, I’d banished her from my thoughts. She was nothing but a succubus, a whore, and she had no more place in my life. In our ancestral tradition, when a relative went astray, that person was systematically banished from the community. When the sinner was a woman, she was rejected all the more swiftly.

Night caught up with me on a bench in a hapless square next to a car wash. Suspicious characters of every stripe were loitering about, spurned by angels and devils alike, beached on that square like whales cast out of the ocean. There was a bunch of dead-drunk bums shrouded in rags, urchins stoned on shoemaker’s glue, destitute women sitting under trees and begging with their infants on their laps. This part of town hadn’t been like this when I was in Baghdad before the invasion. The neighborhood wasn’t fashionable then, but it was tranquil and tidy, with well-lit shops and innocuous pedestrians. Now, it was infested with famished orphans, tatterdemalion young werewolves covered with sores, who would stop at nothing.

With my bag pressed against my chest, I observed a pack of cubs prowling around my bench.

A snot-nosed brat sat down beside me. “What do you want?” I asked him. He was a kid of about ten, with a slashed face and streaming nostrils. His tangled hair hung down over his brow like the nest of snakes on Medusa’s head. He had disturbing eyes and a treacherous smile playing about his mouth. His long shirt reached his calves, his trousers were torn, and he was barefoot. His damaged toes, black with dirt, smelled like a dead animal.

“I’ve got a right to sit here, don’t I?” he yapped, meeting my eye. “It’s a public bench; it’s not your property.”

A knife handle protruded from his pocket.

A few meters away, three little rascals were feigning interest in a patch of grass. In reality, they were observing us on the sly, waiting for a sign from their comrade.

I got up and walked away. The kid on the bench hissed an obscenity in my direction and lifted his shirt to show me his crotch. His three pals sneered and stared at me. The eldest of them wasn’t yet thirteen, but they stank of death like carrion.

I walked faster.

A few blocks farther on, shadows rose up out of the darkness and charged at me. Taken by surprise, I flattened myself against a wall. Hands clutched my bag and tried to tear it away from me. I kicked out, struck someone’s leg, and retreated into a doorway. The would-be muggers came at me with increased ferocity. I felt the straps of my bag giving way and started dealing blows blindly. At the end of a desperate struggle, my assailants released their grip and ran away. When they passed under a streetlight, I recognized the four wolf cubs of a little while ago.

I crouched down on the sidewalk, clutching my head, and took several deep breaths to get my wind back. “What country is this?” I heard myself pant.

When I stood up, I had the impression that my bag was lighter. And in fact, one side of it had been cut open, and half of my things were gone. I put my hand on my back pocket and was relieved to find that my money was still there. That was when I started running toward the city center, jumping aside every time a shadow passed me.

I ate at a place that served grilled meats. I sat at a table in the corner, far from the door and the windows, with one eye on my brochettes and the other on the steady stream of customers entering and leaving. I recognized no one, and I grew irritated every time somebody’s eyes settled on me. I was uncomfortable in the midst of all those hairy creatures, who filled me with suspicion and dread. They didn’t have very much in common with the people of my village, except perhaps for their human form, which did nothing to temper their brutish aspect. Everything about them filled me with cold animosity. I had the feeling I’d ventured into enemy territory — or, worse, into a minefield, and I expected to be blown to pieces at any moment.

“Relax,” the waiter said, putting a plate of fries in front of me. “I’ve been holding out this plate to you for a good minute, and you just stare right through me. What’s wrong? Have you escaped a raid? Or maybe survived an attack?”

He winked at me and went to take care of another customer.

After eating my brochettes and my fries, I ordered more, and then more after that. I’d never been so hungry, and the more I ate, the more my hunger increased. I consumed two baskets of bread and a good twenty brochettes, to say nothing of the fries, and washed everything down with a one-liter bottle of soda and a pitcher of water. My sudden appetite scared me.

To put an end to this gorging, I asked for the check. While the cashier was giving me my change, I asked, “Is there a hotel near here?”

He raised an eyebrow and looked at me askance. “There’s a mosque at the other end of the street, behind the square. It’ll be on your left as you step out. They provide accommodations for transients at night. At least you’ll be able to rest easy there.”

“I want to go to a hotel.”

“You’re obviously not from here. All the hotels are under surveillance. And the police give the managers so much shit that most of them have closed their places down. Go to the mosque. The police don’t show up there very often, and besides, it’s free.”

“If I were you, that’s what I’d do,” the waiter said as he slipped past.

I picked up my bag and went out into the street.

Actually, the mosque was on the ground floor of a two-story warehouse wedged between a large disused store and another building. A large room in the warehouse had been transformed into a prayer hall. The neighborhood had a cutthroat look I disliked right away. The meager light from a streetlamp picked out the boarded-up fronts of two grocer’s shops, one across from the other. It was eleven o’clock at night, and except for the cats rummaging around in the piles of garbage on the sidewalks, there wasn’t a living soul in sight.

The prayer hall had been evacuated and the homeless people lodged in another room large enough to accommodate about fifty persons. The floor was covered with old blankets. A chandelier cast its beams upon various shapeless masses curled up here and there. There were about twenty wretches on the floor, all of them sleeping in their clothes, some with their mouths open, others in a fetal position; the place smelled like rags and feet.

I decided to lie down in a corner alongside an old man. Using my bag as a pillow, I fixed my eyes on the ceiling and waited.

The chandelier went out. Snores came from all sides, intensified, and then became intermittent. I listened to the blood beating in my temples and heard my breathing accelerate; waves of nausea rose from my stomach, ending in stifled belches. Once only, the image of my father falling over backward flashed through my head; I immediately drove it out of my mind. I was too badly off to burden myself with disturbing memories.

I dreamed that a pack of dogs were chasing me through a dark wood where the branches had claws and the air was loud with screams. I was naked, my arms and legs were bloody, and my hair was streaming with bird droppings. Suddenly, the undergrowth parted, revealing a precipice. I was about to step into the void, when the muezzin’s call woke me up.

Most of last night’s sleepers, including the old man beside me, had left the room. Only four miserable wretches remained in tattered heaps on the floor. As for my bag, it wasn’t there anymore. I put my hand on my back pocket; my money had disappeared.

Sitting on the sidewalk with my chin in my hands, I watched uniformed policemen checking cars. They asked for the passengers’ papers as well as the drivers’ and inspected all of them carefully; sometimes they made everyone get out of the car and then began a systematic search, sifting through the contents of the trunk and looking under the hood and the chassis. The previous evening, in this same spot, the interception of an ambulance had turned dramatic. The physician on board the ambulance had tried to explain that the case was an emergency, but the policemen didn’t want to hear about that. Eventually, the doctor became upset, and a police corporal punched him in the face. Things degenerated from there. Threats were answered by insults, blows were struck by both sides, and finally the corporal pulled out his pistol and shot the doctor in the leg.

This part of town had a bad reputation. Two days before the ambulance incident, someone had been murdered in the exact spot where the police roadblock now stood. The victim, a man in his fifties, had come out of the shop across the way with a shopping bag in his arms. As he was getting ready to climb into his car, a motorbike pulled up beside him. Three shots, and the fellow collapsed on the pavement, his head resting on his purchases.

A few days before that, in the same place, a young deputy in the Iraqi parliament had likewise been cut down. He’d been driving his car when a motorbike caught up with him. There was a volley of shots, and the windshield suddenly seemed to be covered with spiderwebs. The vehicle skidded onto the sidewalk and flattened a female pedestrian before crashing into a lamppost. The hooded killer hurried over to the car, opened the door, pulled out the young deputy, laid him on the ground, and riddled him with bullets at pointblank range. Then, without haste, the gunman got back on his motorbike and roared away.

The police had no doubt taken over the neighborhood with the intention of stopping the killing. But the city was a sieve; it leaked everywhere. Murderous attacks were the order of the day. When the authorities plugged one hole, they freed up others that were more dangerous. Baghdad was no longer an urban center; the lovely city I remembered had become a battlefield, a firing range, a gigantic butcher’s shop. Several weeks before the Allied bombardments began, people had still believed a miracle was possible. All over the world, in Rome and in Tokyo, in Madrid and in Paris, in Cairo and in Berlin, there were mass demonstrations and marches — millions of strangers converging on their city centers to say no to war. Who listened to them?

For two weeks, I wandered around in rubble, without a penny and without a goal. I slept anywhere and ate anything and flinched at every explosion. It was like being at the front, with the endless rolls of barbed wire marking off high-security areas, the makeshift barricades, the antitank obstacles against which suicide bombers occasionally detonated their cars, the watchtowers rising above the facades of buildings, the caltrop barriers lying across roadways, and the sleepwalking people who had no idea where to turn but nevertheless, whenever an attack was carried out, rushed to the scene of the tragedy like flies to a drop of blood.

Baghdad was decomposing. After spending a long, tortured time docked in repression, the city had broken from its moorings and gone adrift, fascinated by its own suicidal rage and the intoxications of impunity. Once the tyrant had fallen, Baghdad found much that was still intact: its forced silences, its vengeful cowardice, its large-scale misery. Now that all proscriptions were removed, the city drained the cup of resentment, the source of its wounds, to the dregs. Exhilarated by its suffering and the revulsion it aroused, Baghdad was trying to become the incarnation of all that it couldn’t bear and rejecting its former public image. And from the grossest despair, it drew the ingredients of its own agony.

Baghdad was a city that preferred exploding belts and banners cut from shrouds.

I was exhausted, demoralized, appalled, and nauseated, all at once. Every day, my contempt and my rage rose another notch. One morning, I looked in a shop window and didn’t recognize myself. My hair was bushy, my face wrinkled, my eyes white-hot and hideous, my lips chapped; my clothes left a lot to be desired; I had become a bum.

Now I was sitting on the sidewalk across from the checkpoint. I don’t know how many hours I’d spent in that position when a voice barked, “You can’t stay there.”

The speaker was a cop. It was a few moments before I realized he was addressing me. With a scornful wave, he signaled to me to clear off. “Let’s go, let’s go, move on.” I got to my feet, a little dazed by my nagging hunger. When I reached out a hand for support, I found only empty air. I drew myself up and staggered away.

I walked and walked. It was as though I were marching through a parallel world. The boulevards opened up before me like giant maws. I went reeling along amid the crowd with blurry eyes and shooting pains in my calves. Now and then, an exasperated arm pushed me away. I straightened up and continued on aimlessly.

A crowd gathered around a vehicle burning on a bridge. I passed through the throng easily.

The river lapped at its banks, deaf to the clamor of the damned. A gust of sand-laden wind stung my face. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.

“Hey!”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have the strength to turn around; one false move, and I’d collapse. It seemed to me that the only way to stay on my feet was to walk, to look straight ahead, and, especially, to avoid all distractions.

A horn sounded — once, twice, three times. After an interval, running footsteps came up behind me, and then a hand grabbed my shoulder.

“Are you deaf, or what?”

A pudgy form straddled my path. My clouded vision prevented me from recognizing the interloper right away. He spread out his arms, inadvertently displaying his oversized belly. “It’s me,” he said.

It was as if an oasis had emerged out of my delirium. I don’t think I’ve ever known such a sensation of relief or felt so happy. The smiling man before me brought me back to life, revived me, became at once my only recourse and my last chance. It was Omar the Corporal.

“You’re amazed, aren’t you?” he exclaimed with delight, turning in a circle in front of me. “Check this outfit. A real knockout, right?”

He smoothed the lapels of his sport jacket and fingered the crease in his trousers. “Not a drop of grease, not a wrinkle. Your cousin is impeccable. Like a brand-new penny. You remember, in Kafr Karam? I always had oil or grease stains on my clothes. Well, since I’ve been in Baghdad, that doesn’t happen anymore.”

All of a sudden, his enthusiasm subsided. He’d just realized that I wasn’t well, that I was having trouble staying upright, that I was on the point of fainting.

“My God! Where have you been?”

I stared at him and said, “I’m hungry.”

11

Omar took me to a cheap eating place. All the while I ate, he said not a single word. He saw that I wasn’t in a position to understand anything at all. I bent over my plate, looking only at the wilted fries, which I devoured by the fistful, and the bread, which I tore apart ferociously. It seemed to me that I wasn’t even taking the trouble to chew the food. The giant mouthfuls flayed my throat, my fingers were sticky, and my chin was covered with sauce. Other customers seated nearby gawked at me in horror. Omar had to frown to make them turn their eyes away.

When I’d finished stuffing myself, he took me to a shop to buy me some clothes. Then he dropped me off at the public baths. I took a shower and felt a little better.

Afterward, with a hint of embarrassment, Omar said, “I assume you have nowhere to go.”

“No, I don’t.”

He scratched his chin.

Overly sensitive, I said, “You’re under no obligation.”

“It’s not that, cousin. You’re in good hands — it’s just that they’re not completely free. I share a little studio flat with an associate.”

“That’s all right. I’ll manage.”

“I’m not trying to get rid of you. I just need to think. There’s no chance I’m going to abandon you. Baghdad wastes no pity on strays.”

“I don’t want to bother you. You’ve done enough for me already.”

With an upraised hand, he asked me to let him give the matter some thought. We were in the street; I was standing on the sidewalk, and he was leaning against his van, his arms crossed and his chin resting on an index finger, his great belly like a barrier between us.

“That’s the way it’ll have to be,” he said abruptly. “I’ll tell my roommate to beat it until we find you something. He’s a nice guy. He’s got family in Baghdad.”

“You’re sure I’m not causing you trouble?”

He straightened up with a thrust of his hips and opened the passenger door for me. “Get in, cousin,” he said. “Things are going to be tight.”

As I hesitated, he grabbed me by the shoulder and shoved me into the van.

Omar lived in Salman Pak, an outlying neighborhood in the southeastern part of the city. His flat was on the second floor of a flaking apartment building that stood on a side street overrun by packs of children. The outside steps were falling into ruin, and the doors were halfway off their hinges. In the stairwell, miasmal odors lingered, and the mailboxes hung askew; there were empty spaces where some of them had been wrenched away completely. The cracked stairs mounted into an unhealthy, pitch-black darkness.

“There’s no light,” Omar explained. “Because of thieves. You replace a bulb, and the next minute they rip it off.”

Two little girls, quite young, were playing on the landing. Their faces were revoltingly dirty.

“Their mother’s a head case,” Omar whispered. “She leaves them there all day long and doesn’t care what they do. Sometimes, pedestrians have to bring them in from the street. And the mother doesn’t like it at all when someone advises her to keep an eye on her kids…. The world’s full of lunatics.”

He opened the door and stepped aside to let me enter. The room was small and meagerly furnished. There was a double mattress on the floor, a wooden crate with a little television set on it, and a stool against the wall. A padlocked closet faced the window, which overlooked the courtyard. That was it. A jail would offer its prisoners more amenities than Omar’s studio apartment offered his guests.

“Behold my realm,” the Corporal exclaimed, gesturing theatrically. “In the closet, you’ll find blankets, some cans of food, and some crackers. I don’t have a kitchen, and when I want to shit, I have to suck in my gut to get to the toilet.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the tiny bathroom. “The water’s rationed. It comes once a week, and not much at that. If you’re not here or you forget, you have to wait for the next distribution. Grumbling does no good. In the first place, it’s boring, and in the second, it only increases your thirst. I have two jerricans in the bathroom. For washing your face, because the water isn’t drinkable.”

He opened the padlock, took off the little chain, and showed me the contents of the closet. “Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ve got to run if I don’t want to get fired. I’ll be back in three hours, four at most. I’ll bring some food and we’ll talk about the good old days. Maybe we can conjure them up again.”

Before he left, he advised me to double-lock the door and to sleep with one eye open.

When Omar returned, the sun was going down. He sat on the stool and looked at me as I lay on the mattress, stretching. “You’ve been asleep for twenty-four hours,” he announced.

“You’re kidding!”

“It’s true, I assure you. I tried to wake you up this morning, but you didn’t budge. When I came back around noon, you were still in a deep sleep. You even slept through our local explosion.”

“There was an attack?”

“We’re in Baghdad, cousin. When it’s not a bomb going off, it’s a gas cylinder blowing up. This time, it was an accident. Some people got killed, but I didn’t look at the figures. I’ll bring myself up-to-date next time.”

I wasn’t feeling great, but I was happy to know I had a roof over my head and Omar at my side. My intensive two-week Introduction to Vagrancy course had done me in. I wouldn’t have been able to hold out much longer.

“Will you tell me why you’ve come to Baghdad?” Omar asked, scrutinizing his fingernails.

“To avenge an offense,” I said without hesitation.

He raised his eyes and gave me a sad look. “These days, people come to Baghdad to avenge an offense they’ve suffered elsewhere, which means they tend to mistake their targets — by a lot. What happened in Kafr Karam?”

“The Americans.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

He nodded. “I understand,” he said, getting off his stool. “Let’s go for a little walk. Afterward, we’ll have a bite in a restaurant. It’s better to chat on a full stomach.”

We walked the length and breadth of the neighborhood, talking about trifles, leaving the main subject until later. Omar was concerned. A nasty wrinkle creased his forehead. He shuffled along with his chin on his clavicle and his hands behind his back, as though a burden were wearing him down. And he wouldn’t stop kicking whatever tin cans he found along the way. Night fell softly on the city and its delirium. From time to time, police cars passed us, their sirens wailing, and then the ordinary racket of a densely populated quarter returned, a din so banal as to be almost imperceptible.

We ate in a little restaurant on the square. Omar knew the owner. He had only two other customers; one of them, with his wire-rimmed glasses and his sober suit, looked like a young leading man, and the other, a dust-covered driver, never took his eye off his truck, which was parked in front of the restaurant, within reach of a pack of kids.

“How long have you been in Baghdad?” Omar asked.

“About two and a half weeks, more or less.”

“Where did you sleep?”

“In squares, on the banks of the Tigris, in mosques. It depended. Generally, I lay down wherever I was when my legs gave way.”

“For pity’s sake! How did you wind up in such a fix? You should have seen your mug yesterday. I recognized you from a distance, but when I got closer, I had my doubts. You looked as though some fat whore had pissed on you while you were eating her out.”

There he was in all his glory, the Corporal of Kafr Karam. Oddly enough, his obscenity didn’t repulse me as much as usual. I said, “I came with the idea of staying with my sister, at least for a while, but it wasn’t possible. I had a little money with me, enough to make it for a month at most. By then, I thought, I’ll have found some kind of place. But the first night, I slept in a mosque, and in the morning, my money and my belongings were gone. After that, I’ll let you guess.” Then, trying to change the subject, I asked, “How did your roommate take the news?”

“He’s a good guy. He knows what’s what.”

“I promise not to take advantage of your hospitality.”

“Don’t talk shit, cousin. You’re not causing me any hardship. If I were in your situation, you’d do the same thing for me. We’re Bedouin. We don’t have anything to do with these people here….”

He put his joined hands over his mouth and stared at me with great intensity. “Now will you explain to me why you want revenge? And what exactly do you intend to do?”

“I have no idea.”

He swelled his cheeks and let out an irrepressible sigh. His right hand moved over the table, picked up a spoon, and started stirring the cold soup still left in his bowl. Omar guessed what I had in mind. There were legions of peasants streaming in from the hinterlands to swell the ranks of the fedayeen. Every morning, buses discharged contingents of them at the Baghdad stations. Various motivations activated these men, but they all shared a single, blindingly obvious objective.

“I’m in no position to oppose your choice, cousin. No one owns the truth. Personally, I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong, and so I can’t lecture you about anything. You’ve suffered an offense; only you can decide what’s to be done about it.”

His voice was full of false notes.

“It’s a question of honor, Omar,” I reminded him.

“I don’t want to quibble over that. But you have to know exactly what you’re getting into. You see what the resistance does every day. It’s killed thousands of Iraqis. In exchange for how many Americans? If the answer to that question doesn’t matter to you, then that’s your problem. But as for me, I disagree.”

He ordered two coffees to gain time and gather his arguments; then he went on. “To tell you the truth, I came to Baghdad to do some damage. I’ve never been able to get over the way Yaseen insulted me in the café. He disrespected me, and ever since, when I think about it — which is to say several times a day — I start gasping for air. You’d think Yaseen made me asthmatic.”

Evoking the shaming incident in Kafr Karam made Omar ill at ease. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. “One thing I’m sure of: My ass is going to have that offense stuck to it until the insult is washed away in blood,” he declared. “There’s no doubt about it — sooner or later, Yaseen will pay for it with his life.”

The waiter placed two cups of coffee next to our plates. Omar waited to watch him withdraw before reapplying the handkerchief to his face and neck. His plump shoulders vibrated. He said, “I’m ashamed of what happened in the Safir. Staying drunk did no good, none at all. I decided I had to get lost. I was all psyched up. I wanted to turn the country into an inferno from one end to the other. Everything I put in my mouth tasted like blood; every breath I took stank of cremation. My hands were itching for a gun — I swear, I could feel the trigger move when I curled my finger. While the bus was taking me to Baghdad, I imagined myself digging trenches in the desert, making shelters and command posts. I was thinking like a military engineer — you see what I mean? And I happened to arrive in Baghdad the day a false alert caused an enormous crush on a bridge — you remember — and a thousand demonstrators got killed. When I saw that, cousin, when I saw all those bodies on the ground, when I saw those mountains of shoes at the site where the panic took place, those kids with blue faces and their eyes half-closed — when I saw that whole mess, caused to Iraqis by Iraqis, I said to myself, right away, This is not my war. It was a clean break, cousin.”

He brought the coffee cup to his lips, drank a mouthful, and invited me to do the same. His face was quivering, and his nostrils made me think of a fish suffocating in the open air. “I came here to join the fedayeen,” he said. “It was all I thought about. Even the Yaseen thing was deferred until later. I’d settle his account when the time came. But first, I had to come to terms with the deserter in me. I had to find the weapons I’d left on the battlefield when the enemy approached; I had to deserve the country I couldn’t defend when I was supposed to be ready to die for it…. But, hell, you don’t make war on your own people just to piss off the world.”

He awaited my reaction — which did not come — and then rummaged in his hair with a discouraged look. My silence embarrassed him. He understood that I didn’t share his emotions, and that I was solidly camped on my own. That’s the way we are, we Bedouin. When we keep quiet, that means that everything’s been said and there’s nothing more to add. He saw the mess on the bridge again; I saw nothing, not even my father falling over backward. I was in the postshock, postoffense period; it was my duty to wash away the insult, my sacred duty and my absolute right. I didn’t know myself what that represented or how it was constructed in my mind; I knew only that an obligation I couldn’t ignore was mobilizing me. I was neither anxious nor galvanized; I was in another dimension, where the only reference point I had was the certainty that I would carry out to the fullest extent the oath my ancestors had sealed in blood and sorrow when they placed honor above their own lives.

“You listening to me, cousin?”

“Yes.”

“The actions of the fedayeen are lowering us in the eyes of the world. We’re Iraqis, cousin. We have eleven thousand years of history behind us. We’re the ones who taught men to dream.”

He drained his cup in a single swallow and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I’m not trying to influence you.”

“You know very well that’s impossible.”

Night had fallen. A hot wind hugged the walls. The sky was covered with dust. On an esplanade, some kids, not at all bothered by the darkness, were playing soccer. Omar trudged alongside me, his heavy feet scraping the ground. When we reached a streetlight, he stopped to look me over.

“Do you think I’m putting my nose in something that’s none of my business, cousin?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t trying to put anything over on you. I’m not on anybody’s side.”

“That didn’t even occur to me.”

I looked him over in turn. “Life has rules, Omar, and without some of them, humanity would return to the Stone Age. Sure, they don’t all suit us, and they aren’t infallible or even always reasonable, but they help us hold a certain course. You know what I’d like to be doing right now? I’d like to be home in my room on the roof, listening to my tinny radio and dreaming about a piece of bread and some cool water. But I don’t have a radio anymore, and I couldn’t go back home without dying of shame before I crossed the threshold.”

12

Omar worked as a deliveryman for a furniture dealer, a former warrant officer he’d known in the army. They’d met by chance in a woodworker’s shop. Omar had recently landed in Baghdad, and he was looking for some comrades from his unit, but the addresses he had were no longer current; many of the men had moved away or disappeared. Omar was about to offer his services to the woodworker, when the warrant officer came in to order some tables and cupboards. The two of them, Omar and the warrant officer, had flung themselves into each other’s arms. After the embraces and the customary questions, Omar revealed his situation to his former superior. The warrant officer wasn’t exactly flush with money and didn’t really have enough business to afford new hires, but team spirit won out over bottom-line considerations, and the deserting Corporal was engaged on the spot. His employer provided Omar with the blue van he drove and devotedly maintained and also found him the studio flat in Salman Pak. The salary Omar received was modest and sometimes several weeks late, but the warrant officer didn’t cheat. Omar knew from the beginning that he was going to work hard for peanuts, but he had a roof, and he wasn’t starving. When he compared his situation with what he saw around him, he could only praise his saints and marvel at his luck.

Omar took me to see his employer, with the idea of angling for a job. He warned me beforehand that this was going to be a complete waste of effort. Business was in general decline, and even the people with the deepest pockets were having trouble feeding their families. Everyone had too many other priorities, too many pressing concerns, to think about buying a new sideboard or changing armchairs. The warrant officer, a long-limbed personage who resembled a wading bird, received me with great respect. Omar introduced me as his cousin and spoke highly of merits that were not necessarily mine. The warrant officer nodded and raised admiring eyebrows, his smile suspended on his face. When Omar came to the reasons for my presence in the warehouse, the warrant officer’s smile went away. Without saying a word, he disappeared through a concealed door and returned with a register, which he displayed under our noses. The lines of writing, in blue ink, went on and on, but not the lines of figures, which were underlined in red. The payments received were almost nonexistent, and as for the section in green ink with the heading “Orders,” it was as succinct as an official bulletin.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “We’re high and dry.”

Omar didn’t insist.

He called a few friends on his mobile phone and dragged me from one end of the city to the other; no potential employer we spoke to would so much as promise to let us know if an opening should occur. Our failures depressed Omar; as for me, I had the feeling that I was overburdening him. After the fifth day of not being able to get a foot in any door, I decided not to bother him further and said so.

Omar’s response was to call me an idiot. “You’re staying with me until you can stand on your own two feet. What would our family think if they learned I’d dropped you just like that? They already find my foul language and my reputation as a drunkard impossible to bear; I’m not going to let them say I’m two-faced, as well. I have a lot of faults, I surely do — no way I’m getting into paradise — but I have my pride, cousin, and I’m holding on to it.”

One afternoon, while Omar and I were twiddling our thumbs in a corner of the apartment, a young man, practically a boy, knocked on the door. He was thin-shouldered and frightened, with a girlish face and eyes of crystalline limpidity. He must have been my age, about twenty or so. He was wearing a tropical shirt — open at the neck, revealing his pink chest — tight jeans, and shoes that were new but scuffed on the sides. Chagrined at finding me there, he fixed the Corporal with an insistent stare that dismissed me out of hand.

Omar hastened to introduce us. He, too, had been caught unprepared; his voice trembled oddly as he said, “Cousin, this is Hany, my associate and roommate.”

Hany held out a fragile hand that almost dissolved in mine, and then, without showing much interest in me, signaled to Omar to follow him out onto the landing. They closed the door behind them. A few minutes later, Omar came back to say that he and his associate had some problems to deal with in the apartment; he wondered if I would mind waiting for him in the café on the corner.

“Just in time. I was starting to go numb in here,” I said.

Trying to make sure that I wasn’t taking it badly, Omar accompanied me to the bottom of the stairs. “Order whatever you want; it’s on me.”

His eyes were glinting with a strange jubilation.

“Sounds like good news,” I said.

He said, “Ah,” and trailed off in confusion. “Who knows? Heaven doesn’t always send bad luck.”

I brought my hand to my temple in a salute and went to the café. An hour later, Omar joined me. The discussion with his associate seemed to have been satisfactory.

Hany paid us several more visits. Each time, Omar asked me to go to the café and wait for him. Eventually, his roommate, who still couldn’t bring himself to share any sort of friendly exchange with me, came over one evening and declared that he’d been very patient and that now it was time for him to return to his normal daily life; in short, he wanted to reclaim his share of the apartment. Omar tried to reason with him. Hany persisted. He declared that he wasn’t comfortable with the people who’d taken him in; he was fed up with being subjected to their hypocrisy when he didn’t have to be. Hany had made up his mind. His set face and fixed stare allowed no possibility of negotiations.

“He’s right,” I said to Omar. “This is his place, after all. He’s been very patient.”

Hany’s eyes were still fixed on his associate. He didn’t even see the hand I put out to bid him farewell.

Omar’s irritation was audible as he stepped between me and his roommate and said to him, “Fine. You want to come back? The door is open. But this guy is my cousin, and I’m not about to kick him out. If I don’t find him a place this evening, I’ll sleep with him on a bench, tonight and every night until he’s got a roof over his head.”

I tried to protest. Omar pushed me onto the landing and slammed the door behind us.

First, we went to an acquaintance of Omar to see if there was any chance she might accommodate me for two or three days, but the two of them were unable to reach an agreement; then he fell back on his employer, who suggested I could sleep in his warehouse. Omar accepted the offer as a possible last resort and continued knocking on other doors. When they all rang hollow, we went back to the warehouse and acted like night watchmen.

By the end of the week, Omar had grown less and less talkative. He retreated inside himself and stopped paying attention to what I said to him. He was unhappy. The precariousness of our situation hollowed his cheeks and left its traces deep in his eyes. I felt responsible for his listlessness.

One morning, he asked me, “What do you think of Sayed, the Falcon’s son?”

“Nothing much, one way or the other. Why?”

“I’ve never been able to figure out that boy. I don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s got a household-appliances shop in the city center. Would you be willing to go and see if he’s in a position to give you a hand?”

“Of course. Why do you seem bothered?”

“I don’t want you to think I’m trying to get rid of you.”

“If I had such a thought, I wouldn’t forgive myself.” I patted him on the wrist to reassure him. “Let’s go see him, Omar. Right away.”

We took the van and headed for the center of Baghdad. An attack on a district police station caused us to turn back and drive around a large part of the city in order to reach a wide and very lively avenue. Sayed’s store stood on a corner next to a pharmacy, in the extension of a small, still-intact public garden. Omar parked about a hundred meters away. He was uneasy.

“Well, we’re lucky,” he said. “Sayed’s at the cash register. We won’t have to hang around the premises. You go and see him. Pretend you happened to be walking by and you thought you recognized him through the window. He’s sure to ask what brings you to Baghdad. Just tell him the truth: You’ve been living in the street for weeks, you don’t have anywhere to go, and your money’s all gone. Then, he’ll either come up with something for you or make up a bunch of crap to fend you off. If you get situated, don’t even think about visiting me at the warehouse. Not anytime soon, in any case. Let a week or two pass. I don’t want Sayed to know where I stay or what I do. I’d appreciate it if you never said my name in his presence. Me, I’m going back to the warehouse. If you don’t come back this evening, I’ll know you’ve been taken on.”

Rather eagerly, he pushed me out of the van, showed me his thumb, and quickly rejoined the vehicles slaloming around pedestrians.

Sayed was making entries in a register. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves, and beside him, a little fan whirled its noisy blades. When he noticed my indecisive silhouette in the doorway, he pushed his glasses up on his forehead and squinted. We’d never been very close, and it took him a little while to situate me in his memory. My heart started racing. Then his face lit up in a broad smile.

“I don’t believe it,” the Falcon’s son cried, spreading his arms in welcome.

He folded me in a long embrace. Then he asked, “What brings you to Baghdad?”

I told my story almost exactly the way Omar had suggested. Sayed listened to me with interest, but otherwise his face was expressionless. It was hard for me to tell whether my distress touched him or not. When he raised his hand to interrupt me, I thought he was about to kick me out. To my great relief, he put it on my shoulder and declared to me that my cares were his from that moment on; should I care to, he said, I could work in his store and live in a little storeroom on the upper floor.

“I sell television sets here, parabolic antennas, microwave ovens, et cetera. Naturally, everything that comes in and everything that goes out must be recorded. Your job would be to keep those records up-to-date. If memory serves, you attended the university, right?”

“I was a first-year humanities student.”

“Excellent! Bookkeeping’s nothing more than a question of honesty, and you’re an honest boy. For the rest, you’ll learn it as you go along. As you’ll see, it’s not all that difficult. I’m really very happy to welcome you here.”

He led me upstairs to show me my room. It was occupied by a young night watchman, who was relieved to be assigned to other duties, which meant he’d be able to go home after the store closed for the day. I liked the accommodations: There was a camp bed, a TV set, a table, and a wardrobe where I’d be able to keep my things. Sayed advanced me some money so I could go have a bath and buy myself a toilet kit and some clothes. He also invited me to a meal in a real restaurant.

That night, I slept like a stone.

At 8:30 the next morning, I raised the store’s rolling shutter. The first employees — there were three of them — were already waiting on the sidewalk outside. A few minutes later, Sayed joined us and performed the introductions. His workers shook my hand without displaying much enthusiasm. These were young city dwellers, mistrustful and little inclined to conversation. The tallest of them, Rashid, worked in the rear of the store, an area to which he had sole access. His job was to supervise deliveries of incoming merchandise and store it properly. The eldest of the three, Amr, was the deliveryman, and the third, Ismail, an electronics engineer, was in charge of after-sale service and repair.

Sayed’s office served as the reception area. He sat as though enthroned, facing the large shop window, and ceded the rest of the store to product display. Metal shelving ran the length of the walls. Small-or large-screen television sets with Asian brand names, accompanied by satellite dishes and every kind of sophisticated accessory, took up most of the available surface area. There were also electric coffee machines, food processors, grills, and other cooking appliances. Unlike the furniture dealer’s enterprise, Sayed’s store, located on an important commercial avenue, was constantly filled with shoppers, who jostled one another on the display floor all day long. Of course, the majority of them were there just for the sake of gawking; nonetheless, a steady stream of customers carrying purchases exited the store.

I was fine until the afternoon, when I returned to the store after a cheap lunch and Sayed informed me that some “very dear friends” were waiting for me in my room on the upper floor. Sayed led the way. When he opened the door, I saw Yaseen and the twins, Hassan and Hussein, sitting on my camp bed. A shiver went through me. The twins were overjoyed to see me again. They jumped on me and pounded me affectionately, laughing all the while. As for Yaseen, he didn’t get up. He remained seated on the bed, unmoving, his spine erect, like a cobra. He cleared his throat, a signal to the two brothers to cut out the hilarity, and fixed me with the gaze that no one in Kafr Karam dared to withstand.

“It took you a while to wake up,” he said to me.

I failed to grasp what he meant by that.

The twins leaned against the wall and left me in the center of the little room, facing Yaseen. “So how are things?” he asked.

“I can’t complain.”

“I can,” he said. “I pity you.”

He fidgeted, successfully liberating the tail of his jacket from under his behind. He’d changed, Yaseen had. I’d have thought he was ten years older than was actually the case. A few months had been enough to harden his features. His stare was still intimidating, but the corners of his mouth were furrowed, as if they’d cracked under the pressure of his fixed grin.

I decided not to let him upset me. “Are you going to tell me why you pity me?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You think you’re not pitiful?”

“I’m listening.”

“He’s listening. Finally, he can hear, our dear well-digger’s son. Now, how shall we aggravate him?” He looked me up and down before going on. “I wonder what goes on in your head, my friend. You have to be autistic not to see what’s happening. The country’s at war, and millions of fools act as if everything’s cool. When something explodes in the street, they go back inside and close their shutters and wash their hands of the whole affair. The trouble is, things don’t work that way. Sooner or later, the war will knock their houses down and surprise them in their beds. How many times did I tell you and everybody else in Kafr Karam? I told you all: If we don’t go to the fire, the fire will come to us. Who listened to me? Hey, Hassan. Who listened to me?”

“Nobody,” Hassan said.

“Did you sit around waiting for the fire to come?”

“No, Yaseen,” Hassan said.

“Did you wait until some sons of bitches came and yanked you out of your bed in the middle of the night before you opened your eyes?”

“No,” Hassan said.

“How about you, Hussein? Did some sons of bitches have to drag you through the mud to wake you up?”

“No,” Hussein said.

Yaseen looked me over again. “As for me, I didn’t wait, either. I became an insurgent before someone spat on my self-respect. Was there anything I lacked in Kafr Karam? Did I have anything to complain about? I could have closed my shutters and stopped up my ears. But I knew that if I didn’t go to the fire, the fire was going to come to my house. I took up arms because I didn’t want to wind up like Sulayman. A question of survival? No, just a question of logic. This is my country. Scoundrels are trying to extort it from me. So what do I do? According to you, what do I do? You think I wait until they come and rape my mother before my eyes, and under my roof?”

Hassan and Hussein bowed their heads.

Yaseen breathed slowly, moderating the intensity of his gaze, and then spoke again. “I know what happened at your house.”

I frowned.

“Oh, yes,” he continued. “What men consider a grave is a vegetable garden as far as their better halves are concerned. Women don’t know the meaning of the word secret.”

I bowed my head.

Yaseen leaned back against the wall, folded his arms over his chest, and gazed at me in silence. His eyes made me uncomfortable. He crossed his legs and put his palms on his knees. “I know what it is to see your revered father on the floor, balls in the air, thrown down by a brute,” he said.

My throat clamped shut. I couldn’t believe he was going to reveal my family’s shame! I wouldn’t stand for it.

Yaseen read on my face what I was shouting deep inside. It meant nothing to him. Jerking his chin toward the twins and Sayed, he went on. “All of us here — me, the others in this room, and the beggars in the street — we all know perfectly well what the outrage committed against your family signifies. But the GI has no clue. He can’t measure the extent of the sacrilege. He doesn’t even know what a sacrilege is. In his world, a man sticks his parents in an old folks’ home and forgets them. They’re the least of his worries. He calls his mother ‘an old bag’ and his father ‘an asshole.’ What can you expect from such a person?”

Anger was smothering me. Clearly recognizing my condition, Yaseen raised the bidding. “What can you expect from a snot-nosed degenerate who would put his mother into a home for the moribund, his mother, the woman who conceived him fiber by fiber, carried him in her womb, labored to bring him into the world, raised him step by step, and watched beside him night after night like a star? Can you expect such a person to respect our mothers? Can you expect him to kiss the foreheads of our old men?”

The silence of Sayed and the twins increased my anger. I had the feeling they’d pulled me into a trap, and I resented them for it. If Yaseen was meddling in a matter that was none of his business, well, that was pretty consistent with his character and his reputation; but for the others to act as his accomplices without really getting completely involved — that enraged me.

Sayed saw that I was on the point of imploding. He said, “Those people have no more consideration for their elders than they do for their offspring. That’s what Yaseen’s trying to explain to you. He’s not chewing you out. He’s telling you facts. What happened in Kafr Karam has shaken all of us, I assure you. I knew nothing about it until this morning. And when I heard the story, I was furious. Yaseen’s right. The Americans have gone too far.”

“Seriously, what did you expect?” Yaseen growled, annoyed by Sayed’s intervention. “You thought they’d modestly avert their eyes from the nakedness of a handicapped, terrorized sexagenarian?” He made a little circle with his hand. “Why?”

I had lost the power of speech.

Sayed took advantage of my tongue-tied state to land a few blows of his own. “Why should they turn away? These are people who can catch their wives in bed with their best friends and act as though nothing’s wrong. Modesty’s a virtue they’ve long since lost sight of. Honor? They’ve distorted its codes. They’re just infuriated retards, smashing valuable things, like buffalo let loose in a porcelain shop. They arrive here from an unjust, cruel universe with no humanity and no morals, where the powerful feed on the flesh of the downtrodden. Violence and hatred sum up their history; Machiavellianism shapes and justifies their initiatives and their ambitions. What can they comprehend of our world, which has produced the most fabulous pages in the history of human civilization? Our fundamental values are still intact; our oaths are unbroken; our traditional points of reference remain the same. What can they understand about us?”

“Not very much,” Yaseen said, getting up and approaching me until we were nose-to-nose. “Not very much, my brother.”

Sayed went on. “They know nothing of our customs, our dreams, or our prayers. They’re particularly ignorant of our heritage and our long memories. What do those cowboys know about Mesopotamia? Do you think they have a clue about this fantastic Iraq they’re trampling down? About the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens, Harun al-Rashid, the Thousand and One Nights? They know nothing of these things! They never look at this side of history. All they see in our country is an immense pool of petroleum, which they intend to lap dry, even if it costs the last drop of our blood, too. They’re bonanza seekers, looters, despoilers, mercenaries. They’ve reduced all values to the single dreadful question of cash, and the only virtue they recognize is profit. Predators, that’s what they are, formidable predators. They’re ready to march over the body of Christ if they think it’ll help fill their pockets. And if you aren’t willing to go along with them, they haul out the heavy artillery.”

Yaseen pushed me toward the window, crying out, “Look at them! Go ahead, take a look at them, and you’ll see what they really are: machines.”

“And those machines will hit a wall in Baghdad,” Sayed said. “Our streets are going to witness the greatest duel of all time, the clash of the titans: Babylon against Disneyland, the Tower of Babel against the Empire State Building, the Hanging Gardens against the Golden Gate Bridge, Scheherazade against Bonnie Parker, Sindbad against the Terminator….”

I was completely bamboozled. I felt as though I were in the thick of a farce, in the midst of a play rehearsal, surrounded by mediocre actors who’d learned their roles but didn’t have the talent the text deserved, and yet — and yet — and yet, it seemed to me that this was exactly what I wanted to hear, that their words were the very words I was missing, the ones I’d sought in vain while the effort filled my head with migraines and insomnia. It made no difference whether Sayed was sincere, or whether Yaseen was speaking his real thoughts to me, speaking from his guts; the only certitudes I had were that the farce suited me, that it fit me like a glove, that the secret I’d chewed on for weeks was shared, that my anger wasn’t unique, and that it was giving me back my determination. I found it difficult to define this particular alchemy, which under different conditions would have made me laugh out loud, but now it gave me great relief. That bastard Yaseen had pulled a nasty thorn out of my side. He’d known how to touch me in exactly the right spot, how to stir up all the crap that had filled my head ever since the night when the sky fell in on me. I had come to Baghdad to avenge an offense. I didn’t know how to go about it, but from now on, my ignorance was no longer a concern.

And so, when Yaseen finally opened his arms to me, he seemed to be opening up the path that would lead me to retrieve what I wanted more than anything else in the world: my family’s honor.

13

Yaseen and his two guardian angels, Hassan and Hussein, didn’t return to the store. Sayed invited all four of us to dinner at his house to celebrate our reunion and seal our oath; then, after the meal was over, the three companions bade us farewell and disappeared. It would be a while before I saw them again.

I resumed my work as night watchman, which meant I opened the store for the other employees in the morning and closed it behind them in the evening. Weeks passed. My colleagues hardly warmed to me. They said “Good morning” when they arrived and “Good evening” when they left, but nothing in between. Their indifference exasperated me. I tried for a while to gain their confidence; eventually, however, I started ignoring them, too. I still had enough pride to stop myself from foolishly smiling at people who offered no smile in return.

I took my meals nearby, in a restaurant with questionable hygiene. Sayed had made an arrangement with the manager, who ran a tab for me and sent the bill to the store at the end of the month. He was a small, swarthy fellow, sprightly and jovial. We got on well together. Later, I found out that Sayed owned the restaurant, along with one newspaper kiosk, two grocery stores, a shoe store on the avenue, a photographer’s studio, and a telephone store.

At the end of each week, Sayed paid me a good salary. I bought myself various necessities and miscellaneous items with it and socked away the rest of my pay in a leather pouch meant for Bahia; I intended to send her everything I managed to save.

Things fell into place without difficulty. I carved out a little routine, custom-made for myself. After the store closed, I went for a walk in the city center. I loved walking, and there were new spectacles every day in Baghdad. Attacks were answered with barrages of gunfire, raids were carried out in retaliation for ambushes, and the coalition’s response to protest marches was often racist violence. People made the best of the situation. The area where an explosion or summary execution had taken place was barely cleared before the crowd poured back into it. The population was fatalistic, stoic. Several times, I came upon some still-smoking scene of carnage and stopped to ogle the horror until help and the army arrived. I watched ambulance drivers picking pieces of flesh from sidewalks, firemen evacuating blasted buildings, cops interrogating the neighborhood residents. I stuck my hands in my pockets and whiled away hours in this pursuit, inuring myself to the exercise of rage. While the victims’ relatives raised their hands to heaven, howling out their grief, I asked myself if I was capable of inflicting the same suffering on others and registered the fact that the question didn’t shock me. I strolled calmly back to the store and my room. The nightmares of the street never caught up with my dreams.

Around two A.M. one night, I was awakened by muffled sounds. Switching on the lights, I went downstairs to see whether a burglar had slipped in while I was sleeping. There was nobody in the store, and none of the merchandise appeared to be missing. The noises were coming from the area in the back of the store reserved for repairs and off-limits to all nonauthorized personnel. The door was locked from the inside, and I didn’t have permission go in there anyway, so I stayed in the showroom until the intruders departed. The next day, I reported the incident to Sayed. He explained that the technician, the engineer, sometimes came to work at odd hours to satisfy demanding customers, and he reminded me that my duties didn’t extend to the repair shop. I detected a peremptory warning in his tone.

One Friday afternoon, as I was rambling among the palms on the banks of the Tigris, Omar the Corporal approached me. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. He was wearing the same jacket and trousers, which now looked faded, and new, grotesque sunglasses. The front of his shirt, stretched tight over his belly, was splattered with grease.

He started talking right away. “Are you sulking, or what? Every day, I ask for you at the warehouse and the warrant officer tells me he hasn’t seen you. You’re pissed off at me, right?”

“For what? You’ve been more than a brother to me.”

“So why are you avoiding me?”

“I’m not avoiding you. I’ve been very busy, that’s all.”

He was uneasy, trying to read my eyes to see whether I was hiding something from him. “I’ve been worried about you,” he confessed. “You can’t imagine how much I regret thrusting you into Sayed’s arms. Every time I think about it, I tear my hair.”

“You’re wrong. I’m doing fine with him.”

“I’d never forgive myself if he got you involved in some shady business…in some…in some bloodshed.”

He had to swallow several times before he could bring up that last bit. His sunglasses hid his eyes from me, but the expression on his face gave him away. Omar was in dire straits, tormented by pangs of conscience. He was letting his beard grow as a sign of contrition.

“I didn’t come to Baghdad to get a job and settle down, Omar. We’ve already discussed that. No use going over it again.”

Omar was far from reassured by my words, which, in fact, offended him. More apprehensive than ever, he clutched at his hair.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go have a bite to eat. On me.”

“I’m not hungry. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been eating much, not since I had that harebrained idea of entrusting you to Sayed.”

“Please…”

“I have to run. I don’t want to be seen with you. Your friends and I aren’t tuned to the same frequency.”

“I’m free to see anybody I want.”

“Not me.”

Nervously squeezing his fingers, he cast suspicious looks all around us before he spoke again. “I talked to an army buddy of mine about you. He’s prepared to take you in for a while. He’s a former lieutenant, a really nice guy. He’s about to start up a business, and he needs someone he can trust.”

“I’m exactly where I want to be.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

He nodded, but his heart was heavy. “Well,” he said, extending his hand. “If you know what you want, all I can do is let the matter drop. But should you happen to change your mind, you know where to find me. I’m someone you can count on.”

“Thanks, Omar.”

He pressed his chin against his throat and walked away.

After about a dozen steps, he changed his mind and came back. His cheek muscles were twitching spasmodically.

“One more thing, cousin,” he whispered. “If you insist on fighting, do it properly. Fight for your country, not against the whole world. Keep things in perspective; don’t mistake wrong for right. Don’t kill just for killing’s sake. Don’t fire blindly — we’re losing more innocent people than bastards who deserve to die. You promise?”

I said nothing.

“You see? You’re already on the wrong track. The world isn’t our enemy. Remember all the people who protested the invasion all over the world, millions of them marching in Madrid, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, South America, Asia. All of them were on our side, and they still are. We got more support from them than we got from the other Arab countries. Don’t forget that. All nations are victims of the avarice of a handful of multinational companies. It would be terrible to lump them all together. Kidnapping journalists, executing NGO workers who are here only to help us — those kinds of things are alien to our customs. If you want to avenge an offense, don’t commit one. If you think your honor must be saved, don’t dishonor your people. Don’t give way to madness. If I see pictures of you mistaking arbitrary execution for a feat of arms, I’ll hang myself.”

He wiped his nose on his wrist, nodded once again with his shoulders around his ears, and concluded: “I’d hang myself for sure, cousin. From now on, remind yourself that everything you do concerns me directly.”

And he hurried away to melt into the confused crowds wandering along the riverbank.

Two months after my conversation with Omar, my schedule hadn’t changed a bit. I got up at six o’clock in the morning, lifted the rolling shutter in front of the store entrance two hours later, posted the previous day’s incoming and outgoing merchandise, and closed the store in the late afternoon. After the departure of the other employees, we locked the door, Sayed and I, and busied ourselves with drawing up a sales balance sheet and making an inventory of new acquisitions. Once we’d assessed the take and made provisions for the following day, Sayed handed me the big key ring and took away a bag stuffed with banknotes. The routine was starting to weigh on me, and my universe was shrinking down to nothing. I stopped going to cafés — stopped going out altogether, in fact. My daily itinerary ran between two points a hundred meters apart: the store and the restaurant. I ate dinner late, bought some lemonade and cookies in the grocery store on the corner, and shut myself up in my room. I spent my time staring at the TV set, zapping mindlessly from channel to channel, unable to concentrate on a program or a movie. This situation accentuated my disgust and warped my character. I became increasingly touchy and decreasingly patient, and an aggressiveness I didn’t recognize in myself began to characterize my words and my gestures. I no longer put up with the way my colleagues ignored me, and I missed no opportunity to make that clear to them. If someone failed to respond to my smile, I muttered “Dickhead” loud enough for him to hear me, and if he had the gall to frown, I confronted and taunted him. But things never went beyond that, and so I was left unsatisfied.

One evening, unable to take it anymore, I asked Sayed what he was waiting for to send me into action. He replied in a hurtful tone of voice: “Everything in its time!” I felt like small fry, like someone who counted for nothing. Just you wait, I thought. I’ll show you what I can do one of these days. For the moment, the initiative didn’t depend on me; I contented myself with chewing over my frustrations and elaborating fantastic revenge schemes, all of which served to enliven my insomnia.

And then a chain of events was set in motion….

After seeing off the store’s last customer, I was pulling down the rolling shutter when two men came up and waved me aside so they could enter. Two other employees, Amr and Rashid, who had been putting up their things and preparing to leave for the day, stopped what they were doing. Sayed put his glasses on; when he recognized the two intruders, he stood up from his desk, opened a drawer, took out an envelope, and propelled it across the table with a flick of his finger. His visitors exchanged looks and folded their hands. The taller of the two was a man in his fifties with a sinister-looking mug resting on his fat neck like a gargoyle on a church. A hideous burn scar extended high enough on his right jaw to cause a slight pucker in his eyelid. The fellow was a downright brute, complete with treacherous eyes and a sardonic grin. He was wearing a leather jacket worn at the elbows and a bottle-green knit shirt sprinkled with dandruff. His companion, thirty-something, displayed his young wolf’s fangs in an affected smile. His casual demeanor betrayed the go-getter eager to go very far very fast, assured by the cop’s badge that he wore. His new jeans were turned up at the ankles, revealing a pair of worn moccasins. He stared at Rashid, who was perched on a stool.

“Greetings, my good prince,” the older man said.

“Hello, Captain,” Sayed replied, tapping his finger on the envelope. “It’s been waiting for you.”

“I’ve been on special assignment these past few days.” The captain slowly approached the table, picked up the envelope, felt its weight, and grumbled, “Thinner than usual.”

“The amount’s correct.”

The officer flashed a skeptical grimace. “You know my family problems, Sayed. I have a whole tribe to maintain, and we haven’t been paid our salaries for six months.” He jerked a thumb toward his colleague. “My buddy here’s in the shit, too. He wants to get married, but he can’t find so much as a fucking bedroom he can afford.”

Sayed pressed his lips together before plunging his hand back into the desk drawer. He pulled out a few supplementary bills, which the captain, as swiftly as a conjurer, caused to disappear.

“You’re a good prince, Sayed. God will repay you.”

“We’re going through a rough patch, Captain. We have to help one another out.”

The captain scratched his damaged cheek, pretended to be embarrassed, and looked to his teammate for the strength to get to the heart of the matter. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I didn’t come here for the envelope. My buddy and I are about to start up a business, and it occurred to me that you might perhaps be interested in it and maybe you could give us a hand.”

Sayed sat down and clasped his mouth between his thumb and his index finger.

The captain settled into the chair facing the desk and crossed his legs. He said, “I’m starting a little travel agency.”

“In Baghdad? You think Iraq’s a tourist destination?”

“I have some relatives in Amman who think it would be a good idea for me to invest in Jordan. I’ve been knocking around here long enough, you know, and frankly, I don’t see any light at the end of the Iraq tunnel. We’ve got a second Vietnam on our hands. I’d like to get out while I’m more or less intact. I’m already carrying around three slugs in my body, and a Molotov cocktail nearly took my face off. So I’ve decided to turn in my badge and make my fortune in Jordan. This is quite a juicy business I’m talking about. One hundred percent profit. And legal. If you want, I’ll let you come in as a partner.”

“I’ve got enough hassles with my own business.”

“Stop it. You do just fine.”

“Not really.”

The captain thrust a cigarette between his lips, lit it with a disposable lighter, and blew the smoke in Sayed’s face. Sayed limited himself to slightly turning his head.

“Too bad,” the policeman said. “You’re letting a real opportunity get away, my friend. Tell me the truth — doesn’t it tempt you a little?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s all right. Now, shall we move on to the reason for my visit?”

“I’m listening.”

“Do you trust me?”

“How do you mean?”

“In all the time I’ve been keeping an eye on your businesses, have I ever tried to double-cross you?”

“No.”

“Have I been greedy?”

“No.”

“And if I ask you to advance me a little money so I can get started, will you think I’m not going to pay you back?”

Sayed had been expecting the conversation to reach this point. He smiled and spread out his arms. “You’re an honorable man, Captain. I’d advance you millions without so much as a second thought, but I have debts up to here, and my sales are tanking.”

“Don’t give me that crap!” the captain said, crushing out his barely smoked cigarette on the glass desktop. “You’re rolling in dough. What do you think I do all day long? I sit at a table in the café across the street and watch your delivery vans coming and going. And I make notes. Your deliveries can’t keep up with your sales. Why, just today,” he went on, pulling out a little notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket, “you unloaded two big refrigerators, four washing machines, and four television sets, plus a bunch of customers left the store with various boxes. And it’s only Monday. The way you’re turning your stuff over, you ought to found your own bank.”

“So you’re spying on me, Captain?”

“I’m your lucky star, Sayed. I watch over all your little scams. Have you had any tax problems? Have any other cops come in here to hit you up for money? Because of me, everything’s cushy for you. I know your bills are as phony as your word of honor, and I make sure no one calls you to account. And what do you do? You slip me some crumbs and you think I should be grateful. I’m not a beggar, Sayed.”

He stood up abruptly and headed straight for the storeroom. Sayed didn’t have enough time to stop him. The captain plunged into the rear of the shop and made a sweeping gesture toward the innumerable boxes stacked in tiers and filling three-quarters of the room. He said, “I’ll bet none of this merchandise has ever passed through a customs post.”

“Come on. Everybody in Baghdad works off the books.”

Sayed was perspiring and very angry, but he tried to contain himself. The two cops had the air of calm assurance that people get when they’re running the show with an iron hand. They knew what they wanted and how to obtain it. Getting your palm greased was the primary vocation of each and every functionary in the service of the state, particularly those in the security forces. This ingrained practice was an inheritance from the former regime and continued to flourish under the occupation, facilitated by the confusion and the galloping impoverishment that reigned in the country, where villainous kidnappings, bribes, embezzlements, and extortions were the order of the day.

The captain called over to his colleague, “How much you think all this is worth?”

“Enough to buy an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

“Do you think we’re being piggish, Detective?”

“We eat like birds, Chief.”

Sayed mopped his brow with a handkerchief. Amr and Rashid were standing in the doorway behind the two policemen, on the alert for a sign from their boss. “Let’s go back to the office,” Sayed mumbled to the captain. “We’ll see what I can do to help you with your business venture.”

“Now you’re being sensible,” the captain said, spreading out his arms. “But look, if you’re talking about another skinny envelope like the one you just gave me, you can forget it.”

“No, no,” said Sayed, eager to exit the storeroom. “We’ll work something out. Come on back to the office.”

The captain frowned. “It almost seems as though you have something to hide, Sayed. Why are you shoving us out? What do you keep in this stockroom, besides what we can see?”

“Nothing, I assure you. It’s just that it’s after closing time, and I have an appointment with someone who lives on the other side of the city.”

“Are you sure?”

“What would I be hiding in here? This stuff is all my merchandise. It hasn’t even been unpacked yet.”

The captain squinted his right eye. Did he suspect something? Was he about to give Sayed a very hard time? He stepped over to the walls of boxes, rummaged about here and there, and then suddenly whipped around to see whether Sayed was holding his breath or not. Amr and Rashid’s rigid posture gave him a moment’s pause. He crouched down to peer under the stacked cartons, the piles of television sets and various small appliances. When he spotted a concealed door in a corner, he started walking toward it. “What’s that back there?”

“It’s the repair shop. It’s locked. Our technician left an hour ago.”

“Can I have a look around?”

“It’s locked from inside. The technician gets in through another door.”

Suddenly, just as the captain was preparing to let the matter drop, there was a loud crash inside the repair shop. Sayed and his employees froze. The captain raised an eyebrow, delighted to catch Sayed out.

Sayed said, “I swear I thought he’d left, Captain.”

The captain knocked on the door. “Open up, pal, or I’ll kick my way in.”

“Just a moment. I’m soldering something. Almost finished.”

You could hear creaking sounds, followed by some metallic screeching; a key turned in the lock, and the door opened. The engineer, wearing an undershirt and tracksuit bottoms, peered out. The captain saw a table cluttered with wires, tiny screws, screwdrivers, little pots of paint and glue and soldering material, and, in the midst of the clutter, a dismantled television set. Its back cover, which had been replaced too hastily, hung askew, revealing a skein of multicolored wires inside the shell. The captain squinted his right eye again. The moment he detected the bomb, which lay half-concealed in the place where the picture tube should have been, his throat tightened, and then his face suddenly turned somber when the engineer poked the mouth of a pistol into the back of his neck.

The detective, who had remained in the background, didn’t immediately comprehend what was going on, but the heavy silence that had just fallen on the room caused him instinctively to bring his hand to his belt. He never reached his weapon. Amr jumped him from behind, put one hand over his mouth, and with the other thrust a dagger deep into his back, just under the shoulder blade. His eyes wide in disbelief, the detective shivered from head to foot and slowly collapsed onto the floor.

The captain was trembling in every limb. He could neither lift his arms in surrender nor lean forward. He said, “I won’t say anything, Sayed.”

“Only the dead know how to keep their mouths shut, Captain. I’m awfully sorry for you, Captain.”

“I beg you. I’ve got six kids—”

“You should have thought of them before.”

“Please, Sayed, please spare me. I swear I won’t say anything. If you want, take me into your cell. I’ll be your eyes and ears. I’ve never cheered for the Americans. I hate them. I’m a cop, but — you can check — I’ve never laid a hand on anyone in the resistance. I’m on your side, all the way…. Sayed, what I said was true: I’m hoping to get out of here.

Don’t kill me, for the love of heaven, don’t. I’ve got six kids, and the oldest isn’t even fifteen yet.”

“Were you spying on me?”

“No, I swear I wasn’t. I just got a little greedy, that’s all.”

“In that case, why didn’t you come alone?”

“He was my partner.”

“I’m not talking about the jackass who came in with you. I mean the boys waiting for you outside in the street.”

“No one’s waiting for me outside, I swear to you….”

There was a silence. The captain raised his eyes; when he saw Sayed’s satisfied smile, he realized the seriousness of his mistake. He should have been a little craftier and pretended he wasn’t alone. The unfortunate man had no luck at all.

Sayed ordered me to go to the front of the store and lower the rolling shutter completely. I did as he said. When I returned to the storeroom, the captain was on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back. He’d shit his pants and was crying like a child.

Sayed asked me, “Did you look around outside?”

“I didn’t notice anything unusual.”

“Very good.”

Sayed slipped a plastic packing bag over the captain’s head and then, with Rashid’s help, forced him to the floor. The officer struggled wildly. Mist filled the plastic bag. Sayed held its mouth closed very tightly around the captain’s throat. He ran out of air quickly and started wriggling and writhing. His body was racked by violent convulsions; it took a long time for them to become less frequent and then subside; after a final jerk, they stopped altogether. Sayed and Rashid kept bearing down on the captain with all their weight; they didn’t let up until the corpse was completely still.

“Get rid of these two stiffs,” Sayed ordered Amr and Rashid. Then, turning to me, he said, “And you, clean up this blood before it dries.”

14

After Sayed charged Amr and Rashid with making the two corpses disappear, the engineer proposed demanding a ransom from their families. The idea was to throw people off by making them think the men had been kidnapped. Sayed’s response was, “It’s your problem,” and then he told me to follow him. We got in his black Mercedes and went across the city to the other bank of the Tigris. Sayed slipped a CD of Eastern music into the slot, turned up the sound, and drove calmly. His natural composure made me relax, too.

I’d always dreaded the moment when I would step over the line; now that it was behind me, I didn’t feel anything in particular. I’d witnessed the killings of the two officers with the same detachment I observed when I contemplated the victims of terrorist attacks. I was no longer the delicate boy from Kafr Karam. Another individual had taken his place. I was stunned by how easy it was to pass from one world to another and practically regretted having spent so much time being fearful of what I’d find. The weakling who had vomited at the sight of blood and lost his head when shots rang out was far, far away, and so was the wimp who’d passed out during the screwup that cost Sulayman his life. I was born again as someone else, someone hard, cold, implacable. My hands didn’t tremble. My heart beat normally. In the side-view mirror on my right, my face betrayed no trace of an expression; it was a waxen mask, impenetrable and inaccessible.

Sayed took me to a posh little building in a residential neighborhood. As soon as the security guards recognized his Mercedes, they lifted the barrier. Sayed seemed to receive a great deal of deference from the guards. He parked his car in a garage and led me to a luxury apartment. It wasn’t the same one where he’d convened Yaseen, the twins, and me. The place had a caretaker, a secretive old man who served as a general factotum. Sayed suggested that I take a bath and join him later in the living room, whose windows were festooned with taffeta curtains.

The bathtub had a chrome faucet the size of a teakettle. I took off my clothes and stepped in. The scalding water quickly warmed me to my bones.

The old man served us a late supper in a small dining room filled with glittering silver objects. Sayed was wrapped in a dark red dressing gown, which made him look rather like a nabob. We ate in silence. The only audible sound was the clicking of the silverware, occasionally interrupted by the ringing of Sayed’s cell phone. Each time, he looked at the dial and decided whether or not to answer the call. Once, it was the engineer, calling about the two corpses. Intermittently grunting, Sayed listened to him and then clicked his phone shut. When Sayed looked up at me, I understood that Rashid and Amr had carried out their assignment successfully.

The old man brought us a basket of fruit. Sayed, as before, scrutinized me in silence. Perhaps, I thought, he expects me to make conversation. I couldn’t imagine any topic of mutual interest. Sayed was by nature taciturn, not to mention haughty. I didn’t like the way he ordered his employees around. He had to be obeyed to the letter, and once he’d reached a decision, there was no appeal. Paradoxically, I found his authority reassuring. Working for a guy of his stature meant I had no reason to ask questions; he saw to everything and seemed prepared to face any eventuality.

The old man showed me to my room. Pointing to a bell on the night table, he informed me that should I require his services, I had only to ring. Having ostentatiously verified that everything was in order, he withdrew on tiptoe.

I got into bed and turned off the lamp.

Sayed came to inquire as to whether I needed anything. Without turning on the light, he hovered in the doorway, with one hand on the doorknob. “Everything all right?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine.”

He nodded, closed the door halfway, and then opened it wide again. “I very much appreciated your composure in the storeroom,” he said.

The next day, I went back to the store and my upstairs room. The business resumed at its normally accelerated pace. Nobody came to inquire whether we’d seen two police officers in the area. A few days later, photographs of the captain and his detective adorned the front page of a newspaper that announced their kidnapping and the amount of the ransom demanded by the kidnappers in exchange for the officers’ liberation.

Rashid and Amr no longer shunted me off to one side and no longer slammed the door in my face; from this time forward, I was one of them. The engineer continued installing his bombs in place of television picture tubes. To be sure, he modified only one set out of ten, and so only a minority of his customers was engaged in the transport of death. I noticed that the people who took delivery of the TV bombs were always the same, three large young men squeezed into mechanics’ overalls; they arrived in small vans stamped on the sides with a huge logo, accompanied by writing in Arabic and English: HOME DELIVERY. They parked behind the storeroom, signed some release papers, loaded their merchandise, and drove away again.

Sayed disappeared for a week. When he returned, I informed him that I wanted to join Yaseen and his group. I was dying of boredom, and Baghdad’s diabolical odor was polluting my thought processes. Sayed asked me to be patient. To help me occupy my nights, he brought me a selection of DVDs. On each of them, someone had written a place name with a felt-tipped pen — Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Safwan, and so forth, followed by a date and a number. The DVDs contained videos recorded from televised newscasts or made by amateurs on the spot, showing various atrocities committed by the coalition forces: the siege of Fallujah; the racist assaults carried out by British troops on some Iraqi kids seized during a popular demonstration; a GI’s summary execution of a wounded civilian inside a mosque; an American helicopter’s night attack on some peasants whose truck had broken down in a field — the visual chronicle, in short, of our humiliation, and of the awful blunders that had become so commonplace. I watched every DVD without blinking. It was as if I were downloading into my brain all the possible and imaginable reasons I’d need to blow up the fucking world. The result was, no doubt, just what Sayed had hoped: I got an eyeful, and my subconscious stored away a maximum load of anger, which (when the time came) would give me enthusiasm for whatever violence I might commit and even lend it a certain legitimacy. I wasn’t fooled; I figured I’d already had an overdose of hatred and it wasn’t really necessary to add any more. I was a Bedouin, and no Bedouin can come to terms with an offense unless blood is spilled. Sayed must have lost sight of that constant, inflexible rule, which has survived through ages and generations; his city life and his mysterious peregrinations had surely taken him far from the tribal soul of Kafr Karam.

I saw Omar again. He’d spent the day bouncing around from dive to dive. He suggested we go and get something to eat, his treat, and I accepted on condition that he not start in on me again. He understood, he said, and during the meal everything was fine until, all at once, his eyes filled with tears. For the sake of propriety, I refrained from asking him what was bothering him. Nevertheless, with no prompting from me, he spilled the beans. He told me about the little problems his roommate, Hany, was causing him. Hany was planning to leave the country and go to live in Lebanon, and Omar didn’t like the idea. When I asked him why Hany’s decision troubled him so much, he declared that Hany was very dear to him and that he wouldn’t be able to survive if Hany should leave. We said good night on the banks of the Tigris; Omar was dead drunk, and I was disgusted at the thought of returning to my room and my melancholy cogitations.

The store routine started to seem like a sentence to the gallows. The weeks passed over me like a herd of buffalo. I was suffocating. Boredom was slicing me to pieces. I had long since stopped going to the sites of terrorist attacks, and the sirens of Baghdad no longer reached me. Since I almost never ate, I grew visibly thinner, and every night I lay in bed with my head on fire, waiting to fall asleep. Sometimes, when I was hanging around in the store, I caught my reflection in the shop window, soliloquizing and gesticulating. I felt as though I’d lost the thread of my own story; all I could see was exasperation. At the end of my rope, I decided to talk to Sayed again and tell him that I was ready, that this farce was unnecessary, that I didn’t need to be drawn in any further.

He was in his little office, filling out some forms. After contemplating his pen at some length, he laid it down on a stack of papers, pushed his glasses up on top of his head, and pivoted his chair to face me.

“I’m not trying to string you along, cousin. I’m awaiting instructions in your behalf. I think we have something for you, something extraordinary, but it’s still in the conceptual stage.”

“I can’t wait any longer.”

“You’re wrong. We’re not trying to get into a stadium; we’re at war. If you lose patience now, you won’t be able to keep cool when you have to. Go back to your work and learn how to overcome your anxieties.”

“I’m not anxious.”

“Yes, you are.”

And with that, he dismissed me.

One Wednesday morning, a truck detonated at the end of the boulevard; the explosion leveled two buildings, left a crater two meters deep, and destroyed most of the storefronts in the area. I’d never seen Sayed in such a state. He stood on the sidewalk, holding his head with both hands and teetering as he contemplated the devastation. As the neighborhood had been spared ever since the beginning of hostilities, I assumed that things hadn’t gone according to plan.

Amr and Rashid lowered the metal shutter in front of the store, and Sayed and I immediately drove to the other side of the Tigris. Along the way, he spoke to several “associates” on the telephone, telling them to meet him at once at “number two.” He used a coded language that sounded like a banal conversation between businessmen. We came to a suburban area bristling with decrepit buildings and inhabited by a population abandoned to its own devices; then we turned into a courtyard and parked next to two vehicles that had arrived just ahead of us. Their occupants, two men wearing suits, accompanied us into the house. Yaseen joined us there a few minutes later. Sayed had been waiting for him to begin the proceedings. The meeting lasted barely a quarter of an hour and essentially concerned the attack that had taken place on the boulevard. The three men looked at one another with inquiring eyes, unable to propose an explanation. They didn’t know who had been behind the explosion. It looked to me as though Yaseen and the two strangers were the leaders of the groups that operated in the neighborhoods traversed by the boulevard; the attack had clearly taken all three of them by surprise. Sayed therefore concluded that a new, unknown, and obviously breakaway group was trying to horn in on their territory. It was absolutely imperative, he said, for the other three to identify this group and stop it from interfering with their plans of action and, as a consequence, disrupting the operational schedule currently in force. The meeting was adjourned. The two men who’d arrived before us left first; then Sayed also drove away, but not before consigning me to Yaseen “until further orders.”

Yaseen was not exactly delighted to take me under his wing, especially now that some unknown rivals had encroached on his turf. He contented himself with driving me to a hideout on the north side of Baghdad, a rat hole a little larger than a polling booth, furnished with a bunk bed and a miniature armoire. The place was occupied by a spindly young man with a face like a knife blade, its prominent feature a large hooked nose, whose effect was softened by a thin blond mustache. He was sleeping when we arrived. Yaseen explained to him that he would have to share the place with me for two or three days. The young man nodded. After Yaseen left, my new roommate invited me to have a seat on the lower bunk.

“Are the cops after you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Have you just arrived in Baghdad?”

“No.”

Seeing that I was in no mood for conversation, he gave up. We remained seated, side by side, until noon. I was furious at Yaseen, and also at what was happening to me. I had the impression that I was being tossed about like some worthless bundle.

“Well,” the young man said. “I’m going to buy some sandwiches. Chicken or lamb brochettes?”

“Bring me whatever you feel like.”

He slipped on a jacket and went out onto the landing. I heard his footsteps going down the stairs, and then nothing. I listened closely. Not a sound. It was as though the building had been abandoned. I stepped to the window and watched the young man hurrying toward the square. A veiled sun shed its light on the neighborhood. I felt like opening the window and puking.

The young man brought me a chicken sandwich wrapped in newspaper. After two bites, my stomach tightened. I put the sandwich on top of the little armoire.

“My name’s Obid,” the young man said.

“What the hell am I doing here?”

“Dunno. I’ve been here only a week myself. Before that, I lived downtown. That was where I operated. Then the police raided the place, but I got away. Now I’m waiting to be assigned to another sector, if not to another city. How about you?”

I pretended I hadn’t heard the question.

That evening, I was relieved to see one of the twins, Hussein, turn up. He informed Obid that a car would come to pick him up the next day. Obid leapt for joy.

“And me?”

Hussein favored me with a broad smile. “You? You’re coming with me pronto.”

Hussein piloted a beat-up little car. He kept running into curbs and drove so badly in general that people got out of his way instinctively. He laughed, amused by the panic he was causing and by the things he was knocking down. I thought he was drunk or drugged, but neither was the case; he simply didn’t know how to drive, and his license was as fake as the car’s registration papers.

I asked him, “Aren’t you afraid of getting busted?”

“For what?” he replied. “I haven’t run over anybody yet.”

I relaxed a little once we’d made it out of the heavily populated areas. Hussein was giggling and making jokes. I’d never known him to be like that. In Kafr Karam, he’d certainly always seemed like a nice guy, but a bit slow on the uptake.

Hussein stopped his jalopy at the entrance to a suburb that had been severely damaged by missile fire. The hovels looked deserted. Only after we crossed a kind of line of demarcation did I realize that the townspeople were holed up indoors. Later, I would learn that this was the sign of the fedayeen’s presence. To avoid attracting the attention of soldiers or the police, the local people were ordered to keep a very low profile.

We walked up an alleyway until we reached a grotesque three-story house. The other twin, Hassan, and a stranger opened the door for us. Hussein performed the introductions. The other man was the home owner, Tariq, a pallid individual who looked like an escapee from an operating room. We went to table at once. The meal was sumptuous, but I failed to do it justice. Shortly after nightfall, we heard the belch of a distant bomb. Hassan looked at his watch and said, “Good-bye, Marwan! We’ll meet again in heaven.” Marwan must have been a suicide bomber.

Then Hassan turned to me. “You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you again, cousin.”

“There’s only you three in Yaseen’s group?”

“Don’t you think that’s enough?”

“What happened to the others?”

Hussein burst out laughing. His brother tapped him on the shoulder to calm him down. He said, “Who do you mean by ‘the others’?”

“The rest of your band in Kafr Karam. Adel, Salah, Bilal.”

Hassan consented to answer me. “Salah’s with Yaseen at the moment. It seems that some splinter group’s trying to take over from us. As for Adel, he’s dead. He was supposed to blow himself up in a police recruiting center. I was against sending him on such a mission from the start. Adel wasn’t all there, you know? But Yaseen said he could do it, so they put an explosive belt on him and off he went. By the time Adel got to the recruiting center, he’d forgotten how to detonate the thing, even though it was quite simple — all he had to do was press a button. Nevertheless, Adel got confused, and then he got pissed off. He removed his jacket and started pounding on the explosive belt with his fists. When the other guys in the recruitment line saw what Adel was wearing around his waist, they got the hell out of there, and so the only potential recruit left in front of the center was Adel, still trying to remember how to make his bomb explode. Of course, the cops shot him to pieces. Our Adel disintegrated without hurting a soul.”

Hussein guffawed, writhing in his chair. “Only Adel could go out like that!”

“How about Bilal?” I asked.

“Nobody knows where he is. There was this important guy, a leader of the resistance, and Bilal was supposed to drive him to Kirkuk. The bigwig waited for him at the prearranged meeting place, but Bilal never showed up. We still don’t know what happened to him. We’ve looked in the morgues, the hospitals, everywhere, even in the police stations and army barracks where we’ve got people, but…nothing. No trace of the car he was driving, either.”

I stayed at Tariq’s place for a week, enduring Hussein’s outbursts of incongruous laughter. He was a bit cracked, Hussein was. There was something broken in his mind. His brother entrusted him with domestic errands only. Hussein whiled away his unoccupied hours settled in an armchair, watching TV and loitering until the next time he was sent out to buy supplies or pick somebody up.

One single time, Yaseen authorized me to go on a mission with Hassan and Tariq. We were to transfer a hostage from Baghdad to a cooperative farm. We left in broad daylight. Tariq knew all the shortcuts and back roads and circumvented every checkpoint. The hostage was a European woman, a member of an NGO, kidnapped from the clinic where she worked as a physician. She’d been shut up in the cellar of a villa not far from a police station. We took her out of there with no problem, right under the cops’ noses, and delivered her to another group headquartered on a farm about twenty kilometers south of the city.

After this accomplishment, I thought I’d earned a higher level of trust, and I expected to be sent on a second mission shortly. I expected in vain. Three weeks dragged by, and still no sign from Yaseen. He visited us from time to time and talked at length with Hassan and Tariq, and sometimes he shared a meal with us; but then, Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law, came by to pick him up, and I was left unsatisfied.

15

I slept badly. I think I dreamed about Kafr Karam, but I’m not sure. I lost the thread the second I opened my eyes. My head was stuffed with indistinct images, fixed on a screen that smelled of burning, and I woke up with the odor of my village in my nose.

From my deep, echoless sleep, I kept only the stabbing pain that racked my joints. I wasn’t overjoyed to recognize the room where I’d been wasting away for weeks, waiting for I knew not what. I felt like the smallest in a set of Russian nesting dolls; the room was the next-size doll, the house the next after that, and so on, with the foul-smelling neighborhood as the lid. I was inside my body like a rat in a trap. My mind raced in every direction but found no way out. Was this, I wondered, claustrophobia? I needed to come unglued, to explode like a bomb, to be useful somehow.

I staggered to the bathroom. The terry-cloth towel, filthy beyond expression, hung from a nail. The windowpane had last been touched by a cleaning rag several decades ago. The place smelled like stale urine and mildew; it made me nauseous.

On the dirty sink, a battered piece of soap lay next to an intact tube of toothpaste. The mirror showed me the haggard face of a young man at the end of his rope. I looked at myself the way you look at a stranger.

There was no water. I went downstairs. Hussein was sunk in his armchair, watching an animated film on TV and chuckling as he nibbled roasted almonds from a plate beside him. On the screen, a band of alley cats, fresh from their garbage cans, were mistreating a terrified kitten. Hussein relished the fear the little animal embodied, lost in the suburban jungle.

“Where are the others?” I asked him.

He didn’t hear me. I went to the kitchen, made myself some coffee, and returned to the living room. Hussein had switched channels and was now absorbed in a wrestling match.

“Where are Hassan and Tariq?”

“I’m not supposed to know,” he grumbled. “They said they’d be back before nightfall, and they’re still not here.”

“Has anyone called?”

“No one.”

“You think something’s gone wrong?”

“If my brother had run into problems, I would have felt it.”

“Maybe we should call Yaseen and find out what’s up.”

“Forbidden. He’s always the one who does the calling.”

I glanced out the window. The streets were bathed in the bright morning light. Soon people would emerge from their miserable houses and kids would invade the neighborhood like crickets.

Hussein manipulated the television’s remote control, making a sequence of different broadcasts flash by on the screen. None of the programs interested him. He fidgeted in his chair, but he didn’t turn off the TV. Then, abruptly, he said, “May I ask you a question, cousin?”

“Of course.”

“You mean it? You’ll answer me straight out?”

“Why not?”

He threw back his head and laughed that absurd, cringe-inducing laugh of his, which I was really starting to loathe; as usual, it seemed to have no cause and come from nowhere. It was all I heard, day and night, because Hussein never slept. He was in his armchair round the clock, clutching the remote control like a magic wand, changing worlds and languages every five minutes.

“So you’ll be frank?”

“I’ll do my best.”

His eyes gleamed in a funny way; I felt sorry for him. He said, “Do you think I’m…nuts?”

His throat tightened on the last word. He looked so wretched, I was embarrassed.

“Why are you asking me that?”

“That’s not an answer, cousin.”

I started to avert my eyes, but his dissuaded me. “I don’t think you’re…nuts,” I said.

“Liar! In hell, you’re going to hang from your tongue over a barbecue. You’re just like the others, cousin. You say one thing and think the opposite. But don’t kid yourself — I’m not crazy. I’ve got a full tank and all the accessories. I know how to count on my fingers, and I know how to read people’s eyes to see what they’re hiding from me. It’s true that I can’t stop myself from laughing, but that doesn’t mean I’ve flipped out. I laugh because…because…well, I don’t know exactly why. Some things can’t be explained. I caught the laughing bug watching that simpleton Adel get all frazzled because he couldn’t find the button to blow himself up. I wasn’t far away, and I was observing him as he mingled with the other candidates in front of the police recruiting center. At that moment, I was in a panic. And when the cops fired on him and he exploded, it was as if I disintegrated along with him. He was someone I really liked. He grew up on our patio. I sincerely mourned him, but then the mourning was over, and now, whenever I picture him stabbing at his explosive belt and cursing, I burst out laughing. It was so insane…but that doesn’t make me a nutcase. I can count on my fingers, and I can tell what’s right and wrong.”

“I never said you were a nutcase, Hussein.”

“Neither have the others. But they think it. You imagine I don’t see that? Before, they used to send me on real missions. Ambushes, kidnappings, executions — I was at the top of the list. Now they let me buy provisions or pick up someone in my old car. When I volunteer for a serious job, they tell me not to bother, they’ve got all the guys they need, and they don’t want to expose our flank. What does that mean, ‘expose our flank’?”

“They haven’t given me anything to do yet, either.”

“You’re lucky, cousin. Because I’m going to tell you what I think. Our cause is just, but we’re defending it very badly. If I laugh from time to time, maybe that’s the reason why.”

“You’re talking rubbish, Hussein.”

“Where’s it getting us, this war? Can you see the end of it?”

“Shut up, Hussein.”

“But I’m speaking the truth. What’s going on makes no sense. Killing, killing, and more killing. Day and night. On the squares, in the mosques. Nobody knows who’s who anymore, and everyone has it in for everyone else.”

“You’re raving….”

“You know how Adnan, the baker’s son, died? The story is, he flung himself heroically against a checkpoint, but that’s a crock. He was sick of all the slaughter. He’d been in action full-time, sniping one day, blowing things up the next. Targeting markets and civilians. And then one morning, he blew up a school bus, killed a lot of kids, and one of the bodies wound up in a tree. When the emergency units arrived on the scene, they picked up the dead and wounded, put them in ambulances, and took them to the hospital. It was only two days later that people on the ground began to smell the dead kid decomposing up in the tree. Adnan happened to be in the area that day — just by chance — and he saw the volunteers pulling the kid out of the branches. I’m telling you, Adnan did a U-turn on the spot. He completely flipped. He stopped being the dedicated warrior we all knew. And one night, he put on a belt stuffed with loaves of bread — baguettes, all around his waist, so they looked like sticks of dynamite — and he went to a checkpoint and started taunting the soldiers. After a bit of that, he suddenly opened his coat and revealed the harness he was wearing, and the soldiers turned him into a sieve. As long as the belt didn’t explode, they kept firing. They used up all their clips and their comrades’ clips, too. Adnan was reduced to a pulp. Afterward, you couldn’t tell the chunks of flesh from the chunks of bread. And that’s the truth, cousin. Adnan didn’t die in combat; he went to his death of his own free will, without a weapon and without a battle cry. He simply committed suicide.”

There was no chance that I was going to stay in Hussein’s company one minute longer. I placed my cup on the low table and made for the door.

Hussein stayed in his armchair. He said, “You haven’t killed anyone yet, cousin. So get the hell out. Set your sails for another horizon and don’t look back. I’d do the same thing if I didn’t have a battalion of ghosts holding on to my coattails.”

I looked him up and down, trying to make him dissolve with my eyes. I said, “I think Yaseen’s right, Hussein. Running errands is all you’re good for.”

And I hastened to slam the door behind me.

I went to look at the Tigris. Turning my back on the city, I fixed my gaze on the water and tried to forget the buildings on the other bank. Kafr Karam occupied my mind. I imagined the sandy stadium where youngsters chased soccer balls; I saw the two recovering palm trees, the mosque, the barber clipping away at the skulls of his clientele, the two cafés majestically ignoring each other, the clouds of dust swirling along the silver-gray desert trails, and then I saw the gap where Kadem and I listened to Fairuz, and the horizons, as dead as the seasons…. I tried to retrace my steps, to return to the village; my memories refused to follow me. The images blurred, stopped, and disappeared under a great brown stain, and Baghdad caught up with me again, with its streets bled white, its ghost-populated esplanades, its ragged trees, and its tumult. The sun beat down like a brute, so close that you could have reached it with a fireman’s hose. I think I’d walked across a good part of the city, but I remembered nothing of what I might have encountered, seen, or heard. I’d been wandering around ever since I left Hussein.

As the river didn’t suffice to drown my thoughts, I started walking again, without any notion of where to go. I was lost in Baghdad, my obsession drowned out by the roar of the void, surrounded on all sides by whirling shadows — a grain of sand in a storm.

I didn’t love this city. For me, it represented nothing. Meant nothing. I traversed it like a land accursed. We were two incompatible misfortunes, two parallel worlds that ran side by side and never met.

On my left, under a metal footbridge, a broken-down van attracted a group of children. Farther off, near the stadium — now fallen silent — some American trucks were leaving a military installation. In the roar of the convoy, Kafr Karam reappeared. Our house was in shadow, and I could see only the indefinable tree, under which no one was sitting anymore. There was nobody on the patio, either. The house was empty, soulless and ghost-free. I looked for my sisters, my mother…and found no one. Except for the cut on Bahia’s neck, I saw no face or furtive shape. It was as though my loved ones, once so dear to me, had been banished from my memory. Something in me had broken and collapsed, burying all trace of my family….

A bellowing truck made me jump back up on the curb. “Wake up, asshole!” the driver shouted. “You think you’re in your mama’s backyard?”

Some pedestrians stopped, ready to gather other rubber-neckers around them. It was crazy, but in Baghdad the smallest incident attracted a huge crowd of spectators. I waited for the truck driver to continue on his way before I crossed the street.

My feet were burning. I’d been pounding the pavement for hours.

I sat down at a table on a café terrace and ordered a soda. I hadn’t eaten all day, but I wasn’t hungry. I was just worn-out.

“I don’t believe it,” someone behind me said.

What joy I felt, what relief, when I recognized Omar the Corporal. His new overalls were stretched tightly across his belly.

“What are you doing in these parts?”

“I’m drinking a soda.”

“You can get a soda anywhere. Why here?”

“You ask too many questions, Omar. I can’t think straight.”

He spread his arms to embrace me and pressed his lips insistently against my cheeks. He was genuinely happy to see me again. Dropping into a chair, he mopped his face with his handkerchief. “I’m sweating like a Camembert,” he said breathlessly. “But I’m truly happy to find you here, cousin. Really.”

“Likewise.”

He hailed the waiter and ordered a lemonade. “So,” he said. “What’s new?”

“How’s Hany?”

“Oh, him. He’s a lunatic. You never know what you’re getting with him.”

“Is he still planning to become an expatriate?”

“He’d get lost in the countryside. That one is a certified city dweller. If he loses sight of his building, he cries for help. He was playing games with me, know what I mean? He wanted to make sure I cared about him…. What’s up with you?”

“Are you still with your old warrant officer?”

“Where else could I go? With him, at least, when things get tight, I know he’ll advance me some cash. He’s a nice guy. And you still haven’t told me what you’re up to around here.”

“Nothing. All I do is go in circles.”

“I see. Look, I don’t have to tell you, you can always count on me. If you want, I could talk to my boss again. We might be able to work something out.”

“You wouldn’t be thinking about paying a visit to Kafr Karam, would you? I’ve got a little money I want to send to my family.”

“Not anytime soon. Why don’t you just go back home — I mean, if you think there’s nothing for you in Baghdad?”

Omar was trying to sound me out. He was dying to know whether he could bring up certain delicate subjects again without making me mad. What he read in my face made him recoil. He lifted up his hands and said in a conciliatory voice, “It was just a question, that’s all.”

According to my watch, it was a quarter past three. “I have to go back,” I said.

“Is it far?”

“A fair distance.”

“I could give you a ride. You want? My van’s in the square, close by.”

“No, I don’t want to trouble you.”

“You won’t be troubling me, cousin. I’ve just dropped off a sideboard, and now I’ve got nothing else to do.”

“Well, I’m warning you, it’s ’way out of your way. You’re going to have to go the long way around.”

“I’ve got plenty of gas.”

He downed his lemonade in one swallow and signaled to the cashier not to let me pay. “Put this on my tab, Saad.”

The cashier refused my money and jotted down the amount of the check on a piece of paper, next to Omar’s name.

Night was starting to fall. The last glints of the sun splashed the upper stories of buildings. The noises of the street subsided. The day had been a rough one: three attacks in the city center and a skirmish around a suburban church.

We were in Tariq’s house. He, Yaseen, Salah, and Hassan had shut themselves up in a room on the second floor, no doubt refining the plans for the next operation. Hussein and I weren’t invited to the meeting. Hussein pretended not to care about this slight, but I sensed that it had stung him. As for me, I was beside myself, and like Hussein, I brooded over my anger in silence.

The upstairs door creaked, and a babble of conversation signaled the end of the conference. Salah came down first. He’d changed a great deal. He was enormous, with a mug like a bouncer and hairy fists constantly clenched, as if he were strangling a snake. Everything in him seemed to be boiling, like the inside of a volcano. He seldom spoke, never gave an opinion, and maintained his distance from the others. All his attention was focused on Yaseen, from whom he was inseparable. When we saw each other for the first time since Kafr Karam, Salah hadn’t even greeted me.

Yaseen, Hassan, and Tariq stopped and chatted for a while at the top of the stairs before coming down to join us. Their faces expressed neither tension nor enthusiasm. They all sat on the padded bench facing us. With great reluctance, Hussein picked up the remote control that was lying on the floor at his feet and turned off the little set.

Yaseen asked him, “You burned up the engine on that car of yours?”

“No one told me I had to put oil in it.”

“You have a warning light on your dashboard.”

“I saw a red light come on, but I didn’t know why.”

“You could have asked Hassan.”

“Hassan pretends I’m not there.”

“What do you mean by that?” Hassan asked angrily.

Hussein made a vague gesture with one hand and detached himself from his armchair.

“I’m talking to you,” Yaseen said in an authoritative voice.

“I’m not deaf; I just gotta go piss.”

Salah quivered from his head to his feet. He was none too pleased with Hussein’s attitude. Had it been up to Salah, he would have fixed Hussein’s ass on the spot. Salah couldn’t bear it when anyone disrespected his leader. He snorted loudly, crossed his arms tight against his chest, and clenched his jaw.

Yaseen gave Hassan an interrogatory look. Hassan spread his arms to show he was powerless and then walked toward the bathroom. We heard him talking softly to his twin brother.

Tariq offered us a cup of tea.

“I don’t have time,” Yaseen said.

“It won’t take more than a minute,” our host said.

“In that case, you’ve got fifty-eight seconds.”

Tariq made a dash for the kitchen.

Yaseen’s cell phone rang. He put it to his ear and listened; his face contracted. He stood up abruptly, walked over to the window, and, with his back against the wall, cautiously lifted the curtain.

“I see them,” he said into his phone. “What the fuck are they doing there? Nobody knows we’re here. You’re sure they’re after us?” With his free hand, he ordered Salah to go upstairs and have a look at what was going on in the street. Salah took the steps four at a time. Yaseen kept talking into his mobile phone. “As far as I know, this area has been fairly calm.”

Hassan, on his way back from the bathroom, immediately saw that something was wrong. He slipped to the other side of the window and gently moved the curtain aside. What he saw made him spring backward. He cursed and ran to an armoire, where a light machine gun was concealed. Along the way, he looked into the kitchen and alerted Tariq, who was still busy preparing tea.

Salah came back downstairs, unperturbed. “There are at least twenty cops around the house,” he announced, pulling a huge gun out from under his belt.

Yaseen examined the roof of the building opposite and then twisted his neck in order to see the terraces of the buildings closer to us. He spoke again into his cell phone: “And you’re where, exactly? Very good. You take them from behind and cut a hole in their trap big enough for us to get through…. By the street the garage is on, you’re sure? How many are there?…That’s how we’ll do it. You keep them entertained on your side, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

He snapped his phone shut and said, “Looks like some bastard’s ratted us out. There are cops on the roofs north, east, and south of here. Jawad and his men are going to help us get out of this. We’re going to charge the garage. There’ll be three or four collaborators for us to deal with.”

Tariq was panic-stricken. “I swear to you, Yaseen, there’s no mole in this sector.”

“We’ll talk about that later. Right now, you have to concentrate on getting out of here in one piece.”

Tariq started to fetch a Soviet-made rocket launcher, but as he reached the middle of the living room, a windowpane burst into fragments, and he fell over backward, already dead. The bullet, probably fired from a neighboring roof terrace, had shattered his upper jaw. Blood began spurting from his face and branching out across the tiled floor. Immediately, a hail of projectiles crashed into the room, demolishing the silver, riddling the walls, and raising a tornado of dust and unspecific fragments all around us. We threw ourselves on the floor and began crawling toward anything that might pass for shelter. Salah fired blindly through the window, howling like a savage as he emptied his clip. Calmer than Salah, Yaseen had crouched down in the spot where he’d been standing. He stared at Tariq’s contorted body as he pondered our next move. Hussein was hunched in the hallway with his fly open. When he saw Tariq stretched out on the floor, he burst out laughing.

Salah sprang to the rocket launcher, loaded it, and, with a movement of his head, ordered us to leave the living room. Hassan covered Yaseen, who ran for the hallway. The automatic-weapons fire abruptly stopped, and through the ensuing deathlike silence, we could hear the distant crying of women and children. Hassan took advantage of the lull to push me ahead of him.

The firing began again, as intensely as before, but this time we weren’t the target. Yaseen explained that Jawad and his men were creating a diversion and that this was the signal for us to abandon the house by the rear entrance. Salah aimed his launcher at a terrace and fired. A monstrous, eardrum-jangling explosion was followed by a huge conflagration, which masked the living room in a cloud of thick caustic smoke. “Run!” Salah shouted. “I’ll cover you!”

Stunned, I started running behind the others. Deafening bursts of reciprocal gunfire greeted me outside. Bullets ricocheted around me and whistled past my ears. Folded in half, my hands on my temples, I felt as though I were going through walls. I slipped past a doorway and fell onto a pile of garbage. Hussein laughed and ran straight ahead. His brother caught up with him and forced him into a side street. Gunfire broke out in front of us; a rocket exploded behind us. Someone screamed, apparently struck by the fragments. His cries pursued me as I clenched my teeth and ran, ran as I’d never run before in my life….

16

Yaseen was in a red rage. In the hideout where we’d gone to ground after managing to escape the police raid, he was all we could hear. He punched the furniture and kicked the doors. Hassan stood with folded arms and kept his eyes cast down. His twin brother was in a heap at the end of the entrance hall, sitting on the floor with his head between his knees and his hands on the nape of his neck. Salah was missing, and that fact redoubled Yaseen’s fury. He was used to ambushes, but leaving behind his most faithful lieutenant! “I want the head of the traitor who ratted on us,” he fumed. “I want it on a tray.”

He considered his cell phone. “Why doesn’t Salah call?”

Yaseen’s coolheadedness was gone, lost to a combination of anger and anxiety. When he wasn’t spraying us with his whitish spittle, he was knocking over everything in his way. Although we hadn’t occupied our new refuge very long, nothing was where it had been when we entered.

“There was no mole in this sector,” Yaseen repeated. “Tariq was adamant. We were in that house for months, and we never had any sort of problem whatsoever. Somebody must have made a mistake, and I have no doubt it was either you”—he jabbed his finger at me—“or Hussein.”

“I didn’t make any mistake,” Hussein growled. “And stop treating me like a retard.”

Yaseen, irritated by our silence, had been waiting for just such an opening as this. He leapt on Hussein, grabbed him by his shirt collar, and lifted him off the floor. “Don’t talk to me in that tone. Understand?”

Hussein let his arms hang down in a sign of submission but lifted his head high enough to show his leader he wasn’t afraid of him. Yaseen pushed him away brutally and watched him slide down the wall to his initial position. When Yaseen turned in my direction, I felt his burning eyes go all the way through me.

“How about you?” he asked me. “Are you sure you haven’t been dropping any white pebbles along your trail?”

I was still dazed. The explosions and the screams resounded in my head. I couldn’t believe we’d escaped from that deluge of projectiles, running like madmen through a warren of side streets, ducking past more than one murderous cross fire, and now we were safe and sound. Although unable to feel my legs, I was still, somehow, on my feet, but wrung-out, dumbstruck, undone, and I really didn’t need to be subjected to another ordeal. Yaseen’s glare menaced me like a blade.

“Have you made some new friend? Or told somebody something you shouldn’t have?”

“I don’t know anyone.”

“No one? Then how do you explain the shit that just went down? For months, Tariq’s place is a cozy hideout, and then, all of a sudden…Either you’re jinxed or you’ve been careless. My guys are veterans. They look twice before they take a step. You’re the only one who’s not completely up to speed. Who do you hang out with outside our group? Where do you go when you leave the hideout? What do you do with your time?”

His questions landed on me like blows, one after the other, without leaving me time to get a word in or catch my breath. My hands couldn’t stifle them or fend them off. Yaseen was trying to push me to the limit. He was in a fury, he needed someone to take it out on, and I was the weak link in the chain. It was the age-old story: When you can’t make sense of your misfortune, you invent a culprit for it. I strung together denials, trying hard to resist, to defend myself, to keep from getting upset, and then, suddenly, in a cry of outrage, and without realizing what I was doing, I let slip the name of Omar the Corporal. Maybe it was fatigue, or vexation, or just a way of removing myself from Yaseen’s thoroughly vile scrutiny. By the time I recognized my blunder, it was too late. I would have given my soul to have my words back, but Yaseen’s face had already turned crimson.

“What did you say? Omar the Corporal?”

“I see him every now and then, that’s all.”

“Does he know where you live?”

“No. Once he gave me a ride to the square, but only once. He never saw the house — he left me at the gas station.”

I hoped that Yaseen would drop the subject and go back to harassing Hussein or maybe even turn on Hassan. I hoped in vain.

“Am I dreaming, or what? You led that worthless prick to our hiding place?”

“He picked me up along the way and kindly agreed to drop me off at the service station. Where’s the harm in that? The station’s a long way from Tariq’s place. Omar couldn’t possibly have guessed where I was going. And besides, we’re not talking about just anybody; we’re talking about Omar. He’d never give us up.”

“Did he know you were with me?”

“Come on, Yaseen, it doesn’t make any difference.”

“Did he know or not?”

“Yes.”

“You idiot! You moron! You dared to lead that yellow coward to our—”

“He had nothing to do with the raid.”

“How do you know? Baghdad — no, the whole country — is full of snitches and collaborators.”

“Wait, Yaseen, wait. You’re wrong about—”

“Shut up! Not another word! You have nothing to say. Nothing, you understand? Where does that fat fuck live?”

I saw that I’d made a serious mistake; Yaseen wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me down if I didn’t try to redeem myself. He made me guide him to Omar’s place that very night. Along the way, seeing that he seemed to have relaxed somewhat, I begged him not to do anything rash. I felt sick, very sick; I didn’t know where to turn, and I was consumed by remorse and by the fear that I had caused a terrible misunderstanding. Yaseen promised me that if Omar had done nothing wrong, he’d leave him alone.

Hassan was at the wheel. He had a skinning knife hidden under his jacket, and the rigidity of his neck muscles gave me gooseflesh. Yaseen, in the front passenger seat, examined his fingernails, a blank look on his face. I cringed in the rear seat, my hands damp, my guts roiling, my thighs squeezed together to suppress an irresistible need to piss.

Avoiding the roadblocks and the main thoroughfares, we surreptitiously made our way to the poor neighborhood that had been my home for a brief while. The building in question reared up in the darkness like a landmark in the underworld. There was no light in any window and no sign of any living thing outside. It must have been three o’clock in the morning. We parked the car in a small, damaged courtyard and, after a quick look around, slipped into the building. I had a copy of the apartment key, which Yaseen confiscated and inserted into the lock. He slowly opened the door, groped for the light switch, and flicked it on. Omar was lying on the straw mattress on the floor, stark naked, with one leg wrapped around Hany, whose pallid flesh was likewise completely unclothed. At first, the sight threw us into confusion; Yaseen was the first to recover. He drew himself up, hands on his hips, and silently contemplated the two nude bodies at his feet.

“Get a load of this,” he said. “I knew Omar the Drunkard, and here we have Omar the Sodomite, getting off with boys now. A charming sight.”

There was so much contempt in his voice that I gulped.

The lovers were sound asleep, surrounded by empty wine bottles and soiled plates. They stank, the two of them. Hassan prodded Omar with the tip of his shoe. The Corporal shook himself heavily, gurgled, and resumed snoring.

“Go and wait for us in the car,” Yaseen said. It was an order.

I was four or five years younger than he was, and he considered me insufficiently mature to witness such a spectacle, particularly in his presence.

“You promised me you’d leave him alone if he had nothing to do with the raid,” I reminded Yaseen.

“Do what I tell you.”

I obeyed.

A few minutes later, Yaseen and Hassan joined me in the car. Since I’d heard no screams and no shots, I believed the worst had been avoided. Then I saw Hassan wipe his bloodstained hands under the armpits of his shirt, and I understood.

“It was him,” Yaseen announced as he got into the car. “He confessed.”

“You stayed in there less than five minutes. How did you make him talk so fast?”

“Tell him, Hassan.”

Hassan put the car in first gear and drove out of the courtyard. When we reached the end of the street, he turned to me and declared, “It was him all right, cousin. You’ve got nothing to reproach yourself for. That piece of shit didn’t hesitate a second when he saw who we were. He spit at us and said, ‘Go fuck yourselves.’”

“He knew why you were there?”

“He figured it out the second he woke up. He even laughed in our faces. Look, cousin, some things are clear, and this is one of them. We’re talking about a disgusting son of a bitch, a pig and a traitor. His wild nights are over.”

I tried to find out more; I asked exactly what Omar had said and what had happened to Hany. Yaseen pivoted in his seat and growled in my direction: “You want a notarized report, or what? This is war, not lace-making. If you think you’re not ready, then get the hell out, right now. No one has to know.”

I hated him. God, I hated him more than I believed myself capable of hating anyone. For his part, he was fully aware of the hatred he inspired in me. I know because I saw his vaunted stare waver a little before my eyes. At that precise moment, I realized I had just made myself a sworn enemy, and I understood that Yaseen would seize the next occasion to do me wrong.

Shortly after noon, when we were sitting around gnawing our fingernails in our new hideout, Yaseen’s mobile phone rang. It was Salah, who had miraculously made it out of Tariq’s house unscathed. The television news reports declared that the house itself was completely in ruins. It had collapsed under a barrage of artillery shells, and then fire had devastated a good part of the remains. According to the local residents, the pitched battle had lasted all evening, and the reinforcements sent to the scene of the clash had only intensified the confusion; electrical power had long since been cut, and after some of the neighbors were struck by stray bullets or grenade fragments, panic had spread throughout the area.

When Yaseen recognized his lieutenant’s voice on the telephone, he nearly burst into tears. He chided the fortunate survivor, reproaching him for his “radio silence”; then he consented to listen without further interruption. He nodded, running his finger under his collar again and again as we watched him in silence. At last, he raised his chin and spoke into the handset: “You can’t bring him here? Ask Jawad. He knows how to transfer a parcel.”

Yaseen snapped the phone shut and, without a word, hurried into the next room and slammed the door in our faces.

The “parcel” arrived for us that evening, in the trunk of a car driven by a uniformed police officer, a tall, strapping fellow I’d seen two or three times in Sayed’s store, ordering television sets from us. Whenever he’d come in, he’d been wearing civilian clothes. Now, it turned out, he was Jawad — his nom de guerre — and, to my great surprise, he was the deputy superintendent of this police district.

He explained to us that he’d been returning from a routine mission when he discovered that his unit’s assault team had been sent into action. “When the duty officer read me the coordinates of the operation, I couldn’t believe it. The superintendent’s target was your hideout. He wanted to conduct the action on his own and score points on his rivals.”

“You could have warned me immediately,” Yaseen said reproachfully.

“I wasn’t sure. You were in one of the most secure refuges in Baghdad. I didn’t see how they could have gotten close to you, not with all the alarm bells I’d set up all around. Somebody would have warned me. But not wanting to take any chances, I went to the area where the raid was about to take place, and that’s when things became clear.”

He lifted the trunk of his car, which he’d parked in the garage. A half-smothered man was lying curled up inside, wrapped like a sausage in a roll of clear packing tape. His mouth was gagged, and his face looked lumpy and battered.

“It was him. He’s the one who gave you up. He was there before the operation began, showing the superintendent your hideout.”

Yaseen shook his head sadly.

Thrusting his muscular arms into the trunk, Salah violently extracted the prisoner, threw him to the ground, and kicked him away from the car.

Yaseen squatted down beside the stranger and tore off his gag. “If you yell, I’ll poke out your eyes and throw your tongue to the rats.”

The man must have been around forty years old, with a scrawny body, a malnourished face, and graying temples. He wriggled in his bonds like a maggot.

“I’ve seen that face before,” Hussein said.

“He was your neighbor,” the policeman said, strutting a little with his thumbs hooked in his belt. “He lived in the building on the corner next to the grocery, the one with the climbing plants on the front.”

Yaseen stood up. “Why?” he asked the stranger. “Why did you give us up? We’re fighting for you, dammit!”

“I never asked you to,” the informer replied disdainfully. “You think I want to be saved by hoodlums like you? I’d rather die!”

Salah gave the man a brutal kick in the side, knocking the breath out of him. He rolled about, gasping for air. But as soon as he got his wind back, the snitch took up where he’d left off. “You consider yourselves fedayeen,” he panted. “But you’re nothing but murderers. Vandals. Child-killers. I’m not afraid of you. Do what you want with me, you won’t change my mind. I think you’re a pack of mad dogs. Criminals, heathens, head cases. I loathe you!”

He spat at us, one after the other.

Yaseen was astounded. “Is this guy normal?” he asked Jawad.

“Perfectly,” the police officer declared. “He teaches in a primary school.”

Yaseen thought for a while, holding his chin between his thumb and index finger. “How did he spot us? None of us is on any poster anywhere. None of us even has a police record. How did he know what we were?”

“I’d pick that gorilla face out of a million gorilla faces,” the snitch said contemptuously, jerking his head in Salah’s direction. “You bastard, you dog, you son of a whore…”

Salah was ready to take him apart, but Yaseen held him back.

“I was there when you killed Mohammed Sobhi, the union leader,” the informer said, his face crimson with fury. “I was in the car, waiting for him in the basement garage. And I saw you shoot him in the back when he stepped out of the elevator. In the back. Like the cowardly murderer you are. Disgusting pig! If my hands were free, I’d break you in half. That’s all you’re good for, shooting someone from behind and running like a rabbit. And afterward, you think you’re a hero and you swagger around the square. If Iraq has to be defended by spineless cowards like you, I’d rather let it go to the fucking dogs. What a pathetic bunch of wankers. What a—”

Yaseen kicked him in the face, cutting him off. Then Yaseen said, “Did you understand any of that rant, Jawad?”

The police officer twisted his mouth to one side. “Mohammed Sobhi was his brother. This prick recognized Salah when he saw him going into the place where you were holed up. Then he went to the station and informed the superintendent.”

Yaseen pursed his lips and looked circumspect. “Gag him again,” he ordered, “and take him somewhere far from here. I want him to die slowly, bit by bit. I want him to start rotting before he breathes his last.”

Salah and Hassan assured him they’d carry out his orders. They stuffed the “parcel” back in the trunk of Jawad’s car, got in, and drove out of the garage, preceded by Jawad himself, who was behind the wheel of Salah’s car. Hussein closed the garage door.

Yaseen, his neck bent forward, his shoulders sagging, was still standing in the spot where he’d interrogated the prisoner. I stood a few steps behind him, severely tempted to leap onto his back. I had to go to the deepest part of my being to recover my breath and say to him, “You see? Omar had nothing to do with it.”

It was as if I’d opened Pandora’s box. Yaseen shook from head to toe and then whipped around to face me, brandishing his finger like a dagger. His voice gave me a chill when he said, “One more word out of you, just one tiny word, and I’ll tear your throat out with my teeth.” Whereupon he shoved me aside with the back of his hand and went to his room to mistreat the furniture.

I stepped out into the night. In the anemic lights of the boulevards, while the curfew was regaining the upper hand, I measured the incongruity of people and things. Baghdad had turned away everything, even its prayers. And as for me, I no longer recognized myself in mine. I walked along with a heavy heart, hugging the walls like a shadow puppet…. What have I done? Almighty God! How will Omar ever forgive me?

17

Sleep had become my purgatory. Almost as soon as I dozed off, I started running again, fleeing through labyrinthine corridors with a shadowy shape hot on my heels. It was everywhere, even in my frantic breathing…. I jerked into consciousness, drenched from head to foot, my arms waving in front of me. It was always there — in the bright light of dawn, in the silence of the night, hovering over my bed. I clutched my temples with both hands and made myself so small that I disappeared under the sheets. What have I done? The horrible question penetrated me at full tilt, like a falcon striking a bustard. Omar’s ghost had become my companion animal, my walking grief, my intoxication, and my madness. All I had to do was to lower my eyelids and it would fill my mind, and when I opened my eyes, it hid the rest of the world. There was nothing left in the world except Omar’s ghost and me. We were the world.

It was no use praying, no use beseeching him to spare me, if only for a minute; I supplicated in vain. He remained where he was, silent and disconcerted, so real that I could have touched him had I stretched out my hand.

A week passed, things grew more and more intense, and my inner turmoil, a compound of weakness and dread, steadily increased. I felt myself slipping deeper and deeper into depression. I wanted to die.

I went to see Sayed and informed him of my desire to get it over with. I volunteered for a suicide attack. It was the most conclusive of shortcuts, and the most worthwhile, as well. This idea, on my mind since well before the mistake that had led to the Corporal’s execution, had by now become my fixation. I wasn’t afraid. I had no attachment to anything anymore. I felt as qualified as any suicide bomber. Every morning, you could hear them exploding on the streets; every evening, some military post was attacked. The bombers went to their deaths as to a party, in the midst of amazing fireworks displays.

“You’ll stand on line like everybody else,” Yaseen later told me. “And you’ll wait your turn.”

Any rapport that had existed between Yaseen and me was gone. He couldn’t stand me; I detested him. He was always after me, interrupting me when I tried to get a word in edgewise, rejecting my efforts to make myself useful. Our hostility made life miserable for the other members of our group, and things promised to get worse. Yaseen was trying to break me, trying to make me toe the line. I was no hothead; I never challenged his authority or his charisma. I simply hated him, and he took the contempt he aroused in me for insubordination.

Sayed eventually faced the obvious facts. My cohabitation with Yaseen was at risk of ending badly and endangering the entire group. Sayed authorized me to come back to his store, and I returned in haste to my little upstairs room. Omar’s ghost joined me there; now he had me all to himself. Nevertheless, I preferred the worst of his pestering to the mere sight of Yaseen.

It was after closing time on a Wednesday. I had dinner at the greasy spoon nearby and walked back to the store. The sun was going down in flames behind the buildings of the city. Sayed was waiting for me in the doorway, his eyes glittering in the obscurity. He was extremely excited.

We went up to my room. Once we were inside, he grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Today I received the best news of my life.”

His face was radiant as he hugged me to him, and then his happiness burst out. “It’s fantastic, cousin. Fantastic.”

He asked me to sit on the bed, made an effort to control his enthusiasm, and finally said, “I spoke to you about a mission. You wanted to see some action, and I told you maybe I had something for you, but I wanted to wait and be sure about it. Well, the miracle has taken place. I received the confirmation less than an hour ago. This incredible mission is now possible. Do you feel capable of accomplishing it?”

“I’ll say I do.”

“We’re talking about the most important mission ever undertaken in history. The final mission. The mission that will bring about the unconditional capitulation of the West and return us permanently to our proper role on the world’s stage. Do you believe you could—”

“I’m ready, Sayed. My life’s at your disposal.”

“It’s not only a question of your life. People die every day — my life doesn’t belong to me, either. But this is a crucial mission. It will require total, unfailing commitment.”

“Are you starting to have doubts about me?”

“I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I were.”

“So where’s the problem?”

“You’re free to refuse. I don’t want to pressure you in any way.”

“Nobody’s pressuring me. I accept the mission. Unconditionally.”

“I appreciate your determination, cousin. For what it’s worth, you have my entire confidence. I’ve been observing you ever since you first came into the store. Every time I lay eyes on you, I feel a kind of levitation; I take off…. Yet it was a difficult choice. There’s no lack of candidates. But it means a lot to me that the chosen one is a boy from my hometown. Kafr Karam, the forgotten, will take its place in history,” he concluded. Then he took me in his arms and kissed me on the forehead.

He had lifted me up into the ranks of those who are revered. That night, I dreamed about Omar again. But I didn’t run away from him.

Sayed came back to sound me out once more. He wanted to be sure I hadn’t spoken too soon. The day before launching the preparations for the mission, he told me, “I’ll give you three more days. Think hard. At the end of that time, we’re off.”

“I’ve already thought hard. Now I want to act.”

Sayed assigned me to a small but luxurious apartment with a view of the Tigris. The first time I went to the place, a photographer was waiting there for me. After the photo session, a barber cut my hair, and then I took a shower. As I was to leave Baghdad within a week, I went out to the post office to send Bahia the money I’d managed to put aside.

On a Friday, after the Great Prayer, I left Baghdad in a livestock truck driven by an old peasant in a turban. I was supposed to be his nephew and his shepherd. My new papers were in order and looked properly worn. My name appeared on various documents connected to the livestock business. We negotiated the roadblocks without difficulty and reached Ar Ramadi before nightfall. Sayed was waiting for us at a farm about twenty kilometers west of the town. He made sure that everything had gone well, ate dinner with us, and gave us the itinerary for the next stage before taking his leave. At dawn the following day, we were back on the road, bound for a little village on the slopes of the Badiet esh Sham, the plateau of the Syrian desert. There, another driver took me aboard his van. He and I spent the night in a small town and drove away before sunrise, heading for Ar Rutbah, not far from the Jordanian border. Sayed, who was already there, welcomed us in the courtyard of a health clinic. A physician in a graying lab coat invited us to wash up and occupy one of the patients’ rooms. Our departure from the clinic was canceled on each of the following three days because of a military redeployment in the region. On the fourth day, taking advantage of a sandstorm, the driver and I set out for Jordan. Visibility was zero, but my companion drove calmly along, following desert trails he seemed to know with his eyes closed. After several hours of absorbing shocks and inhaling sand, we made a stop on the slopes of a valley, a barren place where the wind howled unceasingly. We drove onto a natural courtyard and took refuge in a cave. We had a bite to eat, and then the driver, a small, dried-up, impenetrable fellow, climbed to the top of a ridge. I saw him take out his cell phone and, apparently with the help of some sort of navigation device, indicate our coordinates. When he came back, he declared, “I won’t have to sleep outdoors tonight.” That was the only time he ever addressed a word to me. He entered the cave, lay down, and pretended he wasn’t there.

The sandstorm began to subside, its surges coming at longer and longer intervals. The wind still sang in the crevices, but as the landscape steadily emerged from the ocher fog of the desert, the gusts gradually died down and then suddenly fell silent altogether.

The sun burned more brightly as it touched the rim of the earth, throwing the bare, jagged hills on the horizon into bold relief. Out of nowhere, two men riding mules appeared, climbing up the valley to our cave. Later, I would learn that they belonged to a ring of former smugglers who had turned to gunrunning and occasionally served as guides for the volunteers arriving from other countries to swell the ranks of the Iraqi resistance. My driver complimented them on their punctuality, inquired about the current operational situation in the sector, and turned me over to them. Without any sort of farewell, he returned to his vehicle and sped away.

The two strangers were tall and thin, their heads wrapped in dusty keffiyehs. Both of them wore jogging pants, thick sweaters, and espadrilles. The taller of the two sought to reassure me. “Everything’s going fine,” he said. He offered me a big woolen pullover and a hat. “Nights get cold here.”

They helped me climb up on a mule and we set out. Night fell, and the wind came up again, icy and vexing. My guides took turns riding the other mule. The goat paths branched out before us, opalescent under the moon. We hurtled down some steep escarpments and clambered up others, stopping only to prick up our ears and scrutinize the features of the landscape that lay in shadow. The journey took place without incident, as my guides had foretold. We made a brief stop in a hollow to eat and regain our strength. I devoured several slices of dried meat and emptied a goatskin of springwater. My companions advised me not to eat too fast and to try to rest. They attended to my every need, regularly asking me if I was holding up all right or if I wanted to get off my mule and walk a little. I said I wanted to keep going.

We crossed the border into Jordan at about four o’clock in the morning. Two border patrols had passed each other a few moments before, one in a military 4×4, the other on foot. The observation post, recognizable by its watchtower and the light shining on its antenna, stood atop a hillock. My guides observed the post through infrared binoculars. When the squad of scouts returned to their quarters, we took our mules by the reins and slipped along a dry riverbed. A few kilometers farther on, a little van carrying a cargo of plastic bowls bore down upon us. A man wearing a traditional tunic and a Bedouin scarf around his head was at the steering wheel. He congratulated my two guides and traced on the ground a secure itinerary for their return to Iraq. He informed them that drones were flying over the area, explained how to elude their sweeps, and recommended a way to get around a unit of coalition forces freshly deployed behind the line of demarcation. The guides asked a few practical questions; when they were satisfied, they wished us good luck and began their journey back.

“You can relax now,” the new stranger said to me. “From this point on, it’s a piece of cake. You’re in the best hands in the business.”

He was wizened and swarthy. His large head, too big for his shoulders, made him seem unsteady on his feet. His full lips opened on two rows of gold teeth that sparkled in the rising sun. He drove like a madman, with no regard for potholes and no reticence about slamming on the brakes, which he did abruptly and violently, often catapulting me against the windshield.

Sayed reappeared that evening, in my new guide’s house. He embraced me for a long time.

“Two more stages,” he said. “And then you’ll be able to rest.”

The following day, after a substantial breakfast, he drove me to a border village in a large, high-powered car. There, he turned me over to Shakir and Imad, two young men who looked like students, and he said to me, “On the other side, there’s Syria, and then, right after that, Lebanon. I’ll see you in Beirut in two days.”