Frankenstein in Baghdad Page 2

  Nader Shamouni, the deacon, dropped off Elishva in Lane 7 in Bataween, just a few steps from her door. The street was quiet. The slaughter had ended several hours ago, but the destruction was still clearly visible. It might have been the neighborhood’s biggest explosion. The old deacon was depressed; he didn’t say a word to Elishva as he parked his car next to an electricity pole. There was blood and hair on the pole, mere inches from his nose and his thick white mustache. He felt a tremor of fear.

  Elishva got out of the deacon’s car and waved good-bye. Walking down the street, she could hear her unhurried footsteps on the gravel. She was preparing an answer for when she opened the door and Nabu looked up as if to ask, “So? What happened?”

  More important, she was preparing to scold Saint George. The previous night he had promised that she would either receive some good news or her mind would be set at rest and her ordeal would come to an end.

  2

  Elishva’s neighbor Umm Salim believed strongly, unlike many others, that Elishva had special powers and that God’s hand was on her shoulder wherever she was. She could cite numerous incidents as evidence. Although sometimes she might criticize or think ill of the old woman, she quickly went back to respecting and honoring her. When Elishva came to visit and they sat with some of their neighbors in the shade in Umm Salim’s old courtyard, Umm Salim spread out for her a woven mat, placed cushions to the right and left of her, and poured her tea.

  Sometimes she might exaggerate and say openly in Elishva’s presence that if it weren’t for those inhabitants who had baraka—spiritual power—the neighborhood would be doomed and swallowed up by the earth on God’s orders. But this belief of Umm Salim’s was really like the smoke she blew from her shisha pipe during those afternoon chats: it came out in billows, then coiled into sinuous white clouds that vanished into the air, never to travel outside the courtyard.

  Many thought of Elishva as just a demented old woman with amnesia, the proof being that she couldn’t remember the names of men—even those she had known for half a century. Sometimes she looked at them in a daze, as though they had sprung up in the neighborhood out of nowhere.

  Umm Salim and some of the other kindhearted neighbors were distraught when Elishva started to tell bizarre stories about things that had happened to her—stories that no reasonable person would believe. Others scoffed, saying that Umm Salim and the other women were just sad that one of their number had crossed over to the dark and desolate shore beyond, meaning the group as a whole was headed in the same direction.

  3

  Two people were sure Elishva didn’t have special powers or anything and was just a crazy old woman. The first was Faraj the realtor, owner of the Rasoul realty office on the main commercial street in Bataween. The second was Hadi the junk dealer, who lived in a makeshift dwelling attached to Elishva’s house.

  Over the past few years Faraj had tried repeatedly to persuade Elishva to sell her old house, but Elishva just flatly refused, without explanation. Faraj couldn’t understand why an old woman like her would want to live alone in a seven-room house with only a cat. Why, he wondered, didn’t she sell it and move to a smaller house with more air and light, and use the extra money to live the rest of her life in comfort?

  Faraj never got a good answer. As for Hadi, her neighbor, he was a scruffy, unfriendly man in his fifties who always smelled of alcohol. He had asked Elishva to sell him the antiques that filled her house: two large wall clocks, teak tables of various sizes, carpets and furnishings, and plaster and ivory statues of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus. There were more than twenty of these statues, spread around the house, as well as many other things that Hadi hadn’t had time to inspect.

  Of these antiques, some of which dated back to the 1940s, Hadi had asked Elishva, “Why don’t you sell them, save yourself the trouble of dusting?” his eyes popping out of his head at the sight of them all. But the old woman just walked him to the front door and sent him out into the street, closing the door behind him. That was the only time Hadi had seen the inside of her house, and the impression it left him with was of a strange museum.

  The two men didn’t abandon their efforts, but because the junk dealer usually wasn’t presentable, Elishva’s neighbors were not sympathetic to him. Faraj the realtor tried several times to encourage Elishva’s neighbors to win her over to his proposal; some even accused Veronica Munib, the Armenian neighbor, of taking a bribe from Faraj to persuade Elishva to move in with Umm Salim and her husband. Faraj never lost hope. Hadi, on the other hand, constantly pestered Elishva until he eventually lost interest and just threw hostile glances her way whenever she passed him on the street.

  Elishva not only rejected the offers from these two men, she also reserved a special hatred for them, consigning them to everlasting hell. In their faces she saw two greedy people with tainted souls, like cheap carpets with permanent ink stains.

  Abu Zaidoun the barber could be added to the list of people Elishva hated and cursed. Elishva had lost Daniel because of him: he was the Baathist who had taken her son by the collar and dragged him off into the unknown. But Abu Zaidoun had been out of sight for many years. Elishva no longer ran into him, and no one talked about him in front of her. Since leaving the Baath Party, he had been preoccupied with his many ailments and had no time for anything that happened in the neighborhood.

  4

  Faraj was at home when the massive explosion went off in Tayaran Square. Three hours later, at about ten o’clock in the morning, he opened his realty office and noticed cracks in the large front window. He cursed his bad luck, though he had noticed the shattered windows of many other shops in the area. In fact, he could see Abu Anmar, owner of the Orouba Hotel across the street, standing bewildered on the sidewalk, in his dishdasha, amid shards of glass from his old hotel’s upper windows.

  Faraj could see that Abu Anmar was shocked, but he didn’t care: he had no great affection for him. They were polar opposites, even undeclared rivals. Abu Anmar, like many of the hotel owners in Bataween, made his living off workers and students and people who came to Baghdad from the provinces to visit hospitals or clinics or to go shopping. Over the past decade, with the departure of many of the Egyptian and Sudanese migrant workers, hotels had become dependent on a few customers who lived in them almost permanently—drivers on long-distance bus routes, students who didn’t like the college dorms, and people who worked in the restaurants in Bab al-Sharqi and Saadoun Street, in the factories that made shoes and other things, and in the Harj flea market. But most of these people disappeared after April 2003, and now many of the hotels were nearly empty. To make matters worse, Faraj had appeared on the scene, trying to win over customers who might otherwise have gone to Abu Anmar’s hotel or one of the others in the area.

  Faraj had taken advantage of the chaos and lawlessness in the city to get his hands on several houses of unknown ownership. He turned these into cheap boardinghouses, renting the rooms to workers from the provinces or to families displaced from nearby areas for sectarian reasons or because of old vendettas that had come back into effect with the fall of the regime.

  Abu Anmar could only grumble and complain. He had moved to Baghdad from the south in the 1970s and had no relatives or friends in the capital to help him. In the past he had relied on the power of the regime. Faraj, on the other hand, had many relatives and acquaintances, and when the regime fell, they were the means by which he imposed authority, winning everyone’s respect and legalizing his appropriation of the abandoned houses, even though everyone knew he didn’t have the papers to prove he owned them or had ever rented them from the government.

  Faraj could use his growing power against Elishva. He had seen her house from the inside only twice but had fallen in love with it immediately. It had probably been built by Jews, since it was in the style favored by the Iraqi Jews: an inner courtyard surrounded by several rooms on two floors, with a basement under one of the rooms
that opened onto the street. There were fluted wooden columns supporting the arcade on the upper floor. With the metal railings, inlaid with wood, they created a unique aesthetic effect. The house also had double-leaf wooden doors with metal bolts and locks, and wooden windows reinforced with metal bars and glazed with stained glass. The courtyard was paved with fine brickwork and the rooms with small black and white tiles like a chessboard. The courtyard was open to the sky and had once been covered with a white cloth that was removed during the summer, but the cloth was no longer there. The house was not as it once had been, but it was sturdy and had suffered little water damage, unlike similar houses on the street. The basement had been filled in at some point, but that didn’t matter. The main drawback for Faraj was that one of the rooms on the upper floor had completely collapsed, with many of the bricks having fallen beyond the wall shared with the house next door; the total ruin inhabited by Hadi the junk dealer. The bathroom on the upper floor was also in ruins. Faraj would need to spend some money on repairs and renovations, but it would be worth it.

  Faraj thought it would take only half an hour to evict a defenseless old Christian woman, but a voice in his head warned him that he risked breaking the law and offending people, so it might be better to first gauge people’s feelings about the old woman. The best thing would be to wait till she died, and then no one but he would dare to take over the house, since everyone knew how attached he was to it and acknowledged him as its future owner, however long Elishva lived.

  “Look on the bright side,” Faraj shouted to Abu Anmar, who was wringing his hands in dismay at the damage to his property. Abu Anmar raised his arms to the heavens in solidarity with Faraj’s optimism, or maybe he was saying “May God take you” to the greedy realtor whom fate had taunted him with all day long.

  5

  Elishva shoved her cat off the sofa and brushed away the loose cat hairs. She couldn’t actually see any hairs, but she knew from stroking the cat that its hair was falling out all over the place. She could overlook the hair unless it was in her special spot on the sofa facing the large picture of Saint George the Martyr that hung between smaller gray pictures of her son and her husband, framed in carved wood. There were two other pictures of the same size, one of the Last Supper and the other of Christ being taken down from the cross, and three miniatures copied from medieval icons, drawn in thick ink and faded colors, depicting various saints, some of whose names she didn’t know because it was her husband who had put them up many years ago. They were still as they were originally hung, some in the parlor, some in her bedroom, some in Daniel’s room, which was closed, and some in the other abandoned rooms.

  Almost every evening she sat there to resume her sterile conversation with the saint with the angelic face. The saint wasn’t in ecclesiastical dress: he was wearing thick, shiny plates of armor that covered his body and a plumed helmet, with his wavy blond hair peeking out from under the helmet. He was holding a long pointed lance and sitting on a muscular white horse that had reared up to avoid the jaws of a hideous dragon encroaching from the corner of the picture, intent on swallowing the horse, the saint, and all his military accoutrements.

  Elishva ignored the extravagant details. She put on the thick glasses that hung from a cord around her neck and looked at the calm, angelic face that betrayed no emotion. He wasn’t angry or desperate or dreamy or happy. He was just doing his job out of devotion to God.

  Elishva found no comfort in abstract speculation. She treated her patron saint as one of her relatives, a member of a family that had been torn apart and dispersed. He was the only person she had left, apart from Nabu, the cat, and the specter of her son, Daniel, who was bound to return one day. To others she lived alone, but she believed she lived with three beings, or three ghosts, with so much power and presence that she didn’t feel lonely.

  She was angry because her patron saint hadn’t fulfilled any of the three promises she had extracted from him after countless nights of pleading, begging, and weeping. She didn’t have much time left on this earth, and she wanted a sign from the Lord about Daniel—whether he was alive and would return or where his real grave or his remains were. She wanted to challenge her patron saint on the promises he had given her, but she waited for night to fall because during the day the picture was just a picture, inanimate and completely still, but at night a portal opened between her world and the other world, and the Lord came down, embodied in the image of the saint, to talk through him to Elishva, the poor sheep who had been abandoned by the rest of the flock and had almost fallen into the abyss of faithless perdition.

  That night, by the light of the oil lamp, Elishva could see the ripples in the old picture behind the murky glass, but she could see also the saint’s eyes and his soft, handsome face. Nabu meowed irritably as he left the room. The saint’s long arm was still holding the lance, but now his eyes were on Elishva. “You’re too impatient, Elishva,” he said. “I told you the Lord will bring you peace of mind or put an end to your torment, or you will hear news that will bring you joy. But no one can make the Lord act at a certain time.”

  Elishva argued with the saint for half an hour until his beautiful face reverted to its normal state, his dreamy gaze stiff and immobile, a sign that he had grown tired of this sterile discussion. Before going to bed, she said her usual prayers in front of the large wooden cross in her bedroom and checked that Nabu was asleep in the corner on a small tiger-skin rug.

  The next day, after having breakfast and washing the dishes, she was surprised to hear the annoying roar of American Apache helicopters flying overhead. She saw her son, Daniel, or imagined she did. There was Danny, as she had always called him when he was young—at last her patron saint’s prophecy had come true. She called him, and he came over to her. “Come, my son. Come, Danny.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE LIAR

  1

  TO MAKE THE STORIES he told more interesting, Hadi was careful to include realistic details. He remembered all the details of the things that happened to him and included them every time he recounted his experiences. One day he was in Aziz the Egyptian’s coffee shop, sitting on the bench in the corner by the front window and stroking his mustache and his forked beard. He ground the small spoon nervously into the bottom of the teacup and took two sips of tea before starting to tell his story again, this time for the benefit of some patrons whom Aziz had encouraged to listen to Hadi. The guests were a slim blond German journalist with thin lips and thick glasses perched on her small nose, her young Iraqi translator, a Palestinian photographer, and a swarthy young journalist named Mahmoud al-Sawadi, who came from the town of Amara in southern Iraq and was living in Abu Anmar’s Orouba Hotel.

  The German journalist was making a documentary about Baghdad journalists and was accompanying Mahmoud al-Sawadi on a normal working day. She hadn’t planned to listen to a long, complicated story told by a junk dealer with bulging eyes, who reeked of alcohol and whose tattered clothes were dotted with cigarette burns. She was taking a risk by being out on the streets of Baghdad in such a conspicuous way, so she hadn’t turned on her camera and was just listening as she drank her tea. Every now and then she turned to her Iraqi translator, who gave her a lengthy explanation of what Hadi was saying.

  Hadi was rambling. It was a warm spring day, and the German journalist would have preferred to spend the rest of it outside. And at some point, she had to get back to the press center at the Sheraton Hotel to transcribe the tapes she had recorded with Mahmoud al-Sawadi.

  “That guy’s recounting the plot of a movie,” she said to Mahmoud as he walked her out of the coffee shop. “He’s stolen his story from a Robert De Niro film.”

  “Yes, it looks like he watches lots of movies. He’s well known in the area.”

  “Then he should have gone to Hollywood,” she said with a laugh as she got into the translator’s car.

  2

  Hadi wasn’t bothered. Some people walk ou
t in the middle of movies. It’s quite normal.

  “Where did we leave off?” asked Hadi as Mahmoud returned and sat on the bench opposite him. Aziz stood, holding the empty teacups and smiling broadly, waiting for Hadi to resume his story.

  “We’d gotten to the explosion,” said Aziz.

  “The first one or the second?” asked Hadi.

  “The first one . . . in Tayaran Square,” said Mahmoud, waiting for Hadi to contradict himself by changing some of the details. That was the only reason Mahmoud was willing to listen to this story for the second or third time—to see if Hadi would contradict himself.

  The explosion was horrific—and here Hadi looked to Aziz for confirmation. Hadi had run out of the coffee shop. He had been eating some of the beans that Ali al-Sayed made in the shop next door and that Hadi ate for breakfast every morning. On his way out of the shop he collided with people running from the explosion. The smell suddenly hit his nostrils—the smoke, the burning of plastic and seat cushions, the roasting of human flesh. You wouldn’t have smelled anything like it in your life and would never forget it.

  The sky was cloudy and threatening a downpour. The workers were lined up in large numbers across from the grand white Armenian church with the cross-topped towers in the shape of octagonal pyramids. Smoking, chatting, drinking tea, eating cake from the street vendors on the wide sidewalk or pickled turnips or beans from the nearby carts, they waited for vehicles looking for day laborers for building or demolition work. Along the same curb there were buses calling for passengers going to Karrada or to the University of Technology, and at the opposite curb it was much the same: cars interspersed with stalls selling cigarettes, candy, underwear, and many other things. A gray four-wheel drive stopped, and most of the workers sitting on the curb stood up. When some of them approached, the vehicle exploded in a ball of fire. No one saw it coming; it all happened in a fraction of a second. The people who weren’t injured—because they were too far away, or screened by other people’s bodies, or behind parked cars, or because they were coming down the side lanes and hadn’t reached the main street when the explosion went off—all these people and others—like those in the offices next to the Armenian church and some long-distance taxi drivers—witnessed the explosion as it engulfed the vehicles and the bodies of the people around them. It cut electricity wires and killed birds. Windows were shattered and doors blown in. Cracks appeared in the walls of the nearby houses, and some old ceilings collapsed. There was unseen damage too, all inflicted in a single moment.