Frankenstein in Baghdad Read online

  Hadi was watching the scene after the commotion had died down and the big cloud of smoke had lifted. Trails of black smoke continued to rise from the cars, and flames licked small burning objects scattered on the pavement. The police came quickly and set up a cordon. Injured people were groaning and bodies were lying in heaps on the asphalt, covered in blood and singed black by the heat. Hadi said that when he reached the scene, he stood at the corner by the hardware stores and calmly watched.

  As he recounted the story, Hadi lit a cigarette and started to smoke, as if trying to get rid of the smell of the explosion. He liked the idea of appearing on the scene as a kind of disinterested villain, and he waited to see from the faces of those who were listening whether they were similarly impressed. Ambulances came to pick up the dead and injured, then fire engines to douse the cars and tow trucks to drag them off to an unknown destination. Water hoses washed away the blood and ashes. Hadi watched the scene with eagle eyes, looking for something in particular amid this binge of death and devastation. Once he was sure he had seen it, he threw his cigarette to the ground and rushed to grab it before a powerful jet of water could blast it down the storm drain. He wrapped it in his canvas sack, folded the sack under his arm, and left the scene.

  3

  Hadi got home before the downpour began. He crossed the loose paving stones of the courtyard, went to his room, and put the folded canvas sack down on his bed. He had been breathing so heavily he could hear a whistling in his nose and a wheezing in his chest. He reached for the folded canvas sack, then changed his mind and decided to wait. He preferred to listen to the sound of the raindrops, which had started tentatively and then pattered steadily. Within moments the rain was pelting down, flushing the courtyard, the streets, Tayaran Square, and what remained of all the day’s horrors.

  Calling Hadi’s place a house would be an exaggeration. Many people knew it well, especially Aziz the Egyptian before he got married and gave up the dissolute lifestyle. He and Hadi used to sit around Hadi’s table and drink till late, or Aziz might find Hadi with one or two of the prostitutes from Lane 5. It was always fun with Hadi because he didn’t deny himself when it came to pleasure.

  Hadi’s house wasn’t really his and wasn’t really a house. Most of what was in it was falling apart. There was only one room, right at the back; it had holes in the roof, and Hadi and a colleague named Nahem Abdaki had made it their base three years earlier.

  Hadi and Nahem had been known in the area for years. They drove a horse-drawn cart around, buying household junk—pots and pans, and appliances that didn’t work. Mornings they’d stop by Aziz’s coffee shop for breakfast and tea before setting out on a grand tour of Bataween and the Abu Nuwas neighborhood on the other side of Saadoun Street. Then they would head off in Nahem’s cart, to other parts of the city, as far south as Karrada, where they disappeared into the backstreets.

  After the American invasion, everyone noticed amid the chaos that Hadi and Nahem were rebuilding what they called “the Jewish ruin,” although nothing Jewish was ever seen there—no candelabra, no Stars of David or Hebrew inscriptions. Hadi rebuilt the ruin’s outer wall with whatever was lying around and installed the big wooden door that had been hidden under dirt and piles of bricks. He and Nahem removed the stones from the courtyard, restored the ruin’s only good room, and left the half walls and the collapsing ceilings of the other rooms as they were. The room above Hadi’s had one wall standing, with a window. The wall was in danger of collapsing and burying alive anyone who happened to be in the courtyard, but the wall never did fall over. The locals eventually realized that Hadi and his friend had become part of the neighborhood. Even Faraj the realtor, who was notorious for appropriating houses that had been abandoned by their owners, showed no interest in what the junk dealer had claimed for his use. To Faraj the place remained the Jewish ruin, as it always had been.

  Where had these two men come from? No one gave much thought to the question because the area had plenty of outsiders who had moved in on top of each other over many decades; no one could claim to be an original inhabitant. A year or two later Nahem got married, rented a house in Bataween, and moved out of Hadi’s place, although he and Hadi still worked together with the horse and cart.

  Nahem was younger than Hadi—in his mid to late thirties—and they seemed like father and son, although they didn’t look like each other. Nahem had big ears on a small head, with hair that was full and long and straight but like coarse wire, and thick eyebrows that almost converged. Hadi used to joke that even if Nahem lived to be 120, he would never lose his hair. Hadi was over fifty, though it was hard to judge his age. He was always disheveled, with an untrimmed forked beard, a body that was wiry but hard and energetic, and a bony face with sunken cheeks.

  Hadi called his partner Old Misery. Unlike Hadi, Nahem didn’t smoke or drink, was fastidious about religious matters, and didn’t touch a woman till his wedding day. Because of his religious scruples, he was the one who “baptized” the house when they moved in, putting up on the wall in the main room a large framed copy of the Throne Verse of the Quran. He glued it to the wall to make sure it would be hard to remove, at least until it fell apart. Hadi had no regard for religion, but he didn’t want to seem antagonistic, so he let it slide that the verse was the first thing he saw every day.

  Nahem didn’t live long enough to find out whether his head of hair would last as Hadi always predicted. By the time Hadi sat in Aziz’s coffee shop with Mahmoud al-Sawadi and some old men, telling more of his story, Nahem had already been dead for several months—from a car bomb that had exploded in front of the office of a religious party in Karrada, killing also some other passersby and Nahem’s horse. It had been hard to separate Nahem’s flesh from that of the horse.

  The shock of Nahem’s death changed Hadi. He became aggressive. He swore and cursed and threw stones after the American Hummers or the vehicles of the police and the National Guard. He got into arguments with anyone who mentioned Nahem and what had happened to him. He kept to himself for a while, and then went back to his old self, laughing and telling extraordinary stories, but now he seemed to have two faces, or two masks—as soon as he was alone he was gloomy and despondent in a way he hadn’t been before. He also started drinking during the day and always had quarters of arak or whisky in his pocket and the smell of alcohol on his breath. He grew dirtier, let his beard grow longer, and rarely washed his clothes.

  Nahem Abdaki was never mentioned again, lest Hadi throw a tantrum and start shouting obscenities. So Mahmoud al-Sawadi didn’t hear about Nahem till later, in the version of the story told by Aziz the Egyptian.

  4

  “Where did we leave off?” asked Hadi after relieving himself in the toilets next to the coffee shop.

  “At the part about the big nose in the canvas sack,” Mahmoud al-Sawadi replied wearily.

  “Oh yes, the nose.”

  Hadi was zipping up his fly as he came toward the bench by the front window of the coffee shop. He sat down to resume his story, and Mahmoud, who was hoping to catch him out, was disappointed to find he hadn’t changed any of the details. Before going to the bathroom, he had paused at the point in the story when the rain stopped and he went out to the courtyard with the canvas sack. Looking up at the sky, he saw the clouds breaking up like wisps of cotton, as if all at once they had released their water and were now departing. Some of the secondhand furniture was sitting in rainwater, which would damage it, but Hadi wasn’t thinking about that. He went to the shed, which he had assembled out of scraps of furniture, iron bars, and sections of kitchen units he had leaned up against the piece of wall that still remained, and squatted down at one end. The rest of the shed was dominated by a massive corpse—the body of a naked man, with viscous liquids, light in color, oozing from parts of it. There was only a little blood—some small dried patches on the arms and legs, and some grazes and bruises around the shoulders and neck. It was hard to say wh
at color the skin was—it didn’t have a uniform color. Hadi moved farther into the narrow space around the body and sat down close to the head. The area where the nose should have been was badly disfigured, as if a wild animal had bitten a chunk out of it. Hadi opened the canvas sack and took out the thing. In recent days he had spent hours looking for one like it, yet he was still uneasy handling it. It was a fresh nose, still coated in congealed, dark red blood. His hand trembling, he positioned it in the black hole in the corpse’s face. It was a perfect fit, as if the corpse had its own nose back.

  Hadi withdrew his hand, wiped his fingers on his clothes, and looked at the face with some dissatisfaction, but his task was now finished. Actually, it wasn’t quite finished: he had to sew the nose in place.

  The nose was all the corpse needed to be complete, so now Hadi was finishing the job. It was a horrible job, one he had done without anyone’s help, and somehow it didn’t seem to make any sense despite all the arguments he used when trying to explain himself to his listeners.

  “I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash. It’s a human being, guys, a person,” he told them.

  “But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,” someone objected.

  “I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial,” Hadi explained.

  “What happened next?”

  “To me, or the Whatsitsname?”

  “To both of you.”

  Hadi’s listeners were completely wrapped up in the story. New listeners risked missing the pleasures of the story if they insisted on challenging it right from the start. The logical objections were usually left to the end, and no one interfered with the way the story was told or with the subplots Hadi went into.

  Hadi had an appointment with a man in Karrada. For several days he hadn’t bought or sold anything, and his money was starting to run out. He had been pursuing the man for a while because there could be some money in it for him. He was another old person living alone in his own house, very much like Elishva, but this old one had a girlfriend in Russia who had persuaded him to sell his house and furniture and to emigrate so they could spend their retirement together.

  No problem with that; may they live happily ever after. But whenever Hadi thought he and the old man had come to an agreement, the man would panic about losing his furniture, especially his chandeliers, reading lamps, and old-fashioned valve radios. He would cling to them as if he would drown without them. Hadi didn’t want to put pressure on him or frighten him off, so he went away and then came back later to find him all smiles and enthusiastic about sealing a deal.

  Hadi washed his hands after handling the corpse. He changed into clean clothes and went out to meet the reluctant old man, worried that someone else might convince him to sell his valuable furniture or might lease the house furnished, allowing the old man to retain ownership and collect rent while the tenant harbored hopes of assuming ownership when he died.

  The man’s house wasn’t far—Hadi could board the bus and be there in five minutes. When there was traffic, he would make the trip on foot, along the way collecting empty soda and beer cans in a large canvas sack. He could sell them later to the peddlers who specialized in such things or save them in sacks at home and then hire a pickup to take them to the aluminum recycling plant in Hafez al-Qadi near Rashid Street.

  “And the corpse, for God’s sake, what happened to that?”

  “Hang on a while.”

  Hadi reached the man’s house and knocked on the door, but no one came to open it. Perhaps the man was asleep or out. Perhaps he was now dead: his time had come before he could see his Russian girlfriend again and touch her thin, wrinkled hands. Hadi kept knocking till he attracted the attention of the neighbors, then he turned back to Saadoun Street and went to a restaurant near the Rahma Hospital. He ate a kebab sandwich and ordered two kebab skewers to take home with him.

  The clouds had completely cleared, but the wind blew in unpredictable gusts from various directions. The cigarette vendor’s umbrella had toppled over, the block of cement in the large tin can it was in preventing it from flying away.

  Buffeted by the wind, the pedestrians were having a hard time walking. Some looked as though a hidden hand were slapping them or pushing them along from behind. People sitting outside coffee shops soon went inside, and drivers with their car windows partly open wound them firmly closed. The newspaper and magazine vendors dispersed, and the people who sold cigarettes and sweets at traffic lights put their goods into their shoulder bags so they wouldn’t blow away. People wearing hats pressed them down hard to keep them from flying away.

  At the Sadeer Novotel hotel, overlooking Andalus Square, the palm trees swayed and the guard in the forecourt fastened his military jacket tight. He didn’t have to stand in the open air, but his wooden sentry box didn’t protect him from either the cold or the heat. If he had been a soldier or a policeman in one of the units posted throughout the streets of Baghdad, he would have lit a fire in an open oil drum to keep himself warm, covering his clothes in soot, but the hotel management had banned such things.

  “And now he’s going on about the hotel guard!”

  “Be patient, man. He’s coming to your part of the story.”

  Hadi finished off his kebab, drank a can of Pepsi, and then crushed it with his hand and threw it into the canvas sack beside him. He didn’t want to go out in the high wind, so he passed the time by picking through the restaurant’s trash and removing all the soda cans. When the storm had died down, he went outside to find that the sun had disappeared and the sky had turned gray and was growing darker by the minute. He couldn’t think straight. The he remembered the corpse he had left at home, and he felt dizzy.

  Without thinking, he walked toward the Andalus Square intersection. It was an extraordinary day. On the restaurant’s television he had heard there had been explosions during the day in Kadhimiya, Sadr City, the Mansour district, and Bab al-Sharqi. There was footage of the injured in the Kindi Hospital and images of Tayaran Square as the fire brigade hosed it down. Hadi expected to see himself on TV, on the corner by the hardware stores, smoking calmly like a criminal observing the aftermath of his crime. A government spokesman appeared, answering journalists’ questions with a smile. He assured them that the government had thwarted the terrorists because, according to intelligence, al-Qaeda and remnants of the old regime had planned a hundred car bombings, but the coalition forces and the Iraqi security services had foiled all but fifteen of them.

  The fat restaurant owner blew a long rumbling raspberry as he listened to what the government spokesman said. There had, in fact, been sixteen explosions, but the last one wasn’t mentioned by the spokesman because he’d gone home by the time it happened.

  Hadi was walking along with the sack of cans slung over his shoulder. When he reached the Sadeer Novotel, he usually crossed to the other side of the road so the guards didn’t shout at him, but this time he forgot, preoccupied as he was with the thought of the corpse in his shed at home. What was he going to do? He had accomplished the task he had set himself. Should he hire a car to take the body to the forensics department? Should he take it out one night and leave it in some square or on the street and let the police come and finish the job?

  As he was passing in front of the large metal gate of the hotel garage, he realized he was in a quandary. The only good solution was to go home, take the corpse apart, and restore it to what it had been—just disconnected body parts. Then he should scatter the parts throughout the streets, where he had found them.

  Meanwhile, shivering from the cold, the guard considered stretching his legs. He stepped out of the sentry box, toward the gate, then grabbed on to the cold bars of the gate and watched as the creature with his suspicious bag walked past. He didn’t
think it necessary to warn him to move off.

  “And you saw all this yourself?” Hadi prompted Mahmoud.

  “Yes, I was standing with some friends on the other side of the street when I saw a garbage truck heading toward the hotel gate.”

  “You saw it? There you are, so I didn’t make any of it up. This guy’s a witness.”

  When he was twenty yards past the gate, Hadi saw the garbage truck race past him toward the gate, almost knocking him over. A few moments later it exploded. Hadi, together with his sack and his dinner, was lifted off the ground. With the dust and dirt and blast of the explosion, he sailed through the air, turned a somersault, and landed hard on the asphalt. Maybe a minute passed before he realized what had happened. He saw some young people running in his direction. The journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi was among them and helped Hadi get up. Dust and smoke were everywhere. Terrified, Hadi started walking away. The people who had helped him shouted after him, thinking maybe he was injured and couldn’t feel it, but he started running. He was clearly in a state of shock.