Frankenstein in Baghdad Read online

  Darkness had fallen. In the distance Hadi could hear police cars, ambulances, and fire engines. The cloud of dust and smoke dispersed into a thin fog that lit up in the headlights of the vehicles. Mahmoud and the other witnesses, afraid and confused, made their way down the street, crunching underfoot the unseen shards of glass, small pieces of metal, and other debris from the explosion.

  5

  Hadi walked with great effort. He had excruciating pains in his arms and his pelvis, and cuts on his forehead and cheekbone from falling on the asphalt. He was hobbling along, dragging his feet with difficulty. Had he been thinking clearly, he might have taken a taxi to Bab al-Sharqi. In fact, he wasn’t thinking about anything at all. It was as if someone had pressed a button and he’d started walking, nothing more, and maybe when he ran out of energy he would collapse.

  Hadi kept saying he wouldn’t die—he had survived several other explosions. What mattered most to him was that his body hadn’t been hit by shrapnel. All his injuries were from hitting the ground, and they were minor.

  Upon arriving home—without his canvas sack or the dinner he’d bought from the restaurant; he’d dropped these at the scene of the explosion—he pushed open the heavy wooden door but forgot to close it behind him. When he looked in the distance at the door to his room, he felt it was much farther than usual. He walked across the courtyard’s broken paving stones, frightened he might fall and die or faint. He wanted to reach his bed. When he got to his room, he threw himself on the mattress and quickly fell into a deep sleep, or perhaps it was a coma that he had managed to postpone.

  The next day Hadi woke to the sound of the radio news bulletin. It might have been coming from the neighbors’ house behind his, or maybe Umm Salim was sitting on the stoop across from his front door, hugging the radio and watching the people coming and going, as she sometimes did.

  When Hadi lifted his head, he saw that the pillow was covered with saliva and spots of dried blood. At first he thought he must have been very drunk, but then he remembered the explosion. And then the body in the shed. It would be more decomposed today. Maybe people walking past the house would be able to smell it.

  Hadi got up and could tell from the light that it was close to midday. He washed his face; the pain was intense as he moved his limbs. When he turned around, he saw what effect the storm had had on the courtyard during his absence. Some of the old kitchen and office units had been overturned. Pieces of the wooden roofing had been blown away. The ceiling was gone. When he looked closer, he discovered that many other things had disappeared.

  The corpse, too, was gone. He turned everything upside down, then went back to his room and looked in there. His heart was beating faster and faster, and he forgot about the pains that racked his bones. Where on earth had the corpse gone? He stopped in the middle of the courtyard, afraid and confused. He looked up at the clear blue sky, then at the high walls of the neighbors’ houses, then at the low roof that was left over from the room in Elishva’s house that had collapsed. A mangy old cat had its gaze fixed on him. It gave a deep meow. Then it turned slowly and disappeared behind the crumbling wall.

  “And then?”

  “That’s it. That’s the end.”

  “What do you mean, that’s it? So where did the corpse go, Hadi?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not a nice story, Hadi. Tell us another one.”

  “If you don’t believe it, that’s your choice. Okay, I’m off now. The teas are on you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A LOST SOUL

  1

  HASIB MOHAMED JAAFAR was twenty-one years old, dark, slim, and married to Dua Jabbar. He lived with Dua and their baby daughter, Zahraa, in Sector 44 in Sadr City, in a room in the house of his large family. Hasib, who had been working for seven months as a guard at the Sadeer Novotel hotel, was killed in an explosion caused by a Sudanese suicide bomber driving a dynamite-laden garbage truck stolen from the Baghdad municipality. The bomber was planning to crash through the hotel’s outer gate, drive the truck into the hotel lobby, and detonate the explosives, bringing down the whole building. He failed because the guard bravely fired several rounds at the driver, causing him to detonate the explosives early. The guard’s belongings were handed back to his family: his civilian clothes, a new pair of socks, a bottle of cologne, and the first volume of al-Sayyab’s collected poems. In the coffin they put his burned black shoes; his shredded, bloodstained clothes; and small charred parts of his body. There was little left of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar; the coffin that was taken to the cemetery in Najaf was more of a token. Hasib’s young wife wrapped her arms around it, wept bitterly, and wailed at length. Hasib’s mother, sisters and brothers, and neighbors did the same, and his stunned little daughter was passed from arm to arm whenever the person holding her was overwhelmed by grief.

  Exhausted, every member of the family went to sleep dreaming of Hasib walking home with a cloth bag over his shoulder. They all dreamed something about Hasib. Parts of one dream made up for parts missing in another. A little dream filled a gap in a big one, and the threads stitched together to re-create a dream body for Hasib, to go with his soul, which was still hovering over all their heads and seeking the rest it could not find. Where was the body to which it should return in order to take its place among those who live in a state of limbo?

  2

  When Hasib saw the garbage truck, many possible explanations flooded his mind. It was just a garbage truck. The driver had made a mistake—he had lost control and veered off toward the hotel gate. There had been a traffic accident, and the driver had sped off and was unintentionally heading for the gate. No, it was a suicide bomber. Stop! Stop! One shot, then another. He didn’t mean to kill the driver. He wouldn’t dare kill anyone, but this was his duty. He was well aware of the strict orders about protecting the hotel. There were security companies and important people and maybe Americans in it. He had a license to kill, as they say. The thoughts raced through his head in fractions of a second as his finger squeezed the trigger, maybe even before he had decided on the best course of action. The truck blew up, and Hasib was aware of himself observing the explosion, but not from his position between the wooden sentry box and the big hotel’s outer gate. He was looking at the flames, the smoke, and the flying pieces of metal from high in the air. He felt a strange calm.

  He saw a man with a white canvas sack hurtling through the air and landing quite a distance from the explosion. He saw pieces of glass from the hotel windows and the lobby facade flying toward the hotel forecourt. A few moments later the cloud of smoke settled, and half an hour passed before the ambulances and fire trucks arrived.

  He watched darkness descend on the city. He saw the distant lights of buildings, houses, and vehicles. He saw some of the nearby flyovers. He saw the floodlights of the sports stadium and some minarets in the distance covered with bright lights.

  He could see the river too, deep and black in the darkness. He wanted to touch it. He had never touched the river. He had lived all his life far from it. He had driven over it, seen it from a distance, and seen pictures of it on television. But he had never felt the coldness of the water or tasted it. He saw a man in a white vest and white shorts floating faceup in it. What bliss! He must be looking at the stars, clear in the night sky. He was drifting slowly with the current. Hasib moved toward him and looked into his face. “Why are you looking at me, my son?” the man said. “Go and find out what happened to your body. Don’t stay here.”

  He saw another dead body, floating facedown in the water. It didn’t say anything. It just floated slowly, in silence.

  3

  Hasib went back to the hotel gate and looked at the large hole the suicide bomber had made with his truck bomb. He recognized his burned boots but couldn’t find his body. He looked in all the streets and in Firdaus Square, then went to Tahrir Square and saw birds perched on the bronze figures that make up the Libe
rty Monument. Then it occurred to him to go to the cemetery.

  There, in the Valley of Peace in Najaf, he examined all the graves. He didn’t find anything that offered him any certainty, but in the end he saw a teenager in a red T-shirt, with silver bangles on his wrists and a necklace of black fabric. He was sitting cross-legged on a raised grave.

  “Why are you here?” the boy asked. “You should stay close to your body.”

  “It’s disappeared.”

  “How did it disappear? You have to find it, or some other body, or else things will end badly for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it always ends badly that way.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “This is my grave. My body’s lying underneath. In a few days I won’t be able to get out like this. My body’s decomposing, and I’ll be imprisoned in the grave till the end of time.”

  Hasib sat next to him, perplexed. What should he do? No one had told him about these things. What disaster could he expect now?

  “Maybe you haven’t really died and you’re dreaming. Or your soul has left your body to go for a stroll and will come back later,” the boy said.

  “I hope to God you’re right. I’m not used to this. I’m still young, and I have a daughter, and . . .”

  “Young! You’re not as young as me!”

  Hasib continued talking to the boy with the silver bangles. Every now and then the boy reminded him that he had to get back to his body, because maybe God intended him to have a new life.

  “Sometimes the soul leaves the body and you die, but then the Angel of Death changes his mind or corrects the mistake he has made, and the soul goes back inside its body. Then God commands the body to rise from the dead. In other words, the soul is like the fuel in a car. It takes a spark to ignite it.”

  They were silent for a while, and then Hasib heard weeping in the distance and saw some dogs as black as ink fighting with one another. The boy with the bangles looked at him anxiously. “You better find out where your body’s gone,” he said, “or else things are going to end badly.”

  4

  Hasib went back to the hotel and looked up and down all the surrounding streets. After many hours there, he went home and saw everyone sleeping: his wife, his infant daughter, and the rest of the family. Then shortly before dawn he returned to the scene of his death. He felt he was caught in a vicious cycle. In a house in Bataween he saw a naked man asleep. He went up to him and checked to see if he was dead. It wasn’t anyone in particular; the man looked strange and horrible. Seeing the sky changing color, Hasib felt for certain that sunrise would spell disaster for him. He wouldn’t have the energy to roam the streets or go back to the scene of the explosion. With his hand, which was made of primordial matter, he touched the pale, naked body and saw his spirit sink into it. His whole arm sank in, then his head and the rest of his body. Overwhelmed by a heaviness and torpor, he lodged inside the corpse, filling it from head to toe, because probably, he realized then, it didn’t have a soul, while he was a soul without a body.

  5

  So things didn’t happen for no reason? The two of them were made for each other. Now he only had to wait for the family of the naked man to take the body to the cemetery, bury it in a grave, and cover it with soil. He didn’t care what name they had inscribed on the gravestone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE JOURNALIST

  1

  MAHMOUD AL-SAWADI WAS AWOKEN at 7:30 a.m. by the explosion in Tayaran Square, but he didn’t get out of bed. He had a terrible headache and was still sleepy. He didn’t wake up until about 10:00 a.m., when his cell phone rang. It was the editor of al-Haqiqa, the magazine where he worked.

  “Why are you still asleep?”

  “I . . . I,” Mahmoud stammered.

  “Mahmoud, get up right away and go to the Kindi Hospital to take pictures of the injured and speak with the doctors, the police, and so on. Understand?”

  “Yes, I’ll head there now.”

  “Now, now, not tomorrow, as Fairuz sings. Okay, Mahmoud?”

  Once Mahmoud left his room in the Orouba Hotel, he found Abu Anmar, the owner, wringing his hands in the street, surrounded by broken glass. In the center of Bataween, he crossed the main street and stopped in at Aziz’s coffee shop for a glass of tea but didn’t want to stay too long. He had all his equipment with him—camera, digital recorder, notebook, pens—in a black leather bag that hung from his shoulder and hit his bottom gently as he walked.

  Reaching Tayaran Square, Mahmoud saw the blackened stalls and carts and a shallow crater six feet in diameter. The square was deserted, and he imagined how big the explosion had been and how much death and destruction it had wrought.

  Mahmoud stopped on the median, took a deep breath, then brought his digital recorder up to his mouth. “Damn you, Hazem Abboud,” he said. “Damn you right now and always.”

  Hazem was a freelance photographer who supposedly shared Mahmoud’s room on the second floor of the Orouba Hotel, but he was rarely there—he used it as a rest station or a refuge in emergencies. Abu Anmar, the hotel’s paunchy owner, was an old friend of Hazem’s and didn’t treat him as a customer. Maybe he was grateful to Hazem for bringing Mahmoud to live at the run-down hotel, making him the third or fourth guest in a place that in the good old days would have had more than seventy guests at a time.

  The previous afternoon Hazem Abboud had insisted on celebrating, though there was no reason to do so, and he had dragged his poor friend by the collar to a house in Lane 5 in Bataween. Mahmoud was wary but went along. They knocked back beer for two hours, and although it was cold outside, near them sat two blonde girls in skimpy summer clothing. Mahmoud’s heart skipped a beat whenever one of the girls brushed up against him, like when picking up her glass or taking nuts from the bowl. Mahmoud had never been to this kind of party and had never been so close to a woman. Hazem kept goading him to drink more.

  “If you’re not comfortable here, we could leave,” Hazem said every now and then.

  But Mahmoud had no desire to leave. Eventually, the girls got up and pulled Mahmoud by the hand, taking him to a bedroom on the second floor. One of them came out laughing half an hour later and sat down to finish her beer. The other one stayed another hour.

  “Why didn’t you go with them too?” Mahmoud asked Hazem as they went outside into the cold air.

  “Me? I’ll go back and see them another time. The important thing is that you’re now relaxed.”

  “Yes, you’re a good friend,” said Mahmoud with a troubled smile. His head was spinning slightly from drinking so much, and his whole body felt numb. It was a strange combination of feelings. Reaching the Orouba Hotel, Hazem stopped to light a cigarette. He blew smoke through his nostrils; then he turned to his young friend, pointing at him with the fingers holding the cigarette.

  “Anyway,” he said, “never talk about that woman Nawal al-Wazir in front of me again, okay? God damn Nawal al-Wazir.”

  “Sure, I promise. God damn her,” Mahmoud agreed.

  2

  Nawal al-Wazir was a film director, or so she claimed. She was about forty, light-skinned with jet-black hair, plump with a double chin that gave a touch of oriental beauty to her face, which was always covered with a thin layer of slightly tacky makeup. She liked dark red lipstick, a thick line of kohl around her eyes, and black eyebrow pencil to accentuate the arch, and wore a loose scarf on her head, matching tops and skirts, and an ever-changing array of colorful plastic accessories. If anyone had asked Mahmoud al-Sawadi about her, he could have rattled off a long list of details that would have been of interest only to those equally obsessed with her. There was also an annoying detail that Mahmoud tried to ignore: the fact that she was a close friend of Mahmoud’s editor, Ali Baher al-Saidi, who was a well-known writer, an opponent of the old regime, and an associate of many of the politician
s whose faces often appeared on television.

  On some afternoons Nawal al-Wazir would come to the magazine’s offices in Karrada, stay half an hour or more, and leave with the editor in his car. During that half hour Mahmoud couldn’t help seeing her every time he went into the editor’s office. When she was there, the editor might invite him to sit down, to talk about something or other, and Mahmoud would always agree to his ideas and requests without discussion because he felt uncomfortable and confused in Nawal’s presence.

  “She’s the boss’s fuck buddy,” Farid Shawwaf, his colleague at the magazine, once said. Mahmoud quarreled with him because he had no evidence. Later he accepted Farid’s assessment, because what else but sex could have brought this woman and Ali Baher al-Saidi together?

  Occasionally, when Saidi was away or hadn’t yet arrived at the office, Mahmoud had a chance to sit alone with Nawal in the editor’s office. From their conversations, Mahmoud gathered she was working on a feature film about the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime. She made it out to be one of the most important Iraqi movies in development and said Saidi was helping with some of the formalities, such as obtaining permits, through his connections with the political class, ministries, and other institutions. This gave him reason to feel more comfortable and to dismiss the horrible theory that the malicious Farid Shawwaf had planted in his mind.

  His mind at ease, he continued to steal glances at Nawal, examining her closely and noting the daily changes she made to her appearance. He also continued to talk about her in front of his close friend Hazem Abboud. To make matters worse, Mahmoud had become the editor’s favorite journalist. When Saidi said, “Go there,” “Do this interview,” “Attend this conference,” or “Look into this for me,” Mahmoud would usually oblige. Mahmoud alone ended up doing as much work as all the other journalists combined.