Frankenstein in Baghdad Read online

  Hadi was a liar, and everyone knew it. He would need witnesses to corroborate a claim of having had fried eggs for breakfast, let alone a story about a naked corpse made up of the body parts of people killed in explosions.

  Hadi looked up at the roof of Elishva’s house and those of the neighboring houses, thinking someone might have dragged the body up there, but he couldn’t see anything. He opened all the wardrobes and cupboards in the courtyard of his house. Then he walked up and down the nearby lanes. He stopped when he got to Abu Zaidoun, the old barber, who was slumped on a white garden chair outside his shop, but Hadi doubted he would have seen anything even if the body had walked right in front of him. The owner of the Akhawain laundry shop told him the police had been raiding houses all morning in search of armed gangs that were trafficking women out of Iraq. A worker at the bakery said there were “terrorists” coming from the provinces to stay at a local hotel and that the police and the Americans were searching the hotels one by one. Hadi also heard that two young prostitutes he had slept with had traveled that day to Syria to work in the nightclubs—apparently Baghdad was no longer lucrative. He heard lots of other news. In fact he spent half the day listening, but he didn’t hear anything about his mysterious disappearing corpse.

  3

  Umm Salim took it as a good omen when she saw Elishva at the butcher’s. Elishva bought a half pound of beef and two pounds of well-cleaned sheep’s tripe, then went to the greengrocer’s shop next door. Having removed her widow’s mourning headband, she was wearing a red headscarf with white flowers, like a young woman. Umm Salim wondered what had happened to her.

  The two women did their shopping together and walked slowly back to the lane. Umm Salim was talking about what had happened the previous morning and how the dreadful explosion had made cracks in the walls of some of the houses. She gathered from Elishva that she’d been at church at the time. Elishva said she had heard the explosion but hadn’t seen anything when she got back. This was further evidence for Umm Salim that Elishva has special powers.

  When Umm Salim asked about her striking red headscarf, Elishva looked down at the street and said quietly, “The time to be sad is over. The Lord has finally heard my prayer.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it. What good news.”

  Elishva couldn’t help but drop her bombshell, telling Umm Salim straight out that her son had come home. Umm Salim just walked on in stunned silence. What was this old woman talking about, she wondered.

  When Elishva reached the door of her house, Umm Salim, whose house was a few yards farther down the lane, stopped. “Is he at home now?” she asked.

  “Yes, he’s asleep. He’s very tired.”

  Umm Salim curled her lips like someone deep in thought, but she didn’t go into the house to check, a major mistake that she would later regret. She was busy thinking about the lunch she had to prepare for her husband, who sat on the balcony all day in silence, reading old newspapers. She didn’t take seriously what Elishva said—the news was too big to take in after such a cursory announcement. Umm Salim told herself she’d drop in on Elishva later, perhaps in the afternoon, to find out more.

  But it turned out she wouldn’t find out anything more. In the afternoon she was too busy after her middle son suddenly announced the name of the girl he was planning to marry, leaving her no time to see the old woman’s son, who had come back from a war that had ended twenty or more years ago. Eventually, Umm Salim would defect to the group that believed the old woman was senile, and Elishva would lose the last of her loyal allies.

  4

  Hadi went back home. He felt around on the floor of the courtyard for blood or bits of the body parts he knew he had held in his hands when he was cutting them up or stitching them together to get the body into a reasonably finished state. He couldn’t find anything: the heavy rain that had fallen the day before had washed everything away. He spent the late morning stretched out in bed, looking up at the water-damaged ceiling. Then he looked at the far wall where his late friend Nahem Abdaki had hung the Throne Verse of the Quran. One of the cardboard edges had come loose and was curling downward from the moisture. If someone pulled it, they could peel the whole verse off the wall. At the end of the day, he thought what had happened might prove convenient: he had wanted to get rid of the body, and it had disappeared, sparing him another demeaning task—cutting it up and unstitching all the thread, then throwing the parts away in various bins throughout the neighborhood.

  In the afternoon Hadi went to Aziz’s coffee shop, but it was too crowded and his Egyptian friend wasn’t free to chat with him, so he headed to the home of the old man from Amirli in another attempt to persuade him to sell his old furniture. As usual, he was back at square one in his negotiations. For the tenth time he heard the history of how the old gramophone player was made and where he had bought it and the story of whatever piece of furniture or object stood before them.

  What if this well-dressed, clean-shaven old man had known he was standing next to a criminal who tampered with human body parts? He would have taken him down the concrete path to the outer gate, said good-bye to him then and there, and shut the door on him once and for all.

  Hadi would later narrate these details several times, because he loved details that gave his story credibility and made it more vivid. He would just be telling people about his hard day’s work, but they would listen as though it were the best fable Hadi the liar had ever told.

  Sitting in the coffee shop, he would tell the story from the beginning, never tiring of repeating himself. He immersed himself in the story and went with the flow, maybe in order to give pleasure to others or maybe to convince himself that it was just a story from his fertile imagination and that it had never really happened.

  5

  Elishva was busy making kashka. She combined the cracked wheat with the boiled bulgur and added the chickpeas, spices, and cubes of meat. She was good at making traditional dishes but rarely had much occasion to do so—she wouldn’t make them just for her cat. But that day was different. She was honoring a special guest and fulfilling an old vow. As the old woman stirred the kashka, she repeated to herself, “A blessing and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who loved us before we loved Him.”

  Having adopted many of the customs of the neighborhood, Elishva saw it as a vow she was now fulfilling, although Father Josiah always corrected her.

  “We don’t set conditions for the Lord, as Muslims do,” he would say. “We don’t say, ‘If You do this, then I’ll do that.’”

  Elishva knew what he meant, of course, but she saw no harm in setting conditions for God, as Umm Salim and her other Muslim neighbors did. She didn’t see the Lord in quite the same way as Father Josiah did. The Lord wasn’t “in the highest”; she didn’t see him as domineering or tyrannical. He was just an old friend, and it would be hard to abandon that friendship.

  Elishva’s special guest didn’t eat any of the food she put in front of him. She had a little of it herself, and Nabu finished off the remaining pieces of meat and licked the bowls. She wasn’t bothered that her son, or his ghost, hadn’t eaten a bite. Perhaps he was like Abraham’s guests in the Quranic version of their visit, or perhaps he didn’t have an appetite. She wouldn’t pepper him with questions, lest he run away.

  Elishva spent the rest of the day until late at night muttering intermittently to her taciturn guest. Nothing important happened in the meantime. The man who sold cooking gas came, and Elishva swapped an empty bottle for a full one; the man carried it to the end of the corridor to help the old lady out. Some American helicopters flew noisily over the house, causing it to shake and the birds that belonged to Abdel Razzaq, the boy in the house at the back, to flap their wings in a panic, sending feathers up into the air. Umm Salim didn’t come by, nor any of the other neighbors—not even Diana, the pretty Armenian girl from the next lane, whose mother, Veronica Munib, sometimes encouraged her t
o visit Elishva to find out if she was short of anything or needed anything done.

  As she chatted with her guest, Elishva opened up the boxes inside her that had long remained closed and took out everything that was in them. She dozed off on the sofa opposite the one where the strange, silent man was sitting. When she woke up, she saw him staring at the faint light coming through the window overlooking the lane.

  Elishva opened up to Daniel about her conflict with her husband, Tadros, who buried an empty coffin for Danny against her wishes. Tadros, a junior clerk in the public transport department, went with some relatives, friends, and acquaintances to the cemetery of the Assyrian Church of the East in eastern Baghdad and buried a coffin containing only some of Daniel’s clothes and pieces of his broken guitar. They prayed for him, then laid a gravestone reading in Syriac and Arabic, “Here lies Daniel.”

  Elishva hadn’t agreed to go with them because her heart told her that her son was not dead. She didn’t look at the grave until Tadros himself died and was buried next to the grave of his son. It broke her heart to read the name of her son on the limestone marker, and even then she wouldn’t acknowledge that he was dead, despite the passing of the years.

  During that time Ninous Malko’s family moved into one of the rooms on the upper floor of the old woman’s house. They had left their rented house in Bataween. Eventually, Matilda, Elishva’s second daughter, married Ninous’s younger son, and a strong friendship developed between Elishva and Ninous Malko and his wife. They almost made up for the succession of losses that Elishva had suffered, because apart from Daniel and his father, Elishva’s two daughters were also planning to leave. It wasn’t hard for her new relatives to believe that Daniel might come back one day. There were many missing people, and some of them were bound to come back. That kept happening. One of Ninous’s brothers had come back after years in prison in Iran, and at the time many people had talked about the shock of learning that he had abandoned his original religion and become a Shiite Muslim of the Twelver branch. He remained a Shiite for several years but gradually converted back to Christianity, or at least that’s what he had his family believe in order to put an end to the strife that his conversion had caused.

  Many prisoners came home after the war over Kuwait and in the middle of the 1990s. Because of the severity of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, the husbands of Hilda and Matilda decided to emigrate. The two sisters wouldn’t move away unless their mother came too. But like a stubborn mountain goat, Elishva refused. The disagreement continued for a full year, but the old woman wouldn’t relent. Finally she convinced her daughters that she would join them when they had settled down and she had completely given up hope that Daniel might come back. But she never did give up hope, and the presence of Ninous Malko’s family was some consolation for the loss of her daughters. But on the eve of the declaration of the last war, Ninous’s wife accused Elishva of practicing some kind of black magic on her two little boys and said she had prevented one of them from speaking even at the age of six. She was frightened of the old woman, especially after she found her talking to pictures or to the many cats that roamed the house. Once she told her husband that one of the cats spoke back to the old woman and had a conversation with her. She even said she suspected the cats were in fact human and that Elishva had transformed them into cats with satanic magic.

  Ninous didn’t believe such superstitious nonsense, but he couldn’t take his wife’s complaining about the house, and after U.S. forces invaded Baghdad he took his little family to Ankawa in Erbil. He didn’t tell Hilda or Matilda, and Elishva didn’t object—she seemed supportive, or indifferent. Her daughters were shocked when they found out that their mother was alone in a big house in a troubled city where the demons had broken out of their dungeons and come to the surface all at once—at least that was how they imagined it.

  At the time, they were calling Elishva every Sunday on the Thuraya phone at the Church of Saint Odisho, and if Elishva didn’t turn up for some reason, then Father Josiah himself would call to reassure them. The phone call wouldn’t last more than a minute—the priests wanted to be fair to all the people who needed to use the phone, and there were many. Sometimes Elishva and one of her daughters would start arguing halfway into the call, and the minute would run out just as the argument was getting heated, forcing Father Josiah to pull the phone out of Elishva’s hand. The daughters said they wanted to come back to Baghdad and carry their mother off by force, but they didn’t go beyond threatening this. If the argument was interrupted, Elishva would argue with herself instead or grab hold of one of the women in the church to listen to her fiery sermon about how she refused to leave her home and move to a place she knew nothing about. Father Josiah encouraged her to stay, because he saw it as a religious obligation. It wasn’t good that everyone should leave the country. Things had been just as bad for the Assyrians in previous centuries, but they had stayed in Iraq and had survived. None of us should think only of ourselves. That’s what he said in his sermon sometimes.

  At the beginning of that year, Father Josiah asked Elishva if she could put up the Sankhiro family, who had fled sectarian cleansing in the southern Baghdad district of Dora. The family took the room that Ninous Malko’s family had been living in, but only a few weeks later they left for Syria, with plans to emigrate to Europe. Soon afterward, three of Elishva’s cats disappeared, and then Elishva found a fourth cat dead on the roof, its body all inflated. She suspected that a piece of shrapnel had hit it or it had eaten poisoned meat.

  Elishva chatted for half an hour about her cats and how Nabu was the only one left. Then she suddenly remembered Abu Zaidoun, the Baathist responsible for sending her son off to war. Abu Zaidoun used to track down people avoiding military service, and Daniel had been late in responding to the draft. He had refused to sign up and go to the training camps, wanting instead to finish studying music. He loved to play the guitar and kept one in his wardrobe, although he didn’t play it well.

  Abu Zaidoun took Danny away by the collar. From the training camp, Daniel went straight to the front and never came back. From then on, Abu Zaidoun was Elishva’s sworn enemy. When the Baathists brought an empty coffin for Daniel, along with some clothes and personal belongings, old Tadros smashed his son’s guitar in grief.

  Some pieces of the guitar were put in the grand red-teak coffin that Tadros had bought and were lowered into the grave with it. So there was a smashed guitar in an empty coffin, a house that had lost the ghost of its only son, and an enemy who made merry in the neighborhood, imposing his authority on everyone with few people standing up to him. But Elishva stood up to him. She cursed him in her prayers and whenever she saw him on the street. Abu Zaidoun no longer went down Lane 7 in case Elishva suddenly came out of her house to curse him. Some of the women had vowed that if the evil man died, they would slaughter a sheep to God Almighty. Elishva also made a vow, but she never told Father Josiah about it. Now she was revealing it, to her silent guest, for the first time ever.

  As night fell Elishva was winding up one part of her rambling monologue. She told him several times that she knew he would come back. Antoinette, one of her relatives, hadn’t believed her, or Martha, or the wife of her brother Youaresh. Now they had all died or emigrated. She took out an old photo album to show him. In the lamplight she showed him pictures of himself as a child, standing with the church choir in his choirboy vestments. There were pictures of him with his friends at school. At a bar or a restaurant. Wearing team uniforms, his foot on a ball in the same way as the famous footballer Ali Kadhim. All the boys who wanted a picture like that would put their right foot on the ball, put their right hand on their hip, and smile. The picture wouldn’t be any good unless they did exactly that. There was another picture of him with his football team, their arms all wrapped around each other. The picture was faded and had water stains. When Daniel had finished flipping through the pictures, he got to his feet and, suddenly curious, went to roam thr
ough the other rooms. Elishva stayed seated, looking at the picture of her patron saint by the light of the lantern. It didn’t look like it was going to move or speak that night.

  From the kitchen came the clatter of pots and pans falling. He must have tripped on something in the dark. Elishva heard him go to the roof. He was away for a few minutes, then came back, carrying something in his hand. He quickly hid it in his trouser pocket. Then he opened his mouth to speak for the first time. At last Elishva heard his voice. It was croaky, as though he hadn’t said anything since he was born. Pronouncing the words with difficulty, he told her that he had to go out. She wanted to say, “Why are you going? You’ve just come back. Why would you leave me? Whenever anyone goes out that door, they never come back. It’s like a door that opens into a hole.” Feeling like screaming, she gently held on to the sleeve of his green sweater. She could feel how firm his arm was, like the branch of a tree. She looked up at his face, but it was too dark to see anything. He looked away. The cat walked between them, rubbing itself against his trousers and purring softly.

  “I’ll be back. Don’t worry,” he said hoarsely.

  He slipped out of her grasp and walked toward the door. She heard his footsteps as he tramped across the courtyard and then along the path that led to the door. She heard him open the door and then close it gently. Silence reigned again in the large, lonely house. She felt very thirsty and more tired than ever before. Sitting despondent on the sofa before the picture of Saint George the Martyr, she wanted to ask her patron saint some questions or chat with him but couldn’t summon the energy. She noticed that the saint’s metal shield had a new shine, as though someone inside the picture had given it a polish. Then the shine faded, and she had nothing to say. She had said everything she had to say. She wouldn’t speak again for the next few days. Blinking, she looked at the patches of yellow lamplight on the rippled surface of the old picture, while the old cat curled up between her legs in search of warmth.