The Corpse Washer (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (21 page)

Kazimiyya’s streets were teeming with pilgrims from all over the country. Security precautions were more severe than in previous years in anticipation of attacks, which had become common whenever large crowds of civilians gathered. A few mortar rockets had fallen in past years and car bombs had exploded more than once.

Hospitality stations offering water and food to pilgrims punctuated the streets, as did banners mourning the seventh imam and his death by poison in Haroun al-Rashid’s prison. “Peace be upon the one who was tortured in dark prisons” and “O God pray for Muhammad and his family and pray for Musa the son of Ja’far, the guardian of the pious and the imam of the blessed. He of the long prostration and profuse tears.” I saw a banner with the two famous lines by the poet al-Sharif al-Radi about the two shrines of Musa al-Kazim and Muhammad al-Jawad:

Two shrines in Baghdad heal my dejection and sorrow,

Toward them I shall guide my soul and seek peace tomorrow.

The two golden domes and four minarets glittered under the chains of lights, which linked them like tiny bridges. The light emanating from the shrine lit the sky. We parted at the iron fence and my mother went to the women’s entrance. We agreed that I would meet her there an hour and a half later.

There was a long line to get in through the Murad gate on the eastern side. The armed national police were standing at the gate. The green neon lights at the top of the gate illuminated the engravings and verses adorning the arch of the door. Three men conducted a thorough search, making sure I hadn’t hidden anything under my clothes or in my socks. I went inside and took off my shoes and handed them to an attendant.

I looked at the white marble walls and the ornaments and arabesques on the ceiling. I crossed through the golden gate to the courtyard of the mosque. There were hundreds of men and boys, all wearing black. Many crowded around the gates leading to the mausoleum.
It looked impossible to gain entrance, and the crowd barely moved. I walked around in the courtyard thinking,
What would al-Kazim himself say to all these people were he alive today? Would he want them to come here and do what they were doing and say what they were saying?
Perhaps if he returned today he would be a stranger, just as he was in his time, perhaps even more of a stranger.

I looked at the two domes and minarets and then the black sky. My eyes descended again to the domes and then the entrance to the mausoleum. I started a silent conversation with al-Kazim. I told him:
Forgive me for not visiting you for so many years, but I have chosen another path. A path paved with doubt that doesn’t lead to mosques. It is a rough and rugged path, not taken by crowds, with very few travel companions. I am still walking on it and I have ended up in prison just as you did, master. But I am imprisoned by my family and my people. I’m a prisoner of the death which has overtaken this land. It is time for me to escape. My mother is on the opposite side asking you to keep me by her side and by yours, but she might not realize that this daily death will poison me if I stay here.

My silent conversation was interrupted by Basim al-Karbala’i’s voice. He stood before the microphone to greet the hundreds of pilgrims who stood waiting for him. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and started to chant. His captivating voice struck deep in the heart:

Where does this stranger come from?

Where are his kith and kin?

Of poison he died in prison

No crime nor harm had he committed

Woe unto the poisoned one!

He spent his life grieving

O Shiites when a man’s wailing stops

His loved ones surround him

Some kiss and hug

Others close his eyes.

Then he asked the crowd to chant along: “Where does this stranger come from? / Where are his kith and kin?” He urged us
every now and then, saying, “Wail for your Imam and don’t hold back.”

Images and emotions crowded my inner domes: my heart and mind. All the statues I never sculpted and the drawings which remained sketches in my mind. Reem and her breast which was amputated, just as our love was. Ghayda’ and her body which flew away like a dove. My father, Ammoury, and Hammoudy. The faces of the corpses I washed and shrouded on their way to the grave. Tears poured down and covered my face. I stayed in that open space, where I could cry without shame and without any explanation. My pain and wounds had a lung to breathe through. Forgive me Musa, son of Ja’far, for crying in your presence and on your day. I am a stranger among your visitors. I am a stranger like you and I am crying for myself.

“Alas,” al-Fartusi said with genuine sadness when I informed him that I was going to Jordan.

“Why? Why are you going and leaving us?”

“I can’t do it anymore. I’m suffocating. I’m not cut out for this job. I wasn’t planning on doing it for two years. I can’t sleep at night. Nightmares are driving me insane.”

He patted me on the shoulder and said: “You think I’m any better? I’ve gotten diabetes and high blood pressure from everything I’ve seen all these years. And now these crooks want to fabricate charges against me.”

“What charges?”

“They want to implicate me in selling human organs. Can you believe that? There are gangs selling human organs. They have entire networks and there were stories about it in newspapers, but that’s all linked to the hospitals. We have nothing to do with that, because organs have to be harvested from the body within a few hours.”

“Why are they accusing you, then?”

“Someone somewhere wants to make some money, and they just want a bribe to stop harassing me.”

“I’m sorry. You of all people don’t deserve this. I hope it works out.”

“Whatever God wills will happen. This is my destiny and if you are destined to leave, then you will leave. I wish you the very best. But why don’t you pray? I bet you these nightmares will go away.”

“God has yet to guide me to the right path. Plus, my nightmares are really something else.”

He shook his head and laughed. I gave him the keys to the
mghaysil
and we agreed that he would send me the rent in Amman. As we hugged and kissed goodbye, I asked him to take care of Mahdi.

“I’ll treat him like a son,” he said.

The earth was a carpet of sleeping sand stretching from horizon to horizon, nothing disrupting it except the highway on which cars escaped from hell to the unknown. We were part of a convoy of four GMC station wagons. We started out early in the morning so as to avoid the desert darkness that might make us easy prey for the thieves and to make sure we reached the Jordanian border before sunset.

Abu Hadi, our driver, was in his late thirties. He had short black hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He was overdressed and wore his sunglasses even before the sun was strong. Like all other drivers he had a gun that he hid under the seat before we left. I sat next to him. The other passengers were a man in his fifties and his wife and three daughters. The eldest was seventeen, the youngest about eight or nine. They were all veiled. The girls spent most of the trip asleep. The father exchanged short conversations with his wife about the food they had brought along. The father had hesitated at first when he saw that I, a strange man, was coming along, but Abu Hadi lied, saying that I was his cousin, and that calmed him.

Abu Hadi was silent most of the trip. I was left with my thoughts and worries as I reviewed my options in Amman and the potential consequences of this trip. Every now and again Abu Hadi uttered a few short sentences telling us how many hours of travel remained.

I knew that obtaining permanent residency in Amman was almost impossible. According to the latest restriction, only those who could deposit a hundred thousand dollars in a Jordanian bank were awarded residency. I didn’t have even one tenth of that. As for getting a visa or asylum elsewhere, that too was quite difficult. Professor
al-Janabi had promised in his last e-mail to help me get settled in the first few weeks. I had his address and phone number.

It was too dangerous to carry a lot of cash, so I arranged with my sister to transfer what I had saved in the last two years to a bank in Jordan once I got settled there. Getting into Jordan wasn’t always guaranteed.

I felt a bit hungry and reached into the small bag I’d put between my feet and opened the plastic bag inside it. My mother had insisted on making me the walnut-and-date-filled klaycha I liked, filling a whole bag with them. I had brought along a few other things and the book on Mesopotamian creation myths. I had packed one big suitcase. It was tough to decide what to take and what to leave behind. I took plenty of winter clothes, because I had heard that Amman’s winter was severe. I also took two photo albums, which contained many of my photographs from my academy years, as well as of my own works and sketches. And I packed some of my notebooks.

The night before, when I came down the stairs carrying the suitcase to put it next to the door, my mother asked whether I needed help. She leaned on the wall and put her right hand on her cheek and said: “I still can’t believe that you’re leaving.” She started to cry.

I hugged her. “You can come visit me in Amman or wherever I end up. I will visit.”

“I don’t believe you. You’ll never come back.”

She had tried to dissuade me from leaving for the last few days, but I had made up my mind and told her that I couldn’t go on as I had been, that I was suffocating and dying. I left the suitcase by the door to pick it up the next morning before leaving. I gave my mother enough money for a year, and we went to my sister’s new house in Karrada. I wasn’t going to let my mother stay alone at her age and in these circumstances.

In that taxi ride that my mother and I took from our house to my sister’s, I felt for the hundredth time what a stranger I’d become in my hometown and how my alienation had intensified in these last
years. I recalled a line of verse I liked: “One is not a stranger in Syria or Yemen, but is truly a stranger in his shroud and grave.” But the stranger today was whoever lived in Rusafah and Karkh, Baghdad’s two halves. Everyone in Baghdad felt like a stranger in his own country. Most people were drained, and the fatigue was clearly drawn on their faces.

I wondered how they went on despite everything. How did they manage to wake up every morning and try? But was there any other choice? Was I just too weak? Thousands of others were running away from this civil war whose end no one can predict.

When would this war tire of slaughtering people and just quit? Not just stop to catch its breath before continuing to tear away at the country, but really quit. I always used to say that Baghdad in Saddam’s time was a prison of mythic dimensions. Now the prison had fragmented into many cells with sectarian dimensions, separated by high concrete walls and bloodied by barbed wires.

We were approaching al-Firdaws Square, where Saddam’s gigantic statue used to stand. I remembered how I saw them years earlier taking down the old monument of the Unknown Soldier, which used to occupy this square and was much more beautiful than the new Unknown Soldier monument. Now, propelled by the illusion of erasing the past and forcibly disfiguring the present, the new Saddams were taking down statues left and right. As if there was a giant axe snatched by each new regime from its predecessor to continue the destruction and deepen the grave.
What good are all these metaphors,
I wondered.

My sister and her husband, Sattar, had moved to a new house he’d bought in Karrada. It was the fruit of his agility in riding the new wave, just as he had ridden the previous one under Saddam. Her husband was a “comrade” in the past, and he had kept defending the
ancien régime
and its policies vigorously even in its last few years. Sattar and my father once had a terrible argument. Sattar left our house and swore never to set foot in it again. He only did so after my father’s death. Although he had forced my sister to stay away from the family, she would still visit from time to time. My father’s
death finally patched things up. I’d never liked Sattar and had had doubts about him during their engagement, but she loved him and he treated her well.

We got lost in al-Karrada’s streets with its big houses. I called my sister on the cell phone to get directions, repeating everything she said to the taxi driver. She said she was going to stand outside to wave when she saw us. I spotted her in a side street ten minutes later and told the driver to back up to that street. I asked him to wait for me while I said goodbye, but my mother objected: “Why are you in such a hurry?” My sister also chastised me for not having visited her new house or seen her kids in months. I hesitated and looked at the garage. Her husband’s car was not there. As if sensing what I was thinking, she reassured me, “Come on. Come on in. Let’s get enough of you before you leave. Sattar isn’t home and won’t be back until later tonight, and the kids are in school.” I paid the taxi driver and we all went in.

Their house had a big garden. The lawn was neatly trimmed and framed by flowers on all sides. I spotted some carnations. The palm tree’s fronds in the far right corner were touching a window on the second floor. Its bunches were full of dates. A white metal table, surrounded by four chairs, sat on the white and yellow marble of the walkway in front of the house. We went in through the kitchen door. My sister had put plenty of flowerpots by the window and filled them with the cactus plants she loved. The house had been recently built. It had five bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a huge living room. My sister had prepared one of the bedrooms on the ground floor close to the bathroom for my mother to sleep in. That way she wouldn’t have to strain her knees going up and down the stairs.

“Look how beautiful your room is,” my sister said proudly, and I felt she was addressing me as well. My mother kissed her on the cheek and thanked her. I put Mom’s suitcase next to her new bed. The room had a medium-sized cupboard and a huge mirror and two red chairs, one in front of the mirror and the other next to a TV table. Above the TV, the room’s only window overlooked the neighbor’s garden.