The Last of the Angels (10 page)

The police chief asked Khidir Musa to say a few words and to ask the mob to disperse, since the continued presence of this throng in the Chuqor community could lead to disturbances that would be hard to control. Given the difficulty of finding a location in the neighborhood that could accommodate this horrific crush of human beings, Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri suggested that Khidir Musa should give his speech from the mosque's minaret, which was equipped with four loudspeakers. Thus Khidir Musa climbed the minaret and delivered a short, stirring oration in which he thanked the governor, the police chief, and the other officials for their fine welcome for him and his brothers. He also thanked the citizens of the Chuqor community and of the city of Kirkuk for their elevated sentiments and declared that he had returned with his two brothers to the homeland after a long absence to work for its uplift and betterment. Then he requested that the crowd disperse so that he and his two brothers could get some sleep after the long, exhausting trip that they had made by zeppelin. Grudgingly, people began to depart, although some dragged their feet sluggishly—especially those who had come from distant neighborhoods to listen to the story of the shepherd who had returned with his two brothers from Russia in a blimp that had carried them thousands of kilometers.

All the same, the true story of this adventure was on every tongue by the next day, since people had relayed it without feeling a need to embellish it with imaginary touches, which were deemed unnecessary. Why would they add anything when the truth was even more thrilling than fiction? In any event, Khidir Musa himself was forced to narrate his story time and again, without ever growing bored, and the newspaper Kirkuk published it first. Then it appeared in a condensed and distorted fashion in
al-Zaman,
a newspaper published in Baghdad. Finally, journalists arrived from America, England, Germany, and France, seeking to buy his story. Thus Khidir Musa's old taste for money returned. He sold his story, all at the same time, to several different newspapers and to an American magazine that offered him ten thousand dollars in exchange for rights to his memoirs, provided he would soar over the city of Kirkuk once more in the zeppelin and allow them to take photographs. He agreed after the governor—in whose office the negotiations took place—told him that this sum was more than thirty thousand dinars. Khidir Musa, who earned more than fifty thousand dinars in one fell swoop, after presenting suitable financial tributes to the governor, the police chief, and the head of the municipality, decided to be magnanimous this time and divided twenty thousand dinars among his two brothers and his two sisters Qadriya and Salma, his wife Nazira and her mother the old witch Hidaya, Hameed Nylon and his wife Fatima, and even young Burhan Abdallah, who collected a hundred dinars from his uncle. Khidir Musa also distributed five thousand dinars among the households of the Chuqor community, without omitting any, in appreciation for the festive welcome they had afforded him and his brothers. He only kept back for himself half of the sum that had landed on him from the sky, as he put it. Financial gain was not all that accrued to him, for he suddenly became a person of note in Kirkuk. The governor even offered to move him into one of the city's more prestigious neighborhoods. But he declined, explaining that he could not desert the community in which he had been born.

Khidir Musa actually recounted the story, which brought him renown and wealth before anyone else had heard it—while he and his brothers were seated on the ground in the Chuqor community, and supplied details then he did not mention even to the newspapers and the foreign magazines that paid him so liberally. As residents of the Chuqor community laughed, the livestock dealer explained how he had tricked his wife Nazira and managed to escape from her as she pursued him from one place to another. He had headed first toward the Kurdish mountains, proceeding on foot until he reached the Hajj Umran valley, where he contacted the Barzan tribe's chief, who presented him with a mule and provided him a companion for his difficult journey to Russia. Thus Khidir Musa, with his guide, followed the very same secret mountain trail that Mullah Mustafa Barzani had traversed years before during his retreat with his army of Kurdish peasants as they made their way to Russia amid savage battles with the Iraqi and Iranian armies that pursued him. Finally, after an arduous trip, Khidir Musa and his guide reached the Russian border, where they saw the red flag with its hammer and sickle fluttering above a Soviet border control post. The guide headed for it and knocked on the closed door. The man in charge welcomed both of them, thanks to the guide, who had brought him presents of the type Barzanis customarily presented each time they crossed the border. The man running the control post demonstrated his generosity by bringing out three bottles of vodka, which he placed before them and invited them to share. They gently declined, even though he persisted and insisted. Finally the man said, “Never mind; I'll drink your share.” So he swallowed the contents of the three vodka bottles before saying good-bye to Khidir Musa and his guide al-Barzani, without ever showing any sign of intoxication. He even performed a Caucasian dance for them with feet as steady as a bear's.

The two men traveled for three more days until they reached a village where Kurdish refugees lived under a form of self-government, according to the Soviet system. Since the livestock dealer from Iraq was in a hurry, he took the train the next day, heading for Tashkent. He carried with him only a letter of introduction from the commissar of the Kurdish Kulkhuz to the mufti of Tashkent and a few rubles that men of the village had slipped into his pocket. Khidir Musa arrived in Tashkent in the morning and found that the people there spoke the same language as in the Chuqor community. Before proceeding to the mufti's residence, he entered a coffeehouse to drink a tumbler of tea. The proprietor of the coffeehouse refused to allow him to pay once he discovered that Khidir Musa was from Iraq. He asked him to bring him a copy of the Holy Qur'an whenever he visited Tashkent again. Indeed, the man was so gracious that he left his work at the coffeehouse, which belonged to the state, and accompanied him to the mufti's residence, which would have been difficult for a foreigner like Khidir Musa to find on his own. The mufti was extremely happy, once he had read the letter from his friend the Kulkhuz commissar, and joked, “He should at least have given you a lamb to bring me.” Then he offered Khidir Musa a position as muezzin in the great mosque of Tashkent, since God had granted the Arabs the gift of correct pronunciation of Arabic words. Khidir Musa accepted the offer, which was a perfect fit for his aptitudes. He explained to the mufti that he had been motivated to come to Tashkent by a desire to find his brothers, who had been prisoners of the Russians. The mufti then promised to contact his friend the police chief, who would search for them in all possible locations.

Khidir Musa spent many rough months in exile while waiting each day for news the police chief might send him. Had it not been for the hope that filled his heart, he would have returned to Iraq again. He could not, however, return empty-handed, for that would have made him the laughingstock of the whole Chuqor community. For this reason, he held firm in the mosque's lodge where he lived. His only consolation was climbing up to the minaret's balcony five times a day to deliver the call to prayer, inviting believers to pray.

Out of the blue, one day at noon, the mufti entered the mosque accompanied by the police chief and trailed by two old codgers. Khidir Musa rose to greet the men. In a flash of recognition he identified the two men, who gazed at him in astonishment. He embraced them even before asking anything, for they were his spitting image. The Turkmen mufti said, “We've brought you your two brothers. What more than that can you ask for?” His brothers, who took him to their home, where they lived together, told him how they had been imprisoned and brought to Tashkent, where they had witnessed the horrors of the civil war, which had lasted for several years. After that—like other fellow-countrymen—they had been forbidden to leave the country, although they had never lost hope of returning one day to the Chuqor community. For this reason they had refused to marry, since they were unwilling to trade their homeland for a spouse.

They now had to plot their return. The police recognized their status as foreigners and lifted all travel restrictions on them. Khidir Musa wanted to take them back by the secret route he had followed through the mountains of Kurdistan, but the police chief vetoed that idea, declaring that should they fall into the hands of the Iranian or Iraqi border patrols—and this was always a possibility—they would be shot as spies, even before anyone bothered to listen to their story. Worse still, they did not have Iraqi passports. The police chief was forced to consult the bureau of secret intelligence, and the mufti presented their case to the central committee, of which he was himself a member, in hopes of finding a solution to the brothers' problem. The issue was extraordinarily complicated, and the central committee was forced to meet three times, without finding a solution. Thus it was required to seek assistance from the intelligence bureau, which was able to consider anything, even minutiae.

Koliyanovsky, who was the director of the intelligence bureau, smilingly told the mufti, “Don't worry. Everything will be fine.” At first, Khidir Musa was frightened when told that they were flying to Kirkuk in a zeppelin, since he had only a vague notion of what that was, but his two brothers, who had worked in many war-related factories, told him that flying in a zeppelin would be a rare delight. In point of fact, the intelligence bureau, which had decided to send them to Iraq in a blimp, had thought through all the eventualities. First and foremost, diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Iraq had been severed. This meant that the men would be exposed to extreme danger if intelligence agents were simply to deposit them beyond the country's borders, even if they were provided with forged documents. Traveling by blimp, however, meant that they would reach Iraq quickly. The three ageing men would thus be spared a rough trip that might prove too arduous for them. Even more important, when the men asserted that they had fled from Communism in a zeppelin, their perfectly confected story would mislead the Iraqi authorities, who would pardon them for everything. They repeated the story time and again, so that they would not forget any details, and this was the very tale that they repeated to everyone—from the governor to the American magazine, which published Khidir Musa's memoirs with the thrilling headline: “They Fled by Blimp from Communist Hell.”

As a matter of fact, the Soviet intelligence bureau, which conceived this operation, had conjectured that the Americans' propagandistic spirit would prevent them from seeing anything else. It is true that Soviet intelligence saw nothing wrong with returning the three men to their homeland, but they were more interested in pinning down the sites of military bases that the Baghdad Pact had begun to establish and in determining whether these stocked any nuclear weapons. Thus they filled the zeppelin with a special, highly classified gas, which emitted special rays that located the site of every military base and even its types of weapons. Naturally the three ageing men, and even the mufti, the police chief, and the members of the central committee knew nothing of all this, and in any case it was not a matter that concerned them. The zeppelin voyage, which lasted seventeen days, was truly enjoyable, although they were exposed to some dangers on the way. For example, an eagle, apparently upset by this strange, heavenly apparition, attacked the blimp, frightening Khidir's brothers who were piloting the craft. They thought the eagle would cause them to crash. It flew off, however, once they started screaming as loudly as they could and pelting it with anything they could find to throw. Moreover, en route, some Kurdish mountaineers fired on them, believing the craft to be a ship piloted by the devil. This forced the three men to climb higher into the sky. Otherwise, everything proceeded according to plan. They guided themselves at times by compass and at others by Khidir Musa's visual memory, for he had learned by heart all the important landmarks on the way.

Khidir Musa's return by blimp with his two brothers to the Chuqor community left an indelible impression on the heart of the boy Burhan Abdallah, whose belief in science and modern technology increased. He abandoned his fascination with soaring and disappearing the way the supreme master had done and dedicated a lot of effort, instead, to creating a scientific theory, or possibly a mathematical one, that would disclose the secret of existence, for this was a question to which he had found no answer—not even in religion.

As a matter of fact, the impact was not limited to the boy Burhan Abdallah, for the lives of all of the Chuqor community were turned upside down as well. Many residents repaired their homes and filled their storage bins with cereals and rice. Some purchased small shops in the souk. Hameed Nylon abandoned—at least temporarily—the notion of founding a people's liberation army once he had purchased his own vehicle and discovered a prostitute, whom he visited on the sly twice a week to escape the crying and screaming of the twins his wife had delivered in response, she believed, to the fervent prayers she had submitted through the imams.

The Chuqor community received a high honor when King Faisal II came to the city of Kirkuk in a Rolls-Royce preceded by two policemen on motorcycles and trailed by a police Jeep in which stood three secret service guards. Released from class, school children lined up on al-Awqaf Street to await their young king, who greeted his people, smiling from behind the glass of his vehicle. Khidir Musa personally slaughtered a yearling sheep in front of the limousine and Burhan Abdallah, who had been chosen to represent his school, shouted, “Long live His Majesty our beloved King Faisal II!” The royal limousine, however, had already sped past him, and so the king did not hear his greeting. That evening the youthful king received Khidir Musa and his brothers who had returned from Russia and conferred on them the Medal of the Two Rivers, second class, to recognize their rare courage and their love for their homeland, for these qualities had caused the whole world to talk about them. This human touch, coming from the youthful monarch, deeply moved those present. Even the governor's eyes were wet with tears. Others struggled hard to avoid displaying the emotions that the king's personal appearance had awakened.