The Last of the Angels (28 page)

This was the last thing that the men, who had sought refuge by the mountain in flight from the government forces they could not confront, expected to hear. One of the men ventured to say, “We were expecting the issuance of a pardon, and then you come to invite us to a rebellion.”

Hameed Nylon responded, “There's nothing easier than obtaining a pardon for you. I met King Faisal II several months ago and I can do that again. But what have you done that requires a pardon? Yes, you wanted to have a saint buried there in your village. And that's your right. But Qara Qul was buried in Kirkuk, where the tombs are filled with imams. In fact, the police continue to pursue you now for no reason at all. I've come here to tell you that Qara Qul belongs to you and that Tawuq will have him one day.”

The rebellious villagers had at first viewed Hameed Nylon with some suspicion and so had concealed their feelings, but he knew how to gain their affection and trust. First and foremost they were dazzled that Hameed Nylon was a lieutenant colonel. Then, too, he promised that each of them would receive a monthly salary from a revolutionary command that they had never heard of before. He affirmed to them that King Faisal II supported this movement, which opposed Nuri al-Sa‘id, Abdul'ilah, and the English, who were all enemies of Islam. The following day Hameed Nylon slipped into the village and took from the trunk of his car three rifles that the Chuqor community had liberated during the battle of the cemetery. He took these back to the base camp and distributed them to men who had no personal rifle. Into his belt he tucked a revolver he had purchased from the thief Mahmud al-Arabi.

On the first night and the subsequent ones that Hameed Nylon passed at this hideout in the valley, he was able to sleep only fitfully. He felt something between delight and anxiety because here, for the first time in his life, he was successfully taking the first step on the long road to revolution. He was not, however, totally certain about the resolve of these villagers, whose thoughts revolved around the women, flocks, and fields they had left behind. Because he had spent his whole life among people who resembled these men in every respect, he knew that nothing could ignite belief in their hearts more effectively than power and wealth. If they felt that the revolution offered this, they would not hesitate to risk their lives for its sake.

On the seventh day after his arrival, Hamid Nylon stood on a protruding boulder facing his men and made a short speech in which he announced the actual beginning of the revolution. Then he drew out his revolver and fired one shot in the air. That was the revolution's first shot. He was a bit sad that he had not been able to obtain a red cloth from which to make the flag that would flutter over Iraq. Pleased by this gesture, the villagers applauded and raised their rifles too and fired into the air, announcing their allegiance to the revolution, which Hameed Nylon termed a peasants' revolution.

From that day forward the revolution's “squadrons”—the term chosen by Hameed Nylon for his forces—went on the offensive. The men began to visit Tawuq and neighboring villages, even during the daytime, resolved to fight off any attack the police might launch against them. Indeed, they openly began to call on people to join the revolution. Hameed Nylon had succeeded in attracting a number of other farmers and school students, on whom he relied to keep tabs on the enemy.

When Hameed Nylon returned to Kirkuk, he was certain that the revolution had actually begun. He realized, however, that a lot had to be done before the revolution became an indomitable force. His heart was inundated by waves of contradictory emotions: sorrow and happiness all at the same time. What a strange life a man is destined to live! The revolution—this limitless act extending into the future—let him make it a present reality. He saw his hand reaching for the revolver that would make him famous and felt all choked up. It was spring, and the cursed particles of pollen left him so congested he had difficulty breathing. “Why is it my destiny to suffer from this allergy?” He had not killed anyone yet. “But I definitely will kill. It's not possible for a revolution to be a revolution without blood.” He thought that there was always a price to be paid. On the road he saw the land of Iraq stretch before his eyes. He stopped his car and held a handful of dirt in his palm: moist earth. “This is sacred earth,” he murmured to himself. Then he scattered the dirt in the air. Blood on the ground…. There would always be blood on this purple carpet, on this large coffin called the fatherland.

Many matters occupied Hameed Nylon's mind, which was consumed by the revolution. He knew only a little about revolutionary teachings and contacted Faruq Shamil and Najat Salim to ask them for books with information about peasant revolutions. These no longer existed, having been thrown into ovens and burned, for fear that the security men who raided homes from time to time would discover them. Faruq Shamil, however, who possessed a powerful memory, wrote down the instructions he had memorized on a piece of paper that he presented to Hameed Nylon, who stuck it in his pocket, thinking he would study it when he returned to the base camp.

News of the revolution had reached many in the city, but they made fun of the rumors that circulated concerning it: “That would be the last straw if the naïve villagers who kidnapped Qara Qul liberated us.” Indeed, the Communists, whose hearts were shredded by envy, claimed that Qara Qul himself was directing the rebellion, since as usual they mocked anyone who did not agree with them. After it was too late, they regretted making this claim when they realized that many people believed it. In fact, all of Kirkuk was discussing Qara Qul's return to fight for the poor.

Hameed Nylon seized this opportunity and contacted his young relative Burhan Abdallah, who was a gifted stylist, telling him, “Great, Burhan, I believe that the time has come for you to become one of the heroes of the revolution.” So Burhan Abdallah drafted the first manifesto that Hameed Nylon released. It astounded the political parties with its elevated literary language and powerful logic. Someone who worked at the Turkish consulate in Kirkuk set the type and ran off copies on a Roneo press. The police had trouble identifying the source because there was no registration for private printing equipment in foreign consulates. One night Hameed Nylon himself distributed this flyer throughout the city. He stuck it to walls in front of mosques, cinemas, coffeehouses, and government agencies and poked it through holes in the doors of homes and in the souks. Although the next day the police arrested a number of suspects who had been sitting in coffeehouses chattering away against the government, they did not have a clue as to the source of these manifestoes that called on the people to join forces with the revolution. Thus Hameed Nylon realized in one blow and in the course of a few days what many others had failed to achieve during twenty years. The Communists contacted Hameed Nylon after it reached their ears that he had recruited many of the Imam Qasim community's unemployed youth, who spent their time leaning against walls, but he informed them that he did not have enough time to conduct unproductive negotiations. He proposed to them that they should join his movement without any preconditions, if they were serious about their revolutionary claims.

In reality, Hameed Nylon's mind was not focused on anything that related to the Communists or to the many new followers who had joined his movement and been sent by him to the mountain, traveling by foot and even without any weapons, which he lacked. He was, instead, preoccupied by the treasure that Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri had left behind him and which no one had been able to find. As a matter of fact, everything hinged on finding this treasure. Unless he could get his hands on enough cash, everyone would leave him. He was sure of that. No matter how ebullient they were, emotions did not suffice. He would have to feed and arm his men and to provide a generous supply of food to the families they had left behind.

Everyone had totally despaired of looking for the treasure when Hameed Nylon began his own laborious search. When it did not produce any results, he too almost surrendered to despair. Although he searched in all the probable and improbable sites, attempting to assume the mullah's personality so that he could think like him and thus be guided to the hiding place he had chosen for the treasure, he failed to uncover the secret. This matter caused him to drink to excess once again, after a long abstention. He did not recover his strength until Burhan Abdallah asked him one day, when the point that Hameed Nylon had reached alarmed him, “Is this the way you want to lead the revolution, Hameed? You can't tell the difference between your head and your toes now. Why are you doing this?” Hameed Nylon blushed because the boy had made him feel ashamed, and his criticism was justified. So he replied graciously, “There won't be any revolution, Burhan, unless I find the wealth that the damned mullah hid. A revolution without capital doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Everything will collapse after a month or two unless we acquire an adequate number of rifles and pay salaries to the combatants.”

Hameed Nylon was on the verge of tears. He was lamenting his revolution, which would die stillborn. He had promised his men salaries that he had not yet paid and knew he would not dare return to them unless he discovered the treasure, in which he had placed all his hope. Everyone would mock him: “This wannabe who called himself Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Mustafa.” He was thinking to himself: “Fine, Lieutenant Colonel, your days are numbered,” when he was taken by surprise by the smile plastered across the boy's face. “Why didn't you tell me right away? The matter may not be as difficult as you think.”

“Not difficult? What are you saying?”

Burhan smiled again. “I'll help you find the treasure. That's what I'm saying.”

Hameed Nylon became very alert. He asked hesitantly, “Do you know where the treasure is located?”

Burhan Abdallah shook his head, “No, but I'll know this evening.”

The wind went out of Hameed Nylon's sails again. He did not even want to ask what made the boy so certain that by evening he could unravel this mystery that had baffled everyone. Realizing that the man did not believe him, Burhan Abdallah left to avoid any more questions that he would not know whether to answer or not. He waited until evening before heading to the house in which the small angels lived and rapped on the door. Silence enveloped the house in the dark of the alley, where the only light was from a lamp hung in the distance. A long enough time passed that he thought no one was home. All the same he knocked a second time without hoping that anyone would answer. He waited a moment and then started to walk away, thinking that he would return later. He noticed, however, that the door was opening and that a voice filled with affection was calling him, “It's you, Burhan. Come in. We were waiting for you.”

Music coming from some place in the darkness reached his ears. It resembled the sound of men's footsteps descending a mountain. He was afflicted by a sudden terror, for no apparent reason. He even thought about running away and forgetting everything. The old man, whose face was divided by the darkness and the light, stood in front of the door, which was halfway open. Sensing the hesitation of the boy who stood there staring at him, he stretched out a thin, veined hand, gently grasped Burhan's wrist, and pulled him inside the house, which was illuminated by tongues of flame from the fire pit at the center of the courtyard. Then he closed the door behind him calmly and silently.

H
ameed Nylon reached the mountain riding a mule on which he had thrown embroidered saddlebags filled with the mounds of dinars he had brought. He was wearing a military uniform that he had decorated with two red badges attached to the shoulders. He was brimming with the life that spread before him. This fresh arrival by Hameed Nylon, like a king returning to his subjects after an absence, caused the revolution to spread to neighboring villages even faster than Hameed Nylon could have imagined. He knew that nothing is as persuasive as cash. The moment he returned to his base camp, he paid back salaries to his fighters, who could not believe that their pockets were filled with all those dinars—more than they had seen in their entire lives. He said, “A revolution that fails to feed its children does not deserve to exist.”

There was new life in Tawuq and the neighboring villages, which had heard that the revolution was paying salaries to combatants. Shaykhs of advanced years convened meetings in villages after receiving news of the revolution that had sprung from nowhere. Some suggested that they should contact their aghas and ask permission to enlist in the revolution. The villagers, however, categorically refused this proposal: “What connection do our aghas have to this matter that concerns our livelihood?” The meetings broke up, leaving the decision to individuals to do as they saw fit. That was exactly what many had been expecting because fighters had initially come individually, sneaking away to the base camp under the cover of darkness and then in groups, after people became convinced that the salaries paid by the revolution were more profitable than growing onions and tomatoes and better than working for the government itself. This truth tempted many policemen, municipal workers, soldiers, and students from seminaries and caused them to come and ask to enlist. Even county managers and lieutenants fled from their service and came to Hameed Nylon, who received them graciously and then sent them back to their posts to work as undercover agents. He promised that they would receive an extra salary from the revolution while they sat at their bases.

Confronted by this crush of humanity, Hameed Nylon was finally forced to call a temporary halt to new enlistments, rejecting even recommendations from his fighters and endorsements that potential recruits brought from village headmen whose names Hameed Nylon had already added to the roster of salaries to be paid at the end of each month. In reality, this was a step that had to be taken to keep matters from getting out of hand because the number of combatants had grown so large that some sought out their women at night or went missing for days at a time without anyone noticing. The villagers also continued their traditional practice of stealing from nearby villages, which they would attack at night. This caused Hameed Nylon to imprison them in a mud hut he had constructed at the end of the valley. In fact he was forced to flog those who returned to theft after being released. He knew this might scare them but not do much to change their value system, which had been passed down through many generations.

Then Hameed Nylon withdrew to study the page of revolutionary teachings, which he did not know how to implement. These abstract ideas rarely had much bearing on what he needed most. This was how to organize the revolution and to move onto the offensive. There was some useful advice along the lines of: “Depend on the people and consolidate your relationship with the peasants” and “Respect your elders” or “Strike the enemy and then flee.” Everyone knew these things, however. Hameed Nylon had consolidated his relationship with the peasants even more than Mao Tse-tung had. “I pay them salaries that they never in their whole lives dreamed of.” He plunged into deep reflection as he thought about the meaning of “Strike the enemy and then flee.” Then he told himself, “Perhaps it's necessary for us to do that now, but we won't do that forever. The day will come when we march forward and liberate Iraq: village by village and city by city.” Thus Hameed Nylon decided that—like all the other revolutionary leaders whose names people repeat—he himself would write the instructions for his revolution.

He shut himself up in the room the villagers had built for him from stones and plaster. As the red flag fluttered overhead, he filled some notebooks with his thoughts on revolution in just a few days. Then he sent these with one of his secret couriers to Burhan Abdallah in Kirkuk to be rewritten in a refined literary style. This was a new undertaking for Burhan Abdallah, who had always been preoccupied by learning life's secret and brooding about the stories of prophets and leaders, but had never gained access to what he considered the essence, which must be a treasure house for all the answers. He repeated to himself, “The answers are always deceptive and corrupted and shade into each other until it becomes hard for a person to rediscover an answer after the initial moment.” He thought, “There's no essence that contains the answers. There's merely an eternity that precedes the questions. Inquiry is mankind's destiny in this world.” Burhan Abdallah withdrew to a corner of the Umm al-Rabi‘ayn Garden, stretched out on the damp grass, and began to look over Hameed Nylon's teachings about revolution. These were new ideas not contained by the old books. They attempted to get to the reality inside people's hearts, rather than to something external, and called them to become the masters of the world. He thought, “Fine. I've always wanted to write a book about life. This will be my first attempt to compose the book I want. Although it's not my book, it will become part of me.”

His creativity was molded by the clamorous thoughts that Hameed Nylon had jotted down and by the imagery used by oil workers at Baba Gurgur, bakers in the Chuqor community, goldsmiths in the new souk, soldiers in the barracks, and bicycle rental agents on the street opposite the citadel. Burhan Abdallah spent days thinking about drafting this book, which he wanted to be a guide to revolution, about which he actually knew nothing, although he could imagine it. He drew inspiration from the language of the gospels, which contained eternal admonitions for mankind. Thus he climbed to his house's upper room, where he secluded himself for a week.

When he descended, he had drafted the book, which he called
The Guide.
Hameed Nylon found this title unsatisfactory and changed it to
The Pocket Guide to Revolution.
Then he sent it to Turkey with a Turkmen student—from Sari Kahiya—who was studying veterinary science in Istanbul.

Ten thousand copies were printed at the Yildizlar Press. The type in them was tiny—too small to be read by the naked eye. The miniature book, which was not much bigger than a matchbook, reached Hameed Nylon less than two months later, along with ten thousand magnifying glasses manufactured by the German firm Carl Zeiss. These were sent in a separate shipment for fear the censors would detect the link between the book and the magnifying glass. Hameed Nylon really demonstrated his judiciousness in outwitting the security men because the employees of the censorship office assumed when they saw the book's cover, which was decorated with Islamic designs, that it was one of those prayer books that are normally placed inside a scrap of cloth and then attached near the elbow to protect the person wearing it from harm. These were widespread in Iraq.

Thus the book slipped past the censors and created a big stir among career leftists, who almost exploded from envy and jealousy—not because Hameed Nylon had contrived a way they had not devised to trick the security agents, but because he had composed a book in lofty literary language quite unlike the lackluster style of the political tracts that the political parties released from time to time. Although they made a show of mocking and ridiculing it, they spent their nights obsessively reading the book that Hameed Nylon's agents sold with the German magnifying glass for a hundred fils. Others, who were enchanted by the book's message, translated it to Kurdish and Turkish. Imams in the mosques subsequently took quotations from it to include in the sermons they delivered at the conclusion of the Friday prayer—naturally without any mention of the source.

This book, which listed as its author Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Mustafa, made Hameed Nylon swagger with pride and conceit because he had realized in only a few months what had escaped Iraq's political parties as a whole since the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I and the English army's entry into Iraq under the command of General Maude, who had said he came as a liberator, not a conqueror. Hameed succeeded in gaining the Kurdish tribes first. Then, capitalizing on his influence among the Arabs of al-Hawija, he gained the Ubayd and Jibur tribes, which abandoned their internecine wars and announced their loyalty to the revolution, believing that King Faisal II himself supported it.

Even after the first shot of the revolution was fired, several months passed without the revolution's squadrons engaging in any actual battles with the government forces, which had not paid any attention to this revolution, except for a few small skirmishes that occurred from time to time between night watchmen or guardhouse policemen who refused to hand over their weapons to the rebels. The situation angered Hameed Nylon to some extent. He had expected that the government would respond to him in a fashion worthy of the revolution he had announced. The government maintained its silence even when he sent a group of his men to fire—from a distance—on a school for mounted policemen at the edge of the city. A mule was killed then and a policeman was wounded in the thigh.

When Hameed Nylon observed the government's determination to ignore him—not even issuing a communiqué—he felt ever more rebellious and decided to go on the offensive. He had his men set up roving ambushes for vehicles that carried paying customers between cities. The concept his men adopted was actually borrowed from a scene that had stuck in his mind from an American film Hameed Nylon had seen. The idea was guaranteed success every time. One of his men would stretch out beside the road and hold his breath, pretending to be dead. Then passing vehicles would stop. Drivers and passengers would get out and hurry to lend a helping hand. At that, five or six men brandishing weapons would emerge from behind boulders, trees, and hills to capture the passengers, whom they forced to raise their arms. Then they would search their pockets and impound a fifth of any sum over five dinars as an alms tax for the revolution. If a person's pocket was empty or only contained a few dirhems, they would give him a dinar as assistance from the revolution for the poor, after reading him a page or two from
The Pocket Guide to Revolution
. Then they would shake hands with them, bid them farewell, and wish them a safe trip. After two or three months, however, Hameed Nylon was compelled to stop these operations, which cost the revolution thousands of dinars because the scent of dinars attracted villagers, who began to travel every day between the mountainous towns in wooden buses, exhausting themselves to fall into the revolution's ambushes. Indeed some proprietors of vehicles allowed them to ride for free in exchange for half the amount they gained from each ambush staged by the revolutionaries.

When Hameed Nylon saw that the government was deliberately overlooking his revolution, he decided to strike where the pain would be excruciating. One night he himself led nine of his men armed with rifles and slipped into the city of Kirkuk, where they knew every alley. They reached the other side of the city by crossing the Khasa Su River, which was nearly dry. Its colored pebbles glittered in the light from the stars that filled the sky. They were heading for the Arafa region, where the English enclave was surrounded by barbed wire. Hameed Nylon knew every house in this neighborhood, where engineers, administrators, and English intelligence officers lived with their families. For this reason, he had no difficulty reaching the region, which was filled with trees and expanses of green grass. He was able to surprise the neighborhood, without anyone noticing. He did not, however, wish to shed even a drop of blood. The police guardhouse was located at the beginning of the street leading to the neighborhood and beyond the railroad line over which passed the trains linking Kirkuk and Erbil. Most of these policemen were nomadic desert Arabs who had dedicated themselves to serving the English, who were not stingy with presents. If alerted, they would start firing, and this could lead to an unnecessary massacre. Hameed Nylon, however, had no difficulty worth mentioning in taking control of the guardhouse, where the three policemen were snoring in their sleep without having posted a guard at the door. He put the manacles hanging on the wall on their wrists and feet and tied them to their camp beds almost before they woke up. Then he left three of his men there and went with the others, slipping between the trees, into the English neighborhood, which always remained illuminated.

After half an hour, Hameed Nylon and his men returned, clustered around four men and a woman who were plainly English. Their hands were tied with ropes and their mouths were gagged with scraps of cloth to keep them from speaking. They walked with staggering steps and offered no resistance. They seemed indifferent to what was happening around them because they had drunk so much whiskey, the reek of which made the villagers, who were unfamiliar with this dizzying odor, sniffle. Hameed Nylon, who—like his men—had wrapped green cloth around his head, so that only his piercing eyes were visible, and who—unlike his men, who had buried their bodies inside dark, baggy Kurdish pants—was wearing a military uniform, issued his orders to the three villagers who had their rifles trained on the policemen, who were shackled to their beds. “Excellent! Raise our flag over the guardhouse and collect all their rifles and revolvers, because the time has come to withdraw.” The street was totally empty and a pervasive silence, which was occasionally broken by the barking of a distant dog, ruled over the city. Hameed Nylon cast a thoughtful glance at the street, and then they all slipped in a single procession toward the Khasa Su River, crossing the dirt embankment over which the train passed. Inside the guardhouse they left behind a few copies of
The Pocket Guide to Revolution
, to which Hameed Nylon had appended delicate dedications for the governor of Kirkuk, the chief of police, and the director of public security. He had signed these with his nom de guerre: Lieutenant Colonel Anwar Mustafa.