The Last of the Angels (32 page)

Khidir Musa, whose heart was distressed by the devastation that had settled over his city, seemed to be a lost soul. Everything had escaped from his control, and he could no longer find anyone who would listen to him. The world fell apart before his eyes in one fell blow when security agents on one occasion led his two aged brothers to the station and beat them, accusing them of promoting atheism in the Chuqor community. He was obliged to seek out Lieutenant Colonel Adnan al-Dabbagh, who intervened to get them released. He advised Khidir to send them back to Tashkent, where they had once lived. They preferred, however, to seek out the holy city of Mecca, where they appropriated for themselves a corner of the courtyard of the Ka‘ba, which shelters all those who seek its protection. Once Khidir Musa had been deserted by the last hope in his heart, he withdrew again to his tower above the monastery, after first changing out of his military uniform, which he returned to Lieutenant Colonel Adnan al-Dabbagh. He cut his ties with the secular world and dedicated the remainder of his life to the remembrance of God, in the company of his two friends Dada Hijri and Dervish Bahlul, who joined him, seeking to distance themselves from the evil rampant in all parts of the city.

The three men no longer ever left their tower. Everything seemed repetitive and monotonous. Death followed death, and insanity succeeded insanity. The city lost its innocence and became filled with scoundrels and killers. The three men refused to receive anyone other than Hameed Nylon and Burhan Abdallah, who brought them food and cigarettes every day. Eventually it seemed people had totally forgotten these men, whom no one thought of anymore. Dervish Bahlul scaled back his work. He was content to keep his watch with the alarm beside him so he would remember to cross off this name or that from the Preserved Tablet, which he placed beneath his pillow. Dervish Bahlul was not being deliberately neglectful, but people no longer paid attention to death. They began to die so nonchalantly that it seemed they had lost any sense of life's significance. They handed themselves over to death without ever growing weary of it, and even composed songs they chanted in the streets, like, “The people die, the lieutenant colonel lives,” and, “Execution, execution, the people so will it, execution, execution.” The lieutenant colonel, who had some peculiar characteristics, replaced the nightingale that warbled before the radio programs commenced with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, which roars at the beginning of each of the studio's films, to frighten his enemies. Along with death, superstitions the lieutenant colonel's astrologers popularized spread like fire through chaff. Thus many villagers who lived in reed-mat huts purchased a spyglass that they directed at the moon every night so they could see the lieutenant colonel, who was said to look down from there, granting light and affection to the world.

People had changed so much that it was difficult to get to know them. Each of them had stumbled upon some new cause that shaped his life until he no longer remembered the past from which he had developed. Everything seemed new. It was like a virgin land that dazzled newcomers enter, trailing guides who know everything—past, present, and future. It became a popular custom to worship idols, which the new priests often colored with henna and placed on benches in the corners of streets and alleyways and in front of coffeehouses and bars, as if they were signs warning of the advent of a time when earth and sky would unite.

Hameed Nylon broke with his village fighters, whom he left to their new destiny. Others pursued them and made them join peasant collectives that raided and plundered cities from time to time, with or without a pretext. Prison had left many scars on Hameed Nylon's spirit. He had gone out like an ember under the influence of time or his defeat, but no one else noticed. Many believed that he had increased in wisdom and maturity. For his part, though, the world seemed like a play performed by comic actors of every type. He would tell himself, “Now that they've all become revolutionaries, what role is left for you, Hameed Nylon?” He began to sit every evening in the Oil Workers' Union Club drinking arak, sunk in his memories. They had proposed to appoint him head of the Oil Workers' Union, which was no longer a covert organization, but he declined that. He was chosen its honorary president, even without anyone asking him. His visits to the tower where Khidir Musa, Dervish Bahlul, and Dada Hijri lived multiplied. He was gripped by the discussions that these men conducted. Each time he left the tower he would burst into tears, filled with emotions of uncertain origin—like a man awakened by distant cries.

The revolution had changed Hameed Nylon, as it had changed many others, so that friends became enemies and even traitors. A man would pass another and raise his hand in greeting, “Good day,” and then draw his revolver and shoot him. The police did not ask for witnesses. They would always arrest the person closest to the dead man, accusing him of the murder, while the perpetrators stood watching. Things came to a devastating end when a man shot Dalli Ihsan, whom everyone knew to be some other type of being—not human. The moment the three bullets pierced the body of Dalli Ihsan, it was transformed into an awe-inspiring fountain of fire that ascended toward the heavens, emitting thunder and lightning. The earth shook and quaked so that people fell down on top of each other. The fire spread to markets and homes, which were reduced to ashes. From the fire descended Dalli Ihsan's kinsfolk: angels of death mounted on horses and motorcycles, raining destruction on the cities, one after the other. This attack, which no one had expected, lasted three days. Then another conspiratorial armed force spread its control over the capital, which planes from the Air Force had attacked after taking off from the base at al-Habaniya. The foremost lieutenant colonel was arrested and executed by firing squad. His corpse was thrown in the Tigris River.

Although the tribe that had descended from the fire withdrew, satisfied with the destruction they had brought to Kirkuk and the other cities, the new lieutenant colonel delivered a speech—broadcast by radio and television in both Arabic and Kurdish—in which he cursed those who, from ignorance, had supported the foremost lieutenant colonel, who ranked twenty-seventh in the secret faction of Satan. He announced that he himself was the foremost commander and derived his legal authority from his spirit, which soared over the mountains, rivers, and deserts. It had traversed the generations, extracting the essence of the revolution. He added modestly, however, “Even so, I'm a human being like you, even if my ancestors were angels.” He called on the people to go out into the streets to delight in the return of the man whom mankind had so long awaited.

The terrified people, who had witnessed the devastation visited upon them by the angels of fire, sought refuge in their houses and barred the doors behind them. The soldiers, however, donned their helmets and began to break down the doors with their boots and their rifles, storming into houses. They led out the young men, lined them up against the walls of their homes, and shot them. Gallows were erected at the entries of alleys and streets, and hanged men dangled from them. In the prisons and concentration camps, bands of national guardsmen arrived from every place and every era and hosted memorial services that surpassed anything anyone had previously imagined. Each day they led out three or four prisoners whom they slaughtered and then fed to the others. Even so, they frequently organized musical soirées at which they raped the youngest prisoners in front of their comrades, who were obliged to applaud and sing.

People were forced to flee to the mountains' gullies and ravines, hiding from death, which stalked them from place to place. Hameed Nylon returned to his combatants once again to lead the revolution in which he no longer believed. The few Communists left alive sought refuge in new, even more secret cellars, after lengthy confessions had jeopardized the old ones. The soldiers surrounded the tower where the three old men were living, blocked its door and windows with cement, and turned it into a tomb.

Just as many others had disappeared, so did Burhan Abdallah. Many believed that he might have been slain and his corpse buried hastily somewhere inside some mass burial site. He disappeared so unobtrusively that he might never have existed. Many years passed without his giving any sign of life. Rumors spread that soldiers had killed him when he lobbed a Molotov cocktail at them in the Piryadi community. Others claimed that he had been killed during attacks he launched, with others, against the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad. Someone else announced that an airplane had opened fire on him, striking him, as he attempted to cross the border to Turkey. Although his mother heard all these tales, she categorically refused to believe them. She kept saying, “I'm more confident of what my heart says than of what people say. I know that my son is alive. He has simply disappeared. He will return one day.” Even so, Burhan Abdallah remained absent for so long that the memory of him faded from the Chuqor community, which withdrew into itself in response to the succession of invaders that stormed it from time to time, leaving festering wounds in its smothered heart.

S
uddenly everything calmed down. An unusual yellow suffused the heavens. Was it the end or the beginning? Burhan Abdallah returned once more to his native city, which—after he had buried himself in diverse cities and continents, experiencing lethal depression and exuberant vitality—seemed no more than memories cast into time. He had become an old man who supported himself with a cane, and—after forty-six years spent traveling from one place to another, from airport to airport, from a city lost in fog to a city where the sun sparkled over its temples—he wore a gray hat to cover his baldness. Had it really been forty-six years? He felt he had left his city only the day before. He had not matured, because the only time he possessed was that of his memories. Even so, he had endured millions, even billions of centuries. He had endured all of eternity, which had left its traces on his scrawny body but had not touched his spirit, which continued to be subject to whatever lay behind the essence of things. His teeth had taken turns falling out and his head retained only a little of its hair, which hung off the sides. His hands were wrinkled, and their veins showed clearly. Through the prescription eyeglasses he wore, he saw nonexistence and what preceded it: the first dark atom that exploded and filled existence with galaxies and suns. “My God, I was there too.”

He found it odd that he—a descendant of light and darkness—should be shackled with hands, feet, a trunk, a head, two eyes, two ears, and a nose. He thought, “What kind of game is this: that I should be everything and also nothing?” The matter seemed to him totally risible but also serious enough to be a curse. Lifting a hand he took off his glasses, which he wiped with a cloth the optician on Schönhauser Allee had given him. “This hand, which moved by itself even without an engine to regulate its powers and which looked almost like a fish, was—in some sense—a fish.” It occurred to him that he had perhaps read that somewhere…in a poster on a wall, in a detective novel. It did not matter where all that had happened. What happens, happens as a matter of habit. Human beings are always like that. Ideas always exist. To have ideas, all a person needs to do is to look. And he was looking.

In his long years of exile he had learned the humor of vision, or what he called “the self-contradictory nature of meaning,” seeing all of life as a drop of condensation on his spread fingers, which had knobs like the fingers of a robot in an exhibition. It is, however, a life heading toward death. Over the course of generations, people have been born and then died. In a hundred years at the most, no one we now know will be left alive. “There will be others whom we will never know at all: workers, prostitutes, writers, painters, commanders, rulers, and soldiers, but what interest are they to me, when I no longer exist? None at all, although I might linger on as a memory or a secret gesture in this comical celebration called life.”

Burhan Abdallah's heart had been numbed, although he had survived because he never ceased for a moment to hope for a return to his city, which he had fled. For forty-six years he had sat, day after day, in a room in a remote city, listening to news bulletins, thinking he might hear something about his city. There were many things to make him anxious, for over the expanse of these years many upheavals had occurred in succession. One dictator had followed another. Finally, human beings had disappeared from the cities and streets after the dead emerged from their hiding places to occupy everything.

For forty-six years, wars had flared between them or against the others. The ancient dead hated the more recently deceased. The nineteenth-century dead hated the eighteenth-century dead. A new order developed and pushed many of them to resort to violence. The dead who considered themselves civilized refused to associate with the dead of the first human epochs, even those from the stone and bronze ages, on the grounds that their skeletons more closely resembled apes' than humans'. Indeed, there were some who did consider them apes and unrelated to human beings. On account of this struggle, which led to many crimes, the dead from the two factions attacked each other with jerry cans of kerosene or gasoline, which they lit. This was the only way to kill the dead.

The dead originated sects that advocated the absolute equality of all the dead because the deceased possessed no distinctive characteristic save that of being deceased. This in and of itself should suffice to guarantee the solidarity of the dead and their brotherhood. Actually, these dead people displayed some wisdom too by allowing the continued existence of many of the living, so that they would not cut off the stream that provided them with renewed powers every day. Unfortunately for the dead, they could not procreate. For that reason, they were forced to depend upon the living, who bred, gave birth, matured, and then died, thus joining mankind's greatest army: the eternal dead.

All the same, Burhan Abdallah never abandoned his hope that he would one day return to his city to meet the last of the living, who had never lost their appetite for life. He was not afraid of death but of becoming one of the dead. For this reason, he directed that his body should be cremated and the ashes scattered in the Tigris River. He also realized, however, that a man does not die until he loses hope in life. He had not lost this hope and was incapable of losing it. He would awake each morning in exile, where he had spent forty-six years, and gaze out the window of his room at the white snow piled in the streets and on buildings' roofs. Everything was pure and white, affording a glittering light. Black crows would soar here and there, rising high into the air, and then descending to peck at the snow in search of a nonexistent morsel of bread or grain of wheat. He paid attention to each morning and evening throughout the forty-six years, as he moved from city to city, from street to street, and from coffeehouse to coffeehouse. He saw all the cities of the world.

In South Africa he fought for Zulu rights. In Zanzibar he lived for years on spices. In Yemen he joined a Sufi dhikr circle in the Great Mosque in San‘a. He became a guide for explorers crossing the Empty Quarter by camel. He worked as a chef on a German steamship. He transported tea from Ceylon. He led the student revolution in Paris, even without anyone calling attention to him by name. In London he worked as an escort for rich people from the Gulf Region, accompanying them from the hospitals to the dancehalls of Soho. Then he was a secretary for an astrological scholar, who read horoscopes, conducted spiritual séances over the telephone, and investigated the supernatural. In Mecca he organized an international gang of pickpockets to prey on pilgrims. Then he fled with a forged Saudi passport to New York, where he resided for a year or part of a year in one of the tunnels of the Statue of Liberty. At his wits' end, he returned once more to Europe, where he chose to work as a translator paid by the word for an establishment that owned a building almost next to the Berlin Wall.

Each time he moved, he lost his books and furniture. He would leave them and never return. All the same he never relinquished his transistor radio, which he carried with him. It was a black, German-made, Siemens radio with eight shortwave bands. Day after day he would sit searching for broadcasts with news that would restore life to his snuffed-out heart. In his homeland, each war was followed by another. Wars overlapped occasionally so that it was difficult for a person to distinguish between one war and another. There were wars between the dead and wars between the living, wars in the mountains and wars in the cities, wars in the marshes and wars in the deserts.

During these conflicts, each new commander seized the one before him and slew him, feeding his flesh to his courtiers, who ate even the crotch, oblivious to the difficulty they had digesting this. From time to time, festivals were held to immortalize the accomplishments of the new ruler. Each had his own idiom, which differed from the others'. Thus it became customary to compose books about the genius that this ruler or that displayed in his use of language. Each had his special habits. One would eat boiled lettuce and another would sprinkle sugar on his food. One's taste was so depraved that he smoked a cigar while sleeping, and this became the people's compulsion too. They were all demigods. This was more or less understood until someone came along who disdained these pagan practices and proclaimed that there was no god but God. Naturally he was God.

Burhan Abdallah went almost every day to the coffeehouse, where he had a cup of coffee and smoked, waiting for someone who might chance to come and bring him some news from his distant city. He occasionally met another exile like himself and listened to his words, which he knew by heart. Even words lost their meaning with time. When he spoke, he addressed only himself, as he always had done. He existed in his past. His memories weighed him down, but he did not want to become a narrator of his memories, like some old man who is the laughingstock of his community. At times he would ask, “Is there any new information about our homeland?” The other person would reply a bit anxiously, “You must have heard the news. They've resorted once again to striking each other with atomic bombs. This is the second bomb to explode in a week.” He would say, “Yes, I heard that. Basra was hit, isn't that so?” He was not very interested in learning the answer because he knew that death was everywhere in his distant country. Years ago, they used to strike each other with chemical weapons, but now they had changed over to atomic bombs. He would ask himself, “Is there any difference between a man dying of a bullet, cannon fire, a chemical rocket, or an atomic bomb?” He would repeat to himself a fragment of poetry: “The causes have multiplied, but death remains one.”

Emotion frequently overpowered him and brought him to the verge of tears, but he would turn his face and flirt with the German waitress Cornelia, “Connie, would you bring your lover another cup of coffee?” She would reprimand him, “You know I only like young men, you fugitive from the cemetery.” Was he dead too without knowing it? Not at all. Never. He would tell her, “If you allow me to visit you once, I will compress a whole lifetime into a single night.” She answered pensively, “I might do that some day. You really tempt me.”

But all that was finished now, like a curse whose magic was exhausted. He awoke one morning to hear the stunning news that he received so coolly it might as well not have been true. For a long time he had lost the ability to feel delight because he had waited so long, like a man no longer interested even in losses. For the first time, however, he felt that he had liberated himself from a nightmare that had consumed his entire life. He listened once again to the broadcasts that carried news and lengthy reports about the dead, who had finally surrendered to the living, who had built crematories for the dead—who were no longer able to die—in every community and city. They stood in long lines in front of the crematories and leapt into the blazing fire. Life had finally triumphed over death. During a single week, every trace of the deceased was eliminated from his country.

In his coffeehouse, located in the Alexanderplatz square in Berlin, for the first time in forty-six years, he saw his angels, the three old men coming from eternity, carrying spring inside hemp sacks on their shoulders. This time they were traveling across the rolling steppes that stretched to the outlying communities of Kirkuk. They smiled at him affectionately and scolded him, “You shouldn't have deserted us for all this time.”

Burhan opened his mouth with difficulty, “I didn't think there was a spring in store for Kirkuk. It seemed to me that all you were just a fantasy I had created for myself.”

The three men responded, “You shouldn't have done that, Burhan. Don't you see that we've finally drawn near to the Chuqor community? We want you to be our guide when we arrive.”

He heard Cornelia say as she placed another cup of coffee in front of him, “It seems you didn't sleep very well last night.”

He opened his eyes once more, “It's true; that's always the way it is.”

Through the glass façade of the coffeehouse, he cast a look at the street, where people were descending to the subway tunnels, which traversed the city, and climbing out of them. “I wonder where they're going.” It did not matter to him whether he discovered the answer to his question. He said, “They're coming from everywhere and going everywhere. As for me, should I follow my three angels, who have never reached Kirkuk?”

Now he was on his way to Kirkuk in the front seat of a taxi. When they were within walking distance of the city, he stopped the vehicle and got out. He was afraid of the surprise and felt self-conscious. He thought he was returning to his roots again, but saw the city stretching into the distance before him in the sunset, spread out like a legendary bird. He climbed a nearby hill and sat down on its red dirt, from which grass sprouted. He filled his chest with this ancient scent that he had smelled throughout his childhood. He was choked up with sorrow over his long absence: “Burhan, why was it necessary for you to leave for all these years? No one banished you, but you were afraid of death and fled, abandoning your pearls to the dogs. But that's all over now. The life that you squandered in the world's hermetic cities has ended. Everything has ended. Here you return, carrying your old age in your heart to a city that knew you only as a child.” He was not even able to weep.

In the gloom that descended over the distant city, Burhan Abdallah left the hill, heading toward the minarets as their crescents glowed in the red sky. His steps were heavy, but his eyes remained fixed on the distant, blazing fire. He waded through a grassy creek and crossed through two orchards he had not seen before. Step by step, he listened to the wind as it rustled through the leaves of the trees. It was a city that had piled up on itself, an unknown conglomeration that breathed with life, sounding almost like a storm heard from the bottom of a well. So this was his ancient city. Invaders had passed through it, leaving their mark on the stones of its houses. Do you suppose it had died and ended, like everything else? His steps took him through darkness unlike any he had ever seen before. This darkness united with the sky, which was almost blue but smudged with red clouds. It descended upon the earth as if it were a transparent crystal.