The Last of the Angels (33 page)

For forty-six years he had never written a letter to anyone in his city or received one. He had wanted to be as absent as anything else, hidden, leaving no trace behind him. He was almost certain that everyone who knew him had died. Who could defy death for forty-six years? Who could freeze time? He cut his way through the night with his cane, the way Moses cleft the sea with his staff. For the first time he noticed the barking of dogs coming from the heart of the black conglomeration. He listened to the saddening silence, one he recognized from sleeping outdoors on the roof of his family's house in the Chuqor community. “There's no one left in my city. So what will I do in the streets and houses?” He thought he would retrace his steps. “I shouldn't have returned and dredged up all this pain.” Then he composed himself: “All there is to the matter is that I listened to my destiny forty-six years ago and here I am listening to it again.” He realized that there was nothing more that he could lose, after losing his entire life. His body began to shake and tremble as he kicked at the gloom with his two heavy feet. “No one's waiting for you there. Only your memories. No one will even know your name.” He felt dizzy, sat down on the ground, and burst into tears, filled with a happiness that flowed from giving vent to sorrow.

He sat there, staring at the arc of fog and smoke, wrapped up in himself, until he felt fatigue close his eyelids. So he fell asleep, resting his head on his small carry-on bag, into which he had stuffed a shirt or two, pajamas, a toothbrush, shaving supplies, and a diary. He awoke to find the dawn's cold stinging him. That was more like a dream he had seen somewhere else, but could not remember. He felt he was experiencing this for the second time. In a certain sense, he knew what was awaiting him. Was he truly here? Had he also returned before now to this city that lay in the distance? Had he walked along this very road? Had he entered it like a thief in the night? That did not make sense, but he knew he had been here. He felt a lump in his throat. He tasted a bitterness on his tongue each time. So it was spring then. Early-rising sparrows were soaring from one place to another, chirping with the first rays of sunshine. “My God, it's the spring I've dreamt of for so long and which I've never found anywhere else in the world.”

He pulled a cigarette out of the pack he had placed in his pocket. He lit it and inhaled the smoke until he felt it touch the pit of his lungs before he exhaled again. He sensed a slight buzz in his body. The doctor had advised him, “At least don't smoke until you've eaten breakfast.” But of what importance was that now? A man would die some day, whether he smoked or not. It was all the same to him whether he lived a hundred years more or died in only a hundred days. Here spring, which the three old men had brought after they had called to him for so long and spoken to him, was bursting forth again over his city. They certainly must have arrived now. They must have opened their sacks and let spring spill forth. He felt he had gained control of his city once more. The ending merged with the beginning in a way that made separating them difficult, just as day fades into night.

He stood in front of a garden encircled by a fence coated with green paint, which was still wet. He smelled its scent and sat on a stone bench plopped among the trees to gather his strength. Then he saw two men walking in the street, each in a different direction. Their footsteps were almost in cadence. It truly was spring. Scents that mingled with each other roused him: the fragrances of familiar dew and of the still, cold air. There was nothing real about what he saw. Everything seemed a fantasy or perhaps mimicked his memories. Everything resembled images spilling from his imagination, almost as if he were in a dream.

Two eyes saw trees. Two arms stretched toward an island over which awoke a dawn he recognized. Countless birds shot up, soared a little, and then settled back on the bank. A pole rose there. A woman was climbing a mountain that almost touched the sky. Fluttering over its right corner was a Turkish flag, and, before a cannon that had been left on a hill, soldiers sat eating canned food. On the far side, the desert began. Shepherds were playing reed double-flutes and children coming from the alleys followed them all the way to the water. Here was the city once more.

A curtain went up and a naked woman on a gray horse looked down. She was traveling between Friedrichstrasse and al-Musalla community, from Unter Den Linden to the Chuqor community. Khidir Musa was standing in front of an assembly of men and women in the Lustgarten opposite the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, talking about his two brothers who had gone to Mecca and not returned. His mother, Qadriya, was strolling in her black wrap through Saint Germain in Paris or sitting in the Milano café in Cyprus, gazing at the waiters, who always brought a glass of water with the coffee. The scent of intoxicating spring awakened him. “All this affection when you remember the Assyrian girls, coming out of one building heading for another, like an opening in a cloud.” Here is the student of Islamic jurisprudence on his donkey, with its frayed saddlebags, pouring drops of jasmine perfume on the meadows from a bottle in his hand as he travels from village to village. “Oh! Another day, another awakening! Everything is here. They are all here: dead friends and living ones, those I know and those I don't. The trees, always the trees. The plastered houses always and the light that picks out their tops…and as usual, always, me.”

He awoke from his slumber and wiped his face with his hands the way he habitually did. He wanted to rise, go to the kitchen, and put some water on to boil before he headed to the bathroom but stopped. “There's no kitchen here.” He opened his drowsy eyes. Kirkuk stretched before him. He felt both terror and anxiety. He was seized by a feeling that had afflicted him during the past forty-six years as he moved between continents and cities with forged passports or real ones. Time had vanished—like a bubble that pops when you reach a finger toward it. It seemed as though he had never left his city.

He went over to a water tap in the garden and put his head under the water the way he had done in the garden in al-Musalla whenever he passed by it. Raising his head, he found his three angels standing in front of him, smiling. He was so perturbed he did not know what to say. One of them, who was holding a towel of Aleppo velvet, offered it to him, saying, “Dry your face with this, Burhan.”

Burhan stammered and then said, “I didn't believe that all this was real. I didn't believe that all this was possible.”

The three old men answered calmly, “What are you saying, Burhan?”

Burhan corrected himself, “Nothing. I must have said something silly. Old men are always like that.”

One of the three men put a hand in his bag and drew out a handful of seeds, which he scattered into the air. Then the earth was carpeted with flowers and the garden was filled with colorful birds. One of them lit on Burhan Abdallah's shoulder and head. Hedgehogs, rabbits, and squirrels emerged from their lairs and began to frolic among plants that sprouted instantaneously. He started with alarm when he saw life creep into the stone lions that stood at the entrance to the garden. He stayed put because the blood had frozen in his veins as he looked at the three angels, but the two mild-mannered lions approached and lay down at his feet. One of the angels told him, “There's finally peace, Burhan.”

A type of enchantment had settled over the city. “This is more than I expected,” Burhan told himself. Then he placed his hat on his head, and a small sparrow lit on it and began to peck at what it thought was a hole. The three old men, who looked so much alike that it was hard to tell them apart, laughed. One of them said, “Seeing you like this will make everyone in the Chuqor community roar with laughter.” Another added, “Fine, we'll wait for you there, Burhan.” The third placed his hand on Burhan's shoulder, saying, “You must enter the Chuqor community alone, just as you left it alone.” Then they headed for the far side of the garden and disappeared among the olive trees that hid white stone-and-plaster houses that gleamed in the light.

“Definitely not; I can't stand all this tenderness. It surpasses what's required. It's more than I deserve. Not even the mind of God would conceive of such a happy ending.” Images from distant memories mixed together in his mind with dreams so arresting he felt like weeping. Through a crack in a door, he was watching a woman comb her hair and rub her breasts with a lemon. A man sat in a coffeehouse and surreptitiously counted his money. A security officer dismounted from his motorcycle and asked a young man as beautiful as a girl his name. Satan was seated at a table in a restaurant filled with smoke. Pupils were fleeing from their schools to pinch girls' bottoms in demonstrations.

“I normally become intoxicated after the first glass. I dance till I fall asleep on a woman's shoulder. When I awake in the morning I find that an executioner is leading me to some square to chop off my head, but he normally leaves me alone while he goes to a farm to eat greens. My God, how beautiful our days were when we hunted for angels among the trees and pursued demons among the boulders. Once I saw a machine-gun at the rear of an airplane fire on shepherds. Naked women, men, and children at the shore of Grünau in Berlin conduct a memorial service for me. A man with a glass eye reads from a newspaper that almost touches his face. Hamlet's mother stands at the door, wearing a black evening gown that reveals her shoulders while she distributes smiles to soldiers carrying heads on bronze trays. Is this the head of John the Baptist? The man who incited us to rebel against time? Oh, I once saw myself in a sanatorium with blood on my palm.”

He was cast into the spring that had taken the city by surprise after being delayed. He was caught up in his emotions and memories as if in some nameless passion. Here finally was Kirkuk. The dead had quit it, as if it had never experienced death. They had vanished, just as everything else vanishes. They had entered the crematories, leaving no trace behind. Burhan Abdallah's eyes were bathed in tears as he crossed Kirkuk's stone bridge: “My God, it's still standing, even now. Nothing has changed at all.” He leaned on the railing, studying the roaring waters of the Khasa Su, which swept along with them tree trunks, the bodies of wild animals that the floods had overwhelmed, and empty containers. He smelled the scent of the mud and experienced the light dizziness that had always afflicted him as a child whenever he crossed the bridge. He noticed coachmen whipping their horses that pulled carts behind which boys in ragged dishdashas leapt at each other.

At the far end of the bridge was the citadel, to which a person climbed by steps on either side. He thought of heading to the Chuqor community by ascending to the citadel, but wished to pass through the great souk. He turned right and walked in front of the shop of the Armenian prosthetic dentist. The man was still sitting on a chair that he had placed in front of the entrance on the sidewalk. Burhan Abdallah greeted him by politely raising his hat. The man returned his greeting, rising from his chair, astonished to see an old man wearing a European hat in a city like Kirkuk. Through the glass, he saw the Turkmen barber Tahsin lather with a barber's brush the chin of a man reclining in a chair. He passed a lame locksmith, who had covered the wall of his shop with pictures of Egyptian actresses like Fatin Hamama, Samia Gamal, and Shadya. He saw the Kurdish goldsmith Abd al-Samad seated on the ground, stretching his legs in front of his bellows. In the area leading to the great souk, he saw porters transporting sacks of wheat to the great warehouse, which lay opposite a plant that produced large blocks of ice, which children carried on their shoulders. The metalsmiths were still beating their copper and bronze vessels. He passed people selling tea on the sidewalk, kebab restaurants, and shops offering just about anything. The old smell of Kirkuk intoxicated him. Almost everything was mixed into it, and it comprised a blend that went to the head before reaching the lungs.

Nothing had changed except that the colors had become brilliant. He was struck, however, by the dogs that were playing with cats after forgetting their instinctive hostility, the crows that entered stores, and the storks that had descended from the minarets to stand on the sidewalks. The garden's two stone lions were following him like two old retainers, but what interested him was not the lions but the Chuqor community, from which he was separated now only by al-Qaysariya, which had a rotten smell and the passageways of which he still knew by heart. He had scarcely passed through al-Qaysariya and caught sight of the alley that was the beginning of the Chuqor community when he was surprised by something he had never even imagined.

They were all standing there, waiting for him, holding roses. It was all the old faces, as though impervious to time, and they embraced him, one after the other. There was his mother, who looked younger than he did, and his father, who was wearing his Arab clothing. There was Hameed Nylon, who as usual delivered a humorous speech. Abbas Bahlawan brandished his revolver and fired in the air. The thief Mahmud al-Arabi presented him with a skeleton key that would open any lock. Drummers were drumming while the women placed bonbons, chocolates, and candy on the heads of people in the crowd. “My God, how did they learn of my return? I didn't tell anyone.” Burhan Abdallah wondered about this. “My angels, the three old men, must have been the ones who arranged this. They were the only ones who knew I was returning.” He was certain that this was the case when he saw the three men walking through the surging crowd. Burhan Abdallah looked for his maternal uncle Khidir Musa, who had been sealed up in the tower along with Dervish Bahlul and Dada Hijri so that they were buried alive. The drumming continued, women in black wraps trilled, and dervishes poked skewers into their bodies. Here the pilgrim was returning from his long journey to Mecca, after forgetting the hardships of the trip. The deadly days that had subdued Chuqor had ended, and the faces had regained their original innocence. The curse that had settled on the city, blocking spring for forty-six years, had ended. The evil sorcerer had been manacled. They had bound him to a large rock and thrown him in the river.