The Last of the Angels (6 page)

Thus Hameed Nylon found his way to the trade union, for although Faruq Shamil did not work for the oil company, he was a member of the cell that directed the work of the city's unions. At this session, Faruq Shamil told him to attempt—circumspectly—to interest working men in the Chuqor neighborhood in joining the unions and to put them in contact with the leadership of the workers' movement in the city. Hameed Nylon disappeared then for a full week. When he returned, he brought with him a list of the names of twenty-one individuals in the Chuqor community—including four oil workers—who wished to join a union. Hameed Nylon apologized that he had not had enough time to contact more people. The men admittedly belonged to diverse professions and included an officer at the rank of second lieutenant, a policeman, three soldiers, and a dervish known in the neighborhood for sticking skewers through his cheeks and swallowing glass. He was a member of the Qadiriya Brotherhood and affiliated with a Sufi lodge located in the Kurdish regions of the city. Faruq Shamil was puzzled to find the name of the thief Mahmud al-Arabi on Hameed Nylon's roster as well. He asked Hameed gravely, “What did you say to get a person like the thief Mahmud al-Arabi to side with the union?” Hameed Nylon replied, laughing, “Oh, it was easy with Mahmud. I suggested that he should head a union that would embrace all the thieves of Kirkuk, and that was exactly what he wanted.”

Hameed Nylon had scarcely joined the union and contacted the oil workers when a marked difference was observed in their relationship with the firm, which they held responsible for the injustices they felt, especially after it sacked several employees whom it considered saboteurs. These men eventually fell into the hands of the police, who tortured them with special German-made, nail-pulling pincers that the minister of the interior had purchased himself during his annual holiday in Turkey. This gross attack led the workers to call a strike, since they felt their personal honor had been impugned.

During the week preceding the oil workers' strike, neighborhood men, who as a matter of course met each afternoon in front of their homes, noticed a stranger in a dishdasha riding into the community on a bicycle. He traversed the community several times, going back and forth, before stopping in front of the mosque to watch the young men gathering. They had spotted him: “Look! He's an undercover agent come to spy on us.” Hameed Nylon wanted to challenge and beat the stranger, but Faruq Shamil stopped him: “That's not how it's done, Hameed. Wait just a moment.” Faruq Shamil went home. He was gone a few minutes and then returned, laughing. He did not even look at the man, who had taken a seat on the mosque's bench, withdrawing from his pocket a dark loaf of military-issue bread, which he proceeded to gnaw on greedily.

A few moments later, the men standing there heard Gulbahar's voice screaming at the man with the bike, “Dog, scamp, for days now you've been annoying women in our community. Don't you have an ounce of shame or honor?” Before the man could swallow the morsel he was chewing, she pulled off her sandals to beat him. Suddenly the women who had been sitting in front of their homes burst out screaming. Other women left their chores indoors to attack the man, who cried as he fled, “No, by God, I've done nothing.” Blows landed on his head from every direction, and the children took part in the screaming and drubbing too. One even caught the man off guard from behind and attempted to sodomize him with a metal rod as punishment for his insolence toward the women of the community. It was Abbas Bahlawan who rescued him by grabbing hold of him as if he were a scared rat. Then he slapped him a few times, until he fell into the narrow, open sewer that passed through the neighborhood, lifted him again, and gave him a kick that sent him sprawling on his face and made his nose bleed profusely. He tried to flee, but the children seized him and he fell once more. Abbas Bahlawan raised the bicycle into the air and threw it so far that it broke. He grasped the man and lifted him up, threatening, “If you enter this community again, you can kiss your ass good-bye.” The man swore, “I'll never set foot in this community again so long as I live.” Then Abbas Bahlawan turned toward the women and children to say, “Let him go. You'll never see his filthy face again.” The man—whose dishdasha was ripped and soiled with muck and blood—left, dragging his bicycle, which was too damaged to ride. He actually was never seen there again.

The day of the strike, Hameed Nylon stood with more than twenty workers on the train tracks that connected the city and the company to prevent frightened and hesitant workers from going to work, calling them cowards and stooges of the English. Many brawls broke out between strikers and non-strikers during which the food in the men's lunch buckets spilled onto the ground and some men used their cutlery to defend themselves. That first day the police stood at a distance, watching the workers fight one another, ready to intervene at an opportune moment. Hameed Nylon, along with three other workers, retreated to the rear, back to the mouths of the alleyways leading to the main thoroughfare. Whenever he saw an oil worker in his blue uniform, he greeted him, saying casually, “Go home. They've sent us home today. Enjoy your holiday, brother.” The worker would ask in astonishment, “Holiday? What holiday?” Then Hameed Nylon would respond quickly, “Don't you know? The king is visiting Kirkuk today.” This was the way he approached the unsophisticated. For those who seemed more on the ball, he would pretend to be fleeing, after having escaped with his life, claiming that battles had erupted between the police and the workers and that the police were arresting people—indeed, that they were firing indiscriminately on any worker they encountered. He advised them to go back home. Many believed him without even asking any more questions. In fact, his reasoning was only rarely rejected, even by workers who knew what was happening. He would tell these men that the strike's goal was to increase their salaries and to realize gains for them and that it was in their self-interest to join the strike in defense of their own welfare—if nothing else—instead of weakening the operation and harming others. In any event, they would not be held accountable, even if the strike failed, because they could always claim to their bosses that the striking workers had prevented them from getting to work. His spiel was quite seductive: “Share our victory, or, in the event of a failure, blame it all on us.”

Seventeen days of the strike passed without bringing a settlement. True, work at the firm was crippled once the number of strikers increased, but no one thought of yielding to the workers. That would have been, quite simply, a violation of principle and was therefore intolerable to the police chief, the governor, and the minister of the interior. Mr. Tissow, the head of the firm, actually would have liked to bargain with the strikers because he himself had once been a member of the Labour Party when he was a student at Cambridge University, but the governor told him politely, “I understand your humane sentiments, Mr. Tissow, for you Englishmen are fond of democracy, but how can you practice democracy with donkeys?”

The translator whom the governor had brought along was apparently less than fluent in English and became confused, substituting “monkeys” for “donkeys,” so that Mr. Tissow then smiled and replied, “Your Excellency, you should address this question to Darwin.”

As a matter of fact, the issue was bigger even than the governor himself, although he attempted to project an image of being a decisive man of action, for the minister of the interior contacted him by telephone and ordered him to suppress the strike at any cost. The minister of the interior had himself received a comparable order from the prime minister, who had decided to resort to force on the advice of the British High Commissioner, who unfortunately was a member of the Conservative Party and hated workers because his party had lost the most recent election to them.

The workers met every day, from early in the morning, in Gawirbaghi, which was a parched garden not far from the offices of the oil company. There they recited poems by Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Ma‘ruf al-Rasafi, and other less well-known poets. Naturally, half the inhabitants of Kirkuk found their way to Gawirbaghi—especially the women and children—not to show their support, which was assumed, but because the strike was a thrilling song fest, which lasted from morning till evening and which differed from any Kirkuk had ever witnessed. The strikers' children and wives brought them food, even from the furthest communities in the city. The women's trills, which rang out continually, re-energized those men who were quaking with fear inside. Thus they came to see the affair as a question of personal honor, as if it were a clash with a hostile tribe.

The first hours of the seventeenth day of the strike passed like the others. The workers delivered harangues and chanted slogans in the garden. Men, women, and children gathered round to watch. Security men, who were circulating on their bicycles, observed them. Children sat on the branches of olive trees that grew here and there. Even the armored police vehicle was still parked where it had been: at the head of the street leading to the garden. Everything seemed normal until noon, when someone arrived to say that large numbers of mounted policemen were massing at the beginning of the street. Fear drove the workers to greater zeal and they shouted even louder, although everyone expected some face-saving resolution. Finally a Jeep with a rifle-mount appeared. In the back stood three policemen and a lieutenant. The crowd surrounding the area fearfully moved back at first, although they soon returned cautiously when the lieutenant, from his place in the open Jeep, began to address the workers: “We warn you to evacuate the area, end the strike, and return to your jobs. You are the victims of a Communist plot. The Communists are exploiting you and deceiving you. The Communists are friends of the Jews and wish to get you into trouble. Unless you disperse now, the police will intervene.”

Even before the lieutenant had concluded his threatening oration, cries and curses resounded in the garden: “Scum, return to your masters and kiss their asses!” Many people broke branches from the trees and trimmed them into staffs in preparation for a battle. A worker somewhere started a chant that others repeated: “Strike till death!” At that, the Jeep retreated amid the worker's guffaws and catcalls, “The cowards are fleeing.” It was, however, only a few minutes before the armored vehicle returned, followed by a large number of mounted policemen armed with truncheons. Only then did most of the onlookers grasp the danger of the situation. They raced off in every direction, while continuing to watch the spectacle with interest. Others stayed where they were because they felt allied with the workers, or perhaps because they had misunderstood the situation.

Silence reigned over the strikers who had held their ground. They grasped green tree limbs as if these would suffice to ward off the danger confronting them. Suddenly an intermittent round of gunfire resounded. The striking workers lowered their heads amid the universal turmoil and screaming. The first round was followed by a second and a third. The workers looked about and sought shelter behind the trunks of the garden's few trees. Terror-stricken onlookers mixed together with the strikers till they formed a single bloc. Just then, the ground shook from the hooves of the horses that had reached the garden. Their riders, truncheons in hand, were oblivious to any of the crowd of humans who fell beneath their horses' hooves. Occasional shots were fired by policemen and security agents. A number of workers clashed with policemen who had fallen off their horses. In this battle, Hameed Nylon, who—like all the strikers—had concealed his identity by winding a cloth around his head, although short, demonstrated bravery that surprised even himself. From inside his shirt he drew out a dagger, which he carried in defiance of the union's instructions, and began to stab the bellies of the horses from the rear till they were writhing with pain and threw their riders or fell down with them. A Kurdish dervish, who had come from Erbil to present a display of his supernatural powers in a nearby Sufi lodge, seized a policeman who had fallen to the ground, dragged him behind some trees, and then butchered him, after reciting the opening prayer of the Qur'an for his soul.

The battle ended with the flight of the striking workers, who left behind them thirteen slain, including a child—struck by a bullet—who remained lodged where he had been sitting in the branches of a tree, two women, and a vendor of cooked broad beans, who had fallen in a heap over his cart. More than twenty of the wounded were placed under arrest. Others managed to escape from the hands of the police and security agents. Of the attackers, three policemen were killed, including the one slaughtered by the dervish. All the attackers listed themselves as wounded in order to receive the ten-dinar bonus that the minister of the interior had earmarked for casualties.

Many from the Chuqor community and from those recruited by Hameed Nylon witnessed the carnage only to emerge unscathed, with nothing more than bruises, which this person or that received, but Hadi Ahmad received a blow to the head. He was a ten-year-old boy whose father owned a portable camera of the old-fashioned type that ends with a black cloth into which the photographer sticks his head while the customer sits against a plain sheet placed in front of a wall—on the quay at the head of the stone bridge opposite the barracks—while he too is shrouded in black as he faces the moving lens. The blow that the boy received from the truncheon of a mounted cop left him unconscious. Had Abbas Bahlawan not plucked him up and carried him home, he would certainly have died beneath the horses' hooves. When he regained consciousness, the sight in one of his eyes was gone. Worse than that, he had suffered some neural trauma and permanently lost his sense of equilibrium, a condition that stumped all attempts by imams and physicians to find a cure. His left eye, however, quickly regained its sight, thanks to the genius of a young ophthalmologist who had studied in Turkey after despairing of gaining entrance to the Medical College in Baghdad, first because his marks did not average more than fifty and second because he was an Arts Faculty graduate. All this, however, did not prevent the doctor from venturing on an experimental treatment that American ophthalmologists would only adopt forty years later. This Turkmen physician realized that the boy Hadi Ahmad had suffered a detached retina, which needed to be lifted and reattached in its previous location. The challenge did not lie in lifting the retina, for even a nurse could do that, but in reattaching it where it belonged. Since there seemed to be nothing to lose because that eye was sightless, no matter what, he had a simple idea that not even the devil could have dreamed up. This was to fix the retina back in place with a normal adhesive. That resulted in another miracle for the Chuqor neighborhood, although this time it was a medical one, for after half a minute the boy rose and could see better than ever, since the doctor had placed the retina precisely where it belonged, bypassing some of nature's shortcomings.