The Last of the Angels (9 page)

So Burhan Abdallah left the upper room, not knowing whether his uncle was on a true or false path.

That evening, Burhan Abdallah attended a special meeting in a house located in the Piryadi community. He had been invited by an Arabic-language teacher who belonged to “The Afterlife,” an association that had established a center at the head of Atlas Street, opposite the barracks' jail. No sooner had the youth entered the long chamber furnished with carpets and rugs and seated himself on the ground at the rear by the door, than the lights were extinguished. By the faint light slipping into the room he saw a ghost suddenly emerge from the ceiling, slowly descend, and then assume a cross-legged position at the center of the gathering. The audience, who numbered more than forty, reacted noisily, declaring the unity and ultimacy of God. The specter was a man with a wide, luminous face and eyes that shone in the dark like a cat's. Burhan Abdallah asked the person sitting on the floor beside him, “Who is this man?” His neighbor whispered back, “Don't you know? It's the supreme master himself.” Burhan Abdallah felt that this event would stay engraved in his memory for a long time.

The man's dramatic descent from the room's ceiling—as if he were a saint alighting from the heavens—was doubtless a master stroke. Since he commenced his sermon in the dark, his voice seemed to come from no one and nowhere. The voice in the darkness was more like a timeless summons that entered the heart and terrified it, since it could not be attributed to any source. The supreme master began to speak as if singing, and the walls resounded with the vibrato of his voice. He opened his sermon with some verses from the Holy Qur'an. Then he came to the heart of his message: “I have come to teach you a trade that surpasses all others. Consider the souk's vendors who hawk their wares using words that endear them to shoppers. Consider the Communists, who ornament their principles, seducing youth to socialism. Consider the West, which lauds freedom and democracy. Our duty is to sell Islam and to hawk it with terms even more attractive.”

After speaking for an hour or more about the tragedy of Kashmir, the tyranny of Abd al-Nasir in Egypt and of Mossadegh in Iran, he asked his audience to work to combat the atheism that was so widespread in the world. This was a matter that depended most of all on the way a person proved God's existence: “Spare no effort in arriving at this goal, for it is more beneficial than any of the sciences that reach us.”

Then he stood up and presented a final display; perhaps this was his way of proving the existence of God. He raised his hands, held them out in front of him, and then began to flutter them as if he were a sparrow. Next he ascended through the darkness toward the ceiling, as though drawn by a magnetic force, while he said, “Farewell.” Then he vanished like a star suddenly eclipsed by clouds or like smoke dispersing into thin air. At that same moment, the lights came back on. Then the audience made a ruckus, praising and glorifying God, for they had been touched by the magic of the miracle that had occurred before their eyes. This was a miracle that no one could reject on that sacred day, even though the room had been as dark as night.

On his way home the youth reflected that this did not prove the existence of God, for the feat lay within the powers of any sorcerer, who could present an even better display. He had once seen, at the Sporting Club during a religious festival, a magician eat his own head; indeed one magician had vanished even without dimming the lights. From that moment Burhan Abdallah resolved to perform a miracle even more stirring than simply disappearing in the dark. Ill-defined doubts, moreover, gripped him about the whole affair; perhaps it had been a scripted act that the man had rehearsed for a long time till he had perfected it. Thus Burhan Abdallah began, the very next day, an exhaustive search to master the secrets of sorcery, purchasing every book that discussed magic and hypnotism. Most of these were cheap, yellowing books sold on the sidewalk. He also contacted the astrologers who were dispersed up various alleys in the city. In fact he tried to tempt even that crone Hidaya to reveal her secret ways of contacting the demons, but she threw him out, cursing his mother for not knowing how to raise her children. He thought of joining the dervishes, but hesitated fearfully because they only knew how to slay people and thrust spears and skewers into them. He did not wish to take a chance on that. In the end, after collecting a large number of books about magic, hypnotism, astrology, and flying saucers from other worlds, he sat and read them attentively, taking to heart all their instructions and suggestions.

One magic book said that a man could vanish from sight if he recited the Qur'anic sura called “al-Nas” a hundred and fifty times without stopping, so he did that and went into the courtyard to test the result. He was deeply saddened when he heard his mother ask, “Why are you staring at me that way, like an idiot?” He felt sure that he was still visible. He went back inside and recited the sura once more, but to no avail. He gave up finally, believing that there was some catch he did not know how to resolve.

From another book he learned a method by which a person could master other people. It combined magic and hypnotism: “Walk behind anyone on the street and focus your mind and eyes on the nape of his neck until you sense that you control him. Then order him to turn right or left or even toward the rear. In fact, you can order him to stop, turn around, and head off in another direction.” Burhan Abdallah actually realized better results here than with his previous experiment, for occasionally one of his subjects would turn—after he had exerted a tremendous effort—even if in a direction other than the one the youth had chosen. When this attempt proved less than fruitful, he switched to hypnotism. After assembling a number of his classmates, who used to meet every afternoon in one room or another, he chose one of them for his subject and hypnotized him by having him focus on the tip of his index finger, which he moved back and forth before his subject's eyes as he repeated close to his ear, “You feel sleepy. Relax. Sleep. You will do everything I suggest.” This would continue at times for up to an hour. Then the subject would fall asleep or pretend to sleep in the quiet of the darkened room. Next, Burhan Abdallah would instruct him to identify what was passing by on the street at that instant. His subject would open his mouth to say, perhaps, “I see a soldier walking past.” One or two of them would then rush to the street to see whether he had been telling the truth.

Finally, for fifty cents, he purchased a telescope from a shop in the souk and started to observe regions of the pure blue sky from a position on the roof in hopes of seeing one of the flying saucers that visit our terrestrial world from other solar systems.

One of the books he purchased from a vendor who spread his books out on the ground by the wall of the mounted police headquarters furnished accounts from pilots, priests, policemen, teachers, and housewives who had witnessed with their own eyes foreign bodies coming from non-terrestrial cultures. In fact, the American Air Force had itself pursued these flying saucers more than once, but in vain, for these alien visitors always escaped. The book also contained stories about people who were able to contact these visitors, but, to tell the truth, Burhan Abdallah realized it was often a matter of luck whether someone saw a flying saucer or not, even with a telescope.

When these experiments with sorcery, hypnotism, and contacting alien solar systems failed, Burhan Abdallah climbed to the upper room to ask the assistance of the three angels, who were journeying through time on their way to the Chuqor community. He said, “I've come to request the secrets of power.”

One of the three old men smiled: “Power? What do you mean by that?”

The boy replied calmly, “For a rope to stand up straight when I tell it to, for the sun to rise at night, for the cock to bray and the ass to bark, should I so desire.”

The three shaykhs laughed and sat down to rest beneath a leafy tree. Then one said, “Now you're asking for the impossible, Burhan. You're asking to be God.”

Burhan Abdallah was perplexed. He answered skeptically, “I would like to have miracles like the others. The Messiah walked on water. Moses cast down his staff, which turned into a slithering serpent. The supreme master flapped his hands like a sparrow and flew.”

The three old men gazed silently at the boy. Then one of them said pensively, his head bowed, “We're just three tired old men who travel through time with nothing in our bags but spring, which we are carrying to Chuqor.” Then the three men rose, hoisted their sacks to their shoulders, and departed like ghosts that had emerged from the past. The boy Burhan Abdallah returned even more bewildered than before.

Notwithstanding the despair pervading Burhan Abdallah's heart, in a month or less, his life underwent a radical transformation that made him forget his previous, unsuccessful experiments, for his father, Abdallah Ali, decided to run electricity into the house. Indeed he also purchased a large, wooden-cased radio, which he turned on every day at full blast to humor the neighbors, who wished to listen to the songs and the sermons. The residents of the Chuqor community were also delighted when the municipality paved the street. Their cheerful thanks, however, soon turned to curses against the municipality when it asked them to pay the cost of the paving, calculated according to a house's front-footage on the street. Eventually people submitted to their destiny after the municipality agreed to allow payment by installments. People were habitually so tardy in these payments that the municipality finally despaired of receiving them and decided to write them off.

Burhan Abdallah realized in an obscure way that times were changing, for the gramophones with the seated dog on the speaker disappeared from coffeehouses to be replaced by radios set on a high shelf at the front. These almost always broadcast the songs of Lami‘a Tawfiq and Khudayr Abu Aziz. By night, the voice of Abd al-Basit filled the whole city's space, illuminating the spirits of the poor with Qur'anic verses, which he would chant over and over again until it seemed that his voice flowed from a spring in eternity. One summer night, many people in the Chuqor community looked down from their rooftops and some of them even went down to the street to hurry to the home of Izzat, a young man who was his elderly parents' only child and who ran a neighborhood shop with them. His aged parents were quarreling, insulting each other in loud voices, and revealing each other's defects in a way that other people should not be hearing. Concerned citizens hurried to hush them up and to make peace between them but were flabbergasted to find the couple seated in front of their house, begging their son to let them into their locked home. People asked in astonishment, “Who are quarreling so loudly on the roof?” Izzat's mother replied, “I don't know. It's a devil. I quarreled with the old man this noon, and here the devil is repeating our quarrel, word for word, tonight.” Thus people became acquainted with the tape recorder, which entered the Chuqor community through a public quarrel between two senior citizens.

The tragic disappearance of Khidir Musa caused his sister Qadriya, who had forgotten all her previous slanders against him, to weep for him each day. Nazira, his wife, awaited his return for three months, but then donned mourning clothes. The shaykhs of the Chuqor community said a special prayer reserved for missing persons for his spirit. This constituted an announcement that the man, who had set off to search for his two lost brothers, could be forgotten.

This period of forgetfulness did not last long, however, for less than a year after the disappearance of Khidir Musa, people saw a zeppelin hovering over the city one morning. This was definitely the first blimp that Kirkuk had ever witnessed. Its appearance over the city stirred people's curiosity and also the fears of the governor, the police chief, and the commander of the Second Division, who initiated the necessary defensive maneuvers for fear that the zeppelin was the vanguard of a hostile attack. Somehow news reached the correspondent of one of the foreign news agencies, and thus the news spread, bringing a state of alert to the armed forces, which anticipated further developments. People kept running from one street to another, following the track of the blimp, which soared high over the city. Finally the zeppelin landed in al-Musalla garden, where thousands of people congregated, surrounding the spot but at the same time fearful to come too close. Their fears faded, however, when they saw three men leave the zeppelin and wave to the crowds. As they swarmed closer, those who hailed from the Chuqor community shouted, “Here's Khidir! He's back! But, by God, what a difference!”

They saw that the livestock dealer Khidir Musa, who had never in his whole life worn anything but a jilbab, was attired in a stylish, navy-blue suit, sported a hat, and wore prescription glasses. Khidir Musa stood before the throngs and delivered a brief statement in which he explained that he gone to search for his two brothers—Ahmad and Muhammad—who had been lost for many years. He had discovered them in their exile and brought them home. Khidir Musa's two brothers gazed smilingly at the people's faces. Once the governor and the police chief arrived in person, Khidir Musa asked them calmly, “Could we discuss this affair somewhere else?” The three men from the zeppelin climbed into the cars of the governor and police chief, who disappeared from sight as policemen surrounded the blimp, preventing people from reaching it.

After three or four hours, the three brothers returned in the governor's own automobile, which was escorted by a police cruiser, to the Chuqor community, which welcomed them with a party the likes of which the neighborhood had never seen. Attached to the electric poles were banners and placards that read, “The Chuqor community welcomes the return of its absent sons.” The truth is that half the inhabitants of Kirkuk came to this forgotten neighborhood to see the three men from the blimp. Thus many women and children were trampled underfoot, and even the police were unable to hold back this human wave that swept everything before it.