When Mr Salman finally visited us, Salsal exploded in anger in front of him, and told him about the rabbit’s egg. Mr Salman ridiculed our story and dismissed our suspicions of Umm Dala. He assured us the woman was honest and had worked with them for years. But Salsal accused him of betrayal and they began to argue, while I sat watching them. From their argument I gathered that in the world of sectarian and political assassinations, people were often betrayed because of greater interests. In many cases the parties in power would hand over hired killers to each other for free, as part of wider deals over political positions or to cover up some large-scale corruption. But Mr Salman denied all Salsal’s accusations. He asked us to calm down, because the assassination of the target would take place in two days. We sat down in the kitchen and Salman explained the plan to us in detail. Then he took two revolvers with silencers out of his bag and said we would be paid right after the operation and that we would then be moved to somewhere else on the edge of the capital.
‘A rabbit’s egg. Ha, duckling. You’re a real joker now,’ Salman whispered to me before he left.
On the last night I stayed up late with Salsal. I was worried about the rabbit, because it looked like Umm Dala would be on a long holiday. The rabbit would die of hunger and thirst. Salsal was busy with Facebook as usual. I stayed close to the window, watching the garden. He said he was having a discussion with the Deputy Minister of Culture on sectarian violence and its roots. I gathered from Salsal that this minister had been a novelist in Saddam Hussein’s time and had written three novels about Sufism. One day he and his wife were at a party at the home of a wealthy architect overlooking the Tigris. His wife was attractive, stunningly so, and cultured like her husband. She had a particular interest in old Islamic manuscripts. The Director of Security, a relative of the president, was a guest at the party. After the party was over, the security chief gave his surveillance section orders to read our friend’s novels. A few days later they threw him in jail on charges of incitement against the State and the Party. The Director of Security bargained with the novelist’s wife in exchange for her husband’s freedom. When she rejected his demands, the security chief had one of his men rape the woman in front of her husband. After that the woman moved to France and disappeared. They released the novelist in the middle of the nineties and he went off to look for his wife in France, but could find no trace of her. When the dictator’s regime fell, he went home and was appointed Deputy Minister of Culture. The story of the novelist’s life was like the plot of a Bollywood film, but I was surprised how many details of the man’s life Salsal knew. I felt that he admired the man’s personality and sophistication. I asked him what sect the man was. He ignored my question. Then I tried to draw him out on the identity of our target, but Salsal replied that a novice duckling like me wasn’t allowed to know such things. My only task was to drive the car and it was Salsal who would fire the shot with his silenced revolver.
The next morning we were waiting in front of the car park in the city centre. The target was meant to arrive in a red Toyota Crown and as soon as the car went into the car park Salsal would get out of our car, follow him inside on foot and shoot him. Then we would drive off to our new place on the edge of the capital. That’s why I had brought the rabbit along with me and put it in the boot of the car.
Salsal received a text on his mobile and his face turned pale. We shouldn’t have had to wait for the target more than ten minutes. I asked him if all was well. He shouted out a curse and slapped his thigh. I was worried. After some hesitation he held out his mobile phone and showed me a picture of a rabbit sitting on an egg. It was a silly Photoshop job. ‘Do you know who sent the picture?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘The Deputy Minister of Culture,’ he said.
‘What!!?’
‘The deputy’s the target, Hajjar.’
I got out of the car, my blood boiling at Salsal’s stupidity and all the craziness of this pathetic operation. More than a quarter of an hour passed and the target didn’t appear. I told Salsal I was pulling out of the operation. He got out of the car too and asked me to be patient and wait a while longer, because both of us were in danger. He got back in the car and tried to contact Salman. I walked to a shop nearby to buy a packet of cigarettes. My heart was pounding like crazy from the anger. As soon as I reached the shop the car blew up behind me and caught fire, burning the rabbit and Salsal to cinders.
A Wolf
Fear also has a smell, as you know.
The man smelled of smoked fish as he spoke, spraying saliva from his mouth.
‘That was last winter. I was coming back from one of my routine jaunts around the city centre. Jaunts intended to “pick up a living”, as we say in the home country. I was gathering what I could from various, out-of-the-way bars: casual conversation, a fuck, a free beer, a joint, anarchic talk about political matters, an argument with another drunk, or a chance to annoy others on the pretext of being drunk, just for fun. The important thing was that the day should include a human touch, however small. You know. And on the day the wolf appeared, I met a strange young woman. An owl of ill omen, as we would say. Do you believe there are faces that bring bad luck? There are faces you meet that are like the symbols in dreams. You’re an artist and your imagination makes it easy for you to understand what I mean, doesn’t it? You artists are farmers tilling the fields of dreams. Do you like that? Yes, I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert. Imagine there’s an Indian painter in Delhi working on some subject that’s also taking shape in the dream of a man who’s asleep in Texas. Okay, fuck that. But would you agree with me that all art comes together in this way? Perhaps love and unhappiness too. If, for example, a poet wrote about loneliness in Finland, then his poem could be the dream of someone asleep in some other part of the world. If there was a special search engine for dreams, like Google, all dreamers would find their dreams in works of art. The dreamer would put a word, or several words, from his dream into the Dream Search Engine, and thousands of results would appear. The more the search is narrowed down, the closer he gets to his dream and eventually he finds out it’s a painting or a piece of music or a sentence in a play. He would also find out which country his dream was in. Yes, you know. Maybe life… okay, fuck that.
‘The young woman had a surprising face. It looked like the needle of an electric sewing machine had pricked it for many hours. Her complexion was peppered with dozens of little holes. She told me she was Spanish. Then, five minutes later, she told me her mother was Egyptian and her father Finnish. She only knew three words of Arabic, all of them related to sexual organs or blasphemous phrases including the word “shit”. The whore drank three glasses of beer on my account and went to wait in a dark corner. What do you think she’s waiting for? Definitely another prick who’ll spend more on her. I lost twenty euros in the slot machine. I felt exhausted and hungry. Then I waved at the woman with the ill-omened face, a sarcastic theatrical wave, and before leaving, as if addressing vast throngs, I shouted: “Long live life!”