I felt faint. My hand searched in vain for something to hold on to.
Hellish insults erupted from the end of the hall. My mother, ejected from her room, immediately collected herself and went to help her invalid husband. “Leave him alone. He’s sick.” Soldiers brought out the old man. I’d never seen him in such a state. With his threadbare undershirt hanging loosely from his thin shoulders and his stretched-out drawers fallen nearly to his knees, he was the very image of boundless distress, walking misery, an affront personified in all its absolute boorishness. “Let me get dressed,” he moaned. “My children are here. It’s not right; what you’re doing isn’t right.” His quavering voice filled the corridor with inconceivable sorrow. My mother tried to walk in front of him, to spare us the sight of his nakedness. Her terrified eyes implored us, begging us to turn away. I couldn’t turn away. I was hypnotized by the spectacle the two of them presented to my eyes. I didn’t even see the brutes who surrounded them. I saw only a distraught mother and a painfully thin father in shapeless underwear, his eyes wounded, his arms dangling at his sides, stumbling as the soldiers shoved him along. With a final effort, he pivoted on his heels and tried to go back to the bedroom to fetch his robe — and the blow was struck. Rifle butt or fist, what difference does it make? The blow was struck, and the die was cast. My father fell over backward; his miserable undershirt flapped up over his face, revealing his belly, which was concave, wrinkled, and gray as the belly of a dead fish…. And I saw, while my family’s honor lay stricken on the floor, I saw what it was forbidden to see, what a worthy, respectable son, an authentic Bedouin, must never see: that flaccid, hideous, degrading thing, that forbidden, unspoken-of, sacrilegious object, my father’s penis, rolling to one side as his testicles flopped up over his ass. That sight was the edge of the abyss, and beyond it, there was nothing but the infinite void, an interminable fall, nothingness. Suddenly, all our tribal myths, all the world’s legends, all the stars in the sky lost their gleam. The sun could keep on rising, but I’d never be able to distinguish day from night anymore. A Westerner can’t understand, can’t suspect the dimensions of the disaster. For me, to see my father’s sex was to reduce my entire existence, my values and my scruples, my pride and my singularity, to a coarse, pornographic flash. The gates of hell would have seemed less catastrophic! I was finished. Everything was finished — irrecoverably, irreversibly. I had been saddled, once and for all, with infamy; I’d plunged into a parallel world from which I’d never escape. I found myself hating my arms, which seemed grotesque, translucent, ugly, the symbols of my impotence; hating my eyes, which refused to turn away and pleaded for blindness; hating my mother’s screams, which discredited me. I looked at my father, and my father looked back at me. He must have read in my eyes the contempt I felt toward everything that had counted for us and my sudden pity for the person I revered above everything, despite everything. I looked at him as though from atop a blasted cliff on a stormy night; he looked at me from the bottom of disgrace. At that very instant, we already knew that we were looking at each other for the last time. And at that very instant, when I dared not turn a hair, I understood that nothing would ever again be as it had been; I knew I’d no longer consider things in the same way; I heard the foul beast roar deep inside me, and it was clear that sooner or later, whatever happened, I was condemned to wash away this insult in blood, until the rivers and the oceans turned as red as the cut on Bahia’s neck, as my mother’s eyes, as the fire in my guts, which was already preparing me for the hell I knew was waiting….
I don’t remember what happened after that. I didn’t care. Like a piece of wreckage, I let myself drift wherever the waves took me. There was nothing left to salvage. The soldiers’ bellowing didn’t reach me anymore. Their weapons, their gung-ho zeal hardly made an impression. They could move heaven and earth, erupt like volcanoes, crack like thunder; I could no longer be touched by that sort of thing. I watched them thrashing about as though I were looking through a picture window in a microcosm of shadows and silence.
They scoured the house. Nary a weapon; not so much as a puny penknife.
Rough hands propelled me into the street, where some young men were crouched with their hands on their heads.
Kadem was one of them. His arm was bleeding.
In the neighboring houses, orders were shouted, sending the residents into hysterics.
Some Iraqi soldiers examined us. They carried lists and pages printed with photographs. Someone lifted my chin, shined his light in my face, checked his papers, and went on to the next man. Off to one side, guarded by overexcited GIs, suspects waited to be taken away. They lay facedown in the dust, their hands bound behind them and their heads in bags.
Two helicopters flew over the village, sweeping us with searchlights. There was something apocalyptic about the rumbling of their rotors.
The sun rose. Soldiers escorted us to an area behind the mosque, where a large tent had just been pitched. We were interrogated separately, one by one. Some Iraqi officers showed me photographs; several of them had been taken in the morgue or at the scene of the carnage and showed some of the faces of the dead. I recognized Malik, the “blasphemer” from the other day at the Safir. His eyes were staring and his mouth was wide open; blood ran out of his nose and formed tiny rivulets on his chin. I also recognized a distant cousin, curled up at the foot of a streetlight, his jaw shattered.
The officer asked me to name all the members of my family. His secretary noted down all my declarations in a register, and then I was set free.
Kadem was waiting for me on the street corner. He had a nasty gash on his arm, running from the top of his shoulder to his wrist. His shirt was stained with sweat and blood. He told me that the GIs had smashed his grandfather’s lute — a fabulous lute of inestimable value, a tribal and even national heirloom. I only half-listened. Kadem was crushed. Tears veiled his eyes. His monotonous voice disgusted me.
We sat for long minutes leaning against a wall, empty, panting, holding our heads in our hands. Light slowly grew in the sky, and on the horizon, as though rising from an open fracture, the sun prepared to immolate itself in its own flames. The first noisy kids could be heard; soon they would overrun the square and the open lots. The roar of the trucks signaled the withdrawal of the troops. Some old men left their patios and hurried to the mosque, eager to learn who had been arrested and who had been spared. Women wailed in their doorways, calling out the names of husbands or sons whom the soldiers had carried off. Little by little, as despair spread from one hovel to the next and the sound of sobbing rose above the rooftops, Kafr Karam filled me with a flood of venom. “I have to get away from here,” I said.
Kadem stared at me in alarm. “Where do you want to go?” he asked.
“Baghdad.”
“To do what?”
“There’s more to life than music.”
He nodded and pondered my words.