The bus, a backfiring old relic stinking of burned oil and overheated rubber, seemed to be on its last legs. It didn’t roll so much as crawl along, like a wounded animal on the point of giving up the ghost. Every time it slowed down, I felt a tightness in my chest. The sun was blazing hot, our progress had been interrupted three times (two blowouts and one breakdown), and the spare tires, as smooth and worn as the two flats, didn’t look very encouraging.
When the driver, who was clearly exhausted, stowed his jack the second time, he reeled a little. One of his hands was bandaged — the result of a recalcitrant tire — and he seemed generally to be in a bad way. I didn’t take my eyes off him; I was afraid he might pass out on the steering wheel. From time to time, he put a bottle of water to his lips and drank at length, without paying any attention to the road; then he went back to wiping his face on a towel he kept hanging from a hook on the back of his seat. Although probably around fifty, he looked ten years older, with sunken eyes and an egg-shaped skull, hairy at the temples and bald on the crown. He insulted his fellow motorists continually.
Silence reigned inside the bus. The air-conditioning didn’t work, and the heat inside was deadly, even though all the windows were open. Sunk in their seats, the passengers were mostly dozing, except for a few who gazed absently at the fleeting landscape. Three rows behind me, a young man with a furrowed brow insisted on fiddling with his pocket radio, spinning the dial from one station to another and filling the air with static. Whenever he found a song, he’d listen to it for a minute and then start looking for another station. He was seriously getting on my nerves, and I couldn’t wait to get out of that coffin on wheels.
We’d been rolling along for three hours without interruption. Fixing the two blowouts and patching the burst radiator hose had put the driver well behind schedule, and we’d had to cancel the planned stop for a snack at a roadside inn.
The previous day, after my benefactor dropped me off at the station, I’d missed the Baghdad bus by a few minutes and had to wait for the next one, which was supposed to leave four hours later. It arrived on time, but there were only about twenty passengers. The driver explained that his bus wouldn’t leave without at least forty passengers on board; otherwise, he couldn’t cover his expenses for the trip. So we all waited, praying for other passengers to show up. The driver circled the bus, shouting “Baghdad! Baghdad!” Sometimes, he approached people loaded down with baggage and asked them if they were going to Baghdad. When they shook their heads, he moved on to the next group of travelers. Very late in the afternoon, the driver came back to the bus and asked us to get off and retrieve our luggage from the baggage hatch. There were a few protests, and then everyone gathered on the sidewalk and watched the bus return to the depot. Those who were local residents went home; the rest of us spent the night in the bus station. And what a night! Some thieves tried to rob a sleeping man, but their victim turned out to be armed with a cudgel, and they couldn’t get near him. They retreated for a while but then returned with reinforcements, and since the police were nowhere to be seen, the rest of us witnessed a disgraceful thrashing. We remained apart from the scene, barricaded behind our suitcases and our bags, none of us daring to go to the victim’s aid. The poor fellow defended himself valiantly. For a while, he gave as good as he got, blow for blow. In the end, however, the thieves knocked him to the ground and assailed him with a vengeance. Then they relieved him of his belongings and left, taking him with them. By then it was about three o’clock in the morning, and nobody slept a wink after that.
Another military roadblock. A long line of vehicles advanced slowly, gradually squeezing closer to the right side of the road. There were road signs in the middle of the highway, along with large rocks marking the boundaries of the two lanes. The soldiers were Iraqis. They were checking everyone who went through, inspecting automobile trunks and bus hatches and baggage; men whose looks the soldiers didn’t like were gone over with a fine-tooth comb. They came into our bus, asked for our papers, and compared certain faces to the photographs of the people they were looking for.
“You two, off the bus,” a corporal ordered. Two young men stood up and walked down the aisle with an air of resignation. Outside, a soldier searched them and then told them to get their things and follow him to a tent pitched on the sand about twenty meters away.
“All right,” the corporal said to our driver. “You can shove off.”
The bus coughed and sputtered. We watched our two fellow passengers, who were standing before the tent. They didn’t look worried. The corporal hustled them inside, and they disappeared from our sight.
Finally, the buildings on the outskirts of Baghdad appeared, wrapped in an ocher veil. A sandstorm had blown through, and the air was laden with dust. It’s better this way, I thought. I wasn’t eager to see what the city had become — disfigured, filthy, at the mercy of its demons. In the past, I’d really loved Baghdad. The past? It seemed like a former life. Baghdad was a beautiful city then, with its great thoroughfares and its posh boulevards, bright with gleaming shop windows and sunny terraces. For a peasant like me, it was truly the Elysian fields, at least the way I imagined them from deep in the boondocks of Kafr Karam. I was fascinated by the neon signs and the store decorations, and I passed a good part of my nights ambling along the avenues in the refreshing evening breeze. Watching so many people strolling down the street, so many gorgeous girls swaying their hips as they walked on the esplanades, I had the feeling that all the journeys my condition prevented me from taking were there within my reach. I had no money, but I had eyes to gaze until I got dizzy and a nose to inhale the heady scents of the most fabulous city in the Middle East, set astride the beneficent Tigris, which carried along in its meanders the enchantment of Baghdad’s legends and love songs. It’s true that the shadow of the Rais dimmed the lights of the city, but that shadow didn’t reach me. I was a young, dazzled student with marvelous prospects in my head. Every beauty that Baghdad suggested to me became mine; how could I surrender to the charms of the city of houris and not identify with it a little? And even then, Kadem told me, I should have seen it before the embargo….
Baghdad might have survived the United Nations embargo just to flout the West and its influence peddling, but the city assuredly wouldn’t survive the affronts its own misbegotten children were inflicting on it.
And there I was, come to Baghdad in my turn to spread my venom there. I didn’t know how to go about it, but I was certain I’d strike some nasty blow. It was the way things had always been with us. For Bedouin, no matter how impoverished they may be, honor is no joking matter. An offense must be washed away in blood, which is the sole authorized detergent when it’s a question of keeping one’s self-respect. I was the only boy in my family. Since my father was an invalid, the supreme task of avenging the outrage he’d suffered fell to me, even at the cost of my life. Dignity can’t be negotiated. Should we lose it, all the shrouds in the world won’t suffice to veil our faces, and no tomb will receive our carcasses without cracking.
Prodded on by some evil spell, I, too, was going to rage: I was going to defile the walls I’d caressed, spit on the shop windows I’d groomed myself in, and unload my quota of corpses into the sacred Tigris, the anthropophagous river, once greedy for the splendid virgins who were sacrificed to the gods, and today full of undesirables whose decomposing remains polluted its virtuous waters….
The bus crossed a bridge and traveled alongside the river. I didn’t want to look at the public squares, which I imagined devastated, or at the sidewalks, teeming with people I already no longer loved. How could I love anything after what I’d seen in Kafr Karam? How could I appreciate perfect strangers after I’d fallen in my own self-esteem? Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn’t really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition! I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I’d awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life.