Then Hassan turned to me. “You can’t imagine how delighted I am to see you again, cousin.”
“There’s only you three in Yaseen’s group?”
“Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“What happened to the others?”
Hussein burst out laughing. His brother tapped him on the shoulder to calm him down. He said, “Who do you mean by ‘the others’?”
“The rest of your band in Kafr Karam. Adel, Salah, Bilal.”
Hassan consented to answer me. “Salah’s with Yaseen at the moment. It seems that some splinter group’s trying to take over from us. As for Adel, he’s dead. He was supposed to blow himself up in a police recruiting center. I was against sending him on such a mission from the start. Adel wasn’t all there, you know? But Yaseen said he could do it, so they put an explosive belt on him and off he went. By the time Adel got to the recruiting center, he’d forgotten how to detonate the thing, even though it was quite simple — all he had to do was press a button. Nevertheless, Adel got confused, and then he got pissed off. He removed his jacket and started pounding on the explosive belt with his fists. When the other guys in the recruitment line saw what Adel was wearing around his waist, they got the hell out of there, and so the only potential recruit left in front of the center was Adel, still trying to remember how to make his bomb explode. Of course, the cops shot him to pieces. Our Adel disintegrated without hurting a soul.”
Hussein guffawed, writhing in his chair. “Only Adel could go out like that!”
“How about Bilal?” I asked.
“Nobody knows where he is. There was this important guy, a leader of the resistance, and Bilal was supposed to drive him to Kirkuk. The bigwig waited for him at the prearranged meeting place, but Bilal never showed up. We still don’t know what happened to him. We’ve looked in the morgues, the hospitals, everywhere, even in the police stations and army barracks where we’ve got people, but…nothing. No trace of the car he was driving, either.”
I stayed at Tariq’s place for a week, enduring Hussein’s outbursts of incongruous laughter. He was a bit cracked, Hussein was. There was something broken in his mind. His brother entrusted him with domestic errands only. Hussein whiled away his unoccupied hours settled in an armchair, watching TV and loitering until the next time he was sent out to buy supplies or pick somebody up.
One single time, Yaseen authorized me to go on a mission with Hassan and Tariq. We were to transfer a hostage from Baghdad to a cooperative farm. We left in broad daylight. Tariq knew all the shortcuts and back roads and circumvented every checkpoint. The hostage was a European woman, a member of an NGO, kidnapped from the clinic where she worked as a physician. She’d been shut up in the cellar of a villa not far from a police station. We took her out of there with no problem, right under the cops’ noses, and delivered her to another group headquartered on a farm about twenty kilometers south of the city.
After this accomplishment, I thought I’d earned a higher level of trust, and I expected to be sent on a second mission shortly. I expected in vain. Three weeks dragged by, and still no sign from Yaseen. He visited us from time to time and talked at length with Hassan and Tariq, and sometimes he shared a meal with us; but then, Salah, the blacksmith’s son-in-law, came by to pick him up, and I was left unsatisfied.
15
I slept badly. I think I dreamed about Kafr Karam, but I’m not sure. I lost the thread the second I opened my eyes. My head was stuffed with indistinct images, fixed on a screen that smelled of burning, and I woke up with the odor of my village in my nose.
From my deep, echoless sleep, I kept only the stabbing pain that racked my joints. I wasn’t overjoyed to recognize the room where I’d been wasting away for weeks, waiting for I knew not what. I felt like the smallest in a set of Russian nesting dolls; the room was the next-size doll, the house the next after that, and so on, with the foul-smelling neighborhood as the lid. I was inside my body like a rat in a trap. My mind raced in every direction but found no way out. Was this, I wondered, claustrophobia? I needed to come unglued, to explode like a bomb, to be useful somehow.
I staggered to the bathroom. The terry-cloth towel, filthy beyond expression, hung from a nail. The windowpane had last been touched by a cleaning rag several decades ago. The place smelled like stale urine and mildew; it made me nauseous.
On the dirty sink, a battered piece of soap lay next to an intact tube of toothpaste. The mirror showed me the haggard face of a young man at the end of his rope. I looked at myself the way you look at a stranger.
There was no water. I went downstairs. Hussein was sunk in his armchair, watching an animated film on TV and chuckling as he nibbled roasted almonds from a plate beside him. On the screen, a band of alley cats, fresh from their garbage cans, were mistreating a terrified kitten. Hussein relished the fear the little animal embodied, lost in the suburban jungle.
“Where are the others?” I asked him.
He didn’t hear me. I went to the kitchen, made myself some coffee, and returned to the living room. Hussein had switched channels and was now absorbed in a wrestling match.
“Where are Hassan and Tariq?”
“I’m not supposed to know,” he grumbled. “They said they’d be back before nightfall, and they’re still not here.”
“Has anyone called?”
“No one.”
“You think something’s gone wrong?”
“If my brother had run into problems, I would have felt it.”
“Maybe we should call Yaseen and find out what’s up.”
“Forbidden. He’s always the one who does the calling.”
I glanced out the window. The streets were bathed in the bright morning light. Soon people would emerge from their miserable houses and kids would invade the neighborhood like crickets.
Hussein manipulated the television’s remote control, making a sequence of different broadcasts flash by on the screen. None of the programs interested him. He fidgeted in his chair, but he didn’t turn off the TV. Then, abruptly, he said, “May I ask you a question, cousin?”
“Of course.”
“You mean it? You’ll answer me straight out?”
“Why not?”
He threw back his head and laughed that absurd, cringe-inducing laugh of his, which I was really starting to loathe; as usual, it seemed to have no cause and come from nowhere. It was all I heard, day and night, because Hussein never slept. He was in his armchair round the clock, clutching the remote control like a magic wand, changing worlds and languages every five minutes.
“So you’ll be frank?”
“I’ll do my best.”
His eyes gleamed in a funny way; I felt sorry for him. He said, “Do you think I’m…nuts?”
His throat tightened on the last word. He looked so wretched, I was embarrassed.
“Why are you asking me that?”
“That’s not an answer, cousin.”
I started to avert my eyes, but his dissuaded me. “I don’t think you’re…nuts,” I said.
“Liar! In hell, you’re going to hang from your tongue over a barbecue. You’re just like the others, cousin. You say one thing and think the opposite. But don’t kid yourself — I’m not crazy. I’ve got a full tank and all the accessories. I know how to count on my fingers, and I know how to read people’s eyes to see what they’re hiding from me. It’s true that I can’t stop myself from laughing, but that doesn’t mean I’ve flipped out. I laugh because…because…well, I don’t know exactly why. Some things can’t be explained. I caught the laughing bug watching that simpleton Adel get all frazzled because he couldn’t find the button to blow himself up. I wasn’t far away, and I was observing him as he mingled with the other candidates in front of the police recruiting center. At that moment, I was in a panic. And when the cops fired on him and he exploded, it was as if I disintegrated along with him. He was someone I really liked. He grew up on our patio. I sincerely mourned him, but then the mourning was over, and now, whenever I picture him stabbing at his explosive belt and cursing, I burst out laughing. It was so insane…but that doesn’t make me a nutcase. I can count on my fingers, and I can tell what’s right and wrong.”