Meir was Alberto Caeiro, the first character of Pessoa’s Tobacco Shop; Hussein was Ricardo Reis; Omar was Álvaro de Campos. Meir’s role was the keeper of flocks, who made himself master of Ricardo Reis (Hussein), the weak and sickly creature. As for Álvaro de Campos, he was Omar, who left for the east (Egypt in this case) and returned laden with great hope, but torn between his sense of greatness and his utter emptiness. Hence his absurdity and lack of balance.
On the same day, Kamal Medhat walked along the street with Pessoa’s Tobacco Shop in his hand. He entered a grocery shop near his house to buy cigarettes, or tobacco. The courtyard was almost completely dark because of the power cut. The calm was oppressive. He stood leaning on his ebony walking stick with the ivory handle, his mouth twitching and his gaze contemplative and profound. He saw his neighbour, an old engineer who’d once been a paragon of elegance. The man had always worn white, silk shirts with roomy collars, black velvet trousers with braces and English-style shoes with laces. That day, Kamal saw him wearing the traditional gown and his beard was long. He stopped at the entrance to the shop, smoking nervously and talking with great agitation about the Sunni and Shia question with another neighbour.
The social rift was crystal clear. Kamal Medhat found the split reflected in the whole society, not excluding artists. Although people in general tried to downplay the significance of the division, they tacitly reinforced it. Kamal, who thought that the country had a single story, a single narrative and as a result a single identity, was now shocked to find three conflicting and contradictory narratives. Each faction wrote its own history and narrated its own existence in isolation from the others. He suddenly found that the Shia had a narrative, the Sunnis had a narrative and the Kurds had a narrative. These were not complementary, but were contradictory narratives that confronted each other.
The final letter
Kamal Medhat sent his final letter to Farida via his son Meir when Meir came to visit him at his house in Al-Mansour: ‘Death will be here soon. I’m not long for this life. It’s true that I’ll resist at the beginning, but I’ll surrender to it with love in the end. I burn for the final moment. My ecstasy will be indescribable, a moment of orgasmic pleasure.
‘I talked to you last time about the tobacco keeper, didn’t I? Today I’m thinking, why can’t death be the tobacco keeper? I don’t regard death as awful, but see him as an elegant gentleman. I will embrace him and call him brother …’
Part Three
IX Murder revealed, a life on the periphery and strange lands
‘I don’t know how many souls I have possessed, for I change at every moment.’
A dual existence
In the Green Zone, I led a dual existence. Saddam’s small palace had been renovated by an American contractor and turned into the US Agency for International Development. The American army had destroyed it with several smart missiles. When I saw it immediately following the war, the ceilings had collapsed, the doors of the lifts had come off their hinges and the pillars had fallen. The marble staircase was covered with a thick layer of dust. There was twisted metal and crushed brick. But everything in it had been restored. The large palace, however, had become the US Embassy in Baghdad. All the statues of Saddam that had surrounded the palace had been torn down. Nermine invited me for a swim in the lake in front of the palace, which had become a public swimming pool. As we were taking off our clothes, two female soldiers also came for a swim. They took off their clothes and walked beside the pool in their bikinis, still carrying their machine guns. The pretty soldier with the tattoo, who we’d seen on the plane, was also having a swim. She had another tattoo on her left buttock.
The British pub in the shape of a ship was not far from the pool and sold beer at three dollars a bottle. The only official US post office in the Green Zone, a somewhat small branch, was nearby. A US soldier stood at the entrance to the post office, inspecting the parcels going in. I wondered what he would do if there was anything dangerous in them, but it became clear to me later that the soldier was looking for fake DVDs. After inspecting the parcel, he stamped it. Postage was free.
In the palace gardens there was the Country Club, an excellent pub inside the Green Zone. It stood a few steps from the final checkpoint. The pub was hot and crowded most of the time. Tasteless pop music was playing. Pool tables stood on the left of the circular bar. On the other side was an open area where customers could dance, and in the middle of the pub were a few tables and chairs.
The Bunker, another pub, was always pumping out loud music. Its inner walls were made of concrete. The weird thing was that they were decorated with weapons: the walls were plastered with ornamental mortar bombs.
There was also the bazaar where you could buy souvenirs, carpets and photographs. On the other side stood a number of small buildings: a barber’s shop, a car agency, a warehouse and a clothes store. There were also shops selling tape recorders, books, magazines, shoes and bikes, and there was a Burger King. Al-Rashid hotel, where Katrina Hassoun stayed wasn’t very far away. Every day, Nermine and I would visit her and spend an hour or two in her company, for there were quality shops selling foreign papers and magazines as well as a shop selling Rolex watches and another selling photographs, Persian rugs and DVDs. From outside, we watched the swimming pool, the casino and the gym. We sometimes spent the time in the corner of the lounge of a small pub. The barman was an emaciated man with sagging skin. He was always dressed in a high collar and red bow tie. He poured wine from a decanter into small glasses. Strangely, this bar had a permanent clientele; every time we went there we found the same crowd. They were four American strategy officers who sat at a round table near the window, playing cards. The winner always ordered beer for the four of them. A hulk of a man with a pink complexion and grey hair sat near them. He ordered full-strength rum and, as he stuffed tobacco into his pipe, watched the card players with eyes full of cunning.
This was how we spent our time in the Green Zone. The Red Zone, however, was a very different matter.
We went under cover of darkness, for armed gangs were everywhere. The map of the city that we had drawn rested on our knees. It was like a chessboard, with black squares for the Shia and yellow for the Sunni; one mistake would definitely mean a fatal checkmate. The car moved forward in the dark while the night cold enveloped the earth and the humidity increased the hardness of objects. The tree trunks were dry and the wind blew over Baghdad, carrying danger. People shut themselves indoors, seeking the protection of roofs and walls. They expected death at any moment. They stayed awake as though watching the night from above, listening to the murmurs of the dead and the kidnapped carried by the wind from afar. A chill, as if from deep underground, haunted the streets and bats hovered in the air, making savage sounds in the dark.
Who killed Kamal Medhat?
Who killed Kamal Medhat? Why? And how? These were the questions that I kept asking myself. They gave me a splitting headache and made me feel like a robot engaged in a long conversation with itself. At times the conversation was superficial and at others inspiring. When it was neither, it made me sick to my heart. When I was unable to explain anything, I started talking like a parrot whose repetitiveness prompts disgust. Nevertheless, I had to move on, even though it was only moving towards a mysterious void. Speaking about Kamal Medhat was like coloured smears on a white wall or a bell ringing to remind us that we had fallen into a bottomless pit. It was like going on a long journey on a war train full of skulls and screaming black masks. It was like arriving in our country for the first time and finding it overrun by black dread and boundless anarchy.