I don’t know if he actually offered the militia leader money to facilitate the mission, but Faris had included a sum of money in the budget. We then walked along the street. Stagnant water filled the potholes that had taken over the street. The houses standing behind the wealthy district of Al-Mansour graphically illustrated the gulf separating the classes. The militias of the poor Sunni and Shia areas were fighting over Al-Mansour, which was inhabited by the middle and upper classes.
We stopped in front of a very poor house whose façade had been practically destroyed, and knocked on the door. Fawzeya came out to greet us, wearing a wide pair of trousers and a black shirt. She’d covered her hair with a scarf. She lived with three of her sisters and her mother on the salary provided by Kamal Medhat. She was grieving, but was one of our most important sources of information.
She invited us to sit down, and we sat on plastic chairs opposite her. In front of us was a broken wooden table. She told us that he’d had a strange feeling two days before the event, when he’d received a death threat.
This was new information for us. She described his behaviour in detail.
He’d been sitting in the large chair with his eyes open. She thought it was one of his many ways of meditating. But his state of bewilderment seemed like a person who didn’t belong to this world. She came up to him and asked him what was wrong. He told her that he’d received a threat. His voice was hoarse as he said it. Then he sat by the window until night fell and the whole house was dark. In the darkness, she saw his large eyes, grey hair and peaceful face, as he held a coffee cup.
His frizzy hair seemed ashen and his bones were fragile with premature ageing. He still felt unsteady because of the insomnia. ‘I know they’re going to kill me,’ he added gravely.
I asked her why she thought they wanted to kill him. ‘Perhaps because of the American who visited the house,’ she said.
Faris and I blanched. ‘An American visited him? What American?’ we asked.
‘I don’t know. An American visited him at night and left.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘It was night time and dark.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I was in the house and saw him.’
‘Did the threat say that they saw him with the American?’
‘It didn’t say anything about his …’ she said.
(We learned later that it was his son Meir.) Then she told us how he’d emerged from the bedroom the next day in his pyjamas. He’d placed the dish of shaving soap on the marble sink beside the washbag containing his shaving kit. There was also a candle in case of power cuts, which happened frequently. He’d put on his square-lensed glasses with the black plastic frames, which he always kept in the pocket of his pyjamas, and trimmed his beard, which he never shaved completely.
After shaving, he’d paced to and fro in the room, trying hard not to look at himself in the mirror. He’d brushed his teeth using English toothpaste, clipped his fingernails and toenails, wrapped himself in a blanket and gone to sleep.
The visit by the stranger and his guards the night before was the last visit he’d ever received. For quite some time, he’d been mistrustful of everybody. He’d placed important papers, photographs and newspapers in two boxes. She was the only one who’d believed him when he’d said that he was really going this time.
‘Did you love each other?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She had trampled on the traditions of an ultra-conservative society. They were not lovers in secret, but in the open. It was a public scandal. She had shown him increasing love and affection as his sight dimmed and his flesh became loooser. He smoked heavily. She sat beside him and talked to him while he listened to her in his pyjamas, always with a book in his hand. By day, the only sounds to be heard in the silent house were her voice and his laughter.
We left Fawzeya to her grief and loneliness and decided to go to the department of forensic medicine to arrange for the burial of Kamal Medhat’s body. We had an appointment with the doctor in the morning.
When we went in, the doctor was expecting us: Mustafa Shaker had already been in touch with him. I handed him the letter.
He gave me a piece of medical gauze to cover my nose. We followed him. He stopped and pulled hard on a handle. Kamal Medhat’s body lay before us. Faris and I saw his open mouth and his crushed forehead, which was loosely covered with sticking plaster. One eye was open and looked reddish and cloudy.
We filled out the hospital forms and took him from the morgue. He was registered as my father. We had to take him straight to the cemetery. But which one? The Jewish cemetery in Al-Habibeyya, the Shia cemetery in Al-Najaf, or the Sunni cemetery in Al-Karkh?
‘Where should we bury him?’ asked Faris.
‘The nearest one,’ I said.
It was Al-Karkh. So we got out of the taxi and headed to the administrative office of the cemetery.
Faris knew the undertaker and said that he also dealt with militants. He treated us as if we were Sunni. We sat in the office, a simple room with Quranic verses mounted on the walls and a wooden cupboard with some files. The man in charge wanted to know what kind of grave and shroud we required. There was a tomb of alabaster and another just in the ground with a tombstone. There was also a tomb and headstone of brick. We said alabaster.
The undertakers placed him in the coffin and lifted it up. A sheikh sat at the head of the grave, reciting verses from the Quran. They removed the blood-stained wrappings. I saw him as he looked in the photograph sent by Farida Reuben. They removed the plaster from his head, revealing a hole in the forehead. His nose was delicate and straight. A young man brought a sponge and a bar of soap. They poured buckets of water over him as they sprayed white camphor.
They buried him and threw earth over him. It was only then that I felt the tobacco keeper was actually dead.
The following day, we went to a US prison near the airport to meet a leader of one of the militias that controlled the Al-Mansour area. I wanted to meet one of the men who’d murdered or slaughtered more than a hundred people in that vicinity. Kamal Medhat was reputed to be one of them.
We got out of the car. I shook hands with the head of the guards and others who were lower in rank. They were cleanshaven young men armed with machine guns. We told them about our mission, but they didn’t allow us to enter. Instead, they threatened to kill us if we didn’t leave within a few seconds.
We got in the car and headed back. We passed by a concrete block next to which was a small café. I asked the driver to stop so that we could have a cup of tea. I felt bitterly thirsty and thoroughly exhausted. In fact, I felt paralyzed, disgusted and suspicious of almost everyone.
It was time to realize that I wouldn’t arrive at any conclusion regarding the militias and armed factions that were attacking and destroying the country. I’d wanted to reach some conclusion, or understand those who’d kidnapped and killed him. I filled the saucer with cigarette butts while I tried to analyse some of the forces in control of the area. I went over in my head all I had heard or seen. There were accusations of American, Iranian and Arab involvement in violence in Iraq. One heard of all kinds of attacks by militias, armed groups or the US Army: rape, kidnapping, torture and fatal beatings.
Where was the truth? The stories of the Sunni and the Shia didn’t make any sense at all. I told Faris Hassan that the future would demonstrate that all our assumptions were baseless.
‘But the rift still exists,’ he said.
‘True, but only because of the violence, nothing else,’ I replied.
But who directed the violence?
Society was collapsing. Women were fetching water from stagnant pools to wash their clothes and dishes. There were many ways to die, cholera not the least of them, but what euphemisms could be used for those who formed gangs to kidnap and murder? Utter anarchy reigned, for there were powers with licence to kilclass="underline" the US Marine Corps, private security firms, Shia militias, Sunni militias, organized crime and an enfeebled state that had no presence in many districts. So how could we discover the fault lines of the conflict? How could we define the identity of the enemy? Sectarianism? Imperialism? Foreign Intervention? Was it the desperate defence of private wealth, the class system, international law, or the conflicts of governments? How could one label what was happening?