For half an hour the only sounds were the splash of water and what I muttered. We dried him and shrouded him and put two branches of palm in the coffin.
After two years of work alongside Hammoudy, Mahdi had mastered the tasks of the assistant and the rhythms of washing. He was always ahead of me, anticipating the next step and preparing for it. This lessened my anxiety that I would do something wrong. When we went to the corner to fetch the coffin, the two young men got up. We put it on the ground next to the bench and placed the body in it. The uncle asked again about my fees and I told him that there was no set figure. He gave me ten thousand dinars. I thanked him and offered my condolences once again. They carried away the coffin and left.
I asked Mahdi about the amount as I put the bills in my pocket. He said it was very good and that Hammoudy used to ask for twenty thousand if the deceased’s family wanted the special shroud with the fancy print and supplications. I suggested we wash the bench and rearrange the bowls. He said he would do it himself.
I looked for the radio in the side room, but couldn’t find it. Mahdi said he didn’t know anything about a radio. I decided to bring a small one from home to keep us company. I realized that I’d forgotten to say, “I wash this corpse … ” I sensed that Imam Ali was looking at me from the painting, but I didn’t detect any censure or anger in his eyes.
Death was kind to me on my first day and gave me a long rest. No one else came until noon. I remembered the sufurtas and the food my mother had prepared for me. Mahdi hadn’t brought any food with him. I gave him some money and asked him to get us two falafel sandwiches from Abu Karima’s and to get two cans of soda, too. He smiled and seemed eager to go on the errand.
I sat waiting for him and leafed through my old notebook again. I found a few empty pages and decided to write down the names of the dead I was going to wash. I wrote the date and then “Jasim.”
Names filled one notebook after the other in the days and months that followed.
THIRTY-FOUR
I cannot wake up from this endless nightmare of wakefulness. Some people go to work behind a desk on which papers are piled. Others operate machinery all day. My desk is the bench of death. The Angel of Death is working overtime, as if hoping for a promotion, perhaps to become a god. I walk down the street and look at people’s faces and think Who among them will end up on the bench next for me to wash?
Every day of the week was difficult, but Thursday was the day al-Fartusi’s refrigerated truck arrived with the weekly harvest of death: those who were plucked from their families and lives, tossed into the garbage in Baghdad’s outskirts, thrown into the river, or rotting in the morgue. Most of them had no papers or IDs and no one knew their names. Instead of names, I wrote down the causes of death in my notebook: a bullet in the forehead, strangulation marks around the neck, knife stabs in the back, mutilation by electric drill, headless body, fragmentation caused by suicide bomb. Nothing could erase the faces. My memory became a notebook for the faces of the dead. I was on my way home one day when I realized that aside from Mahdi and my mother, I was living my days exclusively with the dead.
THIRTY-FIVE
On a February morning in 2006, I was getting dressed to go to work when I heard my mother wailing downstairs. I ran down barefoot and saw her sitting in front of the TV beating herself and crying, “O God, O God.”
“What’s wrong, mother? What happened?” I asked as I held her hands and begged her to stop. On the TV were images of a destroyed mosque.
Through her tears she said, “They bombed the Askari shrine. I wish God had blinded me so I wouldn’t see it like that.”
I tried to calm her down. I, too, felt sad, but for different reasons. I had visited the shrine in Samarra more than once. That is where the Mahdi is said to have disappeared and gone into occultation to return at the end of time. I had felt awe and sadness when I was inside it and could still see my mother crying as she held on to the golden window surrounding the mausoleum. I was quite young back then and she had stood behind me and had kept me close so that I wouldn’t get lost in the crowds. I felt the cold window as my cheek pressed against it. I felt the warmth of my mother’s body pressing me from behind as she muttered her supplications and prayers. She cried as she mentioned Ammoury’s name and then mine and my sister’s and asked the imam to protect us. I cried along with her. All those pleas and tears did not work. Not for Ammoury. When we were in school we used to go on trips to Samarra to visit the spiral ziggurat. We would climb all the way to the top and look out at the golden dome of the shrine. It looked like a star that has fallen from the sky and now rested on earth after being dipped in golden water.
The band at the bottom of the TV screen scrolled by with condemnations and statements from every side. I realized that matters would deteriorate even further. Corpses would pile up everywhere. My mother was afraid that other domes would be blown up. “Who can stop them if they want to blow up al-Kazim. God help us!”
“God help us, but please take it easy and calm down. They won’t blow up al-Kazim.”
“I don’t want to calm down. You are way too calm about this. Didn’t they fire rockets at it a few months ago? Aren’t there explosions every year during ‘Ashura? You just don’t care about Shiites.”
I was about to tell her that she was right in a way. I had come to a point where I hated everyone equally, Shiites and Sunnis alike. All these words were suffocating me: Shiite, Sunni, Christian, Jew, Mandaean, Yazidi, infidel. If only I could erase them all or plant mines in language itself and detonate them. But here I was, slipping into the very same language of bombing and slaughter.
“Thank you mother,” I said. I went upstairs, got dressed and made my way out of the house. When she heard my footsteps she said, “Godspeed, son,” but I didn’t answer.
When I came home that evening she kissed my forehead and apologized.
“What can I do, son. My heart was scorched.”
“There is no heart in this country that isn’t crushed, mother.”
We had tea in front of the TV. The daily harvest of news was the same stuff I had heard on the radio all day: responding to a statement by the grand cleric al-Sistani, angry demonstrations took place in Baghdad, Najaf, and Basra. There were lethal attacks on five Sunni mosques in Baghdad, and mosques in other cities were torched. I looked at my mother. “What do you expect?” she said. “Their hearts are scorched.”
“So they go burn mosques because their hearts are scorched?”
She probably figured that if we got into an argument I would just leave and go to the Internet café, so she retreated by saying, “You are right. Even if they drew blood first, one shouldn’t burn a place of worship.”
The government declared three days of official mourning. As for the sectarian killings, they spread without any official announcements and lasted well beyond the three days. The satellite channels were buzzing with noise and sectarian frenzy on both sides. They hosted many turbaned men, most of whom were experienced in fanning the flames of hatred and rousing other zealots of their sects, especially masked ones, to translate what was being said with their weapons and eloquent daggers. The next day more than a hundred bodies were found all around Baghdad. The rate of corpses delivered to the mghaysil didn’t increase, but I thought of my Sunni comrades on the other side of this valley whose hours were now choked with death and water.