Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

Sometimes she might exaggerate and say openly in Elishva’s presence that if it weren’t for those inhabitants who had baraka—spiritual power—the neighborhood would be doomed and swallowed up by the

The first was Faraj the realtor, owner of the Rasoul realty office on the main commercial street in Bataween. The second was Hadi the junk dealer, who lived in a makeshift dwelling attached to Elishva’s house.

lifestyle. He and Hadi used to sit around Hadi’s table and drink till late, or Aziz might find Hadi with one or two of the prostitutes from Lane 5. It was always fun with Hadi because he didn’t deny himself when it came to pleasure.

no one could claim to be an original inhabitant.

Interesting. They kinda claim americans the same. But how true is that? Is anybody ever truly and original inhabitant of anything?

putting up on the wall in the main room a large framed copy of the Throne Verse of the Quran.

What is that verse? basically thatt no one can be regarded as comparable to god. Only one god

He swore and cursed and threw stones after the American Hummers or the vehicles of the police and the National Guard.

always had quarters of arak

and went to a restaurant near the Rahma Hospital. He ate a kebab sandwich and ordered two kebab skewers to take home with him.

If he had been a soldier or a policeman in one of the units posted throughout the streets of Baghdad, he would have lit a fire in an open oil drum to keep himself warm, covering his clothes in soot, but the hotel management had banned such things.

They all dreamed something about Hasib. Parts of one dream made up for parts missing in another. A little dream filled a gap in a big one, and the threads stitched together to re-create a dream body for Hasib, to go with his soul, which was still hovering over all their heads and seeking the rest it could not find. Where was the body to which it should return in order to take its place among those who live in a state of limbo?

“How did it disappear? You have to find it, or some other body, or else things will end badly for you.” “What do you mean?” “I don’t know, but it always ends badly that way.”

With his hand, which was made of primordial matter, he touched the pale, naked body and saw his spirit sink into it. His whole arm sank in, then his head and the rest of his body. Overwhelmed by a heaviness and torpor, he lodged inside the corpse, filling it from head to toe, because probably, he realized then, it didn’t have a soul, while he was a soul without a body.

Mahmoud gathered she was working on a feature film about the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime.

“Be positive. Be a positive force and you’ll survive. Be positive. Be a positive force and you’ll survive.”

Hadi also heard that two young prostitutes he had slept with had traveled that day to Syria to work in the nightclubs—apparently Baghdad was no longer lucrative.

Common news?

5 Elishva was busy making kashka. She combined the cracked wheat with the boiled bulgur and added the chickpeas, spices, and cubes of meat.

Some American helicopters flew noisily over the house, causing it to shake and the birds that belonged to Abdel Razzaq, the boy in the house at the back, to flap their wings in a panic, sending feathers up into the air. Umm

himself died and was buried next to the grave of his son. It broke her heart to read the name of her son on the limestone marker, and even then she wouldn’t acknowledge that he was dead, despite the passing of the years.

Marriage. not her husband?

Many prisoners came home after the war over Kuwait and in the middle of the 1990s.

wasn’t good that everyone should leave the country. Things had been just as bad for the Assyrians in previous centuries, but they had stayed in Iraq and had survived. None of us should think only of ourselves. That’s what he said in his sermon sometimes.

At the beginning of that year, Father Josiah asked Elishva if she could put up the Sankhiro family, who had fled sectarian cleansing in the southern Baghdad district of Dora. The family took the room

What cleansing

She suspected that a piece of shrapnel had hit it or it had eaten poisoned meat.

I think its wid that this is an everyday life situation or concern

Abu Zaidoun used to track down people avoiding military service,

Mamdatory?

Although he had clout in the neighborhood, he was still frightened by the Americans. He knew they operated with considerable independence and no one could hold them to account for what they did. As suddenly as the wind could shift, they could throw you down a dark hole.

bottle of Asriya arak

?

saying it was frightened of the Americans and wouldn’t apply sharia law to save people from this scourge.

the Green Zone

Like the mvoie?

ground that we know nothing about. What’s behind all the insecurity? We need to exploit any piece of information we can get to embarrass the Americans and the government,” said Saidi. Mahmoud clearly didn’t understand

Mahmoud learned that the man was Brigadier Sorour Mohamed Majid, the director general of the Tracking and Pursuit Department.

serving the new Iraq.

Which is what?

Brigadier Majid had been a colonel in the intelligence service of the old Iraqi

He was responsible for a special information unit set up by the Americans and so far kept largely under their supervision.

Its mission was to monitor unusual crimes, urban legends, and superstitious rumors that arose around specific incidents, and then to find out what really happened and, more important, to make predictions about crimes that would take place in the future: car bombings and assassinations of officials and other important people.

“Saidi’s an Islamist, and his friend’s a Baathist.

The table was covered with food and drink, everything except alcohol.

the terrorists and the various antigovernment militias on the other. In fact “terrorist” was the term used for everyone who was against the government and the Americans.

cups of strong tea.

Not coffee

The medical report said he had died of a heart attack. Maybe the criminal had killed a man who was already dead. The

Baath Party organizations, doggedly

death gives the dead an aura of dignity, so they say, and makes the living feel guilty in a way that compels them to forgive those who are gone.

They both looked at Hadi. “Tell us the story of the corpse,” they said in unison.

and she glimpsed part of his face—it was the most horrible thing she had ever seen. It’s hard to believe God would create such a face; just looking at it was enough to make your hair stand on end.

But one evening Abu Zaidoun’s sons came to her house and had words with her, making threats if she went on telling her story. Their father had died of a heart attack, they said.

Why would they care?

“Bless the Prophet and the Prophet’s family.” The story sent shivers down their spines. That spiteful woman had won people over with her story. It didn’t matter that it was made up; it was moving, and the reason they spent part of the day in the courtyard of Umm Salim’s house was to escape Bataween and its daily routines and float in another world. This damned woman with a grudge against

Maybe franken is a symbol of the delusions we place into reality to escape

He didn’t have enough money to buy a generator of that kind and pay for the fuel it would need. There were now only four guests left in the hotel, each of them paying the equivalent of only ten dollars a day.

No airbnb where do people stay?

They set off into the darkness in the black Mercedes, heading to somewhere in the Arasat area.

Mahmoud expected they were going out to some exclusive place. They went into a tall building with guards at the gate and then more guards at the end of a long corridor. They were searched for weapons,

and then they heard Iraqi pop songs in the distance and smelled a mixture of alcoholic drinks, shisha pipe tobacco, and cigarette smoke.

Money was the key to everything;

“Don’t be his lapdog” was the phrase that stuck in his mind, but Farid never actually said that. Mahmoud just worried that he might say it. It was an offensive expression, and Mahmoud always caught a whiff of it in what his old friend said. Besides, Mahmoud wasn’t Saidi’s lapdog, or anyone else’s.