Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

“I wanted to hand him over to the forensics

department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash. It’s a human being, guys, a person,” he told them.

“But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,”...

“I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given ...

American’s questions into Arabic and looking accusingly at Faraj, who appeared stunned. 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.

Nearby sat the bodies of four beggars who had been found sitting upright in the lane.

He felt the blood in his veins run cold. What a terrible start to the day. Who had killed these poor beggars? Had an act of God struck them dead in an instant while they were sitting like that?

Each of the beggars had his hands around the neck of the m...

“There are reports about criminals who don’t die when they’re shot,” he said. “Several reports from various parts of Baghdad. The bullet goes into the criminal’s head or body, but he just keeps walking and doesn’t bleed. We’re trying to collate these reports because I don’t think they’re just exaggerations or fabrications.”

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.

He believed that emotions changed memories, that when you lost the emotion associated with a particular event, you lost an important part of the event.

What he said in his diaries couldn’t be squared with the way people saw him in the Jidayda district of Amara. He was highly respected and revered, but maybe that wasn’t an image Mahmoud’s father liked very much. It was an image that had been imposed on him and that he had finally managed to live

with, but only by expressing his real self in his secret confessions.

“You’re responsible for the death of the guard at the hotel, Hasib Mohamed Jaafar,” the Whatsitsname said. “If you hadn’t been walking past the hotel—the guard wouldn’t have come out to the gate.

himself. In a sense Hadi was his father; he had brought him into the world, hadn’t he?

“You were just a conduit, Hadi,” the Whatsitsname replied. “Think how many stupid mothers and fathers have produced geniuses and great men in history. The credit isn’t due to them but to circumstances and other things beyond their control. You’re just an instrument, or a surgical glove that Fate put on its hand to move pawns on the chessboard of life.”

There are laws that human beings are unaware of. These laws don’t operate around the clock like the physical laws by which the wind blows, the rain falls, and rocks fall down mountains, or like other laws that human beings can observe, verify, and define because they apply to things that recur. There are laws that operate only under special conditions, and when something happens under these laws, people are surprised and say it’s impossible, that it’s a fairy tale or in the best case a miracle. They don’t say they’re unaware of the law behind it. People are deluded and never admit their ignorance.

the Whatsitsname was made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim. He was a composite of victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace. He was created to obtain revenge on their behalf.

His horrible face was an incentive for them to attack him. They didn’t know anything about him, but they were driven by that latent hatred that can suddenly come to the surface when people meet someone who doesn’t fit in.

replied, “He’s killing them all, all the criminals who committed crimes against him.”

“And what will he do after that?” “He’ll collapse and go back to how he was before. He’ll decompose and die.”

The Whatsitsname was discovering new things

every day,

found out, for example, that each piece of dead flesh that made up his body fell off if he didn’t avenge the person it came from within a certain amount of time. But if he did avenge someone, then that person’s pi...

They’re accusing me of committing crimes, but what they don’t understand is that I’m the only justice there is in this country.” Hadi suddenly

He looked at the Whatsitsname and said, “You should do an interview with the press to explain your cause.”

What they all had in common, Mahmoud soon noticed, was that they were ugly. Some had genetic defects, others had been disfigured by burns, and others seemed to be insane: their faces were relaxed, with no signs of fear or anxiety.

But he kept staring at the cover of the magazine, with Robert De Niro’s grim face looking out at a world that turned on him, and he wondered what the Whatsitsname, if he really existed, would make of the article. Would he see it as another misunderstanding of his prophetic mission? And what would Hadi say about it? Would he insult Mahmoud or praise him?

“Is that junk dealer really My father? Surely he’s just a conduit for the will of our Father in heaven,

I’m a savior, the one they were waiting for and hoped for in some sense. These unseen sinews, rusty from rare use, have finally stirred. The sinews of a law that isn’t always on the alert. The prayers of the victims and their families came together for once and gave those sinews a powerful impetus. The innards of the darkness moved and gave birth to me. I am the answer to their call for an end to injustice and for revenge on the guilty.

I will finally bring about justice on earth, and there will no longer be a need to wait in agony for justice to come, in heaven or after death.

They have turned me into a criminal and a monster, and in this way they have equated me with those I seek to exact revenge on. This is a grave injustice. In fact there is a moral and humanitarian obligation to back me, to bring about justice in this world,

which has been totally ravaged by greed, ambition, megalomania, and insatiable bloodlust. “I’m not asking anyone to take up arms with

most important

the Magician.

second most important

the Sophist,

and I consult him

when I have doubts about some course of action.

he was

prepared to believe in me—for one reason: that others had no faith in me and didn’t even believe I existed.

third most im...

the Enemy—...

three other people

young madman, the old madman, and the eldest madman.

young madman thinks I’m the model citizen that the Iraqi state has failed to produce,

“Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen,

old madman...

instrument of mass destruction that presages the coming of the savior that all the world’...