Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

eldest madman

savior and that in the coming days he will acquire some aspects of my immortality

Whenever you kill someone, that account is closed,’ the Magician said. ‘In other words, the person who was seeking revenge has had his wish fulfilled, and the body part that came from him starts to melt. It looks like there’s a time factor. If you exact revenge for all the victims ahead of the deadline, then your body will hold together for a while and start to dissolve only later, but if you take too long, when you come to your last assignment you’ll have only the body part of the last person to be avenged.’

The savior doesn’t die.’

They dragged away the body of the man who had died bravely, leaving the body of the man who had pleaded for his life—we called him ‘the saint.’

We’ve brought you back to life,’

convinced my other assistants that the saint was a victim whose soul would seek revenge, so there was no harm in using his body for spare parts.

the need to enforce the law against this criminal. He philosophized a little in the article, saying there were three types of justice—legal justice, divine justice, and street justice—and that however long it takes, criminals must face one of them.

“You’re getting more and more like them. You’re trying to be one of them. Anyone who puts on a crown, even if only as an experiment, will end up looking for a kingdom.”

“If you can foresee what’s going to happen, then that’s a gift from God, and He’s telling you that you can change fate for the better. I’m the god showing you what will happen because what happens depends on what you do. If you don’t do anything, then what you foresee will come about. If you act, you can take advantage of God’s permission to change what’s going to happen.”

He told her it would be about the evil we all have inside us, how it resides deep within us, even when we want to put an end to it in the outside world, because we are all criminals to some extent, and the darkness inside us is the blackest variety known to man. He said we have all been helping to create the evil creature that is now killing us off.

He would never again see the old lady who had contributed to his birth and given him the name of her missing son. He felt closer to her than

to other people and felt that he had helped

to keep the memory of her son alive. Now that she was gone, he had lo...

for existing. She had left him without realizing that she was leaving one of the last threads that ...

This face he had just seen for the first and last time was also from his past. He recognized it, but whose was it? During his slow death throes on the desolate street, he would be wholly convinced that it was a composite face, made up of faces from his distant past. It was the face of his own personal past, which he had thought had no face or features. And now it had appeared to him clearly, caught for a moment in the headlights of a passing car.

I gave him the four hundred dollars, and we agreed to meet the next day. I wanted to drive him back to his hotel, but he said he could walk. Part of me knew he would never show up again. He played his part well and in the end extracted the amount that he wanted from me. He fooled me. But don’t we always do that? Today he deceived me and tomorrow I will deceive someone else, also with good intentions, and

so on.

This wasn’t the face of Hadi the junk dealer; it was the face of someone he had convinced himself was merely a figment of his fertile imagination. It was the face of the Whatsitsname.

“My face changes all the time,” the Whatsitsname told the old astrologer that night. “Nothing in me lasts long, other than my desire to keep going. I kill in order to keep going.” This was his only justification. He didn’t want to perish without understanding why he was dying and where he would go after death, so he clung to life, maybe even more than others, more than those who gave him their lives and parts of their bodies—just like that, out of fear. They hadn’t fought for their lives, so he deserved life more than they did. Even if they knew they couldn’t prevail against him, they should at least have fought back. It wasn’t honorable to surrender in battle, and what a battle! It was a battle to defend their lives, the only battle worth fighting in this life.

Fear of the Whatsitsname continued to spread. In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokesman for the U.S. State Department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq.

As far as Brigadier Majid was concerned, the monster itself was their project. It was the Americans ...

They knew he didn’t bleed and didn’t let anyone catch a glimpse of his face. The definitive image of him was whatever lurked in people’s heads, fed by fear and despair. It was an image that had as many forms as there were people to conjure it.

Mahmoud thought back to his theory about the three kinds of justice, but he wasn’t convinced it was valid. It was anarchy out there; there was no logic behind what was happening. He

Isn’t life a blend of things that are plausible and others that are hard to believe?