Frankenstein in Baghdad

by Ahmed Saadawi

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 turned to Hadi. ‘That’s not everything,’ he said. ‘What’s worse is that people have been giving me a bad reputation. 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.’

‘Is that junk dealer really my father? Surely he’s just a conduit for the will of our Father in heaven, as my poor mother, Elishva, puts it. She’s a really poor old woman. They’re all poor, and I’m the answer to the call of the poor. I’m a saviour, 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.

‘“Each of us has a measure of criminality,” the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. “Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his ageing mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a house with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.”

My head was swimming with conflicting thoughts, but I held firm to the idea that I had only hastened the old man’s death. I was not a murderer: I had merely plucked the fruit of death before it fell to the ground.

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.