[Frankenstein in Baghdad : A Novel [Ahmed Saadawi
Chapter One : The Madwomen
(1)
THE EXPLOSION TOOK place two minutes after Elishva, the old
.woman known as Umm Daniel, or Daniel’s mother, boarded the bus
Everyone on the bus turned around to see what had happened. They
watched in shock as a ball of smoke rose, dark and black, beyond the
.crowds, from the car park near Tayaran Square in the center of Baghdad
Young people raced to the scene of the explosion, and cars collided into
: each other or into the median. The drivers were frightened and confused
they were assaulted by the sound of car horns and of people screaming
.and shouting
Elishva’s neighbors in Lane 7 said later that she had left the Bataween
district to pray in the Church of Saint Odisho, near the University of
Technology, as she did every Sunday, and that’s why the explosion
,happened—some of the locals believed that, with her spiritual powers
.Elishva prevented bad things from happening when she was among them
Sitting on the bus, minding her own business, as if she were deaf or
not even there, Elishva didn’t hear the massive explosion about two
,hundred yards behind her. Her frail body was curled up by the window
and she looked out without seeing anything, thinking about the bitter
taste in her mouth and the sense of gloom that she had been unable to
.shake off for the past few days
.The bitter taste might disappear after she took Holy Communion
Hearing the voices of her daughters and their children on the phone, she
would have a little respite from her melancholy, and the light would shine
again in her cloudy eyes. Father Josiah would usually wait for his cell
phone to ring and then tell Elishva that Matilda was on the line, or if
Matilda didn’t call on time, Elishva might wait another hour and then ask
the priest to call Matilda. This had been repeated every Sunday for at
least two years. Before that, Elishva’s daughters had called irregularly on
,the land line at church. But then when the Americans invaded Baghdad
their missiles destroyed the telephone exchange, and the phones were cut
off for many months. Death stalked the city like the plague, and Elishva’s
.daughters felt the need to check every week that the old woman was okay
At first, after a few difficult months, they spoke on the Thuraya satellite
phone that a Japanese charity had given to the young Assyrian priest at
the church. When the wireless networks were introduced, Father Josiah
.bought a cell phone, and Elishva spoke to her daughters on that
Members of the congregation would stand in line after Mass to hear the
voices of their sons and daughters dispersed around the world. Often
people from the surrounding Karaj al-Amana neighborhood—Christians
of other denominations and Muslims too—would come to the church to
make free calls to their relatives abroad. As cell phones spread, the
demand for Father Josiah’s phone declined, but Elishva was content to
.maintain the ritual of her Sunday phone call from church
With her veined and wrinkled hand, Elishva would put the Nokia
phone to her ear. Upon hearing her daughters’ voices, the darkness would
lift and she would feel at peace. If she had gone straight back to Tayaran
Square, she would have found that everything was calm, just as she had
left it in the morning. The sidewalks would be clean and the cars that had
caught fire would have been towed away. The dead would have been
.taken to the forensics department and the injured to the Kindi Hospital
There would be some shattered glass here and there, a pole blackened
with smoke, and a hole in the asphalt, though she wouldn’t have been
.able to make out how big it was because of her blurred vision
When the Mass was over she lingered for an extra hour. She sat down
in the hall adjacent to the church, and after the women had set out on
tables the food they brought with them, she went ahead and ate with
everyone, just to have something to do. Father Josiah made a desperate
last attempt to call Matilda, but her phone was out of service. Matilda had
probably lost her phone, or it had been stolen from her on the street or at
some market in Melbourne, where she lived. Maybe she had forgotten to
write down Father Josiah’s number or had some other excuse. The priest
couldn’t make sense of it but kept trying to console Elishva, and when
everyone started leaving, the deacon, Nader Shamouni, offered Elishva a
ride home in his old Volga. This was the second week without a phone
call. Elishva didn’t actually need to hear her daughters’ voices. Maybe it
was just habit or something more important: that with her daughters she
could talk about Daniel. Nobody really listened to her when she spoke
about the son she had lost twenty years ago, except for her daughters and
Saint George the Martyr, whose soul she often prayed for and whom she
saw as her patron saint. You might add her old cat, Nabu, whose hair was
falling out and who slept most of the time. Even the women at church
grew distant when she began to talk about her son—because she just said
the same things over and over. It was the same with the old women who
were her neighbors. Some of them couldn’t remember what Daniel looked
like. Besides, he was just one of many who’d died over the years. Elishva
was gradually losing people who had once supported her strange
conviction that her son was still alive, even though he had a grave with an
.empty coffin in the cemetery of the Assyrian Church of the East
Elishva no longer shared with anyone her belief that Daniel was still
alive. She just waited to hear the voice of Matilda or Hilda because they
would put up with her, however strange this idea of hers. The two
daughters knew their mother clung to the memory of her late son in order
.to go on living. There was no harm in humoring her
Nader Shamouni, the deacon, dropped off Elishva in Lane 7 in
Bataween, just a few steps from her door. The street was quiet. The
slaughter had ended several hours ago, but the destruction was still
.clearly visible. It might have been the neighborhood’s biggest explosion
The old deacon was depressed; he didn’t say a word to Elishva as he
parked his car next to an electricity pole. There was blood and hair on the
pole, mere inches from his nose and his thick white mustache. He felt a
.tremor of fear
Elishva got out of the deacon’s car and waved good-bye. Walking down
the street, she could hear her unhurried footsteps on the gravel. She was
preparing an answer for when she opened the door and Nabu looked up
”?as if to ask, “So? What happened
More important, she was preparing to scold Saint George. The
previous night he had promised that she would either receive some good
news or her mind would be set at rest and her ordeal would come to an
.end
(2)
Elishva’s neighbor Umm Salim believed strongly, unlike many
others, that Elishva had special powers and that God’s hand was on her
shoulder wherever she was. She could cite numerous incidents as
evidence. Although sometimes she might criticize or think ill of the old
woman, she quickly went back to respecting and honoring her. When
Elishva came to visit and they sat with some of their neighbors in the
shade in Umm Salim’s old courtyard, Umm Salim spread out for her a
woven mat, placed cushions to the right and left of her, and poured her
.tea
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 earth on
God’s orders. But this belief of Umm Salim’s was really like the smoke she
blew from her shisha pipe during those afternoon chats: it came out in
,billows, then coiled into sinuous white clouds that vanished into the air
.never to travel outside the courtyard
,Many thought of Elishva as just a demented old woman with amnesia
the proof being that she couldn’t remember the names of men—even
those she had known for half a century. Sometimes she looked at them in
a daze, as though they had sprung up in the neighborhood out of
.nowhere
Umm Salim and some of the other kindhearted neighbors were
distraught when Elishva started to tell bizarre stories about things that
.had happened to her—stories that no reasonable person would believe
Others scoffed, saying that Umm Salim and the other women were just
sad that one of their number had crossed over to the dark and desolate
shore beyond, meaning the group as a whole was headed in the same
.direction
(3)
Two people were sure Elishva didn’t have special powers or
,anything and was just a crazy old woman. 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
Over the past few years Faraj had tried repeatedly to persuade Elishva
.to sell her old house, but Elishva just flatly refused, without explanation
Faraj couldn’t understand why an old woman like her would want to live
alone in a seven-room house with only a cat. Why, he wondered, didn’t
she sell it and move to a smaller house with more air and light, and use
? the extra money to live the rest of her life in comfort
Faraj never got a good answer. As for Hadi, her neighbor, he was a
scruffy, unfriendly man in his fifties who always smelled of alcohol. He
had asked Elishva to sell him the antiques that filled her house: two large
wall clocks, teak tables of various sizes, carpets and furnishings, and
plaster and ivory statues of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus. There
were more than twenty of these statues, spread around the house, as well
.as many other things that Hadi hadn’t had time to inspect
Of these antiques, some of which dated back to the 1940s, Hadi had
asked Elishva, “Why don’t you sell them, save yourself the trouble of
dusting?” his eyes popping out of his head at the sight of them all. But the
old woman just walked him to the front door and sent him out into the
street, closing the door behind him. That was the only time Hadi had seen
the inside of her house, and the impression it left him with was of a
.strange museum
The two men didn’t abandon their efforts, but because the junk dealer
usually wasn’t presentable, Elishva’s neighbors were not sympathetic to
him. Faraj the realtor tried several times to encourage Elishva’s neighbors
to win her over to his proposal; some even accused Veronica Munib, the
Armenian neighbor, of taking a bribe from Faraj to persuade Elishva to
,move in with Umm Salim and her husband. Faraj never lost hope. Hadi
on the other hand, constantly pestered Elishva until he eventually lost
interest and just threw hostile glances her way whenever she passed him
.on the street
Elishva not only rejected the offers from these two men, she also
reserved a special hatred for them, consigning them to everlasting hell. In
their faces she saw two greedy people with tainted souls, like cheap
.carpets with permanent ink stains
Abu Zaidoun the barber could be added to the list of people Elishva
hated and cursed. Elishva had lost Daniel because of him: he was the
Baathist who had taken her son by the collar and dragged him off into the
.unknown. But Abu Zaidoun had been out of sight for many years
Elishva no longer ran into him, and no one talked about him in front of her. Since
leaving the Baath Party, he had been preoccupied with his many ailments
. and had no time for anything that happened in the neighborhood
(4)
Faraj was at home when the massive explosion went off in
,Tayaran Square. Three hours later, at about ten o’clock in the morning
.he opened his realty office and noticed cracks in the large front window
He cursed his bad luck, though he had noticed the shattered windows of
many other shops in the area. In fact, he could see Abu Anmar, owner of
,the Orouba Hotel across the street, standing bewildered on the sidewalk
in his dishdasha, amid shards of glass from his old hotel’s upper
.windows
Faraj could see that Abu Anmar was shocked, but he didn’t care: he
had no great affection for him. They were polar opposites, even
undeclared rivals. Abu Anmar, like many of the hotel owners in
Bataween, made his living off workers and students and people who came
to Baghdad from the provinces to visit hospitals or clinics or to go
shopping. Over the past decade, with the departure of many of the
Egyptian and Sudanese migrant workers, hotels had become dependent
on a few customers who lived in them almost permanently—drivers on
long-distance bus routes, students who didn’t like the college dorms, and
people who worked in the restaurants in Bab al-Sharqi and Saadoun
Street, in the factories that made shoes and other things, and in the Harj
flea market. But most of these people disappeared after April 2003, and
now many of the hotels were nearly empty. To make matters worse, Faraj
had appeared on the scene, trying to win over customers who might
otherwise have gone to Abu Anmar’s hotel or one of the others in the
.area
Faraj had taken advantage of the chaos and lawlessness in the city to
get his hands on several houses of unknown ownership. He turned these
into cheap boardinghouses, renting the rooms to workers from the
provinces or to families displaced from nearby areas for sectarian reasons
or because of old vendettas that had come back into effect with the fall of
.the regime
Abu Anmar could only grumble and complain. He had moved to
Baghdad from the south in the 1970s and had no relatives or friends in
the capital to help him. In the past he had relied on the power of the
,regime. Faraj, on the other hand, had many relatives and acquaintances
and when the regime fell, they were the means by which he imposed
authority, winning everyone’s respect and legalizing his appropriation of
the abandoned houses, even though everyone knew he didn’t have the
papers to prove he owned them or had ever rented them from the
.government
Faraj could use his growing power against Elishva. He had seen her
house from the inside only twice but had fallen in love with it
immediately. It had probably been built by Jews, since it was in the style
favored by the Iraqi Jews: an inner courtyard surrounded by several
rooms on two floors, with a basement under one of the rooms that
opened onto the street. There were fluted wooden columns supporting
,the arcade on the upper floor. With the metal railings, inlaid with wood
they created a unique aesthetic effect. The house also had double-leaf
wooden doors with metal bolts and locks, and wooden windows
reinforced with metal bars and glazed with stained glass. The courtyard
was paved with fine brickwork and the rooms with small black and white
tiles like a chessboard. The courtyard was open to the sky and had once
,been covered with a white cloth that was removed during the summer
,but the cloth was no longer there. The house was not as it once had been
but it was sturdy and had suffered little water damage, unlike similar
houses on the street. The basement had been filled in at some point, but
that didn’t matter. The main drawback for Faraj was that one of the
rooms on the upper floor had completely collapsed, with many of the
bricks having fallen beyond the wall shared with the house next door; the
total ruin inhabited by Hadi the junk dealer. The bathroom on the upper
floor was also in ruins. Faraj would need to spend some money on repairs
.and renovations, but it would be worth it
Faraj thought it would take only half an hour to evict a defenseless old
Christian woman, but a voice in his head warned him that he risked
breaking the law and offending people, so it might be better to first gauge
people’s feelings about the old woman. The best thing would be to wait
,till she died, and then no one but he would dare to take over the house
since everyone knew how attached he was to it and acknowledged him as
.its future owner, however long Elishva lived
“Look on the bright side,” Faraj shouted to Abu Anmar, who was
wringing his hands in dismay at the damage to his property. Abu Anmar
raised his arms to the heavens in solidarity with Faraj’s optimism, or
maybe he was saying “May God take you” to the greedy realtor whom fate
.had taunted him with all day long
(5)
Elishva shoved her cat off the sofa and brushed away the loose cat
hairs. She couldn’t actually see any hairs, but she knew from stroking the
cat that its hair was falling out all over the place. She could overlook the
hair unless it was in her special spot on the sofa facing the large picture of
Saint George the Martyr that hung between smaller gray pictures of her
son and her husband, framed in carved wood. There were two other
pictures of the same size, one of the Last Supper and the other of Christ
being taken down from the cross, and three miniatures copied from
medieval icons, drawn in thick ink and faded colors, depicting various
saints, some of whose names she didn’t know because it was her husband
who had put them up many years ago. They were still as they were
originally hung, some in the parlor, some in her bedroom, some in
Daniel’s room, which was closed, and some in the other abandoned
.rooms
Almost every evening she sat there to resume her sterile conversation
with the saint with the angelic face. The saint wasn’t in ecclesiastical
dress: he was wearing thick, shiny plates of armor that covered his body
and a plumed helmet, with his wavy blond hair peeking out from under
the helmet. He was holding a long pointed lance and sitting on a
muscular white horse that had reared up to avoid the jaws of a hideous
dragon encroaching from the corner of the picture, intent on swallowing
.the horse, the saint, and all his military accoutrements
Elishva ignored the extravagant details. She put on the thick glasses
that hung from a cord around her neck and looked at the calm, angelic
face that betrayed no emotion. He wasn’t angry or desperate or dreamy or
.happy. He was just doing his job out of devotion to God
Elishva found no comfort in abstract speculation. She treated her
patron saint as one of her relatives, a member of a family that had been
torn apart and dispersed. He was the only person she had left, apart from
Nabu, the cat, and the specter of her son, Daniel, who was bound to
return one day. To others she lived alone, but she believed she lived with
three beings, or three ghosts, with so much power and presence that she
.didn’t feel lonely
She was angry because her patron saint hadn’t fulfilled any of the
three promises she had extracted from him after countless nights of
pleading, begging, and weeping. She didn’t have much time left on this
earth, and she wanted a sign from the Lord about Daniel—whether he
.was alive and would return or where his real grave or his remains were
She wanted to challenge her patron saint on the promises he had given
her, but she waited for night to fall because during the day the picture
was just a picture, inanimate and completely still, but at night a portal
,opened between her world and the other world, and the Lord came down
embodied in the image of the saint, to talk through him to Elishva, the
poor sheep who had been abandoned by the rest of the flock and had
.almost fallen into the abyss of faithless perdition
That night, by the light of the oil lamp, Elishva could see the ripples in
the old picture behind the murky glass, but she could see also the saint’s
eyes and his soft, handsome face. Nabu meowed irritably as he left the
room. The saint’s long arm was still holding the lance, but now his eyes
were on Elishva. “You’re too impatient, Elishva,” he said. “I told you the
Lord will bring you peace of mind or put an end to your torment, or you
will hear news that will bring you joy. But no one can make the Lord act
”.at a certain time
Elishva argued with the saint for half an hour until his beautiful face
reverted to its normal state, his dreamy gaze stiff and immobile, a sign
that he had grown tired of this sterile discussion. Before going to bed, she
said her usual prayers in front of the large wooden cross in her bedroom
.and checked that Nabu was asleep in the corner on a small tiger-skin rug
The next day, after having breakfast and washing the dishes, she was
surprised to hear the annoying roar of American Apache helicopters
flying overhead. She saw her son, Daniel, or imagined she did. There was
Danny, as she had always called him when he was young—at last her
patron saint’s prophecy had come true. She called him, and he came over
”.to her. “Come, my son. Come, Danny
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