The Rope Read online

  ALSO BY KANAN MAKIYA

  The Rock

  Cruelty and Silence

  The Monument

  Post-Islamic Classicism

  Republic of Fear

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Kanan Makiya

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd., Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpts from “Emperor” and “When the World Stands Still” from The Collected Poems: 1956–1998 by Zbigniew Herbert, translated and edited by Alissa Valles. Copyright © 2007 by The Estate of Zbigniew Herbert. Translation copyright © 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers LLC. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Random House: Excerpt from “September 1, 1939” from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  The Wylie Agency LLC: “Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance” by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. Translation copyright © 1973 by The Estate of Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin. Reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Makiya, Kanan.

  The rope : a novel / Kanan Makiya.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-87047-1 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-101-87048-8 (eBook).

  1. Iraq—Politics and government—2003—Fiction. 2. Iraq—Social conditions—21st century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.A357R67 2016 813'.6—dc23 2015026187

  eBook ISBN 9781101870488

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover art: From the series “Dark Interludes” 2001, by Walid Siti

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kanan Makiya

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: December 30, 2006

  The Hanging: Morning

  The Rope: Evening

  Part Two: April 2003–November 2006

  2003

  Najaf: April 10

  Man in the Alley

  March on Karbala

  Mother

  An Execution in Baghdad

  Car Bomb

  Uncle

  Inauspicious Birds

  The Letter

  Minarets and Kalashnikovs

  Painful Slap

  Black Boots

  2004

  Bad Blood

  Foreigner Iraqis

  The Cabal of Thirteen

  Love of Self

  Three Houses

  The Sayyid

  The Arrest Warrant

  War in Najaf

  Cease-fire

  The Quiet Ayatollah

  2005

  Betrayal

  An Intimate Killing

  The Meeting

  Aftermath

  Grandfather

  The Second Conversation

  2006

  Justice

  The Awaited One

  Names of Things

  The Importance of Being Umar

  Abu Muntassir

  Haider

  Haider and Muntassir

  Baghdad

  The File

  Before the Hanging

  Part Three: When the World Stands Still

  December 30, 2006: Early Morning

  Afterword: Baghdad Today

  Acknowledgments

  A Personal Note

  About the Author

  For Wallada and Mustafa

  PART ONE

  DECEMBER 30, 2006

  Once upon a time there was an Emperor. He had yellow eyes and a predatory jaw. He lived in a palace full of statuary and policemen. Alone. At night he would wake up and scream. Nobody loved him. Most of all he liked hunting game and terror. But he posed for photographs with children and flowers. When he died, nobody dared to remove his portraits. Take a look, perhaps still you have his mask at home.

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

  The Hanging

  Morning

  I checked my watch, over and over again, determined to catch the precise moment when the lever would be released. I still almost missed it, the trapdoor clanging open before he had finished reciting his prayers.

  “The Tyrant was hanged on Saturday, December 30, 2006, at 6:09 a.m.,” I wrote in the evening of that day in a blue-ruled school notebook, whose cardboard covers Mother, God rest her soul, had lovingly wrapped in pink paper decorated with white carnations. She never let me throw away those old notebooks, mandatory in my secondary school in Najaf. The notes I recorded in them between 2003 and 2006 form the backbone of this account.

  Three hours and ten minutes earlier, at 2:59 a.m. precisely, he had been transferred to Iraqi sovereignty for the first time since his capture, proof of our independence from the American invaders.

  His transfer came on the heels of “a bitter struggle between us and the Occupier,” my uncle and mentor said.

  “Did the Occupier agree to the transfer?” I asked Uncle.

  “Not at first; they fought hard to delay it. But they caved in,” Uncle replied, “like they always do.”

  —

  The prime minister wanted the hanging to coincide with the day Sunni Muslims celebrated the first of the four-day Great Feast, and he wanted it to coincide with the day of his son’s marriage. All in the government agreed a higher authority had to rule. And so it was.

  After the Sunni Grand Mufti decreed the first day of the Great Feast to be December 30, 2006, our Shiʻa clerics ruled that a hanging on the day before the Great Feast was permissible, but not on its first day. And so the prime minister settled on the earliest hour of the morning of the Great Feast, minutes before sunrise and the start of the Great Feast, as the day of the hanging. Technically, the Tyrant would be hanged and the prime minister’s son married the day before our Great Feast started.

  Sunni clerics saw through the prime minister’s ruse. They said the Tyrant, a Sunni, was in fact being executed on a day Sunni Muslims consider a celebration, thus spoiling their Feast; meanwhile, we Shiʻa got to celebrate the day our bitterest enemy had been executed, thus enhancing our celebrations.

  Thus was the order of the firmament set by the timing of the rising of the sun; it permitted us to execute one of theirs on the first day of their Feast, but not them to execute one of ours on the same day; and this even though all are Believers of the one true faith. It has always been thus.

  The body of the Tyrant was flown by helicopter to the prime minister’s house, where the wedding celebrations were under way. Accompanied by a chanting, delirious crowd waving Kalashnikovs in the air, the corpse was carried from the helicopter’s landing pad to the front door of the house, vacated for the prime minister’s use by twelve American lieutenant colonels. At the door of the house in which the wedding party was being held, the shroud was peeled back from the Tyrant’s face in his coffin, exposing his bruised and broken neck to the frenzied delight of the chanting mob.

  Our new rulers, in
cluding the prime minister, are former exiles, returning from cities like London, Tehran, and Damascus. I do not know whether revenge, or blood libel, or communal solidarity was behind the timing of the hanging; perhaps all of them. There are no written records to support one view or the other. On the contrary, the government and the court were at pains to stress their desire to apply the rule of law, to rob the insurgency of its titular head and prime symbol.

  The hanging took place in the oldest Shiʻa district of Baghdad, in a former intelligence compound, circled by the winding Tigris on three sides and walled off from the populace by a forbidding concrete wall on the city side, recently topped with bales of barbed wire. Government officials, flanked by the personal guard of which I was a member, met the Black Hawk helicopter transporting the Tyrant to the compound he had built for the purposes of interrogation, torture, and execution.

  I had visited the compound before in the company of Uncle and his friends during the summer of 2003. “You are an expert on the compound,” the turbaned commander who appointed me said. “We might need you in case something goes wrong.” And so he decided I should be on the detail assigned to guard the prisoner from the time of his transfer into Iraqi custody to the moment of his execution.

  —

  The Tyrant slowly descended the folding steps released from the helicopter, pausing at the top to look around him as though to take advantage of the view stretching to the sinuous bends of the Tigris and the Golden Dome beyond. Looking down, he would have seen the dilapidated complex that had, under him, known better days. His feet touching the tarmac, he paused again, and then walked at an exaggeratedly leisurely pace, past flanking rows of American guards, medics, and other Occupier officials. Stiff and unbending, his back straight as a ramrod, the occasional flicker of a smile across thin lips, he thanked and bade farewell to each and every American, some of whose names he seemed to know. They in turn treated him with equally exaggerated respect, as though he were still a head of state. Walking him to a three-story concrete pillbox of a building with no identifiable entrance canopy, the party moved toward the hole in the wall that passed for a door. Papers were exchanged among officials, including a nervous, balding, mustachioed man to whom my eye was drawn, because his stomach rippled like jelly over a tight belt.

  This completed the formalities of the Tyrant’s transfer into our custody. My comrades and I, all in freshly minted uniforms of the New Army, took over from the American escort.

  I had grown up with his images, wall-size on the street, or framed in glass in every office and living room of the Republic. The Tyrant would appear dressed as an Arab or as a Kurd, as an officer in battle fatigues or as a peasant carrying his spade, kissing children or leading men into battle. For the first time, I was able to observe the man himself.

  He was dressed in a black camel hair overcoat made by his favorite Turkish tailor. Freshly dyed, his hair was signature black; his face, calm and impassive, the Stalin-like mustache copied by Iraqi males for a quarter of a century recently trimmed. At the point of handover, his features turned scornful, though he did not say a word, not even to the ministers and government officials present. They did not or could not look him in the eye and were constantly shifting their weight and shuffling their feet. He stood like one of his statues, looking past them when they addressed him, reading from one of their papers; it was as though they were not even there. Wordlessly and motionlessly, the Tyrant humiliated his new jailors.

  This man once possessed absolute power; now he had none. Our government officials, on the other hand, never had power and would not recognize it if they had. To be sure they were seekers of it, but to them power was the chauffeured bulletproof vehicle, the size of their security escort, and the amount of noise and disruption the screeching wheels of their convoy could make scattering ordinary people about in the streets, people who would then turn back to look at them with what the officials misconstrued as awe. The Tyrant knew better. He knew that the true politician is one who plays the game, perfects gestures and facial expressions, not some of the time, but every second of every day. He also knew that there is no escape from power like his, no exit, no way out of the predicament that being always onstage creates; there is only death.

  —

  Sharply detailed pictures of that Saturday before the Great Feast, like the Tyrant’s descent from an American Black Hawk helicopter, come to me frequently; they come in dreams and nightmares, and have been doing so for many years since the hanging, years in which this account was formless fragments, nothing more. I spent them floundering in doubt, dragging my notebooks around in a battered suitcase to a variety of anonymous locations in the urban desert that is today’s Baghdad. I carried them with me wherever I went, because on the evening of the day of the hanging, I took a vow before God and His Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, to record the truth as I began to see it on that day. I understood then what I had to do, no matter how it made me look to others, many of whom I counted as friends. At first they crossed to the other side of the street when they saw me coming; then they began speaking ill of me behind my back; finally they started to persecute me. I knew then I had to sever all ties with the city of my birth, Najaf, and lose myself in a city of ghosts, Baghdad. Nothing else could be done, not after the Tyrant dropped through the trapdoor to the end of the 120-centimeter slack in his rope.

  I don’t have to be asleep to see him drop; all the pictures can be summoned at will, as I am doing now, years later, sitting at a desk. At a moment’s notice, they can materialize one by one like hallucinatory flashes, or take the form of a tightly focused clip of film relentlessly rotating inside my head, easy to summon but impossible to erase. The sharpest and most richly detailed of these images always date back to December 30, 2006.

  I see the Tyrant’s descent from the helicopter. I see him drop on his rope, in slow motion; then I see the rag doll shape of what was left of him swinging gently as though touched by a breeze, but actually from the spent force of his tightly trussed bucking feet traveling through the rope to the crudely fixed metal pulley attached to the concrete ceiling from which it swung.

  The pulley, the type used for hauling building materials, came from a nearby construction site; the execution room, a hastily modified former conference room, contained plastic chairs and a Formica table at one end, and a raised hanging platform made of unpainted crude metal bars with a makeshift balustrade at the other. Above the trapdoor in the center of the platform the pulley had been screwed, askew, to the ceiling.

  They had brought us here earlier, Saddam’s final escort guard, for an inspection, and to memorize the precise route to this room from the windowless room where the Tyrant had waited for several hours before being marched to the hangman’s rope.

  I see him climb the podium deliberately, slowly, holding the Holy Book in his manacled hands. As he climbed the steps, I remember the room turning deathly silent, held in a paralytic grip as though by the sheer presence of the man. Never was there such a silence, until he reached the platform. Three guards wearing black ski masks that concealed their features, and mismatching beige and brown motorcycle jackets, were on the platform waiting for him. They started to manhandle him, trying to force a hood over his head, which he refused with a sharp gesture of his head. The same official in the receiving delegation, the one with the rippling stomach, was on the platform; he stopped the guards from forcing the issue. The Tyrant would remain unhooded. At this point one of the thwarted guards spat on the condemned man, shouting an insult. The Tyrant did not flinch, the spittle slowly running down his face. But the stillness in the room came to an abrupt end; it was as though an electric shock had jolted every person, releasing them from a trance.

  People started to shout and jeer, some even throwing things, the shouting growing in volume and mysteriously coalescing into a single loud, pulsating throb. The well-intentioned official, his stomach heaving, did not know what to do; he started gesticulating anxiously with his hands to silence the crowd. No one paid
attention. The collection of two hundred or so men assembled below the hanging platform were turning into a frenzied mob, hurling the occasional insult at the Tyrant that would break through the steady beat of “Oh, Sayyid. Oh, Sayyid.”

  That was our Sayyid, my Sayyid, they were calling out for—the Sayyid upon whose instructions I had exchanged my hodgepodge militiaman’s garb for a freshly pressed uniform of the New Army.

  Now I see the Tyrant grow ever more erect and stiff amid the deafening roar, his eyes boring defiantly into the baiting pack, his lips curled into a snarl. The governor said something to the hangman, and the noose—knotted in the British tradition of making such ropes—was slipped over his head. At that moment, speaking into the formless void above the heads of the crowd, the Tyrant called out, his voice like a foghorn booming into a sea of noise:

  “God is great. The nation will be victorious. Palestine is Arab.”

  —

  Extraordinary last words: extraordinary because they were in such conformity with a whole life. Had he chosen the words beforehand? Had he thought about what his final words would be, whiling away the time thinking them through in his cell?

  Consider: “The nation will be victorious.”

  What nation do you think the Tyrant had in mind standing up there on the platform looking down at his countrymen? The one that was, or the one that is, or, perhaps, the one that has yet to be? The nation was clearly no longer He. Perhaps he could not be expected to acknowledge this fact. The only nation he could see was in that room, ranting and raving. And if it was to be “victorious,” the question is over whom? Weren’t the Americans who had so meekly handed him over to us supposedly the victorious ones? But the tense is future. So he recognized the nation of the present had been defeated; he meant, presumably, it would be victorious eventually. So whom did he have in mind? The insurgency, perhaps, the nation-in-waiting, which was daily gathering steam.