The President's Gardens Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE PRESIDENT’S GARDENS

  “Though firmly rooted in its context, The President’s Gardens’ concerns are universal. It is a profoundly moving investigation of love, death and injustice, and an affirmation of the importance of dignity, friendship and meaning amid oppression. The novel is undoubtedly a tragedy, but its light touch and persistent humor make it an enormous pleasure to read.”

  ROBIN YASSIN KASSAB, Guardian

  “The President’s Gardens evokes the fantastical, small-town feel of One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . A story buffeted by the wider ties of history: the bloody churn of dictatorship, invasion, and occupation . . . Shocks and enchants.”

  TOM GRAHAM, Financial Times

  “A beautiful novel . . . In writing about ordinary Iraqis who pay the cost of wars waged by remote, autocratic leaders, Al-Ramli touches on deep and timeless themes . . . Consistently compelling.”

  ALASTAIR MABBOTT, Glasgow Herald

  “This compelling novel’s many strands and contradictions fill the reader with a range of intense and complex emotions: anger at the war, sorrow for the people of Iraq, deep humility in the face of such suffering and endurance. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with whom he is often compared, Al-Ramli has created a specific village that manages to be universal and a story that is rooted in history while reaching forward into the present day.”

  KATHY WATSON, The Tablet

  “Al-Ramli is an author who can sum up feelings in just a few words. His characters you may only meet for a moment but they will stay with you forever. He is an important and insightful storyteller and a writer whose work adds a unique dimension to the many stories that make up our literary world.”

  ARAB NEWS

  “Deeply painful and satirical, The President’s Gardens is a contemporary tragedy of epic proportions. No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting.”

  HASSAN BLASIM, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

  “One of the most important contemporary Iraqi novelists and writers.”

  EL MUNDO

  “A stunning achievement . . . Abdullah’s journey gives the book its title: he ends up tending the Iraqi president’s sumptuous garden—but of course digging holes in the earth is not as innocuous a task as it might seem under his rule. [Yet] Saddam Hussein’s name is never mentioned, which has the effect of allowing The President’s Gardens to work as a comment on any totalitarian regime.”

  BEN EAST, The National

  “A novel filled with details . . . with passion, homeland, revolution, and grief. It represents a landmark in the progression of Iraqi literature.”

  MIRAL AL-TAHAWY, author of Brooklyn Heights

  “Masterful . . . In The President’s Gardens, the dead have already suffered enough; it is the living who do not come away unscathed.”

  MALU HALASA, coauthor and editor of Syria Speaks

  “This extraordinary portrait of three friends growing up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq uses a range of storytelling traditions, infusing tragedy with comedy, the epic with the intimate, and the real with the surreal . . . By the time the book reaches the elaborate gardens where many of Saddam’s victims are buried, it has taken the reader through tragedy, imprisonment, and war. Yet the overwhelming impression left is of the indefatigability of the human spirit. A tour de force.”

  RACHEL HALLIBURTON, Prospect

  “How do you preserve dignity amidst the relentless carnage and multination of modern Iraq? Told with a fresh transparency and tender insight, The President’s Gardens draws on the unfathomable resilience of the Iraqi people, leaving me speechless and humbled.”

  PAUL MACALINDIN, author of Upbeat: The Story of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq

  THE PRESIDENT’S GARDENS

  Also by Muhsin Al-Ramli in English translation

  Scattered Crumbs

  Dates on My Fingers

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  Copyright © Muhsin Al-Ramli

  English translation copyright © 2016 by Luke Leafgren

  Jacket art © Nathan Burton

  Series design by www.Salu.io

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  e-ISBN 978-1-63506-038-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ramlåi, Muòhsin author. | Leafgren, Luke translator.

  Title: The president’s gardens / Muhsin Al-Ramli ; translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren. Other titles: Ḥadā’iq al-ra’īs. English

  Description: New York : MacLehose Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017045305 (print) | LCCN 2017048772 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635060386 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635060393 (library ebook) | ISBN 9781635060362 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781635060379 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: Male friendship—Iraq—Fiction. | Iraq—Social conditions—20th century—Fiction. | Iraq—Social conditions—21st century—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PJ7860.A585 (ebook) | LCC PJ7860.A585 H3313 2017 (print) | DDC 892.7/36—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045305

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  To the souls of my nine relatives

  slaughtered on the third day of Ramadan, 2006.

  And to all the oppressed in Iraq:

  May the deceased forgive our bitter grief and rest in peace.

  May the living do their utmost for the sake of peace and tolerance.

  Contents

  Chapter 1. Sons of the Earth Crack

  Chapter 2. The Lives of the Ancestors, or, A Secret Understanding

  Chapter 3. Ibrahim and His Qisma

  Chapter 4. Ever More War

  Chapter 5. The Storms of Destruction

  Chapter 6. The Journey of a Single Step

  Chapter 7. Sick and Besieged

  Chapter 8. Kafka’s Return from Captivity

  Chapter 9. Guests of the Islamic Republic

  Chapter 10. Death Rock

  Chapter 11. The Sea Urchin

  Chapter 12. The Secret of the Scandal that Wasn’t

  Chapter 13. Life in the Cellar

  Chapter 14. A Childhood Preserved in a Military Chest

  Chapter 15. A Night of Tea over the Embers

  Chapter 16. The First of the Gardens

  Chapter 17. Stories of the People’s Palaces

  Chapter 18. The President Slays the Musician

  Chapter 19. Both Sides of the Television Screenr />
  Chapter 20. A Bouquet of Flowers and an Orange

  Chapter 21. The Funeral Leave

  Chapter 22. Notebooks and Corpses

  Chapter 23. Nisma’s Wedding

  Chapter 24. The Flower-Eaters

  Chapter 25. The Fall of the Capital and the Return

  Chapter 26. Where the Living Meet the Dead

  Chapter 27. Remarriage

  Chapter 28. The Sons of the Earth Crack

  CHAPTER 1

  Sons of the Earth Crack

  In a land without bananas, the village awoke to nine banana crates, each containing the severed head of one of its sons. Along with each head was an ID card to identify the victim since some of the faces were completely disfigured, either by torture before the beheading or by something similar after the slaughter. The characteristic features by which they had been known through all the years of their bygone lives were no longer present to distinguish them.

  The first person to notice these crates alongside the main street was the dull-witted herdsman, Isma’il. Curious, he approached without dismounting from his donkey. The donkey’s image was inextricably tied to Isma’il’s in the minds of the people because of how long he had ridden it—sidesaddle, both legs hanging down on the same side—as though the two of them shared one body. As soon as Isma’il saw the bloody heads inside the boxes, he slid off his donkey and bent close, poking at them with the end of his staff. He recognized some of the heads. All traces of sleep fled his eyes as he rubbed them to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. Then he looked around to confirm he was in his own village and not somewhere else.

  The last silver light of dawn was filling the street. The shops on either side were closed. The sleeping village was calm and still, apart from the crowing of a rooster and the barking of a distant dog, responding to another dog in some yet more distant corner. In that moment, Isma’il felt liberated from the ancient sense of guilt that had pursued him in nightmares ever since, as a boy, he cut out the tongue of a goat that had annoyed him with its bleating when he was braiding a wool belt for Hamida amid the solitary silence of Hyena Valley.

  In that same moment, Isma’il’s tongue recovered from its paralysis, and he began screaming at the top of his lungs, causing his donkey to jump, his flock of sheep to freeze, and the pigeons and sparrows to launch from the treetops and rooftops. He kept yelling without realizing what he was saying, and his cries seemed to resemble the bleating of that goat whose tongue he had cut out and grilled. He kept yelling until he saw people rushing toward him from some of the village houses—then all the people from all the houses, after the alarm was raised over the mosque loudspeakers.

  And if Abdullah Kafka had spoken about this incident, he would have said, “It was on the third day of the month of Ramadan, 2006. According to ancient history, that was when a strange amorphous blob with a giant body and a small head, called America, came from across the oceans and occupied a country named Iraq. Historians make clear in some footnotes that the people of that time had hearts that were primitive in their cruelty, savage hearts, like beasts of prey. As a result, among the injurious relations they had with each other were such dishonorable deeds as assault, terrorism, wars, invasions, and occupations. In those remote times, the heart of humanity was sunk in darkness. It wasn’t a darkness of intellect or vision, such that man was unable to cogitate upon the murder of his brother man. Rather, it was much worse, in that he might actually follow through with it.”

  This is how Abdullah Kafka would see and speak about everything that happened, describing it all as ancient, lost, dead history. The present and the future didn’t exist at all for him. There was only the past, and all of it was black. Some of it died irrevocably and didn’t return, and the rest of it was repeated later, in a time that other people called the future.

  Thus for all the years since his return from captivity in Iran, Abdullah Kafka, that prince of pessimists, had been content to sit on the same chair in the corner of the village café from the moment it opened its doors in the morning until it closed after midnight. Sipping cups of bitter coffee and glasses of tea black as ink, he would smoke a nargileh absentmindedly or just listen in silence. He returned greetings with a nod of his head or a gesture with a hand that still gripped the smoking nozzle of the water pipe. If he spoke, or rather, if he was forced to speak, he would go on speaking interminably, or he would be satisfied with a comment of no more than a few words.

  So it was one spring when they informed him that the river had flooded. It overflowed its banks and covered the fields and gardens, carrying off the nearby huts and mud houses and unearthing the hillside cemetery to scatter the bones and skulls of the dearly departed. Abdullah Kafka didn’t say a thing. Ignoring the alarm of those bringing the news, he continued puffing on his water pipe as people ran in every direction before him. He said nothing until Isma’il the herdsman came in, petrified and howling, because the flood had swept away his animal pen and carried off ten sheep and one of his goats. He was sobbing as he described how his goat had floated on the surface of the water, brown with flotsam and mud. It was bleating and looking at him, as though in supplication, and Isma’il could do nothing to save it because he didn’t know how to swim.

  Isma’il’s despair filled the café: “The water is rising. It’s creeping toward the rest of the village! It’s the end! It’s the Day of Judgment and the end of the world!”

  At this, Abdullah Kafka cleared his throat and asked him calmly, “And did the water rise so much that your goat’s back touched the sky above us?”

  “No,” Isma’il said.

  Abdullah said to him, “Then this is nothing. But would that the end had come and brought the heavens down to the earth.” And he turned deliberately back to his pipe and went on smoking.

  As for this morning, when they informed him that the head of his lifelong companion Ibrahim was among the nine, Abdullah replied, “It is finished! He has attained his rest. For this time he has truly died, leaving us to the chaos of fate and the futility of waiting for our own deaths, we the living dead.”

  Abdullah fell silent and remained motionless apart from the rise and fall of his chest with each breath. He sat frozen there for several moments. Then he began to smoke and smoke. And for the first time, the people saw tears stream from his unblinking eyes. He didn’t wipe them away, and he didn’t stop smoking.

  When the news reached the third member of their lifelong brotherhood, Sheikh Tariq, he felt faint and all but collapsed. He sat down quickly, propping up his spirit—so as not to kill himself—by reciting the many religious sayings he had learned by heart and which were always on the tip of his tongue. He wept and asked God’s forgiveness; he wept and cursed the devil so as not to be driven to despair; he wept and wept until the tears wet the edges of his red, henna-dyed beard.

  Questions from the onlookers saved Tariq from succumbing to an even longer bout of sobbing. “What do we do, O sheikh? Do we bury the heads on their own, or do we wait until we come across their bodies and bury them together? They were killed in Baghdad, or on the road to Baghdad, and now Baghdad is a chaos choking on anonymous corpses, buried explosives, car bombs, foreigners, and deceit. It might be impossible to find their bodies.”

  Tariq said, “It’s best to bury the heads, and if their bodies are discovered later on, it’s not a problem for them to be buried with the heads, or separately, or in the place where they are found. Our sons and brothers are not better or more venerable than the prince of martyrs, Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, whose head they buried in Egypt or Syria while his body stayed in Iraq. Make haste to bury the heads, for the way to honor the dead is to bury them.”

  Only Qisma, the widow who became an orphan that early morning, opposed them and wanted to keep the head of her father, Ibrahim, unburied until his body was found. But she resisted in vain when the men refused and rebuked her, saying, “Hold your tongue, woman, and cease this madness! What do you know about such things?”

  They pushed her aw
ay to where the women were gathered, many of whom were surprised at Qisma’s stance since they knew she hadn’t always seen eye to eye with her father. Nevertheless, as was her wont, Qisma refused to give in and began planning her next steps. Only her fat neighbor, Amira, supported her and wanted to do the same thing, to preserve her husband’s head in the freezer until they located his body.

  Each head had a story. Every one of these nine heads had a family and dreams and the horror of being slaughtered, just like the hundreds of thousands slain in a country stained with blood since its founding and until God inherits the earth and everyone in it. And if every victim had a book, Iraq in its entirety would become a huge library, impossible ever to catalog.

  Sheikh Tariq said, “Do not wash the heads, for they are martyrs. A martyr is not washed before being buried because he is purified just as he is. His wounds will exude the scent of musk on the Day of Resurrection.”

  As the last rites were being performed for the heads, Tariq approached the head of Ibrahim and fell upon it, hugging it to his chest and kissing it so hard that his embrace scraped away the scabs formed by dirt and congealed blood that stopped up the wounds and the veins in the neck. The blood drained from it afresh and stained the front of the sheikh’s white robe, his hands, and his beard. They gently pulled him away and wrapped the head in a white burial shroud to match the others, which they buried together in a line. In the end, they dug complete graves the length of a normal man, not the size of a child’s, even though they lowered only the heads into their depths.

  Abdullah Kafka did not attend the funeral but stayed at the café, smoking. No one blamed him, even though all the people of the village knew the strength of the bond that had existed between these three men since childhood, such that they were called by various epithets, all of which played on the idea of three—“the eternal triad,” “the happy threesome,” or even “the three butt cheeks in the same briefs” and “the triple balls” and so on—because they would almost never be seen apart until destiny separated them in the days of the Iraq-Iran War. But the most widely used name was “sons of the earth crack.” That name had a story, which was itself a testament to the strength of their early alliance.