The Last of the Angels by Fadhil al-Azzawi

reached for his small revolver—which he had purchased four years earlier from a Polish soldier whose English unit had been garrisoned for a period of time in tents near the Kirkuk Railroad Station—and had raised it toward Kawakib, who was aghast by this act and gazed at him in consternation. He pressed the trigger, and the gun fired once, twice, three times. Then he came to his senses, perhaps because of the blood that gushed forth. When he felt it sprinkling on his hand, he threw the revolver to the ground and dashed out, forgetting even his two comrades.
    The death of the dancer Kawakib meant the cabaret’s death as well because Ahmad Sulayman, the governor, who had only quite recently obtained his post, issued orders to keep the doors of the cabaret closed, at least temporarily. A week later, when the owners of the cabaret—after paying bribes to the police chief and after the cabaret’s artistes had exerted themselves with city officials—reached an understanding to open the cabaret’s doors once more, Abbas Bahlawan’s aging mother, who thought it unjust that her son should be imprisoned for killing some whore, marshaled the women of the Chuqor neighborhood who rallied many other women—even from distant communities like the Citadel, al-Qurya, Shatirlu, Imam Qasim, and Sari Kahiya—and all these women poured into the streets, wailing and shouting, “The prostitutes’ cabaret has destroyed our homes!”
    Some boys, who were skipping back and forth in front of them like demons, showed them where the cabaret was located on al-Awqaf Street. On the way there, many dervishes joined the band of women. They carried placards that read, “Jerusalem Belongs to the Muslims,” “Down with Communism,” and “There’s No Place for Jews in Our Country.” This outraged the Communists, who were caught off guard by the demonstration, which they considered a provocation organized by the government. This belief seemed confirmed when the policemen stood idly by, watching women throw stones at the cabaret and break its windows. Some of the artistes who lived in the cabaret itself, because there was no hotel that would accept them, were terrified and forced to flee via the roofs of neighboring buildings, even though they were half-naked.
    Apparently the governor took advantage not only of these disturbances, which he had been expecting, but also of the danger to public safety, which he exaggerated in the report that he sent up to the minister of the interior, to cast all the blame on the shoulders of the previous governor, who had not given a moment’s thought to the disasters that opening a cabaret in this city would shower on its innocent inhabitants.
    Thus the cabaret was closed once and for all and its doors were sealed with red wax, and the female dancers and singers were forced to move to Baghdad again to look for whatever work was available at short notice under difficult circumstances. The Egyptians among them returned to Cairo. One, however, succeeded in staying in Kirkuk, and—with the patronage of the police chief—set up a clandestine brothel frequented by prominent figures, near the Government Guest House. She brought in some second-rate whores from al-Maydan in Baghdad and others from a whorehouse in Mosul.
    At the same time, the police chief earned a sterling reputation for himself in the city by ordering, a few days after the attack on the cabaret, the release of Abbas Bahlawan. In fact, no charges were brought against him after everyone, on the advice of the governor, refused to testify against him. Thus the incident was recorded as unsolved, and his widowed mother as well as the Chuqor community welcomed Abbas Bahlawan back with drums and tambourines as if he were a pilgrim returning from Mecca. She was so carried away by patriotic fervor that she began yelling, “Long Live King Ghazi!” as though he had tired of lying dead in