The Sirens of Baghdad by Yasmina Khadra, John Cullen Page B

the car, his hands on his head. He was trembling like a leaf. He tried to speak to the Iraqi soldier, but a kick to the back of his knee forced him to kneel down. When the black GI leaned in for the other passenger, he noticed the blood on Sulayman’s hand and shirt. “Goddamn! He’s dripping blood,” the soldier shouted, jumping away from the car. “This asshole’s wounded.” Sulayman was terrified. He looked for his father. The soldier kept yelling, “Hands on your head, hands on your head!” The blacksmith cried out to the Iraqi soldier, “He’s mentally ill.” Sulayman slid across the seat and got out of the car in confusion. His milky eyes rolled in his bloodless face. The GI screamed out his orders as belligerently as before, reducing me another notch with every shout. You could hear nothing but him; he alone drowned out the din of all the earth. Suddenly, Sulayman gave his cry—penetrating, immense, recognizable among a thousand apocalyptic sounds. It was a sound so weird that it froze the American soldier. But the blacksmith had no time to hurl himself on his son or hold him back or stop his flight. Sulayman took off like an arrow, running in a straight line, so fast that the GIs were flabbergasted. “Let him go,” a sergeant said. “He might be carrying a load of explosives.” All weapons were now aiming at the fugitive. “Don’t shoot,” the blacksmith pleaded, partly in English. “He’s mentally ill. Don’t shoot. He’s crazy. ” Sulayman ran and ran, his spine straight, his arms dangling, his body absurdly tilted to the left. Just from his way of running, it was evident that he wasn’t normal. But in time of war, the benefit of the doubt favors blunderers over those who keep their composure; the catchall term is “legitimate defense.” The first gunshots shook me from my head to my feet, like a surge of electric current. And then came the deluge. Utterly dazed, I saw puffs of dust, lots of them, bursting from Sulayman’s back, marking the impact points. Every bullet that struck the fugitive pierced me through and through. An intense tingling sensation consumed my legs, rose, and convulsed my stomach. Sulayman ran and ran, barely jolted by the projectiles riddling his back. Beside me, the blacksmith was shrieking like a maniac, his face bathed in tears. “Mike!” the sergeant barked. “He’s wearing a bulletproof vest, the little prick. Aim for his head.” In the sentry box, Mike peered through his telescopic sight, adjusted his firing angle, held his breath, and delicately squeezed his trigger. Bull’s-eye, first shot. Sulayman’s head exploded like a melon; his unbridled run stopped all at once. The blacksmith clutched his temples with both hands, wild-eyed, his mouth open in a suspended cry, as he watched his son’s body fold up in the distance and collapse vertically, like a falling curtain: the thighs on the calves, then the chest on the thighs, and finally the shattered head on the knees. An unearthly silence settled over the plain. My stomach rose, backed up; burning liquid flooded my gullet and spewed out through my mouth into the open air. The daylight grew hazy…And then, oblivion.

    I regained consciousness slowly. My ears whistled. I was lying on the ground, facedown in a pool of vomit. My body had lost its power to react. I was in a heap next to the Ford’s front wheel, and my hands were tied behind my back. I had just enough time to see the blacksmith shaking his son’s medical record under the nose of the Iraqi soldier, who seemed embarrassed, while the other soldiers looked on in silence, holding their weapons at ease. Then I lost consciousness again.
    By the time I recovered some of my faculties, the sun had reached its zenith. The rocks were humming in the broiling heat. They’d taken the plastic cuffs off my wrists and placed me in the shade of the sentry box. Still in the spot where I’d parked it, the Ford looked like a ruffled fowl; all four of its