June 2005, Baghdad. Hamdi al Mokhtar, writer poet and friend who once spent eight years in Abu Ghraib prison under the regime of Saddam Hussein. "Once, they even arrested my typewriter," Hamid told me.
Photo: Asma Waguih
In the Shabandar, Ahmed was sitting next to me trying to figure out what he was supposed to do.
"You want me to go ask the owner, Hajji Mohammed, about the bombing?"
"No."
"OK. What do you want to do?"
"I don't want to do anything."
Ahmed waited for more information. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said, "Hate the Game, not the Player."
"I just want to sit here and let these guys get used to us for a minute."
There were warning signs. No one spoke in the cafe, and most of the customers were smoking in silence; if they did speak, they kept their voices low so they wouldn't be overheard. Men sitting on benches across the cafe looked away when we glanced in their direction. People were monitoring us, a few were waiting to see what would happen, keeping an iron in the fire with respect to possible future events. When we'd come in, I had seen a man in his 30s wearing a particular kind of beard that the jihadis favor. He was reading a paper and made a show of not looking up. Fighters in the Mahdi Army wear this beard. It also didn't have to mean anything, although those beards were not common two years ago. We sat down next to him.
"Ahmed, look at this guy next to us."
"Sure, man, I see him, no problem." Ahmed speaks in perfect American movie English.
"Ask him about the bombing on Tuesday that killed Hajji Qais."
So Ahmed turned to the man and asked him.
"I know you guys are from the press," the man with the beard whispered. "You are asking very sensitive questions. If you ask Hajji Mohammed about it he might suspect you of something." The man with the beard didn't feel like talking about the bombing. We went to the front of the cafe and found Hajji Mohammed, who is slightly grizzled and irritable, stuck behind his small desk where he rings up the customers. When we asked him about the bombing he said that he couldn't remember a time when people were killed for absolutely no reason. Hajji Mohammed went on to speak wistfully about the old monarchy, saying Iraq had its best days under the king. We asked him why he'd closed the cafe last Friday on its busiest day of the week.
"Fridays I lose so much money because people buy a tea and sit all day and when it comes time to pay, they come to me and lie about how many teas they had. So I closed the cafe. We also had generator problems," Hajji Mohammed said. It was a massive lie, which he did not expect us to believe. Fridays are the busiest day for the Shabandar, the day that writers from all over the city come to discuss, translate and work on manuscripts; business booms. Mokhtar also makes a point of being at the Shabandar on Friday where he holds court. The real reason Hajji Mohammed closed the cafe, which everyone on the street knows, is that he has been receiving threats from insurgent groups who don't like his clients and their politics. Mokhtar is likely one of the reasons, and there are other dissident groups as well. We would find one such semi-clandestine organization two days later and they would confirm that the Shabandar was receiving threats, but they couldn't say who was behind them. The men never show themselves.
We left the Shabandar and found a man around the corner who said that Hajji Qais' son was not killed in the bombing, and only found out about his father's death on television. He said that Ahmed Qais was working around the corner in another small stationery store, called the Nadeem. The bookseller said we could talk to him if we were interested.
Hajji Qais' son, Ahmed Qais, is in his early 30s, a well-educated Sunni engineer. He's clean-shaven and polite, not an extremist. Ahmed Qais is a little heavy-set from consuming sugary tea and bread. He's well-spoken in Arabic, and he understood a great deal of spoken English, often responding before the translation came in. For a man whose father had been killed a few days before, Ahmed Qais was pretty calm and focused. It took a little while to convince him to talk to a reporter but he relented after a few minutes. We found a room in the back of the stationery store where we could talk.
"Who do you think killed your father?" I asked him. He leaned forward and lowered his voice.
"Everything is suspected. He worked all day and all night, so there's no way he could be involved in something. The police came and conducted a short investigation and then left, but in a destroyed country like this, they can't investigate anything. There are also some strange people here who think that my father was selling valuables or Easter gifts and some people think that might be the wrong thing to do."
Ahmed Qais talked for an hour about how it was important for his family to move on with their lives, which seemed like an odd comment to make so soon after the killing. Ahmed Qais didn't back any particular theory of the crime. In fact, he stayed away from saying anything specific and wouldn't name anyone he thought was involved. He was obviously extremely frightened and thought that talking about the assassination of his father would only bring him problems. Ahmed Qais asked if I heard what happened to the ice seller in Dora and we said yes, that story was going around and we knew it. I asked him about threats his father might have received and he said that there weren't any, that his father didn't have enemies on the street.
Just as I was leaving, I handed him a piece of paper with my contact information on it. He said, "Even if I had some information, I would keep it to myself." Ahmed Qais told me that he had two families to support and that it was a big responsibility.
The Death of Al Muntanabbi Street was originally published in Salon.com in 2005. In 2003, I was lucky to meet Hamid Al Mokhtar, an Iraqi novelist and poet who had been persecuted by the old regime. Al Mokhtar was returning to freedom after his long stretch in Abu Ghraib prison, only to find that the literary culture he loved was under threat by armed groups. Al Mokhtar took me on a tour of Al Muntanabbi street and explained what was being destroyed. Much of the story takes place in the Shabandar cafe, the center of Iraqi literary life. The book market runs along the street right outside the cafe.The Shabandar cafe was destroyed on March 5th, 2007 when a car bomb exploded on al Muntanabbi street killing dozens and injuring as many as a hundred people. An Iraqi judge traveling through New York told me that the owner of the Shabandar had been killed in the blast.
© Phillip Robertson, 2009-2014.