The Last of the Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

women’s wear. She would travel and buy her goods from other cities that no one else visited. It was even reported that she had been to Aleppo, a city that women said was in Syria or Lebanon. She would bring back colored fabrics, beautiful blouses, and the famous Raggi Abu al-Hil brand soap, which she sold to the women in the neighborhood (and nearby ones) on credit, but for high prices. Moreover, her mother, Hidaya, a crone who lived in the adjacent Jewish quarter, ran a depilatory service for women’s faces (using ceruse), practiced magic, and read fortunes. In fact, it was said that she could turn stones to gold by reciting arcane incantations she had learned from her Jewish neighbors. The two women—Hidaya and her daughter—took care to adorn their sturdy ankles with anklets, their wrists with bracelets, and their necks with coins fashioned into gold chains.
    Hameed Nylon had barely finished drinking his first tumbler of tea when his wife Fatima came for him, pretending to be annoyed at being left home alone. As a matter of fact, she was concerned instead that Nazira might be plotting to turn her husband, Hameed, against her. She knew also that Khidir Musa, who was incapable of opposing his wife, would join the plot against his sister-in-law. Hameed Nylon, who was tired of sitting in a darkness dissipated only by the flame of an oil lamp with a dirty globe, rose, saying, “The best thing a man can do during rain and gloom like this is to sleep.” His wife followed him. On the steps to their pair of rooms he heard one of Khidir Musa’s lambs bleat. He answered sarcastically, “And upon you peace.” His wife, climbing behind him, cautioned him about the broken steps. He responded in the dark, “I know each of them by heart.” Fatima was happy they were returning once more to their suite, where he was safe from his sister’s snares. Perhaps he would feel like sleeping with her, too.
    Hameed Nylon stretched out on his back in bed, but did not hear her until she asked if he wanted some tea, since he had been dreaming, and his dream had outstripped the Chuqor neighborhood and the city of Kirkuk to reach a vast, open space, a strange, limitless area he had never seen before in his whole life.

Two
    T he Chuqor neighborhood actually had only two concerns: poverty and afreets. Poverty had driven many, especially migrant Arabs, to adopt theft as a profession, so that they broke into shops and houses by night. And the afreets, with which the neighborhood teemed since it was near the cemetery, similarly had led many residents, primarily the Turkmen, to become dervishes and sorcerers, devoting much of their time, which was always freely given, to encounters with the ghosts that had chosen the Chuqor neighborhood for their home. People thought it odd when Burhan Abdallah, who was a boy of seven at the time, told them one day that afreets follow poverty and thieves follow afreets. When they asked him what this meant, he did not reply, for he himself did not understand the sentence. When his father, Abdallah Ali, who worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company, wanted to learn the source of that statement and whether the mullah with whom the boy studied Qur’anic recitation had taught it to him, the boy insisted stubbornly, “No, I dreamt it in my sleep.” Then he recounted the story of his dream.
    He had been sitting on a hill that overlooked the Chuqor community, fearfully watching the afreets and the thieves who thronged the region. He was screaming, but three old men, who had long beards dyed with henna and who were wearing white robes, came to him and, placing their hands on his head, said, “Don’t be afraid, my son, for afreets follow poverty, and thieves follow afreets.” Then they planted a green banner where the boy sat and departed.
    The boy’s father nodded thoughtfully and told his wife Qadriya, “I believe our son will be a prophet.” His wife,