Khadher F. Alzaydi is an Iraqi writer from Baghdad, the author of novels and short stories. He has published twelve novels and six collections of short stories. He has won the Creativity Prize four times

Trigger warning: This story contains graphic depictions of sexual violence and deals with the subject of suicide.

Some cities are as tight as new shoes. The narrow horizon is trapped in corridors, like a ring stuck fast on the thumb of a burly blacksmith. Other cities are so vast that their maps seem boundless, dishevelled like the filthy coats of madmen, awkward in their soulless elegance, despite their buildings soaring towards the sky and their towers jostling against one another. Yet Hadiyya, the young village girl, loved that cramped city, its poor inhabitants, its warm-hearted women and its barefoot children. It was so like the village of her childhood.

She had moved there with her mother to settle down, for their village had become too stifling. Everyone there knew everyone else's daily affairs, followed their every move, and enjoyed gossiping about their pasts. Curiosity ran rampant, like a chronic illness. At their gatherings, the villagers would make cruel jokes about Hadiyya, who would return home sobbing to her mother about the humiliations she had been subjected to.

Ever since her father and brother had been killed in a notorious vendetta, she had been begging her mother to leave. Nothing was keeping her in the village any longer. So they made the decision to move; leaving became the only option, after the loss of their dearest loved ones. The scent of mourning and absence hung thick in the air, giving birth to grief amidst the whirlwinds of wind, dust and memories.
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(1) Agal: a double cord, usually black, worn around the head to hold the keffiyeh in place

So it happened that a mother agreed to go into exile in the neighbouring town, where people didn't know one another and cared little about each other’s backgrounds. But this town, too, imposed its own harsh conditions, not least the struggle and hard work required to make ends meet. This was what drove Hadiyya to change her gender identity. She began by buying loose-fitting men’s clothes, then wrapped a keffiyeh around her head, held in place by an agal (1).

This was in 1983, as the war of the 1980s was intensifying and the city was being drained of its young men, conscripted against their will into the fighting.

Hadiyya began working to support her ailing mother, a promise she had made in exchange for her mother's consent to the move. The best option open to her was to become ‘Hadi’, a young farmer from the rural areas. After all, in this city, a human being was reduced to an identity defined by their clothes, a keffiyeh and an agal.

After much effort, she secured a small stall at the end of an alleyway in the covered souk. Little by little, the shelves filled with medicinal herbs, rare plants and desert roots that the Bedouins brought her to treat women’s ailments and illnesses.

(2) Hamdh: a local name for several wild plants found in desert regions, adapted to saline soils.

Soon, the fame of ‘Hajj Hadi’ spread across the souk. People praised her proven expertise, excellent reputation, and remedies for amenorrhoea and recurrent miscarriages. She used nutmeg, castor oil and pomegranate peel, tanned and sun-dried.

The town’s only merchant supplied her with these ingredients, as well as other preparations: ground nigella seeds, mixed with oil from venomous snakes, plant extracts, roots from rare trees, pumpkin seeds for hair loss and chronic dizziness, not to mention chamomile, turmeric, hedgehog droppings, mint oil, germander, water drawn from the hamdh (2), a desert plant, and many other secret mixtures for the treatment of tumours and abdominal swelling.

(3) Mahaleb: an aromatic spice extracted from the stones of the Saint Lucia cherry tree, also used in certain traditional hair preparations.

Hadiyya, or rather Hajj Hadi, also obtained liquorice to treat foetal gas. Her preparations eventually proved more effective than the city doctors’ ineffective prescriptions. She was known to have a recipe based on mahaleb (3) and mercury for detangling the unruly hair of brides-to-be on the eve of Friday, and another based on cinnamon bark to treat indigestion. She recommended dirm bark (4) to whiten the teeth of young ladies from good families, mauve rose for dizziness and colds, a carefully selected desert plant to lull the foetus to sleep, and another to ensure the unborn child would be a boy. She also prescribed the effervescent juice of the clove tree for toothache, and night-blooming flowers with anaesthetic properties to relieve the pain of transverse pregnancies and to banish the ghosts of bad dreams. For women prone to repeated miscarriages due to weak backs, she had a magical concoction which promised to keep the foetus in the womb for ten months.

(4) Dirm: walnut bark traditionally used in Iraq to clean and whiten teeth, as well as to colour the lips

Hadiyya jealously guarded her secret, whilst women flocked to her home, convinced of the blessed virtues of the Hajj’s remedies. Gradually, her soul and Hadi’s became one. She treated pregnancy complications as well as cases of possession caused by the appearance of ghosts. She even possessed a staff, reserved for special cases, which she used to treat women who were victims of witchcraft, behind a curtain drawn at the back of the shop. The Hajj thus became a leading figure in herbal medicine and prophetic medicine.

Hadiyya was now the famous Hajj Hadi, the women’s doctor of the town, whom none of the women wanted to believe was a woman like themselves. Every morning, they would crowd around her shop, sit on the floor and wait for prescriptions from their 'brother' Hajj Hadi, for ailments that the city’s finest doctors had been unable to cure. Some even returned after their recovery to decorate the shopfront with henna, a sign of blessing and reverence for her secret work. It was she who granted their wishes and looked after their most intimate needs.
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Hadiyya had become a Hajj, whose title and new identity was never questioned. Her piety and devotion had earned her the nickname ‘the good man’. The cafés welcomed 'him', and she would frequent them in the dignified attire of a respected man. It was common knowledge among the men how familiar she was with the women of the neighbourhood, and the whole town. She was neither afraid of meeting them or of finding herself alone with them, and the men, in turn, saw nothing untoward in the women's visits to her shop, convinced of her righteousness.

She made a point of taking part, without the slightest embarrassment, in the men’s nightly gatherings. But she avoided the women’s public hammam just as much as the men’s, situated at the far end of the covered souk. One day, she had ventured in, but had immediately fled upon seeing a masseur kneeling over the body of a completely naked man. She feared this masculinity, whose desire intensified with nudity, in the unsettling atmosphere of steam and humidity. The only solution, therefore, was to perform Friday ablutions in the bathroom at home, sheltered from the gaze and suspicions of those who questioned her sexual identity. On another occasion, she had tried to enter the women’s sweltering hammam, immediately causing screams and commotion amongst the bathers. She had been forced to flee through the back door.
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One day, early on in the war, an armed unit comprising members of the People’s Army, the Party and the security forces stormed Hadiyya’s home. In those days, when men were in short supply, she was taken to one of the devastated sectors of the front.

The Hajj revealed nothing of her identity to them. She, who had never so much as killed a fly, found herself fighting amongst the soldiers. Now there was a real dilemma: should she reveal to her superiors that she was a woman –  unthinkable – or to allow herself to be swept up, as a recruit, into the crucible of war. With no other choice, she chose the latter.

So she went off to war without lifting her garment to reveal what lay hidden beneath.

The female soldier was put through a terrible ordeal that night on the front line, when her secret was discovered by a non-commissioned officer from an advance reconnaissance company, who had been observing her through night-vision goggles.

The following night, suspicions spread amongst the soldiers at the observation post, who agreed to uncover her true identity. One of them swore he had recognised a woman’s body, tender and desirable.

A secret plan was drawn up during the day. Its execution would begin at nightfall. It was not a matter of storming the enemy’s front line, but of storming Hadiyya’s body.

The officer told them: ‘A plump woman is sleeping amongst us. Tonight, she is yours.’

Then he added: ‘This Hadi is a woman beneath his clothes. I spotted it through my binoculars when she went out into the countryside to urinate.

That night, in that accursed war, the ‘man-woman’ faced the most terrible of ordeals. She came to wish that a sniper would put a bullet through her head, rather than endure this deadly ordeal in which her secret identity would be revealed and laid bare for all to see—an identity she had concealed even from herself.

A woman had loved the man she carried within her, to the point where he had eventually come to possess her. He slept within her like a djinn hidden from view.

In her dreams, hair grew all over her body, from her legs right up to her chest. Her breasts withered away, leaving only two protruding nipples, like two small fruits on a drought-ridden fig tree. Her internal organs lay dormant in the burrow of a rat bitten by the spectre of a snake lurking nearby. And the dream turned into a nightmare when the rabid hyenas pounced on her.

As night fell, the ferocious and savage assault was launched from all sides. A pack of spotted hyenas, emerging from the forward observation post, closed in on her. They ambushed her at her post, forced a handkerchief between her teeth and began to strip her, revealing her true identity beneath the khaki uniform.

The sergeant-major barked at her: ‘This is a military order from the officer. You must obey without question, our Hadiyya, our gift.’

At that time, the soldiers at the front were suffering from mounting excitement and sexual desire. Their leave had been delayed, depriving them of those trips into town where they could rediscover the natural colours of life. An alert signalled an imminent attack, and neither dreams nor camphor dissolved in tea could contain the overflowing force of their lust.

The conspirators had first gathered to devise a plan to breach the defensive wall. They would begin by tearing off their prey’s clothes, then desecrate her privacy with all the savagery of an unbridled assailant. A soldier with the air of a hyena volunteered to tear away the final line of defence: her underwear. Then the flag of victory would be hoisted on the battlefield.

‘Bear witness before the officer that I was the first to breach the enemy lines,’ he declared.

This predatory hyena reached the very heart of its target and uncovered its prey’s most intimate identity. It announced this to the other hyenas, gathered for their wild, collective mating ritual.

‘A woman on the front line! This Hadiyya is a precious gift to us! Sharpen the blades of your weapons and advance, in well-ordered ranks! ”

Once Hadiyya was completely naked, her nakedness exposed by the flickering light of a lantern, a thirsty hyena covered its prey’s head with a striped military blanket to prevent her from seeing what they were doing to her. The assistant corporal forced her to dance to round off the savage orgy, whilst she writhed in agony under the violence of the penetrations and the pain.

She begged them to cover her body, but the taste of this coveted flesh only fuelled their ferocity. One of them exposed his genitals to the light of the lantern, triggering hysterical laughter. They all rejoiced at having discovered what had remained hidden. The leader of the pack then let out a cry:

‘Long live the light! Long live the great lantern!”

After an hour of frenzy and sexual lust, the ritual of the wild hyenas gradually began to fade under the flickering flame of the lantern. It had been nothing but a rape of extreme violence, and the cries of the bloodied prey, exhausted by the brutality of the assaults and the horror of the penetrations, served no purpose. The torment continued until the first light of dawn.

Screaming was useless. All they heard in her cries were the moans of arousal. The predator laughed, and the others laughed with him, seized by a jubilant hysteria. The more she suffered, the more their savage laughter redoubled, fuelled by the exhilaration of ferocious virility. Her pleas only heightened their pleasure, so intoxicated were they by their masculine power and their conquering brutality.

The daggers were drawn from their sheaths, glinting in the light of the onlookers’ eyes and the lanterns, in the heart of that dark night, amidst a savage revel where each man flaunted his sexual power before the others. By the end of the night, all that could be heard were her screams of pain, following this appalling, bestial desecration, and the bursts of laughter that followed each assault. Each victor would then go out to smoke a cigarette, drunk with satisfaction, as if he had just won a victory in this war.
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In the morning, Hadiyya could no longer bear the memory of that night of pain. The unfortunate woman wished that God would take her soul before the war came to an end.

She went to wash with cold water, performed her purifying ablutions, then offered two prayers to God.

She raised her head towards the sky. One of the soldiers on guard heard her calling upon her Lord:

‘Is this, then, what You want, my God, You who hear the cries of women in distress? If not, take back this perishable body, Lord of the Worlds. ”

Then she put her trust in God.

With a steady hand, she released the safety catch on her rifle. With the determination of one who knows what she is doing, she pulled firmly on the bolt. She placed the barrel of her Kalashnikov in her mouth, recited the Shahada and said:

“O Allah! Take from me whatever pleases You!”

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