The Bookseller's Story, Ending Much Too Soon

"What's the rate?" Hayawi bellowed.

"I won't tell you unless you're going to buy," Hajji Sadiq answered.

Hayawi waved to friends passing along the street outside. An elderly woman stood at the door, asking for alms. Vendors entered offering everything from books to beach towels.

The day went on, in the rhythm of a life that now no longer exists. Two Kurdish booksellers came in, bringing a gift of honey from Sulaimaniya in the north. They greeted Hayawi in Kurdish, then the conversation continued in Arabic. Hajji Sadiq returned, quoting an exchange rate that had barely changed. The electricity cut off, with no one seeming to notice. Customers from Balad in the north told of the situation there, as did visitors from Basra in the south.

By afternoon, the electricity came on and a water pipe was brought out. Sweet-smelling apple-flavored tobacco smoldered.

"Life goes on," Hayawi told me that day. "We are in the middle of a war, and we still smoke the water pipe."

Literary Loss

Mutanabi Street always seemed to tell a story of Iraq.

Its maze of bookshops and stationery stores, housed in elegant Ottoman architecture, was named for one of the Arab world's greatest poets, a 10th-century sage whose haughtiness was matched only by his skill. The street was anchored by the Shahbandar Cafe, where antique water pipes were stacked in rows three deep. On the walls inside were pictures of Iraq's history: portraits of the bare-chested 1936 wrestling team, King Faisal's court after World War I and the funeral of King Ghazi in 1939.

In its heyday, this street embodied a generation-old saying: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads. But under the U.N. sanctions that followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, isolating it from the world, its stores were lined with magazines 20 years old, obsolete textbooks and dust-covered religious tomes that seemed more for show than for sale. It became a dreary flea market for used books, as vendors sold off their private collections in an attempt to get by, and Hayawi and his brothers eked out a living by selling religious texts, works of history for university curricula, and course work in English, what he called a passport.

In the months after the invasion, Mutanabi Street revived into an intellectual free-for-all. There were titles by Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, a brilliant theologian killed, as the story goes, when Saddam's executioners drove nails into his forehead. Shiite iconography -- of living ayatollahs and 7th-century saints marching to their deaths -- was everywhere. Nearby were new issues of FHM and Maxim, their covers adorned with scantily clad women. On rickety stands were compact discs of Osama bin Laden's messages selling for the equivalent of 50 cents. Down the street were pamphlets of the venerable Communist Party. As one of the booksellers once said, quoting a line of poetry by Mutanabi, "With so much noise, you need 10 fingers to plug your ears."

Mutanabi Street today tells another story.

When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, it was said that the Tigris River ran red one day, black another. The red came from the blood of nameless victims, massacred by ferocious horsemen. The black came from the ink of countless books from libraries and universities. Last Monday, the bomb on Mutanabi Street detonated at 11:40 a.m. The pavement was smeared with blood. Fires that ensued sent up columns of dark smoke, fed by the plethora of paper.

A colleague told me that near Hayawi's shop, a little ways from the now-gutted Shahbandar Cafe, a black banner hangs today. In the graceful slope of yellow Arabic script, it mourns the loss of Hayawi and his nephew, "who were assassinated by the cowardly bombing."