The first time I heard him drop the f-bomb was when I phoned two weeks ago to find out why he hadn’t shown up to our meeting. I was beginning to worry. There had been reports of several bombings in Mosul. After repeated attempts, he finally answered with masked, yet palpable, terror in his voice: “Shlama lukh, Mr. Timo. I’m very sorry about today, but, you know something? This fucker-psycho…he made a big explosion outside my home.
He doesn’t remember anything about his father. He recalls what was passed down to him from his mother.
Zuhair and his wife Naseera would bear only one child. Having been around for just the first year of his life, Zuhair was stationed in the Kurdish city of Sulemaniyah near the Iranian border. On the morning of June 19, 1986, he and an army buddy set out for a trip to the local market. They were caught off guard. It was an ambush. Zuhair was killed instantly by a shot to the heart, his face smashed in post mortem by a pair of Iranian iron gauntlets as a deliberately gruesome exclamation point. He was 29 years old.
One of his favorite stories to tell is of foreigners’ distaste for his musical hero Yanni—a New Age Greek composer and keyboardist. “When I asked my American music teacher about Yanni, he told me, ‘Please don’t speak about this man ever again in my presence.’” Or he will heartily recall a visiting Spanish percussionist. Chuckling, he says, “When I asked this man his opinion about Yanni, he told me that he’s ‘a piece of shit.’” The punch line always comes when he asks me dead seriously, “Mr. Timo, what do you think about Yanni?” I gesticulate with a gagging motion; he lets out a belly laugh and bangs out Yanni’s “Nostalgia” on the piano. It was an inside joke between us, because I, too, harbored affection for Yanni, albeit more clandestinely. My dad loved him, going so far as to take me and my sister to one of his spectacular concerts when we ere younger.
His face, really half his face, is lying on the ground like a discarded latex Halloween mask—no skull; no brain; no eyes. He has but two teeth and an annoying grin on the remaining half. “Look at him; look at this fucker-psycho. He looks like a donkey," he quipped. I agreed with him but couldn’t muster a response—only silent disbelief and sickening revulsion. There wasn’t any need for gesticulation this time. He could see it on my face as I watched the video.
I saw him cry for the first time. “They don’t respect anyone. They don’t respect the musicians, the engineers, the doctors.” He paused. “I’m sorry…I cry because this is my destiny."
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