Baghdad Journal

Sabah's dog

We visit the home of Sabah Abdi Abdulla, octogenarian and former national weightlifting champion of Iraq. Sabah is Abu Abdullah's father-in-law. He greets us in his wood panelled den which is filled with five decades worth of gold trophies, banners and faded photos of him and other, equally barrel-chested men toting dumbells. Dressed in a white dishdasha and an embroidered arakcheen or cap, the little wizened man can still bench 90 kilos.

So happens he graduated from the University of Florida, Gainsville in 1958 with a BS in Physical Ed. We are brought into the dining room. On the table is an enormous metal serving tray with three large cooked fish on it. Adam says the fish look like flounders since they are splayed open and lying flat on the tray, but they are shehboot, carp, blackened with a heap of curry on them. We eat reluctantly. The meat is white, moist and soft and full of bones. I feel I can taste the murk of the Tigris River in every bite. Sabah rips big chunks off the carcass. The bones and dark green prehistoric scales disappear off his plate as he chews.

Hot and queasy, I try to focus on something else. Sabah is talking about his dog Rocky. Not the ferocious German Shepherd he owns now, which we hear from the back yard barking away at the sputtering sounds of the Honda generator. No, Rocky. His Iraqi dog. Brown and black and huge Rocky was. "I gave it two growth injections," Sabah says. "And it grew to an incredible size. It got so big it no longer fit in its house."
Abu Abdullah remembered that Sabah once tried to get him to pet Rocky as the old weightlifter held the dog by the neck. "C'mon, go ahead," Sabah told him as he wrestled with the beast. "I've got him." Abu Abdullah excused himself and inched away.
It soon became apparent that the steroid-injected dog was uncontrollable. "The men who came to the house to cut the dates from the palm trees asked me to tie the dog. He broke through so I tied him with two chains."
"Did that help?"
"Sometimes," he says, chewing on his fish.
Finally Sabah gave Rocky to the janitor of a nearby school. In the first night, the dog broke free from its bonds and bit the janitor twice, once in the arm and again in the backside as he fled. The next morning, as the children entered the school yard, Rocky was like Godzilla on Toyko. He bit another adult and a child and then stormed out of the school yard, saliva running from his fangs, never to be seen again. "The janitor said, 'I asked for a dog and you brought me a lion.' " Sabah recounts this without a smile but I can see there is a mischevious glint in his deeply set sloe eyes. Sabah, like a Dr. Frankenstein, created his own pumped up similacrum and has let it loose upon the world.

Posted by Brandon Sprague at August 6, 2003 10:30 AM | TrackBack