by Sinan Antoon
I had called Saadoun half an hour earlier but he rarely ever answered his cell phone. I dialed his landline and when his youngest daughter, Sundus, picked up and told me her father was bathing, I asked her to let him know that his nadeem was on his way. After her two brothers and their families had left the country a few years earlier, Sundus, her husband, and their three children had moved into the old family house so that she could take care of her father. The boys had tried to convince Saadoun
to come along but he, like me, wouldn’t hear of leaving Iraq, and Sundus was determined to remain by his side.
As I approached the front gate, I heard the thrumming of the electric generator from the garden. I rang the bell with my thumb. I looked up at the tall mulberry tree in the garden, which had stood to the right of the gate for decades. It had lost all its leaves and was completely bare. I wondered if the tree could feel the cold that I was beginning to feel. I remembered the palm sapling that I had given Saadoun about two years into our friendship after chiding him about not having any date palms in his garden, and how it had died during a particularly cold winter even though he had wrapped it with coarsely woven burlap rice bags as well as sheets of plastic. The sapling that he got the following year had survived, and it towered magnificently above the far side of the garden. I wondered if the date palm ever addressed the mulberry tree, or whether it was too proud for that? My daydreaming was interrupted by the sound of the door opening. Nine-year-old Aws, Saadoun’s youngest grandchild, stepped out and came toward the gate exclaiming, “Welcome, Uncle, welcome!”
“Hey Aws, how are you doing, son? No school today?” I asked.
“No, Uncle, there is school, but I’m not feeling well.”
“Salamtak. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing serious. I woke up feeling sick this morning, but I’m fine now.”
Aws drew back the metal bolt and opened the gate. I kissed him, tousled his black hair, and after he had closed the gate behind me and we were walking toward the house, I asked, “You were sick for real, or just faking it?”
His grandfather, who was standing at the front door, answered on his behalf.
“He’s nothing but a trickster and a rascal. He just wanted to stay home with his grandpa. So good to see you, ya nadeemi!”
Even though it had been years since we’d had a drink, Saadoun still called me his drinking companion.
In his right hand was the small comb with which he always and ever-so-carefully combed his remaining white hair and thick moustache. He slipped the comb into his trouser pocket and opened his arms wide to embrace me. He was wearing an open-necked gray sweater over a black shirt, with matching trousers and socks that were visible from the tip of his slippers.
“Hey, what’s with being dressed to the nines?” I teased.
“In your honor, of course!”
We hugged and kissed on both cheeks.
“Aws, go tell your mom to make us some coffee,” he told his grandson as he showed me into the living room.
Over coffee, which Sundus brought in a quarter of an hour later, he sensed that there was something lurking behind the smiles and the short answers that I was giving him, and he looked quizzical.
I was contemplating the delicate design on the white coffee cup in silence when he asked me, “What’s up with you today? You’re not yourself . . . what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“No, something is wrong.”
“Nothing, really,” I went on after a pause. “I just can’t get Hinna out of my mind. Today is the anniversary of her death.”
His hazel eyes glimmered with sadness, and he shook his head slowly, back and forth, the way he did whenever he was moved by the pleasures of the world or wrenched by its sorrows.
“That’s right. . . . May her pure spirit have found everlasting peace,” he said.
“Likewise, for your dear departed, Saadoun. And may God bless and protect that little boy.”
“How many years is it now? Six, isn’t it?”
“Seven.”
“Seven years already? It feels like yesterday!”
Silence descended on the room, broken only by the whine of the generator and the sound of Aws arguing with his mother in the other room. “Why, mama, tell me why,” he kept repeating loudly.
“You going to church today?” Saadoun asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“You know that if it weren’t for the fact that I have a doctor’s appointment, I would go with you. But it’s my regular checkup, and I can’t postpone it.”
He had attended Hinna’s memorial service and the funeral, and had walked by my side as a pallbearer and helped me lower her coffin into the earth. At the service, he’d sat in the front pew and read the opening verse of the Quran, the Fatiha, twice, as some of the attendance looked on puzzled. It wasn’t the first time he’d entered a church, he’d also been there when Mikhail and Habiba had died.
“Thank you, my friend. I will light a candle on your behalf,” I said, tremulously.
“Yes, please do. She was like a sister to me. May the Lord’s mercy be hers.”
Another silence followed.
“Tell me, something. Do you think I’m living in the past?” I asked him.
“Who ever said such a thing?”
“Maha, my relative. The one who lives upstairs with her husband.”
“Well, of course, there’s a grain of truth in it. We’re antiquated old things. Like that little rascal Aws said the other day, ‘Grandpa, you’re so ancient!’”
I laughed and told him about my dream. “I dreamed that the house had become a museum, and that I worked there as a docent, taking people on tours of the rooms.”
He chuckled heartily. “Oh, that’s a good one,” he said. “In that case, I’m going to be coming over to punch visitors’ tickets at the door! Tell me, what was the occasion for her saying that?”
“We’d been discussing sectarianism and our status as Christians, and before I knew it, we were arguing and the argument became very heated.”
“So what? A disagreement should never come between friends.”
“I know, but the disagreement was profound. She’s very pessimistic . . . she thinks there’s no hope left for us in this country. She just wants to get her degree and leave with her husband.”
“She’s right. How can you blame her? She’s in the same boat as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve left. Let them go and try somewhere else. They have the grit necessary and their lives are in front of them. Isn’t she the one who miscarried?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Poor thing—she’s heartsick. She’s a thakla, a bereaved mother.”
Exaggerating his enunciation, Saadoun went on, “Thakla, thakla, my drinking companion. Haven’t you heard what the thakla says to her son?” He spread his right hand wide open and covered his eyes with his palm. This was a signal that poetry was on his lips. His voice was sonorous as he intoned: O wound in my heart, entrails, and liver
Would that your mother had never conceived or given birth When I saw you enshrouded
Embalmed for rest until eternity’s end. . . .
He faltered at the next verse.
“And then what? . . . Hmmm . . . then . . . ?” he asked, speaking to himself. He was quiet for a moment and then repeated the second verse to jog his memory. He tapped his forehead a few times, and when he recovered what he’d been searching for, he lowered his hand. “That’s it, yes, I’ve got it. . . . ‘I knew that after you, life would not go on, / For how shall the forearm live stripped of its upper portion?’”
On hearing beautiful poetry, I exhaled a deep sigh of satisfaction. This was always a spontaneous reaction, but sometimes I’d add a word or phrase of appreciation. I loved the gems that Saadoun regaled me with and I was astounded by his memory, which had hardly rusted after all these years. As I often did, I asked who the poet was.
“Unknown,” he replied. “A mother whose heart was sear
ed in pre-Islamic times.”
“But that was about a son that had been born and had grown before her eyes, when she lost him.”
“Yes, it was. But still, my friend, it’s not easy. He was her flesh and blood! And one more thing, not everyone is an optimist like you. Tell me, where do you get all your optimism? Who’s going to save us from that band of thugs, crooks, and turban heads? It’s been almost a year, and they still haven’t formed a government—a year !”
“The turbans will unravel, in due course. But that girl, Maha
. . . she doesn’t believe there was a time when sectarianism didn’t exist.”
Saadoun sighed and said, “By the time the turbans unravel, we will be dead and buried. That is, if they do. Between Iranians, Arabs, and Americans, our country has been decimated. Honestly, it’s still a mystery to me. Has there been sectarianism all along and we simply weren’t aware of it? Is that even possible? Where was it lurking all that time? Or is it all a result of foreign interference and this hatred for us, and all those people returning from abroad who brought all their filth with them? Take Sundus, for example, isn’t she married to a Shiite? Was that a problem fifteen years ago?”
I remembered a sectarian joke that Luay had told me a week earlier.
“Listen, you’re going to like this one,” I said. “Three Iraqis, one Sunni, one Shiite, and one Christian, get hold of a magic lamp. The genie pops out and asks the Shiite guy, ‘What is your wish? Ask and it shall be done.’ ‘Get rid of all the Sunnis,’ the man answers. ‘Every last one of them!’ ‘It shall be so,’ the genie replies. Then he turns to the Sunni and asks him for his wish. The man says, ‘Kill all the Shiites so that not one of them remains alive.’ And the genie again answers, ‘It shall be so.’
When he turns to the third man and asks him the same question, the Christian says, ‘Take care of those guys’ wishes first and then come back to me.’”
We laughed until tears streamed down our face.
“What a rascal,” Saadoun said. “That was a good one!”
I changed the subject and we got to talking about Falah Hassan, our favorite player, who had just returned to Iraq to head the al-Zawraa Club and help it rebuild after years of hardship. I asked Saadoun if he had heard the news that Falah intended to run for the presidency of the Iraqi soccer federation.
“For real?” he said.
“Yeah, I saw it in the paper a couple of days ago.”
“Well, there’s no one more qualified. Let’s hope it’s true. But tell me what’s Abu Taysir got to do with sectarianism and your relative?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing more to say. Case closed. I’m sure she’ll apologize—it only happened last night.”
“Hope springs eternal.”
Saadoun dropped the subject and we talked for another hour or so.
But then he brought it up again in a backhanded sort of way when we were having lunch—delicious rice and okra stew studded with fat garlic cloves just the way I like it, along with a salad, all made by his daughter, and fresh tannour bread from the bakery nearby. We got around to discussing the government crisis and the rise of sectarian tension in the country.
“Do you know what al-Jawahiri said on the subject of sectarianism?” he asked, pouring me some water.
“No. What’d he say?”
“Ay TarTara taTarTari, Brag and boast, Go forward, go backwards,
/ Be Shiite, be Sunni, be Jewish or Christian, Kurdish or Arab.”
“Yeah, he said that a long time ago, didn’t he? Does that mean that this whole time there’s been sectarianism?”
“Of course, man, we’ve always had Sunnis and Shiites, Christians and Muslims, but not massacres and extermination, militias, and car bombs.”
“Heaven help us.”
The ditty kept drumming through my head as I walked home after I left him. “Ay TarTara taTarTari . . . .”
2
On my way back, I passed by a house whose owners were obviously neglecting the date palm in their courtyard, neither pollinating nor pruning it. I was reminded of Brisam, the date palm climber, or saaud, who’d pruned and pollinated our trees for more than thirty years. He would have been hopping mad at the sight. Brisam would wander along the streets of residential neighborhoods and ring on doorbells whenever he saw a date palm that looked neglected. He’d ring until someone answered the door and would then give them a piece of his mind, berating them for being heartless and mean. In his last years, when he was almost deaf, he went around declaiming at the top of his lungs: “All I have are God and the date palms . . . only God and the date palms!”
Sometimes, you’d hear him shouting, “This one is a Barhi!”
God loved him for sure: he took Brisam to his eternal rest one day around noon after the saaud had shimmied up a tree to pollinate it. Brisam’s arms were wrapped around the tree trunk and his body was held aloft in a brace when his heart simply came to a stop.
He died caring for a tree to which he spoke as if it were a human being. According to Jasim, who looked after our two trees after Brisam died, he had become a legend among the date palm climbers.
Jasim wasn’t much of a talker. Whenever I asked how the trees were doing, he gave me a reply that was both vague and terse,
“Thanks be to God, sir! Everything is going as it should.”
The only time he ever let loose was three years ago when he rang the bell and told me that he’d decided not to work as a saaud that season because he was going back to his village. I asked him why.
“I’m going back home,” he said. “These days, when I knock, people I’ve never seen before in my life come to the door. Some of them say they’re relatives of the owners, that they’re looking out for the house, but that’s baloney. When I ask them where the owners have gone, they don’t have an answer. Anyhow, it’s none of my business. Did you know that twelve of us have been killed? Better for me to go home and work in the orchards down south. It’s safer over there.”
People had stopped giving him keys to let himself into their courtyards and tend to the trees while they slept, or when no one was home. Now, when the women and girls of the household were there alone, they wouldn’t allow him in and would tell him to come back when one of the men was home.
“Honestly, I was better off before the Americans came . . . I could go and come as I pleased. I could sleep under a tree or in a corner anywhere and no one bothered me. Now I have to get a room in a hostel or else get killed. And the massive concrete blast walls are suffocating us. I swear to God, even the date palms are Sunni and Shiite now. I have to leave my bicycle at the checkpoint, I can’t take it in with me—that was before it got stolen, of course. The dates are wilted and dying of thirst. Do you know how many trees have been cut and burned so that the Americans can see the snipers and the snipers can see them? That is what it has come to. Ya haram, it’s such a shame.”
I was pained by his words, but not surprised—I’d always maintained that the date palm was the weathervane for human affairs. The fortunes of the two were inextricably linked. What befell humans was a reflection of the tree’s condition, and war didn’t differentiate between the heads of men and the crowns of the tree: it decapitated them both.
In that they are created male and female, humans resemble palm trees. Only after it is pollinated by her male counterpart does the female tree become fertile and hang heavy with fruit that is clustered in large and heavy bunches. Like an infant, a palm sapling must be protected from the cold and the rain in order for it to grow strong.
I wondered if the owners of the house I had just passed had fled.
Or perhaps the current occupants were just indifferent to the trees. Was there such a thing as an Iraqi who didn’t love the date palm? I was certain that those who had no love for the date palm had no love for life or their fellow human beings.
From a distance, the fronds of the two date palms towering above our garden seemed to me to be protecting the house—and I, too, was guarding it along
with all the memories it contained. The house was more than a mere shelter, it was like a palm tree, which isn’t a mere tree but a living being unto itself, joined with the earth beneath it, the sky above it, and the air around it which it breathed. So, too, the house, which wasn’t merely a combination of bricks, mortar, and paint, but the assemblage of an entire lifetime.
“It would be best to sell the house and leave,” Amal had said through her tears, when she called after Hinna died. “Things are going to go from bad to worse. Why stay there on your own? You can come here or go and live with Salima in Sweden. Please Youssef, I beg you to leave.”
I responded the way I always had.
“I’m not leaving,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere at my age—
I’m too old for such humiliation.”
Many a real estate broker had been knocking on my door lately, to ask if I was thinking of selling. And my answer was always no.
Our neighborhood was considered one of the safer and calmer areas in the city and prices were going up. A few upscale restaurants had opened and the nouveaux riches had begun buying up old houses that they then tore down and replaced with ostentatious mansions.
One evening, as we were watching television, Luay asked me if I’d ever considered leaving.
“At my age? Better suffer here than experience the humiliations of being a refugee. If I were young, I would consider it. It’s different for you and Maha—your lives are ahead of you, you can go and start over in a new place. I’m not going anywhere. I built this house, and I’ve lived in it for more than half a century.
How could I leave it?”
“Have you ever had the opportunity?”
“I did once or twice. I got an offer from Abu Dhabi in the late seventies, and another one from Dubai in 1989. I turned them both down.”
