by Greg Baxter
Schmetterling was going to end his lecture there, but he could see, I suppose, that I did not understand his last statement, so he continued. It is extremely powerful, he said. Fill a room with fifty different instruments, and have them all play a single melody. The only instrument you will hear, or at least the one you hear first, and loudest, if it is played correctly, is the violin. By the time Schmetterling said that, the room was completely empty. He gave me the sheet music and said I could keep it. Then he said, Tell me, really, what you are doing here. I said, I have told you. No, he said, tell me the truth. I felt some psychic wall crack under the weight of Schmetterling’s strange, calm generosity, and I confessed: that I had assigned death from a distance, co-ordinated land and air attacks, missile strikes, and that I had, for a reason that is still beyond explanation but was, until then, the most necessary thing I ever did in my life, returned to Iraq alone. Had I intended to make restitution? Had I gone merely for money? Had I gone to get myself killed? Or was Iraq the only place in the world where I could find some equilibrium – where the world hated me as much as I hated it and myself, where I could live in the safety of never-ending hatred? It did not matter, I told Schmetterling, because I had only done harm. I left, finally, after a long stint of work with the Iraqi police. I was helping solve a string of kidnappings and murders of policemen and translators working with the US Army. For this, I had essentially reprised my role as a Naval officer in Baghdad, except I was a one-man team. I did most of the work in my hotel room. I woke, made some coffee, went online, checked email, checked the intel I was getting – the Army was providing a lot of it – checked surveillance activity, and prepared reports for the Army and police. These were long days. They were so long I had to phase out all the other work I was doing, all the reconstruction and development consulting. There was no more rescuing priceless artefacts looted from museums. From time to time, I left the Green Zone to meet with police officials in places where abductions were heavy, and on occasion I went out to Forward Operating Posts to give briefings about progress on our cases. The insurgents were abducting these men and torturing them to death. We knew this because we found the bodies. The interrogations, based on the conditions of the bodies found, often took a very long time. They squeezed the men’s heads in vice grips until their skulls broke. They broke men’s backs. They sliced off limbs and genitals. They poured acid all over faces. They – and this was true – tied them down, made small lacerations all over their naked bodies, and had housecats chew on them. So the men I worked with – the forces I helped co-ordinate – were eager to reduce the abductions for the sake of getting new recruits. The US Army was keen to identify and halt the leaks that were leading to the security lapses that allowed these men to be abducted – the identities of translators, for instance, were supposed to be kept secret. The Iraqi police said the same thing – that they wanted to reduce abductions, identify leaks, and boost the morale of recruits – and perhaps they meant it, but in reality the only deterrence measure they could carry out with any efficiency was to retaliate with torture nearly as extreme as the insurgents’. One morning, at a police station in south-eastern Baghdad, I was briefing a chief inspector and a US Army lieutenant colonel when there was suddenly a bit of panic. A man came in and spoke to the chief inspector, and the chief inspector immediately excused himself, put all of his papers into a case, and hurried out the door. The lieutenant colonel, now freed of his obligation to be respectful to everyone in front of the Iraqi chief inspector, responded with a fuck off when I asked what he thought that was all about. And then I was all alone in the blank little room, except for a little table with some orange soda cans on it, and a platter of chocolate bars. I got my things and left, and went out to the main room where all the desks were, and where small oscillating fans blew air around slowly, and sat down across from the only man still there – there were, because of rampant attacks on police stations, often very few men inside them – an inspector who was leaning back in his chair and smoking. Rather than rearrange my lift back to the Green Zone at great expense to myself, I just sat down near him, lit a cigarette, and asked how things were going. Fine, he said. What was all that about? I said. He leaned forward, and I leaned forward too. He said they’d got a high-value target and were taking him for questioning. I asked why the questioning didn’t take place here. I knew the answer. Perhaps I asked the question because I wanted to pretend to him or to myself that I did not know the answer. The inspector smiled and leaned back again. He said, cryptically, and in an English so broken and so mispronounced that I had to rephrase his words in my mind as he spoke, or rather speak for him: The way to win a war is to convince your enemy you have the right to kill him. The enemy will fight forever, to the very last man, if he believes his enemy has no right to kill him. When our men, he said, are abducted and tortured, what are they asked? Nothing. It’s punishment for working with collaborators. If they want secret information about the Iraqi police, he said, they can walk up to the first policeman they see, give him a little bit of money, and ask him a question. If they want an Iraqi policeman to assassinate somebody, or let them drive a bomb into a crowded square, easy, they just have to pay him. That was the inspector’s answer to the question of why the man was not being questioned in the station. Of course I knew that nobody of any importance was ever questioned in a police station. I checked the time. I had a while still. I leaned forward again and, out of real curiosity, not in an attempt to make a moral accusation, asked, What’s it like, getting someone to recognize that right? The man leaned forward and said something like, I suspect you know far better than I. Perhaps he said another sentence entirely. Perhaps he said it was rewarding. The man leaned back and said nothing more, and I decided it was worth the expense to get my lift back to the Green Zone rearranged.
I looked up at Schmetterling. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been talking, but the room was darker and I felt guilty about keeping him there. I also felt that, having heard what I had to say, he had good reason to want to get away from me. Schmetterling wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at his own crossed knees. And when I finished speaking he patted my shoulder, still looking down, and I was thinking of the Iraqi curator who had wept over an artefact and my own desire to do something to reassure him that I believed in his right to weep over a thing, though there, in front of Schmetterling, I felt no need to weep over the man they’d taken that day. We stood, Schmetterling and I, and walked out, and he said goodbye to the girl who was sitting in a booth beside the entrance, and who would presumably be locking up. Schmetterling and I walked together toward the underground. It was still sleeting, but Schmetterling, not surprisingly, had a gigantic umbrella. We made small talk for a little while. The sidewalks were slippery, and Schmetterling wore leather-soled shoes that required an absolutely snail-like pace. But, he said, picking up the previous conversation without any warning, you may be surprised to hear that the violin was not, originally, a Western idea. Yes? I said. Indeed, said Schmetterling. Well, perhaps the violin itself – what we today know as the violin – was first produced in Italy, in Cremona, in 1555, probably by Andrea Amati, though it is also possible that Gasparo da Salo invented it. The most beautiful and arguably most famous violin ever constructed, by da Salo in 1574, was made for Archduke Ferdinand II. This Archduke Ferdinand, said Schmetterling, was an interesting character, because he collected and adored art, but he also led one of the most brutal campaigns against the Turks, a campaign that took place not too far from here, in 1556. Which is ironic only insofar as the instrument he would cherish among his most prized possessions had come from that direction. Schmetterling saw that I finally understood what he was talking about, and paused for a moment to let the recognition soak in. You see, he said, the idea of a small, stringed instrument that could be played with a bow came to Europe first via the pear-shaped Byzantine lyra, and secondly via the boat-shaped rebec, which the Moors brought to the Iberian peninsula in the eleventh century, and which, in some models, could be pla
yed while held under the chin. The rebec’s predecessor was the rabab, a Medieval Arab two- and three-stringed instrument from the ninth century, which is likely the predecessor to the Byzantine lyra as well, and therefore the single precursor to the violin. And all this interests me, said Schmetterling, especially this evening, because the Chaconne, which I believe to be the greatest piece of music ever composed, argues for a Western ideal, and justifies, in its own way, Western dominance of science and art and light and combustion and music and trade, and the embryo of the instrument used to argue this – the only instrument, ironically, capable of making this argument – emerged a very long time ago in a most decidedly un-Western place, had a one-octave range, and never dreamed of what it might become. We arrived at the underground station and discovered that we were going to be travelling in opposite directions, so we shook hands and he suggested I return to the museum in daylight, and try to find a good recording of the Chaconne to listen to, and perhaps even buy a book on it or Bach or music of the Baroque period. There was, conveniently, a shop in the museum where I could pick one up.
The taxi arrives at my apartment, and I grab my things and pay the driver. I have already forgotten which key is for which door, and my hands are shaking from the cold. Saskia is bouncing up and down with her arms crossed, saying, I think it’s that one, I think it’s the other one, it must be the last one. The door opens and we head inside. The corridor is cool. We head up the steps and arrive at my door. So, she says, this is your new apartment. I say, Pretty cool. I open the door and we walk in. I drop my bags by the door and immediately realize that if we stay longer than five minutes, we’re not leaving. I say, Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible and get something to eat. She must be thinking the same thing, because she says, Sounds good. I change shirts and wash my face and brush my teeth, while Saskia, without taking off her coat or shoes, paces the big hallway. We leave the apartment. The night sky is green and pink, and it pours forth heavy soft snowflakes. There’s a bus stop on the road with the cemetery, so we walk to it and wait. The bus arrives after about five minutes, and it’s empty, but the floor of it is covered in water that feet have carried in as ice and snow. Those feet have also tracked in sand and grit. The inside of the bus is exceptionally cold, because the heaters are not on, or are broken, so we sit close together in our coats and gloves and scarves and hats, and we can even see our breath, and Saskia’s teeth are chattering.
The journey from my apartment to the centre is nothing, not even ten minutes, and just a few streets past the ring road Saskia presses the button to stop and says she has remembered something I have to see. She adds, Another thing you have to see. The bus stops and we alight. The air outside seems strangely warmer than the air inside the bus. It is a quiet street, but shimmering in red and green and crystal-white light from enormous Christmas bells that hang everywhere. From another street, music plays. The bus drives away, through the slop of snow and grit and ice. And we walk another direction, through the same terrain. Saskia says, You must pass through this place. What place? I ask. Come on, she says. The road the bus has taken without us goes jaggedly upward, and we walk along the base of a steep and tall rock face that had once been a natural part of the city’s old wall. A narrow switchback stairway has been carved imperfectly out of the stone. Saskia says that on a cold night a long time ago a young and unknown poet, ascending this stairway, saw a woman with large eyes and white cheeks descending. Until that moment, he despised everything he knew, all the people he had met in his short life, and longed for the sack of the city and its consumption by fire. But at that moment, said Saskia, he decided that what he had felt all along was an extreme form of unworthiness, rooted in sexual desire and lack of fulfilment. The woman passed him, but not before she glanced at him with eyes so blue they were silver, then she disappeared down the steps, and walked, quietly, along the frozen canal circling the city wall. He immediately went home, composing, in his head, as he hurried through the city, a poem about the experience, and when he got home he told his flatmate what had happened. The flatmate went to every door in the building and demanded silence. When the flatmate returned, the poet was in his room, working. The next morning, the flatmate awoke to a knock on the door. It was all the tenants in the building, who demanded to hear the poem that would reignite love in their hearts. The flatmate then discovered the poet had slit his own throat in the night. He was lying in bed, covered in blood, and the blood had saturated his sheets and formed a large puddle on the floor. He left a note in which he explained that he had discovered, in the hallucination of three or four a.m., that his unworthiness was perfect, and any accomplishment or happiness would corrupt the perfection, that he must die a virgin that very night, before the sun rose. As for the poem, according to the note, he composed it and ate it. It was twenty-four lines long. He was seventeen.
Is that true? I ask. Saskia’s response is: What matters is that this stairway became, for our poets, the centre of poetic purity on earth. And no poet from here, major or minor, becomes a citizen until he or she has composed a poem about this stairway. Even the anarchists and Symbolists wrote poems about it, all twenty-four lines long. To be a citizen is the highest ambition of the poet. Citizen, she says, and I cannot remember if I told her what the historian said and this entire account is a response to that, or if it is just a coincidence. We reach a landing where the stone wall is covered in graffiti, tiny and intricate scribbles. Here, says Saskia, is hallowed ground for poets. It’s where the amateurs come to praise the young poet. The purpose, she says, is to subordinate oneself, to declare your inconsequence to the whole world.
We continue upward. Snow covers every step thickly, and our feet make those great soft noises that feet do in deep fresh snow. No one has come this way for hours, at least, though I can hear a lot of noise from above. It is the sound of oblivious gaiety, shouting and singing and mechanized bell noises. A Christmas market? I ask. The best, says Saskia. We arrive at the top. The market is situated between two vast museums that face each other. There are bright amusement rides, a merry-go-round and a flashing Ferris wheel. Let’s go through it, says Saskia. There is a children’s choir singing on a large stage and, in a beer tent, about fifty men in Santa Claus suits, looking inappropriately sober. Everywhere else, the square is festive. People are drinking hot wine and stuffing their faces with sausages and pastries covered in icing sugar. Saskia suggests we scrap our plan to have a nice dinner and eat something in the market. That sounds to me like the best possible idea. The prospect of sitting down somewhere dark and quiet and being forced into an intimate conversation is completely unattractive, especially since I know that kind of conversation would lead to the question of what I plan to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so on. The children’s choir is really awful. But they are having fun, and lots of people have circled around to watch them sing. And when they get any melody halfway right, the crowd cheers. I buy a small box of overpriced, gourmet green tea, throw the box away, and stuff the bags into the inside pocket of my coat. Green tea seems like a good first grocery item for the apartment. Something I can drink non-stop, unlike coffee. There are a lot of things here that I suddenly feel I’d like to buy, but I don’t want to have to carry a bag around for the rest of the night. For our dinner, we find a hut that serves hot sausages sliced on paper plates, with sharp mustard and brown bread, and we eat while standing in the cold. Saskia gets a drink after that, and I get a second plate of food, and she holds her mug in one hand and covers it with the other, to protect it from the snow. The crowd flows past us, and no matter where we move, we keep getting jostled. Some people are polite about it. Others are rude. In an attempt to find a comfortable and calm spot to stand in, we drift until we find ourselves standing beside a metal barrier between the market area and a cluttered parking lot of caravans and cigarette-smoking cooks and vendors. Beneath our feet are crushed and crumpled plates that have fallen out of a nearby, overfilled bin. People, seeing there is no more room in t
he bin, throw their trash at our feet. I pull the metal barrier back and walk through. Where are you going? she asks. I don’t know, I say, but I don’t want mustard on my new coat. She comes through with me and I close the barrier behind us. There is a nice emptiness and calm back there, but without the crowds it seems a degree or two colder.
