The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  I had heard much about him, even before I moved from California to Cambridge four years earlier. When I arrived, as soon as people heard I was from Iraq and interested in Arabic literature, many of them, Arabs and Americans, kept saying I had to meet him and visit his famous library. On my way there I realized he would be the friend I missed most when I left. I used to meet him about once a month, but our meetings would be long. He was my father’s age but his mind was still lively. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Arabic literature and was passionate about culture and music. He had completed a doctorate in engineering decades ago, but he was mad about Arabic literature. He studied it and completed another doctorate, writing a dissertation on al-Shidyaq. He taught Arabic at Harvard for many years and had assumed he would stay there, but his contract wasn’t renewed because of departmental conflicts. Someone had plotted against him. He moved on to teach at the University of Massachusetts. I thought I was a veteran because I had spent a whole decade in the U.S., but he had come at the end of the 1950s, so he was a real old-timer. When I visited and talked with him, I felt I was visiting Iraq. The conversation always led us back to Iraq, its sufferings, its pleasures, and its songs. We delighted in the Baghdadi dialect and the expressions that we missed. He loved collecting books, manuscripts, and old pictures. After his divorce, which might have been caused by his obsession with books, his house was transformed into a vast library with more than twenty thousand books. It was in effect a guesthouse open to any Arab in the city who was interested in culture and literature. He hosted a monthly soiree there, with readings from Arabic novels, and I attended several times. Although he was in his sixties, his spirit was still youthful, and he remained on the far left politically, as he had been as a student activist in the radical 1960s. You would see him in all the demonstrations, seminars, and other gatherings in the city. He refused to let us call him “doctor” and preferred that we call him just Ali Hadi. But I liked to call him “professor” or “sir.”

  He was as cheerful as usual when he opened the door. We hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. “Ah, here comes the returnee,” he said with a smile; “it’s good to see you safe.”

  “Returnee to Iraq or to America?” I asked.

  “As you like,” he said with a laugh. “Sit down while I get you a cup of tea.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  We walked to the kitchen and he asked the first question: “So tell me, what took you to Baghdad? And without any warning? Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t call you because I thought you were busy finishing your dissertation.”

  “Some artists making a documentary got in touch with me from San Francisco. Nice people. They were looking for someone to go with them who knew the city and could translate. So I went.”

  “Okay, and what did you make of the situation?”

  “Chaos and confusion. It’s all fucked up.”

  “Of course. It was expected.”

  I noticed there was a picture hanging on the kitchen wall that hadn’t been there in the past, with a river and some Ottoman writing in it. I stood in front of it and asked him about it. Picking up the teapot and putting it next to the teacups and the sugar bowl on the tray, he said, “Yes, it’s new. It’s a picture of the Tigris flooding in Baghdad in the fifteenth century. It’s a laser-printed color copy, not an original. The original is in the British Library. I asked one of my students to bring it for me.” I tried to help him carry the tea tray but he refused.

  We headed to the large study and sat on chairs at the table where he read and wrote. He put the tray on an arabesque-style side table.

  I told him about the visit, about my conflicted and odd feelings, about how pale and shabby Baghdad was, and the chaos and the negligence and the sight of soldiers in helmets and barbed wire and tanks in Abu Nuwas Street. He was shaking his head and saying “alas” whenever I stopped to drink from my teacup. He had hated Saddam and the Ba‘thists for decades, but he was opposed to the invasion. We had gone together to the massive demonstrations in Boston before the war. We had watched the news in his study throughout the invasion. We watched stunned at the moment when the statue came down in Firdaws Square, and we remarked how strange were the feelings in play at that moment. Both of us had dreamed of the fall of the regime, but not through military occupation.

  “The Americans are jerks and they’re going to destroy the country. But I couldn’t go. I wouldn’t be able to take it.”

  “When was the last time you went?” I asked.

  “I went in 1985 after my mother died. So how are your relatives there?”

  “They’re fine. None of them have been hurt.”

  “You must write something about your visit.”

  “I’m trying to but I haven’t been able to. My mind isn’t clear. But I do have some news for you.”

  “Good news?”

  “I landed a job.”

  “Congratulations. Where?”

  “At Dartmouth.”

  “That’s great. But it’s rather isolated. I visited the place once, long ago. There was nothing there but the college and three streets and just a few stores.”

  “Now it’s several times bigger. Now there are five and half streets.”

  We laughed. “But what can I do? I want to pay off my debts,” I added.

  “No, that’s good. What kind of courses will you teach? Language or literature?”

  “Three quarters language and a quarter literature,” I said.

  “Excellent. Besides, the best place to finish your dissertation is somewhere isolated, with no social life and nothing to distract you.”

  “And no one at all!”

  “Why? Where’s your girlfriend?”

  “She has a one-year grant in Bolivia to do some fieldwork.”

  “So you’ll be ‘playing with your tail’?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll even have time to play with any body parts. Mine or other people’s.”

  “I think you will.”

  We laughed.

  “You can spend your time with Abu Nuwas in the cold. When are you going?”

  “Tomorrow morning they’re coming to take my stuff and then I’ll go.”

  “Good luck. You deserve it. But don’t cut yourself off and forget us. Come and visit every now and then.”

  “For sure,” I said.

  I gave him the yellow envelope in which I’d put his present. “What’s this?” he asked. “A present for you. Something simple,” I said. I hadn’t sealed the envelope so he opened it and took out the two booklets I had bought for him—An Introduction to Iraqi Folklore by Abdilhamid al-Alwachi and Nouri al-Rawi (Baghdad, 1962) and On Mudhayyal Popular Poetry by Hashim Mohammed al-Rajab (Baghdad, 1964). When he saw how old they were, he put one of them gently on the table and leafed through it. “I’ve never seen them before. A very nice gift. Where did you find them?”

  “I went to al-Mutanabbi Street on my last day and found an excellent collection of books with someone there.” I was about to tell him about Wadood and his project and the first chapter of the manuscript I had brought with me from Baghdad, but I didn’t do so. I don’t know why. Usually I told him everything. I thought about this later. Maybe I wanted to keep Wadood strictly for myself. Ali Hadi had already yawned several times and he looked sleepy. When I looked at the clock on the wall above the bookshelves it was after midnight. I had to wake up early, clean my room, throw some bags in the trash, wash my clothes, and put them in the suitcase before the movers arrived.

  We said goodbye. He told me I could sleep at his place when I visited the city. He repeated his advice to me: “Finish your dissertation so you can relax a bit.”

  Veterinary Science, French Without a Teacher, Hamlet translated by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The Collected Works of al-Rusafi. An old copy of the third volume of The Collected Works of al-Jawahiri caught my attention. It had Al-Rabita Printing and Publishing Company, 1953 on the cover in small print. I bent down to pick it up off the ground. The light green c
over was torn at one corner and the pages were yellowed. I turned the pages carefully. His poem “Whatever You Want” was the first in the collection. Whatever you want, do it / A chance not to be missed / A chance for you to rule / To bring people down or raise them on high. The poem was from 1952, but as if it were written about what is happening today.

  He was in his late thirties, of medium height, with black hair and a light beard peppered with a few gray hairs. He was wearing a beige shirt, faded jeans, and flipflops, sitting on the pavement on a white plastic chair and reading al-Zaman newspaper. I guessed he was the stall owner and I asked him the price of the book. He put the newspaper down in his lap, gave me a strange look from his honey-colored eyes, and asked me to show him the cover. I did so. “Forty thousand,” he said. “Okay, I’ll take it,” I said.

  I didn’t want to haggle about the price because the book was worth much more. I carried on looking through the books and found selections from Imru al-Qays published in Beirut in 1947. I didn’t ask the price. I added the book to al-Jawahiri. I noticed that he was throwing lengthy glances at me as he browsed through the newspaper. In a tone that had hostile undertones, he suddenly said, “You’re clearly one of those who’ve come from abroad. When did you leave?”

  “In 1993,” I said.

  “Welcome back,” he said sarcastically, adding, “So where do you live?”

  “In America.”

  “Wow, lucky you,” he said, shaking his head in scorn.

  “Look, I haven’t come to govern you and I’m not being paid by anyone. I came with a group to make a documentary film about the situation and the people. No more and no less.”

  My sharp response took him by surprise and he backed off. “Sorry, that’s not what I meant. But you know we’ve been seeing some strange characters.”

  He showed me what he was reading in the newspaper, saying, “Like these people. Half of them lived abroad for twenty or thirty years and after all that now they come to rule over us.”

  “I’m with you, my friend, but I have nothing to do with them.”

  “So that means you’re a film director?”

  “No, I’m an academic, but I’ve come as a translator.”

  “So which satellite channel is your group from?”

  “No, not a satellite channel. They’re independent.”

  “I’m honored. And what’s your good name?”

  “Nameer.”

  “Doctor Nameer.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Welcome, Mr. Nameer. I’m Wadood, and if you’d like to see, in the warehouse I have plenty of poetry collections and the rest of the series of al-Jawahiri’s works.”

  “Thanks, I’d be delighted. Where’s the warehouse? Is it far?”

  “No, it’s here, across the street.”

  He rose from his chair and asked his neighbor to watch his books till he came back, then he beckoned me to follow him. We crossed the street and he put his hand in his pants pocket and took out a bunch of keys. We stood in front of an old wooden door. He opened it and went into a dark entrance that led to a staircase. I thought we were going to go up the stairs, but he headed right and stood in front of another wooden door painted green. There was a padlock, too, that he unlocked before putting another key in the keyhole of the door and opening it. He went inside, pulled up a white plastic chair like the one he had been sitting on in the street, and invited me to come in and sit down. He pulled a cord hanging from a lamp in the ceiling, but the light didn’t come on. He pulled it again and said, “There you are, there’s no electricity.” “No problem,” I said.

  The place was dark, and the only glimmer of light came through a window to the right that was covered by a curtain that seemed to have once been dark blue but was now faded by the sun. He drew the curtain back and the fierce Baghdad sun flooded in, lighting up specks of dust that were floating upward. The walls were covered in shelves crammed with books all the way to the ceiling, with piles of newspapers lying here and there on the floor. There was a small bed with a simple mattress and some crumpled sheets in the right-hand corner of the room. Next to it stood a small table with a small radio and the remains of a candle on a plate. To the left of the bed stood a closet of medium height with newspapers piled on top of it, and next to that a half-open door that led to what looked like a bathroom.

  Wadood interrupted my inspection of the room to say that he sometimes slept here when it was dangerous and hard to get home after sunset. He moved some newspapers and books from a chair, put them on the floor, and stood on them to reach the top shelves.

  “This is all al-Jawahiri and Iraqi poetry here,” he said. “I have piles of it.”

  After brushing the dust off them he passed me a set of books that seemed to be the rest of al-Jawahiri’s complete works. I went to take them. “Do you like al-Bayyati?” he asked.

  “What do you have of his?”

  “I have Smashed Jugs.”

  I told him I loved poetry but I was also looking for rare books, and first or early editions.

  “These here are all old or first editions,” he said. He passed me Poem K by Tawfiq Sayigh, the collected works of Abdulamir al-Husayri, and some other books. I noticed that one of the lower shelves was full of files arranged quite carefully, with papers and newspaper clippings protruding from the edges. There was a collection of medium-sized notebooks interleaved with pieces of paper of various sizes. I was curious and I asked him about them.

  “Those are private papers. A sort of project,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “A documentation project.”

  “Research?”

  “No, a different kind of text. Not traditional.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning everything. History, but circular history.”

  He pulled out one of the files and started leafing through the contents: notes in his own handwriting on small pieces and slips of paper. Cuttings from newspapers.

  “This is the project of a lifetime, an archive of the losses from war and destruction. But not soldiers or equipment. The losses that are never mentioned or seen. Not just people. Animals and plants and inanimate things and anything that can be destroyed. Minute by minute. This is the file for the first minute.”

  “You mean this last war?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And what are the sources you rely on?”

  I noticed a sparkle in his eyes as he spoke about his project.

  “Everything. News. Oral history. Personal observation. Imagination.”

  “But that’s a massive project that calls for a whole institution.”

  “Oh man, you think we still have institutions here? I can do it myself.”

  “And what’s the title?”

  “Fihris.”

  “Fihrist?”

  “No, Fihris, a catalog of every minute, of everything that died in that minute.”

  “That’s a wonderful idea. So have you published any of it?”

  “No. I’m not interested in being published,” he said rather irritably.

  “Why not? It’s an outstanding idea. So that parts of it can be translated into English. I’d be willing to translate it.”

  “Do you work as a translator?

  “I translate poetry and prose into English.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Suddenly he didn’t seem to want to discuss the subject. “Sorry but I have to get back to the books and earn my daily bread.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He put all the books in a large bag and I gave him the money. I wrote my new address in New Hampshire and my email address and asked him to send me a message if he needed any help and if he changed his mind about being published or translated. He looked at the piece of paper, folded it up, and put it in his shirt pocket, saying, “Thanks a lot.” “Where are you staying?” he asked me. “At the Waha Hotel in Karrada,” I said. We shook hands and I resumed my stroll.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE KASHAN

 
The vast majority of Kashans are born in the city of Kashan, of course. But the Kashan I’m talking about here is a Baghdad Kashan in body and in spirit. She was born in the women’s prison in Baghdad in the late 1940s. Her birth wasn’t difficult but it was slow. For months her mother knelt in front of her every morning with the patience of someone who has taken a vow of endless prayer. With tired hands she gradually coaxed her into this world. She didn’t have a midwife to help her, nor a nurse or a doctor. For months she stopped only for a short rest at noon, when she would go off to have a simple meal, then come back and work on the body of her daughter until the guard told her to stop, a little after sunset. Then she would touch the face of her daughter affectionately as if she were saying goodnight, before she and the other women working in the room went back to their cells. Some of the mothers would sing softly or quarrel with one another when the guard wasn’t around. But this mother worked in stony silence most of the time. A smile rarely found its way to her face. In the first few weeks Kashan was very small and couldn’t see or understand anything. She couldn’t make out the features of her mother’s face until the features of her own face emerged. Her features were no different from those of thousands of Kashans, because they were all heirs to a limited number of designs, with variations that had been in circulation since the sixteenth century. Her mother’s mouth was as small as a cherry, and her eyes were deep blue under bushy eyebrows. Her complexion was the color of wheat, and her black hair was hidden under a turquoise headscarf that framed her sad face. On her right cheek a knife had left a deep scar—the same knife that she had picked up off the ground after the attack and planted in the chest of the man who had tormented her for years. That silenced him forever. But she paid a high price for his silence, and she wasn’t free for long, less than four hours.