The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  The old Iranian foreman who, along with his colleagues, had been brought from Iran to supervise the training of the women, and who had himself chosen her after giving her a test, would wander around every day inspecting the progress of the work, stand in front of each Kashan and watch or make observations. She was delighted when he praised her several times, muttering in Persian, “Bah bah, very good,” and “Very nice, madam.” After a few months Kashan had grown in stature until she was almost the height of her mother, who no longer sat cross-legged or bent over, but sat on a chair. Pride began to fill her heart when she saw the intricate patterns and the fringes of her firstborn Kashan coming toward completion and the colored lines converging. The lines met, diverged, and skirted the geometrical shapes arranged regularly within the rectangular frame. When the last knot of Kashan was in place, her mother stood up, amazed at what her hands had made. She ran her hands over the surface of the carpet, kissed it at several spots, and smelled it as her mother had smelled her when she kissed her, because she knew that she would never see her again.

  The next day two men folded it up, tied it in several places with cord, picked it up, and put it in a storeroom in the prison until other ones were ready. They stuck a pin in it to hold in place a piece of paper with “Kashan/1/1949” written on it. The next day the mother started work on another Kashan that she would also have to abandon as soon as it was finished.

  The new Kashan lay slumped in the darkness of the storeroom for a month while they put others like it nearby. When there were ten of them, men loaded them into a van that took them to a carpet store in the Danyal market. It spent two months there until it won the admiration of a woman who, along with her husband, was looking for something to decorate their new home. The merchant lied about Kashan’s provenance; he didn’t say it was born in Baghdad but insisted it was imported from Iran. The woman added two other ones and our Kashan ended up in the reception room, where it stayed for many years without moving, except at the start of every summer, when the carpet beaters came and picked it up with the other ones to beat the dust out of them. Then they rolled them up, tied them up with pieces of cloth to put them behind the furniture or in another room to wait for the weather to turn cold again. But the first time the carpet beaters came, it was frightened and thought they were getting rid of it and it would languish in darkness for eternity. But it got used to this in subsequent years and began to enjoy its long slumber. It slept and dreamed of the sheep that had given it their fleeces. It saw the sheep grazing on distant foothills corralled by a shepherd under a balmy sky and a sun blocked from time to time by clouds driven gently by the wind. Kashan also dreamed of its mother’s face and eyes.

  The lady of the house would later decide to move Kashan to the living room. Her four children would play on it and imagine that the lines that ran across the design were streets for their tiny cars. They would see the arches and the small circles as traffic circles where the cars could turn and passersby could sit. They would drop crumbs of food and spill drops of tea mixed with milk and other drinks on its surface. Even drops of blood sometimes. The lady would get angry and tell them off whenever they did that. They would lie on Kashan, put cushions under their heads so that they could be close to the television when they were watching cartoons or a long film. They would grow up and get married, move to new houses and have their own children. But they would still visit the family home with their children on special occasions and holidays.

  Some of its colors would fade and slight wrinkles would appear on its surface, but Kashan would retain its splendor. From time to time the lady of the house, who lived into her seventies, would remember the day she bought it. As they sat alone together in front of the television, she would ask her husband if he too remembered. A war would come and then another, and as usual she would worry about her children and her grandchildren and ask them to gather in the big family home to allay her fears for them on the first night of war. Some of her grandchildren slept on the bedding she asked them to put on Kashan, and then Kashan suffocated, not from the weight of the children sleeping on top, because they were lighter than birds, but from the rubble when the house collapsed on them and silenced them forever. Kashan imagined it could see its mother’s face, weeping for it and for the children.

  There wasn’t enough space for me in the movers’ truck with the driver and the two men who were helping him. So I took the bus from South Station in Boston to Dartmouth. After the bus driver collected our tickets, he gave out small bottles of water, bags of nuts, and headphones to the passengers. Then he took his seat and, as soon as the bus moved, took the microphone and told us with enthusiasm that the trip included a movie we could watch on the small screens that were hanging down at intervals of every five rows. Those who wanted to watch should use the headphones, which they should hand in at the end of the journey. I was surprised that although he repeated this performance several times a day, he did not appear to be bored and managed to maintain his enthusiasm, or pretend to. I couldn’t remember the movie I had seen the first time I had taken the bus to Dartmouth to give a talk on Abu Nuwas and to interview for the job. It was a silly commercial movie and I had been busy going over my talk and cutting it back so that it wouldn’t be longer than forty-five minutes, as they had asked. It was a small bus company with only one line, and its budget rarely allowed it to buy the rights to show new or high-quality movies. On the way back after the interview the movie was All the Pretty Horses. I watched it intermittently because I was tired, but Penélope Cruz’s voice and her distinctive accent in English intrigued me and woke me up from my sporadic sleep.

  Half an hour out of Boston the landscape gradually started to change. The farther north we went the greener it became. There were the lovely farms and little lakes that make New Hampshire one of the most beautiful states in summer and fall. But the winter was long and cold there, as a British professor who taught Chinese in the department whispered in my ear. “You’ll have to be ready for the coldest winter you’ve ever seen. I’ve been here for seven years and I still haven’t got used to it.” I asked him what drove the European settlers to come to the far reaches of the cold north in the seventeenth century. And how did they endure the winter? Or rather, why didn’t they move somewhere warmer after their first winter? He told me that the man who founded the college was a Protestant cleric who wanted to train Native Americans to become missionaries. But the number of Native Americans willing to embrace the white man’s faith was very small at that time, so the college instead attracted the children of the rich and influential. I liked this grumpy British man because he was candid with me, and he was one of the most enthusiastic and liveliest people at the lecture. He spoke about the positive aspects of his work there and what the college had to offer, but he didn’t hesitate to be critical. The others, on the other hand, didn’t mention anything negative. “There’s no social life except for students,” he said. “Married people socialize with other married people and their families.” “What about you?” I asked him at the time. “Are you married?” “No,” he said, “but my partner works in New York and we spend most weekends together there.” When he said “partner,” I thought he could be gay. “What about you?” he asked. “My girlfriend’s abroad,” I said. I asked him about the students. He said they were very smart. The vast majority of them came from good private schools, and even those who came on scholarships were good students. Then he added, “But they’re conservative. Before I taught here I naïvely thought that most young people were bound to have leftist inclinations, and then affluence and the pressures of bourgeois life gradually induce them to abandon their noble objectives and their dreams of changing the world, so they compromise and become conservative. But many of my students are eighteen years old and they’re right-wing conservatives, like their fathers and grandfathers before them. Since you teach things related to the Middle East and the chaos there, you’ll have to be careful.”

  The bus stopped in front of the Hanover Inn, the only hote
l, a small one owned by the college. I had spent the night in the same hotel and we had had dinner there after my lecture and the interviews. It was on one side of the aptly named Green at the center of the college—a vast lawn surrounded by venerable elm trees and the old buildings that formed the nucleus of the college in the early years, before other buildings were added, most notably the red-brick Baker Library with its tall white tower.

  I asked a woman who was getting off the bus where the housing office might be and she showed me the way. I signed some documents and was given the key to the apartment I had chosen from their website after looking at the pictures. I walked to the building and opened the apartment door. It was small, smaller than in the pictures, but it would do. There was one window in the living room and one in the bedroom, looking out onto the parking lot. I had asked the movers to get in touch with me when they were half an hour away. I called them to check and they said there was heavy traffic on Route 89 because of an accident, and they would arrive within forty-five minutes.

  I closed the door and went along the main street to the White Horse café and was pleased to find that it was close to my apartment. I remembered the old saying “As long as there’s coffee and tobacco, nothing else matters,” although I don’t smoke and in my case it should be “As long as there’s coffee and chocolate, nothing else matters.” I was addicted to chocolate and other sweet things. When I had visited the town for the interview two months earlier, I had stopped at the White Horse and drunk a double espresso to be ready for the lecture. I remembered that the selection of cakes and pastries that they had was as good as one would find in a big city. When I asked the British man that evening, he said the café owner hired a woman who used to work in a fancy restaurant in New York and who had escaped the city for the quiet of the countryside.

  I was hungry, even hungrier when I saw the pastries carefully arranged behind the glass. I ordered a croissant with a Yirgacheffe coffee, which was the coffee of the day, according to the sign on the wall. The woman who took my order wrote a number on a piece of paper and stuck it into a metal holder that she asked me to put on my table. I looked at the newspapers that were on sale, the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and decided not to buy one. Why should I bother reading depressing news so early in the day? My decision took me by surprise because it was unusual. I sat in the corner studying the place and watching the other customers. A few minutes later one of the waitresses brought me my order with a smile. The croissant was perfectly flaky. I ate it slowly to savor it. I put a little milk in the coffee cup and drank half of it. Then I decided to go for a short walk to discover the town. I put the rest of the coffee in a paper cup and took it with me.

  No one dies in traffic accidents here. There are few cars, they drive slowly, and the drivers stop patiently to let pedestrians cross. Everything is calmer and slower here. I remembered what the British man said about his blood pressure falling after he moved here from Chicago to be closer to his lover in New York. After less than fifteen minutes I reached the end of the main street, where there was a small gas station, and after that the street turned into a country road leading to Lebanon, the next town. The European settlers had stamped names from the Bible on the towns since this was their promised land, or names that evoked their European origins, prefixed with the word New.

  I crossed to the other side and retraced my steps. There were three small restaurants, one of them Chinese, a small cinema, a bookshop, and a post office, as well as clothes shops, one of them a Gap, of course. I was about to turn right and head to the small museum and the college’s art department, but someone from the moving company called me and said they were fifteen minutes away.

  Unloading the boxes, the chair, the table, and the mattress didn’t take more than half an hour. I asked them to put the boxes in the corner of the living room. I promised myself I would sort out the apartment and buy some nice furniture later, but I was busy preparing for my classes and completing my dissertation. Most of the boxes stayed parked where they were until the spring, except for two boxes of books and articles related to the dissertation, which I took to the office in my bag in stages day by day. I opened only three of the other boxes and took out some basics for the kitchen and bathroom, some pillows and sheets and blankets. I liked the apartment empty. It looked poetic.

  My office was on the second floor in Bartlett Hall, which housed the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures, the longest name for any department in the university. Anything that wasn’t European had been crammed into the department, in a red-brick building built in the nineteenth century. It had been renovated of course, but it retained its splendor. The ceilings and doors were very high. My office was enormous, and the window looked out over a side street and a towering elm tree with leaves that changed color several times in my first fall.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE CHRIST’S THORN TREE, OR ZIZIPHUS SPINA-CHRISTI

  Ziziphus, that’s my name, or let’s say one of my names. After all, names change depending on who is speaking and in what language. You may well wonder: how can I know this when I’m just a tree that hasn’t moved an inch since I was a seed? Did you not know that trees have colloquies, like birds and people? We talk to each other just like you do. If you listen you can hear the wind carrying what our branches say to each other. Even our roots in the ground call out until they hear an answer from the trunk of a nearby tree, or a tree far off.

  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t here, on this spot. But I wasn’t alone: this was a crowded orchard and I was surrounded by other trees—young oranges, blood oranges, and palm trees. Then one day I heard a wail in the distance, a scream from roots being pulled up and branches being broken. Humans came with those machines of theirs. I thought my fate was sealed. They uprooted all the trees in the orchard but they left me and several palm trees. One of the trees heard me crying at sunset, after the people had gone. “Don’t worry, Ziziphus,” it whispered, “they won’t uproot the likes of you.” I was young then and I didn’t know much about the affairs of trees or humans. “Why not?” I asked in a quiet, frightened voice. “Their holy books say good things about us and the likes of you,” said the tree. “They’re frightened something bad might happen to them if they dig up a ziziphus tree, so hold back your tears, little one.” I didn’t believe the old palm tree at the time. I thought it was senile, and they would come back in the morning to slaughter me and feed my limbs to an oven or a brazier. But the old tree was right.

  Once they had dug up the bodies of the other trees and cleared them away, they started to measure the place and survey it, leaving markers on the ground. Then they dug it as I watched. They brought piles of bricks and sand and cement and started to work like ants. They built a towering house that completely blocked my view of the old palm tree. Although I couldn’t see it, I could hear it talking to another palm tree farther off. It asked me how I was from time to time. When the house was finished they brought a gardener to plant flower seeds and saplings around a rectangle that they planted with grass. Humans are odd. They pull trees up by the roots and then come back to plant similar ones in their stead. The young orange, mulberry, and fig trees grew taller, but I was the tallest and the oldest. Children born in the house grew up and started playing beneath me in the garden. When I was bearing fruit, from my third year on, they asked their father to shake me so that they could enjoy the fruit. They rubbed my bark and were surprised to see gum oozing from my trunk. In my shade they read and played. They defended me when other kids came and threw stones at my branches because they wanted to bring down my fruit. When they grew up they began to shake me themselves so I would feed them, and they would thank me, and I would reward them. I had a delightful life and was the princess of the garden. The bees fed on the nectar of my flowers and sometimes birds nested in my branches. The other trees envied me my status and my height. Maybe it was envy or fate that almost killed me. They and the termites that invaded the walls of the house and the furniture. The queen,
whose orders the other termites follow, had moved into a spot behind the house. But the expert they brought misled them into thinking that the queen’s chamber was under my trunk, and he advised them to kill me. I was panic-stricken when I heard what he said to the house owner. I remembered that all the trees in the garden had been massacred when I was a child, before there was a house. A few days later, when the owner of the house asked the gardener to get rid of me, he flatly refused. “That would be quite wrong,” he said. Because I’m the tree that’s in heaven. “At the lote tree of the far boundary, where the Garden of Refuge lies, where the lote tree is covered with what covers it, the Prophet, may God bless him, used to wash his hands with its leaves.” In my fear I shouted out, “The termite queen isn’t underneath me. She’s over there in the garden of the neighbors’ house!” but of course they couldn’t hear me. The gardener, who I knew loved me, dug in his heels. He said he wouldn’t look after the garden any longer. He warned the owner of the house one last time, saying disaster would strike the house and the people in it if they did me any harm. The owner of the house said disaster had already struck the house, long ago. The army of termites had devoured the furniture and the books and had damaged the walls, and they had to be wiped out. The gardener shook his head and walked to his bicycle, which he had parked close to the garden gate. He opened the gate intoning, “Those of the right hand—what of those of the right hand. They are among lote trees without thorns and among acacia in clusters.” He got on his bike and cast a sad look at me from the street as if he were saying goodbye, then rode off. The owner of the house disappeared and came back an hour later with a vicious ax in his hand. Blows rained down on my trunk. They tore at my bark and cut into my bast, but I held out. I was crying in pain and the mulberry and oranges trees were weeping in sadness and fear. “Sir, there’s no queen under my trunk,” I implored. But he didn’t hear. After hundreds of blows, he tired and stopped, left the ax next to my trunk, and went into the house. I spent that night groaning in pain and sadness as my neighbors consoled me. The next day he came back with a massive saw with a long tail that he attached to a spot in the wall. When he activated it, it emitted a terrifying, constant roar. He brought it close to the spot where my trunk was damaged and I felt hundreds of sharp teeth stripping away my bark and cutting into my heart. The colors around me faded and the world turned black. I heard the gardenia, the myrtle, and the pomegranate: they were all crying with me, and for me. My trunk snapped and my upper half collapsed. My branches fell to the ground. I could no longer see anything. I was shouting but I couldn’t hear my own voice or what I was saying. No other tree heard me, and my branches were no longer mine.