by Sinan Antoon
Wisam didn’t say anything to Qays that day, just smiled slightly. When the bus came, Wisam sat in the back seats with his “big” friends he knew from past years. Qays chose an empty place next to the window in the middle of the bus. They didn’t see each other during the breaks that day. It was a big school: four buildings and large open spaces. But they met again and stood side by side after the bus dropped them off in the afternoon in the same place where it had picked them up in the morning.
The trip back to their area took half an hour on foot. They had to cross the street to the other side and walk past the Khawarnaq bar with its tinted windows. In front of the bar there was a bus stop where they could in theory take a bus to another bus stop five minutes from their houses, but it came only “on special occasions, once a year,” as Wisam put it. Even when it happened to come by just seconds after they got off the school bus, it was packed with passengers and was just crawling along. It looked like an old ship that was about to sink, trying to jettison its cargo. After crossing the main street they took a side street and went past the “oxygen factory.” The name caught Qays’s attention when he noticed it for the first time on a sign on the outer gate. He imagined there was an enormous lung inside the factory, breathing in carbon dioxide, the opposite of human beings, and blowing oxygen out into enormous balloons as if it were at an endless birthday party. He knew that birthday balloons were filled with some gas other than oxygen, but he liked the idea. But the image didn’t make so much sense when he saw a large wooden cube like a small chamber on top of the factory building, and on top of that a pipe from which water poured into the heart of the factory. Then he saw the long cylinders of oxygen stacked up in the factory garage. Sometimes he would watch the workers loading the cylinders onto small trucks that were waiting, each with its back half inside the factory and the front part on the pavement. The balloons he imagined flew far away at high speed. After the oxygen factory they headed left and walked along Canal Street. They passed by some vast old warehouses with high sandy-colored walls. This was the dangerous part that Wisam’s mother worried about because the gap between the warehouse wall and the roadway where cars and large trucks went by was relatively narrow here. From the first day Wisam made sure that he kept to the left, with Qays between him and the wall. After about fifty yards the gap, which couldn’t be called a pavement because it was a mixture of soil, gravel, and sand, widened out at the point where the warehouse wall ended and a row of houses began, set twenty yards back from the public street.
On the first walk back there was an awkward silence, at least at the beginning. Qays broke the silence by asking Wisam which soccer team he supported. He had once seen him playing soccer on the empty piece of land close to the house, which the local boys used as a soccer pitch.
“Tayaran, and you?”
Qays wasn’t crazy about soccer and didn’t know much about it, but his father liked Talaba, so he automatically said, “Talaba.” Wisam quickly said, “Talaba are losers.” He found a small stone and started kicking it around as if it were a ball he was going to aim into the Talaba goal. “Come on, let’s get this stone home with us,” Wisam said, and they started kicking it back and forth between them. They often repeated the game in the following months. One of them might get overenthusiastic and misaim the stone, and when it strayed onto the roadway they would have to look for an alternative. Sometimes an empty tin can they found on the roadway would replace the small stone. Qays’s house was farther away, so the first time Wisam insisted on accompanying him all the way to the door of Qays’s house.
“Do you have a key?” he asked.
“No, but my granny’s in and she’ll open the door for me.”
Wisam stood by the door and waited till he saw Qays’s grandmother open the door for him. He waved goodbye and set off back.
In the morning Qays’s parents drove him to the bus stop to stand with five other schoolchildren who lived in nearby areas. Wisam didn’t speak to him much in the presence of the others, but he was still friendly. On several occasions he helped him get a falafel sandwich from the store. The boys would run to the store as soon as the bell rang for the long recess after the fifth lesson. They would jostle to get sandwiches, and it was a battle that the biggest and tallest usually won. Qays was watching the struggle in front of the falafel window but had given up all hope of getting his hands on one of those delicious sandwiches, in which the pieces of falafel came with sliced tomato and pickled mango. When Wisam saw him, he understood the problem. “Give me the money and I’ll buy you one,” he said.
On the Saturday morning after saying goodbye, Wisam wasn’t standing with the others to wait for the bus. Qays walked home alone that day. When he walked past Wisam’s family’s house, he saw Wisam’s father’s car, a white Peugeot 504, parked in the garage with the metal gate closed. He stopped outside the gate hesitantly, then overcame his timidity and pressed the small round electric bell press with the red light. No one came out. He pressed it again and held it down with his index finger for longer, but the result was no different. The curtains were drawn closed. He walked on home, with the word taba‘iyya spinning in his head. He hadn’t received a satisfactory answer two days earlier when he asked his parents what it meant. His father hadn’t said anything. He just kept watching A Week of Sport on television as if he hadn’t heard the question. His mother’s response was “Why do you ask?” and he told her about Wisam being deported. She put her right hand on her cheek and said, “No. Poor people, may God help them. He looked like a nice lad.” He put the question to his father again another time: “Father, what does taba‘iyya mean?”
“It means they have foreign origins.”
“And why are they deporting them?”
“They might have had some links with Iran.”
His mother interrupted: “So everyone whose grandfather had an Iranian passport is now a spy? What’s all that about?”
“What would you know about it? There really are Iranians and anyway, don’t talk like that in front of the boy, and let me watch television,” said his father.
She didn’t argue back, but she later explained to Qays that in the old days people used to get Ottoman or Iranian passports and they were not necessarily foreigners. She was rather sad about the deportation of Wisam, but she was more concerned about her son coming home alone. Qays convinced her that he knew the way well and he promised to be careful and keep away from the traffic.
He always slowed his pace as he approached Wisam’s house. He looked in case he saw any sign that they had come back. Two weeks later he noticed that the car had disappeared. A week later he saw a young man standing outside the gate smoking. Qays went up to him and said, “Is Wisam at home?” “Who’s Wisam?” the man answered in surprise.
“Wisam. This is their house.”
“This isn’t a house, kid. This is the headquarters of the party branch.”
Qays didn’t say anything but went off home. His father wasn’t very interested when Qays told him that Wisam’s house was now the headquarters of a Ba‘th party branch. He didn’t offer him any convincing explanation, just made do with his favorite expression: “You don’t need to think about such things.” His mother didn’t put her hand on her cheek this time. But she shook her head and said, “Shame. God alone knows where they’ve taken them.” From the things that adults said, Qays later gathered snippets of information about the “taba‘iyya” people being dumped on the border with Iran and that no one knew whether they were in refugee camps or whether the Iranians had let them in. But then the war started and the rapid sequence of events overshadowed the “taba‘iyya” question by raising more immediate questions.
Wisam disappeared like an unanswered letter, leaving his stamps in Baghdad. But Qays didn’t forget his friend. He took the stamp album out of his bookcase whenever he missed Wisam. He would look at the stamps and run his fingers over them as if they were windows through which he would find a trace of his friend. But they were strange windows, cro
wded with people, stones, animals, and landscapes. Qays imagined that they were looking out at him, but they didn’t say anything and they didn’t give anything away other than the value of the stamp or the occasion for issuing it and sometimes the year.
Abraham Lincoln (five cents), Helen Keller (unclear), Queen Elizabeth (? pence), Charles de Gaulle (?), King Faisal I, with a beard and glasses (½ anna), the Arch at Ctesiphon (three annas), an old plane flying (four fils), King Faisal II (75 fils), the minaret at the Nouri mosque, a lute, scout troops (1967), girl guides (two fils), revolutionary leader Abd al-Karim Qasim lighting the eternal flame for the Unknown Soldier (16 fils), The Lion of Babylon (eight fils), stamps promoting savings accounts for schoolchildren (unclear), Maarouf al-Rusafi (1960), the anniversary of the 1920 uprising (a man holding a club) (June 1965), brown fish (1969), carp, butterfish (?), a butterfly (Lebanon), sandgrouse (15 fils), the first anniversary of the blessed 14th of Ramadan revolution (50 fils), Valiant Iraqi Army Day (January 6, 1968), International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the Iraqi Ground Station (10 fils), the sixth national day of the United Arab Emirates, 1977, the Literacy Campaign (20 fils), Fujeirah (five dirhams), the Arab Cup (unclear), Gamal Abdel Nasser (unclear), Arab Unity (unclear).
It occurred to him to buy stamps to add to Wisam’s album. When he went to the post office in New Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s face was on the stamps that the woman behind the counter offered him. He was confused and afraid to ask if there were any stamps that didn’t have the president’s head on them. He bought two stamps but didn’t put them in the album. He knew Saddam Hussein was the reason why Wisam was gone, so how could he put his face in one of those windows? He decided not to put any more stamps, new or old, in the album, but to leave it as it was.
The album stayed in the little bookcase. Issues of the magazines Majallati and al-Mizmar leaned against it. Next to them stood a set of the Egyptian series The Five Adventurers. A year later they were joined by the Agatha Christie novels that Qays had started to read when he was sitting in the bus or at home after finishing his homework. The library gradually expanded and started to take in more serious books that Qays bought from time to time, such as Gorky’s The Mother, War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, Les Misérables, The Black Tulip, and the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, Abdulrahman Munif, and Ghada al-Samman. After he began studying at the civil engineering faculty of the University of Technology in 1986, engineering books and composition books started to take their place on the wooden shelves that his father had bought him. When he had graduated and done his military service in the Military Works department in A‘zamiyya, he worked as a lecturer in the University of Technology and completed his master’s degree. He married one of his colleagues and they lived in an apartment they rented in Haifa Street. He took the album with his books to the new apartment. As they were arranging the apartment his wife opened the album and asked him why he hadn’t told her that stamp collecting was his hobby. So he told her the story of Wisam.
During the embargo years, Qays was forced to sell his whole library in al-Mutanabbi Street to cover the expenses of the household and the three children. His salary, his wife’s salary, and his income from the private lessons he had started to give, all taken together, were not enough. But he kept the album, although he knew that the old stamps would fetch a considerable amount of money. It stayed in the bookcase, which, now that it no longer held his books, was filled with old newspapers and his students’ research papers and dissertations.
The album was there until the moment a missile broke through the windowpane. The apartment was empty because they were all in the underground shelter. The fire began with the old carpet and then reached the lower shelves of the bookcase. The flames consumed the newspapers, including news stories, editorials, fiery poems about the coming victory, and pictures of Saddam Hussein meeting military leaders. Then the flames climbed to the other shelves and consumed plans for hypothetical buildings in graduation projects, housing complexes that ran on solar energy, and architectural dreams. Then it took hold of the album with its green cover that had faded through more than two decades of exposure to sunlight and dust. The tongues of flame soon tinged it, turning it from golden to dark brown and then settling on black. All the kings and presidents who still looked out of the windows of the stamps were burned up. The buildings and birds were also burned. When the neighbors and the Egyptian elevator operator managed to put out the fire, the whole apartment was charred and black.
I was always saving newspaper or magazine clippings, folding them up or putting them in books associated with them. I once tried to pull them all together and sort them into a folder when I was trying to organize my papers and my life, as would happen once every year or two. But I never finished the task because I realized I was using these side projects as an excuse to procrastinate and avoid working on my dissertation. When I came back from Baghdad after meeting Wadood, saving clippings became a daily ritual. I seemed to have contracted by contagion his obsession with archives. At Dartmouth I would buy the New York Times in the morning from the White Horse café and browse through it as I drank my coffee and ate my breakfast: a bagel with cream cheese. I would cut out any articles about the war that caught my attention or that I thought were important. I set aside for them a folder that I put in my desk drawer along with other folders, and I wrote “Collateral Damage” on it. The term had been in circulation for a while, but its use increased after the invasion. I was especially interested in pictures, and I posted some of them on the board above my desk. I bought a small pair of scissors to make sure I didn’t tear any part of the picture, as had happened several times when I tore them out by hand.
Rebecca reproached me when I told her what I was doing. She asked me as usual what I’d been doing that morning and I told her. “Frankly I don’t understand,” she said. “If you were writing a research paper on the war, for example, that would be a different matter. But you have to finish your dissertation and focus on that. You don’t have much time if we add the teaching. Why do you want to surround yourself with pictures of war carnage and dead people? I know it’s your home country and you feel sad. That’s understandable and normal. I feel sad and guilty too. I know your sadness is much deeper. But all the things you’re doing won’t help anyone or change anything at all. Feeling guilty or sad won’t change anything. In fact it will harm you psychologically. You tell me you can’t sleep? Of course. How could you sleep normally? I’ve told you several times you should go to a psychiatrist. You have PTSD. You’re obsessed with that man you met in Baghdad, and it’s not healthy.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with changing anything. I want to write a novel about Iraq,” I said. “You can write plenty of novels, but after you finish your dissertation and settle down in your job,” she said. I was going to tell her that she didn’t understand me, but I didn’t say anything. I was tired of the constant arguments, which drained me psychologically. Her reaction saddened me, regardless of her intentions, and I didn’t like her tone. I realized that we had really started to part ways and that the geographical distance between us had started to translate into emotional distance too. She was more practical and rational than me. She would finish everything on time, ahead of time in fact, unlike me. I would put things off and break my own and other people’s deadlines. She’s going to make a successful and prominent academic. She knew how to play the game too. After that conversation I decided that the relationship had to end officially and that it was I who would have to deliver the coup de grâce. She expected me to visit her in Bolivia, where she was doing fieldwork on the effects of globalization on the indigenous population and on the strategies they adopted to resist it. At first I was enthusiastic about the visit, since I had never been to South America. But that was before my visit to Baghdad and before our relationship deteriorated. Now it couldn’t wait till the visit, which was due in three months’ time.
“Listen, we should take some time to think about our relationship,
” I said.
“Think about what? If you want to end the relationship, why don’t you say so without evasion?”
“Do you think things are going as they should?”
“No, but it’s not a question of thinking. It’s a question of changing the way we treat each other.”
“And how can we change that when we’re in two separate continents?”
“What do you want then?”
“I don’t know … Perhaps I want to be alone.”
My own answer took me by surprise, and then I added, “Yes, maybe it would be best to be alone.”
“I can’t believe you want to end the relationship this way, on the phone. You could have waited and told me face to face. Okay, enjoy your loneliness and your sorrows. You’re pathetic, Nameer.” She hung up. I tried to call her back but she didn’t pick up. I can’t deny that I felt relieved.
THE COLLOQUY OF ABU JINNIYYA
I have a pedigree from the stable of Khaylat al-Ajuz, originally from Shammar. My forefathers accompanied princes and kings on their raids and their trips. Poets sang their praises. Anyone who saw me now would never imagine that I was once pampered and cherished. The likes of those people who now despise me used to keep me clean and comfortable in a spacious stall that I had all to myself. But I lost everything, even my name, Abu Jinniyya, which they gave me when I was born because of the blaze on my forehead. Adham Abu Jinniyya was my full name. I’ve lost my original name, because the person in whose hands I ended up called me I‘jouzi. Old and lazy, he called me, and he still repeats it. He doesn’t understand and he will never understand that I object to his rough treatment of me. I’m taking a stand. I try to draw his attention to the wound in my neck and to the metal stud on the iron ring that I can barely lift. But he knows only the language of the whip. Even the others who toil here like me make fun of me when I boast of the life I used to live. They don’t believe that I used to eat carrots and beetroot and even apples. Why would they believe it when all they know is the dry rubbish they’re happy to eat? They don’t believe I used to dash around the racetrack, leaving the others far behind me, blinded by the dust that my hooves kicked up. I carried a lightweight jockey and the crowds called my name, rooting for me and cheering me on when I reached the finishing line. They festooned me with garlands of flowers around my neck instead of this rusty collar. They patted me on the back and stroked my cheek as I whinnied. They led me back to my stall and took off my saddle and bridle. They bathed me, combed my hair and left me to rest. They tired me out in training before the races sometimes, but they treated me like a prince. I never had any suspicion that I would have to give up this comfortable way of life. But in one race another horse kicked me in the hamstring and I stumbled and fell, throwing the jockey off my back. It was the first race ever in which I didn’t finish first. The pain in my hamstring kept bothering me and neither medicine nor physiotherapy did any good. That made me a loser. Other horses took my place. I stayed in my stall for a while, but then they took me to market and sold me off cheap to this man who keeps shouting at me. He pulled me after him through the streets between all the cars and the people to the place where he had parked his cart. He put this metal collar around my neck, fitted the bridle, the halter, two pieces of wood and ropes. From that day on I’ve been pulling his cart, which he loads with everything that’s heavy. The hunger and thirst are killing me. No one looks after me and people don’t clean me. I whisk the flies and mosquitoes away with my tail. But many spots itch. I freshen up when the sky weeps and washes me, but it doesn’t rain much. At the end of every day I pull him and his cart to his house, and he ties me to a tree in the outer courtyard after he’s freed me from the yoke of the cart. The children often pester me and the stray dogs bark at me too. Last night it thundered as it’s never thundered before. The stars were ablaze and I thought they were falling on me. But it didn’t rain at all.
