The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  I see what you can’t see and I hear what you don’t hear.

  A friend sent me a message drawing my attention to an ad for a job as assistant professor specializing in non-European literature at New York University. The wording was strange and I guessed they were casting a wide net in order to get as many applications as possible . I decided to try since I had nothing to lose. If worst came to worst, I’d get a trip to New York for the interview and I’d spend two nights there. I sent my CV with a cover letter and copies of two articles of mine that had been published. Two weeks later my phone rang and it was the head of the search committee, who wanted to set a time for a phone interview with the members of the committee. I did the interview a week later and the questions were not difficult. Then an email arrived, telling me I was being invited to visit the university and give a talk.

  After sleeping just two hours, I gave a talk about obscene literature and the importance of Abu Nuwas in Arabic culture, which raised many questions. I was exhausted by meetings with faculty and students that had lasted the whole day. I decided that I wouldn’t get the job. This was my policy to protect myself from disappointment. So some of my answers at the end of my interview with the dean of the school and her assistant were strange and somewhat flippant.

  She asked me if there was anything I would miss in New Hampshire if they offered me the job. I was surprised by her question but I answered honestly: “The color of the sky.” The color was different—deeper and clearer. “And who will come with you from there if you get the job?” she added. I remembered I had read in some article that such questions were illegal. She had no right to ask about my private life, because that might have an effect on the appointment decision. But maybe she was asking to find out how large an apartment I would need. I had heard they had many applications for the apartments owned by the university. For some reason I answered, “Three wives and eleven children.”

  But she didn’t smile, and nor did the assistant sitting beside her. I realized that my joke had fallen horribly flat, so I quickly added, “Sorry, I was joking. I live alone.”

  She still didn’t laugh but just smiled tensely. “Do you have any cats or dogs?” she then asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I love cats, especially Persian cats, and if it would improve my chances of getting the job I’d be happy to get one.”

  This time she laughed and the assistant smiled.

  “I’ll tell you honestly,” I added. “I grew up in Baghdad, which is a big city, and although I like nature and tranquility, I love cities, and New York is the city of cities. I know I’d be happy here.” The last sentence was an exaggeration overlaid with much optimism and hope.

  But I had lied. What I would miss was rambling in the woods near the college, or what was left of them, which I discovered only a year and a half after I arrived. My British colleague had advised me to explore the woods and the riverbank, but I was too busy and put it off. At the end of spring in the second year I walked northward to the last of the college buildings, and beyond I found a road that passed along a small lake called Occom Pond and then split in two directions—one leading to the nearby golf course that belonged to a country club for the rich people living nearby and the other leading to the woods. I felt a peace of mind I hadn’t previously known when I walked under the tall elm trees. I could hear the roar of the Connecticut River, which runs parallel to the path and marks the border between New Hampshire and Vermont to the north and the west. I became more inquisitive about the origins of names when I lived in New Hampshire. I learned that Connecticut means “upon the long river,” and it transpired that Occom was a Mohican man who lived in the late eighteenth century, converted to Christianity, and became a missionary. He was the first Native American to have a book published in English. Several times I heard woodpeckers tapping their messages on the bark of trees. But the most beautiful sight was that of the small family of deer that I once saw and that reminded me of Wadood’s manuscript and of the gazelle and the prey. The mother doe was standing between two deer, and behind them stood a stag with big antlers. The doe moved her right ear, which was edged in white. I stopped moving as soon as I saw them. I wondered what they were doing here. And then I realized that they were no doubt asking the same question. The mother flicked her white tail, and then the family ran off into the woods.

  A week after the interview the dean in New York called me to offer me the job and negotiate the salary with me.

  Two days after I arrived in New York and arranged the apartment, my sister Wafa called me from Greece to congratulate me on the new job. I reminded her of a conversation we had had about a quarter of a century earlier back at home in Baghdad. I may have been eleven years old at the time. We were drinking tea and eating cookies. “When I grow up I want to live in Paris or New York,” I told her.

  “These are dreams and delusions. You have to be realistic,” she replied.

  “I never said any such thing!” she said on the phone.

  “Oh yes you did. I remember it very well,” I replied.

  “Oof, Nameer. Why do you keep rummaging in the past? Even if I did say that, it was because I wanted to protect you from disappointment.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I forgive you. But if your young son has any dreams, encourage him and don’t bludgeon him on the head with talk about being realistic.”

  “No problem,” she said; “so now that you have a doctorate you’re going to teach us how to bring up our children? Anyway, are you going to invite us to come and visit you, or not?”

  “You’re welcome anytime, come along. But the apartment’s not that big. I mean, you’ll have to sleep on the floor.”

  But she still hasn’t visited me.

  “Each stone he finds, each flower he picks, and each butterfly he catches is already the start of a collection, and every single thing he owns makes up one great collection … Only in such a way does a man who is being hanged become aware of the reality of rope and wood.”

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE WALL

  I’ve been around as long as this house. They put me here, little by little, until my body was complete. They gave me a good coating and then painted my face. I saw them doing the same thing to the three others that stand with me here, to my right and my left and in front of me, and to the fourth one, which rests on our heads. I called out to them so often in the first years and tried to speak to them. Then I gave up when I realized I was speaking to myself. They seem to have been born dead and I’m the only one alive here. Whole days have gone by with me envying them their blindness, their deafness, and their muteness. How I wish the tedium that surrounds me would draw a sword and kill my ability to see and hear everything, because I’m tired of this burden. And I’m tired of the emptiness, loneliness, and waiting.

  His mother is the only person who hasn’t tired of waiting. Even his father stopped coming here two years ago. He came back twice after their son disappeared but I haven’t seen him for a while now. His mother, on the other hand, doesn’t stay away for more than a few days or weeks. Then she turns up again, opens the door opposite me, and turns the light on. Then she comes to the window on my left and draws back the curtains so that the sunlight can come in and spread some warmth. She opens the windows and the room can breathe a little. She walks around, inspecting things and tidying up as if her son were about to come back. Sometimes she whispers to herself, “It could do with a cleaning.” So she brings a broom and sweeps up the dust that has accumulated, that’s waiting on the ground. It’s as if, with the dust, she’s sweeping away any doubt over whether the son will return. Then she brings a bucket full of water and a piece of cloth. She starts wiping the dust off the small table, the wardrobe, and the windows. And off the mirror that his father hung on my forehead many years ago. She comes up to it, wipes it carefully, then sets it straight. I look into the blackness of her tired eyes waiting behind her big glasses, but she can’t see me. She has grown old and her hair is turning gray. The years have taken their usual toll on h
er forehead, hands, and the corners of her eyes. But all these years have not succeeded in stripping her of her faith that he will return.

  I would hear her come in at night from time to time and sleep alone in his bed. I could hear his father calling her, but she wouldn’t reply. Or she would say, “I’m here sleeping. Let me be” and I could hear her crying. I remember how she used to sleep with him in the bed when he was still a child. She would sing to him. How she suffered weaning him. He resisted the nipple on the bottle with incessant crying. He pushed it away angrily with his hands. Sometimes she was forced to compromise and give him her own nipple to keep him quiet.

  Although I didn’t suckle him or hug him or kiss him, I did at least keep watch over him all those years. My eyes observed him asleep and awake. When he played and when he studied. They stayed up late with him and watched over him at night when everyone was asleep. My eyes watched him grow up. And like his mother, I would say goodbye to him when he stood in front of the mirror before going out.

  When he began to wear khaki, he started to stay away often, but he would come back once a month. The last time I saw him was before that devastating winter that almost broke my back. Since then his mother and I have been waiting.

  His mother was afraid of dying only because she knew it meant she wouldn’t be home when her son came home. And now even the house is no longer … a house, and I too am no longer a wall.

  I had to take an early flight back from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to New York after giving a lecture at the University of Minnesota. There was one store selling breakfast and coffee at the airport, and the line was very long. The civilians in the line were a minority. The rest were soldiers who seemed to be on their way to the fronts in Iraq or Afghanistan. Apparently this was their first deployment and they had just finished their training. I know what troops coming back from the front look like. They are tired and wasted, like broken machines. I had seen the maps of death and destruction in Iraq on the faces of those coming back from the fronts during the war with Iran.

  Most of these were white men from poor backgrounds, with some blacks and Latinos. I realize that most of them were also victims of the massive machine of inequality, exploitation, and discrimination administered by the new Rome. Some of them still showed traces of innocence in their faces. But they would soon master the roles they had to perform. One of them was holding the metal rail with his right hand as he waited in line. He was moving his index finger backward and forward as if he were pulling a trigger. Had he started shooting Iraqis already?

  I go back to the past and sleep on the path on which time marches, in order to make it stop and change direction.

  Wadood’s catalog introduced me to the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. I was sitting on the eastern side of Washington Square Park at midday one Thursday. I was waiting for the jazz trio that plays there three times a week. I loved to listen to them, especially the excellent trumpeter. My notebook with the catalog was in my bag. I took it out to leaf through it, reread the Colloquy of the Christ’s Thorn Tree and then one of Wadood’s letters to me. Her voice interrupted me: “Excuse me. Is that script Persian?”

  When I looked up and turned toward the voice to my right, I saw her face. I already knew her. She had short black hair. Her eyes were brown and her lips full. She was wearing a black leather jacket and a green blouse with very large collars. She was eating a salad from a plastic container on her lap. She had long nails painted in different colors and designs.

  “No, it’s Arabic,” I said.

  “It’s very beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  I had thought that the days when books or newspapers in Arabic elicited complimentary comments from strangers were long gone, never to return. An air hostess on a plane had once said, “What pretty shapes the letters have. I wish I could learn it.”

  But all that changed after 9/11. The looks of curiosity mixed with admiration changed into ones of apprehension and suspicion. Like many Arabs, I unconsciously started to avoid carrying Arabic books with me when I traveled by plane, and took only books in English instead. New York might be an exception, of course.

  “Is it your language?” she asked.

  It was a simple question, but at that moment it acquired a certain depth that I hadn’t previously thought of. Was it my language? We’re used to saying “my mother tongue” or “my first language,” but “my language”? Mine? I didn’t want to sound more academic than necessary. Although I had doubts that any language, as I imagined it in its entirety, could be the property of any one individual, I said, “Yes.” Then I remembered where I had seen her face before. “You work at the coffee shop on Bleecker Street, don’t you?” I said with a smile.

  “Yes. My name’s Mariah.”

  “Mariah. Your name has a nice meaning in Arabic. I’m Nameer.”

  “I know. Someone once told me that, but my family didn’t know that. I’m Mariah, like Mariah Carey. And what does your name mean?”

  “Fresh water.”

  “Nice.”

  “Your name’s nicer.”

  She laughed, looked at her watch and added, “Sorry. I have to go back to work. Lunch break’s over. Sorry.”

  She wiped her mouth with a paper tissue and then put it in the transparent plastic container beside her. She put a green lid on it and put it in her bag. She smiled and said, “I enjoyed the chat, Nameer. See you.”

  “Me too.”

  I watched her walk away toward the street. Did she really mean it when she said, “See you”?

  The moment has white walls and its ceiling is a screen on which we can see the lives and memory of the moment. Every moment was other moments before, but moments seldom remember their previous lives. There’s a door in the middle of each wall. I open one of them and see another moment: a device and a sign over it with the words: “To go down and move to another history. Destruction is what will bring us all together. The moment is a wound.”

  “I’ll ask you a question. Do the dead sing?”

  The night takes up two thirds of the picture and the darkness takes up the upper half of the girl’s gaping mouth, which looks like a cave from which the tongue is trying to escape on the back of a scream. But it will fail of course, because it’s small like her and tongues never manage to escape. We can’t hear anything because the picture is deaf and mute: it can’t hear anything or make a sound. All the picture can do—it’s not blind—is see how the light and shade are distributed and where the blocks, the bodies, and the colors are located. The edge of the circle of light touches the girl’s nose and lights up half of her face, showing the right side with red tears running down from her right eye. Her eyes are half-closed and they are outside the main circle of light. The ends of her brown hair are invisible against the night. She’s wearing a gray dress that’s too big for her (maybe it belonged to her elder sister?). It reaches her feet and is embroidered with red flowers. The floor in front of her is gray. It might be concrete or asphalt that looks pale because of the strong light. At the heart of the strongest circle of light there are red spots. To the left there’s a dust-colored army boot treading on the edge of the circle of light. The front part of the boot is inside the circle and the rest is outside, but we can see his other foot and his khaki camouflage jacket. We can see his body up to his thighs, but we can’t see what’s above that because it’s completely out of the picture. We can clearly see the barrel of his machine gun and, above it, the source of the strong light.

  I took three ice cubes out of the plastic ice tray to add to the glass of cold water she had asked for. I didn’t have any alcohol. When I came out of the kitchen carrying the glass of water I found her transfixed in front of the pictures and clippings that I had hung up on the wall. I had brought them from Hanover when I came and had since added many more. She turned when she heard my footsteps approaching. She wiped her eyes with a sweep, then took the glass of water, thanking me. I asked if she’d been crying. “Maybe”—her favorite, and endearing, a
nswer. It was often the mask that her “yes” or “no” put on. I found this “maybe” genial from the start and saw it as a distinctive aspect of her personality. Then she quickly said, “No, just a speck of dust in my eye.” I asked her to sit down, pointing to the sofa. Then I told her I had to use the bathroom. I went into my room, which led to the bathroom. I urinated, and then I decided to soap my face because a greasy layer had gathered on my pores as usual. I dried my face and looked in the mirror before going back. She was sitting on the chair at the table, with her back to the wall where the pictures and clippings were. The glass of water, half-empty, was in her right hand as she looked out of the window at two tall buildings.

  “It’s a small apartment, but the beautiful view makes up for it,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “So this is how professors at your university live?” she asked.

  “They come in different classes. Those who have lots of books or a family and children live in bigger apartments.”