The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  “Okay, my dear, okay.”

  We walked to the Ghazil market, which was full of cats and dogs and all kinds of birds, all of them waiting in cages. My mother asked about goldfinches and we found a man who sold them inside the market. My mother negotiated with the salesman over the price of a bird and cage while I busied myself inspecting my new friend. I heard her asking him what it would eat and how to look after it. I wanted to carry the little cage myself but I wasn’t strong enough, so my mother carried it. She stopped a taxi to take us home. She put the cage between herself and me on the back seat. We hung it up in the corridor between the kitchen and the sitting room, close to the big window. We would take the cage out and put it on the veranda in the afternoons. When my father came home that day, he heard the goldfinch singing before he saw it. He liked the sound but he shook his head and said to my mother, “You’re going to spoil the boy. That’s not good.”

  I started sitting near the cage to do my homework, and I read and filled my notebooks with stories as the goldfinch sang. My sister Wafa was envious because I told her the goldfinch was mine and mine alone.

  I wrote down everything. The names of people, cities, and countries and all the new words I learned every day. The words of songs and poems. Useful and useless phrases, which were the most beautiful. Everything that happened to me and around me at school, in the street, and at home. Even things that hadn’t happened and could never happen, and things that should happen. Now I know that I was writing for the sake of writing, and maybe to eliminate the divide between the real and the imaginary, or to leave it open. When I was ten, I started a weekly magazine that I wrote out by hand. I handed out the seven copies to the children in our street during the summer vacation.

  I wanted everyone to read what I wrote. I would give it to my mother, who read it and smiled. “Well done, clever boy,” she said. My father would sometimes be pleased, but he found it strange that I could write such nonsense. But this desire gradually diminished when I was in secondary school. I don’t know why. Maybe because I began to appreciate the importance of literature and of writing as an act. Apart from contributing to the bulletins that were put up on the school walls and writing in composition classes, I no longer showed other people anything I was writing. I started to keep my notebooks to myself. As time passed I developed a powerful aversion to the idea of writing itself. I started to be frightened by the blankness of the paper and to worry that what I wrote would be unworthy. I tore up my notebooks and threw the overwhelming majority of them into the trash. I no longer thought I would necessarily be a writer. In the first lecture in the first year of university the lecturer who taught us literary criticism asked us, “Which of you write? Poetry or prose?” I was surprised at the hands that went up. There were more than thirty students in our section and half of them wrote? I didn’t put my hand up that day and I didn’t say anything. I was following everything that was published in the newspapers and the literary magazines and I read voraciously, but I didn’t try to have anything published. I don’t regret that I didn’t have a single piece of writing published throughout those years, or even up to now.

  My correspondence with Wadood was interrupted for about a year and a half. But I thought about him from time to time and went back to his catalog and browsed through it. I was busy teaching and finishing my dissertation, since my contract with Dartmouth College stipulated that I had to complete it within a year and a half. It gave me no great pleasure when I submitted my dissertation, defended it, and was awarded the doctorate after all those years. The title didn’t interest me in the first place. I don’t deny I felt that a heavy weight had been lifted off my shoulders. But I also felt empty and sad. Ali Hadi, who held a dinner in his house to celebrate my graduation, said it was a natural feeling, similar to postpartum depression. “Whenever you finish a major project that has lasted years and on which you have worked so hard, you’re going to feel that way. There’s no escaping it,” he said.

  Four months after I moved to my new job at New York University I found a large envelope in my mailbox at the university. I knew from the address that it was from the department where I used to teach at Dartmouth College. When I opened it, I found a letter from the secretary saying that a large number of personal letters from Iraq had been piling up at my college address in the past few weeks. He enclosed them all and asked me to inform my friends of my change of address. I knew from the handwriting on the envelopes that they were all from Wadood. Naturally I was surprised. I opened the envelopes and read the contents one after another as I sat in my office. But surprisingly, they were not in fact letters, and most of them didn’t include any greetings or remarks addressed to me or any signature, and they were undated. In some of the texts Wadood narrated beautifully a sequence of events that had happened to him, sometimes with an internal rhythm. I was delighted as I read them, and I thought that perhaps he had accepted my request and now wanted to help me write the novel about him, although he had been evasive when I broached the subject with him. But most of the other texts were fragments of poetry and musings written on scraps of paper. Four of them were incomprehensible ramblings. I put the envelopes in a box that I set aside for Wadood’s envelopes and added the writings to the notebook, to be with the catalog. I was unsure how to reply. Two days later I wrote to him to say I had received and read his writings, which had arrived late because I had moved to another city. I asked him not to hesitate to send me more of his writings and in the future to send what he wrote to my address in New York.

  This is my memory with all its treasures, and with all the destruction in it, laid out before you. Take what you want.

  Little by little I started going into the building through the service entrance at the back and using the service elevator to reach my office on the fifth floor. This elevator was used less than the main ones, which were crowded with students and faculty. But I realized that I had started to prefer it for other reasons, such as avoiding meaningless courtesies and annoying conversations. Once, for example, two weeks before spring break, a colleague got into the elevator and asked me, “Are you going back to Baghdad for the break?” Her question stunned me. The news reports for the previous few weeks had been saturated with images of corpses and explosions, and a civil war was raging. She knew I was from Baghdad because she was on the search committee that approved my hiring, but apparently she had forgotten that I had left Iraq in 1993. In silence I cursed the gods and the universe and said calmly, “No, I’m staying in New York. I have things I have to finish.” “Ah, work never ends. I know how it is. Try to enjoy the break anyway.” “You too,” I replied. This conversation persuaded me to abandon the main elevator. The service elevator was empty most of the time. Sometimes the janitors and maintenance workers used it, and most of those were minorities. We smiled and exchanged greetings without feigning any fake interest in each other. Sometimes, especially at night, I would find myself alongside transparent trash bags full of the paper that was gathered from the trash bins, and I thought of the ink and all the words that would be buried in the landfills.

  In a dream he again thought he was in a cage made of human bones. He thought he was a bird. Then he discovered he was a heart and in order to fly he would have to rip a lung and kill the owner of the cage. He was hesitant and unsure what to do.

  I sneak into Wadood’s catalog and hide my dismembered body parts and my ramblings in the folds of his first minute. I extend it.

  You think a moment is but a small speck, but it encapsulates an entire world.

  As usual I arrived a quarter of an hour early. Ever since I had moved to New York, and especially to the Village, everything was close to my apartment and I could walk there in a quarter of an hour—my office, the university library, the café, the restaurants, the jazz club, the park, the market, the university health center, and even the funeral parlor were all no more than ten minutes’ walk away. Only the cemetery was a little far, outside the city, because the city was crowded with living people. I sto
od in front of the building entrance on Lafayette Street. The facade was made of red stone and it was built about seventy years ago (the date was carved on a stone above the entrance), but it looked as if it had been recently renovated. I looked for the name of the doctor, Sarah Friedman, on the brass plate with buzzers. I found the name and pressed the button next to it. Her voice said “Yes” through the speaker. I gave my name and heard the buzz that let me in. I had booked the appointment online through the health insurance website. I had read some reviews whose authors had praised the doctor and the way she treated her patients. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and pressed another button to the right of the office door and heard a buzz that was less jarring than the buzz at the front door. I opened the door and went into a large windowless waiting room with plush leather chairs in the middle and soft lighting. The wooden floor creaked audibly when you walked across it. I sat down on one of the chairs and checked out the magazines that were on a table. I chose an issue of the New Yorker and looked at the cartoons. There wasn’t enough time to read a whole article. There were four doors to four offices, all of them shut. I didn’t know which of them I was headed for. Two minutes later the door on the far left opened and I saw a young man come out of the office, followed by a bald man in his mid-fifties who said, “See you next week.” I went back to the cartoons after exchanging a quick glance with the young man, who looked like one of those people who work on Wall Street. He was wearing a smart gray suit and a red necktie and carrying a small leather briefcase. He hurried out.

  A while later another door opened on the right, and a woman in her twenties with long hair came out. She was wearing a black skirt and black boots that went up to just below her knees. I had the impression that she was drying tears with a handkerchief. Another woman I couldn’t make out because of the sunlight streaming through a large window in the office came to the doorway and said goodbye to her. The young woman walked to the main door without a glance back. “Mr. Baghdadi?” said the woman in the office. I put the magazine back on the table and made my way into her office. She shut the door behind me and gestured to me to sit down to the left on a leather sofa big enough for two. She sat opposite on a chair of the same kind, with a low wooden table between us. On the table there was a square wooden bowl holding dried flowers around a large white candle. I had a quick exploratory look around her office while she sat down. The walls were a calm off-white. The room had a high ceiling, as in old buildings. There was a framed print of one of Miró’s paintings on the wall opposite me. Her certificates were framed in dark wood. To the left was a large window that welcomed the sun and under it a small bookcase with files and psychology books. She put a laptop on her lap and asked me for a health insurance card, which I handed to her. She entered the information into the laptop. She was in her early forties. Her hair was light brown and shoulder-length. Her eyes were green and her complexion was fair and clear. Her fingernails were long but not painted and she had no rings. She was wearing a black V-necked blouse, a silver necklace, and a green skirt that showed the upper parts of her thighs when she sat down. She’s attractive, I said to myself as she entered the information, and if I get bored during the session I can at least enjoy the view. Her breasts were still pert, with no signs of aging, I thought to myself as she reached out to give me my card back. Then I remembered those deceptive push-up bras and how widespread they are these days. She put the laptop on a small side table on her right and retrieved a large notepad. She opened it and picked up the black pen that was inside it.

  “Okay, how can I help you, Mr. Baghdadi? Why are you here?”

  “Because my girlfriend told me I should try therapy.”

  “Aha, that isn’t a good start—coming here because of someone else. You have to be convinced that you need treatment.”

  After a moment’s silence, I said, “If I wasn’t partially convinced, I wouldn’t have come.”

  “Why do you think your girlfriend urged you to start therapy?”

  “She says I’m severely depressed and that I have posttraumatic stress disorder.”

  “Do you agree with her? What do you think?”

  “Millions of people are depressed. That’s the price we pay for living in this world.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Are you depressed?”

  “Yes, I’ve definitely been depressed for many years, but I don’t want to take any pills.”

  “Therapy doesn’t necessarily mean pills. Talking can help.”

  “I talk to myself all the time. Anyway, I’m tired of talking. I talk a lot in lectures to students and that’s enough.”

  “But talking here, with me in particular, is different.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Here you can say everything and anything without any consequences and without any censorship.”

  “What about self-censorship?”

  “You’ll overcome that gradually. Do you think your depression has grown worse recently?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How?”

  “I feel drained emotionally and existentially, and ‘nothing pleases me,’ as a poet I like very much once said. This isn’t new but it’s intensified recently.”

  “Can you say more?”

  “I carry out my basic tasks as required in my work. I teach and I grade students’ papers and I attend boring meetings. But I don’t interact with people, or I avoid that as much as possible, except with my girlfriend, of course. I neglect lots of things. I don’t open my mailbox and I let letters and bills pile up for no reason. With emails I answer only urgent ones. I take the service elevator to avoid silly conversations with my colleagues in the main elevator. I prefer to be alone, and all I do when I’m alone is binge watch films and follow the news, of course, unfortunately. But I’ve stopped reading books, even novels. I read the newspapers, of course, and sometimes poetry. I’ve been trying to write a novel for years, but I haven’t written more than a few stupid pages. I have terrible insomnia. I fulfill my responsibilities when it’s related to others, but I neglect everything that’s related to me personally.”

  “Believe it or not, and I don’t mean to belittle your sufferings in any way, but your situation is not extreme.”

  “I know. That’s why I was hesitant to come in the first place. Because these are trivial bourgeois problems that happen to many people. There are famines and wars and …”

  She interrupted me: “No, they’re not trivial. The suffering is real and applies to everyone regardless of what’s happening in the rest of the world. But the most important thing is that you don’t try to play my role or usurp it. Let me decide and judge. Can you take off your university professor’s hat when you’re here?”

  “I’ll try.”

  She asked me whether my relationship with my family was healthy. I told her I hadn’t spoken to my father for more than a decade, that my mother was dead, and that I spoke to my younger brother and my sister on the phone once every month or two. She said we ought to focus on my relationship with my father in the next session.

  “I’m sorry but our time is running out and I have another patient in five minutes. We can continue, but I want to know whether you’ll make a commitment to come once a week. I’d prefer that you come on the same day and time every week. It’s important that it becomes a fundamental part of your life.”

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE POW

  Hasan al-Aseer, or Hasan the prisoner of war, whose real name was Hasan Jasim al-Lahhaf, was born in the Khan Lawand district in the al-Fadil area of Baghdad in 1892. He worked with his father and his brothers sewing quilts. He is said to have had a fine voice since he was young. He fell in love with the kind of music known as maqam. Credit for discovering his talent should go to the famous maqam singer Ahmad al-Zaidan, who was visiting Hasan’s father’s shop to buy a quilt in 1903. He heard the boy singing and was stunned by his melodious and powerful voice. He asked whether he would like to learn the elements of maqam, and the boy was delighted. But his father d
ismissed the idea and scolded him when he brought up the subject later. Hasan began to frequent the Majid Karkar coffeehouse in al-Fadil, which was owned by Zaidan and was a meeting place for maqam performers. He would sit cross-legged outside the coffeehouse to listen to them. One day his father was passing by and saw him there. He was angry and beat the boy and told him to go back home. His father’s punishments and threats to throw him out in the street failed to deter him from visiting the coffeehouse. Zaidan’s heart went out to him when he saw him crying one day, and he asked what the matter was. When he heard about the boy’s problems with his father, he offered to find him a job and persuaded the tea maker to take him as an assistant in the coffeehouse. Hasan’s father was angry at first and threw him out of the house, and Hasan slept a few days in the coffee shop. But his mother managed to persuade his father to let him come back home, on condition that Hasan give them his earnings to make up for no longer working with his father.

  During those years working in the coffee shop, Hasan took in the various modes of maqam music and learned the principles behind the system. He learned from Zaidan, Reuben ibn Rajwan, and Salih Abu Damiri. Zaidan took an interest in him because he sensed that he had exceptional talent. He began to take him along to his concerts and encouraged him to perform. Hasan al-Aseer sang maqam for the first time in a concert in 1912, when Zaidan was ill and asked him to take his place. He proved himself, and after that his name rose to prominence among maqam aficionados to such an extent that he rivaled Rashid al-Qundarchi and surpassed his master.