The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  After the First World War broke out and the Ottomans joined the Germans, a general mobilization was declared. Al-Aseer tried to escape the war and hid in an orchard in al-Silaykh. But the authorities detained three of his brothers and told his family that they wouldn’t release them until he gave himself up. He handed himself in and was taken off with others to fight the Russians. The train took them to Samarra, and from there they walked for many weeks until they reached the front, in the Caucasus Mountains. He saw most of those who fought alongside him die of cold and hunger. He didn’t die himself, but he lost his sight as a result of an injury. The Russians captured him, and he stayed in Russia for five years before coming back to Baghdad. His father had died while he was in captivity, and his brothers had inherited the quilting business. The maqam people welcomed him back from captivity and invited him to sing. His voice was as fine as ever and had in fact acquired a huskiness that made it richer. But he had not come back alone. It was clear that the war and its ghosts had come with him and were still pursuing him. He drank too much when he sang, and he would shout and swear and have fights with imaginary people, then cry like a child. The invitations dried up and most of his friends shunned him, apart from a joza player called Salih Shameel. Hasan shut himself up in a room at home and cut himself off from the world. In 1925 Butrus and Gabriel Baida, the owners of the Baidaphon company, started recording Iraqi singers on gramophone records and marketing them under the Ghazal label. Their agent in Baghdad heard about al-Aseer’s voice, but some people warned him that the man was an alcoholic and prone to frequent tantrums. Salih Shameel played in a troupe that accompanied maqam singers. He lied to the agent and assured him that al-Aseer hadn’t drunk arak for two years and that he would do a recording without creating any problems, and the agent agreed. Then Salih had to persuade al-Aseer, who was in the depths of depression, to do the recording. At first he refused, especially as one of the conditions was that he should stop drinking for a week. Salih kept pressing him and played on his envy by mentioning the names of all the other people who had done recordings. Then al-Aseer warmed to the idea of a record of his voice that would survive even after his bones had turned to dust. He gave up arak temporarily and began to practice, to restore the suppleness of his voice. Salih went with him to the room that had been turned into a recording studio and he did three hours of recordings for them. When he had finished, the recording technician told him the choice would be up to the Baida brothers in Beirut, who wouldn’t press records for all the songs. The pressing process was done in a factory in Berlin.

  Come give me wine to drink and tell me that it’s wine,

  Don’t give it to me in secret if it can be done in public.

  It would be fraud if you were to see me sober,

  But when I’m roaring drunk, then it’s all for the best!

  God now sees us as the worst gang,

  Without pride we dragged debauchery by the tail.

  Many’s the lady publican I’ve roused from sleep,

  After Gemini has set and the Vulture Star has risen.

  If you complain of love, you’re not one of us.

  You bring antipathy and revulsion, you churl.

  Arise from sleep and drive away our cares.

  How pretty he is when he walks with a swinging gait.

  Arise, the birds are up and singing

  Shall the doves sing better than us?

  You claim to follow the doctrine of pleasure and then complain,

  Where is your call for pleasure, you churl?

  We did not fall in love with you for your attributes, but

  We are people who fall in love once we look.

  Like a dove you grew tame at night

  You became like a gazelle shying away from us.

  Whenever the bottle went round our heads spun,

  The ignorant reckon we’ve gone mad.

  (played in rast mode)

  Tabla—Shaul Haroun Zangi

  Joza—Salih Shameel

  Qanoun—Azouri Haroun

  Hasan Effendi al-Aseer—Baidaphon Records

  Five months later the Baidaphon record reached Hasan through Salih. He was quite delighted. Hasan felt it and smelled it and then asked Salih to describe it to him and read out what was written on it. Salih told him about the yellow paper sleeve and described to him the gramophone player and “Baidaphon Records” written in large letters and under it the words “Beirut, Cairo, Berlin, Butrus and Gabra Baida.” Hasan wasn’t interested in that of course, but Salih was testing his patience. Salih wound up in a dramatic voice: “Hasan Effendi al-Aseer, ‘If You Complain of Pleasure,’ a rast maqam.”

  “And the other records?” Hasan asked.

  “The others are with them.”

  Hasan was saddened and disappointed, but Salih cheered him up, saying, “Come on, man, you should be cheerful. They’ll hear you in Cairo and Beirut and Aleppo, and they sell in Basra too.”

  He didn’t own a gramophone player, so he would put the record on his lap and sing to it as he drank alone at home. When Salih bought a gramophone player, he invited Hasan to his house to listen to himself singing. He had expected to feel happier than he actually did. That day they listened to Rashid al-Qundarchi and Muhammad al-Qubbanchi, and Hasan asked Salih, “Honestly, aren’t I better than all of them? Except that I went blind and had a rough time in captivity.” “If only you’d sober up and stop drinking arak, for God’s sake,” Salih replied.

  But Hasan didn’t give up arak and he died in 1932, hugging a tiny bottle of it, before he was even forty years old. He never married, and all he left behind him was that recording, which was the only evidence that he ever passed through this earth. There were two copies of his songs—one in the Baidaphon office in Berlin and the other in Beirut. Allied bombing in the Second World War destroyed the company’s office in Berlin, and the civil war in Lebanon took care of destroying the Beirut archive. The surviving record in Baghdad remained in Hasan’s room with his clothes and some other things. When his nephew and his fiancée moved into the room, they put his stuff in a small chest, which they placed in the courtyard. A few months later a junk dealer called at the house and bought the whole box. He sold the clothes to the secondhand clothes dealer, and persuaded the owner of the coffee shop to buy the record. So Hasan’s lamentations echoed through the coffee shop when his luck was in—that is, whenever the owner, who insisted on choosing the songs himself, was in the mood to hear him. Then new technologies arrived and forced the earlier ones into retirement. Al-Aseer’s lamentations and his gramophone record then disappeared into a box that languished in a storeroom for many years, awaiting the fire that would consume it one fine spring day in the year 2003.

  I told the therapist about my mother and how I was the first to discover, by chance, that cancer had spread through her body. I was getting dressed and preparing to go out one evening when I heard her screaming. I rushed to her room and found her shaking violently in bed with her hands in the air. She was frothing large amounts of saliva from her open mouth and her eyes were closed. “Mama, mama, what’s wrong with you?” I shouted. I grabbed her rigid arms for some seconds, shook her and tried to hug her. I wiped the saliva off with my shirt sleeve and called on her to wake up from what I thought was a nightmare. Twenty seconds later she opened her eyes and was surprised to find herself in my arms. She said she had gone to bed because she had had a chronic headache that had grown worse in recent weeks, and then she couldn’t remember what had happened. Maybe she had had a nightmare. She kissed me on the cheek and apologized, then got up and went to the bathroom to wash her face. I insisted she go to the doctor because her trembling was very unusual. As usual my father played down the importance of the incident. “It’s because of the tea you keep drinking,” he said. I went to the doctor with her. After some tests the doctor advised an MRI as soon as possible. We went to the hospital and she made me laugh when they laid her on the gurneylike platform that goes into the scanner and stays there about an hour while
they take a magnetic image. “What’s this?” she said, “It looks like a coffin. So they’re training us for death.” Two days later the doctor’s assistant called and asked us to make an appointment. The doctor asked to speak to me alone first since it was my name written on the form. I could see the fear in my mother’s eyes. I realized that this was an exceptional situation. The doctor told me that the cancer had spread through her body and reached her brain. I was stunned because she had had a mastectomy two years earlier and all the subsequent tests had shown that there weren’t any malignant cells left. But he said that this does happen, unfortunately. Even when one is in remission from breast cancer, some of the cancer cells lie low and migrate toward other parts of the body. I asked him about the possibilities of treatment, and he said she would have to go into the hospital. He would prescribe radiotherapy and give her some medicines, but the chances of recovery were slight—ten percent. He asked me whether I thought she was ready to hear the news, and I told him she was a strong woman who had lived through much in her life. I went out and asked her to come in. We sat down in front of him and he repeated what he had told me, adding some other details. I had to translate everything for her. “I won’t lie to you, madam. The condition is very serious, but the human body is strong, and it can resist and recover.” Her eyes teared up and she took a handkerchief out of her handbag to wipe the tears away, but she thanked him and then said to herself and to me, “It’s the will of God, and God is merciful.” My father’s reaction was strange. I read some fear on his face when we told him, but I couldn’t detect any real sadness. He kissed her on the forehead and said, “We’ll have to tell your family,” as if she had already died. After that he started criticizing her for using too many chemicals for cleaning things, as if that had anything to do with it. Her condition deteriorated with surprising rapidity. It was as if the cancer cells, once they had been discovered, no longer tried to hide behind other cells and tissues. During the radiotherapy and after some other tests, it became clear that the cancer had spread to her lungs as well.

  My work tutoring Arabic privately as a freelancer allowed me to have a flexible schedule and I had saved up a considerable amount of money, so I stopped teaching temporarily in order to be with her all the time.

  My father would come to the hospital after ten in the evening , after he’d finished work managing the gas station. On the first days he would kiss her on the forehead after coming in, but he later made do with just putting his hand on her head. Then he would sit down to watch the television suspended from the ceiling in the left-hand corner of the room. He wouldn’t say much, other than his routine questions, or else he would say to me, “Go and have a rest at home if you like.”

  My sister Wafa wanted to come to join us from Greece, where she had been living since 1989 with her Greek husband, who had been working in the Greek embassy in Baghdad. But the process of obtaining a visa took two months, and when Wafa arrived my mother was almost unconscious because of the morphine they were giving her in her final days. Wafa burst into tears when she stood next to the bed for the first time and saw how frail Mother’s body had become and that the cancer cells had spread even into the skin on her face. “That’s not Mama,” she said, but Mother smiled when she woke up and saw Wafa, then joined her in crying. Half an hour later she said, “Enough, I don’t want any crying or weeping. Save the crying for the funeral. I have quite enough to worry about.” Wafa started to sleep near her in the hospital and rest at home during the day, while I took her place until six o’clock every afternoon. I had long ridiculed those who say that the dying sense the approach of death. Hours before she died, between two periods of unconsciousness, Mother asked to see my younger brother. “I want to kiss Naseer,” she said. I called him on the phone in the room and asked him to come. “Why? What’s up?” he asked. “Mama wants to see you. She asked after you,” I said. Naseer took the bus and arrived half an hour later. He looked worried, as if he knew too. He had been visiting her only once a week and he was disturbed and emotionally withdrawn, keeping his distance from the situation, and I didn’t blame him for that. When he arrived she was asleep and none of us woke her up. We sat down in silence and he squatted on the floor, leaning against the wall with Walkman earphones on his ears. Three quarters of an hour later we heard her say softly, “Where’s Naseer?” He jumped up and went over to her. “Come and kiss me, my love. I want to smell you before God takes me back into His care.” Her lips were now as pale as thin paper. Wafa sobbed when she saw her embrace Naseer and kiss him. He cried too. Five minutes later the morphine took hold of her again. I took Naseer home and while we were in the car he asked me what we were going to do. “What can we do? We’ll wait,” I replied. The telephone woke me at five in the morning. Wafa was crying at the other end. “Mama’s gone,” she said.

  We buried her in the Muslim cemetery in Virginia. On the third day of the period of condolences, the number of men paying their respects declined. In the afternoon there was no one but me, my father, and Naseer, who had taken a siesta. I went out for a walk for a while, and when I came back home two of our neighbors’ sons were playing soccer in the parking lot. I stopped to watch them and one of them kicked the ball toward me and I kicked it back. They invited me to join the game. I tucked the ends of my trousers into my socks and played with them for half an hour or more, then went back home. My father was looking out of the window of the sitting room but he didn’t say anything.

  My sister went back to Greece. A month after my mother died my brother Naseer told me that he came home early from school one day and found Father leaving the house with a woman and he suspected she was his lover because it had happened several times. When I asked him how he knew she was Father’s lover, he said he had found a packet of condoms in Father’s room and he had smelt the woman’s perfume in the room and on the bedsheets. I hugged him, ruffled his hair, and tried to console him. “So you’re Sherlock Holmes, are you?” I said. I later felt convinced that she was indeed his lover because the pattern was repeated. She was an Indian woman, much younger, who worked in a shop next door to the gas station that he managed. I confronted him. “Do you have no shame? It hasn’t even been two months,” I shouted. “Don’t be so rude. How can you speak to me like that? It’s you who should be apologizing to me,” he replied angrily. “I apologize? For what?” “Because you played soccer during the condolences.” “You’re comparing that with this?” “What’s ‘this’?” “Your Indian whore.” “Get the hell out of here and don’t come to this house again,” he shouted angrily.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE FETUS

  It can’t see anything, although its eyes are fully formed and it can open them. But they’re shut. It can’t see anything. But it’s dreaming. And it dreams a lot because it spends most of its time sleeping. Its dreams aren’t dreams in the traditional sense. In other words, they don’t consist of events and they can’t be narrated sequentially or even nonsequentially. They are phantasms of pleasures in their raw state. They can’t easily be described because they are in a liquid state and haven’t yet assumed fixed form. There is of course some pain in dreaming, and in the waking state as well.

  It can’t see, but it can hear everything. Music has a positive effect on its mood and can speed up or slow down the rate at which its little heart beats. The sound of its mother and of her breathing has the same effect as either music or noise, depending on the mother’s mood. Its heart is almost a miniature copy of the mother’s heart. They play to the same rhythm. Even in the absence of any external sounds or influences it can hear what sounds like the roar of the sea. It can hear its mother’s pulse, too. Her breathing in and breathing out. It’ll miss that roar when it’s born. But it might try to express it and what went with it in the language it acquires in its early years. The language that will be the only, or maybe the clearest, way to convey everything. There are, however, feelings and desires that language cannot accommodate, that it fails to convey, and that the lips and other organs will handle. Bu
t much will remain buried and will come to the surface only in dreams and nightmares.

  That’s if it had been born!

  But it wasn’t and won’t be born.

  Lauren, an MA student whom I was tutoring, noticed that I was worried, and I told her that I needed temporary accommodation. She said that the woman she lived with was going away for a month and I could stay in her apartment. I lived with Lauren and stayed on in her apartment even after the other woman came back. That was because our relationship had developed. I had told her that I wanted to leave Virginia, but I didn’t have any firm plans. When the semester ended she suggested I drive to California with her in her car, and I agreed. I felt sad and a little guilty saying goodbye to my younger brother because I would be leaving him alone with my father. We went to California in Lauren’s car, a red Jeep Wrangler, and reached San Francisco in three days. This sense of guilt pursued me. But I couldn’t take him with me and I couldn’t support him.

  THE COLLOQUY OF THE TAPE

  A rectangular plastic object, dark brown in color but transparent enough to reveal the two small rollers at the lower corners, and the other small pieces that a thin tape sometimes passes over or between. The tape is brown, too, and it runs around two reels that look like eyes staring into the eyes of anyone who’s looking at them. One of these eyes sometimes grows larger, as if it’s swelling, as the tape wraps around it, while its twin sister shrinks, growing smaller and smaller. If it wasn’t for the pieces of paper stuck on both the A and B sides of the rectangle and the inscription on the bottom part of both sides, “SONY, CHF 60,” it would look very much like the face of a little robot.