by Sinan Antoon
All this was going to happen and I would have become the most famous Arab pianist at the start of the twenty-first century. But in fact I didn’t leave Baghdad. I didn’t go to the music and ballet school. I played the organ for many hours and I saw the program about the music and ballet school, and I was going to apply and pass the exam. But a few months earlier, during that winter of fire, we were all in the car with my father driving fast to get to the house of my grandmother, who insisted we come because her house was safe and not close to any military installations that were likely to be bombed. The traffic lights weren’t working and Father was slowing down a little at the junctions. But he didn’t slow down enough at one of them. The driver who was coming at high speed from the right didn’t slow down—he too was escaping to a safe place. I never played music after that and Hadil wasn’t envious of me.
I don’t like the taste of the coffee they sell in Starbucks, and I hate the company and its role in the demise of dozens of beautiful little cafés in New York and many other cities in the world. But I love their comfortable seats. Whenever I found Think so full that I couldn’t find a place to sit (it happened about once every week or two), I would buy my coffee there and then go to the Starbucks at the corner of West 4th and Washington Square East, to look for somewhere to sit and mark my students’ weekly assignments, or to read the newspapers and kill time (however often you kill it, it comes back to life the next day). Whenever I went to Starbucks, I would find him there in the same corner, even during the vacations when there are fewer students around. But the staff here were pleasant toward him, and I never saw them harassing him, maybe because he too never harassed any of the customers. He always sat in the corner under one of those pictures that often hang in branches of Starbucks, showing the streets in the neighborhood around the store as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century, in black and white. There were horse-drawn carriages and men standing on the pavement selling fruit and vegetables to passersby.
He was like a character who had escaped from a sad play in the early 1950s. He had unkempt gray hair hidden by a woolen cap that he put in the old leather bag that he parked on the ground to the right of the table after removing his papers and spreading them out. Sometimes he picked up the next table if it was empty and put it alongside his own to make space for more pieces of paper. On the first occasions that I saw him, in the fall of 2005, I guessed from afar that he was working on some research or something similar. But once en route to the bathroom I had to walk past where he was sitting, then stand and wait in a short line. I allowed myself to cast an inquisitive glance at the pieces of paper he had spread out. Some of them had only a single word written on them in large letters. I read the words hope, pain, and truth. I was going to ask him whether he knew that in Arabic the words for hope and pain were almost the same, with just the two consonants transposed—amal and alam. Some of the pages were blank, and some had a circle or just one letter. I never saw a computer or even a pen. Lost in thought, he was looking at the street through the window. His eyes were green. Clean-shaven. His complexion was a little ruddy. He was wearing a blue-and-white shirt with a small checkered pattern that reminded me of restaurant curtains I had seen somewhere, and a blue suit, without a necktie, and Newport trainers. Sometimes he would change the position and arrangement of the pieces of paper and look at them for a while before going back to the window. After that I saw him several times and I deliberately went to the bathroom so that I could sneak a look at his pieces of paper, which didn’t change much. There was still plenty of blank space …
The last time I saw him was in the summer of 2006, and after that he disappeared.
Obvious questions that don’t dream of an answer.
Is it the same moment everywhere? Or is each moment tied to its place in this universe? If the latter possibility is correct, then there is more than one time. There are billions of times that might overlap with one another but are never identical.
The barbed wire coils as if it’s weaving a spider’s web that is trying to hide the scene from us. Some of the coils, those closest to the lens, are not clear. But there are enough of them for others to appear as clear circles, with savage, regular teeth. In the upper right and left corners we can see more barbed wire, coiled more compactly, surrounding a space with a sandy surface. On the sand are many footprints around a seated man. His legs are stretched out in front of him and his back is vertical as though he’s leaning against an invisible column. He’s wearing a white dishdasha and leather sandals. His left hand is on the forehead of a young boy, no more than four years old, who has his eyes closed and is resting his head on the man’s right arm. The boy’s mouth is open. He has short black hair and is wearing green pajamas. The man’s right hand is holding the boy’s right hand, and his arm is wrapped around the upper part of the body of the boy, whose legs are stretched out at an angle. The boy has put his right foot, which is soiled with mud, over his left foot at the ankles. Two feet away from them we can see a pair of trainers, and it is clear from the size of them that they belong to the boy. The sun is fierce. The man has a black bag on his head.
I am a fish, without scales.
A window with bars running vertically and horizontally, except for the lower part where an enormous man is squatting on yellow tiles. His bottom is bare and there are signs of bruising on his left buttock. His left foot protrudes from under his right thigh and is held tight by a thick rope tied to the bars of the cell. His right hand lies on the ground, and the upper part of his body is covered by a red short-sleeved shirt. His left hand is tied to a bar in the ceiling with a thick rope. His head is bowed and he has a white blindfold splattered with blood over his eyes.
The same man with the massive body is lying on his stomach on a brown piece of ground. The white dishdasha he is wearing is rucked up to reveal his buttocks and his legs. I can see signs of injuries and bruises, and his back is stained with blood. His hands are tied together. He has a slight beard and short black hair. His neck is twisted far to the right as he tries to look upward, but the dusty-colored blindfold prevents him from seeing anything. There’s an enormous gray dog that seems to be about to pounce on the man. Its front legs are on the man’s bloodied back. In the background there are bars with darkness beyond, and the bars of another cell deep in the darkness.
Say that I can hear what you can’t hear, and that I can see what you can’t see.
I felt restive and decided to go out for a walk. While I was on my way to the elevator, my octogenarian neighbor, Mrs. Cartwright, came out of her apartment and turned toward me when she heard the sound of my footsteps. She was one of what I called “the indigenous people of the building,” a tenant before the university bought the building and allocated most of the apartments to faculty and staff. The indigenous people in general were bitter toward the university. They felt they were an endangered species. “Oh, professor, I haven’t seen you in a long while, but you’re busy no doubt,” she said.
“How are you, Mrs. Cartwright?” I asked.
“Very well, I have a new hip that I’m trying to get used to.”
“Congratulations.”
“There’s still a lot of pain but it’s better than before.”
“That’s excellent.”
We went into the elevator and I pressed the button to take us down to the ground floor. “I met someone from your country last week. I was invited to my granddaughter’s house and I met him and he reminded me of you,” said Mrs. Cartwright.
“Really? What was his name?”
“Oh, sorry, I don’t remember, but he was also from South Africa. He said the situation there is bad because of the violence and the crime,” she replied.
Years ago I stopped correcting people who confused me with someone from some neighboring country, usually Iran, but South Africa is a very long way from Iraq. Even so, Mrs. Cartwright often had confused ideas and vague information, and I had no wish to correct her. At that moment I envied her the imprecision that allowed h
er to change geography and maybe history and give her neighbors new histories and identities. “Yes, levels of violence are high there, unfortunately,” I said.
“Tell me, do you visit your family there? Do you go back?” she asked.
“No, I haven’t been for three years,” I said.
“It must be a very long and tiring journey.”
“Yes, it is really tiring.”
The elevator door opened and we went out together. I said goodbye to her and walked off.
A child. Me. A child sitting in the garden of our house, which is no longer a house. A gift from the sky turned it into an enormous pile of rubble. I pick up a piece of glass from a broken window. I feel the edge and it cuts me and draws a drop of blood. I feel a slight pain and watch the drop fall to the ground. The moment is a wound. I put the piece of glass on the body of time to cut it. I will cut it and draw a drop of blood. A moment. I will make it bleed to death, just as they all died.
“Here’s the night owl, starting his usual ramble,” Dino, the Ecuadorean doorman, said with a laugh.
“Did you know that in the country I come from owls are seen as symbols of stupidity?” I said.
He put out his hand to shake mine and smiled. “Oh sorry, my friend. That’s certainly not what I meant. So what’s the right metaphor for those who stay up late in your culture?”
“Star shepherds.”
“Ah, beautiful. I’ll call you a star shepherd, but where are the stars here? We cannot see them because of all the light pollution.”
The residents and the other doormen and staff called Dino “the philosopher.” Although his education ended at secondary school and he hadn’t gone to university either in Ecuador or in the United States, where he had emigrated forty years earlier, he was an intellectual and a voracious reader. He would argue and debate with the faculty who lived in the building. He followed world news with interest and read the alternative and leftist media in English and Spanish. He was leftist by inclination. He was even a member of the local committee that represented doormen in the union and wore its badge on the lapel of his black uniform. He was fairer than most of the people in his home country. “My mother’s Italian and she gave me my skin color,” he would say with a laugh, then add: “But my father’s ancestors were of Inca descent.” Galeano was his favorite writer.
Dino was obsessed with a personal project to save the world from its worsening problems. He told me the details several times. Truth be told, it was an amazing and carefully thought-out project. Dino had found cheap land on a mountain in Ecuador, close to some natural springs, and had bought it two decades ago. Recently he had bought the land around it and he intended to build an eco-hotel for tourists, relying on the fertility of the surrounding area, where he would grow quinoa and breed Indian rabbits, which he planned to export to China. It would employ the local people, whom he would take on as partners in the project.
“I’ve toiled for more than thirty-five years and sent four kids to college, but I want to ensure their future,” he said. “On the farm I’m working to set up in Ecuador, you can see the stars clearly and gaze at them as much as you like.”
“I’ll definitely visit you there.”
I thought about what Dino said as I walked west toward the river. Was I an owl? Or a shepherd? Maybe I was neither. I was a lonely bat, with no wings.
THE COLLOQUY OF THE EYE
His black hair is receding to the corners of his forehead, which is expanding to look like one of those surfaces that he stares at and then colors. His eyebrows are almost horizontal above his hawklike eyes, which convey all the sadness he has passed on to me. His nose is thin between his eyes, but it gets bigger farther down. His beard and mustache are always bushy, and the beard reaches the top of his cheeks. Wherever and whenever I roam in my earliest memories, his face is there. It even seems to me that I was conceived in his eyes and born from the marriage of his eyes and his hands. At first I thought I was his only child, but then I discovered that there were others, male and female, into which he breathed life. There, beyond the seas, in Florence.
A few days after my birth, men came and swaddled me and then carried me in their arms. They wrapped me in pieces of cloth, paper, and plastic, but I was taken by surprise when they put me in a dark coffin, and I thought that the wrappings were a shroud. I heard them doing the same thing with my siblings. Then we were picked up and they took us in a procession through the streets of the city where I was born. I didn’t see it at all, but I could hear the noise of the people in the streets. The sounds of the city faded away and disappeared for an hour or more; then we heard other sounds that suggested we were close to another city. After passing through the streets of this city, the sound of the sea breathing in and out reached my ears. They took us down and put us aboard a ship. I thought they were going to throw me to the bottom of the sea, as in those old stories that I had heard, I don’t know where. After some days and nights, the ship handed us over to another port, which in turn handed us over to trucks that took us off.
When I came out of the coffin I saw his face for the first time in many days. His brow dripping with sweat, he asked a group of men to treat us gently. I was the first to be mounted on that vast white tableau. To take my place at its heart carrying this torch that I’m still carrying now. He looked at me anxiously from the ground. He shouted and pointed as he addressed the others. But he disappeared and never came back after that. The rest of my siblings came and took their places one after another on my right and on my left. The horse, the bull, the soldier and the bereft mother who had been crying and hugging her son for four decades. I was crying too, but no one could see my tears.
I was the one who saw everything. For days and days. The days of celebrations and marches in which these people chanted and raised placards, pictures, flags, and banners. Happy, or angry. And the ordinary days when they hurried about their business and most of them didn’t look up or notice us. But there were always some who stopped and looked. I saw days when cars and people disappeared and tanks roamed the streets, and other days when bodies were strung up and people cheered at the sight of them, and they were left there for days. I saw days when planes flew around high in the sky and the birds took fright and went into hiding. I saw the day when my only eye was knocked out by a piece of shrapnel and fell to the ground. How was I to bend down to pick it up? Because I’m trapped here. I hold this torch and I can no longer see anything but my past and his face.
One sad, cold, and very ordinary night, I was wandering around the East Village. I saw big white trucks parked on both sides of the street, electricity generators and enormous coils of wire running along the sidewalks, and I knew they were shooting a scene for a movie. In my first year in New York the sight impressed me, and I would stand around enthusiastically with other people who make a habit of watching to see whether any of the actors are famous. But movie shoots were now part of the bigger Manhattan scene that I was used to, no longer “new” to me, especially as you might sometimes have to wait an hour for one scene to be shot and for the stars to come out of the big white cars where they relaxed and slept. But I noticed the face of Julianne Moore that night, and I liked her very much, especially after The Hours. I liked everything about that movie, even the music, and I’d made sure to buy the CD to listen to. So I waited, and after three quarters of an hour the shooting started on the other side of the street. Julianne Moore sat smoking a cigarette on the stone steps leading up to the door of a house, and a man came to sit beside her. They talked awhile and then kissed. They reshot the short scene three times. After the last time the director clapped and said “Great!” Moore went back to her car, the lights were turned off, and the crowd dispersed. I went back to my apartment wondering what happened to the character after the film ended. Major actors take on characters and identify with them, and the actor’s personality disappears temporarily, but where do the characters go after the acting ends? Do they die? And if they die, do their ghosts hover around us? Or do they
remain homeless, looking for a new story to inhabit temporarily?
The catalog was a sapling when I started it years ago and now it’s an orchard with branches that reach up to the ceiling. My room is no longer big enough for it. I don’t know what I’m going to do. All this and I’m still on the first minute.
I was woken up by her lips brushing over my cheek and then my neck. “Enough, up you get, darling,” she whispered in my ear and kissed me. “The weather’s wonderful today. Let’s go to the sea.” Then she got out of bed and went to draw the curtains. I covered my head with the duvet. Before I had time to ask her what was behind all this sudden activity, she said, “Do you have a sea in Iraq?” and then “Come on, get up, you can sleep there on the beach.”
“Let me wash my face and have a cup of coffee, and then we can decide,” I said.
“Ah, I forgot you’re not a morning person. Coffee’s ready. I’ll wait for you at the table.”
