The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  The “burned room,” as we called it, stayed as it was for several weeks. Father warned us not to go inside, but I sneaked in several times and stood inside looking in amazement at the blackened walls and the burned pieces of furniture, including the iron bedstead where my uncle slept. The remains of the mattress had turned into black cotton. The smell of fire pervaded the house, especially on the second floor. We couldn’t get rid of it until the workers came, took everything out of the room, moved it far away, and then repainted the room. Some years later it became my sister’s room and I would frighten her by saying that the fire was still lurking in the room and would wake up one day and burn everything.

  Everything shuts its eye everything what I lack and I look for it for me it looks it doesn’t find me I find myself where is everything I’ll say I say everything I’ll say I shut the eyes of the sky the hole of the sky is a grave I dig alone I was no I wasn’t there how don’t I know I don’t believe I believe myself did they go into the hole for who and why they didn’t wait who took the hole who took the house the house didn’t wait for me I shut its eye their eyes my eyes now I don’t remember now they are with them I should have been there now the hole who shut it but not when I opened my eyes hide-and-seek the hole I ran and ran shut papers and smoke and stones everything every nothing God where he was he wasn’t I shut his eyes what will he say be is he in the hole I ran and behind me and in front of me and behind me the hole I am all of them nothing

  I came out through the kitchen door to the fig tree next to the water tank that sits against the back wall of the house. How I longed to taste the figs! I was so impatient for them to ripen that summer, as I was every summer. I stepped off the concrete path onto the wet ground. Mother would scold me if I dirtied the house with traces of mud. Standing under the tree I looked for figs that were ripe to pick. I made sure I didn’t trample on the patch of celery and parsley that she had planted. She had repeatedly warned me not to damage the plants by treading on them, so I walked along the edges. I caught sight of a fig that was ripe and I reached out with my right hand to seize it. I could feel it with my hand, on the branch that was hanging down. It was so soft it was bound to taste sweet. I picked it and walked to the faucet close to the big water tank. I washed it quickly and then bit off half of it. I looked forward to the soft pulp of the remaining half, which was partly yellow and partly red and gave off an amazing aroma. As I was about to devour the second half I heard the creak of a door opening and then the sound of female laughter. I realized it was the neighbors’ daughters laughing. I had recently seen them from the roof of our house, sitting in the side garden. One of them was beautiful, with long black hair and pert breasts. I didn’t know their names. Their house wasn’t on our street, but on the street behind us. All I knew about them was that they were the Abu Khuloud household and they had moved to the area a month or more earlier. Our houses shared the back wall, which I approached warily to hear more clearly what they were saying. I bent down so that I didn’t move the branches of the tree and I walked toward the wall. I crossed the irrigation ditch that ran parallel to the wall and crouched down close to the wall. I tried to put my ear close. I could hear the sound of glass bottles being put in a crate and a voice saying, “Take these too.” I noticed a crack in a piece of cement in a corner between two bricks in the courses of the wall, which had been left without rendering or paint. When I touched it with my hand it fell off, leaving a considerable hole, and I could see part of the ground on the other side of the wall. I tried to lower my head to get a better view. I was so busy adjusting my position for snooping that I didn’t notice that the soft, wet soil under my feet was sinking. I put my eye right up to the hole. I could see the kitchen door clearly for two seconds before my feet slipped and I fell into the ditch, which hadn’t dried out since the last time it had received its share of muddy irrigation water. I could feel the mud in my hair and on my arms and back, and my clothes were spattered with it. I was worried that they might hear me moving and I would be caught out, so I didn’t move for some seconds. But the sound of bottles being put in crates continued loudly. I climbed out of the ditch and felt my hair and clothes and tried to scrape off the mud. I went to the faucet, turned it on, and started to wash my hands and tried to clean my clothes as best I could. I thought about what I would say to Mother. I heard the door closing, but I consoled myself with the idea that the hole in the wall would still be there and that I would catch sight of something bigger and more valuable the next time.

  I went into the house through the kitchen door, went to the bathroom, took off my clothes, piled them up, and then washed. Mother found the dirty clothes later and scolded me: “Why did you do that? Why did you roll in the mud?” She didn’t believe it was from playing soccer.

  I began to reconnoiter the back of their house more intensively, from the roof or from behind the curtains in my parents’ room when it was empty, just on the off chance of seeing something. Two weeks later I saw the girl filling a bucket with water. I rushed down to the ground floor, went out quietly to the fig tree, and sneaked carefully into my snooping position. The ground was dry and firm. I took a plank of wood I found close to the water tank, put it in the ditch, and knelt on it so that the hole was at eye level. I saw her standing with her back to me, wearing a light blue, partially diaphanous sleeveless dress that she had raised to above her knees, tucking a part of it on both sides into her white underwear so that she could wipe the floor and move more freely. It was the first time I had seen bare thighs. She turned off the faucet and threw the cloth she was holding into the bucket. She soaked it, then wrung it over the bucket. She carried it into the kitchen through the open door and came back a minute later. The wetness had made parts of her dress cling to her body. She wasn’t wearing a bra and I noticed her pearlike breasts. She was facing me this time. When she bent down to put the cloth in the bucket for a second time, an ample expanse of her breasts was visible, and I thought that they were fruits about to fall. She wrung out the cloth, went back into the kitchen, and disappeared. Then she reappeared and soaked the cloth again. But this time the area she was mopping was within my field of vision and I could watch her clearly as she bent down and mopped the floor methodically. Her bare thighs and big hips came closer and closer as she walked back toward the kitchen door. My erection grew harder and my right hand had slipped into my pants when I started watching her. I opened the zipper to take it out and play with it, while my left hand rested on a brick in the wall, with my forehead pressed against the wall. For a moment I was frightened someone might come out and discover me, but it was an opportunity I couldn’t afford to miss. When she bent over the bucket to wring out the cloth again, I couldn’t control myself and I ejaculated onto the ground beneath me. I took my eye away from the hole and looked down. The drops of sperm spattered on the dark soil looked odd. I put my little friend back in his place and did up the zipper. When I looked through the secret hole again I couldn’t see her, but I heard the sound of water cascading out of the bucket and then the sound of her footsteps approaching. I saw her put the bucket under the faucet, go into the kitchen, and close the door behind her.

  After that I thought that in the future I was going to enjoy various other scenes. I waited impatiently for her but that sighting proved to be a one-off occasion. Three weeks later I saw some builders working on the walls of the house. They scraped them clean and then covered them with a coat of stucco. I was worried this embellishment might affect the peephole I had discovered in the wall. My worry was justified. When I went out two days later and put my eye to it, I couldn’t see anything.

  But the scene remained vivid in my memory, and afterward whenever I smelled figs I remembered her thighs. Whenever I bit into a fig and enjoyed its softness, I remembered her breasts rubbing against each other.

  I go back home.

  Often.

  Once every two weeks.

  I get on the bus at Bab al-Mu‘azzam. The number 79A. I always sit on the upper deck. I prefer
the front seat on the right so that I can sit in front of the big window and see the city. I feel claustrophobic on the lower deck. Even when I can’t find a seat on the upper deck I prefer to stand there, although it’s difficult to keep your balance sometimes when the driver accelerates or applies the brakes. I stand and wait for a passenger to leave their seat so that I can take it. I take a book or a magazine with me and read. By the time the bus reaches our neighborhood, it has already disgorged many of its passengers. I prefer it that way, half-empty. It stops at the bus stop near our house, close to the pedestrian bridge. I can see our street in the distance. The door opens and closes. I stay sitting in my place. Our street slowly recedes and disappears. I look at the road ahead and go back to my book. The bus reaches the end of the route and the driver turns off the engine. Sometimes he comes up to the upper deck, is surprised when he sees me, and asks me to get off. When I tell him I want to go back, he says, “Okay, but you’ll have to buy another ticket,” so I do. Some of them don’t check the upper deck and don’t discover me. I sit where I am and go back to Bab al-Mu‘azzam.

  Days later I go back home.

  Without getting off.

  One of the drivers has grown used to my presence and has come to know me. At first he would ask, “What’s up with you, buddy? You never leave?” But then he stopped asking. Once, when we were close to home, a woman called me as she was about to go down to the lower deck. “How are you, dear Wadood?” she said. I turned and saw a smart woman in her sixties, wearing glasses. She had gray hair. She smiled. But she had tears in her eyes as she spoke to me. Her face was familiar but I didn’t recognize her. “Thank God you’re safe. I heard that they released you. Where are you living now?” she said. I didn’t say anything. How did she know all this? “You seem to have forgotten me. I’m Zeidoun’s mother. Your neighbors,” she said. Zeidoun? Yes, I used to play soccer with Zeidoun. Zeidoun Pajamas. A short guy who wore pajamas all the time. Even when he was playing soccer in the street he wore sneakers but kept his pajamas on. I remember that we formed a soccer team that included a selection of street kids to take part in the local soccer league that played on the dusty square near al-Ghadeer. We called ourselves the Zayouna Cubs and collected donations to buy a real leather football that cost five dinars, which at that time was a massive amount, because the plastic footballs that cost four hundred and fifty fils, less than a tenth as much, were no longer good enough for us. A group representing the club went to buy the ball from Rassam’s in Baghdad al-Jideeda. “If you don’t mind, I have to get off here. Come and visit,” she said sadly. “Thank you,” I said, but I didn’t utter it. “May God be with you, my dear, may God help you.” Zeidoun I remembered but I didn’t remember her. She shook her head and said “Oh dear God” as she got off.

  On my way back once, I was reading an old magazine and found a translation of one of Cavafy’s poems. I was struck by a stanza and images that I still remember. About bygone days that look like snuffed-out candles. Some are still smoking, but others are cold, melted, and bent.

  And I rained.

  That expression will sound strange to you, so I will explain. There are hundreds of clouds that hide in my body. Clouds that are formed from the vapor of images and words and from heaps of things that I don’t know and don’t understand. Every now and then a wind blows them and turns them into torrential rain that looks for a way out. The rain uses my eyes and all the pores in my skin. I shrink and cry. I sweat and shake and groan in pain. I stay that way for a quarter of an hour and sometimes for hours. Later I calm down and feel greatly relieved because I’ve released the clouds and “cleared my mind.” I have read passages that are much sadder than this one but I didn’t rain. Perhaps it depends on the amount of clouds bottled inside.

  “Intense bursts of crying” is the official term that the doctor wrote in my file. But why are people frightened of rain inside them? Very well, I’ll confess. Sometimes the rain is accompanied or preceded by thunder, which I can hear inside me and which I let out too—in the form of screams. It’s the cycle of sadness in nature. Don’t you remember how we used to study the life cycles of oxygen and nitrogen and so on? This is part of the cycle of sadness in nature. I claim that sadness is a natural compound found in our bodies and in the air we breathe, and sometimes the levels of sadness increase, depending on the conditions and context.

  Anyway, the clouds all gathered in my eyes. The thunder I could hear started to hurt me. I dropped the magazine I was reading. I clasped my head and my back arched. I could hear the fear in the voice of the boy who was sitting next to his mother in the seat nearby: “Mama, what’s the matter with that guy?” he asked, and then he started to cry. She tried to calm him down and I could hear the sound of her footsteps as she said, “There’s nothing, my boy, don’t worry. Come, let’s go down.”

  I started writing the alphabet and words at home early, two years before I went to school. My aunt Suhad, who worked as a teacher, gave me a book and a pencil and taught me how to form the letters and words. I was delighted with the letter ha’, my favorite because of its form at the beginning of a word. My obsession with letters and writing was accompanied by a fear of going to school that came from a source I couldn’t identify. Whenever my mother said, “My God, you’re growing up now and you’ll be going to school,” I would say, “I don’t want to! I want to stay here at home.”

  “Impossible, my son. How so? Everyone has to go to school,” she said. I wasn’t convinced that going to school was inevitable until one day we were sitting on the veranda and she said, “You have to go to school to study and become an engineer or a doctor. If you don’t go to school, what will become of you? Do you want to be like this kerosene man?” I looked at the young man who was coming back for the second time carrying two jerrycans of kerosene, one on each side to balance each other, to take them to the water heater near the kitchen and empty them into the fuel tank. When he’d finished the job, he came to my mother and took from his pocket a money pouch made of dirty, stained gray cloth with coins rattling inside it. He wasn’t more than sixteen years old, and the strong smell of kerosene from his clothes went right up my nose. He was dark and slim with amber-colored eyes and short black hair. He was wearing a pink undershirt that looked as if it had originally been red but had faded with time. He had khaki pants and blue sneakers with gray tips and gray laces. He took the banknotes my mother gave him, put them in his money bag, then took a handful of coins out of it. I saw the dirt under his fingernails. “Keep the change,” my mother said, and he thanked her. He smiled as he put the bag back in place. He turned and headed toward the door. My mother walked slowly behind him to close the main gate. The man got on his cart, picked up the reins that were tied next to his seat, made a click with his tongue, and pulled the reins. The old white horse moved off slowly, pulling the green cart. Then the man started ringing the metal bell—ding, ding, ding—in search of other customers.

  I stood in awe in front of the horse that pulled the cart whenever the kerosene man came. I liked to watch its gestures as it waited for its owner. It shook its head. It whisked flies off with its tail. But what my mother said that day made me forget the horse and made me fear for the miserable fate I would meet if I didn’t go to school. My fingernails would always be dirty, I would have to carry heavy jerrycans around all day long, and I would stink of kerosene. I would sit on the cart and smell the horse’s shit. I realized that day that I had to go to school.

  A few months later I went to the preparatory class in a kindergarten called the Rawdat al-Uqhuwan, which was part of the al-Ibtikar School in Palestine Street. I cried bitterly when my mother left me. And I cried when we lined up in the courtyard. I carried on crying in class, although the girl I was made to sit next to was pretty and tried to silence me in various ways. The teacher was losing patience: “What’s up with you? That won’t do,” she said. She told everyone to be “sensible,” then took me to the principal’s office. We went through the courtyard to the other building wher
e the big children were. “I want to go home,” I said. “We can’t send you home. You’ll have to wait till the end of classes.” “Leave him here for now and we’ll find a solution,” the principal told the teacher. “Just give me his full name.” The teacher told me to sit on the sofa, then went back to her class. The janitor, ‘Ammu Warda, sat outside the door watching me and smiling reassuringly at me. The principal looked through her papers, then picked up the phone, dialed a number, and waited. “There’s no answer. Does your mother work or does she stay at home?” “At home,” I said. “Well, she still isn’t answering. I’m going to take you and put you with your sister in the third grade.”

  I stopped crying when I heard her say that. The principal stood up from her desk, came around, and approached me, saying, “Come on, don’t cry. Come, let’s go and see your sister.” She took me by the hand and we went out to the corridor and then up to the second floor. The principal knocked on the classroom door and opened it. I was wearing the green uniform tunic, while the boys sitting in this class were wearing white shirts and gray pants, and the girls white blouses and blue skirts. I spotted my sister at a desk in the middle of the room. She looked confused and embarrassed. The principal told Miss Wisal, the Arabic teacher, “Sorry miss, this boy wouldn’t stop crying and he was disrupting the lesson. Let him sit with his sister and maybe he’ll calm down a little.” “No problem. Come here, my dear. Who’s your sister?” “Wafa,” I said. “I can write, miss,” I added for some reason. She laughed and said, “You can write? Come on then, if you can write like them we’ll put you in this class and you can stay with your sister and not go back to the kindergarten. So go and sit next to Wafa.” I believed her and was delighted by the idea. I walked toward the desk at which my sister was sitting with a classmate as the other children watched. At the time I didn’t understand why Wafa was behaving strangely. My sudden appearance in class had embarrassed her. “Why did you come here?” she asked me irritably. The girl sitting next to her at the desk was nicer and kinder. She smiled and moved to the right to make room for me to sit with them. I took out my exercise book, pencil, pencil sharpener, and eraser to be ready to write. The principal thanked Miss Wisal and left. “Okay, let’s go back to dictation then.” I picked up my pencil, all primed to write, but the words that came from Miss Wisal’s lips were unfamiliar and very long. I had never heard them before. Before I had written down two letters from the word I thought I had heard she had moved on to another word and then another and the children around me were writing fast. The words piled up and I realized within moments that I wouldn’t be able to keep up and I would have to go back to the preparatory class, and another tear fell on my exercise book. I don’t remember what happened after that, but I do remember that I cried the next day, though less, and that later I settled in. In fact, I became one of the star pupils. The competition was between me and a Kurdish girl called Viyan. We took turns being first and second in the class. We went on like that for six years until we graduated from primary school. I’ll never forget the looks we exchanged in first grade when the teacher gave out gifts for those who had the best grades. The principal came and whispered something in the teacher’s ear and the teacher called on Ma‘an as one of the pupils at the top of the class. We were surprised because Ma‘an was stupid and lazy. But he used to go home in a fancy Toyota Crown with a driver in military uniform. We later found out that he was the son of Khairallah Tulfah, Saddam Hussein’s uncle and father-in-law. In second grade they transferred him to another school so he no longer came higher than us in class, but higher than some other children instead.