by Sinan Antoon
The first time I fell in love was at al-Ibtikar School. I was nine years old and my beloved was not one of my classmates. No. She was twelve years older than me. Rana. How I enjoyed saying her name. I wrote it hundreds of time on pieces of paper, real and imaginary. Rana was the trainee teacher who taught us history for three months, as was the practice for those at teacher training college. I dreamed of her lips and kissing them. Her breasts, which showed through the relatively generous opening in her blouse, excited me. I was embarrassed by my little erection and felt guilty that I was defiling the pure image of her that I had in my imagination, which was almost innocent at that time. I was bold enough to write her a letter declaring my love for her and my sadness that she was about to leave us.
She wrote in my little autograph book—one of those books with colored pages that we children would pass around for others to write memorable comments in. “To my favorite student. I hope you have a brilliant future. With affection, your friend Rana,” she wrote. I was delighted by “my favorite student” and “your friend,” but the word “affection” puzzled me somewhat and left my happiness incomplete. I even asked my mother whether there was a difference between affection and love and her answer was ambiguous. I later discovered that affection was not like love, and this was confirmed when I heard at the end of the week that a boy, staying on after classes for his father to take him home, had seen Mr. Sabah, one of the trainee teachers, kissing Miss Rana in an empty classroom. I tried not to believe what I had heard, but I started observing them and I cried when I discovered that she had betrayed me.
I go back home.
I went back home.
Yes, I went back, just once.
I plucked up courage and went down from the upper deck to the lower deck when I saw the pedestrian bridge in the distance. The driver opened the door and I found myself on the pavement. The bus moved off and the people who had got off with me dispersed to their various homes. I hesitated and stood there on the pavement for five minutes. Then I decided that I wouldn’t retrace my steps this time, as I used to do in the past. Yes, I would go back home.
I came to our street. I looked for the open area where we used to play soccer on the right. But it was no longer an open space. Its place had been taken by a two-story house with walls painted gray. It had a wrought-iron gate painted white. There were no cars inside. I could smell the citrus blossom on the branches that hung over the wall. A cat with black and yellow spots walked past, looking more emaciated than any stray. I reached the first intersection where we used to hang out for many hours when we were teenagers and later. We watched everything that was going on and everyone passing by, especially girls who were coming back from school. It was on this corner that I witnessed one of the wonders of the universe. In a matter of just a few months the girl next door had been transformed from a child whose passing I did not notice into a woman whose passing created a magnetic field that controlled the flow of blood in my veins. I even began to pursue her and tried to make conversation with her before she got home. She didn’t say anything the first time I tried to speak to her. She looked frightened. The second time she smiled because I joked with her, saying, “What? Can’t you hear?” I don’t remember what happened after that. Did they move to some other area? Did she disappear from life or from my memory?
The details along the way were the same. Yes, some of the houses looked older than I remembered them and others had been renovated and improved. The street itself seemed narrower. I went past the house of the lawyer, Tu‘ma al-Sa‘di. The plaque with his name was still on the gatepost. Then there was the house of the businessman who owned the candy factory in Jamila and whom God blessed with four daughters but no son. He is said to have married another woman who was younger so that she would produce a male heir, but she gave him two more daughters, and I don’t remember if he finally succeeded in his endeavor.
I stopped outside our house.
But it wasn’t there. I found another house that was completely different. Much taller. I didn’t understand how that could have happened. How could a whole house vanish and be replaced by a different house? It had four large windows with smoked glass on the second floor. The palm tree that stood in the corner of the garden had disappeared. The garden wall was relatively high, but you could see the tops of citrus trees that were much shorter than the ones at our house and a mulberry tree of medium height that we didn’t have in our garden. The posts at the gate were high and coated in light brown stucco. Between them there was a high black gate. On the right-hand post was the doorbell and next to it a small red light. The house number was still 26 but there wasn’t a sign with a name to say who lived there. I felt the heat of the sun stifling me. I pressed the bell and left my finger on it for a long time. I heard a voice shouting, “Where’s our house?” It was my own voice but it was coming from far away. “You kept pressing the bell and you wouldn’t take your finger off. The people and the neighbors gathered around you.” That’s what my uncle said when I asked him what happened.
I went back but I didn’t go back.
My uncle said, “Wadood, after you gave me power of attorney, we sold the land for a good price and we still have the money. I put it in the bank and whenever you want or need anything, just tell me and I’ll withdraw the amount.”
I felt stifled and thought I had become a burden on them. I heard my uncle’s wife, the fat whore who pretended to care about me, saying to my uncle one night, “How are we going to get out of this mess? Why did you let them discharge him from that place? The boy’s not normal. He keeps talking to himself and whenever he screams at night, he startles me.”
“Where can he go? He doesn’t have anyone but us and I don’t have the heart to leave him at the mental hospital. They treat them like animals. I think he’s improving.”
“Improving? Are you out of your mind?” she replied.
I suspected she was working with them and spying on me. When I told my uncle that, he didn’t believe me and said, “May God forgive you. She pouts and whines, but all these things are in your head, Wadood.”
I heard her whispering about me to her neighbor.
When my condition improves! Ha ha ha. How many times has my condition improved and then I go back to square one! “How many times are we done for?” They let me go out by myself. I went to al-Mutanabbi Street to buy books and there I met Muhammad al-Sallum, who was with me at university. I hadn’t seen him for years and I didn’t recognize him at first because in our university days he had been slim and he hadn’t been bald. I came across him standing in front of a stall and it was he who called me. “You’re Wadood, aren’t you?” he said. “Where the hell have you been, man?” As we were chatting and reminiscing about our university days I saw a handwritten sign on the wall behind him. “Room to let,” it said. My uncle didn’t understand why I wanted to live in a room in al-Mutanabbi Street. “If you’re not comfortable here, find yourself a small apartment close to our place. Why confine yourself to a room?”
But I insisted. “It’ll be more convenient there, for me and for you. You’ve been very supportive, uncle,” I told him. In the end he didn’t raise any objections, because having me in his house had exhausted his patience and no doubt the sense of relief he would enjoy after I left far outweighed his anxiety and his occasional sense of guilt.
I’m mentioning all this to you because you asked me several times how I came to be in al-Mutanabbi Street selling books. As you can see it isn’t exciting or necessarily complicated. It was just a matter of escaping from a little social hell to somewhere where I had more space. This little room from which I am writing to you is my real homeland because it is full of books and every book is like a whole sky. It also contains my catalog, which in its turn will contain everything I know and can imagine. But I don’t want to be unfair to my uncle or give you the wrong impression of him. He’s a kindhearted person and he visits me from time to time, at least once a month, to make sure I’m well and to give me the monthly allowan
ce that he withdraws from the bank and that we agreed on after I moved out of his house. Selling secondhand books here these days is not at all a profitable way to make a living. We always lose out, but I manage to live on very little.
I don’t know how to classify it—a dream or a nightmare? I thought that we were one person. A single “I” united us. I saw him when I looked in the mirror and he saw me. We had the same memory, the same voice, and the same body. Our name was neither Wadood nor Nameer. I don’t know the name. Then I left that “I,” or was taken out of it. I broke away from it. I left Baghdad and traveled far away. When I came back to Baghdad I didn’t recognize Wadood because he too had become detached from “I” and had become another person. He became Wadood, in the same way as I became Nameer. And so he didn’t recognize me. “I” combined Wadood and me because I wanted to know what happened to Wadood because it could happen to me. “I” says to me, “Go with Wadood to his house to find out what happened, so I can go back to how I was and so he can too. Follow Wadood, who is looking for his house.” He goes into a side street and disappears, and I wake up.
THE COLLOQUY OF PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVES
Agfa (24)
1. overexposed. Mostly black except for a small patch of light in the middle and some haze in one of the corners. (He didn’t intend to take a picture anyway. The salesman put the film in the camera, closed the cover, and then handed it to him. But he pressed the button by mistake, and the shutter opened and saw what it saw at that moment. This was the first time he had held a camera.)
2. A woman about twenty years old. She has short black hair cut in the garçon style. She’s wearing a white blouse and a blue jacket and she has a binder and a book tucked under her right arm and a small purse in her left hand. Her eyes are laughing (there’s some dark kohl on her eyelids). Her head is slightly tilted to the right. Behind her is a shop window and we can see a man walking past the shop. To the left there are cameras attached to the wall. (He told her that the first picture he took would be of her.)
3. The woman is standing next to a young man who’s wearing a blue jacket, a white shirt, and gray pants. They are standing right in the middle of the frame and smiling. The background is the same as in picture 2, but the composition is better. (He asked the salesman to take a picture of them.)
4. A street scene with vehicles (the most prominent is a red double-decker bus) moving toward the lens of the camera. In the median strip there are some shrubs of medium height and a man trying to cross the street. In the background there’s a building and a footbridge. The sky is cloudless. (A man who passed them by looked at him in surprise and turned around after walking past. He thought of saying, “What’s up? Never seen a camera?” but he didn’t say anything.)
5. A close-up of the woman’s face laughing flirtatiously. Her right hand (with a bracelet around the wrist) is raised in front of the lens and seems less sharp than the rest of the picture. (She said to him, “As you like. You’re going to run out of film in five minutes this way.” He replied, “Don’t I have to practice? And I bought three rolls of film.”)
6. Some large eggplants stuffed in the lid of a cardboard box that’s been turned upside down for use as a container. (She said to him, “What? You’re making a documentary about the life of eggplants!” He asked her, “Aren’t you hungry? I’m dying of hunger.”)
7. A restaurant worker wearing a white apron stained with oil is cutting slices of shawarma with a massive knife. (He said to the worker, “Boss, if it’s not too much trouble, could you include some extra tail fat please?” She screwed up her face and said, “Ugh, how can you eat that stuff?” “You’re not a serious eater, my dear. It’s the best part.”)
8. The woman puts on lipstick and looks into a small round mirror. (She had finished washing her hands and mouth and had come back to the table. Before taking the picture, he said, “You got married and never knew what became of me. While you put lipstick on your lips I bit mine in pain.” She was surprised. “What kind of stuff is that?” she said. “That’s a folk poet who wrote a poem for his love on the night she married someone else.” “Looks like you want me to marry someone else?” “Not now, later!” They laughed together, but her laugh turned into a scowl when she saw him taking a picture of her. “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it? Enough! If you don’t put that camera away, I’ll get upset and go.” “Okay, that’s it. I’m done.”)
9. Her elegant hand, which ends in nails with red varnish, is holding a plastic cup full of ice cream with “al-Khasaki Sweets” on it. We can see a small watch under the bracelets on the wrist of the other hand, which is holding a small plastic spoon. (He convinced her that he would take a picture only of her hand, that her face as she ate wouldn’t be visible in any picture. “So stubborn!”)
10. A fountain in the middle of a square full of bushes and myrtles with cars driving around it. (“Come on, we’re going to be late for class if you stop to take pictures all the time.” “You should be encouraging me and supporting my talent.”)
11. A wide street and children walking along in school uniform. There are buildings on both sides and eucalyptus trees on the sidewalk. (He said to himself, “This will turn out to be a useless picture.”)
12. A large mural of Saddam Hussein wearing an academic gown and cap, holding a graduation certificate. Under the picture are the words “The pen and the rifle speak the same language.” (She whispered to him, “He has enough pictures everywhere and then you take a picture of the picture!” “That’s because I’m using him to practice.”)
13. A brass plaque inscribed “Al-Farahidi Hall” in black over a large wooden gate.
14. A group of students, male and female, sitting in a lecture hall. (They insisted he take a picture of them. He whispered in her ear, “Half of these people are hypocrites and it’s not worth wasting a photo on them. But what can I do? I can’t pick and choose.” “It’s your fault. Put the camera away and be done with it.”)
15. Her white blouse and her gray skirt are lying on the floor next to the bed and one of her shoes is sitting a few inches away.
16. A white bra lying on the floor. (She’s in the bathroom washing and she doesn’t hear the sound of the picture being taken. He wanted to immortalize this moment. He didn’t realize that the floor of the tiny apartment could assume such aesthetic and poetic value.)
17. The bathroom door is ajar. A side view of the upper half of her body bending down slightly over the basin. The arm washing her face shields most of her left breast but does not hide it completely. (This time she hears the sound of the shutter as it opens and closes. She’ll open the door and say, “What’s that?”)
18. The eyes are full of fear. Her mouth is gaping in an angry scream. Her hands are covering her breasts. (She’ll slam the door closed and sob in the bathroom. She’ll refuse to open the door or talk to him.)
19. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed fully dressed. She has covered her eyes with her hands. (She shouted out loud, “Enough. Don’t you know what enough means? I’ve been telling you all day long that I don’t want to have my picture taken. Give me the camera.”)
20. A picture that is not clear. She is standing with her hand outstretched toward the lens. (“That’s it, I swear. I’m not going to have the film developed.” He took it out of the camera and offered it to her. “There you are, take it. No one’s going to see the pictures. Burn it. Throw it away if you like. Whatever you want, do it, but just stop crying.” He put the film on the bed beside her.)
21, 22, 23, 24 darkness (She had intended to destroy the film but decided to keep it as a souvenir.)
I opened the glass door of the refrigerated cabinet to look for the milk that Mariah likes: two percent fat. The cold air trapped in the fridge brushed my face. As I took the plastic bottle of milk and put it in the shopping basket I was carrying in my left hand, I noticed that there was a whole row of milk in glass bottles of various sizes. It was rare to see milk in bottles now that paper and plastic were dominant.
I left the cabinet door open and picked up one of the bottles. The name of the company was Fresh and the slogan under the name was “From the Farm to Your Table.” Under the slogan there was more writing in a smaller font: “We Pamper Our Cows Because Happy Cows Produce Delicious and Refreshing Milk. We Don’t Use Antibiotics. We Use Glass Because It Is Safer than Plastic and Does Not Pose a Danger to Your Health. Enjoy It with Us.” The bottle I had picked up was whole milk, but there was also milk flavored with chocolate and orange. I put the bottle back in its place, took a bottle of orange-flavored milk and put it in the shopping basket. The orange-flavored milk and the coolness of the open fridge took me back to Baghdad in the middle of the seventies and to our delight (mine and my sister’s—Naseer had not yet been born) when the milkman, driving a large refrigerated truck with the words Dairy Company written on the sides in large letters, came along and stopped outside the house. We would help Mother carry the crates of empty bottles to the door so that we could change them for full bottles. The milkman would get down from the driver’s seat, turn, and stand at the back of his truck. Then he would unbolt the back door and the cold air would drift down. He checked the number of empty bottles in each crate and made sure they weren’t broken. Mother told him about the other crate that had smaller bottles: “Half orange and half banana.” The orange was my favorite flavor, but Wafa liked the banana. He pushed the two crates into the truck, climbed into the back of the truck, and pushed a crate of white milk to the edge of the deck. Then he arranged another crate that was half orange and half banana. Mother would take one crate down and he would take the other. Then she would ask him for some big packets of the yellow cheese and some of the small packets of clotted cream that he sold. She put them on the crate of white milk and paid him, and he gave her a receipt. My sister and I would help each other carry the crate of flavored milk into the kitchen. This cooperation was temporary and exceptional, dictated by the need to enjoy the milk as soon as possible. The eternal struggle between us would resume as soon as we had the crate in the kitchen and disagreed over which of us should have first dibs on the bottle opener. She often let me go first, saying, “You’re the baby.” The milk truck disappeared at the end of the 1970s for no obvious reason. With it the flavored milk disappeared, and only traditional milk remained.
