The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  I told her I had all my appetite with me and she laughed. I added that okra was an important dish in Iraq too. She was surprised, raised her eyebrows and said, “Really?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “it’s cooked with tomato sauce and we eat it with rice or with pieces of bread like Indian tandoori bread.”

  Putting some salad on my plate, Mariah’s mother asked, “I know you don’t cook, Mariah, but does he cook for you?”

  “No, but he takes me to excellent restaurants in Manhattan,” she replied.

  “If he’s a generous man, don’t let him get away from you.”

  We laughed, but Mariah protested: “What do you mean, Mom? You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  Her mother turned to me and said, “This is what we call soul food, which our ancestors cooked.”

  The food was delicious and the okra was cooked with peppers, onion, and spices. We finished off dinner with apple pie, a little ice cream, and a cup of coffee. We helped her mother take the plates to the kitchen, and Mariah put them in the dishwasher. Her mother pressed us to stay after dinner and watch television with her but I thanked her and Mariah said, “Nameer doesn’t like TV.”

  Mariah’s mother raised her eyebrows and said, “He’s free to like whatever and whoever he likes and hate whoever he hates.”

  “I’m going to take him to The Old Crib,” Mariah told her.

  “That’s an excellent idea. He’s eaten our food, so he can listen to our music.”

  I liked the name of the place, “crib.” Mariah said it was a small bar where young jazz and blues musicians came to play and sometimes famous people would pass by, and who knows if we might strike it lucky tonight.

  Mariah’s mother said goodbye to us, and hugged me and kissed me too. As we went down the steps she asked me if I had been bored.

  “On the contrary, I enjoyed it very much,” I replied.

  The Old Crib wasn’t far, but it was small. We paid an entrance charge at the door, found two chairs at the bar, and had to squeeze carefully between the tables to reach the bar. We could see the singer in the far corner at the other end of the place, but a pillar meant we couldn’t see the others in the band. Mariah ordered a Corona beer and I asked for a mojito. A sign behind the bar said “Whisper. The music sounds nicer than your voices.” After two songs the singer said they were going to take a short break. She came to the bar to fill the empty glass that had been on the floor next to her foot. Mariah asked her to sing a Nina Simone song.

  “I’d be delighted. Any song in particular?” the singer asked.

  “‘I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl.’ It’s my favorite song,” said Mariah. The singer sang it right after the break. I kept humming the tune as we took the train back to my apartment.

  Alone in front of it alone a black hole in my heart his heart wreckage a dead sky its stars no alone a sky with holes from which blood is dripping God’s blood blood blood blood a sky its blueness a needle sewing I hurt I cry I’ll forget I don’t want a nail to go in more than one nails a nail in the wall in the piece of wood in my heart holes dust in my mouth his mouth doesn’t speak his lip a tree that’s dying I stand up and walk shshshshsh it’ll end but after a while I’m not walking I see him climb this edge fall here they slept dust closes them don’t tell them phew the papers under the cupboard heartbeat an ink pen her wing colors my finger she stops I put her in the book don’t say or say say he won’t write the moon split open its door and run away the moon’s door is broken papa enough

  Mariah loves me and knows how to love me. She reminds me of a line in a popular old poem: “She’s young and doesn’t know how to love and desire has never stirred her heart,” because she’s quite the opposite. She’s young but she knows how to love. And I love her love for me. Without promises or conditions. She knows how to run her fingers over my wounds to discover the contours of my soul. But, intelligently and wisely, she makes do with tending to my wounds and she doesn’t want to eliminate them. She never claims or proclaims that she’s going to heal them. Unlike that woman who, after the first night we spent together years ago, asked about my relationship with my father. When I told her how I hated him, she said, “I’ll heal all your wounds!” All I could say was, “You seem to have started confusing your working hours and your hours of relaxation.” (She had studied psychology and had started training to be a social worker.) That relationship ended the next day.

  A whole year passed without either of us saying “I love you.” It wasn’t necessary anyway. Once we spoke about scars, visible and invisible. It was one of the first times we slept together. I ran my fingers down her back and asked about a little scar there on the lower part. She said it was all that was left of an accident when she fell off her bicycle at the age of ten. She added a phrase that I loved at the moment: “I like that scar. It’s part of the history of my body and part of my memories.” When she asked me about my family and we came to my father, I said, “I hate him.” She wasn’t surprised. She asked me for details and when I told her the story she said she understood. “White people keep talking about ‘peace’ and the need for people to make peace with their past. I don’t believe in that logic. There are things that can’t be accepted and memories that must stay alive.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  I want the feathers I want them he has to to stick them one by one these feathers I stick them so that I can go down to them there I can’t see anything you won’t see a feather fell I’m not a bird no I don’t dig by night their names fly a feather fell faces faces faces where are they where is it all they eat the dust an eye flies my eyelash is broken where no address permit travel document sees me the smoke and shuts shuts me Ereshkigal where’s my mother where where you have to fall more maybe they where are your feathers I’ll find them darkness darkness

  “I must learn Arabic,” she said seriously one day.

  “It’s a beautiful language. There’s a poet who says, ‘He who filled languages with charms placed the secret of beauty in Arabic.’ But why?”

  “So that I understand what you say in your sleep. You toss and turn like a fish on dry land and mouth things that I don’t understand.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry. It’s sad that we can’t be together in dreams and nightmares.”

  “Yes, in an ideal world we would keep each other company even in sleep. Then I could experience the peace you enjoy when you sleep.”

  “I always sleep deep,” she said with a laugh.

  Even the sound of the radio, which I left on at night to hear classical music and the news bulletin every hour, didn’t disturb her in the least.

  Because she had started to spend most weeknights in my apartment , she had begun to move some of her clothes and leave them at my place. She was like a bird nesting on the branches of my life. I gave her a copy of the key to the apartment and cleared a space for her in the closet and half of the bathroom cabinet.

  She slept deep. As if she were lying on the seabed. But even when she’s sleeping on her left side and I pull back an arm that’s wrapped around her, she’ll pull it back and cling to it as if she doesn’t want me to move away. But I toss and turn, then try to read a while. She wears an eye mask that shields her from any light. She sleeps on the seabed like a mermaid, while I thrash and turn between the shore and the water. When I fail, I get out of bed, get dressed, and go out for a walk.

  Time doesn’t move in one direction. I wouldn’t believe that unless I had escaped from one of its processions. I fell on the roadway and joined a procession that was moving in the opposite direction. I began to see my life in reverse and I went back to my mother’s womb. When I turned to go back, they aborted me.

  Insomnia hadn’t previously been a serious problem in my life. I suffered from it from time to time for one night and then it would pass. It didn’t call for any treatment. But after I came back from Baghdad it imposed itself like an unwelcome regular guest. At first I sought help from mint-flavored NyQuil, which was orig
inally meant for colds and flu but also has a sedative effect. The only problem with it was that it took a heavy toll on my vitality the next day. I would feel lethargic all day long. But even NyQuil began to lose its effectiveness as the months passed. I began to drink two doses and then three, and addiction to it started to cause side effects and an inflammation in the wall of my stomach. After I visited the doctor to have the effects of the inflammation treated, he offered to prescribe me sleeping pills. I tried not to become addicted to them and promised myself that I would take them only if the sun had risen before I was able to fall asleep, if I had an important meeting or work that required that I sleep at least two hours.

  THE COLLOQUY OF SHABAD

  Shabad didn’t sleep much. She kept tossing and turning, fighting off an anxiety that made it difficult to sleep—the anxiety that she might write the wrong words in the morning. Why should she be anxious when she had been training for years and could write with her eyes closed? She had memorized the poem that she had composed specially for the goddess Nisaba, and the next day she would write it down in front of everyone in the temple. She repeated it aloud dozens of times, and before she went to bed, she repeated it in front of her father, who smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “You will be a great scribe, Shabad, like your father and your forefathers,” he said. “Great Nisaba will bless you and grant you the strength to be a priestess in her temple.”

  She repeated the verses of the poem once again in the darkness:

  Glory be to Nisaba

  Daughter of An and Urash

  Sister of Ninsun, mother of Gilgamesh,

  Mother of Ninlil.

  Enki, the God of Wisdom, named you scribe of the gods

  and built you a school

  It is you who keeps the records

  And chronicles momentous events

  The gods seek your help, you offer them advice and counsel

  Glory be to Nisaba.

  Nisaba is bearer of the lapis lazuli tablet

  Nisaba, the oryx that drinks the sacred milk

  That opens the mouth of the seven heavens and kisses them

  The mistress who was granted divine powers

  Glory be to her

  Glory be to Nisaba

  My mistress

  Mother and goddess of the earth.

  You are the one who soothes the earth with cold water

  The great mountain begat you, wisdom gave birth to you

  Glory to you, O pure one, mistress of scribes

  Keeper of the records of Enlil, keeper of the seals

  O sage of the gods

  Glory to you

  Glory to Nisaba

  Shabad knelt humbly in front of the wall of the temple where Enki appeared as he approached Nisaba. He had prepared sacrifices for her and built her house of wisdom for her. He put the tablet of lapis lazuli on her knees, so that she could consult the holy tablet in the sky and write down the names of the stars. She repeated the poem in a trembling voice and, when she had finished, the high priest of the temple said to her, “Nisaba has honored you and made you a teacher. May She bless you with a joyous heart and free you from sorrow.” He asked her to recite the scribe’s prayer, and she recited it in a voice that sounded more confident:

  Knowledge illuminates every dark place.

  Glory to Nisaba, who gave us order

  And marked the boundaries

  The mistress whose divine powers are unlimited and unrivaled

  The queen of kings.

  The scribe

  She who knows everything

  And guides our fingers on the clay

  She tells them how to press the stylus onto the tablets

  And how to embellish them with a golden pen

  Nisaba is the one who gave us the measuring rod

  And the shining thread of the supervisor

  She is the country’s scribe

  It is she who feeds the gods

  And sates humankind.

  She has a crown of wheat on her head

  House of stars! House of lapis lazuli!

  He who reaches every country

  And builds a temple in Uruk

  The lords look up to you every month

  Nisaba draws her divine power from the heavens

  The Mistress of Wisdom who reads her tablet of lapis lazuli

  She draws a map of the sky and places its ropes on the Earth

  She draws the boundaries

  Glory be to her

  Glory to the Mistress of Erech

  Glory be to Nisaba.

  Shabad remained a loyal priestess of Nisaba and a skillful scribe who over two decades inscribed thousands of tablets documenting life in the city of Umma: sale and purchase contracts, inventories of harvests and land taxes, prayers and rituals of worship, magic spells to ward off evil spirits, poems old and new for the gods. But her first poem remained the one closest to her heart. Shabad died without imagining that after her death her poem would become the prayer that the scribes would recite in Mesopotamia during rituals, or that it would creep north and be written on the walls of temples devoted to Nisaba, or that all the tablets she inscribed would be moved to the great school in Shaduppum close to the Diyala River where a temple was built for Nisaba. Taha Baqir’s team excavated at the site between 1945 and 1963 and discovered two thousand clay tablets, including Shabad’s poem to Nisaba. He handed them over to the National Museum, where they remained until April 2003, after which they disappeared into a black hole.

  Strolling aimlessly and talking nonsense offer similar pleasures. The feet, like the tongue, have no particular direction or purpose. They cross the street suddenly and veer right or left without reason. There is no clear, straight trajectory, no map or compass. Invisible scribbles on the map of the city. Later the raving is organized, relatively speaking, into particular sentences that are constantly repeated.

  When I first came to New York I had an ambitious plan to explore all parts of the city on foot, but time didn’t allow for that, of course. Even so, I often walked, in a different direction each time. I began by heading north along Fifth Avenue until I reached the Empire State Building on 43rd Street. Sometimes I would walk on to the edges of Times Square and then retrace my steps. But this route was full of shoppers and tourists the closer I got to Times Square.

  Later I preferred to walk west toward the Hudson River. I went through the West Village, which was also crowded with stores and restaurants, but the crowds diminished the farther west I went, especially in the quiet backstreets that had expensive stone houses. To reach the river I crossed the West Side Highway. Then I walked south along the path for joggers and cyclists. I preferred this route because the sight of the river imparts a sense of tranquility, especially just before sunset. There were yachts moored at the jetty of the river port. At night the lights of New Jersey sparkled on the other side of the river.

  As the months passed and I took more long walks, I started to roam around in Chinatown. At first I just enjoyed myself and I didn’t analyze why I felt relatively at ease there. I looked at the store windows and enjoyed the shape of the Chinese characters, or the Korean characters in part of the neighborhood, on the store windows and the posters, without understanding or bothering to find out what they said. It was often obvious. Restaurants, many of them, stood alongside bakeries, vegetable stores, massage and acupuncture establishments. Maybe it was the liberation from the burden of translating and interpreting that I had to perform every day in various ways. Here I could be a perfect stranger, with no desire to understand anything and happy to let symbols remain symbols.

  The end of the walk, or rather its unspoken objective, was always Columbus Park on the intersection of Mulberry and Bayard Streets. I was drawn to this place, where many of the local residents sat, mostly old Chinese people, especially on the weekend. They played cards, chess, or mahjong or sat on the benches watching other people. I found out later that the old women in retirement were immigrants from China or Hong Kong who had worke
d in the sweatshops that were common in that part of Manhattan in the 1950s. In the meantime, some young people, mostly white, practiced Tai Chi or basketball in the square. There were always some tourists who wandered around inquisitively and took photographs. But my favorite spot was the corner where a cluster of Chinese senior citizens gathered under a cherry tree to play and sing traditional Chinese opera. The whole ritual reminded me of the Baghdadi chalghi, except for the fact that there were women performers. The instruments were descendants of the varieties that were common to the countries along or close to the Silk Road. The yangqin is similar to the santur, with the player hitting the strings with two pieces of bamboo, and the zhonghu is a two-stringed instrument played with a bow, rather like the joza. The yueqin is like an oud, but the body is round rather than oval. They also use a small tabla and a wooden rattle. A pipe player sometimes joined the ensemble too. The amateur singers waited for their turn to sing. Some held pieces of paper with the words written on them, others turned the pages of sheet music placed on music stands that the players brought with them, and they agreed on a piece to play. Men and women in their fifties and sixties, and even their seventies, awaited their turns patiently and then sang with gusto.

  I didn’t need to know the language to understand the words, since they were the same in all languages—the tightropes that stretch between pleasure and pain, which we all walk. We feel dizzy and sometimes we fall, but we keep walking. The words that the racked strings on every instrument know, where sorrow and joy intersect. The pains of longing for another time and place. Anguish at the vast distances between things and people. The vast distances between everything and nothing.

  A stranger is someone who is despised wherever his mounts stop.

  A stranger is defenseless and he always finds it hard to express himself.

  People help each other out, but he has few to help him.

  And someone else said:

  It was not in anguish at fear of the separation that my eyes started to tear up, but a stranger is a stranger.