The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  The trucks hadn’t arrived yet to spew out what they held in their bellies. But he was a hunter and skilled at finding what others, even the experienced ones, missed in the piles of trash that they sifted through. Hadn’t he once found a gold ring? He caught sight of it glittering, ran to it, and grabbed it. He gave it to his mother, who put it on her ring finger after wiping it with her sleeve. It was rather tight. She quickly hid it in her bosom. She was very happy and hugged and kissed Rassoul. “Bravo to the clever guy! A real hunter!” she said. She went to market the next day to sell it. That day they ate a real meal of the kind they managed to have only at Eid time. But the ring was an exception. Since then he hadn’t found anything as important or as valuable. They were looking for cans and empty bottles because they provided a reliable and steady income. They wanted as many sacks of rubbish as they could collect. His mother once found a small radio in the heaps of trash and, when she bought some batteries and put them in, the radio worked. She started listening to it at night after going back to their room. So why had someone thrown it away? She often repeated this question without finding a satisfactory answer. Sometimes she imagined who these people were that threw away all these things that could still be used, along with things that couldn’t be used.

  Batteries, toothbrushes, empty perfume bottles, sometimes with a drop or two left, torn underwear, fruit peel, earphones, broken CDs, juice cans, eggshells, tomatoes, a football with a hole, surgical gloves, plates and cups, diapers, cassette tapes, rotten meat, pieces of paper, newspapers, magazines, wires.

  When he pestered his mother with the same question: “Why do they throw all this stuff away?” she lost patience and silenced him with a convincing answer, rather than just “How should I know?” “My son,” she said, “we thank God they throw it all away. Let them. If they didn’t, how would we eat and live?”

  He liked the term hunter and preferred it to scavenger. Once he found a beautiful picture in one of the magazines he hunted. It showed a handsome man sitting alone on a wooden chair on the shore of a lake, with a fishing rod and a pack of cigarettes beside him. There was one sentence in large letters in Arabic and one word in foreign letters, but he didn’t understand what any of it meant. When he asked one of the grown-ups who worked with them what was written on the picture, the man said, “Advertising.” “Advertising what?” “Cigarettes.” He imagined himself as a great fisherman. He tore the piece of paper out of the magazine, folded it up and put it in his pocket. He began dreaming that he would be a famous fisherman when he grew up. He would catch fish, instead of people’s leftovers. And he would smoke a cigarette during his breaks. He would take it out from time to time, touch the glossy surface, and dream.

  He was approaching the dump when he noticed that there were three large piles that hadn’t been buried yet. Sometimes the trucks came late at night after the scavengers had gone off home and the piles weren’t buried until the next morning.

  He was alone, just him and some birds circling over the piles but unable to lift the empty cans. They would fly away as soon as he arrived. He took one of the two sacks from his pocket to be ready to hunt. The smell of rotting grew stronger the closer he approached: he could smell it through the sweater over his nose. He would breathe through his mouth to avoid it. Usually he put pieces of Kleenex in his nostrils, as he had learned from others, but this time he had forgotten to bring a tissue from home.

  He reached the foot of a pile and began to dig around as he moved forward. As usual he found several empty cans. This was the easiest thing. He heard the drone of a plane in the distance. He stood upright and looked out to the horizon. He couldn’t see anything.

  Two hundred yards from the dump there was a building that used to be a small military installation as part of the Ministry for Military Industrialization. It had been bombed in 1991, and the building was abandoned till the end of the 1990s, when this area became an additional trash dump. The scavenger families moved into the damaged building and lived there, but the pilot’s information was that the site was a strategic target.

  “Anyone who has once started to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its parts; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth lie.”

  Is this incessant desire to archive everything a sickness? Can it spread by contagion, or just by reading? For years I’ve been clipping pictures and news stories out of the newspapers and keeping them, albeit not methodically. The pace at which I archived material picked up when I came back from Baghdad after meeting Wadood and finding out about his project, and after the level of violence and destruction in Iraq increased. But I had never been interested in collecting stamps, documents, or postcards, and it had never occurred to me that I would have this obsession. Once I was leafing through Wadood’s manuscript as I sat in my office. When I got to the Colloquy of the Stamp Album, I was struck by the passage where he describes the stamps. I stopped reading and looked for old Iraqi stamps on the Internet. The search results took me to eBay. I had read articles about the strange things that are sold there. I found many old Iraqi stamps, from the time of the monarchy, the beginnings of the republican era, and Saddam’s time, of course. Some of them were in excellent condition and on sale at reasonable prices (there was no bidding on the stamps because there wasn’t enough demand), so I bought some. After I’d given my address and my credit card number, the site told me the stamps would arrive within three days. The page took me to all the things on sale that were in the Iraq category. Apart from stamps, it was mostly banknotes and coins, old and new. That day I also put a 50-fils coin from 1931 and a bronze one-fils coin from 1938 with a picture of King Ghazi in my shopping basket. I would go back to the site once or twice a week to add more things to my shopping basket. A tourist map of the Baghdad area in 1962, with the names of the districts and landmarks in English. A Royal Rescue Medal, which was awarded to those who helped save Baghdad from floods in 1954. The envelope of a letter sent from Baghdad to Jaffa from 1939. An official envelope from Mosul University, sent to Holland in 1971. A large box of matches with a picture of the spiral minaret in Samarra. The Iraqi atlas for primary schools, published in 1972. A postcard with a picture of Hafiz al-Qadi Street. One of the strangest things I found and bought was a yellow piece of paper from the clinic of Dr. Abdilqadir Wahbi al-Amir (it gave the address as al-Azamiyya, The Ship Shop, Near the Bridge, Clinic Telephone: 310 Kadhimiyya, 253 North); on it a message read: “Upon examination of Mr. Abdilmajid Ismail, it was apparent that he was suffering from malaria and anemia, and after giving him the necessary treatment I advised him to rest completely and to take medicine for five days. May 5, 1949.” It had two stamps on it with a picture of King Faisal as a child, frankings, and some handwriting saying the patient should receive his salary in full and be given sick leave. There had recently been a proliferation of plates and sets of silver spoons stolen from Saddam’s palaces. I examined them in detail, but I wasn’t interested in owning them. The site mentions the city and country where the buyer lives, and often these were from southern and central states, so they were from American troops coming home with minor spoils of war.

  I arranged the stamps and the coins and framed them into five pictures, as well as two maps of Baghdad, and hung them on the walls of the office and in my flat. The rest of the pieces I had bought stayed in boxes that piled up in my closet and corners of my flat. It was like a dark museum invaded by dust and silence, scowling at the world, and no one could visit it. Sometimes I took the things out of their seclusion. I tried to listen to them as they told their stories. Isn’t that what Wadood says? That everything has a story to tell. But I couldn’t hear anything. Maybe I was a bad listener. Or perhaps they didn’t want to tell their stories to me.

  I peel the moment by hand as if peeling an orange, but it’s a blue orange, as in Éluard’s famous poem. The peel of time gets under my fingernails and the scent reaches my nose. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that I fee
l like a child discovering everything for the first time with his fingers, mouth, and eyes. Not the child that I once was. Another child that I don’t know. With no memories and no language. When I’ve finished peeling it, I try to break it in half and a vast sea bursts out of it and overwhelms me. I dive into it and breathe like a fish. I grow tired and sleep naked on the seabed. When I wake up I find myself on wet ground, and the fruit-moment awaits on the ground.

  “But now the moment has come when you must allow me to shake a few meager fruits from the tree of conscientiousness which has its roots in my heart and its leaves in your archive.”

  When I was a butterfly.

  The butterfly is my mother.

  My mother was a butterfly that laid her eggs in a moment. All the eggs died except the egg I was in. When my egg hatched, I started crawling, eating, and shedding skin after skin when the old skin wore out. My mother flew off and didn’t come back. I wove my cocoon from my tears and my fear. I hid inside it and waited a long time. The loneliness preyed on me, so I slipped out of my cocoon. I flew off looking for my mother. I saw hundreds of butterflies, but none of them was my mother. I almost forgot her. Then my wings took me to a table in a garden. On it lay an open book with the breeze turning the pages. I caught sight of my mother’s body between two pages.

  My mother is shrouded in words.

  For years I’ve been eating a bagel almost every morning, but just today I remembered the simit incident. I may not have thought about it since the time it happened, more than three decades ago. The first time I stood in front of a bagel store in Virginia, I remembered the simit I liked to eat in Baghdad in my childhood.

  The bell rang, setting us free. For the long break we ran to the big back gate, which was made of wrought iron and painted light blue. We reached out our hands to buy simit from the peddler who stood outside carrying a tray with simit piled up on it methodically. When we arrived at the gate that day, the janitor was shouting at the simit seller, warning him not to come close to the school gate. We asked him why and he said, “The principal will no longer let you eat food from outside. Go to the school shop and buy sandwiches from there.” “Oh please, janitor,” we begged him, but to no avail. Rasim Adnan, my classmate who was with me at the time, told me we could climb over the wall to buy simit outside and then come back, and that he knew how. I agreed enthusiastically. He ran off and I ran after him. We reached the line of trees parallel to the wall and he pointed at one of the trees, saying, “Let’s climb this one and jump.” That’s what we did. We clambered up the branches and reached the top of the wall. Our clothes got dirty because it wasn’t easy to get down on the other side. He clung to my hands and let his body hang, then let go and landed on the ground. But he didn’t get a firm footing, so he stumbled and fell on his side, but it was a slight fall. I did the same and managed to land on my feet without falling over. We brushed off our clothes and ran to the simit seller, who had moved off toward the main street. I felt a pain in my right foot. Each of us bought two simits. We ate one on the way back to school. We had overlooked the fact that it would be impossible to climb the wall from outside because there were no trees to climb. When we reached the iron gate the janitor insisted we give him our names, class, and section, or else he wouldn’t open the gate. I don’t know why we didn’t lie. We told him our names, class, and section. He took the key out of his pocket, unlocked the padlock, and let us in. In the lesson after the break the principal, Sister Beninya Shikwana, knocked on the class door, opened it, and came in in her loose white gown and her thick glasses. Miss Fatma, the history teacher, greeted her. The principal read out my name and Rasim’s name from a piece of paper she was carrying and ordered us to stand in front of the class. She scolded us: “You climb over the wall and go outside school to buy simit? Why are you so naughty? If a car hit you what could we tell your parents? You’re our responsibility. This shop here is full of all kinds of food. No one is to go out again. If anyone thinks of getting out again, I’ll expel them. Understood?” She told us to put out our hands. She was holding the Chinese ruler of ill repute, and she struck each of us with it five times. My hand was still hurting when I ate the second simit after school. And now I’d be willing to put up with that pain again for the sake of a single simit.

  When we met, you asked me if I was a writer. I’ve written hundreds of short poems, five novels, and a one-act play, but I haven’t yet had a single word published. I’ve completed one novel, but I tore it up and threw it away, just as I’ve torn up everything I’ve written, because I wasn’t convinced that it was complete. After that I had a severe psychological crisis that lasted many years. I might tell you the details later. All I did then was read and sell books. I hid in a dark tunnel and came out only when I grasped a simple truth: there are no real endings, just as there are no real beginnings. There are just imaginary borders, signs, and marks that we put in place in order to structure our irrational existence in this random universe. We dress it up with meaning to cover its nakedness. They are bridges we build over the eternal river that flows, indifferent to us. This truth set me free and opened a new horizon for me. Ever since I discovered it, I’ve been working according to a new methodology, with confidence and not a hint of bitterness. And I am writing this book, which may never end, as all books (don’t) end. It won’t end even with the death of the author. Other writers can go on writing its other parts after me.

  I look through the notebook and discover that my words have come to resemble Wadood’s words in many places. Did that happen because I copied out his colloquies and letters by hand because I was worried they might get lost or be torn up? Because I had read what he had written dozens of times? Was that a pretext for assimilating his style and inhabiting his persona? I’m not sure. No, I didn’t write this part. He was the one who wrote it. These are not my words. They are his words. My words are the ones that sneaked into his eternal minute and his catalog to escape through the black hole. Or to hide inside it. I can no longer tell the difference. How did the goldfinch from my childhood, for example, fly off and end up in Wadood’s hallucinations? And the butterflies?

  All this is circling around me. All these beings and things have been circling around me for decades. Every being or thing has an orbit that it occupies alone, and its own orbital period, which grows longer and shorter. As for me, at first I thought I was stationary, not circling. But I discovered that I’m turning. I’m circling around myself. Yes, I’m circling around myself, looking for myself. Later I discovered that I’m not only circling around myself, but I’m also trapped in an orbit. I’m turning like all those beings and things. I’m turning around something, but I don’t know what it is. It might be a vacuum. It’s definitely not a sun. I’m turning and nothing keeps me company in my orbit. Maybe I’m turning around darkness. Invisible darkness. Darkness that hides in the light. I’m circling and feeling dizzy and screaming. I lose consciousness, and when I come around I find I’m still turning and turning. I’m looking for a black hole that will take me back to nothingness.

  “The painting shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”