by Sinan Antoon
I got out of bed, hurried to the desk, and turned on the computer to look for more details. All the sites in Arabic and English repeated the same thing, adding that eyewitnesses said fire had destroyed some shops and a number of cars. As I read, I repeated, “No! Wadood! No! not Wadood, not Wadood,” like a spell that would protect him or a prayer that would save him. The image accompanying the news story didn’t give me any hope. It compounded my fears and my sadness. A man has covered his mouth with a towel to protect himself from the smoke. He’s looking at the debris that covers everything around him. Behind him firemen are spraying water from a hose. The stores don’t appear clearly in the picture and you can’t make out much.
I called Midhat three times but he didn’t answer. I sent him an email asking him to check on Wadood as soon as possible and get in touch with me.
Mariah called me an hour later after reading the news, to ask about Wadood and whether I had contacted him. I reminded her that he didn’t have a phone and told her I had left several messages for Midhat and that I was trying to call Baghdad. I sent an email to my students telling them that class that day had been canceled. An hour later Midhat called me and said he would go to the area to try to find Wadood or any news about him. He called me back two hours later, and the first words he said were: “My condolences.”
“So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.”
I hadn’t wept so bitterly since my mother died. Wadood was twenty-seventh on the list of thirty people killed in al-Mutanabbi Street. Wadood hadn’t been able to decide his own end, as he had been planning, even if his ending was somewhat similar to the one he had envisaged. He didn’t light the fire himself, but it ravaged that orchard he had been tending and watering in his room and transformed it into a pile of ash and a cloud of smoke. The only branch that remained of that mythical orchard was the one he had left for me at the hotel and that he later regretted giving me. I wonder whether Wadood foresaw his ending. Did the catalog contain the signs and seeds of destruction within it?
“Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”
I put Wadood’s name into the search engine several times a day in the hope of finding out something new about him. Four days after the explosion I found a short article titled Al-Mutanabbi as a home, farewell Wadood on the al-Hiwar al-Mutamaddin website, written by an Iraqi called Muthanna al-Nasiri. Here is the text:
The news traveled the desert before reaching me
In shock I clung to hopes that it was false
But when the truth of it left no room for hope
I choked on my tears until my tears almost choked on me
Tongues stumbled as they tried to say it
As did couriers on the roads and pens in books
For years death and destruction have taken turns slapping us and our cities every morning. They erase all names, the names of places and loved ones, one after another. Sometimes they erase them with the blood red color that leaves wounds open. At others with the black that blocks out the Iraqi sun and makes its long night even longer. Yes, Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi. You saw Iraq when its night was long and now it’s longer than ever. A night that now descends sadly on your street, which they have stabbed with fire, along with my friend who lived in its heart.
Wadood Abdulkarim, another name to be added to the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi dead marching into the twilight of oblivion and silence. But wait! Do I not have the right to stop the procession for a few minutes to bid farewell to my friend? I know this name. We were together in the same unit in Baquba back in 1991. We spent a week in the same trench and miraculously survived the inferno of bombardment. Wadood Abdulkarim, a graduate of the College of Arts, who was dragged, like me, into that ill-fated war, which we thought (how naïve we were!) would be the last. We survived because we decided to run away and go home like the others, after all communications were cut off and we had nothing left to eat.
Wadood went back to his family’s home in Zayyuna, but an American missile had arrived a few days before him and turned it into a massive crater. He never recovered from the shock, even after years of therapy in the al-Rashad Hospital. After living with his relatives he chose al-Mutanabbi Street as a home because he had lost his home. And now the destruction has pursued him, destroying his home, destroying his soul, and burning his innocent body, which chose to live and die with books. The last time I saw him was a year ago. I kiss your soul, Wadood, and bid you farewell. Now you are finally going home and back to your family to lie with them in the earth.
I wiped my tears away and printed out the article. I wrote “Wadood’s Colloquy” on it by hand, added it to the catalog, and decided to write this novel.
NOTES
Page 93
Amiri Baraka, “A Guerilla Handbook” (1969).
Page 110
Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin’s Archive (2016).
Page 115
Walter Benjamin, One Way Street (2016).
Page 134
Benjamin, One Way Street.
Page 276
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle (1932).
Page 279
Walter Benjamin, Letters to Gershom Scholem (1933).
Page 284
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942).
Page 300
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” (1931).
Page 300
Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library.”
SINAN ANTOON is a poet, novelist, academic, and translator. He was born in Baghdad and studied English literature at Baghdad University. He left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He studied Arabic literature at Harvard, where he earned his doctorate. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His award-winning works have been translated into fourteen languages. His op-eds have appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and al-Jazeera, among others. He is an associate professor in the Gallatin School of New York University.
JONATHAN WRIGHT’s translations include three winners of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He studied Arabic at St. John’s College, Oxford, and worked for many years as a journalist for Reuters in countries across the Arab world, including Egypt, Lebanon, Sudan, Oman, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. He has translated work by Ahmed Saadawi, Hassan Blasim, Rasha al-Ameer, Alaa el-Aswany, Ibrahim Essa, Amjad Nasser, and many other writers.
