Out of Mesopotamia

by Salar Abdoh

  H returned to the room and offered tea, which I accepted.

  “Why did you bury the book in Iraq?”

  “Someone saw me do it?”

  “Of course. Someone always sees.”

  “You are spooking me.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Well, I knew I wasn’t going to read the thing. It’s just too much of a book, you know? So I took photos of where this Daliri guy had underlined certain passages, figuring those are the important parts, and then I buried it.”

  “Is this how one reads a book? Aren’t you a disgrace as a person of letters?”

  “I am. I’m a disgrace. I’ve known this for some time as a person of letters.”

  “But why bury it? Why not simply throw it away? Were you leaving it for someone to pick up?”

  “This is what it’s really about, isn’t it? You think I left a book in English for someone to pick up. You think there are some secret codes in there?”

  “No, I’m just curious at your very odd behavior.”

  “I didn’t destroy it because it’s a good book.”

  “How do you know? You say you didn’t read it.”

  “One knows a good book after half a page. I didn’t have the heart to just throw it away or burn it. And it was too heavy to carry around when the enemy is out there wanting to cut your head off with his constant Allahu akbar from a quarter klick away. So I buried it, hoping one day someone would retrieve it and appreciate its words of wisdom.”

  “Like what? Tell me one of its wisdoms.”

  “Like one character in the book talks about how war is always in a state of becoming.”

  “I don’t understand this.”

  “It kind of means you can never win. No one can. War is perpetual motion. Even after it’s over. You think you’ve won, then a few years later your win turns into a loss. Once you enter combat you’ve signed away anything good in this world. Men who don’t understand this simple equation have a habit of turning the world to shit.”

  “This Marcel Proust gentleman says all that?”

  “I’d like to believe he does. But I’m not so sure he actually says it. I haven’t read the book, don’t forget.”

  “Yet in Syria you join the men in the fighting instead of doing your job, which is reporting. Don’t you think your behavior does not at all match what you say Mr. Marcel Proust says in his book?”

  “I didn’t say I’m a shining example of good behavior.”

  “So you admit you did wrong by going to Syria?”

  “Not at all.”

  We went silent for a moment. He was exasperated with me, and so was I.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Because there’s a loss in meaning in this world and I thought I’d find it there.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “Death. It’s the only thing that matters. The only constant. If you can give your death some meaning by becoming a martyr, then your death becomes significant. You will not have lived in vain.”

  “This is bullshit talk coming from you of all people.”

  “I know. But I’ll take it.”

  * * *

  I ate twenty-five miniskewers of barbecued liver. H’s questioning had gone on for another three hours. He had decided to touch on all the “problematic” points of my life in one sitting. We went back over old, long-resolved territory. He wanted to know why, of all the places I could have picked to live in Tehran, I’d chosen to live across from a synagogue. Wasn’t that an odd choice? And what were the chances of that even happening? It was not unlike his fixation with the Marcel Proust book, searching for significance where there wasn’t any. Two years before, when I’d finally gotten around to putting together my only short story collection, he had called me in to insist I change the location of the protagonist’s apartment in one of the stories.

  “Why can’t you change where he lives? Have him living across from a mosque if you like, or across from a shoe store or a mall or a park or a real estate office. Anywhere! Why does it have to be a synagogue?”

  “Because that’s where he lives.”

  “That’s where you live, Saleh.”

  “So I’m too lazy to make up an imaginary location. Choose a location for me then.”

  When he saw that I really didn’t care and that it was really out of laziness I’d picked my own address as the protagonist’s dwelling, his mind was set at ease. But today we were back to the synagogue questions. It was a loop of pointless back and forth that one simply had to survive. His next set of questions were about Daliri, the owner of the Marcel Proust book. H wanted to know if I was aware of the guy’s whereabouts.

  “He is probably dead, for all I know.”

  H played with his fountain pen and gave me a concerned look. “What if he’s not?”

  He opened a drawer and took out a photograph. Daliri. Baby-faced. Beatles haircut. The look in his eyes was one of sadness or bewilderment. With some people you can’t tell the difference. In a country with more opportunities than ours, he would have gotten a PhD in something precious and insubstantial. Literary theory, maybe. Or philosophy of the mind. He would have had a following of young students who swore by him and loved him. He’d marry one of them. And he’d still be sad.

  Instead, what was this Daliri guy? A sound engineer for State TV in Iran. Now lost in Iraq. Or dead. Or on a boat with other refugees escaping Syria and Iraq.

  All the information was in his margin notes. Our soundman for State TV had gone on location with an Iranian film crew to northern Iraq. In a battle near Sinjar he had somehow gotten separated from his team and ended up having to work his way back from behind enemy lines. But by the time he did, it was too late; at home, they were already calling him a martyr of the war. A street was going to be named after him. All of this information he could already glean from his cell phone from across the border, while he remained invisible to friends and family. For all they knew, his phone was in enemy hands now too. They wrote to him, sent him messages which he did not answer. How could he? Providence had made an impostor of him. Now his recently widowed mother would probably get some kind of martyr’s allowance. How could he go back and declare himself not dead and not a hero?

  “I understand what your concern is,” I said. “But I would not worry too much. If this guy were alive I would not have come across his book.”

  “It’s not impossible there was a battle and he had to escape in a hurry again, leaving his stuff behind.”

  “True. These things do happen.”

  H gave a hard stare. “We can’t have this war turn into a joke. We have to know if this guy is alive or not.”

  My voice faltered. “And if he is?”

  “The idiots at State TV have already held ceremonies for him. There have been posters. Speeches about the courageousness of our heroic TV reporters and their teams going out there to the front lines. This guy’s name makes it even more problematic: Daliri, Courageous. For the love of God, I can’t have a man named Courageous returning to Tehran all of a sudden. We’ll be a laughingstock, don’t you see?”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Instead of going out to Aleppo to play soldier, go back to Baghdad and start looking for this guy.”

  “And if I find him?”

  “Tell him I better not see his mug in Iran. He has to stay in Iraq. Make a new life for himself over there. We’ll give him something to tide him over for a while and we’ll also help him create a new identity. We’ll even give him a new name and an Iraqi passport. If he wants to get married, we’ll help with the cost of the wedding. But if he comes here . . .”

  “I think I get the point.” After a pause, I added, “And if I don’t find him? If he’s dead, never to be found?”

  “Then we don’t have a problem.”

  All of this was why I was eating one skewer of liver after another. I was eating automatically, resentfully. Not because I ha
d been tasked with finding Daliri, no. It was because once again I had encountered that wall of ridiculousness. I wanted this war to offer gravitas, but there was only more absurdity—my diapers, finding Marcel Proust at a place called the Eye of the Horse in northern Iraq, and now Daliri’s fake martyrdom. I hungered for high seriousness, the way that the nineteenth-century British critic Matthew Arnold had instructed us to be serious. In fact, I’d spent a decade before this war writing essays, reviews, and criticism for local papers and journals that I imagined were serious. At the University of Art off 30th-of-Tir Boulevard, down the street from my apartment and the synagogue, where I had occasional teaching gigs, I’d tried to drill into my students the value of getting serious about things. I forced them to read in other languages, the way I’d forced myself years earlier, so that their worlds would expand beyond the stifling prison house of their native Persian with its accursed mystical poetry and Sufi drivel about transcendental love. I wanted them to break out of the petty chaos of their lives in Tehran and the endless problems of the mad Middle East and learn something about the larger world. But all of it had been an illusion; now I knew. One more war had killed all of life’s buoyancy and I understood the foolishness of wanting to ever do anything—anything at all. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt this way, but after achieving the near impossible in this city, which was to make half a living as a writer, I thought I’d crossed a threshold at last. The war had seemed at first like a chance to do something new, something fresh after years of borderline hack work in Tehran. That was the trouble: the war was fresh. It made everything else irrelevant. One became a follower, a hanger-on, an addict. I had a feeling that this Proust guy Daliri was alive, if not well, and in Iraq, unable to come back to Tehran not necessarily because he didn’t want not to be a martyr, but because the war had swallowed him up—and like all the volunteers fighting there he was no longer good for anything else but playing the death game. I could not be sure about this logic 100 percent. But I thought I had pretty good insight into the man’s head.

  All of these considerations were not even half of the morning’s interview with H. He wanted me penalized for going to Syria instead of sticking to Iraq, where my reporter’s purview was.

  But weren’t these imaginary lines in the sand anyway? Was there really a Syria, an Iraq, a Lebanon, a Jordan?

  “They are states of mind,” I told him. “Ever heard of the Sykes-Picot Agreement? A midlevel British diplomat and his French counterpart decide to produce budding new countries a hundred years ago, and because of that you are telling me I can go to Iraq but not Syria? Why the hell not?”

  “Because tomorrow if I see on the evening news that the enemy found one of our reporters—that would be you, by the way—and cut off his head and displayed it for the world to see, this would be, well, bad publicity for us, wouldn’t it? And do you know what else? My superiors would have my job. This is why you can’t go to Syria.”

  “On the other hand, if they cut off my head in Iraq, it’s all right?”

  “Don’t argue with me.”

  “Fine, fine. I was just asking.”

  “Also, don’t give me any more history lessons. I don’t give a damn about the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Who are they? And what agreement? Forget it. I don’t care.”

  We continued to sit there stewing in our own heads. A few years back I’d been sent to cover a film festival in a tiny West African country we were trying to have better relations with for “strategic” purposes. It was my first time back to the continent in more than a decade and I’d brought H a small African figure, the size of one of those Barbie dolls. I had to give it to him discretely because gifting your handler is bad business. But I knew I’d touched a soft place in his heart. Tears welled in his eyes and he ran his hands over the face of the African god figurine like it was a long-lost child. I knew then that both of us were wrong in our skins. Why did he have to work for the ministry, and why did I have to report about film festivals that had more prizes than entries? Our lives needed serious rearrangement, and now that I had finally tried to do something about it, he was making a big fuss.

  He’d looked up all of a sudden, as if recalling something. “Do you plan to write another TV pilot?”

  “They stole my last idea. State TV is filled with mediocre thieves stealing other people’s work.”

  “All right, they stole your idea. But maybe you can do another one. This time I’ll stick by you.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “Write something that takes place between Baghdad and here. I’ll make sure no one steals your work.”

  “Why didn’t you do that the first time around?”

  “Because you hid the pilot from me until it was too late.”

  “What exactly shall I write about?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Write about Baghdad, circa 2006. Write about the Americans, make them as bad as you can.”

  “Well, they weren’t exactly angels.”

  “Don’t interrupt. Baghdad 2006. Scenario: Our guys have a few operatives in there. You’ll need one main guy. A hero. In charge of . . . well, you know the rest.”

  “Your people need a TV series about us against the Americans? Is this why I’m here today?”

  H shrugged. “Consider it a favor to me.”

  “If I write this, they’ll give you a promotion?”

  “They might.”

  “I’ll think about it then.”

  “Do more than that.”

  3

  By the time Saeed and I got to the legendary sniper he already had more kills than damn near anyone else in this war. He was a philosopher of his craft. My inadequate Arabic did not catch everything he said, but I could tell that at some point he had decided he’d had enough; he was ready to die. He had come out of retirement only because the great grand cleric in Najaf had spoken. Every able-bodied man had a duty to stand up for the country and fight the enemy. Two years later, by the time they brought him down at Hawija, the sniper’s body count had become a Mesopotamian myth. I could not fathom that number of concentrated, individual kills and didn’t want to think about it every time they showed him on Iraqi TV as a war hero. This war had so many impostors that when you came across a guy like Abu Abbas, you became a believer. Even the way he did the ritual wash before prayer had a sort of deliberateness that made you think of yoga and mindfulness and saintly patience. The Russians, he told Saeed and me, had been his original teachers, way back in the 1970s. He held women snipers in high regard because of their unflappability and fortitude and said that if trained properly, no man could ever match them.

  I wanted him. Abbas was the unwavering rock of the war, its cedar of Lebanon. The way he carried that SV rifle, one imagined prophets returning to speak in tongue in this godforsaken land. In Basra he admitted to us he’d never shoot a man unless he was armed, even if that man had the blood of Abbas’s brothers on his hands. I believed him; I needed my champion. And when Saeed, my onetime partner, stole all the footage we had of him to make his own documentary about the war hero, I hunkered down and wrote a pilot for an action TV series based on the great man. But then, just as Saeed had stolen our collective footage of Abbas, the TV writers and producers in Tehran stole my pilot about him. Abbas was bringing me only grief. The idea of him was too good for people not to steal. He wasn’t like other war heroes, people like the “Father of Death” who was a bodybuilder and a showoff. Abbas had the humility that comes with ultimate agency, that of holding the power of life or death over any man or woman at any time from long distance. He took that responsibility seriously. Which was why he hadn’t trained anyone to follow in his footsteps. His takedown at Hawija had thrown my world into disarray. It was like losing a father. The enemy websites were full of celebrations of his death, and the more they celebrated the more I hated the enemy.

  But I hated film people even more than I hated the enemy. Maybe it’s the old envy of a poor writer who does the heavy lifting before the buzzing of the flies in th
e film business. First Saeed, then the O Channel from State Television. With my blueprint for Abbas’s character in their hands, O Channel had gone to Saeed, bought the footage of the sniping legend, and made their stupid hit series just in time for the Persian New Year—a tired old formula of a bunch of guys with shaved heads and two-week beards walking around acting angrier than anyone should ever get if they want to live, in the middle of a war—flashing around the latest weapons instead of the shit we had to improvise with over there, and giving long, somber soliloquies about having to make “tough choices” in combat. It was bullshit pseudowarrior stuff, written by men who had seen a half year’s combat at most, if that. Nothing like Abbas or others like him back in Iraq who’d been in combat nearly continuously for almost four decades.

  The only poetic justice was that Saeed never finished his documentary on Abbas. He needed that one final kill recorded through Abbas’s telescope lens. There’s a special camera for that and while Saeed waited for its arrival, Abbas met his end at Hawija. Without that kill, there wasn’t a finished product. This time, Saeed was just another documentarian waiting and, thankfully, failing at recording other people’s misery.

  What if I simply refused to write the TV pilot H asked for? As far as interrogators went, H was all right, but he wasn’t exactly a friend, was he? The ministry could confiscate my passport and not allow me to cover another war. Then what was I supposed to do? At the paper, the Citizen, they’d put me in a corner of the city desk to cover small fires and stories of women who had been swindled by married Muslim Casanovas. No. I couldn’t say no to H.

  * * *

  I waited at the Parkway fire station for Atia to come out of the Citizen. She always took the same route and always seemed in a hurry to squeeze into a shared taxi or a crowded Valiasr express bus before gawkers accosted her. Atia’s life was one punctuated with “no­”—to the bosses who wanted to sleep with her, no to the marriage proposals from colleagues at other papers and magazines, no to the lecherous interviewees, and a big no to your average unctuous fool on a Tehran street who thinks when a woman says no she’s misled or playing hard to get and needs her logic set right before inevitably saying yes.