The Baghdad Clock

by Shahad Al Rawi

  ‘Friendship is an unambiguous human blessing, and what’s more, it is holier than love in that it does not require any kind of worship or renunciation of dignity, as does the latter. By its nature, friendship leaves an appropriate distance between friends, clear boundaries that must not be crossed. In addition to all that, it is not egotistical in a way that prevents the other from living their life however they wish.’

  I considered her words and thought to myself, ‘This soothsayer is a devil. She speaks well, but what she says is not necessarily true.’ I thought I would end the conversation with her, but I had skipped some questions, and I asked the one about war and the sanctions.

  ‘What if there had never been a war? What if the sanctions had not been put in place? What would our lives have been like, and what would Baghdad have become?’

  ‘Well,’ said the soothsayer, ‘that’s a very good question.’ She passed her right hand over her forehead, was silent for a couple of minutes, and then continued: ‘Listen, my dear. I know you want to say, “Were it not for the war and the sanctions, things would have been better for us.” That might be true, if we were to ignore geography and history. For you are a victim of geography in the first place. Your country isn’t on the Mediterranean where it might breathe the sea air, nor is it in the desert, where it might live on the luxury brought by oil. You live halfway between them, where the bright light of the sun shines down on you all year round. Which is good on the one hand, but light resembles utter blindness, for it prevents the accumulation of dreams. Look into the eyes of any European, for instance, and you’ll find an obscure story, while in the eyes of any Iraqi, you get the whole thing immediately in a single sentence. The sun dries up ideas like it dries shirts on a clothes line. That’s why you don’t accumulate ideas and preserve your dreams. These words of mine may seem strange to you, but they’re the truth. Modern civilisations are found in winter climes where the bright sun rarely shines. Bright light deprives souls of depth. This is the part connected with geography.

  ‘As for what’s attached to history, you are the children of a long, disconnected history. Your countries live through the ages as islands separate from each other. The history of pain alone is the sole river flowing through your time. You and sadness form an eternal friendship, and whenever its river dries up, you fill it up again with your tears. To tell the truth, I don’t know if it is you who are chasing sadness, or whether sadness is following you. You are masters at producing sorrow but ignorant of the alphabet of joy. Look at your songs and your music. Look at your tears when you laugh. Look at your poems and your proverbs. With you, even love is an allusion to sadness, absence, anguish and separation.’

  ‘What’s the solution?’

  ‘Geography is a fate that cannot be escaped, but history is made. Adapt to your geography and change your history.’

  ‘How do we change history? Do you mean falsify it?’

  ‘Not at all. Just weave from its cloth a new garment. Gather the good islands together and leave out the painful ones. There, make a fresh memory, a good space for joy. In short, change the entire culture. Or at least some of it.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying!’

  ‘It’s not important that you understand. That may take a long time. But write down my words and preserve them for your children. Preserve them for the future.’

  Saying that, she got up to leave. She smiled at me and asked for the silver bracelet on my wrist with my name written in small letters, as a memento of me that she would keep forever. She said goodbye, and I closed the gate behind her. Biryad, who had been hiding on top of the garden wall, jumped down and headed towards his owner’s house. Had he been eavesdropping on us? Who knows?

  25

  To stumble and fall when you are a college student is not the same as when you are in primary or secondary school. Childhood is a time for experiments, when we learn how to get back up quickly after a fall. As we get older, we learn that we are never supposed to stumble. Thus, with the passage of time, we lose the freedom even to trip.

  I thanked the student who reached out and helped me up when I fell on the campus grass, but I continued on my way without looking back. In my embarrassment, I decided not to go to the lecture hall, but instead headed away, far from the eyes of the students. I sat alone on a secluded bench and nearly choked on my tears.

  Was Farouq an emotional fall on the road of my adolescence? Did I have to get up and brush off the skirt of my memories this time? Was I in need of a new life, a life that began this very moment and plunged into the future?

  No, I told myself, it is not like that. Farouq is the truth that ties me to my beautiful time. He is the link that connects me to myself, to my world in our neighbourhood, to my songs, to the emotions I recall.

  Farouq is the first word, the first touch of the hand, the first kiss. He is the first embarrassment, the first mistake, the first risk. He is the white gull that lands at my window in the morning, and he brought the sun into my life when he told me, ‘I like you,’ going on to say, ‘I love you,’ when I became tongue-tied and did not reply.

  The first admiration that someone shows you is the truest kind, born without any history. It is the unexpected event that we receive just as it is, without any preparation, and we preserve it in our memories forever.

  That first admiration is a sublime spiritual language, in which we consecrate a new era in the civilisation of love, that vast kingdom that builds its towers, its ziggurats, and its hanging gardens in young hearts.

  Many weeks passed, during which I met my prince just once, briefly. I ran into him by chance in the street, and we walked through the neighbourhood alleys. We did not have much to talk about at the time. Together, we sang all the songs we knew. Our old songs alone afforded us that singular feeling of intoxication and insensibility.

  My university books did not resemble my old books. They were entirely free of scribbles, free of the cryptic phrases I would record for myself so that others would not understand, those words I used to write unconsciously. My notebooks too were free of the letter F, which I used to draw big in different colours. Had I begun thinking about the future?

  We do not fear the past because everything that can happen has happened, and it remains at our memory’s disposal. We dread the future.

  Is it possible that Farouq will become a story of the past? Could Nadia someday become part of the past? Ever since Nadia entered the University of Baghdad and I joined the University of Technology, fear had grown within me. I feared for our friendship, that the future would steal it from our hands. How did she and I not go each morning to the same school, enter the same class, and sit at the same desk? How did we not study together? Not invent excuses to tell each other’s parents and the deputy head, Mrs Athmar? How would we walk home from the main street without being together? What would Biryad say when he saw me alone, without Nadia? Would he recognise me?

  Would the future take her from me? With the passage of time, would she become just an old friend with whom I reminisced about the air-raid shelter, school, the Baghdad Clock and Al-Zawra when we ran into each other? What would I do about her dreams, which I was addicted to watching?

  I would sometimes run into her at the end of the street, waiting for her bus when I was there for a different one. We would talk a little, and then one of the buses would come before the other and end our conversation. She would go to Al-Jadriya, and I would go to Al-Sana’a Street. It was not far, but neither was it close.

  The future was coming – so brash and careless – and it would make our generation old: old songs, old clothes, even an outdated dialect. Dear God, we too were growing old! The wars had kept us busy, and we forgot that we were growing up. The modern wars retained their vigour as we advanced in age. The rockets were still young as we passed into distant years.

  Time would surprise us. Hatem Al-Iraqi would become an old singer. Haitham Yousif too, and Muhannad Mohsen, Raid George and Ismail Al-Farwaji. Adnan would get
old, Lena would get married, and Sinbad would retire from sailing the Seven Seas. Our dialect would change, and our words would appear strange. Customs, in turn, would evolve, and standards would be inverted. With the shift in our local dialect, everything would be different. For a dialect is the repository of morals and the guiding force of a people’s behaviour. When we give it up, we lose ourselves and our feelings become distorted.

  Every day at university, I heard new, somewhat strange, words. Words entirely lacking in courtesy. Words with sharp letters that squeezed themselves into the way we spoke and tried to penetrate the memory of our Arabic dialect. Even more, they warned of a deep spiritual ruin. By its nature, a local dialect develops spontaneously, responding to an inner growth. With the passage of time, it continually transforms reality and then refashions itself.

  In the hallways at college, in class, at the student centre, I lived as a stranger among strangers. I was not myself, the way I was in my old school, in my neighbourhood, at home. I was now forced to become reacquainted with myself. I was presenting others with a false impression of this student who was me; I was reduced to a series of fake copies of myself.

  Is that right? Maybe.

  No, I’m wrong. I am here at university now. I am clearer about who I am, more at peace with myself. I pose dozens of complicated questions to myself, and hear dozens of simple answers in response.

  In the beginning, in the first days of university life, I was somewhat afraid of the students I did not know: normal, understandable fears of what is new and different.

  We are instinctively afraid of things we do not know. We fear the uncertainty produced by first impressions: this young man, good to the point of naivety; this unfortunate young woman; this wicked student; this deluded girl; this mean clique; this complicated classmate; this haughty man; this humble woman; this upright young man. At first, these evaluations of others take place without any experience, and then little by little, things become clearer. Time guarantees the foolishness of our first impressions. Why did we have to form first impressions anyway? Why did we not let time do its thing without getting entangled with others or entangling them with ourselves?

  Only with Baydaa did I feel reassured. That was not because my first impression of her had been good, but because of time, which was responsible for combatting the darkness that obscured the nature of her soul. Time was what made me so attached to her. Time was what piled up between us in the shape of memories.

  Should I transfer and join Baydaa’s course in order to stay close to her?

  What if Baydaa herself had changed? What if she no longer loved her memories?

  That morning, I spoke to Nadia about her as we waited for the bus. ‘Baydaa studies in a department close to mine,’ I told her, ‘and I go to meet her between lectures.’ Nadia was not very interested and did not make any comment. It appeared that she no longer lived in semi-exile at her college. She did not experience what it means to announce one’s presence among people, as though suddenly born without any history.

  Nadia was acting differently towards me that morning. Actually, she was not behaving in her usual way at all. This girl had grown up a lot, more than her age would suggest. She had put a layer of foundation on her face, and the make-up concealed her old freshness from me. The layer of colour was relatively pronounced, and she did not need so much of it. Nadia in her natural state was more beautiful than Nadia with make-up.

  But what is this natural state in which she is more beautiful? The one I saw when I confined her to an eternal box, where I wanted to keep her because she was all my memories? I knew Nadia when she was small, the person I met in the air-raid shelter. I grew up with her in primary and secondary school. I was the friend of her childhood and her adolescence, and this make-up was an intruder in our relationship. It brought her to a new world far away from me. Make-up was a practice hostile to our memories. It was just a pale way of making peace with the present, or a stupid way of distorting the past. Or else it was a feeble weapon to delay the future’s betrayal.

  Farouq surprised me once with a strange gift, one I was not expecting from him. After he came back from a trip with the youth national team, he gave me a multi-tiered box of make-up. The colours varied gradually from dark brown to light pink. It was the first time in my life I possessed that kind of box, the first time I discovered that my face could be threatened by strange colours. I went up to my room and began experimenting. I put red, blue and green on my cheeks and under my eyes until I looked like a clown. I had previously seen my mother put a little white moisturiser on her face. Then she would take a light red pen and pass it over her lips. But not all these colours. Once I went secretly into her room, sat on the chair she would sit on as she made herself up, and began playing around with her powders in front of the mirror. All of a sudden she entered the room, took me by the hand, and laughed at me in front of my father. He took me on his lap and said, ‘When you grow up, you’ll put make-up on your face and be beautiful.’

  Was Farouq trying to tell me I was beautiful?

  Was I not beautiful without these colours?

  Farouq was not thinking about it the way I was. Maybe he wanted to tell me I had become a woman.

  Farouq... You too have become a man. You no longer write me letters that you colour and sprinkle with cologne. You have begun bringing gifts like television stars do, new gifts from the world of adults.

  I did not take the bus for female students that day but decided I would go to meet Farouq. Today I will leave the future to everyone else and walk towards the past. I will go walking with Farouq through streets that know me, that I know. I do not want to enter the future. I am afraid of the past disappearing. I am afraid of the unknown. The future is open to all possibilities, and each possibility on the horizon these days frightens me. There are no miracles that the future will realise. It is a sick old man leaning on the crutch of the past as he comes towards us.

  The future is not a swift road that carries us forward. That is nothing more than a foolish and trivial lie. We live aboard an enormous ship. The waves push it around aimlessly. Storms batter it amid the heaving sea of the world’s madness. How can we be confident of the future if we do not move forward? How can we submit our affairs to it when we are falling behind? How many times have we left our future behind and become lost on the road to ourselves?

  The past is the only truth I am certain of. I know it well, and I find reassurance even in its destruction. I have a vague dread of what is coming. It is a deep feeling of defeat, a frantic sense that we are passing into chaos. Everything crashes down before our eyes; the fruits of the future rot on the vine and fall to the ground. They seduce me with a bitter taste and an obscure, unknown fate, and I look out towards wide horizons shrinking like a narrow alley in an old Baghdad neighbourhood. I saw that once in Nadia’s dream, and I have not forgotten it since.

  I will go out with Farouq this evening. I will wander with him along the paths of the past. I will recall with him all the stories that have nothing more to tell. I will speak to him in the dialect I love, a dialect that contains all that I am as a person. Who are we apart from the language we speak?

  26

  War was coming. There was no longer any possible doubt about it. We all knew it; we breathed it in the air. Without any contact, its magnetic force shifted things out of place. We moved like iron filings under the influence of its negative charge, having lost all sense of direction.

  Up on the roof of our house, I stood on the water tank a second time, inspecting our ship and its high sails on the distant horizon. I rubbed my eyes and watched for war, the goals of which I could define precisely. I have become an expert on this place, an expert on war and its ends. I know exactly what it sought.

  Come along, war, my old friend! This is Ma’mun Tower; this is the Baghdad Clock. The tall buildings are over there, and that is the airport. Go to Al-Rashid Street, where towers and buildings wait for you. Try the Bridge of the Republic, where you will find a tall b
uilding called the Ministry of Planning. Come over this way and drop your payload here. Turn back a little. There is the power station, and not far from it is the big water tank. Come a little closer and drop your bombs on us. Throw down your burden anywhere you like. This time, you stand alone in the arena. We are exhausted and in despair. Come, get rid of us like human scraps, superfluous to this world. We too no longer have any need of it.

  A squadron of birds moves across the sky. I lift my eyes and turn my face towards the arc of their flight, longing for their lightness. How happy are these creatures who live without country. I want to fly with them, to soar far away. I want to live in a new world, a world without wars. O heavens, be good to me just this once! I have become tired of our homeland.

  Our primary school was turned into a military barracks. The middle school became a missile depot. Anti-aircraft guns were erected on top of the secondary school, their muzzles circling the sky.

  Nadia came to our house looking for me. She found me on the roof, watching for the war. ‘Come on!’ she said, taking me by the hand and leading me towards the garden. ‘I want to spend this night in the shelter. I want to live there again. Last time, I was a child and did not understand what it means for people to run away from death. Come with me tonight.’

  ‘Have you gone mad, Nadia?’

  ‘No, not at all. I just want to experience the meaning of running away from death.’

  ‘But the war hasn’t begun. The shelters are locked.’

  ‘Come on; let’s just try! Let’s race war and laugh in its face. If nothing else, let’s try running away from life.’

  I went out with her on a scouting mission to find the shelter. The concrete building was surrounded with barbed wire, the dust of twelve years of neglect piled up against it. Stray dogs and starving cats slept in its shadow.