I kissed the palm trees, I kissed the ground and the water, I kissed the air and I kissed everything that my grandfather loved. I went into my grandmother’s dark room and looked at his picture, which used to protect me from thieves.
‘I’ve kissed everything that you asked me to, Grandfather. Do you want anything else from me?’
Grandfather smiled at me from the picture. He lifted his cap off his head and set it aside.
I remembered his home in the City of Light. I remembered the scent of the paradise he lived in. I remembered his love for the land, and a tear fell from my eye.
That night, I sat with my grandmother, kissed her forehead, gave her a hug, and went to sleep beside her. The following day we would return to Baghdad. Things had deteriorated, and there was no hope that the situation would stabilise. ‘There’s nothing to do but accept reality and adapt to it,’ my father repeated, my mother nodding her head.
I got up in the morning and made breakfast for my grandmother. It was like the ones she used to make for me in my childhood. We ate together without a single word. I kissed her hand and then got up, taking my bag.
We returned to our house in Baghdad. We all helped clean it and sweep away the dust that had piled up everywhere. We reinforced the locks on the windows and doors with thick iron chains. Then we fell asleep, exhausted.
Our spacious, comfortable house, with its clean air, where the sun circled and shone in from every side, had become dark and depressed. Strange ghosts moved across its roof. The comfort of a house comes from the comfort of its people, and our house was not happy in those days. Pervaded by dreariness, it breathed polluted air and choked on its own tears. Have you seen houses cry? I often heard the walls of our house groaning. I saw its tears with my own eyes and cried along with it.
I was born in this house, and in it I uttered my first sounds. I spoke my first ‘papa’ and my first ‘mama’. On these tiles I learned to stand and take a step. I fell down, got up, and took another step. When I walked towards the door for the first time, the light of the world was revealed to me, and through that door the wars entered. In this house I saw things as they were in their reality. I saw the door as a door, the street as a street, the window as a window. I saw the tree as a tree and the rose as a rose. Where did that old clarity go, which solid things used to offer? Why did the door lose the power of its existence, the tree its presence, the flower its touch? In childhood, we see things as they are in all their clarity. We live as real things in direct contact. We feel them and become aware of the power of their outpouring in front of us. Why do these things change and become strange and confused, losing their substance?
Door, window, house, tree, dog, cat, sparrow, stove, chair, rack: when we say things separately, we feel the weight of their soul. When we put them in complete sentences, we kill that soul. Why did we learn to speak of things in complete sentences? Things in themselves are complete without sentences.
In those days devoid of meaning, I came across the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in my father’s library. Through it, I travelled from our neighbourhood to the village of Macondo, whose people were afflicted with the same insomnia that we were living through. We too no longer took any pleasure in sleeping. Forgetfulness began erasing the blackboard of our collective memory. We would pass by Uncle Shawkat, and it was as though we did not know him like we used to. We would pass by houses and forget the names of their inhabitants. The forms of things changed, and a single thing would come to possess many names. Language was no longer blessed with good health. Liberation, fall, occupation, invasion, destruction: how could all these words apply to a single day?
Days that do not have a clear name – those are the days when hope ends. Limp days without sufficient strength to face the future.
The contagion of multiple names was transferred to the people themselves. A name began referring not to an individual person but rather to his religious affiliation. A large number of young men lived difficult days with more than one name and address. When you renounce your name, how will you know other people?
Only Farouq was unable to change his name since he was a famous football player who everyone knew. He came one day in the early afternoon. Summoning his courage, he knocked on the door of our house. When no one answered, he slid into our garage a short letter telling me goodbye and saying he would be leaving for Jordan in an hour. My mother stumbled across the letter and picked it up with a trembling hand. She thought it might be one of those letters threatening people and warning them to leave their homes. She read it quickly, and her fear subsided. Instead of tearing it up as might be expected, she came to me in the living room and threw the paper in my face without uttering a single word. I took the letter and went up to my room where I read it and cried.
My dearest beloved,
I have to travel with the youth national team. I had wanted to see you at this sad hour. Didn’t I tell you the war would deprive us of the most beautiful things? Do you remember that, when we watched the sun setting over the Tigris?
I love you,
Farouq
Two days later, I asked my mother to take me to Nadia’s house. I missed her, and I wanted to cry on her shoulder. My mother opened our gate and looked out with fearful eyes, examining the street carefully to the right and left. When she saw Biryad walking around and wagging his white tail, she was sure the area was free of strangers. She put an abaya over my head. It was the first time I had worn one, and this one was actually my mother’s.
We walked quickly to Nadia’s house. Her brother, Muayad, was sitting on an old chair at the gate and got up to greet us. My mother returned home, while I entered the house without knocking and walked straight into the front room, just like I used to do as a child. Startled, Nadia leaped from her seat, and with an astonishment as great as a city’s when suddenly captured, she wrapped her arms around my neck. That was the first time we had met since Baghdad had fallen.
We went up to her room, and my tears flowed down onto her shoulder. She cried with me, and I stayed with her until sunset. Then I returned to my house escorted by Muayad, who made sure I arrived safely before saying goodbye and returning home.
Visiting Nadia’s house became a daily habit for me in that slow time. I would put an abaya over my head and go to see her. I stopped the day an American soldier on patrol through our neighbourhood catcalled me. Nadia became the one to visit me on a daily basis, her brother accompanying her all the way to our gate. Sometimes she would spend the night with me, and we would stay up till sunrise before going to sleep.
I lent her García Márquez’s novel. She returned it to me the next day, saying, ‘It’s long, and the names are complicated. I didn’t understand a thing.’
As for me, I reread the novel more than once. It formed for me a magical, parallel world that allowed me to escape the pressure of the difficult days that our neighbourhood was living through.
The Americans detained Nadia’s father. They came back the next day and detained her brother. After several days, they released her father, while her brother was kept for more than a week before they set him free through the intervention of Marwa, who had begun working as a translator with the American army. To protect their lives, her family had been forced to leave their home and go into hiding.
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One day in July during the first year of the occupation, Marwa visited us, disguised in an abaya and large sunglasses. Speaking in a low voice and looking left and right to give extra weight to her words, she said, ‘The Americans suspect that groups of militants are hiding in the abandoned houses. Some Marine units will come tomorrow to surround the area and search the houses one by one. They will conduct night-time raids on everyone.’ She went on to advise us to cooperate, since they had clear instructions to open fire on anyone they suspected.
Before leaving, Marwa told us in a whisper, as though she were divulging a dangerous secret, ‘They are searching for Ahmad.’
My eyes followed her as she walked away
from the alley. I remembered the flag-raising ceremonies and the bullets from her rifle that would startle the sparrows out of their nests. But despite all that, I loved her. I loved something inside her, there in the depths of her soul. There was another Marwa that resembled our childhood. Even though she had been speaking with my parents without looking at me, I kept my gaze focused on her face, looking for her old eyes, for her nose, for the shape of the mouth she had used as a child to pick on us in the street. We had grown up in the same place, breathed the same air. We had played here on the pavement of this street, under the light of this street lamp.
‘They’re searching for Ahmad.’
It is your young heart, Marwa, that was searching for Ahmad. When we lived through our teenage years, you tried to catch him with songs and smiles, but he loved Nadia. And now you come with the greatest military power in history to catch him again. What a passionate lover you are, Marwa! How stubborn and strong you are! But that’s life, Marwa, and that’s love. You cannot compel it with force, even with the greatest military power in history. Love comes from a different place. All the technology of the Marines is incapable of finding it out, but the heart of a young woman in love knows it well. You are beautiful and smart, and a thousand Ahmads desire you. Let love come and knock on the door of your heart, unlooked for. Do not drive it away with planes, armoured cars and bullets. Leave Ahmad alone! Let him live how he wants at a time when even the oxygen in the air is deadly poison.
Before leaving the neighbourhood for the last time, Marwa stopped at the door of Umm Rita’s house to greet Uncle Shawkat. She went up and greeted him eloquently and respectfully. She tried to remind him of her name, of his teeth marks on her wrist, but to no avail. She slipped a small amount of cash into his pocket. A tear fell from her eye, and she took out her handkerchief to wipe it away.
When Uncle Shawkat used to bite our wrists in the days when we were young, he did not know that we would grow up this quickly. He had wanted us to remain children who wore our imaginary watches, pressed by his teeth into our delicate skin. He knew that it hurt us a little to bite our tender wrists, but it was a pain that caused pleasure for both parties, a pleasure we felt without being able to preserve it. Those hours effaced by time kept circling within our depths, drawing zigzag lines between our childhood and our future. The Marines came for our future and smashed its windows. They demolished everything. They destroyed the lives of us children who grew up in this place. Their tanks wiped the traces of our childhood from the streets.
Why are there no longer any children in our street to offer their wrists to Uncle Shawkat for him to make watches? These days, it was his own lips he would bite, a practice that could express any number of things. Indeed, gnawing on his lips had become Uncle Shawkat’s sole language with everyone. There was one bite for memory and another for pain, a gentle bite when he met someone he loved, and a snap at the air when he passed a house that had belonged to neighbours who had departed, a powerful bite that planted the upper teeth into his lower lip. It was when he saw an American tank breaking up the street’s pavement and wiping away the familiar steps that had been imprinted there for twenty years that he lost the power to speak and developed this habit of biting his lips.
Uncle Shawkat got up the following morning and, dragging himself along heavily, set off to knock on Umm Ahmad’s door. She went out and tried, without success, to understand the meaning of the rapid bites on his lower lip. She called her son. Ahmad had been listening to the news on the radio, and he stood before Uncle Shawkat, who went to him, took hold of his left hand, and bent over to press into his wrist the deep imprint of a watch, something he had forgotten he used to do when Ahmad was a child. His glances conveyed many things he wanted to say but could not find the words to convey. Uncle Shawkat drew Ahmad’s hand in a second time and waved it in space as though to say, ‘Goodbye.’
Ahmad grasped the meaning of this sign, which his mother had been incapable of understanding. Uncle Shawkat went off, and Ahmad stood there, explaining the situation to his mother. She went inside and gathered their things. She soon came back, turned the key in the lock, and departed quickly with her son before anyone noticed.
The Americans came at dusk. Once they had surrounded the area, they began to raid the houses. They conducted a search, house by house, room by room, going up to the rooftops of the dwellings and digging through their gardens. Using heavy hammers, they broke the lock on the door of Umm Ahmad’s house. One group went inside while another lined both sides of the street. They made a careful inspection of the rooms and then left. Was Marwa with them? Did she translate for them Nadia’s letters, which Ahmad had hidden in a drawer of his desk? What did they find inside the house apart from secret love letters?
At the top of the street, we heard the sound of the first improvised explosive device exploding against an American armoured car. The battle of the IEDs had begun.
At midnight, unknown persons distributed flyers announcing, in the name of the resistance, the destruction of an American Humvee. The flyers threatened the families of those cooperating with the enemy. Life had become deeply uncertain.
Night and day, planes circled in the sky over the neighbourhood, and explosives were planted in the street.
Slogans criticising the occupation and threatening collaborators with death were written on the walls of houses, schools and government buildings everywhere. The front door of Marwa’s family was painted black, with the picture of a bullet over the words ‘Death to traitors’.
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Umm Farouq left her house and made certain to lock the door. She did not inform us where she was going. In our street, none of the houses retained their original inhabitants except ours, Nadia’s and Baydaa’s, in addition to Uncle Shawkat’s, if we wanted to count it, though in reality it was also abandoned, for the owner had not lived in it since Umm Rita’s house was robbed.
The three remaining families took turns caring for Uncle Shawkat, providing him with food, tea and other necessities. Sometimes we obtained medicine for him, but he would throw it away when we were not looking. His illness was not the kind that needed a doctor’s prescription: he was wounded deep in his soul by an injury the size of a giant ship that had anchored here for many years.
In those lonely days, Nadia and I began spending the night at each other’s house. Each night, we would sleep together in one of our two houses and would be together nearly twenty-four hours a day. In that way, we reclaimed something of our small share of happiness.
Oh, for that happiness that can be invented even during hard times! Do I speak the truth about happiness? What was its form? What did it taste like? Was it a true happiness that people could talk about without feeling sick?
Whenever the electricity was cut during the daytime, we would sit in the garden until evening; sometimes we would do that even when the power came back. One sunny day, as we chatted on a small bench off to one side that offered a view of their whole garden, I happened to notice a piece of clear glass reflecting the flashing rays of the sun. It was tucked away among the jasmine that formed a green rectangle around the grass of the garden. I went over, picked it up, and discovered it was a half-empty bottle of liquor. It later came out that the bottle belonged to Nadia’s brother, Muayad, who had hidden it there out of fear that his consuming alcohol at this early stage of his life would be found out – at a time when doing forbidden things meant death by a single bullet.
When Muayad came back to look for it, Nadia and I bargained with him, saying we would return the bottle to him on the condition that he hand over his cassette recorder. He agreed, laughing at the way we fleeced him. From then on, we had a way to listen to music.
Every morning, we would eat our breakfast listening to the songs of Fairuz. The day would continue with Kathem Al-Saher, Hatem Al-Iraqi, Mohannad Mohsen, Haitham Yousif, Raid George, and a single tape by Najat Al Saghira, which had a rasp that prevented us from hearing it well. We also found some tapes of foreign music in Nadia’s mot
her’s wardrobe: Jane Birkin, Madonna and the Beatles.
Among all these tapes, there were certain songs that spoke directly to Nadia’s heart: ‘Be Safe in God’s Hand’, ‘If Only We Never Met’, ‘Loving You and Losing All’. When these songs played, Nadia would lose herself in dancing and forget everything – herself, Kathem’s voice, even the air. I would watch, clapping enthusiastically, and then the song would end. She would wipe away her tears, sit down absent-mindedly, and recall old memories. Ahmad had abandoned her, but she loved him from the bottom of her heart. She invented one excuse after another for him: ‘His circumstances in exile have pushed him to the heart of another girl, a blonde girl from Mosul. She enchanted him with her charming stutter, the force of her personality and her bewitching smile, but he’ll come back.’
‘He’ll come back,’ we would always tell ourselves, for we did not want to surrender. We did not want to transform our first stories into mere memories that lost their usefulness and were forgotten, just as our neighbourhood had forgotten its past and hung suspended in space.
In García Ma´rquez’s novel, the village of Macondo was forced to confront forgetfulness through writing. On each thing, they recorded its particular name so that forgetfulness would not wipe those names away.
Later on, the people of the village realised that their method was not sufficient, for they might know things by writing down their names, but how would they know the advantages of those things and how to use them? So they added explanations. In this way, they hung a label round the neck of the cow that would remind them to milk it and then to use that milk in their coffee.
In this way, writing does the work of protecting memory. Through it, we remember the names of things, some of their functions and how to use them. But this ignores their spiritual history. Living memory was the only thing that could protect us from the curse of the unknown.
The Baghdad Clock Page 15