If they had written just the word ‘cow’ without any clarification, it is possible that after the disease of forgetfulness came, they would have discovered the whole thing all over again. They would have learned how to milk the cow, one of them would have mixed the milk into his coffee, and in this way, they would have made coffee with milk, a new flavour that no one had ever tasted before. They ruined everything by writing sentences.
To combat forgetfulness in our neighbourhood as well, Nadia and I thought about writing descriptions of things. We began this experiment with ourselves. In a blue notebook we found in my father’s library, we wrote: ‘This is my friend Nadia. Her eyes are green, and her hair is blonde. I’m a little taller than her. I met her in a concrete air-raid shelter. That was in the year 1991. We went to primary school, middle school and secondary school together. Now she studies at the University of Baghdad and I study at the University of Technology. She loves Ahmad and I love Farouq.’
When the first pages were filled with writing about obvious things, it resembled the reading book in our first year at school: house, floor, fire and so on.
One morning we went out and wrote on the houses the names of their old inhabitants, the dates they left their homes, and the countries they now lived in. Then we transferred those details into the notebook. On the wall of Uncle Shawkat’s house, for example, we wrote: ‘This is Uncle Shawkat’s house. His wife, Baji Nadira, left for Kurdistan after the first Gulf War in 1991. He currently lives in Umm Rita’s house, and has done ever since thieves still at large stole their furniture.’
Our idea developed, and we decided to write in the same notebook twenty pages about each family in the neighbourhood to summarise their lives and our memories of them. This was the first time that our personal history as neighbours had been recorded, just as our memory was at risk of passing away.
‘But what is the name of this record?’ Nadia asked me.
‘The Baghdad Clock.’
‘No. Let’s name it The Record of a Neighbourhood.’
‘The Baghdad Clock: The Record of a Neighbourhood,’ I replied without too much thought and without knowing why this name occurred to me. Nadia agreed immediately, and on the cover of the notebook, we wrote in big letters: The Baghdad Clock: The Record of a Neighbourhood.
Here is a sample from the notebook:
The house with the wide black gate is the house of Umm Ali. The house that the red car goes into is the house of Umm Manaf. Umm Hussam’s house is the one whose grape vines hang down over ours. The house with ivy creeping up and covering its windows is Umm Wijdan’s. The house that Devil Girl plays in front of is the house of Umm Osama. The house where the daughter got married and many colourful cars came to take her away with music is the house of Umm Salli. The house where we go to sing at New Year is the house of Umm Rita. Next door is the house of Umm Marwan, and after that is the house of Umm Ahmad. Then the house of Umm Baydaa, and after it the house of Umm Farouq. Last is the house of Uncle Shawkat, and Abu Nabil’s shop.
Taking Umm Salli’s house as an example, they are a family composed of a mother, a father and five daughters, all of whom are remarkably beautiful. Umm Salli never gave birth to a son, and she often recounts how she dreamed on her wedding night that she would be deprived of sons, but that God would compensate her with beautiful daughters, all of whom would marry foreigners and live in distant cities.
Take Sahir, for example. She is the fourth of Umm Salli’s five daughters, and when she left the neighbourhood with her family to go abroad, she was a captivating young woman with amber eyes and jet-black hair, rosy, dimpled cheeks, a wide forehead, a charming lisp when she spoke, and eyebrows that looked like slender spears. She was the most alluring of her sisters, and the most conscious of how to exploit her beauty in life.
She always said, ‘I’ll only marry a handsome pilot.’ In order to fulfil this desire, Amjad, the younger son of Umm Ali, enrolled in the Air Force College so that he might achieve his wish of marrying her. He did in fact become a pilot, but by this time, she was already living in Denmark, far from her homeland, and had abandoned all her old desires. Amjad wrote to her many times, but he did not receive a single response. The last letter he wrote her was the day before his plane went down, and no trace of him has been found up until the time of this writing.
I lent García Márquez’s novel to Nadia again and urged her with all my heart to read it. She returned it to me two days later, saying, ‘Disturbing. Depressing.’
My father did not have anything by García Márquez in our library apart from One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it was most likely the only novel we had at all. I read it many times, as I have said. I had not heard of García Márquez before and I used to believe this novel was the first and last written by a magical novelist who lived in a distant century.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel written against both forgetfulness and memory at the same time. It sets forth a new world we did not know, as though it were a spiritual prescription for escaping misery. It did in fact save us from the actual conditions in Baghdad in 2003 by transforming me into an honorary citizen of the village of Macondo, where I was bound by strong ties to all the inhabitants of the village, even as I developed passing friendships with their gypsy visitors and the residents of the neighbouring swamps.
When I resumed my academic life, I secretly chose new names for my university professors that were borrowed from the inhabitants of García Márquez’s village: José Arcadio Buendía, Dr Aureliano, Dr Amaranta, Professor Aureliano José, Professor Úrsula, Dr Aureliano II, Dr Rebeca.
When Nadia returned the novel to me the second time, a folded upper page corner made it clear she had stopped reading at page 59. The events of these relatively few pages out of the big novel – which was longer than 500 pages – formed the core of her dreams’ narratives till the end of 2003.
Each time, her dream began with a cinematic shot at dawn in which the camera pans round, filming twenty mud-and-reed houses erected on the bank of a clear-water river. Her dream would end with José Arcadio Buendía explaining everything he knew about insomnia to the village elders.
That scene occupied my memory for a long time, and I may have been mistaken about whether it came from one of Nadia’s dreams or whether it was actually produced by García Márquez’s mind. Sometimes it even occurred to me that I should consider it a scene invented by my own imagination.
31
This time, I will think about the American pilot as he hovers at dawn in his Apache helicopter in the sky above Baghdad. He often flies over our neighbourhood and circles several times low over our rooftops.
I will suppose he comes from Los Angeles, or from New York, the same city where the towers fell and for which – by some illogical reasoning – we were paying the price. I will suppose that he comes from any American state, for that does not interest me personally.
He will be thinking about his wife and children whenever his eyes pass over the figure of a slender woman or a skinny child walking down the street. He will remember their home far away when he observes the roofs of our houses with their clothes lines, iron water tanks and iron bedframes waiting there for another summer.
He will think about the clean skies over his city when our dust prevents him from seeing things clearly. He will certainly think of all that. He will keep watch on the movement of the people, the cars and all the strange things moving on the ground as he passes his reports on to the command centre: ‘Nothing happening here that resembles a ship. It’s calm and the traffic is normal. Nothing exciting.’
Someone from the operations centre will respond: ‘Sweep the area well, and photograph it from every angle in high definition. It’s likely that the target is hiding in one of the neighbourhood’s abandoned houses.’
The pilot circles again, moving slowly along all four sides of the neighbourhood. He stops there in the sky like an eagle eyeing its target, waiting for the right moment to strike. He photographs us one by one and then swe
eps off to the east, leaving behind the sound of his helicopter’s rotors ringing in our air.
I will imagine an advanced piece of equipment, the kind we believe America is able to invent. Let us suppose it is a giant device that photographs the movement of time in a given place. That location’s distant past appears slowly and moves across an enormous screen the size of the sky over our city. On this screen, we see a film of our neighbourhood in black and white.
The film starts when the first brick was laid in this place, running through to the hour in which the pilot circled and went back to his base.
I sit in front of this screen to watch the past that prepared for my birth in this street. That sweet childhood, jumping through hopscotch squares. Please, be so good as to watch with me! Here is the first wedding celebration in our side street. Here I am at age two. My young mother is holding me as she follows the sound of traditional music coming from Umm Nabil’s house. Their daughter Amira has got married, and people are coming with a new car decorated with colourful ribbons and a big bouquet of flowers to take the bride far from the neighbourhood. They take her away amid a carnival of colours created by the radiant clothes of the beautiful girls dancing in front of the bridal car.
Look! See the young men in army uniforms, heading off before dawn for distant military bases along the border where the Iraq–Iran war is taking place. These young men... Hear their heavy boots striking the night-time asphalt.
This is the propane vendor, and this the vegetable man, circling with his cart from one alley to the next. Here are children wearing small backpacks and heading off to school. There is the country’s flag over a rented car. It is Adil, the first martyr that the war sent home to us in a wooden coffin. Listen with me to the tears: they belong to his wife, Umm Ahmad, as she mourns him with tears that will never end.
This is the fire in Umm Ali’s house: a gas canister explodes in their house, and the neighbours all rush out to extinguish the fire and save the house. This small garden belongs to Umm Rita’s house. There is her husband sitting under the orange tree behind a table with some meze and a bottle of beer. Here is Umm Nizar sitting in her doorway all day long, draped in black. She is waiting for her only son, whom she beseeches heaven to send back safely from the war.
This is Abu Nabil’s shop, and these children are us as we make our way there. These young men are the first football team from our neighbourhood, and these old cans in the middle of the street form the goal they strive to hit. That young woman on the rooftop is Najat, and that young man making signs to her from the roof of the neighbouring house is Ali. The rainbow between them is a story of secret love that joins their hearts.
There are many things I can see on the American pilot’s screen, things that, to be perfectly accurate, exist in my head, in my memory. Small scenes, nonsensical stories, overlapping voices – I can summon them up before me now. All these things form my relationship to this place.
This is where I myself was born and where my personality crystallised. In this place, my spirit grew like a tree with no history. Right here, in this square that the pilot photographs from all four sides, I became that idea dropped into time.
I was little when Baydaa’s grandfather died. That may have been the first time in my life that a question about the meaning of our existence occurred to me. Where do people go after they die?
Why do we exist in the first place?
Death is a collective attention to the voice of Abdul Basit Abdul Samad as he recites alif lam mim at the beginning of a sura from the Qur’an. His heavenly voice draws a straight, sharp line between our existence in this world and the eternal unknown.
What the American pilot does not know is that this place is the first planet I settled on when arriving out of non-existence, and I established my personal civilisation here. In this place, I have slept more than 7,300 nights, have woken more than 7,300 times, and have heard my name repeated more than 7,300 million times.
Dear pilot, be so good as not to hover over the past! You photograph my steps in the road, count my breaths in the air, and make it difficult for my shadow to observe its habit of following me.
When the sun sets over our neighbourhood, the night becomes responsible for guarding our shadows, which the daytime laid down upon the pavements: our zigzagging shadows, our straight shadows, squat or stretched, our ghostly shadows cast by street lamps in the night.
Even those who have left us – traces of their shadows walk on the walls after we sleep. This neighbourhood is a planet of sad shadows. I beg you not to harm them.
When you land your helicopter close to the edge of our houses, it shakes the dust of our souls. Sparrows and doves are startled into flight; the blankets on our beds billow into the air. Memories bolt, gasping for the sky that is our neighbourhood’s share of mercy.
Dear pilot, be merciful with us! Do not harm this sky that we have raised with dreams, prayers, sighs, laughter, songs and mothers’ laments.
32
One early afternoon, Nadia, Baydaa and I were in my garden, killing time and listening to songs on the new tapes Baydaa brought from home. At a certain point, we heard a car stop outside Uncle Shawkat’s house and Biryad’s fierce bark. Curiosity prompted us to watch what was happening through the wide gaps in the gate.
The driver got out, wearing traditional Kurdish dress. He began knocking on the door while the dog dug at the ground with his left paw some distance away. When no one answered, a tall, slender woman got out of the car. She wore magnificent clothes and had a translucent red shawl over her head. When the dog saw her, he stopped barking as though he knew her from before.
We did not recognise her at first, but when her face turned towards us, we shouted, ‘Baji Nadira!’ We opened the gate and went out to welcome her joyfully.
Baji Nadira was a sudden breeze wafting over our souls from the past, from our childhood. She pulled us to her breast as she asked our names in order to recognise us and remember. From her towering height, she stroked us and leaned over to kiss our heads tenderly, time after time. Her tenderness and her kisses, which we had missed for such a long time, touched our souls once again.
‘You’re all grown up, my daughters.’
Baydaa summarised Uncle Shawkat’s story for her. Baji told the driver to wait at the door of the house, and she hurried with us towards Umm Rita’s house. Biryad – who seemed delighted at her arrival even though he had never seen her in his life – got there before us.
Baji’s husband was sitting on an old chair at the edge of the garden with his long beard and baggy clothes, rocking from side to side. Baji was stunned by the unexpected appearance of the companion of her life story, the most elegant, vigorous and self-confident man she had known. She let out a suppressed cry and rushed forward to embrace him. For his part, he looked at her with a gaze old enough to encompass three lifetimes. She began raining hot kisses on his face, his hand, his foot, as her hands passed over his face to confirm what her eyes were telling her, that this sad scene was not a figment of her imagination.
Baji touched his forehead with a palm filled with the longing of the years. She tried to raise him from his seat to bring him home. Uncle Shawkat was biting hard on his lips as he gripped the chair with a child’s stubbornness. Baji sat down at his feet, crying bitterly. She kept him company with Kurdish words loaded with sorrow, bitterness and longing.
Biryad was nodding his head with each word she said, just as if he understood their meaning. At each word, he also shed a tear that hung suspended on his whiskers before falling to the ground.
Some curious people tried to gather in the courtyard, but Biryad barked them away. Nadia hurried to the gate to glare at them. This was a family matter, private to the neighbourhood and its history, and not within the rights of strangers to disturb.
After a while, my parents and Nadia’s joined us. Baji Nadira wept as she pulled them to her breast, exchanging tears with them that resembled little rocks rolling down a barren mountain, tears the likes of
which the history of sadness in this place had never seen.
My father went up to Uncle Shawkat slowly and whispered some words in his ear. At that, Uncle Shawkat released his grip on the chair, sat up and became more relaxed. My father took him gently by the hand and led him towards our house. Baydaa’s parents joined us afterwards.
In our garden, that hour saw the last gathering of the remnants of the neighbourhood. My mother wasted no time in preparing lunch, and I brought a tray of food to the Kurdish driver, who was waiting for Baji outside her house.
Lunch ended and we drank tea. My father whispered a second time in the ear of Uncle Shawkat, who had remained still for a long time. Uncle Shawkat got up and put his hand in the hand of his wife, who was exhausted by her tears. The two of them went towards their abandoned house, walking with those familiar steps that we all knew so well, steps we preserved deep in our hearts. They went inside as the dog waited at the door, keeping watch over the driver.
Before evening fell, Uncle Shawkat emerged on the street in all his elegance. Biryad followed him with silent sorrow, a gleaming tear burning in each eye. Uncle Shawkat had shaved off his beard and his thick moustache and had combed his hair into its former style. He had also reclaimed his power of speech, but in the Turkoman language this time. He had come to bid us farewell. In her limited Arabic, Baji Nadira translated his affectionate feelings towards the neighbours of his life, along with his gratitude towards them for their kindness to him throughout the time he had lived among them.
Uncle Shawkat took out of his pocket an old photo belonging to Umm Salli’s house. He kissed it seven times and handed it to me. He gave his dog a deep look without a single word, tears streaming from his eyes. With a gesture of his hand, he told the dog to stay. Biryad sat there, looking at his owner in a way that broke our hearts. It was the first time we had seen him submissive and quiet, acquiescing to fate.
The Baghdad Clock Page 16