Uncle Shawkat returned to his house and wrote on its door in Turkoman: ‘This house not for sale or rent.’ He got into the car with his wife, and the two of them departed.
Biryad remained in his place, twisting his neck from side to side, not believing what had just happened. I sat beside him, petting his head and shoulders, but he did not move from that spot. Everyone gathered around, watching him in silence as though he were a pile of sadness.
Biryad lifted his gaze to the sky where the dejected purple sunset streamed down. He got up and paced heavily to the end of the street, where he looked in the direction that the car had taken. He came back to our gate, his eyes beseeching us not to abandon him too. We brought him inside. He stretched out in the garden and slept for three days straight.
Thus, our neighbourhood was opened up to interlopers, and our empty houses became free for the taking. Uncle Shawkat, who had guarded the cemetery of the unknown, had left us. We faced life without memories floating over us from a past we had shared, laugh by laugh, tear by tear. That first night passed like one of the longest nights in history. After Uncle Shawkat’s departure, in the very moment that Baji Nadira’s car had turned the corner and we lost sight of it, we were certain that our appointment with eternal exile had begun. Our ship was about to sound the siren to embark.
Without Uncle Shawkat, this depressing place could no longer claim to be a neighbourhood. When Baji and her driver came, they stole the past from under our feet, and we tumbled into a well of forgetfulness. Were it not for The Baghdad Clock: The Record of a Neighbourhood, which we wrote with the pen of memory, the neighbourhood and all its history would have been merely a long winter night’s dream that we forgot in the morning.
Some days later, strangers moved into Umm Rita’s house and threw the statue of the Virgin into the street. They renovated the place, painted its walls with bright colours, and wrote over the front door, ‘By the grace of our Lord’.
The Lord had granted them a big house with a beautiful garden. This Lord, who had shown favour upon them with such a great blessing, certainly was not the same Lord to whom Umm Rita had prayed, lighting candles to seek forgiveness and mercy. He was not the same Lord whom my grandmother beseeched to protect us from the bombs, nor the same Lord whom Umm Ali invoked every evening in the courtyard of their house. Any Lord, who, by his grace, had granted them a house that was fully furnished, even with its stock of memories, but for which they did not lay a single brick – he could only be Satan himself.
In that big house which the Lord had bestowed upon strangers, we would gather every New Year’s Eve to celebrate with a Christmas tree lit up in the far corner of the living room. Under a picture of the Virgin and her swaddling infant, prayers, praise, anthems and hymns would be lifted up. We would gather there, waiting for gifts from Papa Noël, our pockets filled with sweets. Then we would go out into the cold of our street, singing songs and walking by the light of lanterns lit by slender candles.
New years were born in that place. In that corner, right there in Umm Rita’s house, the new year drew its first breath. The years are born as children, and then they grow.
Were the years growing? Or were they just piling up in this house, settling forever in that clear space called the past? How is the past unknown when we know it as well as we know our own names?
We do not remember the future. Essentially, life is a past moving forward behind us as we hurry on ahead. As for the future, it is the house of non-existence.
On the last night before Uncle Shawkat’s departure, Nadia dreamed of the last chapter in García Ma´rquez’s novel – how, on the night of the festival, Pilar Ternera died in her rocking chair, and how her final wishes were honoured when she was buried not in a coffin, but rather sitting on her chair, lowered on fibre ropes by eight men into a giant grave.
33
Baydaa brought a small bag of clothes and other things and came to sleep at our house. Nadia had persuaded her with the idea that we three would stay up together that sad night following Uncle Shawkat’s departure. On the table in my room, Baydaa came across the blue notebook with The Baghdad Clock: The Record of a Neighbourhood written on the cover. She began to flip through its pages with such great interest – passion, even – that she forgot we were there with her in the room.
Baydaa was surprised by this crazy idea. She had put her finger in the middle of the notebook and looked us in the face without uttering a single word. Then she opened it up again and read, page by page, line by line, word by word.
Without asking our permission, she took a black pen from my table and began to write without stopping, as though she were drinking the words from a pouring rain cloud of memory. She wrote everything she knew and remembered about houses, people, events and special occasions. She remembered the kinds of cars in the neighbourhood, their owners and the date they first came down our street. She recorded a summary of the cats, the dogs, the birds and the butterflies which found themselves there. She listed the palm trees, the fruit trees and the plants, indicating how old they were, how tall they were and where they were situated. She listed the flowers and the gardens they grew in. She made a map of the street lamps and the telephone poles. She enumerated the water tanks on the roofs and how large they were. She compiled a list of the most delicious foods we were used to eating and the women who were famous for each dish. She drew a chart for professions and jobs that each family member in the neighbourhood held and a chart for the school stage of each individual in the household. She noted the births, recent and old, along with the dates, the names of each child, and details about their appearance. She mentioned the names of the living grandmothers and grandfathers in each family. She remembered the marriages, people falling in love, engagements and divorces that the neighbourhood’s families had seen in their day. She made a list of the most handsome young men and the most beautiful young women. She summarised the famous people who had come from our neighbourhood. She detailed the names of shops and stores, along with who owned them. She described the furniture of the houses she had been in throughout her life: the colour of the curtains and the kinds of rugs and carpets. She listed the names of the women who ran each household, along with their nicknames in the neighbourhood.
Baydaa named the families she believed to be the happiest or the kindest; likewise, the ones that felt the deepest misery. She wrote an account of the temperament of each person she knew well: their taste in clothes and appearance and the songs they usually listened to. She unearthed details that had been forgotten along the way. She organised a list of the words most commonly used in the neighbourhood’s lexicon. She made a separate page for proverbs and popular jokes, going back and forth between each category and treating their histories and the circumstances or the difficult situations in which they would be cited. She classified the children’s games and when they appeared and disappeared, discussing the most skilful player in each game.
Baydaa stayed up almost till dawn. She kept writing and writing without ever tiring of it. Sleep overcame Nadia and me, and we left Baydaa absorbed in her writing, just as though she were answering the questions in an exam with details she had learned by heart. When we awoke in the morning, Baydaa had surrendered to sleep. Nadia told me her dream about García Márquez’s novel, and before she finished I smiled to remind her that I had seen it too.
Baydaa slept all morning, the notebook open beside her pillow. The black pen was still fixed between her fingers as though she had not yet finished her task.
We gently pulled the notebook away and began flipping through her pages. We were dazzled by the wealth of information she had recorded from her prodigious memory, which did not leave out anything related to our neighbourhood, even as she avoided recording any boring details. In that way, we had a memory that was nearly complete. The full history was now in our hands. In The Baghdad Clock: The Record of a Neighbourhood, all that beautiful time slept. Its pages contained a living memory, impossible to forget. Life in its entirety was transl
ated from actual existence into words.
After Baydaa woke up and before she had her breakfast, she picked One Hundred Years of Solitude off the shelf above my desk. She asked – begged first and then insisted, actually – that she be allowed to take the notebook and the novel home with her. I gave in on the condition that she return the notebook to me the following day, and that she keep the novel as a gift to remind her of our friendship.
Here is page 19 of the notebook (exactly as we read it in Baydaa’s handwriting):
After graduating with a degree in science, Osama married one of his university classmates and brought her to live in his father’s house in the neighbourhood. Haifa was a tall, beautiful young woman with light skin. She bore him two daughters, Mala’ika and Niran. After giving birth to the first, Haifa left her government job to look after the household. Osama was transformed, however, into a very peculiar person by the bitter days of the sanctions. He too left his job and began doing business at the market, buying and selling used furniture.
It became rare for Osama to return home before nightfall, and rare for any of us to meet him in our neighbourhood’s streets. But at midnight every night, the neighbours in his alley – particularly those who lived on either side – heard the sound of continuous fighting with his wife, with whom he lived on the second floor, which opened onto the roof of the house.
Haifa submitted to his daily bouts of madness. She suffered from bouts of hysteria that would strike suddenly when copious amounts of alcohol made Osama stagger up the stairs to their bedroom. Osama’s sick father often intervened to distract him from breaking the furniture; his weary mother often intervened to bring him back to his senses. But things kept going downhill as time went on. Osama’s poor wife did not have family with whom she could seek refuge from this hell: they had left the country years before.
One morning, Haifa was on her way to the market when a handsome young man approached and asked her to help him find a certain house. He had the address on a piece of paper in his hand, which he held up for Haifa to read. Haifa apologised for not knowing the address and turned away, but the young man continued to follow her.
Every morning, he would be waiting for her in the same place where he had met her that first time. He would subject her to a heavy dose of flirtation, emphasising the allure of her body – specifically, her hips, her breasts and her lips. Haifa resisted all his appeals and more than once changed the route she took in order to avoid meeting him, but in those days, she began feeling her body with the palm of her hand, exploring it in front of the mirror as though it were the body of a woman she did not know. She had been neglecting this deeply alluring body for a long time, ever since her husband had begun ignoring it. She experienced a severe conflict within herself between her body’s appeals, pressing upon her from every side, and the innocent personal history of this body that was now constantly aroused. In the end, desire won out, and Haifa became the secret lover of a handsome man who began making frequent appearances in the neighbourhood around that time.
One morning, Mala’ika found her mother in a somewhat different state than before. She was singing to herself as she applied make-up, dabbed a lot of perfume around her neck, and put on a revealing low-cut dress that fitted tight around her hips and bottom.
The mother left with a suitcase in which she had packed some of her clothes, without having thought too much about what she was bringing. Her young daughter followed her, unnoticed by the mother. Mala’ika saw with her own surprised eyes as her mother disappeared with a young man behind a building in the market, where she got into a taxi with him that was waiting to take them away.
Haifa disappeared without a trace and without anyone knowing her fate. Her daughter left school and began caring for her sister and her father.
Baydaa wrote this story in the pages devoted to Abu Osama. It was one that she alone knew. Nadia and I were not able to confirm its accuracy, but at the same time, we kept it in the notebook because Baydaa never lied. This notebook was the complete history of the neighbourhood, and we were obliged not to leave anyone out. When it came down to it, we were not a neighbourhood of angels.
In these pages was a long description of the house and its rooms, walls and furniture, which changed greatly after Osama became skilled in buying used furniture. There was a description of the garden and its plants, a description of Mala’ika and her sister, as well as of her grandfather and grandmother, their first appearance in the neighbourhood and the nature of their relationship with the neighbours, along with the way each one of them spoke, dressed and walked. Likewise, Baydaa dedicated numerous lines to describing Haifa’s passion for her body and the way she caressed it. She avoided focusing directly on its arousing parts, but in Baydaa’s magical way, she drew a tangible picture of this body in words.
Baydaa did not possess just a magical singing voice. We discovered through her writing in the notebook that her true gift manifested itself in literature. She was able – in a single night – to write the neighbourhood in the form of a novel packed with events. In it she drew places, personalities and events in an enchanting way. If I had enough time, I would read you more of her pages, for she picked out unremembered events in our neighbourhood, nearly swallowed up by forgetfulness, and with a genius touch, restored them to existence.
34
The bus that was taking us to university braked suddenly and came to a stop in the middle of the street, just in time to stop its wheels from crushing an elderly man with a wooden hand cart who was refusing to get out of the way.
‘Run me over and set me free from this life! I don’t want to live another day in this miserable world. Just let me die!’
The driver got out to plead with the man to step out of the road. He was in despair and wanted with all his heart to die, but after a while, he came back to his senses and was ashamed of himself. He did as the bus driver asked and pulled his cart to the pavement where he sat down and wept bitterly.
How can a man want to die and feel shame at the same time? That question occupied my mind the whole way to university. Was death not the end of everything? So why did this man still retain a little shame? Did he want to take it with him in death? Do the dead also feel shame? What good was that in the other life? I loved this elderly man and wanted to go back and listen to his story. It is my nature to love people who feel ashamed, for only with such people is it possible to come to a mutually beneficial understanding. That’s because shame is the magnificent quality that makes a person human.
In our neighbourhood, we would describe the best people as being ‘good and shamefaced’, and whenever I came across someone who did not feel a sense of shame, I would secretly think he was dangerous and wicked. Shame is not a religious or pedagogic quality, nor is it moral principle. It is rather one of the gifts of existence that prevents us from committing travesties against the rights of other people. I loved Farouq because he felt this sense of shame deeply. His face would become red whenever he encountered some embarrassing situation. I love how he looks at the ground when talking about his father. I love how bashful he is around people when he is alone, and how he avoids the fans who admire him for being a famous football player.
What if Farouq lost this sense of shame? Would he still be the same person? What if shame evaporated suddenly from our lives – would we be transformed into a jungle? That jungle in which we were living consisted more precisely in a lack of shame that descended upon us suddenly.
I arrived at university and found Farouq waiting for me across the street from the printing shop. I walked with him to where he had parked his new car in a secluded road branching off the main street. Before he said goodbye and got in, he told me what he had been wanting to say but had been too ashamed: ‘My mother and my aunt... Tomorrow at your house, they’re going to seek an engagement from your family.’
‘Farouq, where’s this surprise coming from?’
‘What do you mean, surprise?’
‘It’s just that I wasn’t read
y for this news.’
‘Think about it on your own for a day,’ he said, looking at the ground.
‘It’s not something I need to think about. You know me and how deeply I love you. But things these days – it’s not really a good time for engagement and marriage.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know – my family might emigrate.’
‘I’m ready to marry you in any place, in any country, on any continent. Wherever you go, I’ll be right behind you.’
‘That’s not the point, my love. Let’s just think carefully before we make a decision that isn’t right.’
‘Take your time, but my mother and my aunt are coming by tomorrow.’
He turned away, unhappy with my response. As he got in his car and drove off, I remained frozen on that spot and spun around trying to catch my breath. My God, what had just happened?
From a personal point of view, I was not ready for this news. I actually had not even thought about it. I had thought that we were still playing. Why did love turn into a social contract, an obligation like the homework you had to do for school?
At the same time, an obscure joy pulsed inside me, though it did not know how to break through and express itself. My heart rejoiced even as it was choked with misgivings. Every girl dreamed of marrying the boy she loved, but at the same time, marriage meant a contraction of her world, a shrinking of the dream’s scope, a story coming to an end before all the chapters were written.
Love as a teenager is like young children smoking. It is the desire to move into the world of adults with a child’s mouth and a grown-up cigarette. How can the child trade away his mouth for the sake of a cigarette burning between his lips?
Am I a teenager? I got past that childish nonsense long ago, and I have no desire to repeat the beautiful mistakes of the past. Am I a mature woman? I do not know.
The Baghdad Clock Page 17