The Baghdad Clock

by Shahad Al Rawi

  And since you do not dream, I cannot wish you sweet dreams. I will content myself with saying, sleep well, you good and pure creature.

  *

  After I finished reading the letter from the future, I calmly got up, went straight to my bed and slept.

  The next morning, I woke in a different mood. I took a relaxing bath. Tuning the radio to a classical music station, I opened my windows to the sunshine, and ate breakfast. I sat down and serenely began turning over the pages permitted to me, free from fear.

  Book of the Future, Page 3:

  Uncle Shawkat and Baji Nadira

  Despite the repeated urging of Baji Nadira, Uncle Shawkat insisted on not selling their old house in the neighbourhood.

  ‘My dear husband, no one we know is going back there. Things have changed. Life has changed. Everything is now gone.’

  But after all her pleading, Uncle Shawkat declared that, as far as he was concerned, everything would eventually go back to normal. Every spring evening, when he sat with her in the garden of their house in the centre of Sulaymaniyah, he would recall for her beautiful memories of their lives in the neighbourhood. He told her about Baghdad: its beauty, its magic and its golden days. He would talk to her about Al-Rashid Street and the Orosdi Back department store, or about River Street and how he bought her wedding dress there. He told her about the Tigris, about Abu Nuwas Street and the fancy neighbourhoods of Al-Mansur and Al-Mu’min, about his idyllic childhood in the time of the monarchy, about his business studies in secondary school, and later on in the College of Economics.

  He told her about his job in the central bank and about the arc of the Iraqi dinar. He told her things she knew well and had experienced personally alongside him, but he still loved to tell them, just as though he were getting to know her for the first time. Every time his imagination went to the past, he took her left hand and, with utmost tenderness, used his anxious teeth to press the trace of a watch on her wrist.

  Baji Nadira would say, ‘We’ve grown old, dear husband. There’s no hope of a new life in Baghdad again. Let’s sell the house and use the proceeds to buy a large grave in the cemetery on the mountain. We’ll ask in our will that they erect a small room over it, on the walls of which they write the story of our love, from the first day we met until the last day of our lives.’

  At that, Uncle Shawkat would stare into space for a while and reply, ‘Everything will go back to normal.’

  When the evening cold fell in the garden, Baji Nadira would take her husband by the hand and bring him inside. He was sick, and could no longer endure the mild spring breezes. She would sit with him, watching television, and in less than an hour, when he closed his eyes, she would cover him up and go to her bed.

  Biryad would appear in Uncle Shawkat’s dreams, rushing down the side of a towering mountain. Biryad would start rolling towards him like a black rock that came to a halt by crashing into the front of his shoes.

  Book of the Future, Page 4:

  Hussam, the brother of Mayada

  After murdering his sister and escaping to Jordan, Hussam left roughly a year later for a different country on the border, where he changed his name to Abu Sayf and became a political opponent to the dictatorial regime in Iraq. Immediately after the regime’s fall, he returned to Baghdad with a thick beard and black sunglasses that he wore all the time. He became a member of the first parliament formed after independence, and then an important official in an executive government agency.

  One dark night, he went out and entered the neighbourhood in a long procession of black armoured cars. He ordered his followers to close off its roads with concrete barriers, and he blocked its entrances with fences of barbed wire. He put a black mark on all the abandoned houses. Then he began selling them, one by one, on the pretence that they were the ancestral property of his family.

  When he went inside his family’s old house, he began to examine his memories. His sister Mayada rose from her sleep in the dark. She approached him, her feet leaving footsteps in the dust on the tiles.

  ‘Why? Why did you kill me?’

  Terrified and not believing his eyes, Hussam took a step back. After some moments of distraction and anxiety, he confirmed that this young woman in front of him was his sister Mayada in flesh and blood, in the same clothes that had been stained with blood the day of the crime, her hair done up the same way. The voice he heard was her same voice. No one can say how long he remained frozen there, in that place. Meanwhile, her eyes sank into his soul like a sharp knife through soft clay. He tried to break himself away and call his bodyguard, but he had no voice. He tried to move, but his feet were stuck to the tiles like an iron statue set into solid concrete.

  Mayada remained where she was, watching him, motionless. And Hussam remained held by her gaze, shattered with fear. When his bodyguard realised he was taking longer than expected in a dark, abandoned house, they became worried and went inside with their flashlights. They found him dead where he stood.

  The men tried to carry Hussam out, but his feet remained firmly fixed to the floor tiles. Using hammers and pickaxes, they broke apart his feet and the lower half his legs, such that he fell where he stood like a rotten tree. After loading him in the back of a pickup truck, they buried him in a deep crater made by an American bomb that had missed its target and fallen in a field, it being the closest abandoned space they happened across on their way. Minutes, hours and days instantly rained down upon his grave – the same number of minutes, hours and days since he committed his crime and murdered Mayada until the moment he was covered by the dirt.

  After Mayada felt assured that time had brought her justice, she stretched out in her eternal chamber and resumed dreaming of Dr Tawfiq, who remains a bachelor to this day. She dreams the same, familiar dream: a small house, colourful curtains, simple furniture, and little ones who put on their backpacks and head off for school in the morning as she stands in the doorway, smiling and blowing a kiss to say goodbye.

  Before he died, Abu Sayf had sold all the houses. He sold the entire neighbourhood, even its schools, its clinics, its shelters, its shops, its bakeries and its pharmacies. His family’s old house was the only one that remained, haunted by ghosts, and in its empty rooms can be heard a voice singing the old songs that Mayada used to dance to.

  Hussam’s father died, as did his mother, in a terrorist attack. They had left for a distant province two months before Baghdad fell and were killed on their way back to the neighbourhood.

  Book of the Future, Page 5:

  Farouq and Marwa

  Marwa was born on the first day of February, the same day Farouq was born, as well as you and Nadia. That day, by the way, was a prodigious one for births, when the neighbourhood welcomed the second generation of its descendants.

  Marwa and her family emigrated to the United States after they obtained asylum on account of her work as a translator for the Marines. The lives of her family had been exposed to danger in Baghdad on more than one occasion.

  On the way to their new country, they stayed in Jordan for several weeks. Marwa encountered Farouq there by chance and they began to meet regularly. She wanted him to deliver a letter to Ahmad from her, and in turn, he wanted her to send you his telephone number. After she left Jordan, she got in touch with him from America, and a new relationship grew between them, one that developed into a kind of love.

  Farouq suffered a serious leg injury. He never regained his former level of play and was unable to join the national team. It was then that he decided to get engaged to Marwa and marry her. He moved to join her in her new country, but before too long, they separated. Farouq returned to Baghdad to work as a coach for the club in which his star had shone when he was first starting out. Before long, he emigrated a second time to the US, where he acquired citizenship. This time, however, he chose to settle down in a state far from Marwa’s. At this point, he lives with an Arab girlfriend who was born in America, and he works as an assistant coach for an obscure American club. Meanwhi
le, Marwa married the son of a prominent Iraqi politician, to whom she bore a son. Farouq never forgot his love for you, but he was embarrassed by your abrupt response to his proposal, and his embarrassment was all the greater in front of his mother and aunt, whom he prevented from visiting your family after informing them that you were not ready.

  Book of the Future, Page 8:

  Baydaa, after the moment of her departure

  Baydaa was born on the first day of February, the first child of parents who had got to know each other on the train going from Basra to Baghdad. Her father was a young officer in the army who was making the trip one day on leave from the front. Her mother was a doctor who had recently graduated and had received her placement to work in a village clinic near to the port city of Umm Qasr. A loving relationship developed between them, and they got married.

  Baydaa had one brother, who lives with their grandmother on their mother’s side. That grandmother was devoted to him from birth, and he has remained in her house to this day.

  Baydaa grew up in the neighbourhood, and she went to the same school as you. You have the rest of the story, and there is no need to go over it again because, as you know, my task is not the past but rather the future, and the future does not only mean that which is yet to come in time, but also those things that happened in the past, yet which we do not know.

  Never forget that everything we do not remember is the stuff of the future.

  After the car transporting Baydaa’s family crossed the border, the tension melted from their faces. They heaved a deep sigh of relief because Baydaa’s father was travelling with falsified documents, containing a different name and profession. He had altered a passport so that it bore his photo and someone else’s name underneath.

  Baydaa opened the novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which you had given her. Her eye fell upon the passage in which the people of Macondo were astonished when they saw the large festival and found their village had been thrown into confusion.

  A tear fell from her eye and rolled quickly down her cheek as she thought of the neighbourhood, remembering you and Nadia and how she was leaving the two of you behind to be devoured by the desolation. The neighbourhood would condense into a sphere around you and bottle up the old air in your lungs.

  After leaving Baghdad, Baydaa completed her studies in their new city. Her mother found work in a new hospital, and the son of one of her colleagues proposed to Baydaa. Two months after the wedding celebration, Baydaa emigrated with her husband to Canada. There she gave birth to a beautiful daughter, whom she named after you in honour of your friendship. She also gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named Shawkat to honour the memory of Uncle Shawkat, whom she had loved. From time to time, she would touch the spot on her wrist where he would use his teeth to leave the imprint of a watch.

  These days, Baydaa is free to devote herself to the house and the children. She previously felt a great desire to fulfil her dream of setting up a website that would contain the full history of the neighbourhood found in the record. She tried to contact you and Nadia but could not find your addresses. After a frustrating search, she gave it up for a while and then forgot the whole idea.

  At dawn on one of those bitterly cold Canadian mornings, Baydaa got up from bed and decided to write a long novel about the small Canadian city in which she lived with her husband and their two children. Without any forethought or planning, she sat at her new computer and began to write.

  I do not know what the ground looks like, encased as it is by ice. Nor the colour of the grass that used to cover it. But I know that I am born anew on the ground of this white continent, so far beyond the ocean. I do not remember how I arrived here, nor the country from which I set out. I just woke one morning and found myself enveloped by the vast whiteness, this enormous eraser that covers the face of life and sweeps away every trace of old memories in the soul.

  The person born after a quarter of a century of life, finding herself in a strange geography, a strange air and a strange language, needs to forget her umbilical cord immediately, along with the womb in which she dwelt all the years preceding her new birth, just as the infant forgets the womb in which he lived before being born. From the moment of existence in this world, it is a person’s nature not to remember the first womb in which he lived. He always receives the world without memory, just as if he came from nothingness. I am the new child in this world, coming from nothingness. I will tell you the story of my first day.

  Baydaa finished her novel and left it to sleep on a small shelf in the living room of her apartment. She returned to it every now and then for the pleasure of reading it. At one and the same time, she was the author and the sole reader. When a person writes only for himself it means he writes in complete freedom, a feeling that professional writers never enjoy. Baydaa wrote a novel for herself, and she left it on a small shelf in the living room of her apartment.

  This is the most important part of her news, and in the folded pages, the ones I warned you not to read, there are other matters that it is not important to peruse. I caution you once again against opening them, or even thinking about it: seeing what has not yet happened would make your life a living hell.

  Book of the Future, Page 9:

  Nadia, after the moment of departure

  In a traditional family marriage, Nadia’s father had married a first cousin without any preceding love story. Nadia was born on the first day of February, the second child in the family after her brother, Muayad.

  You know the story of her childhood from the time of the air-raid shelter up until the last tear that fell from your eyes as you waved goodbye.

  Nadia reached Damascus with her family on the night of the city’s first snowfall that year. The vast, awe-inspiring whiteness was the only thing that prevented her from bursting into tears – that, and her memories of you, which kept watch over her throughout the long hours of the journey.

  As is the case with most of the young women across all times that we know, Nadia automatically associated anything pure white with the wedding night. From the first moment of that snowfall, she started dreaming of marrying Ahmad, for he was still the young man she loved, with whom she had lived her first story of passionate young love. He now represented for her the entire sky of the past with its familiar birds, all things beautiful that she had left behind in the neighbourhood. In her mind, he was you, Farouq, Baydaa, Uncle Shawkat, Abu Nabil’s shop, Al-Zawra Park and the Baghdad Clock. He was the streets and alleys, the storefronts, the gardens and trees, the birds, the doors and windows. Ahmad was the entirety of the past, as well as the present she was seeking.

  In the first days after her family arrived in Damascus, they rented a small apartment in a working-class district. Nadia would sit on a small balcony that extended from the front of the building to watch life in the street, as though she hoped by chance to catch Ahmad’s shadow. Days passed without her hearing anything about him, but she was certain that he was present with her in the same city. Her heart told her he was close, even if she did not see him.

  She opened a Facebook page, another on Instagram, and began searching for his name, sometimes in Arabic and sometimes in English. When she gave up on the virtual world, she decided to enrol at university to continue her studies. Perhaps she would come across him that way, or else find someone who could lead her to him. At the very least, she hoped to hear some news about him that would ease her anxiety. And in fact, someone did come who brought her this news:

  ‘Ahmad got married a few days ago to a friend of his from the University of Mosul, the same friend who appeared with him in the photo he sent you when he was still a student there.’

  This news fell upon Nadia’s head like a thunderbolt. At first, she did not believe the girl who brought it, who happened to be the same one who brought Ahmad’s letter and photo the last time, when Nadia had been studying at the University of Baghdad.

  This girl had been a student there with Nadia, and her sister was studying with Ahmad at t
he University of Mosul.

  Nadia was unable to control her emotions in front of this messenger of misery, whom fate had used to convey the worst news of her life on two separate occasions, first in Baghdad and now in Damascus. Without looking her in the eye or saying goodbye, Nadia turned around and walked away, choked by tears.

  Nadia left her studies at the university and lived in painful solitude in the small apartment with her family. She would spend her days listening to old love songs that filled her spirit as memories that made her cry.

  A year after this incident, a handsome young man, who worked as a civil engineer in a prominent company in Dubai, came to ask for her hand in marriage. She agreed, and a few weeks after the marriage ceremony, they departed together. She lived some beautiful days with him, all the sweeter after the birth of a lovely daughter she named Baydaa in memory of her friend.

  But in recent times, she has become consumed by jealousy over her husband, constantly fearing that he will leave her, to such a degree that discomfort is his primary emotion around her. Nadia is now addicted to searching his phone ten times a day. She has developed a repulsively keen sense of smell by sniffing through his clothes for any trace of women’s perfume. She watches him with a restless, tormented eye, even when he is sitting in front of the television. This is in addition to the times she calls him at work, with or without any apparent reason, just to confirm that he belongs to her alone.

  Book of the Future, Page 10:

  The life of Biryad