The Baghdad Clock

by Shahad Al Rawi

  Was Biryad something in one of Nadia’s dreams?

  Maybe he was a bicycle tyre that became bored of turning in the dream and left. Or else let him be the clock that stayed behind in her old dream but stopped telling the time and departed. Maybe the cow, the sheep, the tree, the pillow, or anything. But most likely he was something from one of her dreams, something that, by his own wish, left, only to find himself locked inside a house. He was able to get out of the dream easily enough, but then he was caught in the maze of a large house with all its doors and windows locked. It was Umm Ali’s house in the time after her family emigrated.

  Hunger and thirst nearly killed him. He submitted to his fate and stretched out on the floor, waiting for the end. He was surprised when a strange man came in and brought him food and water, caring for him and giving him a new name. That man was Uncle Shawkat.

  As you recall, in the very minute that the car carrying you to Jordan turned to leave, Biryad jumped up on the wall around your house. He spent the night there. He had no desire to do anything. He decided to give up food and water in order to die on that wall.

  Biryad talked to himself a long while that night. He wondered about his fate, about his past and his future, about his life after death, and whether he would meet you there. He remembered all of you; he remembered the entire neighbourhood from the day he appeared until the moment he was abandoned there.

  He truly was alone. The friendly cats did not approach him. The cheerful bats did not swoop in to startle him.

  How did you enter the dream, he asked himself, and why did you leave it? Why did I find myself in a house with locked doors?

  Biryad got up in the morning and jumped down. He circled the houses, remembering their families. The strangers who were the new residents drove him away and shut their doors in his face. Even the children did not love him; they threw stones at him and other sharp, heavy things. His head was gashed by more than one deep cut, and his back bled from the painful blows of sticks that some of them used to drive him away mercilessly.

  In the end, he decided to die. But he did not know how to do that. He cut himself off from food and water, but that became his natural state, and he no longer felt hunger or thirst. What he did feel, deeply, was the loss of respect, the shame and the insults. He did not like the cats feeling sorry for him, nor the bats, and he began avoiding their glances.

  Biryad suffered a cruel blow to his right eye. A heavy flow of blood ran down far enough that he could reach it with his tongue. A child had hit him with a big rock that suddenly made the earth spin beneath him until he could no longer stand from the dizziness. Exhausted, he dragged himself away until he stretched out along the wall of your house. Some little children were following him and began pelting him with handfuls of pebbles. Biryad rose heavily to his feet and plodded towards the main street. He stood there for a while, watching the cars race past, and when a large truck came by, he rolled under its wheels and ended his life.

  Book of the Future, Page 11:

  Happy News

  Less than a year from now, you too will marry an exceptionally nice young man who graduated from a prestigious international university. He will appear in your life suddenly, meeting you by chance in the street on a visit to his family, which lives next to yours in Jordan. In that moment, he will say to himself, ‘This is the girl I’ve been dreaming of my whole life.’ At the end of the weekend, he will walk up with a red rose and tell you, ‘I like you,’ and when you hesitate in your reply, he will say, ‘I love you.’

  The two of you will get married and head off to live in Dubai too.

  Is this happy news, as far as you are concerned?

  Do not reply too quickly: more happy news is still on the way. Now get up and relax a little. Drink a cup of tea or coffee, listen to a song from the recent past, something from your days in the neighbourhood. Wander among your memories there, and then come along with me.

  The future organises its pages well. It makes additions and abbreviations; it erases and corrects, cuts and pastes. The future is more flexible than the past. The past that you love cannot bend at all. Do not say yet again, ‘Everything that could happen in the past has actually happened.’ That is not true in the least. What would it mean to live only that which we know and are used to, without any surprises or disappointed expectations? That would make life a prison of memory revolving around itself for evermore.

  *

  I gently closed the notebook. Getting up, I drew back the curtain to let the sunshine into the room. I made a cup of tea. I listened to a song I loved by Haitham Yousif. It begins with a long introduction in that organ music so familiar from the nineties, and a melody so sweet it squeezes my soul.

  I stood in front of the mirror and looked at my face. I saw him there in the depths, standing behind me: that handsome and elegant young man who holds a red rose and comes up to say with all the warmth in the world, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  *

  Do not tell me this is the least of your concerns. No, it is of the utmost importance, my beautiful one. Do not run away from your femininity. Do not shatter it with lies. Do not suppress the voice of the woman that is inside you. Do not slap down your desires simply because you are liberated and cultured. Do not betray yourself. Do not invalidate the needs you have put on hold. Do not stray far from your body. Do not keep your distance from the song of womanhood that wants to express itself.

  The dream of the white dress does not keep you from being cultured, liberated and strong. Dream for the sake of the tenderness found inside your soul. Dream of the wedding night, of the music, of the first dance. Eat the cake from his hand, and feed him from yours. Enfold him in your arms and dance with him like a princess in a fairy tale.

  Be cultured and liberated and strong, but let love come from the right place, at the right time. It comes with a red rose, the touch of a hand, a kiss.

  Do not block the river in the waterway. Do not pour concrete over the sparrow’s nest. Do not keep the sunshine from stealing inside your darkened room.

  *

  When I finished talking to my image in the mirror, I went back to my place and sat at the table once again. I opened the Book of the Future where I had left off and resumed reading.

  *

  Your wedding reception will be a historic event never to be forgotten, neither in your life, nor in the lives of your family members, nor in the lives of anyone who loves you and shares your life. He loves you, and for your sake, he will prepare surprises you cannot imagine, things that never would have occurred to you, that you never dreamed of – because after all, you do not dream.

  After you cut the wedding cake, and after you dance to the music of a beautiful song you love, but before you return to your seats, new music will begin playing in the music hall, and with it, a sudden trilling and shouting will burst out, voices talking over each other, a general chaos of whistling together with vigorous, uninterrupted applause. In a dazzling moment, you will turn towards where the band is playing. A sudden light blinds you. You close your eyes and open them to see Kathem Al-Saher.

  *

  I rubbed my eyes and began reading again. I held the page in the book carefully and turned it over to make sure I was reading the future section. Then I got up, turned around a few times, opened the window, and began speaking to the birds, the trees and the air: ‘Kathem Al-Saher?!’

  Leave off, O Book of the Future! Stop for a while. Let me talk to you for a few minutes. In your kindness, give me leave to state what you do not know, what you are not thinking of because it has not occurred to you.

  Kathem Al-Saher is not just a talented and successful singer-songwriter, not just a dazzling poet. This is not the full story of Kathem Al-Saher as far as we are concerned – my generation, that is, which experienced sadness, frustration and failure on every side. Kathem was a bright light shining in the dark sky, a unique success that seemed miraculous at a time when everything was collapsing around us.
<
br />   Kathem Al-Saher: a deep question in our exam book, and a confusing answer on the question sheet. How did this young man escape the grip of those bitter days when time ran backwards? How did he sail his small boat through the ocean of stormy terrors that completely devastated our lives? The entire world stood at the door of our house to prevent our success. The entire earth spun us through the air of failure, and in those cruel years, Kathem Al-Saher was writing a success story. Life pushed us towards non-existence, and Kathem brought us to centre stage.

  I am not talking here about the romantic Kathem Al-Saher, whose songs have made millions of people happy, and about whom millions of girls dreamed. I am talking about the success story itself. Do you know, O Future, what it means to succeed, when you are prevented from even entering the examination hall? Do you know what it means that people see you in a song, and it becomes your entire essence?

  I return to the notebook and reread the last lines. I hear Kathem Al-Saher’s song at my wedding reception:

  Fold me upon your chest and take me away from them all

  A colourful bouquet of roses appears in my hand, I take two steps towards the centre of the hall and lose myself in a long dance. My white gown changes into a flock of small white gulls that circle the hall and then fly out of the window to the distant sky.

  Book of the Future, Page 12:

  The Baghdad Clock

  The clock stopped at six minutes and forty seconds past five in the morning, when the Americans bombed it and destroyed the building on which it stood so tall. All the contents of the museum inside were looted within a month of its being destroyed. The minutes flowed away from the clock hands onto the ground and time stopped altogether.

  Years later, the government resolved to restore the clock so that it might stand again with its four faces. As it happened, each of these four clocks pointed to a different time. So you could say, for example, that it is seven in the morning, local Baghdad time. Meanwhile, somebody on the opposite side would say, ‘It is five in the afternoon, local Baghdad time.’ On a third side, a person passing through the city by chance could say, ‘It’s now two in the afternoon on Wednesday, the ninth of April 2003.’ Simultaneously and without any mistake, somebody else standing not far away on the side facing him could say, ‘The time is now four in the morning on Sunday, the tenth of February in the year 1258.’

  Thus the local time in a single city was confused, and its people were divided according to the position from which they looked at the clock. In this prodigious city, different generations coexisted without having a natural feeling for the time in which they lived.

  People began swimming through time, mistaking remote centuries for recent years. It became possible to see Nebuchadnezzar and Samir Amin sitting in a restaurant where Yazdegerd III worked as a waiter. Harun al-Rashid in military garb presented Charlemagne with an hourglass that fell to the ground and shattered; a street cleaner came and swept it away. Meanwhile the Abbasid caliph Al-Mu’tadid Bi-llah hurried past the restaurant window with a bomb, on his way to destroy the statue of General Maude. When he passed the famous Arab traveller, Ibn Jubayr, the latter wrote these lines in his noted book, The Travels:

  Even if it is still the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and the gathering place of the Qurayshi tribe, the form of this ancient city has departed, and only its name remains. Beyond the dilapidated ruins or the statue of a towering horseman – that which it used to be prior to these events that have rained upon it, before the eyes of misfortune turned this way – there is no beauty here that might arrest the gaze. It invites the active mind to careless contemplation. The only exception is its Tigris River, lying between the workshops and jetties like a polished mirror in a dull frame or a woven necklace under the collarbone. Indeed, we return to it, and we do not thirst; we stare into it like a burnished mirror that does not rust.

  Ibn Jubayr recorded these words and set about counting the burning buildings along Al-Rashid Street, in Al-Saadun Street, and down Abu Nuwas Street. Then he sat at the statue of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and began to write:

  When time was the receptacle into which life was poured, only to gush forth again in a flowing succession divided by hours and minutes, the people in the city of Baghdad became diametrically opposed in their creeds, their views, their clothing and hair, their taste in food and drink, and their sleeping, sitting, walking and standing.

  Some, when they found it difficult to adjust to this epochal chaos, decided of their own free will to go and live in the past. They decided to open Al-Tabari’s History and insert themselves into its pages and become historical figures. They wore shabby scraps of clothing and revived the turbans of old. They grew their beards down to their chests. At certain times, they massacred people who did not resemble them, or they would blow themselves up in social gatherings, yelling, ‘Allahu Akbar.’ Other times, they would drag people off to the slaughterhouse to butcher them like animals.

  On all sides of the Baghdad Clock, the same historical battles were renewed, and many people died. The Caliph of Death appeared on the back of an iron mount in a column of beasts stretching from Raqqa in Syria to the antiquities of Nimrod. He wore a broken Rolex watch on his wrist in order to proclaim that his time had come. He killed everyone he met along the path of his procession – men, women and children. He razed walls, dried out rivers, uprooted trees and buried gardens. The caliph and the crime become a single thing, and death became the song of that obscene time, the time of Allahu Akbar, announced by innocent blood butchered on the hills of Iraq.

  Epilogue

  I know I was a dream in someone’s head. And I know I will live in Dubai. I know I will work here in this city, where I will establish a new life out of a used past. I know Nadia lives in Dubai too and that we will resume our friendship in its entirety, with its deep roots and its memories. She will spend the night at my place, and I will spend the night at hers. I will go to see her each day, and she will visit me. I know that my life and hers have been tied together by a fate that cannot be shaken. The madness of history tears us apart; geography brings us together.

  Here I am on my way to see her, caught in traffic and remembering. I will be at her place in minutes. Her daughter will welcome me at the door of the house, and she will cling to me just as her mother did once in the shelter when we were small, when we sought protection from death and shared our dreams.

  I do not need the Book of the Future to know all this. But what I do not know is that which the hand of days has recorded in the forbidden pages, the events sleeping in those lines that the future warned me not to approach.

  Will I ignore these warnings and draw near?

  Why do we fear our final destinies?

  What if we knew that which the unknown keeps hidden from us? How would anything change unless we also knew the paths that led us there?

  I do not know!

  The events of this novel, the neighbourhood and its characters, the narrator and her friends and her life, have all proceeded from dreams and imagination that have sought to take their place in the world of reality.

  About the Author

  Shahad Al Rawi was born in Baghdad in 1986. She is a writer and novelist. Her first novel The Baghdad Clock went through three printings in the first months of publication. She is currently completing a PhD in Anthropology in Dubai.

  About the Translator

  Luke Leafgren received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2012, after taking BA degrees in English and theology from Columbia University and the University of Oxford. He has translated several Arabic novels into English and teaches Arabic at the University of Harvard, where he also serves as assistant dean of Harvard College. He is an avid sailor and designed the StandStand portable standing desk.

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