by Sinan Antoon
All that remained was the wounded half of my trunk and my shredded heart. This wasn’t the end of it. He came back later and injected my heart and what was left of my insides with some foul-smelling liquid. He flooded the ground around me with it until my roots suffocated. I could hear them dragging my branches, breaking them and carrying them off. I thought I was about to die, but I didn’t die. I was blind and mute, without branches or fruit. But a spirit part of me was still here. The horrible liquid evaporated and the rains washed it away. The years passed. Once when their son graduated from university, they tied a sheep to my trunk with a rope, to what was left of me. The sheep was frightened, as if it knew its fate. I envied it, saying to myself, “You’ll be slaughtered and die, whereas I was killed years ago and yet I cannot die.”
Then a day came when I heard the sky splitting open and volcanic ash raining down. It was as if the bottom of hell had burst. A flame found its way into the remains of my heart and started a fire inside me. I was frightened but I saw it as a good sign. It may be painful but now my long drawn-out death, which had started years earlier, would finally come about. I thought my soul would fly off to heaven, content and satisfied to be close to our big sister, the lote tree of the far boundary. But I’m still here hovering around my memory, and I feel as if my trunk is still here.
I was expecting an email from Wadood as he had promised in the letter he had sent with the manuscript, so that I could send him a message to express my enthusiasm and say how much I admired his project. I had prepared a draft of my message. But I didn’t receive anything from him. In the first week of classes I passed by the office of the department secretary to pick up my mail. Among the internal university communications (information about pension plans, and mortgages for those who wanted to buy houses) and the offers from credit card companies (they had long turned down my applications, but the situation had now changed and they had found out that I had a job), I noticed a brown envelope with foreign stamps and writing in Arabic. I turned the envelope over and was delighted to read the name of the sender: Wadood Abdulkarim. I had given him the college address. I opened the envelope impatiently. But the letter was surprisingly disappointing:
Dear Mr. al-Baghdadi,
Greetings.
I hope you arrived safely and are well. First, I’d like to make sure that you received the envelope that I left for you at the hotel. I’m very sorry but I now realize that I was much too hasty. Two days after meeting you I sat down and went over the draft of the first chapter of Fihris and realized it was still merely a draft. I started erasing things and changing and rewriting some passages. That means that the draft that you have should have stayed with me. It’s a bird whose wings are not fully formed yet. So I request that you return the manuscript to me as soon as possible to the following address:
Wadood Abdulkarim c/o Mr. Yasir Alaa,
Adnan’s Bookshop,
Al-Mutanabbi Street,
Baghdad, Iraq
Please don’t translate any part of it or publish it anywhere or tell anyone about the idea. Please understand my position and respect my wishes. I appreciate your interest and I apologize for any inconvenience.
Yours sincerely,
Wadood
I took the letter to my office and read it three times without understanding his decision. I had to go teach my class and I was still confused. That afternoon I went to the apartment and brought the envelope and Wadood’s manuscript to the department. I scanned it carefully in the copy room and sent it to my email address in PDF format. I also printed a copy and put the hard copy in a file marked “Wadood’s Fihris.” I decided to copy it by hand into the notebook I had taken to Baghdad and that I had filled with silence, blank space and the word Baghdad. Didn’t Wadood, who himself lived in the street with the Xerox shops, know how easy it is to copy anything? I sat in my office thinking about the letter I was going to write him.
I called my cousin, who had given me a lift to the hotel and who had given me his phone number. I chatted with him and asked about the situation in Baghdad. Then I asked him whether he could make inquiries for me about “someone I met in Baghdad,” as I put it. “What, are you going to get engaged? And you want to know what her reputation is like?” he said. I laughed and told him it was nothing to do with a woman, but rather a man I had met briefly while visiting al-Mutanabbi Street and that he had sent me a letter. “No problem, but why? What’s the story, I mean?” he said. I didn’t tell him the whole truth. “It’s really nothing. There’s a translation project we might do and I want to know more about him before I decide to work with him,” I said.
He called me three days later and said that his detective work on my behalf revealed that Wadood had been selling books in al-Mutanabbi Street since the 1990s. “He lives alone in a room and doesn’t have any family. He’s very smart and a voracious reader. He’s weird but he’s not crazy. They threw him in prison in the mid-nineties and tortured him, on the grounds that he was selling banned books. No one knows what his story is. He lives with books and has no family. He says he’s written twenty books but he’s never published anything. They told me not to get involved with Wadood, because he’s a mess. He’s damaged.”
The phrase “he’s damaged” kept ringing in my head. I didn’t comment. I thanked him for his efforts. When he insisted on knowing why I was inquiring after Wadood, I said I was looking for someone I could rely on to buy books regularly and send them to the college library. This wasn’t a lie. The college library was poor as far as Arabic literature was concerned, and the head of the department had obtained a promise from the dean’s office that some funds would be allocated to buying books.
Dear Wadood,
Greetings,
Forgive me the delay in writing this letter. I was expecting a message from you by email, as we agreed, so that I can communicate with you. I was really delighted with the two valuable gifts you left at the hotel for me before I left. The collected works of al-Karkhi, whose works I love, will enable me to delve deeper into his poetry. It’s now the most valuable thing in my fledgling library, so I am very grateful. But the most valuable gift was your wonderful Catalog, which I started to read in the desert on the way to Amman. I didn’t stop till I’d finished, and I ended up hungry for more. I have reread it several times since then and I thought seriously about translating it into English. I was intrigued by the unusual idea of the project, and the language in it was also fluent and poetic. I am really fortunate that you allowed me to wander around in this magical world. Thus what you said in your second letter seems like a massive loss for me personally and for every reader. Now you’re asking me to send back the valuable gift with which you enticed me when you lent me a part of it. Of course as the author you have a right to do so, but allow me to disagree with you. It is no doubt rare to feel completely satisfied with any work, especially in the case of writers, especially those who treasure and appreciate the meaning and value of writing, and you are clearly one of those. Faulkner says that a work never lives up to the idealistic dream with which the writer started. But I believe you are doing yourself and your text an injustice if you withhold it from others. The prologue might need some rearrangement of the sequence of its tumultuous ideas and some trimming here and there. But when it comes to the body of the text, I think you are too hard on it and on yourself.
I won’t take up much of your time. Please find enclosed the work you entrusted to me, which was the most precious thing I took with me when I left Baghdad. But please reconsider your decision, and I repeat that I am interested in translating the text, or at least parts of it, into English. You should think seriously about publishing it in Arabic first. Whatever you do, please stay in touch and let’s be friends at least. Can you send me a telephone number or an email address? There’s another project I have in mind and I would like to hear what you think of it. That project would be writing a novel about you.
With affection and admiration,
Your friend
Namee
r al-Baghdadi
Roy sent me an email asking after me and saying that their Egyptian-American friend, who had volunteered to translate the tapes, was having trouble translating some of the material because he didn’t understand colloquial Iraqi. He said he realized I was busy teaching so he was asking me to recommend someone I trusted who could produce an accurate translation within three weeks or a month. I wrote saying I was willing to do it myself. He was delighted and sent me a link with a password for downloading the film, which wasn’t yet in its final form. They had chosen three hours out of the thirty hours we had filmed in Baghdad, with the intention of cutting it back to just an hour and a half. He sent me the text of the interviews that had been translated, with the problematic sentences, or those where the translator was unsure of the meaning, marked in red for me to check or translate.
I sat down in my office in front of the big computer screen and watched the whole three hours. How would the poor Egyptian have known how to translate sondat (rubber tubes), hwaaya (very), qashaamir (idiots), fannak (I dare you), and other words that were used? I translated all the segments and the missing phrases and corrected some mistakes. He had thought that bustuna (“they hit us”) meant the same as the equivalent word in Egyptian colloquial (“they gave us a good time”). I was saddened that some amazing and extraordinary interviews had disappeared from the edited version. I wasn’t the director or the producer and I didn’t know to what extent they would accept a critical opinion, though Roy had said in his letter that he was interested in my opinion as an Iraqi. Most of the material that had been cut had been about the cruelty of Saddam and the violence of the regime. It was the same old problem we faced with many of the leftists who were opposed to the war in America. They devoted all their efforts to criticizing the policy and actions of their own government, which was their right and their duty. But they turned a blind eye to the crimes of tyrants. They ignored all those crimes whenever the opportunity arose. Roy wasn’t one of those, but I remember that when we were on the way from Amman to Baghdad he had said, “Our film is not about Saddam and the dictatorship but about the occupation. Everyone knows that Saddam was an evil monster. There should be films about Saddam’s dictatorship, but our film is about the occupation.” I argued with him that day, saying that the two were linked, but his priorities were clear.
The three hours brought back to life all the faces and scenes, all the phrases and even the smells that had been half-asleep in my head. I had shut them out for weeks because I was busy with the things around me and moving somewhere new. But they had only shut their eyes, taking a siesta or a nap, before waking up, stretching, standing up, and resuming their life in me, taking me back to Baghdad.
In the nights after I watched the documentary, my head became a screen, with a collage of scenes that Roy hadn’t chosen and others that had retained their place in the final version. The tanks crouched on the pavement in Abu Nuwas Street. The American soldier who came up to us when he saw us filming the statue of Abu Nuwas and asked us who he was. The woman in her fifties who wept and said, “I’ll forgive the Americans for bombing us but I’ll never forgive them for the embargo years.” The former prisoner we met in al-Andalus Square who, smoking with trembling fingers, told us about the torture he had endured. Then he asked us to stop filming and said, “I can’t go on.” The librarian at the Faculty of Arts at Baghdad University, walking between the burned books. The president of the writers’ union, who said, “It wasn’t our battle and we let America fight the tyrant.” The kids who polished shoes outside the Sheraton Hotel. The taxi driver who was convinced that Iraq would become like Hong Kong. Other scenes of events that did not take place and that I hadn’t seen in the first place. Dozens of tired, browbeaten faces, with wrinkles that grew deeper and crisscrossed like barbed wire. The people behind the faces were silent. Their lips never moved. But I heard growlings and mutterings that seemed to be coming from their eyes.
THE COLLOQUY OF THE STAMP ALBUM
He didn’t like stamp collecting. He hadn’t shown any particular interest in stamps before that day in 1980. He heard the bell ring and when he looked out of the living room window he saw Wisam standing at the outer gate. He went out to meet him and they exchanged greetings from a distance. Before he reached the front gate to open it, Wisam had taken what looked like a big book covered in green cloth from the paper bag he was carrying. As soon as Qays opened the metal gate, Wisam handed him the book and, in a voice tinged with a certain sadness, said, “This is my stamp album. Keep it for yourself. Look after it.”
Qays didn’t understand why Wisam was giving him the stamp album at that particular moment. He smiled with pleasure at the gift, opened the album and turned the thick pages. He was struck by the colors and designs of the stamps arranged in rows under a strip of transparent plastic that covered their bottom halves and protected them. Some were Iraqi stamps, old ones and new ones, and others were from Arab and foreign countries. Most of them had round postmarks showing where their journeys had started or ended. Others had no postmarks because they had never officially traveled.
“My god, that’s so nice. But why? Don’t you want it?”
“We’re leaving tomorrow and I can’t take it with me.”
“Why are you leaving?”
“The government’s going to deport us.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Iran.”
“Why?”
“They say it’s about taba‘iyya.”
“What does that mean—taba‘iyya?”
“It means we have Iranian origins,” Wisam said with derision.
“Are you really Iranians?”
“No, but my grandfather had an Iranian passport.”
Qays didn’t understand what exactly taba‘iyya meant and at the time he couldn’t grasp how Wisam could become a foreigner overnight. He felt sad because Wisam’s departure meant they wouldn’t walk to school together and he would have to come home alone after school. Before Qays could find something to say, Wisam added, “The stamps are sold in bookshops. You can buy them. If you can get hold of envelopes with stamps on, just put them in hot steam for a few minutes until the glue softens, and then you can get them off the envelope without them tearing.”
Qays didn’t pay much attention to the details and rituals of stamp collecting. “So you’re leaving?” he asked Wisam again. “And when are you coming back?”
“I don’t know. No one knows.”
Qays noticed the fear mixed with sadness in his friend’s eyes when Wisam came up to give him a farewell hug. “Look after the stamps,” Wisam added. Wisam was taller, so Qays’s head only reached Wisam’s chest. Wisam put a hand on Qays’s head. They held each other for some seconds. Qays felt a desire to cry but he didn’t cry.
Everything happened suddenly. Qays stood standing at the gate watching his friend walk away. When Wisam reached the end of the street, he headed right and turned his head toward Qays. He stopped for a few seconds and waved from afar. Qays moved the stamp album to his left hand and waved his right hand vigorously. He didn’t realize he would never see him again. He went back into the house and took the bag to his room without telling anyone that Wisam had given it to him. He put the album on the top shelf of his little bookcase, next to the issues of Majallati and al-Mizmar that he kept.
This was Qays’s first year at Baghdad College, while Wisam was in the fourth year there. The three years that separated them meant Wisam treated Qays as his younger brother. But what first brought them together was a request from Qays’s mother, who on the first day of the school year took her son to the place where the school bus stopped to pick up children and take them to the school, which was far away in Suleikh. Qays’s mother said hello to Wisam and thought she had seen him before in the streets in the neighborhood.
“Isn’t your house on the right in the street where the bakery is, my dear?” she asked.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“So that’s why I thought I’d seen
you before. What’s your name?”
“Wisam.”
“Wisam, my dear. Please look out for Qays on the way back because his father and I will be at work. Walk together. Think of him as your younger brother, because I’m worried about him with all the cars.”
“No problem, Ma’am.”
“Thank you, my boy.”
Qays’s mother kissed her son on the cheek, which made him embarrassed, and told him to stay with Wisam. She was more anxious about how Qays would get home safely than her husband, who was waiting in the car, because it was she who had insisted on enrolling Qays in far-off Baghdad College, which took only gifted children. Her husband would have preferred that he go to a local school.