by Sinan Antoon
She laughed. “So you’ll have to hurry up,” she added.
“Hurry up having books published or having children?”
She laughed again. “It’s up to you. Which is easier?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll try my luck with one book at least, or else I’ll lose my job.”
“Do all these pictures on the wall have something to do with your book?”
“Yes, they do, but not with the academic book. With another project.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“If you don’t like to talk about your book I won’t ask again.”
“No, believe me, I don’t know exactly. I’m still collecting material and trying to find my way. Seriously, I don’t know.”
“Does it have anything to do with the man you met in Baghdad that you told me about?”
“Yes, in a way. I wanted to write a book about him and his project. But I’ve been too busy finishing my academic book for the past two years. Anyway, he refused to let me write about him and he asked me to postpone the project.”
“Does he have to agree?”
“No, but I wanted to use his real name and details of his life.”
“Hmmm. And have you finished your academic book?”
“I still have one chapter that will take me two or three months.”
“Excellent.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me? I’m not a writer.”
“Are you a musician?”
“No, I’m a listener. I studied history and decided to take a year or two to think about my next step.”
THE COLLOQUY OF THE OUD
I don’t have a name. My father gave numbers to my brothers who were born after me. But I don’t have a number, because I was the first. I have no father other than my father. And I have more than one mother. One in India and another in the mountains of Kurdistan. I know how I was born. Not because I observed my own birth, but because I observed all my brothers being born, one after another, the way I was born. All of them were copies of me, with slight differences, because we were born in the same spot and were made by the same hand. Our frames are the same, but some of my brothers have ribs made of beech or sandalwood, or a mixture of the two. The ribs of some others are made of mahogany or walnut. My ribs are made of Indian rosewood, as my father always repeated whenever he referred to me.
I saw my father making my brothers. Many times I saw him laying out the ribs and putting them in place one after the other. He took the first rib and put it over a gentle flame. He bent it and arched it carefully. Then he laid it in the middle of the mold, which looked like the belly of a pregnant woman. He fixed the two ends with two pieces of spruce at the front and the back so that they were attached to the mold. Then he repeated the process with the other ribs, which lined up to the right and the left and were stuck to their neighbors with glue. Then the back was complete and he left it to dry and stick together.
Then he took a sheet of spruce for the soundboard. He cut it, sanded it, and fixed the large and smaller rosette soundholes in place and inscribed his name—Omar al-Mufti—on it decoratively. Then he attached the bridge that holds the ends of the strings. Then he put the soundboard onto the back, sanded its edges, and stuck them together. After that he added the neck, the head, and the pegbox, and installed the fret that the strings pass across. Then he came to the strings, which he tied and pulled tight, and then he tuned it.
This is the first moment of my life that I remember. When I felt his fingers strumming my strings when he had finished me. He was alone in this shop of his. He played me for two hours. Then he kissed me as if I were his loved one, parked me on the chair, and sat looking at me as he drank his tea, as he often did. He seemed proud of his handiwork. He spoke to me as if I were human, saying, “I’m not going to sell you. You bring me beginner’s luck and I see you as a good omen, so you’ll stay with me.”
I’ve watched him breathing life into my brothers all these years. With a mixture of joy and sadness. Every brother would leave sooner or later. Musicians would come and point to my brothers and my father would hand them to them. They would play them and bargain over the price and another brother would leave without me seeing him again. And I would be left alone with my father.
But he hasn’t been here for three days now.
I had enough coffee to last two weeks, but I deliberately went to the Puerto Rico Importing Company store three days after meeting Mariah in the park. When I went in, the young white woman I usually see there was grinding coffee for a customer. I guessed that Mariah might be in the storeroom inside getting something. I walked between the rows of large sacks containing types of coffee from remote and exotic places. From Indonesia and the Philippines to Tanzania, Burundi, Jamaica, and Brazil. There were delicious varieties flavored with hazelnut, chocolate and vanilla, or orange, with various degrees of roasting. I had tried many of them. Sometimes I was attracted just by the name. Once I bought a coffee only because it was called Fragrance of Heaven. I had read that it came from forests at very high elevations above sea level. I usually buy half a pound of each kind. Sometimes I’m seduced by the story of the coffee and the changes it has undergone. Like Monsoon Malabar, which in British colonial times was shipped to Europe from the Malabar coast in southwest India in wooden sailing ships on a long journey around the Cape of Good Hope. The coffee matured from the effect of the moisture and the tropical sea breezes over months and acquired a special texture and taste. After the Suez Canal opened, the voyage was shorter and the coffee lost its flavor. But coffee companies have devised a new way of curing the coffee and storing it until the tropical monsoon winds arrive and then exposing it to the moist monsoon breezes by storing the beans in ventilated warehouses. I breathe deep its aroma when I grind it in my kitchen and think back to stories of its journeys.
I didn’t know or like coffee before I left Iraq. We used to drink tea, which I still like. But I stopped drinking it after I left home. I didn’t approve of teabags, and for some reason I wasn’t inclined to make a whole pot of tea for one person. For me tea was still a family drink to be drunk with family or with friends in a public place, while coffee was a drink for individuals and sustenance for late nights and solitude. Taste and aroma are important to me, and I started looking for high-quality varieties of coffee. My years in California helped me develop my taste. I heard the young white woman say goodbye to the customer. She came up to me and asked whether I needed any help. I told her I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Then I added, “Is Mariah here?” “No, she doesn’t work on Saturdays,” she replied. Disappointed, I looked at all the various mugs and cups and espresso machines on display in a corner of the store. I’d have to wait till the beginning of the next week. I thanked the woman and left. I went to Café Dante nearby to read a book about the life of Walter Benjamin and the archive he collected.
In a dream two days ago I again thought I was a bulbul, but the cage I was in was someone else’s bones, maybe yours. A voice in the distance was saying, “Fly away. The sky’s nearby.” I could hear my heart beating like a giant drum. But in order to fly away I had to rip your lungs and kill you. I stayed, hesitant and uncertain what to do.
“Your apartment is a mass grave!” she said, looking at the wall again.
“Does that mean I’m dead?”
“No, you’re alive. But it’s like you’re guarding the dead.”
“You know that I really like cemeteries?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I like the symmetry of the gravestones and the green grass. The names and the dates inscribed on the stones. I feel at peace there. When I was in Boston I visited one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the country at Mount Auburn. You have to visit it one day.”
“I’m beginning to worry that you might be a vampire.”
I laughed out loud.
“I am a creature of the night. I like to kiss necks and bite them gentl
y or sometimes not so gently, but I’m not a vampire.”
She laughed flirtatiously.
I saw myself living in a faraway country, where everything was clean and tidy. A quiet life without wars, sects, or religions. Immigrants and refugees had all the rights and freedoms that humans could dream of. Even animals were respected and had rights. Science and technology were so developed that human beings could travel to the future or to the past, to visit or to stay, provided of course that they were adults and in good health and didn’t have a criminal record. Even as I dreamed I knew I was dreaming, because I had lied on the application form. I wrote that I had never been in prison and that I didn’t have any health problems. I signed the form without hesitation. I also knew I was dreaming because I was speaking their language fluently. Even the blond civil servant , who reminded me of an actress I had once seen in a sad Swedish film, whose character died at the end of it, said, “You have completely mastered our language. How did you get rid of your accent?” I laughed of course and said, “Thanks for the compliment. It’s thanks to your schools.” They carried out many rigorous tests with modern devices in a clean hospital where classical music was playing everywhere, and the nurses smiled with maternal tenderness. I was worried I might fail the medical tests, but I passed. They would let me travel only in one direction, into either the future or the past. On their website there was a message saying that the Ministry of Time was currently studying the possibility of allowing citizens in the future to travel in both directions. I wasn’t interested in the future, of course.
I think that people are divided into two types: those who escape from the past and those who escape to the past.
Is life also an unwritten novel in which dozens of major and minor characters live? (Wadood says we are books or manuscripts.) When I saw one particular man for the hundredth time perhaps, it occurred to me that life is a novel of phenomenal size that can neither end nor be written in full. I don’t know his name and I might never know it. I see him almost every day, sometimes more than once in the same day, but I have never spoken to him. Although I want to know his story, I don’t want to disturb him. The only time I said anything to him was some months ago in the Wendy’s on Broadway close to the university. I was on my way back from one of my long roams and I had to take a piss and couldn’t wait till I got back to my apartment. I went into the restaurant and headed for the bathroom. I saw him there approaching the door of the men’s bathroom from the other side, with a thick paper cup in his hand. We reached the door at almost the same moment. Maybe he beat me by a fraction of a second. The indicator under the door handle showed red so we stood waiting our turns. He leaned against the wall and began shaking the empty cup and looking inside it, as if he were checking that a die that no one else could see was there. Then he rolled out the invisible die from the cup to the floor, and then he repeated the process. He avoided looking straight at me or at anyone else. In fact, he seemed to be looking into the distance. Avoid is not the right word here. I don’t think he was interested in anyone else anyway. I never saw him trying to speak to anyone or ask for anything, as most homeless people do. Except for coffee and water, and even those he obtained from the nearby cafés without speaking. He was wearing what he usually wore at that time of year: a khaki shirt half-open at the chest and sleeves that reached to his elbows. He had loose, longish trousers of the same color. The hems were frayed and blackened from being stepped on. He was wearing black rubber sandals that showed his socks, which were black most of the time. He carried a small gray bag made of rough cloth. He was very tall, like an old spear, and his hair was braided in the Rastafarian style, held together by a large black woolen hat that reminded me of Bob Marley’s hat. So for a long time I thought he was of Jamaican origin. His eyes were brown and full of a serene and mellow sadness. His nose was prominent over a thick mustache and beard. He didn’t take much care of his appearance. But three or four times I had seen him cross-legged on the ground near the heating grate on Greene Street, holding a small round mirror and a pair of tweezers, with which he was plucking some of the excess hairs on his cheek.
I heard the sound of water in the basin, then the whine of the hand dryer, and then the sound of the door being unlocked. The indicator turned from red to green. The door opened and a blond young man rushed out wearing a Miami Heat basketball shirt, apologizing for taking so long. “After you,” I said to the other man who was waiting. But with the hand holding the cup and without looking at me, he signed that I should go before him. “After you, please. You were here before me,” I said. He shook his head and waved me in again. When I came out he was still standing there. I thanked him and smiled, but he didn’t say anything as he made his way inside. I would have asked him his name, but I was certain he wouldn’t answer.
He always walked alone. He had nothing to do with the gatherings of homeless people who sit on the benches close to the library or sometimes on the side opposite the Think Coffee shop. He didn’t squat or sleep in front of the soup kitchen on Mercer Street. He didn’t stand in line to take one of the meals offered to the poor and the homeless inside. On cold winter days he wrapped up in a dark green blanket and slept on the sidewalk on Greene Street on the big ventilation grating that blows up warm air. He walked at a leisurely pace, speaking to himself quietly in a low voice, always in Spanish and not English. He sometimes got excited in his arguments with himself or with the demons he was fighting. He would raise his right hand to emphasize some point he was making, but that hadn’t happened often in the past year since I started watching him. I never saw him shout or quarrel with anyone.
Once I was having a coffee with a colleague in the Pane e Cioccolato café at the intersection of Waverly Place and Mercer Street, and we saw him walking toward Broadway along the pavement outside the café. “There’s that elitist homeless man,” I said out loud.
“Why do you say that?” asked my colleague, who was from Puerto Rico.
“Because he never talks to anyone. He doesn’t mix with the other homeless people.”
“Yes of course, because he’s still at war somewhere far away.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sure he fought in Panama during the American invasion. I hear him mumbling in Spanish. He says things about Panama. I was standing behind him in line to buy coffee from the Delion deli once, and I heard him talking as if the battle was still raging. Haven’t you seen the dog tag around his neck? It has his army number and rank.”
“What was his rank? Did you speak with him?”
“I said hi to him and spoke to him in Spanish. I asked him if he needed any help.”
“And what did he say?”
“Fuck off!”
I laughed and he smiled. “In Spanish or in English?”
“In Spanish. There’s one phrase he often repeats.”
“What’s that?”
“Estoy aquí.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I’m here.”
I’m here.
We’re here.
“Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. … Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over and over as one turns over soil.”
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t write. Ever since I learned to write letters and words I’ve been writing incessantly. Even before that I often used to scribble. All children scribble, but my grandmother, who died before I was eight, used to say she had never seen a child who scribbled as much as I did. She even called me Scribblekins. How I loved forming the words on the lines in my school exercise books. I’d finish all my homework as soon as I got home from school, even before having lunch. The exercise books weren’t enough. I would write on any scrap of paper I found anywhere. The walls
were also like wonderful pieces of paper that enticed me to write. I’d fill them as far as I could standing up, then bring a chair to climb onto and fill the spots I couldn’t reach otherwise. The consequences were dire. My father scolded me and punished me several times because I’d covered the walls at home with sentences written in pencil. A vicious slap brought an end to my “wall phase.” My cheek was red for hours. My sister was frightened and cried, although she didn’t write on the walls like I did. My father broke the pencil in my hand and gave me a warning: “I’ll break your hand like I broke your pencil if you scribble again. Understood?” Then he warned my mother, who came running to protect me from his anger: “I don’t want to see a single word on the walls ever again. Do you understand? It looks like your son will turn out to be an ‘arzahalchy.” As usual my mother tried to calm him down. She wiped away my tears that day, kissed me, and whispered, “Come on, never mind. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the Saray market and buy you notebooks and pencils. Write as much as you like, my love, but not on the wall, my son, please.” “What’s an ‘arzahalchy?” I asked her. “Someone who sits outside the courts and writes out legal documents for people,” she said.
Two days later two men came and painted all the walls a slightly yellowish white. All my words disappeared under a sticky layer with a smell that hung around the house for a week, as if to keep me away.
My mother fulfilled her promise to me, took me to the Saray market and bought me a dozen notebooks, a bunch of pencils, pencil sharpeners, and scented colored erasers. As we were about to leave the market, I heard a bird singing. I looked for the source of the sound and found it was coming from a cage hanging outside one of the shops. I went up to the cage and saw a bird that looked as if it was wearing a multicolored dress at a costume party. Its face was mottled red, black, and white. The top of its head was black, its breast feathers were white with a sandy-colored edging. Its wings were a mixture of yellow and black. It seemed happy that I was interested in it. The shopkeeper noticed I was standing in front of the cage. “What is it, sir?” I asked him. “That’s a goldfinch, my boy,” he said. Its voice enchanted me, and I insisted that my mother buy me one. “They have them at the Ghazil market if you want one,” the shopkeeper said. I noticed that my mother was hesitant, and I pretended I was about to cry. “Please, mom, please,” I said.