The President's Gardens

by Muhsin al-Ramli

  In the side street leading to his house, he was whistling some tune or melody. But he stopped with a shudder when he recalled what had happened to the musician the day before. He struggled to drive the memory from his mind, recalling the hope that day’s meeting with his wife had given him, and how she might be better tomorrow. He would bring her a bag of oranges because she loved oranges: their color, their taste, and their smell. He would even bring her a bouquet of flowers. That would certainly make her smile, even as she chided him because it was something only city-dwellers did.

  He would confess to her that this late-night walk of his had made him feel a certain affection for cities. It was as though he were discovering them anew, feeling out the pleasures of wandering through the markets and along the pavements at night, among the columns of street lamps, the close-set buildings, the noisy crowds, and the quiet alleys. He even liked the rumble of the cars driving by. Until now he had only passed through cities, when moving from one army unit to another. It was just a matter of being transferred from one truck to the next. He might buy sandwiches or whatever was available from street carts selling food at the bus depot. If the trucks were late, he would spend the night in a cheap, dirty hotel, in a shared room with other soldiers or travelers passing through: immigrants from Egypt, Sudan, or India. Or he would sleep out on the grass of the city squares, fully clothed in his uniform, using his bag as a pillow.

  Ibrahim felt he was better, stronger. A spontaneous desire welled up inside him, and he thought that as soon as he entered the house, he would try to act differently with Qisma and be more open and trusting. He would say to her, “You are my daughter, and I love you. Come, let me hug you. Tell me whatever you want to say without holding anything back. Everything, whatever it might be. This time, I wish for your wishes to triumph over mine.” He would explain that her mother was a wonderful woman, whom he loved, and that she was getting better. He would tell Qisma he was happy with both of them in his life, and that his life would be dedicated to them both. He would joke with her, and he would act toward her the way he had behaved with her mother today. He had seen its remarkable results, even though he hadn’t consciously planned to act in a certain way—it just happened. Nevertheless, he had learned from it, and he realized that expressing what was in his soul was a magical thing. He would ask Qisma to go with him the next day to the hospital to see Umm Qisma for herself. On the way, she would help him choose a bunch of flowers fit for lovers, not for the sick. Yes, he would say that to her, and they would buy the oranges for Umm Qisma together.

  He entered the house in a rush, eager to embrace Qisma, but he found her asleep. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was past three in the morning. So he moved quietly around the house and put off till the morning all the cleaning he wanted to do. It was enough just to take off his clothes and throw himself on the bed, where he immediately plunged into a deep sleep. He slept ravenously, deeper than he usually did, and as a result he woke up late but completely refreshed.

  Qisma had already left the house, and the clock pointed at noon. He didn’t regret the late hour. It was probably for the best: if he needed all that sleep, his wife would certainly need it too, especially since he had tired her out with his company for the entire day and prevented her from taking her usual nap. Ibrahim turned on the television as he began preparing his breakfast, but he quickly turned it off when he saw they were broadcasting yet another national festival.

  He slipped into Qisma’s room, which in its chaos resembled a cozy nest, crammed with perfume bottles and with big posters of celebrities covering the walls. He thought about making her bed for her, but he preferred to leave it as it was. It made him happy to see all the books on the bedside table, though he didn’t have much sympathy for the piles of colorful gossip magazines. He passed them all by and looked at the music tapes piled near the tape player. He shuffled through them, avoiding all the sad Iraqi music he recognized. He wanted something entirely different. He picked an English recording and put it in the player. Of course, he didn’t understand a word of the lyrics, but he liked the noise and the rhythms of the music, which were different from what he was used to in Arabic music. This is what he wanted, something different: different voices and words he didn’t understand. He turned up the stereo volume and went out of Qisma’s bedroom, leaving the door open. The strange music shook the air inside the house and inspired Ibrahim with an unusual vitality, such that he sometimes bobbed his head and shoulders to the beat. He even shook his hips as he made tea. He turned to look around, smiling to himself—or at himself. Then he continued his spontaneous movements as though he were a teenager.

  Ibrahim ate breakfast, showered, put on cologne, and dressed himself in the same suit as the day before. He bought ten oranges from the local shop, picking them out himself one at a time. He took the ripest he could find and polished them with his handkerchief to shine them up. When he got out of the taxi in front of the hospital, he went over to the kiosk selling flowers. He asked the old crippled woman working there to put together the most beautiful bouquet for him. She began rolling back and forth on her wheelchair, picking out the flowers he liked. He tipped her generously and entered the hospital, pleased to have arrived by chance at lunchtime—another opportunity for him to feed his wife by hand and insist on her getting more nutrition.

  But when Ibrahim arrived at her bed, he found it empty, though her things were still there. She must be in the bathroom, or perhaps they had taken her for some kind of test. He wanted the surprise to be even greater and her smile to be even more beautiful, so he set the bouquet of flowers in the middle of her pillow like a head. He emptied the bag of oranges onto the bed, spreading them out like a body. He covered the oranges and flowers with the diaphanous white sheet and sat facing the door, waiting for Umm Qisma to return.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Funeral Leave

  Ibrahim knew he and his wife were fortunate. His new job had come through for him, and things had fallen into place for her to be treated at this private government hospital. He wished his father were still alive to be treated here too, for this hospital was one of the few good ones in the country; no one came here except celebrities and high-ranking government employees and their family members. Even the doctors and nurses addressed him with a respect he was unaccustomed to, calling him “comrade” and “sir.” But the doctor who treated his wife was even more polite than usual today, going even further in his words of affection and respect. He led Ibrahim into his office and began explaining his wife’s illness on a scientific level, using terms Ibrahim didn’t understand. Indeed, he didn’t understand the majority of the doctor’s words. So he contented himself with bowing his head in silence, since the long and the short of what the doctor wanted to convey in this discourse was that his wife had died.

  Ibrahim didn’t open his mouth once. The whole conversation was carried by the doctor, who appeared not to expect Ibrahim to say anything and was trying to fill the silence. The doctor got up to bring him a glass of water. Ibrahim drank the whole thing. Then the doctor pointed at the telephone on the table. He hurriedly pushed it toward Ibrahim and left the office. Ibrahim called the central office for his work, and they informed him that it was necessary to come in person with the hospital death certificate in hand. Then they would give him ten days’ leave.

  Ibrahim went to the information office at the Palace of the Republic with one piece of paper, and he returned with another. He hadn’t expected the transaction to be this quick and easy since the usual way of things was exhausting and involved boring queues, bribes to be paid, humiliations endured, and thick files full of ink-stained papers that had already been stamped dozens of times. For a moment he hoped he would see Sa’ad there, even though he knew the young man didn’t work in this office. He felt a desire to tell someone about his great loss, if only to receive the traditional words of consolation.

  He went back to sit alone in the house until Qisma came home late. She didn’t appear to be
affected too much, and immediately started discussing the details of transporting her mother’s body back to the village. She said she would go to the institute in the morning to ask for time off. He would go with her so that they might head straight to the hospital afterward in order to load the coffin onto the roof of the car and set off on the journey.

  During the hours of the trip from Baghdad to the village and during their stops, they hardly exchanged a word. Qisma just drove the car, swearing at the other drivers and expressing her frustration with the farmers’ tractors and their herds, which wandered across the streets without any sense of order. As for Ibrahim, he felt his wife’s body, tied to the roof of the car, as though it were a bird’s soft wing caressing his head. He wished she were sitting with them now. He would be beside her in the back seat, squeezing her hand, or leaning her against his shoulder. He would look at her peaceful face and speak to her the last words that remained stored up from the passage of decades.

  Ibrahim was tempted to tell Qisma about this desire of his—perhaps they would take Umm Qisma out of the coffin and sit her in the car with them. But he feared that Qisma would be horrified at his suggestion and he would have further marred her opinion of him. She would think he was crazy as well as a weakling and a good-for-nothing failure. He feared her reaction, whatever it might be. So he slumped further in his seat, retreating into himself and his silence. He fell back into his habit of submitting to fate, which had struck him yet another blow. Every time he thought things were easing up, it knocked him back down, dragging him by the ears from a bad situation to one that was worse. It had been that way his whole life. It was his destiny. Everything was fate and decree.

  In the village, the funeral ceremonies lasted three days. It was a simple affair, just for relatives. Tariq played a major part in them, preparing the burial, performing the funeral prayer, reciting the Qur’an, proclaiming Islam’s tenets about death and the life to come, welcoming the mourners, and seeing them off. Nor did Tariq neglect to attempt to persuade Ibrahim to remarry: “You are still young, brother! Your daughter has become a woman who will soon get married and leave you by yourself.”

  Ibrahim, of course, didn’t reveal to him the secret reason for his refusal. He had no desire for it, nor did he truly understand what marriage was about. But more than that, his condition rendered him unfit for remarriage.

  As for Abdullah, he was content to visit the cemetery in the days following the ceremonies. He knew Ibrahim would be beside his wife’s grave. He found Ibrahim there with his head bowed and came up behind him, placing his hand on his shoulder and kissing his head. He sat beside Ibrahim on the ground, smoking. Umm Qisma’s grave was in front of them, and Zaynab’s was not far away, along with the seven others that formed the core of the new cemetery.

  Abdullah offered Ibrahim a cigarette, but he refused until Abdullah insisted he take one. Abdullah said to him, “Is it any surprise, Ibrahim? Aren’t our lives—everyone’s, but especially yours and mine—always tied to death and the dying? We have lived with death and gotten to know it better even than life. Personally, even now I still haven’t deciphered the exact meaning of life. I just don’t understand it. I can’t see anything of value in this gelatinous mass of humanity that fills its time by fighting itself, knowing that the end result is extinction. Have you understood anything about life? About its meaning? If so, fill me in, even if it’s just a guess. Personally, I suspect that I know death better, and I imagine that it is preferable, more peaceful . . .

  “There’s no way death could be worse than life. Even if it’s just unending nonexistence. I don’t have the sense that death will be another life, like this one, for instance, or somehow different, with new conditions and circumstances. If I’m wrong about that, then all of this is a meaningless joke on an even bigger scale. Personally, I have felt so much pain that pain no longer hurts me. And I decided long ago not to feel regret, not to feel sorrow, and not to suffer. Every outcome would be equal as far as I was concerned. I decided not to tire myself out and work myself up over things I couldn’t do anything about. I have nearly envied the dead sometimes for having dispensed with all this mess, turning their backs on it all. Or rather, I no longer envied anyone, neither the living nor the dead. Listen, my friend . . .”

  Abdullah fell silent, unable to find the words to express this great thing at work inside him. Struggling to get hold of the idea and the precise words, he said again, “Listen carefully, my friend . . .” And when he could go no further, he finished the sentence by saying, “Take another cigarette.”

  They looked at each other and burst out laughing together, laughing so hard they were still shaking several minutes later. Then they embraced. “Shit,” Abdullah said. “God damn it all. Let’s go to the river.”

  On the way, Ibrahim tried to tell Abdullah about what he had seen in his work in the gardens of the presidential palaces, since Abdullah was the only one who would understand him and would keep the secret. But Abdullah cut off Ibrahim’s attempts before he went too far by saying, “I know what you will say. Or else I don’t want to know anything about any of that—neither about the palaces, nor the types of people, and not about the things you saw or the gardens. For in the end, what are they apart from communal graveyards by another name? The whole country, the earth, nay, the entire universe itself—isn’t it all just a communal graveyard, crumbling sooner or later into oblivion? And even if the universe were to go on, when all is said and done, what is it apart from a meaningless eternal expanse? Let’s just swim and play a little in the river.”

  Ibrahim spent the rest of those days beside his blind mother, who had grown very senile and was now hunched over like a question mark. Most of the time, he would sit on the floor leaning against her, and he felt her tenderness seep into him. Sometimes she would touch his face and his hands, his back and his feet. She would massage his head. He sensed she was the one who understood him best, even though her speech would jump at random between memories, topics, and names. She talked about common everyday things and about childhood. She talked about events from a time no one remembered or cared about any longer; about people who were forgotten even by their grandchildren; about the harvest and those who got rich off of it; about the floods; about people getting married and fighting and talking and dying. She talked about customs that had been lost, marriage and funeral customs, and conflicts resolved; about recipes how to make yogurt and butter. Her speech—which made no distinction between the living and the dead, animate beings and inanimate objects—cut through his mind like a knife and made him feel that his entire life were just another ordinary drop amid a vast, enormous ocean of innumerable drops that comprised everything around him: people and their stories, being, and possessions. Umm Ibrahim was entirely neutral, and times, places, people, circumstances, and everything else were all the same in her eyes.

  As for Qisma, she kept urging that they return to Baghdad because she was bored in the village, pleading the urgency of her exam schedule and the need to study. So after spending a week there, they went back, driving once again in silence.

  Ibrahim spent the three remaining days of his holiday gathering all his wife’s things—clothes, bags, shoes, and so on—to give to the neighboring church. He only kept her wedding ring and the shawl she wore around her neck most often; he could still smell her scent on it whenever he missed her. He also kept a half-empty bottle of her perfume. Meanwhile, he gave all her gold earrings, her necklaces, her rings, and her simple silver bracelets to Qisma.

  He spent entire days and nights wandering around the city on foot, slowly discovering it. The din of the streets and cafés distracted him from his thoughts, and walking wore him out so much that he fell into a dreamless sleep without any restless thoughts in bed beforehand. During one trip, the beautiful facade of a bookshop in the middle of the capital stopped him, and the display of books inspired him with a feeling of peace and a sense of the world’s deep roots. As he regarded numerous covers and titles, he found they made h
im imagine other worlds, different from his own. He went inside, and spent long, relaxing hours looking at books and flipping through some of them. He ended up buying two translated novels, a volume of poetry, a religious book, and a small edition of the Qur’an.

  And when Ibrahim came to the shelves of pens and notebooks in their alluring colors, sizes, and shapes, he purchased a black pen and a large notebook with a light-blue cover, the color of a summer evening. He told himself that maybe he would write down in this notebook what was going on in his mind. He would open himself up here, if that was what he needed, since he had no one close with whom he could talk about himself. He would also use it to write letters to his wife.

  Ibrahim left the shop, satisfied, pleased with himself for having arrived at this idea.

  CHAPTER 22

  Notebooks and Corpses

  On the morning Ibrahim returned to his work, they immediately informed him that his job had changed. He was driven for half an hour in a private car to a different gate that resembled the one from his old job. On the other side, an officer who looked just like the previous one came to talk to him. Indeed, he looked like every officer here—they all seemed to resemble the President, with their mustaches, their tailored and carefully ironed olive suits, pistols at the hip, polished burgundy shoes, and imperious tones of voice.

  In an impressive office, where a photograph of the President filled the entire back wall, the officer told Ibrahim exactly what the first officer had told him, almost as though they were airline stewards explaining emergency exit procedures to the passengers: you are forbidden to speak to anyone about what you see and hear in this place, you must be exact in observing deadlines and obeying orders, and so on. Then he added in a gentler tone, “It seems that your superiors were pleased with you and put great trust in you. They wrote excellent references, which is why you have been transferred to this sensitive place. This trust is not granted to just anyone. Your hours will be reduced, and your salary will be higher. You will work from one at night until five-thirty or six in the morning. A private car will come every day to your house to bring you here and then take you home after your shift. Please, come this way.”