Iraq + 100

by Hassan Blasim

  I couldn’t find a way of getting to the author’s relatives to link, in any obvious way, to me or to the ancient figure of Scheherazade. Nor could I find a copy of A Thousand and One Nights, which I now knew was a very ancient text, to fathom any clues from its plots.

  We attempted to use the official government data port that holds specific threads for every citizen, starting with their births and recording all subsequent life events; but this proved useless, as the system only reached so far back. At one point Ishtar thought of searching the regional archives knowing that, in the olden days, people would meet at established places for socialising, and subsequently exchange photographs of these meetings through online networks that were called ‘social media’. These sites were no longer available, but after a few private calls I was able to obtain a large archive of random images of social websites from the archives. I managed to access these by claiming they were needed for my design research; so my professional practice was now being exploited by Baghdad Syndrome!

  I was sent a folder of photographs showing people who participated in establishing the site and the various dates involved. However, the names were blurred and unclear due to the low quality of photography back then.

  We tried giving the photographs a resolution boost to make them clearer, and with this, we were able to sort the images into groups. Clearly these people cared about the statue, and considered it a symbol of Baghdad, but what we found perplexed us. The statue didn’t just disappear overnight as the story about the square claimed; it was more gradual, people must have simply not noticed this as they so distracted by other events.

  In one set of pictures the statue is missing a forearm, in a later batch both arms, and in the third group Scheherazade is minus a head, and in a fourth set Shahryar is there alone, listening to no one. I stared at this groups of pictures.

  ‘Uncle look!’ Ishtar said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘There’s an earlier set, with the statue intact … And here’s a close-up of Scheherazade’s face … and, if you look, you can see fine white lines, or scratches, running down her black cheeks … These lines … they look like tears!’

  I looked at the pictures and she was right. There were tears streaming down Scheherazade’s face.

  I was certain that the tears on Scheherazade’s face were somehow connected to the author and her migration from Baghdad, as the appearance of the tears happened around the same time. I then returned to the task of searching for the author’s descendents. Ishtar proved invaluable here, as she downloaded an app onto my system that used faces of people from the past to find contemporary descendants.

  I uploaded a picture of the author and her partner and immediately received algorithm-estimates of what her children and grandchildren might look like, which were then matched with contemporary records. Initially, I doubted the process greatly; all the matches were with people living outside Iraq and still used names that seemed ancient compared to contemporary Iraqi names. Then I realised that she and her family never returned to Iraq, so proceeded to email three of her alleged grandchildren.

  Ishtar and I had a break, ate a little and discussed her studies, but my mind remained on the mission. I was nearly finished when I jumped at the sound of an email alert.

  The first reply was from a grandson confirming his relation to the author but confessing he didn’t know anything about a statue. Likewise from the second. The granddaughter then replied saying she had once heard her grandmother tell a story about a statue with a scratched face. She also said she knew nothing of the loss of the statue’s hands and head.

  I went back to the start, pulled up the photographs again, and tried to think about the bigger picture. Ishtar and I pored over them again, one by one, and slowly the obvious dawned on us.

  The pictures that showed Scheherazade’s tears dated from immediately after the poem was first published. It was the author who had scratched those tears on the stature, before writing that Scheherazade would remain weeping, and then abandoning her, and her city, to cry.

  Then came the first photo in which she’d lost her left arm. This was not the usual selfie of lovers or teenagers posing in the square, with the statue in the background; this was a different type of selfie, of a military person, with an ancient piece of weaponry round his neck. He appeared to be waving at the statue—as if bidding it goodbye after performing some great service to it. In all the pictures from this set, Scheherazade could be seen, in the background, surrounded by chaos, smoke rising in the sky above her, people scrambling for cover. This led me to suspect that her hand must have been stolen in this chaos, by thieves, and what it must feel like to have part of you owned by one of them, for the hand not to be her hand any longer.

  With that I felt that I had an explanation for two of the sentences from my dream, the tears and the left hand. A few sentences still remained vague as we tried to connect each of them to the remaining pictures and arrange them:

  ‘The night of the separation was black. This hand, which wiped away my tears, is no longer my hand! Black, it’s black and my nights are black…’

  —We pulled out this sentence and attached it to a photo in which Scheherazade’s left arm, the one gifted to me, was missing.

  After that:

  ‘I’ve wept for so long and no one has wiped away my tears, unless you count the tears of Heaven that have washed my cheeks, and maybe one other who watches me as I weep…’

  —we attached to a headless picture.

  Lastly:

  ‘My body is the story of a woman who flouted the restrictions, who fled and now pleas to return—so that she can tell her king the story of the thousands of nights, of the tens of decades…’

  —was attached to the picture where she is both headless and without arms. One sentence was still missing though.

  In the photos where Scheherazade had only lost one arm, our attention was drawn to the repeated appearance of a young man and woman in the foreground. We ordered these images chronologically but could find nothing but happiness in their expressions. In another picture, the man seemed to have been inspired to decorate the statue as he waited for her, to surprise her. Another photo showed the place filled with smoke.

  The following group of photographs were the headless ones. The severed neck was hard to look at. Shahryar couldn’t have cut her head off, the way he threatened to in the story, but there was another person in the background of several of these photos. An old man.

  None of the photos were taken for the old man’s benefit it seemed, he was never centre stage. And Ishtar downloaded another program to search all the photos for any other appearances, in the archive. It seemed he appeared in many of them, not interacting with the main people in the photos, but sitting on his own, in the background, staring up at Scheherazade’s face. He only stopped appearing in them after the head was removed.

  After the head disappeared, the number of photos of the square reduced sharply. Most of the images from this time showed groups of women around the decapitated statue; peace, it seemed, had been restored to the background city. Shortly after this, Shahryar and the remains of Scheherazade disappeared altogether. Despite the progress we’d made, connecting the faces in the pictures to names of people now living in Baghdad was extremely difficult. Hiding links to the past was very common back then. Old names and surnames became dangerous things to hold on to, and people were allocated new, neutral names, free from any affiliations to religions or sects of the past. The slogan we read about in history was: ‘Leave behind your names and live!’

  Every generation yearns for the past. The father says that his time was the best. The grandfather says that his was the best. This leaves us forever romanticising the past and singing its praises until we find ourselves reliving it; this is why we ended up bearing the same names and surnames we used five thousand years before. The cycle had to be broken. So our history teacher told us.

  * * *

  The following day I excused myself from work. Downloading a list of nam
es and addresses, I left the house in pursuit of any information that would guide me back to Scheherazade.

  I had with me downloads of the images, in the hope they might mean something to those descendants I’d managed to trace. The first dozen or so addresses I visited, I left disappointed, knowing nothing more about their ancestors or their connection to the square. I was starting to doubt the whole project.

  I returned to my flat and threw myself onto the bed. Once more, I was haunted by the same dream, but for the first time I woke without panicking. I knew for certain it was guiding me. No longer was it merely a nightmare painted on the walls of my mind by Baghdad Syndrome. I took an official leave from work and continued my door-to-door investigations for three further days until I had answers.

  That young man, in the early photos, had planned to propose to the woman he was often seen with—there, under the statue. He arranged everything, even decorated the square. But he never managed to place the ring on his darling’s finger. On her way to their rendezvous, just a street away, she had been caught by a car bomb, and had lost her right arm. After this, she refused the marriage and fled with her family to the North. With this, the young man broke off Scheherazade’s right arm and placed the ring on its finger. He married his cousin and the hand remained with him as a reminder of the severed love. The ring stayed on the hand for many decades—completing an unlikely broken treasure that later owners would never appreciate—until eventually it became detached, and was lost.

  As for the old man, he turned out to be a famous sculptor who, in that corner of the square, found a place to watch Baghdad. When the author came to scratch the tears onto Scheherazade’s face, she told him her story. The sculptor remained there, depressed, watching the events unfold around Scheherazade until he could no longer bear the sight of her weeping alone, without anyone to console. So he removed the head and took it home.

  The head remained safe, hidden among the many sculptures of his own that his family inherited.

  As for the women seen gathered around the statue in its final years, these represented an Iraqi women’s rights association, who couldn’t bear seeing her stand there in front of Shahryar helpless, enslaved, and beheaded. They produced slogans demanding the restoration of the remains for the dignity of all Iraqi women, and when these went unheard they conspired to remove the remains of Scheherazade’s body and continued to protect the statue for so long that they forgot it wasn’t actually theirs.

  Within a few weeks, I had managed to locate all the pieces of Scheherazade but failed to track down Shahryar. The search had cost my sanity dearly, however; I had lost all sight of the design I was supposed to be working on for the square. It was as if Scheherazade had told me stories that I couldn’t ignore and I needed to return to her place each day to listen.

  * * *

  Then one night the final piece arrived. I had popped out to get some take-away biryani from a nearby restaurant and returned to eat it in my flat, before phoning the office for an extension on the design deadline. As I dozed I heard her voice again:

  ‘My lover is closer than you can imagine. The migrants dream of returning but they never return. My lover, however, didn’t emigrate and he isn’t a migrant.’

  Her words spun through my thoughts, and made contacting Utu my first priority the next morning. I passed the window without even glancing at Baghdad, and that morning’s tea sat untouched as I went to call him.

  ‘Where can I find Shahryar, Utu? I need to find him!’

  ‘Sudra,’ he sounded like he was about to laugh. ‘You have become obsessed with Scheherazade. I’m afraid your symptoms have intensified.’

  ‘Scheherazade has charged me with finding Shahryar; I can’t return her statue to the yard on her own. I don’t want to go blind before I do this.’ Utu sighed and fell silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly he spoke: ‘There is a gathering. Of the old families. You should come. My family will be there.’

  * * *

  The day of the gathering arrived, and though I was full of anticipation I hadn’t forgotten that this was going to be the first time I met Utu’s family. I left early to shop for some sweets to take with me. I made my way to the location and found that it was a family-run, private club, hidden away in the back alleys of old Baghdad, surrounded by date-palm trees. The door was locked so I called Utu and I soon heard him unlocking a series of inner doors for me. Eventually the outer door swung open and shocked me with what it revealed.

  In the middle of the spacious inner hall sat Shahryar. Men, women and children were gathered around him talking, laughing and playing. I stood there dazed, not quite processing what I was seeing.

  A group of men approached me with Utu among them: ‘None of us have forgotten the names of our ancestors—be it the fourth or fifth generation,’ Utu explained. ‘My great-grandfather’s name, on my father’s father’s side, was Ali,’ one of the men said. ‘My grandfather’s on my mother’s side was Omar,’ another said. ‘My paternal great-uncle was named after Jesus,’ a third man added. ‘My mother’s father was Azzad,’ said a fourth. ‘Sarkis’, said another. ‘Yashar.’ ‘Seth.’

  The names went on and on, until Utu concluded: ‘All of them were lecturers and friends at Baghdad University. They were worried for Shahryar, afraid that he would become dishonoured and would fall from being a king to a mere customer in this new world, that he would be accused of disloyalty to the country, not being an Iraqi.

  And yet Shahryar has witnessed all the blues of the Tigris, all its reds and its blacks; its floods and its draughts. The men had succeeded in keeping him hidden, to be returned only when Scheherazade returned. You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Baghdad.

  * * *

  A year on and here I stand, between Scheherazade and Shahryar in a square on the bank of the Tigris. I cannot see her but it’s as if I can hear her telling him stories—stories of the thousands of nights that they were separated for. Stories that fill the air, along with the sound of the pigeons fluttering above our heads, singing, ‘Cokookty … Cokookty…’

  OPERATION DANIEL

  KHALID KAKI

  TRANSLATED BY ADAM TALIB

  District: Kirkuk (Gao’s Flame), 2103.

  It was still early when the SMS bracelet around Rashid’s wrist vibrated, waking him. The message was brief and precise.

  Dear Beneficiary no. RBS89:

  Good Benefit.

  Today, the first Saturday of the month, is dedicated to ‘eradicating the remnants of evil.’ The Beloved Units will be mobilised throughout the city between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Anyone in possession of audio or audio-visual recordings of the reclassified languages (laser on titanium or carbon fibre) should turn these in to the officially designated droids patrolling immediately. Anyone failing to comply with these instructions will be arrested and promptly archived.

  Gao Dong, The Beloved, Loves You.

  There was nothing unusual about these messages, not since the Venerable Benefactor, Gao Dong, who currently preferred the title ‘The Beloved’, had made the Memory Office his priority department. For those who don’t follow state politics, the Memory Office is both a security and social service. It functions as a security service by virtue of its core mission: to protect the state’s present from the threat of the past. But what makes it a social service, you ask. This stems from the intimate relationship the government has with its followers, trainees, and admirers—not exactly the relationship between superior and subordinates, rather benefactor and beneficiaries. That was the touch of genius the Venerable Benefactor had brought to all areas of life in the black-gold state of Kirkuk, thirty-five years ago. What he did to protect them all from the threat of the past was itself a service. For instance, he had reclassified all the city’s older languages, the most ancient of which dated back five thousand years, as ‘prohibited’. As beneficiaries, the people were forbidden from speaking Sy
riac, Arabic, Kurdish, Turkmen, or any language other than Chinese. The punishment for speaking those languages, or reading about history, literature, or art in them was merciless: you were archived. This involved being incinerated in a special device—resembling one of those UV tanning beds that were all the rage in the late twentieth century—your ashes would then be removed to a facility that produced synthetic diamonds, where, just a few hours later, all that had been left of you would re-emerge as a tiny, glittering stone. It was called ‘archiving’ because a crystal can store an infinite library of information locked in its chambers—more secrets than the House of Wisdom—even a traitor’s personal history could be preserved in them. (It was something to do with electrons and vibrations.) Once polished, these crystals would be sent to another factory where they would come to adorn one of the Benefactor Gao Dong’s shoes, or one of his many hats.

  Rashid didn’t possess any recordings in any of the languages Gao Dong wanted to strip Kirkuk of, but he spoke three of them fluently. This he couldn’t deny. He’d learnt them from his parents, and he knew something in his bones would compel him to teach them, in turn, to his own children one day, if he had any. But that’s all he felt about the issue. He was no rebel. He knew there were some people who would fight, or even die, for these languages, claiming they held the key to citizens’ real hearts. But these were just rumours Rashid had heard. He’d never met one of these rebels.

  A few days earlier a special search-and-raid unit had turned up several discs and tapes, dating back eighty years, on a hillside in Daquq. Information had been leaked by a double agent to the search unit who reported that the artefacts were found to be full of songs—songs that some people in Kirkuk had heard about, but that no one had actually heard. According to the gossip, these had been among the most beautiful, exquisite pieces ever recorded. Songs about the singer’s beloved and the pain of being separated from her; songs about the beauty of nature and the women who go down to the village spring to get water, and lots of other things like that. The times they lived in sounded much simpler, safer and more humane, than our present age.