The Baghdad Clock Page 10

  ‘Twenty-seven years, Biryad! I hung on the trunk of a tree that has abandoned me now. How happy that far-off day, when as a young employee I entered the building of the central bank in a suit my father bought in Al-Rashid Street. He also bought me a dark tie and a pair of black shoes from Bata. I sat at my desk and wished in that moment that my mother could see me sitting there on the chair, flipping through important papers on my desk and signing them.

  ‘My mother passed away, my father passed away, and I kept signing papers at my small wooden desk. I fell in love with Nadira. At first, her family rejected me, but she didn’t listen to their advice and married me anyway. After years of being united, she left me all alone and went back to them, explaining that life with me had become boring. I no longer went with her to the movies like I did in the old days. It was a long time since we had been to the theatre. We didn’t travel to Dohuk, Amadiya and Suwarah Tukah.

  ‘O my dear wife! It wasn’t my life that became boring. The whole world became boring. The neighbours you loved are leaving, Nadira. Come, see our neighbourhood: the rusty gates, the neglected gardens buried under the dust of the days. Life isn’t as you left it, my wife. Everything here has quickly been transformed.’

  A tear rolled down his cheek, and he walked to the bedroom. He changed into his old work clothes, went back into the garden, and got out the lawnmower and his toolbox. With Biryad in tow, he left the house to inspect the houses of the neighbours who had departed. He would double-check that the locks on the doors were secure, and he would look after the plants. He would write on a piece of thick cardboard to hang on this wall or that: house for rent, house for sale.

  His suit hung loose these days. He went without his tie. And his shoes needed replacing. There was no longer any space on them for another patch. He exchanged them for an old pair he found in a closet of odds and ends under the stairs. His beard had grown long and become white with depressing black splotches. Uncle Shawkat had begun looking a lot like our neighbourhood.

  The sight of beautiful gardens in front of the houses disappeared gradually. Cottages built for recently married children took their place, or small rooms with side doors, rented out for the sake of providing an additional source of income after salaries no longer had any real value.

  The green face of our neighbourhood disappeared, and with it, the scent of roses, orange blossoms and grass gradually faded. So too did the fragrance of water when it splashed on the bricks of ancient walls. Our youthful neighbourhood had grown up and become old, slowly losing its memory. The number of broken-down cars increased. They choked the streets and impeded the flow of traffic passing through. Rubbish piled up in front of the doors. Teenagers found work to help their families carry the heavy burden of the times.

  Bit by bit, the gates became rusty. Windows took on a cloudy hue. Walls facing the street were built higher, as were the walls between neighbouring houses. Iron padlocks were added. Life withdrew into distant rooms. The number of strange faces in the place increased, and the number of thefts went up despite Biryad’s barking, which never stopped, day or night. Our houses lost the confidence to seek out what was behind the walls.

  21

  I have a story I remembered just this moment, and I said to myself I have to tell you about it. It happened one night when Nadia and I were getting ready to take the national aptitude exams. We stayed up in her room to some late hour of the night, when Nadia suddenly threw her book on the floor and leaped up on the bed to dance. I kept my book open and sang for her. Then I gently set it aside and started beating out the rhythm of a song she liked. She jumped down and went to the window, which she opened to look out over the back garden. She breathed in the night air and then came back to start proposing topics that had nothing to do with what we were studying. It was clear she was bored to death.

  ‘I’m sick of studying!’

  ‘It’s our final year! Come on, let’s finish up and get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ve had enough! I can’t concentrate on books any more.’

  She went back and put her hand out of the window to confirm that what she was hearing was raindrops. I knew she had some crazy idea in mind. I have told you before about how much she loves the rain.

  ‘It’s raining outside. Let’s go out to the street!’

  ‘The street? At this hour? You’re crazy!’

  ‘Let’s go! I’m so depressed I’ll die!’

  ‘What about your parents?’

  ‘Sleeping.’

  ‘And if someone sees us in the street in the middle of the night, what will you say?’

  ‘It’s no problem!’

  ‘You have a father, Nadia. Be reasonable for once!’

  ‘If you aren’t coming, I’ll go by myself!’

  I got up too, and we went down the stairs on tiptoes. My heart nearly stopped from fear. With the utmost caution, we opened the door and went out.

  We walked down the street at an insane speed. I did not know where she wanted to go at that time of night. The drizzling rain cleaned the air and wet our faces.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The Baghdad Clock.’

  ‘What will we do there?’

  ‘Take a photo to remember!’

  ‘But we don’t have a camera!’

  ‘Don’t need one.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I know I’m crazy! But I like it. I’m tired of being reasonable.’

  ‘Don’t we have exams?’

  ‘We’ll be fine!’

  As we got closer, we headed in the direction of the clock building. One of the guards was sitting on a small stone bench with his rifle between his knees, listening to a radio that sat beside him under the cement shelter built to protect the bench from the rain. We cautiously passed behind him and went deeper into the darkness, further from the light. We stopped in front of the clock, and Nadia asked me to take an imaginary photo of her. But before I sat on the ground so I could get her and the tower in a single shot, she turned around and, laughing at herself, said, ‘Just a minute. Let me make sure Marwa won’t show up in the picture!’

  I laughed with her and took the photo. She smiled with all her heart and said, ‘We’ve fallen into the future!’

  The clock struck midnight in Baghdad, sleeping now under the rain. I put my hand in hers and we ran towards our neighbourhood. We turned into our street and reached her house. Pushing open the door we had left half-open, we slipped furtively into her room on the second floor of the house. We opened our books, but before getting through a single page, we fell asleep on the floor sprawled in opposite directions. Her mother woke us in the morning. We ate a quick breakfast and headed off to school.

  The head teacher walked among the graduating classes and, in a tone that was both challenging and encouraging, said, ‘This is the school of Mrs Rajaha, and it accepts nothing less than a one hundred per cent success rate.’

  These were our last days with Mrs Rajaha and Mrs Athmar in our secondary school, in which we lived through some hard times. They coincided with the years of the sanctions, which deprived us of coloured notebooks and new books. The sanctions placed before our eyes the picture of a future open to possibilities, all of which were unhappy. The familiar faces of our childhood disappeared from their seats in the classroom. Wijdan left us. So did Tabarak, Sumiya and Rita. Absence took many faces away amid the tears. Many names disembarked from the train of our school at many different stops. Someone would disappear, and her absence would linger until the news came that she had emigrated with her family.

  Emigration became the defining social characteristic for those who left. The students who stayed felt envy for their classmates who crossed the borders, whose feet touched the ground of a new life, and who breathed the perfume of a new world. Those friends left for cold cities while we disintegrated where we were, living our days of dust with frozen smiles.

  22

  Khalil went ahead and asked for Shuruq’s hand in marriage. Her family assented withou
t the least hesitation. Folk music was performed in the large garden of their house. Candied nuts and other sweets poured down like rain on our heads.

  Biryad was the first of the dancers. This was one of his surprises that we had grown used to. From the first note of the large trumpet that a member of the traditional musical troupe had brought, Biryad lifted himself up on his hind legs and began jumping around joyfully in a circle as he wagged his white tail. The musicians were astonished by the sight, something they had never encountered in their work throughout Baghdad’s neighbourhoods. When they found that those present did not comment on this strange occurrence, they continued playing, and Biryad continued his delightful dance, which we began to imitate.

  The young women went forward, followed by the boys. They moved with a fierce exuberance, for such a long time had passed without happy occasions coming our way that our feet had almost forgotten how to dance. When Biryad saw that the circle had filled with dancers, he brought his front paws down to the ground, lifted his tail over his back, and withdrew without anyone noticing him. He slipped away and reappeared on top of the garden’s outer wall and began dancing by himself, watched from the rooftops by cats that were dying with laughter.

  A sense of happiness spread everywhere, and spirits relaxed into a sense of joy. The music continued beyond the normal stopping time for this kind of event. Nearly everyone danced, with the exception of Shuruq, who went up to her room after Khalil put the engagement ring on her finger. All alone, the tears began streaming down her face. She did not know why, at this precise moment, her heart went cold and she was more inclined to believe the soothsayer’s prophecy regarding the future of her marriage. For when she looked into Khalil’s eyes as he put the ring on her finger, she found that his face belonged to another world. Sadness descended on her heart and filled her soul, despite her attempts to hide her true feelings in front of the others.

  Khalil’s mother, sisters and relatives were perplexed by her lack of emotion at this important occasion in her life, especially when everyone knew the story of love that had joined her to her fiancé. They started thinking it over in their hearts, and when no reasonable answer came to them, they all told themselves the exact same sentence: ‘She’s overcome with happiness.’

  After an hour, Shuruq felt ashamed of her unacceptable absence – at her own engagement party, no less – which would spoil the joy of her family, her fiancé’s family and the neighbours. It would provoke rumours about their relationship. She dried her tears, washed her face, lined her eyes with kohl, brushed her hair, and put on a beautiful blue dress that went down to her knees. She had had it altered by the most famous tailor in the neighbourhood and had kept it for this day.

  Rather than going down the stairs and joining the partygoers in the garden, her curiosity impelled her to open the door of her small balcony overlooking the garden and to cast a quick glance at the dancers. She saw Biryad dancing on the garden wall and smiled at him when he began wagging his tail at her. She tried to forget everything for the sake of these neighbours and relatives, happy as they were on her day. Before she turned back and closed the balcony door, her eye fell on a strange man dancing and waving his cane with abrupt movements. She focused on his features and let out a muffled scream: ‘The soothsayer!’

  She hurried down the stairs and out into the garden to grab him and prevent him from getting away, so that she might learn the whole story from him.

  She immediately headed towards where the party was going on and pressed her way through to the circle of dancers. She was startled to find the man had disappeared without a trace, even though the dance floor was crowded at that moment with other young men and women, as well as some children from the neighbourhood.

  Surprised, she turned back. She asked several women who knew him well, who had spoken with him on his previous visits, but she did not receive any answer. Her question about him was met with disapproving glances and confusion. Some of them even thought the girl had been struck on her engagement day by a mental infirmity from a magic charm placed in her house by one of her rivals.

  Shuruq went back to her room and reviewed the chain of events from the first moment this strange person had appeared until his magical disappearance from the dance floor.

  Thinking about it exhausted her. She stretched out on her bed and slept till the following morning. When she opened her eyes, she found a doctor gathering up his things to leave amid the deep, confused sadness of her parents and some relatives.

  Shuruq rubbed her eyes and, pushing back the heavy covers, got out of bed. She stood there, looking at their faces, asking why they were in her room and why they had called a doctor to treat her.

  Meanwhile, a sudden thought popped into her mind that the doctor who had just left bore a remarkable resemblance to the soothsayer. Then she went further and told herself that maybe it was the very same man. Indeed, without a doubt, it was him! ‘Him ... him ... him!’ she began repeating at the top of her voice.

  Her mother held her and recited in her ear the invocations for warding off evil. Someone brought some cold water to wet her forehead. Shuruq fell onto her bed, shaking like a paper aeroplane in a violent wind. She wrapped herself in the thick blanket and squeezed her eyelids shut.

  ‘Call the doctor!’ someone said.

  ‘No, no, no! I don’t want a doctor!’ Shuruq shouted at the top of her voice from under the covers.

  Shuruq was in this state for three days. All attempts by her family to summon the best physicians – including their neighbour, Umm Baydaa, who was a doctor – were of no benefit to her condition. Despite many examinations, no one could diagnose a clear illness in her body.

  Wise women, well known for their skill in magic, stood at her bedside, as did wise men expert in the same field. But none of them could give a single clear answer.

  After Uncle Shawkat heard the news of her illness – it was on everyone’s tongue – he decided to visit her, for from the time he had known her as a small girl and as she had grown up before his eyes into a woman that young men proposed to, she had remained one of the girls in the neighbourhood dearest to his heart. With every step up to her room, it became even more difficult to control the burning tears that fell. They gathered on his eyelashes until they were so big they fell like pebbles, crashing audibly onto the floor. Biryad followed him step by step, smiling with an exuberant happiness that he was entering one of the neighbourhood houses without the slightest feeling of shame.

  Uncle Shawkat stood beside Shuruq’s bed and sobbed. The dog took advantage of everyone’s distraction to move closer without being noticed. Wagging his white tail at the end of her bed where her feet were, he pushed back the covers a little and licked her left ankle.

  Uncle Shawkat took her arm. Jokingly, he pressed his teeth in the place of a wristwatch, just as he used to do in the days of her childhood. Shuruq immediately stirred. It was as though the blood began moving through the veins of her desiccated body again. She got up, hugged Uncle Shawkat, and wiped away his tears. She kissed his forehead and asked him to stop crying, for here she was in front of him, safe and sound. Nothing bad had happened to her. In order to prove it, she raised herself to her full slender height on the bed and danced the dance he used to like when she had been a child. He and Baji Nadira would bring her into their house, where she would dance for them as they clapped and kissed her after each dance, pressing a piece of candy into her hand. Her family was surprised at this vigour that flowed through her body and spirit. After the initial shock had passed, her mother let out a trill of joy and summoned her father. Everyone joined them in clapping and calling out expressions of joy and blessing.

  Shuruq went back to how she was before and forgot everything connected to the soothsayer and his tales.

  Two weeks later, she married Khalil. She lived with him in the cottage she had planned for him, and in her belly, her unborn baby kicked from time to time as she heard the sound of him crying for her. With a mother’s tenderness, she would rep
ly, ‘Sleep, my little one, sleep!’

  Am I Afraid?

  23

  We graduated from secondary school together with good grades in the final exams. Then we sat at home for a long time, waiting for the results of the central university admissions process. Nadia was accepted into the University of Baghdad, and I was accepted into the University of Technology. This was the first time we would be separated from each other. Nadia kept busy with registration, as did I, and we did not see each other much.

  In her dreams now, a new scene kept repeating itself. It was the rising smoke of a war that had settled at the gates, a smoke that reduced visibility, confused everything we saw, and deprived us of our joy at embarking on college life, which we had been looking forward to for so many years.

  That was the year of new patriot anthems, the ‘year of culmination’, as they called it. The atmosphere of war imposed itself anew on our lives, but this war was not like the previous one in that, along with death and destruction, it carried some hope, hope for an end to the sanctions that were crueller than the war itself. The sanctions were a slow death we lived through minute by minute.

  The sanctions were not only a weapon to make us starve, they largely put an end to our way of living and destroyed the meaning of life. They stole away the spirit of hope, and when hope disappears, life becomes merely a routine in which we move from one miserable day to another yet more miserable. In such a life, people do not love each other. They do not even love themselves. I saw with my own eyes a woman commit suicide by throwing herself from a bridge into the Tigris. It was during winter, and the water in the river was cold. The people who gathered nearby said that she and her children had not eaten anything for three days, and her husband was in jail for stealing. That incident remained fixed in my mind as the epitome of the sanctions, something that turned a man into a thief bound for prison, while his wife kills herself and leaves their children in the street.