The Baghdad Clock Page 11

  I asked myself what would have happened if that woman had not killed herself. How would she have provided food for her little ones? What would these children have done when they grew up? Every time I thought about what had happened, I imagined what could have been. I would set the woman’s husband free from prison immediately; I would find a new job for him; I would bring the woman back from the river; and, putting her hand in the hands of her children, I would make them all go for a walk along the bridge, wearing their best clothes. I would give them one of the abandoned houses in our neighbourhood, bestowing upon them the home that a family had left behind when they emigrated. Then I would ask myself, why did they leave? Would Abu Salli have become a thief if they had not emigrated? Would Umm Salli have killed herself by jumping off a bridge, leaving her daughters to live in the street?

  I was afraid I would see another man or woman jump from the bridge. Sometimes I imagined people standing in a long line in front of the bridge, killing themselves in groups, one after another. But what is it that the war will do? Will it end the sanctions? Will those who left come back if the sanctions are dropped? Will Uncle Shawkat become an elegant man again in his dark suit, his white shirt, his blue tie and his shoes? Will Biryad disappear from our lives? Or will he love us more because we give him more food?

  On the television, enemy planes were lined up on huge aircraft carriers, and soldiers from all the countries of the world made their way towards us, who welcomed them with patriotic anthems and despair and suicide from the bridge into cold water.

  What does the advanced world want from us?

  What do these happy countries with their terrifying fleets want from a hungry people in despair and utterly exhausted?

  ‘They have devastated our country and emptied it of the middle class.’ Our Arabic teacher repeated this obscure sentence to us every day.

  What was the middle class? How did we know if someone belonged to the middle class? This was one of the riddles that confused me. Even when I asked my father, ‘Are we in the middle class?’ and he answered, ‘Yes, because I’m a university professor, and your mother has a master’s degree in engineering. We are not rich, but at the same time, we are not poor. We are children of the state, and if our class disappears, the state becomes a broken machine.’

  ‘What about the poor people, father? Aren’t they children of the state too?’

  He was silent for a while and then looked at me, displeased with my question because fathers need to have answers for every question. ‘The poor are the children of the nation,’ he told me.

  I did not understand politics, and I did not want to understand anything about politics. But I also did not want life in the shelter again. I did not like seeing the buildings collapse onto each other. I did not want the bridges to fall dead into the water. I did not want our house to shake with the rockets crashing into the ground. I did not want to die. I did not want anyone else to die.

  Am I afraid?

  Yes, I am afraid, very afraid of the war. Afraid even of its declarations, its songs, its music and its patriotic poems. How could I not be afraid when planes hover in the sky and deal out death in straight lines?

  Why did I have to witness all this in a single lifetime? A war in my childhood, sanctions as a teenager, and a new war with advanced smart bombs when I have not yet reached twenty. How can a normal person tell their personal life story when they move from one war to another as they grow up?

  Is there anything uglier than war? How ugly is this world that understands itself through wars and blockades! What does civilisation mean when we starve children and adults and then launch missiles at them?

  What does it mean for humanity to progress when it keeps inventing ever more hideous paths to mutual annihilation?

  These are not complicated political questions. They are simply the questions of a person who is afraid. Yes, I am afraid. Deeply afraid, to the point of trembling. My humanity, which hates aircraft carriers, shines forth in this fear. This fear alone forms the foundation of my personal culture, one that hates wars. From this fear, I love all people who tremble in fear at the news of war.

  Ahmad was accepted into the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Mosul; Farouq into the College of Sports and Education at the University of Baghdad. We all went our separate ways.

  The night before my first day at the university, I rummaged through the old drawer in our living room, looking for the pictures of my mother in her days as a student at the University of Baghdad. I took out one of the photos and brought it up to my room. I knew it well; I had studied it dozens of times. In the photo, my mother was sitting with a group of classmates in the college garden. Nearby sat her friend Fatin, hair done up and looking straight ahead in all her striking, magical elegance.

  Aunt Fatin, as I used to call her when I was a child, exemplified what I wanted to be in life. I constantly imagined that when I grew up I would be like her. I would cut my hair like her; I would marry a man who resembled her husband and who worked as an ambassador; I would live with him in the beautiful capitals of the world. Like her, I would meet the wives of ambassadors and diplomats. I would put my hand on my knee and draw my foot in as I turn halfway towards a lady from Africa seated to my right. We would speak about our countries. I would tell her about Iraq, its history, its folklore and its styles. She would tell me about her country. I would listen respectfully and nod my head at every word.

  I looked at the photo carefully, engrossed in the details: her shirt, her skirt, her shoes and socks. For a long time, I studied the way she sat and how her hands were folded on her knee as she smiled like a princess from some elegant time. Fatin was a beautiful student from the time of my beautiful mother, that era that breathed magnificence and self-confidence, when being a university student meant being a smart young woman, armed with knowledge and strength of personality; it meant self-reliance and confidence in the world. I stuck the photo on the right side of my mirror frame and began arranging my clothes and adjusting my hair under her guidance, wanting to be like her.

  I put on my skirt and found that it was longer than hers. I put on my socks, which were a darker colour than her socks. I put on my shoes, which were embarrassed and reluctant. I did my hair, but it did not come out as I wanted. A great space of time stood between Aunt Fatin and me, time that changed things and made that way of life distant. The picture of Fatin belonged to a future the city had left behind, a future that stopped there, floating in place in the form of old photo albums forgotten in the drawer.

  I left my clothes on the edge of the desk and went to sleep.

  The next morning, I woke up to a new sun, a warm sun that sent its rays into my soul. That day I became a university student. I became part of real life, part of the delicious days I had imagined. On my own, I struck out from my family to live in a new world that spread before me all at once.

  University life was not just a stage of advanced study; it was life in all its earnestness. Old relationships were broken up and formed anew. From the very first, what it meant to be a classmate was different. The meaning of relationships with others was different. Things became clearer; mistakes were no longer innocent. From this morning on, the right to be wrong would be a foreign concept. The right to be spontaneous was disallowed. The right not to bear responsibility for our behaviour, in its turn, would seem bizarre.

  I stepped timidly through the university gates. In that moment, I imagined that all eyes were turned upon me, watching. Every mouth was talking about me, just as though I had suddenly been born into a strange world. I heard my shoes strike the pavement and focused my gaze on the ground so as not to lose my balance.

  Whenever a fleeting laugh reached my ears, I choked on the pain inside. I was sure my feet would stumble on the uneven pavement and I would fall. I had forgotten my old way of walking, which I had practised ever since my first steps on the rug at home. How had I run down the neighbourhood alleys all those years without ever being afraid of falling?

&
nbsp; The first day of university was the clear division between two times in my life: the time of innocent playing in naive childhood and happy adolescence, and a new time when everything inside me contracted. It was as though my nerves had stiffened under the mockery of people’s faces, their actions and reactions. I no longer had an answer ready for every question. It was necessary to think carefully about every word I uttered. It was necessary to watch my steps, to feign assurance and to sit cautiously in the lecture hall.

  Do I carry my books in my right hand or my left? Do I put my bag on the floor, or do I keep it beside me? Do I sit up on the front of the chair, or do I lean back? Do I move my hands freely when I sit down, or do I hold them still on my lap? How could I have forgotten to ask my mother all these questions? Why had I relied on my spontaneity to carry me through?

  Everyone here had friends who came from the same secondary school or from the same neighbourhood they had lived in. I was the exception. I was the only one who walked alone. I sat on a small bench in the shade. I was too embarrassed to buy anything to eat, and I became confused if anyone looked in my direction.

  Some days later, I discovered by chance that Baydaa was a student in the same university, though in a different department. My soul clung to her, and I sought her out between lectures. I would sit with her in the student centre far from the others. She would reminisce with me and sing with a voice that I alone heard.

  Baydaa alone came here with me from our neighbourhood. She was the message that reached me from a secure past. In those days, Baydaa represented for me the nineteen years that were my entire life. With her, I was like someone grasping her mother’s hand while taking a step into cold, deep water. It was as though the university was a cold river whose temperature I tested with a finger before throwing myself in.

  ‘My friend, where have you been all this time! How have you been, my dear?’

  I held back a tear and murmured, ‘I miss secondary school so much.’

  ‘The time will come when you will miss university.’

  My mind wandered off, overcome by memories of the old days. Then our time was up. I kissed her cheek as though I were kissing the entire neighbourhood, kissing nineteen years of my childhood when we ran across the playground grass towards our classroom.

  Baydaa was a young woman with a child’s face, clear skin, and grey eyes with thick eyebrows that joined above her small nose. With her good heart and generous emotions, she lived life exuberantly. On days when I was too busy to visit her, she would come to my department and seek me out like the mother of a single daughter who feared the air might do something to her beloved girl. She would kiss me with the tenderness of a thousand grandmothers kissing the soul of their only grandson. With her alone I felt I was still living in our neighbourhood, on our street, attending our old school.

  Each time we parted, Baydaa walked with me, and we made our way along the narrow path imprinted by students’ feet on the damp grass. We stood in the middle of the campus, halfway between the architecture department and the civil engineering building. We were only one step apart, but in my mind, that step represented my childhood and my adolescence.

  Once when I was waving goodbye, I stumbled and fell onto the ground. Another girl reached down and helped me to my feet. I brushed off my skirt, thanked her, and continued on my way with a new tear in my eye.

  24

  I did not think too much about the soothsayer who had arrived in our neighbourhood once upon a time and had become the subject of everyone’s conversation. By my own intuition, I knew everything he said. Even before he spoke of it, I had seen the ship on that day I climbed up on the water tank. I knew we were living in a dangerous ocean. I did not care what he was talking about. I just kept wishing that some young soothsayer would come in his place, perhaps his daughter, his sister or some other relative. Or even a stranger he did not know. A teenage soothsayer in fine clothes who would put her right hand on her forehead to take her temperature from time to time, and then would be silent for two minutes before picking up where she had left off.

  I would not want her to summon good luck for me or tell me about my future children. What I dreamed was that she would answer questions that had to do only with the past. Not the events that had taken place, for those I remembered well. But the important thing was to know how some of these events had happened. And what if some of them had not? Among these questions, there were some that seemed ridiculous, and others that were important. But it is a question of degree, and the answers to silly questions often bring us to an understanding of life’s most important and complicated matters.

  Well, to give an example, one thing I wanted to know was why Farouq loved me and not any of the other girls of the neighbourhood, or any of the girls he had met in his life who loved him or found him attractive.

  Why did I become Nadia’s friend from our first meeting in the shelter, even though there were other girls our age who came every night with their families, whom we ignored from the first moment we met each other?

  What if there had never been a war? What if the sanctions had not been put in place? What would our lives have been like, and what would Baghdad have become?

  Questions like these were the crazy things that ran through my mind. They were the ones that would lead me to true answers about the deep, hidden meanings. They would let me know the meaning of love, friendship, chance and history, and how events come to be.

  I imagined this young soothsayer as she passed by our street without Biryad barking at her. On the contrary, he would go up to her, smell her hand, and then move aside to clear a way for her, giving me a sign through his welcome.

  It would happen that she would pass by when I was standing alone at the gate of the house. I would approach and invite her in to our garden to sit on the swing. I would sit on the grass in front of her and ask my questions.

  ‘Why did Farouq love me and not the other girls of the neighbourhood or the girls he met throughout his life? Why did Nadia fall in love with Ahmad and no one else? And why was Marwa attached to him alone?’

  Raising her right hand to feel her forehead, the soothsayer would fall silent for two minutes and then answer as she turned her head to look around the garden: ‘Listen, my dear. If people knew why they fell in love, they wouldn’t fall in love at all. And if it were granted to them to know why they loved one person and not any other, they wouldn’t love them in the first place.

  ‘Love, my friend, is in the category of things that are not made in this life of ours. It existed before us and will go on after us. Love is not some physical part of our bodies or any raw material found in nature. It is not a chemical reaction or a physical element. It is not a property of geography, not a historical event; neither a mathematical equation nor an engineering hypothesis.

  ‘The question about the meaning of love is the same question as the meaning of our existence. It will forever remain a question with no clear answer. For this reason, our ancient ancestors invented the goddesses Ishtar, Inanna, Venus and Adonis, Aphrodite, Cupid and others. They invented many goddesses in order to spare themselves the trouble of this question, for everything that the goddess makes, the goddess alone answers for, and rarely do goddesses make humans their partners in their special domain.

  ‘You exist if you fall in love.

  ‘Imagine you lived without lungs. Would air have the same meaning it has now? Love is air that doesn’t need lungs. Imagine you did not have eyes. Would things have the same clarity? Love is something whose existence we see without eyes, that we hear and taste and touch without any physical sensations. There is a single sense for love, which is ourselves – our entire existence, with and without our five senses. Love is the spiritual light in our depths, and light, as you know, has no mass. It has no tangible material, yet it exists. It exists even in the meaning of darkness itself. The question about light’s mass is fundamentally a simple question of physics. The one about love remains an incomplete sentence, even if we add a thousand questi
on marks.’

  The soothsayer would ask me for a little water. I would go inside to bring her a large glass, in which I would put a little ice so that she would not need to ask for that too. Talking with her was an invaluable opportunity not to be relinquished, even if her responses did require deep concentration, given that she would sometimes speak without saying anything. I imagined bringing her the glass. She took a drink and set it down beside her.

  ‘Why did I become Nadia’s friend from the first meeting in the shelter, even though there were other girls of our age who came every night with their families, whom we ignored from the moment we first got to know each other?’

  She did not put her hand to her forehead as I had been expecting her to do. She shifted in her seat, and her eyes wandered through the garden, as though she were listening to the plants. She focused her gaze on the fig tree. Then she turned to me and said, ‘Friendship resembles love in some respects, but the goddess has left it to humans in their freedom. Friendship in its nature does not come from a glance, a smile or a letter expressing admiration. Friendship grows naturally and develops over time. It replaces natural differences between friends with agreement.

  ‘Friendship allows room for an unlimited number of people, varying in degree from one friend to another according to your ability to become acquainted with a thousand friends without any one of them calling you a traitor.

  ‘You and Nadia do not love each other just for the sake of the deep friendship between you. You love your memories too.

  ‘Both of you, but especially you, are afraid for these memories, because their passing means ripping up the solid ground under your feet. For those who fear the future, the past is a merciful cave in which people seek shelter when they turn away from the cruelty of the present.