The Baghdad Clock Read online

  In the course of just a few days, the house had become old, with frightening ghosts moving about inside it. We even became afraid to approach it. The cats, however, were not afraid, and they jumped up on the outer wall and then down inside. They wandered freely through the house. Umm Nizar’s house had become a home for ghosts and stray cats.

  During that summer holiday, Umm Nizar’s family was not the only one that left the neighbourhood. Umm Ali and Umm Salli emigrated too, followed by Umm Rita’s household. The scene of tears and farewells became normal. Each time, we would stand there saying goodbye to a friend who was moving away with her family. We did not have the slightest hope that we would see her again.

  ‘It’s death in another form,’ said my mother. ‘Someone in your life disappears, and you don’t have any hope of meeting them again. The way I see it, that means that each of you, from the point of view of the other, has died.’ My mother always made things more complicated. For her, everything was connected to death.

  Death is the long absence after which there is no hope of reunion. The deceased has gone to paradise, but for the one who emigrates from their country, hell follows close behind.

  At first, the mothers would sit in the doorways at the terrible hour of sadness whenever a family left their house to embark on that long journey. They would exchange stories about these neighbours who were leaving, from their first day in the street until the last moment when they got into the car. But then we became used to it.

  When we saw a family getting into the big black Chevrolet, the suitcases stacked on top made it clear they were emigrating. Everyone stood around to bid them farewell, and that was it. People quickly adapt themselves to sad things when they are repeated and become a natural, expected event. It is the things we do not expect that produce extreme sadness. Therefore, the sadness was most intense at the beginning, when the first families left. That does not mean we did not feel sad when we passed by abandoned houses and remembered the families who used to live there. Precisely the opposite. The sorrow then would be deeper and more painful, and there are even more tears than at the moment of departure itself. Not because we have lost people whom we love, but we are pained at the sight of their beautiful houses, which blur like dark forests in the smoke.

  It was in October, during our first year of secondary school. Many things in our lives had changed. There now had to be a proper distance between us and the boys we had grown up with. It was no longer appropriate for us to laugh audibly in the street or write on the walls. Nadia and I would pass by the houses of the neighbours who had emigrated, and when we saw the dry leaves of the trees in their gardens, we would feel pain. We would both wish to turn into large clouds to drop a clean rain that would wash the dust off those leaves.

  Sometimes, a deep desire would impel me to go up to Umm Salli’s house and knock on the door. I knew they had not returned, but I liked knocking. It was the one thing I could do in order to remember them and feel like they had not disappeared from our lives. I would look into the garage alongside the house, and imagine footsteps in the hallway. I would hear their voices, frozen in the walls. I would feel joy, seeing their smiles stuck to the windows. I would see tyre tracks from their car imprinted on the pavement, and hear the rattle of the engine as it coughed out white exhaust and hummed to life.

  Once when I was little and my father was away from home, I stood on the stairs with blood flowing from my nose. My mother picked me up and hurried off with me to the government clinic in the next neighbourhood. Abu Salli came out of their house and saw her crying. He quickly went inside, started his car, and set off after us to take us to the doctor. How I wish at this moment that my nose might be hurt again! I want Abu Salli to carry me in his arms to the doctor. How I have longed for them! For Umm Salli, too, and for their daughters: Salli, Sandus, Sawsan, Sahir and Sulaf. I have longed for my nose to bleed again.

  Just like I have told you, I like it when people take care of me, even if it means my nose is hurt and pouring with blood.

  My tears fell at their gate, and we continued on our way in silence. In moments when I am sad, I do not like to talk to anyone. Nadia knows this and does not get upset with me.

  My silence did not last long. Mala’ika – or ‘the Devil’, as we used to call her in the shelter back in 1991 – appeared. Without any warning, she came up to us and said, ‘I’ve left school.’

  ‘Why?’ Nadia and I asked in shocked unison.

  ‘I’ve dropped out, and this is my last day. I’m going to burn my books and my notebooks in the bread oven. My mother got divorced yesterday. Father kicked her out of the house. My little sister and I will stay with him.’

  ‘Why don’t you and your sister go with your mum?’ Nadia asked her.

  ‘My mother is evil,’ she replied with a deep sigh. She started to cry.

  ‘Why would you say that about your mother?’

  ‘Because my poor father is a good man, and he does not know the truth about her.’ She continued to cry.

  Nadia and I stood there, astonished at what she was saying. The Devil looked at us, as though getting ready to say something she had planned out in her head: ‘I know the two of you have hated me since the first hour I saw you in the shelter. You are happy that my mother cheated on my father with a stranger. But I hate you too.’

  Then she walked away. She called back in a loud voice: ‘I’m the Devil, aren’t I? I hate everyone in the neighbourhood. All of you are devils!’

  8

  One winter day – I don’t remember exactly which month or year it happened, but most likely around the middle of secondary school – a thick fog spread over our neighbourhood in the morning after a night of intense rain. It was as though a clean shawl were blocking our vision. Tired houses and trees, unseen, were restored to health, and the sparrows moved through the fog like little dots of ink.

  Ahmad appeared and stopped his bicycle in front of us at the end of the street. When we came up to him after a few steps, he did not say good morning. He was embarrassed, and it looked like he had not slept. He approached Nadia and put in her hands a piece of paper that had been folded with care. He turned his bicycle around in the opposite direction and shot off, disappearing into the fog.

  Nadia was not expecting this surprise. Or maybe she was expecting it, and I did not know.

  She opened the paper and began smelling the cologne on it. She read it in a whisper to herself. Then she turned to me and said, ‘Ahmad is crazy!’

  ‘Why is he crazy?’

  ‘He says he has loved me since we were in primary school.’

  As the day went on, Nadia increasingly lost her sense of the world’s heaviness around us. She would get distracted and not pay attention to what I was saying, even when I was talking about something important.

  This was the first time that Nadia seemed to let our childhood disappear behind a thick wall of fog. She changed a lot that day. It was as though she were a different Nadia whom I did not know. I wanted to go inside her heart and experience love. But we are not able to use other people’s hearts in order to love.

  *

  Nadia read Ahmad’s letter several times as we walked along. She brought it close to her nose to smell it. More than once she made as though to tear it up, but each time she changed her mind at the last moment.

  At home, when we returned from school but before she changed her clothes or had lunch with her family, she stood in front of the tall mirror in her mother’s bedroom and secretly ran her hands over her body when no one was looking.

  Nadia went out to the garden by herself and sat in the delicious winter sunshine, smiling. A delicate breeze blew over her and rustled the leaves, shaking free a few drops of rain that had been clinging to them since the night before. Nadia got up and picked a red damask rose. She scattered its petals in the air, imagining Ahmad’s childlike face with his pale eyes, his pointed nose. She inhaled the cologne he had left on his letter, and her spirits soared. Her breast was filled with a gentle, ref
reshing air. She went inside and stood in front of the mirror a second time, still smiling.

  During this time, Nadia began to be afraid of her body. She was afraid of this early discovery of her femininity. She told herself that her eyebrows were beautiful – indeed, none more beautiful had ever graced this world. Her long eyelashes made the colour of her eyes a magical fairy tale. She confirmed that her cheeks were rosy, and her lips attractive. Nadia lifted a strand of hair from her forehead and then softly let it hang down again. She took a small step away from the mirror and pulled her shirt tight around her waist before quickly letting it go again, as though she had done something forbidden.

  That night, Nadia sat down to write a long letter to Ahmad. This was the first time she had written a letter. Even in English, when the teacher would ask the class to write a letter to a fictitious friend living in a foreign country, Nadia did not like doing so. Instead of letters, Nadia would choose to write about an imaginary journey to London.

  Nadia laid out Ahmad’s letter in front of her and began copying its phrases. She wrote, ‘I love you,’ but scribbled it out. She tried to remember song lyrics and lines from television shows, but she could not remember anything appropriate that matched what she wanted to say. Exactly what did she want to say? She wanted to tell him, ‘I love you,’ but not to say it directly. In the end, after she began to feel sleepy, she wrote: ‘I was delighted to receive your letter, and I liked how you scented it. Before I fell asleep, I thought of you, and when I wake up in the morning, I will think of you again. You have made me think about you.’ Then she drew a heart with an arrow and went to sleep.

  *

  In their first passing encounter the following day, Nadia threw the letter to Ahmad abruptly and then ran towards me, laughing brightly.

  She pulled me behind a newspaper stand so we could watch Ahmad from afar as he opened the letter and read it. She was gripping my hand and jumping with happiness as he put it in his bag. He took a few steps forward, and then he stopped and took the letter back out of his bag to read it a second time. Nadia pulled me along by the hand she was squeezing, and we ran off to school.

  In geography class, I glanced at her sitting beside me at our desk. She had hidden Ahmad’s letter between the pages of the book and was rereading it. She was engrossed, as though she had discovered a new world of words she had never known before.

  I glanced at her swiftly in order to confirm that she was still the same friend I loved. This was the first time another person had entered her life, and I was afraid love would steal her from me, that Ahmad would take my place in her heart and share her dreams with her.

  During break, I put my hand in hers, and we walked round the courtyard. She was busy looking off into space and paid no attention to me. This boy had taken possession of her spirit and was driving me far away from her. He had filled her thoughts entirely.

  Had Ahmad become everything in her life?

  ‘Nadia, I would die for you.’

  ‘And I’d die for you,’ she said with a certain coldness, or so I imagined it. I had not expected this reply from her, and I wished she had said something different, something like, ‘Why would you say such a thing?’

  She opened the letter, still tucked inside the book, and turned her back to me to read it, this time in a whisper. Nadia’s innermost thoughts were taking her off by herself, and she was now establishing a private world, far away from me. Her heart throbbed to its own rhythm, and her lungs were breathing air that was not the same air we used to breathe together.

  When love proposes its secret history, it begins to guard a sense of uncertainty. It uproots a person from himself, from his family, from his friends, from everything around him, and it holds him in a state of anxiety. Perhaps my existence beside her had faded. She had fallen out of step with me. One moment she was racing ahead, and another she was behind me. And as our stride fell out of harmony, we began to stumble frequently on our path. It was as though that famous song about love was written just for her:

  Confused, eyes now awake to passion

  Your pupils blear staying up all night

  Plunge down the path ahead

  The first step now clear: let’s find what comes next!

  That year at the beginning of spring, when we went outside at the end of the school day, the downpour we had heard pounding against the windowpanes a short time before had increased. Ahmad was waiting for us at the end of the wall, wearing jeans and a white shirt, with a short leather jacket over the top. Like a passionate hero in the love stories we saw on television, he approached Nadia to hand her a black umbrella before disappearing into the crowd.

  ‘Ahmad is afraid for me – even of the rain!’

  In her happiness, she forgot to open the umbrella. She lifted it up, still folded, and waved it in the air, as though telling the rain, ‘I love you!’

  Nadia actually did love the rain, and she was happy whenever she looked in the sky and saw clouds gathering above her. She anticipated rain before a downpour, and on many sunny days, she told me, ‘It’s going to rain tomorrow.’ And indeed, the clouds in the sky above our school would burst with rain on the following day. It went beyond that. She had a strange affinity with the natural world and its cycles. She watched birds in the sky and knew the times of their migrations; she knew when the seagulls would disappear. ‘They are playing over the surface of the river,’ she would say. She knew the mating season of the sparrows, and she determined the precise dates on which the flowers would open in the gardens. She spent a lot of time following the lives of insects on the leaves of trees, and when the middle of March arrived, she would say, ‘The butterflies are coming,’ and so it would be.

  She said goodbye to me at the door of her house, and I continued on my way. A few moments later, I heard her footsteps as she panted to catch up. I turned around, and in a voice distorted by a foolish smile, she asked, ‘Where do I put the umbrella?’

  ‘Give it to me.’ I took it from her and went inside.

  If any of you wants to know why I took the umbrella, the matter is very simple and does not require much thought. Nadia would not have had any reply if her mother had asked her, ‘Where did you get this umbrella?’, whereas I could tell my mother in such a case, ‘I got it from Nadia.’

  9

  As I told you before, we never forgot Baji Nadira. But one day the rain fell and washed her off the wall where we had drawn her sitting beside Uncle Shawkat on a sofa, with a sparrow flying above them. When I passed by this wall, I cried a lot. I cried because I saw Uncle Shawkat sitting by himself while a sparrow, trapped in chalk, flapped its wings above his head. I did not feel pain on account of Baji herself. I felt pain for something else, maybe loneliness.

  After Baji Nadira disappeared from his life, Uncle Shawkat did not forget her. Maybe he did not try to. Maybe he had not even considered it. But he did learn to live alone without minding much because he had had grown used to it.

  ‘He’s afraid of dying alone,’ said my mother as she spoke about him to my father. She went on, ‘It’s hard for a person to die alone, like a stranger.’

  My father was silent as he reflected, not wanting to continue the conversation with her. My mother always makes things more complicated, for in her mind, as I’ve said, everything is connected to death.

  Believe me, I did not understand that. I do not understand why it is hard for a person to die alone. On the contrary, the way I see it, it is hard for a person to live alone because when they die, a person does not need friends.

  Every Friday, Uncle Shawkat would get up late. Sometimes he would wake at nine in the morning, and sometimes it would be eleven. Ever since the rain had washed away the picture of his wife that we had drawn on his house, he had been alone. He ate his breakfast alone. He stretched out on the sofa and watched television alone. After a few minutes he would turn it off again, and he was still alone. He did not like to watch the programmes that Baji used to like. His life had changed since she left. He no longer looke
d at the photo of them under the Geli Ali Beg waterfall, hanging on the wall of the living room, even when he dusted it. The last time he had looked at this picture, he found he was alone.

  Uncle Shawkat began sitting alone at the bottom of the stairs in his house to shine his shoes. Then he would get up to gather his clothes from the clothes line and iron them. He would arrange them in his dresser after choosing his clothes for the following workday. Among his clothes was a pink shawl that had belonged to Baji Nadira, which he found in the wash after she had left. Every time he washed his clothes, he put this shawl in with them. He would spread it out on the clothes line with his other things. Then he would iron it and set about putting it carefully away before putting it back in the wash.

  After he had done all of that, he would go out to inspect the back garden. He would feed the nightingale and the two partridges. He had noticed in recent days that the nightingale was singing less, and the partridges had become skinny. He began talking to them as he fed them. Then he pretended to ignore them, feeling a painful lump in his chest. He could not do anything for these birds. He knew in the depths of his heart that they were longing for Baji Nadira.

  Uncle Shawkat left his lunch on the stove and went out to the street to inspect a neighbour’s house that had been abandoned by its family. Ever since the families had left, he had assigned himself the responsibility of preserving these houses, something he never grew tired of. He would go inside, and in that air he would inhale all the years he had breathed with his neighbours, whom he loved and who had become his extended family. Indeed, the neighbours’ houses were the storehouse of his memories. When he took care of these houses, he wanted to tell each family member who had lived under its roof, ‘I love you. I miss you.’ He missed the grown-ups and the children in equal measure.

  With one hand, he would push in front of him a lawnmower with its annoying rattle. In his other hand he carried a toolbox.