Packaged Lives, page 4
And, why don’t you talk about Fawzi, yes, Abu al-Qurun, Comrade Fawzi, the father of horns, the pimp, please, don’t laugh, I gave him that nickname ages ago. What do you hear about him these days? He’s a big investor now. Let me ask you, it’s my turn to ask questions, where do you think he got the funds to start with? Donations made by the poor people to the party for hardworking laborers, the money I, and others, collected for the party year in and year out, for how many years now, how many? It went straight into the belly of the big brother, the biggest investor, the father of all commercial and cultural projects. He now owns a cultural center and a publishing house. He curries favors with writers and poets and sells even the stories of the people living lucklessly in exile. The worst is that he sells morality in our name and at our expense. Remember when Comrade Siham made a complaint, remember, let’s not talk about it, it’s better! You now know why I’m so edgy, why I feel angry all the time, like my body is poisoned from top to bottom? Look at it, look at my body! Do you need a second example? I’ll give you a third, a fourth, a tenth, any given number matching the few strands of hair on your head. I have evidence for every word I say. Do you need another example? Let me think, ha, yes, remember that big shot historian, the luminary of the scholarly community with one foot in the grave? It turned out that he was on the list of names who were receiving a salary from the KGB. And that famous artist, so very innovative, so creative, who taught everyone the meaning of magic? He now lives in great luxury in Paris. He was a small spy whose only ambition was to become a big spy. Spy for whom, you ask? Let me tell you, for anyone who would pay. Look, my dear, it’s not about who pays but about who pays more. You want me to shut up? Allahu Akbar! We’re in the blessed month of Ramadan and I’m fasting! I swear by God Almighty I will spend the rest of my life exposing their corruption, wherever I go, at every meeting and symposium, I will go and expose them. Why do I waste my time? No, no, this is not a waste of my time; it’s my duty, my investment, a huge investment in the future, so that others will not be deceived as I had been. Look here, look at me, living in a room not even good enough for dogs, while every one of them lives in a grand palace.
Do you know what they’re doing now besides their investments, commercial ventures, and espionage? Believe it or not, let me tell you, they have become democratic; they’re all for democracy, just like what the proverb says: “It’s the same donkey with a different saddle.” Not only that, they have all joined the Opposition too. Imagine. In a flicker of the eye, they took the rags of proletariat dictatorship off their bodies and put on them the silk robes of democracy. Of course, of course, it’s for the better. Without a doubt America is mightier now. America pays in dollars, and of course they all get their salaries in dollars, in hard currency. Democracy these days is the market with the highest return. It looks cleaner and more beautiful too, without the ogre of Communism, the scythe, the hammer, or the workers. Damn Communism, Marxism, and Socialism.
Only a few days ago they organized a conference under a new name. I met one of them, who argued with me so pompously you would think he’d been democratic all his life. His father was democratic, his mother was democratic, he went on and on, “why not, we’ll learn, the entire nation must learn, democracy is new to us and we must help people to understand it.” To no avail. “The chicken came back the same way it left.” We’re back to educating the people and nation and helping them, as if it wasn’t enough what they did to them. They abandoned Communist organizations, class struggle, and the rights of workers and farmers for democracy. As if it wasn’t enough! Before we knew it, it was our fault, the fault of those who served them for years, and the fault of the people and the nation. One of them got up on stage and proclaimed from the podium: “The history of our nation is full of cruelty and violence. We need years to be able to learn democracy.”
Son of a bitch, what is democracy and what is educating the nation? Who is qualified to educate the nation, you, or you, you who’ve never known the nation? If only America, America, if only . . . You still imagine you can deceive the nation?
You think if you organize a symposium or a conference in London with one of you cheering and another disparaging, we want democracy, the people are not ready, you think this will help you? I will never give up on my responsibility. I will expose them wherever they are, these sick people, even if it kills me.
March 1995
From Beyond Our Horizon (1997)
4
Duck
For Ibtisam al-Khalifa
“Why did you break up?”
He was tired. He had just finished a forty-eight-hour shift at the hospital. Still, he welcomed his friend Tony’s invitation to have a pint before heading home. As soon as he accepted, he began bracing himself for questions about his personal life and about the reasons he and Suad split up. He did feel he had to meet Tony. For one thing, he is their common friend, and for another they both owe him a great deal. Tony, who is a doctor himself, has chosen to work in a clinic in the neighborhood where he lives, to be close to his patients and away from the bureaucracy of hospital administration, “the kind of bureaucracy Suad navigates so well,” as he often said jokingly.
From Beyond Our Horizon (1997), 99–113.
This translation originally appeared as “The Duck That Broke the Mule’s Back,” Middle Eastern Literatures 21 (2–3): 244–50. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd., http://www.tandfonline.com.
Adnan took a big sip of beer and swallowed deeply. He stretched his legs to relax even more, and to shake off fatigue and tension. They were sitting at a small table near a window overlooking the hospital. Like an Iraqi policeman. When he takes a day off, he spends it at a café across the street from the police station.
“I called Suad a couple of days ago. I asked her why did you break up? She told me what she has been doing and thinking about. She didn’t talk about her work as she usually did, about her disagreements with the hospital administration, or about her daily conflicts with her specialist colleagues, strangely enough. Instead she talked at length about a schedule packed with gatherings and meetings. I said I must be mistaken, am I really talking to Suad? She laughed and said yes, political gatherings and meetings. I said with whom? She said humanitarian organizations, and organizations for the defense of the environment and protection of animals, and I recently took part in a conference on the defense of human rights. I said, these meetings, are they attended by Iraqis? She said of course, Tony, you may not believe it but I have changed so much.”
Adnan listened to Suad’s news calmly, with the relief of someone who has had a heavy weight lifted from his chest. He was looking across the street at the hospital, at the twelve-story building. He was seeing himself dragging his body across the corridors in exhaustion. Should he tell Tony about the last time he saw Suad? At a symposium on the defense of human rights, where he introduced her as “an Iraqi woman suffering from the pains of exile.” He gazed at Tony’s features, his pale skin and thin hair. He was exhausted like him, like all doctors, whose worlds are crowded with patients. “One thing this city does so well is that it metes out unending exhaustion on its citizens.”
“Why did you break up?”
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know, maybe because our personalities are so different,” he looked at Tony affectionately, “or maybe because she has truly changed while I stayed the same, or maybe it’s the duck,” he laughed out aloud, “the duck that broke the mule’s back.”
Suad
Until that moment she did not know very much about ducks. Ducks were birds of both the land and the water. They swam and walked on land. They were birds of the land and the air. They walked and flew. She had her own descriptions for ducks. She saw them in public gardens in London, and in Shatt al-Washwash Creek in Baghdad. She saw them as fat women wobbling down the street, hilariously shaking their large buttocks, the bobbing and quivering layers of fat inflating even more their puffed-up plumage. But the difference between London ducks and Shatt al-Washwash ducks is huge. London ducks command respect. Children and the elderly feed them with affection. They look lovingly at the ducks eating breadcrumbs they throw at them. Japanese tourists compete to take photos of them. Shatt al-Washwash ducks were on the other hand pitiful. They were dirty, just like the children gathering around them on the banks of the creek, and were afraid to leave the water because they knew what fate was waiting for them. A crowd of children ran after them, threw stones at them, and would try, if they caught them, to pluck out their feathers.
Suad never cared very much about the ducks, not those living in the Royal St. James Park, or those living in the putrid waters of Shatt al-Washwash Creek. Not until she saw a duck blackened by oil from the spill on the British TV screen.
Shatt al-Washwash
What distinguishes Shatt al-Washwash, a small town located to the west of Baghdad, is its creek. The city was at one point famous for fruit orchards and clover fields. That was before it was invaded by government projects for residential homes and shopping centers, and by the five-year plan to pave the only street in the city. In the summer, when the temperature rose above what the government had announced, an odor wafting from the creek would attack the nostrils of the citizens, sticking to their nose hair so unrelentingly that they could never get rid of it or even forget it. It was futile for women to close the doors and windows, or turn on the desk and ceiling fans, for the stink from the creek would form a thick fog that hovered above the city and engulfed the streets and houses.
The creek water was not exactly putrid, but it ran slowly, and people who lived on the two banks used it as their rubbish bin. Life existed side by side with death, living beings with castaways. Ducks, mallard, eels, predatory fish, frogs, worms, bristle worms, rotten leftover vegetables, rusty empty cans, slippers and shoes, bottles, broken glass, and even feminine napkins. Against all expectations, the creek, or the little stream as the citizens of the city called it when they despised it the most, never got landfilled as everyone demanded. On the contrary, it acquired a new role after the 14th of July Revolution, in the year 1958 to be precise, that scrapped the idea completely. The hateful creek became the natural checkpoint separating the original people of Shatt al-Washwash living on the right bank from the people of al-Sarayif living on the left. The transformation did not take place over night. Rather, it took a long time, relatively speaking, starting with the arrival of the Abu Kazim family, immigrating here from the city of al-‘Imara in the south of Iraq. They built their first mud house on the left bank, and from there they built an entire Sarayif shantytown, then a bridge connecting the two banks.
Suad
Why did we move to Shatt al-Washwash? I asked my mother about our old house but I can’t remember her answer. She said I didn’t listen. Suddenly we found ourselves in a new house where foul air filled our noses. I used to cover my nose with my hand or handkerchief, but I soon gave up the habit and the smell became a part of my life. How I hated Shatt al-Washwash. I can’t decide why. Was it because I saw disgusting barefoot children diving into the creek either to swim, or cross the creek, or chase after the ducks, only to come out and stink up the air even more? Or because my mother told me not to play with them? Or was it because they strutted before me when I wouldn’t play with them? Or because they grew rougher and more aggressive the more they failed to make me join them? Or was it because of the severed human leg I saw floating in the creek when I was standing on its bank? How old was I? Nine?
The policemen came and fished out of the green water one limb after another until they recovered the whole body except for the head. From that day I never went near the creek again. It became forbidden to children. “Suad, come home straight from school, don’t play in the street, it’s all dusty, dirty, and full of Sarayif kids.” Kids played on the dirt roads, while I sat at the threshold of our front door with a copy of Egyptian comics, Samir, in my hands. The oldest of the kids threw a stone at me. I looked at him, at his white dishdasha robe, at his bare feet, in total revulsion. He came near me and I put my hand on my nose to insult him even more. With a sudden move, he lifted his dishdasha and pointed at his member, then ran off with his gang. I ran away in horror, into the house, never to sit at the front door again.
When I was a teenager I kept my own company. I had no friends. I used to ask myself, I who always studied hard to be at the top of my class, “Do I have to spend the rest of my life here? Escaping from one book into another, walking in the streets of a city where I dare not look up so as to not see what I won’t like, living in a rotten, dusty city that got attacked by flies during the day and mosquitoes at night, with half of its inhabitants ill with trachoma and the other half with Bilharzia, tape worms, and tuberculosis?”
Adnan
I look at her now and see the woman I was meeting for the first time at my cousin’s wedding. She kept her distance from the party and looked on as if she was watching kids play. She got my attention right away. Tall, her fair skin untouched by Baghdad’s hot sun or air, and her hair cut short unlike other women I knew. She stood there, proud and aloof, as if she wanted to keep away from the others. I asked my sister about her, and she gave me a full report. “She is a pharmacist and her name is Suad. You might know her father, Hajji Hakim? Do you remember him? Her dream is to complete her studies abroad and live outside the country.” I had already secured a scholarship to study in London and said to my sister jokingly, “If she marries me, all her dreams will come true.”
I look at her and feel my love for her. It has not changed. I was a young doctor dreaming of changing the world, at least changing some things I couldn’t really put my finger on yet. Changing Suad seemed as if it would be easy. Her coldness toward my Iraqi friends and their families did not bother me. I said to myself her nature was different, she was busy with her studies, and I came up with excuses for her when a friend visited and she withdrew, very politely, from our living room. When she stopped writing letters and calling her family in Iraq I thought it was temporary and she would soon miss them and get back in touch. She would learn to see the homeland from afar and rediscover every bit of it lovingly and affectionately. Like all my dreams I have watched crumble, Suad did not change. She did extremely well in her studies and very quickly she became a specialist in a prestigious hospital. She came out of her isolation, learned how to drive and swim, joined an expensive sports club, and made new friends who called and asked for Sally when I answered the phone. She had her own friends outside my Iraqi circle, and she continued to withdraw into herself like a tightly wound rope whenever my friends visited. For her sake, or for the sake of avoiding her haughty looks and quarrels, I stopped inviting friends to our home. I met them at pubs or their houses, where I could relive the feeling of being at home I so missed, and relish the usual political discussions, not because, as some friends hinted, I was afraid she would be upset or angry, but because I loved her and believed in her right to choose her own friends and acquaintances and to have her own fun. We reached a reasonable agreement about my emotional attachment to Iraq and Iraqis and her disdain for them. We separated our married life and our professional concerns completely from my interest in politics. The most important thing was that we should accept each other for what we were. Until Suad saw the duck blackened by oil from the spill on British TV.
January 1991
There were lots of birds. One stood out with its long neck, heavy body, and two small wings. It looked like a duck, and they called it “Duck.” Duck was covered in oil spill. She lifted her head up weakly, teetered, and struggled even to breathe, her neck twisting under the weight of the shining, thick oil spill clasping her feathers. She looked like a bronze creature rising out of savagely burning alluvial mud. She was unforgettable. Duck was everywhere, in the living room, on the TV screen, in news broadcasts, political debates, and environmental programs. Even the elderly zoologists were called out of their retirement at a moment’s notice to talk about Duck’s crisis. The UN representative spoke of Duck tearfully. An English traveler spoke regretfully of his past visits to the Ahwar Marshes in southern Iraq, saying, “Ducks were very happy there.” Duck’s picture appeared on the front page of every newspaper, serious or light, in the Times, Independent, Guardian, Sun, and Daily Mirror. War is clean. War is safe. The dead appear as moving targets on computer screens at first only to explode on TV screens later. War has no victims worthy of mention except for Duck, with her beautiful, twisted neck and her sad eyes.
Adnan and Suad
She sat glued to the TV after work. She did not move for hours. She watched every news program, on BBC1 at six, channel 4 at seven, BBC1 again at nine, ITV at ten, and BBC2 at ten-thirty. From a distance, Adnan, sitting on one of the huge armchairs, watched her long and hard.
Between the nine o’clock news and ten-thirty news, she turned, looked at him as if she was seeing him for the first time, and said, “What do you know about ducks?” He said, half in earnest and half in jest, “They fly, swim, and lay eggs. Their down covers a layer of fat that in turn protects them from fluctuating temperatures. Last but not least, according to our English friends, their meat tastes delicious if you know how to cook it. And, the best place for duck is a small restaurant in Chinatown.”
She glared at him furiously and said a few nasty things as she usually did when she got angry. She turned her back on him and continued watching Duck’s news. When he walked across the room in front of her to pick up the phone a few minutes later, he saw her silently wiping tears away.
The room was charged with emotions. Hatred hung heavily in the air. Who hated whom? Unconsciously, he moved from the armchair to the couch, then got up from the couch and walked back and forth across the living room floor. She sat there, in front of the TV, totally withdrawn. He wanted to talk to her and to understand what really happened to her, to him and between them. He wanted her to explain her feelings, even if only her feelings toward Duck. She kept silent, refusing to look up, and if she did, it was only to throw reproachful looks his way. Why?
