Najem Wali
TRANS. BY Peter Theroux
Three Pillars of Wisdom
The truth is that I was born in Basra, but I grew up in another city, al-Amarah, which here I will call Amaria, because the city I am talking about no longer exists. It is one of those cities that live within the confines of memory, which keeps re-establishing itself with the passage of the years. While Basra taught me longing and nostalgia, Amaria gave me the light of wisdom, the beacon that lit the way to where I am today, as I wander the world like a sailor looking for landfall. Amaria resembles many border cities of the world in its growth and development, and because it sits on the southeastern border of the country, it has been a major center for trade, to which merchants have been encouraged to immigrate, merchants of all communities, religions, and sects. They came with their families from all over the country and settled here because of the easy profits.
The city today looks like an oasis whose waters have dried up; it has been desertified, after having been, until the last four or five decades, virtually a spa for taking the cure; Amaria, whose people once called it the Paris of Iraq, due not to its location and the fertility of it soil, the purity of its air, beauty of its architecture, and density of its parks, gardens, and uniquely tall palaces; nor due to the exotic, elongated market of the past, in which at the time the taverns stood all in a row together; nor for its many rivers with their sweet, potable water—no, not just for any one of these reasons, but for one preeminent reason, and this is confirmed by the few old men who remain alive there: the diversity of its people. This is what made it a Paris to them, the only international center they knew. Wherever you turned, you saw different faces and heard different languages. You saw every imaginable sect, community, and religion: there were Sabeans and Mandeans, Jews, Muslims of all sects, Christians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Assyrians and Tel-Kiffians, Arabs and Kurds, Turkmen and Feyli Kurds. And there were even Englishmen, dead, lying beside the Gurkhas, Afghans, Indians, and Australian aborigines, all of whom fell in wars for the British Crown there. I have often asked myself, had I not been born there, would I have written the stories I have written thus far? Whenever I think about that, I find myself in the early years, the years that shaped my consciousness.
The story, as my father tells it, is that I was five years old when I drank nearly a quarter liter of kerosene, the fuel that people there bought for housewives to use in their little Primus stoves. I drank enough kerosene to kill a dinosaur. My father said, “You and your friend wanted to imitate the grown-ups you saw passing by every day through the entrance of the garden near the English cemetery.” It was in that cemetery, which is actually two cemeteries, that my grandfather started working as a gardener in June, 1914, when the English entered the city and were driven out of the southern part of the country by the Turkish army. The two cemeteries were located in the Beit Jani Garden, facing each other, the first for the well-kept graves of the English soldiers, and the second, the poor Indian cemetery for the burial of the Gurkhas, the Afghan, Indian, and Australian aborigine soldiers. From the square that lay between the domes of the two gates there was the daily movement of men of diverse sects usually carrying with them flasks of arak in buckets of ice and water; bars had not yet become common. They were on their way to the Haj Mahmoud Garden, opposite the cemetery, which ran down to the Tigris River, to sit in the field with their vegetable appetizers the peasants grew, especially lettuce. My father did not explain to me how it got into my head to drink kerosene instead of arak, lethal in its own way, but when he told the story he gazed at me as if reassuring himself that I really was alive. A half-liter of kerosene is enough to kill a bull, and my father knew that even before he heard that from the doctor he took me to, Dr. Daoud Gabbay.
I still remember him. He was tall, with a light brown complexion and close-cropped hair, wearing a navy blue suit. When he gazed at you, you wondered if he was walleyed; true, he spoke directly to you, but his eyes deviated, looking far away, so that you thought he was talking to someone else. You did not know it was you he was thinking of; this was his way of concentrating on what you said to him. His voice was soft and tender.
I may have forgotten thousands of sentences in my life, but I never forgot the sentence Dr. Gabbay uttered then, which still rings in my ears; I hear it in the corridors of memory as I write these words. “He’s in no danger now,” he told my father. “Anyone who could drink that quantity of kerosene and stay alive is going to have a long life.” Then he recited a verse of poetry by the Iraqi poet Jawahiri: “He remains, and the life of tyrants is short.”
I remember how he leaned over me as I lay on the soft leather examining table. He pinched me on the cheek, and because I was wearing a sailor suit, he added, “Right, little land sailor?”
Dr. Gabbay was the most famous doctor in the city. He came here with his father, who was also a doctor. At the time of his secondary school exams he came to the English cemetery with another group of students my grandfather allowed to study their lessons in the garden of the cemetery. Officially, Dr. Gabbay was a pediatrician, but for the people he was a general practitioner, an angel sent to our city to cure everyone of their ills, not only children. When someone fell ill, there was no other doctor but him, whether it was a woman who had given birth, or a sick old man. Daoud Gabbay was a doctor who specialized in everything; his clinic, the neighborhood known as the Torah Quarter or al-Sabunjiyah (because the city’s first soap factory was there; the owner was Jewish, of course) was always crowded with villagers. They visited him until late at night. I remember how some of the terrorists of that time (who still grow like fungi even today) attacked him in his clinic in 1962, smashed his table and broke his instruments and shouted at him to leave his city at once. It was said that the leader, Abd al-Karim Qasim, heard this story at the time and told the police chief in Amaria to protect his friend, with whom he had attended the Central Preparatory School in Baghdad.
I remember how my father asked him how he could bear so much degradation; was he, too, thinking of leaving? Gabbay gazed at my father, smiled, and said, “I’m a doctor before I’m a Jew. How do you expect me to leave my patients?” He did not know at the time that there was another disease, one whose virus of hatred sunk its claws into people, which medicine was powerless to cure. “Medicine can only postpone death from this virus”—that is what I learned from Dr. Gabbay’s experience. I still remember the sorrow that overwhelmed me when this disease of hatred succeeded in driving Dr. Gabbay away. First he went to the capital, Baghdad, and opened a clinic in the al-Batawin neighborhood, but my father and grandparents were not alone in refusing to change their doctor. Whenever they were sick, they traveled 360 kilometers, a long, two-day journey in those days, to visit Dr. Daoud Gabbay’s clinic.
Of course, I never forgot Dr. Gabbay, but another person emerged back in those days to whom I paid much attention—Asala. Asala the Jew, Asala—“honey drop”—Asala, the beautiful, tall woman, also with a light brown complexion, always wearing black, it was said, for a family that had either died or fled, I do not know. These stories were mysterious to me at the time. Asala, with her honey-hued eyes and thick lips; tall, solid—athletic is what we would say today. Asala showed up every day with four or five lengths of various-colored and styled fabrics rolled up under her cloak, but the most renowned and beautiful, in which she strolled through the alleys of Amaria, where her clients awaited her, not only newly married women like my mother for example, but all those women who dreamed of buying fabrics that the vendors in the market did not show, fabrics they were proud to buy, special, unique fabrics, selected by Asala with her incomparable taste.
So where did Asala find these unique fabrics, the rare silks and velvets?
“That’s a secret only she knows,” my mother told me when I once asked her about it. But what did she mean by secret? She laughed and answered me as if teaching me the first lesson in what constituted beauty. “To know that, you have to feel the fabric with your hand.” Now I rub my fingers together; there is no cloth, and I do it while writing these words (it is not easy for anyone who never touched Asala’s fabrics; try to imagine it). Now I do not only see the texture of the fabric Asala sold, I see the beautiful young women pressing around her, feeling the fabric with their fingers, astonished—what enchanting beauty! Close your eyes and imagine, with me, what is left of the beautiful images of your childhood days; only in this way will you understand what I mean.
In January 2004 I went to visit Asala in her same old house; I visited this sole woman who had insisted on remaining single. She said she never felt alone. The colored fabrics that filled her home were her life. How old was she now? Eighty? Ninety? I did not ask her age. Only an idiot would ask a mwoman of her beauty about her age. Asala was lying on the bed deep in theroom. I tiptoed over to her without saying a word, thinking she was sleeping. I did not know that she had gone blind until I sat by her side and felt her fingers stroking my head.
“So, you’ve come back, after all these years,” she said.
I asked her how she had recognized me.
“Don’t you smell, with me, the old smell of your sweat? The fever that had you bedridden twenty-four years ago?”
So Asala had not forgotten those days, when she soaked pieces of colored cloth and lay them on my burning forehead as she said in a soft voice, almost a whisper, “You’ll grow up, and you’ll tell about what happened, won’t you?”
Those black days, those days I refer to as the virus of hatred, its claws sunk into the country, which Dr. Gabbay dreamed of eradicating, came in the winter of 1970. But about one year before I lay there with my fever, there came to our school a new English teacher named Abd al-Ilah. I remember how from the first day of school how cheerfully he came into the class. He was tall and massive, and when he laughed his whole belly shook and his forehead ran with sweat and his pores gave off a disgusting smell. Before we got used to him and his strange smell, he told us that he would give any of us ten bonus points in English for the execution of every Jewish “spy.” “And whoever brings the good news first will earn ten more.”
In those days, in the winter of 1969, on the twenty-sixth of January to be exact, Radio Baghdad began to broadcast excerpts from the show trials organized by the Baath against more than thirty citizens accused of spying for Israel. On January 27, the radio emitted the thundering voice of the chief of the special military tribunal, Ali Hadi, announcing that “the traitors have been convicted of the charges against them. Fourteen of them have been executed.”
For this purpose, eleven gallows had been set up in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, along with three others in Umm al-Barum Square in Basra. On February 8, 1969, on the sixth anniversary of first Baathist coup in Iraq’s modern history, then-Iraqi dictator Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr (or Ahsan Hamad al-Bakr, as some of us wits called him), described the angry global reactions against the executions of the Jews as “dogs’ barking on all sides with the aim of combating the revolution; but they will never deter it.”
The trial of yet another number of suspects concluded on March 19, 1969, announced only after the sentence of execution was carried out. This time they were all Shiite citizens, with no Jews among them, though three of Jewish descent were executed later on, two of them following a trial that ended on August 18, 1969, and one of them following a trial that ended on January 21, 1970. The latter was a Jew, who would enter history as the last Jew executed in the country (which is another story I will tell in another place). At the time, I thought, what do English class and the ten points have to do with the show trials broadcast on radio and television? It seemed strange to me. If you knew that most of the pupils suffered from English homework syndrome, and that some of them sat in the same class for two years because they had failed, and that they had a year to go in order not to be expelled from the school and drafted by the army, then you might imagine the shouts of joy from some of the pupils. We were in the second year of middle school (eighth form by my grandfather’s measure, who figured my school years by the English system), and the teacher who originated in the far suburbs of Amaria, from al-Qurna, where the Tigris met the Euphrates, where grew a huge tree of which it was said Adam ate the apple Eve offered him, Abd al-Ilah, was the only teacher in the city whose genius produced this suggestion. I did not know that he was a member of the local committee of the Communist Party until two years after this incident, when the Communists entered into a partisan alliance with the ruling party that they named “The National and Patriotic Progressive Front.”
The irony is that they occupied the former clinic and home of Dr. Gabbay as their party headquarters. I made no secret of my rejection of his plan. I said openly that I did not want the ten points; if he wanted, I would write for him instead something about the last Jew executed by himself, in English, for composition class. I remember how he stared angrily at me as he ground his teeth.
“Are you trying to be funny? Better put off writing the story of the last Jew, because there are definitely other Jews who’ll be executed, and I’m sure you’ll be one of them!” Then, to be funny, he asked me whether I had any Jewish blood in my veins. He depressed me, him and the other pupils who promptly piped up, “His grandfather buried the English with his own hands, and put the cross on their graves, that’s why!”
Abd al-Ilah stared at me angrily and told me to be quiet in the future.
“Or else . . .” he threatened.
When the execution festivities recurred, the teacher repeated his offer. One day, I stood up in class without his permission and suggested that he do the opposite with me—to subtract ten points from me for the execution of every suspect. He stared at me and said, “If you weren’t young, and your grandfather weren’t well known in town, I’d do my best to see you died on the gallows like those traitors. I think you know the end that awaits every spy. But you’re a foolish pupil.”
The corpses of the hanged remained suspended on the gallows in Tahrir Square in Baghdad for three days, and in Umm al-Barum Square in Basra. We saw innumerable families taking their children on picnics, eating and drinking, listing to Umm Kalthoum songs under the gallows. It was a surreal sight (with apologies to the surrealists). It was hard for someone like me to grasp. The sight made me sick, and for forty days I could not leave my bed, as Asala told me on my last visit to her, thirty years after we had last met. The fever ravaged my body for forty days. Every night I had the same nightmare that did not leave me: as soon as I thought I closed my eyes, a strange man visited me, led me to the noose, and led me to the platform of the gallows. Before pulling the hood over my head, he held my head—frozen of all movement—to force me to look forward. I saw them all, all those families that went there, led by the fat English teacher, Abd al-Ilah. I saw them mocking me, loudly singing the anthem of the tough guys and the Baath, “The spear heads shine, they sparkle above the hills,” all the way to the final lyrics that glorify murder and racism. I had the same nightmare dozens of times every day. And Asala? She told my mother, “I brought some pieces of cloth to soak.” She soaked them and laid them on my forehead, delicate clothes, soft to the touch—I can still feel them on my forehead.
“Who’ll tell these stories but you?”
Asala repeated this question in our last meeting, making me remember the three pillars of wisdom my life was founded upon; so what was my mission now?
Dr. Daoud Gabbay, the physician who dreamed of healing his patients—it was he who restored me to life. Asala, the itinerant fabric vendor, Asala who banished the fever from me; they gave me the first and second lessons every artist must learn, to sense beauty. As to the dead, the dead hanging in their nooses for days and nights, the dead who still knock on our doors, these dead taught me the third lesson every artist must learn: learning the meaning of being different, not only not saying yes easily, but on the contrary, actually rebelling.
Najem Wali is the author of six novels and three story collections. His work has been widely translated, and his honors include the Bruno Kreisky award for political writing for his novel Baghdad . . . Marlboro: A Novel for Bradley Manning. Born in al-Amara, Iraq, Wali is currently based in Berlin, where he works as a freelance journalist and cultural correspondent for the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat. His most recent novel is Sara’s Sin.
Peter Theroux is the author of Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia, and the translator of a dozen books from Arabic, including Elias Khoury’s Yalo, Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley, and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt trilogy—the first Saudi novel published in English. His honors include the Arabic Translation Award from Columbia University’s Translation Center.