[Title here] Read online

  *

  I often think about this Neanderthal Islamist advance. In countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, it will no doubt turn into a Camusian plague. The men with beards, probably dyed and perfumed with ‘Crusader’ products, shamelessly raise the old inauspicious slogan of ‘Either everything or nothing’. They banish from their hearts and minds options such as preserving margins for innocuous intellectuals or ethnic minorities or making truces with other human beings. No way, because such things are heresy and that deserves nothing less than stoning. And now let some mercy descend from some heaven on the soul of Nuri al-Said,1 whose only distinction was that the Musayyah factory was distilling arak specially for him at that time! This English puppet didn’t steal a single dinar from state coffers, and there is a well-known story about him and the real estate bank that initially refused to grant him a loan. Yes, we live in strange times, with all kinds of bad currency in circulation and with reptiles that have ended up massive because they are in fact dinosaurs, though no one there cares that dinosaurs are extinct.

  Doctor DJ

  This will be my first visit to Berlin. I search the internet for any recent German novels translated into Arabic. There isn’t much. All I have at home is Günter Grass, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll and Nietzsche. In the end, I take Rilke, the Austrian, with me to the airport to read above the clouds:

  And if you began your life

  as if you were going to conquer it in hours,

  in the smallest things you will find a master,

  whom deep inside you can never satisfy.

  It would be ironic and naïve for you to speak about strangeness in a country where everything that happens is stranger than fiction. What’s strange about me being a woman and a DJ? Or do you find it strange that I’ve given up the practice of medicine and devoted myself to techno music? What I find strange are things like depression and boredom and the brutality of mankind. I’m not very interested in things like what they call me back home – the country’s first woman DJ. What does that mean? That’s nothing to be proud of, nothing special. What I know is that techno is my only remaining refuge against the panic attacks that make the simplest things impossible. Enough of these superficial, journalistic questions and listen to me! It will be the first and last time I speak in detail about what happened. I don’t have the ambition or dreams of an artist. All I want is to have the beat of the music fill my head 24 hours a day and not to wake up, not to come back and rediscover the sounds of what they call reality.

  I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to annoy you with stupid questions. Maybe you misunderstood me. I apologise again. Let’s talk about the hospital.

  A year after the disaster, I got a job in the hospital as an intern. I only managed to work there three months. The emergency wards were full of wounded people from the battles between the army and the Islamist groups. If it hadn’t been for my family and friends, I wouldn’t have been able to last all that time. They tried to keep my morale up by saying things like ‘Stay strong, Hadeel, and keep going with your life.’ I didn’t understand how you are supposed to carry on after your peace of mind had been stripped away, the way skin is stripped away by fire.

  I couldn’t maintain my compassion for the patients when I heard their moans and groans and their repeated complaints. All the sounds around me in the hospital turned into red hot nails that hammered into my skull and fried my brain. I started leaving my headphones on, listening to techno music and stealing the anaesthetics. The patients grumbled about the state I was in and my colleagues complained. The hospital director reprimanded me and threatened to fire me. At the time I was searching haphazardly for all kinds of techno music. While working at the hospital I listened to Berlin Calling, Carl Cox, Ben Klock, Charlotte de Witte and others.

  I gave up working in the hospital and hid myself away in my old room in my parents’ house. My father supported my wish for privacy and gave me protection from the intrusions and curiosity of others. When I first started listening to techno, I had painful, frightening ideas spinning around me in the air. I had to get rid of them. The angry volcanoes of music helped me to disperse them. But as soon as I started composing music myself I realised that I needed every image, every detail, every sound and smell I could remember. It wasn’t just my memories about the day of the disaster. I also dug up images from my childhood, my dreams and other parts of my life. I started composing music for whatever came up in my mind’s eye. I decided to run away from the hell of other people into the cave of techno, where I could scratch pictures of my life on its walls and dance freely by myself... so I made up my mind to leave for Berlin.

  Are you okay? I can stop recording.

  She doesn’t reply. She waves at the waitress. The charged atmosphere doesn’t stop me stealing a glance at the waitress’s amazing arse. The doctor orders another beer, and I do the same. She continues speaking as she looks anxiously at an alcoholic man stretched out on the pavement in front of us.

  I was sitting in the living room, reading a haematology textbook. The heat was stifling. I drank lots of water. The temperature had risen to 50 degrees and the electricity had been off since Daesh took over the neighbourhood a week earlier. We didn’t know exactly what had happened. They suddenly invaded the district, the local police disappeared and the Daesh people imposed a curfew. We followed the news on the radio. They occupied the whole eastern part of the city, and the army was preparing to launch a counter-attack. Would the government bomb us with planes and artillery? If the situation went on like this for another week, we were bound to starve to death. We’d eaten nothing but rice for three days. What worried me most was Muhannad. He sat in his room on the second floor and didn’t stop looking through the window at a dead body in the street. Three days earlier the Daesh people had brought a young man and executed him by firing squad in the middle of the lane, then cut off his head. They took the head with them and left the body to decompose under the burning rays of the sun. At the time, Muhannad and I had only been married for two months. I had never loved anyone as much as him before. He was warm and affectionate and he had a lively imagination. I had met him some years earlier at an art show in Baghdad. The exhibition was of works by a young sculptor who had abandoned his sculptures and departed this world. He died in a traffic accident on his way to visit his brother in jail. His brother had been a prisoner of the US army because he belonged to an Islamist resistance group.

  I argued with Muhannad repeatedly. Ever since they cut off the man’s head, he’d been fidgeting with his camera, saying, ‘All I want to do is go out into the lane and take a few pictures of the body. I only need ten minutes.’ I couldn’t believe what he was saying. He tried to explain his motives for taking such pictures. I wasn’t convinced by his idealistic nonsense. ‘Those ten minutes could cost you your head,’ I said. ‘They could catch you and come and rape me. Do you understand or not? What are you talking about? Humanitarian motives indeed! And how many horrible, humanitarian moments do you have to photograph before we can learn from this nightmare? It would be suicide in the circumstances. Repeat what you said once again, please, so that I can try to understand you! You’re talking nonsense and you don’t know what you’re saying. Maybe you’ve finally lost it. What about me and you and our life together? Listen to me carefully and don’t be stupid. The government will be back in a few days. It will get the situation under control and put an end to this fucking nightmare.’

  He didn’t listen, he just repeated what he had said before: ‘Nobody’s going to notice me. I’ve been watching the street for days. There’s nothing! I mean, the shitty Daesh car may go past every other day or so. Don’t worry.’

  My anxiety prevented me from continuing to read the haematology book. I made him some tea and went upstairs to the second floor. ‘Come on, my love, tea with cardamom for my lovely Hanoudi.’ I pulled the curtain closed and kissed his sweet lips. ‘Please, love of my life, forget about the pictures and the body.’ We kissed long kisses, smelled each other and felt
dizzy, and then the lights came back on: ‘Yes!’ I shouted in celebration. The first thing we did was charge the iPhone batteries. Immediately dozens of text messages arrived from family and friends who wanted to make sure we were okay. I turned on the air conditioning unit in the bedroom and called Muhannad. We stripped off and had sex in the cool breeze of the air-con. At night the power went off again. I advised Muhannad not to listen to music on his phone so that the battery didn’t lose charge. He didn’t care. He put headphones on and started listening to the techno he was addicted to. This was back when I didn’t really enjoy techno that much. I preferred old Arabic songs full of sadness and romance. Muhannad had given up studying at the engineering faculty and devoted himself to his hobbies: modern dance, techno and photography. He was developing his passions at the complete expense of his studies. For our living expenses we were dependent on my father and Muhannad’s brother. Each of them gave us an allowance every month. My father’s a surgeon and Muhannad’s brother is a steel merchant. We were lucky. My family and Muhannad’s family got on well with each other and they showered us with love and kindness.

  The next morning, we were lying in bed and I was thinking about the Daesh people who had descended on us like devils out of the blue. I heard the gate outside opening. I jumped out of bed in a panic and ran to the room on the second floor. Through the window I saw Muhannad cautiously approaching the body. He took several pictures. I wanted to call him from the window but I was worried someone might hear me. Muhannad went up to the body and took a picture of the neck where the head had been cut off. Then he moved back for a wide-angle shot of the body and the lane together. Then he went back to the body, kneeled at its feet and started taking pictures of them. At that point Muhannad collapsed in a heap close to the young man’s body. For several minutes I was transfixed, watching the scene from the window. It was like something from a film about someone else’s life. Muhannad showed no sign of life. He had died! Or maybe he’d lost consciousness. It must have been a sniper bullet. The Daesh people would arrive at any moment. Would they cut off his head? Would they burn his body? I called my father. In shock, he begged me to stay inside the house. He said that the counter-terrorism unit was now massing its forces on the edges of the neighbourhood and they would attack at any moment. Sobbing, I said, ‘My phone's running out of charge and Muhannad might still be alive,’ and then I hung up.

  I tried to pluck up enough courage to go out and pull Muhannad into the house, but I was paralysed by fear. The Daesh people wouldn’t just leave his body there. They would come to find out who he was. They might search all the houses in the lane. Would the neighbours give away Muhannad’s identity? In a frenzy I started going around all the rooms in the house to hide any trace of him. I gathered all Muhannad’s photographs from the drawers and the walls, as well as his lenses and everything to do with photography. I went down to the bedroom, gathered any photos of the pair of us from the chest of drawers and from the walls. I filled a large cardboard box with the pictures. I went out into the back garden. With the spade, I dug a hole under the lemon tree and buried the box of memories. I sat looking at the spade, my mind spinning. I went upstairs to the second floor to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. I found Muhannad’s phone. The last thing he had listened to was Rødhåd. I put the headphones on and listened. I kept listening to the music as I looked out of the window where he lay motionless beside the decapitated body. The rhythm of the music made me feel both angry and indifferent. I listened until the sun went down. In the darkness I decided to bring Muhannad back into the house. I thought about making a stretcher so that I could pull him off the street easily. All I needed was a wooden board and four wheels. I set about dismantling the wardrobe to get the board I would use as the base for the stretcher. The side panel of the wardrobe was strong and would serve the purpose well. The problem was finding the wheels. I looked all over the house. A while ago we had bought an electric cooker that moved on four casters. It took me a long time and great effort but I managed to turn the heavy cooker over, undo the casters and attach them to the board.

  The sniper’s bullet had gone into Muhannad’s head from the left side. I put him on the stretcher and pulled. The wheels made a frightening noise on the tarmac. Half way across, one of the casters broke off and I couldn’t pull Muhannad’s body any further. I heard a child crying bitterly, and then I saw three kittens watching me from a windowsill. I was terrified and I started sweating when I saw Abu Bakr, our neighbour, opening the gate of their house and coming towards me. He helped me carry Muhannad into the house. We buried him in the garden close to the pictures, the lenses and all our memories. Abu Bakr invited me to stay in his house with his wife until the neighbourhood was finally relieved of this nightmare.

  Are you cross-eyed?

  Yes, pretty much, I’m slightly, partially cross-eyed in my right eye.

  Doctor DJ looks into my eyes for some moments, then leaves without saying a word. I check the recording on the iPhone to make sure it has all been captured. The waitress comes back to take away the empty bottles of beer. I try to strike up a conversation with her but my shyness holds me back. I’m not sure exactly how shy I am, really, deep down. My shyness might be like the ice cubes in a glass that melt with a little stirring and a little warmth. All I need is a little heat in my body and my tongue will loosen up and I’ll sing. In Children of the Days – A Calendar of Human History, Eduardo Galeano writes about the disease industry: ‘Healthy? Unhealthy? It all depends on your point of view. From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, bad health might be very good. Take shyness, for example. This character trait used to be acceptable, even attractive. That is until it became a disease. In the year 1980, the American Psychiatric Association decided that shyness was a psychological ailment and included it in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is periodically updated by the high priests of Science. Like all illnesses, shyness requires medication. Ever since the news broke, big pharma has made a fortune selling hope to patients plagued by this “social phobia”, “allergy to people”, “severe medical problem” ...’

  I order another beer. ‘It’s my first visit to Berlin,’ I tell the waitress. ‘I want to hear some techno. Do you know of any good nightclubs around here?’

  ‘You’re joking, obviously,’ replies the waitress and busies herself cleaning a table nearby. Then she turns to me and says scornfully, ‘You’re interviewing Doctor DJ and you don’t know where her gig is tonight? You’re very funny.’

  I go back to the hotel, have a shower and lie naked on the bed. I think about how stupid I was! But how could I know that the waitress would recognise Doctor DJ? I consider the possibility that the waitress will come to the Doctor’s gig that night. The possibilities turn into daydreams. I dress the waitress in slutty clothes drawn from my imagination and take her into the nightclub. I imagine going up to her with a glass in my hand and making fun of my stupid attempt to strike up a conversation with her earlier, and she laughs! We’re on the same wavelength. We pop a few pills, we dance to the techno rhythms of Doctor DJ’s love story. We go back to the hotel together and warm up those clean, cold white sheets with our naked bodies. Maybe the sheets later become a love cocoon. We get married, produce a beautiful daughter and call her Angela Merkel.

  I play a clip of Doctor DJ on YouTube, a clip called ‘A Look at Your Dead Body’, and I stroke my cock as I picture the waitress’s amazing arse on the ceiling of the room.

  I’ve gone back to Cioran, to translating 'Civilized Man: A Portrait' to be precise. I don’t think that any of us writers in Arabic probe the defects and paradoxes of this chance-based existence of ours as realistically and as revealingly as this Romanian does, steeped as he is in such unsacred water.

  I’ve translated John Ashbery’s ‘Finnish Rhapsody’. I had a long fight with it. This great poet really does do two things that I love: he doesn’t think of the reader during his labour pains and he comes close to Cioran in more than
one respect.

  *

  Dear Hassan,

  I gave up tobacco more than ten years ago, which means I’ve eliminated the habit and no longer miss it after my morning coffee! But new habits have started to dig their tracks into my daily routine. Of course, most of them are harmless habits, and some are even enjoyable, beneficial and amenable to more than one aspect of a fragmented being such as me (Pascal went for generalisation and likened man to a thinking reed that trembles in the wind). I sit a long time in front of the computer, which is now as loyal as a dog. I also feel grateful towards it, because it has become a silk ribbon that pulls me towards those I love. I don’t want this introduction to be sentimental. Long ago I fell victim to the advice of Albert Camus: We shouldn’t become too emotionally invested, merely report the reality of the situation. Writing to you is now a habit, like cigarettes for all those years, so much so that I feel obliged to share with you my daily writing schedule.

  All the best.

  Flies and YouTube

  Before going to the vegetable market to meet the juice seller, I visit the Ghazel market and walk around for more than an hour. The Ghazel, a well-known location in the middle of Baghdad, specialises in pets of all kinds, including snakes, aquarium fish and some rare breeds of bird, as well as animal feed. The market was built in the Ottoman era and at that time it specialised in trading in yarn, or ghazel. The market’s landmarks include the Mosque of the Caliphs and the Monastery of the Carmelite Fathers. After the American invasion of Iraq, the market was targeted in numerous acts of terrorism, but despite the security situation the market continued to open its doors as usual every Friday. The terrorist incidents included: two bombs planted in bags, which killed four people; mortar rounds that fell in the market, killing three people; a bomb planted in a birdcage that killed fifteen people; an attack by unknown gunmen in which thirteen people were killed; and a bomb that killed 46 people and injured 80 others.