To Adnan Mubarak
One of the tiger-droids has been tampered with. The public garden system has only just launched the model, and some nine-year-old boy has already hacked it, making it circle pointlessly in the air, above everyone’s heads. Visitors have begun gathering round, laughing at it, including me. We watch as a supervisor intervenes, along with a male and a female droid, and together they coax the thing back down to Earth. As the crowd disperses, the supervisor issues the boy’s mother with a fine. There’s nothing unusual about this kid’s hacking skills, of course: Babylon is now a paradise for digital technology developers, a playground for hackers, virus architects and software artists.
It’s still too early for the queen to arrive, so I watch the children having fun with the crocodiles in the water tank. There are other animals, originating from every continent, roaming freely among the visitors: tame, friendly beasts, from birds to insects, as well as smart-trees, developed to match the rhythm of this ‘Age of Peace and Dreams’—as our queen likes to call it. And our queen is right. I don’t understand the people who object to her policies. This virtual life, with so much affluence and creativity, really is the true rhythm of the age. It means there’s extraordinary harmony between our imaginations and our realities. It was the federal ruler of Mesopotamia who gave the director of the city the title ‘queen’. I think she deserves the title. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong, but she’s a strong woman and she’s left her mark on our city by building it on the principles of creative freedom. We have built peace and prosperity through imagination. That’s what the queen says, and today she’s going to open the Story-Games Centre, which recently recruited me. The queen took over the management of Babylon ten years ago. She divided the city into twenty-four giant domes. At first HK Corporation objected to this division, but the Chinese later did a U-turn, saying they hadn’t initially understood the queen’s plans. Of course, they only said this after the queen gave them the contract for managing the city’s water provisions. Maybe what I’m saying today about Babylon’s imagination policy doesn’t exactly apply to me, since these days I find it difficult to work. But for most citizens it’s perfect. My problem is I need to relax too much. And it’s like my imagination has run dry. I have to finish my first story-game this week, but I’m too laid-back. Creativity requires a certain exuberance. I have no ideas, no images; too often I feel bored and empty.
On the screen above the Gardens, I watch an advert for the new water trains that will soon come into service. These are fast trains that will supply the city with water from central and northern Europe. I feel an overwhelming desire to leave the Gardens and head for the abandoned Old City, but I’ve left my facemask at home. Our queen has now appeared on the screen, with the CEO of HK, and they are drinking glasses of water with the new train behind them—the pride of Iranian industry. Over recent years these water trains have become a key factor in the selection of city managers. City managers are appointed by the Governor General of Federal Mesopotamia, with the proviso that the international companies that manage the provinces endorse the choice. Things have gone well with the water trains. For several years, Babylon had faced the prospect of going thirsty. Then the Water Rebels had formed and started to agitate against the Chinese company. The Water Rebels are constantly on the move and are still active in both the abandoned city and in the new domes. The rebels still don’t like the way the water is being apportioned. HK Corp distributes the water from a central point and armoured, automated trucks are responsible for supplying every house with its quota of water. To some extent, I can see why the Water Rebels are angry; some people hardly seem to have enough e-credit to pay for their quota, while in rich areas you see special trucks filling swimming pools and fountains with the stuff. Several times the rebels have hacked into the trucks’ software and made them dispense water in the poor parts of town. What I don’t understand is why they reject any dialogue at all with our queen.
I’m hungry. I message the restaurant and they send me the nearest waiter-bot. I like this restaurant. They’ve designed their robot waiter to look like a cook and also like the first astronaut to set foot on the moon. He’s very funny. Everything you order comes out of his belly. I credit him on my phone for the sandwich and the orange juice and, as I eat, I reread a classical text by a writer who lived here at the beginning of the previous century. It’s quite a boring story about violence in the age of oil and religious extremism. I was disappointed when I was offered the job in the Archive Department. My dream was to work in the New Games, designing my own story lines. But they assigned me the task of converting the old stories by our city’s writers into smart-games. The manager said it was one of the most important departments. ‘You will have the chance to open the door for the new generation to discover the distant past of Babylon.’ Of course the manager is exaggerating, because who’s interested in that bloody past today? Most young people only follow the best-selling space story games. The garden is teeming with visitors. It’s obviously because the queen’s expected to visit. There are visitors from all over the world, although today most of them are Chinese. They and their families look very happy. Why not, since it was they who designed the new domes, and they who are running Babylon? Almost everything—the transport system, energy, the hospitals, and smart-schools. Not to mention the food and water business. No one can deny the ingenuity of the giant domes. Each district is a circular space like a giant sports ground, roofed over with a smart-glass dome that absorbs the sunlight, which is the main source of energy in Babylon. All the districts are linked by amazing underground trains. The Chinese have also given the inhabitants of Babylon the privilege of Chinese citizenship, so we Babylonians can go and live in China as if it’s our own country, and likewise for Chinese people wanting to live in Mesopotamia. I call up my dear Indian friend Sara. Her phone isn’t available. I can’t read anymore. The rhythm of the story makes me feel sleepy. I switch the story to listening mode in the hope that the reader’s voice will inspire me and give me an idea about how to design the story-game I have to produce.
* * *
The doorbell rings. I look out of the window. The morning sun floods the trees in the garden. The oranges shine like my mother’s golden earrings. How I miss her! I miss her kisses, her tears and the way she sighs at life’s ups and downs. I miss her earrings, the golden love hearts my father bought in Istanbul in the 1970s as a honeymoon present. That was when my father played the oud and my mother was a history teacher.
The doorbell rings again. A large flock of sparrows is pecking the grass in the garden. My father waves from beyond the garden wall. Frightened, the sparrows fly off to the neighbours’ garden.
‘Good morning, father. All well? Has something happened?’ I say as I undo the padlock on the door’s steel chain.
‘Nothing, son, nothing, I just wanted to see you.’ He shakes my hand and wipes the sweat from the end of his nose. He looks into my eyes and embraces me. He’s carrying a black bag, which he waves at me.
‘Mr Translator, I’ve brought you a present,’ he says.
‘A present in a black bag, Lord preserve us. What is it, father? Not a Kalashnikov, I hope.’
‘War won’t end as long as there are people, my boy, war after war. When was the world without wars anyway? My God, to hell with it,’ Father says as he comes in.
I get breakfast ready: tea, eggs and cheese.
My father lights a cigarette after swallowing one bite of egg. He picks up his teacup and looks around at the pictures hanging on the wall. He stops in front of a copy of a painting by Fayeq Hassan, Horses in a Desert.
‘What news of your English stories?’ he asks as he looks at the picture.
I take his present out of the black bag. It’s an explosives detection device that looks like a wand. He takes it from me and explains how it works, pretending the table is a car. My father’s worried I might be targeted by Islamist groups because of my new job. They might see translating American literature as treason and a form of cooperation with the occupier. In fact, the wand turns out to be just a plastic stick with the end connected to a mirror to check underneath cars. In recent years the killers have developed new ways of reaping people’s souls. They stick explosive devices under people’s cars. It doesn’t matter who the person targeted is. What matters is that the constant mayhem should serve their objectives. The explosive devices either kill you instantly or blow your legs off, in which case your neighbours, relatives and friends will say, ‘Well you should praise God and thank Him for ensuring you survived!’ Then you’d be a legless man who praises and thanks God. Violence sculpts you and in this case turns you into half a statue. Violence is the most brutal sculptor mankind has ever produced. A barbaric sculptor: no one wants to learn lessons from the works he has carved. I graduated from the Languages Faculty a year ago. I studied English. I was lucky to get a job in the foreign literature magazine. The magazine specialised in translating literature from various languages. While I was studying I translated one story by Hemingway and another by Margaret Atwood. I had them published on the culture page in Awraq magazine and my translations apparently caught the eye of the editor-in-chief. He contacted me when I was about to graduate and asked me to visit him at the magazine after I graduated. I had signed a contract with the foreign literature magazine within three weeks. The people at the magazine chose a Raymond Carver story for me. I hadn’t read anything by him, but I had come across the name Carver in a critical article about dirty realism and about Carver’s writer friend, Richard Ford.
My father poured himself another cup of tea and went out to the garden.
I watched him from the window. He sat at the table under the orange tree and stared at the table as if he were looking at himself in a mirror.
Every ten years my father changes into another person. It’s as if he dances faithfully to every new rhythm in our shitty country, turning with each new turn. My mother’s brother, who translated Freud’s books, used to call him ‘the chameleon’. For the past few years he’s kept repeating that it was the chameleon that killed his sister. My mother died suddenly of a heart attack. We were three boys and a girl. My mother disembarked from the ship of our life and we had to battle the stormy and unpredictable waves of life with my father. Before we were born, in the 1970s, my father was obsessed with communism and playing the oud. He used to hold communist parties just for his comrades and play them revolutionary songs. There was a well-known song at the time called ‘Lenin in Baghdad.’ At the beginning of the ’80s my father abandoned communism, volunteered in the army and became a sniper. He won several awards for bravery in war. As a sniper, he was skilled at making neat little holes in the skulls of Iranian soldiers. In the ’90s my father deserted, but was caught and spent his days in one military prison after another. He treated the prisons as mosques: he started to pray and grew religious. Instead of thinking about a world full of free and happy people, he started thinking about a divine roadmap that led to Heaven or Hell. When the dictator was overthrown at the beginning of the new millennium no one understood him any longer. He would descend into strange periods of seclusion. He would disappear for a week or more, then suddenly reappear. He wouldn’t let anyone ask why he had disappeared. He became introverted and depressed. After the U.S. forces left the archaeological site in Babylon, my father got a job as a guard in the antiquities department. Some time in his first days at work, he declared, ‘The American infidels have turned the site of the oldest civilisation in the world into a camp for stupid soldiers, occupying a country in the name of democracy.’
* * *
I take the lift to the tenth floor. At the door to the main dome the info-bot reminds me of the security procedures for going out into the abandoned city. I pay him and borrow a facemask. The door opens and then closes behind me. Dust blocks out the sun. Sandstorms are blowing all over the city. I turn on the mask’s vision screen and walk up to a dead fountain more than a hundred years old and sit on the rim. Three drunks are messing around on the street corner. Sara’s phone is still unavailable. She must be busy with the customers at the pleasure hotel. One of the drunks goes down on his knees theatrically while the other two imitate executing him. I think they’re making fun of the country’s murderous past—Daesh and the sectarianism that was fed by oil money. This abandoned city is now just a desiccated relic of a bloody past, a past that was steeped in religious fanaticism and dominated by classical capitalism. The violence only stopped after Babylon was engulfed by the effects of climate change and the oil wells had practically run dry. How puzzling and painful is the march of man! The rivers and fields dried up. The desert advanced and obliterated the city. At the time, the federal government was struggling to mobilise modern technology to stop people abandoning the city forever. The federal government took advantage of oil exports in the final years, started some big investment projects and opened up to the world. For many third world countries the decisive factors in shifting the balance were that clean energy matured and spread all over the world, people in the West rose up against the brutal and selfish capitalist system, and the idea of one destiny and one world without hypocrisy or selfishness gained strength. People started saying, ‘This is neither your country nor my country. It is our land,’ and this was not just a slogan. People agitated and started to take the initiative to change the world through intelligence, humanity, and real justice. In the middle of the century the name ‘Iraq’ was changed to ‘Federal Mesopotamia’. First the Germans built technically advanced districts in Babylon and other cities, which made it possible for the residents to live with the desert storms. The sandstorms had made life in the city miserable by making the air unbreathable. During the time of the German districts, generations developed that were skilled at digital technology, until the Chinese appeared on the scene and stunned the world with the domes concept, which is now seen as the ideal solution for cities that are subject to desertification and environmental degradation. After the Chinese domes were built Babylon’s ‘Magical Generation’ was born—a generation that now exports the cleverest software and the most extraordinary scientific discoveries to the world. Thanks to our queen, the domes have become the new gardens of Babylon. Each dome in Babylon has its own special character. One dome is known for its fascinating cybergardens, another for its digital arts centres, and a third for its space dreams, such as the ninth district, where they are now building the world’s tenth space lift. If it wasn’t for the Water Rebels, we would be living in complete peace. I understand why the rebels object to the water allocations but violence is an emotional and primitive solution in a situation that calls for self-control and reflection. I don’t know what solutions they are proposing. Blind rage is an inhuman weapon. It’s a form of selfishness and hollow pride. I’m reminded of our city’s classical writer, who was angry at how bloody and violent life was in the city at the turn of the century. Okay, why not? That might work as the intro to his story-game. Why can’t the story-game be inspired by how the writer ended up? He took refuge in Finland after Islamic State took over his city. In Finland he wrote four collections of stories and a play, then he disappeared until they found he had killed himself under a tree in the forests of northern Finland. The temperature was forty below zero, and when I looked for his date of birth, it turned out he was born in summer, in the month of July. Maybe he was born when the temperature was forty above zero. Maybe he was born in the sun and the fact that he died in the snow could be written into the start of the game. There could be two options for the player: a sun icon or a snow icon. If the player clicks on the sun icon the game begins at the birth of the writer and then we move on to his story, but if they choose the snow icon the player starts with his suicide under a tree with a pistol in his hand. Or the way into the game could be just two numbers: −40 or +40 and the story would have two tunnels and the player would choose. Shit, what a dumb idea! I’ll go for a little walk and maybe get these superficial ideas out of my head, and maybe inspiration will descend on me. It’s not my day! Near the old parliament, there’s a teacher wearing a facemask and a group of children who look like primitive animals in their masks. It’s clearly an educational tour of the past. Some Nigerian tourists go warily into the ruins of the parliament building, taking photographs. I taste a bitterness in my mouth. I go back to the dome and get aboard a driverless, automated taxi and go to the pleasure hotel where Sara works. Most tourists prefer taxis with local drivers they can chat with. In the pleasure hotel I take the lift to the fantasy floor. I submit a blood sample to the analysis-bot, and he opens the door. I pay twenty e-credits and another door opens into the hall where the really sexy women are. I choose a beautiful Turkish girl and have sex with her in the zero-gravity room. I go down to the cyber-sex floor where Sara works. As soon as she sees me she rushes to hug me.
‘What floor were you on?’ she asks with a smile.
I tell her about the Turkish girl and she slaps me on the ass. ‘You idiot!’ she says. ‘On the romance floor there’s a new girl from Basra that would make your head spin if you saw her.’
I hug her again and whisper close to her lips: ‘I’ve missed the way you think.’
She pushes me away gently and taps me on the head with her fist. ‘Let’s leave now, you story prick. What’s up with you? Are you okay?’
I tell her in brief about my problem making a story-game out of the text by that writer who killed himself. She pulls me by the hand and says cheerfully, ‘Let’s go to the Selfish Gene bar, it’s a vintage bar and it might do your classical text some good.’
In the bar, Sara orders a beer from the alcohol machine and I have a new arak they started making two months ago. We take a seat in the corner. From the screen on the table, Sara chooses the privacy option. A glass cocoon surrounds us. From the screen I choose a new Swedish song that Sara likes. I ask her how her mother is in India. ‘My mother’s resigned from the Mars project,’ she says. ‘She’s taken issue with the recent constitution written by the One World committee. She objects to the part that says that every citizen in space must undertake never to rebel against Martian government through violence. You know the debate—it’s been raging for more than seventy years. A simple argument: if a violent rebellion took place and any parts of the settlement were damaged, it could mean all the settlers die. Life is still fragile there and it can’t tolerate any violence. My mother objects and says it lays the basis for a space dictatorship. Anyway, you tell me now, what’s your story problem?’
I don’t like the taste of the new arak. Sara fetches me another drink made in South Africa that I haven’t drunk before. It tastes sharp and pleasant. I look into Sara’s big eyes and say, ‘My dear friend, quite simply, I’m a short-story artist and I want to write my own story-games and novel-games. I don’t get any joy from turning classical literature into smart games. Quite honestly, their stories don’t excite me very much. Besides, there’s nothing new in the story of the writer who killed himself. I think it’s one of his weakest stories. It was the last story he wrote and then he committed suicide.’ Sara suggests I take the Games Centre by surprise by turning an almost dead classical story into an original, advanced story. Then they will trust me and give me a chance to move to the department that composes new story-games. Sara takes from her pocket a small metal box and puts it on the table. She opens the box, which looks empty. ‘Here’s the key. With this you’ll finish the story within a day!’ she says.
‘No, please Sara. You know I don’t like psychedelic insects. Maybe smoking something natural, okay. But I don’t approve of electronic parasites.’
‘Life is short. You have to try an insect at least once,’ Sara replies. ‘Believe me, it’s one of a kind. It was developed in Brazil and now it’s colonising the whole world. You can’t take it by youself. You have to take it with a partner you trust and who trusts you, so that they can keep the thing under control. It’s your partner who decides when your trip ends. Don’t worry and don’t be so serious. You trust me, right?’ Sara uses her phone as a magnifying glass and looks into the box. She wets the tip of her finger and puts it in the box, and the microscopic insect sticks to it. She puts her finger into my hair and sets the insect free. ‘Calm down, it’s not working yet,’ she says. ‘The insect needs to find the right place on your scalp first, you numbskull. And it won’t start to take effect until I activate it from my switch. I’ll send the app for neutralising it to your phone. Some people can stop the effect of the insect during the trip by themselves, like someone who’s asleep and realises they’re dreaming and they have to wake up. But not everyone manages that. The important thing is you have to relax. I’ll monitor the insect’s progress and your brain activity and stop it when the time is right.’
* * *
The next morning I decide to go to Dome 7. From there, I can go on to the abandoned city and then to the old site of the ruins, where the lion of Babylon used to stand—the lion that was moved to Dome 14 with other important antiquities some years ago. Together with Sara’s insect, being at the site of the lion might stimulate my imagination. I take a facemask and some food and water. I reread that old writer’s story and leave.
It’s just desert. I locate the site of the lion through the e-map on the screen of the mask. There are lots of sandstorms and a hot wind. I send Sara a message: ‘Activate your insect.’
‘Have a good trip, story prick,’ she replies.
I try to find the site of the old oil pipeline. Five minutes pass without me feeling anything. Maybe my brain is too tough for the insect to penetrate. I feel uneasy in this deserted place. I can hear children’s voices. I climb a sandy hill. I think the oil pipeline lies beyond it. At the base of the hill, on the other side, I see a group of children playing football. How can they play without facemasks? I approach them and the referee, a young man, waves at me as if we’re friends. A thin boy scores a goal after the defender tries to block him. They start arguing and the defender head-butts the boy who scored. The forward’s nose starts to bleed. The match stops. Next minute, the forward is back home and his mother is trying to stop the bleeding with cotton wool while telling him off for playing rough. She stuffs his nose with cotton wool and asks him to hold his head up high. I know this boy. It’s the writer who killed himself, but when he was a boy. I go out to the family’s back garden to check up on this. Yes. Definitely. This is the pomegranate tree he was born under in July. His mother is now screaming in front of me, and carries on screaming until the woman next door climbs over the garden wall and helps her with the delivery. Where is he now? Okay, he’s on the roof of the house. He’s sitting among dozens of red birds. He throws seeds to the birds and takes a book out of a large wooden bird tower. He has installed a small shelf of books inside this tower. He might be hiding the books from his family. What’s he reading? Ah, Demian by Hermann Hesse. Suddenly the sandstorms die down. Thick snow falls in what’s now a vast forest. I see smoke rising. I head toward it. It’s a small wooden hut with a sauna close by. The smoke is rising from the latter. A naked man comes to the door of the sauna smoking and drinking alcohol. Who else could it be! It’s the old writer in flesh and blood. A white beard and a bald head and a glum look on his face. Although he’s no more than forty years old, time has cruelly scarred the features of his face. I like this Finnish forest. I walk away from the sauna and go deep into the darkness of it. I spot a wolf. I’d better go back to the writer’s house. The author sits in front of the computer, writing and drinking alcohol and smoking, wearing a green hat. Suddenly he gets up and slams the computer against the edge of the table and finally kicks the wreckage of the computer like a goalkeeper kicking the ball upfield. He goes into the kitchen, takes a psychedelic mushroom out of a drawer, eats some of it and sits at the table smoking. I sit opposite him. He puts his hat on the table in front of him and in turn I take off my facemask and put it on the table. Minutes pass as we stare at each other. ‘What do you want from me?’ he asks. I’m not sure whether he’s addressing me, because maybe he’s under the influence of the mushrooms and can see someone else, or maybe he’s talking to the characters in one of his stories. In the corner of the kitchen there’s a wand for detecting explosives. He might have made it himself to re-create the ambiance in one of his stories. The wand is the father’s gift to his son, the translator. How pathetic he is. He seems to have a gloomy imagination and his creative resources are very simple. He gets up and comes over to me. He puts his hand on my shoulder. What’s happening surely isn’t for real. He’s hallucinating! He speaks to me, or rather he tells his story, which I know by heart. I don’t pay him any attention. My mind wanders to a black cat lying under a delicious sun. I can feel it breathing. I feel as though I’m settling down inside the cat. I merge with the cat, while our writer goes on telling his story:
* * *
After my father went out to the garden, I picked up the teapot and followed him. I asked him if he wanted any more tea. He didn’t answer, then started to talk about how wonderful orange trees are. ‘Did you know, my son, that orange trees spread across the world from ancient China, where the orange was the king of foods and medicines. What a splendid tree it is! It flowers and bears fruit at the same time.’
‘Father, are you all right?’
My father doesn’t respond. He stands up and picks an orange. As he is about to speak the black cat, stretched out along the top of the garden wall, opens its eyes.
* * *
Through its eyes I can see bright sunlight flooding the scene. I can see the father sitting with his son under the orange tree. I can hear an enormous mass of sounds. I can make out every note and mutter in this feast of sounds. At first the sounds surprise me but after a while they make me uneasy. I try to ignore the concerto of sounds and concentrate on what the translator’s father is saying.
* * *
‘Listen to me, son. That Abu Zahra, he never listened to what I said. I warned him and pleaded with him. In my head, he became the rebellious angel. The oil pipeline explosion tore him to shreds and roasted him. It’s Babylonia. It’s damned. He didn’t believe me. This lousy country is inhabited with devils. We’re just slaves, man. Don’t be an oaf. I’ve said that a hundred times. He ranted on about morals and conscience as if we were living in God’s promised paradise. Everything he said reminded me of the Arabic religious drama serials: morals eloquently expressed in a moribund language. Abu Zahra—you know him, my colleague, a fellow antiquities guard—he blocked his ears and didn’t turn his useless brain on. I swear by God Almighty, I kissed his hand and pleaded with him on his last night. We were sitting close to the Babylon lion.’
* * *
I leave the cat. I feel sorry about that. I felt really comfortable inside it. I sit close to the guards at the lion, wearing my facemask. They light a small fire to get warm.
* * *
‘It was a cold winter’s night. I buried myself in my coat and started listening to his nonsense, my blood boiling. He kept saying the same thing, like a preacher in a mosque. Shame, man. This is your country, and those people are bastards who burn and steal in the name of religion and want to take the country a thousand years backwards so that they can live in their paradise with slave girls and virgins and all that bullshit.’
* * *
I take my mask off and the guards disappear, but the lion of Babylon is still there. It’s a beautiful night. The sky is clear and the weather is mild. For sure I’m in another season. Not winter and not cold, or even sandstorms. What time am I in? I hope I don’t get lost. I lie down on the sand and look at the stars twinkling in the sky. I shut my eyes. The cat on top of the wall opens its eyes. I can see the father and his son the translator again. The father gets up, touches the leaves of the orange tree and continues:
* * *
‘Six months ago the parliamentary committees began to descend on the archaeological area. The Antiquities and Heritage Agency accused the Oil Ministry of destroying the ruins of the city of Babylon by extending a pipeline for oil products across an archaeological area that hadn’t be excavated, but the Oil Ministry denied it and said the pipeline had been built in an area where two other pipelines, one for gas and one for oil, had been in place since 1975. The Antiquities Department didn’t give in but submitted the case to the courts. The department said that the ministry’s pipeline would irrevocably prevent the Babylon ruins being reincluded on the list of world heritage sites after the former dictator had messed with them, because in 1988 the Iraqi authorities had carried out restoration work on the ruins but UNESCO, after inspecting the site, said the work did not meet international standards. Materials had been used that were different from the original materials used by the Babylonians, and on some pieces of stone they had carved the words “From Nebuchadnezzar to Saddam Hussein, Babylon rises again.” So UNESCO insisted that the ruins of the city of Babylon could not be included on its list. When the media reported the story of the new pipeline, a fierce debate broke out between the political parties in parliament and they started accusing each other of corruption and serving foreign powers. My wife’s uncle, who is known as Abu Aqrab, visited me and made me a tempting offer. He said his armed religious group wanted to blow up the old oil pipeline in Babylon and he asked Abu Zahra and me to help him. My wife’s uncle knew Abu Zahra well. They had worked together in a primary school in the days of the former dictator. Abu Zahra taught religion and her uncle taught geography. The uncle is now a senior official in an armed religious organisation called the Sword of the Imam. The organisation claims to be fighting the new government and the infidels, and it calls everyone traitors. The organisation was set up by a cleric who had broken away from a broad-based religious movement that had laid down its weapons and joined the nascent political process. The mainstream movement changed from being a movement of murderers that fasted and prayed, into one with ministers, members of parliament, businessmen and people of influence. Within a year they and their religion and the rest of their world had drowned in the sea of corruption that swept the country. Now the Sword of the Imam was offering a large sum of money in return for us turning a blind eye to their activities during the night shift at the ruins. They would sneak in and blow up the oil pipeline, then issue a statement on YouTube saying they had blown it up as a warning against building a new pipeline in Babylon, and that the government of corruption and occupation, together with the Americans, were stealing the country’s oil while the people were starving and impoverished. Oh, and death to traitors.
‘I told Abu Zahra we wouldn’t be helping them to kill innocent people and they could just blow up a pipeline in an area far away from any people. And besides, when it comes to this oil—we’d been living for decades in fear and terror and conflict because of this oil. What have we seen it bring, other than death and oppression and shit? Let them blow it up and rid us of this oil and its curse forever. Eveything else had been plundered in this Babylonian site. The bones of the ancients and the liquidised bones of prehistoric life had both been stolen, and what had we gained from guarding the greatest civilization in the world? We were guards protecting thieves. In the time of that bastard the dictator, the president’s cousins had dug up antiquities and sold them to the West, as part of its ongoing collection of antiquities and oil. And today, the imam’s cousins want their share of this store of bones. They want to make a new deal with the smart markets of the West.
‘Abu Zahra categorically rejected the offer from the Sword of the Imam group and threatened to write to the security agencies and to the governor if they didn’t stop their threats. I never saw anyone so stupid in my life! Which governor and which security agency was he talking about? All the security agencies were militias that belonged to them. Abu Aqrab himself went to see Abu Zahra and threatened him. But what can I say? He blocked his ears and dug in his heels. Life’s crazy. Life’s shit.’
The father falls silent and stands up. He looks at me, his son now, and, hugging me, asks me to forgive him. He puts his cheek against my cheek and his tears wet my skin. He takes from his pocket a DVD wrapped in ordinary paper and puts it on the table.
‘Keep it,’ he says as he leaves.
* * *
The cat leaves at the same time. It goes down to the neighbours’ garden, then climbs up to the second-floor window of their house. It sits on the windowsill and looks at what’s inside the room. There’s no furniture in the room—just a red Persian carpet. A naked man, with his paunch hanging beneath him, in the prostration posture for prayer. His whole body is covered in hair. He looks just like a pile of hair. A young woman is leaning forward right behind him. She puts her middle finger up his asshole, while the man moans with pleasure. He suddenly stands up straight, then bows. He’s performing Muslim prayers and every time he bows or prostrates, the young woman sticks her finger up his ass. Maybe he imagines she’s one of the houris of paradise. Finally the gorilla man turns over on his back and kicks his legs in the air in ecstasy. Then he gets up and goes out. The woman sets about locking the door. I look at her beautiful slim body. It looks like Sara’s intoxicating figure. Where is Sara? Why don’t I get in touch with her? Does what’s happening have anything to do with the story by our writer who killed himself? There’s no mention of the man praying with his ass bare in his story. The ass man comes back and knocks loudly on the door. He kicks the door and starts shouting, asking the woman to open the door. The woman sits on the floor and starts crying. The cat tires of the man shouting behind the door and goes back to the garden. It prowls warily, then suddenly braces itself to pounce. Maybe there’s a mouse there. I have a good look. Ah, okay, it’s just a little bird.
* * *
The old writer slips a pistol out of the table drawer and goes out.
I follow him. He walks barefoot across the snow. I walk behind him. I ask him to stop but he keeps walking. I shout out loud: ‘Stop. I know you. I’m a story designer like you and I’ve come to turn your story into a smart-game!’
Our writer looks back. ‘It’s all the same,’ he says with a smile.
The cat goes back to the house of the translator, who sees it through the window. He opens the door for it and it goes up to him. He strokes it, picks it up and carries it in his arms. He looks at the computer screen. I can’t see anything. I’m outside the cat now. Where am I, I wonder? What’s he reading? Maybe he’s translating the Carver story. In the original story he’s translating What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Bloody cat! Maybe it felt me inside and evicted me. The translator plays the DVD that his father gave him. I can’t see anything that’s on the screen. It’s true I’m outside the cat but now I’m close to the lion. Always the same places, but outside time! I don’t need the cat’s eyes. I know the content of the DVD. I’ve read the story dozens of time. The video starts, with night descending on a view of the giant oil pipeline. The only light is the light of the moon. Abu Zahra is down on his knees with his hands tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded, next to the pipeline. The antiquities guard, the father of the man translating Carver, comes into the frame. The guard looks at his colleague Abu Zahra for some moments. He bends over him and kisses him on the head and moves out of the frame.
I feel very thirsty. The translator opens the window in the room, his hands trembling and terror in his eyes at what he’s seen on the DVD. What’s all this ranting and raving that goes on inside our skulls? A brutal struggle for ephemeral survival. An illusory survival, just a postponed death walking about on two legs. What is this instinct that imprisons us? Can imagination solve the riddle? The cat leaps from the window. The girl’s scream reaches their neighbour. The translator runs to the neighbours’ house. He bangs on the door but no one opens. He leaps from the wall to the garden, then smashes down the door to the house. I stay in the translator’s room. I roam around his house. It’s a modest house but neatly arranged. So this is the style of houses at the beginning of the last century. In the sitting room there’s a picture on the wall that strikes me as familiar—a picture of a young girl standing under the Lion of Babylon. It’s the same picture I keep in my room in Dome 2, a picture of my mother when she was a child. Perhaps it just looks like my picture. Could it really be the same picture? It is my mother. The translator saves the poor girl from the man who’s praying, who broke down the door of the room and started threatening the girl with a knife. I don’t understand what happened to him. A short while earlier the pious gorilla was enjoying having her finger in his asshole. I look for more pictures in the translator’s house. I come across a photo album of his life. It’s my history.
The camera moves to a place far from the oil pipeline. The antiquities guard blows up the pipeline by remote control. Abu Zahra burns. I burn too. I scream in terror. Darkness descends on the forest. The pain is unbearable. Someone wraps me in a blanket to smother the flames. Our classical writer fires the bullet into his head as he sits under the tree. I don’t want to die. I shiver from the intense cold. I’m stretched out close to Abu Zahra as he burns. The pain in my body stops, but the smell of roast flesh makes me feel sick. The cat goes out into the street, then runs in panic toward the main road. The smell of human flesh burns my brain. I want to get rid of everything. I just want to be this cat. A police car almost runs it over. The cat cuts through the streets of the damned city of Babylon. It goes through houses, then goes down into the gardens of other houses. It climbs a tree, then walks cautiously along a branch that almost touches the balcony of one of those historic Babylonian-style houses. On the balcony there’s an old woman whose face radiates goodness and wisdom, sitting in a wheelchair and watering the flowers on the balcony. ‘Go to Adnan,’ she whispers to a flower. ‘Go to Adnan.’
Might Adnan be her son, or her dead husband? I very much enjoy the sight of the old woman and I feel a strange peace course through my feelings. The smell of Abu Zahra’s flesh subsides. Peace and the smell of flowers descend. The old woman puts her lips close to the plant and whispers a song to the flower:
From winter we learn the magic of our fable: warmth, nakedness, bed
From time we learn how to store memories in the drawers of the spirit house
From autumn we learn the shape of the leaves of life
From cruelty and hatred we learn how strange the face of man is
Then we scatter our thoughts
And play again …
The mangle of life as it drips saliva on the shirt of our days!
We’re frightened and we gather
We fall in love and we part
We learn the game and play it!
We learn to laugh from the silence of the toy that is broken in the arms of man
We go to sleep and wake up
Then we go to sleep and don’t wake up
It’s the sleeping rock that said, ‘Life is the mirror of death.’
Both of them are a dead life!
We learn fear before faith
We learn faith before love
We learn love before truth
So we make a mistake and learn to be dizzy, as if it’s a lesson to be learned
We learn how emotion drifts from the music of silence and speech
From the depths of caves blows the wind of our toy that’s broken in the lap of a child
From sleeping fields and forests blow all the stages of drunkenness
The forest of life a grape
The forest of death a barrel
The forest of life fermentation
The forest of death a cup
Then the fingers of man hold the wineglass of pleasure and he eats the thorns of uncertainty
Then we inscribe our poor human sentence
On the blackboard of darkness:
‘Sleeping in oblivion’.
The cat thinks about coming down from the tree. The old woman notices it. She smiles at it and calls it: ‘Puss puss puss puss.’ The cat advances warily along the branch and jumps onto the balcony. It sniffs the old woman’s feet. The old woman puts out her fingers to the cat and it sniffs those. The smell of flowers on the old lady’s fingertips puts me at ease. The old woman strokes the cat’s head. I feel the affection, the love, the peace, the value of human touch and the sweet power of love.
* * *
I feel numb.
I doze off.
I dream.
I wake up.
* * *
In the cyber garden of Babylon, the weather is more than wonderful. Sara lets out a shrill laugh every now and then as I tell her about my trip.
Sara says, ‘I did everything I could to control the effect of the insect so that you could have a good trip, but your brain’s so stubborn and so sunk in melancholy that even that Brazilian insect wasn’t any use.’
‘Okay, Sara,’ says Adnan. ‘What you say may be true but your Brazilian insect did me an invaluable service. Firstly, my story-game will be based on the cat as a main character for getting into the story of that writer who killed himself. But more importantly, what’s really surprising about what happened is that I finally found out who my grandfather was. You might not believe it, Sara, but my grandfather was the man who translated the Carver stories.’