Muhammad Khodayyir

Muhammad Khodayyir’s loyalty to his city of birth, Basra, is proverbial. He has stoically endured the harsh conditions Basra has suffered since the early 1980s and wrote a fine tribute to a city left in ruins after the 1991 Gulf War.

According to Khodayyir, a storyteller’s aspiration is a humble one: to be a middle man. The storyteller’s memory, he says, is a grocery store crowded with dusty cans, and his or her texts are not constructed or created, but exist in the world, packed with thoughts and images. The writer’s mission lies in exorcising their potential narratives at the appropriate time and place (see Al-Hikayah al-jadidah [The New Tale], 1995).

Khodayyir’s stories lend authority to his critical reflections. Their craft conjures up layers of voices, places, and eras that continuously stir what we know or remember. “Yusuf’s Tales,” for instance, is at once about the present and the past; the writer’s city, Basra, and the ideal republic for writers and printers; living and writing; the carnage of war and the glittering marble of the mind’s eye. Similarly, “The Turtle Grandmother” blurs the line between the narrator’s tales and the grandmother’s stories he recollects. In these fictional works, the real and the imagined are not strictly drawn territories, and dead poets join living storytellers in narrating.

Central to an understanding of Khodayyir’s vision is the setting of much of his recent work. It is Basrayatha, a Basra of sorts, a city of the imagination with pristine stone edifices and marble towers, but also the one bombarded for years with artillery shells, missiles, and the rhetoric of divisive hatred. The legacies of the Iraq Iran War and the Gulf War are certainly driving forces behind the emergence of the imaginary city. The appeal of “Yusuf’s Tales” is that it also circumvents the calamities of war by portraying a utopia based on the privilege of producing books. Interestingly, the principles on which Yusuf’s postglobal publishing house is erected correspond to Khodayyir’s theory on the origin of texts to which I referred earlier. The text simply exists in the world, and the writer merely facilitates its release. If Yusuf speaks for Khodayyir, then the publishing tower stands not only for a future fantasy, but also for the actual city in which war made intellectual activity a worthless surplus.

“Yusuf’s Tales” and “The Turtle Grandmother” are translations of “Hikayaat Yusuf” and “Ruʾya kharif” from Ruʾya kharif (Autumnal Visions; Amman, Jordan: Muʾassasat Abdul Hameed Showman, 1995). “Friday Bounties” consists of excerpts from Khodayyir’s novel Basrayatha: Surat madina (Basrayatha: Portrait of a City; Baghdad: Manshurat al-Amad, 1993, 1996).

Yusuf’s Tales

When we reconstructed the city after the war, we set aside a plot of land one by two kilometers overlooking the river.* On that we built the printing house. We raised its twelve stone tiers so that visitors would see it polished and glittering in the sunlight next to the massive marble city towers. Work on building the house went on day and night for years, and now it pleases dozens of skilled workers to sit on the broad steps around the building to bask in the early-morning sun and reminisce about those joyful days. Laborers and craftsmen then disperse on the wide city boulevards leading to their workplaces as soon as the central city clock chimes fifty strikes.

Our city authorities have attracted from neighboring towns and cities scores of blacksmiths, founders, masons, carpenters, engineers, and bestowed on them enough honors to raise their status among the public. But printers, transcribers of manuscripts, and writers have received even greater honors. Theirs is the highest building in the city, and their chief is none other than the famed master we know as Yusuf the Printer.

On this sunny spring morning I walk briskly to the printing house, climbing up the many stone stairways and maneuvering my way through those relaxing on the steps. One impulse has so possessed me that I am oblivious to several colleagues who are also heading for the southern gate. Yusuf the Printer has promised to share with me a secret he has kept locked away in one of the house’s chambers.

My eyes hover over the impressive mural on the arch of the gate, colored in firm chalky strokes, to seek out one more time a tiny detail, an Arab transcriber bending over an open manuscript. At exactly this time of day when I report to work, I look up to see the ink in his inkwell sparkling in the sunlight. Other details of the mural conspire with sunlight at other moments all day long. The transcriber detail diminishes as I go through the reception and service offices, then into the overwhelming openness of the inner hall. The hall is a thousand square meters, pierced through the center by a massive elevator shaft whose metal pillars are visible behind thick glass panels. The printing presses occupy the entire lower floor.

I cross the hall to the lift, my rubber shoes gliding over its solid glass floor. The colored plastic chairs all over the hall are vacant at this time of day and look brilliant under lights coming from hidden spots in the ceiling. The printing machinery is visible through the glass floor, with forklift trucks and carts rolling through the aisles and separate areas for paper storage, binding, and the mechanical repair workshop. The printing presses and the heads of the workers are bathed in that murky basement light familiar in the press work area and that the eyes of our veteran printer have known since they first made contact with a printing machine. Below, massive wheels, oiled and gleaming, are spinning huge reels of papers and printing cylinders, and paper cutters are delivering to agile hands the first runs. Phosphoric lights from computer screens and monitors shower over faces, machines, and outstretched arms. From above, I can hear nothing—the glass ceiling rules out the clatter of wheels and the fluttering of paper, not to mention the sucking of inks and the dancing of characters and forms on screens and sheets of paper.

Four elevators run up and down inside the central shaft, but only one leads to the printing floor. The giant glass elevator ascends through the lower and middle tiers set aside for proofreaders, calligraphers, cover designers, illustrators, the photo lab, and the offices of the administrative staff, then through the eighth floor where the restaurant and clinic are. The elevator slows down as it reaches the top four tiers housing writers, transcribers, editors, translators, and manuscript readers. From the elevator you can see the occupants of these floors in their glass cubicles or in the corridors, and even have a glimpse of faces you might not have a chance to see elsewhere. The faces of the city’s gifted few who willingly shun publicity: learned scholars M. J. Jalal and K. Khalifa; the storytellers K. M. Hasan and M. al-Saqr; the poets A. Hussein, M. al-Azraq, S. al-Akhder, and S. al-Chalabi; and elite journalists and publishers.

The occupants of these top tiers change, which explains why no visitor or worker has ever had a chance to see the city’s intelligentsia all together at one given time. Their rank occasionally includes guests who collect manuscripts and rare books and who wander agog among the cubicles. But, as a rule, all writers, editors, and manuscript copiers from this city and neighboring cities can stay at the printing house only long enough to finish their work, but then leave so that others may take their places. Only Yusuf the Printer has been a fixture here, and he might be making the rounds right now on the printing floor or relishing seclusion in one of the cubicles.

I am a fellow at the printing house while I work on my novel Khamarawayh’s Last Portrait, although I knew Yusuf before the war when he owned a small press in the city’s old business district. Besides the local newspaper he edited, he used to print his own fiction and his friends’ nonfiction there. When the city came under intense bombardment in the last year of the war, the press was closed even though it was producing Yusuf’s autobiography at the time. Our meeting at the house after the war was brief and memorable. He looked old, a profusion of white hair hugging both sides of his red, slender neck. He supported himself on a smooth cane and had a flower in his jacket lapel. It was at that meeting that he promised to reveal to me the secret he had kept at the house.

I get off the elevator on the tenth tier where I work among the affiliated writers. In one cubicle I see Abdulwahab al-Khasibi proofreading his only collection of short stories, and from another I hear a diligent translator’s renderings of Tagore’s reflections. Then I walk past the cubicle occupied by Balqis, the young poet. She’s barely fifteen years old, becalmed and not of this world, like a dreamy bird I once saw in a pomegranate tree. She surprises me when she looks up. All I can think of then is Tagore’s line: “The bird wishes it were a cloud, and the clouds wish they were birds.”

On the eleventh tier, the transcribers’ floor, I see the tired face of an old friend, Ubaid al-Hamdani, and I wonder if he’s copying the manuscript on medicinal herbs he found in a discarded box in a subterranean vault. Ubaid once told me about the Muslim medieval storyteller al-Hariri who penned seven hundred copies of his own Maqamat. On this tier of the house, only the aged silence rules the transcribers’ cubicles, and the invisible creeping of mice hankering after volumes of ambergris paper.

I walk for hours looking for Yusuf the printer. As I reach the twelfth floor, I pass by the quarters of the writers who have acquired permanent status. They are the only exception in the house. And why is it that these permanent residents will not complete their work, even if the house were to become a madrasa of sorts or a workshop for writing or printing? I am considering a number of possible answers when I catch sight of the veteran printer. He is in the elevator ready to descend to the printing floor.

“I have been waiting here for you for hours,” he says. “The first step dooms the ones that follow. As soon as you step into a corridor, you end up coming back to it, and when you move up to the next tier, you achieve no actual upward movement.”

That is humor befitting an old man familiar with ascending and descending. His sparkling eyes make me think of a giant press where thousands of machines run day and night to put out a single book composed of endless volumes. I give Yusuf a wan smile. After all, it is he alone who knows the rules and secrets of the printing house.

Then he says: “I read your novel. I think you’ll rewrite it. You had Khamarawayh commit suicide the moment he entered the chapter of the letter K instead of allowing him to materialize anew under a different name.”

His words surprise me.

“When you’re unaware of the value of letters,” Yusuf adds, “you sever the chains of words beyond the repair that imagination or grammar can provide.”

I reply: “I’ll write the novel again. That will please me, of course, since it’ll help me prolong my stay at the house for one more year. I’ll also have more chances to get to know the recluses of the upper tiers.”

“You’ll stay,” he says gleefully. “Your affiliation will be extended.”

I have to ask him about the permanent writers of the twelfth tier.

“They’re as permanent as ghosts, not individuals with names and accolades. Their works are part of this ever-reappearing ghostliness. As soon as they finish a page, a certain part of their existence vanishes. If they complete a book, they’ll disappear entirely. But you see them every morning rewriting one page after another just to relish their presence at the house. What intoxicates them is the vineyard of inks, these ghosts of writers composing transparent pages. If you want, you can join them and never leave the house.”

I am fumbling for an appropriate reply when he remarks: “We won’t succeed in completing a book if we don’t really defend our characters. The name ‘Khamarawayh,’ for instance, is hermeneutic since it reveals a part of the character’s truth. A character could escape death by hiding his or her name behind that of another and not letting that name get swallowed up in the magician’s melting pot. Her name alone betrays her transparent symbolism and the shackles from which she’ll never be liberated. Give your character more than one name and more than one form, and your book will escape the rottenness of an ending. We fail because our books start to decay before they’re finished. We impose on them our imperfection—we die and let the book die with us. What a dismal outcome for an honest and painful ordeal.”

“Yes,” I say, overwhelmed. “We let our characters live for us.”

“When you approach the truth of genuine creation . . .”

I have the feeling that Yusuf suddenly stops talking, and then he presses a button on the elevator keypad. The elevator goes down through a series of tiers and stops at an unmarked one, the basement possibly or an entirely different floor. One thing I hear clearly is a suppressed roar. We leave the elevator and come to a suite with black walls. Yusuf takes out a small key and opens the door. When he turns the lights on, I find myself in front of a small printing press, old and manual, and cases of lead letters stacked all around it. The room is airtight, sound and light proof, and connected to a smaller side room with a table laden with zinc printing blocks.

“This is my secret, my friend,” Yusuf says. “The treasure of the house.” He is looking at me, searching for signs of wonder, joy, or interest, then he says: “Here I can work the way I like. I salvaged this machine from the devastation of war. It was in a room in my house. The one I trust most.”

The silent machine generates an aroma of ink, acids, oils, rubber, leather, and paper—the remains of several printings of the rare books that this press put out. A structure crouching like a lubricated mythical animal. The mysterious energy the machine emits captivates my spirit, shakes my limbs, and sends my heart racing, as if I were feeling with the ends of my fingers the ancient leaves of a volume bound with deer hide. Kalila wa Dimnah, the One Thousand and One Nights, Ibn Sina’s Qanun. Yusuf’s voice comes to me again, “On this press the Ottomans printed the first issue of Annafeer newspaper, and the occupying British authorities used it to print out colonial communiqués. Perhaps it even fell into the Iraqi rebels’ hands afterwards. When I bought it in 1940 from a merchant, some of its parts were missing or damaged. A blacksmith I knew made alternative parts, and a famed smelter cast new sets of characters. Today, it will print my tales.”

He then pulls out of an open drawer a newly printed sheet and gently places it on the machine. I bring the page close to the bulb over the press. “If you want to print a genuinely great book,” I hear Yusuf say, “one for yourself and for the ages, you have to set its characters with your own hands patiently, confidently. You will need only a few copies. Ten would immortalize you for ten centuries.”

The page feels as if it were printed on a rough stone tablet. The nicely lined text is surrounded by wide blank margins stained with faint streaks and spots of ink and fingerprints. The page has a full tale printed on it and ends with a dark star rather than a period.

Yusuf is still flashing a euphoric smile. “One story fills out and never gets beyond a page,” he says.

I think about what he has said and soon realize the discipline and skill involved in his work. You can read Yusuf’s tales where you choose without ever having to turn the page. The title of the story I’m reading is “The Mirror of Turdin.” Here’s its plot: A giant mirror that the astronomer Sulayman al-Saymari made from a rare polished metal and placed on a green hill outside the city of Turdin was to reflect the three stages of the city. Its past image in the morning, its present one at midday, and at sunset the sun was to display changing reflections of the city’s future. The city’s old image gradually appears as the sun ascends, revealing first the Ziggurat, then the irrigation canals of the Hanging Gardens, the Procession field, and the Virgins’ Altar. As soon as the details come into full view, the display starts slowly to vanish. At noon, the show lasts but a few minutes, long enough for the inhabitants to recognize the city where they currently live. But the display at sunset is rare and unpredictable. It came up twenty years ago for just seconds in front of a lucky shepherd and his flock. The future city flashed and dazzled the human and animal eyes in an instant that would remain folded in pastoral time. The description of this future place that the city dwellers wrested from the shepherd was more bewildering than the image’s resistance to appear. He spoke of that city as a colossal and glittering golden hand lining houses in the shape of a cone. Then another golden hand, more brilliant and much faster than the first, would undo the work before the eye had had a chance to behold it. Since then, people go out to the fields surrounding the mirror hours before sunset and wait for the emergence of a city to come.

In the nights to follow, the patient printer will put on his overalls, smeared with patches of ink and oil, and select letters from the cases. He’ll bend over the single-page forme to set the reversed characters of the tale with his blackened thumb, then align the rows within the wooden frame. And while we relish the leisure of our nights, he’ll secure the type forme to the bed of the press, feed in the ink, and lay a blank sheet of paper. He’ll turn the spiral handle gently down in the faint, saffron light of the bulb over the machine.

Years later my hands will hold one of the ten copies of the magnificent book of tales, illustrated with paintings etched by a house artist. I’ll read it on the stone steps outside the building in the deliciously warm sun of the early morning.

The Turtle Grandmother

This autumn brings along a vision unlike those it brought in previous years. Those past visions belonged to the riverbank: the Severed Head, Functionless Clocks of the Public Squares, Isle of the Statues, the Hanged Flies. A series of apparitions saturated with morning dew, quivering like the heart of the big river.

All the faces but one in this autumn’s vision are buried in fog and fear. The face flows clearly—maternal, tranquil, resigned. A crowd with light personal effects rushes from a bridge or a ferry and instantly disappears in all directions when it hits the coastal pavement. The crowd leaves behind an old woman plodding like a turtle.

The vision is invoked and examined again, as if in slow motion. Its components pass along with fresh details as the mind’s eye lingers on a small segment, the kernel of the vision: the ancient face of an old woman. Framed in that recollection of the face are other particulars: the wavy surface of the river, the boats, giant wood poles of an old bridge, braided metal cables whose loose ends disappear in the water. Other indistinct details look like a squadron of planes or a cloud of fears. A few hours later the crowd rushes and disperses again with new details, and the same ancient face springs from nowhere and trudges like a freshwater turtle on the bridge leading to the ferry pier.

Before sunset, I went out to ponder the site of the new vision. Tranquility had pinned anchored ships to the surface of the turbid water. A breeze would occasionally rustle the wilting leaves. I arrived at the pier, the place that ceaselessly figures in all of this autumn’s vision, with its familiar images: the wood poles, the braided cables, an old ship with rutted metal sides, and the quivering, tethered boats. And a bench right on the edge of the water.

I waited for a while, but nothing happened. No herald dazzled the eyes. The last ferry from the other bank docked and unloaded a few commuters. Darkness fell, clouding the big trees along the coast, and lights from the scattered ships became visible. The bridge leading to the ferries looked deserted, and the wings of a few birds combed the air above the river one last time. The repeated appearances of the vision sharpened the image of the old woman till it became identical with that of the archetypal grandmother, the midwife of hundreds of newborns, the turtle grandmother with the laborious walk and the dark, green face. Forty years later it was the same face, without a single wrinkle added.

It was the spring of 1941, when British warships dropped off their Indian soldiers to seize al-Ashar. My family sent me away with the midwife to our relatives in Nahr al-Khoz, a village near Abu al-Khaseeb. The midwife brought me to a mud house in the middle of a palm tree orchard. We arrived at night, but in the morning I was surprised by how big the house was—five rooms with a long outside wall that separates the house from a nearby river. I also found out I was not alone there. In addition to the old couple who occupied one of the rooms, there were ten boys from the orphanage evacuated by the city’s committee for civil security. They were handed to the midwife when the public’s resistance to the occupation forces intensified. The police force and civil servants had already abandoned the city, and bandits were on the loose, looting public and private property. That morning, the midwife gave us our first breakfast. We sat on the ground around a long table about a foot high. It was a simple meal during which my eyes kept moving from the rim of my metal milk cup to the quiet faces. Swarthy, slim boys, the eldest barely ten.

After breakfast we left for the river. One of the house’s three doors led to stone steps that went all the way to the river. It was not a big river, almost completely shadowed by the palm trees flanking it. The overwhelming lull of the palm tree orchard pressed on our bodies. In the evening we came back to the low table and followed with our eyes the midwife’s heavy movements behind us as she dispensed bowls of hot soup and pieces of warm bread. We drank water from an earthenware pot and mugs. One of us said, “She’s a turtle.” In that secluded place the comparison stuck to our minds like the fluid of the bember fruit, transparent and gluelike. When the old woman finally took her seat at the head of the table, the meager candlelight fell on her green face, revealing small scrutinizing eyes under scant eyebrows. But she looked like a sturdy tree whose turtlelike and peaceful visage were only meant to hide her real age and her trying chores between bellies and pudenda. She remained unchanged till the ferry delivered her to this autumn’s vision.

I came back to my apartment later that evening and saw that none of my friends had arrived yet. I peeked out the window overlooking the bus station and followed the laconic energy of those returning or going home. Humans and buses looked almost unwilling to move, and their eventual departure made the vacant waiting sunshades appear even more desolate under that oppressive humidity and the wan lights of lampposts and hotel facades. From my elevated point of view I could see something falling ceaselessly. I couldn’t pin it down, but it dimly fluttered so close to my eyes, it assaulted my ears with inaudible resounding, it brushed against my skin upwards and downwards. The room had virtually no furniture other than a long, low table. I sat on the ground at one end and started drawing the face of the turtle grandmother. I must have been sketching for a while before I heard my friends’ feet approach the door. They were three of the company that had assembled every night. The sketches changed hands, and they asked if they knew her.

“One of you will eventually remember her,” I said. “Many years ago we used to call her the turtle grandma.”

Remembrance didn’t seem to hit any of them. The rest of the group arrived, bringing more clamor and merriness. One of them asked on entering, “Tell me who said, ‘A battle of your soul against the specter of fidelity, of mine against the specter of friendship’?”

“I don’t know. Victor Hugo?”

“James Joyce.”

The gang, the nightly gang, was complete now. All ten of them sat on the floor around the low table. From the next room I fetched their favorite wine, well chilled, and put the bottles on the table.

“Tonight, you’ll drink in pottery mugs,” I said and handed out brown ceramic cups. We raised our cups to a friend’s toast, “To clay.”

We filled our mugs again, and I raised mine, “Let’s drink to the lost turtle.” My eyes on the rim of the mug, I watched them take quick sips of wine. They come every night, sometimes bringing their own food and wine, then take off late at night in different directions, leaving me to my loneliness. I’m probably the only single person among them. They have homes to go to, wives and children I know nothing about. They don’t talk about their families, and when they go, they leave behind no shadow or trace as if their presence were a chance meeting never to be repeated. Their names dare my memory, and I have no recollection of where they work or live. Before they came tonight, I was not sure they would come. Their uncertain gathering at the outset of the night concludes with their ghostlike dispersion at its end. They come from a very distant place.

I went back to the window and looked at the bus station. A small number of people sat under the sunshades or moved around them. The last bus was about to take off. That mysterious thing kept falling down. One of my friends was ending a speech I wasn’t following, “Homelands are occasions for enduring friendships.” They were getting drunk; the hands holding drinks and cigarettes became less steady. The leaning posture at the table, the closeness, and the overlapping of their shadows on the wall made them look like ghosts radiating with loyalty. An age-long and cherished closeness. The ceiling fan dissipated cigarette smoke and the wet drunken breaths, its squeaks blending with the low-pitched exchanges of final rough words.

They had grown old, and I noticed for the first time tonight premature crevices cutting through their faces whenever they changed their position at the table. The years’ searing fingers had touched the faces and left permanent marks. Before tonight, they weren’t aware of their past as it lingered in the shadows of alleys, palm trees, and dreams. Tonight, they took hold of the years and felt with their own fingers their long tracks on the smooth surface of the mugs’ baked clay. Viewed from up here, they seemed to be looking down an abyss that glimmered under their hesitant stares. Even though I was less concerned with the passing of time, I was, like my friends, conscious of the years’ slow flow as I contemplated the vision possessing me the past few days. Oh, I see that now—they’re part of this vision—the tired friends, aging, docile drunkards, the intimate ten. Here, there, everywhere. Their voices and scattered words came from a very distant place.

Night was nearing its end. I must have fallen asleep because I noticed my companions were gone, their cups turned upside down next to the empty wine bottles. Still hovering over the table, smeared with a dry pink coating, was the face of the turtle grandmother.

I left the apartment at daybreak heading toward the ferry pier, taking in the river’s cool breeze as I approached. There, in the same place, became visible a floating bridge on which a row of big military trucks crossed toward the eastern bank. A long caravan loaded with soldiers and military ware heavy enough to keep the parallel floats in continuous friction and squeaking. At the end of day I came back to the river. The bridge was still there, and the trucks were still crossing.

None of the companions showed up at my place that night. Or the night after.

Friday Bounties

The Night Supplicant

Friday, memory of a name, the name of memory, the repository of day’s bounties and night’s secrets. Friday, the day’s answer to the night’s query, uncircumscribed expansion and inevitable reunion. Creation, selection, recognition, ascendance, congregation, a path of righteousness. Of Friday I remember the walled roof of a house, a meal in the open, and a whole family having dinner on that roof under the sky’s swings, with stardust descending like a forked tongue out of the caved mouth of Being. The child’s flying bed bumps into trembling stars, fences, television antennas, water pots, doves’ nests. The whispers of mosquito nets, the oozing of bodies, the surprises of the street below.

At the end of day, the night supplicant comes. A beggar collecting dinner leftovers, the surplus of households that close their doors after sunset. More than the handfuls of rice and bread and fruit, Friday for the beggar is light for the eyes and warmth for the feet. We feel his presence in the alleyway with the tapping of his cane and the resonance of his voice in front of silent doors. We have never seen him. His voice alone conjures up a blind form wading through the dark, Friday in Friday out. He is alone, but he knows the doors and lingers in front of a few. His clandestine appearance fares well along our faltering imagining of him as a light being, superhuman, carrying a sack loaded with unfathomable commodities.

His is the begging deposited by past nights outside our doors. If the house rejects you, you become a beggar, a supplicant in the alley of munificent bounties.

I remember a beggar who came to our house—dark brown face, failing eyesight, a running nose, patched sandals, dusty headwear, a musty coat. An ancient madman. He was the first visible beggar, one of our forgotten relatives, I was told. The first and last visible beggar I saw and around whom my consciousness formed the notion that every family has a mad relative or an absent beggar. For storytellers, all the relatives are touched with madness or paupery, and all their days are Fridays. When storytellers don’t have relatives, they themselves become the beggars, and their stories the bounties.

The Day Supplicant

As soon as the night’s beggar disappears, the day’s beggar takes over. This beggar is not alone like his predecessor, but one in a group, and this is one reason for the name. He’ll be relaxing in a café, bathing in a public bath, sitting in a barber’s chair, slipping into the souk crowd, attending a feast, visiting a movie theater, worshiping in a mosque. He’ll have a name, a description, an appearance, a number. The day’s beggar won’t lose the amenities of the tribe. For outcasts perishing in their loneliness, Friday is but a nameless day. They’re exiles within their own walls, beyond the collective bounties of the holy name. When you fall outside the name, you’re ostracized, an outcast, like those confined to beds or behind bars.

Let’s break the shells behind which habit hides to see how habit works. We’ll watch how our hands extend to the misbaha to tell its beads, or to reach for the moustache, or to scratch, pull, or sneak into one thing or the other. We bend to tie a shoestring or count money in front of mirrors. From the day we saw the light, our bewilderment has grown at the machine that controls us, exposes us, and binds us to the screeching wheel. Break the chain, and you’re on your own, a stranger to the faces in that common ball. Break the chain that separates you from the answer and alienates you from Friday’s collective ritual, from the metamorphosing myth. But the question extends and reaches to the foot of the myth and beyond the city, to before the café, the public bath, the restaurant, the barbershop, the movie theater.

Heavy on our chests, our myths overwhelm lips worn out from narrating the tales of the marshes, the boats and fishing, the tilling and harvesting, and the pursuit and exile and murder. The most famous is the jolly myth of the long journey to the city, the wandering in its bazaars, entering a restaurant, praying in a mosque, and then the return to the village with fresh tales.

The myth begins with the farewell gathering Thursday night in the village guesthouse for the member of the tribe leaving for the city in the morning. The chosen one is the recipient of anxious looks, loaded with envy and expectations. The embers under bundles of cane in the hearth are fanned by the tribe’s breaths and yawns and by the flickering of the lantern and the appearance of the knights of this collective spirit sporting their forked swords or long-barreled rifles. The jolly myth travels with mosquitoes and thick egals, colorful wool rugs and rolls of thin cigarettes, coffee pots and the brown faces shaped from the rivers’ clay and the bowels of dead fathers. And the sperm that traverses the wombs of hard and fighting females, maternal and paternal grandmothers, mothers, green from tattooed dots and crosses, and happy girls taught at schools floating on isles of thatched canes. At the end of the night, the men, tired from coping with the urge to travel, leave the chosen man with the tribal totem that has crept out of the big coffeepot on the hearth. In the morning the two will take the roughest roads to the faraway city.

His back bent, the villager sits watching the waiter put dishes down on the table. The hardened fingers turn pieces of bread soaked in stew. The aroma of barbecued meat, pickles, and raw onions brings in the absent family to join the father in devouring the appetizing luncheon with one mouth. The table surface glistens with sunlight, and on it the father lines up the souls of his dogs and cats and hens, and the souls of his wife and children, next to the ghost of his hungry totem, so that they all will savor that leisurely meal. The restaurant is big enough to house all the feeding troughs of the village, and mirrors make it bigger and fuller with people. Food companions crowd the place, licking bones and fingers and lips. The villager belches, surveys the place and its mirrors, hanged pictures, and darting waiters, and tells himself, “I ate for all of you.”

The literati and social reformers have forgotten the last villager lost in the crowds of Friday bazaars, and with the disappearance of the last character of a city villager in an Iraqi story, we lost the prototype of the first flea-market hawker, the porter, the dellak at the public bath, and the cotton carder. The early migrant villagers settled in the city, but their children inherited different occupations in the spice market and the copper market, and among moneychangers, carpenters, goldsmiths, and pottery makers. Above all, they laid their hands on the Indian secrets of mixing spices.

The Friday Market

A giant call wakes up the entire city, its source the massive common grounds vacated by all the weekday souks for the Friday market. It’s the hub of all markets, but has no order, weights, measures, or pricing system. Secondhand items line up in a topsy-turvy land, a carnival of trivial finds. I go to the Friday market to ascertain the existence of a type I expect to see among the market loafers. I want to see him embodied, and I want to follow him at the end of the day to the little storehouse of trivia he has made out of his tours into the market. I know he exists. I can picture him amidst all these useless things. In that tiny museum you’ll find a big bronze key whose teeth form some secret word that invokes the echo of a door slowly closing on the crushed bones of the past. And a mousetrap that keeps me remembering night after night an old story about a flute player whose tunes led a herd of mice to their demise in a river. A small stone grinder, a butcher’s knife, scissors, an inkwell, a bookbinder’s needle, a kohl container, pins, coins. Things dead and gone with no relevance to everyday life.

The trivia man lies in bed, his eyes fixed on a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, with dangling glass snakes whose heads have the bright stones of colorful, poisonous dreams. Like me, he dreams of a giant mousetrap that devours an army of mice all at once. A cage three-by-three meters, but only a half-meter high, with hidden retracting springs at one end connected to side levers that support the raised gate. A mere brush with one of the springs would cause the levers to snap and bring down in a flash the trapping gate. The mice will then become an easy prey to a crushing plate the size of the upper side of the cage. The plate is automatically released when the gate closes, its sharp spikes shredding the small, stunned bodies.

I read about such a machine in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” I have no idea what inspired Poe and Kafka with these terrifying notions, but I know that storytellers of great truths are familiar with the vicinity that houses depositories of worthless finds collected from the Friday market.

Al-Saʿada Public Bath

To relinquish everything, to be liberated, the quiet settling, the total liquescence—states generated by the very act of stepping into a public bath. Along with clothes the bather discards in the changing vestibule all that has hung onto him, sheds the temporary and nominal, and melts in an indiscernible, steamy presence. The bath’s parlors have been designed to duplicate the labyrinths of the quest for annihilation in the last white basin of anonymity, where the body, infinitely bare, looks like a sugar lump.

The bath I have in mind is in a roofed part of the souk. A low doorway obstructed with a curtain leads down to the warm changing parlor scented with oleander blossoms, cotton bolls, and cinnamon sticks and on to the heated stone benches covered with cedar and wet towels. When I step out of the parlor and into the sauna, I imagine myself among nude buddies, the children of the stone bridges, as we stand bewildered at our gathering and our identical nudity. Then the bathers would move into the parlor of dissipation and discontent, spread between the lumps of steam as the heat swells their sexual prizes. We would overflow then with complaints of illusory pains, decrepitude, exhaustion, servitude, and filth. A languid move of the hand would brush away dirt and hair like dead skin. In the mollification parlor we would regain our bodies—hairless and obese or marked by tattoos and scars. Bodies overflowing or happily settling within the human boundaries or consumed by their increasing thinness, waxlike and shadowless. Idols bent on their evaporating existence.

Then we would come into the middle hall beneath the bath’s pentagon dome, light flooding its high windows. Steam would condense up there and fall on us in warm dribbles that induce semisenselessness. We would then disengage and become more prone to dreaminess. Then comes the ingenious parlor where I know the fabricating fellow. His lies would turn into a penis writhing on the bath tiles, bouncing from one water bowl to the next till it finally vanishes in the woods of steam and daylight feathers falling from the bath dome. Outside the public bath this man has no existence; neither does the laughing fellow, the crying fellow, or the cynical one. They are the mutant men of the bath, half human, half viper.

Then bodies become one nude form that slips into a big basin under a shower of waters hot enough to awaken in the veins the pleasures of breaking the fetters of the body. Desert drowsiness, cotton numbness, stationary and artificial trees, a fading sun, smooth marble floor. From a distance, a giant ball flickers like the egg of a mythic bird, emitting scented vapors. White doves alight on the rim of the basin, then transform into bathing maidens. The shapely bodies with little feet cast reflections on the marble of the pool, then transform again into birds that fly away. Behind the ball, the image of a white ship emerges gliding on the marble floor, and then it swallows the birds and disappears into the rising vapors. What remains visible then is whiteness alone. Drops of scented rains fall, and invisible anklets resonate, and out of the vapors red mouths take shape and caress the united bodies. For the bathers, a recurring dream comes back, and they remember the way back through the corridors and the basins and the benches and the drapes. A complete return eludes them, but they are finally delivered to the changing parlor, where they get back their clothes and go through the bath’s curtain one more time.

The House of Names

The reader of electricity and water meters told me about a house in old Basra; it was behind the fish and vegetable market, close to a carriage stop where coachmen and appliance fixers would get together for rest. He would enter that house, its door open all day, to find to the right of the corridor a door on which the word toilet is written in chalk, and on the left another bearing the phrase door to the staircase, also written in chalk. The meter reader does not have to come all the way to the house yard, roofless and slab-stoned, since the water and electricity meters are under the staircase inside wooden boxes on which somebody wrote the words Water Meter and Electricity Meter. Flooding daylight exposes the writings on the other closed doors surrounding the yard: Saintly Woman’s Chamber, Bibi Karima’s Chamber, Salih’s Chamber, Marhoun’s Chamber, The Bride’s Chamber, Bathroom, Kitchen. The oddest of these writings was on a door bearing the inscription Chamber of the Lame.

It was a child who went about practicing his writing by naming the house parts, especially its doors, with these chalky, fuzzy lines, exactly the way he labels parts of the landscape he draws in his school sketchbook: fish, river, woman, car. When he misspells names, images from his childish imagination creep into these chalky nominations. It’s his way of driving away from his folks’ house the silence, gloom, and emptiness once they are out. Although the meter reader has never seen a human being in the house, or an animal for that matter, no one with a hunched back coming out of the “Saintly Woman’s Chamber,” or a fiery figure darting out of “Marhoun’s Chamber,” he always felt the names signified the occupants’ presence and the suppressed turmoil of life behind the doors of that ever-open house. Somehow like the bundles of leftovers dumped at night in the rusted garbage container at the door’s entrance.

And as it happens in stories, one of the house’s doors was left without a name to hint at what lay behind it. The chamber of warm secrets into which the child of the future has fallen, the one who wrote the names. Let’s descend the steps into the room where a woman labors among three other women clustering around a stove. The patient women display their skill in supplication and small talk as the mother resists this collective invoking of the vocabularies of labor, relaxation, the promises of family life, and the pleasures of wet nursing. And resists the smells of medicines and the fumes of steam rising from the tasht, the talcum powder, the clean white sheets. The light falling from the room’s single bulb flutters like a blade at the end of a thin line, never to fall. The mother’s rhythmic breathing lifts her like white wings over the puddle of plasma and sterilizers and pincers and scissors. A sharp cry and the alighting of the fresh live lump end the feast.

The Friday child is born. Years later the boy will scribble on the unnamed room where he was born the name that has originated in his navel. For some reason he’ll call it the “Honey Chamber,” a vision of her name, the mother submerged in the darkness of the house of names.

* The writer dedicates the story to storyteller Yusuf Yaʿqub Haddad.