“No, I won’t forget you, but don’t you forget me,” I responded.
He laughed and kissed me again on my forehead. He hugged everyone tightly, especially Father.
Afterward, I asked Father about my uncle. He said that Sabri had gone to Beirut. I missed him and asked often when he would return. My mother would say, “He can’t. He’s busy there.” I would ask about his work and when he would be finished. She never gave a straight answer, sometimes saying, “Ask your father.” But Father evaded my questions too. Months later, while doing my homework, I heard on the nightly news that a number of Communist officers in the army had been executed. I heard Father tell my mother, “That’s the fate of Sabri’s people. They won’t leave any of them alive. Thank God he escaped.” I understood then that Uncle Sabri was a Communist. I asked Father, “What does it mean, being a Communist?”
“None of your business, son.”
“Uncle Sabri’s a Communist?”
He shushed me. “Stop asking questions. I told you it’s none of your business.”
When my brother Ammoury came back home, I asked him about Uncle Sabri and what communism meant. He said the Communists and Ba’thists were sworn enemies and Uncle Sabri had fled because the regime was arresting Communists. Two years later, when I was in middle school, we were all given papers to fill out to join the Ba’th Party. There were questions about relatives living abroad, and a separate sheet on which to list the names of relatives who belonged to the Communist Party or the Da’wah Party. I wrote in my uncle’s full name: Sabri Hasan Jasim — Communist.
We would receive letters from him once every year or two. He would always include a line for me alone, like “kisses to my handsome Jawad. Is he still a loyal Zawra’ fan cheering on my behalf?” I wrote a letter of my own to him, and we included it in the family letter. I wrote about school and Zawra’s performance in the league and its new star players. I told him that I missed him very much and was waiting for him to come back.
He once called us on the phone to let us know that he was all right. Father was summoned to the directorate of secret police and was interrogated for three hours because of that one call. He wrote to my uncle after that asking him never to call again. I used to think of Uncle Sabri a lot, especially when I heard the news about the civil war in Lebanon. After his letters from Beirut, we received two from Cyprus. Then we heard that he’d gone to Aden, and we received letters with Yemeni stamps on them. He had started working as a teacher there. A civil war erupted there as well, and he had to go to Germany, where he was given asylum. He would send us money from time to time, especially in the late 1990s, when the embargo suffocated us.
After my father’s death I sent a letter to Uncle Sabri in Berlin, at the last address we had for him. I told him that phone lines were all down after the bombing and we had no idea when they would be repaired. One day three months later, my mother was fluttering her hand fan, saying: “We thought the Americans would fix the electricity. How come they’ve only made things worse?” The absurdity of the situation could be expressed only with equal absurdity.
There was a knock at the door, and I quipped, “Maybe that’s the electricity at the door waiting for your permission to come in.” She laughed for the first time in weeks. I looked out the window and saw a white-haired man with sunglasses standing at the door as a taxi idled. He had turned to the other side so I could see only his back and shoulders. I went to the door and asked, “Who is it?” “Sabri,” he said. “Open the door. It’s Sabri.”
The years had turned his hair white, leaving only some darker ash on his sideburns and eyebrows. I yelled in disbelief: “Uncle Sabri!” He hugged me tight and laughed: “Oh my, Jawad. You’re taller than I am.” We both cried as we kissed each other seven or eight times. He held my face in his hands as he used to do so often two decades before and repeated my name “Jawad” as if he, too, was in disbelief. My mother came to the door and said, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe my eyes.”
They embraced and she thanked God for his safe arrival, but chastised him: “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming, Sabri, so we would prepare something.”
“Prepare what? I’m not a stranger. I came to see you.”
We took his suitcase out of the car and brought it inside. He paid the taxi driver and asked him to come back eight days later at six in the morning. Then he took out another small bag from the back seat and slung it over his shoulder. We went in and my mother led him toward the guest room. He said, “What is this? Am I a guest? I want to sit where we used to.”
We sat in the living room. My mother offered him food, but he asked only for some water. He took off his sunglasses and put them on the table. He took out another pair of plain glasses from his pocket and put them on. He said that he was late because he had gotten lost and couldn’t find the house: “Baghdad has changed so much.” He had tried to call us from Amman, but the phone was dead. He looked at the black-and-white photographs of Ammoury and my father on the wall and said, “May God have mercy on their souls.”
My mother brought a tray with a jug of water and a glass. She apologized that the water might not be cold enough and complained again about the electricity. She had changed into a black dress from the nightgown she had been wearing when he arrived. He thanked her and drank the whole glass. He offered his condolences to her, and she started to cry, saying: “He left me all alone.”
My uncle told her, “All alone? How can you say that? Jawad is here for you.”
He asked us about Father’s death. My mother rushed to narrate the story she’d told before dozens of times. When she finished, he said, “May God have mercy on his soul. He is in peace now. The most important thing is that he didn’t suffer.”
I asked him about his trip here and when he would return.
He asked me jokingly, “Are you already sick of me and want me to leave?”
I laughed and said, “On the contrary. I hope you stay here for good and never go back.”
He said that unfortunately he couldn’t stay for more than a week because he had to go back to work. I asked him about his work. He said that he had studied German for four years and had been working recently as a translator for an Arabic-language German satellite channel. He had traveled from Berlin to Frankfurt and then on to Amman, where he spent a night before taking a taxi. They had left at four in the morning so that they would enter Iraq early and be able to drive through the desert highway in daylight. Driving in the dark meant risking being robbed by the many gangs and thieves operating there.
“We entered Iraq at dawn and it was a painful sight. The man welcoming me back to my country after all these years of wandering and exile was an American soldier who told me: ‘Welcome to Iraq!’ Can you imagine?” He said that the soldier had written his own name, “William,” in Arabic on his helmet. “I told him: This is my country.” Uncle Sabri shook his head and said that he was against the war and had demonstrated against it like millions in Germany and all over the world, but he never thought the Americans would be so irresponsible and inept. The border checkpoint with Jordan had only three soldiers and only one Iraqi official, who was wearing slippers and stamping passports. He asked the official who decided who was allowed in and who was not, and he said the American officer decided. “I just stamp.”
“There was no search. Nothing,” Sabri said. “Whoever wants to enter Iraq can do so very easily. So if the border checkpoint is like that, imagine how easy it is to enter from other points. Anyone coming now from Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran can enter.” He said that one of the Iraqi officials at the border asked him for a sum of money, and when my uncle asked why he should pay, the man answered “Why not?” The driver said just to ignore him.