I told him that bribery had become endemic during the last years of the embargo and now was part of any transaction.
He said this was a process of erasure. Dictatorship and the embargo had destroyed the country. Now we had entered the stage of total destruction to erase Iraq once and for all. He took out his passport and said that even the name of the state no longer existed. The stamp simply read, “Entry-Traybeel Border Point.” As if Iraq had been wiped off the map.
My mother said that if Iraqis themselves were not protective of their own country and were looting and destroying it, what should one expect strangers to do?
He said that Iraqis didn’t always loot and burn public property and that even Europeans looted and burned when there was no police or law around.
I said that Europeans don’t destroy museums and national libraries.
“True,” he said, “but Europeans were never subject to an embargo which starved them and took them back a hundred years. They didn’t have a dictator who put his name on everything so that there was no longer any difference between public property and him.”
“Didn’t they have Hitler?” I said.
He said the Americans hadn’t supported Hitler the way they had Saddam and that they’d helped rebuild Germany after the war with the Marshall Plan.
My mother told him that we didn’t want to spend all our time on politics and its headaches and that he hadn’t changed in that respect even though white hair covered his entire head. He told her that that wasn’t white hair, but snow from Germany which couldn’t be washed away. We all laughed.
She asked whether he was craving any particular food that he hadn’t tasted in years.
“Everything you cook is lovely, but Kubba is the best,” he said. They both laughed. He brought out a box of sweets he’d bought from Amman and said “Here, this is for you.”
I asked whether there was anything particular he wanted to do. He said he wanted to spend most of the time with us, wanted to visit my sister and her kids, but also to roam around Baghdad a bit and visit his favorite spots and look for old friends. He asked whom he might hire to drive him for a week.
I told him that a neighbor had a taxi. I reminded him of the curfew after sunset.
I told him that he would be sleeping in my room. I carried his suitcase upstairs.
The next morning I heard him singing while he shaved:
So unfair of you
To be gone for so long.
What will I tell people
When they ask about you?
You left my heart burning
Reeling from your absence
So unfair of you and so cruel.
What will I tell people
When they ask about you?
How could you ever
Let me down and betray me?
Never think my heart will heal
Never think the pain will go away.
What will I tell people
When they ask about you?
I told him that we should be singing that song, reproaching him for his long absence.
“So I’m the traitor?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “you just forgot about us.”
He laughed and said, “I forgive you, Jawad. Wait until I tell you what happened to me.”
After breakfast I left him chatting with my mother and made a deal with Hamid, the taxi driver. His only condition was not to drive anywhere outside of Baghdad, because the roads were dangerous.
Our first stop was the book market on al-Mutanabbi Street. Hamid dropped us off there. I asked him to come back for us three hours later. My uncle pored over the titles of books. After a long conversation with one of the booksellers about what he was looking for, the seller told him he had lots of poetry and history books in his warehouse across the street. My uncle told me to wait while he and the bookseller went there.
I wandered the neighborhood alone. I loved the street. It had a lot of booksellers with a surprising wealth of great titles, all the books stacked without regard to subject or genre. A timid wind blew that morning and became more self-confident around noon. It, too, leafed through books and magazines and turned pages angrily, as if it were dissatisfied with what it read and could find nothing it liked.
Many booksellers put rocks or pieces of brick on the magazines to keep them in place. Some had laid out long boards to secure a row of books without hiding their titles. Books on Shiite theology, which were previously banned, had the lion’s share. New newspapers had multiplied. It was difficult to keep up with names. The lack of any law regulating publication meant that anyone with the money and the desire could start a newspaper.
In addition to newspapers, there were back issues of foreign magazines and many new Arabic magazines with glossy covers. Seduction flowed from the eyes of the female singers and movie stars on the covers. These were a few centimeters away from equally glossy posters of turbaned clerics with stern and angry faces. My uncle returned, showing me what he had found: first editions of some of al-Jawahiri’s poetry collections and one of Sa’di Yusif’s, together with some Jurji Zaydan novels and Neruda’s autobiography.
On our way to al-Shahbandar café we saw a young man standing in front of a set of booklets and pamphlets piled on a box on the ground. He was tall and clean-shaven, in his early thirties with curly brown hair. He wore a white shirt and gray pants. We drew closer. The pamphlets bore the logo of a Revolutionary Workers’ Party, of which I hadn’t heard. Some of the booklets were writings by Trotsky, Lenin, and Gramsci. My uncle greeted him and started asking him about the party’s links to the Communist Party.
The young man was critical of the Communist Party for many reasons, chief among them its mistaken decision to join the governing council that had been announced a few days before. That was a recognition of the occupation and a legitimization of its project. The young man spoke passionately and confidently, prefacing his sentences with “dear” or “brother,” and used his right hand to illustrate main points.
My uncle told him that he himself had left the Communist Party eight years before, because he was against its practices, dubious alliances, and new trajectory. Then he asked the young man where he was from.
“Al-Thawra,” he answered.
I teased him, saying “You mean al-Sadr City.”2
“No, dear, al-Thawra City.”
My uncle asked him about the popularity of Marxist ideas in al-Thawra City after all these years.
The man sounded optimistic and said that his party had active cells and good numbers there, but that the embargo had dealt a severe blow to political activism because it had destroyed the entire social fabric. “Were it not for the embargo,” he said, “the regime wouldn’t have survived.”
My uncle was not as optimistic as this young bookseller. He asked him what he thought about the rise of sectarian discourse and how religious thinking had struck deep roots during the years of the embargo. The man responded that compared with other countries in the region, the history of secularism in Iraq was well known, and that religious parties had no solutions to offer, just obscurantism. Islamic movements had failed anyway in the Arab world, he said.
A devout man who was listening to the conversation started to argue with the young man. My uncle took this as an opportunity to leave. He took some of the booklets and gave the young man some money as a donation. The man thanked him and invited us to visit the party’s temporary headquarters, in the Rafidayn Bank at the beginning of Rashid Street. My uncle asked, “Are you the ones who looted the bank?”