History is a struggle of statues and monuments, Father. I will not have a share in all of this, because I have yet to sculpt anything important. Even Saddam’s huge statue in Firdaws Square was brought down right after your death. I thought I would be happy since I detested him so much, but I felt I’d been robbed of the happiness. That was not the end I had imagined. Those who brought him down were the ones who put him there in the first place. They armed him to the teeth in the war that killed Ammoury, your favorite son. Now some want to sever the head of Abu Ja’far al-Mansour, the founder of Baghdad, and bring down the statue of the poet al-Mutanabbi. Even the statues are too terrified to sleep at night lest they wake up as ruins.
TWENTY-SIX
I thought I had succeeded in distancing myself from death and its rituals during the two years following Father’s death. But I discovered that even though I wasn’t dealing directly with it with my own hands, death’s fingers were crawling everywhere around me. I couldn’t shake the notion that death was providing my sustenance. For a time I leaned on a rationalization: What has really changed? Weren’t things the same when my father was the provider? Didn’t I eat and drink what death earned for us, one way or another? I used to contribute a bit to the household expenses. The only difference now is that death is more generous, thanks to the Americans.
Hammoudy stopped by at the end of every month to give me half of the earnings. Whenever I asked him how things were at the mghaysil, he said that there were more and more corpses. I knew that already, because the amount he gave me was increasing month by month. I asked about the men he washed. He said most had been killed by the Americans, but there were also many victims of the unprecedented wave of crime, as well as those blown up by car bombs and other explosions.
All my attempts to find a job failed. I started to spend most of my time reading and browsing the Internet. Ufuq café on al-Zahra Street near our house became a daily stop for me. I was naïve when I chose “giacometti” for a username for my e-mail account. Hundreds of others had chosen it too. After several variations were rejected, I settled for his name together with the year I was born. I looked for Reem the first few days, but to no avail. I had been seriously thinking of continuing to study sculpture abroad. I realized that getting a scholarship was not easy and that not only would it be expensive to travel and live abroad, but it would be almost impossible to transcend the language barrier. My English amounted to the little I had learned at school and a few sentences I had picked up from films. Nevertheless, I started to gather information and wrote to a few institutes and arts colleges. Their answers were usually formulaic: they thanked me for my interest, advised me to read the prerequisites and requirements, and stressed the issue of the visa.
I asked Professor al-Janabi for advice. He was encouraging and promised to write a letter of recommendation, but reminded me of the importance of having a strong portfolio to increase my chances of acceptance. I had not participated in any exhibitions since graduation. He told me straight up that I had to get serious again about producing art. I bought a small digital camera to take photographs of some of my old works.
Three months after the invasion, Professor al-Janabi called me on my new cell phone. He said that the French Cultural Center was organizing an exhibition of young and marginalized artists and encouraged me to participate. I could submit only one work, so I chose one that had caused some trouble back when I was still studying. It was a strange-looking iron chair I had found thrown out on the street while wandering around with Reem near the academy. It was old and had some rust on it. I decided to carry it off. Reem laughed coquettishly: “Are you already furnishing the nest?” “You know I’m against the idea of marriage,” I said. “I just got an idea for a piece.” When I took it to the academy to put it in our shop, the security guard ridiculed me, saying, “What’s this? Are you selling scrap now?”
I bought some metal chains from Bab al-Agha and added them to the chair’s arms and front legs to make it look like a torture chair. I had planned on submitting the work to the annual exhibition, but Reem said I would be endangering myself for no reason. Professor al-Janabi agreed that it was too dangerous. I even thought about adding a tiny cage to it and putting a real bird inside. Reem said it was a good idea, but she preferred it with the chains alone and no cage or bird. “It doesn’t change the main idea and it’s still dangerous to show it.” Al-Janabi liked it a lot, so I gave it to him as a gift. He refused at first, but I told him it would be an honor if he accepted. The chair stayed in his office all those years. He made sure not to put anything on it despite the piles of papers and books he had in his office. He gladly lent it back to me for the exhibition, and it was accepted.
I stopped by his office to take the chair home, intending to clean it up a bit and add some red dye to resemble drops of blood. The professor seemed anxious. He said that there were rumors about revenge against anyone who had been a member of the Ba’th Party. I laughed, saying that it was obvious he wasn’t a real Ba’thist, that, like so many, he had been forced to join, in his case to gain approval for his scholarship to Italy. He said people were trying to settle scores. “Let’s hope for the best.”
We were told to bring our works two days before the opening. I took a taxi to the French Cultural Center at Abu Nuwas Street. The streets were crowded and chaotic, full of bumps and craters because of the bombing. I was afraid at first that the chair, which I had put in the trunk, would be damaged, but then I remembered that it was made of iron.
Only one of the two lanes was open to traffic. Cars were driving in both directions in the same lane. The eastern side of the street had huge American tanks parked on it. When we approached al-Firdaws Square, where the big hotels are, American soldiers had blocked the streets and were motioning to everyone to turn around and go back. The driver sighed and made a U-turn. We took al-Sadoun Street to al-Karrada and arrived at the building. I had passed by it many times years before when Reem was taking French classes there. It had a nice café in the back garden where we would sometimes sit. The last time I was here was the day she finished her French course. Her classmates had gathered in the courtyard to take pictures. Fifteen minutes later a GMC truck with tinted windows parked on the sidewalk right under the “No Parking” sign. The driver turned the flasher on and a man wearing khaki came out of the passenger side. He approached the group which had been exchanging good wishes and congratulations and asked who had used the camera—“Photography is not allowed here.” He snatched the camera from one of the female students, took the film out and warned everyone not to do it again. He went outside, got into the car and took off. Most of us were surprised, but we later realized that the presidential palace was just across the river. Now the Americans have occupied it and surrounded it with walls and checkpoints; our new rulers can live far away from us.
Finally arriving at the center, I asked the organizers to put my piece in a dark corner away from windows, but close to where I could still plug in the projector light I had added to it to make it look like an interrogation or torture chair. The opening ceremony was held in the afternoon, because having it at night would be too dangerous and would violate the curfew. Nevertheless, the ceremony was uplifting. It included a short speech by the French cultural attaché, then another by one of the academy’s professors, full of hope for a future filled with freedom. Many of us were hopeful in those days that there would at least be some sort of new beginning for people to start a better life despite all the destruction. The occupation would come to an end sooner or later. I was surprised that some of the participating artists went overboard in praising the Americans, as if they’d actually come here for our sake. I was happy to see Sergio de Mello, the United Nations representative in Iraq, at the exhibition. He and the three men accompanying him paused before each work. He paused much longer before mine, saying through his interpreter: “Very powerful.” Then he shook my hand and covered it with his left and thanked me twice.