I noticed that every now and then a few cars headed back in the opposite direction, toward Baghdad. After about half an hour the line started to move. Our driver got in and inched forward. He motioned to me to get in, but I told him that I was going to walk. The line stopped after a few minutes. I told the driver that I was going to keep walking ahead. He took a drag on his cigarette and said, “Sure, just don’t get lost.”
“How can I? It’s all desert!” I said.
I walked for fifteen minutes. A man asked me for a light for his cigarette. I apologized, saying that I didn’t smoke.
He laughed and seemed astonished, as if I were the only non-smoker in the world. “How can you bear living without smoking?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. Then: “How I can bear living?”
He smiled and asked, “Leaving alone?”
“Yes.”
“They’re saying that single men aren’t allowed in. Only families.”
“Why?”
“I dunno, man. They’re saying they’re afraid of Shiite militias. I mean, we’re running away from the militias and terrorism.”
I had included not being allowed into Jordan on my list of contingencies, but I had allowed myself to imagine my escape from the hell I was shackled with. The man’s words reminded me that my plan might fail.
I went back and got into the car. It took us two hours to get through. Before we arrived at the al-Ruwayshid border point on the Jordanian side, dozens of tents with ropes and clothes hanging between them appeared on the side of the road. The United Nations’ blue flag flew over the camp. The driver noticed me turning back to look. “It’s a camp for the Palestinians who were kicked out of their homes in Baladiyyat,” he said. “A lot of them were killed. They’ve been here for more than a couple of years now.”
The woman in the back seat chimed in: “They flourished under Saddam and now they’ll get a taste of the torture we got for so many years.”
Her comment brought her husband back from his snooze, and he scolded her. “God Almighty. They didn’t get any more than many others did. Poor people. Have some mercy in your heart, woman.”
“I don’t have a heart anymore,” she answered.
I thought of what she said. Most hearts were so fatigued, they ran away from their bodies, leaving behind caves in which beasts sleep.
After we waited an hour at al-Ruwayshid, the Jordanian officer eyeballed me with tired eyes and asked me rather coarsely: “Anyone with you?”
“No, just me.”
He threw aside my passport, saying:
“No single men. Only families get in.”
“But why?”
“These are the orders.” He motioned for me to leave and yelled “Next!”
Abu Hadi, the driver, brought down my suitcase from the trunk and gave me back half of the fee. He patted me on the shoulder saying, “Try to go to Syria. It’s much easier. Or just wait until things calm down a bit and give it another try.” We said goodbye and the man who was waiting with his family in the car waved to me. I waved back. Abu Hadi drove away. I tried to send a text message to al-Janabi, but there was no network. I would have to write to my uncle.
The number of those who weren’t allowed into Jordan was enough to start a service from the border back to Baghdad’s stabbed heart. I saw a driver yelling from the window of his car “One passenger to Baghdad. One to Baghdad.” I walked over carrying my suitcase, heavy with disappointment. I would have to write to both my uncle and al-Janabi about this. Would Ghayda’ believe me?
FIFTY-THREE
One of the old Mesopotamian creation myths says that for a long time the gods used to do their work and fulfill their tasks. Some planted, some harvested, and others made things. But they were tired, so they complained to An-ki, the god of water and wisdom, and asked him to lighten their burden. But he was in the depths of the water and did not hear their complaints. So the gods resorted to his mother, Nammu.
She went and called out to him, “Rise up, son, and create slaves for the gods.”
An-ki thought about it, then summoned the crafts gods to make humans out of clay. He told his mother: “The creatures I have decided to make will be in the image of the gods. Scoop some mud from the deep waters and give it to the crafts gods to knead and thicken into clay, then you make the body parts with the help of Mother Earth.”
Thus humans were created to carry the burden of the gods and their toil. An-ki said to the great gods, “I will prepare a pure place and one of the gods shall be slaughtered there. Let the other gods be baptized with his blood. We will mix his flesh and blood with the clay and he shall be both god and human, eternally united in clay.”
FIFTY-FOUR
We finished washing and shrouding a nine-year-old boy. He needed only wings to look like an angel. He was killed with his father in an explosion next to the National Theater. I felt my ribs stabbing me from within and strangling my every breath. I told Mahdi that I was going outside to sit next to the pomegranate tree. I’d been sitting the last few months on the chair I’d put in front of it to converse with it. It has become my only companion in the world. Its red blossoms had opened like wounds on the branches, breathing and calling out. I’d been humming a song I heard a few weeks before and replaced “Sweet Basil” with “Pomegranate” in its lyrics.
Pity me, pity me
O Pomegranate tree
I’ve become skin and bones
And nobody knows
My malady
And nobody knows
My remedy
Pity me, pity me
O Pomegranate tree
I looked at its dark soil, wet with the washing water it had just drunk. It’s a wondrous tree, I thought. Drinking the water of death for decades now, but always budding, blossoming, and bearing fruit every spring. Is that why my father loved it so much? He used to tell me that the Prophet Muhammad said there is a seed from paradise in every pomegranate fruit. But paradise is always somewhere else.
And hell, all of it, is here and grows bigger every day. Like me, this pomegranate’s roots were here in the depths of hell.
Do the roots reveal everything to the branches, or do they keep what is painful to themselves? Its branches rise up and when the wind toys with them, they look like they are fluttering and about to fly. But it’s a tree. Its fate is to be a tree and to remain here. I keep saying that I don’t believe in fate. So why am I saying this? I should say its history, not its fate. History is what people call fate. And history is random and violent, storming and uprooting everything and everyone without ever turning back.
A beautiful nightingale perched on one of the pomegranate’s high branches. The nightingale turned its black head and gazed at me with its black eyes. Its head was adorned with a white triangular crown. It turned its head again and I saw its cheek was the same white as its tail feathers.
It started singing with a gentle sweetness — as if it knew I had complained that paradise was far away, so it had brought its sound right here. Are you thinking of building a nest here? Does my presence worry you? Don’t be afraid. I’m not an enemy. I remembered the nightingale we had in a cage at home when I was a child. My father used to feed it pieces of dates, apples, grapes, and pomegranate.
The living die or depart, and the dead always come. I had thought that life and death were two separate worlds with clearly marked boundaries. But now I know they are conjoined, sculpting each other. My father knew that, and the pomegranate tree knows it as well.