The sight of him reminded me of the fish my mother used to put on the kitchen table to clean before cooking. I was curious to touch the fish’s skin but felt a mixture of fascination and disgust afterward. I spent a long time looking at the fish as it lay on its side. With its open mouth and thick lips, its head looked like a human head, crying out, demanding to be returned to the water. The eye, too, was open looking into our eyes. We, who were about to devour it.
The eyes and mouth of the dead man were both shut. He was asleep and would never wake up again. Father noticed how nervous I was and how hurried and clumsy I was in pouring the water. As if wanting the whole thing to be over. Twice he had to tell me: “Slow down, son! Take it easy!” When we finished I rushed out to the street to catch a breath of fresh air.
EIGHT
He stepped into the classroom confidently, carrying a leather bag out of which he took a stack of drawing pads and a sack full of pencils that he put on the table. He went to the board and wrote in a nice script and big letters: FAN, art. Then he wrote his name in smaller letters: Raid Ismael. He was in his early twenties, with curly black hair and a thick beard. His light green shirt lit up his dark face. When he turned toward us and smiled, most of the students were still in recess mode and hadn’t noticed his entrance. He clapped three times to get their attention and said: “Come on, guys. Please. Back to your places. Let’s get started.” He pointed to his name on the board. “My name is Raid.”
At school, sports and arts classes were ignored and we often spent those classes (especially arts) playing soccer, or trying to sneak out to roam around the neighborhood. Some years we would get teachers assigned for arts, other years we wouldn’t. Dealing with sports was easier, because all the teacher needed was a few balls and some exercises. Arts, however, was a more challenging subject. Our school didn’t have a special arts room, and the administration wasn’t keen on providing the necessary material for teachers. Energies and resources were channeled into more “serious” subjects. Thus most arts teachers, if they bothered to show up at all, killed time by chatting with us or letting us do our homework for other classes. Meanwhile, they would read the newspaper or look out the window, asking us to keep it down when we became too noisy.
I had always enjoyed drawing and had started to do a great deal of it during that first summer I worked with father. The hours of waiting for death were long and boring. After I’d exhausted all my questions about death and filled numerous notebooks with notes about the rituals of washing, I started to draw father’s face from various angles, capturing him in the washhouse and at home watching TV. He wasn’t bothered at all and teased me sometimes: “Isn’t that enough? I’m no Saddam Hussein!”
One day, I drew Hammoudy as well. I liked his short spiky hair, wide eyes, and beautiful eyelashes. He liked his portrait so much that he asked to keep it. I offered to draw his portrait on a bigger piece of paper the next day and he was ecstatic. Father and Hammoudy were the only live models I could draw. I filled the notebooks with sketches of the washing bench and the shadows that gathered around it at various hours of the day. I drew the water faucet and tried to show the droplet of water at the moment it was about to fall from the faucet, but I couldn’t get it right.
Once, father got very angry when he found out that I was sketching the face of a dead man he’d washed just that morning. He scolded me: “Shame on you! The dead have their sanctity. Draw your father or Hammoudy as much as you want, but leave the dead in peace!”
Flustered, I lied, saying that I had been sketching the face of a relative who had accompanied the dead man and not the dead man himself.
He snatched the notebook from me and pointed to the sketch and said: “Don’t lie! Here he is lying on the washing bench!” He ripped the page out and tore it to pieces.
I apologized and never did it again. I felt ashamed and humiliated and went out to the little garden and sat next to the pomegranate tree, tending to my wounds. I turned to a new page and started to sketch the tree and the pomegranates it bore.
Mr. Ismael told us that life is the eternal subject of art and that the world and everything in it are constantly calling out: “Draw me!” He never said that death and the dead were outside the bounds of art. I regret not having asked father what harm there was in drawing the dead. Would it change anything or disturb their eternal sleep?
In addition to his zeal and his seriousness in dealing with art, what distinguished Mr. Ismael was how he treated us as his friends. He never ridiculed us, never dismissed or devalued our opinions when we disagreed with him.
He walked between the rows of desks distributing the drawing pads and pencils while we looked on in disbelief. He asked those who liked drawing to raise their hands and I raised mine high. I looked around. Many others had raised their hands too. He smiled and said: “Marvelous! Picasso, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, said: ‘Every child is an artist. The challenge is for the artist to stay a child when he grows up!’”
One of the students in the back said: “But we are not children, sir.”
There was laughter and Mr. Ismael laughed too and said: “You are young men and not children. The idea is that art allows the child imprisoned inside the adult to come out to play and celebrate the world and its beauty.”
He said that art was intimately linked with immortality: a challenge to death and time, a celebration of life. He said that our ancestors in Mesopotamia were the first to pose all these questions in their myths and in the epic of Gilgamesh, and that Iraq was the first and biggest art workshop in the world. In addition to inventing writing and building the first cities and temples, the first works of art and statues had appeared in ancient Iraq during the Sumerian era and now fill museums all over the world. Many still remained buried underground.
He said that we all were inheritors of this great treasure of civilization that enriches our present and future and makes modern Iraqi art so fertile. He asked whether we knew of the Liberty Monument in Liberation Square and the name of the artist who designed it, but we didn’t.
“Memorize the name of this man: Jawad Salim,” he said.
Mr. Ismael took out an apple. He put his bag and the apple on the table and asked us to draw them in fifteen minutes. Silence reigned except for the lead in our pencils scratching against the surface of the paper and the squeaking of a nearby desk whose occupant kept erasing what he’d just drawn. I started to sketch. I was seated in the third row close to the table. Those who were in the back had to stand up every now and then to look.
Mr. Ismael walked around checking each drawing and making comments. When he got to my desk, he stood and looked for half a minute without saying anything. I’d finished drawing the table, bag, and apple and started to add the shades in the corners and some other tiny details, especially how the sun’s rays entered the classroom from the window next to the table and how the bag blocked some of the light, leaving the apple in the shade.
I expected him to criticize me, but he said: “Well done, Jawad. Marvelous! Marvelous!” I was very happy with his approval and praise.
He continued to walk around and announced that ten minutes had passed. Five minutes later, he asked us to stop and put our pencils down. Then he told us to get up and have a look at what the others had drawn without making noise. Of course there was some chatter and some students who pretended to be critics, pointing with their fingers and offering silly comments. I saw one drawing that I thought could compete with mine, but the others were quite ordinary or incomplete.