God, how embarrassing! I’d been caught red-handed for the first time. Sara demanded an explanation. From the beginning. Starting with the temple and leading to her briefcase. From then on, she — silently — supported my habit. In her own way, naturally. By leaving her briefcase out on the table and strutting off to the bedroom. Like some priest’s daughter.
FOUR. Talking Walls
I frequently wonder about the fate of languages, given that they entered the world as a curse. God’s curse, when He was angry with humanity for trying to reach Him through the Tower of Babel. Babel isn’t far from my home town Baghdad, just a hundred and twenty kilometres away. My mother was born there. From that point of view, I suppose you can say that I have Babylonian blood in my veins. Shortly after I heard the story of the tower for the first time, my family paid a visit to my grandparents in Babel. I, of course, was dying to see the tower. My grandfather said, ‘The Tower of Babel hasn’t existed for a long time. But if you look very closely, you can still see it.’ It was a long time before I undesrtood what he meant by ‘look very closely’.
A good friend of mine, a student of English philology in Baghdad, wished to continue his studies in Australia. He told me that he thought the tower was no more than a symbol for the various languages. In a letter to me, he asserted that the tower had never really existed and cited several pieces of evidence to support this view. But the curse of the tower was to dog him. As far as Australia, almost, where he hoped to land, illegally. He was swallowed up by the sea. To me, it doesn’t matter whether the tower existed. Whether humanity had indeed brought God to the point where He finally shifted His arse and used His power against them. The one important thing was that the tower was the reason for human beings to want to be able to record and write things as well as to speak languages. Why? Quite simple: if people have many languages, they write in order to protect their own as well as to communicate with others. I can easily imagine that — as is written in the Bible — in the beginning was the word; the word scrawled on a stone in the tower by a madman following the curse: ‘I am the forefather of all authors to come.’
Perhaps as a result of my Babylonian blood, I began to scribble on walls from an early age. Not to protect my language, though. But to annoy older people. Back then, I didn’t know the lines by Heinrich Heine: ‘And it wrote and wrote on the white wall letters of fire; and it wrote and disappeared.’ Nonetheless, I wrote and disappeared. In my intermediate-school years, I adorned the walls with provocative indecencies: ‘The head teacher’s an arsehole.’ ‘The literature teacher’s fucking the cleaner.’ ‘The imam is gay.’ ‘The president is fucking everyone.’ And observed with relish how the teachers, the police and the government officials searched the school for suspects. That was my game. I’d played it for a while before it came to a sad end. The government arrested a large group of boys from our district, labelled them ‘dangerous’, ‘suspicious’. The boys never came back. At first, I thought they’d return all right. Then it was rumoured that they’d admitted, under torture, to writing those slogans. Never again did I write another sentence on the wall. Even today, I’m plagued by the thought that I was responsible for those boys leading a life in prison.
Fate had possibly played the same game with me. At the age of nineteen, I was put in prison for a similar reason. Where there was any number of walls to write on. Nothing but walls. A window was an alien concept. As were the sun and women. You could only guess that the sun shone somewhere out there. On the dark side of the Earth, the first line of verse I read was on the wall of my first celclass="underline" ‘Prison is, for me, an honour; the shackle, an ankle bracelet; and the gallows, the heroes’ swing.’ Its author must have lost all hope. I grew frightened. Back then, I had no intention of ending up as a hero at the gallows. A year later, I wrote the same line in another cell and thought nothing of it. Simply anything and everything was written on the walls. You could spend a lot of time exploring the worldview of the various prisoners, their ethnic or religious affiliations. ‘Workers of the world, unite!’—a communist. ‘Free Kurdistan!’—a Kurd. ‘May God protect the believers’—some religious person. ‘Come, Holy Imam al-Mahdi, and save the earth!’—a Shi’ite. ‘I want to go back to my mother.’—someone like me, with no idea why he was there.
Not all holy men were present on these walls, though. Joseph — sent from God — was the wall star of this prison. ‘God, free me as you freed Joseph from prison!’ This Joseph was everywhere, as if he’d been the only one God ever sent to earth. The Shi’ites have an imam known as al-Kadhim. He was poisoned in prison.His name could be found everywhere too. You could hardly overlook the fact that the person who’d written al-Kadhim’s name had had enough, with life or what was left of it. And so I spent my time analysing the sentences on the walls.
Later, I discovered a new game. I studied the inscriptions to try and find out how long their authors had spent in prison. Many wrote their date of arrival on the wall as soon as they arrived. Very few also had a second date. Of their release, perhaps? In most cases, though, there was only the one. I memorized certain styles of lettering and looked for similar ones in other cells. For, in the course of my time in prison, I went from one cell to another. And so, in time, I discovered that the inscriptions without a second date were generally by the Shi’ites and Kurds. This set loose a boundless fear in me for I, too, was a member of a Shi’ite family. In the end, I had the good fortune to be allowed to see the light of the sun again — after eighteen months and four days.
Since my rebirth I’ve barely written on the walls. Instead, I read more than ever what others have left behind. I don’t know why. After my release, it hardly made sense to besmirch the walls. In my eyes, things had changed. I thought only of fleeing now. And so I battled my way to Jordan. And from the harbour town of al-Aqaba, I made it by sea to Egypt. On the dirty, old ship were hundreds of Egyptian workers, taking home new TVs, video recorders and clothes. A few Iraqis, too, wanting to get as far away as possible from their homeland. The ship’s sides were covered with inscriptions. I spent the hours not looking out to sea but reading all the scrawls. The most beautiful, and the most heartbreaking, was: ‘Welcome to Africa. He who enters is lost. He who gets out, reborn.’
The inscriptions were constantly changing. Once, I found my name everywhere. It was in a village on the border between Chad and Libya. The village of the Garar tribe. For a brief while, I found work there. The Muslims from Chad were desperately looking for someone to teach their children the Koran. True, there were a few in the tribe who knew Arabic but the village elders felt that a real Arab would make a better teacher. The village didn’t have a school. Only a tent. The children sat on the ground. A board, held up by dowels and stones. A chair for the teacher. That bothered me less, actually. What bothered me more was that, from the very first day, everyone laughed at my name. The children, too, grinned cheekily and followed me with shouts of ‘Mister Rasul’. After my first walk through the village, I understood part of the puzzle. My name was everywhere, on every wall — in the valley, on the hill, on every stone. The men with me explained, mysteriously, that the name had been written all over the village for a long time and hadn’t anything to do with me. To me, it seemed strange. The head teacher reassured me with a smile, ‘The people in this village believe that, some time in the future, a hero will come. He will be called Rasul and he will change the world.’