‘Are you serious?’
‘It’s true. But it has nothing to do with you — the hero is from Chad, not Arabia.’
I didn’t believe a word. The inscriptions seemed to point, at least, to a glimmer of hope. Nonetheless, ‘Rasul’ was to appear more and more on the stones in the valley. I thought nothing of it. Hero, after all, isn’t necessarily the worst thing I have been called. When, after three months, I was to return to Tripoli, I took my leave of these people who had been so good to me. The head teacher accompanied me to the car and said, with a smile, ‘Now I can tell you why your name is everywhere. It has nothing to do with heroes, nor with you.’
‘Then—?’
‘Some time ago, we had an Arabic teacher from Libya. His name was Rasul too. The boys in the tribe liked him a lot, spent all their free time with him. When he left, some of them — still longing for him — wrote his name everywhere.’
‘Was he that good?’
‘Yes. . and. . umm. . he was gay.’
The inscriptions on the walls were so different in the East and the West that, sometimes, I couldn’t work out whether they were meant positively or negatively. My next stop was Turkey. I had to cross the Greek border illegally, on foot. It was my third attempt, already, that ended on the bank of the Ebrus. Many had lost their lives in it — the ‘river of doom’, the refugees called it — trying to swim across to Greece. I remember a young Persian who was dragged under by a powerful wave. He never came up for air again. The river can rightly be called an ‘international watery grave’. Countless people of many countless countries have lost their bodies and souls to it. To them, I dedicated the following inscription on a tree on the Turkish side: ‘This is the River Ebrus, an international watery grave and meeting place of many cultures.’
Each time, I sat on its bank and dreamt of reaching the other side. It was really and truly a curse, this border river. Three times, I was arrested by the Turkish police. The third time, I was sitting beside a tree as our people-smuggler fixed his rubber dinghy. Carved into the tree in Arabic was ‘Here is where the sun goes down in the east and rises in the west.’ I didn’t have the time, sadly, to consider what the author meant by that for a loud voice—‘Durmak, polis!’—Freeze, police! — tore me from my thoughts.
At the fourth attempt, I succeeded in crossing the river of doom. Nonetheless, I had to return to it. On the Greek side of the river, the police surprised our gang of refugees. They took us to a prison in Komotini. In the dirty, old, damp, smelly prison were jailed a vast number of refugees. Someone had written on the wall, in English: ‘Welcome to Istanbul.’ I asked a Kurd beside me, ‘We’re in Greece, aren’t we?’
‘Yes, we are.’
‘So what does this mean?’
‘Nothing. I think the police wrote it to let us know that we’ll all be deported to Turkey. They’re making fun of us.’
‘Are we really being deported?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they send back all those they arrest before they reach Thessaloniki. If you get beyond Thessaloniki, they send you to Athens.’
‘Is that the law?’
‘It’s a fact!’
I succeeded — after years of trying — in crossing the Mediterranean and reaching Germany. In Germany, the police sent me to Bayreuth. I stayed there for a while in an asylum seekers’ home, full of refugees from different countries. The rooms were between twenty and thirty square metres and meant for four to six people. I slept in a room with three men, also from Iraq. The walls were full of inscriptions and paintings. One of my room-mates told me that on a wall in the next room was a poem that sounded incredibly hopeless and cruel. ‘Chronicle of Lost Time’, it was called. I went over and read it. It ended with these lines:
In the seventh wound
I sit beside the graveyards
and await my coffin that passers-by will carry.
I couldn’t say a word. Went back to my room. I couldn’t believe it. The poem was one of mine. What kind of world was this? No matter how hard I thought about it, I could think of no one who could have written it on the wall. It had to be one of the many friends I’d made on one of my many escapes. I often wrote poems and then gave them to friends to keep safe for me. That day, I knew I’d found the title for my first book of poems.
From Germany, I went on my first journey as a tourist. I’d been on the road for four years but as a refugee. My Bavarian girlfriend Sara invited me to travel to Italy with her. We went in her car — and with a tent — to Verona. A beautiful little town, and the home of Juliet, Romeo’s beloved. I was delighted to be able to visit that square steeped in history. The entranceway and the walls of the passage were completely covered with the signatures of lovers from all over the world. I remembered the story of the Tower of Babel. And, suddenly, I understood what my grandfather meant when he’d said, ‘Look very closely.’ The languages of the world had come together — right below Juliet’s balcony. Not because of God’s anger but because of love. Lovers wrote their messages in every imaginable colour and their scrawls formed a huge fresco on the wall. At that moment, it occurred to me that there could be Arabic legends too. I looked and found the wonderful words ‘Habibti, Habibi’—my inamorata, my inamorato. I found another but that made my mouth fall open with horror. I stood there, rigid. As if a snake had bitten me. There it was, in clear handwriting: ‘You evildoers, what a return awaits you, Hell is your shelter and the journey to it is terrible.’
My girlfriend wrote our names on the wall. ‘And what have you found?’ she asked me. ‘What does this Arabic writing mean?’
‘What else, but Love!’
FIVE. Save Me from Emptiness
My grandfather’s face was like the walls of our house, old and weather-beaten. Like a stone on the beach. Like an eternal sailor. He’d lost his sight but was exceptionally big and strong. So strong that not even a mob of fully grown young men could have flattened him. I, at least, was convinced of that. He said that was his nature. ‘One of God’s whims — or have you an objection to that?’ he’d laugh and ask whenever the subject was raised. He died when I was still at intermediate school.
I can remember one day, even now. I was playing football with my brothers in the yard. I shot the ball at the goal but didn’t score. It landed within my grandfather’s reach. He picked it up with a grin: ‘You’re not getting it back!’
‘Please, Granda, I’m losing as it is.’
‘Do you really want it back? Then you’ll have to fetch it! Come on, be men! Try, at least!’
Three of us, boys aged between ten and eighteen. But we couldn’t wrest back the ball from that blind man of ninety-eight. He grabbed all three of us with his huge strong arms. We couldn’t move. Then he broke out into gales of laughter, ‘Come closer to your Granda, closer! I want to smell you!’ He did that. Sniff at me, I mean. He often said that my smell reminded him of many people he’d encountered in the course of his eventful life. Especially Jabar, his brother and our great-uncle, whom I’d never met. When my family talked about Jabar, Hussein, the strong man, would grow weak. Hardly would they have started talking about Jabar when he would begin to cry. He included him in his prayers, daily. ‘Allah, the Almighty, bring Jabar back to us as you once brought Joseph back to his father, David.’ But he wouldn’t tell us what had happened to Jabar.