I stayed in Athens for only a short time and then went on to Patras. That place was teeming with refugees hoping to slip into one of the countless lorries, and thus to board a ship to Italy, illegally. Again, the bringer of bad luck was at my side. It was in the evening. I was lying in the park with a large group of other refugees, from a different Asian and African countries, looking longingly at the ships and the sea and dreaming of the day when I too would manage a trip across the ocean. Suddenly, one of the ships went up in flames. The fire brigade, police and press arrived immediately. There was talk of twenty dead, all Iraqi Kurds. They had hidden themselves in several lorries when the fire — caused, allegedly, by a cigarette — broke out. The next day, the police chased all the refugees from the harbour area. No one was allowed anywhere near the wall. The Kurds organized a demonstration. Demanded proper funerals for the dead. The municipal authorities conceded to the demand. A few days later, we were walking behind the coffins. At the cemetery, one of the refugees turned to me and smiled sadly. ‘Look at this dead man! He is my friend. We are from the same village. Now, he has finally found peace and, what’s more, a beautiful black suit. He never had one like that when he was alive.’
I didn’t answer but walked away in a bad mood and thought, ‘All this, only my fault!’
It became difficult to leave Patras and get to Italy. It was months before I managed. I still wonder how — in such a tragic situation — you can apologize enough. For I need to ask a whole lot of people for forgiveness. But I’d rather not think about it. It’s fate, isn’t it? Or isn’t it?
I got to Italy, this time bringing neither earthquakes nor scandals with me. Thanks to the Italian police who couldn’t be bothered to check every one, I was able — quite comfortably — to jump, in Bari, across the harbour fence and to end up, finally, in Bolzano, just before the border between Italy and Austria. At the railway station, a crowd of other refugees had already settled for the night. I managed to get a place to sleep beside a photo booth. People told me that by train or lorry the route to Germany was fast and easy. I was pleased. But that same evening, a people-smuggler turned up with unpleasant news: ‘There’s no way through any more. The snow’s blocked many roads and the police are out all over Austria and Germany. We need to wait for a few days.’ These few days became almost a month that I spent cursing myself: ‘You jinx, you unlucky raven!’ At least I didn’t have to apologize to the locals — it wasn’t they who were affected by the bad luck.
I arrived in Germany. The inconvenience wasn’t so tragic. No big problems. Only small ones. The Germans had jettisoned the Deutschmark and talked themselves into the euro. Everything became expensive. A new immigration act was passed that didn’t make life any easier for asylum seekers and refugees. The political Right and Left formed a coalition such that, in the end, you no longer knew what was now Right and what Left. Nonetheless, the feeling didn’t ever creep up on me that I was to blame for anything in this country.
I stayed. I started university. Then things took a dramatic turn, after all. Suddenly, some politician or other had the idea of boosting the government’s coffers with money from the purses and wallets of the students — and the universities began to ask for up to five hundred euros per semester by way of fees. I decided to apologize to my fellow students.
‘I’m sorry!’
‘What?’
‘That whole fee thing.’
‘What about the fees?’
‘It’s all because of my raven!’
‘Raving? Have you gone completely mad or what?’
‘No, I mean a different kind of rav-en!’
‘Which then?’
‘A raven that, at some point, will devastate the earth.’
‘You must be mad. What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know, the unlucky raven that reached Germany not so long ago.’
‘Is this one of your Arabian fairy tales again?’
‘Yes, it’s a real Arabian tale. Arabian Night Number 1002.’
EIGHT. Return of the Faces
The Iraqis or, to be precise, the Babylonians invented astronomy. They even built the first telescope. Alongside, another kind of science of the stars was developed — astrology. Then, as now, reading the stars is one of the favourite occupations of the inhabitants of the two-river country. The women in my family also proved to be in no way averse to this science. Many ordinary people saw the stars as more than mere shining dots in the firmament. They attributed to them an ability to determine fates. Accordingly, there are stars that signify bad or good days. In mediaeval Baghdad, a system was developed whereby the stars were differentiated and ordered very exactly. This complicated system (of which my mother, too, had total command) included the following fact — there are people whose entire lives are brightly lit by the stars. They are blessed with power and success. And there are people whose lives proceed completely in the shadows of the stars, regardless of whatever efforts they make. They are battered by fate all their lives.
Modern Iraqi history seems to proceed in the shadow of the stars. In truth, though, it isn’t led by the stars of astrology but by very different ones. The stars on the epaulettes of the generals, those military monsters who have placed one unlucky raven after another on the roofs of those battered by fate. My life, too, was ruined by these stars in my homeland where I experienced nothing but wars, rebellions and other disasters. These, in the end, sent me off on a long, almost unbearable journey. I changed towns in Asia, Africa and Europe the way other people change their shirts, and tried to put down new roots in every new country and every new town. Again and again, though, the day arrived — or rather, the star — that forced me, usually, for the oddest of reasons, to flee once more.
But what does all that mean? All the wars, rebellions, disasters — and inhuman exertions required by an escape? The stars-on-epaulettes fates that determined my life? Are they just individual incidents in an exciting, never-ending story — to put behind you, like a childhood illness? Or does something else remain deep within, something indescribable and mysterious? A cemetery full of memories of a whole host of nightmares and of dead people? Yes, precisely such a cemetery turned my life too into a hell — the cemetery the stars pre-arranged for me.
I always wanted to free myself of this cemetery but, again and again, faces rose from it that made a suffering Christ of me — or perhaps, to put it more pathetically, and as I first wrote many years ago: ‘Jesus went to Heaven but I’m still hanging on the cross.’ Again and again, the faces. And not only in my dreams. The faces of relatives and friends who perished in the war, who lost their lives in jail or on the run. Endless corpses — more than there are hairs on my head! I tried, several times, to talk to a psychiatrist about it. That led each time, though, to a packet of tablets — to help me sleep better. But when I asked the doctor about the faces that always spoke to me in the streets, I got no reply or, at best, a childlike, naive one that, even days later, had me and all my faces laughing.