These faces didn’t just take me to the edge of madness. They also took my life to the limits of tolerability. They appeared one after another, in different constellations, as if they’d discussed things in advance. Each of these groups tried to trigger memories I’d have preferred to leave to eternal sleep. Recently, the faces of Fadhel and Aga surfaced, surrounded by a number of other faces, in a deep, never-ending stretch of water.
Fadhel was an Iraqi, a good friend I had met in Benghazi. He’d studied English and was especially interested in mythology. His greatest wish was to go to Australia and write his master’s thesis on the Tower of Babel. But during his illegal boat journey to the world’s fifth and smallest continent, he was seized by the immense vastness of the ocean and swallowed up. In contrast, Aga was an ordinary boy who had the very small dream of sleeping in Denmark, or Sweden, with a great big blonde. He was Iraqi or Persian or neither, he didn’t know. During the Iraq — Iran war, when he was still a child, his family was deported to Iran because the Iraqi government regarded them as Persian, and thus as racially impure Iraqis, and treated them as such, though they’d been based in Iraq since the nineteenth century. In Iran, however, it was the reverse — they were seen as Iraqis, not pure Persians, in racial terms. There was only one way out of this dilemma. And so, I met Aga in Turkey when he was trying, with me and some other refugees, to enter Greece illegally. But the powerful deluge of water that was the Ebrus washed him away. Might he finally have found a homeland at the bottom of the river? His and Fadhel’s face often visited me, whispering, ‘Life is like water, you can’t grab it and hold it in your hand. You can only plunge into the middle of it.’
Alla’s face often dropped by, too. In his wake, a string of others. I knew Alla from Jordan. A member of a Shi’ite party, he fled from Iraq because the party had been banned there. Abroad, he wanted nothing more to do with politics. He simply wanted peace and quiet, to live in peace. He then tried to go from Jordan to France, illegally. Everything he’d worked hard for in Jordan, about nine thousand dollars, he gave to a people-smuggler for a French passport. Arrested at the airport, he spent a short time in jail and was due to be deported to Iraq. One night, they found him in his cell — dead. He’d banged his head on the wall until he collapsed. Alla’s face said to me, ‘Life is like a wall. You have to bang your head on it to understand what the truth is.’
Faces and more faces — faces that died in jail, faces that died in the war. Faces that went missing. Faces that became slaves to madness. The face of Mustafa. He, too, fled from Iraq to Libya. In Tripoli, he worked as a chemistry teacher. Then one day he simply went mad. He imagined he was being followed by the Iraqi secret service, that he would soon be killed. He began doubting all his friends and made their lives hell. ‘You traitor! You spy! You’re working for the secret service.’ One day, he even beat up his superior, the director of the Institute for Technology, because he was convinced the latter was an agent of the Iraqi government and was spying on him. He’s been in a mental home since. A few years ago, his face appeared before me. I knew right away he’d died. His face, too, was accompanied by a string of others. He didn’t say a single word, only looked at me as if I were a ghost. I don’t know why. Perhaps he’d told me what he wanted to say and I just hadn’t understood.
The face of Zahir came to me too. Oh, Zahir! We first met in Berlin. He was already an old man, almost sixty but looked eighty. He’d left Iraq with his wife in 1979 when the government abolished the Communist Party and persecuted and murdered its members. Zahir then lived in East Berlin and moved to the western part of the city when the Wall came down. Somehow, he didn’t ever live in the present. The past had its arms firmly round him. When we met in an Arabian cafe in Kreuzberg, he talked only about the Iraq of the seventies. ‘We did that’ and ‘back then was’ and ‘those were the best years, after all’. He had no idea of the present, nor did he want to. He talked to me about the communist values that would save Iraq. At first, I wanted to enlighten him, to tell him about the current position in Iraq of the former Communist Party — how only a few old men and women remained whom almost no one knew after all these years. Then I decided to let him revel in his dreams.
Zahir’s wife once told me that his suitcase was packed and waiting in his bedroom since 1979, ready for their imminent return to Iraq. He regularly checked the contents to ensure everything he needed was in it. When the war began in 2003, he phoned me, full of joy. ‘I’ll soon be flying to Iraq!’ On 9 April, the big statue of Saddam on Firdos Square came down. That same day, I called him at home. At the other end of the line, his wife’s voice: ‘Zahir waited his whole life for this moment. He didn’t get to experience it. He died yesterday. Heart attack!’ Zahir’s face had a word of comfort for me. ‘The most beautiful paths are those that don’t reach their goal.’
Some time ago, the faces of Salim and Hasne — whom I’d almost forgotten — visited me. Salim’s face consoled me, ‘In war, we are all just lost feathers.’ Hasne’s face added, ‘We mothers are grief’s jewellery and its lipstick.’ I can now remember Hasne and Salim. It was in the first days of the Iraq — Iran war. I was still a child. One day, some members of the Ba’ath Party, some policemen and a few from the security service, brought Salim into the playground of our primary school. They shot him in front of all the students because he’d refused to go and fight at the front. ‘See, children!’ our head teacher declared, ‘That’s what happens to traitors and cowards.’ Salim had just turned twenty and was a peace-loving, sociable young man. He was the only son of Hasne, the blind woman, who sat all day at the window of her home, selling sunflower seeds, chewing gum and Pepsi-Cola to the children. Despite being blind, she could easily feel and recognize coins. Following her son’s execution, she descended into an abysmal sadness. A month later, she too died.
In the summer of 2006, new faces assailed me. Faces determined to take me away with them. None of the previous faces had tried to do that. The new ones tried all the harder, the faces of Karima, Saber, Basem and Sumeia. They’re so embroiled in my fate, they swim in my blood. God, that’s a long, long story! Where to begin? It’s best if I begin with the fortune-teller.
I’d just turned seventeen when I visited a fortune-teller with my brother Mohammed, two years my junior, and Galil, the boy next door. For the first, and last, time in my life, I wanted a fortune-teller to predict my future. First, Mohammed and Galil heard their futures from the mouth of that old man who was barely four feet tall. He predicted a splendid and successful career for both, as engineers. Then he turned to me. ‘Do you really want to?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘But, my son! Believe in God — not in fortune-telling!’
I thought he was joking. ‘But I want you to!’
He waited a while, looked to his left and right and then said softly, ‘Listen. This is your fate. You won’t ever have peace. You’ll go to jail. Then you’ll flee — far away. You’ll always be on the run. You’ll see the walls of many jails on this earth. You’ll travel and travel. You’ll live far away, in another country. You’ll marry and have a child. Then you’ll leave your family and go away. You’ll travel some more. You’re a hard-working person, my son, but that won’t help you because your star in the sky doesn’t shine. So you’ll always remain a loser. In the end, when you’re thirty-five, you’ll live in the street with down-and-outs and then die alone in a foreign country on a bleak platform. That is your fate.’