‘You’re going back to the Central Prison today,’ the prison guard said to me a week later.
‘Can I take these pages with me?’
‘No!’
‘Please! I beg you! You look like someone from southern Iraq. My father’s from the south too. Please help me — please!’
‘Okay, but don’t tell anyone.’
‘I won’t! Promise!’
He took all my clothes, my underwear too, carefully undid some hems and, then, incredibly skilfully, hid my pages in them. Not even the Devil could have guessed that something was hidden in my clothes.
When I was finally released, I couldn’t believe at first that I was free again. There’d been a government amnesty for all political prisoners. I returned home in the same clothes the secret service had taken me away in. Incredible! I was getting to see my family again and they, me. I was overjoyed. And confused. I had difficulty grasping reality. Everything seemed like a dream. My mother gave me a clean set of clothes. Only days later did I ask her, ‘Where are my things?’
‘What things?’
‘The ones I had on when I came home.’
‘Oh — they were full of lice and stank like hell. I burnt them.’
I was still in Baghdad when the next loss hit me. My time in jail was behind me, true, but deep within my soul the memory of it burnt brightly. Life outside the prison walls wasn’t very different from inside. I felt that there was no longer a life for me. I imagined that everyone was against me, was spying on me, wanted to be rid of me at the earliest opportunity. I could hardly sleep at night. I crouched until dawn on the roof of our house, watching the street like a hawk, convinced that the police would come for me again. And if, by chance, I was able to sleep, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat. ‘Don’t hit me. I didn’t do anything! Please — leave me alone! I’m innocent!’
My family feared I was going mad. I was haunted almost daily by this nightmare and desperately wanted it to stop. One night, I locked myself in my room, threw the books and notepads from the shelves into a pile and then sat on top of it. Poured petrol, lit a match and let it drop. The fire spread quickly. Everything round me began to slowly become ash and smoke. It was such a wonderful feeling. I was free. Floating away with every charred scrap, every plume of smoke. Suddenly, there was a crash. My brother’d kicked in the door. Then dragged me away from the fire. The next day I got hold of a map of the world and decided to escape. To another country. Far away.
And I succeeded. I spent a few years in various Arab countries in Asia and Africa until the day finally arrived when I could head for Europe. It was then that the greatest loss hit me. At the Turkey — Greece border. Near Edirne, on the Turkish side. I was travelling with about thirty refugees — Kurds, Turkmens, Persians, Afghans, Arabs, Africans, Pakistanis and a Kurdish people-smuggler. We stopped for a short break on a hill. Suddenly — out of nowhere — the border police were upon us. We ran as fast as we could. In all directions. I was running so frantically that I dropped my rucksack and it rolled down the slope. A policeman, who really could run, arrested me. Nodding at the valley, I tried to tell him that my rucksack was down there. It seemed to interest him very little. He dangled a weapon before me. And then began to beat me. When I came to, I was in a Turkish jail — again — and without my rucksack. It had a few tins of food, the little money I owned and a notepad in which, for three years, I’d been recording all my ideas — three years of poetry between Asia and Africa. What a loss! I think, sometimes, that everything I write now is nothing but what I’d written back then. As if I am rewriting everything I’ve lost.
My escape came to an end in Germany. Since then, I’ve been living in Munich mainly. Many of my earlier writings reached me by post — things that friends from Asia, Africa and Europe had kept for me. To prevent further losses, I decided to publish as much as I could. Since I’ve been in Munich, my reading and writing habits have also changed. Often, I sit in a cafe in town to revise my drafts. Everything was going peacefully until, one afternoon, I had the feeling that a loss was springing up on me again. I was sitting, once again, in a cafe in Schwabing and had the manuscript of a book of poems with me. On the bus, on my way home, I leafed through the pages and was happy with the changes I’d made. Then I got off and went home. My flatmate was at the computer. ‘How was work, Rasul?’
‘Very good!’
I sat on the couch to look at my changes again. I opened my bag to take out my manuscript. Damn! I must have left it on the bus! No! How, after all my tragic losses, could I do something so stupid and ridiculous? How?
‘Who’re you talking to?’
‘Myself!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I think I’ve left my manuscript on the bus!’
‘All your corrections gone? I’m sorry!’
‘It’s not just the corrections. It’s the whole manuscript. . Gone!’
‘Hey, man!’ he said, with a grin. ‘What century are you in? Why do you think we have these machines?’
‘What machines?’
‘You’ve saved everything on the computer here, haven’t you? Chill, man!’
‘Oh!’ I jumped up, mouth and eyes wide open. My friend got up so that I could sit at the computer. I clicked on My Documents, then on ‘Rasul Hamid’, then on ‘Poetry Books’. . And there it was—‘Adams-Station’.
Relieved, I grinned at my friend. ‘Thank you, Computer!’
THREE. Priests’ Daughters
Even in my youth, I had a lot of bad habits. But what is ‘bad’? What for one person is a bad habit can be for another a perfectly good one. Everyone sees what he wants to or, as it often is, does not want to. So, I have been blessed with many odd habits. I like to smoke — a lot. I drink like a hole in the ground — I prefer beer and vodka. Passionately, and very obviously, I love to stare at women in the streets, especially those with well-rounded arses. I read and write only at night. Like to sleep on sofas or on the floor. Without a thought I’ll slap people in the face with the truth (this, understandably, has earned me a lot of enemies).
I don’t know how or why I acquired these habits. Not even my most embarrassing but unique one — stealing paper. I don’t know any more when I began. It may be a dream that is to blame. A dream that’s haunted me since I first was able to think. An ancient temple, a thousand years old, perhaps even before the Common Era, decorated with Babylonian, Old Egyptian and Greek sculptures and paintings. From behind a column, I spy on the priest’s daughter and the muses as, with bare bosoms, they pray to the gods at the sacrificial altar. I look at their breasts, round, small and firm. When the prayer ends, they scurry outside without a sound. And a tremor goes through me, and I quiver like a palm leaf in a thunderstorm. I creep to the altar, steal a sheet of the sacred temple paper, sit on the floor in front of the fire and begin to write. I can no longer remember what. But I know that since that day — and that dream — I have wanted to do nothing but write. And ever since, this unspeakable paper-stealing curse has weighed heavily on me.
Perhaps my vice began in Baghdad, with Fatima, our neighbour. She had a round face, long blond hair — like the golden sun — and little apple breasts. She wore bright, colourful clothes, patterned with roses and other flowers. Whenever she went to the roof in the afternoon to hang up the washing, my hungry gaze would follow. I’d wait for her to hang up each item, to raise her arms as she did so, and then stare at her bosom moving up and down like that of the priest’s daughter in my dream.