I was soon good friends with Suad. She told me she also wanted to write but just for herself. She was from Palestine but had Jordanian citizenship. Her family had to leave Palestine in the forties when Israel began to exist on the map. Suad’s father fought for some banned Palestinian organization that wanted to free Palestine from the Israelis. One day, he was found dead in the street, along with his eldest son. Suad had just turned two. His mysterious death remained unexplained. Suad didn’t like talking about it though she told me once that the Jordanian government was responsible. ‘This government is a disgrace!’ Immediately after her exams, poor Suad had to begin working at the soap factory. To keep herself and her mother afloat. Of her dream of becoming a lawyer, she simply said, ‘I’ll have to forget about that!’
It soon became clear to me that I’d fallen in love with Suad and her fate. A close friendship grew between us. We began going out, mostly to the cinema, and spent a lot of time together. We even wrote poems to each other. I never showed Suad my most important poems from that period, though, for they’d been inspired by her body. And they’d been written in the grip of that indescribable tremor and quiver. I didn’t say a word about that either, of course. I simply rejoiced at every day that let me see her sad black eyes.
You can imagine how much paper I used up. I wasn’t in a position to buy it, of course. My salary was just about enough to live on — where was I to find the money for paper? I got it from the bins or from the many falafel or kebab stands. Once, I even pinched a whole pile from a snack bar when the waiter stepped into the kitchen.
I wrote for more than seven months, almost daily. It’s not as if that in any way means everything was okay. I could no longer remain in Jordan. True, I did have a six-month residence permit but — like all Iraqis who came to Jordan in the nineties — I didn’t have a work permit. I had to hide whenever the factory was inspected. Jump over the factory wall and run — as far as possible, as quickly as possible. After your first six months in Jordan, you have to pay the government a dollar per day or be deported to Iraq. But who can afford that?
I’d passed the six-month mark long since. Suad was very sad when I left Jordan but I was sadder still. How I would have liked to tell her I loved her but my courage abandoned me. And so, I left Suad in her substitute homeland and set out to find one for myself.
My poems for Suad and her poems for me I left with her, as my farewell gift. But those I’d written secretly, on falafel and kebab paper I took with me, of course. During my six-day trip, by bus and ship from Asia to Africa, I leafed through them again and again and every word reminded me of my beloved Suad. I wrote her a long letter in which I vowed my love for her. I kept it with me for a long time until, one day, like in a romantic film, I put it into a bottle and threw it into the Mediterranean. Did it ever reach its addressee?
I landed in Libya. Or, to be precise, I landed in Benghazi. A small seaside town, it didn’t have a lot to offer other than the sea and numerous beaches — in terms of women, I mean, of course. True, there was a nice selection from Asia and Africa, even Europe, especially Romania, but it wasn’t easy to speak to them, let alone touch them. I think that if the government had permitted it, the men would have hung signs on their women: ‘Haram — Danger! Don’t touch!’ On Fridays, you felt like you were in the Sahara. Not a woman to be seen in the streets. Wherever you looked, nothing but believers in a hurry, keen not to miss Friday prayer. In the evenings, too, it was as if the women had all been blown away, except a few foreign girls who, almost always, were accompanied by a man. As usual, there were also a few whores, foreigners mostly, especially from Morocco.
In Benghazi, my hobby of ‘looking at women’ developed into a science, the theory at its root being what I called ‘the analysis of female arses’. With Hasan, a fellow countryman, I hung around Tibisti, the beach in the centre of town, to view the women out for an afternoon walk. In next to no time we’d identified the crucial differences between the different types of arses and arrived at the conclusion that a particular arse could easily be attributed to a particular nationality. Big, curvy arses were Libyan or Egyptian. This, in my opinion, was because of the large amount of noodles and beans traditionally eaten in those countries. Small, firm asses, on the other hand, were Tunisian and Moroccan. Because, as Hasan supposed, those women moved about a lot and had to work as hard as men. Small, broad and slightly flabby asses — on very thin legs, often — were Sudanese or Somali. Perhaps because of starvation, and the merciless sun. Those on firm, fleshy legs were Mauritanian because. . Well, why do you think? Our theory was hardly likely to play a significant role in the wider field of international science. But Hasan and I had great fun with it. And that was all that mattered.
As if that weren’t enough, I finally had a bit of luck with work — and not just with my depleted escape fund. Right away, in the first few months, I found a position as an Arabic teacher in a primary school. I was kept busy all day every day until a priest’s daughter suddenly stood before me in the form of Jasmin, the new English teacher, who instantly caused my now-almost-abnormal compulsion to write to flare up again. This time it was paper carefully removed from the centre of the students’ exercise books when they handed them in to be corrected. From each, I took exactly one sheet.
After one particular dream, I desperately needed paper. The dream had made me tremble really fiercely. There it was again — the temple, and round me the priest’s daughter and my muses, Fatima, Suad and Jasmin, who, item by item, were removing their clothes and sliding them gently across the ground for me to write on. That night, I crept into my colleague’s room — a maths teacher — and pinched paper from his notebook.
Jasmin was from a very traditional family. She was already twenty-four and her mother was horrified that she wasn’t married yet. It wasn’t long before I heard that a teacher was asking for her hand. I was relieved to have a bit more distance between us. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Jasmin. On the contrary, I liked her a lot. I was living, though, in constant fear of someone discovering what we were up to. For we were meeting twice a month at the home of her married sister; she was aiding and abetting us by making her home available to us. There, we did all kinds of things to each other. I even wrote a poem on her body once, with lipstick. Unlike with Suad, I let Jasmin read almost all my poems, including those I’d written about her body on the very paper I’d removed from books at school.
In the end, she went to her husband a virgin. As the customs of this country demand. ‘A woman must enter marriage as a virgin.’ That had been clear to me from the very beginning and I had to take bloody good care that she remain one. It had also been clear to me from the very beginning that our relationship didn’t have a future. Jasmin’s family would never have agreed to their daughter going to a foreigner, an Iraqi no less, with nothing to his name but a few poems. Several times already, I’d heard of accidents involving foreigners in relationships with the locals. I still remember how the teachers at school once sat together, discussing such a case. A neighbouring school had been witness to a tragic accident a few months before. A music teacher, a Moroccan called Malik, had been murdered. The culprit was never found, no doubt because the police never looked for him. The head teacher said he’d seen the dead man with his own eyes, lying on the ground outside the main door of the school, covered in blood. With a bullet in his head. Shortly before that, another rumour had gone round — Malik had slept with Leila, the chemistry teacher. Soon after the tragic incident, Leila had married someone important. A member of the president’s personal army.