Elegy on Kinderklavier (17 page)

2.

Araz's return was inaugurated by a wet, lifeless spring, the air damp and torpid. Even the subdued light, which each day snuck obliquely into the town under the guard of the heavy, unsettled clouds, failed to obscure the glaucous film that covered the buildings and streets. In the middle of the town the river's surface was matte-faced, and its wavering pulse quickened, as if hurrying through.

Araz had arrived on one of the new, dreamily christened “Amman-Qum” expresses, its name suggesting the bus might continue on, long after all the returning Iraqis disembarked, all the way to Iran instead of turning back as everyone knew it did at Baqubah, not even within sight of the border, and refilling itself with dozens of Baghdadi businessmen eager to see the midlevel luxury hotels of Riyadh. After the express, Araz had to connect with a smaller bus to go north for the final leg into town, and as the aged vehicle growled and whinnied its way up the highway, dutifully collecting the tunnels of blast barriers at abandoned checkpoints and police outposts, Araz had the distinct impression that some kind of magic had been broken—specifically, that the spell which had kept the country of
his memory outside the passage of time had been lifted, and that all the built-up brutality of urban aging had, in the six years of Araz's absence, suddenly happened at once: the reclamation of concrete security dividers by sand and dirt, the winnowing to bone of buildings once thrown up for immediate use, the incidental artifacts of the American, then Provisional, then New Iraqi, then New Parliamentary authorities (the burned-out skeletons of Humvees, imported black SUVs, white Toyota pickup trucks, and cheap, Chinese-made taxis, respectively) all suffering what looked to Araz to be the deconstruction that time practices on civilizations over hundreds of years, but in the span of just six. It was as if Araz had looked away and turned back only to find himself adrift in a vision of the country's distant future.

The eternal city had changed too, though in less pronounced ways. During the six years Araz had been gone, news of the town's transformation had drifted to him—little asides and clippings from his father washing ashore in his Darlington Abbey Boys' College mailbox and then, after Araz had turned eighteen and departed for King's College London, via those abbreviated emails of rumors that had wended their way into the law office in Beirut, where his father had gone back to. Araz read every bit of information about the town carefully and each time felt a sort of wonder at the familiar foreignness, especially as he got older. This was the driftwood of his years in the town coming back to him, even in England, to reconsider; time and the distance these anecdotes traveled seemed to have softened away any real detail or utility. At any rate, he'd heard some things, learned them from his father's half-mentions or his own bored, late-night Internet searching. Though what he'd learned had not prepared him for the place itself.

The town had grown. It was now fully a city, apparently, the city center (now referred to as “downtown”) built up with multilevel buildings and shops, all of which perhaps wouldn't look quite
so pointedly modern if they did not surround the original dun-colored buildings of crumbling local bricks, which looked positively Neolithic by comparison. The farming compounds previously on the edges of town had been quietly taken in, assimilated by the city's amebic expansion, and were now just groups of low buildings unnaturally close together. What Araz felt on his first exploratory drives around with Asti, her ruined cheek turning this way and that to watch the simulacrum of their town pass by the window, was not so much that the home of their adolescence had changed (it was not a betrayal of time, exactly) but more that the town in some eerie way had approximated the change Araz knew he had experienced in himself while thousands of miles distant.

This feeling was especially borne out in the strange balance of layout the city had settled into in his absence. In the north, the Kurdish farmers who had lived in the town of Araz and Asti's childhood had bunched into a loose agricultural suburb that got thinner and thinner the farther it projected from the city's center until it eventually just petered out, reaching wistfully back in geo-ethnic time toward Iran. In the south, there was a similarly nebulous comet-tail stretch back toward Baghdad, origin of the Shi'a money that was now developing the city, except that this trail was made up of shanties, as if many of the Shiite pilgrims streaming in from Baghdad's religious environs had simply run out of money before they could reach the city proper. And finally, in the west, gesturing toward Samarra and the Al-Askari, was the real cause for the town's increase: a previously little-noticed mosque, in whose tranquil courtyard the Shi'a Imam Al-Alwani had decided, during an American siege, to relocate the holy relic that now made the city such a destination.

All of which bore a curiously accurate spatial resemblance to the grounds of the Darlington Abbey Boys' College (an unassuming but respected catch-all for the children of foreign diplomats) and
the general world Araz had spent his first four English years in. He'd woken each morning in his cramped, separatist, scholarship boarder's room on the north end of campus and made his way to the dining hall in the middle, where he met with the devout children from the religious quarters on the south end (both groups eyeing enviously the spacious central dorm suites of the rich students) before trudging off to prayers at the small mosque, partially obscured in the west part of the campus by the larger, largely unused chapel building beside it. The whole time during this morning walk, Araz felt as if he belonged exactly no place, or rather to some undisclosed place nearby that he always seemed to be waiting in vain to stumble upon. He got this very same feeling driving around with Asti in his first weeks back in the city: full of hope that he might at any moment turn a corner into an unknown neighborhood that felt perfectly and finally familiar.

The popular mosque of Imam Alwani was situated at the tip of a fingerlike projection of new buildings rising from the city's chorion, and it presided calmly over a muddy stretch of rich soil, a panorama of the verdant, soggy fields stretching out behind it. Its entrance and the minarets topping the four corners of its courtyard looked back toward the city, and the curving, prehensile jetty of development that it crowned enclosed a small slum that had grown up around a wide nearby square long before anyone could remember. The slum had hung on, despite the best efforts of the mosque's wealthier pilgrims; the area seemed to have the power to revert any new venture or building to its natural, semidecrepit state. This was certainly what it had done to the Hotel du Chevalier, where Araz took a flat.

The Hotel du Chevalier had been built and then quickly abandoned and sold by a foreigner a few years before the invasion and had already, in the span of a little more than a decade, undergone several discrete phases of decay. By the time Araz rented a fourth-floor flat on an indefinite lease, it had passed from hotel to run-down boarding
house to something resembling a Caliphate-era inn, and had become, finally, a sort of crumbling, late-empire Roman cathouse.

The building did tower over the uneven harlequin blanket of the surrounding slum's roofs, though, and if it had portions of ceiling or intermediate floors missing—the bits of concrete rebar exposed like nerves, hung with the residents' colorful wet wash—it also had rooms, mostly on the southeast corner, that were more or less intact and that, as Araz's did, even improbably retained bits and pieces of the hotel's old official errata, regurgitating them whimsically. Once, braced on all fours on the gritty floor beside the bed as a low-level officer of the “Imam's Army” thrust into him, Araz knocked into the leg of the room's desk and a piece of stationery floated down and landed in front of him. As the man's timid grunts (really he was just a boy, or maybe a late teenager) accelerated, Araz stared at the miniature, ridiculous hotel seal at the top of the sheet—not a knight, as it should have been, but a falcon—and recited to himself (simultaneously in this room full of late-afternoon sunlight and back in Father Vere's poetry class at Darlington) the Hopkins poem Vere had passive-aggressively demanded all the Muslim boys memorize. As the man-boy climaxed, Araz recalled the words: “Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!” The man was silent for a long time before Araz realized he had spoken the last line aloud. The man's breathing was uneven and querulous, and Araz had laughed sharply into the quiet.

•

Araz saw Bajh again for the first time at the mosque, after prayers had let out and the courtyard was filled with people. There was a small stage set up just in front of the bright green structure that housed the
relic, from which every Friday a local imam delivered the khutbah. This Friday, however, Bajh was to speak, and Araz, pushing unnoticed through the crowd to stand just inside the wide courtyard's walls, could see him sitting on a chair at the edge of the stage.

Asti, preparing a hookah the night before, had told Araz about the change in Bajh. Even though Araz had taken in her information greedily, now, standing there, watching Bajh rise from the chair and approach the bundled microphones, watching the way the brisk wind revealed the shape and shadow of his body inside the brilliantly white (how did he keep it so, in all this mud?) dishdasha, Araz was conscious of all he knew falling away, leaving only the mercurial breath in his chest and the midmorning light that vaulted beneath the ceiling of clouds, gathering around Bajh's figure as he spoke.

The experience of Bajh's later sermons and speeches—they would become weekly—was so similar to this first one that, in Araz's memory, watching Bajh this first time was like watching the Unity of Bajh, or at least of New Bajh, as he was now, in his new world. Bajh was reading his speech haltingly from a piece of paper, talking about the religious theme of the day. Araz wasn't really listening; he stared at Bajh's hands and face, at his perfect skin. Araz had always assumed Bajh had escaped the night of fire unharmed, but Araz had also, if he was honest, occasionally hosted other hypotheses, which had only been encouraged by the news of Bajh's rise in the esteem of the great imam in Baghdad. Half of Araz thought Bajh must have some visible marking, a lesser version of Asti's, that let everyone who looked at him see the entire span of his lifetime in this country: the supple skin of a boy, the awful violence of his adulthood. This was the easiest way for Araz to explain to himself the news of Bajh's growing popularity in the city, among the Shiite pilgrims. But he could see now that Bajh was visibly unscarred. If Asti was to be believed, he had no trace at all of what had happened about his body. Araz watched Bajh pause and
look up, watched him smile a little sheepishly at the crowd's cheers, which grew wilder and wilder with the growing abstraction of his exhortations.

“The genius is that he never says anything about what happened,” Asti had said, blowing on the hot coals of the pipe, and Araz saw now that she was right.

In the following weeks, moving among the crowd, Araz would hear countless versions of the story—the trio's story—most of the speakers curiously downplaying Bajh's actual role, Bajh always more one of the victims than the hero. “It's the same way with his family,” Asti had also said. “He's Feyli, so he's OK in the mosque, but they never talk about him being their little Kurd.”

On the stage, though, Bajh was as handsome as ever, almost defiantly so, though he now cut his hair short, and his skin was an even deeper tan, and his classic features seemed less striking on his adult frame. When Araz left, he could already hear the words of Bajh's speech being rebroadcast breathlessly by the muezzin's loudspeakers, as they would continue to be all afternoon until even when they'd stopped his voice seemed to echo in the streets, an inescapable diminuendo.

•

As the moist spring went on, Araz began to understand better the way the city had managed to preserve its unnerving sense of perpetuity. Araz had been invited to a dinner party by an old Kurdish politician, a friend of the man Araz had met in Kensington on a similar afternoon, the air relieved of its rain, the city quiet around him. Now, as Araz walked through the market district, he thought of how, while the town had been goaded into its chronological future as a
city, a bewildering sense of timelessness remained. People back in Baghdad used its traditional name now as a sly denigration for its residents. Yes, the
eternal town
, they said, meaning,
This will never be your city
. And yet Araz could not find a single person who could tell him the day or even the month that all the meat in the market had become halal or that Uncle Nuri's shop (now a corner supermarket) had ceased selling the popular pirated DVDs from Syria, or that anyone, let alone fully half the women among the stalls, had started wearing her loose hijab pulled across the mouth and not just the hair. Maybe, he thought, it was more that the city was just over-full with illusion, as in the Shi'a-backed real estate companies that quietly bought up the big apartment blocks and upped the rent on anyone who refused to be observant. If religious families were all you saw on that block, and if you couldn't remember the change occurring, hadn't it always been that way?

The dinner party was in the north end of the city and the host, Araz realized upon arriving, had invited someone from every important Kurdish interest or family left in the area. The men stood closely, their rounded bellies almost touching as they slurped in the traditional way at their tea saucers, as if no one could see that the dark substance was actually American whiskey. Araz understood then that he was there representing the Kensington man's money. These men, these old local politicians and businessmen, knew Araz's story, knew he'd had an expensive English education paid for first by a settlement with the Americans and then, vaguely, by other interests. It was possible they wanted Araz as a spokesman or at least as a representative to a large potential donor to the cause. They did not know Araz had been in love with the Kensington man, did not know that Araz had left him on a cold, lightless winter afternoon in the shared garden behind his flat a few weeks before Araz's reappearance in the city. They knew nothing about the kind of silence that had come
into Araz while the man, some twenty years older, had gasped and sobbed like a child.