He said
☂I went back on my own. I entered through the door which was always open. First I heard the snoring of the Hadj and then I saw her gather at the far 🍃end of the dim room. She started to move towards me. I didn’t move from where I stood. I was going nowhere but here, towards her. She asked the darkness, ‘Christian?’
She searched for a lone, decisive ‘yes’, ♏a ‘yes’ complete with ten fingers and eyes and mouth.
In my darkness, I said, ‘No.’
She said, ‘Go back to the house.’
‘What house?’ I said.
‘Your house.’
I remained standing, fort♓ified in my darkness as she came towards me.
‘Are you the Iraqi’s son?’
The nickname ‘the Iraqi’ had been attached to my family for some years now because of my eldest uncle. He talked constantly about his role in helping the Iraqi army towards the end of the 1948 war, north of the West Bank. The basis of my uncle’s story was that he served in the region as a guide to an artillery regiment that had altered the course of the war and protected a number of villages in the sector (my uncle called it a ‘sector’) from massacres, forced migration and complete annihilation, which was the fate of h𒊎undreds of towns that year on the coast, in Galilee and Jerusalem. The historical truth of the role played by those five or six regiments was not in question. The inhabitants of those areas had even taken the rare step of erecting a monument to the Iraqi troops killed in the battles that summer. Flowers travelled to the monument from towns and the far, calm reaches of the hills and valleys. Wildflowers, oleander, flowers of tenderness, olive twigs held by farmers across mountain passes☂ of dust and thorn.
Those days were retold by the bread of many houses, in the stories and treasures of many men. But hesitation followed when it came to discussing my uncle’s role in all that. Those few weeks that he spent with the arꦰtillery regiment were the only thing that gave him any peace in a life that had been mostly without satisfaction.
If he went astray in his story, or if he felt that the listener was not sufficiently convinced, he seasoned the events with words of Iraqi dialect, giving touches of flavour that usually pleased the listener. He called the officers by their first names and paid no attention whatsoever to ordinary soldiers, whom he mercilessly and conspicuously left out. This seemed to glorify his own position, which was very eagerly delineated in the telling. It did not seem to matter to him how this neglect of the ordinary soldiers affected the impression of the structure and hierarchy of the Iraqi army in general, or at least of that particular regiment, which seemed to consist of an innumerable cast of officers and holders of high rank moving against a vague background of faded, indistinct troops. A dazzling light was cast on the few officers who were his focus—we learnt their names, traits, positions and behaviours to a point of complete familiarity. The listener could effortlessly bring to mind the scene of Abu al-Jasim (the Iraqis’ nickname for Muhammad) creeping leopard-like over the rocks, penetrating regions of jujube trees and shrubby mountain thorns, up to the closest reach of the enemy, until he could hear their chatter and smell their tea. ‘Abꦜu al-Jasim knew Hebrew as well as the Jews, maybe better,’ my uncle would say. Then he would fall silent, distracted for a moment, and look into our faces 𓆉for signs of the impact of what he had said.
There were wide and painful, overlapping gaps in the story. But the intense desire of the listeners to break apart the lost war into tiny heroisms, each holding a private victory, alongside my uncle’s piercing faculty for performance and effect, turned those doubtful events with one witness into root♍ed, living truth. The officers became our loved ones next door.
The climax of the st🌠ory came when Abu al-Jasim wept into my uncle’s hands, ‘balling like a woman’ because he ‘had no orders’.
The story of some Iraqi officers crying is established and well known in the area. This occurred when orders were issued for them to cease♓ fighting and march down to the sea, to leave matters as they stood on the ground. There was no convincing justification given for those orders, especially not in a war like this, which had become a holy war for the officers.
What was very doubtful, 🃏however, was that this crying took place between my uncle’s hands.&🦄nbsp;
It further weakened the story among sceptics that our family did not belong to this region originally but had come from the hills overlooking the coast in the south. It was difficult to imagine how a man who was born and lived in the south could come to work as a guide to a regimen🉐t conducting milit𝓰ary operations in the north.
Clearly, he had chosen the one point of victory in that impossible war and decided to bꦅecome a participant in it—maybe because the defeat was so sudden and heavy, beyond what one could anticipate or handle.
Then the Iraqi vocabulary became more widespread in his stories, like small nails used to fix the days into place. Little by little, the words crept into his daily language. He gave an obviously Iraqi💖 name to one of my cousins, against my father’s reservations and to my mother’s astonishment.&nb🐭sp;
(Excerpted from ‘Describing the Past’ by Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Samuel Wilder; with permission from Seagull Books)
