Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Finally, the brief sensations that would not end up savaged by the violence of time passing: the load of clothes, half ablaze, lifting up and up into flight and falling, slowly, slowly, onto Araz’s back, lighting his own clothes. Araz struggling up, wildly glimpsing what must have been the shape of Asti’s body in the bed of the truck, where she was somehow embracing the clothes, the fire, to her; then Araz knocked flat by the collision of Bajh’s panicked, tilting run. At some point, Asti was pulled down off the truck and landed near where Araz lay. A scurry of dirt as Bajh smothered her flames, Araz somehow still burning, the heat spreading up his side and reaching around to his chest like a grasping hand, then the feeling of Bajh returning to smother him again, the heaviness of Bajh’s body landing on his own, seeming — because Araz never quite got his breath back — to last for hours and hours.

The afterward Araz would remember better, the coming of morning. He lay situated in a position where he could see only the flat expanse of the field and the horizon beyond. He assumed the truck, Bajh, and Asti to be somewhere behind him, but in the strange otherworld of his condition he did not really think of them, and the emptiness of his mind was even vaguely pleasant. He felt no pain (or he felt pain so completely that all other sensation was wholly undone, and so did not suffer). There came a distant, rainless storm, and the brief office of lightning gave way to an ataraxic lightlessness just before dawn. The subsequent creep of color into the sky had a curious physical presence to it, limning the ridges of the field and the dirt nearest Araz’s face. Just before daylight was full, a drizzle stung Araz’s eyes, and he woke for a moment simultaneously into the effluvium of the morning and the insanity of his reverie, just enough to process the arrival of other cars and other people, after which there was only the long surrender of unconsciousness.

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.