Abbas Khider - The Village Indian

I succeeded — after years of trying — in crossing the Mediterranean and reaching Germany. In Germany, the police sent me to Bayreuth. I stayed there for a while in an asylum seekers’ home, full of refugees from different countries. The rooms were between twenty and thirty square metres and meant for four to six people. I slept in a room with three men, also from Iraq. The walls were full of inscriptions and paintings. One of my room-mates told me that on a wall in the next room was a poem that sounded incredibly hopeless and cruel. ‘Chronicle of Lost Time’, it was called. I went over and read it. It ended with these lines:

In the seventh wound

I sit beside the graveyards

and await my coffin that passers-by will carry.

I couldn’t say a word. Went back to my room. I couldn’t believe it. The poem was one of mine. What kind of world was this? No matter how hard I thought about it, I could think of no one who could have written it on the wall. It had to be one of the many friends I’d made on one of my many escapes. I often wrote poems and then gave them to friends to keep safe for me. That day, I knew I’d found the title for my first book of poems.

From Germany, I went on my first journey as a tourist. I’d been on the road for four years but as a refugee. My Bavarian girlfriend Sara invited me to travel to Italy with her. We went in her car — and with a tent — to Verona. A beautiful little town, and the home of Juliet, Romeo’s beloved. I was delighted to be able to visit that square steeped in history. The entranceway and the walls of the passage were completely covered with the signatures of lovers from all over the world. I remembered the story of the Tower of Babel. And, suddenly, I understood what my grandfather meant when he’d said, ‘Look very closely.’ The languages of the world had come together — right below Juliet’s balcony. Not because of God’s anger but because of love. Lovers wrote their messages in every imaginable colour and their scrawls formed a huge fresco on the wall. At that moment, it occurred to me that there could be Arabic legends too. I looked and found the wonderful words ‘ Habibti, Habibi ’—my inamorata, my inamorato. I found another but that made my mouth fall open with horror. I stood there, rigid. As if a snake had bitten me. There it was, in clear handwriting: ‘You evildoers, what a return awaits you, Hell is your shelter and the journey to it is terrible.’

My girlfriend wrote our names on the wall. ‘And what have you found?’ she asked me. ‘What does this Arabic writing mean?’

‘What else, but Love!’

My grandfather’s face was like the walls of our house, old and weather-beaten. Like a stone on the beach. Like an eternal sailor. He’d lost his sight but was exceptionally big and strong. So strong that not even a mob of fully grown young men could have flattened him. I, at least, was convinced of that. He said that was his nature. ‘One of God’s whims — or have you an objection to that?’ he’d laugh and ask whenever the subject was raised. He died when I was still at intermediate school.

I can remember one day, even now. I was playing football with my brothers in the yard. I shot the ball at the goal but didn’t score. It landed within my grandfather’s reach. He picked it up with a grin: ‘You’re not getting it back!’

‘Please, Granda, I’m losing as it is.’

‘Do you really want it back? Then you’ll have to fetch it! Come on, be men! Try, at least!’

Three of us, boys aged between ten and eighteen. But we couldn’t wrest back the ball from that blind man of ninety-eight. He grabbed all three of us with his huge strong arms. We couldn’t move. Then he broke out into gales of laughter, ‘Come closer to your Granda, closer! I want to smell you!’ He did that. Sniff at me, I mean. He often said that my smell reminded him of many people he’d encountered in the course of his eventful life. Especially Jabar, his brother and our great-uncle, whom I’d never met. When my family talked about Jabar, Hussein, the strong man, would grow weak. Hardly would they have started talking about Jabar when he would begin to cry. He included him in his prayers, daily. ‘Allah, the Almighty, bring Jabar back to us as you once brought Joseph back to his father, David.’ But he wouldn’t tell us what had happened to Jabar.

My family believed that Jabar had gone to India, or Iran. But why? It was a long time before I heard more of the story. At the beginning of the twentieth century, somewhere in southern Iraq, Jabar fell in love with a black servant. Her name was Nerzes. She’d been exceptionally pretty. Jabar’s father, my great-grandfather, was then the head of our tribe and totally against his son marrying a black servant. But Jabar had no intention of bowing to his father’s will and decided, without his father’s consent, to take Nerzes as his wife. A few days later, very early in the morning, everyone was rudely awakened by the sound of women screaming. Some of them had gone to the well to fetch water and they’d found Nerzes, dead. Someone must have killed her and left her body there. Jabar got on his horse and sped off in the wind, that same day. No one saw him again. Where did he go, and who killed poor Nerzes? No one from our tribe talked about it, never mind trying to bring the murderer to justice. I am quite sure that only one person could have committed this despicable act — my great-grandfather.

The second person to escape from our family was my humble self, even if there wasn’t a woman involved.

It began in the eighties, during the Iraq — Iran war. I can clearly remember my sister leaping under the stairs with tears in her eyes when the alarm went off. It was the first time I’d seen so many planes all at once. My mother thought every existing demon, dragon, snake and evil spirit had come to attack us. I thought so too. The planes were flying very low. I could see the face of a pilot through the windscreen. Missiles were being fired into the air. Detonations, rockets, smoke — wherever you looked. From the military base not far from our district, rockets were being fired at the planes. Their ear-splitting noise made the houses tremble. That went on for a few minutes until the siren howled again.

‘The attack is over!’ my father declared.

My sister Farah’s face suddenly turned white. She rolled her eyes. Then fell, unconscious, to the ground. ‘Pour some water on her face!’ my father commanded. ‘Typical woman! No guts!’

‘What’s going on?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘What do you think? War!’

‘Who with?’

‘With your aunt’s arse — Iran!’

We turned on the TV. The newly elected president of Iraq appeared on the screen and said in a pathetic voice: ‘A curse on our foe! Death and doom to our foe!’ After his speech came the first declaration of war. The speaker began with ‘May our foes be cursed,’ followed by the song ‘Curse, curse, curse’. Finally, he announced another war film— The Curse of War .

This Iraq — Iran war was over after eight years but not the other wars. The next one arrived. That was in 1991, when thirty-three countries from all round the world gathered in the Arabian Desert to free Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion. Baghdad was like a ghost town during this war. No light. Only the fear of rockets and bombs and other surprises. I remember the first day of the war. The attack began at midnight. I could hear only the screams of my mother and my sisters as huge detonations shook the house. We ran quickly, hid in my parents’ bedroom on the first floor. My mother used clothes to stuff the holes in the window. ‘If the Americans use chemical weapons, this will stop the gas from getting in!’