At Rest in the Cherry Orchard E-Book

Azher Jirjees

• Herausgeber: Banipal Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 267

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Iraqi Said Jensen, living in Norway, is forever haunted by the ghost of his father, killed by the Iraqi regime before he was born, and nightmarish visions. On being called to Baghdad where a mass grave, possibly holding his father's remains, will be opened, he thinks about the peaceful cherry orchard his neighbour Jakob was laid to rest in. Through the story of Iraqi Said Jensen, who is granted asylum in Norway and builds his life there but is forever haunted by his father's disappearance, Iraqi author Azher Jirjees's debut novel captures brilliantly the way Iraqi life flips from reality to unreality and back as people have to find ways to live with the bloody horrors and deprivation that count as 'normal life', leading to countless people fleeing and countless others thrown into mass graves. A monumental account of human endurance in the face of mounting horrors.

Leseprobe

At Rest in the Cherry Orchard

First published in English translation

by Banipal Books, London, 2024

Arabic copyright © Azher Jirjees

English translation copyright © Jonathan Wright, 2024

al-Nawm fi Haql al-Karaz was first published in Arabic in 2019

Original title:

Published by Dar Al-Rafidain, Beirut, Lebanon

The moral right of Azher Jirjees to be identified as the author of this work and of Jonathan Wright as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher

A CIP record for this book is available in the British Library

ISBN 978-1-913043-39-1

E-book: ISBN: 978-1-913043-40-7

Front cover painting: Hanoos Hanoos

Published with support from Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center through the Spotlight on Rights, Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2022

Banipal Books

1 Gough Square, LONDON EC4A 3DE, UK

www.banipal.co.uk/banipal_books

Banipal Books is an imprint of Banipal Publishing

Typeset in Cardo

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

“Life is a cherry, death is the stone, and love is a cherry tree.”

Jacques Prévert

Introduction

If the postman hadn’t made a mistake, none of this would have happened. It was bitterly cold outside at the time and a heavy snowfall was blanketing the roads and the pavements. Snowflakes also covered the mailboxes and hid the names written on them. As usual, I put on a long woollen coat and a hat with two furry ear flaps. Then I pulled on my fur-lined boots and went out to check the mail. I put my hand in the mailbox and found a newspaper with an invitation card tucked between the pages. This was puzzling since I didn’t have a subscription to any newspapers. I’d stopped my subscriptions when the translation agency where I work started providing the morning papers for free on the tables in the cafeteria. So where did the invitation come from, I wondered, as I turned it over.

The invitation was from the mass-circulation newspaper Dagposten and it wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. It was for a party to celebrate the newspaper’s golden jubilee. I suspected it was meant for my neighbour, retired doctor Morten Solheim, since he was a long-standing subscriber to the newspaper. I knocked on his door but there was no answer. I phoned him in case he had had some mishap since he wasn’t in the habit of sleeping so late. A voicemail message told me he had gone to Antalya in Turkey and wouldn’t be back for three months. He does that every winter – travels to sunny climes in search of warmth.

I contacted the newspaper that had sent the invitation and confirmed that my theory was correct: the invitation was indeed intended for my neighbour, and it had come to me only because of the postman’s error. Very graciously, the editor apologised on the postman’s behalf and suggested compensating me with a slice of cake if I accepted the invitation and attended the reception. I accepted willingly of course – who turns down an invitation from a gracious woman? And the following night I was there, dressed to the nines.

It was a lavish event attended by dozens of journalists, writers, newspaper staff and readers. At the door stood an attractive woman in her forties in a long dress, wearing some heady perfume. She introduced herself as the editor in chief, Helena Jorstad. I returned her greeting and reminded her of her promise, and she laughed. After the speeches and the formal parts of the party, we met again at the buffet. She was carrying two plates, each with a piece of cake covered in chocolate. I took one and thanked her, and then we started chatting. I told her I’d liked this kind of cake since I was in Iraq, where my mother used to make it for holidays and parties. Helena stopped eating the cake as soon as she heard that. Her eyes opened wide and she rubbed her cheek with the tip of her finger. “In Iraq?” she asked. “That means you must know Said Jensen, the Norwegian writer of Iraqi origin!” “How could I not know him?” I replied. “I regularly read the things he’s had published in your paper and I’ve translated some of his short stories for the Arabic magazine al-Shiraa.” Then I started listing the stories, expounding on Jensen and the bitter irony in his work. I told her about the story of the bird that lost its voice, the first one of his I had translated, and The Sheep’s Lord, Three on the Road and other stories here and there. Helena listened with great interest as she tried to polish off the cake on her plate. After that she told me there was something I had to see immediately.

She invited me to her office on the second floor of the newspaper building, and I followed without asking any questions. We went into the office and she took a brown envelope out of a drawer and put it on the table. She said it contained a hand-written manuscript in Norwegian and she had been planning to publish it, but was waiting till she could find someone to translate it into Arabic.

She pulled it out of the envelope and waved it in the air. “This story by Said Jensen should first be read by those who speak his language, because of what it contains.” Then she handed it to me and suggested I translate it into Arabic. I took the manuscript from her and immediately began to read the first page. Two years later, and all because of that postman’s mistake, the translation is complete, and this is the story.

The translator

Oslo 2010

I know I should die where I was born

          But, before that, let me finish off being born.

Sargon Boulus

1

He was standing on one leg like a statue hit by a stray piece of shrapnel. His face wasn’t wholly visible because the straw hat he was wearing shaded his eyes, and his chin was covered by a white piece of cloth that had faint traces of blood on it. He was tall and thin, with a long nose that almost reached his mouth and a ragged beard that hung down from under the piece of cloth. I tried to approach him but he waved me away with his myrtle walking stick. We stood facing each other on an abandoned railway line with weeds growing up between the rusty tracks. Thick clouds were closing in, blocking out the sky and creating a dreary, stifling grey umbrella above us. The wind carried the sound of a crow cawing and of trees rustling, though none were visible around us. There was just that forgotten railway track and armies of ants carrying their winter supplies and disappearing into deep black holes in the ground. Finally he cleared his throat and, in a voice tinged with sorrow, said, “Where’s my grave?” I went up to him to get a look at his face but he backed away, leaving a pool of blood behind him. A large hole stretched from under his neck to his navel. His torn, tattered and bloodied clothes showed serious damage in the lower part of his body. His only leg was connected directly to his stomach rather than to a pelvis, like a tower that has been blown over in a storm and then reassembled by a drunken monkey, or like a wall that has been destroyed by a random shell and rebuilt by an elderly cripple. I felt dizzy and collapsed to the ground. I tried to stand up again but I couldn’t, while my father stepped back and moved away, after giving up hope of hearing an answer. I stretched my arm out towards him, as if begging him to take me with him, but he dissolved into smoke in the distance. Then a crow came up, flapping its wings and grabbing the myrtle stick in its beak. It threw the stick towards me and then was gone too. I took hold of the stick, leant on it and stood up. It was strong enough to help me up. I set off in the direction my father had taken along the railway track. I wanted to catch up with him and take the piece of cloth off his face, but an express train came from behind and flattened me.

I came to my senses. The coffee had boiled over so I turned off the stove. I poured what was left of it down the sink and starting making another cup. It wasn’t the first time I had seen my father: he would visit from time to time, appear in front of me when my mind wandered. But despite his repeated visits, he would never show his face. His features always seemed to have disappeared and his appearance was incomplete. He visited me once on the balcony of the flat: his head had been cut off and his voice was coming out of a black hole in his neck. When I went up to him, he disappeared into thin air. Later he appeared in front of me at the metro station, split into two halves that looked quite different. One evening I saw him sleeping near me like a piece of human dough without any covering of skin. I often saw my father, without really seeing him. I often begged him to show me his face but he would never do so.

In fact, I wouldn’t know what my father looked like anyway. I’ve never seen him in my life and I don’t have a single photograph of him. He disappeared into the realms of oblivion before I came into the world and, on the day he was arrested, my mother burned all his books, papers, diaries and photo albums. That’s what she told me. One night, in a low voice, she told me that in a moment of fear and panic she opened the clay oven and threw in everything that belonged to my father or that hinted at his existence, and everything that made her anxious for his sake. My mother fed the memories of a whole life to the oven, and the damned fire turned them into worthless ashes, the last trace of my father disappearing along with any future he might have had. He was a leftist opponent of the government and a wanted man. He had been imprisoned several times, and then released. Every time he came out he was missing another tooth, which meant that despite his young age, he had dentures on both his upper and lower jaws. But the last time he didn’t come home. They said he had died under torture, they said he had been fed alive to dogs, they said he had been thrown into the tight-lipped River Tigris, and they said he had been secretly buried in some graveyard. But they never gave us a body or any bones, or even a certificate to say he had departed this world. When I was five years old, my mother told me: “Your father’s in good hands.” And when I asked her whose good hands he was in, she scolded me without explanation.

I went to bed after two thirds of the night had already passed. I turned out the light and put the sheet over my face in the hope of stealing a short nap, but it was no use. I couldn’t get the image of my father with his broken body out of my mind and that made it impossible to sleep. I threw off the cover and went to the study. I was met by the empty frame hanging on the wall. I felt it was slightly tilted, so I put my index finger under the right-hand corner and pushed it up gently until it was level. Then I sat at the computer trying to get my father’s ghost out of my head. I browsed the byways of the Internet far and wide. In the end I came across a poem by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab on a literary forum: “They stick out their necks from the thousands of graves, shouting at me / To come – a blood-curdling, bone-shaking call that scatters ashes on my heart. / The late afternoon here is like a torch in the shadows / Come and burn in it till sunset / My grandfathers and forefathers are a mirage that hovered on my cheek.” I let out a sigh, and al-Sayyab moved on, thundering in his sad voice: “My mother calls from the grave, ‘Embrace me, my son, for I have the coldness of ruination in my veins; warm my bones with the clothes on your arms and chest, and dress the wounds.’”

“My God! How come I can’t escape the sound of graves tonight?” I said to myself. I was about to turn off the computer, but then I remembered that I hadn’t opened my email since the previous Saturday. It had been such an exhausting week that I hadn’t had a chance to sit down and look through my messages. I opened my inbox and found some emails that were not very important. They were warnings to pay late bills, an invitation to take part in a workers’ protest to demand a small salary increase, and advertisements from new companies. But finally I found an unexpected message from Baghdad, dated the previous Saturday. It read:

“Hi Said. There’s something important that can’t be postponed.

You must come back to Baghdad immediately.

All the best,

Abir.”

2

For fourteen years I’ve been forgotten, living here in exile like a bear that’s lost his partner. In this country the winter is long and dark and the snowfalls are heavy, while the summer is shorter than a break for tea on a journey. After the alarm clock rang, and before going into the bathroom, I was in the habit of opening the window to see how much snow had fallen overnight. Every time I would see the same scene: a white cloak covering the surface of the city and workers leaving the warmth of their beds, weighed down by thick coats and furry hats. I would dismiss it grumpily with a wave of my hand and close the window. My work in the postal service was especially arduous because I had to sort hundreds of letters and parcels in the snow in the cold dawn hours. I learned that, to be a postman in a country such as Norway, you have to get used to angry skies and the taste of hell, especially in winter, what with the cold, the ice and the constant danger of slipping. But in my case it wasn’t just the sky that was angry with me: my boss was too. Kari Solberg, a thin woman in her sixties with a wrinkled, ruddy face, hated me instinctively. When she saw me, it was as if a scorpion had stung her between her thighs. She couldn’t bear the sound of my voice and she looked away whenever I spoke to her, as if I were a toad covered in disgusting warts. If I said, “Please look at me, Mrs Solberg,” she didn’t respond. She pretended not to have heard, even when we were talking about work. When I got an address wrong, she used vitriolic, disgusting, hair-raising language.

Once, speaking to my colleague Daniel, she said, “Listen, Daniel, I can’t bear that monkey Said. You should keep away from him as much as you can during work hours.” I’m much more handsome than a monkey, of course, but whenever I see her angry, there’s a question that nags at me: why does this woman hate monkeys so much? Why can’t she bear to look at their cute faces? I, for example, have never done anything to anger her, although I would like to do so, and I’ve never been negligent in my work with her. So what, I wonder, lies behind all this hatred? At first I thought there must be some grudge she wanted to pursue against me, but over time I discovered that she didn’t like foreigners in general and couldn’t bear to look at them. In fact, I was certain she considered them all to be monkeys, even if they happened to have blue eyes. I was also certain that, however hard I worked, I would remain suspect in her eyes, and in the end this forced me into social isolation. At seven in the morning I would arrive to pick up the mail, put it in the van and go around delivering until four in the afternoon, without speaking to anyone or even meeting anyone. In this way Kari Solberg made me feel as lonely as a leper.

3

The darkness finally dissipated and dawn started to etch its lines on the face of creation. I hadn’t slept a single hour. Anxieties were burrowing away in my skull, like termites in wood. I tossed and turned in bed as I pondered Abir’s last message: “You must come back to Baghdad immediately.” What could I do there? She must have been joking. I had written to her, asking for an explanation, but she hadn’t replied. Her internet access was through local top-up cards and it ran at the speed of an overweight tortoise. I went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water and went back to bed.

In all the time I had known her, Abir had never written such an obscure message. I came across her by accident when I was sitting at the computer one day, reading the news on a website. I caught sight of an interesting article on cemeteries in Iraq. That was exactly two years ago. When I read the article, I imagined my father’s body lying on its back in a hole lit by the moon. I called out to him but a cloud of black bats blocked out the light and he disappeared. I looked up the name of the journalist who had written the article and ended up on her personal website. With one click, her personal details leapt up in front of me like salmon in a river: Abir Kazim, journalist and photographer, born in Baghdad, BA in journalism, participant in several local and international projects, works as a news correspondent for the BBC. “Great!” I shouted, clicked on the link to photographs of her, and gasped like a teenager when a beautiful woman walks past. She won my heart from the first gasp and held her place there, unchallenged – a woman of medium height, as slim as an orchid and meek as a dove. Abir had eyes the colour of honey and short hair the colour of dates. In the middle of her left cheek she had a beauty spot that a bird might mistake for a mustard seed. In all the photos she was wearing a blouse and grey skirt that ended a fraction of an inch above the knee. She looked like a well-dressed student in university attire. I copied her email address and sent her an instant message: “Good evening. I’m Said, an Iraqi in the land of ice. If you wish, I can most solemnly swear that if you reply to this message, I will not only be happy, as my name Said implies, but Asaad, very happy indeed.” Her answer came the next day: “Welcome, Asaad,” it said. Since then we have been exchanging emails and transcontinental e-kisses.

4

I silenced the alarm clock when it screeched at me at six in the morning. I should have turned it off the night before, because I didn’t need it. My long vacation had started and I wouldn’t have to see Kari Solberg’s face for three whole weeks. I tried to get back to sleep, but it was no use: some messages keep you awake and shatter the peace of mind that protects you. Why did Abir want me to come back immediately, I wondered. Why now in particular? Going back to Baghdad became fashionable back in April 2003. At the time, thousands of Iraqis left their places of exile and returned voluntarily, some of them hungry for power like hungry dogs, some of them to invest their assets in projects they thought would yield pure gold without taxes, and others in the belief that Iraq was now open-minded enough to tolerate them. I had seen them packing their bags, putting arduous years of exile behind them, but I never thought of doing likewise. I never said to myself, even hypothetically, “Why not go back home?” For me the answer to the question was a foregone conclusion.

I’m well aware that Abir loves Baghdad, even in its recent state of ruin, and she isn’t thinking of leaving, but we have never spoken about the question of returning before. Over two years she has never once asked me about it. What’s happened now, for God’s sake? I pushed the bed cover off and went to the bathroom. It was raining heavily outside, although it was summer. I took the electric razor out of the drawer and started trimming my beard. It was long and shaggy and ugly. Unusually for me, I had a close look at myself in the mirror, and saw that a grey horde had made inroads from my scalp. My sideburns were tinged with grey and there were plenty of white hairs at the roots near my parting. Why hadn’t I seen them before? Or rather, why was it today in particular that I was interested in counting the white hairs on my head? Did Abir’s message have anything to do with it? I don’t know.

I finished shaving and showering and went off to the kitchen naked. Being naked is the only good thing about living alone. Being alone means you can take your clothes off whenever you want and let the air brush your skin. I washed the dishes that had been gathering in the sink for days, then took some bread out of the freezer and put it in the oven. I rinsed out the teapot, filled it with water and put it on the stove. I threw in two cardamom pods and waited till it started to boil. Then I put in three teaspoonfuls of the Sri Lankan tea sold by Kaka Sirvan, the Kurdish owner of the oriental grocery in the neighbourhood. I took the tea off the stove, left it to brew in peace, and went back to the bedroom. I got dressed and splashed a little aftershave behind my ears. I put the bottle back in its place and looked in the mirror. The black rings under my eyes were growing larger and the grey hairs made me uneasy. I opened the drawer and took out a small pair of scissors. I cut off a thin streak of grey that was hanging over my forehead, and another one that was buried in my moustache. I cut off three hairs that were hiding in my sideburns, then moved the scissors closer to my parting to stop the damned greyness sneaking out of the follicles. But I felt it was futile, because such a small pair of scissors couldn’t erase the effects of time and exile on my face. “It’s quite clear. You’ve grown old, Said,” the mirror said. “A day in exile has the same aging effect as three normal days.” I didn’t care. I abandoned it to its nonsense and left the room.

The smell of bread from the kitchen filled the sitting room. The tea was ready too. I took two eggs out of the fridge, boiled them and cut them into round slices. Next to them I put a piece of salty cheese and five olives. I didn’t put five intentionally, of course, they were what was left in the jar. I finished breakfast before seven o’clock and sat in front of the television in all my elegance. I picked up the remote and started switching between channels. I hadn’t been inclined to sit rooted in front of the television before, but I’d become addicted as soon as the drums of war started beating two years earlier, when the word Baghdad was always in the headlines. At the time, the world was interested in us and I had spent the whole night switching channels and following the breaking news that appeared at the bottom of the screen. Sitting on the same sofa in the sitting room, I had watched the UN inspectors leaving Baghdad and listened to the speech in which the US president gave his Iraqi counterpart forty-eight hours to leave the country or face war. After the deadline passed, I read on the same screen the urgent news that zero hour had come and that the allies had launched missiles against strategic targets in Baghdad. My friend Jamal Saadoun called me that day to tell me the good news, as if they were announcing the sighting of the new moon and the start of the feast after Ramadan. He was overjoyed to see the night sky over Baghdad lit up like day as multiple smart bombs exploded. “Have you seen what’s happening, Said?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you this day was bound to come? It’s all over, all over. Hurrah, hurray.”

“What’s all over, Jamal? And what’s to celebrate? The country’s on fire, man, and people are dying.”

“No one will die, believe me. They know what they’re doing. We’ll finally get rid of the tyrant, and Iraq will become a paradise like Las Vegas.”

I don’t know who had told him that. He swore that serious multinational corporations were waiting on the borders for the signal to go in, and they would transform the country.

“You’re right, we’ll get rid of the tyrant. But Iraq becoming a paradise like Las Vegas? Is that the joke of the season?” I had commented, once my friend was done with his torrent of solemn oaths to the truth of what he’d said. He didn’t like what I said and hung up without saying goodbye. Then I suddenly had a terrible headache, concentrated as usual in the back of my head, and it forced me to visit the doctor.

5

The city was decorated for Christmas and snowflakes were falling slowly, combining with the lights to create an otherworldly ambiance I had never seen before. I stood at the bus stop in my long woollen coat, planning to go to the library. I wanted to borrow a book about photography, a medium that I love, although I rarely use my camera and I’m lazy about changing the batteries, which went flat long ago. The bus finally arrived. I greeted the driver, then reached into my coat pocket for some money for the bus fare. But I couldn’t find my wallet. I remembered that I’d left it on the bedside table. I slapped myself on the forehead and shouted: “Khara bilkaa’inat!” The driver laughed at me swearing in Arabic and said, “Never mind, get on.” He paid the fare from his own pocket and gave me a ticket. He was a young man with a distinctly Arab face, in his thirties, of medium height, with dark, deep-set eyes in a thin face and a small, trimmed beard. I thanked him and sat down in the seat immediately behind him. He laughed away as he repeated the expletive I had used. “You reminded me of what our people say, man,” he explained. Now I knew he was Iraqi, though at first I had thought him Palestinian. Then we started chatting and exchanged telephone numbers. Jamal Saadoun, the immigrant bus driver, thus became the only Iraqi in Scandinavia who knew my telephone number.

Since I had met him, Jamal had been tirelessly counting the days till the fall of the regime and a change of government in Iraq. He never harboured any doubts, never gave up hope that the moment would come. When it did come, as one of the countless victims of that repressive regime, he danced for joy till dawn. He had graduated from the engineering faculty at Mustansiriyah University and worked as an engineer for the Baghdad municipality. Once he had settled into his job, he asked to marry the neighbours’ daughter and was about to move on from bachelorhood. But because he had a beard and frequented mosques, informers, who were thick on the ground at the time, decided to keep a close eye on him and provide their masters with secret reports full of fabricated intrigues. In the end he was arrested on a charge of treason and news of him was as hard to find as the remains of a cat that strays into a cave full of starving dogs.

6

The librarian pointed to a rectangular brass plaque that said Photography in black enamel. It was on a large shelf of books and rare magazines on photography. I went over, picked out one of the books and sat down at a table to have a quick browse. On page 27 I saw a black-and-white photograph of a glider that took part in the Vietnam war, according to the caption below. The commander of the glider was giving a V-for-victory sign after unloading a pile of bombs onto the heads of the inhabitants. I remembered the sound of the first warplane I ever heard. I was nine years old at the time, playing ball in the alleyway with my friends when an air raid siren sounded and we ran home in panic. I went and hid under my mother’s long dress, and awaited disaster. Some warplanes flew over at low altitude and the sound was deafening. My mother put her hands over my ears and recited from the Qur’an: “Bardan wa salaaman. Bardan wa salaaman. Cool and safe. Cool and safe”, until the sound of the planes receded into the distance. I looked into my mother’s eyes and saw a fear that would last a long time. In the meantime someone pulled out a chair and sat at the table. I came to my senses: I had my hands clasped around my head and I was chanting “Bardan wa salaaman” repeatedly.

7

Treason is well-known as an accusation made by bastards more often than drunks sing Atlal, that song by Umm Kulthoum. “You’re a traitor” is an easy, readily made charge, like pot noodles. But these characteristically Arab noodles can easily lead you to the gallows and bring shame on those you leave alive behind you. Oddly, this vile charge is often thrown in your face without explanation or justification. You may not know what form your treason took or when or where or on whose behalf you committed the crime. Someone has simply called you a traitor and that is the end of the matter. There is nothing you can do then other than admit total surrender, sign a confession to treason, and then prepare to walk fearlessly to the gallows and put up with eternal shame.