IMCA: A Gardener at Midnight by Peter Lyssiotis

Travels in the Holy Land

The towers of Babylon are in the dust – the walls of Jerusalem are laid low – the gorgeous palaces of the East are in their ruins, desolate; the temples and the synagogues, the Altars and the Arks are overthrown, but a mighty voice comes from their ruins, which speaks to all nations of the world.

Alphonse de Lamartine

This book preserves the visions of Yabez Al-Kitab and unites the sound of his words to that “mighty voice” which rises from these Holy Lands.

_The National Museum,
Baghdad, 2003._

The forty thieves.

They were the first wave and they looted to order. They had keys. None of the locks was forced. They had glass-cutters for the cabinets, fork lifts for for the sulptures. An inside job. The Al-Jazeera news service reported that American soldiers had been photographed looting. The Kuwaitis too, were right in in the thick of it. Then a gang of Baathist officials pulled the last right the thick of it. Then gang of Baathist officials pulled the last swindle and claimed a a truck-load of Babylonian treasures as as part of their pension scheme.

I took shots of the rubble. A Trojan horse. There’s always a Trojan horse.

The second wave looted and burned.

The American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld asked:

“How many vases can one nation possess?”
You tell me.

•

While you’re at it,
tell you’re at it, While me, how many Intifadas? How many cuneiform tablets have to be slung at an Abrams tank? How many alabaster figurines have to rain down on the kevlar helmet of many alabaster figurines have to rain down on the kevlar helmet of that boy from Wyoming?
A girl hands her brother a third-century stela for the barricade.
Tell me. How long does it take to set up an oil colony?

Bits. Piece by piece. Everything has a meaning. These fragments, along with these stones, will be placed on graves as markers of respect and memory.

Humvees roll over them.
Minefields.

•

It wasn’t the muezzin’s call that got me here. It was one of Omar’s e-mails. “Come on,” he wrote “what have you got to lose? You failed at writing.You lost it in photography. You passed your use-by-date as a teacher… and your marriage… where do you want me to start? It’s simple. A man needs a war. A war helps him discover parts of himself that have gone A.W.O.L. I’ll get you a pass from Al-Jazeera. Just bring the Nikon.” Omar always signed his e-mails “Papa”.

“Listen,” he would say whenever we met, “it sounds the same…
Omar – Papa, Papa – Omar.”
He’d wink and spray himself with eau d’Issy.
“Remember friend, as my ancestors keep telling me, voyaging is victory.” Always that tag-end of Levantine wisdom. He knew how desperately I wanted this… to be a part of something… like they had in the early days at Magnum, under Capa.

Bloody Omar.
His lightest touch could start a rockslide.

•

Things weren’t simple, because things had changed in Iraq.
It was difficult to get there and it was difficult to leave. The killing was making ghosts of us all. I was trying to blend in, make myself small, part of this line of ants heading out from the El Kaial Café onto Al Rasheed Street. Bit by bit, piece by piece, I ended up here in Baghdad with Omar, the forty thieves and this folio.

The TV is on all the time in the El Kaial. German hardcore videos throbbing. They’ve replaced Saddam’s twenty-six-years-long speech. Outside, pimps sway from the effects of Belthane. Kids sniff thinners from Coke cans wrapped in rags. Drunks sleep off their hangovers on the banks of the Tigris. Shops bolt their doors at two in the afternoon. Houses are shuttered. Bits of Baghdad fall apart. Piece by piece. Carried off by a single line of ants.

I’m tired, used up. Sitting here in the foyer of the Palestine Hotel where the here and now feels light years away. Sitting in fifty-degree heat with a sandstorm in my Heineken.

•

An old Arab aphorism: “Our books are written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad.”

Not any more.

Five thousand manuscripts burnt at the Awqaf Library. The Saddam Manuscripts Library looted and set alight. Forty thousand codices lost.
At the National Archives, the fire devoured half a million books, newspapers and documents in two days.

Bit by bit The Word was disappeared.

There was a smell of petrol at all three sites. The fire was so intense, marble floors buckled and concrete stairs cracked. Meanwhile the Coalition secured the oil fields, took over the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of the Interior which housed Iraqi Intelligence. The deal was done: looters could have the museum, the libraries, and the galleries while Americans would take oil and information. At the National Archives, identity cards, propaganda leaflets and abandoned military uniforms smouldered.

Omar raked through the ashes. He looked at his blackened hand and said, “When that fucker, Hulegu, sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century, the Tigris turned black with the ink of books. Now, they’ve inked the heavens.”

As we got to the archives, the sun was blood-red in the sooty sky. They were arriving. There was an army of them. They had maps. They had leaders. They were under instructions. Some were in family groups. They came in blue and white buses. One guy had been there the previous day. When he recognized me, he raised his right hand, made a pistol out of his index finger and thumb and grinned. He slowly dropped the hammer. I heard the voice of The Man in Black on the sound-track in my head:
I shot a man in Baghdad/Just to watch him die.

Baghdad.
The drag of a thousand and one nights.
Lines of gooks, skinnies, towel-heads, hajis.
Killing makes ghosts of us all.

The day I saw Robert Fisk of The Independent scoop up an armful of papers at the archives, I grabbed this folio. Feeling like kids who’d made their first score, we went back to his room on the Al Rasheed where he spread what he’d salvaged over the floor.

There was a document about Ottoman armies, another on the punishment of camel thieves and letters from Sharif Hussein of Mecca to Ali Pasha, the Ottoman ruler of Baghdad.There was a report on attacks on pilgrims and another on the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz, soon to be Saudi Arabia.

I untied the red string that bound my folio and flicked through twenty-five sheets of Arabic text. All were numbered, but they weren’t in sequence. There were thirty coloured drawings, each bearing a title in English. The images were of sites in the Holy Lands. All were signed Al-Kitab.

“Yes,” said Omar when he got to see them, “our books are written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and burnt by the Kuwaitis and their dogs in Baghdad. As a national duty, we must rescue something; by force if we have to. This is not the time to farewell arms.”

He was trying to reassemble the busted AK-47 he’d found. Papa-Omar.

The café Abu Simbal was run by The Pharoah. The Pharoah was Egyptian. He’d come to Iraq when the country was wealthy. Part of the flood of guest workers. He used several chairs to make himself comfortable while he smoked his nargileh. Half snake, half charmer, he knew everybody. He didn’t speak much and when he did, it was slow. It came with several glasses of sweet tea and a rumbling in his throat. He hummed a favourite song by Abdel Halim Hafez; over and over.

“Pharaoon, please! Lose that tune before it gets into my head as well,” I said.

The Pharoah smiled.

“You want Mister Caspar. He the man,” he said, pointing to my folio.

•

I stop for a fresh orange juice at Ali Azrim’s stall. The forty thieves call him Ali Dysentery. Um Kalthoun is seducing the world from a single speaker.
I take my first mouthful.

Abu Nawas Street.
I believe in first moments.You know, when the ancient mixes with the sacred to become mystery.The faded inscription, the chipped pot, the flaking mural. So it was with Mister Caspar.

I knocked and entered…
He was a shroud of alabaster skin slouched in a cane rocker. Frankincense swirled behind him. Walls lined with books. Tables woozy with stacks of catalogues. French film posters. Maps poking out of postal tubes. Edges of illuminated manuscripts held down by cups and saucers. You could tell, that here was another place where mystery was going to overwhelm explanation.

He motioned me to take some tea. I poured some for him instead. I wasn’t feeling too good. Then he opened the folio and looked at each of the sheets, keeping their original order. He flicked through the drawings, mouthing their English titles. He savoured each of the thirty images. He repacked the folio, leaving it as he found it. Then he pulled out the Robert Frew catalogue. Ran his index finger down a list. I thought I heard him say “travel and topography”. Then I did hear him say:

Number 81, Roberts, David.Travels To The Holy Land from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts R.A. Description by the Revd. George Croly, lithographed by Louis Haghe, London. FG Moon, 1846-9, 3 volumes bound in 2. £35,000.

“That’s your expedition. Al-Kitab must’ve been part of that.”

He got out of his chair, went to his bookshelf and pulled out his own copy of Roberts. Three immaculate elephant folios. Placed them one at a time on the table in front of me and asked me to please be careful. The frankincense was getting to me. The pages were turning on their own.

•

Enter the Babal Sharqi markets and you’re in the croquet match in Alice in Wonderland.The rules are fluid. I push through the feral packs of night children. Kick my way through uncollected garbage. Elbow the dusky girl-prostitutes.

I realise I’m only a single watt above this darkness.

On my way back to the Palestine I crossed the Al Sarafia Bridge. I made up my mind. I was Lee Freidlander, uncovering Bellocq’s time-ravished stash. His glass plates. Prostitutes in New Orleans. Storeyville Portraits. I was Berenice Abbott finding Atget’s glass plates in a tiny room in Paris.
The World of Atget.
I was looting.
Bit by bit.
Piece by piece.

•

I open the folio again. Take my time.

I look at the Arabic text; running my hand right to left, swimming with the current, hoping to catch something by osmosis. Each sheet is numbered. Like those broken urns stuck back together by archaeologists. The gaps are filled with putty.
Only connect.

The drawings float in a sand-storm. I look for familiar shapes. I touch their imperfections: small holes, mould, water damage, creases, foxing and tears. I hadn’t felt that collector’s passion for years. As a kid it was plastic soldiers, Boys’ Own annuals, football cards, stamps, graphics, books, first editions. Omar was right. I was retrieving the feelings that had gone A.W.O.L. The tremor. I look at the English titles: Gaza, Jericho, Jenin, Nablous, Hebron, Ramla; names that leave bloody handprints. Nazareth, Baalbec, Jerusalem. Names that spook me. Cana, Ashod, Bethesda. Names which lead straight to the Void. I’m Abram leaping between doubt and faith. And Sinai. My Sinai. Twenty-four thousand square miles of nothing. Only cactus-bush saints.
Existing on dust, prickly pears, visions.
Bones, trials, dry winds.

•

I know the difference now between David Roberts and the kid, Al-Kitab. Roberts travelled and recorded. He was like this Nikon. You could count on him. He walked the line so surely, kept his finger so tightly on the button that he seized up, rusted.

But Al-Kitab journeyed. He teetered on a high wire, lost his balance, took flight, returned with a vision smuggled out of sleep. You focus on his journey until your eyes burn. When you accept his blindness, you realize the kid had looked God in the eye.

•

In 1917 the Englishman, Lieutenant General Stanley Maud, took Baghdad and issued the following statement: “…we have come here not as conquerors but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny.”
One piece.

In 2003 the English Prime Minister Tony Blair announced: “Our enemy
is Saddam and his regime, not the Iraqi people. Our forces are friends and liberators of the Iraqi people, not your conquerors.”
Another piece.

In the same year the American President, George Bush said: “We are encouraging the orderly transfer of authority to the Iraqi people. Our Coalition came to Iraq as liberators and will depart as liberators.”
How the pieces fit.

•

Bit by bit.
The Mongols became Ottomans who became British who became Americans.
A long line of ants. Carrying off sweet things. Busy little insect legs.

•

Omar explained how a looted artifact gets laundered: “The looter sells to a dealer. The dealer takes the piece to a museum for authentication. Then he sells it to a collector. The collector lends it to a museum which puts it on display. Because it’s exhibited, the piece increases in value. The collector can then donate it to the museum, grab a huge tax break, sell it, or keep it as a clean piece for his collection.”

It didn’t seem that hard.

I’d picked up the folio in the courtyard of the Archive that day with Fisk. I’d found someone to authenticate it. Maybe now I wanted to publish it. It was a way of wiping off my finger-prints. Publishing as a form of laundering.

What’s left? Am I going to cough it up like Fisk at the border, pissing his pants? Give it to the next Iraqi who crosses my path? You’d have to be nuts.
What about handing it to that nice concierge at the Palestine?

•

I keep hearing their voices:

Donald Rumsfeld:
“… stuff happens … it’s untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

Jay Garner, (America’s first administrator in Iraq):
“So how are my little brown buddies today?”

Bernard Kerik, (the former head of New York City’s police), handing out copies of his autobiography to Iraqis:
“There you go, boy.”

Piece by piece.
Step by step.
White ant, after white ant, doing what they do.

•

But the boy knows.
From now on it’s Mogadishu Rules.

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