The sky was overcast, but it wasn't raining yet, when I ran into Abbas Kadhim on Euclid. I found him standing before a row of newspaper boxes, bent forward scanning front pages, while a frenzy of students and professors went back and forth to lunch. Between the moving people, I sidled up to him and said hello. He looked up and gave me a huge smile and hugged me like a brother. He pushed back away from me, his forearms against his waist, and looked at my face as if he didn't believe I'd made it back from Iraq, his home.
Seeing him, I felt something I hadn't felt for two weeks, a living connection to the people and place--the stories--I left behind.
Abbas, if you don't remember, was an Iraqi-exile who had been generous enough to teach Brandon and I some Iraqi-Arabic free-of-charge before we left for Baghdad in late July. He was the only man on the street who knew the country I'd regretfully left, who knew the people I drank tea with in the afternoons, who knew the kind of Baghdad heat that baked my bones for three weeks in August, who knew the dark blue of the Tigris in the early evening and the people who gathered on the bridges to watch the sun go down, who knew the sweet taste of the fresh dates we'd been served and had seen ripening in the palm groves, who knew the underlying pulse of a country I could only intuit as a visitor. (He knew what reporters like Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter, couldn't know as an outsider. Filkins wrote a good and sad story in the September 4 NYT
about outsiders jogging along the Tigris, though he tainted his story with stereotypes and weird conclusions: "The area along the Tigris [Abu Nawas Street] is a kind of Iraqi skid row, where the underside of Baghdad life often reveals itself. Thieves--affectionately called 'Ali Babas' here--lurk in its environs," [all this is okay, I guess, until the next part where he tries to dramatize, but ends up sensationalizing] "not to mention Islamic radicals opposed to Westerners" [unless he did run into some radicals coming out of the riverbank, or knows someone else who did, but just isn't telling]. And then he goes on to write, "Yet even on the worst days here, the city carries on, in the crazy, chaotic Middle Eastern way." What? It is chaotic there. I'll give him that. But the chaos is not necessarily "Middle Eastern" in character. I'm not even sure how he's defining "Middle Eastern," what he wants it to mean, other than "crazy" and "chaotic." This is why for two weeks I haven't been able to digest any news coming out of Iraq, except for the bombing in Najaf, which happened right after we returned, and which speaks for itself. The news is filled with too much sensational garbage, too many simplifications.) Seeing Abbas was like returning to Iraq, to a piece of the truth of what it is, and I was relieved and excited to be back.
When the rain started--a slow, cold drizzle--we pressed up against the outside wall of the copy store, a few feet from the curb, from the bus stop. Abbas was about to catch the bus heading down the hill into downtown Berkeley. He wanted to hear everything about my trip, he said. And I wanted to tell him everything, and I wanted to hear what his summer in Berkeley was like while I was visiting his home. He said two weeks after we left for Iraq, a Jewish woman in the Iraqi-dialect class accused Abbas of being Anti-Semitic,
as the result of a conversation they had about the writers (and their intention) of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. "It was crazy," he said. "Many of my colleagues are Jewish, and I consider them friends." I asked him if he still had his job. "Yes, but it wasn't my job I was worried about," he said. "She attacked my character."
The story spread through the Berkeley community
and all over the world through the web. He was receiving emails from as far away as Russia, he said. After some investigation by the dean of the Near East Studies department,
he concluded that there was no real basis to the woman's argument. To his relief, Abbas was cleared, but the incident has left him feeling unsettled.
I tell him I'm sorry to hear of his troubles, but unlike Iraq, there was no real "time" to get the juicy details. I had a class starting in five minutes. And he was headed in another direction.
Before Brandon and I left on July 21, in addition to language, Abbas gave an introduction to Iraqi culture. He told us Iraqis didn't pay too much attention to time. There was a trust in the day, in Fate, in what it would bring, in human relationships, in the conversations that happened over glasses of chi hilu--sweat tea. In the states now, everyone seemed possessed by time, too busy with their own ambitions, too busy to talk and argue with one another, every one rushing in a dizzying flurry of activity. "I don't want to keep you out in the rain," Abbas said, and without setting a time or date we promised to get together for lunch soon.