I Remember Fallujah

PROLOGUE

(October 6, 2019)

My father had an unvoiced dream: to build a successful life far away from Iraq. That dream fell apart in the 1970s in the subprefecture of Paris.
If you won’t collaborate, don’t dream, sir.
The dream hung on a small rectangular piece of plastic. A political refugee card brandished by one of the agents. It was a brief exchange.
“It’s simple, this card is here, it exists, it belongs to you. But it has a price. We want to know everything about your friends, who they see, their political leanings . . .”
“In my country, I never betrayed my convictions even though I would have been given a fine career if I had. I won’t start doing it here,” he replied before putting his beret back onto his head, as if setting his dignity straight right where it belonged, and then he left with a slam of the door. I wasn’t yet born. My father was looking for an adoptive country with no prisons for idealists. He’d ended up in France, imprisoned by a principle he would never contravene: to not betray himself. He wanted asylum, a life far from his own country, an escape from the madmen who governed Iraq; and he had become a political refugee with no status, an exile with no identity card, an immigrant with no future. His broken dreams had wedged themselves deep inside his heart. And the things he had not achieved became things he would not discuss.
The vagaries of life have brought me to write about those things.

FORGETTING

(August 2, 2019)

I’ve never forgotten the day my father lost his memory. I clearly remember the date, which imprinted itself on my life in rainy-day numerals, the date since when nothing has been the same.
Friday, August 2, 2019, in Paris, in room 219 at the Bizet Clinic: It all started with a misunderstanding.
“Aren’t you going to wish me a happy birthday?” my father challenged me.
It wasn’t his birthday.
“My last year before I hit thirty . . .” he added. He wasn’t in his twenties.
“I know, I’m talking like an old man trying to escape decrepitude,” he concluded.
His voice was cheerful that day. But I didn’t recognize the smile hovering on his lips.
He relit his cigarette, tilted up his chin, and offered the packet to me.
“You want a smoke, buddy?”
I’d never touched a cigarette.
“I’m your son, Dad. And I don’t smoke, you know that.”
“Well, what do I know?”
My head suddenly swam.
In his strange rejoinders there was a note of sincerity, a suggestion of accuracy, a hint of truth.
“You sure you don’t want a smoke, buddy?” he persisted.
Buddy. I forced a smile. He’d never called me that. I didn’t understand right away. Or rather, I didn’t want to.
I’ve never been a smoker, or his buddy. Until that day, I was his son; the only reason he was in room 219 was to have treatment for stage IV lung cancer; and he remembered me. Until that day, my father wasn’t an amnesiac.

The head of department saw me in a gloomy office. I stepped into it as if into a church, fearful in the face of the Lord. There was no confessional between us, just the unkempt wasteland of a desk. From the full height of his Hippocratic oath, scrawling busily on a notepad, he didn’t look up. I stayed standing, watching him. We were both in our graying forties. He wore a white coat by way of a cassock, and I the previous day’s shirt crumpled by my overnight anxiety. The lowered blinds were conducive to confidences. I murmured what I had to say as if confessing a sin.
“My father, Rami Ahmed, is losing his memory.” He looked up at last.
“Oh… Mr. Ahmed, room 219?”
“Yes.”
“Does he not recognize you?”
“Well, he talks to me like I’m somebody else. Maybe it’s only temporary?”
Silence.
I’ve never liked it when doctors say nothing, or avoid eye contact. It implies anything but agreement.
“If he’s really losing his memory, is there a chance he’ll recover it?” I reformulated.
He gave the beginnings of a smile.
“There are no chances in science, you know. It’s not that straightforward. Unfortunately, there isn’t an exhaustive list of disorders of memory. The pathology of each individual amnesiac is different. Some don’t remember their childhood. Others lose the more recent past. Sometimes, their memory functions but it’s full of holes, like Gruyère cheese. And then things get jumbled—names, places.”
“How will we know?”
“You must talk to him. That way you can find out what he’s forgotten.”
“Do you think this will go on for long?”
“These memory lapses can last from a few minutes to several years. It depends on the type of amnesia—anterograde, retrograde, dissociative, or partial. I’ll examine your father, but I’d advise you not to overburden him with too many faces. You have to go about it gradually. If need be, you could make an appointment with our neurologist, he’s a hotshot on memory.”
If need be. The doctor used the words like someone who rubs elbows with death every day. My father’s situation was routine to him, amnesia nothing more than conjecture, a diagnosis, a detail. When someone dear to you is affected by it, you want the world to stop turning. This doctor was in his own world, though, and I didn’t have access to it. His telephone rang. He dived back into his work, he seemed very busy. I was no longer in the room. Or I shouldn’t have been. Far from having been absolved, I left that office with an additional weight on my shoulders. My head was still ringing with the implacable terms the doctor had used. Before going back to see my father, I typed them into my cell phone. Search engines know no empathy or restraint.
Retrograde amnesia: loss of preexisting memories. Anterograde amnesia: loss of new memories.
Dissociative amnesia: memory loss caused by trauma or stress.
I didn’t know where in all this my strange conversation with my father belonged. I stopped right there. He’d lost his memory, and that was the only thing I knew for sure.

Back in room 219, he still looked at me with a stranger’s eyes. I tried to explain why, from now on, he would be spending twenty-four hours a day in this clinic. He often used analogies himself so he would understand that he was now a book with many pages torn out, that his memory seemed to have partly disappeared, like a jigsaw puzzle with lots of pieces spirited away by this illness. Then I told him he could ask me as many questions as he liked.

As a child, I was the one who asked him questions: Who are we? Do I belong in France? Why live if we end up dying? What makes a person a person? My father took my interrogations seriously, tackled them with concern. To achieve this, he used allegories—particularly when he was drunk—and one of these made a profound impression on me.
One evening he suggested I sit down beside him and he—a man who was a usually nostalgic, often silent drunk—was suddenly garrulous. He’d slipped his headphones down onto his shoulders, and the crackle of an Iraqi maqam brightened the living room with its age-old melody. He had decided to shed some light on my questions, as if he’d been pondering them for a while.
His reply—which seemed to me to come straight out of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales that I devoured at the time—boiled down to these few sentences: “My son, you and I are travelers. Every traveler carries a suitcase. You can’t see the suitcase. It’s invisible, but it’s there. Over the course of your life, your suitcase will fill up with people, things, memories, and experiences—good ones and bad ones. So that it doesn’t get too heavy and you can keep going, you’ll have to take out things that are no use to you and keep the most important. You’ll have to sort through the suitcase because, with all that weight of words, people, adversity, love, and hate, with the victories and defeats, a traveler’s shoulders start to stoop. Identity is a long journey, mine son. It’s up to you to make it as light and uncomplicated as possible. But know this, it’s not that we are. We become.”
We become. Two words whose power I didn’t suspect at the time—how could they summarize existence? We become wasn’t exactly an answer, it was a tool that I had to use. I’ve held on to those two words my whole life as if to a climbing rope.

That recollection has dredged another statement from my memory, an impenetrable pronouncement that my father intoned several times, like a series of beacons intended for the traveler I would grow into: I live with a secret that I will take to my grave. The before version of my father always made sure I understood what he meant, with the same intensity in his eyes, the same sincerity in his voice, and the same refusal to reveal the secret. So why mention it only to say no more? For a long time, I thought he was toying with me. In room 219, I pondered the question again: Had this secret ever really existed?

I felt an urgent need to get my father—this once taciturn man who was deaf in one ear—to talk, a need to restore his sight, understand him, listen as he related his early life and, who knows, discover this secret taboo that may have been stolen by amnesia. A shameful urge too to satisfy my curiosity. I’d never had access to my father’s big narrative. I didn’t know about his past. There was no continuity from his story to mine, and the world I’m originally from is completely foreign to me. In our adult conversations, he brushed aside my questions with a sweep of his hand. Instead of the analogies of my childhood, this melancholy man would now reply, “It’s too complicated.”

On the evening of August 2, 2019, I made him a promise. I would make things easier. We would reclaim the lost memories together.
“Do you remember who you are?” I asked him.
“I’m Rami Ahmed. I was born in Fallujah on January 25, 1944. I left Iraq in 1972.”
All sorts of contradictory thoughts came into my mind. What had he forgotten? Had he emptied that invisible suitcase? Would it always be this difficult for him? Should I be unearthing these old stories he never wanted to tell me? There, in that hospital ward, illness had changed all the parameters. Everything had become urgent and necessary. All that was left now were the essentials. A man’s story. A son’s hopes. Communicating. Memory. And so I started at the beginning that evening. I bought him a notebook. On the first page I wrote some names, as he had for me long ago. First name: Euphrates. Role (it occurred to me to put job): son.
“Dad, I’m your son, my name’s Euphrates. You have a wife and a daughter. You have a family. Your wife is Wafa and your daughter, Arwa.”
He nodded. “Euphrates . . . I know the Euphrates.”
Snatches of memory may have come back to him, but his meandering amnesia wouldn’t allow him to go further. If he was to remember his life, he had to talk to me. I needed to launch him on a subject.
“What’s your earliest memory, Dad?” I asked, despite the confusion in his eyes.
This mishap of life gave me hope that I might get to know the man who had kept a veil over his past all through my childhood. Now that the end was drawing near for him, would he finally unpack his invisible suitcase? I waited for his first words. Were we about to speak at last? Reopen the door to Stop Cluny? It turns out that amnesia could be our attenuating circumstance. An unhoped-for opportunity to make up for lost time, to tell each other everything before he went.
My father seemed to remember something, he stammered, thinking out loud. Slowly, as if conjuring his childhood, as if ghosts from the past were appearing before his eyes, as if a dull and distant pain was stirring inside him, he turned and looked me right in the eye. And then at last, fragments of memory pieced together Rami’s story.
“I remember Fallujah.”