BAGHDAD
He remembered that the dreams of men belong to God, and that Maimonides wrote that the words of a dream are divine, when they are all separate and clear and are spoken by someone invisible.
(J. L. Borges, The Secret Miracle)
I had a dream that I ended up in Baghdad.
The mighty ivory walls towered over the red-hot sand; above the desert there were horrific images quivering in a swelter, in unbearable ardor.
The town had a hundred golden gates that glowed in the morning sun. A stream of passengers collided in front of the city gates. The movement of armies, vast troops on camels and horses at gallop were raising a cloud of yellow dust that overshadowed the view on the minarets and gilded cupolas of mosques. It must be, after all, a time of prayer, because protracted muezzin chanting was permeating through horse neigh and hoarse shouts of grooms.
I passed through it all and slipped through the Caliph’s guards holding spears and curved sabers, wherefore I found myself in a tight street flooded by streams of dirty water. From the dried mud hovel dark-skinned women with big, dark, warm eyes were curiously peeping out; a pack of poor, barefoot urchins ran past me screaming at the top of their lungs. I did not understand the language spoken by the residents of the town. However I understood that invaders are approaching the city: hordes of slant-eyed warriors of forty, fifty or even a hundred thousand horsemen, which were pouring like an avalanche from the Mongolian steppes...
Baghdad had hundreds of thousands of these same streets, and countless squares where fairs were held during the whole day as well as colorful bazaars. Merchants from Cathay with slanted eyes, blue-eyed Muscovites, Genoese and Tatars, caravans from Abyssinia, Cairo, Libya ... – all of them probably barely speaking a word in Arab. At the mosques entrances the scribes were sitting with red turbans on, thoughtfully inscribing calligraphic characters on camel skins; under booths on squares were sitting exchangers counting copper, silver and gold coins. In front of a fabulous palace I heard the kettledrum and bagpipes and I saw a golden carrier and a cortege following it and in it the Caliph of Baghdad himself; he was dressed in silk be-furred in golden threads and black and white pearls. Some mighty prince, from countries of the evening light, rushed to visit him; a hundred knights with silver armor and colorful banners were surrounding the sovereign holding his head up high.
But what is the earthly power when the disaster is already written in the stars? One court astrologer erroneously interpreted the signs of the disaster; others are talking about the comet visible in the night sky, which foretold the plague. And indeed the plague appeared in Basra.
I was a stranger in Baghdad, but I still knew that in a dark alley dwells an old man with beard white as snow. When I finally found him, he was on his deathbed. He was lying on a bed dressed in tattered rags and expiring, painful cramps quavered his emaciated body; he certainly had more than a hundred years. He was the most miserable old man in the whole city. Poor old man! I leaned over to him, under squinting candle light, but have not managed to hear the words that were coming out of his dry mouth in agony. I realized that he was dying, and that by his death the hordes of wild Tartars will effuse through walls, that it will cause the whole Baghdad to perish in flames, the caliph will be murdered in his palace, its citizens will be slaughtered or taken as slaves, the blood will flow in the streets...
In the eyes of God the lives of hundreds of thousands of people were not dependent on the mighty Caliph, but on the miserable old man who was expiring in front of my eyes.
I realized that even I cannot avoid the slaughter, because I failed to understand the words he whispered to me on his deathbed.
Boris Nad
Translated by: Zorana Lutovac
KOMENTARI