The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon

Author:Sinan Antoon [Antoon, Sinan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300228946
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-08-14T21:00:00+00:00

Five months later the Baidaphon record reached Hasan through Salih. He was quite delighted. Hasan felt it and smelled it and then asked Salih to describe it to him and read out what was written on it. Salih told him about the yellow paper sleeve and described to him the gramophone player and “Baidaphon Records” written in large letters and under it the words “Beirut, Cairo, Berlin, Butrus and Gabra Baida.” Hasan wasn’t interested in that of course, but Salih was testing his patience. Salih wound up in a dramatic voice: “Hasan Effendi al-Aseer, ‘If You Complain of Pleasure,’ a rast maqam.”

“And the other records?” Hasan asked.

“The others are with them.”

Hasan was saddened and disappointed, but Salih cheered him up, saying, “Come on, man, you should be cheerful. They’ll hear you in Cairo and Beirut and Aleppo, and they sell in Basra too.”

He didn’t own a gramophone player, so he would put the record on his lap and sing to it as he drank alone at home. When Salih bought a gramophone player, he invited Hasan to his house to listen to himself singing. He had expected to feel happier than he actually did. That day they listened to Rashid al-Qundarchi and Muhammad al-Qubbanchi, and Hasan asked Salih, “Honestly, aren’t I better than all of them? Except that I went blind and had a rough time in captivity.” “If only you’d sober up and stop drinking arak, for God’s sake,” Salih replied.

But Hasan didn’t give up arak and he died in 1932, hugging a tiny bottle of it, before he was even forty years old. He never married, and all he left behind him was that recording, which was the only evidence that he ever passed through this earth. There were two copies of his songs—one in the Baidaphon office in Berlin and the other in Beirut. Allied bombing in the Second World War destroyed the company’s office in Berlin, and the civil war in Lebanon took care of destroying the Beirut archive. The surviving record in Baghdad remained in Hasan’s room with his clothes and some other things. When his nephew and his fiancée moved into the room, they put his stuff in a small chest, which they placed in the courtyard. A few months later a junk dealer called at the house and bought the whole box. He sold the clothes to the secondhand clothes dealer, and persuaded the owner of the coffee shop to buy the record. So Hasan’s lamentations echoed through the coffee shop when his luck was in—that is, whenever the owner, who insisted on choosing the songs himself, was in the mood to hear him. Then new technologies arrived and forced the earlier ones into retirement. Al-Aseer’s lamentations and his gramophone record then disappeared into a box that languished in a storeroom for many years, awaiting the fire that would consume it one fine spring day in the year 2003.

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