The Northern Front by Charles Glass

Author:Charles Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863567445
Publisher: Saqi

Saturday, 22 February 2003

Suleimaniya to Tower Hotel, Erbil

Hans Blix announces that Saddam’s al-Samoud missiles have a range of 180 kilometres – thirty kilometres longer than UN resolutions permit. He gives the Iraqis eight days to destroy them. Thus, the US may launch a war for thirty kilometres of air.

Ham’ali Khan comes by this morning for coffee at the hotel. He is one of this city’s great characters. Sometimes he is like the Ancient Mariner, who won’t let me go until he has his say. Other times, I ask to hear more – this morning, about his stage career. ‘I translate Hamlet from Persian to Kurdish,’ he says. He directed it here in 1991. A bit old to play the Prince, he would have been a good Polonius. The play went to the Fajr Festival in Tehran. ‘I act Hamlet in Arabic in Baghdad when I was student. I act in Eugene O’Neill plays. And Osvaldo Dragùn’s The Story of the Man Who Turned Into a Dog. I play Mozart in Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri. I act Steinbeck, from the novel Of Mice and Men. The director was Karim Osman. He’s dead now. They kill him in the war between the PUK and KDP. I was in play by Nazim Hikmet, The Skull. I act in forty-five plays and fifty films.’ Then, uncharacteristically modest, ‘I’m not famous in Baghdad like I am here.’

He made a film about Saddam’s ethnic cleansing of Kurdistan, al-Anfal. He played the title role in the film Qazi Muhammad, about the fall of the Mehabad Republic. His list of credits goes on, while I try to finish breakfast. ‘I act in Samuel Beckett’s The Scream.’

The Scream?

‘That was the Kurdish title. And I was in The Chairs of Ionesco. I learned English from films. I watch two or three a day.’ He pulls out a bunch of DVDs, including Gangs of New York.

He pats his pockets, looking for something. ‘You didn’t smoke?’ He needs a cigarette. I don’t smoke them, but I could use one too. Or something. ‘Every person here has 500 stories, because every person in this area didn’t live for peace for one minute. War. War. War.’ He lists the wars from the time the British arrived. It takes some time. ‘This area lives from war to war.’

Ham’ali leans towards me and confides in a whisper that he needs a job – as translator, maybe. Though his English is not good enough, he has too many talents to waste them. I will try to think of something else. He says, ‘I have two brothers and one sister in Germany. They say, “Come, kaka.” In 1987, I tried to go. I was in the mountains. I went to Tehran. I came back. A friend from Karbala, name Qassem, he died by the way, because he cannot breathe in the triangle of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. I write a poem to him, “The Bells”. A man bleeds to death. They translate it into Arabic.’

Then he tells me about a woman he saw for the first time in twenty-eight years.

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