April 5, 2009
We spent this most beautiful spring day in the city. After stopping by the textile museum in the ancient citadel for postcards, we lingered at a tea shop in the bazaar below. Eventually though, we realized that the tiny, grungy, tea shop was becoming packed with men with the pretense of drinking tea but with the real intention of making googly eyes at us (3 unaccompanied girls in a tea shop is unheard of; 3 unaccompanied foreign girls in a tea shop? They are clearly not just looking for tea...), so we left and caught a cab to the other bazaar in town. Unfortunately, the taxi driver made googly eyes at us the whole time through the rearview mirror. After we left Lenga Bazaar, we caught another cab to Char Chra Hotel. Unfortunately, this taxi driver also made googly eyes at us through the rearview mirror the entire way. It was a day for being oggled at by googly-eyed men. Who comes up with these words?
Inside Char Chra was the most perfectly aged man in all of Erbil- possibly in all of Kurdistan. His name was Khaled Mohammed, and on the outside, he looked a lot like the prophet Zoroaster (well I thought he did), with a bare dome of a head, deep-set eyes, and a mustache and salt-and-pepper beard. But it was not his outer appearance that drew us to him- instead, we were drawn initially by his amazing artwork that was displayed outside his little gallery in the left-hand corner of the hotel lobby, and eventually by the man's inner dimensions.
The first piece I saw was a large, life-sized one of a beautiful fair-skinned maiden walking barefoot in a meadow. Her head was tilted back, while her long, long hair was blowing forward, and her eyes looked startled or serious, I can't remember which. Next to this painting was a painting of a horse, so lifelike you could see its veins popping out of its face- which I had never noticed on a real horse before, actually. Not that I've been near too many horses in my lifetime. Next to the horse was a painting of a woman with her hand on the button of a half-buttoned dress.
“Do you think she's getting dressed or undressed?”
“Definitely undressed. After a long day, she's come home, her hair's disheveled, her eyes are tired.”
“Yeah, definitely undressed.”
Next to the undressing woman hung a painting of a very promiscuous scene: a man crouched inside a small, dark room. Next to him on the floor lay two women only partially covered by brown blankets, clearly nude, and clearly having fun, judging from their laughing faces. I felt like I had just interrupted a threesome, but for some strange reason, the man's face expressed despair, his mouth agape and his eyes gazing upward as if to cry out, “I don't know what to do!”, his arms crossed over his heart. New Day pointed out the faintly-painted heads of two other women floating in the shadows in the upper left-hand corner. And what was that butterfly doing settled on the blankets at the feet of the naked women?
So many questions, it was time to ask the artist sitting inside for some answers. The Zoroaster-like figure came out and explained that the promiscuous painting of the threesome illustrated a Kurdish folk tale about an ultra-religious man who, determined to escape the sinful temptation of women, went to live a monastic life in a cave. But upon entering the cave, he found that it, too, was filled with women, nude and ready to seduce and be seduced. Moral of the story? You can't get away from them. Women are everywhere and there is no way to escape this fact of life- hence the look of utter despair and perhaps acceptance of the inevitable on his face.
Inside the small gallery, he went on explaining several other paintings that we asked about. The most jarring one hung right beside the door frame. An old woman's face screamed out from a black background. Skulls floated behind her head. She wore black- the color of mourning-, white, and red- the color of blood. Black, white, and red- the colors of the Iraqi flag. Part of the white had a very faint smudge of green on it, which had deliberately been whited out but not all the way. Green was a color of the Kurdistan flag. There was never any green. Most of the painting was done in the colors of the Iraqi flag- except for the blue abaya (headscarf) over her head. Blue was the color of the sky, of freedom, but even that color of freedom had been forced into a form of imprisonment- of women.
“Check out this one, Ang.”
“Wow, it's so...swirly!” We studied the painting, a 1.5-by-6-foot one that extended horizontally. It depicted a nude woman entering a swirly whirlpool-like ring from the right side. The picture ended on the left with the same nude woman lying dead, half-way into another whirlpool ring. At her lifeless yet graceful fingertips lay a spread of fruit and wine, while the ring she was caught in was the color of smoking, burning hellfire. I was mesmerized by the ring's blend of swirling colors. In between the two swirling, tempestuous tidal waves was painted two white doves, the symbol of peace and love.
“What is the story (chirok) in this painting?” I asked.
“Life is like a swing,” New Day translated, “It goes back and forth from good to bad. But the best part about life is love.” The image depicted love as sort of the calm in the midst of a storm. This painter must have an amazing relationship with his wife, I thought. There are too many others who would have painted it the other way around, showing love as the capricious tempest.
He had been to Korea. He had loved Korea because everything there was so fast-paced. No one was ever talking on the phone. Instead, everyone constantly- on the streets, in the subways- texted at lightning speed. He brought us over to his computer to show us pictures of the Iran-Korean International Art Fair he had attended. He clicked to a picture of his son who worked as a graphic artist in Iran, and told us about how the creator of Tom and Jerry had once told his son: “I would cut off my hand so that you never stop making your art.” I immediately wished that I was that good at something. That must be what it feels like to be born with a purpose. Eventually, he reached the pictures of the Art Fair in Korea, and though he clicked through most of them pretty quickly, he paused suddenly at one that showed a pale, blonde Iranian woman.
“This is my wife,” he explained, though there was no need to explain. His eyes became lost as he gazed at the picture and shook his head wistfully, tenderly. Clearly she was no longer living. And clearly, he had loved her very much. During the lull, I noticed that music was playing softly from his speakers, featuring a woman's strong voice and some unknown folk instrument.
“That's his wife singing,” New Day translated. “He says she never recorded her songs for anyone but him.” She continued, “He says that he doesn't believe she is really dead, and that she's waiting for him. They're going to be be together again someday.” If these words had come out of anyone else's mouth, I would have dismissed it as religious nonsense about the afterlife, but I recognized that the source of his belief was his profound, genuine longing for another human being- something I can actually believe in. His words were noble rather than psychotic or delusional, and I was more ready to believe them than those of any pastor I had heard before.
We chatted with the artist for a long time in his tiny gallery inside Char Chra Hotel. He talked about Iran and Hafez poetry and about his love for wine, how once in Russia, he had tasted a wine so old that it could barely come out of the bottle when he opened it, like stubborn ketchup in a Heinz bottle. Does that really happen to wine when you age it for too long? I couldn't tell if he was pulling our leg. The man himself seemed like a fine wine, his soul aged to perfection.
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