Mundhir is an honest judge in an Iraqi court. He has been a fair arbiter of cases and, as his wife complains, is so compassionate he can’t even kill a mouse.
When his son Anwar is sent to the front lines to fight against Iran, it doesn’t occur to Mundhir to use his connections to get his son more favourable treatment. But as soon as Anwar goes “missing” from his army unit, Mundhir regrets his upright nature and begins to reverse his countenance in unexpected ways.
Iraqi writer Mahmoud Saeed's novel A Portal in Space, set in Basra and Baghdad during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War, traces a father's attempt to comprehend how his son could simply disappear from the Earth. For readers, this mystery might be easier to fathom given that war's tragic legacy.
More than 100,000 Iranians and Iraqis were held as prisoners of war, and thousands more are still missing. Closing the chapter on this decade is impossible for many families, since documentation of what happened to those missing “simply does not exist”, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
This massive loss of life is an unhealed wound that has inspired a slew of novels about the war from both sides of the border, like Iranian Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's 2014 Thirst.
Saeed, born in Mosul in 1939, left Iraq in 1985 after repeated stints in prison. He now lives in Chicago, Illinois.
A Portal in Space is his latest novel to be translated into English, and translator William Hutchins writes that it is "poised to be his breakout novel."
A Portal in Space opens in Mundhir's idyllic garden at his Basra home. Although Iranian bombs bombard the city throughout the day – never at night – Mundhir's family life is relatively stable. His daughter is a budding naturalist with a love of birds, and his son will soon graduate from architecture school.
Anwar has modest dreams – to marry a beautiful woman and to design shanashil (historic Iraqi houses) – but he also wants to escape it all: “Can’t we have a single moment of peace? I want a portal in space so I can escape to a world where I feel secure and can walk forward, without being afraid to hold my head up high.”
Anwar doesn’t return home along with his unit on leave, so Mundhir travels to the front, only to be told that Anwar is missing – a term that is unbearably vague.
The pain and helplessness that follow Anwar’s disappearance is felt as Mundhir travels each week to Baghdad to check the list of prisoners outside the United Nations building, along with swarms of grieving Iraqis. Such a dismal setting would seem like a path to understanding something essential about that time period, but the story takes a bizarre turn.
Mundhir falls madly in love with a woman he meets outside the UN and they begin a rather unbelievable affair. Repetitive romantic chit-chat fills entire chapters, and its English rendering can often feel like it is awkward teenagers courting each other, not adults.
The one interesting moment in this drawn-out affair is when Mundhir uses his status as a judge to get a hotel room with his mistress. The reader will understand that this is Mundhir’s fall from grace, but by that point, the story has strayed so far from the emotional reality of Anwar’s disappearance that it’s hard to care.
Unfortunately, among the characters who appear in the first several chapters of the novel, only the father is portrayed with any depth. The mother becomes a cliché of madness, and though the daughter is intuitive and sharp in her observations of nature, she fades into the background.
Mundhir is the most human as he reflects on the nature of the human psyche – what makes someone moral or immoral – but his questioning is filed in interludes that feel too brief and never really fit in with the rest of the story.
A Portal in Space is best at the start, when Saeed describes how Mundhir's family has come to measure the war in numbers: how many minutes elapse between bombs and how many kilometres away a bomb falls.
The war’s destruction is almost predictable when calculated as such, and you start to understand how one can manage chaos.
But the rest of the novel is lacking when it comes to any real exploration of the consequences of a disappearance, or even broaching the complicated question of whether death is deliverance from war.
We can only guess what happened to Anwar, but it takes more than a father’s illicit affair to make us appreciate that loss.
Leah Caldwell writes for Alef Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Texas Observer.
