Mehsin disclaimed responsibility for the outrage, saying that he had never given the order, but his son was imprisoned for a while and the incident caused some loss of face. This time Aboud was sent back to live beside a police post, without cultivators or an appreciable amount of cultivable land. Threats reached the pedlars and travelling merchants, and none dared sell their goods to him. I do not imagine that an insurance company would give much for his life.
The atmosphere beneath the dim and stately arches of a sheikh’s mudhif is, for a guest, very different from that of a village house. As time wears on the mudhif fills, it is true, but for the most part with elderly and dignified Arabs who squat cross-legged in silence. Speech when it comes is gentle and desultory; the beads click slowly and aimlessly between their fingers like the clucking of hens in a summer farmyard. The blue smoke curls up like incense from the burning dung at the coffee hearth; overhead it has given to the reed arches of the mudhif a patina as rich and glossy as old mahogany.
The people drifted away early, since there is rarely singing or dancing in so august an establishment, and as we lay down to sleep swarms of bats flitted among the dim columns above us, casting huge upward shadows on the arch-tops. Near to the door the faces of four black slaves were lit alone in the darkness by the flame of a Lux lantern; they squatted by the hot embers with their rifles across their knees, and the grotesque whirling shadows swooped over them like vampires.
We lunched the next day at the fort of Mehsin’s brother, Jabir; in this atmosphere of internecine strife it was not surprising to learn that the two were not on speaking terms with one another—or rather were said to be “shouting insults at each other across the river”.
The day was marked for me by an incident of painful comedy. I had brought with me from England a fishing spear gun of the type commonly used in conjunction with a Schnorkel mask by holidaymakers on Mediterranean shores. The gun was not mine, and I had never used it; nor, indeed had its owner, who had confided to me that in circumstances of peculiar chagrin he had discovered his utter inability to load it. It was before these toys had become popular, and they were still a novelty on most plages. He had been reclining on the sand of an Italian beach with the shiny and as yet untried object beside him when a group of Italians approached and asked if they might look at it. They examined it with animation and interest, and inquired if it were really possible to spear fish under water with this weapon. Its owner assured them that this was the case. They remarked that it must require much skill, and my friend replied that this, too, was so. They tempted him with admiration and flattery; in a few minutes he had sketched in a light picture of gaudy gurnards and ink-squirting octopuses impaled by his deadly aim deep down in the jewelled garden. Almost diffidently they inquired how to load this beautiful toy.
He knew the principle but had never tried the practice. At the muzzle end of the gun were two big loops of finger-thick rubber, and these had to be stretched back by brute force until they engaged in two corresponding notches at the butt-end of the barrel. He did not anticipate any particular difficulty, and with an easy condescension he reached for the weapon to demonstrate the procedure.
Under the amazed and then frankly amused eyes of the Italians he strained and tugged at one of the rubber loops without being able to stretch it halfway toward the notch for which it was destined. He was dripping with sweat and scarlet with effort and embarrassment when after many minutes he had to explain that it was not in fact with this gun but with another that he had decimated the shoals. The gun returned to England unfired, and was kept where it could arouse no moody memories of humiliation.
There was time to put away at Jabir’s fort by the edge of the river, and I decided to see whether I would fare better than the gun’s owner; making very clear to the onlookers, however, that I had neither loaded nor fired it before today. Owing to the sprouting curve of white rubber that grew from its muzzle the gun had early been christened by the canoe boys the Father of the Horns—(in the same way they refer to a particularly verminous house as the Father of Fleas, or to a hospitable sheikh who kept a lamp of invitation burning before his mudhif as the Father of the Light)—and they were no less curious than I to see just what the horns could do.
Whatever else they could do it did not seem at first as if they could be made to stretch a fraction of the required distance. I sat on the bank and jammed the pistol butt of the gun into my stomach and tugged until my muscles were aching and my stomach bruised, until at last, breathless, I slipped first one loop and then the other into their retaining notches. When I had done this I put on the safety catch and rested.
Hassan became impatient, and fetched some pats of buffalo dung to throw into the water as targets. At last I felt ready for a trial demonstration.
He tossed a pat on to the opaque yellow surface a little upstream of me so that it would be carried past me on the current some twenty feet away. I removed the safety catch, took careful aim along the barrel with the metal pistol grip a couple of inches in front of my nose, and pulled the trigger.
Something hit the bridge of my nose with shattering force, and I was knocked over flat on my back. I began automatically to get to my feet again, and saw as I did so that my shirt was covered with blood and that it was splashing heavily from my nose. I fumbled in my pocket for a handkerchief, and as I touched my nose I heard the bones inside clicking like a box of dice. Thesiger was hovering between concern and uncontrolled laughter; and the tears were streaming down my face as uncheckable as the blood.
At this point an agitated slave rushed up to us with cries of sympathy and dismay, and on hearing that my nose was broken exclaimed in great agitation that he would bring medicaments at once. Thesiger indicated his vast medicine chests that were stacked within a few feet of us, but the slave’s goodwill would take no denial and he hurried off into the fort. A second or two later he came panting forth and with reassuring smiles pressed into my hand a small bottle labelled in English “Squibb’s Mineral Oil”. This struck both Thesiger and myself as excruciatingly funny, and I began to giggle so helplessly that the slave clearly thought my reason to have been affected by the blow.
When my nose had stopped bleeding and I had cleaned up my shirt as well as I could, I decided to try the gun again. This time I held it well away from my face with my arms braced. The shock against my tense muscles made it very easy to understand why my nose had broken. The spear shot merrily if inaccurately on its way, but as it did so I was conscious of a searing pain in my left thumb. This time the flying line connecting the spear to the gun had carried away with it an inch-long strip of skin. I returned the outrageous weapon to the tarada, uncomforted by a further offering of Squibb’s Mineral Oil.
In the afternoon we left Jabir’s mudhif downstream to visit his grandfather the great Mehsin, but when we arrived at his fort on the river bank he was in the act of stepping into a great high antediluvian-seeming motor launch to visit his son Ali. We abandoned the tarada to the canoe boys and travelled with him, our mountainous conveyance hammering and vibrating down-river between packed villages orange in the glare of light that comes before sunset.
It was in this same weird stage lighting that we came to Ali’s mudhif. It leaned drunkenly at an angle of forty-five degrees, its foundations undermined by floods three years before, and had been long since due for repair. Ali had planned this the previous year, but had been thwarted by the total destruction of the reed crop which should have rebuilt it. There had been a cataclysm of nature, a hail storm of unprecedented violence, whose stones had been bigger than golf balls, killing many men, decimating the birds, and smashing down the giant reeds until they lay flat over the marshes like laid corn at the end of a wet and windy English summer.
Slaves carried into the mudhif several of the heavy arm-chairs from the reception room of the fort, and in one of these Mehsin sat near the entrance, vast, hunched and amorphous, smoking incessantly. He was, I thought, like Charles Laughton with a stubbly white beard and moust
ache. Each man who entered kissed his hand; there was also much whispering in his ear. He was very fat and contrived to be stately with it all, but he blew his nose on to the floor; he also ignored the ashtrays with which the slaves had surrounded him, and threw the stubs still burning on to the reed matting. There was a vast and various spread for dinner, but Mehsin sat apart from us, eating his way steadily and messily through a large and somewhat raw fish.
For all his absurdities he gave the impression of power and shrewdness; well filling his position as one of the great figures of Southern Iraq. Throughout the evening his wazir, small, pockmarked, scribish and viperish, sat on the floor near his master with a huge ledger open on his knees, making a seemingly casual entry from time to time. Mehsin talked with Thesiger with increasing animation; after a while I could follow little or nothing of what they were saying. Their intensity gave me the impression that they discussed momentous matters. Suddenly Thesiger seemed at a loss, and turned to me. “What was the date of Ethelred the Unready?” Even had I been less taken aback I should not have found the answer. After a few minutes there was another pause, and Thesiger said “Gavin, I’m very bad at knowing this sort of thing—how long is St. James’s Park?” Finally, “What word would we use in English for someone who lies in bed all the morning?” “Slugabed,” I hazarded, and Mehsin sent his wazir over to me to copy it down into his ledger. “Slukabeed,” they repeated over and over again with evident satisfaction, and later it became in this form a much-used term of opprobrium among our canoe boys.
Mehsin’s son Ali has little of the presence of the old man; his face is loose, cruel, and self-indulgent, and he has a sadistic sense of mischief. Once when Thesiger told one of his canoe boys to tie up the tarada near the stone fort Ali gave orders for the boy to be beaten up and thrown into the river. He also possesses a box filled with spikes, in which those who incur his displeasure are placed and shaken up.
Ali boasted a sarifa besides a mudhif, and it was in the sarifa that we slept that night, on beds carried in from the fort. I revelled in the guilty pleasures first of sitting in an arm-chair and then of sleeping on a mattress, but less in the third western amenity that so many sheikhs boast—the unspeakable lavatories.
Away from the towns practically no one except a sheikh would think of possessing such a thing anyway. In the marshes one takes a canoe into the reed-beds and perches precariously on its wobbling side; on the dry land one merely walks a little distance from the houses. (If one has a servant one says to him harid ibrig, “I want to wash”—a curiously European euphemism—and he leads the way carrying a jug of water.)
A number of the sheikhs’ forts, however, possess lavatories whose function must surely be that of prestige rather than convenience. These are usually on a river bank, four stakes round which a screen of reed matting is stretched over a shallow trench cut into the mud. The trenches are presumably intended to be sluiced down into the river, but I never saw one that had been within a recent past. In dry sunny weather a million flies form a cloud like a solid obstacle; in wet weather the scene is better left to the imagination.
Chapter Six
T HE next morning we made a short journey to the village of Sahain. On the way we passed long processions of water buffalo being towed by canoes heading northward towards Naija, the swimming beasts urged on by quick loud cries like the honking of wild geese. The great hailstorm had been responsible for consequences more serious than prolonged failure to rebuild the tottering mudhif; it had destroyed the reed crop that is the marshmen’s livelihood, and many of them, reduced below the level of subsistence, were forced to sell their buffaloes in the market at Naija.
Sahain turned out to be a big huddle of islanded houses criss-crossed by big and small waterways, running at right angles to each other like streets. In the centre of the village stood a small stone fortress, rushed up by Dakhil four years ago, when insurrection by the community against his father Mehsin had seemed imminent. The fortress was still garrisoned, and the muzzles of light machine-guns poked from its loopholes with a glint of dark metal. Just such another village had not long ago rebelled against their sheikh, and when the villagers had overcome his garrison the government had confirmed their independent status. It is easy to see how what may be for the State the only sensible solution to one problem may create a precedent forming others.
In this war-like setting it was a surprise to find that here was the first village that we had visited whose children went to school, and therefore spoke—though did not understand—a few sentences of English. English is compulsory at all Iraqi schools, and is taught by the Direct Method, of which Desmond Stewart and John Haylock have given an illuminating description in The New Babylon. They learn, as I was to discover later, after some perspiring hours with their teachers, from Iraqi English Masters who are incapable of carrying on the very simplest conversation in any language but their own, but who have a few parrot-learned phrases and are able to read aloud with just-recognisable pronunciation from children’s primers.
I was sent out that afternoon to perform my now customary but still precarious function of shooting coots or duck for the evening meal, and the boy who paddled my canoe was determined to exercise his English; probably he wanted to score off his schoolmaster by retailing the grammar or pronunciation of a real Englishman. It was amazing how much he really could say when he tried, but much more amazing how little he could understand; nothing, in fact, but single words, and then only after constant repetition.
“In English please what is this?” He indicated the boat. “You have not answer my question. Is ‘motor-water’?”
A little later, after the inevitable disgrace, “Now Sahib Thesiger will not be your friend any more, because he very much love cartridges.” Then, with a hint of avarice “Does Sahib Thesiger love empty cartridges too?” Reassured on this point he began again. “Why are Iraqis yellow men and English red men? Answer my question. You have not answer my question; please answer my question. Why I yellow you red?” He wasn’t, in fact, very yellow, but as time passed I began to grow red.
At last I did shoot a duck, and as he held the carcase with its head pointing toward Mecca and began to slit its throat he asked “At England which way you point?” and then, impatiently: “Muslims, this way, head blood to Mecca—at England how?” I remembered how in Morocco I had been speaking to an Arab when a water-seller passed with his sheep-skin of water and his tinkling brass cups that cost a penny to drink from: “How much do water-sellers charge in London?” the Arab had asked.
At Sahain that night I saw professional dancers for the first time, a man and his fourteen-year-old son. Our host brought them in to dance for us after we had eaten, but the boy sat down as soon as he had made his greetings, and no amount of cajoling could make him dance one step. His shoulder-length hair had been shaved two days before because he was going to school, and he wore a red skull-cap which he fingered nervously as he sat cross-legged and stared at the floor. At last he consented to drum while his father danced, and there were tears in his eyes as he watched the man tie his headcloth to resemble swinging hair, two dangling ropes of cloth with a heavy knot tied at the bottom of each.
The father danced well, and the erotic passage brought the usual applause from the audience, but I could not take my eyes from the boy. As he drummed he looked only at the rhythmically swinging keffia that was doing duty for his own lost hair, and slow tears rolled unnoticed down his face. His hands on the drum worked in a frenzy as though they had some life independent of himself, as though they were controlled by the rhythm of his father’s flying feet rather than by his own sad head shorn of its pride. The drums of stretched pelican-pouch have a twang like the plucked strings of a stringed instrument; they can be plaintive and melancholy, or menacing and ferocious when struck, as they were now, in quick hard rhythm. So furious was the fluttering of his hands on the drum that they left a succession of different positions on the retina of the eye, from the open upraised palm to the flat back of t
he hand as it struck. Never once did he turn his eyes from the swinging knots at his father’s head, until suddenly the drum split under his hands, and as he bent over it I saw him wipe his face quickly with the skirt of his dish-dasha. Pity Samson at the mill with slaves.
During the talk round the fireside that night I heard mentioned again and again the name Ghadbhban, and after a while I asked Thesiger who this man might be. “A bandit,” he replied, “although actually rather more than a bandit; it’s a strange story.”
At the end of the First World War Ghadbhban, of the family of Beni Asad or Sons of the Lion, had refused submission to the British and had built himself a fortified position on one of the mud islands in the marshes. The first attacks against him were unsuccessful, and at length the British, with the aid of a powerful Arab, prepared for him a ruse. They sent a bombing aircraft, while the Arab ambushed Ghadbhban’s retreat from the island, and into this trap he fell. His canoe and gear were sunk, and he himself severely wounded in the leg. He escaped through the reeds, carrying his child, and sought refuge among the pastoral tribes of the uplands near to the Persian frontier.
Some thirty years later, in 1954, Ghadbhban’s brother Faleh decided to try whether he could not play the same hand with greater success. He occupied the same island that his brother had so ignominiously vacated, and levied and looted from the surrounding territory until at last the government recognised his claims and granted him land. During the time of his thrall rumour had gone round the marshes that he had attempted to hold up Thesiger’s party, and that there had been a battle. Thesiger himself was said to have escaped after inflicting damage upon Faleh’s men, but it was understood that Amara and Sabeti had been killed, and they arrived at their home village to find their parents preparing to mourn their deaths.
A Reed Shaken by the Wind Page 10