The Weight of a Mustard Seed

by Wendell Steavenson

  Once or twice the daughters brought me into the private interior of the house, leaving my male translator behind, to show me something: how Ali, the second son, had decorated his room in pink satin and tulle for the arrival of his new wife, a new baby; or how to stuff eggplants. But usually when I visited, once or twice a week, I sat in the reception room and various members of the family would come in to say hello, bring me tea and then coffee, and sit for a talk.

  KAMEL SACHET’S WIFE was Um Omar, Mother of Omar (her eldest son), mother of his nine children. In rough order: Shadwan, Omar, Ali, Sheima, Amani, Ahmed, Zeinab, Mustafa, Zaid—and a burgeoning number of toddling grandchildren. She was a warm matriarch. Kissing her hello was like putting your arms around a feathered divan; when she moved it sounded like a swishing quilted curtain. She was firm and yielding; soft and bulky and upholstered in voluminous black velvet. She had aged into house-mother doyenne, indulgent of her family brood and prone to twinges of nerves. From time to time she suffered acute but nonspecific complaints: sleeplessness, problems with her stomach—not exactly a cramp but not exactly an ache. Once she went to three doctors in a week and came back with a bag of medicine, sleeping pills, anti-depressants, antibiotics and, bizarrely, typhoid tablets. I brought a doctor friend of mine to give her some proper advice. She felt dizzy, she felt sick, but she had not been sick, yes, it happened once before like this, and it was very bad, that time she had fainted, maybe it was stress—yes, she nodded as my doctor friend explained the intersection of psychosomatic and physical. He told her to relax and not to worry and then some bomb banged distantly as if in ironic response.

  Her headscarf framed her face in a severe black oval, but Um Omar’s features were plump and powdery and, when she wasn’t upset, her mouth smiled benevolently in repose. The big garrulous Ali, then in his early twenties, who seemed to get fatter and fatter every time I saw him, told me that when they were young she was strict and hurled slippers or wooden spoons at them if they ran around the house breaking things or neglected their homework. But it was hard to imagine this sternness—although not impossible; she wore large gold rimmed glasses and I could glimpse the school-teacher she had once been. Sometimes she seemed almost the naughty one of the family: her children had been brought up proscribed by the strictures of Saddam’s regime and under the firm authority of their father, but Um Omar had grown up in a more indulgent time. She often giggled, almost girlish; she would swirl her wrists in gesticulation and roll her eyes as if to say it is not as serious as all that! And then she would look over her shoulder in comic concern that Ahmed, her devout and censorious son, had caught her being frivolous.

  One afternoon at the end of 2003, when I went to visit, her hands were orange.

  “Oh, I know! I was putting henna in Shadwan’s hair and look at me!” She upturned her fluorescent palms.

  “You have been shelling fava beans also.” I had noticed two large bags of discarded pods by the kitchen door.

  “Oh, they are very delicious, now is the season for them,” said Um Omar, smoothing her lap, “but it takes a very long time to get the little beans out of their skins.” She shuddered comically at the work involved and clapped her hands on her knees, a movement that was like patting a cushion.

  Presently Shadwan, her eldest daughter, thirty and unmarried, came in carrying a vast circular platter piled with rice and green fava beans. Um Omar beamed. Shadwan smiled triumphantly. Another daughter, Amani, thin and wan like a swaying reed, with a pale oval face, followed with bowls of yogurt. She looked up in docile polite greeting, but did not say a word. She carefully and noiselessly set the bowls down on the glass-topped table and then retreated, with a slight limp, back into the private interior of the house. Um Omar flapped her hands like semaphores:

  “Eat! Eat!” The mountain of rice and fava beans looked like it was enough to feed the entire Janabi tribe. We bent to the task. Um Omar threw her arms up, the sleeves of her black gown fell back a few inches towards her dimpled elbows, and asked, “Is it good? I always worry if it will come out right. You know, when you are not paying attention everything works fine. When you want to do something well, it never works out.”

  Um Omar had just come back from Mecca. It was the first time she had ever left Iraq, and she had applied for the lottery—each Muslim country is allotted a quota of pilgrims—and was accepted for Haj, the pilgrimage. She had remembered me in her prayers and brought me back a handbag as a present and I was exhorted to sip from a small glass of holy zamzam water. I protested about drinking their precious supply, but Um Omar shook her head and said she had brought back several liters.

  So, I asked, how was it?

  “Oh yes, it was very good, very interesting, but very tiring!”

  Five days it took them to get to Mecca! They went by bus to Safwan and had to wait there, at a camp where there were permanent tents for pilgrims. The toilets were very bad; Um Omar shuddered. “We were like sheep; but the group before us was worse: they had to wait in Safwan for five days!” She threw her hands up to heaven in supplication. From Safwan they traveled to Kuwait on a yellow school bus. At first Um Omar did not know anyone, but the unaccompanied ladies on the journey soon became friends. She befriended a woman who was from the elite Mansour district of Baghdad.

  “She was a Wahhabi, but she was very kind.” said Um Omar, referring to the fundamentalist Islamic strain to which the woman adhered. The Wahhabi woman had given Um Omar pamphlets and religious tracts to read, but Um Omar confessed she never bothered to read them and when she got home…! Ah, an uproar of hands, Ahmed had made a big complaint and confiscated them as heretical.

  The Kuwaitis had a very nice place for pilgrims to stay in; it was like a village and the bathrooms were clean and the food was fine. Then it was time to go on the airplane. Um Omar had never been on an airplane and she had been a little nervous but she thought it was a very nice experience: the stewardesses were very beautiful, “they are from Turkey, you know—and the food! It was my best meal ever!” They flew to Jeddah and from Jeddah made their way to Mecca.

  In Mecca the Iraqi contingent stayed in a good hotel with an elevator which alarmed Um Omar. At breakfast there were baskets filled with foil packets of honey, milk, orange juice and cheese. Um Omar had been rather taken with the sachets, so neat!

  “But many people in Mecca! And from everywhere.” The crowds were thick and dense and if you got into the middle of one it was hard to get out of it. There were so many people pressing forward that on the way to Mount Arafat people would trip over the men who stopped to kneel down and pray. One old man was being continuously tripped over until other pilgrims dragged him up by his neck and told him to wait to pray later, for Allah’s sake. Um Omar had wanted to stone the devil in the pillar but this was the most dangerous place for stampedes so she had given two stones to two different people to beat the devil on her behalf. “I asked two because you know, one might forget!”

  The men all wore their special white robes, which left a shoulder bare. Women, Um Omar explained, can wear anything, of course, as long as it is hijab.

  “Some of the women from Indonesia wore cosmetics and blue eye shadow!” Um Omar was shocked. And some of the Shia had brought pictures and likenesses of Hussein and this was wrong. And some of the pilgrims from England tried to give her some books and literature, but she refused them, no no! She waved her hands, waving away the foreign. Mostly, however, she was not impressed with the behavior of the other Iraqis in her group. Apparently they had quarreled and argued and caused too many problems about every little thing. Um Omar said that when she had been accepted for Haj she asked the man who was in charge of her tour what the most important thing to bring was and he’d replied that the most important thing on Haj was patience. So she was very patient through the long periods of waiting and organizing. The other Iraqis, she complained, had not been patient. She had wanted, for example, to spend more time in the second holy city of Medina on the way home, two days was not enough time at the gr
ave of the Prophet, but there had been so much arguing that they had left early.

  “It was interesting, you know, that most Saudis are Wahhabis, and they do not agree with offering prayers to Mohammed or to Ali, they say these are only men, there is only one Allah. They are right, I was convinced by their arguments. But they would not let us throw our letters from relatives and friends into the grave of the Prophet Mohammed. I had a letter from Shadwan, and I threw it away.” Shadwan looked downcast and shrugged her shoulders. “And I wanted to buy a mobile phone that plays music as a gift—but they told me this was not allowed because music is haram! Why? It was a gift for a child!” Um Omar opened her palms in bewilderment. There was something foreign about it all, but what could you expect? “Ah. Of course, the Haj, like a feeling you cannot describe, like a feeling nowhere else.” Um Omar looked away and then back at me. “But inconvenient!” She said she was very happy to have gone but she did not want to go again. Once was enough. “It is what God has imposed upon us, it is a duty.”

  Ahmed came in. He was seventeen and studied at the religious university in Baghdad. He was wearing a fawn colored dishdasha, extremely clean and well pressed, bowed to me hello and touched his hand to his breast in greeting, blinking his disconcertingly long eyelashes. He said he hoped one day to perform the Haj himself.

  “A prayer in Mecca is worth 100,000 ordinary prayers. Yes, it is clear. And a prayer in Medina is worth 10,000, the same in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. A prayer in a mosque is worth twenty-seven prayers compared to a single prayer at home.”

  PHOTOGRAPH: A black and white snap from the sixties with a white border: Um Omar, then a university student called Shamh, young and curvy, squeezed into a dark pencil skirt and a cropped jacket with a cinched waist, is standing on the street. Her dark hair is swept up into a big beehive, her eyes are drawn with kohl like a movie star and her lashes are thick with spiky mascara. She is smiling at the camera as if she is pretending to be annoyed with it for catching her.

  “I didn’t wear hijab then.” Um Omar and I were sitting together, talking alone. I had told her I wanted to hear everything from the beginning, how she had grown up, how she had met her husband, and I had asked her if she had any old photograph albums.

  “Not many,” said Um Omar, and then she had gone inside and come back with a box of loose snaps. Fingering this one, she regarded her younger Shamh self fondly and then said, with jokey self-admonishment, “If my husband had been a religious man back then, he would never have married me!”

  Um Omar sat closer to me and laughed at another era and her memories.

  “I am glad Ahmed isn’t here…,” she suppressed a smile. Ahmed would certainly have frowned.

  Shamh had gone to Baghdad University to train as a teacher; none of her sisters had gone to university—education was her abiding ambition. When she was in her second year she began to notice a young man from the neighborhood following her. She would see him at the bus stop wearing his police uniform. She was flattered by his attention, but she did not speak to him until he sat next to her on the bus one day, told her his name was Kamel and recounted his virtues and his circumstances and said he would like to marry her. Shamh was pleased, his speech showed that his intentions were honorable, the Sachets were a known family. Shamh confided in her sister-in-law his attentions, and after a short time, he formally brought his parents to meet her parents. Shamh agreed to marry him on one condition: that he bought her a house so that they could live independently, but Kamel could not afford a house on his policeman’s salary and so the plans for engagement were stalled.

  Um Omar covered her mouth with her hand in a conspiratorial whisper, and explained, in mock-rueful horror at her own disrespect, the difference between her family, urban and established, and his family, recent immigrants from the village with Bedu manners. “You know I did not want to live with his family; his parents were a bit Araby!”

  KAMEL SACHET HAD been born in 1947 in the village of Hor Rajab, the third son of an illiterate farmer’s family. Life was as plain and poor as it had been for generations. Hor Rajab was only twenty kilometers from Baghdad, but there was no road or electricity or radio or even a mosque. On Fridays the village sheikh would climb a small hill and make the call to prayer without a megaphone and prayer would be held in one of the rooms of the low mud-built schoolhouse.

  Kamel was tall for his age and quiet, even as a child, to the point of taciturn. His life was barefoot and dishdasha, blackboard and chalk, elder brothers and father, cold in the winter and burning in the summer. The government provided lunch for schoolboys: eggs, oranges, bread and milk and a daily spoon of cod liver oil that they called caviar and hated the smell of. Lessons taught by the sheikh, reading and writing and the Koran, chores at home and play. The boys in the village made their own footballs out of bundled bits of rag and scraps of shoe leather tied up with heavy string. One time a camel caravan came to the village and they scooped up tufts of camel hair and mashed it with camel milk and packed it hard to dry and make a rubbery ball that bounced, but the ground they played on was limned with salt and the salt would stick to the camel milk football and scratch up their toes as they kicked it.

  Whenever I talked to Kamel Sachet’s friends or military colleagues they always used two words to describe him. They said, “he was brave” and that “he was a simple man.” In translation, this “simple” meant uncomplicated, straightforward, straight talking and clear-cut. But I always imagined Kamel Sachet’s simplicity in another way, as a purity of mind carved out of hard-edged shadows in a single color: yellow of the sun that beat through a yellow sky onto the yellow earth. Kamel grew up in poverty that did not know it was poor—spartan, austere, simple. It was not the way of the village for boys to fight and scrap but to let anyone hurt you was haram, forbidden, and shame.

  Kamel was part of the clever group of boys at school and his teacher praised him to his parents and encouraged them to send him to middle school. Whether it was for this reason or economics, when Kamel was twelve his father Aziz moved the family to the outskirts of Baghdad, to the district of Dora, a pre-suburb area that was still then fields and unpaved roads and to which electricity (and television and radio and music and news) was not to come until 1964.

  Here was the teenager, testing limits and boundaries, leading his little gang into the adjacent Christian neighborhood, fighting other little gangs, studying under trees when it was too hot at home and then jumping into the Tigris to cool down, falling in love with a girl from a good Jobouri family who refused his humble proposal, becoming momentarily inflamed with Unity! Liberation! Ishtiraqiya [Socialism]! during the short lived Baathie coup of 1963, even temporarily manning the checkpoint near the Dora refinery with a green uniform and an Egyptian rifle (“so bad that if you dropped it, it would discharge and explode”) and encouraging his father to go to the new literacy classes sponsored by the socialist revolution.

  His ambition, as that of his friends and childhood gang from the neighborhood, those that had seen their fathers struggle with the land, was to work as an employee in a government position that would bring a salary and a position. Many of them, after the humiliation of “The Aggression” of the 1967 war when the Arab states were defeated by Israel, felt compelled to join the military. After passing his baccalaureate, Kamel Sachet applied for the airforce, but he was turned down and joined the police instead.

  A YEAR AFTER Kamel’s proposal, Shamh was chatting at the bus stop with a boy from the university, who was praising her high marks. “I can still remember his name,” said Um Omar wistfully, “it was Mahmoud.” Kamel saw this, and walked over with high red indignation and his fists raised. Shamh told Mahmoud to leave to avoid a confrontation, but then she reminded her suitor that he had no rights over her.

  The next year he agreed to buy a house of his own and she accepted his marriage proposal. Her sisters had married people introduced through matchmakers and relatives; Um Omar chuckled that she had found a husband by herself. Her brot
her asked around about the reputation of a young policeman called Kamel Sachet. In general people praised him: he had a reputation for being brave, but also he had a quick temper. He got into fights. If someone cut him off at a traffic light, for example, he was liable to beat them up.

  Kamel Sachet and Shamh were married in 1972.

  PHOTOGRAPH: Polaroid of Shamh-Um Omar as a young mother in the seventies. She is wearing a knee length sundress with a bright geometric pattern and a pair of towering tottering white platform sandals with bows on her toes. She’s laughing and holding a baby, her first son, Omar.

  Was Kamel Sachet always religious? Didn’t he impose the hijab on you when you were married?

  “No, no! It came much later that he began to pray regularly and to study the Koran and then he regretted he had not started much earlier.”

  Um Omar had wanted to continue her studies with a master’s degree but her husband thought it was unnecessary and in any case she quickly fell pregnant. Instead she became a teacher at a primary school called Etedahl (Being Straight), which later changed its name to Emtethal (Setting an Example). She taught general studies, geography, history and wataniya, national studies.