The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  By the beginning of World War I in 1914, many Iraqis were quite happy that the Allies, led by the British, had come to oust the Ottoman Turks who had been ruling and oppressing them for centuries. Initially, many Iraqis co-operated with the British. The British conquest and this naming of children with English names laid down the foundations for, and foreshadowed, the possibility of my current half-English and half-Iraqi family.

  “So, were Nasser and Samira Chaldean Christians?” I asked, as I’d heard of Iraqi Christians being called Chaldean.

  “No, no. It’s different,” my father said. “We’re Syrian Catholics. We’re Suriyan, not Assyrian or Athuri.”

  “So that’s obviously different from Roman Catholic?” I couldn’t understand how Syrian Christians could be Catholics, and my father didn’t really know either.

  My father had never even hinted that the kind of Christianity he’d grown up with in Iraq was any different from what my mother had grown up with in England. My mother had once said that despite their different cultural backgrounds, she felt that she and Ibrahim had had similar upbringings because of their Catholicism. I’d assumed it was the same Catholicism.

  Later on, I found out that Christianity had existed in Iraq since the second century AD, when Jews who had converted to Christianity arrived there and began to convert the Mesopotamians. Our family is considered Suriyani, more specifically Syrian Catholic, the branch of the Syrian Orthodox Church that united with the Roman Catholic Church in 1782. Syrian Catholics have maintained many Eastern rites, and the liturgy is still performed in the ancient Syriac language, a dialect of Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself presumably spoke. Syriac replaced Aramaic, and the language became synonymous with Eastern Christians.

  At church when they were young, my father and aunts heard the sacred liturgy in Syriac while the homily was in Arabic. An Iraqi man I once met in Paris took one look at me and said, “You have a Chaldean face.” This comment wasn’t quite accurate because Chaldeans are a separate branch of Iraqi Catholicism, but I took it to mean that I look like an Iraqi Christian.

  “Why don’t you know more about your religion?” I asked my father.

  “I never questioned it.” He shrugged, moving on. “There is little family lore about Nasser because he died young of pneumonia. Forty-two, I think he was. By then the family had moved to Old Baghdad with its shadowy bazaars selling silks and spices, indigo and velvet. The lanes were so narrow that a heavily loaded donkey could block the whole space, making it impossible to pass. Wooden latticework balconies hung out into the lanes, and old houses were hidden behind doors in the walls of the streets. My mother was just eighteen, and to think, she was the eldest. She had a place at medical school, which she had to give up to become a teacher so she could help support the family.” When I press him about why he knows so little about his own grandfather, even anecdotes, he answers, “Life was hard then, you know. People had to struggle, people didn’t have the luxury to talk about family history or stories about the past, even the middle classes like us. You just got on with life, with surviving. Besides, we were too young to be asking questions about our ancestors; we just didn’t think about it.”

  “Perhaps your grandfather was already a translator for the British before World War I, since there was a British presence in the area due to their interests in India and Iraq, which was on the trade route,” I speculated.

  “Maybe, maybe,” he said, nodding. “I’ll have to check the history. You see, there must have been a reason why he knew English well enough to be a translator by 1917. Maybe World War I explains it, but I just don’t know. In 1917, Britain occupied Baghdad, and after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 the mandate for Iraq was given to the British, and King Faisal was enthroned the next year as king of Iraq.”

  “Is there a photograph of Nasser at least?” I asked.

  “I think there might be a wedding photo of Nasser and Samira, but it is at home, in Baghdad. I remember Nasser had a huge black twirly moustache that came to two hard points at either tip. I can’t remember what they were wearing in the photo, but I think it was Western-style wedding attire,” he said.

  Now I had a picture of Samira’s life, living in a house in Old Baghdad as a young widow with six children to bring up. Despite the hardship, she managed to send four of her children to university. She made her living as a midwife. Harry became a schoolteacher, and Antoine studied law. Surprising to me, the girls studied and worked as well. Victoria became a teacher; she had to study quickly and get a job as soon as possible to help contribute to the family when my great-grandfather died. Lina took economics at university and worked her way up to a high position in Customs and Excise. Clement, the youngest, was wild and handsome and loved partying and staying out late. Eventually, he got married and opened an automotive spare-parts company.

  “The Iraqi government always put on so many import restrictions, so Clement never actually had much to sell. It was a controlled economy, remember. Of course, people always find a way of getting around these things, but he never did a huge amount of business. He’s Maha’s father. He’s still alive.”

  “Maha, who’s that?” I ask.

  “She is my cousin. She lives in Baghdad with her husband, Karim, and their children. She is very close to Auntie Lina as well,” he explained.

  We sat side by side, our dinner eaten, and the dim lights made it easier for my father to freely reminisce.

  My father thinks his parents met through Victoria’s brother, Edward. By 1939, Khalil had moved to Iraq to start his professional life as a teacher after finishing his degree at the American University in Beirut. He’d already taught in Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, but now he’d moved to Baghdad and gave private lessons in English. Edward was one of Khalil’s students. Edward was bright in some subjects, but students had to pass all of their exams in the same year in order to go on to the next year. And Uncle Edward passed everything for two years running, except English. In his third year, he had to write the national final exam that all Iraqi students had to sit, and somehow the exam papers were leaked and some students got hold of them. Edward took them to Khalil’s house. “Khalil gave Edward the answers,” my father explains, “but he still got only fifty percent. English was just too hard for him. The way my father told it, laughing at the absurdity, he just couldn’t believe that even when Edward knew the answers in advance, he still almost failed English! But my father must have been madly in love with Victoria, so that’s why he gave Edward the answers, I suspect, to impress her. He was a very honest man. Usually, he abhorred any mention of cheating, never mind cheating itself.”

  In 1939, King Ghazi (who had succeeded Faisal in 1933) was killed in a car accident and was succeeded by his infant son, Faisal II, under the regency of Prince ‘Abd al-Ilah who had been educated in England like his cousin, King Hussein of Jordan. They were Hashemites (a dynasty from the Hejaz region of Arabia), not Iraqis. Britain had given them Jordan and Iraq to thank them for their help in defeating the Turks in World War I. In April 1941, a military coup d’état by Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani caused the regent to flee Baghdad. But the government of Rashid collapsed two months later when British troops marched on Baghdad, and the regent was reinstalled, propped up by the British.

  I’ve seen my grandparents’ wedding photograph, taken in a studio in Baghdad on the day they were married, August 8, 1943. They are dressed in Western-style wedding clothes: Victoria in a long white silk dress with a tiara of orange blossoms and a very long veil that trails down her back, and Khalil in a black suit with a white bowtie. They are standing arm in arm flanked by two bridesmaids, Victoria’s aunt Madeline and her teenage sister, Lina. Both Victoria and Khalil are wearing white gloves, and Victoria holds a bouquet of lilies. They were in their thirties when they got married. At first they lived with Victoria’s mother, Samira, in Old Baghdad, where my father was born a year later in 1944, just as World War II was ending.

  My father doesn’t remember living in that first h
ouse, but he recollects visiting relatives in the back streets of the old city when he was a bit older. His first memories are of riding his tricycle on the roof of his grandmother’s house in a new suburb near the Tigris River, which she moved into when the city started to spread out in the late forties and early fifties. Her house backed onto her sister Madeline’s, and the two gardens were connected by a gate. Nine people lived there with Samira: my father, his parents, his two sisters, his three uncles and Aunt Lina. His childhood memories are happy ones. The house was alive with people. He remembers his uncles, handsome young men who were in their early twenties at the time. They didn’t do much. They went to work in the day and in the evenings played backgammon or went out to cafés and friends’ houses to socialize and philosophize. My father was doted on by his fierce grandmother, a great matriarch with an extremely powerful personality. Auntie Lina and her three brothers always had friends dropping by, so there was continual laughter, eating and drinking tea. He was never alone.

  To add to the activity, Samira was a very busy midwife and a nurse, and her patients came to the house for a host of minor medical needs: injections, penicillin, and once in a while even a night birth. People from all walks of life came to the house to see Samira, but there was a variable charging system depending on whether the patient was rich or poor. Most of the visitors were poor, and house calls were reserved for rich families, especially when the women were having their babies.

  Samira’s sister Madeline was also a midwife, but she didn’t, or couldn’t, have children of her own. She married Daoud—the “chocolate uncle” my sister and I remember—for romantic love, which was unusual and glamorous at the time. In Iraq in the early twentieth century, marriages generally occurred between families who already knew each other. Older female family members would play matchmaker, searching out eligible partners for their young relatives. Once introduced, it was up to the man and woman to fall in love or decide to marry. In Madeline’s case, the families did not know each other and so no matchmaking occurred. She was said to be very beautiful with her dark hair and large coffee-black eyes, but she chose an intellectual from a poorer background rather than a rich husband. Aunt Madeline and Daoud even honeymooned in Alexandria in Egypt, which was an exceptional and exotic destination at the time.

  “My grandmother disliked Uncle Daoud and couldn’t understand why Madeline had married him,” my father said. “He was a bit arrogant, spoke English and was an Athuri. She thought he was too full of himself.”

  Unlike my father’s own uncles, Uncle Daoud was political. He was a printer and a publisher who owned and ran his own printing press. He also imported printing presses and copying machines, mimeographs called Roneos. They were a cheap way to make a few copies, and many political pamphlets were printed in this way. He was also a journalist who sometimes worked as a correspondent for Western wire services during the 1940s and 1950s. Daoud was on the left and was anti-monarchy; he wanted a more socialist country that wasn’t tied to Britain, and even ran in the Iraqi elections as a social democrat in the 1950s, but was never elected.

  “So what was the political scene like in those days?” I asked.

  “It was the appearance of democracy, but the British were behind the puppet government. The structure was similar to the relationship between the British monarchy and Parliament, but the Iraqi monarchy made sure that the elections resulted in a friendly, co-operative prime minister. Nuri al-Said was prime minister for as long as I can remember until the revolution in 1958. Parliament was just a rubber-stamp body. There were regular elections, but they were rigged. In comparison to what happened after the revolution, though, it was a mild dictatorship. We even had double-decker buses in Baghdad,” he recalled.

  “I thought Iraq had never had elections before?”

  “Oh, we’ve had democracy before. There were many elections under the monarchy, but they were all manipulated. Even under Saddam there were elections! So what if he got 99 per cent of the vote! Having elections is what makes elections, right, not whether they are fair or not,” he said sarcastically. “That’s why Daoud was never elected. He never even got three votes! When Auntie Siham was a little girl, she used to campaign for him at the bus stops, handing out his political leaflets to people as they got on or off the bus. But, of course, nothing ever came of it.”

  My father then said, “Have I ever told you that Iraqi joke about the old man?”

  “No.”

  “Well, an old man goes to vote. He comes out of the voting booth, and starts going home. Suddenly, he remembers something and goes back to the polling station. He says to the officials, ‘I’m sorry, I think I made a mistake on my ballot and did not vote for our great leader Saddam Hussein.’ The officials laugh and say, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, we already made the correction for you. We knew who you really meant to vote for.’ ”

  In the end, Daoud was jailed in the early 1970s, when he was sixty.

  “They found one of his printing presses in an anti-government cell, an organization that was publishing a pamphlet or something antagonistic to the government. Daoud sold the printer to these men who were in the cell, so he was put in prison. I think he was in prison for three years, maybe less. I think Madeline pulled strings and more or less got him out. She was a respected midwife and had lots of contacts. People felt that because she helped bring their children into the world, they had a kind of obligation to her. So if she wants to see you, and you are a minister or something, you would give her your time. The government probably eventually realized Daoud was a harmless old man and let him go. He was probably tortured in prison though,” my father said casually.

  “But I met him in London. When was that?” I asked.

  “I think it must have been just after he’d been released from prison. He was very quiet and remote, and got on well with my father all their lives. He never spoke about what had happened to him in jail, but he ceased to be political after that,” he concluded.

  It was hard to put into perspective my memories of my kind great-great uncle and the idea of him being imprisoned and tortured in an Iraqi jail. My father was used to this idea, so he was already thinking about something else.

  “But back to my grandmother,” he said. His memories, now jolted, seemed to be coming back quickly, as one story after another streamed out of him. “So both sisters were midwives and made a good living.”

  Madeline was also part owner of a cinema close to Martyrs Square in the centre of Baghdad, so the family went to the movies for free and sat in the special box seats.

  “I spent much of my boyhood going to old movies with Auntie Madeline. She was very glamorous, dressed beautifully and was quite rich,” he said. “She even had a fur coat, which was very unusual in those days . . . maybe it came from India. Even though she was my grandmother’s sister, she was only four years older than my own mother. So she seemed quite young to me, comparatively. And maybe because she’d never had children too. She took me to the cinema on Sundays because I went to Baghdad College, which was a Christian school, and we had Sundays off rather than Fridays like everyone else. All my friends were at school, and my father was working. Madeline wasn’t working much as she was getting older, and so she used to take me to church and then to the cinema afterwards. I only remember seeing English movies; they were subtitled, but I could understand them mostly. We saw fifties Hollywood movies like Ben Hur or ones starring Elizabeth Taylor.”

  By 1951, Victoria and Khalil had built their own house on a street near Samira’s. The family moved in just before Amal, the youngest daughter, was born. This is the house that is still spoken of as “our house.” My grandparents lived there until they died, and Aunts Amal and Ibtisam lived there until the Gulf War.

  “When Amal was born, I recall coming home from school and being told, ‘You have a new sister.’ Of course, Madeline and Samira delivered her, and Lina was there too. Always a household full of women.” My father shook his head, rolling his eyes. “I think that’s why we
were not a very political family, not many men and lots of strong women. So by and large we were left alone by the regime.”

  At the time of Amal’s birth, tragedy befell one of Khalil’s sisters, Miriam, whom he had left behind in Syria. Her newborn daughter had died suddenly, and her husband died very shortly afterwards. So she moved to Baghdad to be with her brother’s family, enlarging the household further.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask my sisters. No one really knew how they died.”

  I looked unconvinced.

  “Well, they didn’t tell us anyway. But their deaths were the result of natural causes; I think no one liked to talk about sad things.” He went on. “Because my mother and father both worked all day, Miriam really raised Amal. She doted on Amal and loved her like a mother, and Amal was like her daughter, except she could do nothing wrong. She probably spoiled her. It didn’t seem strange at the time, but when you think of it now, she must have been channelling her grief. Years later, Miriam married a family friend and left the house, but she was a fixture there while we were growing up.”

  “So what was growing up in Iraq like?” I asked.

  “Just ordinary,” he said. “I went to school, and we had mass every day.” He seemed sleepy now—it was the middle of the night—but I was wide awake on his stories.

  I didn’t want him to stop talking. It felt as if his childhood had been somehow hidden away, even from him. My mother was always passing on her family history. There was an oral tradition in her house, and she told stories of everyone in her family. Without knowing it, I’d absorbed her past, memorized her family history. But this was all new and tantalizing.

  “How did you learn English?” I asked.

  “My Baba.”

  Khalil had taught his son English as soon as he started speaking, and communicated with him in both languages. So Ibrahim was, in essence, brought up bilingual. In primary school, he learned English as well. By the time Ibrahim was eleven and attending an all-boys’ Jesuit college, his English was quite good. All his foreign teachers were American priests, but the boys also had local Iraqi teachers. The curriculum was bilingual and all the subjects, including math and science, were taught twice, once in each language. He remembered Arabic literature and English literature class.