“I hope you don’t have your camera with you.” Silence.
“It’s at my feet, Uncle.” He doesn’t say anything.
It’s April 8, 2003, and now that they’ve moved into another house off Palestine Street in the Engineers District. No one knows how to reach Farah. Far off in the distance, she can see the Ministry of Oil.
“I have just heard my first helicopter during this war,” she writes. “The bombing was quiet last night, kept at a distance. I dreamt early this morning that I was in Vancouver, in a classroom sitting among people discussing the war which was still going on. In the dream, I’d been in Iraq for the start of the war, but unable to handle the isolation of being locked in this house, I left. The feeling of regret at leaving Iraq was so incredibly heavy, and just as the regret was nearly unbearable, I woke from the dream to the sound of an American plane. I am relieved I am still inside. The plane flew low, accompanied by heavy rattling as it dropped clusters of what we thought were bombs. Still confused we are.”
She got up that morning to a debate in the apartment as to whether or not Hassan Ali Majid, better known as “Chemical Ali,” (he earned this nickname because he ordered the horrific chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988), has been caught or killed. It started when Sima suggested he should rightfully be one of the first to be killed.
Her husband argues, saying, “Where have you been? That’s old news. He was caught outside of Basra days ago.”
After convincing the family that Chemical Ali had been caught his mother Lamaan says, “See, let only those who have killed be killed. Please, Allah, let the rest of us be in peace.”
Thikra came into the room, and she’s just found out that the American plane they heard hovering overhead earlier today fired at an air defence site in Zayuna district, which is just over the next bridge, not far from their house.
“An entire air defence site was hit, completely wiped out. ‘All just kids, of course,’ said Thikra. Her eyes were stunned and started to fill with tears,” Farah records.
“ ‘Kelb ibn al-kelb.’ ” Lamaan throws her arms up immediately and sits down on the sofa chair in the kitchen. She starts to wail as she rocks back and forth. In the same sentence she starts sobbing to God, and cursing Saddam. “ ‘Allah, why?’ ” Her arms up to the sky, “ ‘No, no, ya Allah. Saddam, dog, son of a dog. They are all dying for you, Saddam. Why don’t you leave or take a bullet to your head and spare us? All of this is happening for you. You are one, us millions. Dog, son of a dog.’ ”
As Lamaan wails, Farah sits on the edge of the wooden sofa chair and rubs her back. Still sobbing, Lamaan she tells Jihan, her eldest granddaughter, to continue sweeping the floor. Lamaan gets up and starts cooking, still crying.
“Lamaan relates everything to her own two sons, but her cries were not just for the lost boys of the defence site,” Farah writes. “She’s had enough. She’s tired of having left her home because of the bombing, and she’s tired of worrying that none of it will be there when she returns. She’s tired of this fourteen-person apartment suite and these crying kids. She’s tired of this tired Iraqi life that has resulted from the brutal regime, brutal sanctions and endless war.”
Then Luma starts talking, reminding the family why her sister Suhad locked her twin sons up ten days before the war started, forcing them to desert their military service. They’ve spent the entire war on the top floor of the house, forbidden from answering the door, or the telephone, or even stepping out on the rooftop.
Suhad says, “Leaving them at their air defence site would be consenting to their deaths. That site will definitely be hit.”
Lamaan continues wailing for the mothers; until now she’s not shed a tear. As she continues to sob, Sima continues cooking, Jihan continues to wring out the dirty wet cloths that she’s used to clean the floor and Luma goes back into the room to the kids. Life goes on.
Lamaan said one day her tears just stopped. She ran out. Weeks ago, she told Farah of the frustration of wanting to cry but not being able to. Between both her sons’ visits to Abu Ghraib prison, and the death of her mother and brother, she’d run out of tears.
“A doctor once told her that surgery would bring tears back. ‘But none of our doctors are good enough, and who has money for that? Sometimes I need the relief of crying. I just want to cry, and I can’t, how can you cry with no tears. See? Are you starting to see our sadness now?’ ” Lamaan asks.
Farah is tired, and it’s been only a few months for her. She tries to be patient when she remembers Iraqis have been living in this cage for decades. Shihab says that because she’s just come into the cage, her memory as a free bird is too long and recent. She is just not used to the bars constraining her movement, her mind.
On the morning of April 9, 2003, Farah sits in a window of an apartment off Palestine Street. She watches from behind a palm tree that camouflages her as a middle-aged man hands out refill cartridges for Kalashnikovs.
“His hand is in a pink plastic grocery bag the whole time I watch him make his way towards the house,” she describes. “He reaches the edge of this property. I wonder what his thoughts were as he walked down the road, his hand clenched the entire time on Russian Kalashnikov cartridges. I wonder where he got them, how much he paid and if he’s just giving them free to these neighbourhood men. I haven’t seen any exchange of money.
“Yesterday, the men heard rumours of Americans doing house-to-house searches, so they hid their weapons,” she continues. “Kalashnikovs are illegal under the regime unless government-supplied, so they fear that Americans will mistake them for Baath party members (hisib) or Iraqi military. They’re only to protect their homes. It’s the only fighting these men intend on doing. They think a dangerous chaos will hit the streets and homes once the Americans have moved in and the regime has broken. It seems everybody has a Kalashnikov in Iraq—some I know are official Baath party members, and many aren’t. You can get anything in a black-market system in Iraq. Somehow, the country just feels out whether or not the government is serious about its regulations. I suppose a few test it; if they’re not executed or disappear, then more brave men do the same, until it becomes a quiet joke that something everybody has is supposedly illegal. That happened years ago with American cigarettes and street vendors. And on two occasions I’ve heard it happened with sugar at the start of sanctions. A sugar depression. Not even honey. You could be hung if you were caught offering sweets to your guests.”
OVERLOOKING DAMASCUS
PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Snow in the Desert
The past is another country.—L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953
I wake up on January 30, 2005, at 5:00 a.m. to the lamenting sound of the call to prayer, “Allah Akbar.” I am in Beirut staying in a hotel on the Rue Hamra, a few blocks from where I had stayed with my parents as a two-year-old in 1973 on their only trip to the Middle East together, just before the Lebanese civil war broke out.
My fiancé, Scott, and I arrived just a few hours earlier in the middle of the night to a renovated and slick Beirut airport. Because of the late hour, we weren’t prepared for the crowds when we walked through Arrivals. The barriers were heaving with a press of people beautifully robed in white, women in chadors, waiting for their relatives returning from the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. There were hundreds and hundreds of people, and whenever a hajji, a pilgrim, appeared framed in the doorway, the crowd clapped and ululated in celebration. They have made their obligatory once-in-a-lifetime trip to the holy city, and they are greeted ecstatically by their families, who embrace and kiss them. We stood out completely, obviously not on our return from Mecca, and were greeted with silence when we walked out, so we tried to slink through the stifling crowds to find a taxi to the hotel. The air was humid even though it was January, and the taxi driver said the weather had been unseasonably mild.
Once at the hotel I was relieved. I had felt deep trepidation about coming to the Middle
East again; it brought back memories of an earlier trip to Beirut, twelve years ago, when I had come with Siham to visit my elderly great-aunt Selma. I had memories of the destruction of war, ruined buildings and destroyed lives on a scale I had never seen. But now, I realize, Beirut has changed. Back then the airport had been a concrete bunker full of guards who looked at you with suspicion. There was no electricity, and we drove home through the dark streets, totally disoriented and on edge. Arriving this time at the hotel felt like arriving in a sophisticated city, the staff dressed smartly and ready to offer advice and help with anything we needed.
That morning I was too excited to sleep in, and had jet lag, anyway, so we turn on the television. It is the day of Iraq’s first “democratic” elections in fifty years, to elect the Iraqi National Assembly. We watch on CNN as people vote under occupation. A curfew was enforced and no one is allowed to drive in Baghdad. There are images of Iraqis walking through the grim, empty streets to the voting booths. The occupation and curfew mean that many people can’t or don’t vote, and that most candidates running for office are too afraid to show their faces. Even the legality of elections under occupation is unclear, but the Western media is in full gear, reminding people of the historic occasion and that no election is perfect. The television shows ecstatic Iraqis voting for the first time. So far there has only been one bombing at a polling station. I find out later that two hundred and fifty people died in violence that day. It is as if there has never been an election in Iraq, but then I remember that my father had joked that elections, albeit rigged ones, were held before, under the monarchy and even under Saddam. We won’t know the results of this one for weeks.
For many Iraqis, it is the first time that they have ever voted freely. Even I am eligible to vote, despite having never been to the country, because my father is Iraqi. I would just have to show my father’s Iraqi passport, and then I’d have the right to cast my ballot. But I have decided not to. I don’t believe in these elections, don’t see how I have a right to vote when I have never stepped foot in the place and when many Iraqis within the country live in areas that are too violent to allow them to get to polling stations. Besides, to me, voting would mean supporting or giving legitimacy to a government that has been created out of the violence and killing wrought by the invasion.
When I get back to Canada a few weeks later, I hear that Maha’s mother, Haifa, despite being in her seventies and barely able to walk, insisted on going to vote. This was the first, and likely the last, “free” election she would ever vote in in her life and she didn’t want to miss it. Baghdad was under curfew and driving was forbidden, so Karim, Maha and Haifa had to walk to the voting booth. They left the house at 7:00 a.m., and Haifa insisted on walking over a kilometre to the nearest voting booth. Karim said she usually couldn’t walk ten steps on her own. She took many painkillers but managed to get there and mark her ballot. Karim and Maha risked their lives to vote because they want so much to believe that Iraq is going forward. They had no choice but to take part.
After a few minutes of watching TV, we go to breakfast, a Middle Eastern spread of lebne, olives, bread, cucumber, tomato, with a nod to the French influence in croissants and freshly made crepes. I can’t help feeling strange that the elections are happening, and here I am in Beirut, when I could have been in Baghdad by the end of the day, driving to Damascus and over the desert as travellers have done all through the century. But when I’d told my family (both in and outside of Iraq) that we were planning this trip, they had all unanimously insisted that we not go to Baghdad. Not now, not yet. It wasn’t the right time; things would be better after the elections, after a sovereign government took power, after the army was rebuilt, after there was security in the city. We also knew that as Westerners, we would put anyone that we met in danger of being seen as collaborators. So despite being within a day’s reach of Baghdad, we are not planning to go. I have to make do with Beirut instead. It strikes me how different it feels to be witnessing events in Iraq from here, the Middle East, than at home in Vancouver. I am relieved to be closer; it feels more real.
Farah and I had talked about my not going to Iraq. She’d always understood that it was a big decision for me and insisted that because it was so dangerous, she could never encourage me to go.
She’d said, “It’s only a decision you can make. You only know when not going is more painful than going. I have to go there to do my work. I can’t do it from here so I don’t have a choice. It’s different to have a choice.”
Scott and I spend the day wandering through central Beirut, adjusting to the Middle East. The city streets are still broken down; wild skeletal stray cats pick at garbage, rundown Ottoman-era villas stand amidst hastily erected ugly concrete buildings. Straggly palm trees line the potholed sidewalks, but bright lights shine out over Rue Hamra. We lunch in a lively, sleek restaurant where well-dressed families eat lemony tabbouleh (parsley and tomato salad), taratour (sesame sauce) with shish tauok, chicken kebab and fresh orange juice.
We arrive at the Corniche, the promenade by the sea, close to sunset. This is when all Beirut seems to be walking along by the light sage-green water, breathing in the sea air and forgetting their troubles. We buy nuts from a cart flying Lebanese flags, and the vendor scoops them with a tea saucer into a paper bag. Men at kiosks sell corn on the cob, and people are fishing over the side of the Corniche. There are big fancy cafés overlooking La Rocha, the arched rocks that are synonymous with the tourist image of Beirut. Cars blare out Arabic pop music from their windows, some full of young men out cruising the city, while a whole family clambers into a beaten-up Mercedes, squeezing two grandparents, two parents and five children into the ancient car.
After the Corniche, we head towards the American University of Beirut and stumble upon a bookstore on the way. Stacks of books teeter on the shelves, seemingly on the verge of tumbling down on the sombre proprietor, who sits with a cigar hanging out of his mouth at his desk We recognize many English books about the Middle East by the British publisher Saqi Books, and Arabic books translated into several European languages.
We end up at a café near the walls of the university where my grandfather Khalil studied theology in the 1930s. Before going in, we decide to walk around the grounds in the growing darkness. This is as close as I’ve ever come to my grandfather’s life. Despite various renovations, many of the golden sandstone buildings were the same when my grandfather studied there. I try to picture Beirut then, a small town, really, in a beautiful location; this campus overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
The high-ceilinged café is decorated with Arabic tiles, and students sit in high-backed wicker chairs, playing backgammon or drinking coffee, some smoking the narghile, hugging the pipe to them, cradling it under their chins so the mouthpiece stays in their lips as they puff steadily. The delicious scent of apple-infused tobacco smoke and the burning charcoal of the pipes perfume the air. Arabic pop videos flash on television screens behind Scott, and we sit feeling relaxed and happy.
We talk about our upcoming trips to visit two of my relatives. The next day we are being taken by a friend of Siham’s to see Great-aunt Selma who lives in a convent that has been transformed into an old-age home run by nuns. She is ninety-seven years old. The following day we plan to travel to northern Lebanon to a tiny village in the mountains where my father’s namesake, Ibrahim, my grandfather’s best friend, still lives. Khalil was also an only son, like my father, and so was Khalil’s friend, Ibrahim.
My aunts always visited Ammu Ibrahim—Uncle Ibrahim as they always called him—with their father when they were young, but since the civil war, our family has lost touch with him. I hadn’t even known of his existence until Siham found out I was going to Beirut.
“You have to visit your grandfather’s best friend!” Siham said to me. “I looked him up on the Internet a couple of months ago. Just as a joke, I never expected to find him that way. But I looked up his full name and it came up, his phone number in his village in Leb
anon. So I called him. Just like that! His voice was so deep and strong, I thought it was his son. I asked for Ibrahim, saying who I was, thinking that he was likely dead. Immediately, he knew it was me, and said, ‘I am Ibrahim.’ I couldn’t believe it for a few minutes, I kept insisting who I was and who I wanted to speak to until I realized it was really him. ‘Ammu Ibrahim?’ I said. He is ninety-two years old, and has only just retired from being the mayor of the village. They wouldn’t let him retire, he said. I’ll phone him again and tell him you are coming and then you can phone him.”
So it was arranged; we would visit him. It felt strange that instead of visiting Lina and Karim and Maha in Baghdad, I would be visiting my grandfather’s best friend, who had been like a brother to him in Lebanon, but my father and aunts who actually knew him were not. This is the Middle East where simplicity itself is complicated.
I am nervous about the next day; the last time I had been in Beirut in 1993, Siham and I had spent two weeks at Great-aunt Selma’s apartment in the hills, hearing her stories and trying to be tourists in a war-ravaged city. At eighty-four Selma had lived through twenty years of war but was still cooking and cleaning for herself. She and her neighbours were full of war stories: running to bomb shelters, seeing family members dying, celebrating Easter underground, militiamen smoking hashish by campfires in the hills. Siham’s happy memories of Beirut in the fifties and sixties were superimposed on the tragedy I saw all around me. At the time Selma had been relatively strong; despite her age, she had been living alone, being looked in on by kind neighbours but still independent. Now she was confined to her bed after a hip injury that she’d never recovered from. She didn’t have relatives to help her, or access to the kind of care we have in Canada. I had been told she was senile and wouldn’t remember me. I do not know what I will find the next day at the convent.
The Orange Trees of Baghdad Page 15