The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  His brother Nusrat was already a cripple because of a wound he received as a conscript in the Iran–Iraq War. Then he’d spent five years as a prisoner of war in Iran and finally returned to Iraq a changed man. His life was over, his youth shattered.

  “What did you think of the Americans at that time?” I ask Maha.

  “We didn’t know anything about America,” Maha says. “We thought that it was the United Nations who made war on us. But now Iraqis are thinking back to the first war, now that we have had this second war, and they are wondering whether the Americans tricked Saddam so they could have an excuse for a base in Saudi Arabia. We are starting to notice a pattern, connections.”

  TWO SCHOOLGIRLS WALK PAST AMERICAN TROOPS

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Letter from

  the City of Peace

  Iraq is in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948, a mass flight out of and within the country that is ravaging basic services and commerce, swamping neighbouring nations with nearly 2 million refugees, according to the United Nations and refugee experts. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which appealed for $60 million in emergency aid last week, believes 1.7 million Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, whose prewar population was 21 million. About 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing inside Iraq each month, the United Nations said. Roughly 40 percent of Iraq’s middle class is believed to have fled. . . .—Carolyn Lochhead, “Iraq Refugee Crisis Exploding,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2007

  Now that the six of us women have been living together for a few weeks, we have developed a morning routine. Siham and Amal get up early and go to work. The remaining four of us wake up, Ibtisam and Maha usually first, then me and finally Reeta. Rose has gone back to Toronto. We have breakfast together: strong English tea, pita bread and lebne, sliced tomato and cucumber dressed in olive oil, clotted cream and jam and toast. The clotted cream reminds Ibtisam of the buffalo cream they ate in Baghdad. They’d take their own plate to the farmer who would boil the water buffalo milk and then skim the cream off the top.

  Today, we sit outside in the garden. The September sun is bright and warm for England, and the pears fall off the trees with an occasional thud. The fruit is collecting in various stages of rotting at the foot of the tree, so we pick a pear or two to have with our breakfast and find that they are small and ugly but taste fresh and sweet. We clear the dishes from the table and tidy everything away in the kitchen. We have spent weeks discussing Maha and Reeta’s fate: What countries could they apply to? How could they leave Iraq? Would England or Canada take them? To Ibtisam and me, the situation is urgent, but to them, it feels as if they think they have time to spare. They are paralyzed by the dilemma.

  Reeta makes Turkish coffee and brings it out to us in tiny coloured cups decorated with butterflies. By now I am used to hearing Arabic. I recognize many of the words, and translating has become more natural. I know that someone will translate if there is something I need to hear. Otherwise, I am free to observe and be in my own thoughts.

  Maha looks around the garden. “If I lived here, the only thing I would miss about Iraq would be my house.”

  Ibtisam translates. “She says, ‘If I could pick up my house and bring it to England, with everything still inside it, then I would be happy, I wouldn’t miss anything else about Iraq.’ ”

  “What about people? Her friends, her culture? Language?” I ask.

  Maha laughs her tinkly laugh. “No, just the house and everything in it.”

  Ibtisam continues, “She loves her house. She doesn’t like the houses here. To her, they aren’t . . . homey. They don’t feel like home to her; she can’t explain it. But I know what she means; I felt the same way when I first moved here. The houses are so different in Baghdad; it was hard to feel really comfortable in an English house. The style is different. I didn’t want to live here when I first came.”

  “And now?” I ask.

  “I feel better, I am used to it. I don’t know if I could go back. I’ve changed,” Ibtisam says softly.

  “So, if you could stay in Iraq, if it wasn’t for the war and lack of security, would you want to stay even with everything you’ve been through?” I ask Maha and Reeta.

  By now Maha can understand my statements or questions in English if I speak slowly. “Yes, of course, but we have to leave somehow. We don’t have a choice, there is no future there. It is over.”

  Ibtisam has tears in her eyes; she didn’t choose to leave Baghdad either, fifteen years ago. She hesitates before she says anything, and I look at Maha and Reeta. They have both started to weep.

  Ibtisam continues, “It isn’t easy to leave your country behind. I miss people there still. I miss our house. Even if it is a ruin now. And the garden? How is it?” Maha doesn’t answer her. “You see, it is different there. People don’t move house easily, they don’t buy and sell property and move around. Your house is your house, and if you have children you build an annex and you hope that your son will live with you and his family too. So a house is really important to us. Your house is your life.”

  I try to lighten the mood. “I guess you should never have left Maha in charge of looking after our house then, if she’s let it become a ruin.”

  Ibtisam manages a smile. It was actually Lina who was taking care of it until she died.

  Reeta is weeping hard into her palms. I want to know what she is crying for.

  Ibtisam says, “She misses Iraq so much. You have to remember she has never left Iraq before, everything she knows is Iraq. She likes being here on holiday, but if you suggest that she could stay here, go to school here, and not go back, she starts to cry.”

  “Even though she is free to do everything here that she can’t do there? She still wants to go back there?” It seems impossible to me that they would go back to that horror. We catch glimpses of what is happening there on the news every evening. Every time we talk about it, Maha simply shrugs. “I know, but what can we do? This is our life.”

  “But you could come to Iraq, Ibtisam. You could come and see your house,” Reeta says, wiping her eyes. “You have an Iraqi passport, you could come back with us.”

  “Yes, but we couldn’t be responsible for you if you came,” Maha adds. “If you were killed, we couldn’t be responsible for your decision to return to Baghdad.”

  Then Reeta turns and looks at me with a cheeky glow in her eyes, and sweeping her finger across her neck says, “You couldn’t come. If you came to Baghdad, they would cut off your head.” She giggles.

  “Are you serious?” She looks at me with big dark eyes, repressing her mischievous smile and nodding hard.

  “Yes, she is,” Maha agrees. “You couldn’t come. They would know you were a foreigner. You don’t speak Arabic. They’d know right away and you’d be targeted.”

  “I would not speak while I am there.” I wink at Reeta, covering my mouth with my palm.

  Ibtisam smiles a little. “No, it is impossible, it is too dangerous. Impossible. They would kidnap you for ransom if they found out about you.”

  Ibtisam starts crying again. I touch her arm. “What is it?”

  She doesn’t say anything but continues to cry. She doesn’t even try to control it, and it is the first time I’ve seen her break down over everything. I wait. Finally, she stops and says, “I don’t think I will ever go back. I want to, I thought maybe we could. But we can’t go back now, and things are getting worse. I think we have to realize that we have to sell the house. We should get rid of everything and sell it. Even now we wouldn’t get anything for the house. Who would buy a house now? But we have to accept that we aren’t going back. Now is the time to sell everything, give the new things to the poor, and get back the valuable sentimental things. It is time. We are never going back.”

  I am shocked to hear Ibtisam say this. I have never heard her speak about the house so decisively. Our whole family has waited for so
long for stability in Iraq so that we could go back.

  Then she adds, “Of course, it is your father’s decision.”

  “Reeta is afraid of your house. She used to go and stay the night with Lina. To her, it is an old house with high ceilings and full of ghosts. Lina kept it exactly the way it was when you left. Exactly. We don’t like visiting old houses, even museums here, they are creepy,” Maha says. “It’s sad, there were ten or twelve beautiful old carpets all rolled up with mothballs inside. But the moths got them, ate away at them. Now they are ruined.”

  My father’s inheritance had disintegrated before he’d had a chance to claim it.

  Reeta nods, and says to Ibtisam, “I used to stay in the house, and sleep in your beds, a different one each time, and look in your drawers and cupboards. Sometimes I would try on your clothes, playing dress-up, and as I got older, your jewellery. I wasn’t supposed to touch anything because Lina was looking after everything for you. Leaving it as it was. But I couldn’t help playing with it, and I didn’t know you.” She says this by way of apology.

  I’d always imagined the house as slowly decaying as only an unlived-in house can do. I never pictured my aunts’ clothes still hanging in the closets, their jewellery on the dressing table or in their jewellery boxes. I’d never pictured the physical remnants of the life Ibtisam left to go on holiday in 1990 and never returned to. Now I added the picture of Reeta, who had not been born when she left, going through her aunts’ clothes and jewellery. She even went so far as borrowing some clothes for this trip, without knowing Aunt Ibtisam, never having met her. It must have felt like going through someone’s belongings after a funeral. Except it was more like looking through a used-clothing store; she didn’t know the person who had once worn them. They were mere objects again. And yet, she did know that they belonged to Ibtisam and so she felt strangely responsible while she rummaged through her things. But Ibtisam could hardly remember what she had left behind.

  “Do you know there is a painting of Safita there? Painted by Ammu Ibrahim,” Ibtisam says to me.

  “Really, he painted Safita?” I thought of all the paintings surrounding Ammu Ibrahim in his house in northern Lebanon. “We wouldn’t want to lose that painting, would we?”

  “No, no, we wouldn’t,” Ibtisam says slowly. “It’s very important.”

  How could we decide to give it all up? After all that waiting, would we just abandon it all, decide that we couldn’t wait anymore? It was the same for Maha and Reeta. When would they know that living in Baghdad was too dangerous, that they had to save their lives by leaving everything behind and becoming refugees? I didn’t realize until then that for many refugees leaving home was a deliberate choice. One day it is necessary to depart with nothing rather than stay with everything, because all you have is worthless. We were watching the value being drained from Iraq, the oil, the people, the culture, the heritage, the educated, and it was happening so quickly.

  “Do you know what else we found there? Did your father ever tell you about the newspaper he wrote?” Maha asks.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “We found a newspaper that your father must have created when he was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old. It has stories about all the people in the house, mostly what the women were doing, what they were cooking, eating, who was there and who wasn’t, who was visiting. He must have done it every day one summer. Did he ever tell you about this?” Maha asks me again.

  My father is someone who hardly writes notes, never mind letters, and so a newspaper was completely out of character. I had imagined him as a boy who played backgammon and chess, collected stamps, never as a writer. When I asked him about this later, he laughed.

  “I don’t remember doing that at all. I’d completely forgotten about it. I must have been so bored!” he said.

  I picture my father as a boy in a house full of women. Their activity centres on domestic duties, and perhaps his friends in the neighbourhood aren’t around for the summer. I imagine a young man observing all the goings-on of a busy household, recording all these seemingly trivial details of life. A life that is now lost and gone.

  “Don’t throw that away!” I say to Maha, “I want that newspaper!” It was a direct record of a time that my father hardly remembers and finds difficult to describe, something that would give me the essence of life in his boyhood household. This is what I’d wanted from him. My father echoes me when I tell him about it.

  “We should get that. It would be funny to read it now!” he says.

  We finish our coffee and as no one remembers how to read the meaning of the future in the coffee grounds as many Arabs like to, we go back inside. We discuss what we will cook together for dinner. Ibtisam wants Maha to show her a simple zucchini dish that she’s forgotten how to make, and I want them to teach me how to make some Arabic meals. Soon the garlic is frying and the tomato paste is added and I watch while Maha scrapes the wooden spoon back and forth along the bottom of the pan. The smells fill the kitchen. Ibtisam has an electric stove, but Maha is used to cooking with gas or on the Aladdin.

  When Siham and I were out buying the vegetables at the Iraqi store nearby the day before, Siham reminded me that Reeta’s entire childhood had been spent under sanctions. We stood filling plastic bags with tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, fresh parsley, lettuce, figs and apples.

  “They didn’t have fruit and vegetables then,” Siham explains. “You should ask Maha about it. You know, they couldn’t get chocolate under sanctions. So the children had no sweets. So you know what Aunt Lina used to do? She had some sugar cubes from before, who knows how old they were, because you couldn’t get sugar cubes in the shops under sanctions, but somehow she had them. And she would give them to the children, Reeta and her brother, after meals as their sweets. One sugar cube each.”

  While I watch Maha cooking, I am prompted to ask her how they lived under sanctions. She looks at the fridge.

  “We didn’t have a fridge; it didn’t work without electricity, so we just bought things day to day. We had little to no electricity until 1998 since there were no parts for power stations,” Maha says. “And we kept everything, we never threw any food away and we always ate the leftovers. Our bread was made with a mixture of flour and wood chips ground down, to make the flour go further. If anyone did go to Jordan for any reason, everyone would beg them to bring back bread. People became very poor very quickly; they were selling things like their doors and windows just to live. We didn’t have any new material for clothes, so we had to take old clothes and cut them up and remake them. Nothing was imported. Now we can buy anything in Iraq. But it is so expensive.”

  Maha sighs, lost in thought.

  “We had no planes, so no one went anywhere,” she continues. “And if you could get an exit visa somehow, no one would give you an entry visa to come into another country. We were totally isolated from the world. When Reeta was a few months old, we had no electricity and so we had to call around to our friends and family to find out who had electricity for heat. It was so cold at our house in the winter, and I was worried about Reeta. Finally, one of my uncles said he had electricity and we went there to get warm. After 1998 we had power, but it was two hours on and two hours off.”

  The zucchini pieces sizzle and splatter as Maha drops them expertly into the pan.

  “So is anything easier now?” I ask her.

  “Shall I tell you what my day is like these days? A normal day for me now?”

  I hand her the can of tomatoes and she tips the contents into the pan.

  “I wake up and if I have heard bombing in the night, the first thing I do is call all my friends and relatives on my mobile to make sure everyone is all right. We don’t have electricity, and sometimes we can’t get gas for the cooker.”

  “So it’s difficult to make tea and breakfast?”

  “Since we don’t have water in the tap, we need a motor to pump water into the taps,” Maha says. “When there isn’t electricity we c
an’t do that. We have to get the water from the tanks. Some people have generators to supply them with electricity. There is one in our neighbourhood that supplies everyone on the street. When the electricity comes on later in the day, we might have five hours with none and then an hour on from the government. But electricity from the generator is very expensive. So no, no hot water. In winter we heat it on the Aladdin stove if we have gas. But in the summer, like I said before, the water in the tanks on the roof is boiling hot, so we fill pans and wait until it cools to use it in the evening.”

  “Is there a school bus to take the children to school every day?” I ask.

  “No, no. They go with ten other children with their driver who has been driving them for years,” she explains. “The car is an old station wagon. My son used to sit at the back because he was one of the youngest, but he is moving closer to the front as he grows up.” She laughs. “No one uses public transport, it’s far too dangerous.”

  She continues stirring the tomato sauce, sprinkling dry mint on the surface and whirling it through the sauce.

  Once they have left for school, Maha has to dust the house. “There is so much dust everywhere, and on our clothes.”

  “Do you have a washing machine?”

  “We have four.”

  “Four?” I ask, surprised.

  Ibtisam pipes up, “It’s because before, under Saddam, you never knew what would be in the government shops day to day, and whether what was there today would ever come back for sale. So we used to go shopping every day and just buy multiples of whatever was being sold that day. One day they would bring in dishwashers and everyone would buy three or four because if they broke down, you didn’t know when you’d be able to find a new one. The next day would be fridges or washing machines, and so on.”