The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  “Lots of people sold these extra machines under sanctions,” Maha adds, then reminds Ibtisam, “Did you know you have a whole wardrobe at your house full of brand-new towels, never used. And sets of dishes, all still in the boxes. And a suitcase full of new night-gowns. Never used.”

  Ibtisam nods, a little ashamed.

  “Did you have to sell things under sanctions?” I ask.

  “Well, my husband had a job, so not really,” Maha says. “But my mother had to sell some of her gold because her pension wasn’t enough to survive on and the price of living was going up and up all the time.”

  I ask her whether they had air conditioners.

  “We have an air cooler. The air conditioner was broken in that bomb blast I told you about. Really you need one in every room in Baghdad. We only have one air cooler which uses less electricity, and we do everything in one room in the summer, sleeping, eating, we all live in one room. The rest of the house isn’t usable in the heat.”

  By now Maha’s put the lid on the pot, and the zucchini is simmering in the tomato and mint sauce. She turns the heat down.

  “Now we just leave it to bubble for a while,” she says to me.

  “What about the rest of your day?” I ask.

  She brings her hands together, almost into a prayer position.

  “I just spend my time worrying. When the children are at school and my husband at work, I just worry until they come home. I usually hear two or three bombs close by every day. I call them when I hear explosions to make sure they are alive. I only go out to the neighbourhood shops. I don’t drive anymore. I am too afraid.”

  I ask her why she stopped driving.

  “There is no petrol sometimes, and so people have to queue up, sometimes all night, to get it. This in a country we know is swimming in oil,” she says sarcastically. “There is a queue for men and one for women, and the women’s queue is shorter. So often I was the one to go and fill up the car. One day I went to fill up the car and I didn’t see the American tanks coming and I just passed them. It was very dangerous, and they could have opened fire. If you go in front of an American tank, they can kill you. There is a new law that you have to leave a hundred metres between you and the American convoy. All the streets and pavements are destroyed because of the tanks. They go anywhere they want. Anyway, now the people can’t queue all night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Curfew. Everyone is at home by seven. The curfew is from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. And on Friday the curfew is in the day too, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. You are afraid all the time; afraid of policemen, American soldiers, kidnappings, bombs, militias, checkpoints. Now they stop you and ask you if you are Sunni or Shia and they decide whether to kill you. I never go out alone now.”

  “Do you have guards on your street?” I’d heard of local checkpoints being set up in different neighbourhoods.

  “Yes, we employ guards, as we did in Saddam’s time, as we had many people stealing cars then. At that time, the guards just walked in the street, and if they saw a stranger in the car they would stop him and see who it was. After the war, they bought some guns. It is more like a deterrent,” she says.

  “So what do you do in the evenings?” I ask her.

  “We just watch television if there is electricity. We used to go out to social clubs, swimming pools on days off, now, nothing,” Maha states.

  “What do you hope for the future?”

  She laughs. “I just want everything to go back to normal, normal life, as it is here in England. In Iraq, there is always something. Like under Saddam, they forced you into a job and you had no choice; you couldn’t leave your job. Everything was forbidden. You could be hung if you left your job. And now everything is forbidden because there is no security. I just want things to go back to normal.”

  Later that evening we gather around the computer. Maha speaks to Karim and Samir in Jordan every day via Yahoo Messenger. She has never been separated from them, so these weeks have been hard on the whole family. Ibtisam has bought a webcam so that the family can see each other. Tonight, we are all there when Karim calls. Everyone adjusts their hair and clothes because we can see ourselves onscreen, and then we answer the phone. There is a webcam on the computer that Karim is using, and we see him wearing a headset. He is there with his other relatives who have also escaped Baghdad to Amman for the summer. We all greet one another, and I say hello to him. We are seeing each other for the first time.

  “Hello, Leilah,” he replies.

  His voice is familiar but he looks different than in the photographs I’d seen of him. He is saying the same thing to Ibtisam and Maha in Arabic, that I look different from the photographs he’s seen of me. Then Ibtisam and I leave the family to speak in private.

  After the call, we all congregate in the study and chat, while Siham plays on the computer. Siham decides to try to find her house in Baghdad on Google Earth. This site uses satellite photographs to guide you in aerial views of cities all over the world; you can “fly from space to your neighbourhood.” The images are three-dimensional, so not only can we “fly” like a helicopter over the city, but we can also swoop down and almost see the city from the angle of a pedestrian. We can zoom up and down like Peter Pan.

  In the box labelled “fly to,” Siham types “Baghdad, Iraq,” and the earth turns and we soar through a cloud until that clears and we see the centre of the city in detail. Quickly, we are gliding over the prairie flatness of Baghdad, the sand-coloured buildings laid out in a grid around the green river, which you feel moving sluggishly through the city. We keep falling closer and closer through the sky, and we zero in on the neighbourhood where our house stands and where Karim and Maha still live. We can see the flat roofs of the houses and the green of the trees; the city looks open and peaceful. But then the detail gets blurry again and we can’t get any closer, can’t see the checkpoints or the blast walls or the fortifications around the Green Zone. Suddenly, we are hovering over the house, looking down on the roof.

  “This is our house,” says Ibtisam.

  “Which one?” I lean in. I see a beige square shape and a green square behind it, and then a bigger square of green. “Is that your garden?”

  “No, that is the neighbour’s garden. She has two gardens, they are very large. That is our garden,” Ibtisam says, pointing to the screen.

  “It’s not very far from the river,” I remark.

  “No, but we can’t go near the river anymore.” Maha sighs wistfully.

  I watch Ibtisam closely; this is as near to her house as she has come in fifteen years. I can see Ibtisam mentally filling in the gaps between what she can see and what she remembers. I don’t point out that there are areas on the map where there are the traces of buildings—they look like watermarks—in the centre of the city; faint lines where government buildings or army buildings that have been destroyed used to be. I don’t know if Ibtisam notices them. My mind strains to see the house. I have seen old photographs and now I know where it is situated in the city. But I have a bird’s-eye view, not a human view. I can’t get any closer.

  “Let’s drive to your house,” Ibtisam says playfully to Maha.

  “Do you remember how to get there?” I ask.

  “Of course.” Ibtisam moves the cursor down the street, turning left and right a few times until we are hovering over Maha’s street. “It isn’t far.”

  “Oh no, we live close to your house,” Maha says.

  Now we hover over their roof.

  “That’s where you sleep?” I say to Reeta. “That’s where you see the helicopters?”

  “Yes, they fly lower than this,” Reeta says.

  “Is it every night?” I ask her.

  “Yes, usually one, two or three fly around each night,” she explains.

  “Do you know what they are doing?”

  “Sometimes they are protecting high-ranking Americans in the streets below, and so they are watching for anyone behaving suspiciously. Or they are just checking on th
e neighbourhood,” Reeta replies quietly.

  Now that I had this view, I could imagine it vividly.

  “Tomorrow we’ll fly to Vancouver,” says Siham, closing down the program. “And see your house.”

  I want to keep looking; I want to see the Green Zone, Fardis Square, Saddam’s palaces, the huge embassy the Americans are building, Sadr City, the Palestine Hotel, the mosques, the bridges, the churches.

  “You can’t see the Palestine Hotel from the outside anymore,” Maha says. “The road is closed to the Palestine and the Sheraton. It’s a dead-end street with a huge blast wall at the front; you can only go in if you are staying there . . . mostly Americans and foreigners stay now.”

  “Isn’t that where you had your wedding reception, Maha?” I remembered Amal saying that. At the time, all I knew about the Palestine Hotel was that it was where all the foreign reporters stayed before and during the war.

  “Yes, I got married there. In 1988, after the Iran–Iraq War and before the Gulf War,” Maha says.

  Reeta is very shy and hardly opens any conversation. When we are alone, I can talk to her and she understands enough English to reply with a soft yes or no, but she can’t expand on anything I say. I invite her for walks in the park with me, and her face lights up in excitement, but she is silent. As we walk through the lush summer greenery, I speak to her, chatting away about our lives, the differences, the similarities and when we might see each other again, and she nods or shakes her head. I am never sure what she is getting so it is a strange, one-sided conversation. I find it hard to just walk in silence. I feel that there is too much I want to talk to her about.

  But during our time in London, we’ve built up an older sister, younger sister relationship. When I come back to my aunts’ house from meetings in London, I phone and tell the women which train I will be on. Reeta insists that they come and meet me at the local station. I get off the train, she and Amal or Maha are there too, and Reeta rushes up and gives me a hug, giggling shyly at my surprise since they never tell me if they are going to be there or not.

  We take them to the seaside because Reeta has never seen the sea before. She loves it, and again, we have a silent walk along the water, almost an hour long. I am full of emotion, thinking that she’d never enjoyed the simple pleasure of going to the beach with her brother when she was little. We dip our feet in the sea and look out over the water. All I can think is that they have to go back to Baghdad.

  At my aunt’s house one evening, I say, “Ibtisam, ask Reeta if she looks forward to anything, does she think about the future?” She was only twelve when this last war started and now she is fifteen.

  Reeta shakes her head, speaking in Arabic, she understands me.

  Ibtisam translates. “She is saying, ‘No, I don’t think about the future, we don’t know what will happen, maybe the universities won’t even be open by the time I finish school. We just have to live day by day. I think about the past, before the war, when life was normal and there was no killing. Not the future.’ ”

  “So what do you think of war? Is there ever a good reason for war?” I ask Reeta.

  She shakes her head emphatically. “No, never a good reason. The Americans are far away from us . . . why did they attack us?” Ibtisam responds in English.

  “Did you understand what the war was for?” I press.

  “She remembers the UN inspection teams, but she never believed the Americans would invade her country,” Ibtisam says after listening to Reeta’s response.

  “What do you remember most about the war?”

  Reeta speaks for a long time, then stops suddenly.

  Ibtisam translates. “It was the last day of the war. Reeta and her brother went with her parents to take back her aunt, Karim’s sister, to her uncle’s house. When they got there, a bomb exploded. A missile had been fired on the house behind her aunt’s house. The explosion was massive; fire, shrapnel fell on them. Windows shattered. Everyone ran in different directions. It destroyed the whole house. In a second, the house was gone, flattened.”

  “Did she know why they hit that house?” I ask.

  “No, they don’t know why the Americans hit this normal house in a normal neighbourhood.”

  Reeta continues and Ibtisam listens, shaking her head, tsk-tsking in shock.

  “They ran from house to house. She went into the neighbour’s house. Maha was still in the car, but she jumped out and started running after them, crying, ‘Wait for me, wait for me.’ They stayed at the neighbours’ until everything had stopped. Then they went back home, and when they reached the end of their own street, they heard a strange noise. It was an American tank, and then another bomb fell. It fell into their neighbour’s garden. Luckily, the house was empty, and so only one person, a passerby, was injured.”

  “Why did they hit that house?” I repeat.

  But Reeta is on to another story, and Ibtisam follows her. “During the last days of the war, there was a heavy bombardment of an army base near their house. Rashid Base. The noise of the bombing was different, the family hadn’t heard it before. It went on for one day and one night. Then Saddam Hussein decided to put the army tanks into the streets near the base, hiding the tanks in our street. We saw them when we woke up, and we were terrified that the Americans would bomb these tanks. So everyone on the street left, and we all went to your house and Lina was there.”

  Now Ibtisam is speaking for herself: “You know, at the end of the invasion, at the end of those twenty-one days, Lina cried on the phone when we finally spoke to her. It was the first time she’d cried, everything she’d been through. It was scary to hear her crying, out of everyone.”

  Reeta understands her. “Lina stayed at your house by herself during the whole invasion,” Ibtisam translates. “But sometimes she would drive to us during the day. There were seven of us altogether then, our family of four, Lina and my grandmother and grandfather. We went out, short distances, to check on other people, other families. We had to because we didn’t have phones; we had to check that everyone was all right. Lina used to go to her bed at night and sleep during the bombing. ‘They don’t bother me,’ she’d say. When the bed shook, she’d just swear at them. But she started to get a bit weak by the end.”

  Now that Reeta’s started telling stories, she can’t stop: “We knew when the bombing would come. We had dinner at 7:00 p.m. because we knew that at 8:00 p.m. the attack would start. We would stay up all night through the barrage. At around six in the morning we would fall asleep until about 10:00 a.m., as that was when the bombing was not as intense. But we didn’t really sleep.”

  “So what about school?”

  “There was no school during the war. We went back in May. All the photos of Saddam had been taken out of the books. And we used to have one subject called Patriotic, about how you behave in society, and it was all about Saddam and the Baath Party and what he did. But when we came back, that subject was gone.”

  “So what do you think of England?”

  “Yani, I like it but . . . I don’t want to live here.”

  Amal wants us to eat out at a local Turkish restaurant that features a belly dancer performing on the weekends. Maha loves to go out, but in Baghdad she never does. Amal wants Reeta to have some fun. A group of ten Iraqi women, some Muslim, some Christian, including me, all dress up and go out for a night together. The other invited family friends have an aunt visiting from Baghdad, and so our party consists half of exiles and half of Iraqis who still live in Baghdad. Dining in a restaurant reminds Maha of a story.

  “You know my husband’s favourite dish is tishrib leban. It’s a very delicious dish. Leilah, you have to try it, lamb with yogurt and pita bread. Amal, do you remember there was a nice restaurant on Abu Nuwwas Street that served this dish? Well, one night the restaurant was bombed and many people were killed. The owner moved to Jordan and opened a restaurant there instead. So it’s gone now. Very sad. My husband loved that place,” she says.

  After we finish our appetize
rs, five different dips, the belly dancer begins her show. She is an English girl, but a bold dancer, who comes up close to all the tables as she dances. The English customers don’t know where to look as she shakes her belly and her sparkly costume in front of their plates and wineglasses. But our table is clapping along and ululating and cheering, and the atmosphere starts to warm up. We are all dancing in our seats and commenting on the music, which songs we like and which we don’t. Maha tells us that the only time they go out in Baghdad now is to a family social club to eat. On Fridays there is a curfew between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., and sometimes it is extended if there is trouble, so if they happen to be at the club on Fridays they have to stay there. There used to be a swimming pool there before the war that the children could play in, but not since the war. No water. The only pools now are in the Green Zone.

  Soon the waitress comes over and encourages us to get up and join the dancer. I am hesitant, but Amal and her friend get up to dance immediately, and Maha follows them. They are completely uninhibited even though they haven’t had a drop of wine. Maha dances with grace, moving her hips in time with the music and the belly dancer. The hired dancer gets up and starts dancing on Maha’s chair, and Maha and Amal dance around the room. Now the other customers are clapping along as the women at our table get up and down. Reeta is blushing and won’t dance.

  “She says she doesn’t know how to!” shouts Ibtisam. “She says she has never seen her mother dance either, in her whole life!”

  Reeta looks embarrassed, the way fifteen-year-old girls always look when their mothers draw attention to themselves. At the same time, she can’t help grinning while she watches her mother dance. Then she looks down at her plate again. Amal pulls me up and I swirl my hips in time with my wrists, hoping that I’m doing a fair imitation of belly dancing. We are all smiling and moving, clapping and shrieking. But we can’t convince Reeta to dance with us. After forty-five minutes, the dancer finishes her show, and Amal calls her over to the table and she sits down with a glass of wine and chats to us. She admits she was totally intimidated when she heard that a group of Iraqi women were in the audience.