Many Iraqis dreamed of a resurrection of the golden age of the Caliphate, seven hundred years earlier, with Baghdad as the showcase of the region and the torch-carrier of a new Arabic modernity. Iraq’s leaders increasingly viewed their country as a stronghold against Communism in the region, and the United States began to strengthen its links to it. Western-educated young Iraqis were returning home, optimistic and full of new ideas for their country. Many among them, especially the newly qualified engineers and architects, found the Development Board fertile ground in which to sow their ambitions for Iraq.
Perhaps encouraged by rumours of the city’s transformation, there was a high level of migration to Baghdad from the rest of the country, as people from all walks of life came looking for a livelihood. They had seen the success of relatives who had moved to the area before them, and wanted the same for themselves. Ahl al Hawr – the Marsh people – also moved north in search of water for their buffalo, and in the spring, when the floodwaters had receded, entire families travelled on foot up the river to pitch their shacks, called sarifas, in what grew to be a large shanty town by the dam to the east of Baghdad. The poorest of the population, they were often seen picking up buffalo dung to use as fuel.
The Marsh people were a formidable sight, the descendants of the Sumerians; they were fine-featured, dark-skinned, and many had pale eyes that shone like gems in their faces. Theirs was a different world, harsh and rooted, which intersected fleetingly and strangely with the arrogance of the metropolis. Amidst the hustle and bustle of Baghdad’s busy streets, some of the Marsh women would cross the city early in the morning with their buffalo in tow, to the residential quarters where they sold milk directly by milking their buffalo outside the doorstep.
When Bibi’s youngest child, five-year-old Ahmad, saw the Marsh women with their buffalo, he thought they looked like something out of a fairytale, and asked his brother Jawad, who wrote to Hassan regularly, to describe them in his next letter to him.
Jawad laughed at the request. ‘He might be more interested to know that Najla is engaged at long last; we always thought she’d end up an old maid.’ At the age of twenty-four, Najla was to marry Ilham’s brother, Abdul Latif Agha Jaafar.
One cloudless morning in Paris in the spring of 1951, Hassan had woken up early to go to the bathroom when he collapsed in sudden pain. The thud of his fall woke Jamila, who ran to him and summoned help.
Diagnosed with an ulcer, Hassan underwent an emergency operation at the American Hospital in Neuilly. Almost two-thirds of his stomach was removed. It had been a very close call.
Jamila asked Hassan’s friend Kazim to send a telegram to Bibi and Hadi with the news. Hassan spent ten days in hospital, but he would need another three months in which to convalesce. His young uncle Saleh came over from London, on leave from his hospital training, but he could only stay for a week, after which he entrusted Hassan entirely to Jamila’s care.
Hassan’s illness broke down a barrier between them; he had nearly died, and her love for him was made clear by her meticulous and dedicated care for him. Hassan didn’t know what to do; he was extremely attached to her, but was it love? For Jamila’s part, she was tortured by guilt, torn between her faith and her love. She would often walk to the church of Nôtre Dame des Champs, light a candle and pray for forgiveness, for resolution.
Bibi decided it was time to visit Hassan again, having enjoyed her previous trip two years earlier, during which she had discovered the delights of Parisian haute couture. Following that trip, she had decided that aeroplanes were not for her. The gravity-defying experience had brought her much too close to God for comfort, and she had arrived in Paris exhausted. This time Hadi booked a luxurious sea passage for the family across the Mediterranean.
Bibi and Hadi took with them their three youngest sons: nineteen-year-old Talal, already a bon vivant; the more austere seventeen-year-old Hazem; and six-year-old Ahmad. The trip was a huge success: they took in the sights of Alexandria, Brindisi, Venice and Milan, which Bibi discovered was a shopping paradise. For the two eldest boys, the highlight of the Italian leg of the trip was the beautiful young women, whom they went to seek out in bars after dinner. Despite Hazem’s filmstar good looks, Talal always had more success with the ladies. He was much more witty and good-natured than his younger brother, whose view of the world tended towards the sardonic and the absurd. Both of them practised the few words of Italian they had learned on the boat in the hope of charming the Italian girls.
One morning at breakfast in Geneva, Bibi demanded a jewel from Hadi. She told her sons earnestly how unkind their father had been to her, how he had spent all those years travelling to dangerous spots around the country, leaving her alone to raise the family and worry about him.
Hadi chose not to argue with Bibi and risk ruining the holiday. He took her to Adler, where he bought her an art-deco, princess-cut ruby ring which covered half her hand, and to Boucheron, where he treated her to a rectangular diamond brooch. Bibi was very particular about jewels: she never wore earrings, and only rarely necklaces, which she thought would draw attention to her neck, which she still believed was the feature that made her look so short. Her signature accessories were large rings, brooches, crocodile handbags and silk scarves.
By the time Hassan and Jamila greeted the family at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, Ahmad was nervous about meeting his elder brother. The last time they had been together had been back in 1947, when Ahmad had been barely three years old, and Hassan twenty-six. He had been told that Hassan was blind, but his dark glasses frightened him a little. But when Hassan grinned at him and reached out to ruffle his hair, he overcame his fear and gave him a hug. Bibi smiled at them; she still felt responsible for Hassan’s condition, and continued to scour the papers for news of any possible cures for him. However, she had recently had a dream in which she had been told that Hassan would never see again, and was slowly beginning to come to terms with her son’s fate.
That evening they all went out to dinner, during which Hazem insisted on doing the ordering, much to the irritation of his family and the maître d’. As they all waited patiently, he leafed through his antiquated French dictionary, intent on ordering yoghurt for his father. Finally and triumphantly, he put the dictionary on the table and smugly asked for ‘lait caillé’.
Confused by these strange people and this unusual request, the waiter came back with a glass of cold milk. Everyone except Hadi and Hazem burst into laughter. Wiping a tear from her eye, Bibi asked Jamila to take over the ordering. ‘It might not be as poetic, but at least we won’t starve!’
Hassan was amused by his youngest brother Ahmad’s precociousness, and decided to test him on his general knowledge. He had heard that Ahmad knew the names of many of the world’s capitals. In fact, when Talal had friends staying over, he would often wake his little brother up as a joke and ask him to name the capital of some distant country. Ahmad always got it right.
‘Tell me, Ahmad, what is the capital of Australia?’ Hassan asked.
‘Canberra.’ Ahmad smiled up at his new big brother.
Hassan congratulated him, and asked him a string of other questions about a range of subjects, from the name of the King of England to the parentage of a mule. Ahmad got them all right. Finally, Hassan asked if he could recite the Fatiha prayer. Ahmad immediately launched into the verses: ‘In the name of the merciful and the bountiful …’
Over the course of that dinner, Hassan’s heart opened fully to Ahmad, and he came to love the little boy almost like a son of his own.
Paris in the summer of 1951 was full of tourists, including many young Americans, both the moneyed and the penniless, who had come to inhale the city’s chic and intellectual air. Bibi was very taken with the sophistication of the Parisians, and her first port of call was Dior’s sumptuous maison on the avenue Montaigne.
An oil portrait of Bibi painted in the 1950s.
Dior’s New Look suits had been a hit since 1948, launching the designer as the darling
of post-war fashion, but to Bibi’s disappointment few of his clothes fitted her elegantly – she had always struggled with her weight. She did, however, manage to find a few nice outfits, and bought her daughters those that she couldn’t fit into herself. She also treated herself to an array of new accessories.
Ahmad hated accompanying Bibi on her shopping trips and began to miss Saeeda acutely. He began to write a letter to her, unaware that she couldn’t read, to complain about his plight. When he got stuck in the middle, he asked Jamila to continue it for him as he dictated:
Dear Saeeda,
How are you? I miss you very much. I am not well. My mother makes me wash every day. I like Hassan very much and also Jamila. The boat was very big, bigger than the one you came in when you came from Africa …
He smiled to himself as he remembered how Saeeda often complained about her false teeth; to his immense delight she sometimes took them out and chattered them at him, mumbling through wrinkled lips that her babuj – her slippers – were getting too big for her mouth. Best of all, he remembered how comforting it felt when she pulled him to her and cuddled him. With her, he was safe from the world.
On their return from Europe, the family moved into their newly built house. It was on the land that Hadi had bought when they had moved out of the Sif Palace, across the road in A’zamiya from the villa they had been renting. In the end, the house had been designed by Raifa’s brother-in-law Jaafar Allawi, a talented architect who had been educated in Britain, but who had a distinct Bauhaus sensibility.
The construction had been supervised by Hadi, who loved building and design. The marble and pink granite were shipped in from Italy, along with furniture chosen by Hadi during the family’s trip. He also purchased crystal chandeliers and other objets d’art, including Sèvres porcelain and sterling silver. The statue of the deer that his father Abdul Hussein had loved so much was allocated a place in the new front garden, between the two entrances to the house.
The household staff had changed over the years, expanding and contracting yet continuing to just about represent the ethnic composition of Iraq. For the many Iraqis among them, Baghdad represented the hub of the country, where they came to find employment and to improve their fortunes. Like their predecessors, the Iranian staff usually came as pilgrims to the Shi’a shrines and stayed on, finding the atmosphere in Baghdad agreeable. Saeeda and Ni’mati too remained; it would have been impossible to imagine the new house without them.
Bibi continued her tradition of being the worst house manager in the world, yet somehow she maintained sufficient respect among the staff for the house to run smoothly. Her daughters stepped in when there were large parties to host, writing the menus and supervising the staff.
Even on quiet days, the poor cook still had to produce enough food for an army, as there were endless members of staff to feed, besides the large lunches for the family who gathered around the thirty-six-seat dining table. Hadi and Bibi, their children, their sons-and daughters-in-law, brothers-and sisters-in-law and their spouses, grandchildren and cousins all came. It was an open house, and any member of the family could turn up unannounced to break bread. Bibi was oblivious to the fact that these lunches might undermine her married children’s domestic arrangements, taking them away from their own homes.
Besides being the pivot around which her extended family revolved, Bibi played cards every day with her society friends. On particularly serious gambling days she would drop by Hadi’s office in Baghdad, waiting in the car while the driver went in to collect cash. No words were spoken, and no refusal could be brokered. The office manager, Yusuf Zubaida, would duly appear with an envelope, Bibi would exchange a few words with him, then off she went. She never set foot inside her husband’s office, and he never came out to see her when she called by.
Her card-playing companions were mostly from the Sunni elite, which raised strong objections among her children, particularly Hassan and Najla. Najla was outraged by what she regarded as her mother’s decadence, and was also very aware of the sectarian inequality between Sunnis and Shi’a. Her disapproval irritated Bibi, but luckily Thamina and Raifa played cards too, so neither was in a position to criticize her. Nevertheless, she berated them for being unsupportive. In between sips of tea she would complain: ‘With children like you, who needs enemies? You’d think I’d killed someone.’
Bibi’s other activities were of a different kind altogether, concerned with charity and the life beyond the walls of the house. Although she didn’t wear the abaya every day, she was still a firm believer. She didn’t drink, she prayed daily, fasted during Ramadan, and performed the pilgrimage to Mecca with Hadi in early 1944. Her mother’s influence ran deeper than she wanted to admit. She wasn’t very keen on the festival of Ashura, because of its funereal aspects, but she took her visits to the shrines very seriously. Besides going to Kazimiya to make her wishes directly known to the Imam, she also went to Karbala a few times a year.
Bibi would put on a scented silk abaya whenever she entered a shrine. Following the greeting and recital ritual at the outer door, she often hired a reader to guide her through her visit. Each shrine had its own prayer, dedicated to the appropriate Imam and available in booklet form, but Bibi always wanted a direct experience. The reader, dressed in his traditional gown and fez, would read out verse after verse, stopping occasionally for Bibi and her daughters to repeat the words after him. Once he had recited the last verses they would step out into the courtyard, where, much to the dread of her daughters, Bibi would open her handbag to pay him. Stronger than a magnet, the handbag drew all the shrine’s beggars and unfortunates, threatening to submerge Bibi as she handed out money to them by the handful. Thamina and Raifa always worried that she would be knocked over by the crowd, and wished that she would not subject them to this ritual every time they came with her on one of her pilgrimages. In the end, it always took someone from the shrine management to clear a path for Bibi so she could leave the shrine, outside which she would be met by yet more supplicants, young children holding their hands out. By the time she had finished her bag would be entirely empty, much to her satisfaction.
Walking away from a shrine with her on one occasion, Raifa said: ‘Surely there’s no need for you to hand out so much every time? One day you might get seriously crushed and hurt.’
Bibi gave a sharp little snort. ‘What is the point of having all this money if we don’t share it?’
Her philanthropic outbursts extended to her mother’s family in Kazimiya, although these handouts were altogether more discreet. She often sent them money via Saeeda or other intermediaries, or slipped them a few notes if they dropped by the house for a brief visit. She made sure to hide this help from her husband. As many of her relatives were Communists who openly criticized him, she suspected that Hadi and her sons would disapprove.
There were also the social hangers-on, the ladies of modest means from Kazimiya and Baghdad who knew the family through an extremely convoluted set of connections. Several mornings a week, such ladies would come to visit Bibi, much to the consternation of the staff, who resented their very existence. They brought with them news and gossip, as a quid pro quo for the money they expected from her. Hadi’s elderly aunts Munira, Amira and Shaouna were increasingly frail, and no longer came to the house for their monthly breakfasts as they once had, so Bibi appreciated their supply of tittle-tattle more than she might once have done. She always gave to them generously, and continued to adopt people as pet projects, as she had done with Zahra, the girls’ nanny, many years earlier.
25
Storm Clouds Gathering
Family Feuds and Revolution
(1952–1956)
AS BAGHDAD’S NEW buildings gradually took shape and the arts flourished, it seemed that Iraq was about to enter another golden age.
Then, in June 1952, a military coup toppled the Egyptian King. Jamal Abdul Nasser, an army colonel, took the reins of power, declared a populist dawn and destroyed Egypt’s cosmopolitanis
m in one fell swoop. Nasser was a charismatic orator whose voice shook the whole Arab world. To the common man, he spoke from the heart. He stood up to the West, and many felt he had restored pride to a people who for centuries had been either tutored or colonized by the West. He became a symbol of anti-colonialism, aggressive nationalism and an idiosyncratic brand of socialism.
Hassan was shocked by the news of the coup in Egypt. He had recently returned from Cairo, where he had been defending his PhD in law, and he had a deep love for the country of King Farouk, its institutions and cultural diversity. He knew that there was poverty in Egypt; that there was illiteracy and decadence; but he felt that the country had nevertheless been moving in the right direction – state institutions were in place, and there had been a real opportunity for debate and progress. In Hassan’s view, Nasser was wrecking all that was good about the old state. He destroyed the governmental and administrative systems, inflated the bureaucracy and undermined the educated classes.
Following the coup, thousands of people were forced to leave Egypt. Many of them were Europeans, including Italians, Greeks, Jews and French who had enjoyed a privileged position in the country for generations. Nasser introduced state censorship, and the existing parliamentary system was completely dismantled. To Hassan’s mind, Nasser resembled a Pharaoh in his decrees. However, for the masses, he was a prophet resurrected. The Chalabi family were deeply disturbed by the events in Egypt. Bibi in particular developed a deep-seated fear and hatred of Nasser.
That summer, the family went on their annual retreat to the Lebanese mountains. One morning Bibi was enjoying a leisurely breakfast on the veranda when a member of the household staff approached her. ‘Madam, there’s a man with a boil on his forehead who says he wants to see Mr Chalabi. Should I kick him out?’
Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family Page 27