Baghdad Diaries

by al-Radi, Nuha;

  19 May

  Killed a hunchback cockroach today. If the cockroaches are becoming malformed, what could be happening to us? It had a curved back and looked like a walking arch.

  20 May

  My mud wall is down. Yesterday I saw it leaning and told Abu Ali to find someone to patch and buttress it. He said he would bring it all down and rebuild it. Well, it’s now down, the dogs will love it.

  The sculptor has not been given permission to take out his bronzes. He is depressed and wants to leave and not come back. I met another sculptor and gave him a lift home – he was clutching a box that looked like one used to house binoculars, but he said it wasn’t. He had taken it off a dead Iranian soldier during the Iran-Iraq war. It had ‘Beethoven’ written on it and under that it said ‘dynamite explosives’. Imagine calling a dynamite box a ‘Beethoven’ – why? Because he was deaf? I asked him whether they took the name tags of dead soldiers first. ‘Nothing doing,’ he said. ‘Each person does their own thing – those who steal, steal what they like first.’ Since he always liked antiques and old things, he spent his time looking at mounds and archaeological sites, but when he came across this box he took it, thinking it might be useful. He said there were so many dead that one got used to it.

  When Imad arrived home after being held as a prisoner-of-war in Iran for nine years, the first thing he wanted was a bath – he wallowed for hours in soaps and perfumes. Then came down and wanted a huge breakfast of eggs, sausages, HP sauce, etc, reverting to his early days in the UK. He said being a prisoner hadn’t changed him, but I don’t believe that. They did all sorts of terrible things to him, including seven months in solitary confinement in a loo – naked with buckets of shit being thrown on him. He taught English when he was not in solitary (in secret as it was not allowed) and whenever he could, day or night, and kept himself sane that way.

  Isabel’s appointment yesterday with Uday was cancelled after a wait of seven hours. They said they would call her again, and the next day they gave her a 6.30 p.m. rendezvous. The woman who came to pick her up was horrified by her casual outfit and insisted that she put on a smart dress and make-up. Isabel said, ‘That’s the way I am, take it or leave it.’ The woman started to plead with her, saying, ‘You have to be nicely dressed.’ At that point Isabel refused to go and slammed the door in the lady’s face while she was still pleading with her.

  The trees are full of young birds learning to fly, they do it in spurts an inch behind their mum or whomever is teaching them.

  29 May

  Salman Shukr* says that his father broke fourteen of his ouds** because he didn’t want him to study music. ‘You are shaming me in front of my friends,’ he told his son.

  ‘But my grandmother used to play the oud and it was not considered shameful,’ answered Salman.

  ‘That’s the difference between the Rasafi and the Karkh sides of the river,’ said his father. ‘There’s a lag of a few centuries between the two banks of the river.’ Years later, when Salman had become a renowned and internationally famous musician, he asked his father whether he now accepted and enjoyed his success as an oud-player. ‘No,’ said his father, ‘now you have shamed me in front of the whole world.’

  Embargo talk: chickens are being fed with mouldy bread, a form of natural antibiotic because there are none to give them. Maybe that’s the way dogs protect themselves, they eat the rottenest things – all dead and mouldy. Najul says that when she was a child she got bitten by a Baghdad Boil Fly,*** and her aunt got some chicken shit and rubbed it on that place and it never took. Must ask Q what he thinks of this bit of medical information. Aspirin is made from eucalyptus bark, just learned that.

  Boris and Neal* left this morning – got used to having them around, though I was working so hard on finishing the two portraits I didn’t spend as much time as I’d have liked with them. To every question Boris now replies, ‘It’s the embargo.’

  31 May

  M.A.W. is on the warpath. I went out this morning to find him standing at the gate with two men, one with a rifle. They said they were from the Ministry of the Interior and had come to shoot dogs because a complaint had been lodged against them. I told M.A.W. that he had better not shoot Salvi or I’d never speak to him again. He was practically frothing at the mouth and yelling, ‘I’ll shoot “Salvi” and you! What sort of neighbour are you, having dogs that ruin my garden!’

  ‘You have no garden!’ I screamed back, and went to check on Salvi, who was zizzing quite happily in the studio. I returned and said to M.A.W., ‘Thanks for wanting to kill me and the dogs,’ and he said,

  ‘I’ll kill you, the dogs and then myself!’ A slight improvement.

  Meanwhile the ministry types said, ‘We have to shoot, we have to obey orders, otherwise there will be a complaint against us and we could get sent to prison, and who would get us out?’

  ‘Do you think dogs will just hang around waiting for you to come and shoot them?’ I said. ‘You’ll never find them, anyway.’

  Majeed went with them to the empty lot behind M.A.W.’s house. I told M.A.W. that everyone in the neighbourhood wanted Salvi around to guard the area. ‘I don’t want any bloody guarding!’ he yelled back. Majeed said that the ministry men stayed for around two hours and took a shot at one of the black dogs – Blackie hid until they left. They apparently saw her pups but didn’t shoot them, saying, ‘Poor things, they too have souls.’ They let fly at some birds, which caused a woman with a bad heart who lived right across the road to collapse in a heap. Hamdiya had to go and comfort her. If Salvi is being a menace, then we may have to tie him up more.

  The yellow lovebird dropped dead just before they started shooting. Old age perhaps? We went and bought a new blue mate for the white one. We stopped at a shop called ‘Birds and Flowers’; they had dogs and a cage with a baby hyena, a Siamese cat and a baby monkey. They seemed to be living happily together, the monkey was jumping on the hyena’s back and the cat was curled up fast asleep in a corner. The owner thought the hyena was a pig! Who would want to buy a hyena? They had no birds.

  3 June

  Apparently, one of the Mauritanian ambassador’s ears was cut off by thieves trying to steal his car. Why wasn’t there a diplomatic incident? Another diplomat, a Russian woman, was badly cut up in the stomach by another robber, she fought back fiercely and got hit on the head. One of the thieves was caught by neighbours but the others fled. The one who was caught said, ‘Why are you bothering? I’ll be out in a couple of days.’ Meanwhile the Russian lady was taken to hospital and crudely sewn up in the emergency room; later she was operated on properly. She caused a sensation, wandering round the hospital corridors in her underwear – being an attractive lady. There is no air-conditioning working in any of the hospitals and she was hot. She is now recovering inside the Russian embassy.

  Surgeons are now operating without gloves. There are none in the country, and the dead have to be buried immediately because there are no working freezers in the hospitals.

  Rolf Ekeus came and went without seeing my Destroyer.

  We have two broccoli and tomatoes turning orange, what a thrill. Yesterday Majeed proudly showed me a cucumber, at this rate we might feed the nation. The citrus trees seem to have a disease, the oranges drop off when they are the size of ping-pong balls. I have never seen that happen before and it’s all over Baghdad, not just in this orchard. Do I have to say goodbye to all my trees?

  Majeed has blocked up all of Salvi’s exits and has locked him up for the past two days. He is sulking but managed to drag himself into my air-conditioned studio. No sight or sound from M.A.W.’s house, I heard that he wants to leave soon. I’m pleased about that because I was worried about what he would be up to after I leave.

  6 June

  Isabel said it is the bad environment that is making the oranges fall off the tree; a result of bombs (with barium) dropped during the war. She said that we need to plant four million bombex, ficus and other large leaf trees to improve the quality of the a
ir. The government can import them from Pakistan, which has a similar climate, at the price of 1 dollar per tree; otherwise all our trees will die. What about us, will we die too, and where are going to get 4 million dollars?

  Rushed off to Suha and Assia’s house because they had a man there who could put one in a trance under which one answers all questions truthfully. He couldn’t put anyone in a trance and was pacing up and down smoking a cigarette. My eyes started to bother me – the cigarette smoke – and I left.

  Went to the Saddam Centre to get permission to take Suha and Hisham’s portrait out with me to Amman and saw Sulaf there. She too was trying to take out paintings. We didn’t have a tape measure and had to approximate the sizes of the canvases – it all has to be officially written down. Also saw Ali Jabiri and we had a great conversation about who was dead/alive and who has left or will leave the country. People seem to be dying like flies. Ali says that if we ask for a permit to die, they’ll say, ‘Come back in a week and bring all your papers with you.’ We would have to pay and then they might refuse our request!

  8 June

  Everyone had heard about M.A.W.’s scene with the dogs. Sparrows and bees have taken to having baths in the bird bath while magpies and Salvi stand in it and muck about. It’s fun watching them all. Yesterday Mahmood said that a dog had gotten into the Ministry of Finance and had to be chased all over the sixth floor. I said maybe he went up in the lift, but Mahmood said it wasn’t working. One can imagine the chaos of the scene. Iraqis are scared of dogs.

  Another sad story. A lady I met at Amal’s last week has been killed, her husband shot and their car stolen from near the old British Council. Amal is in a sad state and unable to work on embroidering her son’s wedding bed-cover – another delay for a wedding that never seems to take place.

  Went to see Hajir, buried in the past of her albums and photos. She gave away her magazines from 1910 to Abla Jalila, who is one of the few people left in Baghdad who can read old Turkish. Pictures of our noble ancestors. Hajir doesn’t enjoy looking at the past so much now, she’s getting very thin and doesn’t have the energy to do anything, not even let in the man coming to mend her air-conditioner. She rarely comes downstairs but stays up in her limbo on the first floor.

  Isabel thinks that men’s sperm count is less and weaker and that is why there is such a high mortality rate of babies. It’s not only malnutrition, but also the after-effects of the mineral fallout – the uranium, barite, etc – from the Gulf War.

  11 June

  Gave a big dinner last night and again did not manage to have a proper conversation with anyone. Mila and Kawthar liked their portrait very much, a big relief. I’m always very nervous with sitters before they see the end result. I made a huge amount of Bloody Marys, using fresh tomatoes, but I put in too much chilli powder – people were choking on it – and there were not many takers. A huge quantity was left over. I bottled it and put it in the fridge. Amal came in very fancy, high-heeled shoes that looked like perspex pyramids. Halfway through dinner one of the heels came apart, so I told her that I would stick it for her and gave her a pair of slippers to go home in. She was wearing an embroidered Palestinian dress and said, ‘Don’t you remember this dress? It was eaten by rats when I was staying at your house during the war.’ Amal gave it to some Palestinian lady to repair and she cut out the eaten pieces and repatched it. It has no back now (presumably that went to patch up the front), so she wears it with a jacket.

  Dhafir has a story that he has told us many times, but which seems to be more factual every day. The time is February 1993, when Dhafir was in Somalia working as a doctor for the UN forces (I was in London waiting for Granta to come out). Mutaza, in Baghdad, was driving the car taking Ma and Needles to a futtur dinner at Sahira’s house (it was Ramadhan). As they were driving, a horrific storm blew up that turned everything orange and black. By the time they left to go back home, the car was covered with black dust and mud that they had to wipe off to be able to see. It was also difficult to breathe. A couple of weeks later, Dhafir was sitting with his fellow workers in the dark in Somalia (no electricity) and each was telling a story. An American with them told them about how he had been exploding warheads that day and that this time they had done it properly. Apparently they have to dig a huge, deep hole, line the interior with a steel and concrete frame, put in the stuff that has to be exploded, and then seal it with cement so that the dust of the explosion stays buried for generations. In Iraq, he continued to tell them, we had a similar assignment – to blow up war materials. When he went to the site, he noticed that there was no concrete bunker or even a built structure, just a hole in the ground. When he radioed to his superiors and informed them of this, they told him not to bother with safety measures and just to explode the material regardless. Everyone knew there was a big storm coming from the south but they blew up the warheads anyway. He wrote up a report and sent it to headquarters, so presumably it is part of the sea of unread files in the UN. He then went on to tell them that in the coming two to four years, there will be a terrible increase in cancer, leukaemia, glaucoma, bone and joint problems in Iraq. Trees and plants will suffer too, although a few may flourish. Fruit will fall off the trees and it will be an environmental disaster. Dhafir couldn’t remember the man’s name, but says he has it somewhere among his papers and will look it up.

  The UN will keep the embargo until all Iraqis are dead. They are always finding new stories and blaming us. Now all this stuff in the warehouse in New York – nuclear material stolen from the Ukraine, imported into the USA under the eyes of US Customs and then bought by Iraqi agents so that the country can continue to work on its nuclear bomb. How far-fetched can a story get? All this, with the UN commission visiting every two months to check on our military capabilities – we’re supposed to be building a bomb under their very noses. Either we are geniuses or else the UN commissions are made up of a bunch of imbeciles. The whole thing is such a charade.

  Back to M.A.W., who has been on another rampage. He told Hashim, ‘Please talk to that dog and keep her busy while I go and get my gun’ – the dog he was referring to was Salvi’s black wife, mum of a million pups. Naturally she had disappeared by the time he got back, so Majeed went with him while he fired a couple of rounds. M. A.W. is now building a high wall along one side of his house, but the road end is so low the dogs will be able to jump over it easily. Serves him right. I’m not talking to him.

  14 June

  The UN man in Somalia was a senior field officer in the UN Department for Humanitarian Affairs. Dhafir looked him up. How do you like that? The humanitarian bit is what gets me every time. He didn’t know that Dhafir was only out of Iraq for a short while and would return, and when he found out he said, ‘Gosh, I shouldn’t have told you that; now you will tell everyone,’ and Dhafir said he would not tell. I have told this story to Isabel and she will include it in her report. She told me that she had been asked to go and check the area around Eridu, a most beautiful archaeological site near the Saudi border. The ground is covered with some sort of silver glaze, and there is no one to check it – Isabel thinks it might be mercury. There are mines in the area but the government doesn’t have the money or the experts to get rid of them.

  Kristoff’s Mercedes has been stolen. The driver left the car to buy a paper, leaving the key in the ignition. One second later the car was gone. Now he’s in prison because they have to check whether he was part of a gang of thieves. Each embassy is allowed to have three cars and they had just bought a new one and were going to sell this one. The same thing happened five years ago – the car was stolen just before it was due to be sold. It was the same driver, too. Smells fishy. Isabel says a lot of the embassies are being harassed; the French have had rocks thrown at them and at their windows. I can’t blame people too much if there is resentment.

  We took the Destroyer to Samira’s farm. It looked very happy sitting in the open countryside. She said she would paint it whenever it needed it, and I said I would kee
p adding to it. When I told Suha, she said, ‘You know where you’ve taken it? – right next to the nuclear power plant that was bombed by the Israelis years ago.’ Isn’t that funny? Without premeditation, it has gone to defend – although it’s against my principles to have anything atomic around. Anyway, the Destroyer can’t function as anything much.

  Mudhaffar talked to us about the chaos in the city’s hospitals – no air-conditioning, overpowering heat, patients running away because they can’t bear it, but returning sicker than when they left – a nightmare that has to be seen to be believed. A lot of massive heart attacks among the young, twenty years old or so, and a virus that they think may be encephalitis because of its symptoms – it kills in two days – but there is no pathology lab to do post-mortems.

  M.A.W. put out poison for the dogs, so I had to tie up Salvi tonight. Majeed says he saw him in the afternoon fighting a big black snake.

  15 June

  There are three dead dogs according to Majeed, including two mums, ex-Salvi wives, poor pups. Hamdiya saved a whole pile of pups by keeping them around her house. She tells them not to go to M.A.W.’s house and somehow they obey her. They remain very quietly inside the fenced area of the orchard.

  I need to have my bones checked; all my joints hurt. Dhafir said that it’s part of Gulf War Syndrome. The BBC said that there was some sort of military coup, but it all seems very quiet and no one knows anything. Few armed guards around. The government has naturally denied all.

  16 June

  I was supposed to be leaving today, but am still here and it looks like I will not be able to leave for at least another week. I am determined not to pay the 200,000-dinar exit fee tax, and as an artist going to have an exhibition, I am supposed to be exempted from paying it. But I can’t wait too long. I have only two and a half months in Amman to do the objects for my exhibition there.