The old fisherman told Jabar he would wake at dawn every day, go to the fish market in Karada to buy bunni, and bring them all the way to the river, where he would put them in a pool to keep them alive—just to grill masquf by the side of a river too polluted to fish from. Economically, it made no sense: the money the old man spent on gas was probably more than the little he made from the handful of fish that he sold. But that wasn’t the point; the point was to be there by the river, making masquf. “He couldn’t leave that place,” said Jabar. “The river was his home.”
Back at Mahar, in Inner Karada, my masquf was finally ready. Each part of its surface had been licked by radiant heat until it was roasted golden brown and fragrant, like a giant, edible fishy halo. They had wrapped it in tanoor bread and packed it with a plate of chopped onions and tomatoes and parsley.
The flavor of masquf comes from the wood over which the fish is grilled. Applewood is prized, but other fruit trees—pomegranate, orange, and apricot—are good too. The surface that faced the flames directly had a leathery outer layer that was charred in a few spots. But underneath that was tender white flesh with a delicate wood smoke flavor. I have never eaten trout right after it has been smoked, but I imagine it might taste something like masquf. Using scraps of tanoor bread, I pulled off pieces of the white flesh. I folded them into tiny sandwiches, alternating smoky mouthfuls of fish with an acidic burst of tomato and onions and parsley. At the time, Mahar served only takeout, so I’d intended to take my masquf somewhere and eat it sitting at a table. But I was so hungry by the time I got it, and its firewood flavor was so irresistible, that I devoured the entire fish in the car with Abu Zeinab in the middle of a Karada traffic jam.
Chapter 11
Iftar Alone
IN LATE OCTOBER Mohamad and I were walking down the street in Baghdad when we heard a husky, teasing voice exclaim, in Lebanese Arabic: “Mohamad Ali! Do you remember me?”
We turned around and saw a lanky, wicked-looking fellow with dark brown eyes and curly black hair. This was Maher, whose brother was Hanan’s ex-husband, and it taught me something about the interconnected nature of the Middle East, not to mention diasporan family relations, that Mohamad didn’t seem particularly surprised to run into his sister’s ex-brother-in-law strolling down the sidewalk of a foreign capital with a population of five million.
Maher was an independent filmmaker, a freelancer like me—or as he put it, throwing his arms wide and flashing a double-edged smile: “Je suis libre—comme Irak!” He was staying with Hazem, a reporter Mohamad knew from Beirut, who worked for the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat (“Life”). They were at the Cedars Hotel, but it was too bombable, so Mohamad got them a room at the Sumer Land. They lounged around their hotel room in baggy white T-shirts chain-smoking, telling stories, and drinking whisky with the television blasting. Neither of them spoke much English, so our conversations veered wildly from Arabic to English to French. They were both ex-Communists, both as crazy as bandicoots, and I adored them.
In addition to being our honeymoon, the fall of 2003 was the first time Mohamad and I had been in the same country for our birthdays, which are eleven days apart. That fall Mohamad’s birthday also coincided with the beginning of Ramadan. When Hazem and Maher heard about this alignment of special occasions—honeymoon, Ramadan, two birthdays—they decided to celebrate with an impromptu hotel-room iftar.
Iftar is the dinner that breaks the daylight fast during the month of Ramadan. But ours was thoroughly secular; an infidel iftar. Maher had brought a bottle of arak all the way from Beirut. It smelled like my first night at Baromètre, back in May—by this point, that felt like years ago. But on that October evening, with the Lebanese diva Fairouz playing in the background, three languages colliding, and the cold astringent fire of arak, Beirut’s liberal intellectual life didn’t seem so far away. I made hummus with olive oil and Iraqi spices. Hazem and Maher made scrambled eggs with sujuk, and we ate makdous. I could feel my Arabic fluency rising miraculously as the level of arak in the bottle sank lower and lower. I would forget it all the next day, and the hangover wouldn’t help, but for one night, I felt like I was exactly where I belonged.
Ramadan is the ninth month in the Muslim lunar calendar. It commemorates the period when the angel Gabriel first began to reveal the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad, commanding him to “Read!” During Ramadan, Muslims believe that the gates of Heaven are open, the gates of Hell are closed, and angels come down to walk among us. It’s a month to reflect and reevaluate your life, to get closer to God, and to be forgiven for all the sins you committed in the previous year. People fast all day, and refrain from smoking, sex, or drinking water. At sundown, as the evening call to prayer echoes from the mosque, they break the fast with dates and yogurt, just as the Prophet and his companions once did. A good Muslim spends Ramadan fasting, contemplating hunger and the suffering of others, giving alms and food to the poor, and going to the mosque at night for special readings of the Quran.
That’s the idea, anyway. The reality of Ramadan, in much of the Muslim world, is different. For the food business, Ramadan is one long Black Friday. Restaurants are booked. Charities and companies and political parties throw lavish iftars for dozens or hundreds of guests. Families spend all day cooking enormous iftars featuring every dish in their repertoire, including elaborate dishes and sweets that they don’t usually make the rest of the year. Everybody goes to iftars; it’s common to invite non-Muslim friends to dinner. At its best iftar gives everybody, even infidels and godless ex-Communists, a chance to celebrate together.
After iftar, people socialize. Stores stay open late into the night, lights blazing, and happy shoppers walk up and down until the wee hours. (The later you stay up, the later you sleep in and the less of the next day you’ll have to spend fasting.) Some people even stay up until suhoor, the predawn meal that prepares people to fast for an entire day. The Arabic satellite channels premier blockbuster monthlong soap operas, which people gather to watch. Theaters put on plays. In Beirut, it’s not uncommon for sweet shops to make more money in the month of Ramadan than during the entire rest of the year. People consume so much bread during Ramadan that bakeries often run out of flour, and sometimes revert to the age-old practice of making bread out of ground barley flour. It’s a time of fasting and deprivation, but the entire month of Ramadan revolves around food.
For a generation of Iraqis, 2003 was the first Ramadan without sanctions or Saddam. For the first time in decades, people would be able to gather freely and have political discussions they could never have dreamed of before. Roaa planned to see friends she hadn’t seen since before the war. Everyone had high hopes. They had been fasting for more than thirty years.
On Monday, October 27, the first full day of Ramadan, simultaneous bombings at the Red Cross headquarters and three police stations killed thirty-five people and wounded more than two hundred. In one morning, Iraqis’ hopes for a happy Ramadan vanished. The first week of the holy month passed in gloom and foreboding. That Friday, a poet friend of Hazem’s named Reem had a birthday party for her daughter, Laylak, and we stopped by with Hazem and Maher and Ali, an Iraqi newspaper editor who was also a poet.
Reem had kept her daughter home from school since the Red Cross bombing; many Baghdad parents had done the same. She promised her daughter a fabulous birthday party, with a spectacular cake, to make up for the week of being grounded. But the morning of the party, a leaflet began to circulate throughout Baghdad. It commanded all schools, offices, and shops to close for three days and threatened the lives of any who disobeyed. Reem drove all over town, defying the flyer with its sinister warning, but she couldn’t find a cake: all the bakeries were closed. Even worse, all the guests had canceled.
That afternoon, when she heard her aunt and cousins weren’t coming, Laylak burst into tears. “No one is going to leave home today!” she shouted. She ran to her room, tore off her party dress and put on her floppy pajamas instead. She stalked back out into the living room and
wailed, “This is not a birthday—it’s a Day of Blood!”
Laylak was thin, with a dark, serious face and that apologetic way of hunching her neck into her shoulders that seems almost universal among eleven-year-old girls. By the time we got there, she had more or less given up on her party. She sat down, smiled shyly at us, and told me quietly that she liked school.
Poor kid, I thought. Grounded by terrorists, then sentenced to spending her birthday with her parents and their boring grownup friends.
“It’s so sad that she can’t go to school,” I whispered to Mohamad, when Laylak went back to her room.
“You should write a story about it,” he said.
He was right. Forget the armies, the insurgents, the politicians—half the reporters in the world were elbowing one another to get to those. The first story I wrote from Baghdad was about a little girl who wanted to go to school and couldn’t.
The cake Reem had eventually found was several days old. It was beginning to go dry, the white frosting picking up a slightly chemical taste from the hard sugary buttons of red, green, and yellow candy that had begun to crack and leak into the frosting. It had been ordered and baked in a more hopeful moment, before the Red Cross bombing, lovingly frosted, studded with sugary candies—and then sat growing staler and staler while it waited for an iftar that would never take place.
At its best, Ramadan is a balance: deprivation by day, celebration by night. By taking away Baghdad’s nights, its ability to get together and share food, the terrorists reduced Ramadan to a season of fear and fasting. Laylak’s lonely birthday party was one of thousands of isolated dinners that night. In 2003, instead of strolling down Abu Nuwas, shopping in Inner Karada, eating ice cream at the famous ice cream shop Faqmah, or staying up late talking to cousins and aunts and uncles and long-lost friends—all the normal Ramadan things—a city of five million people sat down to a meal they had never had before, not even in the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq War: iftar alone.
We left early. Ramadan was just beginning, and everyone anticipated other attacks before the month was through. At the gate, Reem broke off a small branch of night-blooming jasmine and handed it to me. “Take this with you,” she said. “Its smell is very good.”
People in Baghdad often said good-bye by handing you a flower—jasmine, gardenia—an echo of the ancient custom of rubbing a visitor’s hands with rosewater at the moment of departure. The ghostly fragrance wove around us, past checkpoints and armed guards, fending off the smell of sewage and burning garbage and generator fuel, an invisible guardian as we walked home through the insurgent night.
Chapter 12
Chicken Soup for the Iraqi Soul
Have you ever seen a garden that will go into a man’s sleeve, an orchard you can take on your lap, a speaker who can speak of the dead and yet be the interpreter of the living?
—Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz
TWO WEEKS LATER, Hazem and Maher left: Hazem for Beirut, and Maher for Paris, where he lived. (Oday and the other Najeen boys asked him to lay a bouquet of roses on Jim Morrison’s grave, a mission he gallantly accepted.) I missed them terribly. But by then the search for food and drink had led me to Mutanabbi Street, named after the famous tenth-century Iraqi poet who had once boasted his verse was so powerful that the blind could read it and the deaf could hear it.
The Persians represent Paradise as a walled garden. My idea of paradise is more like Mutanabbi Street, in Baghdad’s old city: an entire city street with no cars, just books and cafés. Every Friday, book and paper merchants laid down blankets and sheets of plastic, covered them with books, magazines, and newspapers, and hawked the written word as if it was potatoes or watermelons. The entire street and parts of the sidewalks were paved with books used and new—books of spells, religion, poetry, proverbs, and propaganda. It was like a giant horizontal library, an earthly garden of books. And not just books! In Mutanabbi Street, you could buy anything and everything that had to do with writing or paper. Green-and-gold-embossed Qurans. Giant posters of Imam Hussein holding his dying infant son, pierced with arrows by the soldiers of Yazid at the battle of Karbala. Glue sticks, pens with fuzzy feather heads, and inflatable armchairs for children. Spiral notebooks with fluffy white kittens, gamboling puppies, and vampy women batting dark-lashed eyes. Engineering textbooks. The Oxford Guide to Phrasal Verbs. Teach-yourself-English phrasebooks nestled among handbooks of archaic tongues like PASCAL and BASIC and COBAL; and, for reasons I never divined, copy after yellowing copy of The Journal of Heat Transfer. Rows and rows of vintage Time and Newsweek, a few of them old enough to have Nixon on the cover. Ancient copies of Playboy and Hustler jostled for sidewalk space with back issues of Flex and other bodybuilding magazines. Mutanabbi Street was also known for books of spells and sorcery for putting curses on rivals or enemies. They were banned under Saddam, who feared black magic might succeed where CIA-backed coup attempts had failed, and according to my friend Usama some of them sold for thousands of dollars.
The Baath Party had imposed controls on book imports in 1970. After that, no books could enter the country legally without government approval, and the number of books coming into Iraq dwindled. The booksellers still came to Mutanabbi under the Baath, but the books they could sell were more tightly controlled, and some were contraband. My favorite books in Mutanabbi were the samizdat copies of books that used to be outlawed, like 1984 and Animal Farm. They were tiny, the size of poetry chapbooks, easy to hide or jettison if necessary. Mimeographed on cheap shiny paper and stapled together crookedly, they were barely more than the idea of a book, stripped down to the barest element of thoughts moving on paper. It was hard to believe that these faint purple words, already fading, once held the power to jail or even execute their readers. And yet people had read them nonetheless. The crowds that packed Mutanabbi Street every Friday showed how hungry Baghdad was to sample these formerly forbidden fruits.
Most of the books were in Arabic, but inside the dusty little bookstores you could find plenty of English-language paperbacks piled in perpetually collapsing towers: E. M Forster; Herman Melville; English translations of famous Iraqi writers; even Wilfred Thesiger’s classic ethnography of southern Iraq, The Marsh Arabs. Then there were stacks and stacks of dusty, faded romance novels from Mills & Boon, Harlequin’s British cousin.
The first time we went to Mutanabbi, Roaa bought a six-inch pile of battered 1970s romance novels. Their covers blazed with craggy men and bosomy women clinching in front of purple mountains and heaving seas. “People laugh at me for these,” she said, putting them in her bag. “But in fact, it is from these books that I learned how to speak English.”
Roaa had not been able to attend the English-language high school, where the sons and daughters of Baghdad’s elite chattered in perfect American accents. But Mutanabbi’s bookstores functioned like lending libraries: for a small deposit, she could check out a book or two, devour them at home, then bring them back the next week and trade them in for more. After years of studying her borrowed bodice rippers, she spoke English as fluently as any Baathist apparatchik’s daughter. Mutanabbi Street was a great equalizer.
The heart of Mutanabbi was its cafés, the most famous of which were Hassan Ajami and Shahbandar. Like those on Abu Nuwas Street, the cafés housed a culture of intellectual curiosity that cut across sectarian and ethnic identities. They were part of a tradition of public discussion and debate that stretched back to medieval Baghdad.
Shahbandar was my favorite tea house, close to a century old, on the corner of Mutanabbi Street. Inside the café, birdcages hung from the high ceilings. Gossip floated upwards on cigarette smoke, staining the lofty light-blue-and-white-painted walls with the fumes of ancient literary feuds. The whole room was glazed a comforting sepia from a century of nicotine. On the walls there were colorful paintings of old Baghdad streets, with their overhanging balconies; pastel paintings of mosques; a drawing of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, inscribed with the shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith;
a watercolor of the family tree of the Prophet Muhammad, in reds and blues; and the ninety-nine names of God printed in Arabic calligraphy. Faded black-and-white photographs told the story of Iraq’s tragic twentieth century: here was a picture of King Faisal I, the Hashemite chieftain the British installed as Iraq’s king in 1921, his reward for leading the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Next to it hung a picture of Faisal’s young son Ghazi: a little boy dwarfed on a great throne, his feet barely reaching the ground. A little farther down the wall, another photo showed the massive 1939 funeral of the flamboyant, beloved twenty-seven-year-old Ghazi, by then king of Iraq, killed in a convenient car crash as he grew increasingly critical of British control over the supposedly independent Iraqi state.
I always ran into somebody I knew at Shahbandar. Basim the sculptor; Nassire, a poet I knew from the Najeen group; Reem’s husband Sadiq; and always, holding court in his usual spot on a worn white wooden bench against the back wall by the kitchen, Abu Rifaat, otherwise known as the Professor; Graffitiman; King of Graffiti; Wall Hunter; and the Virgil of Baghdad.
When I look at my photographs of Abu Rifaat, I don’t see a person so much as a hurricane. He could never stay still long enough to have his picture taken, and so a lone eye peers distractedly out of a blur of whirling cheeks and chins. The pink tip of a fleshy nose holds a graying mustache in place; the rest of him reels as he turns from one side to the other in midsentence, the better to speak to everybody at once. Black plastic glasses jammed crookedly across his nose, black watch cap mashed down over his bald pink pate, muffled in layers of ragged sweaters and jackets like a woolly snowman.
“This you must try!” he decided, on my third or fourth visit, after peering at me for a few seconds and trying to remember which of his courtiers I was. “It is a traditional tea, an Irrraqi tea;”—rolling the “r” in Iraqi, holding up a finger—“the very best tea of all!”
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 12