When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad

by Mona Yahia

  Laurence clambers up the ladder and runs howling towards the changing-rooms. I bolt after him. The two wooden doors are locked. He crawls through the wide opening underneath. I hesitate for a moment before the silhouette in trousers nailed on the door, then duck my head and follow him into the men’s room.

  His clothes rapidly pile up on the floor, giving rise to a new anthill. Dozens of ants are skittering in and out, down and up, covering routes similar to the ones their sisters must be tracing on my skin. If I do not immediately undress, they will eat me up, reduce me to a heap of clothes beside Laurence’s.

  He darts naked under the shower. He is yelping, now because of the cold water. I scrutinise his hairless body from top to toe, as white as chalk. His hair has turned brown and sleek. His penis is bouncing up and down like a spring-board. He is raining ants. They swim and whirl around his feet before draining away into the plughole.

  —It’s getting warm, he says, relieved, his voice fenced in the patter of water.

  Hearing no answer, he peers at me from under the shower. His hands instantly twitch and cover his privates.

  —Go away! he hollers. Go to the ladies’ room.

  —You said I was your guest!

  —Get lost I said!

  —The dress ripped as I took it off in the changing-room, I tell mother later that evening, tucked up in bed. Driven crazy by the bites, I couldn’t wait to unzip it. Even after the shower, I caught two ants in my left ear, one between the layers of my eyelid, one between the wrinkles of my navel, and another… in my genitals.

  Mother sits on my bed and mends the seam in sombre silence. I hug Teddy-Pasha who whispers her unspoken thoughts in my ear. It’s her smartest dress, sewn by the renowned Armenian seamstress. Why did she go about it so roughly? Why did they fool about in the changing-rooms? The girl’s too old to be playing with a boy. I should speak with her father. We ought to put an end to this relationship before it is too late. Before the neighbours start talking. I wonder if she has told me the whole story. She has never lied to me so far, but this time, I have a hunch that she is keeping something back.

  I gulp down the bottle of water on my night-table.

  —Mama…

  She raises her brows, about to squeeze a confession out of me.

  A sneeze comes to my rescue. An ant rushes out from the hem of the dress. Mother and I burst into laughter. She blows the lone beast away, the mite of evidence of my incomplete account.

  —Mama, I spoke English the whole day.

  She stands up and hangs the checked dress in my wardrobe.

  —You’re old enough to be mending your clothes by yourself. Girls your age sew their own dresses and knit their own pullovers. Now cover yourself well. I hope you didn’t catch cold.

  She kisses me on the cheek, and turns off the light.

  When thirst wakes me up in the middle of the night, I find poor Pasha strangled between my thighs.

  Purim

  In the sixth century BC, Judea falls to Nebuchadnezzer. The Temple is destroyed, and the Judeans are deported en masse to Babylon. Five decades later, Babylonia in her turn is conquered by the Persians. Cyrus the Great allows the Judean captives to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild their temple. But Persia is tolerant and the Judeans are well-off and assimilated. So they remain in Persia and send money for the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

  Can anyone imagine a Jewish queen in the diaspora? It could only happen in Susa, the capital of Persia, when King Ahashwerosh fell in love with and married the beautiful Esther.

  Without inquiring about her origins.

  Now Persia is rich and liberal, and Mordechai, Esther’s uncle is a devoted courtier. But he is careful too. He advises Esther to conceal her true identity and to keep quiet about their family relationship.

  In case a new wind blows. In case trouble knocks at the door of history.

  His name is Hamman. He is the personification of evil, and he has just been made a grand vizier. Mordechai refuses to bow to him. Hamman is insulted. Not only is Mordechai a traitor, Hamman whispers in the King’s ear, all the Jews are a threat to the Persian empire. A crazy argument, but Ahashwerosh listens. Not only should Mordechai be hanged, but all the Jews will have to be destroyed. A fanatical proposition, but the King agrees.

  Mordechai urges Esther to intervene on behalf of her people. She hesitates. The Queen is not to meddle in the King’s affairs. Mordechai does not relent, the danger is imminent. Esther despairs. The King executes whoever steps into his inner court unsummoned. Mordechai reminds her that her fate is bound to that of her people. Hamman casts lots to determine the right day for the destruction of the Jews. Esther calls on the King. Mordechai fasts and prays. Esther uses her beauty to open the King’s eyes. Hamman is the one who is hanged the next morning and not Mordechai. Esther has gambled with her life and rescued her people from destruction.

  —And that’s why we call it Purim, which means lottery, ustad Heskel explains, the way he does each year after he has related the story of Beautiful Esther, Pious Mordechai, and Hamman the Wicked, as if they were characters in a puppet show.

  —The Book of Esther demonstrates the vulnerability of the Jews in the diaspora. No matter how safe their situation seems to be, they …

  And each year the moral of Purim is drowned by the school bell, piercing the premises for twenty seconds, delivering twenty-five classrooms from the tyranny of education. No authority, not even a biblical one can hold back the children after the bell. The savages fling chalk and date stones at each other and roar at the top of their voices. Ustad Heskel strokes his white three-week-old beard, which gives him the appearance of a Jew in permanent mourning. Only through the abrupt wildness of the children does he realise that his time is over. He has become almost deaf lately and does not even hear the bell. A Hebrew prayer book drops to the floor. He is about to remonstrate, but the pupil picks up the book, kisses it, and slips it into his satchel.

  Ustad Heskel puts on his sidarah, the headwear that only elderly Jewish men wear nowadays. The classroom is already empty. He smiles. On Purim, fun and merriment are commanded. The Feast of the Mjellah belongs to the children after all. For two days, they are allowed to do what Esther did – gamble.

  His head goes on shaking. He is no longer in full control of the muscles of his neck, but he still carries his body straight, an ancient ustad as the children call him, the oldest of all teachers, father of the century.

  When the century was born, they say, ustad Heskel begged his father, the rabbi, not to send him to a yeshivah but to secondary school, like the other boys in the neighbourhood. The boy’s wish was painful to the man. Yet how could the son possibly see a small Messiah in every light bulb, and not break his father’s heart?

  When the century was eight years of age, ustad Heskel graduated from secondary school. In October the same year, the Young Turks proclaimed that all the subjects of the Ottoman Empire, Moslems and non-Moslems, would be equal citizens and treated alike.

  Were the Ottomans truly prepared to abolish the Islamic law regarding the dhimmis – the protected, socially inferior religious minorities – and exchange it for novel terms such as liberty, equality, and fraternity? Ustad Heskel had good reason to ask.

  His encounter with equality began with a drawback, compulsory military service. In the middle of the First World War, he found himself in uniform, untrained, on the way to the Caucasian front. His unit was so ill-clad and ill-supplied that it had little chance of survival in the Caucasian winter. He deserted at the first opportunity, escaping the cannons of the Russians and the rifles of his own Ottoman officers. In one of the villages, he traded his uniform for food and a rag of an overcoat, which helped him pose as an Armenian refugee whenever he came across a Russian regiment, and as a Kurd when the troops turned out to be Turkish. They did not believe his show but found him too lousy to waste a bullet on. So they set him free, battered, starving, and disoriented in the mountains of Persia. Luckily, he was knocked down by
a jeep of English missionaries who felt so awfully sorry about the accident that they offered him a lift to Kurdistan. From there he set off on foot to Baghdad, and reached it in February 1917.

  His own mother did not recognise him. She handed the stinking derwish, beggar, bread and a bottle of water from between the bars of the gate, and told him off.

  One month later, General Maude marched at the head of the British army into Baghdad.

  The Ottomans blew up the Talisman Gate and retreated. Maude entered a desert city, destitute of palaces and pleasure grounds and orchards and pavilions and harems to entertain one thousand and one soldiers. They say no traces of the original Abbasid capital were preserved after the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A miserable phoenix came out of the ashes, bound to a legendary name it would never live up to. The city Maude entered was a patchwork of living quarters based on religious and ethnic divisions – Sunni, Shia, Jewish, Christian, Kurdish, Armenian, Persian, Turkish – and strewn on the two banks of the Tigris. Each neighbourhood had its suqs, hammams, khans, and houses of prayer. Each was a maze of twisted alleyways which tunnelled through crowded houses, seeking shade under the overhanging balconies. And then of course there was the citadel, the boat bridge, hospitals, private schools, a telegraph service, and an unfinished railway station whose track had once been destined for Berlin.

  When flood protection dykes were in place, Baghdad soon expanded under the British colonial administration. British architects, who worked with a set square and a ruler laid out new streets, broad and straight, parallel to the river and to each other. They were crossed at right angles by side-streets, similarly straight, wide enough to allow the passage of arabanas, horse-drawn carriages. The Round City was stretched northwards and southwards, two pontoon bridges were added. The straight line changed the sense of distance in the city, the four wheels challenged its sense of time. The main road, Khalil Pasha, was regraded and paved. Arcades and shaded pavements were built on its two sides. It was renamed New Street, and became Baghdad’s modern commercial centre, on which the city galloped into the twentieth century. The wealthy and the educated took off their kaffiyahs, dishdashas, and zbouns, and slid into white shirts, ties, and suits. They held a cigarette in one hand, thrummed worry beads with the other, celebrating the effendis they were – vain gentlemen of the East.

  To be or not to be … How familiar, even though in Arabic, the question must have sounded in Maude’s Irish ears, when the General attended a performance of Hamlet in one of Baghdad’s Jewish schools as guest of honour.

  To his misfortune, General Maude was stricken with cholera two days later, and ceased to be.

  As to the Jewish community which constituted one quarter of Baghdad’s population, its being was revived by the British occupation. British laws were as straight as the streets they cut and, unlike the Ottomans, they applied them to the letter. They taxed impartially and were uncultured in the art of bribery. The predictability of their rule safeguarded life and guaranteed personal property. Business improved after the war. Opportunities for the educated, regardless of their religion, opened up in every field. The brave new world was knocking at their door and they were not going to send it away.

  Ustad Heskel got married and set up his own import—export business. From his office window in New Street, he would keep his finger on the pulse of the city for decades to come.

  His first son was born in 1921. He called him Faisal, after the first King of Iraq, crowned in the summer that same year. Shortly after the British had placed the king on the throne, the Jews of Baghdad held a reception in his honour, in the Great Synagogue. King Faisal I, son of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, astonished his hosts and all the other notable guests by kissing the Torah Scroll and embracing the Hacham Bashi, the chief rabbi of the community. Then he delivered that unforgettable speech in which he acknowledged the contribution of the Jews to the development of modern Iraq, and added that both Arabs and Jews were Semites, related by their biblical forefather, Shem.

  The entire community was fed on the King’s words, and his liberal spirit was to breed a generation of patriotic Arab Jews. Arab Jews, what a paradox, let alone patriotic. It would be hard enough for the children of the sixties to picture an Iraqi parliament, but with seats for the Jews! They also could not have imagined how in the twenties and thirties and as late as the forties, Jewish poets had written love poems to Arabic, their mother-tongue, and how Jewish journalists had aspired to shape the new kingdom, their watan, their homeland. shoe-maker, what is it the Jewish children, born half a century later, would question? How could one possibly be infatuated by earth, plain dirt under one’s feet?

  Horses clopped on the paved streets, electricity and telephone poles stood up, as tall as palm trees, from which hung cables, as if to begin a cat’s cradle. Street-lamps burnt all night, making starlight superfluous, and, much later, romantic. Sewers were dug under the earth, houses were numbered, a new currency was introduced, and postage stamps printed. Order was slowly emerging from the shambles.

  In 1932, the British ended their fifteen-year mandate. Iraq was the first Arab state to gain independence and to be admitted to the League of Nations. From his office window in New Street, ustad Heskel watched the last of the British troops leave.

  Please don’t go away … don’t leave us alone with the Arabs, a voice cried after them.

  It issued from the back of his office. Ustad Heskel turned, but he was alone in the room. The recently installed telephone was ringing.

  Patches of green sprouted in the capital. Public parks were built in the new residential areas. Walled gardens surrounded the new houses, replacing the inner courtyards, the heart of the oriental home. Circular lawns were planted at street intersections, flowers and shrubs coloured the centre of avenues, and eucalyptus trees lined the pavements. But neither did the desert city turn into an oasis, nor did the greenery induce half-tones in the sight of the Baghdadis, or coolness into their temper.

  The modern neighbourhoods based on social classes broke up the centuries-long tradition of religious and ethnic divisions. Like hundreds of other Jewish families, ustad Heskel moved from the Jewish quarter southwards, to a mixed middle-class district, together with his wife and six children.

  In 1933, King Faisal died and his son, Ghazi, succeeded him to the throne. The procession of the young King passed in front of ustad Heskel’s office in New Street, which was about to be renamed Rashid Street.

  But no sooner was the city restored to its owners than armed tribesmen from the Middle Euphrates roamed its streets, protesting against national conscription and land reforms. The army was dispatched throughout the country to crush the uprisings and to submit the tribes to the authority of the state. On their return, the victorious soldiers paraded in the streets of the capital. Flowers and rose water showered from the roofs on the smart boys in uniform. Politicians too would resort to the army to settle disputes in the cabinet. Military planes often roared in the sky. A putsch was announced, the fall of a government, the emergence of a new leader. Five coups would erupt in the second half of the thirties. The radio blessed each in turn. Rumours elaborated upon the mistrusted official reports. People slighted their politicians, joked about their speeches, gossiped about the intrigues in the palace, and put all the blame on the English. Then the dice clacked, coffee was sipped, and radio music resumed.

  They say that Baghdadis will dance to any tune you play them.

  But they danced most fervently to the anthems of nationalism, and drew their example from Nazism. Hadn’t the Führer united the German people and rescued them from national disgrace? Mein Kampf appeared in Arabic as a serial in a local newspaper. Prams with baby boys named after Hitler and Himmler and Rommel proliferated. At the barber’s, while the razor was scraping smooth surfaces along his foamed face, ustad Heskel suddenly realised to what station the radio was tuned. Swifter than any railroad could have been, Berlin broadcast in Arabic directly to Baghdad. Street demonst
rations against the British increased, against their policy in Palestine, and against Zionism. Heads of the Jewish community publicly distinguished between Judaism and Zionism, and repeatedly dissociated their community from the latter. To no avail. Assaults upon Jews in the streets persisted.

  Never trust a Moslem, not even in his grave, says a Jewish idiom.

  Had it been a blunder to move out from the Jewish quarter? Did he stand out in the mixed neighbourhood? A fear older than himself was dug out from ustad Heskel’s heart. For centuries, the Jews were prohibited from bearing a weapon and from striking back at a Moslem, even with a bare hand. No wonder that the image of the Jew in the Moslem world was that of a weakling, a despicable coward. But where could he learn fighting? In the war ustad Heskel had learned only to flee. Perhaps he was a coward after all. So who would defend his family if the need arose? The British army was too far off, and although he was still an observant Jew, the tongue of God had long been lost to him.

  In the spring of 1941 Radio Baghdad proclaimed a sixth putsch. The new cabinet consisted mainly of pro-Nazis. Italy and Germany supported the new government. Controversies with Britain escalated into an armed conflict. Iraqi and British aircraft were seen in air battles above the capital. A month later, when British planes rose all alone in the sky, the government of Iraq had to fall.

  During the two lawless days which followed, a pogrom against the Jews broke out.

  Pillage, rape, havoc, and murder make up the universal language of pogroms. Due to its reduced vocabulary, its usage does not restrict itself to uniform, age, or sex. The Jewish quarters of Baghdad were assaulted by Iraqi soldiers, by tribesmen and by townsmen, by growling men, women and children. Within two days, they murdered hundreds of Jews and wounded thousands.