When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad

by Mona Yahia

  Ustad Heskel and his family were not hurt. No hostilities had taken place in their mixed neighbourhood. On the contrary, Moslem families had offered them refuge. As for the British army, it turned out to be not so far away after all. It had stood on the outskirts of the city, under orders not to interfere.

  That the British would not lift a finger unless it was in their own interest to do so became clear at last to ustad Heskel. But that the streets were safer when the British troops were present was a fact nobody could deny. And the streets remained safe till the end of the war, as troops of the Allies were stationed in Baghdad on their way to, and back from, North Africa.

  Subsequently, when Europeans queued for food and European Jews lined up for the gas chambers, business boomed in Baghdad and ustad Heskel, among thousands of other merchants, made his fortune.

  In the meantime, his children had grown up with minds of their own, deeply marked by the farhood, the pogrom. If it had lasted a few days longer, none of the mixed neighbourhoods would have been spared, they assured him. They blamed him for accepting pogroms as an inevitable part of life. They claimed that he had the soul of a dhimmi, who turned invisible whenever a Moslem foamed at the mouth. The more harshly they flayed him, the more sophisticated they appeared in their own eyes. As a youth, he had himself broken his own father’s heart by not devoting his life to the study of the Torah. But had he cut the old man to pieces only to feel free to go his own way? Ustad Heskel did not remember.

  Half of them joined the Tnuah, the underground Zionist movement, where they were trained to shoot and defend the community if necessary, and where they learned modern Hebrew – in preparation for Eretz Israel. The other half identified with the oppressed masses in Iraq and found their answers in communism. Two ideologies under one roof, two revolutions in one dining-room – what clashes ustad Heskel had to put up with. How non-compliant and righteous they all sounded, even the girls – he could side with none. Meddling in politics would bring nothing but disaster, and not only to themselves but to the whole community.

  His words were heeded no more than the gabble of the radio stations swept across in search of the news.

  Without prior illness, his wife passed away one night, leaving ustad Heskel alone with half a dozen offspring who, each day, ceased to look like his own. Loneliness he could slowly bear, but his life was bereft of meaning. Why had he turned his back on God, he asked himself over and over again.

  In 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed. Mullahs cried Jihad in the mosques of Baghdad, students went on strike, and demonstrations urged the government to take up arms. Iraq followed the decision of the Arab League, and sent its regular army to the front.

  Martial law was imposed throughout the country. Thousands of Communists, Zionists, and Jews were arrested and detained in a special camp in the southern desert. A wealthy businessman, Shafiq Adas, who lunched with a minister and dined with the Regent, the richest Jew in Iraq it was said, found himself accused of communism and of Zionism at the same time. Though the military court presented no evidence of his arms trade with the Zionists in Palestine, Adas was sentenced to death. He was publicly executed in front of his mansion in Basra. Crowds gathered to watch the spectacle and their cheers incited the hangman to a repeat performance. The next day, close-up shots of the hanged man covered the front pages of Iraqi newspapers. His neck was broken, his corpse dangled over his puddle of excrement. He was labelled the Serpent, the Traitor, the Spy, the Zionist, the Jew, while his estate worth millions was appropriated by the Ministry of Defence.

  But he did not bequeath any Arabic Émile Zola.

  And the wave of arrests continued. All government departments dismissed their Jewish officials and employees. The Ministry of Commerce refused to renew licences for Jewish merchants. The Ministry of Defence forbade Jewish bankers to conduct transactions with foreign banks. The Ministry of Health would not issue medical licences to newly graduated Jewish doctors. The Ministry of Education reduced its quota of Jewish university students. The official language used the terms Zionist and Jew as synonyms. Street hostilities against the Jews increased. A synagogue was desecrated by a group of demonstrators. Nuri al-Said, the Prime Minister, called the Jews of the Arab World hostages. Illegal emigration of young Jews who refused to be hostages of Arab moods intensified.

  And ustad Heskel had to deal with a son in prison, two under-age daughters across the border, and a business licence about to expire.

  Unable to control the illegal emigration, the government finally decreed a taskit, a law of denaturalisation in 1950. It allowed the Jews to emigrate to Israel, provided they gave up their Iraqi citizenship.

  The first weeks, hardly anyone deigned to consider the offer seriously. Tension would soon abate, they all said, and life in Baghdad would resume its normal course. Who, apart from some rash youngsters, was eager to emigrate anyway? Could middle-class merchants turn into farmers within one life span? Who was keen on having his sons drafted into the army, and who could tell if the new state would survive the next war?

  They were the Babylonian Jewry, they did not forget. They were the First Exile, whom God had sent back to the native land of Abraham. They had been living in Mesopotamia for the last twenty-five centuries, for one hundred generations, one thousand years before it had occured to the Arabs to invade it. It was here that the first synagogue had been erected. It was in the academies across the river that the Talmud had been put together. Didn’t these contributions carry any weight? Didn’t their history commit them to continuity?

  Was it possible that all ustad Heskel’s friends were indifferent to Eretz Israel? Israel, he repeated to himself, what a sonorous sound! It had obstinately persisted throughout the centuries, a Holy Promise transformed into a tangible reality. A piece of land and a flag, a cloth whipped by the wind and defended by a row of tanks.

  All its stores, without exception, closed on Saturdays, they said, as Saturday was the official day of rest. Over there, even housewives scribbled their shopping lists in the holy language. Over there he would fill out forms, sign cheques, call a cab, have a haircut, read a newspaper, gamble on a horse, order a drink … all in Hebrew. And each sentence would sound like a prayer.

  He could not help it, Israel made him sentimental.

  They said that over there even the policemen were Jews. No, he would not be content with tolerance, in the Jewish state he would belong, he would be a citizen. His rights would not be bestowed as a favour, he would take them for granted. He would be nobody’s Jew any more. After twenty-five centuries of exile, ustad Heskel was given the chance to part, once and for all, with fear.

  Is home merely the place where he can fall asleep in safety?

  The rash youngsters signed up with enthusiasm. They swept along their friends, who dragged their siblings, who blackmailed their parents, who convinced their relatives, who left no choice for the grandmother, who shocked her neighbours with her determination. The chain reaction was expanding beyond all expectations. And then a bomb exploded in a café frequented by Jews, followed by another in a synagogue, a warning sent to the other half of the community, to those minds who were not set on leaving.

  A rumour circulated that the Zionist underground had a hand in the bombings. The Zionists in their turn put the blame on Arab nationalists. But whether Jewish-or Arab-made, the bombs brought about a turning-point in the attitude towards emigration. From that day on, it was departure that became self-evident while staying required a decision, and a series of justifications.

  Within a year, over 100,000 Jews gave away their Iraqi identity cards and prepared themselves for the transfer, or the exodus, as they would rather call it. Among them were ustad Heskel’s children, Zionists and Communists alike, some eagerly, others reluctantly. His elderly parents were packing as well, possessed by the idea of being buried in the Holy Land.

  As if the earthworms had turned holy too.

  Ustad Heskel was caught up between the piety of his parents and the pioneer spir
it of the youth. He felt neither old enough to celebrate his death, nor young enough to rely on the promises of the future. Carefully he went over his daughters’ letters from Israel, until he reached his own conclusion. Pioneers his children might well be – as for him, he would only end up as a refugee in the new country.

  In 1951, on the day that the taskit expired, the Iraqi parliament passed a new law which froze the possessions of all the Jews who had registered for emigration.

  He laughs best, who laughs last – what a jolly session the parliament must have had. The Zionist bandits, who boasted of greening deserts and drying marshes, were now defied to perform one last miracle and survive the onslaught of 100,000 naked newcomers.

  Ustad Heskel watched plane after plane airlift his children, his parents, his relatives, his friends, his business associates, his business rivals, his clients, his doctor, his lawyer, his barber, his butcher, his baker, his banker, his beggar, his tailor, his shoemaker, his maid, his cook, his favourite poets, and the musicians he would never hear play at parties again. Only a year ago, every sixth Baghdadi had been Jewish. Now, the Jews were flying away, with 50 dinars each, and an extracted root to replant in the desert.

  Schools, synagogues, suqs, stores, banks, clubs and whole neighbourhoods stood, one after the other, empty. But Baghdad wasted no time wailing over her Jews. Business and trade were at last open for Moslem merchants to take over. Some of the vacant houses were handed over to Palestinian refugees. The rest, the frozen possessions in cash and real estate, were appropriated by the state.

  Ustad Heskel paced the house, cluttered up with piles of bed-linen, towers of china, stacks of books, bundles of clothes, and whatever else his children had left behind. He picked up a pearl necklace resting in a basket, between the balls of wool. His present to his eldest daughter on her eighteenth birthday. Couldn’t she have hidden it inside the heels of her shoes, the way banknotes were smuggled! Fingering the necklace as if it were worry-beads, his eyes fell on the Book which he had laid aside for the last fifty years. When ustad Heskel started to read, he remembered. And once he remembered, he came across those historic roots, preserved between the pages like the dessicated wings of a dead butterfly.

  He read on for months, for years perhaps, until he brimmed with thoughts and queries which he longed to share with people of his kind.

  He went out to seek the remains of Jewish life in Baghdad.

  There were but a few thousand Jews, who lived in middle-class mixed neighbourhoods. Their vulnerability as a Jewish minority in an Arab country made them avoid politics, and all sorts of ideologies. As a consequence, or just out of laziness perhaps, they neglected values altogether. Their Jewish tradition was too loose to support them, their Arab heritage all too ready to desert them. They were people who had been spat out of place and time. Facing a cultural void, they turned to modernity, not unlike their Moslem and Christian middle-class counterparts. And not unlike them, they consumed only its shell.

  They said sorry, merci, please, vraiment, with a thick Arabic accent. Some gave their children European names: Linda, Edward, Ramsey, Lisette, Vera, distancing them from their environment from the very start, and preparing them for a future abroad.

  They devoted their lives to work, to the family, and to poker – their main leisure, their addiction, and only culture. They played it in clubs or at home, men and women alike – modern enough to sit face to face. Dressed up in their best at the card table, they trumpeted no end their aristocratic origins, the prestigious posts their fathers had held in Baghdad before the taskit, and their children’s brilliant performances at school. Between the deals, they flirted with one another and gossiped about the marital problems of the players at the other tables. Although they were living out their fat years, they were well aware of their mistake in opting for Baghdad. They had bet on the wrong cards, they admitted to each other now and then. Their bluff had been called by fate, time or just history – they could not even name their antagonist. And in spite of the relative security they currently enjoyed, they were always on their guard, warning themselves against staying too long and losing their entire stake.

  And what gambler leaves the table in time?

  Ustad Heskel found their existence too superficial, their company too pretentious to bear. Determined to share the bliss of the Bible with others, he called on the Jewish school.

  Yes, they would be glad to assign him a few hours a week. What, had he forgotten that the Ministry of Education had, years ago, curtailed religious teaching in Jewish schools? No, by no means – reading the Bible in Hebrew was forbidden. The students read only from prayer books, without translation or interpretation. True, religion must bore them to death!

  But when he closed the prayer book and recounted biblical stories, their ears pricked up, as if he were a first-hand witness to Samson’s extraordinary powers, to the prophetic dreams of Joseph, the crossing of the Red Sea, the miracle of the light. Sometimes he deviated, to other stories about great Jews like Einstein, who, before his death, had declared his belief in the existence of God. The mixture of compassion and respect he read in their eyes told him how antiquated he looked, how old he had become. The spoiled brats. It pleased him all the same that they called him ustad so naturally, as if he had been born a teacher.

  Although father strictly disapproves of gambling, his principles make an exception for Purim. As every year, he has brought us new shining coins from the bank to gamble with on the two feast days. As every year, he is building coin towers on my desk. Two towers, of ten silvery dirhems each. Only one dinar? A dinar was my Purim gift last year, but now that I am twelve years old, father has promised me a rise. Has he forgotten? With an oblique glance I follow his hand as it slips into his pocket. Small change! He has not given me small change yet. I fidget with the dirhem towers to hide my expectations, while father, pretending not to notice anything, unwraps more cylinders, and builds five additional shining towers with scalloped edges – made often coins often fils each.

  A total of one and a half dinars!

  I fling my arms around father’s neck and squeeze him with all my strength, longer than last year. Then we toss my shining coins into the green felt pouch which mother has sewed for me, especially for Purim.

  It is Selma who is throwing a card party this year, and she has been talking about nothing else for weeks. As soon as her mother opens the door, I smell sambousak pastries and hear the jangling of a machine nearby. A babble of whistles and laughter pours out from the guest-room as I step inside. So many attractions, all at once! Hastily I take off my jacket, and peep inside the small room beside the entrance. Selma’s father is demonstrating the fruit machine he has rented for the occasion. Spellbound by the rotating pictures, the children are staring without blinking lest they miss the moment when the five lemons come up, or the five cherries or the five bananas.

  The chances of getting four or five of a kind are extremely low, father explained to me yesterday. But the children are saying that no fives have appeared for a while, and are therefore expected any minute. Father would have certainly contradicted such a statement, “because the machine does not remember”, and because at each turn the chances of getting five of a kind will be as low as ever.

  And I am saying that the five cherries have been waiting for me all morning.

  I insert my first ten fils, turn the metal handle, hear the coin fall and set the machine in motion. Slowly, the pictures in the small windows come to a standstill. Pineapples and lemons and ice-cream cones and clusters of grapes turn up, but why all together, damn it! In no time the machine swallows four coins, five, six, spits back two, only to win them back in the next rounds. All too quickly I have used up my ten turns and lost, how many coins? The brief taste of thrill has only whet my appetite for more. I plead for another chance, just to get my money back, but the girls in the queue do not give way. Reluctantly I let go of the handle and move over to the guestroom.

  The spacious room has been converted into a ga
mbling-den, as on Saturday nights I suppose, only this morning, the players are spruced up eleven-and twelve-year-old schoolchildren. They are sitting at small rectangular tables spread all over the room, or standing at two round tables in the middle, one for roulette, the other for dossa, a card game. I wave to Selma, who is standing by the roulette wheel, but she is too caught up in the game to notice me.

  A familiar burst of laughter draws my attention to four players sitting in the corner. Dudi and other children are playing Liar Dice. Although Dudi is no longer in our class he is still invited to our parties. I approach their table. Dudi announces a full house, while shielding his throw with his palms and wearing a straight face. Dora peers at him through her thick spectacles. Her narrow eyes have narrowed further into two worms. Dudi blushes at last, bites his lower lip as if to suppress a smile. Dora’s face lights up. “Liar!” she cries out, like a judge in a revolutionary tribunal. Dudi slowly removes his hands and uncovers his dice: three fours and a pair of twos.

  I snatch a cheese sambousak from the finger buffet by the window, and proceed towards Selma to congratulate her for the best Purim party I have seen for years.

  —Just like Las Vegas, isn’t it? she asks.

  —Like what?

  —Never mind, she says and shows me the mound of coins in front of her. She claims that the roulette ball has been following her from red to black and vice versa all morning. No sooner has she said that than she loses her bet on red. She persists in backing red and keeps losing for a few rounds. She abandons red, bets on even and wins. She wins a second time. She shifts to odd, loses, returns to even and loses again. Now it is Selma who is hopelessly chasing the ball. Soon she loses the little patience she has anyway, grabs the heap of coins in front of her and hurls it all on red. The mini wheel spins. Red and black mingle into one dark ring. The ball twirls and rattles and multiplies to make me feel a bit dizzy. Brown splits into black and red divisions again. The ball slows down, skips from slot to slot until it drops into a red one, still swinging but settled. Selma’s money is doubled. She is about to place the whole sum on black. Take your money and leave the table right now or you’ll lose it all, I tell her, and pull her by the arm. The last of the baked cheese has melted on my tongue. I am longing for the touch of playing cards and for their colourful pips and pictures. Selma collects her coins, but does not budge. The wheel slows down. The ball hops into a red slot. Selma casts the handful of coins into her purse and follows me to the card table. Only then do I notice that it is Laila the Wolf who is keeping the bank.