When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad

by Mona Yahia

  “England.”

  I fell for her at first sight, although the sight was no more than a streak parting the sea from the sky.

  But why am I telling you all this? It happened a long time ago, and we are not through with stamps yet. I am enclosing two sets: the International Tourist Year, issued in December 1967, and Iraqi Birds from January this year. To the best of my knowledge, no other stamps within the range of your interest have been issued in Iraq in the last two years.

  Now that I think of it, I must admit that my stamp collecting is, like England, borrowed love – one for which you may hold yourself entirely responsible! Stamps are birds, you used to say at school forty-five years ago, the carrier pigeons of the twentieth century. Your collection at the time barely surpassed thirty: portraits of King George V, and older ones of King Edward VII and Queen Victoria, to which I contributed Babylonian bulls and winged cherubs – that won me your friendship, I dare say. Or that was at least how I read your unique farewell present – the photograph you converted into a giant stamp. It must have taken you days to cut the frame into delicate perforations, mark the five shillings at each corner, and the date of my departure at the bottom, 12.8.1927, crowned by the double half circle of the postmark.

  It was the photograph of our rowing team, dressed in caps, jackets and shorts – if you remember. It was shot during my last term at school, when nobody took me for a foreigner any longer, not in that picture, nor in real life. My English was impeccable. My looks did not give me away either, unlike Ramesh, the Indian boy, who was thrown into the river by the other boarders “to wash off his darkness”.

  Until last year, our rowing team was pinned in my wardrobe, behind my shirts. Not in the sitting-room, lest our guests would misread it as flaunting, nor on my desk, lest my wife would tease me and call it “my corrective institution”. It was rash of me perhaps, but I destroyed it, out of cautiousness, on the first day of the war.

  The last sentence is crossed out.

  After four years at Oxford, I collected my degree and set off for Iraq. So many ballads sing of the longing for home, but give me one which depicts the despair of an exile bound to return. Crossing the Suez Canal, I prayed that the sands would fall back into the waterway and stop us from reaching Basra. As the groves of date palms loomed on the horizon, I whispered “Iraq” and waited for the name to awaken my homing instincts. Again and again I uttered it, until the guttural sound estranged me from my own voice. I was no sailor, I understood at last, only a deserter posing as an English gentleman.

  But let us leave my rootlessness and return to stamps. As your farewell present predicted, it is most probably our collections which have kept us in touch all these years. Still, today, our worlds overlap whenever we pore over a pile of stamps, whether it is you, sorting out the damaged ones, or I, hunting for “errors”. It was not for nothing that I became an accountant, my wife likes to say in regard to my obsession with philatelic errors. Not that I totally disagree with her, only I would rather compare it to a quest, the pursuit of treasure at the bottom of the sea. And I did chance upon quite a few treasures, the most recent of which was a British one, whose perforation cut Her Majesty’s profile in the middle. But as life often claims back what it has once granted, for lack of cash, I may soon be compelled to sell them, as I sold our Kashan carpet last month.

  Clifford, I turned sixty yesterday.

  Men my age have built houses in the suburbs, cosy nests for the golden years – as they are called nowadays. I, on the other hand, am living out of a suitcase, preparing the family and myself for a journey. Where did I go wrong to end up an immigrant, if not a refugee at sixty?

  The two last paragraphs are crossed out.

  Yesterday, on my sixtieth birthday, my wife and daughter surprised me with a new magnifying glass – which just reminds me that the names of the enclosed “Iraqi Birds” are printed only in Arabic. So here is their translation, in ascending order of value: the bulbul, the hoopoe, the jay, the white stork, the marbled duck, the swallow. Being a bird of passage, the swallow shouldn’t be included in this series you’d say, and I would totally agree. It is even called sind-ou hind in Arabic, the one from the lands of Sind and India.

  Their departure caught me unawares this spring, the swallows I mean. Suddenly I realised that the days were longer, that the smell of orange blossom was wafting through our garden, that birds were copulating on the branches, that the breeze was blowing, announcing the new season. It is quite painful I’m afraid, to watch the world flower while I myself am growing dull, as time stops for me and life stagnates.

  I have been out of work for the last eleven months, sacked two weeks after the Six Day War. Besides, it has become quite difficult for me as a Jew to draw money from my own bank account. Fortunately, my former colleague, Z., one of the few non-Jewish friends who did not shun us after the war, secretly brings me work and reports it as overtime. If not for him, I wouldn’t like to think what would have become of us.

  The last paragraph is crossed out.

  My son S. was arrested eight months ago,

  The last sentence is crossed out.

  Shaul, my nineteen-year-old son, has been detained for the last eight months. The sequence of events which had led to his arrest is too painful for me to relate and too absurd, I’m afraid, for your English mind to grasp. My wife, who visits him once a month, says that he has free access to a toilet and a tap. He is also allowed books, thank God. Nevertheless, I am quite concerned about his powers of endurance, Shaul has never been particularly tough, and although quite intelligent he is still immature and by no means sensible. But to be honest, it is mainly I who am to blame for his present misfortune. Had I not been over-protective and imposed my will upon him, he would have now been studying at an American university instead of languishing in some army cell …

  Naturally, you can’t expect civil rights in a country ruled by military dictatorship, justice in a society still struggling against feudalism, or integrity in a people torn between a tradition in standstill and imported modernity. But after their defeat in the last war, our rulers lost the little moderation they still possessed. There are not more than three thousand Jews in this country, what threat can we possibly present to a population of eight million?

  Believe it or not, we still get some foreign papers, but since the articles on the Middle East are censored, their relevance to us is significantly reduced. I’d give anything to know, for instance, if any attempts are being made in the world to pull us out of here, or just how long we will be kept like hostages in this country. For the sake of my family, I do my best to display an optimistic front, but whenever I wallow in despair, it dawns on me that a decade is a very short span, not more than a twinkling in terms of history.

  History itself looks like a chain of inconclusive, unfinished episodes … is it possible that such a diffuse author is our God?

  Father did not sign the letter. I crumple the creased sheets back into a ball and toss them into the waste-paper basket. Like his previous letters, they will end up as ash flushed down the lavatory.

  He folds a sheet of stamps along the perforation lines. The swallow is illustrated with pointed narrow wings, a short bill, and a forked tail. Father divides the sheet into ten rows, splits each row into ten stamps, and inserts the hundred identical squares into a blue envelope.

  Not even a jigsaw puzzle for beginners. Just a flight of migratory birds dispatched to Oxford without a return address.

  PART III

  One More Revolution

  Zebil! Rubbish! He cries out as he rings one doorbell after the other. It is collected on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, early in the morning. Mother asks me to take out the bin. I do as I am told without arguing this time, keen myself to have it emptied. The roofless lorry advances slowly towards our house. From either side of the street, a man is picking up the bins waiting before the gates. A third is standing inside the lorry, up to his ankles in litter.

  Dustmen, Laurence used to
call them. A delicate term, I thought, and pictured English rubbish to be odourless, pale, and airy – like sawdust.

  —Ready? abul zebil, the rubbish man asks.

  Ready is echoed from above. The Langley’s bin is flung up. The man in the lorry seizes it, empties it to his side, and drops it into the hands of the man below. Then he bends down and manipulates the greasy pile, searching for some item of value in the English refuse. Stale bread, egg shells, chicken bones, orange peel, garden clippings, broken bottles, balls of paper, torn nylon stockings, and a number of empty food cans. I feel uneasy at the thoroughness of his inspection. The rubbish man fingers the contorted bristles of a toothbrush, runs a single scissor blade over his chin, then tucks the two articles into the pocket of his rolled-up trousers.

  —Ready? shouts the man below, and hurls up our bin, the first in a series of three.

  Now that it is buried under two bucketfuls, nobody will have the chance to scrabble through our refuse.

  The rank smell of the lorry is receding. I shake our empty bin to chase away the fly inside, whizzing and whirling around the yellow grains of rice stuck to the sides. Two bangs against the wall and the fly finds its way out. Too late for it to catch up with the lorry, which has reached the main street.

  I breathe a sigh of relief. They have disposed of my first sanitary towels.

  It caught me unawares yesterday – a lump of blood smudged on my pants, so thick and dark that I let out a cry of awe, then screamed for mother to come urgently to the bathroom. She neither smiled nor frowned at the sight, but her voice sounded tired as she instructed me to wash away the blood stains with cold water, and showed me how to hook the two ends of a sanitary towel to the pink belt which I was to wear under my knickers. Her matter-of-fact demonstration annoyed me. When I asked if it was definite, if there was really no way out, she fondled my head briefly – for the last time I assumed – said we were now in the same boat, and left me to my lot.

  What had made me so certain that I, of all females, would be spared?

  I hate to be in the same boat as you, I wanted to yell back, urge her to put a stop to my bleeding, postpone it for a year, perhaps two, for I was by no means ready yet for such a lifelong commitment.

  But when the warm liquid trickled from my vagina, the sensation was far from unpleasant, and although sharp, the odour was in no way repulsive. On the contrary, I even recognised a vague familiarity about it. Moreover, the idea of an inner wound that did not hurt was a paradox which endowed my body with an aura of mystery. If only I were not bleeding so much. Covering up the mess gave me a hard time, wrapping the sodden towel in a newspaper – as mother had suggested – proved insufficient. Its smell might be detected, I feared, or else its shape might give it away. So I wrapped it further until it swelled to the size of a shoe and laid it under Curry’s nose, who sniffed it all over and meowed inquiringly. I swathed the package with additional sheets and tried again. Only when the cat lost interest in sniffing and started playing football with the parcel did I relax and dump it at last into the rubbish bin.

  Adah, habit, we call it in colloquial Arabic, as if it were any other habit one may take up or abandon of one’s own accord.

  In the same boat, I mumble, as I put the empty bin back in the kitchen. Suddenly my swimming date with Selma dawns on me. I cannot make it tomorrow morning. Not in my state! I ought to bike to her place and cancel our appointment. Didn’t I tell you it was contagious, she will mock me, as if my bleeding was another accomplishment of hers. Our child has finally made it, she will tell all the other girls, for I was the only one in the class who had not menstruated. Such secrets leaked in the summer, whenever a girl missed three or more successive days of swimming. At first it puzzled me that their absences did not coincide, for I had imagined all women in the world bleeding on the same days, the last five of each month.

  But who said I ought to announce my menses at all? All I need is a credible excuse – not a headache, not a sore throat, and definitely not a cold. None of the hints which girls use for their period, then grin in a mixture of mischief and apology.

  Selma’s mocking words haunt me all day. Yet no matter how I turn over the problem, I fail to find a sound explanation that would mislead her.

  At night, I set the alarm for quarter past five and place it under my bed on the roof. If they do not find me at our gate at five-thirty tomorrow, Selma and her father will honk and honk until they have woken the whole street. I lie in bed and observe the full moon overhead. The milky face and its smile remind me of a bedtime game that Shuli and I used to play on full-moon nights. We had to disassemble the features of the face and replace them with landscape – hills and valleys. I visualise the hills, but my eyes are still blind to them. I make a new attempt. The white smile persists, fatuous, like a white lie. I am about to give up when, without warning, the disc in the sky switches into a sphere – a radiant planet suspended in a dark, infinite universe. The sky is no longer above, but all around me. The moon has moved closer. I’ve made it, I can see the moon! I would cry out, fixing it with my gaze, lest it would slip away. Good! Now drop it and try to catch the face again, my brother would dictate. The quicker you shift, the more points you’ll get. But my eyes are too possessive to let go of the planet, which is slowly freezing into a still life.

  A star falls. A wish is released into the night.

  It must be a hangover from childhood to believe in shooting stars, I tell myself and turn over, my back to the moon.

  The hour hand strikes three. The alarm could not have gone off. It sounds more like machine-gun fire, coming from the west bank. The Presidential Palace? Now it is cannon shots, I am sure of it. I pick up clock, pillow and blanket and rush indoors. Mother meets me on the stairs, on her way to call me inside. Father is trying to tune the radio in the bedroom, but all the local stations are silent.

  —God be with us, it’s a military coup! Who could it be this time? mother exclaims.

  —Go back to sleep, daughter, father says. Whoever these gangsters might be, it will eventually come to light – by morning at the latest.

  I retire to my room and turn off the alarm, reconciled with the world again. It is beyond doubt that all tomorrow’s appointments will be suspended – no matter on whose side the star has fallen.

  I wake up with a start the next morning and check my sanitary towel. Soaked again. My knickers too. A miracle that the sheet has remained clean. Then I see that I am in my room and not on the roof, and last night’s shots flash through my mind. I look out of the window. The street is dead, as if there is nobody left to shoot. I join my parents at the breakfast table downstairs. Radio Baghdad has come to life again. It is broadcasting communiqués given out by the Council of the Revolution. The former Nationalist regime consisted of illiterate and corrupt men, thieves, opportunists, and Zionist spies – the new voice is snorting. The change our country has been craving for is at last attained. Not a single drop of blood was shed last night, the announcer assures us. The former president has already been dispatched by plane to London this morning.

  —Good for him! I sigh.

  “Wahda, hurryiah, ishtirakyiah”, unity, liberty, socialism. They are repeated at the end of each communiqué and again between the martial songs. I pour hot tea on a hunk of hard Kurdish cheese, and pierce it with my knife to check its softness. “Wahda, hurryiah, ishtirakyiah” – always in the same order. Even I can recall the slogans of the Ba’ath, who seized power in 1963, five years ago. Although they did not rule longer than ten months, their name has become associated with the notorious national guard and blood baths.

  A new President is appointed. Portfolios and key positions in the government are being redistributed among the adherents of the new regime. Lists are being read – names of new generals, ministers, general managers, ambassadors. Enough names to fill a telephone book. The Ba’aths are calling the exiles home, pledging to stamp out corruption, to pave the way for democracy, and to release political prisoners.

&nb
sp; Mother glances questioningly at father.

  —Don’t build up hope, he replies. By political prisoners they mean members of political parties, and this, too, will most probably begin and end with Ba’ath cronies and activists.

  —Waqa’ mezzalem, may their fortune fail! Couldn’t they have waited for a while? Why now, when our situation has just begun to improve?

  A month ago, forty Jewish detainees were released without prior notice. In the same week, the Minister of the Interior promised our hacham that the rest, about sixty, would be discharged within the next days. No wonder Jewish morale immediately leapt to the skies. We believed that the worst was already behind us, and that our star would soon be on the ascendant again. A rumour circulated that the authorities were on the point of issuing laissez-passer documents for those who wished to leave the country for good. Although weeks passed and the Minister of the Interior did not fulfil his promise, the Jews, all the same, felt secure enough to return to some forgotten activities, like frequenting coffee shops and promenading along the river bank. Some students even went to see Un homme et une femme at the Nasr Cinema. Selma’s father hired a boat for the summer. I was allowed to join in.

  —No matter what policy the new regime adopts towards us, father goes on, I wouldn’t expect any drastic changes in the coming weeks. They’ve got more urgent matters to settle, interior opposition to begin with. What’s the future of three thousand Jews in comparison?

  A twenty-four hour curfew is imposed throughout the country. Time enough to arrest opponents, suspected opponents, and potential opponents. Dudi’s mother drops by to share her worries with us. A few days ago, the Minister of Justice in person promised her that all the Jewish detainees would, in no time, be released.