Baghdad Noir

by Samuel Shimon

  Translated from Arabic by William M. Hutchins

  THE FEAR OF IRAQI INTELLIGENCE

  by Hayet Raies

  al-Waziriya

  Life in Baghdad in the late 1970s and early 1980s was massively politicized, and there was no neutrality, not even in romantic relationships or in the most intimate situations. During that time, I was a student in Baghdad at the Faculty of Arts, located in the neighborhood of al-Waziriya.

  Everything functioned for the political benefit of the Baath Party. The atmosphere was laden with a kind of phobia known only under autocratic regimes, which I might call Iraqi-security-apparatus phobia. Everyone feared everyone; everyone informed on everyone; everyone suspected everyone; everyone mistrusted everyone; everyone spied on everyone else. Friends wrote reports on friends, and brothers betrayed brothers. Wives informed on husbands and accused them of terrible political crimes if they cheated with other women. We used to hear legendary stories about the Iraqi security apparatus and its penetration into people’s lives.

  One day, our friend Nuha entered our room at the main university dormitory in a state of panic. Room 51—I will never forget the many dramas we saw in that room. I lived with Syrian Sabah, Lebanese Nuha, and Palestinian Nawal. Nuha grabbed Sabah and me by the hands and took us out to the balcony, where she told us in whispers that some guys at the Faculty had warned her about our rooms being under surveillance. Our rooms contained listening equipment and wires—hidden with masterful secrecy, inside the walls, between the wood of the beds and our wardrobes. The surveillance was directly connected to the General Intelligence Center, and Russian engineers had designed the equipment when the dorm was built.

  We were stricken with anxiety and started to reexamine what we had said, whether we had uttered words about the Baath Party, or criticized a position, or discussed the behavior of politicians and leaders, or spoken ill of the Saddam Hussein regime and his entourage, or wronged Hussein personally. We entered a state of hysterical madness, between laughter and fear, between seriousness and fun. Sabah in particular was the most sensitive of us on this subject. She belonged to a Syrian family that lived in Kuwait. Her family had fled from Syria because of a death sentence issued by the military court against her brother Jihad.

  Sabah dragged her heavy bed to the spacious balcony to sleep there, attempting to escape the bugged room. I had tried to dissuade her, telling her calmly: “Maybe this story isn’t true; it could be the result of the exaggerations and security phobia that have become a collective madness.”

  Nuha, who was known for her sharp tongue and inability to keep secrets, egged Sabah on, mocking her: “Maybe the bed itself is stuffed with listening wires? You must watch your words and not repeat more than once, Saddam Hussein rules the country with iron and fire, because here, the walls have ears, as they say.”

  The joke that the bed was bugged was enough for Sabah to lose her temper, and she screamed, hysterically: “Is it reasonable to expect our dreams to be monitored to this extent?!”

  Most of our friends were sincere young people at the Faculty—they all warned us more than once about talking politics in the dorms and elsewhere, because there were infiltrators among the girls living there. Baathists, Iraqi, and non-Iraqi spies were charged with recruiting women in the dorms, and were tasked with monitoring specific students. We even discovered some of the infiltrators, which caused huge quarrels between us.

  I recalled the report written by Khuddouj—a female Lebanese Baathist responsible for recruiting newly arrived students, especially those from South Lebanon—against a girl from her own country—her name was Rawiya—a left-wing Beiruti who belittled, secretly and publicly, the Baath Party’s principal slogan, One Arab Nation with an Eternal Mission. “If there is one Arab nation, why then are relations severed between the neighboring sister states Syria and Iraq? Both countries are ruled by the same party, the Baath!” Rawiya would exclaim.

  Of course, this often led to arguments. And the charges were ready: betraying the nation and betraying the party—the party that sheltered us and provided us with free education and accommodation (even though several of us did not enter the Faculty via the Baath Party).

  What really hurt me was how the Baath used the settling of personal scores between students (both male and female) for their own advantage. We were cautious in our romantic relationships with young Baathist men, fearing they would turn on us or harm us if the romance went sour, or if there was a change of heart.

  Da’ad, a Palestinian Baathist and our neighbor in room 52, joined in these heated debates: “Girls! You shouldn’t do that. You are giving the party a bad image and slandering its reputation. To the Baath high morals! Yes, the party teaches us to have principles and high morals!”

  The phrase, To the Baath high morals, appealed to me. I would agree with Da’ad, joking: “Of course, of course, the Baath has high morals, as love has high morals—exactly.”

  I was trying to reduce the severity of the problem.

  Sabah volunteered to prepare pots of tea, which had seemingly magical powers in reconciling us. We would drink the tea, and then Sabah would take a pack of Kents out of her handbag and invite us to smoke. As we smoked, the cigarettes would absorb all the tension from the room. And we would end all disputes with: “We can’t fight like this. After all, here we are: students, Arab women, immigrants who have only each other. We came here to study, not to take sides.” But such declarations did not much please Lebanese Khuddouj. We winked at one another with the recklessness of children, blaming “global imperialism” that worked to disunite and divide us, while Iraq strived to unify the Arab world. We had to be content with unity whether we belonged to the party or not.

  * * *

  On winter nights, we would often hear gunshots right before bedtime, and we would rush wildly to the balcony—but we would only find pitch darkness, the night concealing gloomy, damned Iraq. In the morning, we would hear Iraqis whispering about the disappearance of some people after their conversations were overheard.

  Sabah persisted in sleeping on the balcony. Later, Nuha joined her.

  “If I were in your place, I’d marry that Iraqi lieutenant Najim Abbas. He’s in love with you,” Nuha teased Sabah. “So that way, we’d be safe from suspicion. Especially since we’re so far from our families and there’s no one here to protect us.” Then, sarcastically, she added: “Who refuses an offer of marriage from an Iraqi officer?”

  “You go and marry him!” Sabah said, stretching out on her bed. “You want me to marry an officer to protect your life, while I’m tied to him for the rest of my life? What happens if we get in a fight and he goes and files secret reports against me, or maybe against my family? Who knows what he might do to me physically . . . I’d be a madwoman to trust a Baathist military officer!”

  “If you don’t like him, why did you go out with him before?” Nuha asked.

  “Well, just be happy I haven’t gone out with him since that day,” Sabah replied, rolling her eyes. “You all know that I returned frightened to death the day he invited me out to the corniche by the Tigris, then surprised me by taking his pistol out of the car’s glove box. I was trembling, imagining him pointing the gun at me. I had never seen a weapon before, except on TV. He told me that he wanted to take me on an excursion! How much I wished then that I was with an uncomplicated young man, walking along the riverbank safely, like the lovers enjoying themselves on Abu Nuwas Street.”

  We knew that Sabah was engaged to her cousin Mohammad—but that was before she came to Iraq, and she was still very uncertain about marrying him. She had told us that Mohammad had cut short his studies and had not passed beyond the elementary level. Instead he went to work with his father and became rich. He was madly in love with Sabah, and would go crazy if he saw her with another man. Yet Sabah often turned against him, usually when she came into contact with the young men at the Faculty, for they made the intellectual gulf between them ever clearer to her.

  Sabah was pretty and
flamboyant, with long black hair that flowed past her shoulders. She had a soft, likable nature and good humor, as well as a simple elegance. Sabah’s personability especially aroused the jealousy of wealthy Nuha, who received expensive yet tasteless dresses from her family.

  Mohammad lived with his family in Kuwait, and often traveled back and forth to Iraq in his black Mercedes. He would come laden with presents for all of us; he would show up at the dorm with crates of fruit, cans of soda, Kit Kat bars, and he never forgot his chain-smoking fiancée’s Kents. Her affliction had spread to the rest of us. We all eagerly awaited the Kents and smoked them greedily, particularly when we gathered on the spacious balcony for soirées around the dinner table. We used to compare Mohammad and Najim; we gossiped about the couples on campus—who broke up, who got angry, who was reconciled. I persuaded Sabah to tell me the latest news about Faris—her relative and fellow countryman—specifically about the day he visited her at the Faculty of Science. It was all about the smallest details: Who did he sit with and who did he talk to? What was the reason for the visit? Why did he talk to her? Did they mention me? She knew my weak points and exactly where to strike. She pressed and did not let up . . . and I delighted in it . . . That was our favorite entertainment and perhaps the basis for our friendship. Sabah presented to me the idea of a relationship with her relative, and I fell more and more in love with him. Nawal would pick up on Sabah’s theatrics and try to stop her, but she would ignore her. I did not care, because when you love someone, you will believe anything about them. As we say in Tunisia, the most important thing is to have a nice conversation, smoke incessantly, drink delicious tea, enjoy hanging out, chat on the balcony, and have promising dreams when we sleep. After all, is love not the most beautiful illusion we experience?

  Sabah was not happy with Mohammad, except when he would show up for a few days, pampering us and taking us to the best restaurants. We stayed up until morning at clubs like Baghdad Nights and Scheherazade Nights, and Faris was invited to join us for my sake. Mohammad also invited Nawal and Nuha, because they too were residents of Kuwait, part of the Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian migration there.

  Once Mohammad returned to Kuwait and Sabah went back to the environment of the Faculty and its students, she would call her mother and tell her that she was having difficulties with her prearranged engagement to Mohammad.

  Sabah had recently told her mother the story of her and Lieutenant Najim Abbas—he wanted to marry her and was determined to visit her family in Kuwait—but her mother only reluctantly agreed to speak on the phone, after his great persistence. Her mother wanted to understand Najim’s side of the story, without showing that she actually supported him instead of her nephew Mohammad. They spoke several times. Najim asked her to call if she wanted further reassurances or needed anything from Baghdad.

  * * *

  One night, for a change of scenery, I proposed that we go out and spend the evening at the Tigris corniche gardens on Abu Nuwas Street, to celebrate finishing our final exams. Sabah agreed, provided we did not stay out late. We all laughed and told her that we understood, that we would leave a message for him with the night supervisor; we all knew that Mohammad was about to arrive in Baghdad via Basra—so we would tell him to join us on the corniche.

  We yearned for the Tigris; the river cleansed restless spirits simply by crossing it, breathing its air, sitting on its banks; it touched Abu Nuwas Street, the place that first embraced our exile when we arrived in Baghdad.

  That night, when we reached the corniche, Sabah, Nuha, Nawal, Khuddouj, Da’ad, and I began to search for other young people from our cohort, who usually gathered on the riverbank. Young Tunisians, Moroccans, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Palestinians, and Sudanese flooded the Tigris corniche every night in a mosaic found only in Iraq—attracting both students and Arab intellectuals. We fled our dorm for these gatherings, escaping from the severity of the June heat to the fresh breezes of the riverbank. For those who were still studying or who had not yet finished their exams, the corniche was furnished with tables, chairs, and lamps.

  As for me, I was looking for Faris, even though I had not made plans with him. I had not seen him in four days, during which time he had been absent from the Faculty and his party activities. My longing to see him had intensified, but I relied on luck and my intuition, which told me I would meet him that night. I conjured visions of a date with him in the riverside gardens. Perhaps the heat would drive him at last from his house in al-Waziriya to our dorm, to the breezes of the banks of the Tigris, which might help him finish his master’s thesis. He was studying English literature, with a focus on Shakespeare.

  The Tigris gardens themselves were a theater, filled with stories, soirées, lovers, suffering, and desires. The Tigris nights were replete with love, intimacy, pleasure, joy, good fortune, fun, and fights . . . overflowing with waves of people. The true observer of the pulse and clamor of Baghdad’s nights, during celebrations to mark festivals and holidays, was the statue of Abu Nuwas standing guard over it all. He gazed from afar with a contented eye at the crowds gushing with life, with his famous cup in hand, bursting with passion, drinking in all the pleasures of the earth in its great variety—an eternal, immortal poet. Turkish artist Ismael Fattah had designed the statue in 1972. It aroused your appetite for love, intimacy, and desire—as life assaulted you unexpectedly—and you hoped it would seize you and never let go.

  The riverbank was also full of foreign tourists, who were particularly fond of such excursions. The boats bobbed on the surface of the water, pulsing with life under the light of the moon, staying up late with us. I dreamed of being swept away on a moonlit trip by Faris . . . I secretly cursed all his party meetings and political activities, which always took him away from me. As his comrades would joke: Faris is married to the Baath Party.

  Large television screens were erected on the riverbank; Iraqi families gathered around on wooden benches or the sand to follow the episodes of Arab soap operas, as if they were watching in their own homes. We enjoyed them too; they relieved our homesickness and reminded us of our families.

  We often encountered our professors here, as well as poets, journalists, politicians, and intellectuals. The conversations drew people into heated debates, converting the riverbank garden into a sort of literary salon. We were content to listen and learn, but afraid to participate—aware that it would not be free from the eyes and ears of the Baath Party.

  The murmur of the waves reminded us that nights on Abu Nuwas Street were also nights of music, where voices sang with Iraqi sorrow. The songs of Nazem al-Ghazali, Zuhur Hussein, and Salima Murad blended with the Egyptian songs of Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. We were attracted to these Iraqi wedding songs and Sabah’s songs, and we danced the dabka while children’s laughter rang out around us from the playground. The glint in lovers’ eyes embroidered love poems in the moonlight. Meanwhile, the boats swayed in the breeze, their lights like scattered pearls.

  My heart leaped suddenly when I spotted Faris, just as my intuition had predicted. He was bent over one of the study tables—locks of his fair hair covering half his brow, glowing in the lamplight, which cast a long, semicircular arc in front of him—completely absorbed in his studies.

  Sabah also noticed him. I wanted to walk over and take advantage of this beautiful coincidence, but Sabah grabbed me. “Behave yourself, let him come to you,” she advised.

  My strong and uncontrollable feelings toward him were mixed up. Sabah always enticed me away from such spontaneity with lessons of ancient Oriental love; she repeated to me endlessly that the man is the one who pursues the woman and it is she who rejects him.

  “Let’s go and talk to him together,” I suggested. “We can ask whether our rooms are really bugged with listening wires!”

  “Won’t he just laugh at us and make light of the matter, like he always does?” Sabah replied. “He’ll try to remove all suspicion about the Baath Party—they’re above the rumors of biased enemies. And we
might become included among the enemies in his eyes, according to the rule, He who is not with me is against me.” She winked at the other girls.

  “I want to get out of here before he starts reciting the latest studies and theories of the Arab Socialist Baath Party,” Nawal said.

  “Yesterday, Faris took me to the Faculty of Science and invited me for tea at the club on my break,” Sabah added. “He made my brain ache with talk of politics. He left me some books by Michel Aflaq and Tariq Aziz on the party. I’m afraid he’ll ask me now if I’ve read them.”

  “Let’s stay here instead.” Nuha said, agreeing with the other girls. “We can listen to Nazem al-Ghazali’s songs instead.” She began to sing in a loud voice: “She appeared before him from her father’s house, going to the neighbor’s house . . . dressed in red and white, with the eyes of a gazelle—”

  Interrupting the song, Da’ad called out that she had found a group of young Palestinians she wanted us to join by our favorite spot near the statue of Shahriyar and Scheherazade. So we headed toward the group, passing a row of popular cafés and restaurants along the riverbank. The aroma of masgouf, the famous Iraqi delicacy of grilled fish, wafted through the air. Baghdad was famous for having the best river fish—carp and barbel, freshly caught by the fishermen of al-Karrada, close to Abu Nuwas Street. We could also smell kebab, served hot with fresh Baghdadi bread.

  Our other friends joined us later at our usual spot. We jokingly called ourselves the Ali Baba Gang, because our “leader” Ahmed al-Salemi was always stealing things from us, and we had to look for him all night long. We spread out in a circle on the sand on the banks of the Tigris, right next to the water, and spent the evening in pleasant conversation—debating, arguing, singing, and dancing.

  Jamal, from the Palestinian group, sat beside Nawal and had been flirting with her for a while, inching closer to her; Ahmed al-Salemi sat beside Nuha in order to pick a fight with her, the tension growing between them; I sat sideways, so as to keep one eye on the river and one eye on Faris; then I withdrew to the steps of the marble base of the statue, drawing from it the power of the word to protect the man I loved.