Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (15 page)

paintings. All the pictures were hung about two feet from the

ceiling, so I had to crane my neck to look at them. Hamza,

observing the direction of my gaze, got up in the middle of a

conversation with Jabbar and Bob and began to identify the

photographs: one of his father—an unpleasant-looking old

man, but at least his face had bones and character in contrast

to the formless fat of Hamza; countless pictures of himself:

Hamza shaking hands with the young King Feisal; Hamza

boarding a KLM plane for Lebanon, standing beside a pert

airline hostess and grinning fatuously; Hamza bowing before

Nuri Said, the Iraqi Prime Minister; Hamza kissing the hand

of the British ambassador’s wife, who wore flowered voile

and a picture hat.

Then he started on the whatnot shelves: one had come from

Germany, he said, and had cost ten English pounds … who

would believe that such a small piece of wood could cost so

much? For a moment I was afraid he might launch into the

origin and price of every whatnot in the room (it would take

hours) but fortunately the servant arrived with tea. Hamza sat

down beside Jabbar again, and we were presented not with the

strong tea of the tribe, but with an imitation of English

afternoon tea, lukewarm and filled with canned milk and

sugar.

A second servant brought in a large silver tray which was

encrusted with baroque silver leaves. Hamza told me proudly

it was a French antique tray; it may have been. Plates of tinned

biscuits and pastries were passed around, and a huge bakery

cake, complete with garlands and rosebuds of pink icing, was

set down, together with a silver cake knife, in the center of the

biggest coffee table. The tinned biscuits tasted like tinned

biscuits, but the pastries were stale and hard, at least a week

old, bought no doubt when Hamza was last in Baghdad. Even

Jabbar, I noticed, waited until Hamza left the room for a

moment and then surreptitiously wrapped his inedible pastry

in a handkerchief for later disposal. While Hamza was out, I

broached the subject of the cake. “Shall I cut it?” I asked.

Jabbar laughed, almost gleefully. “You can’t,” he said.

“I can’t! Why not?”

He laughed again.

“It’s made of plaster,” he said, lowering his voice at the

sound of approaching footsteps. “He just keeps it for show,

and serves it to all his guests.”

I opened and shut my mouth in amazement, and looked

hard at the cake. Perhaps the pink rosebuds were a
little
dusty,

but … I restrained a giggle in time to refuse a second cup of

milk-sugar-tea.

Hamza was trying out his twenty-five-word English

vocabulary on us. This was good for perhaps ten minutes of

questions and answers.

“You visit Iraq for the first time?”

“Yes.”

“How you find the weather in Iraq?”

“It’s very nice.”

“How is the weather in America?”

“Hot in the south, cold in the north, like Iraq.”

“Did you visit Hollywood?”

“No.”

“Is the weather hot in Hollywood?”

“Sometimes hot, sometimes cold.”

“Do you see Marilyn Monroe?”

“No.”

After this effort, Hamza lapsed into Arabic with Jabbar and

I continued my fascinated inventory of the room. The whatnot

shelves held, among other things, two pink-and-gilt

cornucopia vases filled with bright paper flowers; Toby mugs

from England; a Kewpie doll; a miniature German beer stein

with a pewter cover; and several figurines (the shepherd

embraces the shepherdess in baby-blue china; the Chinese

man balances his eternal water buckets in red-and-black

lacquer).

On the mantelpiece of the artificial fireplace stood, reflected

in an oval gold-framed mirror, a full-size Coca-Cola

advertisement (a girl in white shorts and sailor blouse lounged

beside a bright blue sea and smiled before the pause that

refreshes), a fine Turkish silver coffee service, a painted

plaster Dutch girl, and two glass candlesticks. In one

candlestick stood a red twisted candle; in the other a green

twisted candle; “Merry Christmas” was spelled out on each

candle in vertical gold paper letters.

All of the end tables were covered with antimacassars,

which were in turn covered with glass ash trays, brass ash

trays, silver ash trays and vases stuffed with real overblown

roses. The central coffee table, its three black legs supporting

an enormous abstract kidney, held, in addition to the plaster

cake, Hamza’s favorite treasures: a Persian miniature on

ivory, a beautiful inlaid Damascene cigarette box, and an

enormous music box upholstered in pink silk. At the touch of

a button on the music box a ballerina doll sprang up from a

hidden recess and pirouetted, round and round, to the strains

of “Tales From the Vienna Woods.” Hamza pointed out the

largest object on the table, a silver and gold globe, as big as a

basketball. He pressed another button, and I started in fright.

The world split open and cigarettes sprang out at us in all

directions.

That was enough. I leaned back and nibbled a last tinned

biscuit. Hamza thought I was bored and immediately

suggested a tour of the house and gardens. We rose politely

and followed him, tailed by the young son, still goggle-eyed. I

decided privately that the boy must be not quite bright.

The gardens were lovely. Carefully tended rosebushes were

in bloom, filling the air with fragrance. The grass was freshly

watered and lush green, and rows of lemon and orange trees

shook their leaves in the late afternoon breeze. At the edge of

the gardens we could see the fields of green barley ripening in

the gentle winter sun, stretching away as far as we could see to

the edge of a palm grove. Small groups of Bedouin tents

dotted the landscape and a man on a donkey, making his

solitary way home, disappeared from sight as we watched. A

flock of black-and-white crows rose, calling to each other

from the tall grain. The sun had begun to set. I said to Hamza

in all sincerity that with such a lovely scene to look upon

every night, I thought he would never want to leave his house

and go back to Baghdad. Jabbar agreed, pointing to the pale

colors of the sky as the sunlight faded from the flat land land

the dark palms, and said the country was very beautiful to

him. Hamza seemed at a loss for words; after a moment he

said he was lonely and bored in the house, and would leave

again soon. We returned to the porch and sat on a lawn swing.

As the twilight deepened, a faint trilling note came to us, and,

as we waited, breathless, the full-throated song of a

nightingale. It was a mournful song, clear and sweet in the

quiet air. I had never heard a nightingale before, and was just

deciding that I had been too harsh in my private judgments of

Hamza’s taste when a blast of music from the special

combination record player drowned out the unseen bird.

“Mambo Italiano!” screeched a sugary male Latin voice.

Hamza chuckled with pleasure. “My son knows that we like

music,” he explained.

After “Mambo Italiano” we heard Elvis Presley on two

badly cracked records; at the earsplitting volume Hamza’s son

had set, each nick in the face of the record grated doubly on

our hearing. When Elvis Presley was finished, we heard

“Mambo Italiano” again.

In half an hour we finally did accept a drink from Hamza.

Anything to dull the noise, I thought, and asked for beer,

which came with dishes of Greek olives, pistachio nuts, and

canned English vegetable salad. At 7 P.M., starving and

exhausted, we were summoned to lunch, five hours after we

had arrived.

Hamza had spread his resources lavishly for us. I counted

forty-three separate dishes of food on the table, centered by a

whole roasted lamb. Unfortunately none of it was very good,

and all of it was cold, the rice, the tomato sauce, even the

good lamb meat clammy with a film of congealed grease. I

was glad I was a woman then, for the delicacies of the table

(sheep’s eyes, roasted to lumps of fat) went to Bob and Jabbar.

We picked at our food, doing our best, but it was heavy going.

The cornstarch pudding was tinted bright pink and had the

consistency of rapidly drying plaster. I barely got it down.

After our meal we returned to the living room, and as we

sipped our coffee a sudden rainstorm burst around us. For

fully two hours the rain poured down in sheets, and Jabbar

looked worried. He told Bob in English that we could not

leave until at least an hour after it stopped raining, for even

with four-wheel drive we would not get farther than half a

mile in the mucky fields. Of course, he added slyly, we could

always spend the night at Hamza’s. Spend the night? I looked

in consternation at Bob, who was not too pleased at the

prospect either. Hamza responded nobly to the sound of rain

outside by turning on the record player again. We sat

doggedly listening to “Mambo Italiano” and Elvis Presley

over and over again until finally the rain let up.

At eleven o’clock Jabbar decided it might be worth trying

the road. Hamza said he would send four men to ride in the

back of the car and help us if we got stuck. Bob protested but

Jabbar said he thought it was a good idea.

Hamza and his son stood at the door, bidding us a flowery

farewell. We thanked them and shut the door of the Land-

Rover. The four retainers, with rifles cocked, climbed into the

back.

“Why do they bring their rifles?” I asked.

“Well,” said Jabbar, “Hamza is not too popular with his

fellahin, as I’m sure you can imagine. He sent the men along

to help us out of the mud, but also he is taking no chances that

someone might attack us.”

“Surely that’s not even a possibility,” said Bob.

“You never know,” answered Jabbar. “The share of the crop

which the fellahin take is very small. Hamza gets the rest.”

We inched through the mud in silence, for the presence of

the four armed men in the back had dampened our

conversational spirits. After two hours we reached the

crossing to Suffra, and here we stopped, the men dismounted,

said “God be with you,” and turned to tramp home the ten

miles through the muddy night.

“Thank you. God be with you,” shouted Jabbar after them,

and we started on again.

After perhaps another half hour Jabbar spoke.

“You mustn’t think too harshly of Hamza,” he said. “Oh, of

course he wanted to see your wife—she is the only Western

woman who has come into this area in years—but more than

that, he probably was ashamed of his women’s quarters. He

wanted to entertain you in style, as he thinks Westerners

entertain, and so he brought you to his house, to offer you the

best he had. It’s a compliment, in a way”

“He certainly was generous,” admitted Bob.

“And Hamza is not really an evil man,” continued Jabbar.

“He is not like the sheiks on the Tigris who beat their fellahin

and imprison them and treat them no better than pack animals.

Hamza is just stupid.

“Yet,” went on Jabbar, “because of his stupidity, many

people are starving. No,” he added, almost to himself, “it is

not right. He must go, like all the others ”

“But what about men like Sheik Hamid?” argued Bob.

“They fulfill their tribal duties, they are hard-working and

conscientious, they take only a fair share of the crop.”

Jabbar was quiet for a moment. “Sheik Hamid is different, I

agree,” he said. “A hundred, even twenty years ago, he had a

place, but not now. It is too bad, really; Sheik Hamid will fight

in all sincerity because he feels he is right, and that sheiks and

tribes are still important. He really believes that, you know.

And when the revolution comes he will be hurt; he will never

recover. I am sorry about men like Sheik Hamid. But

Hamza”—he snapped his fingers in the air—“he will just run

away and never understand what happened to him—if he gets

away, that is.”

And we were all silent, thinking of the foolish Hamza and

his goggle-eyed son, his trick cigarette holders and Persian

carpets, his plaster cake and his beautiful nightingale.

8

I Meet the Sheik

A week later I was presented to Sheik Hamid. The day after

we returned from our visit to Hamza, Bob went up to the

mudhif and invited the sheik to lunch. He accepted, and said

his brother Abdulla and his oldest son Nour would accompany

him. We decided that after lunch I would, minus my abayah,

serve the tea; at that point I would be introduced, and the

meeting would take place in our own house and on our own

terms.

We were both extremely apprehensive about the lunch. It

was the first time we had entertained our host, and we wanted

to do it well. For days beforehand we discussed what might be

appropriate to serve; finally I drew up a menu which Bob

liked, and submitted it to Mohammed for his approval. He