Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (2 page)

able to? Bob had warned that we could certainly expect the

women to be friendly at first, in the customary hospitable

Arab way, but he couldn’t be sure how they would react after

the initial period.

In the dining car I was the only woman, and the men stared

at me curiously. We went back to our compartment and

watched the dark landscape while the train pushed slowly

south. I had thought, and Bob had agreed, that the women

might accept me more readily if I met them on their own

terms. Thus, although I had balked at wearing an all-

enveloping black
abayah
, I had elected to live like the women

of El Nahra—in relative seclusion behind walls, not meeting

or mixing with men. But what if, in spite of my efforts, the

women shunned me and left me to myself, more of a

hindrance than an asset to my husband? Two years alone in a

mud house, I reflected. Hardly an enchanting way to spend a

honeymoon.

The weather was certainly not welcoming; a midnight rain

in Diwaniya poured down as we ran from the train to the

waiting room with its single wooden bench. I sat by the

luggage while Bob looked for a taxi or a carriage to take us to

the government rest house; even if the weather had been ideal,

we could not have continued on to El Nahra that night. The

village lay only ten miles southeast but there was no regular

transportation except for occasional trucks and taxis which did

not travel after dark.

While I waited, people gathered to stare at me again, and I

slowly became aware that, among the crowds of middle-class

Iraqis and townspeople, I was the only woman without an

abayah. I began to be self-conscious. This is ridiculous, I told

myself. Why should I have to wear that ugly thing—it’s not

my custom; the arguments with Bob about the abayah returned

in a rush. Bob said I ought to wear it, since everyone else did.

Since we were guests of the sheik, he added, it would make

everything easier if I wore the abayah; the sheik wouldn’t

have to punish people for insulting me. Insulting me! I had

been indignant. “They say an uncovered woman is an immoral

woman,” Bob had explained, “and the tribesmen ask why a

woman should want to show herself to anyone but her

husband.” I remembered my furious reply: “If they can’t take

me as I am—if we have to make artificial gestures to prove we

are human beings too—what’s the point?” Now, although I

hated to admit it, my principles were weakening before my

embarrassment as more and more people gathered to whisper

and point and stare. I wished from the bottom of my heart that

I had borrowed the abayah offered by a Baghdadi lady friend

and could bury myself in its comforting anonymity.

After half an hour’s carriage ride through splashing mud we

were ushered into a side wing of the rest house, the place

where women were allowed to stay if accompanied by their

husbands. I broke out our angel-food cake to eat with the tea

Bob had ordered before we lay down to sleep with the rain

dripping into the puddles outside our curtained window.

Although the sun was shining in the morning, the taxis were

still not able to move on the muddy roads outside the city, so I

was deposited in the home of one of Bob’s friends to wait.

The lady of the house was called Um Hassan, mother of

Hassan, her oldest child, “like my husband is called Abu

Hassan,” she explained slowly and patiently in Arabic. Um

Hassan was a perceptive woman. She took a long look at my

tweed coat and red scarf.

“You’re going to live in El Nahra?” she asked

incredulously.

I said that I was.

Without another word she produced an abayah. “You wear

this, dearie,” she said (or the Arabic equivalent thereof), “and

you’ll feel a lot better.” As I began to protest, she stopped me

in midsentence. “You can borrow it. I’ll have one made for

you here.”

Her son brought samples of black silk; a dressmaker came

and measured me. The abayah would be sent by taxi next

week, said Um Hassan, and I could return hers then. Well, it

seemed I’d capitulated; I was going to wear that servile

garment after all. I discovered that my principles were not as

strong as my desire to be inconspicuous and well thought of in

my new home.

Um Hassan and I drank several glasses of hot sweet tea and

I was urged to eat lunch while I waited for Bob to return. My

mood was hardly improved by the long face Um Hassan

pulled when I struggled to ask about El Nahra in my scanty

Arabic.

“You won’t stay,” she prophesied. “You won’t be able to

stand it. No cinema, no paved streets—and the food! No

chickens—if you get one, it’s nothing but bones.” To make

sure I had understood, she rattled in their dish the chicken

bones I had picked clean at luncheon.

Bob finally arrived at dusk, tired and annoyed; we would be

sharing a taxi with six other people and he had had to pay

double to assure that he and I would have the front seat to

ourselves.

“The driver can’t even promise we’ll get through, the road

is so bad,” he admitted. “But I think we’d better try it; we

can’t sit in Diwaniya for the next three days.”

Um Hassan showed me how to keep the black silk abayah

on my head and around my body by clutching the two sides

together under my chin. At the doorway I turned to shake her

hand, stepped on the hem of the abayah, and it slipped neatly

off my head into a little pile on the doorstep. The men in the

waiting taxi stared popeyed, and one of Um Hassan’s little

boys stifled a giggle while Bob helped me recover the abayah

and I tried to maneuver myself and the unfamiliar cloak into

the taxi without losing it again.

Bob looked at me. “I do think you’ll be more comfortable,”

he said. I knew he meant the abayah but I was beyond

discussion of the matter at this point.

“We’ll soon be home,” he said. “Don’t worry.” He put his

arm around me comfortingly, but he’d forgotten the abayah

too, and only succeeded in dragging it off my head again.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and together we dragged the silly thing

back up.

Home. Home indeed. I could not even see a track in the

mud ahead of us as the old Ford taxi slid around through

puddles in the growing dusk.

“After we pass the shrine of Abu Fadhil, the local saint, we

pick up the El Nahra road,” Bob was saying, and although I

didn’t believe there could be anything ahead of us in the

muck, a single electric globe gradually became visible, high

up; it was burning on the very top of the shrine’s brick dome.

The mud-and-thatch houses nearby were shut tight and

darkened by the rain; they rose up on either side of us like

deserted tombs. Only a donkey braying within indicated life.

Night was coming; already the huts were merging into the flat

landscape, and as we passed them and edged forward into

empty fields of mud, the horizon itself slowly merged with the

dark sky.

We drove on into nothing. No lights were visible in any

direction; no other taxis, people or animals were on the road.

In the back seat the men were quiet, and we could hear, very

loudly in the silence, the splash of mud against the sides of the

car and the ominous bangs and creaks as the undercarriage hit

the ridges of ruts. Wind swept in through the windows, empty

of glass panes. Even in my borrowed abayah and overcoat and

sweater, I shivered in the damp air.

The ten miles took almost two hours, but we were stuck

only once. The driver sighed, the men in the back seat got out

and tied their long garments or
dishdashas
up, and Bob rolled

up his trouser legs. Directed by loud shouts from the driver,

the seven of them, shin-deep in mud, rocked the car back and

forth in the slime, and finally, when it would still not budge,

literally lifted it up and over the bad place, the driver gunning

the motor as hard as he could to help. We finally got to solid

ground, the men emptied their shoes of water, and Bob looked

ruefully at his mud-soaked khakis. Everyone climbed back in

the car and we drove on.

Eventually the men stirred. Bob was pointing ahead to

where a faint light could be seen. Dark shapes of palm trees

loomed in front of us, and we rounded a bend and rolled over

the last rut onto pavement and into a blaze of fluorescent

lights: the main street of El Nahra. Bob indicated the jail and

the school and the mayor’s house. The street was deserted, but

the fluorescent street lights burned brightly all the way to the

bridge, where we stopped at an open coffee shop. The back-

seat passengers got out and a few men sitting drinking a late-

evening cup of coffee raised their hands in casual salute to the

taxi. We crossed the bridge and turned right onto a mud road,

which followed the irrigation canal past dark walls and a lean-

to coffee shop. “This is the tribal side of the canal,” said Bob,

“where we live.” Here there were no fluorescent lights, only

old-fashioned street lamps glimmering dully in the muddy

waters. I could make out big trees next to the water.

A dog began to bark, and another. Within minutes what

seemed to be hundreds of dogs were howling furiously around

us.

“It’s only the watchdogs of the tribal settlement,” Bob told

me. “They always bark when a stranger comes near. That’s

what they’re for.”

We turned left away from the canal, the dogs still barking,

and the taxi stopped at a high mud wall, where Bob unlocked

the padlock on a wooden door and carried in the bags. I

gathered my abayah around me, picked up my purse and the

angel-food-cake box and went through the door into a garden,

following Bob up a narrow path to a small dark house as the

rain spattered down onto the leaves in a sudden shower.

As Bob wrestled in the dark with the padlock on the house

door, the trees in the garden around me rustled and sighed, and

my shoes squished in deep mud. I shifted my feet, transferred

my parcels to one hand so that I could get a firmer grip on the

abayah. Water dripped from my bangs down my forehead and

into my eyes.

The lock snapped open. “Don’t expect too much,” warned

Bob as we stepped over the threshold. He flicked a switch and

a single bare electric globe went on, illuminating a small,

dusty, incredibly littered room.

“I’ve been living in one room,” he offered, “but now you’re

here we can fix up the other. In fact you can probably fix this

one up better too.”

I stood by the door. Books, papers, clothes, blankets and

dishes were piled on an old wooden table covered with dirty

oilcloth, on a broken-down sofa, on a single iron cot which

stood against a stained and cracked whitewashed wall. Among

the dusty papers stood a tin can; the label stated that

Robertson’s strawberry jam had been or still was inside. Most

of the earth floor was hidden under woven reed mats which in

turn were covered with a dusty rug. Above my head I heard a

strange sort of twittering and I looked up to the high beamed

ceiling.

“What’s that?” I found I was almost shouting.

“Only a few birds, for heaven’s sake,” answered Bob in an

exasperated tone.

I looked at him and he looked back blankly. At that point,

somewhere inside of me, I knew what I should do. For it had

been hard for Bob too; he had searched for this village for

months, gone through all the preliminaries that were necessary

for us to settle down here: asked for permission to stay, found

the house, moved into a strange place all by himself, and

prepared the way for me. His Arabic wasn’t very good either,

but he had gone right ahead. I could have made a lighthearted

joke about living in a mountain, no,
desert
cabin (loud, foolish

laughter), with all the mountain, no,
desert
greenery (more

silly laughter), where God paints the scenery, etc., etc., etc.,

and we could have laughed it off together, the tense journey

and the staring, pointing people and the exhausting drive

through the mud. We could have had coffee and talked about

the abayah and kissed each other and it would have been all

right.

But I couldn’t do it. I felt only a flood of irrational

resentment against my new husband for bringing me here,

where not only was the bed not big enough for two, but the

ceiling was full of birds’ nests!

“Do you want to see the other room?” he asked. We went

outside into the rain and mud again. “No connecting doors in

this hotel,” he added lightly.

He unlocked a second padlock and the door swung in,

releasing a dank and musty odor. He turned on another bulb,

lighting a bare room that held a camp stove, a table with a

canteen of water on it, and more birds whirring in the beams.

“Shall we finish the tour with a quick turn around the

garden, ending at the outhouse, which, experience has shown,