Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (28 page)

violin and a piano swelled out of the tropical night. “It’s

Beethoven,” said Bob, astounded. “The Archduke Trio.” We

waited for the coffee shop proprietor to turn it off, but he did

not.

Bob roused himself to say to Haji that we found this music

very beautiful. Did he?

“No,” said Haji, “I don’t. I have friends who say they do,

but I think they are just pretending to like it because the

English and other foreigners do.”

He sipped his tea and spoke of his weariness and his

financial troubles and his feeling that he needed a change. The

Beethoven went on, and Bob and I exchanged looks of pleased

amazement at the sound of the music we loved and had not

heard for so long. I went to get more tea.

With a click the station changed. Abdul Wahab, a well-

known Arab vocalist, sang among the drums and pipes. When

I returned with the tea, Bob and Haji were chuckling.

“Now this,” said Haji, “is music.”

I wished the sheik bon voyage and left the men to linger

over their tea glasses.

Two days after Haji left, Selma’s oldest son Feisal was in

bed with an unidentifiable illness. I went up to the house,

where the boy lay on a cot in the
sirdab
, or summer cellar, a

room much cooler because it was set in at least two feet below

the surface of the ground. Feisal’s mother and aunts, his

brothers and sisters and cousins all sat on the floor around his

bed, clucking in anxiety. A glass of water stood on a little

bedside table. From time to time one of the children would

take a sip from the glass, only to flee screaming in mock terror

at a reprimand from the women. The noise and the crowds and

the bright electric light in the sirdab had no effect on Feisal;

he lay in a stupor and did not move.

Selma’s eyes were red from crying. “He is so sick, Beeja,”

she said, “and he won’t eat and he won’t drink, since

yesterday afternoon. Feel him.”

I put my hand on his forehead; the child was burning up

with fever.

“He vomits,” said Selma, “but he won’t drink at all and he

gets hotter and hotter and I don’t know what to do.”

I didn’t know either, but it was obvious that the child was

seriously ill. The temperature outside was at least 110, and if

Feisal would not drink and the fever continued, he was in

danger of dehydration.

“Has the doctor come?” I asked.

Selma said that Nour and Abdulla had gone to get the

village doctor. I sat for a few moments before excusing

myself. Selma had her hands full and another guest was the

last thing in the world she needed.

After lunch Bob brought bad news from the mudhif; the

doctor had diagnosed Feisal’s illness as typhoid fever. This

panicked us. We ordinarily did not meddle in community

affairs, even if asked, but typhoid in midsummer was

something we did not like to contemplate. Bob had suggested

to Nour that the people living in the compound should be

inoculated, but Nour had replied that only Haji Hamid himself

could authorize such drastic action.

“I think I’ll call Haji myself,” said Bob. “He’s probably still

in Baghdad. It would be terrible to have a typhoid epidemic

break out.”

Haji, as we expected, thought inoculation an excellent idea.

When Bob reached him, he had just received news of Feisal’s

illness and was wondering whether to return to El Nahra.

Instead he called Nour and talked to Abdulla, giving

instructions that everyone in his house and Abdulla’s house

was to be inoculated.

Soon another crisis developed: Dr. Ibrahim had no serum.

Abdulla and Nour and Bob got the postmaster out of bed to

open up the telephone exchange and place another call to

Baghdad. Haji promised he would buy the medicine as soon as

the pharmacies opened in the morning and put it on the first

taxi bound for El Nahra, tipping the driver well to deliver the

serum directly to the doctor.

In the morning I could see the boy was worse. Even more

women and children had gathered round his bed. They

moaned when Feisal moaned, cried out when he cried out. The

presence of so many people in the small sirdab had warmed

the usually cool air, and Selma was perspiring freely, wiping

her face with her foota and trying hard not to cry. She fell on

me as I entered, something she had never done before, and

demanded what she should do. I could think of nothing new,

and merely said that the boy should be bathed and that

somehow she must get water into him.

“But Beeja. I can’t,” she said desperately. “He knocks the

water out of my hand. He’s my first-born and I’ve spoiled him

and his father has spoiled him. But he gets worse and worse

and I’m afraid—I’m afraid he will die.” She broke down and

sobbed.

I put my arm around her shoulder, which seemed little

comfort, and several of the older women got up and told her

not to worry.

“No, he won’t die, no, Selma he won’t die,” I kept repeating

over and over again while she sobbed, talking for lack of

anything more concrete to offer. “No, he won’t die,” I said

again, but not out of conviction, for the boy looked dreadful.

Nour spoke through the screen to Selma.

“We must all leave—the doctor is coming,” she said, drying

her eyes on her foota again, and we all adjourned to Selma’s

room where the women loudly debated Feisal’s chances of

recovery.

The boy cried out in anguish from the sirdab, and the

women shook their heads, silenced for the moment, and

whispered in sympathy. At another cry Selma half rose,

realized she could not enter her son’s room while the strange

doctor was present, and sat down again. We all knew the

doctor was not doing anything awful to Feisal, but his cries

were piercing. Selma sobbed again, and Kulthum patted her

knee. The screaming gradually subsided and a knock sounded

on the door. Selma put on her abayah, talked for a few

moments with Nour outside the door, and came back into the

room.

“The doctor says Feisal will get w-worse tonight,” she

announced, her voice trembling, “and tomorrow he may be

better. And the doctor says he must stay in the room alone,

with only me to watch. And the door must be shut.”

This was greeted with cries of protest.

“He’ll be frightened.”

“He can’t stay alone.”

“No, no, Selma, we must keep watch.”

“Nour says so,” interrupted Selma firmly, “and he also says

the doctor is going to give everyone in the house injections

against the fever.”

Shock, disbelief, fear and displeasure registered in rapid

succession on the faces of the women as the force of this

statement penetrated to them. The barrage of objections was

almost too much for Selma and she appealed to me.

“Beeja will have the injection too,” she said.

I replied that I had already had it, and the injection did not

leave a scar, baring my upper arm to show it unmarked. They

crowded to look, distracted momentarily, and I showed them

my smallpox-vaccination scar–“very small and it didn’t

hurt”—lying blithely and babbling on about how many

different kinds of injections I had had for how many different

kinds of diseases.

“The doctor is coming after supper,” pronounced Selma.

By late evening Bob reported the doctor had inoculated

more than thirty men, women and children. Feisal was

approaching the crisis, and the doctor felt he would reach it,

and the fever would probably break, before morning. He was

right. I went visiting in midmorning and found the crowd of

women in the sirdab again, but now Feisal was conscious, and

crying, in his usual wheedling way, for sweets, for toys, for a

bird to play with. He struck his mother’s hand when she came

near him. Yes, the spoiled son was getting well.

The summer wore on and each day was a little hotter than

the day before. We found we were accomplishing less and

less. An hour’s cooking tired me. Bob made the effort every

morning to visit the mudhif or the irrigation office, but found

almost no one to talk to. People were hoarding their stores of

energy to last through the two months of heat yet to come.

About this time we both had bad bouts of dysentery, which

sapped our strength even more. After this experience we

decided to boil the drinking water, and each night before bed

we would pour boiling-hot water into two huge porous clay

jars to cool during the night. For despite our relative

inactivity, we were drinking between us over a gallon of water

a day.

At night we slept outside, on camp beds and under

mosquito nets. Each morning the bedclothes had to be carried

inside or they would have been so hot and dusty by nightfall

that we would not have enjoyed lying on them. We found that

an afternoon nap had become a necessity, and this grew longer

every day. By mid-July we were eating our lunch at noon and

immediately afterward retiring to the living room to try to

sleep. But even protected by our foot-thick mud walls and by

window screens of woven camel-thorn dampened by a bucket

of water several times a day, it was so hot that sleep came

with difficulty. We lay on the camp beds and read mysteries

and waited for sundown. Fortunately we had a little fan and,

more important, electricity to run it, for Abu Saad, the mayor,

had a fan too and liked to keep it running while he napped.

When the mayor ordered it, naturally the town generator was

turned on. Even so, in that one summer we perspired so much

during the long hot afternoons that we rotted through the

canvas of both brand-new camp beds.

At five we would get up, take a cold sponge bath and dress,

and as the sun dropped to the horizon, we would hear other

people on the paths outside. By seven o’clock dusk had settled

over the countryside and the settlement was alive again.

“In Iraq in summer the days are very hot, but the nights are

very beautiful,” ran one of the phrases we had learned in our

colloquial Arabic course at Georgetown University.

I have often wondered about the homesick Iraqi who was

the author of the phrase, writing about the marvelous summer

nights of Iraq from his desk in the steaming humidity of a

Washington, D.C., summer. For I shall never forget the sense

of release we felt when night had descended after the fierce

heat of the day. The birds woke and added their voices to the

buzz of the noise as families cooked their dinners and went

shopping in the reopened suq. The children played a game

with sheeps’ knuckles, shouting, in the road. We sat in our

garden, eating supper from a big tin tray and tasting the

coolness of the air. We stayed up late, for it was too wonderful

to go to bed. Bob would go to the mudhif and I would head for

Laila’s house or Selma’s or Sherifa’s.

The women gathered in the courts under the stars. One by

one, children would come home and fall asleep in their

mothers’ laps or on the summer beds of split reed mats which

ranged round the court; the women sat on and on, smoking,

chewing pumpkin seeds, talking and relishing the breeze that

frequently came up after sundown. It was on these evenings

that I felt closest to the women, as we relaxed together after

sharing the day’s heat and talked and exchanged confidences

as friends.

“What do you dream about, Beeja?” asked Laila one

evening. We sat in an irregular circle in the court of her house.

Fatima was passing around a tray of khubuz laham which she

had just made, and we nibbled the bread contentedly, washing

it down with cooled water from the clay jug in the center of

the circle.

“What’s the matter, are you
afraid
of us?” Nejla, the family

jokester, opened her eyes very wide and looked

melodramatically into mine. Everyone laughed.

“How could I be, Nejla? You are so funny,” I answered.

Nejla was delighted. “Yes, I am, aren’t I?” she asked the

group.

“Well, what do you dream about?” persisted Basima.

“Many things,” I said. “My mother, Mr. Bob, things that

have happened in the past. What about you?”

“I dream about my cousin,” said Basima. “I always dream

of him, and the day we shall marry.”

Fatima said slowly, “I have one dream again and again. I go

out in the morning to get water and the canal has gone dry.

Soon everyone is standing by the bank, waiting for the water

to come.”

“And does it come?”

“I don’t know. I always wake up.”

We sat quietly together. A finger of the new moon was

visible in the sky above us.

“When you see the new moon,” said Basima, “my father

says you must look at something beautiful or someone you

love and then make a wish.”

“What if there isn’t anything beautiful nearby?” I inquired.

“Then you look at water,” she replied.

“Has the canal ever dried up?” I went on.

“I don’t think so,” said Laila, “but my father says that once

the British cut off the water because Haji was fighting them