Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (46 page)

news rather than the subject of it. Looking at her thin little

body, the head of fine black hair marred by a certain awkward

tilt, the plain face with its intelligent but small eyes, the

mobile too-wide mouth, I felt perhaps the Book of Stars was

right in telling her she would not marry. She had energy and

talent and moderately good health and could support herself.

But she had little gentleness and no beauty to make a man

draw in his breath at his good luck when he raised her veil on

her wedding day. She was too sharp, too curious, too

stubborn, difficult as well as plain. She would grow into the

role she was beginning to assume already, a small pillar in the

women’s society, a fountain of gossip and good talk, a woman

whose emotion would be expended in bitter enmities as well

as deep friendships—with other women.

As I had thought, Laila could not keep this secret with

which she had been taunting me. But she evidently felt it

worth while to be cautious, for she leaned over and whispered.

“You must not tell anyone, but Haji’s son Ahmar, the clerk

in Diwaniya, has written to my father and asked for my sister

Sanaa’s hand in marriage.”

“How did you find out?” I asked, surprised that a daughter

as young as Laila would be taken into her father’s confidence

in such a matter.

“My father reads Arabic, but he doesn’t write it,” explained

Laila, “and so he had to ask Basima to write the letter to

Ahmar, asking him to wait. And Basima told me in bed last

night.”

“That’s wonderful! But why did your father ask him to

wait?”

“Haji is against this marriage. He wants Ahmar to marry

one of Abdulla’s daughters.”

“But Ahmar obviously wants to marry Sanaa.”

“Yes,” answered Laila patiently, “but my father doesn’t

want to offend Haji just now. Our land is getting salty and my

father may have to buy some of Haji’s land before too long.”

I offered Laila another glass of tea and thought of Sanaa.

Was she destined to be an old maid like her sisters, to sit in

her house year after year while her beauty faded? I hoped not.

But if land was at stake as well as the uneasy peace among the

sheik’s brothers, her chances of happiness would not be

considered very seriously.

“Promise you won’t say a word, Beeja, even to Mr. Bob.”

I promised.

All the next week was spent visiting women I had not seen

during my absence. Selma certainly did not look happy at the

prospect of another child. She seemed listless and her

movements were already slow, though she was only four

months pregnant. We sat down together on a mat in the

sheik’s bedroom and Selma produced a small dish of pumpkin

seeds.

“It’s so hard for me to bear children, Beeja,” she said.

“Everyone said it would be easy, because I have big hips” (she

slapped one broad thigh) “but it wasn’t. Then my mother said

it would get better with each child, but, it hasn’t. It’s awful

every time.”

“You must rest after the baby comes,” I suggested.

“Oh yes, rest, that’s what everyone says.” Selma nodded

her head. Her usually good-natured face looked bitter for a

moment. “Well, I stay in bed for two days after the birth and

that’s all.”

“Only two days?” I echoed foolishly.

“Yes, and even then I have so much work to do when I get

up.” She closed her eyes.

I touched her knee. “I’m sorry, Selma. I too had always

heard it got easier.”

Selma opened her eyes and sighed. “And then the midwife

has to come and cut my breasts so the milk will come. That’s

almost worse than having the child.”

I was appalled. “Cut your breasts? But why?”

“I don’t know, but it’s the only way. Otherwise I can’t

nurse and then what would the baby live on? It would die.”

At this I felt completely inadequate, and did not know what

to say in sympathy. Now I realize that poor Selma must have

had inverted nipples and the midwife was doing the only

possible thing, painful though it must have been, to free the

milk supply.

Selma looked at my stricken face. “Never mind,” she said,

trying to smile, “God is good. Maybe it will be easier for you.

The children are worth it, el hamdillah. How is your friend in

Hilla?”

Two days later I took a present of cloth and went to sit with

Sahura, who tried to rise when I came into the small mud-

bricked room, but grimaced with pain and lay down again on

the mat.

“She shouldn’t have lifted those big sacks of grain,” said

her mother Sheddir in a scolding voice. She sat beside her

daughter, spinning wool. “How could you be so stupid,

Sahura?”

I glanced at Sheddir in surprise and saw that there were

tears in her eyes.

“She is a good girl, wanted to help her husband; she didn’t

know any better,” said Sheddir; she took up from the floor of

the room the wooden spindle she had put down when I entered

and resumed her spinning. “It was a boy,” she said, looking

down; her hands moved quickly, rubbing the threads of wool

together and moving the spindle so that the thin strand of yarn

grew longer and longer.

I walked to Khadija’s house, and she told me that Jabbar

was bringing his bride Suheir home from Baghdad in July.

“You won’t be here,” she said.

“No, I guess not,” I replied. “Come,” I suggested to change

the subject, “let’s go visit the schoolteachers.”

Little girls in their white-collared black uniforms were

streaming out of the school gate when we arrived. Hind and

Aziza were going from room to room gathering up the day’s

records while the janitor swabbed the floors of the halls. We

were taken into the teachers’ office and Hind ordered coffee.

Aziza looked thin and tired. Remembering her animation

and enthusiasm when she had arrived in El Nahra last fall, I

wondered. Had she been ill? Had life been too hard on her in

this lonely village?

Hind, always quick to sense a mood, had seen me look at

Aziza. “Beeja,” she announced, “this girl works all the time.

She doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to play.” She

laughed, not pleasantly, but Aziza did not join her. I knew

Aziza was a hard worker and a serious girl. Hind, on the other

hand, managed to take life very lightly and do with it just

about what she pleased. Had the frivolous headmistress and

the serious junior teacher clashed head-on, and the junior

come out the loser, unable to take the mocking and the

ridicule? From Aziza’s set face, it seemed so.

“How are your sisters in Diwaniya?” I asked Aziza.

She turned and gave me all her attention. “I haven’t seen

them for a long time, but I can imagine what they are doing. It

is time to think of spring. My mother always had us take out

all the blankets and our woollen clothes and air them

carefully. Afterward we would sit together and mend

everything, and then we would put the woollens away with

cloves in each layer, to keep out the moths. I remember

mother made anise tea for us to drink while we mended,” she

added wistfully.

“Come, come, Aziza, don’t talk as though your poor sisters

were dead,” teased Hind, and Khadija laughed obligingly.

“Tell us about Jabbar’s bride, Khadija—is she pretty? What

kind of gold pieces did she choose for her wedding jewelry?”

By the end of the afternoon Aziza had begun to relax and

Hind produced a book from under a pile of papers on her desk.

It was a volume of modern Iraqi poetry and Hind chose some

of the love poems to read aloud. She read very well. Suddenly

she slammed the book shut.

“Read my fortune in the coffee cup, Aziza,” she said. “Tell

me when I shall marry.”

The next morning Hussein’s wife Sajjida came to see me.

Her oldest girl had been sick for a long time with cough, but

was better now. I went in the evening to Mohammed’s, where

Sherifa made lemon tea and we sat around the charcoal brazier

telling stories about the past. Sherifa had a two-week-old lamb

which she had bought to raise and sell in springtime. Bleating,

it tottered about the room on fragile legs until Sherifa

persuaded it to settle in her lap, where she fed it milk from an

old medicine bottle with a nipple. Afterward Sherifa and

Medina took down the lantern and walked me home. Soon,

however, we blew out the lantern, for a full moon rode high in

the wide, clear sky. Against that sky the palms were cut out

dark and clear, and the camel-thorn topping the walls became

a strange, intricate pattern of decorative filigree. Pale light

dappled the mud houses, and when we turned from the alley

toward my house the moon was reflected, like a watery

balloon, in the still waters of the canal.

That night I sat in my kitchen and wondered at the changes

in me. We were scheduled to leave El Nahra within a month,

and I found I was avoiding the thought. During the last year

and a half my life had slowly but surely become intertwined

with the lives of my women friends, and I was surprised at the

depth of my feelings.

When Bob came in from the mudhif, I told him. He looked

at me quizzically. “I feel the same way,” he said, “but I have

always thought, from the beginning, that our situation here

had much more to offer me than you. We have to go, though,

because I have lots of library research to do in Baghdad before

we leave for home in June.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“We could come back for the big feast in May, if you like,”

suggested Bob, “the Iid after Ramadan. Why don’t we? By

that time we’ll both be more accustomed to the idea of going,

and it’ll be easier to say our last goodbyes after we’ve been

away for a while.”

“That’s a fine idea,” The more we talked of it, the better we

felt, and by bedtime we were already planning the presents we

would bring back with us.

The truck had drawn up outside the gate and men were

carrying our bags and baskets and bundles out the door. The

little house was stripped almost clean, as bare as when we had

arrived more than a year and a half ago. In the kitchen in

lonely splendor sat the refrigerator, our hospitality present to

Sheik Hamid. The furniture he had lent us was still in the

living room, but the big wardrobe with the double mirror now

reposed in Mohammed’s house, our contribution to

Mohammed’s wedding savings. The stove and the plastic

chairs and the aluminum folding table were tied on top of the

truck. Children streamed in and out of the open garden and

Laila stood beside me holding a present, a two-kilo can of

rice, cleaned rice. I looked at the rice, trying to figure just

about how many hours of patient labor it had taken the girls to

pick out the straw and chaff and tiny particles of dirt. I said I

could not think of a nicer present.

Laila wiped her nose. “You won’t come back for the Iid,”

she said accusingly.

“Oh yes I will. Mr. Bob says we will and so we will.”

“No, you won’t.” She wiped her nose again and I held my

breath, afraid of what she or I might do next. At that moment

Sherifa arrived with another present, a can of sweets—her

mother’s specialty, made with milk and pistachio nuts.

“Well, if you do come for the Iid,” went on Laila

importantly, “you must stay at our house, not at Haji

Hamid’s.” She launched into a long account of the comforts of

her house as compared with that of Haji’s.

Sherifa and Laila and I checked the two rooms once more to

make certain nothing had been left behind. A pile of pumpkin-

seed husks in one corner of the living room was all that

remained of my party the night before. I had told Laila to

spread the word that Bob would be in the mudhif that last

evening and I would welcome any woman who might come. It

had been a gay party; we had consumed several kilos of

pumpkin seeds, five packages of cigarettes and countless

glasses of tea.

“Come on, B.J., the driver is waiting,” Bob called from the

gate. At the sound of his voice, Laila and Sherifa instinctively

covered their faces.

Mohammed came running up the path; he was coming to

Baghdad to work for us until June. His freshly pressed

kaffiyeh and his agal seemed set at exactly the right angle, but

being Mohammed, he could not resist adjusting them once

more.
“Yallah,”
he said. “Everything is now ready.”

There was no time for extensive farewells. I climbed up

beside Bob in the driver’s seat. We had hired an entire truck

and I saw that it was full not only with our possessions, but

with townspeople and tribesmen taking advantage of a free

ride to Baghdad. The sun was bright and the children ran after

us, shouting, as the truck turned the corner and swung out of

town along the gleaming canal.

PART VI

25

Back to Baghdad

We settled in Baghdad with a friend who was doing research

in Middle Eastern history. She had rented a
mushtamal
or