Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (48 page)

Nour probably never been in a restaurant like the Auberge

before, but also that this was one of the few times he had eaten

with his father and perhaps the first time he had eaten with

any woman, much less a Westerner, since he had been a child

at his mother’s side. His father confirmed this in the next

moment.

“It’s time Nour learned some foreign ways,” said Sheik

Hamid, “well enough to get along, anyway, don’t you think?”

Nour smiled dutifully. “Yes, Father,” he said, although he

could hardly have felt more at ease by having his lack of

experience pointed out to us.

Being with his father, Nour was duty-bound to be silent

except when spoken to, a duty which he fulfilled that evening

to the letter. But he seemed totally bewildered by the food and

table service and kept glancing at Bob to see what was to be

done with the array of spoons, forks and knives arranged in an

unknown pattern around his plate. I kept comparatively quiet

myself, Bob volunteered a few jokes and Haji responded with

some of his own.

The dinner passed in relative calm and we were relaxing

over coffee when the trio finished and a large dance band

came on. As we ate, more and more people had slowly been

filtering into the Auberge and now many of the small tables

around the dance floor were occupied. When the band started

off, brassy and loud, a few couples ventured out to dance, in

rapid succession, a rhumba, a waltz and a slow fox trot. A

Charleston retired most of the dancers, but three active

couples remained and Haji laughed uproariously at their

antics.

“You see,” he pointed out to Nour, “that’s the sort of

woman you find in Lebanese night clubs. You can always tell

a woman of that type by the kind of clothes she wears.” He

glanced briefly at me, and then jerked his head in the general

direction of the dance floor.

Nour followed his father’s gaze and his eyes widened. I,

too, followed Haji’s eye, from my own reasonably

conservative dress (high neck, three-quarter sleeves) to the

décolleté cocktail dresses on the dance floor. And suddenly

seeing through the eyes of Sheik Haji Hamid the couples

gyrating frenziedly around, the women in tightly fitted low-cut

dresses kicking and twisting in time to the music, I was

embarrassed for my countrywomen. I was embarrassed partly

because they appeared ridiculous and partly because of what I

knew the sheik was thinking of them.

We could never have explained to Sheik Hamid that the

majority of those lightly clad, madly pivoting women on the

dance floor were respectable married women dancing with

their husbands, or proper embassy secretaries out on a date.

He simply would not have believed us. Just how firmly fixed

his ideas were we learned by his attitude toward us in relation

to the activity on the dance floor. It did not occur to him that

we might want to dance, or that Bob and I were ever

participants in merrymaking of this sort. He talked to Bob and

Nour in confiding tones, as though he were an old roué

introducing his sons to the fleshpots of Monte Carlo.

I suppose I was flattered, for I had apparently shown, by my

restrained conduct in El Nahra, that all Western women were

not, per se, wanton, but I had done this by generally observing

Hamid’s own customs toward women. How many years

would it have taken, I wondered, to convince Sheik Hamid

that I was a respectable woman if I had not worn the abayah in

El Nahra, if I had sat with the men in the mudhif, ridden

horseback in blue jeans and wandered through the suq and the

village as I pleased? How many years would it take, I

wondered, before the two worlds began to understand each

other’s attitudes towards women? For the West, too, had a

blind spot in this area. I could tell my friends in America again

and again that the veiling and seclusion of Eastern women did

not mean necessarily that they were forced against their will to

live lives of submission and near-serfdom. I could tell Haji

again and again that the low-cut gowns and brandished

freedom of Western women did not necessarily mean that

these women were promiscuous and cared nothing for home

and family. Neither would have understood, for each group, in

its turn, was bound by custom and background to misinterpret

appearances in its own way.

At this moment Haji Hamid leaned over and nudged Bob,

indicating a particularly curvaceous blonde in black who was

being whirled around by a young Iraqi somewhat shorter than

herself.

“There,” he said, “look at that.” From his tone, he might as

well have said, “Look at that tart and her client.”

To my horror I recognized a girl Bob and I both knew well.

Her partner was also an acquaintance of ours.

The gulf that divided us from Haji Hamid never seemed

greater to me than at the moment when I realized that we

could not introduce him to our friend. He had already made up

his mind about her, and the fact that we knew her would

detract from our reputation, not improve hers.

The sheik must have caught a hint of my consternation,

although I tried very hard to act as though nothing had

happened. Yet I was terrified that the girl would come over, to

confront us, as it were, with the absurdity of our position.

Perhaps I could do what such a situation demanded, but I was

not sure; I was afraid that our evening would be ruined and

something else indefinable spoiled forever.

“I think your wife is tired, Bob,” said Haji. He consulted his

gold wrist watch. “We should go home.”

Home we went, avoiding the dance floor on the way to the

door. We were not noticed. The Oldsmobile delivered us to

our mushtamal, where with many thanks and a great sense of

relief we bade Haji Hamid and Nour good night.

We talked until very late that night. The dinner party had

dramatized, a little more effectively than we might have

wished, the difference between the sheik’s world and ours. It

had also made us realize that our presence in El Nahra had

done little to resolve those differences. We admitted to each

other that we had both had somewhat irrational and idealistic

notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one

set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had

not basically changed anyone’s attitude, except perhaps our

own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal

ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have

hoped for, and perhaps it was enough.

26

Leave-taking

We were on pilgrimage ourselves, back to El Nahra to

celebrate the feast with our friends. Instead of the knocking

train, we had allowed ourselves the luxury of a taxi ride from

Baghdad, and the car sped through a countryside that was

shorn and green, for the harvest was nearly finished. In a few

fields we passed, clouds of chaff still rose into the air from the

threshing circles, where the fellahin led their strings of

donkeys around and around to trample the wheat and the

barley. We knew that the harvest was finished in the area

around El Nahra, because Nour had written Bob that the

annual division of grain between Sheik Hamid and his

sharecroppers had already taken place. The yield had been

good this year. It was May 1958. In Baghdad, pundits declared

the undercurrents of revolution stemmed by the news from the

countryside. In a good year, revolution was less likely. But we

did not think much about revolution that late spring morning.

After three months of hard paper work in Baghdad, the

prospect of a holiday with the tribe in the peace of El Nahra

was very inviting.

The problem of accommodations had been neatly solved,

and what I had feared would become a quarrel between Selma

and Laila did not even develop. Laila wrote to say that since

we were guests of the tribe, it was only right that we stay with

Sheik Hamid and his family. She and her sisters would expect

me for lunch. Bob would sleep in the mudhif and I was to be

housed in the harem—but where, I wondered? The apartments

of Bahiga and Kulthum were too small, and they could not put

me in Selma’s own rooms because that was where Haji slept.

“Are you looking forward to going back?” asked Bob.

“Of course.” I spoke more sharply than I intended and he

looked down at me.

“You don’t have to be so snappish,” he said. “I just

wondered how you felt. After three months of city living, it’ll

be quite a change. You haven’t forgotten how scared you were

when we came down the first time, have you? I was really

worried about you.”

“No, I haven’t forgotten.” But it seems so long ago, I

thought, when I was somebody else and hardly knew Bob. I

looked back at my old self patronizingly, mentally patting that

frightened bride on the head. Poor thing. She certainly had

been worried and unsure of herself. I could still recall vividly

my overpowering embarrassment as I had sat without abayah

in the Diwaniya station and people had pointed at me. The

frustration of not being able to understand what was said to

me. That circle of unfriendly women in Selma’s quarters,

whispering behind their abayahs and giggling—at me? Sheik

Hamza goggling. Sheddir spitting out my good bread on the

floor. And the chastening realization that the women had

pitied me. Pitied
me
, college-educated, adequately dressed

and, fed, free to vote and to travel, happily married to a

husband of my own choice who was also a friend and

companion. The idea of a husband as friend had never

occurred to my friends in El Nahra, and as for the rest, none of

it meant much beside the facts.

“Poor girl,” Kulthum had said, summing it all up. No

mother, no children, no long hair, thin as a rail, can’t cook

rice, and not even any gold! What a sad specimen I must have

seemed to them. I smiled again at my image. What kind of

charity combined with compassion had persuaded them to

take me in?

Bob spoke again. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“Only that the first trip seems ages ago,” I answered. “It

seems quite natural to be going back. I’ve missed my friends.”

Bob put his arm around me. “I feel the same way,” he said.

By the time we reached Diwaniya, the wind had come up

and the clear sky was darkened by a fine cloud of rolling dust

and sand. A strange brown pall hung over the countryside.

Shopkeepers in Diwaniya were slamming down their metal

shutters and animals were being herded home through the

streets, ominous signs that this would be a big storm.

“What a shame,” said Bob, echoing my own thoughts. “The

feast will be ruined.”

We transferred to another taxi and for the last time headed

out across the plain to El Nahra. The shrine of Abu Fadhil was

shrouded in a mist of dust, and the horizon was gradually

disappearing as the wind strengthened and raised more and

more sand. In an hour, when we neared El Nahra, the clump of

palms at the edge of the village was only a vague dark mass in

the moving swirling clouds of dust. We drove down the main

street just in time to see the fluorescent lights turned on,

although it was scarcely four o’clock in the afternoon. The

canal was murky in the dulled light. Few people were out by

the time we turned the last corner and passed the wooden gate

in our wall, locked and double-locked against intruders, I saw

in sorrow. We were deposited in front of the mudhif; here

sand beat against the taxi like fine hail and behind the huge

arch of the mudhif the shadowy palms were tossing back and

forth on slender trunks.

“We’re going to get the full blast of the storm here,” said

Bob. “The wind has a clear field all the way across from the

desert. I hope it lets up soon. Oh look, there’s Nour coming

down from the mudhif. I’d better go.”

“Have a good time,” added Bob, and he was gone, running

back with Nour to the shelter of the mudhif.

Ali, the old gardener, helped me out of the taxi and for the

first time the full force of the wind hit me, whipping my

abayah around my legs and flinging sand into my face. I

pulled my abayah close for protection, Mohammed took my

bag and I was ushered into the compound.

“She’s come!” shouted a figure, whom I recognized in the

dimness as Amina. She dashed forward. “Beeja is here!” she

called.

“Ahlan wusahlan,”
said a voice. Samira, I thought.

“Ahlan, ahlan,”
another called. Bahiga.

“Beeja,” cried Laila and took both my hands. She stood off

and looked me over quizzically. “You came back.”

“Of course I came back,” I said, trying to be matter-of-fact

and smiling at that sharp sidelong look of Laila’s.

Fatima shook my hand. “We told you, Laila,” she chided.

Kulthum’s voice was heard scolding. “What are you

standing out there in the wind for? Can’t you see that Beeja