Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (15 page)

I said, “I didn’t like her. Does she have anything proving what she is saying is true? How was her husband arrested without her? How did she make it out of the airport if the group she belonged to was ordered to be arrested? Besides, what’s with the dark glasses and the leather jacket?”

He said, “Wait a minute! Hold your horses, are you a police officer?”

I said, “You had no right to take her to Mahmoud Rashid’s home because he’s a low-key guy who minds his own business, his being a leftist notwithstanding. I don’t think it is implausible that she is under surveillance from the Iraqi security. So why get the man involved?”

He said, “Putting her up for a week will not attract attention and I will personally monitor her movements.”

I said, “I have a special sense that sniffs out informers. Perhaps because during my college days many students were recruited by state security to monitor our activities. I became so good at it I could feel their presence behind my back.”

He said, “Look at you!”

She provoked me every time she came to the office. I asked myself, “Why am I so repulsed by her? Is it because of those theoretical discussions that she initiates and insists on her point of view in them without regard for the feelings of others? Is it because she has a complex, mysterious personality? How can she not be mysterious when she belongs to an underground party and has had all this experience at twenty-five or younger?” Dr. Ragya was appointed rather quickly to a general hospital on the outskirts of Baghdad. She moved out of Mahmoud Rashid’s house to a place closer to her job. She became a regular visitor at the office where she met Atef, Sawsan, Abd al-Rahim, and Suhayla and joined this group of young friends.

On one of her visits to the office she told me the story of her departure from Egypt. As she started talking my aversion to her began to dissipate gradually and I cautiously got closer to her. She said, “I fell in love with a colleague in college, but he didn’t finish school because of his constant running away from the police and being arrested several times. I finished school and we got married and I worked in a hospital during the day and in a private clinic in the evening and that was how I provided support for the family. We lived by ourselves sometimes in furnished apartments we rented and sometimes with the comrades. I terminated my pregnancy by abortion on the eve of my departure to Baghdad and Hashim divorced me so I’d be free if my situation changed in Baghdad or Beirut where a number of Egyptian leftists work in Lebanese newspapers or with the PLO. We debated where to go and I chose Baghdad.”

Ragya presented me with an incredible model of a young woman leading a communal life, moving among furnished apartments and marrying a student pursued by the police. I asked her in disbelief, “Where’s your family?”

She said, “My brother is a member of the same organization. You have no idea what a wonderful revolutionary my husband is and how much he loves Egypt.”

Ragya was quite specific in the way she presented the story of her life: an underground party, detention, escape, abortion, and divorce. I was shocked. I didn’t quite absorb the whole experience. I was quite touched by her abortion, so much so that I didn’t take my eye off her belly. But I still had some uneasiness about her. It was no longer suspicion of her being an informer, but it was uneasiness nonetheless. I was measuring her behavior by my own customary yardstick and not according to other criteria that might have been there but about which I knew nothing. I noticed the difference between Hilmi Amin’s assessment of her, and mine. He believed her the whole time and I believed her sometimes, until she did something that confused me. I noticed that she was developing a strong relationship with Anhar and I thought that was quite natural since they both were communists, and lonely, and came to the office in the evening.

I asked Hilmi Amin one day, “You’ve always said that there were attempts by Egyptian security to penetrate the bureau. Why couldn’t Ragya be the one that Egyptian security has sent to report the whole scene in Baghdad back to them. Especially now that she has gained easy access to everyone’s houses and knows the details of everybody’s lives.”

He said, “There’s nothing to fear and she is not a dangerous person. It is natural that Ragya does not feel comfortable with you and treats you in a gruff manner, because she looks upon you as a bourgeois young lady without any concern for public life, one who feels happy about her and her class’s achievements, especially as you are a champion athlete. She does not see in you the struggle for social justice. Young communists in Egypt have a long and hard story. They accuse us of dissolving the party for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s sake and they reject our cooperation with him. They place the responsibility for what happened these last few years on our shoulders.
She comes from a different world and does not see you for what you really are because she and her cohorts are too busy holding previous generations accountable. These young communists want to make a way for themselves in which the past is quite distinct from the present. They do not understand what you are doing in the public arena. So she considers you just a bourgeois woman.”

I said, “A rotten bourgeois woman, please.”

He laughed long and heartily.

I lost contact with most of my Baghdad friends. I didn’t meet them in Cairo or anywhere else and I don’t know where most of them have gone. Are they still in Baghdad or have they left? Maybe a question to the Central Bureau of Inspections and Quality Control would tell me where Abd al-Rahim Mansur and the rest of the group have gone. The atmosphere in Cairo is still uncomfortable for people like them. I know that some wives have taken their children back to Egypt. Sawsan called me and told me that Samia and her children had come back to Cairo and we met one time. Tomorrow I’ll call and find out. Maybe they have returned to Baghdad just as Titi did now that things are more quiet. None of them got involved in the war except Basyuni Abd al-Mu‘in.

I looked around. Some friends were busy talking among themselves. Others were busy reading. They all looked tired and some succumbed to intermittent, uncomfortable sleep, leaning on their suitcases. Boredom and weariness took over the departure lounge at the Amman airport, which was now full of passengers on their way to London. There were young English women and men with large backpacks. There were some Palestinians who looked welloff, and Jordanian Bedouin. I wanted to sleep. A beautiful little blonde girl was jumping around, leaving her father’s side, going to her brother sitting with his mother, then going back to her father, then her brother again. The boy was Yasir’s age when he came back with me to Baghdad after his health was restored.

I am an Arab soldier with my rifle in my hand

Defending my homeland against the evil aggressor

Bang, bang, bang

Boom, boom, boom.

We burst out laughing to see Yasir with Madu and Amani, son and daughter of Titi, holding short sticks as they ran around shouting “bang!” and “boom!”

Why worry at such an early age about soldiers or homeland? But it seemed they adapted the patriotic song to their purposes and found their own fun with it.

Yasir completely changed my life. Sometimes he would ask if he could come in from the back to my study while I was busy writing.

“Mama, I want to tell you that I love you.”

“Come in.”

I opened my arms and kissed him. “Why don’t you play a little bit with your gazelle Zuzu until I am done, then we’ll play together.”

“I want to sit with you here without speaking.”

“Take these papers and draw on them.”

“Mama!”

“Yasirrrr!”

I could feel his glances trying to follow my every movement while he, without raising his head, pretended to be engrossed in the paper in front of him. I smiled at his innocent little act of deception. I went back to writing my article, then raised my head after a short while. I found a wonderful smile all over his face, happy that our eyes had met.

“I drew a soldier, a rifle, and a dog.”

“Draw your beloved Zuzu, or draw a ship or a forest.”

When I felt him kicking in my tummy, I was the happiest woman in the world. I hoped the baby would be a girl. I picked the most beautiful features from our two families for her: my father’s eyes, Hatim’s nose, and my mother’s complexion.

Hatim, laughing, said, “She’ll have a potato on her face which she’ll get from Susu, and Imad’s crooked ear.”

I laughed. It would be a catastrophe if she took the smallest eyes in the family and the biggest nose. I’d call her Inji.

The early months were very hard. An ever-present sickness made it impossible for any food to stay in my stomach. This would last for three days in a row and then maybe relief would come with a piece of fruit which I’d eat and fall asleep. I kept losing weight and I turned into a frail ghost that loved to sleep. My Iraqi women neighbors kept trying to entice me with all sorts of food and dishes, but it was no use. They said it was happening because it was my first baby. My condition changed completely when we moved to the house in Dora. We had been visiting the family of one of Hatim’s colleagues at work, another engineer. He invited us to move to the upstairs apartment in the house where he lived. Hatim agreed after a long discussion, as he was averse to getting too cozy with acquaintances or neighbors. I pushed the idea because I wanted companionship.

On the first day Sabah noticed my constant vomiting and commented on my emaciation. The following day I was surprised when she knocked on my door as soon as the company car picked up Hatim and Shukri. She held in her hand a plate of fried hot green peppers covered with pieces of tomato. I asked her what it was and she said, “This is our breakfast: oven-hot bread, and food enough for a whale. Take an antiemetic.”

Behind her came her son Wa’il and her daughter Hanaa, and Fathiya, her husband’s niece, a fourteen-year-old girl. They opened the fridge, taking out different kinds of cheese and pickles, and began to wash lettuce and put oranges in front of us. We sat eating with a hearty appetite while laughing.

The morning sickness stopped. I had hot peppers in the morning with Sabah and the children. After breakfast we went to the market together to buy fresh food for the day, then came back to prepare it together. I stole a few minutes here and there to read before Hatim returned. I loved Sabah’s goodness and also her gruffness. But I was
sometimes shocked by her habits, which were different from mine. Before coming to Baghdad, she used to work in Egypt at the main office of the Sharqiya governorate in the city of Zaqaziq. She had married Shukri, her neighbor, and had a child. She had not yet gone back to work when her husband got a work contract in Baghdad. They decided to take Fathiya, who was taking care of the baby, with them to Baghdad. They were hoping that Sabah would find work in Baghdad, but she couldn’t even though she applied to all government departments and despite a promise from the company where her husband worked to get her a job. When they gave up on getting a job, they decided to have two more babies so that when they returned to Egypt, the child-rearing phases would be over.

Both Sabah and Shukri came from poor families that sent some, not all, of their children to school. The work opportunity in Baghdad fulfilled their lifelong dream: to make money. They had furnished a house and bought a Kelvinator refrigerator on the installment plan, thus outdoing their colleagues who had bought the more modest Ideal eight-foot fridges. From their first day in Baghdad they decided to save enough money to buy a plot of land on which to set up a fruit and vegetable refrigerated warehouse. They were actually able, within the first year, to save half the price. They bought the land, paying a down payment and taking a mortgage for the rest of the price. Thus their main concern in Iraq was to save money. They talked about nothing else and they cut down their cost of living to the minimum. I didn’t realize that Hatim and I, leading a normal life, were provoking them beyond words. Shukri usually deposited the bulk of his salary in the bank, keeping only their estimated expenses according to a very strict plan and budget that they never deviated from. Sabah brought eggplant and pepper for breakfast, replacing eggplant with potatoes when their price was lower. She also gave each of her two children an egg. On Fridays each member of the family also ate an egg, an event that Shukri celebrated, shouting as he came in from the garden, saying, “Eat eggs, a protein that you, sons-of-guns, or your forefathers, never dreamed of.”

Every Thursday she cooked one kilogram of mutton that she divided over two days. Sometimes she bought a chicken in the middle of the week. And when she and I discovered frozen fish in the Assyrian market nearby, she bought fish instead of the chicken. Such a celebration of food and what they bought or didn’t buy would have been dismissed as the pride felt and demonstrated by a poor family feeling that it had gone up in the world. But they did not keep it in the family, so to speak, but began to observe me closely. It started as a simple story, but then it quickly escalated. We would come back together from the market carrying bags of groceries. The children would come noisily through the garden gate and then take from my bags the fruit, cheese, and chocolate which I, laughing, gave to them. I noticed, however, angry glances in Sabah’s eyes. With time I discovered that those angry glances prevented them from touching her own bags. It became more pronounced and noticeable day after day. This was also accompanied by another phenomenon that was also growing: Sabah began to ask for things that she had seen me buying at the market. It started with meat and then extended to medications and personal care items that she would send Fathiya to borrow but never returned. Then I discovered that she was calculating our equal income from the factory and our unequal spending, as far as she could tell. After all, there were only two of us and five of them. This petty behavior began to bore me. Our stories about our life before we came to Baghdad showed her a kind of life she had not before heard existed. And even though I had completely accepted the fact that her life was different from mine, she did not accept that difference. Her reactions became more intrusive: a word here and a word there, seemingly unintended, and a ready refutation of any new piece of information I cared to give. Then she began to ask questions about my relationship with Hatim, brought about by our sitting close to each other in front of her. She would come up to my apartment at five in the morning, touching my wet hair and asking me with a smile, “Did you have a bath today?”