Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (18 page)

Hilmi Amin told a joke: “Haridi came back to his village in southern Egypt, having obtained a doctorate in logic. The village had a celebration for him and his cousin Hasanayn asked him, ‘What’s that logic you keep talking about?’ Haridi said, ‘Are you married?’ Hasanayn said, ‘Yes.’ Haridi said, ‘From a big family?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ Haridi said, ‘And of course your wife is a virtuous lady?’ Hasanayn said, ‘Yes.’ Haridi said, ‘And you have a dog that your wife takes care of?’ Hasanayn said, ‘Yes.’ Haridi said, ‘That is logic.’ Hasanayn left and on his way met his friend Awadayn. So he asked him, ‘Did you, Hasanayn, understand this logic that Haridi is talking about?’ Hasanayn said, ‘Are you married?’ Awadayn said, ‘Yes.’ Hasanayn said, ‘Do you have a dog?’ Awadayn said, ‘No.’ Hasanayn said, ‘Then your wife is a whore!’”

Hamid said, “Aman passed by a kaka (a Kurdish man) sitting in front of a river and asked him, ‘Can I cross the river on foot because I don’t know how to swim?’ The kaka said, ‘Yes, cross it.’ The man went into the river and after a few steps, his foot slipped and he struggled with difficulty to avoid drowning. He came back to the
riverbank and asked the kaka, ‘Haven’t I asked you if the water was deep?’ The kaka rolled his fingers into a ball and said, ‘A duckling no bigger than this has just crossed here.’”

Hilmi said, “There was a man who, whenever he passed the corner near his house, saw a fat, black woman praying ‘May God bless you my son, Khaisha, and may you become president of the republic.’ Some time passed, then once he saw her at the same spot watching the president’s motorcade in silence. He asked her, ‘Why have you stopped praying for your son?’ She laughed and said, ‘Here’s my son, right in front of you. May your turn be next.’”

We all laughed and Mervat, Rasha, and I went back to mimicking comic situations and punch lines from popular radio shows. The car proceeded, running away from unknown ghosts that might materialize before us at any moment, until we arrived at Erbil and went noisily into the hotel, paying no attention to the silence that enveloped the sleeping city. As I was getting out of the car I noticed a machine gun under the front seat. I couldn’t believe that we had been sitting on top of our only means of protection the whole time without being aware of it. Of course it would have been impossible to use that machine gun had we been actually attacked. One bullet to the driver would have toppled the car deep down into the wadis at the bottom of the mountains.

We slept soundly and had a long rest the following day. Hamid came in the evening to accompany us, together with Jamal and Sulafa, to the village of Ayn Gawa, a suburb of Erbil. We walked in its clean streets, then went inside the house of one of the local musicians to drink tea. I found out that there was not a single illiterate person in the village. I took some pictures and wrote an article that I sent to
al-Zahra
magazine with the title “Little Paris in Northern Iraq.” These were the happiest days in my life. I felt I was growing up and developing as a journalist.

I never forgot that trip, nor the tension I felt there. And here I was, coming back to Iraq, which was in a real state of war this
time. A war with armies, tanks, planes, and rockets blowing up towns along the twelve-hundred-kilometer borders. Between that war and the ethnic conflicts with the Kurds and the religious conflicts between Sunnis and Shia, Iraq has had its share of problems. As for us and our simple capabilities, we keep looking for our relatives and friends, wondering about their disappearances: Where are you, Anhar, Basyuni, Tariq, Suhayla, Fathallah, and Ragya?

The Iraqi stewardess rolled the food cart as Muhammad Abd al-Wahab sang:

“This is one Arab people / United on one tumultuous path toward renaissance.”

Noha said, “Why am I so hungry? Didn’t we eat cookies and chocolates at the Amman airport?”

Kamilia said, “What else have you eaten all day long? That doesn’t count.”

I said, “Bon appetit! What kind of trip is this, without singing?” I began to draw on my memory of school trip songs and started singing. Mona, sitting behind me, belted out a folkloric song that all the passengers listened to, laughing boisterously.

Then there was silence in which the only sound heard was that of eating implements. I raised my head and turned it to the right and the left languorously. The stewardess came back saying, “Tea”; another came saying, “Coffee.” I took some tea and asked for a little glass, the way they served tea in Iraq.

I remembered the samovar that we bought for the
al-Zahra
office and placed in the reception area as if it were a piece of art. We seldom used it to make tea: only during parties. We used an Aladdin heater in the winter and we placed a large kettle on it to boil water for the tea and to add some humidity. I extended my foot lazily as Noha got into a conversation with Kamilia.

I felt sleepy and my body began to succumb, but my memory took me back to my early days in Iraq, during the years of success and prosperity, before the change in direction.

*

I couldn’t keep up with the festivals and cultural events in Baghdad. As soon as I was done covering one conference, I’d begin on another. Hilmi Amin decided to distribute the material that we had generated, written, and produced to Iraqi newspapers and magazines. We signed a contract with the cultural supplement of the
al-Jumhuriya
newspaper,
Alif Baa
and
Funun
magazines.

At the opening of the Palestinian Cinema Festival the scope went beyond Arab cinema to covering political art that celebrated the struggles of peoples of the world. Artists from all over the world were invited. Among them was the world-famous actress Vanessa Redgrave, who believed in the right of the Palestinian people to return to their homeland.

I went to interview her at the Dar al-Salam hotel. She had on a simple and light muslin dress, and a pair of sensible shoes. She had no makeup on. I looked closely at the color of her eyes, which were a pale hue between green and gray. Her gaze was piercing, steady, and very focused. She sat answering my questions in a simple manner and did not ask me any questions, as other celebrities usually did after I finished my questions and after the formal interview was over. She thanked me and got up to go to another appointment. I ran to the office carrying the first international interview of my life. My life? I had just begun.

When I submitted the written-up interview to Hilmi Amin, he wrote the introduction himself, discarding my introduction. In it he said that the value of an artist is not in his art or his artistic choices only, but in the cause he believes in and fights for. I liked his introduction better. Several years have passed since that interview, during which I have met many famous artists, men and women of letters and thinkers, but I have never forgotten this impressive woman who had respect for her ideals and art and who stood by another people’s cause.

We got busy once again working on the book we were writing on the Kurds. We finished our fieldwork, listening to the views of
representatives of all Kurdish political parties about the current autonomy and what they wanted to accomplish. We also gathered the historical material and settled on the information we would use. We decided to review our conclusions after we got it all organized. Based on all the information we had, we inferred that the experiment, as presently constituted and implemented, was impossible to sustain. Hilmi Amin asked for an appointment with the information official in charge of the joint book project with the bureau. He went alone, without me, to the appointment. When he came back he said, “They hid from me the fact that Mustafa Tiba had written a book on the Kurdish question and autonomy and that the ministry had rejected our book. This saddened me greatly: we reached the same conclusions that Mustafa had reached. I am certain of it without having to go and ask him. I discussed with them much of the information that the book would contain and analyze and presented my view of it. They got very upset and tried to convince me to drop certain data, but I refused and decided to abort the project. We will begin with your book about the peasants as the first fruit of the collaboration between
al-Zahra
bureau and the Iraqi Ministry of Information.”

I said, my eyes filling with tears, “All this effort for nothing?”

He swallowed hard and lit a cigarette, then said, “Nothing was lost. In culture and in politics there’s no such thing as a wasted effort. We’ve learned from the material that we’ve compiled; we got to know the Kurdish region better and learned much about the inner workings of the Iraqi government as it faced the Kurdish problem. We’ve also gained contacts and friendships with the Kurds. These are experiences and information we could never have gotten without our work on the book. Right?”

My eyelids got heavy. The plane turned into a spaceship. The passengers rolled around in the air while I sat in my seat. I was seeing my body parts separating from me. My forearm was at the ceiling, my leg by the door. My head spun around and came back to me upside down.
My eyes were focusing on my face. I was astonished. I couldn’t find my fingers to close my eyes. My head smiled at me. Anxiety was gone. I asked my head about Anhar Khayun. Aunt Fatma, her mother, was coming toward me wearing a blue dress the color of the sky and the sea. She was dancing like a ballerina atop a marsh boat at an equal distance between the ceiling and the floor. Hilmi Amin came to dance with her. I asked him, “Who said there’s no land for tomorrow?” Hatim appeared and carried me off the plane seat and twirled me around. He changed the music to a tango. I was full of lust. Many eyes got loose and ran away in the middle of the aisle. Eyes. Eyes. I looked for Yasir. Hatim said he was in the forest with his gazelle, Zuzu. Rajaa, Ilham, and Sajida stood up, crying. Amal al-Sharqi ran away. Suhayla Bezirgan got onto a horse that went up the mountain, then flew away. Abu Lu’ay, Anhar’s boss, opened his mouth guffawing. He extended his hand to me and I shied away. My neighbor, Abu Samira, patted me on the hand and Abu Dalaf gave me a car going to Cairo. Ragya wound a lot of gauze around her head. Haytham held an automatic rifle and stood on the roof of our house in the Shurta district with Jasir, his friend from next door, and Subayha was shouting in the air in celebration of the Iraqi soccer team winning the Young Men of Asia Cup. Umm Ali, Bayyati’s wife, sang, “Keep your weapon awake / If the whole world fell asleep, I’ll stay awake with my weapon.”

Saadi Yusuf gave me a red anemone and said, “Goodbye.” The theatre director Jawad al-Assadi took it from me, saying, “The Elephant, O King of Time.” Basyuni Abd al-Mu‘in came in at the age of five wearing a pair of shorts, holding a basket of toys and a slate board and chalk. He gave them to me and said, “I am grown up now.” Muhammad Abd al-Wahab took the microphone and sang:

This is one Arab people

United on one tumultuous path

Toward renaissance

Who better than us knows the right path, righteousness, dignity of soul, and well-kept pledges?

I smelled fermented dates, cardamom, and cracked wheat boiling on stoves in huge stock pots outside the homes in Ayn Gawa. An anguished woman appeared, standing on the wooden radio shelf in our house in Zamalek in Cairo, asking, “I wonder where you are, Manzuq?” I told her, “At the Farabi Bar.” A storm started from the cockpit, sweeping away everyone on the plane. Tied red sacks got up from the plane seats and moved with difficulty toward the aisles. My head got away from the tip of the sack and looked at me in panic. In place of the eyes were black cavities where bees buzzed. Another sack struggled to stand on its feet. It removed the cover. It opened its mouth for the bees to get out. All the heads were getting away and turning into dark mouths and eyes which filled the flying sacks and the bees covered the sky. My head hanging upside down in front of my face said, “You’re dreaming, Nora.” I said, “I know.” It said, “How are you?” in the Iraqi dialect. “Wake up. We are landing, landing, landing.” I said in the Iraqi dialect, “Good. Good.” Kamilia said, “Welcome back. You caught some sleep.”

The Iraqi stewardess announced that we’d arrived in Baghdad safely. It was midnight. The temperature outside was four degrees Celsius and it was raining heavily. She asked us to be quiet and not to move. I looked out the window: a total blackout. I remembered Cairo in 1967, with the glass windows all covered in blue. The plane landed using faint lights as markers on the runway. The wheels stopped and total silence enveloped the plane inside and out. The stewardess was still gesturing to us to be quiet. We were filled with cautious anticipation, realizing that we were really in a state of war. For one reason or another, the passengers stopped talking. I recalled the image of the airport that I knew: a constant buzzing sound and everybody coming and going noisily, with optimistic faces. I felt tired. I let my head fall back and gave in.

Three Other Knocks

November 1976

Explosion

There was an explosion today at Baghdad airport that caused a great number of casualties in the terminal. The shattered glass was responsible for the bulk of the injuries among passengers and their families. The casualties included over two hundred Egyptians wounded as the explosion took place at the time of the arrival of an Egypt Air flight from Cairo. The wounded were taken to the airport hospital. The number of those killed was seventy persons and ten of the wounded were in critical condition.

I stood motionless in front of the television screen until the news was finished. It was 9:00 p.m., Hatim was getting ready to go to bed. Our day was coming to an end. “What are you going to do?”

I said, “I’ll go right away, of course.”

“I’ll come with you.”

I said, “Of course not. You have work tomorrow and I don’t know whether I’ll work all night or not. I’ll call the Iraqi News Agency first to know which hospital they’ve taken the wounded to, then I’ll leave a message for Hilmi Amin.”

He said, “Nora, I’ll go with you to the hospital where the picture will be clearer. Then I’ll leave you.”

I said, “No problem.”

We went to the emergency room. We found dozens of wounded suffering from severe burns. All the beds in surgery and internal medicine were taken. The other wounded were scattered on seats in the corridors where visitors were not allowed because of overcrowding. I sat in the midst of the wounded asking them what happened. They all told the same story: a few minutes after the arrival of the Egyptian plane, while everyone was waiting at the baggage claim area, a bomb exploded right where the bags were, instantly killing all those nearby, mainly airport workers. And because of the new airport’s modern design, with lots of glass and metal pipes, the explosion carried a lot of flying glass that injured people inside as well as dozens of meters outside. This was what considerably raised the number of casualties.