Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (23 page)

The idea of war has always seemed stupid to me, an idea whose price was not paid by soldiers alone but also those around them. Defending one’s land was one thing and getting into a useless fight for reasons of vanity and the like was something else. Judging from a lot of information that I had gathered during my work here before and from my personal experience, I was never convinced that war was inevitable. I say this despite knowing the fanatical attitudes on both sides of the Iraq–Iran divide. I have studied the history and witnessed the intermarriage among the various parties in the region, which only recently saw the creation of the state of Iraq. I’ve known about the antipathies between Persians and Arabs, Shia and Sunnis, the tangled elements of the history of Zoroastrian, Babylonian, Akkadian, and Assyrian civilizations and cultures. My travels all over Iraq, north and south, gave me the right to interpret events according to an intuitive sense that went beyond reason and data alone, and to see and analyze what was being said on a different scale. My journalist friends wanted to sum it all up, dismiss it really, in short and easy press reports: they wanted to advocate for their cause, ending the war, or whatever. I didn’t comment. I returned to my room filled with thoughts and feelings, my body weary and my spirit confused. I wanted to leave myself open to enjoying the show whose butterflies transported me to Ishtar’s heaven, but a persistent current of curiosity and desire was eating at my heart, pushing me to unravel the secret trove of Hilmi Amin and to know. I turned on the music, then emptied my bag on the bed. My hands trembled as I went through the papers. As I had expected, there were invitations to attend artists’ exhibitions. How I loved their posters. I called it the poster revolution, back then. There were invitations to plays; a panel discussion on Iran’s role in the region; a flier for a Syrian kebab restaurant; one for a store selling potato chips and various seeds and munchies; a letter from Tariq Mandur telling me he had settled in Suleimaniya, written on August 1st, 1980, a whole month before I returned to Egypt; a letter from the postal and telephone authority saying in reference to your previous letter, we regret that
we are unable to provide your office with a telephone at this time in view of the difficulty of extending lines in your area; a letter from Tante Fayza sent from Egypt a few days before her arrival in Baghdad. Hilmi did not receive that letter and she did not look for it. Perhaps Hilmi Amin deliberately did not give her the key.

Anhar’s Papers

I saw Anhar’s notebook in the middle of the papers. I examined it as I turned it over. Ustaz Hilmi Amin had given it to her as a gift and had given me one just like it that he had brought from Paris at my request. It was a notebook of natural-colored coarse paper, and its pages were fastened together by a twine thread knotted daintily at the bottom of the notebook. My daily work with paper made me fall in love with it in all its forms and shapes. I loved its primitiveness and the ancient scent that wafted from it because it was manually cut, forgoing the precision that has come to dominate our lives now. I opened the cardboard cover on which Anhar had affixed her first color photograph. It would have been better if she had placed a black and white picture of her to be more in line with the ancient feel of it. She wrote on the first page:

These are my days; if you disavow them, you disavow knowing me forever. I am doing this for the sake of my mother.

Anhar Khayun

These are private papers as I expected. I couldn’t have left them in the post office and I didn’t know if I had the right to read them. When did they arrive at the post office? Did Anhar leave them for Hilmi to read or did she keep them in her own drawer and he discovered them when she left? Has Tante Fayza laid hands on them after his passing? Did she read them? And why has she left them behind in the mailbox? Could Anhar have mailed them to him after she left? But Hilmi didn’t mention in his letters that he knew where Anhar was. I opened the first page and read:

My story begins many years before my birth in a dreamlike place, enveloped in a fog that hides houses, humans, and plants and makes events seem as if they’ve never happened. Water covers the whole area endlessly and mornings appear on the horizon veiled in dusk until the sun rises fully, wiping away the morning’s mystery and dew, giving the entities of that world a chance to reveal their features. Our houses appear in the midst of the water as if they were the nests of large birds made of bamboo sticks, tree branches, and palm tree fronds. Grass grows in our pathways in the water and it rises like tips of sturdy spears drawing the map of our world. We have constantly to control the growth of the grass and also feed our cattle and to make room for shallow-draft balam and mashuf vessels, as well as other kinds of boats and canoes, which are our only means of transportation. Our houses are little islands at the mercy of the waters, which, if they rise, could submerge the houses. But it seems that there is a covenant between us and the waters that makes it possible for both of us to live side by side: the water would not rise without giving us advance notice. We have learned to read the water’s ciphers from early childhood by using platforms or kibashas made from reeds and rushes to raise the houses above the water level.

My story resembles the place: mysterious and magical, treacherous and kind, simple and harsh and fatal. Yes, it can kill. Don’t wonder at that, for whoever does not respect the will of the marshes ends up losing everything, including their life. My story, which started before I was born, is the story of love and hate, ecstasy and blood and peace. I’ll go back a few years so that you’ll come to know all the contradictions that have shaped my life and which made me realize, when I saw you, that your coming into my life was not a coincidence as you imagined, because fate, which spun the black and white threads of my life like a spider’s web, would not have brought you into this world of mine for no reason. When we first met I thought of you as a savior and this was why I always came back to you whenever the circle pushed me out, since I had already been caught in that mad part of the web of life.

I was born to a mother from a large clan living in the midst of the marshes in one of the villages of Amara Province. Her family were peasants who owned several buffaloes and cows and did some hunting and fishing in addition to cultivating rice and some other crops on the bits of land scattered among the islands in the marshes. It is largely a poor society governed by strictly observed ageless customs and traditions but it is also a homogeneous, closely knit society. One morning the village woke up to news of the killing of Mahdi al-Khayun, a young man said to be one of the most handsome and manly youth of the clan, at the hands of his friend Abbas Khatir. The two had been rivals for the attention of a splendidly beautiful young lady, by the name of Khulud. And because Mahdi was the son of the chief of the Banu Asad clan, and a sayyid descended from the Prophet and his daughter Fatima, he thought he was more worthy of her and decided to marry her. He started writing poetry extolling her beauty and declaring his love for her and followed her everywhere she went. But he knew that he had to obtain the approval of his friend Abbas because he was her cousin and as such had a right to her hand. Mahdi also knew that Abbas loved Khulud and would not give up that right. Abbas had warned him more than once to stay away from her but it was no use. One day Abbas saw his friend and Khulud together so they fought and Mahdi, who was not yet twenty years old, was killed. His friend went to jail since it was deemed to have been a quarrel. But the story did not end there. The clans met and decided to marry off the brother of the slain man to the killer’s sister, as was the custom, so that she might give birth to a son who would take the slain man’s place. It was a custom that came about originally from a lofty idea and not out of a desire for revenge as it became with the passage of time, because it brought closer the two fighting families in a marriage producing a child who would then belong to the two families. Thus life would return to normal. According to custom, the head of the clan had the right to choose the killer’s sister. If the killer did not have a sister who was a virgin, he would then choose his
cousin, and the process would continue until it got to the youngest daughter in the whole clan. Neither the girl nor her family would have the right to refuse the arrangement.

Thus my mother, at the age of nine, was taken, crying and wailing, to the slain man’s family. She lived in their midst until she grew old enough and she married my father, Mahdi’s younger brother. According to custom, the marriage had to continue until the woman gave birth to a son, whereupon she would have the right to go back to her own family or to stay with her son. But if she gave birth to girls then she had to stay with the family until she had a boy. We call such a woman a fasliya, and the word is used as an example of the utmost humiliation and disgrace. Thus a woman who is oppressed or mistreated by her husband or his family might say, “Why are you doing this to me? You think I am a fasliya?”

My grandmother tormented my mother in every conceivable manner. She assigned to her all the hard work at home and outside. My mother suffered all the insults and she had no rights whatsoever to complain or return to her family. But all the hardships she endured made her the most skilled girl in the village in cooking, baking, cultivation, weaving, animal husbandry, and making dairy products. The days also revealed a splendidly beautiful young lady despite the hatred heaped upon her every day from the early morning by my grandmother, who spent the whole day bewailing her slain son, singing heart-rending elegies of her son, declaring a grief that would never end and a state of mourning with the color black covering everything.

And despite my grandmother’s attempts to strengthen the roots of hatred toward the little girl in her young son’s heart, my mother’s care of him as the only one close to her in the whole family won him over. So, when it was time for the two to get married, my mother’s femininity sprang into full bloom and she became a beautiful wildflower that all the young men of the village desired. Unfortunately, she looked like Khulud, her cousin who was the cause of Mahdi’s killing; all the more reason for my grandmother to hate her more
than before. My grandmother would shove her roughly whenever she passed by her and she would fall and get bruised and wounded all over. Some of those wounds left deep scars that stayed with her all her life.

My mother’s complexion was the color of red plums because of her work outdoors under the relentless rays of the sun. They made her wear a long black dress and covered her long hair under a large black turban with thin tassels, the usual garb for peasant women in that area. As children we would see her emerging out of the thick reeds and the morning fog on the mashuf as if she was the beautiful sunrise or one of the houris of paradise with her captivating beauty and her gentle spirit. As I remember those days I almost choke on my tears and I realize my father’s secret affection for her since he was afraid to show the slightest interest in her or feeling toward her in front of his family, who lived in the same house with us. What aggravated the situation even more was the fact that my mother had given birth to four girls and not a single boy that would have given her the right to go back to her family. She got pregnant every two years upon weaning her daughter. My grandmother kept pestering my father to take a new wife who could give him a son and to have my mother serve the new wife until my mother would also bear him a son and leave. But my father decided to apply for a job in Baghdad and take his little family away from the climate of hate in which he was living. When he got the job, my grandmother went to the family living next door and got him engaged to their daughter and got him married quickly. Then she pressured him to take his new wife with him to Baghdad, keeping us in her house. You can imagine what happened to us until my mother had our only brother. Two years afterward, my grandmother took the baby and kicked my mother out. I would see her in the morning and the evening furtively checking on us through the reeds, without us daring to speak to her. Then my grandmother fell sick as a result of long months of hard work that my mother used to perform. Then she became bedridden, unable to care for us. My mother appeared one
day in our courtyard in a scene that I’ll never forget, saying to my grandmother, “I don’t know any other mother besides you. You are my mother. Why are you shunning me?”

“What brought you here?”

“You. My children are cared for by their family. They are your children, I know, and I don’t fear for them but I cannot stay away from you. I want to serve you in your old age.”

“I will never forgive your brother.”

“Yes, you will. One day. For he too lost his youth.”

My grandmother screamed and kicked her out mercilessly, saying, “I will never forgive him no matter how long I live. And you will be deprived of your baby just as your brother deprived me of my son, the apple of my eye, Mahdi.”

My mother left in tears but she came back the following morning. She took the cattle to pasture, she cleaned the house and cooked, then left without talking to anyone. I remember that day very well as if it were yesterday. It was winter and the water had been rising as usual since January. My grandmother and my cousins were building kibashas under our house using reeds and papyrus. But in February when the water rose to unusually high levels, people of our village began to remove the reed crossings and the palm tree trunks that they used as bridges connecting the various islands. By the middle of the following month, the waters had risen even further, submerging many of the low-lying islands. Neighbors began deserting their homes. I’d look at my grandmother’s eyes and see fear but also pride. I wanted to tell her, “Why don’t we call my mother?” Then I’d refrain when I heard her crying in the night, weeping over Mahdi as if he had died only yesterday. My mother kept coming and going and I could hear her footsteps outside reinforcing the foundations, and when the next morning came we would know that we had been saved one more day. Did my grandmother know that my mother was doing that? The question perplexed me. If she did know, why didn’t she invite her to come in? And then we’d all help her. Many of our clan were unable to continue living on their islands after the
water kept rising all the time. They abandoned their houses and were taken in by other families until the water would recede. They all remembered the big flood in which the stores in the market, government offices, the school, and the brick homes built on the riverbanks all went underwater.