Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (37 page)

Dahlia complained about her work at the hotel and decided to apply to the Ministry of Education, so she would have a long vacation. She went to the Ministry to apply on the same day that she found out that she got approved for appointment in the Ministry of Health, pending submission of the rest of her papers. I noticed that soon thereafter she stopped following up on her application. That brought all my previous questions back to my mind, especially when I found out that she deliberately made a habit of coming to the office after I left and before Anhar arrived. I decided to talk with her in the hope of changing my mind as I did, to a certain degree, with Ragya.

I was patient as I listened to her obstinate views and did my utmost to understand. I discovered that her way of thinking was a bundle of contradictions. And even though she was a member of a small communist party, as I found out by chance, I heard her say,
“The poor and the working class in general are the most corrupt of the social classes, even more than the aristocracy.”

I came to the conclusion that she was just a lost woman, one who fit the stereotype of a devil-may-care woman I met in the real world, not in books or movies. It didn’t occur to me at that time that her coming to Baghdad may not have been because of political reasons or to look for a cushy and lucrative job. It could have been to run away from a failed love story or some other reason that I couldn’t think of.

We got involved in a discussion about a presentation given by the president of the Moroccan Women’s Union and we left the conference hall still talking about the subject. We made our way to the restaurant. I sat with Rajaa, Ilham, and Sajida from
al-Mar’a
magazine for the first time since the conference began. We began to reminisce about our friendship and laughed quite heartily.

On my way to my room, I met Dahlia, who said, “I can’t believe it! Nora Suleiman? Long time no see!”

I said, “Hello, Dahlia. So, you still live here? I didn’t expect you to stay after the war.”

She said, “Where would I go? Did you see Ragya in Egypt?”

“Yes, once. By chance.”

She said, “Tonight let’s go together to the theater. When you come back from Basra, I’ll have a party for all of you in my house. I hope you can come.”

I said, “God willing. Pardon me, I have an important errand.”

I ran to my room and finished all I wanted to do quickly. The taxi took me through the streets that I knew by heart. Then it stopped at a traffic light before the Iraqi Museum, which I loved very much and where, sometime in the past, I had discovered an Assyrian mural of two kings, one of whom had the features of Gamal Abdel Nasser while the other looked like Umm Kulthum. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to visit it this time. I kept watching the people through the taxi window and windshield: men wearing very baggy pants, tied
with belts at the waist and round turbans, men wearing the latest fashion in suits, women with loudly dyed hair and very pronounced makeup in spite of the war, black abayas side by side with miniskirts, a mix of different ethnicities alerting me to aesthetic diversity. With time I had been able to identify the features with their ethnic groups. I could also tell from their body language at a distance and also when they spoke, because dialects here were very distinct.

In Allawi Square we passed a mosque whose architectural design I loved because of its flowing lines. I followed with my eyes the simple mix of turquoise and white in its minaret. I remembered the golden domes that dazzled me when I saw them for the first time. I asked myself, “How have things changed so quickly and in such a cruel manner?” It was the stupidity of war. I was not convinced by all the justifications that I heard for it. The road turned. I saw Zawra, at one time housing English army barracks, and now turned into a beautiful park with many swimming pools, amusement spots, and small motels and restaurants from which you could smell the aromas of fresh samun bread and hamburgers. In it you could find small shops selling salted yogurt drinks, black grape and orange juice, and you could hear in its pathways, as you would in many Baghdad streets, people hawking chilled water and cold yogurt drinks.

I remembered the mid-afternoons that I lived in the park as I pushed Yasir to play and ran behind him on winter days, or during the evening in Baghdad’s hot summer. I also remembered my picnics with Hilmi Amin’s family, my long reading spells under the trees to escape being disturbed by the intrusion of Sabah, my neighbor, and her family. I wondered whether they were still so sociable or whether the war had changed their ways.

The road turned toward Dora. We passed the neighborhoods of Bayyaa and Sayyidiya and came to the intersection. I told the driver to turn left on the next street.

I saw Abu Samira’s grocery store. The man had passed away several years ago while Umm Samira lived by herself waiting for the return of Samira, her goddaughter who was also her niece. Samira had gone to
study in Spain and married one of her colleagues there. The store was kept open and run by a family member. I wondered whether Umm Samira was still there or had passed away during the two years that I had been away from Baghdad. I asked the young man minding the store about her and he told me that she was at home.

I ran toward her. She embraced me and showered me with the kindness I was used to all the time we were neighbors. She tried to open the door of the salon so I could come in. I said, “I am not a guest. I’ll come in through the kitchen door.”

I took off my shoes and went into the living room and sat near her on foam rubber cushions on the mat.

She said, “Where have you been all this time? How are Yasir and Abu Yasir?”

I said, “Now I also have Haytham. Where is Samira? And how is her husband?”

She said, “They are well, thank God. Samira had twins and she is almost done with her studies. They will come next year, God willing, to buy a house here and live near us.”

She got up to pour tea for me. I remembered that Iraqis would give a niece to a couple who did not have children of their own; the couple would use her name as if she were their own child and they would be responsible for her throughout their lives. This would give them happiness and would give the girl a different kind of life, more comfortable in most cases. Umm Samira tried to make me stay, but I apologized because of my tight schedule. She came with me to my old house. We knocked on the door of Abu Dalaf’s house and that of his brother, Jamal. The women and girls of the family came out to welcome me. The men were either still at work or in the army. Umm Jamal used to take my son Yasir from the nursery school bus before I came back from work and feed him with her children and let him sleep in their midst until either Hatim or I came home.

Umm Dalaf said, “Abu Dalaf will never forgive you if you don’t stop to see him before you go back to Cairo. You should at least go to his office.”

I said, “I will try after I come back from Basra, even if I change my departure date.”

News of my arrival spread through the houses on the street. My women neighbors, Umm Tayih and her daughters, Salma and Khuloud, Umm Sulafa, Umm Mahmoud, and Umm Jamal came, and they walked with me to my house. I noticed some changes in the wall of the house adjacent to it. My house occupied the corner lot. Its side door opened to a giant mulberry tree and a big garden. It had a grapevine trellis and its owners had planted tall trees around it to shield the inhabitants from the neighbors. The mulberry tree was now over eighty years old. A large Sabian family of gold merchants lived in that house until the children got married and left to live in several separate houses in modern parts of Baghdad. Old trees in the garden gave the place a sense of deep-rootedness and reminded me of the Egyptian countryside. We had been living in the Shurta neighborhood when an Egyptian engineer, one of Hatim’s colleagues, invited us to visit him and he offered us the upper floor. He said that the villa was too large for his family since it had thirteen rooms, not counting the rooms on the roof. We agreed and moved there after a while. When he returned to Egypt, we had the whole place to ourselves. And that was how the second floor got to be rented by another family: Engineer Mahmoud Isam and his wife Titi. I remembered Sabah and Shukry. My eyes welled with tears when I heard Titi say, “You brought light to Baghdad!”

I said, “Where are Madu and Amina? Yasir sends a million greetings to them.”

She said, “At a birthday party for my friend Hizam’s son. You know her, don’t you?”

I entered my house in the midst of a boisterous crowd. Everyone was asking about Yasir and commenting on the new baby whom they hadn’t seen yet and news of Egypt and Egyptian actresses. I asked Titi about the house and what happened to it. She said, “The rocket destroyed some of the walls on the second floor and broke
the glass of the windows and burned some trees. But we’ve made the repairs with the landlord’s help.”

I said, “They must have written ‘Nora Suleiman’ when they were making the rocket, because the only one who could have been there by chance during the day was me. You all have to go to work in the early morning and I am the only one who sometimes stayed home during the day.”

Titi said, “The wicked live long!”

Umm Tayih said, “Abu Tariq’s son died and all the women of the street were hit by shrapnel. Abu Mahmoud al-Qarasholi’s house collapsed and Abu Nidal’s house was hit.”

They listed off the names of martyrs. “Do you know the Abu Sami family? Three of them died, and from the Abu Omar family, his only son and his daughter’s husband. From the Abu Rashid family, the husbands of the daughters were killed.”

We climbed the staircase inside to the upper floor. I stood in the living room now empty of all the things I remembered. I saw a large hole between the wall of the living room and the winter bedroom that was repaired with cement but not yet painted. I went into the large living room that opened to the front balcony, my favorite spot during the summer, overlooking the railroad tracks. There was a new concrete wall and visible repairs to the ceiling. The unmistakable reminders of war were overwhelming. I didn’t find the grapevine that I looked after for a long time and that extended its branches to the kitchen window, then found its way to the roof. I remembered its leaves that I used to pick to make the fresh dish of stuffed vine leaves. I never cut one leaf that I didn’t use. I looked at the roots of the vine and saw that its wooden stalks were intact. I said to Titi, “I think it started to green after the bombing.”

She said, “How did you know?”

I said, “I raised it. The roots are healthy but it needs a lot of care. You have no idea how much a plant adapts in order to live.”

She said, “It won’t find someone to talk to it as you did.”

I noticed the fancy mansion built behind the wall of my old house. I said, “The map has changed.”

Umm Jamal said, “The neighbors sold the old Qarasholi house after it was destroyed and then many others caught the bug, as you can see.”

In spite of the warm welcome and loud demonstration of love that they showered on me, and despite my keen desire to assure myself of their welfare, I wished I could sit alone for a few minutes on my terrace, to recall long days I had lived there: writing and thinking under the Baghdad sky whose clear, dry summer nights I was so much in love with. I remembered those nights I couldn’t sleep while lying on my back, watching the stars and letting myself get lost in the distant galaxies that that sky opened for me like no other sky. I had come to believe that something special connected me to that sky and that my sojourn in that land was not a matter of chance. That was why I felt such pain and anxiety whenever I left Baghdad airport heading for Cairo, consoling myself that it was just a holiday after which I would come home, but soon after I arrived once again in Baghdad I began to count the days before I could go back to Cairo. When Hatim and I decided to go back to Egypt for good, I didn’t realize that I was leaving Baghdad and that I would need an invitation to visit it, and that attachment to the place depended on my being there, not to the physical city or the stones. But then again those were not any other stones or material things by themselves. They were the walls that I had painted snow white when I was bored, or beautified with some cheerful motifs such as miniature pictures of Walt Disney characters, or gave some depth to by reproductions of Van Gogh. They were the tables at which I sat to write, the chairs, my bed, the Aladdin heater that warmed the room for five winters, the space that contained Yasir’s laughs and his gazelle Zuzu which we had made up and which accompanied him everywhere in the house. They were the moments of love that Hatim and I shared. They were the hours of loneliness, sadness, and homesickness. They were Sabah and the red peppers she fried with tomatoes to feed me
on the days of intense craving. They were the safe haven in which I had taken refuge for years, working, loving, and laughing.

Titi said, “Hey, there. Where did you go?”

I said, “I just wanted to see how the Abu Nidals are doing. I know they have sons of conscription age.”

Umm Jamal said to Subaiha, “Umm Yasir is here and she wishes to say hello.”

Subaiha said, “I don’t want her and I don’t want her hello.”

I heard the sound of her mother’s footsteps running toward me and saying, “Hello, rose! Hello, Umm Yasir! Please come in.”

I said, “Some other time, God willing.”

I left their embraces and ran to the taxi to take me to al-Rashid Hotel, recalling the incident that caused Subaiha’s anger and which I had totally forgotten. I marveled at the workings of memory.

I had stood in front of my armoire, puzzled. I counted the money that I was going to put in my purse before leaving for work. I had a feeling that something was not right. I said to myself, “I don’t know what came over me since I came back from Cairo. I’ve been off the mark in counting my money, even though I didn’t have much since I exhausted our savings before leaving.” I noticed that my money was decreasing and I didn’t know why. I had seen in one of the stores a light washing machine that I thought of buying to wash socks and other light clothes, once Hatim decided whether it was sturdy enough. I said to myself that I would put up with his sarcastic comments. When I bought a rice cooker, he said, “The washing machine washes on its own and the cooker cooks, so why should one get married?”