Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (40 page)

I said, “That doesn’t sound good, for them. Their adversary has no mercy.”

He said, “It seems the Ba‘th Party has been surprised by the large numbers joining the Iraqi Communist Party even though Ba‘th is the ruling party.” Then he added, “A short time ago, the Communist Party celebrated its anniversary and invited the central committee of the Ba‘th Party to attend. Saddam Hussein himself went to the party. New members’ names were announced and welcomed. It seems that demonstration did not sit well with Saddam, who was surprised by the numbers. He left, intending to punish them.”

I said, “Do you think this is the only reason? There must be other sources of conflict. I feel sometimes that communists resent the Ba‘th Party and the way it has been running the country.”

We arrived at the
al-Jumhuriya
newspaper offices. One of our communist colleagues told us that
Tariq al-Shaab
had come out and that it contained an article defying the Ba‘th Party and that it had bypassed the censor.

It was announced that a communist organization was uncovered in the army. We got news of the arrests.
Tariq al-Shaab
denied the claims of the presence of an armed wing of the Communist Party. The five-party coalition front collapsed.

I remembered what Jamal, Abu Sargon, had told me while we were at his house in Erbil: “Those underground parties worked together against the monarchy and English occupation. They know each other’s every move and no member of any of those parties can escape and hide from the other parties.”

We hear that communist detainees were subjected to horrible torture in jails to confess their membership in the military wing of the party in the army. That was painful to hear. We no longer knew what was really happening. I could sense the anxiety gripping Hilmi Amin to his very core: he believed the collapse of the relationship between the Ba‘th and the communists would have repercussions for the communists in the whole Arab world in general and for an Egyptian communist in exile in Iraq even though he had been safe so far. He was also worried that Anhar might be arrested at any moment.

I began inquiring about my communist colleagues who worked at other newspapers. I especially liked Salwa Zaku for her seriousness and integrity. I found out that she was in jail and that her husband had fled the country. The Ba‘thist journalists looked alarmed when I asked them about our communist colleagues.

Developments followed in quick succession. It was announced that some communist officers were executed. Many intellectuals fled the country and upon arriving in any other country announced their condemnation of the Ba‘th Party regime, accusing it of dictatorship and abuse of power and squandering Iraq’s resources and corruption.

Detentions continued and extended to all Iraqi cities. The names kept coming. Hilmi Amin would meet his communist friends in the evening and get detailed news from them, and the names of detainees and those who had fled the country. A large number of pivotal artists and writers disappeared. Some went to the Soviet Union, France, and Eastern Europe while others went to Yemen, Morocco, and the United States.

The clove necklace in my dresser’s drawer turned into a symbol of Iraqi communists and I was no longer able to put it on at all, for its scent was a potent reminder of the woman who had given it to me. I wondered where Nariman was, and even though I couldn’t wear it, I couldn’t keep it hidden away, as if its physical presence would give her security and life and remind me every morning of my friends who had disappeared in circumstances I had never expected.

We received some news of sexual abuse of women communists in detention. The Ba‘thists denied the news and we no longer knew whom we could believe. I couldn’t find out what happened to Nariman. Was she still exiled in Shaqlawa? Or detained? Or did she flee the country? Those were the options for Iraqi communists now. And where is Sulafa? I remembered the day she told me that she was preparing to get married. I received the news as if it were a bolt of lightning, but then I told myself: What else could she do? Jamal is a Christian who cannot divorce his wife and she couldn’t wait for him. Where are you now, Sulafa? It’s not your health I am worried about now, but about the imminent danger facing you. I didn’t know at the time that Anhar would disappear the same way and that Hilmi Amin and I would look for her to no avail, or that I would leave Iraq without knowing anything for sure of her whereabouts or come back two years later hoping with all my heart that she had migrated to Brazil.

The memories weighed down on me. I couldn’t concentrate or think straight. All the contradictions that I had seen throughout the five and a half years that I worked in Iraq came back all at once: all the successes and all the conflicts, explosions, and failures. In the
seventies, the rate of growth in employment in government agencies reached three hundred percent over ten years. Women in particular made huge strides: at least forty percent of the increase affected them. Women in education, especially medicine and pharmacology, increased their numbers by thirty percent. Daring progressive personal status laws dealt a blow to tradition. Then there was the literacy campaign, as mentioned in the papers presented and from my own experience. All these contradictions! How, in God’s name, has all that happened? What kind of authority was responsible for all of that? Was it truly nationalist? Progressive? (They sometimes characterized it as something co-opting the communists.) Or was it just a dictatorship using terror to cover up its foolish acts?

Naglaa, who noticed how lost in thought I looked, asked me, “Nora, you out of all participants in the conference have your own experience in this country. Do you think we will find the right answers soon?”

I said, “Your history haunts me a lot. Can I tell you something of that history without any comment, Naglaa?”

She said, “Please do. I’d like to reassure myself.”

I said, “There was an ironic Babylonian parable that goes something like this: ‘A mongoose once chased a mouse. The mouse wanted to hide so it ran to a cave inhabited by a serpent. When it found itself facing that new danger, it didn’t know what to do at first, then it said to the serpent: the snake charmer sent me to you with his best wishes.’ Do you think this parable applies to your situation today, thousands of years after this Babylonian parable?”

Naglaa cried and got up to wash her face. I met the leftist literary critic, Yasin al-Nusayyir. I asked him how he was and how Baghdad Underground, our name for avant-garde culture that did not agree with the state’s official culture, was. I hoped my artist friends and their works were all right. I told him I also wanted to go to the theater. Yasin said that the day’s program included a performance of a wonderful show,
The Door
, by a new company and that I shouldn’t miss it.

The conference hall was full to the last seat. Iraqis, at least on the official level, celebrated closings exactly as they did openings, and on the whole they have become dazzlingly successful at mounting and running festivals. Some poorer women in traditional garb were usually seated in the last rows and ululated every time the president’s name was mentioned. I got used to the long poems they delivered on such occasions, as if they were still desert dwellers. I remembered the giants of Arabic poetry and wondered why of all the poetry of al-Khansaa only those elegies in which she lamented the death of her brother Sakhr survived!

After the closing ceremony we went to watch a one-act play whose action took place in an underground tomb. That brought back memories of how I loved to watch Iraqi actors on the stage. It also made me wonder where such important Iraqi theater figures were now, men such as Yusuf al-Ani and Jawad al-Assadi. Haytham snatched me away from the play, even though I had pumped out the milk a short while earlier. I tried to keep his image away from my mind’s eye, but he kept coming back, looking for me with tears in his puzzled eyes. I tried to hold back the tears and focus on the play in front of me, but my chest felt Haytham touching it and it hurt, even though nothing physical caused this pain. It must have come from somewhere in my soul. Yes, it must be that. I was taken away from the pain by trying to keep up with the dialogue between the actors on the stage.

Baghdad Railway Station

Five in the Morning

Buses took us to the Baghdad Railway station. I hadn’t taken an Iraqi train before because trains were slow. I loved that time of the morning in the winter: a breathtaking fog that lifted, revealing sun or rain. The silence was broken by an Egyptian’s melodious voice as if he were hawking goods. I saw that the voice belonged to a worker wearing the official railway uniform and covering his head with a woven wool skullcap and a white turban. “A morning of cream!” he said.

“A morning of roses,” I said, laughing.

He said, “May our whole day be honey!”

Layla and Sajida replied together, “A morning of jasmine, my love!”

The whole column we were part of burst out laughing. The non-Arab participants asked why we were laughing. Sajida explained the humorous exchanges to them. We got on the train, most of whose cars had been reserved for the conference delegations. For the first time I realized that I hadn’t gotten close to the non-Arab guests, even though among them were several people that I wanted to interview. During the trip I had a chance to catch up with my Iraqi friends and find out what happened to them during the past two years. They were not used to venting to me that much and with such candor before. I didn’t know why. Was it because I was preoccupied with my work, or was it that the tragic war had cast a shadow on their lives and they couldn’t hide the pain any more? I noticed that they were no longer very secretive and on several occasions my tête-à-tête with one of them got collective comments from several other participants. I asked Lutfiya, “And how do people receive condolences on the death of a son?”

She fell silent as tears glistened in her eyes and said, “The mothers cry at home among the family members, for a martyr belongs to the whole homeland, and it is an occasion for joy, not grief.”

Her broken sentences rang in my ears for hours. So, the fear of speaking one’s mind was no longer as strong as it once was, but it was still there. Were the party’s watchful eyes and ears still strong? Was it the party that was doing the watching or some opportunists to prove their loyalty? Was what I heard just exaggerated rumors?

Manal al-Alousi came and sat by me. “Nora, how are you today? Do you need anything? Don’t let the time pass without us sitting together for a long time. I want to know all the news from Egypt and the latest jokes.”

I said, “Thank you, Umm Tayyiba. I am among family here with you. In Egypt, they wanted to come up with new jokes and discovered
they had used up the Sa‘idis in jokes. Someone who had just returned from Iraq said, ‘Get a Ma‘idi.’”

Sajida joined in and said, “Or a Kurd!” and we all laughed.

I said, “How is your sister Hind and her husband? Anything new?”

She said in a sad voice: “No. He’s still missing like thousands of Iraqi men. This is her problem right now. Don’t forget that we’ve got to get together.”

I felt hot as milk filled my breasts. I did not look forward to going to the train’s very cramped bathroom, but I had no choice. I decided to empty some of the milk over several trips but finish the job better at night. I asked myself whether there was a point to what I was doing, and whether I should either stay at home and devote myself to mothering my baby or do what my colleagues did and feed him baby formula from a bottle. “Until when,” I asked myself, “will you continue this dance, trying to balance the role of a traditional mother and that of a journalist preoccupied with the wide world outside?” I pushed the questions aside as I remembered Yasir, who would let go of my breast to play with me, letting the milk flow all over my chest. I also remembered my aunt Fawziya saying, “Why are you so cruel, Yasir?”

I was surprised to hear that. Yasir was used to nursing voraciously for a short while, then letting go of my breast to breathe through his mouth because he suffered from a recurring blockage of his nose. When he let go of my breast, which by that time would have responded and turned on, the milk would soak my breasts before Yasir came back to it. When he got his fill he would laugh and begin to play and breathe at will. I looked at my aunt and guessed what she tried to tell me, but I was not convinced. My aunt got up and patted Yasir on the shoulder—he hadn’t yet finished his sixth month, the same age as Haytham right now. Then she made me hold my breast and place the nipple in his mouth and said, “Don’t take it out of his mouth while he is nursing for any reason.”

I said, “But his nose …”

She said, “He’ll get used to its being in his mouth and he will breathe.”

Yasir learned to breathe while nursing but kept letting my breast drip. “Do you remember celebrating his birthday every year even though you were not with him?” I asked myself.

Tante Fayza and Hilmi Amin’s daughters had arrived in Baghdad to spend the summer holidays with us. The office routine changed. Hilmi Amin was more relaxed and family activities dominated our schedule, which was now full of social activities. Dr. Ragya came to the apartment regularly every afternoon. Anhar said she was going to Kubaysh, her village in the marshes, with her mother to visit her family and totally disappeared.

I said to the girls: “I am going to Orosdi Bak to buy a gift for Yasir. His birthday is today.”

They said, “We’ll go with you.”

I found a teddy bear almost the size of Yasir and happily bought it. The girls brought more joy and happiness to my life. I was used to them coming back home with me and staying for long periods of time during the summer months. This holiday, however, was different and shorter. We went back to the office and I told Tante Fayza that I was going to make a cake for Yasir and asked her to let the girls go with me.

Hilmi Amin said, “She’s having a party for her son and expects him to talk to her on the phone from the party which his grandfather and the family will have for him in Egypt. Have you seen more madness than this? Okay, Sitt Nora, we will come.”