Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (42 page)

A mood of anxious waiting prevailed on the train. Some women journalists stood in the aisles, others changed seats. I took out my recorder from my handbag and looked for Manal al-Alousy and went over to her. “Do you have time for a short interview?”

The president of the Moroccan women’s union moved to give me space and said, laughing, “Work, work, work?” I’ll have you know that I am watching you!”

Manal said, “Nora is a dear friend. Whatever she wants.”

I asked her about the conditions of Iraqi women at the present time and the losses they suffered in the family laws that women throughout the Arab world had hailed when they were first announced. She said, “Necessity forces us to detach ourselves from our own feelings and to give the homeland sons to defend it. A martyr’s widow deserves special considerations and society adapts to changing conditions. Marrying a martyr’s widow is a national duty and noble ideas are always costly.”

She knew her figures by heart, listed them calmly, and spoke of the union’s role, saying that the whole Iraqi people were voluntarily ready to defend the homeland and build the country, keeping the factories and the farms running. Then she winked at me and said, “With the help of the Egyptians, no?”

I went back to my seat full of sadness over the time when laws banned bigamy except under extremely extraordinary circumstances and gave women rights that infuriated men.

I took my mothering tools out of my bag and headed dejectedly for the bathroom. I didn’t want to reach for my breasts but my bulging veins forced me to empty them. The conference was over and I had gotten used to the emptying process, keeping it up regularly, but I felt tired. I told myself that I should be thankful, but I felt very tired. I remembered how easily Haytham nursed. I felt cold even though I had dried my chest thoroughly with the towel. I was in great need of a cup of tea from the samovar. I couldn’t believe it when I found Naglaa waiting to give me one as if she knew exactly what I needed. Then she distributed hamburger sandwiches, the ever-present magic Iraqi solution for everything. We sat down to eat our sandwiches. It was neither breakfast nor the usual English lunch. It was what my mother-in-law would call “Getting your mother-in-law’s goat,” when the young daughter-in-law shirks her housework before lunchtime, claiming to be hungry. The train started moving again. I opened my notebook and jotted some brief comments so as not to forget what was said or what I thought at the time. I remembered my friend Nahid, who insisted on feeding us every time we went on a trip, and how we used to try to run away from her, saying, “If we keep eating what you are pushing on us, we’ll end up being like sheep fattened for Eid.”

I remembered the last time we met before everything was turned upside down. I think it was a birthday celebration for Basil, son of Mahmoud Rashid and Samia.

We had gone in the morning to the central post office to send our weekly letter from Baghdad to
al-Zahra
in Cairo. We had kept our working relationship with the magazine even though the bureau had ceased to represent it officially and became a private, independent press office. I bought some postage stamps. Hilmi Amin said, “Why all these stamps? Are you corresponding with all of Egypt?”

I said, “Tomorrow is Friday. That’s when Hatim and I write our letters to family and friends.”

We found in our mailbox a letter from Tante Fayza and the girls. Hilmi Amin sat on the wooden bench to read it. It seemed he was pleased. I didn’t ask. I waited for him to tell me. These last few days he has not been quite himself, given to different moods.

He said, “Thank God the transfer was made and Fayza solved some financial problems. This gives me some respite.”

I said, “Thank God. I’d like to stop at a photography supply store to buy some film for the camera.”

“Well then, let’s go through the other door,” he said.

I had hardly taken three steps from the door to the street when I stopped in disbelief of what I saw. Tariq Mandour was sitting in front of an upturned wooden box on which were displayed packs of Baghdad cigarettes and matchboxes. His hair was long and he hadn’t shaved in some time. His shirt was negligently not tucked in and he looked exhausted, and it seemed that he hadn’t been sleeping well. I said to him reproachfully, “You are here and I have been looking for you all over Baghdad? I thought you had gone back to Egypt. I was going to write to your mom tomorrow to ask her.”

He said, “Sorry, Nora. I didn’t want you to know where I was. My circumstances have changed completely. I moved to a very bad hotel and I’ve been doing my best to make enough money for a plane ticket to Egypt.”

I said, “Why didn’t you come to our house or to the office and tell me what was happening to you?”

“Did Ustaz Hilmi tell you? He saw me yesterday and I asked him not to tell you. He tried to give me money, but I refused.”

“No, he didn’t tell me. I came here by chance. Come on. Get up and come to our house.”

“I am sorry. I can’t. I have to sell this carton and pay the owner. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

“Take this money. Pay the hotel and move into our house.”

“No. I have enough. I’ll come by tomorrow. Say hello to Uncle Hatim.”

We returned to the office, Hilmi Amin and myself. I wanted to wait for Hatim to come and take me and Hilmi Amin to celebrate Basil’s birthday. Anhar came. She asked Hilmi eagerly whether he had received the letter.

He said that he had. I said, “He is so happy about it. Don’t you see how cheerful he looks?”

She waited for me to leave the room to bring tea and asked him what was in the letter. I heard a few muffled sentences in a whispered exchange that sounded angry and full of worry. I wanted to just get away from there. Their relationship these days was not a calm, relaxed relationship, but one that created tension and unhappiness all around. What good are such relations? Why don’t they make up their minds? To go on? To get married? To get a divorce? To break up? To move ahead? What good could come out of this vacillation? What should I do now? As I crossed the corridor, I sang out loud the comic singer Shukuku’s song about the “love taxi” that moves faster than pigeons and trains, without wings or engines, and which brings distant lovers closer. I made sure they heard me singing.

“Here’s the tea. I’d like to go now to buy the cake from Karrada Maryam, so we can save some time. It is much closer from here to Waziriya.”

I went out to the street. I walked on Saadun Street. I loved to look at shop windows in the afternoon, a time that had a feel all its own, quite different from rushed mornings and slow nights. It was the very heart of the day and its emotional center, filled with happiness. Why haven’t I noticed that before? I thought about how much I loved Mahmoud Rashid and Samia, for whom I also had great respect, maybe because they were the closest couple to me. Mahmoud had problems with his eyes that required several surgeries, which he preferred to have done in Egypt despite the recent advances in medicine here in Baghdad.

We arrived at Mahmoud and Samia’s house, followed by Adel and Nahid. We stood around the cake and candles and sang an Egyptian
children’s version of “Happy Birthday.” Then the children left to play in the garden. Mahmoud went into his study and brought out a new book by Noam Chomsky wrapped in gilded foil, saying he did that with all his political books so as not to attract attention to them, and when one of his colleagues asked him what it was he would make up a novel’s title.

We laughed and Hilmi Amin said, “Ask Nora about her story with
Autumn of the Patriarch
.”

I said, “I was walking down Saadun Street when the owner of a bookstand recommended a novel by a Colombian author, Gabriel Garciá Márquez. I held it in my hands, and because I hadn’t heard of the author before, I thanked the owner and returned the novel to the display and left. That same night I heard it had been banned. So the following morning I went back to the bookstand but the owner told me apologetically that the police had confiscated all copies of the book. I told him to please try to find me a copy, saying that since I was Egyptian, I was not subject to those banning and confiscation orders. He laughed and said he couldn’t do anything about it. I made the rounds of all bookstores I knew, even communist bookstores, but I couldn’t find a single copy. Then Ustaz Hilmi obtained a copy for me from a friend of his, secretly of course. It’s a beautiful novel in which the author uses Latin American mythology to poke fun at dictatorship. It’s a novel full of vibrant life that captures Colombia, redolent with its scents. I fell in love with it.”

Adel said, “But why was it banned?”

I said, “They do not admit that their regime is a dictatorship. They should have left it available on the street so that people would know that all Third World regimes copied each other.”

Hilmi said, “A dictator believes that he is right in whatever he does, that he is surrounded by secrets that would elude even those on whom he is imposing his dictatorial rule.”

We all laughed and Nahid said, “Why don’t we think of something more pleasant on this birthday?”

Samia said, “May it all be for the best. When are you leaving, Nora? Hatim’s told me that the doctor has finally agreed to let Yasir come to Baghdad.”

I said, “Early summer so Hatim and I would have a long vacation during which Yasir would get used to us. I don’t want to cause him any psychological disruption by taking him away from his grandpa and grandma before he gets to know us well.”

Tariq did not come to our house. I looked for him all over Baghdad to no avail. Then, out of the blue, he called me from Suleimaniya to tell me that he had gone to work for a contractor, then quit his job after a while and settled down working at a tourist tea and beer garden.

After lunch everyone on the train was singing and dancing, and that helped time to pass more quickly than before. Most of the women gathered in the car where I sat and a Moroccan lady got up to dance in the aisle to the music of the train movement. There was a lot of shouting and merriment and Moroccan colleagues told me that they usually danced to entertain their guests. The Egyptian women in the car admitted failure in that department, perhaps to defend the reputation of Egyptian women, about whom the other Arabs said we each had a belly dancing outfit that we put on for our husband’s pleasure every night. I smiled as I remembered Hilmi Amin’s article, “Arabs and Egyptian Women,” in which he refuted the idea that Egyptian women awaited Arab men at Cairo International Airport, chanting and welcoming them with open arms. I thought of the adolescent way Arab young men behaved vis-à-vis Egyptian female movie stars and their naïve fantasies that behind every door in Egypt was a Suad Hosni, a Naglaa Fathi, or even a Hind Rostom. And for Arab women, especially impressionable young women, there was, of course, Abd al-Halim Hafez and all the fantasies created by Egyptian cinema’s portrayal of drug gangs and guns and macho men like Farid Shawqi.

Awatef Wali stepped forward in the aisle, moving her neck right and left and forming a bow with her hands above her head. Everyone laughed and Aziza Husayn shouted: “Long live Egypt!” Iraqi ululations and very loud songs rang out and hands clapped noisily. Then all of a sudden an Iraqi tabla drum appeared from nowhere and non-Arab women got up, dancing in an arrhythmic but beautiful way. The Iraqi women organized themselves in a dabka dance formation in the aisle, swaying with their long hair and statuesque figures, shaking their shoulders up and down, forgetting their anguish. I imagined that each of them was trying to forget a loved one on the war front or a missing brother. Bitterness gathered in my throat at the thought. Then I began to feel milk lightly streaking on my chest. I automatically reached for some Kleenex as I caught a whiff of the milk curdling. I said to myself that it could be turning into yogurt. Lutfiya, who was nearby, understood what was happening on her own and asked me, “Your chest again?”

I told her, “By the time we get to Basra, I’ll give you a piece of cheese!”

We both burst out laughing as she said, “I want a lot of cream.”

I got up, wading through the dancing crowd on my way to the bathroom. I closed the broken window with great difficulty. Earlier in the day I was not bothered by it but with the sun waning I felt cold, and together with the heat I felt coming from my chest, the desert wind gusts were unbearable. I looked through the window at the road, now totally empty except for reddish trails and purplish clouds. I removed the wads of tissue that had accumulated in my bra. I’ve always loved to travel outside Baghdad. I remembered the rhyming saying about Basra and how those who hadn’t seen it would regret that until the day they died. I also remembered the shanashil, or the latticed wooden windows, crafted by Arab artisans and adorned with lace, which helped to hide the faces of young women from prying eyes while permitting these women to look out at the street, exactly like mashrabiyas in Egypt. I tried to fill in from memory the rest of the picture: scattered tents and Bedouin women
sitting in front of their spindles and carpet looms, with camels grazing in the distance and savanna reeds rising like aimed arrows on the river banks. I remembered my exasperation and my desperate cries to myself: “All this red soil and all this water and no one sowing or reaping? What’s wrong? Where are the Egyptian peasants? This is our land! Our land!”

I noticed in the distance a long line of camels, chewing as they moved forward with a lone boy following. As the train came closer I saw a donkey moving ahead of the boy, an unusual sight in Iraq. I remembered the day I went to al-Khalsa village and saw a number of donkeys. I smiled.

I told Amm Ahmad Wadie, “The donkeys have come!”

The agricultural supervisor said as she laughed, “Egyptian peasants are spoiling the donkeys, giving them chewing gum and soda pop!”

Everyone laughed. The children stood around, happy to see their old friends, the donkeys. Every boy rode a donkey as big as a mule and started racing.

I said, “What’s the story?”

They all said at the same time gleefully, “A donkey for one dinar, Abla!”

I said in disbelief, “One dinar?”