Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (9 page)

Hilmi said, “Wasn’t Saddam the one in charge of the Kurdish file from the beginning?”

Jamal lowered his tone as he continued, “Since the vice president got the Kurdish file there have been several attempts to assassinate Mullah Mustafa al-Barzani.”

Later on we found out that the cultural season was a success and that relations improved. Hamid felt indebted to us for helping to do his work successfully now that the Kurds were actively participating. He started to invite us whenever he organized any activity in a Kurdish town and we accepted whenever we could.

I asked Hamid if I could attend a Kurdish wedding. He invited me to attend the wedding celebrations at the house of the chairman of the executive council of the autonomous zone. The women gleefully explained to me their marriage customs. I took their pictures with their gold jewelry and their unique costumes: long dresses woven with silver threads, vests with hearts of pure gold in their hems, and around their waists they wore belts studded with carnelian and sapphires on top of which were gold chains. They also wore bracelets connected to the ring on the middle finger with netting of gold. They were full of glitter and also showing off their wealth. I wrote about marriage in the Kurdish fashion and submitted the feature to the bureau director, who read it carefully, then gave it back to me, asking me to complete it by writing about the marriage customs in Bedouin and southern communities. I did my research and finished writing after trimming it to be a comprehensive feature. I submitted it. He read it and smiled, “Now it is a beautiful piece. Congratulations.”

The bureau flourished and acquired a good reputation among Iraqi journalists and press bureaus. The office became a radiant Egyptian cultural center that welcomed the guests of Baghdad. We collected many reference books about the history of the Kurds and began to study the region in depth, conducting lengthy interviews with Kurdish parties and leading Ba‘thist figures, and got to know Kurds, their life, and problems better.

As we prepared for a trip to Mosul the following day to celebrate the spring festival, Hilmi Amin said to me, “Nora, it is time to appoint an Iraqi journalist in the office on a permanent basis to help us with some purely Iraqi matters. I feel that our expansion places a big burden on you.”

I replied, “If you wanted to hire an extra journalist for the bureau and if we expand our work, our success will be the greater for it.”

He said, “What do you think of Anhar Khayun who works at the Agency?”

I said, “She’s fantastic. She’s a very appropriate choice. But would she leave the Agency?”

“No, she’d work evenings.”

In Mosul we found that Anhar had gone ahead of us to write about the preparations for the celebrations. When we got to the woods she had started a long discussion with Hilmi Amin in the car which they did not stop when we got out of the car at a cafeteria that occupied an elevation in the middle of the woods. They walked together and went farther and farther until they disappeared into the trees.

I noticed how their relationship was getting closer by the day. Anhar was tall and slender. She had smooth black hair, in a fashionable tapered cut. She was in the habit of letting a lock of hair fall over her eyebrows. She had big black eyes and a large nose like most Iraqi women. She was pretty despite having a scar next to the nose, which they called a “Baghdad mark.” When Hilmi Amin saw her for the first time he asked me, “Is this Layla who set Qays’s imagination on fire?

I looked at her, and said, laughing, “Yes, and he was quite right to go crazy.”

“She taunted me about my gray hair, though it’s a mark of dignity; she should’ve taunted me about a shameful thing,” he said, laughing as he followed her conversation with another journalist in a garden at the wood, continuing his quotation from the famous song by Nazim al-Ghazali: “The stars are adorned by the moons!”

Anhar used to bring the evening bulletin of the Agency after I’d left the office. She wrote short features for the magazine. They continued to get closer and the scent of the stolen pleasure of love filled the air. I was also complicit in it, as I looked the other way when the two of them found pretexts to work side-by-side, alone. I took
pity on her as I saw her rushing in headlong, no longer caring about concealing it from me. And even though the bureau director did not show his feelings readily, perhaps because of experience or because it was his nature, I noticed how he couldn’t wait to see her and how happy he was when she was there. What would that poor girl do with a married man, the father of three daughters, one of whom was almost her own age? Did she imagine that he would stay in Baghdad forever? She is of marriageable age and would be squandering an opportunity to marry a young man her own age. Iraqi laws also didn’t permit bigamy. And what if he were to return to Egypt tomorrow? What business is it of yours? All these questions crossed my mind when I caught a mutual glance of longing. We were at a formal party and they were sitting apart. Their movements together no longer had that spontaneity that marked them before. She was engaged to her cousin who was a Ba‘thist, while she was a communist, and their relationship had its ups and downs. She often expressed unhappiness at the prospect of marrying him and postponed making a decision.

The stewardess smiled at me as she asked me to open the food tray. Salma came to as she took the box, then said, after the stewardess left, “I don’t like airline food and yet I eat it. Isn’t this another form of Arab repression?”

We both laughed. She went on to say, “I wonder what the Iraqis are doing about food. Do they have problems?”

I said, “As far as I know, they have no shortages. But the tragedy is the squandering of the resources of Iran and Iraq in this absurd way. Also in the number of martyrs.”

She said, “May God damn all dictatorships on earth. This man is quite puzzling. We’ll go and see.”

I said, “Every people deserves its leader. Iraq for some time has played a revolutionary role in the region and that was reflected in Iraqi society itself. No day would go by without new farms and factories, roads being paved and development of new cities and education. A real renaissance! Then came the foolishness of the war.
Didn’t we have enough with Gamal Abdel Nasser? Why are we always repeating our mistakes?”

She said, “Every day I hear about delegations going to Baghdad and coming from Baghdad. It seems they have a new conference every day.”

I said, “I used to cover at least one international conference every month, not to mention local conferences.”

She said, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

An Egyptian peasant walking in the aisle reminded me of my first visit to al-Khalsa village.

I didn’t imagine when I went there one late afternoon that it would become part of my world or that I would give it that much importance and care about it to this extent. I didn’t believe that I would be able to follow up on my belief that our Arab world was really one world that should be integrated. I had arrived at the office early in the morning as usual when I heard voices inside. I found a group of Egyptian peasants whom the director introduced to me saying, “Abd al-Barr, Sabir, Bashandi, and Muftah from al-Khalsa village. We are interested in their experiment, as you know, and publish their news all the time.”

I greeted them. Abd al-Barr said, “Why haven’t you visited us till now, Sitt Nora?”

I said, “God willing. Ustaz Hilmi has promised to arrange a trip soon.”

I noticed that the whole group fit the common stereotype of peasants that I had met before: simple, goodhearted, and wary. Abd al-Barr, however, was slightly different. Was it because he talked easily and took over the conversation most of the time? I don’t know. For some reason, I just did not feel that he was a real peasant.

A few days later we were visiting a number of Egyptian intellectuals working at the Academy of Arts. Some of them expressed a desire to visit the village. The director set it up for the following Friday afternoon.

I arrived at the office with Hatim, then the guests started arriving. I was meeting some of them for the first time: the journalist Durriya Awni, the actress Nadia al-Saba‘, the critic Ahmad Abbas Salih, the Iraqi painter Layla al-Attar, Nasir Fathi, director of the Middle East News Agency in Baghdad, Mahmoud Rashid, the film director, and his wife Samia. On the way I dreamed of the smell of the ovens and the freshly baked fitir mishaltit and homemade crackers, of aged cheese and cream. We arrived at al-Khalsa shortly before sunset. I didn’t find any children in the street or shouting soccer players or someone playing hide-and-seek. I didn’t see any firewood stacks on the roofs, and no cattle on the road. I found white one-story houses with large gardens in front and a deathly silence. It was a ghost town. I did not feel that I had entered an Egyptian village, but rather a suburb near a city in any country. We went to Abd al-Barr’s house where we met his children and his wife Sharbat, who had on a short dress with floral patterns and whose hair cascaded down her shoulders, which made me all the more certain that somehow she was not a peasant.

After we drank tea we went out for a walk in the village streets. I knocked on one of the doors. A peasant woman with a pleasant fresh face and brown complexion opened the door and invited me in, saying, “Welcome, welcome dear. You bring the fragrance of Egypt with you!”

Her husband, Abu Ahmad, came. I sat between the two of them. I felt that it was an authentic household reminiscent of its southern peasant roots. She said to me, her face glowing with happiness, “I got married eight years ago but God did not bless me with any children. My husband has grown-up sons from his wife, God have mercy on her soul. When I came to Iraq, I got pregnant. It was a pregnancy after a long anticipation.”

Laughing, I said, “You got pregnant after you crossed the sea!”

She said, “You know that, too? But you are a city lady!”

I said, “But I am Egyptian.”

Abu Ahmad said, “It’s going to be a boy, God willing, and I’ll name him Gamal Abdel Nasser.”

I left them to their dreams and went to another house. The group dispersed throughout the village. I knocked on a door. A middle-aged man came out with his wife and children in tow and invited me in. Inside I saw a girl wearing a new satin dress. I asked her, “Are you a bride? How old are you?”

She smiled shyly and said, “Yes, and I am sixteen.”

I cried out, “That’s impossible! You must be eleven or thirteen at the utmost. Why did you marry her off at such a young age?”

The mother said, “Circumstances, ma’am, I swear by God.”

I said in alarm, “What possible circumstances would make you marry off a child at this age? It is unconscionable!”

The mother said, “Sayyidna Muhammad married ‘Aisha when she was nine.”

The father said, addressing his wife, “The Khalsa project gives ownership of the land to families, not individuals. Among the peasants who came there were some bachelors who had to get married in order to be eligible for the land. There are only a few families here, some of those bachelors had to marry young girls and they wrote down that they were sixteen.”

I said, “My God! You brought to your new world your old problems!”

The mother said, “What problems? Everything will be all right, God willing.”

I left them, filled with sorrow. I hastened to catch up with the group and found them already on their way back. They said the dark made it difficult for them to see clearly. They also said the fields were far away and we should probably pay another visit. We left the village.

I returned to al-Khalsa many times after that and came to know the inhabitants one by one. When I decided to gather material for a book on the project, Abu Dalaf, head of the farmers’ union, provided me with a car. The director of the project also helped me with whatever I needed. My visits there were delightful and friendly as I watched the growth of life in an Egyptian–Iraqi village. But I was
also full of trepidation, fearing the vicissitudes of politics. In the meantime I became close friends with some of them. Al-Khalsa was a microcosm of Egypt with its authentic historical roots, the poverty of its people, and the kindness that lay hidden under the weight of their need to make a living. But here they possessed hope for the morrow, together with a wide land that had called to them. They answered the call and sowed and reaped, leaving their destinies to fate and to the hands of careless politicians.

Salma came back and sat down in her seat. She said, “It is such a short distance between Egypt and Jordan, but the problem will be the hours that we will spend in transit in Amman. May God make it go smoothly.”

I said, “We are members of an official delegation, Salma. It’s ordinary travelers who suffer a lot during that wait. After discontinuing direct flights between Cairo and Baghdad, it became unbearable for them.”

She said, “Nora, I wanted to ask you: is it true that Iraqis sleep on their roofs of their houses?”

I said, “Yes. Baghdad in particular is dry and spending the night under the open sky is fantastic, because staying indoors without air conditioning is unbearable. So they adapted their homes by adding higher walls for their roofs and they installed partitions so that everyone would enjoy their privacy. And, believe me: it’s sound and enjoyable sleep. I got used to it in Baghdad and tried to enjoy it in Egypt but I couldn’t. Not even on the balcony because the dampness at dawn in Cairo has a sting to it and goes straight into your bones.”

The captain turned on the seatbelt sign and we heard a voice asking us to return our seats to the upright position in preparation for landing at Amman airport in ten minutes. I opened my handbag and took out two pieces of chewing gum for me and Salma. I fastened my seatbelt and I recalled an unforgettable night, one that delineated the contours of my intimate relationship with Hatim.

*

I hadn’t yet gotten used to sleeping in the open air, a practice I had only heard about in a song by Fayruz: “Did you once sleep on the grass and use the air as your bed cover?” After we returned to Baghdad from our honeymoon, I was surprised, one night, when Hatim took me up to the roof, opened a room, and took out a mattress that he placed on the bed, which was out there in the open air. My surprise was compounded when he asked me to try enjoying the dry air. He lay next to me and embraced me. I closed my eyes in anticipation of the adventure and the pleasure of discovery but sleep refused to visit me at all. It was not that I feared the loss of privacy, but because of the sounds made by a cat running or a car in the street or a plane passing way overhead.