by Sinan Antoon
At one point, Nawal got up and start walking around, cradling Maha in her arms, and trying to lull her to sleep. She approached the doorway by the stairs where I stood holding the small transistor radio that went with me everywhere. Even though all they had been saying for the previous forty-eight hours was,
“Allied forces continue their aerial bombardment of targets inside Iraq and Kuwait,” I felt the need to listen to the news continuously and I couldn’t get a signal inside the basement shelter, so I stood in the stairway near the exit, ducking back in whenever the shelling became too intense.
When I saw Maha with her face buried in her mother’s chest, Nawal had remarked, “The poor child, she’s frightened to death!” but then she turned to her daughter and said, “Look, who’s here! It’s Uncle Youssef! Let’s say hello to him!” Her green eyes brimming with tears, Maha had looked up at me, as if she hadn’t heard a thing her mother had said.
“Hey, what’s going on? Why all this crying?” I asked.
She pointed her little hand at the ceiling and said, “That.”
Chucking her cheek gently, I asked, “That? What’s that?”
“Boom, boom, boom,” she answered, her eyes glistening, and then put her thumb back in her mouth.
“No, no,” I told her, “It’s not ‘boom, boom.’ It’s just raining!
It’s raining really, really hard. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon. All gone!”
Her eyes grew wide as if she were thinking over what I had just said. Then she looked to her mother for confirmation and Nawal reassured her. “It’s just the rain, darling. Nothing but rain.”
Although fear lingered in her eyes, soon Maha was repeating the words “Rain, rain,” after her mother. All through the remaining days we spent in the shelter, she would chant, “Lain, lain!”
every time the shelling intensified—as if the four letters were an umbrella that would shield her from the man-made cloudbursts that poured down on Baghdad and other Iraqi cities for weeks on end.
Hinna had brought bags of klaicha, sambusak, and cheese fatayer for us to eat in the shelter. I also stocked up on chocolate whenever the store opened for a few hours in between waves of bombing. Following the invasion of Kuwait, we suddenly got British chocolate bars such as Cadbury’s and Flake, which I hadn’t seen in years. On the wrapper of a particularly good one, with hazelnuts and raisins, it said “Specially imported to Kuwait,” and I realized that it was looted merchandise. The same thing happened two months later when I bought a box of cheese, which said, “Danish aid to the Iraqi people.”
The Americans’ so-called ‘surgical strikes’ were nothing of the kind. Contrary to what they claimed on the news, the strikes were
‘aami shami’ as Hinna said—pell-mell, indiscriminate, and random.
They mistakenly hit the nearby Ilwiya post office three times, destroying several buildings before hitting their target. I didn’t understand the connection between the Ilwiya post office and their campaign to liberate Kuwait. One of the men in the shelter, who smoked almost nonstop just outside the door, had an answer to everything and informed me it was to cut off communication with the army in Kuwait. I found him annoying and wasn’t convinced—it seemed ridiculous that the Iraqi army was communicating with troops in Kuwait from this post office.
The day after the Ilwiya post office was hit, I decided to venture out and see for myself. As I approached the side streets, I saw hundreds of pieces of paper strewn on the ground and hanging off palm trees everywhere. I stopped to take a look and saw that they were telephone bills and other mundane official paperwork.
A week into our sojourn at the shelter, there wasn’t a drop of water left in the tanks on the roof of the building or in the sole toilet that everyone who didn’t have a house nearby was using. It grew awkward and uncomfortable, and Hinna finally agreed
that it was time to go home. An anti-aircraft gun position had been set up on the roof of the building next door, and it made such an ear-splitting and terrifying noise that there was practically no difference between being home and being at the shelter.
When we got to the house, we had to clean out the fridge and the freezer and throw away the food that had spoiled after the power was cut off at the start of the bombing. Because it was Lent and we couldn’t eat meat, Hinna wanted to throw out meat from the freezer that was still good, but I told her we should use it.
“Haram,” I said, “don’t throw it away. Food is short, everything is closed.”
As we argued over what to do, Heaven intervened and our parish priest dropped by for a visit. He was doing the rounds of the neighborhood to check on his parishioners. When Hinna asked him about the meat, he told her that the church had issued a directive postponing Lent due to the state of emergency.
“Excellent, Father! The Good Lord sent you our way!” I exclaimed.
The first few days, the bombing went on nonstop, but it soon settled into a regular pattern. The ‘American fireworks,’ as Hinna called the air raids that would start in the evening and go on until daybreak.
“What was with them last night? Boom, boom, boom, boom . . . .
Isn’t it enough already? Haven’t they had their fill yet?” she’d ask, every morning.
In those days, Amer, my sister Salima’s son, would come over on his bike from their house in al-Amin. Like everything else, gas was in short supply and the phones didn’t work, so bicycles were suddenly a prime means of transportation. Salima sent him over to check on us and he relayed her suggestion that we move in with them. Their house was safer since it wasn’t located right by the air force command. Naturally, I objected.
“Thanks, dear boy, but your house is no better. The Rashid barracks are right behind your place so it’s six of one and half a dozen of another.”
Although Hinna tried to convince me, I wouldn’t budge. I told her she was free to go if she wished and I offered to drive her there, despite needing to save what gas I had in the tank in case of an emergency. She hemmed and hawed but stayed put because she couldn’t bring herself to leave me alone in the house.
We only had water every three days, and we’d fill as many bottles and plastic pitchers as we could. We also filled the tubs in both ground floor bathrooms, and used that water to flush the toilets.
To bathe, we’d heat a big cauldron over palm-tree kindling that I would light in the fireplace in the reception lounge.
“They’ve turned the clocks back a hundred years,” Hinna would exclaim, shaking her head. “In the old days, the fireplace was for sitting around and roasting chestnuts.”
Following the cease-fire, the regime’s slogans and vocabulary changed. No longer were euphemisms like “returning the branch to the tree” and “the mother of all battles” being used; instead, we heard more mundane phrases such as, “the events of August 2” and,
“the allied attack.” One day, after the northern and southern uprisings had broken out and I had gone out to get a few things we needed, I noticed that the Secret Police car with tinted windows had disappeared from al-Wathiq Square where it had always sat. According to one of the market vendors in the square who was listening to the radio, there was, “fighting everywhere.” For three days in a row, Saddam made no speeches and I heard a report on the radio saying he had lost control of most of the provinces.
He regained the upper hand, of course, after slaughtering thousands of people and throwing them into mass graves.
The first time the power was back after that was in April, on the eve of Saddam’s birthday. On his special day, he appeared in a white suit and cut into a birthday cake before a group of children singing and dancing as if nothing had happened. Hinna turned to me. “Can you believe that man carrying on like this?
After everything we’ve been through? Has he no shame? People are dying everywhere, the country is devastated, and he’s playing at happy birthday like a little kid! What a disgrace.”
7
I needed to withdraw money from the bank and plann
ed to visit my friend Saadoun by the same token. I wouldn’t let Maha and her husband pay rent, even though they wanted to. It didn’t make much difference to my budget or overall situation—my needs were simple and I had saved much of what my siblings and their children sent our way from time to time. I decided not to take the car as I wasn’t going far and had promised myself to heed my doctor’s recommendation to walk every day in order to help lower my blood pressure. I returned my tea glass to the sink. I took my blood pressure pill with a little water that I gulped straight from a bottle of mineral water in the fridge without bothering to use a glass. I love cold water, whatever the season.
I went into my room, took off my pajamas, and put on gray trousers and a blue shirt, and wore the comfortable sneakers I used for walking. I looked around my room and in the closet for my navy blue overcoat but couldn’t find it. Then I remembered it was hanging in the vestibule. I stepped out of my room, closed the door, and stopped at the stairwell. I pricked up my ears. The door to the second floor was closed and it was completely quiet up
there. No matter, I would see Maha before church and we would make up. She was sure to apologize and I would do the same; I realized that I wasn’t sufficiently sensitive toward her, especially after what had happened to them in al-Dawra. I crossed the living room and grabbed my coat from the coatrack in the vestibule on the way. I put the coat on, picked up my keys from the wooden table under the rack, and unlocked the three deadbolts. The front door slammed shut as a cold wind blew into my face. I went back to the coatrack to get my black scarf and wrapped it around my neck. I noticed that the door from the vestibule leading to the reception lounge was open. I reached over to shut it and as I did so, glanced at the photographs across the room that hung on the wall next to the wooden bar.
I stepped inside the reception lounge that I no longer used since so few visitors came by and most of our relatives had emigrated.
I tripped on the edge of the Kashan rug whose colors I loved, but was able to recover my balance without falling. I went around the coffee table in the center of the room and stood before the archipelago of photographs dotted across the wall. I’d picked them out years ago, and had them nicely framed and hung them at regular intervals from one another. Once again, I recalled the previous night’s dream.
Family Photographs
1
No one knows the exact date the photo was taken. But Youssef remembers that it was a Friday a few months before the Haraka, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s coup in 1941. He was eight years old then. The shot was taken at the old family house, which they shared with Uncle Yuhanna and his family. The Armenian photographer had been going door to door trying to convince residents of the Christian quarter to sit for family portraits.
Youssef’s father had been hesitant to begin with but they all insisted, and after his own brother, Yuhanna, had agreed to it, and was rounding up his wife and children to sit for a photo, Gorgis came around. The photographer had set up in a corner of the courtyard where the light was just right, and he had them drape a large white cloth across the garden wall as a backdrop.
Abu Youssef, as Gorgis was known, sat solemnly at the center of the photo, wearing a traditional damask robe and a yashmagh wrapped around his head in the style of migrants who had recently arrived from the north. Although he had come to Baghdad three decades earlier, he categorically refused to dress like an effendi and adopt western clothes; he ignored the harping about it, which he heard from everyone, and wore the traditional garb to his dying day in 1957. Youssef sat beside him, but like a flitting bird, he couldn’t keep still, and Gorgis had wrapped his left arm around his son’s shoulder, clasping the boy’s hand in his own. After smoothing his moustache one last time, he’d rested his right hand on his right knee just as the photographer
instructed them to stop moving and to look straight at the lens.
Pulling out a plate from the camera, the photographer began counting down, “Five, four, three, two, one, zero.”
Naima, Gorgis’s wife, sat next to him on the other side, smiling confidently. The absence of color in the black and white photo in no way diminished the radiance of the wide, dark eyes that had first captivated Gorgis and made him go back to his village to betroth her. After he’d spent years working in river transport with his cousins, plying the waters between Muhammara and Baghdad, she had assumed that he’d forgotten the village and its inhabitants. Some of the villagers had warned her parents against Gorgis: they considered him cursed because his first wife and her two children had died in a drowning accident. They feared that a similar fate awaited Naima. But her father wasn’t in the least swayed by such talk. He was actually happy to marry his daughter to someone he considered to be of good extraction: he and Gorgis’s father owned adjoining plots of land in Talkayf where they had farmed barley together their entire lives.
Naima looks happy in the photo; Amal, the last of their brood, was already quite active in her belly, as if she were trying to muscle her way into the picture or play with Salima, the two-year-old seated in her mother’s lap. Gorgis had insisted on the name Salima in tribute to Iraq’s most famous singer of the time, Salima Murad Pasha. Naima had wanted to bear Gorgis more children to make up for the two that he’d lost in the accident near Muhammara, even though he never talked about it. But two years later, Naima’s heart stopped beating after dinner one day. She passed away, leaving a heavy burden to Hinna, her eldest daughter, who, in the family portrait, is sitting beside her and holding onto her mother’s right arm. Hinna had to leave school at fifteen to devote herself to doing the cooking and bringing up her siblings, while also working as a seamstress to help keep the family afloat. This went on for five long years, until her brothers finished school and were able to start pulling their weight. The greater sacrifice, from her point of view, was giving up the dream of becoming a nun and devoting her life to God. She never married and instead of being the white-robed virginal bride of Christ she had always dreamed of becoming, she gave up her life for the sake of her siblings.
Habiba, who was three years younger but taller than Hinna, stood right behind her, resting her right hand on her older sister’s shoulder, as though to thank her in advance for all that she would do. At the time, she had no idea that she would be part of one of the first generations of nurses to graduate in Iraq or that she would be sent to Sulaymaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan. Gorgis and his daughters would end up moving to the faraway city in order to be by her side during her three-year stint there, while the five boys remained with their uncle in Baghdad. Habiba’s salary had been sufficient to support them all, and after a few years she was even able to relieve her father from years of hard work, allowing him to stay home after the accident that led to his retirement.
The photographer had asked Ghazi, Jamil, Elias, and Mikhail, whose ages ranged between four and seven, to sit on the ground at their parents’ feet. This was the one and only photograph of the entire family together. Over the years, they scattered, moving to other parts of the country or to other countries where they appeared in other photographs, either alone or in clusters, but never again as a complete group.
2
Ten-year-old Youssef is wearing a white shirt, and a piece of white ribbon tied around his right wrist makes it look as if a large butterfly has landed on him. Encased in soft white gloves, his hands are joined together in prayer and a rosary with a crucifix on the end of it hangs between his index and third fingers
—even though he wasn’t really praying. His black hair is carefully combed and it looks as if he is trying to stifle a smile. He had been the object of everyone’s attention that morning, and all eyes had been on him. He had just completed his First Communion at the nearby Church of Our Mother of Sorrows in the predominantly Christian quarter. Afterward, his father had taken him straight to the studio for a photo to commemorate the day when Jesus had entered his heart. From then on, he was expected to be observant like his elders, to pray every night before going to sleep, to accompany his parents t
o church every Sunday, and to take confession, and take Holy Communion. The photograph, which was an upper-body portrait, didn’t show his white pants or the shoes and new socks that his father had bought him for the occasion. That morning, at Our Mother of Sorrows, he had knelt down in front of a statue of Jesus on the cross and repeated the chants, which they had all learned by heart in the previous weeks. He could still recall some of the verses.
Holy God, almighty and eternal, have mercy on us. Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, forever and ever, amen and amen. To You, Lord of all creation, we give thanks. To you, Jesus Christ, our praise.
He had listened to the sermon by the patriarch who had officiated at the ceremony and had placed the host in his mouth with his own hand. He could still taste the body of Christ moistened with his blood, which is how the patriarch described the wafer dipped in wine. He had remembered to let the wafer melt in his mouth and not to bite down on it because it was the friable body of Christ.
At the ceremony now in the studio, he knelt before the camera, and instead of the patriarch, there was an Armenian photographer officiating, asking him in broken Arabic to look straight at the camera lens without moving. Youssef was puzzled because the man had addressed him as a girl, but when he saw the smile on his father’s face, he understood that this was a peculiarity of the photographer’s speech.
They went home afterward, joining his mother and siblings who had gone back to the house ahead of them. His mother had prepared a
celebratory breakfast that she’d laid out on a big table in the courtyard where both their family and his uncle’s family were assembled. Taking advantage of all the commotion, Youssef stuffed himself with delicious kahi with gaymar , which his uncle had brought, and ate as many bread wraps as he could. He loved the paper-thin bread rolled around a filling of cheese and homemade jam which his mother made, and Hinna kept on rolling them because she couldn’t deny him anything that day. The next day, he was laid up in bed. All that food, followed by running around and playing with his siblings and cousins had done him in, and given him an upset stomach. His mother had chided him, saying he had no self-control, “Ay ma eeth brayshukh? Satana?”
