by Sinan Antoon
He was the only son who went to university, where he studied law, but was repeatedly jailed for his politics. In spite of everything he went through, Elias remained a bon vivant, more so than the rest of them. There wasn’t a wedding where he wasn’t dancing or singing, and when no one else could move anymore, he just kept going, a glass of araq always at hand. After years in jail, he eventually gave up politics, but they were always watching and following him around. The last time he was jailed he had been working as legal counsel for a Yugoslav construction firm
that had a number of projects in the country during the 1980s.
The company director had asked him to deliver an envelope to one of the employees, and after he did, a member of the local staff reported him for “accepting bribes from foreigners.” The accusation cost him another three years in jail. Prison didn’t break him, but it wore him down. He remained physically fit but he tired of life, especially during the long years of sanctions.
Then he began losing his memory. He’d forget the simplest things and would sometimes get lost when out on his regular evening walk. At her insistence, his wife began accompanying him, but one day in 1999, he slipped out of the house in his pajamas while she was still asleep and he never came back. They found him at the coroner’s office a week later. His body had been picked up in a small alley off Rashid Street. When the residents of the area were questioned, they said he’d been roaming the neighborhood for several days and they couldn’t make head or tail of what he wanted or was after, and he had no ID or wallet on him. Someone had eventually found him lying against a wall; he had died of thirst and hunger.
During the embargo and after years of deprivation, people changed: everybody was overwhelmed by their own problems and no one had reached out to him or tried to help. Why Elias had wandered to that particular neighborhood, nobody in the family could fathom.
On the third day of mourning, one of Elias’s friends came to offer his condolences, and as he sipped on his coffee, the conversation turned to the circumstances of Elias’s death.
“Good gracious,” the friend exclaimed, “we used to meet in a house over there during our days underground!”
Elias’s Alzheimer’s, or whatever dementia afflicted him, had erased everything except for that old party haunt. His wife found no solace in the story, and she reiterated her view that politics had robbed her of everything: first, her brother who’d been executed in 1979, and then her husband, whose mind had been destroyed.
10
Youssef is seated at the head of a large table laden with food.
He is grinning broadly and holding up a very full glass of araq, which he is about to clink with his brother Jamil, seated to his right. Samia, Jamil’s Lebanese wife, is sitting next to her husband and remains, in her forties, as attractive as ever.
Looking straight into the camera and smiling, she too holds up her glass in a toast. Seated to Youssef’s left is Hinna, the only adult whose glass isn’t filled with araq. It contains, instead, a soft drink that the waiter had brought out after Jamil had exclaimed in his best Lebanese accent, “She’s not a drunk like the rest of us! Get her a soft drink. She and the little one drink soda!”
To ensure he would be in the picture Fadi, the five-year-old boy sitting next to Hinna, is sticking his head out. Danny, two years younger, isn’t in the picture because they’d left him at home with his grandmother. The table, heaving with delicious mezze, was at one of the fabled Zahleh “casinos”—outdoor restaurants located along a gurgling watercourse under the shade of leafy trees in the town of Zahleh. Hinna was smiling happily: it was the first time in five years that they’d seen Jamil, and except for a little gray in his hair, he remained largely unchanged. The three weeks whizzed by as if they’d been three days.
In that time, Hinna was able to visit the renowned pilgrimage site of Our Lady of Lebanon in Harissa, and to pray in the church built at the feet of the massive statue of the Virgin Mary situated on the hilltop.
Jamil had started out working for Shakir Ibrahim and Bros., and left for Beirut in 1969 after a close friend of his was charged with being a Freemason. He remained in Lebanon for the rest of his life, and never set foot in Iraq again, not even for a visit.
During this particular visit, Hinna admonished Jamil and his wife repeatedly for not coming to see them.
“You want Jamil to come to Baghdad so they can jail him or sentence him to death?” countered Samia. For Hinna, that was just hyperbole.
“Jail! Samia, how you love to exaggerate!” she retorted.
Hinna would always recall the overland journey she and Youssef made in one of those huge buses that set off from Baghdad and arrived the following day in Beirut, after stops in Amman and Damascus. The situation in Lebanon had been tense but it never occurred to any of them that the country would be engulfed by civil war for years on end. They wouldn’t see each other again until 2001 when Jamil traveled to Amman from Beirut after Hinna’s tearful entreaties on the phone.
“Dear boy,” she’d said, “I want to see you one more time before I die.”
11
By the time the middle sister, Salima, graduated high school with distinction in 1956, the family’s economic fortunes had vastly improved. Youssef’s salary, alongside Habiba’s from her nursing work and what Ghazi sent from Kirkuk, afforded them a good life.
The Jesuits had just opened al-Hikma University in Zaafaraniya, and Youssef encouraged his sister to apply. Salima was overjoyed when he offered to pay for her to attend. She had always dreamed of becoming an engineer and that is what she studied for in the four years she spent at al-Hikma. Everybody was so proud of her and they all went to her graduation in Zaafaraniya, which was attended by the nationalist leader and then-prime minister Abdel-
Karim Qasim. Known as the Zaeem, ‘the leader,’ Qasim personally handed their diplomas to the students graduating with honors.
Salima was pro-Qasim, and she was always arguing with Hinna who favored King Faysal and was heartbroken by the way he and the royal family were killed. Salima insisted that it wasn’t Qasim who had issued the order but Abdel-Salam Arif. After Qasim was executed three years later, Hinna forgot her opposition to him and bemoaned the Zaeem’s sorry fate.
Salima was wearing a black dress that she had bought for the occasion even though Hinna had said it was, “shorter than necessary.” The hem of the dress fell just above the knees, and pulled up further when she sat. But her graduation gown provided the requisite modesty during the ceremony, hiding her knees and covering her breasts. Because of her rather high heels, Salima climbed up the steps to the stage gingerly. Even though she was a little flustered, she smiled as she shook hands with the Zaeem and thanked him for the diploma with high distinction which the dean had given him to hand out. She couldn’t believe that he had spoken to her and had congratulated her personally. “Alf mabrouk, binti” he’d said, as the camera lens blinked and captured the moment.
12
Amal, the youngest girl, is wearing a white dress and a matching headscarf tied under her chin. She’s looking down at a baby, barely two months old, in her lap. Only twenty at the time, Amal wouldn’t marry and have children until after she had graduated university with a degree in management and economics. The baby in the photo is her niece—her sister Habiba wanted her to be the godmother to May, a girl who’d come on the heels of two boys.
Amal is standing in front of a small basin filled with water. The bishop’s hand is raised in the air, drawing an invisible cross to bless the water in which May is to be baptized, in emulation of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River. To Amal’s right is Habiba, in a brocade dress and the same dark-colored headscarf worn by the other women in the congregation. Her hand is extended toward the baby who is howling like a cat before water. Abed, the father, is standing to Habiba’s right, with a broad grin on his face and his hands behind his back. This was the first family celebration at which Youssef was able to use the expensive Leica he’d purchased in Bonn on a work
trip in 1961. He snapped photos inside the church, as well as in the adjoining courtyard, and in the backyard of the house where they all gathered to celebrate afterward. He took dozens of pictures, which were stored in albums or boxes with hundreds of others, and he’d picked out this particular one to hang in the reception room. Maha’s husband, Luay, had repeatedly offered to scan them onto a disk at his office and to upload them to Facebook so that all their scattered relatives could see them, but Youssef just kept putting him off.
13
Mikhail, the youngest of the boys, was the spoiled baby of the family and the apple of his father’s eye—perhaps because Gorgis had spent more time with him than with any of the other children.
Gorgis had become homebound with back pain after suffering an injury on one of his trips upriver when he had lost his footing and taken a fall. Mikhail—or Mikha as Gorgis liked to call him—
was a scoundrel: he was smart and had a razor-sharp wit, and he’d joke and banter with his father until he had him in stitches.
Gorgis was enthralled by Mikha’s cleverness, and all the questions he asked. He could deny him nothing: whatever took the boy’s fancy would have his father reaching into his pocket for the money with which to purchase it. Hinna’s warnings that such indulgence would spoil him went unheeded, and when Gorgis died in his sleep, Mikhail was so grief-stricken it took him months to recover. He had graduated from Baghdad College, like Youssef and Jamil, and like Youssef, became a translator. He had gone to work for a British firm in the H-3 zone, not far from the Jordanian border, coming back home every Thursday night to spend the weekend with his family. That particular Thursday, he knew as soon as he got back that something awful had happened. Gorgis wasn’t sitting in his usual place—on the sofa in the living room—
where he sometimes even slept. Instead, Mikhail beheld the sight of his father’s body being washed and readied for the funeral service at Our Mother of Sorrows that would take place the next morning and be followed by burial at Sahat al-Tayaran cemetery.
Later, Mikhail would turn to a life of pleasure and dissipation, showering himself with the indulgence that his father had formerly bestowed on him. He worked for a number of foreign companies and his large salary facilitated his profligacy and he drank and partied to his heart’s content. When his siblings remonstrated with him, he pointed out that so long as he contributed to the household’s expenses, he was free to do as he pleased with his time. He often came home in the wee hours having forgotten his keys, and would call out Amal’s name until she woke up. As the youngest of the girls, Amal was the one closest to him, and she would come down from the roof where they slept in the summers in order to let him in.
In all his pictures, Mikhail is either smoking, drinking, or dancing. The photo on the wall shows a handsome young man in his twenties with short, black hair. He is standing next to a friend, and the two of them are cheering, bottles of beer held aloft as they lean against the hood of the friend’s car. In the background is Taq Kisra, the site of an ancient triumphal arch and a favorite picnic stop on road trips. That handsome young man is how Youssef liked to recall his brother. Whenever Hinna pleaded with Mikhail to cut back on his drinking, he responded by reminding her that Jesus’s first miracle was the conversion of water into wine at the wedding at Cana in Galilee—a clear sign, he’d say, for “those who have eyes to see.”
Mikhail was a gifted linguist: in addition to English, which he’d mastered under the tutelage of Baghdad College’s ‘fatherhood,’ he
had also learned German after years of work with Züblin, the German company in charge of building the Samarra Dam. Later, he became a broker for a consortium of Australian firms bidding on Iraqi contracts. Mikhail’s cut was one percent, and when the consortium landed a deal to help modernize Iraq’s agriculture after two years of negotiations, he and the rest of his family had been assured of a life of luxury for the remainder of their days, as the contract ran into the hundreds of millions of dinars. However, because of a clause holding it liable for losses incurred in the event of a natural disaster, the Iraqi government changed its mind, and the deal fell through an hour before the signing ceremony. Mikhail sank into a deep depression and stayed home for an entire year without work.
Even though he eventually landed a job at the Australian Embassy, thanks to the encouragement and support of friends, and resumed normal life, he never got over the setback. He’d leave the embassy in the Hindiya district after work and make his way to the Ilwiya Club to meet up with his drinking buddies. He’d teeter home drunk at eight or nine in the evening, have a bite of dinner, and go to bed alone. His wife refused to sleep in the same room because she could no longer stand his drunkenness or his snoring. He almost never attended family celebrations or visited relatives. He couldn’t get over the bad cards fate had dealt him, or the lost opportunity of a lifetime that had destroyed his dreams and made him a wreck. Doctors’ warnings and recommendations were in vain: he would not give up his daily drinking or chain-smoking and would crow that he was still alive despite a doctor’s prediction in 1967 that he would die from smoking within a year. “Even the Angel of Death has lost his way with me,” he’d joke—but the Grim Reaper claimed his reward soon enough.
14
Dating back to 1990 when the family celebrated Wisam’s First Communion, the sole color photo on the wall held within its frame almost all the family tree’s limbs and fruits. Wisam was Salima’s grandson, May’s eldest boy, and as her house in the Baladiyat wasn’t large enough to accommodate the many guests attending the occasion, Salima had asked Youssef and Hinna if she could hold the celebration in the courtyard of the old family house. Except for Jamil who was in Lebanon and Ghazi who was in America, all of Gorgis Hanna Baharatli’s children, as well as their children and grandchildren, appear in the picture. No other photo after this one would bring them together again. The invasion of Kuwait took place less than a month later, following that there was another war, and after that came a prolonged blockade. Slowly, all the brothers and sisters fell away from the family tree, either swept up on the winds of exile or returning to the earth in the plot that the family had bought at the new Chaldean cemetery on the road to Baaquba—the capital’s cemeteries were overflowing with the dead and there wasn’t a square foot of land to spare. Mikhail was the first to go. He died of a heart attack on the last day of that
year, just a few weeks before the war, and his death ushered in a decade that would witness the dissolution and final dispersal of the family. Habiba was next, and she died within a year and a half after cancer had spread throughout her bones. Heat and dementia killed Elias. After 2003, the remaining siblings and their grandchildren scattered to the four winds, ending up in Sweden, Canada, and even New Zealand.
15
There were more photos, some on top of the television, and others hanging on walls in various parts of the house. And of course hundreds more in albums, envelopes, and plastic bags piled inside the third ground-floor bedroom which had gradually turned into a storage area. In the late 1990s and after the 2003 invasion, every relative leaving the country would sell what could be sold, carry what could be carried, and park a few remaining bags and possessions in the family house in the hope that these could somehow be forwarded to them in the future. But the bags and boxes just piled up, gathering dust and awaiting the return of someone to take them to new homes far from Baghdad.
There was one picture that Youssef kept in a small envelope in the bedroom closet that he hadn’t taken out in years. In the past, he had often reviewed the many copies of it that lined the walls of his heart and soul. Although the recesses of his heart had darkened in the autumn of his life, they would light up from time to time as his memory stirred. There were changes in some of the details that he alone could see, but the basic elements remained constant: a smiling woman (she always smiled whenever he looked at her); the shiny brown eyes that were the color of the chocolate he so loved and that echoed the glimmer of her beautiful smile; the long
black hair that sometimes hid the earrings which she chose ever so carefully. Sometimes he’d glimpse her laughing, covering her mouth with tapered fingers even though she had pretty teeth that were white and straight. Dalal was her name—it was a good designation, for Dalal was true to the enchantment that her name signified.
When she was hired at the agency in 197l, she turned Youssef’s world topsy-turvy. She had come with a master’s degree in agriculture from the University of Edinburgh and was appointed to a newly created position responsible for development and planning in the date sector. The government’s economic policy had been entirely focused on oil and the petroleum industry until then, and with the country undergoing rapid changes, the date sector had been adversely affected. Date palm orchards suffered neglect as migration from the countryside increased, and other date-producing states entered the international market and competed with what had hitherto been Iraq’s undisputed monopoly. One of Dalal’s first tasks was to conduct a countrywide study on the state of date production in concert with the regional branches of the agency.
She stole his heart the very first time she set foot inside his office with Abu Shukri, the agency’s director, who was making the rounds introducing her. She wore a blue jacket with a white blouse underneath, and a skirt that was a slightly paler shade of blue and skimmed her knees. Black stockings and modest heels completed her outfit. Her elegance was distinctive but understated: barely a whiff of makeup and just a small gold Quran on a fine chain around her neck.
