The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  “We learnt Arabic poetry and some modern literature and Shakespeare,” he said. “Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and our teacher even read out the entire play of Othello once. He tried to explain the poetry to us. I don’t know if we got it. I think we read the play in both Arabic and English.”

  They learned Iraqi history as well.

  “We were taught about Islam and how it spread, the first Islamic Empire and the Caliphate that was established around Damascus and then moved to Baghdad when the city was founded in AD 763 by the Abbasid Caliph Mansur who called it Medinat al-Salam, ‘the city of peace.’ We read One Thousand and One Nights, and learned how Baghdad already had universities, science and art, literature and poetry, by AD 800 under the famous Caliph Harun al-Rashid. It was the greatest city on earth back then. But I hated history. It’s such a dry subject if it isn’t taught properly.

  “Of course, we loved the summer holidays,” my father mused aloud. “The summers in Baghdad are so hot that if you go out at the height of the heat of the day, it can practically kill you. Temperatures rise to 50 degrees Celsius. We’d hang around at home, or go to the outdoor swimming pool, which was a ten-minute bike ride from my house. I learned how to swim there. I remember only boys being allowed to go, but I think there was a special time for the girls to swim. We never swam in the Tigris, my parents forbade it. But, in the spring, the Tigris floods, and then by summer it has gone down a bit and so there are all these sandy islands in the middle. My uncle Clement camped in a little temporary structure made of straw matting and cane, called a jerdah, on one of the islands when he was in his twenties. He’d spend the summer there, which is three or four months long in Baghdad, sleeping out overnight. He spent more time there than he did at home. It was called colloquially, Al Jazzra, the island. He slept, washed and ate there; he’d sit by the river and catch fish, swim. It was refreshing in the intense heat. But once in a while he’d row us all over in a little rowboat for picnics in the evenings, which I loved. The whole family would come—aunts, uncles, cousins, friends—and we’d cook masgouf, a method of barbecuing fish on wooden stakes around an open fire, and the women brought a picnic in an icebox and tea and coffee and sweets. It was a popular summer pastime in Baghdad.”

  But by far, the best summers were when Khalil took my father and his eldest daughter, Siham, to Lebanon and Syria, for a month at a time. First, they’d go to cosmopolitan Beirut and stay with Khalil’s sister, Selma, in her flat near the Corniche and La Rocha, the arched rocks that are Beirut’s signature sight. They’d walk on the Corniche at sunset eating corn on the cob.

  “You could see the whole sun going into the sea,” my father reminisced. “I found it beautiful, it was something you didn’t see at home. Aunt Selma lived near the American University in Beirut where my father had studied. So we’d go there and meet his old friends and get a drink in a café nearby. Then, as a treat for being well-behaved, he’d take us on the tram to another neighbourhood and buy us ice cream.”

  When my father was seven, he went with his father to a village in northern Lebanon near Tripoli where Khalil’s best friend, Ibrahim, lived. (My father was named after this man, who was more like a brother to Khalil.)

  When Khalil was a boy, Syria and Lebanon were one province of the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, the French took control, and separated Lebanon and Syria two years later. Khalil’s hometown, Safita (now in Syria), was not far from Tripoli (now in Lebanon). Khalil had been sent to boarding school in Tripoli where he’d met Ibrahim. Neither had brothers, and they became inseparable.

  “I remember a café in the village square, really just a concrete floor and a straw awning for shade, near a creek,” my father described. “There was beautiful, picturesque Mediterranean mountain scenery all around us. I was bored in the village; there was nothing for a young boy to do. So we’d go to the café, and one of the old men there taught me how to play chess. That’s how I learned chess and became quite good playing those old guys.”

  A few times Khalil took Siham and Ibrahim to Safita. The town is built on three hills and around the white tower of the Chastel Blanc, the remains of a Crusader fortress, built by the Knights of the Templar in 1188. At the turn of the century, when my grandfather lived there, Safita had a population of a few thousand, almost all of whom were Christians.

  I remembered my own visit to Safita in 1992 when I was only twenty-one. I arrived by bus, and the road climbed, undulating over hill after hill covered in olive groves, revealing scenes evocative of Greece or the south of France. The pink-and-white town appeared to be huddling around the ancient square tower. In the old town centre, the cobbled streets and houses are made of white, yellow and black stone. Most houses are roofed in red tile and have terraces.

  I tried to track down my remaining relatives and find my grandfather’s house. I found myself in this unfamiliar town in a strange country, searching for some shred of my ancestral connection; I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but some strong urge had brought me there. But I didn’t speak Arabic, and no one I encountered spoke English. In the old days there were no addresses, so I couldn’t just find my grandfather’s house for myself. My father had said I should go to the church and see if the priest recognized our last name, so I did. But the day I went there and knocked on the huge wooden door of the Chapel St. Michael on the ground floor of the Chastel Blanc tower, it was closed. I was disappointed because I’d heard that you could climb the tower, and that, on a clear day, you could see as far as Tripoli and the Mediterranean Sea.

  I’d seen a few photographs of my grandfather’s father, Said, who’d been the mayor of Safita for some years. According to the family stories, he was a serious, trustworthy man. In the only formal portrait we have, he is around sixty and wearing a suit and tie, with a suit vest underneath. His hair and eyebrows are black, but his toothbrush moustache is white. His old stone house was covered with grapevines and had olive trees growing all around it. It was high on one of the hills that had a direct view of the tower. He was an extremely pious man who knew the Bible by heart, and he treated the poor the way it was prescribed in the Bible. Every year, he let the poor come to take from his olive harvest.

  “The Bible is our culture,” he’d say.

  During World War I, Khalil’s two eldest sisters used to go into the surrounding countryside and give food to their relatives who were fighting the Ottomans, and so living in camps and unable to come into the towns.

  My father still has the family Bible in Arabic from Safita. It belonged to his great-grandfather Yousif who was born in 1845 and had his name printed in Arabic in gold letters on the black cover. Inside, my grandfather Khalil had mapped out the family tree. He’d also written in English that his grandfather’s sight had become weak, and he couldn’t read. When he saw this Bible he’d cry, lamenting his bad luck for not being able to read it. So Khalil kept it in its original form so that “his descendants would keep as a memory the pure soul of this man who lived his life without harming anybody and without coveting anything. This is the first Bible of the family.” The inscription reminded me of the day I visited Safita. I remember how the bell rang out from the tower, and echoed far away down the hills and olive groves below, when I was finally leaving to go back to Damascus.

  Khalil always cherished Safita, but he loved Beirut best and wanted to retire there. All through his life he visited his friends and family in Syria and Lebanon as often as he could. One of my father’s earliest memories is of his father not returning home to Baghdad from one of these trips.

  “The taxis crossed the desert at night,” he told me. “They usually leave Damascus around 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon and get in to Baghdad early in the morning. It’s better to travel at night in the summer because of the heat. But this time, Khalil didn’t arrive at the usual time. And in the late 1940s, there were no phones, no way of knowing what had happened to him. He just didn’t arrive for hours and hours. My mother was getting really worried. Finally, late in the evening
, he walked into the house. The taxi had got lost in the desert. In those days, the road to Damascus wasn’t paved; it was just a hard mud track. Most drivers just knew the way, and there was lots of traffic. The taxis had two drivers, as it was a long overnight drive, and usually four passengers, one in front with the drivers and three in the back seat. But the young driver wasn’t experienced enough at reading the stars to guide him at night. At daybreak, when the older driver woke up and saw that they weren’t anywhere near Baghdad, he took the wheel and steered them in the right direction. The young driver hadn’t even known he was lost; he’d just been driving what he thought was straight ahead, but had been going around and around in circles.” He laughed.

  “That reminds me of another story from when I was about thirteen,” my father continued. “The whole family—Lina, Victoria, Khalil, and Siham and I—were on a bus coming back from Damascus to Baghdad. It was the first time we’d been to Safita for the summer all together. The bus broke down in the middle of the night, in the heart of the desert. I remember the stars were so bright and thick, like millions of droplets of light reflecting on water . . . you never see them like that in cities.

  “My father was panicking all night, worried sick about being stuck, lost, broken down, conjuring up all the worst case scenarios, so he’d stayed awake waiting for someone to come by. If we were lost in the desert, he thought we might not find our way home. In the morning, we realized we’d broken down right by the start of the newly paved road. We weren’t lost at all. The bus was fixed and we got going again. We arrived at the border and Customs, where we had to show our passports and declare our goods. But remember, by then, Auntie Lina was very senior in the Customs ministry, and she told the officials who she was. They were very impressed and didn’t search our luggage, but gave us tea instead.

  “Lina chatted to the guards and discovered there had been a wanted communist on the bus. The Secret Police had been tracking the bus. We saw the communist being hauled off by the police and we felt very sorry for him. The officials laughed when Lina told them how worried we’d been. They said, with typical Iraqi black humour, ‘You didn’t need to worry about being lost, we were watching you and we knew exactly where you were all the time. . . .’ ” My father laughed at the joke, despite having told it.

  “I wish you’d known my father,” he said. “I think you are like him. Reading and travelling . . . like you he loved books, theology, philosophy, ancient history, and like you all he really wanted to do was travel. He used to believe in meaningful connections between things, coincidences that always came in threes.”

  “What do you think he would have thought about this war?”

  “I remember he came to London when you were still a girl, and I gave him Orwell’s Animal Farm to read. He loved it, saying, ‘This is exactly what happened in Iraq every time there was a coup or revolution. Exactly.’ Maybe he’d think the same was happening now. Who knows? He hated hypocrisy. He used to ask my sisters how they could watch the lies on television in Iraq, just sit and watch. They said, ‘We know they are lying, so we ignore it.’ But he hated that.”

  In the 1940s and 1950s, Iraq was a relatively prosperous country because it had oil revenues, and its internal food supply made it self-sufficient. “Iraq was very feudal; the various tribes owned and worked the land, and produced a lot of food,” my father continued.

  I reminded him I’d never seen Baghdad; I didn’t even know what the city looked like, what it smelled like.

  “The river is the biggest feature, and it is a very dry, sandy city,” he explained. “But people irrigated the city, and so there are trees and gardens. Without irrigation, nothing would grow. You could tell where the irrigation stopped on the edge of the city, as the greenery stopped too. When I first flew from Baghdad to Beirut, I saw how dramatic it was, nothing grows in that desert.”

  Unfortunately, anti-British sentiment worsened when Israel was established in 1948. Iraq wanted Palestine to remain for the Palestinians, and the country became increasingly anti-Jewish as the loyalties of the 117,000-strong Iraqi-Jewish community were questioned and restrictions were imposed on them. They were accused of serving both the British authorities in Iraq and the Zionist project in Palestine, because the British Mandate in Palestine that had led to the creation of Israel and the British Mandate in Iraq had been established at the same time. Finally, Nuri al-Said threatened to expel the entire Iraqi-Jewish community if Palestinian refugees were not allowed to return to their homes. In 1950, a new law allowed Jews to renounce their Iraqi citizenship and leave Iraq forever, and most of the remaining Iraqi Jews left, for Israel or the West. Until then, Iraqi Jews had lived in Iraq for more than two thousand five hundred years. Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was from northern Mesopotamia. When the Babylonians conquered Judah in 587 BC, they took some Jews as captives, who continued to practise their religion even in Babylon.

  “I remember in the mid-1950s going with my mother to another lady’s house, and she was crying because she had to sell everything and go to Israel. It was so sad, and my mother felt sorry for her. The woman didn’t want to leave Iraq, but she was an Iraqi Jew so she was forced to go,” my father said.

  One of the other issues that generated anti-British sentiment was oil. In the mid-1950s, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) was the only oil company in Iraq. It was jointly owned by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, Compagnie Française Petrole (Total), Exxon, Mobil and a private investor called Gulbenkian. IPC was a stand-alone company with shares, and BP was the operator. Iraq only received a royalty from the oil.

  “It was peanuts,” my father said. “But in the mid-1950s, the rate increased a lot. The Iraqi government suddenly had lots of money and so civil servants, like my parents, who were teachers, got big raises. But Iraq was still under a puppet government. IPC was still active, with offices all over, but it was run by foreigners, so Iraqis didn’t get very high up. I remember making friends with an American boy whose father worked at the Dora refinery. I think he was the first American I met, and I bought his bike when he and his family went back to the States.”

  “But what happened to the British? When did they finally leave Iraq?”

  “We had a revolution in 1958. I was staying over at my grandmother’s house that day. Some of my best friends lived on her street, so I often slept at her place. When I woke up we heard gunfire, and we listened to the radio. I remember my grandmother saying, ‘The radio sounds funny.’ The propaganda had changed, you see. Suddenly the message was ‘Down with the British,’ not the pro-monarchy party line that had been repeated before. A curfew was imposed, and we were forbidden to go into the streets. It was a military coup and an army officer, Abd al-Karim Qasim, had taken power. They occupied all Baghdad’s strategic buildings including the radio station. It was horrific. They shot King Faisal, the regent and the royal family when they emerged from the palace. Nuri al-Said’s house was surrounded. He managed to escape, but was captured the next day and shot in the street. Of course, as a young boy, this was all very exciting. I wanted to go and see the palace, but thank God my father forbade me. Really, apart from those murders, it was actually a bloodless revolution, since it didn’t cause widespread anarchy and killing.”

  Not long afterwards, another curfew was announced when my father was at his great-aunt’s house playing cards with his mother, Madeline and his sisters. Curfews became common as the political situation in Iraq was highly unstable. He wasn’t allowed to play outside, so he was left with the women.

  “My uncles wouldn’t play backgammon with me, and they wouldn’t play with Madeline either,” he said. “So we played together. I learned quickly and would play her for money and beat her. Just for pennies. When you think about it, it was strange she played backgammon as well. That was exotic too; women didn’t play usually.”

  The house was only a block away from his own home, and the women suddenly needed something and sent the fourteen-year-old boy home to get it. My father ran out as quickly a
s possible, but a young guard, dressed in the uniform of the Bedouin regiment, pointed at him and told him to stop. He asked my father what he was doing breaking the curfew, and my father explained he was only going a few houses down to do an errand.

  “He dragged me back to the house where all the women were. Suddenly, they all started shouting at the guard and giving him hell. It was like walking into a hornet’s nest. They demanded to know what he thought I was going to do in those small steps between the two houses.” My father was giggling. “That poor guard, he was scared. He just wanted to get out of there, away from all those women, as quickly as he could. He didn’t bother me anymore after that.”

  Most people were happy with the revolution, and Qasim was popular because he worked to improve normal people’s lives after a long period of self-interested rule by a small monarchist elite. British influence disappeared in Iraqi politics, and Qasim passed Law 80 in 1961, which seized 99 per cent of Iraqi land from the British-owned IPC concessionary area (the exclusive geographical area that the IPC was allowed to operate in to produce oil and gas). He also enacted Law 30, an aggregation law that seized estates from the three thousand wealthy landowners who owned half of Iraq’s cultivatable land, and distributed them to landless peasants or small landowners. The size of the middle class increased as a result of Qasim’s policies. In retrospect, my father realized how profoundly this revolution affected his life, because he happened to graduate in 1959, the year after the coup.