The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  “When you think of it,” he said, “only for a couple of years out of the last fifty, government scholarships to study abroad were given to students on the basis of merit rather than influence. I was in the top two hundred students in Iraq in my year, so I was sent to Britain. I was very lucky.”

  Two people were responsible for encouraging my father to study outside of Iraq. His father wanted him to win a scholarship and go to a Western country either in Europe or North America to get a good education. Adventurous Aunt Madeline also influenced my father. She had flown to London in 1956 with a female relative and returned with outlandish stories of the Underground, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. My father took his exams, hoping to get a scholarship to Britain. In June 1960, the family travelled to Beirut for the holidays, while Khalil went on a British Council–sponsored trip to England for teachers. It was the first time he had been to Europe. We have a photograph of Khalil standing in the open air on the tarmac at the Baghdad airport with the Iraqi Airlines plane behind him. He’s smiling, looking happy and carefree, despite his smart double-breasted suit and tie, and he’s surrounded by dark-haired women and men in white suits, laughing, probably the other teachers going on the trip.

  Auntie Lina had stayed in our home in Baghdad while the rest of the family vacationed in Beirut. She received Ibrahim’s marks when they were delivered to the house. They were good, so he flew back alone from Beirut to interview for the scholarship. At the Ministry of Education he was quizzed by a panel. The students were ranked by marks, and the top ones were given a choice of which country they wanted to study in. The top two hundred could go to Britain. They asked my father where he wanted to go in England, and he said London. He wanted to study civil engineering, but all the spots were taken, so he decided on a whim to take petroleum engineering. They told him that he had won a scholarship, and that he’d be going to England that autumn.

  “When I came out of the interview I was really happy. But my grandmother didn’t like the idea; she didn’t want me to go. She said, ‘I’ll never see you again.’ Everyone knew that when you sent a young man away to the West, he didn’t tend to come back home to live. But the rest of the family was excited, and they had a huge party for me with a typically massive spread of Arabic food. My parents gave me a watch as a going-away present.”

  Like any young man embarking on a new adventure, Ibrahim was thinking about his future and not what he was leaving behind. He never dreamed he’d never return to his home city. But his grandmother was right; my father never saw her again.

  TRAFALGAR SQUARE FROM THE STEPS OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY LONDON, ENGLAND, EARLY 1960S

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Motherland

  . . . our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Hugalu, your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers . . . and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile . . .—British Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, Commanding the British Forces in Iraq, “Proclamation to the People of Baghdad,” March 1917

  In October 1960, my sixteen-year-old father, along with the top two hundred students in the country that year, took a chartered Iraqi Airlines flight to swinging-sixties London with a refuelling stop in Vienna.

  “We were flying to London, but in the opposite direction to this flight,” my father thought aloud. “Funny, I’ve never made the reverse trip, Baghdad to London, but I’ve done this flight from Canada countless times. Flying was so exciting for me then; it was only the second time I’d flown alone.”

  He’d just turned sixteen a few months earlier, so he was at the time a slender boy, with a head of impossibly thick black hair on top of a smooth nut-brown face. A few friends from Baghdad College (which was actually a high school) had also made the cut, and so the atmosphere on the airplane was like a boys’ school holiday, full of loud jostly energy and the excitement of being unfettered from family and country. The cultural attaché from the Iraqi Embassy met them at the airport, and they were put up in a British Council hostel and given a three-day “indoctrination,” as my father put it, into British life.

  He sent a short, expensive telegram to his parents reporting that he’d arrived safely. After that, his parents had to wait for more than two weeks to receive any further news from him. They had no idea where he was in England, how he was living, eating or sleeping, and his mother brooded about him all the time and couldn’t sleep during those weeks. She was worried about him alone in a new country, with not a single relative or friend and not one familiar face.

  Ibrahim already knew all about British culture from his father, the basics of how to dress, how to introduce yourself and make small talk. But there were many terrified students from small Iraqi villages who were very clever but had never lived in a city before and had no idea how they were going to manage in England. All the students were a year or two older than Ibrahim because he’d started elementary school a year early, but his English was better than most of theirs. During those first three days, he was overwhelmed by London; he loved it. It was crowded, vibrant and exciting; he was fascinated by the Underground and the escalators, and the grey streets lined with fashionable shops and the European architecture were new and refreshingly unfamiliar. Couples kissed in the streets, which felt almost pornographic to a young Iraqi who wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend or be alone with a young woman who wasn’t a relative. Here, people flaunted their affairs in public.

  Soon the students realized that hardly anyone was going to be staying in London. All the Baghdad College boys were to be split up. My father found out he was being sent to a small city in Yorkshire in the north of England with two Kurdish students, Shirzad and Ahmed. The British Council helped them open bank accounts, gave them references and a train ticket, and on a miserable rainy October day, they were dropped off at King’s Cross station in northeast central London to catch the train to Yorkshire. There were no cell phones or credit cards, and international calls were prohibitively expensive, so Ibrahim was on his own, fending for himself for the first time in his life without the buffer of his large, doting family.

  When the students got off the train, they saw that their new home was even darker and drearier than London. The grey skies stripped all colour from the town, while the rain poured down with a force they had never before experienced. For Ibrahim, raised on romantic notions of Britain and the West, it felt like the most horrible place in the world. He was almost offended by the relentless rain that made him feel so damp and uncomfortable. To this day, he hates rain. As soon as a few drops touch his head, he immediately ducks for cover. He can’t understand how people can accept going out in it, even with an umbrella.

  My father and his new friend, Shirzad, were staying together with a landlady and her family in a typical English semi-detached row house. There were three bedrooms and a bath upstairs, and two rooms and a kitchen downstairs. Ibrahim found the house small and cramped, and the front room where they first sat was alien to him with its dark wallpaper, little mantelpiece ornaments, English-landscape etchings and the flowery china teacups and teapot. His landlady was a widow who lived with her invalid elderly mother and her tall twenty-one-year-old daughter. Her son had just joined the army, which is why they had a spare room for boarders. Ibrahim and Shirzad shared one room, the daughter was in another, and the widow and her mother in a third. Ibrahim was allowed to use the front room as a sitting-study area; there was a gas heater with a grill on top to keep him warm. And he needed it because he was often freezing, suffering a damp seeping cold he’d never felt before.

  “I’d never bathed in a tub,” he recalled. “At ho
me in Baghdad we had a Turkish bath. It was like a sauna room with running boiling water that you poured over yourself to wash. Here, I had to sit in the water that I was making dirty, which didn’t seem hygienic, and I wondered how I was going to wash my hair. I was told off for not cleaning the tub after. The soap scum formed a ring because of the hard water. But what did I know?”

  The widow gave the boys breakfast and dinner, and they had a hot lunch at school. Breakfast was often bacon, which the Muslims ate even though they weren’t supposed to. The evening meal was usually light—cheese sandwiches, a boiled egg and a piece of cake.

  Ibrahim was enrolled in the local College of Technology to study for his A-level exams in physics, chemistry and maths in preparation to get into university. The college was co-ed, but he was doing sciences, so there was only one girl in his class. It was peculiar to have girls in the same school; he was envious of the Kurdish students studying politics, who had many girls in their classes.

  The local people had very strong accents that made their English almost incomprehensible, and his teacher was Welsh, so Ibrahim could barely understand him during his classes. He found it hard to study in his first year because of the culture shock and his intense loneliness.

  After about six months in the widow’s house, the unbearably tasteless food drove the boys away. Ibrahim moved into a one-room bachelor apartment in a rougher part of town. It was in a big semi-detached house split into several apartments.

  “I have no idea how I could afford it,” my father recalls.

  Now he was a sixteen-year-old boy, who had not even finished high school, living alone in another country with complete freedom to do and live as he liked. But instead of going ‘wild,’ he went domestic. What he liked was Iraqi food, and if he wanted to eat it, he had to learn to cook it himself. He asked his parents and grandmother to send him recipes. On his one-ring burner, he learned, through trial and error, to prepare simple casseroles with tomatoes and okra or green beans and rice. He played chess with his friends and listened to records since he didn’t have his own TV. Heartbroken with homesickness, he wrote long letters to his parents, but it never occurred to him that he could go back home.

  “People didn’t think like that in those days,” he explained. “You just got on with life. There weren’t any other options. How would I even get home? Plane tickets were very expensive in those days.”

  Not long afterwards, three of his close friends from Baghdad College, Selime, Nasser and Yaseen, who’d been sent to a nearby town, finally worked out where Ibrahim had ended up, and one day they turned up at his apartment completely unannounced. He’d known Selime since the day he was born, and Nasser was a school friend. The boys shuttled back and forth between the two towns visiting each other, and suddenly Ibrahim was having more fun. The loneliness started to ease, and he began to enjoy and adjust to English life.

  He went to the pub and drank beer even though initially he didn’t like the taste, because he knew that you had to have a beer if you went out in England. All social activities revolved around a pint or two and eventually he acquired a liking for it. He met girls and socialized with them; a welcome novelty. No one he met had ever heard of Iraq, although they knew about “Arabia,” but everyone was relatively welcoming. Some of the Iraqis complained about discrimination, but Ibrahim never experienced it.

  “I had high self-esteem, so I didn’t care if people were rude. Maybe they were reacting to my being Arabic, but I just thought they were being unpleasant. It didn’t occur to me that people were discriminating against me because of my race. I thought it was their problem. I never thought it was because of the colour of my skin,” he said, shrugging.

  Ibrahim and his friends hung out at the international club at college where they met a group of European au pairs studying English.

  “People smoked Woodies in those days, Woodbines,” he continued. “You could buy them in tens. They were small, narrow and thin. In Iraq, if a teenage boy had a pack of cigarettes, he would just have a puff and then throw it away to show that he was wealthy. He didn’t actually want to smoke it. But here, on my first day of school, I remember seeing a guy on the tea break, smoking half a cigarette intensely, putting it out and then returning it to his top pocket. I thought, What is he doing? Then, at the next break, he took it out and continued smoking it. That was culture shock!”

  My mother’s older sister, Jane, attended the same college as Ibrahim’s friends. Through a group of international students, she had made pen pals all over the world and became friendly with the Iraqis. In the summer of 1961, she was expecting a visit from a Dutch boyfriend, but one of the Iraqis had fallen in love with her. She banned him from the house while the Dutch boy was there, but he was forever dreaming up excuses to visit her anyway.

  One day, the Iraqi boy said to Ibrahim, “Come on, you will come with me and I will introduce you to Jane’s family, her nice sisters.”

  In their mackintoshes, they motored on his Vespa to my mother’s house.

  That first day, my mother, Mary, wasn’t home, but Ibrahim met my maternal grandmother. Nasser introduced him as an Iraqi friend from school. My grandmother was a funny, generous woman who loved the vitality of young people, their exuberance and sense of fun. She was warm-hearted and felt for these young men who were so far away from their families and on their own in the world. She wanted to nurture them. They were well mannered and well groomed, compared to some of the local boys who she thought weren’t properly polite or respectful towards their elders. She liked Muslims and Christians equally, and it never occurred to her to try to convert anyone, even though she was a fervent Catholic. She was colour-blind and unusual in her openness to foreigners, and the more conservative mothers in the neighbourhood whispered about her; they thought it was a little foolish for her daughters to invite strange boys into the house. Mary’s father used to say, chuckling to himself, “It’s like the League of Nations in our front room.”

  On Ibrahim’s second visit to the family for tea, he first set eyes on the young girl who was to become my mother. She’d come home from a day out at the seaside to find the house full of her sister’s friends. Ibrahim was wearing a fine black wool sweater, and she noticed his long black eyelashes; to her, he looked very fashionable and smart. She was just fifteen and her pale blue summer dress complemented her eyes. They didn’t speak, but my mother reports that he gave her a wink as he left the house.

  Ibrahim prevailed upon his Iraqi friend to ask Jane to see if Mary would like to go out with him. At first my mother wasn’t sure which boy was asking her out, and she feared it was another of her sister’s friends whom she hadn’t been attracted to. But when she found out that it was the quiet boy who looked so mysterious, she was excited. She agreed, and the date was set for after Sunday mass.

  Mary and Ibrahim met and took the bus to the next town. To Ibrahim, she seemed very prim and proper, prettily dressed in her best Sunday clothes, black gloves and a green coat with a fake-fur collar. He took her to an Italian restaurant called Paradise Gardens which was a bit exotic and avant garde for Mary. It was the first real date ever for either of them, and so they were shy and found it difficult to make conversation. Their second date was a secret, because she went alone to Ibrahim’s apartment where he made her “some sort of Arabic meal, beans and rice. It tasted terrible.”

  My mother has given us little morsels of this story over the years. She still has a vivacious and youthful spirit even in her fifties, and she is said to have been rebellious and stubbornly single-minded as a girl. I once asked her if my father had a strong foreign accent when they’d met, because he didn’t have one anymore.

  “Oh yes, he did. A lovely one,” she laughed. “And he was very exotic. The film Lawrence of Arabia came out around that time, I can’t remember when, and we were all very taken with notions of the ‘East.’ I remember seeing Omar Sharif in the movie and thinking of your father! The East was very remote, very ‘other,’ and we romanticized and idealized it, the way
you do as a teenager. Baghdad was this exotic city. When I thought of Baghdad then, it was a place bathed in a golden light connected to the Ottoman Empire, a city with a skyline of minarets and domes like Istanbul, but with the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers flowing through it and palm trees everywhere. It was something out of a fairy tale.”

  Since Mary knew Ibrahim’s family was Westernized, she never pictured his parents dressed in flowing robes.

  “I was totally naive, and open, and young,” she recalled. “I knew he had a large family full of love and care and attention. He didn’t say much about Iraq that I can remember, but he described Beirut and how beautiful Lebanon was, and told me about his childhood visits there. Early on before I met him, he planned to meet his whole family in Lebanon because he couldn’t go back to Iraq, even then. I don’t know why. It was the last chance he’d have to see his grandmother Samira, who died a few years later. There was a lot of excitement while he was preparing to go. And when you think of it, he probably hadn’t seen his family for a year or so. He probably missed them dreadfully. But at the last minute the trip was cancelled, and he couldn’t meet them. He was terribly disappointed.”

  When I asked my father what had happened, he said, “I was supposed to go by ship to Beirut, from Southampton or somewhere. My father bought and sent me my ticket. It was a special cheap ticket to be used by foreign students returning home. But when I went to pick it up, I had to show my Iraqi passport and they said, ‘You aren’t going home, you are going to Beirut. But you are Iraqi. Lebanon isn’t home for you.’ I tried to explain but they wouldn’t let me use the ticket. My parents had already left for Beirut and so I couldn’t get a message to them. They were waiting for me at the port, but when the ship arrived I wasn’t on it. They must have been so disappointed. They hadn’t seen me for over a year. I was upset too.”