The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  I asked my mother if she had dreamed of going to Iraq and seeing Baghdad for herself, if she’d wanted to familiarize herself with the place her husband came from. She hardly knows the Middle East to this day, has only visited Lebanon once and has never been to Iraq.

  “It was never ‘on the table,’ ” she explained. “Because of politics. Around the time of our wedding, the fear was that if Ibrahim went home he’d have to do military service. He didn’t want to do that, and as soon as that emerged as a possibility—the idea of being in the military—he just shut the door to us ever going. And so did I. Too risky.”

  Her elder sister, Jane, was more knowledgeable about Iraq than my mother was. Jane was bewitched by the whole notion of the Middle East; she even wore a small metallic carved brooch of Lawrence of Arabia’s face.

  “We were all into that at the time,” my mother said. “She forgot the brooch when she left home and I took it, and remember I gave it to you when you started getting interested in the Middle East?” At eighteen, I hadn’t realized what it had meant when she gave the brooch to me. She went on, “It was Jane who always talked about how amazing it would be to go to Baghdad, about how ancient the country was, about history and about the Bible. Years later, she moved to Kuwait and had a chance to briefly visit Baghdad and Babylon. She is still grateful that she had that opportunity, especially because of what has come to pass there.”

  Mary was more interested in being an international couple with my father, and travelling the world.

  “I was a sixties person. I suppose I thought I would visit Baghdad one day, but I never thought I’d live there,” she said. “And do you know something strange? My father’s sister, my auntie Jean, came over once before I even met your father. She looked at me and said, ‘You look like May Clayton. You have her smile.’ May was my dad’s cousin. Later I discovered that May Clayton had married an engineer who worked at the Iraq Petroleum Company. The couple lived in Iraq in the 1930s. Now that I think about it, it’s eerie.”

  Her father, my English grandfather, had once quietly warned her about ever thinking of moving to the Middle East. My mother suspected that he thought about the ‘bigger picture’ often, and although he loved Ibrahim as a person, he warned Mary in a humorous way, “Now you wouldn’t want to go all that way to live, would you?” My mother claims that she answered defiantly, “No one will make me go anywhere to live. It will be my decision.” But her parents were not against her marrying an Iraqi.

  “So you knew that for the rest of your life you might never go to Baghdad, to Iraq, together?” I asked her.

  “I suppose we didn’t think it through to that final conclusion,” she said. “Probably, we always thought, hoped, that things in the country would improve, that things would change there, that it would be possible to visit. And after we had you children, we thought that it would have been so incredible to take you back to meet all the relatives there. But I must say, I never thought any of you would really feel so connected to Iraq, because you didn’t know it, you never lived there.”

  She was articulating the confusion I often felt. How could I feel even a little bit Iraqi when I didn’t know the language or the culture and had never lived there, never even been there? Yet I’d always had this mysterious magnetic pull, a curiosity to know more and more, to get closer and closer. I felt frustrated, because while I was aware that many Iraqis had left the country and never returned, I knew there were some who took the risks and went back periodically to visit their families.

  My mother understood. “Many of the Iraqi students did go back without fear. Some even took their English wives with them. But every individual is different. Every person makes choices, makes decisions about what risks they do and don’t want to take. Ibrahim doesn’t take those kinds of risks. But it wasn’t such a culture of fear then, as it is now. He could have finished his degree and gone back to Baghdad. The idea wasn’t as unfathomable as it became later on.”

  GATHERING OF KHALIL’S FRIENDS IN THE COURTYARD OF A HOUSE IN BAGHDAD

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “It Is Written”

  They are a happy, laughing people, the Iraqians [sic], and they seem to live completely in the present moment, forgetting the past and taking small thought for the future. If misfortune overtakes them, with a shrug of their shoulders they accept it, saying, “Mek-toub-est” (It is written).—Janet Miller, Camel-bells of Baghdad, 1935

  In February 1963, Abd al-Karim Qasim was ousted and executed after a show trial. In the days surrounding the coup, which was backed by the British and the CIA who had been alarmed by Qasim’s flirtation with communism, about five thousand Iraqis died in a purge and there were house-to-house hunts for communists. In those revolutionary years, different groups controlled Iraq, as coup followed coup and each government resorted to repression and dictatorship to impose its agenda upon the country.

  Although Ibrahim was far away in England applying to universities, the unrest and instability at home made him afraid to return. My father recalled this story clearly because his father had told him about life in Iraq after he left.

  “So there was a year in the early sixties, when teenagers had a lot of power,” he explained. He became animated again, his voice rising over the drone of the plane’s engine. The second movie was ending, and we hadn’t watched either film. “They had guns and were patrolling the streets. One day, Khalil was driving back from school, and he was stopped at a checkpoint by a young man who asked him for his ID. Khalil looked at him, pointed at a house nearby and said, ‘Aren’t you the son of the man who owns that house there?’ ‘Yes, Mr. Nadir,’ he replied. ‘Mr. Nadir? Well, if you know who I am, why are you asking me for ID?’ And my father just drove through the checkpoint in anger. Everyone knew and recognized one another in the neighbourhood, and Muslims and Christians lived alongside each other with few problems. This is the kind of daily life hassle that my father was protecting me from, by sending me away.”

  When he looks back on his life, my father realizes that everything hinged on a mark on a math test that he took when he was sixteen. “If I had got one per cent higher on this test, let’s say 98 per cent instead of 97 per cent, I’d have been one person higher up the list of the two hundred students on scholarship from Iraq that year. One higher up on the list and I’d have been sent to a different part of the country, perhaps Cardiff in Wales instead of Yorkshire, and I’d never have met your mother. You’d never have been born,” he concludes with a gentle smile. He saw his life always hanging in the balance, based on minuscule differences that had far-reaching and unforeseen consequences. Whether he believed it was fate or not, he never said.

  By August 1963, he had received provisional acceptance at Birmingham University, his place dependent on his A-level marks. That same week, Imperial College in London offered my father an interview for a place in their engineering program. With the letter from Birmingham in his pocket, he took the night train to London. At the end of his interview, which went well, the professor said, “Thank you very much. We will call you and let you know if you are given a place.”

  It was at this moment that my father took the first in a series of minor risks that changed the destiny of his life forever.

  “I remember saying to the professor, ‘I’ve already been accepted at another university, and I need to give them an answer immediately. I need to know right now whether I have a place at Imperial or not.’ ”

  The professor hesitated, looked hard at Ibrahim, and replied slowly, “Well then, well then, if you put it like that.” Ibrahim nodded in anticipation. “Well, yes, you are in.”

  Ibrahim went out into the street and called Mary from the first red telephone box he saw.

  “I’m in, I got in!” he shouted over the phone.

  He was elated. Imperial College was one of the best universities in the country for engineering and the only school that offered petroleum engineering, since there was hardly any oil business then. They only took ten students a year, and most gra
duates went overseas to work. Ibrahim moved to London and lived in Maida Vale in northwest London. Mary stayed at home for a year to finish school, and they visited each other in London or Yorkshire whenever they could, keeping their love affair alive.

  The next year, Mary was accepted as a nursing student at a large London teaching hospital near St. Paul’s Cathedral. She’d also been interviewed for a job as a fashion buyer at Harrods but, at the last minute, had decided to pursue nursing. They lived in the same city, but she didn’t see Ibrahim often because she did shift work and lived in residence at the hospital. But they continued dating and seeing each other when they could. This romance continued throughout Ibrahim’s studies.

  While Ibrahim was doing his third-year final exams, his mother and Aunt Madeline came to London. Victoria had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was to have radiation treatment there. They stayed for a month before returning to Baghdad. Ibrahim didn’t do well on his exams, especially in geophysics, which was the subject he had chosen for his master’s degree. When the results came out, he went to his professor, who told him that even though his marks weren’t sufficient he’d passed Ibrahim anyway because he knew his work well enough to know that something was wrong. Ibrahim confided in him about his mother’s illness, and the professor understood the pressure he was under. He advised my father to take his master’s degree in petroleum engineering since he didn’t need as high marks to get into that program as he would for a geophysics degree. Again, fate made a life decision for Ibrahim.

  Once back in Baghdad, his mother’s cancer went into remission, but she was always fighting the disease from then on. It was 1967, and my father didn’t want to go back to Baghdad. Life hadn’t improved there since the revolution. Political life in the sixties was turbulent and dominated by the denial of real representation for the Iraqi people and a changing array of privileged military rulers. Iraqis had dreamed of freedom and democracy, but instead they were living under a worse dictatorship than the monarchy. There were coups and counter-revolutions, and each time they got bloodier and bloodier. Meanwhile, Ibrahim was finishing his master’s degree, but he had no idea what to do next. He didn’t have a job to go to and his scholarship from Iraq was running out, as was his student visa. He was in love with Mary and wanted to propose to her, but he had nothing to offer her in England, and he knew she wouldn’t marry him and move to Iraq.

  “I knew that there was no freedom of the press, no freedom of expression, even though this was way before Saddam,” my father told me. “I knew that you had to join the Baath party to get along in the government and in society. I’d become used to living in the freedom of England. I was stuck. I was scared. I had no reason to go home, other than my family, and every reason to stay abroad.”

  Ibrahim wrote fifty letters to companies around the globe asking for employment. One letter was to the president of an oil company in Oklahoma. He’d heard they had offices in Libya. This was before the Gaddafi revolution so it seemed like a suitable place for him to find work. He was sitting his final exams when he got a letter from the company (the only letter he’d received back), asking him to come for an interview in their London office. He had written to the president, which meant that his letter was passed to the international vice president and downwards, and because it had come from the top down, it was taken seriously.

  The interviewer liked Ibrahim and wanted to help, but told him that they couldn’t send him abroad since he had no practical experience. As Ibrahim didn’t want to go back to Iraq, the interviewer suggested Canada and a five-year plan of getting work experience and a Canadian passport. It would be much easier to “go international” if he had a Canadian passport rather than an Iraqi passport.

  The company offered him a job in Canada for five years. He accepted the offer and started working on the papers to emigrate. Canada was very receptive to his application; they wanted highly qualified immigrants and were accepting many in the late 1960s. But they were very slow to give him an answer. By now, Ibrahim had a temporary job at an oil company in London and was making money, but he still didn’t have the right papers.

  Because he had found a job, Ibrahim invited Mary to Odin’s, a fashionable new restaurant near Marylebone High Street. By now, according to my mother, he “wore black turtleneck sweaters and trendy black-rimmed glasses like Michael Caine in the Ipcress Files.” The restaurant was hip for its day, upside-down open umbrellas hung from the ceiling, and the menu was scrawled on a chalkboard. White tablecloths and candles and vases of primroses decorated the tables. Here Ibrahim finally asked Mary, “Will you be my wife?” They had been in love for seven years. He couldn’t afford an engagement ring, so the fancy meal was the celebration. My mother said that, at the time, they didn’t really believe in getting engaged, marriage seemed like an old-fashioned formality, but they needed the banns if they were to move away together.

  When Canadian immigration found out Ibrahim was on an Iraqi scholarship, the officials hesitated again. They didn’t want to upset the Iraqi government by poaching one of their graduates. Week after week, Ibrahim had meetings at the Canadian embassy in Grosvenor Square. The officials were concerned about the scholarship and wanted to see the contract between him and the Iraqi government. Before he left Iraq, Ibrahim had signed a contract saying that if he didn’t return to Iraq, he would pay the scholarship money back. There was no interest and no penalty. The amount was around six thousand dollars, a year’s salary at that time. Ibrahim told them that his parents would pay back the money to the Iraqi government. The Canadians wanted permission from the Iraqi government, but Ibrahim told them that it was impossible for him to go back to ask for anything else from the government authorities. He had already been granted a one-year extension to do his master’s degree, and he didn’t want to run the risk that the Iraqi ministry would be upset that he wasn’t planning to return to Iraq and demand all their money back at once. The Canadians, saying they would see what they could do, sent him away. But he heard nothing.

  Meanwhile, Ibrahim’s permit to stay in the UK was about to expire and he wasn’t supposed to be working. Again, he went back to the Canadian embassy to find out what was going on. As he waited for an interview, he decided that he had to give them an ultimatum. He needed to force their hand because he couldn’t wait any longer. He was afraid he’d lose the job offer from the company in Canada.

  Sweating, he sat down in front of the official and said, “Time is running out. The job in Canada has been waiting for me for a year now. I need to know right now whether I will get the visa. Otherwise, I will have to go back to Iraq. I need to know now. I cannot wait any longer.”

  The official didn’t change his expression and told him to sit down and wait.

  Ibrahim sat down in the office, put his head in his hands and wondered what he had done. His whole life hung in the balance; he had forced an ultimatum that might not work in his favour. He might have to go back to Iraq, break up with the woman he loved and wanted to spend his life with, and the job in Canada would go to someone else. It was the longest hour of his life, and he hardly dared breathe or look up when the official came to get him. The man took him into the office, closed the door and said, “Congratulations, we can give you the visa. You can go to Canada.”

  Before he could process his relief, they were giving him a list of tasks. He and Mary both had to have a medical exam, get immigration papers and an immigration card, and Mary had to come down to London to do the paperwork. She was waiting at home with her parents to hear what was going to happen. Since the company wanted him immediately, Ibrahim had less than a month to get his life organized.

  The following days were a flurry of activity and tension. Ibrahim and Mary had to get married, and so they picked a date two weeks later. Then the church refused to marry them because Ibrahim didn’t have a baptism certificate. “I don’t even think they issued them in Iraq,” he told me. They wrote to the Vatican to request one. Time was pressing, and Ibrahim threatened to marry Mary in a r
egistry office instead. Mary thought that they should just elope. Mary’s local parish priest decided that he knew Ibrahim was a good Catholic and agreed to marry them without the certificate. His family in Iraq had only a few days to get ready because driving from Iraq to England took two weeks. Weddings in Iraq are usually elaborate affairs involving a few hundred extended family and friends, with a lead-up of engagement parties, all-women henna parties and other festivities. The whole family dashed out from Baghdad to London—Victoria and Madeline by ship, and Khalil driving through Europe with Auntie Lina and two of Ibrahim’s sisters.

  Victoria and Madeline made it just in time from Iraq via Beirut. They brought the traditional bridal gold for Mary, the treasures my mother still has in her jewellery box: the gold-and-pearl necklace and matching bracelet from Ibrahim’s parents and the bracelet made of tiny gold bars from Aunt Madeline. Victoria and Madeline cornered the couple before the wedding, and Madeline said solemnly, “Canada is too far away. Your mother and I both agree. Why don’t you just come back to Iraq with us on the cruise ship? Everything will be fine there and you can come and live with us. You will be very happy. Ibrahim will find a good job.”

  They were serious. To them, the risk of returning to Iraq wasn’t as great as others thought at the time. But Ibrahim didn’t want to go back, and my mother had made a strong commitment to herself that she would not move to Iraq. She thought her life would be more restricted there, and she wanted the personal freedom feminists were now agitating to obtain in England. She realized later that they felt free to say these things because Khalil wasn’t there yet. Khalil got stuck in a transport strike in Europe on the way to England, and he, Auntie Lina and Ibrahim’s two sisters missed the wedding. He didn’t get to London in time to see his son and his new wife off to Canada either.

  The wedding was held in Mary’s local church and was followed by a small reception at a hotel in the countryside nearby. The invitations were bright red and the cake was sky blue and silver. In the photographs, Mary smiles in a wide-brimmed floppy pink hat and a ruffly white bridal minidress; Ibrahim wears a dark suit and a blue Swiss-cotton shirt with his thick black hair combed neatly over to one side. Mary’s middle sister, Anne, was her only bridesmaid because Jane had married a German and moved to Germany. Her parents and younger brother and a few friends attended.