The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  After the wedding Mary was alone gathering some last-minute things together and packing. She was preparing to leave the house and say goodbye to her family. Victoria and Madeline knocked on the door. They came in and sat down on her bed. My mother remembers Madeline as a very charismatic woman who was used to getting what she wanted. She had a smile that lit up her face. Madeline pleaded persuasively, “Please think again. If you come with us, we can cruise back together to Beirut. We want you to come back to Iraq with us. It still isn’t too late to change your mind. Victoria says you can live with her and Khalil in their big house. She will make sure that you are very happy there. You will be like her daughter. Our house is your house.” Victoria nodded hard in agreement.

  Mary looked at them, wanting to please her new relatives with the answer they longed to hear. She was slightly intimidated, aware of their power as her new husband’s family. She hardly knew them, but knew they were sincere and that she would have a good life if she went with them. She was torn. Her happiness was taking Ibrahim further away from his mother. Despite the commitment she’d made not to move to Iraq, she couldn’t help but be tempted by the romance of their entreaty, but at the same time she felt she couldn’t let them see her waver or know how attractive their concern and sincerity was. Mary stood firm. The die was cast, the decision had been made; she was already on her way to Canada.

  “I said, ‘We will come to Baghdad. We will see you again, but the job is waiting there. All the plans are made.’ ”

  Only fifteen years later, as a mother with a son of her own, would she understand how wrenching it must have been for Victoria to give up her only son to an alien and, for her, unreachable place like Canada. Only then did she know what Victoria intuited then, that her grandchildren would never know Iraq or Arabic. The connection was being severed.

  The next day Mary and Ibrahim travelled to London for two nights before flying to Canada. Mary’s father lent Ibrahim twenty-five pounds and Victoria also gave him a few pounds, but that was all the money they had until they got to Canada. They stayed in the brand-new Lancaster Hotel opposite Hyde Park (for ten pounds a night). Their suitcases were all they had with them. They’d packed trunks to follow by ship.

  At Heathrow airport, the officials noticed that Ibrahim’s permit to stay in the UK had run out a few months earlier, and his Iraqi passport had expired. My father was surprised. He never expected to have trouble leaving the country. After all, he was leaving anyway, what would they threaten to do? Throw him out of the country? After Ibrahim showed them the visa from the Canadian government, the officials let them board but said that they would write on my father’s file that he had overstayed his visa.

  The newlyweds flew to Calgary, Alberta, for their honeymoon. They stayed at the Canadian Pacific Palliser Hotel which was meaningful to Mary, for she’d heard about Canada’s incredible railway. Three days later, they drove to a small town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where they were going to live. In the magnificent mountain scenery, unlike anything either of them had ever seen, they felt that their international adventure had begun.

  Still, the small town was a shock to the Londoners, and they were a shock to the town. The Canadians had known an “A-rab” had been hired and were expecting a traditionally robed Gulf Arab with a red head scarf and his exotically veiled submissive wife. Instead, a green Chevrolet pulled into town and the townspeople watched the new engineer, Ibrahim, with his shaggy black hair, trendy tight T-shirt, and jeans, helping out his new bride, Mary, with her long brown hair parted in the middle and flowing down her back, wearing a brightly coloured miniskirt, loud prints on her shirt and platform shoes. This was not the belly-dancing wife that some had expected.

  Mary couldn’t believe that people drove their cars everywhere despite the town being only a few blocks long, and that they left their cars running while they went into shops and diners. But gas was so cheap at the time. She heard later that some townspeople raised their eyebrows when they saw her walking along with an umbrella, in her high heels and short skirts. The town still had wooden platform sidewalks and a bar with a separate entrance for women. It was the Wild West to Mary and Ibrahim.

  Meanwhile, in Iraq in July 1968, there was a military coup carried out by Arab nationalist and Baathist army officers. Then, another Baathist coup ousted the non-Baathist allies. The young Saddam Hussein was named vice president.

  The Iraqi government took a while to find out that Ibrahim had not gone back to Iraq. When the authorities contacted his parents, they started paying the scholarship back in monthly instalments. Without being asked, Ibrahim started to send money back from Canada to repay his parents. His father wanted him to send the funds to his account in Lebanon because he thought the bank system there was more stable than Iraq’s. In 1974, however, the eruption of the civil war in Lebanon made the currency worthless and all the money was lost.

  “I was all right with the Iraqi government with my scholarship,” my father said when he told me this. “But if I had gone back, I’d have been drafted into the army. All the men went into the army for two years of military service. Now, at some stage there was a law passed saying that you could buy yourself out of the service. My father paid that money and got a piece of paper exempting me. I wasn’t considered a deserter. Maybe I could have gone back and then come out of the country again, but I never wanted to take the risk. They might look at my resumé and decide I should not leave, but instead be the head engineer at ipc. They might offer me everything because there was a drive to lure graduates back with incentives. It would have been nice to visit. I wanted to see Iraq again, my family, show off you, my children, and I would have gone back with different eyes. But even by the early seventies Saddam was already very powerful and things in Iraq were bad.”

  From then on, my father always had to choose between his present life in Canada and going back to Iraq. To him, it was an either/or choice; he couldn’t have both.

  I was born in March 1971, and exactly two years later my sister Brigette was born. That Christmas of 1973 we made our only trip to the Middle East as a family. We went to Beirut to stay with my grandfather’s sister, Selma, and the Iraqi family came to meet us: my grandparents, my aunts and my great-aunt Lina. We flew from Calgary to Heathrow airport on December 17, but the flight was delayed and we missed our connection to Beirut. While in the air, my parents didn’t hear any international news. We got to Heathrow at the height of the miners’ strike and the oil embargo, and England was on a three-day week. There was no energy, oil or electricity. The airport was freezing cold without much heat. When we finally got on the plane, we had to go up the stairs from the tarmac the old-fashioned way. The British Airways pilot said to my father as he passed, “Well, I guess we’re lucky it’s not our turn today.”

  Ibrahim didn’t know what he was talking about. But when he got to Lebanon he heard that a plane had been hijacked in Rome that day by a Palestinian group. They wanted the plane to fly to Beirut, but the government had filled the runway with army trucks, making it impossible for the hijacked plane to land. It went to Libya instead. When we finally got to Beirut, my parents were shocked to see all the military there, and people were only allowed to disembark. British Airways was supposed to notify Ibrahim’s parents about the changes, but they hadn’t received any information and so they’d waited for the original flight. Of course, no one had arrived. The airport was closed, and they couldn’t get in to meet us. Finally, they convinced a BA official to tell them which plane we were on, but they still waited all day for us to arrive.

  This was my father’s first, last and only trip to the Middle East since leaving at sixteen. Despite the difficulty getting there, my parents had a magical time with his parents Victoria and Khalil. They ate Ibrahim’s favourite Lebanese food and toured the country, and he showed his English wife the Roman ruins of Baalbek and the mountains and cedars of Lebanon. On New Year’s Eve there was huge party in the streets of Beirut, and they all had champagne in our flat and
vowed to return to Lebanon every year. The next year the Lebanese civil war started. They never went back.

  MY SYRIAN GREAT-GREAT GRANDFATHER, YOUSIF

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Three Graces

  I felt pangs of pain . . . as I watched an American tank crawling across Al-Jumhuriyaa Bridge in the heart of Baghdad. I have crossed that bridge hundreds of times, and I used to linger a bit halfway along, especially when walking alone, and look down at the river. . . . I used to recite Ali Ibn Al-Jahm’s famous line about the enchanting, almond-shaped eyes of the Baghdadi women who used to cross from one bank to the other in the ninth century. On a lucky day, I would encounter a descendent of one or two of those women. Now the moon-like faces celebrated in thousands of verses are hiding in houses on both banks, while voyeuristic satellites are hovering above and scrutinizing every inch of the city’s body. —Sinan Antoon, “Of Bridges and Birds,” Al-Ahram Weekly, April 17–23, 2003

  London is my father’s city. As soon as we touch down at Heathrow Airport, he becomes a different man. The sprightly energy of his youth resurges as he walks briskly through the airport he is so familiar with. He has spent fifteen years commuting between Canada and England, a week away every month. Dismal Heathrow airport is as familiar to him as the Calgary neighbourhood he lives in, and he flits through the routine of passport control, baggage pickup and Customs with the air of someone who belongs, who possesses the airport more deeply than the other travellers by dint of the time he has spent here. He has the instinct for the quickest queues, he knows the gates where the Air Canada flights land, which carousels the bags tend to come out on, and how long each part of the routine should take.

  London itself is the place of the prime of his youth, for he lived here from ages nineteen to thirty-seven, apart from the five years he spent in Canada between 1968 and 1973. Although my parents moved back to Canada for good twenty-five years ago, I always see them as Londoners.

  Imperial College, where Ibrahim went to university, is in Kensington in the heart of London. The Royal Albert Hall, Hyde Park, Brompton Oratory, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, Knightsbridge, Harrods, Chelsea and the King’s Road were all his domain. He stays in Knightsbridge when he works in London for that one week out of every month, and where we are headed now is an apartment in a mews off the Brompton Road. While I didn’t inherit the chance to see Baghdad with my father, I have been given a consolation prize—to know London through him. He loves the bustle, the theatre, museums, restaurants, shopping and food; he loves England and the English. But this time we aren’t on holiday. My father is working, and we are both going to visit his sisters who live in Greater London, near where I grew up in Surrey.

  The war is everywhere as we enter central London, the headlines blaring from all the papers, the papers stacked at newsstands on every corner and outside every tube station. English soldiers are fighting, and England is rallying around them. The propaganda of war is on full display. I feel like a foreigner, and want to be one. I think about how English I am, and now I want to deny that Englishness and assert my Canadianness. Canada is not at war. I don’t believe in war, and now I really feel proud to be Canadian. But I know I am picking and choosing my identity as if from a menu.

  Every day B-52 bombers leave England and eight hours later pass over Baghdad, dropping bombs on the city under cover of darkness. Here, in London, the rhythm of life continues unabated: the Underground runs, newspapers are printed, politicians debate, people shop and eat in restaurants, and apart from the news, life has not altered one bit. I sit on a Piccadilly Line train and open a newspaper. The images from Iraq are more intimate than the pictures I remember from the first Gulf War: thin Iraqi men (who look exactly like my father) with their arms in the air; Iraqi civilians hooded and bound with plastic cuffs sitting by the road, one with a young boy sitting beside him; and then an unforgettable photograph of a boy with bloodied bandages instead of arms, his brown frightened eyes staring into the camera. He lost his parents too.

  The feelings are new and awful, and the photographs tear at my heart. The tears are falling, and I cannot control them. People glance up at me, and I catch their eye for a moment before looking away. For the first time I know what the desire for revenge feels like.

  This is why my grandfather sacrificed his son to another life. It was as if he was clairvoyant and knew that he had to save him from the horrible destiny of war, and so gave up his only son. I remembered my mother telling me that when the family came from Baghdad to London to visit them in the early years of their marriage, she hadn’t truly understood how important those visits were. To a young woman in her twenties with a new family, it was hard to have her in-laws arrive and take over her home, bringing a whole other culture into her domain. She realized then how “Anglo” she was, and how, despite all the strange similarities of their Catholic upbringings, the cooking smells were so unfamiliar, how different the language was, and the customs.

  “It was all too strong for me,” she once admitted.

  She was overwhelmed by their differences; his family was out of context for her so she couldn’t understand them. But she saw how much they loved Ibrahim.

  “They cared so much about him, so wanted his attention, and he, always being the finest human being, was patient with their need to be near him, understood how limited the time was, how fleeting the possibilities of those meetings were. I wish I’d had more generosity of spirit to understand those things then,” my mother says wistfully. “Only now that I am older do I realize how utterly remarkable it was. They lost their first-born and only son so young. He left home at sixteen and never went back. They’d made the ultimate sacrifice. Not only that, but Khalil made sure that all his daughters had good educations too, so that they had freedom to move away as well. How did he know then that this was so important?”

  The last time his parents came to England was the summer before we moved back to Canada, in 1982. My mother told me that when Victoria said goodbye to her, she held my mother’s gaze in a deep meaningful look, which seemed to say that she knew she would never see my mother and father again. She never did. She died one year later in Baghdad, while Iraq was at war with Iran, so there was no possibility of my father attending her funeral.

  My aunt Amal once let it slip that, every now and then, my grandmother Victoria would get angry at her husband.

  “It’s because of you that Ibrahim isn’t here!” she would shout. “That we never see him, that we never see our grandchildren! Why did you have to send him away to England?”

  Khalil never argued because he knew that they both recognized that Ibrahim’s exile was for the best, for the greater good, but she had the right to be upset. After the revolution of 1958 and all the bloodshed, Khalil had worried that his teenage son could get caught up in the violence to come.

  I told my mother this story later, and she looked at me and said, “You could say that your frustration at not knowing them or Iraq properly was the twin of Victoria’s pain.” We are at least joined in that; both angry at our helplessness in the face of circumstances beyond our control.

  Looking at the images in the newspaper made the possibility of entering Iraq even more remote than ever. Yet I had to admit to myself that even though I was completely against the invasion of Iraq, I couldn’t help but wonder, if everything calmed down quickly, would it finally be my chance to go with my father and see his house, his city, his country? Despite all the empty rhetoric of freeing Iraq, every cynical Iraqi secretly wanted to believe, against their better judgment, that this invasion was partly about their future freedom.

  As we have done so often before, my father and I take the train to the London suburb, still known locally as a village, to visit his sisters for dinner. When we lived there in the seventies, my Iraqi relatives had come to this very same patch of England to visit us. This is the first part of England that my aunts Amal and Siham had ever seen, and then where they first stayed when they moved here as young wome
n, Amal for her postgraduate studies and Siham to work. And this is where Ibtisam visited Siham, who came here first and where she eventually ended up living after the Gulf War. Not only is London my father’s city, it has become my aunts’ city as well; despite being immigrants they are synonymous with the place for me. They love Wimbledon, the royal family, the Last Night of the Proms, “Top of the Pops,” Hugh Grant (especially in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and the BBC.

  As the train jogs through the outskirts of London, still grey with wintry light but spring just starting to break through in patches of crocuses and daffodils, I think about how my aunts have finally settled in the same village they’d first visited, all three living together and forced into the same apartment by the Gulf War. Siham lived there on her own all through the 1980s, while the Iran–Iraq War raged and Amal and Ibtisam were still in Baghdad. Then in the spring of 1990, Aunt Lina and Ibtisam were granted travel visas to England for a holiday. Amal was due to join them, but she didn’t receive permission to travel until later in the summer. By then, Aunt Lina had been in London for two months and missed Baghdad and decided to go home. Siham and Ibtisam tried to convince her to stay until Amal arrived, but she was homesick and left just before Amal arrived. A few weeks later, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Ibtisam and Amal have been living in London ever since, and Auntie Lina has been in Baghdad.