The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  Siham gets out the photo albums, as she often does when I visit. Ibtisam replenishes the plate of baklava.

  “Amal brought Baba’s albums when she came before the Gulf War. Thank God she thought of that,” Siham says. “In 1989, when he knew he was terminally ill, he spent the last months of his life creating these albums.”

  The album is covered in black cloth, and Siham opens it gently, patting the seat beside her, which means that I am to sit close to her. The album is falling apart; there are some blank spots where the glue isn’t sticky anymore, and photographs are just loose or lost. Faded black-and-white photographs are attached with corners to the delicate black pages, with thin tracing paper protecting each page. The first page is a collage of portraits of Khalil and his family. The top image is a snapshot of his white-haired Syrian grandfather (my great-great-grandfather), Yousif, wearing a fez and a suit and tie along with a thick white moustache; next comes Khalil’s father, looking very stern and high-cheeked.

  Surrounding the portrait of Khalil are his three sisters in their thirties, all with 1940s hairstyles, smoothed but kinked black hair. The eldest sister, Safiya, had married and been whisked off to Peru by her husband; Khalil never saw her again. The middle sister, Selma, is the one who stayed in Beirut throughout all the recent turmoil and is still alive, the last survivor of her generation. And the youngest sister, Miriam, lost her husband and daughter, and so lived with Ibrahim’s family in Baghdad until she remarried there. Khalil’s mother wasn’t represented, but his father had had three wives, and his real mother, Agia, had died in childbirth. My aunts didn’t mention her often; they said there were no photographs of her that they knew of.

  The next page held photos of Khalil’s youth in Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s. The photos were sepia-toned and small, with writing in blue ink all around them, naming the people and the occasions: school photographs, the basketball team in striped shirts, and a few labelled “Jibran journey,” which was a several-day hike Khalil had taken with his best friend, Ibrahim, in the north of Lebanon to the home village of the poet, Kahlil Gibran.

  As I look at these pictures, I realize most of the painstakingly written captions are written in English and there are only a few names in Arabic script. Khalil had even marked small X’s directly on the photographs with the names printed out in the margin so that people could be identified. It’s as if he had purposely written this for us, his grandchildren, knowing that we didn’t know Arabic. He didn’t make the albums so much for his own children, who knew most of the people and events they contained, but for us, the grandchildren he couldn’t know. He knew that all the family history would be lost in a generation if he didn’t make the albums. I believe this wasn’t an accident—it was his direct intention.

  The album continues chronicling Khalil’s life, moving to Iraq to teach, his wedding to Victoria (with portraits of each of them on either side of the wedding photo), starting a family, building the house in the suburbs of Baghdad in 1950, trips back to Syria to visit his father, trips to Beirut to see his sister. There is a photograph of a crashed car with the caption “1939. King Ghazi I of Iraq died in a car accident. The car was left at the place of the accident for the public to have a look at. Khalil, with his fifth class from Kirkuk, were on an academic trip to Baghdad.”

  In the pictures, the women are dressed in Western-tailored formfitting clothes, and have modern fifties hairstyles and a good deal of makeup on. The photographs are rarely of one person, except in professional portraits, but instead are full of family groups, friends, engagement parties, weddings, graduation ceremonies. Many of the photographs seem to gleam with happiness. There are shots from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and many are outdoors on the Tigris River and its sandy islands, in nearby fields and parks, and in the garden at the house my grandparents built almost sixty years ago.

  Then there is a photograph of Ibrahim in his first year in England. Beside it is another photograph of the family sitting around the same photograph framed on their mantelpiece in Baghdad. Khalil was making a family portrait despite my father’s absence. Finally, there is a photograph of my grandparents sitting by the fireplace: Victoria looks up from a book she’s reading, and Khalil browses through the same album that we are looking at now.

  I picture him assembling the album, carefully arranging the photos, writing the captions, thinking of who would look at it one day. The future was as exotic to him as the past is to us. But he didn’t want us to forget Iraq, our roots. Did he suspect that one day it would be impossible to go back and see the house he built for the family, to collect our possessions, the family heirlooms? Did he know he was recording it all for us to remember? At the time of his death, Iraq had been cut off from the world for almost a decade. Maybe he knew what that meant, and how easy it would be for that to happen again.

  We pass the album to my father, and Amal and I clear the teacups away. In the kitchen I ask Amal a question I’d wanted to ask earlier: “Were you ever really frightened during the Iran–Iraq War?”

  “No, I wasn’t afraid,” she states simply.

  “You weren’t? You didn’t think about dying?”

  “No, I never thought about it. Ibtisam was scared, but what could I do? I couldn’t do anything so why think about it?”

  “But I—”

  Amal interrupts me. “I told you that at the end of the war, when Iran was bombing Baghdad, they didn’t put the air raid siren on every time. The government stopped using it, I don’t know why. So you didn’t know if an attack was coming. My logic was this, if you hear the bomb then you are alive. If you don’t hear it, then you are dead anyway. So you won’t know. So if you hear the bomb, it’s good, in a way, you are still alive. Once, there was a bomb about ten streets away from us, it made a massive noise. Huge bang, it’s impossible to describe how loud a bomb sounds when it explodes. Two houses were destroyed and the people who lived there killed. But when I heard it I knew I was still alive. . . . Do you understand my logic?”

  “No. You never thought about dying? I think about it all the time and I’m not even in a war.”

  “No,” she repeats. “I never thought about it. You don’t know when it will happen so you don’t think about it.”

  “Precisely, you never know when it will happen, so you think about it all the time,” I answer.

  She laughs. “I don’t know, you have to go to work, you have to get on with your life, and the war was mostly on the front lines, not so much in the city. You just get used to it after eight years,” she says.

  “So Grandpa was still alive then?” I knew he had been ill and died quickly, and that Amal and Ibtisam were there with him until the end.

  “Yes, he died in 1989. In March, six months after the war ended. He had cancer. We went to the hospital every day for two months and looked after him. Actually we lived at the hospital for two months. We slept there overnight, ate our meals there. Lina brought us food and we’d go home only to wash ourselves. I closed my shop for two months and the government paid me my full salary for the whole time. That’s what happens in Iraq, the family brings food and washes the patient and does all the things that nurses do here.”

  “So were people not allowed to travel to Iraq then, is that why my dad and Siham didn’t come to see him?”

  “We didn’t want them to worry, or know how sick he was.” I can see she is uncomfortable talking about this. “They didn’t realize how sick he was, the communication was so difficult. They wouldn’t have come anyway, maybe Siham would, but not Ibrahim, not your father. I don’t think it would have made a difference. What could they do anyway? It might have been difficult for them to leave the country again; Siham might have been stopped from going back. You just never knew what would happen with Saddam. The saddest point for me, of course, was losing my father. But the fact that his children were not at his funeral was very sad. He didn’t see his children.”

  “You mean when he was sick?”

  “No, I mean, he didn’t see them
at the funeral. I was so sad for him that they couldn’t be there. I think children should be at their parents’ funerals, don’t you? He is buried in the cemetery in central Baghdad. Because he was a Protestant.”

  “What about Grandma? Where is she buried?”

  “She was buried in a very beautiful old Syrian Catholic church, about three hundred years old,” she says. “It’s in the old city, Old Baghdad, on a street known as Christian Street because of all the churches. It’s where we all celebrated our first communion, even your father. Remember those funny photos of Ibtisam and me in white veils? My father created a beautiful stone for Mama that was engraved with calligraphic writing to mark her burial place. During the Gulf War the church was destroyed. Not by a direct attack, but by the reverberations of the incessant bombing nearby. The walls of the church began to crumble, and the priest summoned Auntie Lina and asked her to move my mother’s remains. Now Mama is buried in the same church as my grandmother, in Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church. Lina always looks like she is about to cry when she tells anyone this story.” Amal’s eyes moisten as well, but she composes herself.

  “If I ever get to Baghdad, could I visit their graves?”

  “Yes, underneath the church there is a crypt, with different graves. Like drawers in a wall. Different from here,” she says.

  “So not everyone is buried in a burial ground?”

  “Well, it’s better in the church crypt, but there aren’t many graves there. The crypt can only hold a few people. Auntie Madeline is buried in the crypt too. My father used to go and visit my mother’s grave every single Friday. He took roses from our garden, her garden, with him and never missed one week.” Amal is quiet for a moment. “He was so good. Everyone came to him for help if they needed something, and he never denied anyone his assistance. He was unusual for his time; he’d go to the market to buy the groceries. Sometimes he’d be the only man in the market, apart from the stall owners, among all the women.

  “I remember at Easter, he used to put parsley leaves on the shells of boiled eggs, and then wrap them in an onion. He’d leave them for a while and then when he took off the onion, it left a beautiful green pattern on the egg. It must have been a Syrian tradition. I don’t remember anyone else doing it. We were supposed to go to church on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday for Easter. We’d try to sneak out and not go. But we always had to. It was warm weather at that time of year, so everyone was outside; a different feeling to the way it is here.

  “Baba used to walk two kilometres each morning to get fresh bread for our breakfast. This was when he was retired in the eighties, and Mama was gone. I used to say to him, ‘Why are you doing this? Why don’t you just put bread in the freezer?’ And he would say, ‘When I die, there will be no one to do this for you. So while I am here, I want to get bread for you.’ And of course, after he passed away in 1989, we didn’t have fresh bread in the mornings.” She looks down, silent for a few minutes.

  Finally, she says, “You know, he used to call us the three graces?”

  I shake my head.

  She laughs, saying, “You know, from Greek mythology, the daughters of Zeus. Charm, Beauty and Happiness.” Then she holds up her index finger, remembering. “Have I shown you the quilt that was made for my parents’ wedding bed?”

  “No, is it here?”

  “Yes, we brought it to give to Siham when we came in 1991. Come up to the loft with me.”

  We go upstairs and open the square hole in the ceiling that leads to the attic.

  Amal gets out a ladder, laughing, saying, “This is always my job, to go up to the loft.”

  Ibtisam and Siham didn’t like going up into the dusty darkness, rummaging around disturbing old boxes. She climbs the ladder slowly while I hold it. Then I clamber up behind her into the dark space where all the extra boxes and suitcases and forgotten items are stored. Amal walks all around, picking up boxes, saying “No, not that one. I think it’s this one. No, that’s not it.”

  Finally, she locates what she’s looking for, and we climb down again and go into her room. She spreads out a quilt made of peach-coloured shiny silk.

  “I’m not sure, but I think my mother made it when she was engaged. There’s also another blanket, a matching baby one, for Ibrahim when he was born.” She mutters, “I thought it was here,” as she rummages through the box. “It must still be in the attic. I’ll look for it later, but it looks the same as this one. Just much smaller.”

  “I don’t know why you’ve never shown me this before or told me the stories you told me tonight,” I say.

  “I didn’t think you were interested.”

  “Interested? But we are family, you should be talking about it, handing it on.”

  “Well, we don’t know much about our family background. It is over, it is past,” she says.

  NATIONAL MUSEUM OF IRAQ IN BAGHDAD DISPLAYS THE TREASURES OF NIMRUD FOR A FEW HOURS, JULY 3, 2003

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pieces of Civilization

  They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq’s history . . . the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks. . . . No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewellery glinting amid the piles of smashed pots.—Robert Fisk, “A Civilization Torn to Pieces,” The Independent, April 13, 2003

  My father and I are still in London for the “liberation” of Iraq. Horror follows horror; stories of destruction, killings and random violence seem to overflow the newspapers and television. In the anarchy that reigns after the invasion of Baghdad, the National Museum and the National Library and Archives are looted and burned. Centuries of precious literature, poetry, art and artefacts are wantonly destroyed within a matter of hours. We hear in bewildered disbelief the reports that the only government building the American soldiers protected from looting was the Oil Ministry. This is the beginning of the occupation.

  “Why didn’t they impose a curfew?” my father mutters.

  Iraqis were used to being put under curfew during a revolution, coup or war. My father couldn’t understand why the Americans hadn’t put a curfew in place to control the looting and protect the citizens. The message we took from this and from all the other acts of reckless violence was that if the invading soldiers were indifferent to priceless artefacts of human history, what value would they place on the lives of the Iraqis they were supposed to be liberating? Any twinges of joy we felt at the end of Saddam Hussein’s appalling reign were stifled by the terrible fear that those who would replace him would not end the terror as they had claimed. The one impossible dream Iraqis had nurtured for decades, the end of Saddam’s tyranny, was finally coming true. But instead of relief, it was bringing more and more pain in its wake.

  Finally, my aunts receive a call from Iraq. It is Karim, the husband of their cousin, Maha. He says that he, his wife, their son and daughter, both his wife’s parents and his parents, and Aunt Lina have all survived the war.

  “We have no phone, no electricity or water. The call is costing ten dollars a minute,” he says.

  They had bought two minutes on a mobile phone. He puts Aunt Lina on the line, and when she hears Amal’s voice she starts crying. She had not even cried after the Gulf War. She says the war has been catastrophic and admits to being terrified, and that when she had finally left the house at the end of the war, she had literally not recognized the city. She didn’t know where she was.

  “It’s not my city anymore,” is the last thing she says. And then the line is dead, and they are both gone.

  Amal says to me, “We only heard Lina cry once in the past, when her mother died. She is a very strong woman.”<
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  Amal didn’t know when we’d hear from them again.

  I first encountered ancient Iraq as a small girl in the Great Hall of the British Museum, which houses Assyrian artefacts alongside Egyptian treasures. My father pointed out two huge black Assyrian lamasus, stone beasts with the body of a bull or a lion, a man’s bearded head and an eagle’s wings. They were massive to me. He explained that they were guardians at the temple gates. As we wandered through the exhibition halls, he never emphasized that ancient Mesopotamia was my particular heritage, but explained Iraq’s history as a part of world history, of the beginnings of man. Only later did it occur to me that the Assyrian sculptures and reliefs, the treasures of Ur and the Sumerian cylinder seals, were out of place, like my father, in a museum in London. As he’d shown me the wonders of the ancient world, he betrayed no bitterness and didn’t mention that these treasures rightly belonged to Iraq. He expressed pride in Mesopotamia’s ancient civilization but never referred to Iraq as a British colony. Iraq’s treasures are scattered around the museums of the world: Philadelphia, New York, London, Paris and Berlin house Assyrian sculptures, Babylonian gold and Sumerian cylinder seals.

  I decide to go to the British Museum to see the Mesopotamian collection to remind myself of the historical artefacts that are being plundered in Baghdad. Through a series of serendipities I manage to secure a meeting with Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum who agrees to show me around the Near Eastern Hall. When I meet Irving under the great dome, I realize I have seen him before. He is unmistakable with his wire-rimmed glasses, shock of white hair and long white beard, and brown corduroy jacket over a blue shirt. I attended a lecture he gave on cuneiform two years before, and I remembered it was passionate, full of humour and brought the richness of the ancient society to the modern world in the arid lecture hall. Cuneiform is the script used by ancient Mesopotamians. It was written with the wedged end of a reed impressed in clay tablets. It looks like the imprint of tiny birds’ feet running over clay. It is a syllabary (a set of written symbols that represent syllables that make up words) rather than an alphabet and was the written script of several ancient civilizations, including Sumer and Assyria.