The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  As Khalil used to say to my father, “There are no bad drivers in Lebanon, only dead bad drivers.” Driving in Lebanon is always a spectacular event; whether in the city skidding through unmarked intersections missing crashing by a hair’s breadth or careering up and down the mountain roads that lace across the country, your life always feels in danger. Today, we are picked up by Siham’s vivacious and still attractive Iraqi friend Nebal who has kindly, and without fail, visited our great-aunt Selma every month for the past decade.

  The first thing she says to me is, “I knew you were a Nadir, you look like the sisters.”

  Siham had said that Nebal was always laughing, despite having had a life full of tragedy, and that she was always telling stories. She drives us to Jouneh and up the mountain road to the convent where Selma lives. She ushers us into the reception area, talking all the while about her two sons who live in Sweden and how she can’t move there because her husband and mother-in-law are ill in Beirut and she needs to be with them.

  A nun dressed in a white habit escorts us into the ward. Six ancient women sit in pristine white beds in a room that overlooks palm trees and the Mediterranean. I bubble over with tears when I recognize Selma, a shrunken version of herself at ninety-seven years old. Her wrinkled brown hands peek over the top of the white sheets, and the sister goes to find her glasses so she can see us. I remember how, when we’d been there twelve years ago, she had broken her glasses and we had to insist angrily that she let us buy her new frames before she relented and allowed us to. Nebal introduces us to her. Selma looks up at me, blinking slowly, and then smiles.

  “Bint Ibrahim,” she says.

  “She remembers you, ‘Ibrahim’s daughter,’ ” translates Nebal. “Of course, she has no idea who I am even though I come and see her every week, but she knows you!” Her laugh tinkles out.

  Selma keeps talking in Arabic, and I recognize the tones of her voice.

  “She’s saying she wants to see your father. She is asking where he is.” My heart catches on itself.

  “Tell her I am coming as his representative, that he sent me to see her because he could not come.”

  Nebal translates and says, “Good. She knows you, and today she remembers her father’s and grandfather’s names too. She says she remembers when you came with Siham and stayed with her.”

  Nebal is beaming, so happy and proud that Selma remembers me. Then she starts laughing uncontrollably.

  “Now she is saying that her brother Khalil, your grandfather, was such a wonderful man. And that he was the president of Syria. The best one they’ve ever had.”

  Nebal has tears smarting at the corners of her eyes at the ridiculousness of the thought. The old lady in the bed beside us suddenly turns and glares, then opens her toothless mouth and shouts at us to be quiet. She seems to shout for five minutes, before Nebal can interrupt her and assure her that we won’t be long. And then the sister comes in and tells her that Selma never has visitors and that we have come all the way from Canada and that her loud family comes every week and no one complains. The woman continues to glare at us and shout every once in a while. There is nothing to say or do but kiss Selma and hold her hands, and introduce Scott, whom she seems to approve of. We tell her we love her and our family loves her. We take photographs and she sits smiling.

  “She really knows you,” says Nebal. “I’m so surprised.”

  I am flooded with sadness that we can’t take her back to Canada or England with us and look after her. Here is the last member of my grandfather’s Syrian family of that generation, alone and looked after by strangers, visited only by a woman she doesn’t really know. She has no family here. And the family she does have are all abroad and haven’t been able to visit her for so many years because of incessant war. All we can do is provide the nursing home for her and pray.

  Afterwards, we invite Nebal for lunch and she shows us the newly rebuilt downtown district known as Solidaire. The hairs stand up on my arms as we drive through a pristine reconstruction of the Ottoman and French mandate-period architecture that had been completely destroyed in the civil war. The buildings are all brand new, but there is something familiar about them. When I last drove through these streets in 1993, the roads were completely potholed, the buildings empty ruins, beautiful facades were crumbling into gaping holes full of sandbags; the area had been deserted, and Siham had almost wept over what had been lost.

  And yet, I am now driving through streets that Nebal says have been rebuilt according to the original plans; you can look at old photographs of shattered buildings and match them with the exact replicas that now stand on their ruins. It is eerie; the only phoenix I have ever witnessed. Could this ever happen to Baghdad? Can its past be reborn? The streets are lined with open-air cafés that Nebal says bustle at night with Lebanese out for a good time Beirut style. We sit on the terrace of a beautiful restaurant adorned with coloured tiles, and Nebal recounts the story of her life over endless mezze dishes. For ten years she nursed her father, who suffered a stroke when her sister was diagnosed with brain cancer around the time of the Gulf War. Then her husband almost died of heart failure, but survived after her church prayed for him. The doctors and nurses said it was a miracle because he had only 30 per cent of his heart left. Nebal believed he had been saved by God.

  Her Turkish father, a Syrian Orthodox Christian, had been persecuted by the Turks, much as the Armenians were, in the early part of the twentieth century. He’d lost everything and walked to Iraq over the mountains with his gold wrapped around his body under his clothes. Kurdish bandits captured him and stole the gold, so by the time he got to Baghdad he was penniless, a refugee and alone. But over his lifetime he slowly built up his riches in Iraq. When Nebal was a child, her family would fly to Kuwait for shopping trips. Then the Gulf War came, a terrifying time of houses bombed and civilians killed. They didn’t have electricity for six months and had to bake their own bread and buy and make food every day, as they had no way of preserving anything.

  The family fled to Lebanon just as the civil war was ending. But now she feels stuck here, lonely and like an animal in a cage, unable to escape the tiny country. One hears stories like hers all over the Middle East, a pained and tragic life cut off from the support of extended family, fleeing wars and never feeling or being truly settled or secure. And yet, she is not difficult company; rather, she is just the opposite. Ever hospitable, ordering more dishes for us to try, offering ways to help us in our travels, and even with her sad stories, she never complains or tries to elicit sympathy; she is merely sharing the tale of her difficult life.

  We explain that we are planning to go to northern Lebanon the next day, and discuss how best to get there. Lebanon is a tiny country and anywhere else, the 150-kilometre journey would have been an easy day trip in a rental car. But the roads aren’t very good and the maps aren’t either, and so she doesn’t want us to drive ourselves. The bus could get us to Tripoli, but then it would be impossible to find our way to the small village where Ibrahim lives. We decide to hire a taxi, but she offers to find one of her neighbours to escort us. We resist the offer, but she is insistent. That evening, she calls us full of heartfelt apologies. She had lined up a few people to drive us, but they have all called saying they can’t make the journey because a snowstorm is forecast and the roads might be bad and it might take too long to go there and back. We reassure her that we want to hire a taxi, and she apologizes profusely and then lets us go and make our own arrangements.

  Our taxi driver, Hani, gets us to Tripoli. Rather than look at a map, he leans out of the window, asking people where the village is. One man offers to jump in and help us find it, another waves dismissively up the mountain and a third makes intense gestures of turn right, turn left, until none of us can follow anymore. But Hani is jolly; he has already told us his life story and all about his brothers and sisters. He drove us up the coast from Beirut, pointing out landmarks and beauty spots and ignoring the Hezbollah supporters and refugee encampmen
ts by the sides of the road. We had been told that once we got to the village we could just ask for Ibrahim’s house, since he had been the mayor until recently.

  We head up into the snow-sprinkled northern mountains of Lebanon, and I know that just beyond the distant hills is Syria and my grandfather’s hometown. We enter the village where the road narrows to a lane, and the houses are walled in and turned away from the road. We stop the first man we see, and this time he does get in and rides with us through the few turns it takes to find Ibrahim’s house. Once there, Hani says he’ll wait in the car and rest. It turns out he didn’t sleep the night before because he took his brother’s shift (they share taxi duties), and so is relishing the promise of a long nap while we visit inside.

  The driveway is dominated by a huge lush green orange tree, which still bears a few gleaming oranges shining through the leaves on the grey winter’s day. Ripe fallen fruit decorate the grass below. We walk up to the door and it is opened by a young woman who smiles politely and ushers us upstairs without saying a word. We don’t know who she is, but assume all will be revealed shortly. We go through another door and into a spacious entry hall where we are greeted by a middle-aged woman with strawberry-blond blow-dried hair and bright lipstick. The other woman disappears, and we realize that she was the maid. The new woman says a friendly hello in English and then starts speaking rapidly in Arabic.

  I shake my head, and then a man who has to be Ammu Ibrahim comes into the room. I know he is ninety-two, but he doesn’t look older than seventy. He is rather tall, his face is narrow without looking thin, and his cheeks are full and high. His eyes are large and brown behind his glasses, and he is dressed in a brown cardigan over a shirt and tie and long trousers. His hair is thick and truly silver.

  “Come in, Come in,” he says, his English perfectly clear, to our relief. “So you are Leilah, Ibrahim’s daughter, Khalil’s granddaughter.” He takes my hands and looks into my face, “I am so so pleased to see you. You can never know how much this means to me.” We move into a large room with a small black wood-burning stove in the centre. “Stand near this if you are cold. What would you like to drink? Tea? Wine?”

  Before I know it, I say, “Wine.” I feel that an occasion of this magnitude deserves more than a cup of tea, no matter how delicious Arabic tea is.

  “And this is my wife, who has the same name as you, Layla.”

  A small grey-haired lady with big clear smoky eyes smiles up at me (she doesn’t speak English), and we all sit down around the stove. I feel that I am among relatives, as if I am really meeting my grandfather’s brother and his family.

  “You see,” says Ibrahim, reading my thoughts, “your grandfather was more than my best friend, really. He was a brother to me. I loved him very much. And his children, I loved them too.”

  The last time he’d seen my father was forty-five years earlier, in the summer of 1960, just before he left to study in England. I hand Ibrahim the gift I have brought: a simple box made of Western red cedar from the rainforests of British Columbia—a nod to Lebanon’s symbol, the cedar. He carefully puts it on the table without unwrapping it.

  As I settle into my seat, I look around and notice that the walls are covered in beautiful modernist oil paintings that look like they were painted in the 1920s or 1930s. Some have a feeling of Edward Hopper; muted melancholy in vibrant colours. Then I realize that they are all done by the same hand.

  “Who did these gorgeous paintings?” I ask.

  Ammu Ibrahim replies with modest pride, “I am the painter.”

  Scott and I immediately stand up and start admiring each painting as if we are in a gallery. The largest wall is taken up by a bright green hilly landscape dotted with white and red houses with a great Lebanese cedar in the foreground.

  “That is this village. Our village. I was born here. I love this place. But it is the view from the hill over there.” He points outside the window across the valley. And then he points out his house, where we now stand, in the painting.

  We find out that he studied painting for six months at the American University in Beirut when he was young. His dream had been to study art in Europe, but then World War II broke out and he couldn’t go. Later, he’d visited all the major galleries in Europe and had seen many masterpieces of Western art and so was largely self-taught. Above where his wife sits is a portrait of a younger Ammu Ibrahim and Layla sitting on the very same sofa drinking their morning coffee beside the black wood stove, a Christmas cactus in full fuchsia bloom between them. It is a tender scene of quiet intimacy between husband and wife.

  “I painted that because those quiet moments of drinking coffee with my lovely wife in the morning are my greatest moments of happiness,” he said.

  Next to me is a painting of two old men wearing fezzes, talking, one touching the other’s knee. Beside that is a large painting of an ancient cedar tree, unlike any Lebanese cedar I’d ever seen. The trunk is knotted and gnarled and painted in shades of orange and pink, and the eye is drawn up towards the tree’s canopy, which fills the whole canvas with tapering, swaying branches. It’s as if you are looking up from a child’s point of view. Ammu Ibrahim explains that he paints for himself, that he has never sold a painting, only given them away as gifts or used them to decorate his own house to remind him of happy memories.

  “But now we must eat lunch. Where is the driver?”

  “Oh, he’s asleep in the car.”

  “Well, I will go and ask him to join us.” Before we can protest, he is putting on his coat and walking slowly, deliberately, downstairs and out to the car.

  The rest of us are shown into the dining room. The table is filled with countless plates and dishes, which could have fed the entire village, not just two Canadian travellers and Ibrahim’s family. There is typical Lebanese mezze, kofte, kibbe, half-moon pastries filled with ground lamb and pine nuts, roast chicken lemon drumsticks, tabbouleh, hummus, French fries, a rice dish with chicken and pine nuts, pomegranate sauce, mayonnaise and garlic. There is also lasagne, made to cater to our North American tastes. Ibrahim returns with a bleary-eyed Hani who says, reluctantly and in an apologetic tone, “He insisted I come and join you.”

  “Yes, yes,” we all agree. When he sees the table loaded with food, he smiles.

  As we sit down, I notice the painting that decorates this room is an arresting Pietà done by Ibrahim. The Madonna is dressed in bright red robes with a sky-blue scarf on her head and she holds the body of Jesus after he’s been taken down from the cross tenderly in her lap. It is like a modern Renaissance painting.

  Over lunch, as we are cajoled into trying something from every single dish on the table, I ask Ibrahim about my grandfather.

  “He was the best friend you could have,” he said. “People treasured his friendship because he was a scrupulously honest man and he treated everyone the same, whether they were very important and rich or very poor and humble. Everyone respected and loved him for that. And he was a very religious man, very pious. He prayed all the time. If you want to know the parents, look at his children, look at your father and his sisters, if you want to see what kind of man he was.”

  They had met when they were boys, and as young men he and Khalil had hiked from this village all the way to Bscharre to see the Khalil Gibran Museum. I had seen some photos of their trip in Khalil’s album. It had taken them two days to get there and two days to get back. I asked when they had last seen each other.

  “Oh, we lost touch when the Lebanese war started in 1973. Then the Iran–Iraq War. And then . . .” His voice trailed off. “I think he died of grief after your grandmother Victoria died. He loved her and missed her so much.”

  Ibrahim stops talking and starts eating in earnest and we eat until it is impossible to consume anymore. The rest of us try to communicate with our various levels of English and Arabic. At the end of the lunch, we have Turkish coffee in tiny cups and baklava, and a huge fruit bowl is brought to the table—a cornucopia of peaches, kiwis, strawberries and ora
nges. We politely take one strawberry each.

  Ammu Ibrahim looks tired, so we take our cue and tell him that we have to leave. Hani tactfully announces that we’d better leave soon or we will be late getting back to Beirut. I feel frustrated that the visit has been so brief. Ibrahim could tell me so much more about Khalil that no one else could know. But Ibrahim is old, ninety-two, and he doesn’t seem to want to divulge more details about my grandfather’s youth.

  Ibrahim and his wife insist on walking us to the car, making sure we have everything and are settled in. We embrace and kiss goodbye, and Ibrahim gazes at me and says, “Thank you so much for coming all the way to visit us. You have no idea what it means to me, really. To see the granddaughter of Khalil.”

  I hug him, my eyes smart with tears. He couldn’t know what it meant to me to meet the only friend of my grandfather that I would ever know. As we back out of the driveway, Ibrahim and Layla stand side by side under the orange tree, waving at us. For a moment, it is as if it is my grandfather and grandmother I am saying goodbye to. I wave back and when we turn out of sight, I rest my hands over my eyes and cry.

  We take a servis (shared) taxi to travel to Damascus. The price is ten US dollars, and it’s an extra five if we don’t want to share the back seat of the yellow seventies Mustang with a third person. A man in a keffiyeh sits in the front and doesn’t look at us once through the journey, though he chats nonstop to the driver. The distance is barely a hundred kilometres, but because the road winds through mountains over two thousand metres high and there is a border to cross, the trip from Beirut to Damascus takes all day. In a raging snowstorm, it takes even longer.