The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  It is precisely the helplessness that makes me so angry and worries me so much. But I realize that he never had that luxury; he’d made decisions in his life based on external situations that were too large and beyond his control to worry about. He had to focus on what he could control. And he did.

  I’d encouraged my dad to call Lina when he last saw his sisters in London. I’d been telling him that from the moment I first talked to her. I knew he wanted to speak to her, but he’d put it off. I couldn’t understand why. Even though I knew the family joked that my father didn’t “like Iraq” because he’d never returned, I knew that they all understood the real reasons that he’s stayed away. Eventually, a year after the invasion, the four siblings all called her together, and my dad spoke to her in his rusty Arabic for the first time in fifteen years. Her voice was weak. In fact, he didn’t recognize her. They all agreed on that; it was the first time they’d heard her strong voice weaken. I had this sense that Lina wanted to talk to my father, that he meant so much more to her than he could really understand. She’d known him since the day he was born, watched him grow up, seen him leave Iraq and had gone to London to see his new life. But for the last fifteen years, she hadn’t known him or spoken to him. She needed to hear his voice, his corroded Arabic. I wondered what she thought about when she stayed alone in the house while the war raged for those twenty-one days.

  Auntie Lina is dead. I’d known she was ill, but somehow I thought she would get better. The war might stop, and we’d all be free to go back and see her. Her life had spanned over seven decades, and yet she was born under British occupation and died under American occupation. Was the occupation responsible for her death? Were the sanctions responsible? Sanctions had caused doctors to flee the country, hospitals to become dilapidated and antiquated, and medicines to become scarce. The health system, which had been one of the best in the Middle East, was in tatters by the end of the Gulf War and sanctions. The US invasion and occupation had only exacerbated the situation. The reconstruction of hospitals still had not happened.

  My telephone conversation with Lina in June 2004 turned out to be the first and last time I’d ever speak to her as an adult. Everything about our connection to Iraq was vanishing. Her phone had stopped working soon after I’d spoken to her, and then she’d become too ill to stay home alone. She’d moved into Karim’s house to live with his wife, their children, her brother Clement and his wife (Maha’s parents). The phone hadn’t worked in their house since the war, and so I couldn’t phone them either.

  My father asks us to sit down beside him, and we cry quiet tears while he recounts what his sisters told him. On March 4, 2005, my great-aunt Lina died alone in her room in the early hours of the morning at Karim’s house in Baghdad. The muscles around her spine were weakening, and she was unable to stand up without assistance. She was disintegrating, and nothing could stop it. The stage of the war that is known as the insurgency, the armed resistance by diverse groups in Iraq against the Coalition and each other, was raging all around her, and the hope that Iraqis had nurtured at the end of the invasion had disappeared in a morass of bloodshed and fear exacerbated by no electricity, water, jobs or personal security. Karim didn’t know exactly what had killed my great-aunt. Before the war had started she was fine, she was strong. When Farah visited her four months after the invasion, she was starting to feel weak and tired, but she was still driving, talking, cooking, alive.

  Karim said that when she had moved in with them, Lina had worried about being a burden to her relatives. She was strong and proud, and was used to looking after other people rather than depending on others. She found it hard to accept being cared for by our cousins. When her brother Clement died a few months before from leukemia, my great-aunt said, “It’s my turn now.” Her health had deteriorated until she was bedridden. She called her body an old machine, until she couldn’t speak anymore. Then she was still able to understand what was said to her but couldn’t answer back.

  From the symptoms described over the telephone to my aunts, and then passed from one relative to another and interpreted by Iraqi doctor friends living in exile, it seemed that she had a neurological disorder or an autoimmune disease. In any event, she was wasting away. Her muscles were melting away. The strength in her body was leaking out of her.

  Her death came without warning, despite her illness. The day before she died, Karim’s wife, Maha, got Lina out of bed, bathed her, washed her clothes and gave her a cup of coffee. At the time, the electricity in Baghdad was running at two hours on and four hours off. The water was running, but there was no water treatment so it was contaminated. Lina seemed the same, better even, managing to read the paper a little, even though she couldn’t speak. She shared a room with Maha’s mother, Haifa, who she’d known for decades and had now, in both of their twilights, become her roommate. At 2:00 a.m. she woke up and was uncomfortable, so Haifa soothed her. At 7:00 a.m. Maha went into the room to check on Lina and found that she had died in her sleep. Maha felt that Lina’s passing had been peaceful.

  Again, my aunts in London were at the other end of a phone line, upset but impotent while Lina’s funeral arrangements took on the usual bizarre twists of life in post-invasion Baghdad. At least a prayer was said for her the next day at Karim’s reopened Protestant church. But Lina was denied a funeral and burial at the Syrian Catholic Church where her sister, her mother and her aunt were interred because the burial ground was full and the church was too damaged. The city morgue was crammed with bodies, so my great-aunt Lina could not be laid to rest there while our relatives prepared a funeral for her in Baghdad. She had to be buried immediately. The priest at the Syrian Catholic Church advised Karim to take my auntie Lina’s body to the plot of land in Baqubah. At least it was the same cemetery where her brother Clement had been buried just a few months earlier.

  This time Karim went alone. He tied the coffin to the roof of his little car. It was normally a dangerous drive, and today the road to Baqubah was blocked by American troops, so he had to take side roads. It was raining heavily, which was unusual, and the car kept getting stuck in the mud, almost spinning its wheels to a stop and then gripping again. When he finally got to Baqubah, he paid two gravediggers to dig the hole for Lina’s cardboard coffin, and so she was in her grave, not twenty-four hours after she had died. There was no funeral. Seven days later, Ibtisam, Amal and Siham held the customary memorial mass for her in faraway London.

  Forty days later, another service takes place, as is also the Iraqi custom, to have a memorial and reception after forty days of mourning. Instead of being held in Baghdad, the mass is conducted in a church in Acton that holds an Iraqi mass every week by an Iraqi priest who ministers to the Iraqi Catholic community in London.

  My parents and my youngest sister, Rose, are in London for the memorial service. I am at home in Vancouver, unable to attend because of work commitments. They arrive at the modern church. The altar stands at the centre and the pews radiate out in a triangular formation, the ceilings are low and the architecture contemporary. An Iraqi priest says the mass in Syriac, and the altar boys are Iraqi and wear cotta, plain white robes draped over their clothes.

  Although it isn’t a high mass, the solemnity of the occasion is emphasized when the congregation is blessed using a thurible, a metal container containing hot charcoal that is ritually swung on chains to waft burning incense around the church. The aroma of the incense and the rattling of the chain remind my mother of the mystery of going to Sunday mass when she was young, because thuribles aren’t used at mass much anymore.

  Iraqi Christians fill the church. Rose, who lives in Toronto and is a political activist who doesn’t like to dress up, was insistent that she must find a black skirt to wear to the ceremony. Ibrahim and Mary both wear sombre black suits. Mary is comforted hearing the mass in a foreign language, not realizing until afterwards that she is listening to the language of Christ. The hymns are all sung in Syriac without accompaniment, which is hauntingly beautiful to my mo
ther’s ears.

  Afterwards my aunts host a reception, and the house is jammed with well-dressed exiles. Some guests bring platters of food, and Ibtisam and Siham have cooked as well, so there is a buffet table filled with Iraqi dishes. The mourners are mostly friends of my aunts, but they also include Beatrice, a close friend of their mother’s who is staying with them. She, and the mother of one of their friends, are the only two other people of Lina’s generation present. Beatrice is in her eighties and was a teacher with my grandmother Victoria. My mother and sister have never been in such a large gathering of Iraqis. They are in the minority, speaking English. Most of the guests are women, and Mary is struck that there are so many doctors and professionals among them. Rose feels incredibly awkward to be around all these Iraqis who she thinks she should feel comfortable with because they are family friends. She realizes that she doesn’t know much about the culture or the people, even though she knows all about the politics.

  Rose had started as an anti-poverty activist in Toronto at university; she couldn’t believe the injustice of poverty and homelessness in the city and wanted to do something about it. My parents worried that this was distracting her from her studies, and our aunts encouraged her to put her education first. They also reminded her that poverty was relative and that worldwide there were many poorer people than those suffering in Toronto. They challenged her, “Why don’t you do something for Iraq? Your country? What about the injustice of the sanctions?” She’d never thought of Iraq as her country, but in the lead-up to the war, she too attended protests and demonstrations.

  At the beginning of 2004, she helped form a group to protest against Canadian companies that were doing business in Iraq or with the US military, to show Canadians that they too were profiting from the war. On June 30, they held a demonstration called “The Day America Hands Iraq Over to America,” on the day that the CPA claimed to be handing power back to the Iraqis. A year later, they campaigned against SNC Lavalin, a Canadian corporation manufacturing bullets for the American military, which could not get the two billion bullets it needed from its regular US suppliers.

  The invasion of Iraq had solidified Rose’s Iraqi identity and she was now feeling more emotionally connected to her activism. And the politics of my parents, who had once considered her too radical, had suddenly moved closer to Rose’s. My father used to feel that the United States and its policies and systems were the best the world had to offer, even if they weren’t perfect. After the invasion, my father questioned his earlier faith in the West because he could see that America’s actions weren’t in the interests of Iraqis. He became proud of Rose’s activism.

  As the afternoon goes on, Rose bonds with Beatrice, who talks nonstop, and regales her with an anecdote of being picked up by an elderly man on her flight to London and with colourful stories of her life in Iraq. She tells Rose about how she’d fled the country after surviving the Gulf War. In Baghdad Beatrice had found out she had been accepted to go the United States and cried with joy at her luck. When she checked on the map and saw that she and her family were being sent to the Midwest, they were terrified. They thought they were being sent to a refugee camp in the middle of the desert. She arrived in New York City with her daughter and her grandson and begged American authorities to let them go somewhere else. The authorities kindly let the family stay in New York in a hotel for a few days, but then said that they had to go to where they had been assigned. When they finally arrived they were relieved to be in a big city, but it still took them years to assimilate.

  Mary goes around the room with Ibrahim, introducing herself and getting to know my aunts’ friends. The next day, when we speak on the phone, my mother says, “By the end, I realized that there were Muslims and Christians there. It was a mixture of Kurds, Sunnis and Shia. I’d never known that in Iraq, Muslims spoke in one dialect and Christians another. They both switch effortlessly back and forth between the two, even in a conversation. You know, sometimes it’s merely a difference in accent and pronunciation. They shift automatically.”

  They all translated for Mary, but she often felt that she understood what people were saying through their tone and gestures, even if she didn’t know the language. She says that as the atmosphere relaxed, some of the guests started looking up their old classmates from Baghdad on the Internet, laughing as they found their friends and relived those easier days. My mother admits that she’s never seen this large gathering of Iraqis in London before. A whole community is forming in Greater London of transplanted educated Iraqis which was not there when she’d lived in the same area twenty years before. She kept thinking about Lina, that the memorial service for her death was taking place in London with a community of exiles, most of whom had not been back to Iraq for decades. And yet, a funeral hadn’t been possible in Baghdad, in the city she had lived in all her life.

  Karim and Maha are bereft; the house feels empty without Lina. She had been like a second grandmother to their children, showering them with affection and love during childhoods marred with sanctions and war.

  Lina was the fifth of six of my relatives to die during the occupation. Later Haifa, Clement’s wife and Maha’s mother, would follow her. She died in the summer of 2005, of dehydration and a heart attack. She survived two years of war and most of the summer without air conditioning or fans because the occupiers still hadn’t got the electricity running. When Karim called, he said that two days before she died there was a bomb attack near their house, and the family believes that the incident hastened her death. The blast was so near, the sound so loud, that the windows shattered and the air conditioner flew out of the wall. (Ironic, seeing that it hardly worked anyway.) The explosion was like an earthquake, and Karim went out to see the dead. At least twenty of his neighbours were killed, and one of the destroyed houses backed onto theirs. His friend’s wife, a neighbour, was out in the street, and her husband went to look for her and became hysterical when he couldn’t find her. They were all distraught and thought she had died. Eventually, she returned, not knowing what had happened in her absence; her decision to go out was why she had survived.

  Uncle Clement, and his brother, Uncle Antoine, and his wife, Harriet, and their daughter, Noor, all died before Haifa. Within two years, they all died one after another. Not from a direct assault because of the war, but because of terror, stress, a lack of adequate nutrition, sanitation, medicine, and access to decent health care and good doctors and nurses. Many doctors who had chosen to stay during sanctions had fled the country after having family members kidnapped for ransom, or seeing their colleagues murdered.

  I have never met my father’s uncles, but my aunts say that there is one uncle, Antoine, who looked exactly like my father as he aged, fulfilling the Arabic saying Thil thane al walid allah el Khal—two-thirds of the boy comes from his mother’s brothers.

  Great-uncle Antoine suffered from dementia in the years before he died. Throughout his entire life, he had visited my grandparents and my aunts every single day while they still lived in Baghdad. He loved the family. In photographs, it is hard to tell the difference between my father and this uncle. When an old neighbour from Baghdad made it to London and visited Amal, she gasped when she saw my father’s photograph, thinking it was Uncle Antoine. He died of a heart attack. His daughter, Noor, who was in her forties, also had a heart attack not long after the 2003 invasion. And not long after that, his wife, Harriet, died of unknown causes. A whole generation, with their stories of my family history, was lost in two years. They are the other casualties of war who will never be counted in the humanitarian reports to be released in the years to come.

  Auntie Lina had owned her own house, the house that she had lived in with her mother, Samira, most of her life, but since she was a single woman, she had rented it out while she was taking care of our house. It is situated on a street that also contains a government ministry building, and at the time the entire street was being protected by both Iraqi and American troops. Karim and Maha had not worried about loot
ing because the street was barricaded at either end, but after Lina died, Karim returned to the house to find it ransacked, and the man who was supposed to be renting it was nowhere to be found.

  “Everything was gone,” he told me. “It was like a plague of locusts had eaten the house clean.”

  Not only were all the personal effects like carpets and furniture stolen, but he was astounded that “the kitchen counter, the kitchen and bathroom sinks had vanished too. There was no telephone and no appliances, and all the kitchen cabinets had been stripped away. Even the copper wire from the electricity cables had been stolen. The house was completely empty.”

  Only the desolate walls of the house remained. All of Lina’s furniture, photographs and carpets, some that were meant for presents to her nephew, my father, were gone. And this all occurred on a street in Baghdad that is heavily guarded by both Iraqi and US forces.

  Karim is now talking seriously about escaping Iraq, since now there are no elderly relatives who will be left behind. His brother and his family will still be there, but maybe, he says, they can get out as well. Karim feels that his family cannot stay. There is no hope. There is a growing movement against Christians. In Mosul, a city in northern Iraq whose population is a mixture of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and Turkomans, the Christians are being asked to leave. My grandmother’s family came from Mosul. Christians have been leaving Basra, the second-largest city in Iraq located in the south, since the beginning of the war, and many of the Christian intellectuals have fled. Karim isn’t working much, and although his son is in a special school for gifted children, it is an hour’s drive away.