Then Rose says, “I know Palestinians in Toronto who wear necklaces like that of Palestine.”
Maha answers, and Amal translates her sarcasm, “Yes, everyone who has lost their country has to wear one of these necklaces. Wear their country around their neck.”
Reeta is sitting on another couch, watching us. I walk over to her and she looks up but doesn’t move, so I lean down to give her a hug and three kisses. She slowly unfurls herself and quickly hugs me, embarrassed. Her body is soft and limp. She is far more beautiful in real life than the photos show. She has large brown eyes with such thick long black eyelashes that I am convinced she must be wearing mascara, though Amal had told me on the phone that Reeta doesn’t wear makeup yet. She has long thick black curly hair and high cheekbones. She is slender with the shy bearing of a teenager innocent of her beauty. She dresses like many other teenagers around the world, in jeans and a pale pink T-shirt and bright pink running shoes with Velcro straps. Apart from her dark colouring, you wouldn’t know that she is Arabic and has never been out of Iraq. But Reeta was born in Baghdad in 1991, just after the Gulf War, grew up under sanctions and became a teenager during the 2003 invasion.
Amal asks me how my flight was. That day there had been a massive terror alert in London after police had uncovered an alleged plot to blow up ten aircraft. I tell them it was strangely easy. Arriving wasn’t a problem; it was leaving Heathrow that was said to be practically impossible.
“How was your flight from Jordan, Maha?” I ask.
It was Reeta’s first flight, and Maha hadn’t flown for twenty-five years.
Amal chimes in, “They were nervous that they wouldn’t know what to do, but once they got to the airport, they realized that it was easy.”
I look at Reeta and say, “Did you like it?”
She looks at Amal and says softly, “Shinoo?” (“What?” in Iraqi Arabic), but Amal insists I say it more slowly in English, and Reeta understands and nods vigorously, yes, she liked flying.
Karim had told me how he’d tried to explain flying to his children before the war, but they hadn’t understood. With the war they’d seen thousands of flying machines, almost all military, but this was the first time either of his children had flown. I’m sure he was sad not to be with Reeta on her first-ever flight.
I ask them how they like English life so far; they have already been in London for a few days. They nod and laugh together like sisters. Their laughs are very light and long.
Siham explains that there is an Arabic expression, which roughly translates as, “You are like a deaf man at a wedding who can’t hear the music.” You say this to someone if they don’t understand what you are saying to them. Maha and Reeta feel like that when they hear English.
But then Maha says, “Life here is so easy, there is nothing to do.”
Maha opens her palms and explains that in Baghdad they often have no water supply, and so they have to store water in tanks on the roof. She proceeds to explain the details. They don’t get hot or cold water anymore from the taps because the pumps can’t work without electricity. In the summer, the temperature outside is over 50 degrees Celsius, and the water heats up naturally in the tanks and they have to carry it down from the roof in pans to use in the house. The only time I ever saw this done was in Lebanon when I visited my great-aunt. But without electricity it is difficult to get cold water. They don’t have a steady electricity supply, and so they buy it from a generator set up by a man down the street. They don’t know when the generator will be turned on or off, and if they plug in too many appliances, then when the generator comes on there is often a power surge and a fuse is blown. They blame each other when the fuse goes, and this causes arguments about who forgot to turn off the appliances, even though no one knows when the electricity will be on or off.
This summer they had no air conditioning, and sometimes it was so hot that they would just throw water on their smooth stone floors and lay in the water to cool down.
Amal stopped her, repeating in disbelief, “You just lay on the floor of the house to stay cool? Fully clothed?”
And for the first time I heard a phrase that would be repeated often throughout their stay: “But what else can we do?”
“Speaking of water,” Maha says in Arabic, laughing again, “when Baghdadis dig wells in their back or front gardens to find water, they often strike oil instead.” Of course, this makes them very angry since nothing can be done with it, so they just cover the hole again.
“You can’t drink or wash in oil,” Amal grumbles.
I ask Maha how Karim is. This is the first time they have been apart since they got married. She says he is all right but deeply traumatized. A few weeks ago, since I’d last heard from him, he was sitting in his car at a police checkpoint waiting to go through. A policeman approached the car two cars ahead of him, and as he got to the car it disappeared in fire and smoke right in front of Karim’s eyes. They think it was a suicide bomber. There was only one car between Karim’s car and the bombers. Karim’s window was open and his arm was resting on the car door. In an instant the whole front of his car and his arm were covered in blood and pieces of flesh. He saw body parts everywhere—of the murdered policeman, the bomber and innocent bystanders. It was a miracle that he wasn’t killed or injured. He was so horrified that he drove straight to his brother’s house, which was nearby, and had to lie down for several hours to get over the shock until he was well enough to go home. Amal shakes her head as she translates. All I can say is, “Oh my God. He must be distraught.” Maha just nods her head gravely. I look at Reeta, wondering what she is feeling as we are talking about her father, but her facial expression betrays nothing.
Amal asks Reeta whether she is afraid at school.
Reeta gives her favourite response, “Yani,” which means many things in Iraqi Arabic depending on the context, but here means “kind of.”
She pauses, and Amal teases her, “She says yani for everything.”
Reeta seems intimidated by her new aunts. They treat her intimately like a daughter, but she doesn’t know them and they are a strong force when together. Reeta explains that she was terrified when she first went back to school after the war. At first, every time they heard an explosion they would be sent home by the teachers. Often the windows would shatter. Eventually, the bombs were going off every day, and the students wanted to study, so they stayed at school all day despite the danger. Now they leave the windows open so that they don’t shatter. Reeta is so used to the blasts that she doesn’t even hear them anymore.
Maha adds, “When I took Reeta back to school after the war ended, I mean, it was months after it ended, but finally they opened the schools. We walked into the school and there were no photographs or images of Saddam Hussein in the halls or classrooms. This terrified us. We were so shocked. We didn’t know what it meant. So we immediately left the school again.”
Siham reminded us that Saddam had not yet been captured, and everyone was still afraid he might come back. They had lived with his image everywhere for their whole lives, thinking about him every day, and the shock of those pictures being gone was petrifying. Instead of the jubilation and relief one would expect, there was a strange absence and no one could imagine what might fill it.
“Now the Iraqis are saying that life was better under Saddam,” Maha laughs.
“Do they really mean it?” I ask.
“Well, probably only because they know he isn’t going to come back. But yes, before, our lives were more stable. Life was very hard, but we could go out, leave the house, go to school and work, we had our life. We had security,” she says.
“Do you care about Saddam’s trial? Do you watch it on television?” She flicks her hand away and tilts her chin up dismissively.
“We don’t care what happens to him. It’s over. We know he will die in prison.”
Amal changes the subject. She insists they show Maha and Reeta a good time and not talk only about the war incessantly.
�
�Shall we go to the park later?” she says to Reeta. “She loves the park, we had tea there last night, like a picnic, and she wants us to go there again. They don’t go out of the house in Baghdad.” But when she asks Reeta if she wants to go to the park, she answers “yani” and shrugs her shoulders. “This is a democratic household,” Amal jokes. “You are allowed to make decisions here. Oh, these women, they don’t want to make decisions, they don’t want democracy. They want to be told what to do! That’s what they are used to.” They all laugh.
In the park, I notice that Reeta doesn’t seem to have any muscles. She is slim but her body is slack and soft. I realize the reason is that they never walk anywhere. Reeta is driven to and from school, and stays inside the rest of the time. Maha is upset because she herself has gained weight in the last three years.
“All we do is eat. Cook and eat. We are stressed. So we eat,” she says.
It isn’t easy for them to walk for a long time, they tire much more quickly than we do, but they love being outside. I see the park through their eyes, a park I walked in most days with my mother when I was a girl. It is a typically English mixture of a carefully pruned garden with a wilder aspect of fields and huge chestnut trees. Reeta doesn’t speak much unless we ask her a question. I am chatting away, anxious for us to feel natural, despite everything.
As we walk she tells us how much she hates sleeping on the roof at home now. Her little cot bed is left on the roof especially for that purpose and folded up in the day. Since the invasion, the American helicopters fly so low over Baghdad that Reeta can actually see inside them as they pass over her house; the soldiers, often not much older than herself, sit in the helicopter doors, their legs dangling over the side, their boots and their guns pointed at the sleeping people of the city. They are so close that she can see their faces as they fly over her. The helicopters are painfully loud, she says, and I ask how low they come. Reeta points at a nearby tree and says that they would hang as low as the treetop. It’s not very tall, just a little higher than a two-storey house. Reeta sits up in her bed, crouched in her nightgown under her blanket, watching them circle. She hates them and feels angry when she sees these men peering at her while she is trying to sleep.
Suddenly, Reeta cowers behind me in fear, clinging to my arm. I imagine she is remembering her fear and anger, when a dog comes bounding up to us. Amal shouts that Reeta is terrified of dogs. In Iraq people don’t keep dogs as pets, and so most are wild street dogs that will bite you and can give you rabies. Amal has explained to her that these English dogs are harmless, even nice, and that people keep them as pets because they are cute, but Reeta doesn’t care. She is frozen and won’t move until they are gone. I try to tease her lightly, saying that I can’t believe she is terrified by dogs, she who has lived the last three years in a war zone.
She frowns and says, “I am used to the war, but I am afraid of dogs.”
They have another reason to be afraid of the American helicopters. Maha tells us that near their house one day a helicopter came and hovered in the sky, then three car bombs went off in close succession and soon afterwards the helicopter left the area. Nothing else happened after it had gone. In the absence of any accurate or reliable information, quickly, the rumour went round the neighbourhood that there was a connection between the helicopter and the three bombs. Did they set off the bombs by remote? No one knows. No one knows what the meaning is behind any of the violence in Baghdad anymore and what is connected and what isn’t. Rumours run rampant and many Iraqis say that the Americans are deliberately stoking the violence, to keep Iraq on its knees. They can’t even gauge what to be afraid of and what to run away from. Death can come from anywhere and be caused by anything.
Maha giggles suddenly.
“Did you hear about the time Lina went out and her car broke down?,” she asks. “She didn’t know what to do, so she went up to a policeman directing traffic at a roundabout and asked him to help her. (They don’t have AA service in Baghdad.)” Amal inserts these parenthetical comments whenever she translates, giving me another dimension of simultaneous translation, cultural interpretation. “He offered to fix her car but only if she would direct traffic while he worked on it. So suddenly, there was Lina, a civilian woman in her sixties, directing the flow of traffic in the centre of the city.” Maha chuckles as she tells us this, wiping her eyes at the memory.
Amal says, “She was incredible, Lina was. Did you know that she baked us birthday cakes on our birthdays every year, even when we weren’t there? Throughout the whole time we were away, fifteen years, she always remembered and celebrated.”
That evening, after the visitors have gone up to bed and we are eating our traditional evening snack of a piece of fruit, Amal reveals to me that Reeta didn’t want to come to England for this holiday, didn’t want to leave her friends and life in Baghdad. Amal is puzzled because Reeta seems unmoved by England, her eyes don’t light up with excitement at any of the sights she has seen so far. She is passive and painfully shy. She is also fretting about her weight, even though she is very slim. She and her friends have made a pact not to gain weight in the summer holidays and so she keeps refusing to eat, and then feeling faint and then repeating the pattern the next day.
The next morning, at the breakfast table, after we have finished eating a traditional English breakfast of sausage, bacon and eggs and all insisted that Reeta eat some of it, I give Amal the gold bracelet and necklace that Farah smuggled out of Iraq in the spring. We all laugh at the irony that Maha could have brought it to Amal herself. I tell them of how Farah almost had the gold confiscated on the way out, and they are horrified and worried at all the trouble they caused her. Maha produces other pieces of jewellery she brought with her: my great-grandmother Samira’s wedding ring, a large flat gold oval setting filled with irregular-cut diamonds, and another simple diamond ring in a gold setting. Piece by piece, Iraq is coming back to my three aunts.
Maha tells me that Amal drove her past the house I grew up in, which she remembers visiting as a child when she and her parents came to London. She came with my relatives in one of the family convoys through Europe to England. Her parents have both died since the invasion in 2003. Amal asks Maha what happened to her mother, how she died, even though we’ve heard bits of the story before.
Maha looks down, pausing to collect herself, then she tells us slowly that in July 2005, a political party that was running in the election set up a campaign office on the street directly behind their house. Maha’s mother, who was a widow by then, was still living with the family, but Auntie Lina was already dead. In the run-up to the election, a bomb exploded at the office. Maha and the family were at home, and the force of the blast shattered all their windows and caused the air conditioner to fly from its post and across the room to smash against the next wall. All the cupboards flew open and the contents tumbled out onto the floor. The family ran out of the house and over to the next street to see what had happened. Maha saw the severed arm and head of the suicide bomber on the ground. Maha shakes her head sharply, as if she is trying to dislodge the memory from her mind.
They went back home through the fog of dust created by the explosion. The next day Maha’s mother took ill. It was summer and very hot, and again nothing was working. Of course, the air conditioner had been broken in the blast, but it was useless anyway because there was no electricity. Maha’s mother was too ill to get upstairs to sleep on the roof, and so Maha stayed inside with her, spraying water on her face periodically to cool her down. She died a few days later of unknown causes. They all believe that the shock of the attack was what killed her. In the photographs Farah took in 2003, Maha’s mother looks healthy for her age, with no hint of illness.
“This is usual in war,” says Amal. “Maha says that the daughter of a friend of theirs got diabetes when a bomb went off at her school.”
“Is that possible?” I ask. “Medically, I mean.”
Amal shrugs, “It happened.”
I am lost in my thoug
hts as the conversation continues in Arabic, until I notice that Amal has her arm around Maha who is crying into her palms.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“She is worried because we told her that the whole family thinks she should talk to a lawyer while she is here,” Amal explains. “We want to find out if there is any way she can apply for the family to come to England. They have to get out of Iraq. But she doesn’t want to move here and become a refugee. She just wants to stay in Baghdad and for everything to get better.”
Reeta leaves the room, taking a few plates with her, but I see she’s holding back her own tears. Reeta misses Baghdad already; the idea of leaving forever is tormenting her. Every time the subject comes up, and it does every few hours, she bursts into tears. Even though Iraq is in such anarchy, the British government and many other Western countries regard the country as “free” since it has held democratic elections. It is more difficult now to apply as a refugee than it was during the years of Saddam’s dictatorship.
I see their predicament clearly for the first time. Karim is in his mid-forties; it would be extremely complicated for him to leave everything he has built up in Baghdad and move to an English-speaking country and start again. What would he do? Become a cab driver, a cook? His engineering degree would be worthless, and since he doesn’t have a huge sum of money to bring into the country, he would be a refugee. He would be dependent on the charity of the country he arrived in. Reeta is top of her class in Baghdad and wants to be an engineer. But for her to leave Baghdad and move to another school system and do as well in English as she has done there would be very difficult. Her brother is a couple of years younger than her, but suffers the same predicament.
The Orange Trees of Baghdad Page 24
