The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  I ask Maha about covering up when she is out in public, because I see how much they are enjoying being dressed up for an occasion. Maha tells me, mostly through mime, that they don’t have to cover their hair yet in Baghdad. Since their neighbourhood is very mixed, they haven’t been under pressure to change the way they dress. I ask her if she thinks there is a civil war now.

  “Yes, there is a war between the different militias that are working for different political parties,” she says. “But not between the people. The people themselves have always lived together and have mixed families. You would be asking people to hate members of their own families.”

  I ask her about freedom of speech.

  “Oh yes, we talk politics all the time. Iraqis love politics. We can’t think about anything else, it’s our life. Under Saddam we couldn’t speak openly of anything. But now we can. But we don’t believe anything the politicians say.”

  “Why not?” I explain to her that while we in the West are skeptical of our politicians and their motives, we still have remarkable faith in the fairness of our political system.

  “Well, we see what the politicians say and then we watch and see what the results are. See what they say and then what they do. And then we can see clearly that they lie. It’s all lies,” she concludes.

  When we get home, we have tea in the kitchen. Amal gets out her reading glasses and opens a letter she had received from Beatrice earlier that day. Beatrice is my grandmother Victoria’s old friend, another Iraqi refugee now living in the United States. She has become paranoid about speaking on the phone in the US because Iraqis have been given to understand that their lines may be tapped and that they are being eavesdropped upon. She is now in her eighties and left Iraq ten years ago, after the Gulf War. Ironically, she lived for fifteen years under Saddam never being able to say anything on the phone, and now she is in the United States experiencing the same fate. A few weeks earlier Ibtisam spoke to her about her recent trip to Jordan. Usually, Beatrice is extremely talkative and can tell stories one after another without stopping for breath. She hinted that she had other things to tell Ibtisam about her trip, but wouldn’t elaborate further.

  “I’ll write you a letter,” Beatrice said. “I’ll tell you everything in the letter. I can’t say anything now.”

  Ibtisam reads out the letter in Arabic. “I will translate it afterwards,” she says. She starts reading, then says, “Ooh, ohh my God.”

  I can’t restrain myself. “What? What? I can’t wait, tell me.”

  “She went to Baghdad!” Amal exclaims.

  Everyone is talking at once in Arabic. Amal keeps reading aloud, peering down her nose, then up at her listeners, then after the first page she says, “She was in Amman, and her nephew’s wife in Baghdad was having a baby, so her nephew begged her to come to help her in labour. They said they would buy her a plane ticket. She waited for a month before deciding to go . . . Oh, but they shouldn’t have done it, they weren’t thinking . . . She took the flight to Baghdad. She was terrified in the taxi from the airport to her house. She says she can only describe one percent of what happened to her in those weeks. As she drove through Baghdad, she was crying, crying, crying all the way. She says, ‘It is in ruins, all the buildings, the streets, and the people. Life in Baghdad is nothing but terror, terror, terror. Fear. Panic. I can’t tell you about the terror, my whole stay whenever anyone went out of the house, I was just terrified until they came back. It would take a book to tell you what happened to me in those weeks. I cannot describe Baghdad to you. It is destroyed.’ ”

  I look around at the faces sitting at the table hearing this. “Is it true? Or is she exaggerating a little bit?” Despite all that I know I just can’t believe that Reeta and Maha are living in such terrible fear all the time.

  Maha and Reeta look stony. “Yes, it is true.”

  Reeta says, “But I am not scared. I am used to it. Unless I see someone with a beard next to us in the car. Then I feel scared. I would expect the car to blow up. But usually I don’t think about it.”

  “Oh dear, she says that the family received a ransom note saying that unless they give them fifty thousand dollars, the whole family would be killed. Oh, they will kill them anyway, she says. So that dark night, the whole family fled to Jordan.” Amal repeats Beatrice’s final words: “ ‘I wish I had never gone back. Never go back.’ ”

  Ibtisam says, “They shouldn’t have asked her to come. She is an old lady, why did they do that? What good has it done her to see Baghdad like that? Her memories will be gone.”

  Ruined, like the city.

  Ibtisam, Maha, Reeta and Amal cram into the car to drive me to the airport. I’m leaving a few days earlier than Maha and Reeta. We get out at the airport drop-off lane, and I hug Ibtisam and Amal and thank them for their hospitality, which they shake away, saying, “You know, you never have to ask if you want to come and stay here. You just say you are coming. Our house is your house. In our culture, if you are family, you don’t have to ask if you can come. You are welcome. Even our friends don’t ask. Remember, just tell us you are coming.” Then I embrace Maha and Reeta. I don’t know where or when, or even if, I’ll see them again. They feel closer than cousins, more like sisters, and I wonder what is going to happen to them. Will we next meet in Australia? The United States? Or will they move to Canada? Britain? Or will I have to go to Baghdad to see them again? We don’t allude to any of that. We just say brightly, “God willing, en shallah, we’ll see each other again soon.” And they get back into the car, waving through the windows until we can’t see each other anymore. They are gone.

  AN IRAQI CHRISTIAN CLEANS UP AFTER AN ATTACK ON HER HOME

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Christmas in Baghdad

  Gianni Magazzeni, the chief of the UN assistance mission for Iraq, said 34,452 civilians were killed and 36,685 wounded [in Iraq last year.]. . . . Figures show that almost 100 civilians are killed on a typical day, while dozens of bodies, many showing signs of torture, are found daily on the streets of Baghdad, . . . The UN report also said 30,842 people were detained in the country as of December 31, including 14,534 in detention facilities run by US-led forces. —“Many killed in Baghdad blasts,” Staff and Agencies at The Guardian, January 16, 2007

  It’s the week between Christmas and New Year 2007. I’m walking in Kananaskis Country with my father, trudging through the pristine snowy landscape of the majestic Rocky Mountains, about as far from the desert he was brought up in as you can possibly get. The snow is falling in thick flakes around us, the sky is pale blue and the dark pine trees glisten with their frosty decorations.

  “So I guess there weren’t many Christmas trees in Baghdad when you were a boy?”

  “Not many, but we had one. On Christmas Eve, my father and I went to a huge house with large grounds and a walled garden that was on the river near Grandma Samira’s house. We’d take an axe and go and choose a fir from the grounds, often six feet high, and cut it down for our Christmas tree. Then we’d carry it home and decorate it with the family that night. I think my sisters have the Christmas decorations in London. Or maybe they are still at home.”

  “I guess there wasn’t any snow though!” I say.

  “No no. But it was sometimes chilly,” he says. “The shops sold lots of Christmas decorations because there were so many Westerners there at the time, and even the Muslim families often had Christmas trees and gave presents. It was nice to have a feast in the middle of winter, and they’d just enjoy the celebration and the socializing and ignore the Christian element.”

  He said the children woke in the morning and, like all children on Christmas morning around the world, got presents from Santa Claus who had come in the night. The family went to church and then the men would go from house to house giving Christmas greetings to family, friends and neighbours. The women stayed at home and received the men.

  “My uncles used to come to us,” my father continues. “Since I
was a young boy I’d have to stay with the women, who offered the guests some food. Sometimes we had tabbouleh, after my aunt Miriam came from Syria to live with us. No one had heard of tabbouleh in our family until she came. Apart from my father, of course. They’d joke that she brought tabbouleh to Iraq, and they’d make so much of it, chopping the parsley was endless.”

  “So you didn’t have turkey for dinner in Baghdad, right?” I joked.

  “Oh yes, we did,” he chuckles. “We bought one a couple of months before Christmas and it lived on the roof. We’d feed the bird our leftovers. Sometimes it flew off, but we kids would chase the turkey and get it back. We’d fatten the turkey up and then the uncles would kill it. The killing was a bit gruesome, but when you live with animals around like that, you aren’t really bothered when they die. My mother plucked off the feathers, then boiled the carcass until it was so well done the meat fell off the bone. And then she’d make special rice with the broth. That rice was delicious. You know, the one we make with nuts and raisins.”

  “I wonder what Christmas was like in Baghdad this year. How are the family?” I ask.

  “Well, they are still alive. Not dead yet, so that is good. Actually I wanted to talk to you about the house.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Maha and Karim have been approached by a family, not known by us, who lives down the street from our house. They had noticed that it was empty. Nowadays an empty house is a cause of deep concern. The neighbours are worried that insurgents, a gang, or a militia will take it over and live in it and use it as a base from which to launch attacks, as they have done in many other houses. Then the whole street would be drawn even further into the war. They wondered if our family would rent the house to the wife’s sister. This sister and her family had been forced to leave her house in a dangerous neighbourhood where there has been intense fighting and were now living in their house with them.”

  The last time I talked to Karim was over the Internet. The family had returned to Baghdad. Karim said that Maha and Reeta saw Baghdad with new eyes when they returned from their six weeks in England. It is hard for them to be there, knowing what life is like in the rest of the world. They’d had a taste of freedom, and it was hard to go back to their caged existence.

  Karim finally closed his business for fear of kidnapping. A man from a store near his office was snatched by some armed men a few weeks before. He was released after two days without a ransom; no one knows who did it or why. But that incident was enough to scare everyone on the street. Karim has retreated to the safety of his home and now has his computer there. The curfew is enforced every day, and Iraqi civilians rarely leave the house; their home is their only safety, but has become their prison as well.

  Now all that the family hopes for is to escape Iraq. The situation in Baghdad is far worse, more dangerous, and security has worsened precipitously since the summer. Day after day, things get steadily worse. They are still not yet ready to flee to Syria, they don’t want to leave their house, family and friends and run away. They want to get visas, leave with the right papers.

  I ask him if he is afraid for his life, if he thinks their house will be bombed. He replies, “Yes, sometimes the helicopters throw something that gets into the garden.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The garden is full of these thin pieces of metal, about two inches by two inches, that have been dropped from the sky.”

  I don’t understand what he means. “How many pieces?”

  “Hundreds. Maybe more. We clear them up and throw them away.”

  “Is it debris from a cluster bomb?” He doesn’t understand my question.

  “We have seen so many things here. You would not believe the things we have seen. I think the Americans have many things to do here. For four days, it has been like the war again. Airplanes and bombs, day and night. No one knows what their plan is, but they have one. Maybe they want Iraq to be three countries.” I ask him if he thinks that could happen. “Yes, but it might take ten or fifteen years. As long as it is a weak country, that’s what they want.” I ask him if he thinks the American plan will succeed. “Of course. The future of this country is over.”

  I repeat to my father what Karim had said. He nods saying, “I talked to my sisters about the house. On the one hand, if the house is left empty then it probably will be squatted in eventually anyway, and then we might lose the place forever. But renting it is difficult emotionally.” It is hard for them to imagine their parents’ home, the house they grew up in, being occupied by strangers, it would never be the same. “On the other hand, if they do rent the house perhaps Karim won’t be able to get the rent money or much worse, we would never get the family to leave if we ever wanted the house back.”

  He explained that since there is no rule of law in Iraq now everything is based on a code of honour. They could only hope that the people are honest. The house is in my father’s name, and he could choose to sell it. Of course he’d get next to nothing for it because no one is buying houses in Baghdad while there is still war. But my father wants to keep the house.

  “It’s the family house,” he explains. “It was built by my parents, and it’s been in the family for fifty years. My logic is, the situation in Iraq can only go two ways. Either it will get worse, and then everyone will be displaced, and we wouldn’t need to move the renters out as we wouldn’t want to go back anyway. If there is a civil war and it ends eventually, then these people will have to leave. It might take twenty years, but it would still be our house.”

  He told my aunts to ask Maha to find out if the renter wants any of the furniture or the appliances and to sell her whatever she wants. Maha and Karim will take what they can use and move the personal stuff out of the house. Since Maha’s parents died, they have extra rooms where they can store things. But all the belongings that had been left in situ, looked after during the sanctions, guarded by Lina through the war and cleaned since by Maha, will be finally moved out. Maha has already cleaned out one closet, which was full of new sheets. She’d taken the sheets to nuns who run an old peoples’ home, who were happy to receive them. They said they’d tear them up to make dressings for wounds.

  This year, Maha decorated a tree, but because she was scared, they had to put it at the very back of the house, out of sight so that no one would see it from the street. Iraqi children were very worried this Christmas that Santa would be kidnapped and that he wouldn’t make it down the chimney to give them their presents. Of course, when he did come, they were all deeply thankful.

  The family went to church on Christmas morning and were given presents from a charity in the West. I remember making similar packages as a schoolgirl, putting a box together to send to less fortunate people on the other side of the world. Now our relatives were the destitute, living in the most perilous city on earth. They received different things in each box. Reeta was unimpressed by hers, which held a toothbrush and toothpaste.

  Maha said, “I mean, we know it’s useful, but she didn’t find it very Christmasy.”

  And her brother got a dollar in his box.

  “Do they use dollars in Baghdad?” I ask my father.

  “Of course they do, but one dollar?”

  “Pray for us and our country,” Karim said in his e-mailed Christmas greeting. That was all we could do.

  A few hours before our walk, at 6:00 a.m. on December 29, 2006, Baghdad time, Saddam Hussein was executed. The electricity didn’t come on until 11:00 a.m., and then Reeta and her brother watched the execution on television along with most Iraqis. They’d witnessed so much violence already, their parents didn’t think to shield them from this. But the children couldn’t sleep that night, and their parents had to go into their rooms and sleep with them. They both had nightmares. Reeta dreamt that she saw Saddam emerging from a river flowing entirely with blood. Karim and Maha thought that Saddam had been killed to cover up everything he knew about American complicity in his crimes. Amal didn’t feel anything for him; she
considers him an evil man, but she considers George W. Bush just as much of a criminal. It is zero degrees centigrade in Baghdad, and there is no power. The family is freezing cold without heat.

  I ask my father, “What do you feel about Saddam Hussein’s death?”

  “Nothing.”

  I thought that showing him moments before his death with the noose around his neck was medieval in its barbarity. It felt like the end to a Shakespearean tragedy; Elizabethan in its raw violence.

  “But he ruined your life? Your country?”

  “I knew this day would come. This always happens to dictators eventually. They all have to die one day. I just didn’t expect it would come like this.” Then he says, “You know, people often forget that everyone suffered under Saddam. Not just Shia or Kurds. Saddam was indiscriminate in his ruthlessness. He even killed family members and trusted friends. And he could just change his mind on a whim and you were dead.”

  “Do you worry about Iraq?” I ask him.

  “Not really. We’ve always had war and invasion. Remember, over the centuries we’ve been invaded by the Persians, the Turks, the Mongols, the Arabians. Iraq is used to it. If you knew the history you’d see. This time is especially bad, but it has always been like this. I wanted to leave. It wasn’t accidental, it was by design.” He is quiet for a moment, lost in thought. Then he says, “I know a Sunni Iraqi who fled for Canada in the 1990s; he was just as horrified by Saddam Hussein as I was. Anyway, this man went back to Baghdad right after the invasion and he was stunned by what he saw. When he came back he said, ‘Never ever go back, Ibrahim. Just forget Iraq. Forget it.’ ”