The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  I look at my father, bundled up in his ski jacket, toque and gloves, braving the cold temperatures that I know he struggles against, and I know that he will heed this warning.

  We stand looking out over the frozen forests with the beautiful jagged stone peaks ringed around us, the snow glistening in the bright sun. In the peaceful silence, I picture the flat expanse of the landscape around Baghdad, the date palms, the river, the relentless heat, the sandstorms, and I hear the clamour of explosions, shiver at the thought of the tension and fear brought on by the presence of violence and death lurking everywhere at every moment.

  For now, all I can do is imagine, in ten or twenty years, with my children perhaps, opening up the old house and going inside. Perhaps the photographs will still be framed on the mantelpiece, my aunts’ clothes in the closets, my father’s newspaper in a drawer. I walk up on to the roof. I look everywhere, but the house is empty. I go back downstairs and out onto the terrace facing the neglected garden, shrivelled and wild. There I am greeted by the ghosts of my grandparents, my great-aunt, my great-uncles, all saying at once, “Welcome, welcome. You’ve come to visit us. Sit down, sit down, we’ll drink tea. We knew you’d come one day. We knew you’d be back.”

  MY GRANDFATHER KHALIL TEACHING

  ENGLISH IN BAGHDAD IN 1962

  Epilogue

  Mesopotamia or Iraq retained a powerful Christian culture at least through the thirteenth century. In terms of the number and splendour of its churches and monasteries, its vast scholarship and dazzling spirituality, Iraq was through the late Middle Ages at least as much a cultural and spiritual heartland of Christianity as was France or Germany, or indeed Ireland. . . . Middle Eastern Christianity will not become extinct in the same way that animal or plant species vanish, with no representatives left to carry on the line and no hope of revival. . . . For practical purposes, however, Middle Eastern Christianity has, within living memory, all but disappeared as a living force.

  — Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity

  This book was first published in Canada in September 2007, the same week when George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq to announce that security was improving and life was stabilizing for ordinary Iraqis. A few days before my book launch, my father called me.

  “We’ve heard from Karim. They are fleeing Baghdad.”

  “Where will they go?” I asked, knowing only two countries are admitting Iraqi refugees.

  “Syria, they just decided yesterday.” He went on to explain that a car had rammed into theirs and when they got out, the driver demanded a large sum of money in dollars. Karim and Maha were so shocked by the audacity of these men that they ignored their threats and quickly got back in their car. The men pursued them as they drove home. At the checkpoint at the entrance to their neighbourhood, Karim asked the guards (who are paid for by the residents) what they should do. They replied, “Just give them what they want. Now that they know where you live, they could do anything.”

  With no police or justice system to turn to, Karim and Maha handed over the cash, and immediately decided they could not live another day in a country where people could extort money from you on the street in broad daylight. This was true anarchy. The Syrian government had just announced that it was going to close the border to Iraqi refugees; in one week’s time, they would need a visa to get into Syria. It was now or never.

  Karim and Maha would leave behind not only everything they’d ever known but also four houses: their own, that of Maha’s recently deceased parents, a third belonging to my great-aunt Lina and finally my father’s house, with all the contents still inside. Everyone knew that once they left, it was unlikely that anyone in the family would return to Baghdad for many years, if ever.

  My father asked Karim if he would mind filling a small suitcase with any of my grandfather Khalil’s memorabilia that was still in the house. In the forty-nine years since he left Iraq, my father had never made such a request. He was thinking of letters, photographs and documents: birth certificates, wills, house deeds, anything. He knew without asking that it was impossible for Karim to bring anything of monetary value.

  Karim replied that he was deeply sorry, but it was impossible for him to take anything at all into Syria. They could only leave with a few clothes and personal effects. He thought Syrian officials were especially suspicious of any documents that could contain coded messages from the resistance or other fighters. Documents could detain the family at the border for hours or even days and could ultimately even stop them from getting into Syria.

  As I was reading aloud from my book at the launch, the last members of my father’s family were fleeing the city of his birth, becoming what they had most feared: refugees. That morning, Maha had sat in her garden crying, saying goodbye to her beloved house which, despite all the terror and hardship of the last four years, she had not wanted to leave. That night, their taxi broke down in the desert on the dangerous road to the border and they had to wait, terrified of being ambushed by fighters or renegade soldiers, while the driver did the repairs.

  The next day, I called my aunts in London and asked Siham if the family had got to Syria. She said yes, they had made it through the border and registered with the UN as refugees. I wanted to know how she felt about finally losing her house in Baghdad. “Of course, I am very upset about losing my house,” she replied. “But I am far more angry that I have lost my country.”

  After a moment’s silence she said, “You know the other day I was thinking of something I forgot to tell you about. When we were girls, my mother would make her own rose water. She cooked rice dishes and baklava with it, and splashed it on the linens to make them smell nice. We used to help her make it, pick the petals from the bushes in the garden, press the water and scent from them. I’ll explain to you one day in detail how we did it. We used to think it was work at the time. We resented it. But now you realize it was a nice thing to do. It’s something we haven’t done since we left Iraq. I’ll always think of her when I use rose water. You can buy it now in the Arabic shops here. It’s not really the same though.”

  Six months later my father came to visit me in Vancouver. “I have something to show you,” he said. He pulled out a blue plastic bag with an elongated rectangular picture frame inside. “Do you recognize it?” Inside the cracked gilded-wood frame was a painting, a very simple silhouette of a black hillside with low houses and a tower on it, with a muted brown sky.

  “No, I’ve never seen this before.”

  “It’s Safita,” my father said. “The view from my grandfather’s house. Ammu Ibrahim painted it when he was just starting to paint. You see it has something written on the back?” In my grandfather’s elegant handwriting, I read, “Safita, Syria, Summer 1935. By my lifelong friend Ibrahim; drawn from our roof at sunset. The side facing us was shady because the sun sets behind.”

  “Where did you find this?” I asked.

  “It is one of the few things that Karim managed to recover from the house in Baghdad. He thought he could risk it. No one could accuse him of anything sinister for being in possession of a landscape painting, could they?” He chuckled. “My sisters brought it back from Syria when they visited the family at Easter. It’s funny that the only thing we have from our Baghdadi house is a painting of Khalil’s childhood home, which is also lost to us.”

  Karim, Maha, Reeta and Samir have now been living in Syria for sixteen months. They cannot work or earn money but the children are allowed to go to school. They have found an apartment to rent in a town full of Iraqi Christians who have also fled the violence. They live on UN rations and what is left of their savings and are applying to any country on Earth that might take them in. They say they cannot stay in Syria indefinitely as refugees, and there is no future there for their children. There are an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria who are all trying to survive. Unemployment is high among Syrians themselves, and middle-class Iraqis now live hand to mouth or on scant savings, while the poor are forced in
to crime or prostitution.

  Maha says that despite now having the freedom to go out and socialize in the evenings without fearing for her life, Reeta still misses Baghdad. When she walks past Iraqi falafel shops, which have mushroomed all over Damascus, she breaks down and cries at the sounds of Iraqi music and people speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect.

  Meanwhile, Farah has just returned to Baghdad for the first time in almost three years. She emails me her first impressions; the famous “highway of death” from the airport into the city is now lined with massive concrete blast walls on either side that are painted with colourful murals of Iraqi historical scenes. She says she can’t travel that road without thinking of how many people have been killed on it. She wonders if anyone knows the number of deaths that have occurred on that highway.

  She tells me that the oranges are ripening now, dusty fruit weighing down the trees. Sitting in traffic makes her anxious because there are many unreported explosions and she hears them in the distance sometimes. Nobody else flinches at the sounds of gunfire or bombs exploding. The other huge difference is what she dubs “the landscape of fear”; Baghdad is now a concrete jungle criss-crossed with blast walls and checkpoints. There were some walls up on her last visit, but now the whole city has been dissected into fragments like honeycomb so you can no longer travel freely.

  On my recent book tour in Australia, an Iraqi woman approached me after one of my readings in Brisbane. Light hair framed her relatively unlined face; she surprised me when she told me she was in her seventies. Her name was Noor, which means “light” in Arabic. She’d been living in Australia for decades, but her memories of her life in Baghdad were still intact. Her green eyes shone with the remembrance of her happy childhood. When she was a young woman she picked orange blossoms, drying them in the sun to make orange-blossom tea. No doubt my grandparents did the same, she said. I agreed that they might have.

  I really hate to say this but it is the truth—there is no Iraq now.

  —Manal Al Sheikh

  I stand behind a podium looking out at scores of Iraqi faces. “I’m here today by happy coincidence,” I begin. “My newfound cousin Natalie contacted me after she read my book.” I am breathless with nerves and excitement, I move my hands too much as I talk, as I’m not sure I’m entitled to speak to Iraqis about their own country.

  I’d walked into a nondescript building in an industrial area of Mississauga, a Toronto suburb, and been instantly surrounded by warmth and friendliness. Natalie had found me by way of my book a few months earlier. She had been attracted to it because she too was Iraqi but did not speak Arabic and had never been to Iraq. She passed my book on to her father and he recognized the story of my great-uncle, who camped out in a jerdah on a sand island in the Tigris during the summers. A family conversation ensued to figure out if we were related. They invited me to give my very first reading for a Middle Eastern group at their Iraqi social club, a reincarnation of the social clubs popular with families in Baghdad. In the audience sit my second cousins and their families, friends and acquaintances, ranging from teenagers to seniors.

  I’d never heard of this side of the family. When pressed my father said he had forgotten to mention it, but that yes, he’d known of an older family member who had immigrated to Montreal in the ’60s. Finally, Natalie sent me photographs of my father, aunts and grandparents at her parents’ wedding in Beirut in the ’50s. I was shocked. Who was this woman? From our correspondence, I discovered that I had over two hundred relatives, Iraqis who now lived all over the world, in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, many of whom had left Baghdad in the last ten years. Here was my lost family, not in Iraq but scattered all over the globe. And now I am meeting dozens of them for the first time, we are united, not in Baghdad but in Toronto.

  After the reading, people line up to get their books signed and finally a couple arrives at the front. The man, in his fifties, neatly dressed, has my book in his hand, open to the last chapter, “Christmas in Baghdad.” On the facing page is a photograph of an Iraqi woman cleaning up her home. Her living room is wrecked and in disarray but directly behind her is a decorated Christmas tree. “That is my wife,” he says and gestures beside him, and I immediately recognize the woman from the photograph, standing in front of me like an old friend. “She doesn’t speak much English,” her husband adds. “But I lived in England for ten years.”

  My mind is reeling; I am trying to figure out how this woman’s picture got into my book. I ask her if she knows Farah Nosh, but they’ve never met. She has short wavy reddish-brown hair and large eyes full of emotion. Behind her is another woman, her face bearing identical features but looking much younger. She says, “I am her twin sister, but I’ve lived in Canada for thirty years.” In the flash of comparing their matching faces, I see the toll the last three decades has taken on Iraqis. The sister from the photograph wears her pain in her tired expression and lined face. Obviously a foreigner to Canada, her clothes are drab and old-fashioned. Her twin sister gives off a shinier air, and even though she must have suffered the pain of exile that many Iraqis endured over the Saddam era, her eyes still light up when she speaks.

  The man clutches a sheaf of dog-eared papers, enlarged and photocopied photographs. “Our house was destroyed by a massive, 300-kilogram car bomb full of TNT explosives,” he says, pointing at the pictures. “Flames shot into the sky from the explosion, windows were blown out, whole walls collapsed and the roof caved in. It was all destroyed.” I imagine he’s shown these photographs again and again to many officials in Iraq, Syria and Canada, to prove his stories.

  He speaks with confidence and anger. “It was New Year’s Eve 2003, in the first year of the American occupation. The target was a restaurant next door where some Americans were having a New Year’s Eve party. We were at home trying to welcome in the New Year with the lights dim, as we ran everything off a generator in those days. Neighbours saw a car circling unable to find a parking spot directly in front of the restaurant. So it blew up in front of our house instead. It happened at 9.28 p.m.” Six people were at home, but they all made it out alive, crawling out of a window. “If it had happened an hour later, I would have been killed in my bed, as our whole bedroom collapsed. I was all cut up from shards of glass from the windows blowing out. I only remember being out on the street and taken to hospital. Five people in the restaurant were killed. Three people on the street died as well, one who had been guarding the cars for the restaurant, and thirty-six people were injured.”

  He spent three days in hospital: “When the three American journalists who had been injured in the restaurant saw me being stitched up without anesthetic, they decided to go to a private hospital. But in those days the hospitals were still good and I left with a nylon bag with penicillin, cotton, bandages and everything to help me heal. A year later, you had to bring your own supplies.” He smoothes out the wrinkled and worn photocopies in his hand and points at a framed picture on the only wall still standing; the entire front wall looks as if it has been knocked in by a wrecking ball, leaving the living room open to the street.

  “Ave Maria, that image of the Virgin Mary has been on my bedroom wall since I was little, it is the only thing that survived intact, including me. Everything else was broken or destroyed. Our Lady got us out of the house alive that night.”

  I ask if he knows who was responsible for the bombing, if there was an investigation. He replies, “No. We have no idea. The police came, the journalists came, the Americans came and they looked around. But no investigation, we never knew who was responsible. This happens with all the bombs.”

  For the next two years, the family was forced to move from one friend or relative’s house to another. “We never thought of leaving Baghdad, our life was there, my job, all our assets, our family. We wanted to stay. But then the foreign car company I worked for pulled out. Letters sent to the head office and to the secretary—a foreigner married to an Iraqi—threatened that every
one in the company would be killed if they didn’t close. There were bullets in the envelopes. They shut down right away.”

  “I tell you under Saddam not a shot was fired in the streets, except for shooting in the air after soccer matches. But after the invasion, anyone could buy a machine gun or a Kalashnikov. It was like Texas! You just went to the American army station, registered your name and got a license, and suddenly there were guns everywhere. It was chaos. It was never like this before.” He shakes his head, sighing.

  “So you left because of losing your job?”

  “No, not even that made me want to leave. It was after two incidents where people threw themselves in front of our car! When they were taken to hospital they claimed they had been hit and demanded compensation. They’d have ‘witnesses,’ so what could you do? You had to pay up. After the second time, I felt that the country was finished, the people had changed. Society had collapsed, the sewage, electric, telephone and medical systems had been targeted in the invasion and none had been repaired. Nothing had been done. How could you live in a country like that? So we fled to Damascus and then Aleppo and we are only here because of the UN sponsorship program.”

  “And what do Iraqis who are still there think?”

  “When I was in Syria I went back and forth to Iraq once a year to check on our house and people would say, ‘We are praying to bring Saddam back.’ He was a tyrant, yes, but if you didn’t touch him, he left you alone. Now you can’t live at all.”

  By now, everyone is sitting at crowded tables, their plates piled with rice and kebabs. I am propelled to a nearby table and sit down beside the twin sister who lives in Toronto. She explains that she’d not seen her sister for two decades. After the war started she watched it on CNN obsessively. Then, during the day on New Year’s Eve 2003, there suddenly in front of her she saw her twin, crying and wringing her hands in front of their bombed-out house. She leapt out of her seat in shock, crying out to her sister as if she could hear her. Her sister was openly suffering on CNN and she was helpless, she felt her sister’s emotions as if they were her own and began crying uncontrollably. As the house was destroyed, there was no way she could contact her sister directly. But at least she knew that the family was alive, though now she also knew that her sister’s husband was badly injured. She was in shock; she couldn’t go out to a New Year’s Eve party after that.