Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

by Tamara Chalabi

  Hadi began to feel personally involved in the war effort, and studied the generals carefully whenever he got the opportunity. He observed the tensions between them and the ways in which they organized their staff, and was horrified when he saw soldiers being flogged for their misdemeanours, or when he was forced to be present at the execution of deserters.

  Closer to home, Hadi’s maternal uncle, the poet and newspaper editor Abdul Hussein al-Uzri, was rounded up from his house in Kazimiya in the spring of 1915 on the orders of Nur al-Din. Uzri had been outspoken in his editorials, criticizing the Ottoman position and calling for self-determination and Arab independence. As a punishment, he was imprisoned in Kayseri, ancient Caesaria, in the Anatolian heartland. With him were several Baghdadi men of letters, including the notable Pere Anastate al-Karmali, a Jesuit scholar who has contributed substantially to Iraq’s literary heritage.

  Although he was at the Citadel that day, Hadi only learned about what had happened when he came home in the evening to find the house filled with a cacophony of raised voices. He panicked, thinking at first that someone had died. His young cousins were huddled together, holding on to their mother, Abdul Hussein’s sister Amira, who was sobbing loudly. Hadi had never seen his aunt like this. He knew her as a tough woman who was cowed only by her mother Khadja; not even Uzri’s fiery temper could intimidate her.

  The heavy shadow of terror fell over the household as the family fretted over the possibility that further retributions might come their way. In these times of war, even Abdul Hussein’s good relations with the authorities could not be counted on to protect them.

  As the days passed, Amira cried less and shouted more, becoming short-tempered with everyone, especially the servants, who tried to stay out of her way. Hadi’s mother Jamila, on the other hand, simply lost her appetite. She would only drink tea and nibble on bread, like the fragile little bird she resembled. She slept very poorly, yet she made sure to be up early each morning to see Hadi before he left for work, anxious that it might be the last time she saw him if he was also taken away.

  Hadi, however, equipped with his enthusiasm for tackling every challenge that came his way, continued to make himself indispensable at the Citadel. When he was not at work, he preferred to stay away from his father’s dawakhana, where the endless complaints about the authorities bored him. Instead, he wandered among the bazaars near Headquarters in Qishla. From the stallholders and café owners he gained an insight into the soul of the country: what people bought, what they wanted, what they required. He found that the mechanics of the market interested him, and his eyes were opened to the world of commerce. The war had depleted the bazaars, but even as a young man Hadi smelt the endless opportunities that might lie ahead.

  He was chatting to a pomegranate-juice seller late one afternoon when the sky suddenly seemed to rip in two above them.

  ‘Ya Allah, what is it!’ yelled the juice seller, instinctively ducking. Other men nearby had pressed themselves into doorways, or against walls, their eyes wide with fear.

  Looking up into the blue overhead, Hadi spotted a trail of white, then the sun glinting on the wings of a flying machine. His heart was beating furiously, but he could hardly contain his excitement when he realized what he was looking at: an aeroplane! He had heard his father talk of such things, and now he had seen one. He rushed home to tell his younger brothers, Abdul Rasul and Muhammad Ali. The future was coming to Baghdad.

  New technology was not the only thing to arrive in the city. After a defeat at Shuyaba in the winter of 1915, the Turkish army reshuffled some of its military leaders in Baghdad. One of the newcomers was Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, on ‘loan’ from Germany to the Ottoman army. With a long history of military service, beginning as a Prussian officer before German unification, Goltz had contributed to the modernization of the Ottoman army in the 1890s. His arrival in Baghdad on 15 December 1915, in the company of thirty German officers, caused some consternation as he made strategic decisions from the outset without consulting the leading Turkish commander. Nonetheless, when he arrived he was ceremoniously welcomed in the streets by crowds of school children.

  Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim in a studio shot.

  Hadi was curious about the Germans’ motives in posting these officers to Baghdad. He wondered why they were here, fighting with the Sultan in Mesopotamia, rather than fighting the British in their own country. Although he listened carefully to his father’s explanations, and to Uncle Abdul Ghani’s arguments about fighting the infidel, he wasn’t sure if he understood why this war was being fought at all. And if what his uncle said was true, then surely the Ottomans shouldn’t be fighting alongside the infidel here, in Baghdad.

  He hadn’t witnessed many encounters between men of the East and Europeans, and he found the interaction between Goltz and his Ottoman colleagues absorbing. When irritated, Goltz would take off his round spectacles and wave them around, while his face turned very red, and he would lift his hands up to his hair and down again in rigid, mechanical fashion like a wind-up toy. He was especially impatient with his local staff, reprimanding them in his pidgin Turkish for the slightest mistake. Hadi once witnessed the flogging of a tea boy who had accidentally dropped a glass on one of Goltz’s documents.

  One day, while walking back to Headquarters, Hadi spotted Goltz patting his handsome pair of Turkish Kangal sheepdogs. The way he fussed over them, murmuring to them and affectionately stroking them, was in complete contrast to the way he treated people.

  Whatever his personal idiosyncrasies, Goltz earned his military reputation. He was regarded as a hero by many for his successful planning of the famous siege of Kut in Mesopotamia in 1916, which inflicted a humiliating defeat upon the British. All the same, having seen how he treated his staff, Hadi wasn’t sure if Goltz really cared about the fate of the Arab people.

  The fighting continued unabated as the British pushed north towards Baghdad. The sound of weeping became a constant in the streets as women feared for the safety of their conscripted sons, husbands and fathers. There were shocking reports of children dying of starvation, of women selling themselves in order to survive, and of harsh reprisals by the Ottoman military authorities. Hadi knew the last of these to be true, as he had seen for himself the bodies of army deserters left to rot on poles in several of Baghdad’s squares.

  One morning, a woman approached him as he stood outside the Citadel talking to a friend. In spite of her youthful voice, she looked old. She was haggard with worry, and had barely started talking when her tears welled up. Both her sons had been conscripted a year earlier, she explained, and she hadn’t even seen them go as they had been forcibly carted away from their shop in the soug al saffafir, the metal market, where they were coppersmiths. She begged Hadi to find out where they were, as no one had responded to her many pleas. He wrote down their names and told her he would do his best.

  Hadi approached some of his colleagues, who simply shrugged their shoulders and said that it was probably lucky the boys’ mother didn’t know their fate, as they had most likely perished on the Eastern Front in Russia. Unable to give the woman the news she wanted, instead he started to give her food secretly, which he could arrange fairly easily as he was delivering supplies to the officer at the Deer Palace. She took the food gratefully, especially as the price of staples such as sugar and wheat had risen drastically in recent months. Yet the look of hollowness in her eyes never left her as she waited for her sons to return.

  The horror of the war was never far away. A constant flow of wounded soldiers streamed into Baghdad; the bodies of the dead lay in flimsy open coffins, attracting swarms of flies. There were never enough doctors or medical supplies, and many of the wounded died unattended. These sights terrified the local population, who could only assume that their conscripted loved ones suffered similar fates on more distant fronts.

  The Ottoman military casualties on the Mesopotamian front amounted to approximately 38,000 lives out of an estimated total of 305,08
5 lost Empire-wide. Civilian casualties were even higher. There were increasing numbers of destitute women begging on the streets, many with infant children, who had escaped from the ravaged villages south of Baghdad where the fighting continued, or whose menfolk had been taken to the front, leaving them to fend for themselves. Some were even imprisoned by the authorities for their husbands’ desertions. The plight of these women moved many, including a leading poet, Ma’ruf Rusafi, who wrote:

  He died, the one that gave her safety and happiness

  And fate, after his absence, lumbered her with poverty …

  Walking, she carried her infant on a tear-covered breast;

  His swaddle from rags, repelling any onlooker.

  No man, but me did I hear her

  Pleading with her God, her suffering life …

  3

  All That is Good Will Happen

  A Marriage Prospect

  (1916)

  THE INSANITY ON the streets outside afflicted Hadi’s grandmother, Khadja. Gossip abounded about the general state of moral turpitude in Baghdad, now that the city streets were awash with refugees, and Khadja was concerned by the long hours her grandson spent at Military Headquarters, adrift in a sea of corruption. At home, she had caught him stealing interested glances at several young women who had come with their mothers to visit her; she also suspected him of flirting with their pretty new maid. She concluded that it was time for Hadi, now aged eighteen, to marry.

  Ensconced within her own quarters in the large Chalabi house, Khadja had outlived her husband, Ali Chalabi, and her robustness and energy were boundless. She had a reputation as a domestic tyrant who never had to repeat her decrees more than once. A fair-skinned woman with small eyes and a delicate physique, she occupied herself by matchmaking and initiating divorces between couples, applying equal effort to both activities.

  Summoning her three eldest daughters, Munira, Amira and Shaouna, and her son Abdul Hussein, Khadja delivered her verdict with respect to Hadi. Hadi’s mother, Jamila, was excluded from the meeting on the basis that she was an outsider. Although she had been married to Abdul Hussein for many years, she was still disliked by her sisters-in-law because they had originally wanted another wife for their brother, believing he was too good for her.

  An oil portrait of Jamila, Abdul Hussein’s wife.

  Khadja was so feared that no one else dared approach her kursidar, her private sitting room, unless invited, except for the servant who brought them the tea at the beginning of the meeting. Resplendent on her satin-covered seat, Khadja smoked her nargilleh and ran through the list of potential brides for her grandson.

  The name Bibi Begum was mentioned a few times. Although she was personally unknown to the family, the girl was the niece of the wife of a distant cousin of theirs and the daughter of Sayyid Hassan al-Bassam, a respected merchant who had died five years earlier. They also knew her mother Rumia well. Rumia was a highly regarded, God-fearing woman, famed for her culinary talents and her lineage – her mother was a granddaughter of the Persian Qajar Shah, Fath Ali Shah. She came from a well travelled and erudite family, the Postforoush from Azerbaijan, who had settled in Kazimiya several generations earlier.

  For hours the three Chalabi daughters discussed the advantages and disadvantages of such a union. Munira preferred another family, the Qotobs, whose daughters she thought much prettier. Amira disagreed, considering them too haughty. But finally and inevitably they agreed with their mother, settling on Bibi.

  When he came home later that day, Hadi was informed of their decision. He knew that he was expected to get married; it was a part of life. In addition to being a religious duty, marriage was a rite of passage that everyone went through. Love, if it came at all, was expected to come after marriage. It would have been impossible for it to come before, as there was almost no opportunity for a young man such as Hadi to meet a suitable bride outside the family in any respectable setting. He accepted the decision with a combination of excitement and trepidation, trying to imagine what Bibi looked like from the description that was given to him. But none of the Chalabi women – not even Khadja – had an inkling of the true nature of the girl’s personality and temperament.

  Sixteen-year-old Bibi had recently had an argument with her mother, Rumia. Her grandfather Sayyid Nassir had summoned her to his sitting room, where he and Rumia were drinking tea. A willowy and cultured woman, Rumia sat quietly out of respect for her elderly father-in-law while he informed Bibi that he had been approached about the prospect of marrying her to a distant cousin who was a mullah. He explained that the cousin was moving to Persia, where she would join him if the match went ahead.

  Incensed, Bibi declared brazenly, ‘I don’t want him!’ The force of her response silenced the room.

  Rumia covered her eyes in despair, fearful of the damage her daughter’s character would inflict on her reputation. After a moment she looked up and pleaded in a small voice, ‘Bibi, be reasonable, what is it that you expect? He’s a good man. Don’t become blind with your empty dreams – life requires sacrifice.’ Rumia knew that her daughter wanted to live comfortably, to mix in good company and travel the world in style. Apparently all those Persian love poems she had learned when younger had gone to her head.

  Bibi was adamant. ‘Yes, mother, you remind me of that every day, and I can see it all around us,’ she said firmly. ‘But why should I sacrifice myself to this man? I don’t want to be a mullah’s wife; I don’t want him – I won’t discuss it!’

  Bibi retreated to her room, where she kept a hidden stash of hand-rolled cigarettes that she had discreetly stolen from Rumia over time. She lit one up and sat with her back against the door so that no one could come in. She had been a smoker since the age of twelve, and now she played an old game: with every puff, she followed the rising smoke, seeing what shape it suggested and interpreting this in relation to one of her many wishes. If the puff of smoke retained the same shape for a count of five, it meant her wish would come true. Now she wished for a suitable man – handsome, intelligent and well-to-do.

  Bibi had been her late father Sayyid Hassan’s favourite, and nothing could ever compensate her for his loss. Even as a young girl, precocious and with a sharp turn of phrase, she had commanded and demanded attention from all, particularly from her father. Her name, Bibi Begum, was partly a testament to her father’s travels. Not content with one title to call his daughter, he put two nouns together: ‘Lady Madam’ in Urdu and Hindi. However, in picking the name Bibi, he also stripped her of the title she would earn when she eventually became a grandmother, as ‘Bibi’ was the name grandmothers were given in Mesopotamia. Long before she became a grandmother, Bibi’s name imbued her with matriarchal qualities. It seemed to give her the foundation upon which to build her life.

  As a little girl, Bibi had always been excited as she waited for her father to come home from his latest travels in the East; from Persia and India where he bought goods for his wholesale provisions business in Baghdad. Everyone else in the household would rush around, preparing for their master’s return, except for Bibi, who would flit in and out of the courtyard to check whether he had arrived.

  She always wanted to be the first to greet him, ahead of her mother and her two brothers. Once she had spotted him from a distance, walking along the alleyway with several men. Trailing behind them came a cart piled high with cases. Bibi couldn’t contain her excitement a moment longer and ran over the cobbles to her father, flinging her arms around him as he reached down to pick her up.

  ‘My, my, you’ve grown, my khatuna, my darling,’ he chuckled as he kissed her warmly on her flushed cheeks.

  ‘Did you bring me back lots of presents?’

  ‘You naughty girl, is this the first thing you ask your father after such a long trip?’ Sayyid Hassan laughed.

  ‘Well, did you?’ Bibi insisted.

  ‘Of course I did,’ Sayyid Hassan replied with a smile.

  ‘And do you have lots of stories to tell me?’
r />   ‘Lots and lots. Let’s go inside.’

  No one embraced her like that any more, and no one gave her the sorts of gifts her father had once lavished upon her. He had had a good eye, always returning from his travels with lovely objects for the house and beautiful jewels for his wife and daughter.

  Sayyid Hassan had taken a deep interest in Bibi’s education. She appeared to have inherited from her mother’s cultivated and bookish family a talent for poetry and learned conversation, and he saw her interest perk up whenever her maternal uncles visited, when she would hang upon their every word. However, there were no girls’ schools in Kazimiya and only a handful in Baghdad, to which few of the local townsfolk ventured.

  As a solution to this dilemma, two male teachers were hired to teach Bibi. One was a sheikh who taught her to read the Quran and gave her lessons about Islam; the other taught her literature and poetry. Bibi proved to have a knack for memorizing and reciting verse and songs that she retained all her life. Her language teacher was an Iranian resident of Kazimiya, and he included Persian poems, which were both tender and spiritual, in Bibi’s curriculum.

  Bibi was also encouraged to pray, having watched her parents do this every day since her infancy. As a little girl, one of her favourite things was to recite prayers to her father, thus commanding his full attention.

  With her mother, things were different. Religiosity was perpetually in the air around Rumia and she seemed obsessed with doing good, a trait that Bibi absorbed unconsciously, even though she felt overwhelmed by her mother’s devotion to God, and became ever more critical of her ascetic ways. Since Rumia was busy with the household chores and managing her staff, she had little time in which to give Bibi the undivided attention she craved.