Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  Marsh Arabs often urged me to shoot one of the most common birds in the Marshes, the pelican: and I as often refused to do so. Pelicans are harmless and look far too dignified and far too vulnerable: firing into them would be like mortaring a congregation of bishops. In any case, pelican meat is inedible, and the tribesmen simply want them for their stretchable neck pouches which the Madan say make the most resonant skins for their hand-drums. Ungainly they may be, but pelicans at rest, their pure white feathers and yellow bills reflected in the mirror surface of a lagoon, ride the waters with ship-like grace. They can be beautiful. Standing in the shallows to feed, at evening, several hundred together, they stoop and pluck and preen, making a sea of agitated whiteness that slowly turns to flamingo-pink as the sun sinks. And high up, slowly wheeling and wheeling on outstretched, unmoving wings, these sometimes ludicrous-looking birds give to the sweep of water, reeds and towering sky an extra touch of majesty.

  But above all other creatures, the geese and duck lodge in the memory. Their wild sky-armies come whirling and crying out of the Russian tundras and seem to carry with them much of the spirit of the Marshes. When the duck seethe on the skyline in dark, shifting clouds like smoke or bees or locusts: as the descending grey-lag or white-front swirl across an evening sky that is pearl-grey and flecked with tongues of flame-coloured cloud: when darkness has fallen and the village noises have died away and the sad goose-calls come from the grazing-fields, it is time to be silent and let the wild creatures have the Marshes to themselves.

  11 Return to the Marshes

  I went to the Marshes first, as I have described, in early 1952; and I returned to them numerous times and for much longer periods after I had left Ralli Brothers. Then I left Iraq for two years of uninterrupted travel in the south-western Highlands of Saudi Arabia, from the sand and mountains of Taif, Bisha, Najran and the Asir, to the humid saltflats of Lith and Gizan on the Tihama coast. In 1956, I flew back to Basra on my way home for a holiday in London and was reunited for a short happy time with the Madan.

  My life with Marsh Arabs had made it easier meanwhile to adapt to the ways of the sterner, tribal bedu and hill-peoples of Arabia. Naturally the terrain I lived in in Arabia – dusty and arid to the east, superb mountains with running streams and orchards to the west, the tawny plains of the Red Sea coast – was about as unlike the marshlands of Iraq as anything could be. The Arabic dialects were different, too. I look back at those months in Arabia as some of the best in my life. But the Marsh Arabs were the people I had met first – and that, in terms of affection, makes a subtle but essential difference.

  As it happened, almost as soon as I arrived in London for that short holiday in 1956, the Suez crisis erupted like a political Vesuvius. Overnight, Britons became outcasts in the Middle East and it was quite impossible to return to the area as a traveller. I had left baggage and books there. I had left Arab friends behind with farewells still unsaid, and no way to write to them because they could not read or write and, besides, had no fixed address. To make going back still more impossible, a revolution in Baghdad ended the monarchy in Iraq, and plunged the country into a decade of political turbulence. So many years went by before I could even seriously think of returning to the Marshes. I became a foreign correspondent for The Observer, saw a considerable part of the rest of the world, witnessed a good many wars and upheavals and became deeply attached to other places and other peoples. Despite this, the dream of that return never left me.

  Now and again sensible friends advised me to forget the Marsh Arabs. ‘Never go back,’ they said. Perhaps it is good advice most of the time. You are certainly asking for disappointment if you go back to a once-loved place after as much as seventeen years. Memory of a first love seldom fades. The danger is that time can twist memories into strange, false shapes.

  All the same, when in 1973 an official in Baghdad said to me, ‘Yes, of course, you can see the Marshes again,’ I didn’t hesitate. It was only later, in the car on the road south from Baghdad to Amara, that I began to worry. I knew there had been changes. Sheikhs (or most of them) had been dispossessed; water had been controlled, possibly reducing the area of the Marsh; land had been distributed to tribesmen. But the nearer my Chevrolet taxi came to the Marshes the more I began to imagine other, more drastic changes. Suppose the Marshes had been largely drained? Suppose the people I knew had migrated untraceably to jobs in Baghdad or Kuwait? Suppose they were dead? I actually suggested stopping and turning back to Baghdad, but the driver looked at me as if I were mad. And it would have been a shabby retreat.

  After we had crossed the Tigris at Amara, landscape and sky flattened out exactly as I had remembered. The car bumped to a halt on the water’s edge more or less where I had found Thesiger beside the tarada twenty-one years before. This was a chilling moment. For now, in a few minutes, I would know what had happened to my Marsh Arab friends and whether it was worth while going on. The information would come from a tiny police post which lay just ahead on the waterway I was staring at – a Beau Geste fort with a complement of, perhaps, a sergeant and four men. Beyond that post there was nothing but Marsh. The policemen’s ‘beat’, at least in theory, extended south from the fort into the Marsh. The policemen, therefore, were the people who would tell me the best or the worst.

  I left the driver with the car and walked to the little whitewashed fort. As I approached, a policeman came out to meet me. He was fat, fifty-ish and his chins were covered with a greying stubble. He wore a khaki uniform jacket over a dishdasha, the ankle-length Iraqi shirt. He looked at me curiously. And I stared tremulously back at the chins and stubble of this man who was about to announce the future.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said.

  ‘Good evening.’ He shook my hand. He was looking at me fixedly. ‘Odd. Haven’t I seen you before?’

  ‘Well it would have been twenty years ago.’

  ‘Yes, it was many years ago. And you came with another foreigner. You used to go into the Marshes.’

  Thank heavens I had not forgotten all my Iraqi Arabic. ‘That’s right,’ I said. This was the moment of truth, and not a moment I enjoyed. ‘What happened, do you know, to all my friends? I mean Sahain, and Amara, and Hafadh, Sahain’s brother?’

  ‘You mean at Al Qabab?’ He took an age lighting a cigarette from a red and white packet with an old lighter that sparked with difficulty.

  ‘Yes, there and other places.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, slowly blowing out smoke. ‘They are here. Sahain, yes. Amara, you’ll find him. Perhaps Hafadh is dead. I’m not sure….’ I swung away.

  ‘Is there a boat?’ My haste startled the fat policeman – he did not know that I felt like embracing him for the news he had given me.

  ‘There’s that launch,’ he said doubtfully, pointing at a decrepit motorboat with a wooden roof that lay on the water. A man in a dirty dishdasha and a small boy, covered with oil and holding a spanner, crouched over its engine-housing, repairing something. ‘How much to Rufaiya?’ I said to the man. He looked up.

  ‘I am not going to Rufaiya again until morning,’ he said. It was true that the sun was lying very low on the horizon. It would be dark in an hour and a half at most.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘This is urgent. I must be there tonight. Whatever the fare, I’ll pay three times more.’

  ‘Three times? All right. Bring your baggage.’ He thought a second longer. ‘Wait. I shall have to come back without passengers and in the dark.’

  ‘Four times the fare,’ I yelled at him, and he said, ‘Get in.’ The oily boy ran to the stern-rope and cast off. With a couple of quick twists of the starting-handle, the motor spluttered into life and the boat edged away from the bank. ‘Salute Amara for me. Tell him I’m coming to see him soon,’ the fat policeman called. ‘I will,’ I called back. ‘I owe you a thousand thanks.’

  ‘What for?’ he shrugged, turning slowly back into the fort, where a transistor radio was giving out some football results from Baghdad.

  You cann
ot hurry the owner of an ancient motorboat whatever you do. The engine stopped twice in mid-stream while the man and his boy-assistant unhurriedly hammered metal deep in its bowels, and these halts were not good for my patience. But slowly and surely we meandered down the winding Wadiya channel that I remembered so well. The water ran as swiftly and as muddily as ever. The pied kingfishers dropped into the water from their diving-boards in the willow trees as they always had, and the small mud-coloured turtles slipped down as usual into their mud-holes in the nick of time as our wash swept towards them. The same stubble of grass covered the low banks on either side. The same angry, orange sun was slowly quenched in a mauve evening haze.

  There were some visible changes. On the skyline behind us I saw a towering meccano-like structure. ‘That’s the new sugar factory,’ the launchman said when he saw me looking at it. Later – ‘The Sheikhs used to live there,’ he said, when we passed the fork in the channel where Thesiger and I had disembarked at Falih’s Mudhif – an empty place now where clouds of midges danced in the evening light. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember.’

  It was dusk when we came abreast of a big mudhif. ‘Sayyid Sarwat still there?’ I asked. He was, the launchman said; but I wanted to push on to Amara’s that first night. We passed a fine-looking tarada moored to one of the Sayyid’s willows and a lot of barking from the Sayyid’s guard-dogs, and presently turned right into the Rufaiya channel. By then, the light had gone. We slid into Rufaiya, squeezing between the narrow banks; the dark avenue of trees loomed like a menacing smudge. I saw again the long huddle of arch-backed reed and mat houses that lined both sides of the channel between fields of barley stubble and rice. The boatman slowed the engine, reducing our wash. The small glimmer of lighted doorways grew larger. The first dogs rushed out at us. Dark figures moved on the bank in the blue-grey haze of evening fires. Rufaiya! ‘To Amara’s house,’ I said.

  Amara had been Thesiger’s beloved companion. I retained a vision from all those years ago in Basra of a small, slim figure smiling gravely up at me when Thesiger introduced us, and then just as gravely offering me a handful of Huntley and Palmer’s ginger biscuits from a silver box on the British Consul’s tea-table. After that, in obscure parts of the Marsh, I had met him whenever I met Thesiger. They had parted for ever at Basra Airport in 1958. I had not seen Amara since 1956.

  ‘Amara’s house,’ said the boatman uninterestedly. We bumped the bank and the boy skipped ashore with the mooring-rope, and people standing there in the darkness beat away the snarling dogs. There were voices saying ‘Salaam aleikum. Peace.’ A rough hand grasped mine and helped me to the land, and the boatman handed up my bag. Several people greeted me, but no one I recognized. And then I saw Amara. His face was suddenly illuminated by a leap of flame from an open fire (it was warm weather and they had been sitting round their tea out-of-doors). It was a long, lined, rather worn face, with a day’s stubble and a neat black moustache. He was now taller and, like me, a good deal older. I knew him at once from his eyes; deep-set, rather sad, or, at least, resigned-looking eyes. But I knew that he had not recognized me, despite his murmur and handshake of welcome. At that moment he was turning away to see to the tea for us.

  ‘Amara,’ I called in English, ‘Amara, you bloody boy, damn and blast it!’ It was the only English Amara had ever known. It had been Thesiger’s shout of protest in the stress of doctoring if Amara dropped the syringe or handed him the wrong medicine-bottle. It had soon become a joke-phrase to all our Marsh friends. When Amara heard it now, he stood stock still with his back to me. Then he wheeled round, eyes wide, and an expression of astonishment and gladness that I shall never forget.

  ‘Sahib!’ He came back to me in two strides, swiftly grabbing my hands. ‘Oh it’s a long time, a long time,’ he said.

  Twenty years, Amara. Bloody boy. You had forgotten.’

  ‘No, no! I couldn’t see you in the dark. I have never forgotten.’ He led me to sit down on the rugs that lay round the fire. Now things were quite different. Excitement filled the atmosphere like electricity. The crowd and confusion increased. A man shouted, ‘Make coffee. Bring the cushions.’ There was a sound of dogs being angrily thumped; people calling from more distant houses; the splash of canoe-paddles in the water-channel. I sat bemused in the centre of a human whirlwind, hardly able to grasp where I was, while Amara continually seized my arm and cried, ‘How are you? How is Thesiger? Where is he?’ And among the crowd Hasan bin Muhaisin’s beaming face appeared and he shouted the same questions. ‘How did you get here?’ and ‘Where did you come from?’

  The boatman and his lad were surrounded by questioning people, and the boatman explained at length how he had found me and brought me, and how I had refused to wait until next morning, and how I had refused to stop at Sayyid Sarwat’s on the way, and how he, the boatman, had nobly agreed to bring me despite the lateness of the hour and the darkness, and how now he must be on his way because he was exhausted and his boy … and well, yes, he would have a cup of tea, God give you a long life.

  A lot of people came that evening, from Rufaiya, and from other villages on the edge of the Marsh proper. We sat and drank tea and coffee and then more tea. I could see Amara’s intent, wondering eyes fixed upon me. He brought his small children to shake my hand and carefully explained to each one who I was and who Thesiger was and where we had travelled together. ‘Is Thesiger really in Africa?’ he said. ‘God is wonderful!’ And, laughing: ‘You don’t look very old. No older than me at least.’

  Later he conferred loudly and with much gesticulation with Hasan and his two neighbours, Farhan and Idan, the sons of Saghair. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, coming back to me excitedly, ‘tomorrow we shall borrow Sayyid Sarwat’s tarada – it’s a fine one – and we’ll go into the Marsh. It will be like the old times. Do you remember Sahain? We’ll go to Al Qabab and see him and have a lovely time.’

  Nothing could have been better than this. We talked and talked, and at last the crowd thinned away. It had been a long day. I pulled up the blankets Amara had given me and lay down. I stared at the swarm of stars overhead. I felt the warm breeze off the nearby, unseen Marshes and the old belief returned that I could smell the water of the lagoons. I felt the amazing space, the unchanged, open land and waterscape spreading, it seemed, limitlessly away around me. I heard Amara’s deep, gentle voice still murmuring to his friends a little distance away. The seventeen years of my exile slid away, as if I had been able to flick back the meter of my age and become a scrawny youth once more with a job of shipping in Basra. It had been right to come back.

  Presently, Amara left his friends and came and tucked in my blankets. Then he squatted down cross-legged beside me as if preparing for a vigil. Hasan and Farhan joined him. They gathered their cloaks round them comfortably and opened their tobacco boxes and began to roll cigarettes. ‘Go to sleep,’ Amara whispered, ‘I am going to sit by you for a while. After all, this is your home as well as mine.’

  12 The Marshes Today

  Early next morning Amara said, ‘The tarada is ready. Shall we go?’ Sayyid Sarwat’s war-canoe lay there – the one I had dimly seen moored to the channel-bank the night before. It was long and slender and its prow swept up sweetly: a thoroughbred beauty. ‘There’s one condition,’ Amara said. ‘The Sayyid insists you call on him when we get back from Sahain’s. But he says keep the tarada as long as you like.’

  The tarada was a godsend. I soon discovered that the great canoes had become very hard to come by. Since the sheikhs – or most of them – are no more, practically no one can afford to have a tarada built at Huwair. Sayyid Sarwat can still afford to, but these days he keeps his boat for others. He is well into his eighties and too old and bulky for rocking about in taradas.

  The way to Al Qabab had not changed. I sat in the tarada, my tin box of medicines and films and a twin-flapped camel-saddlebag I had bought years before in the Hejaz behind me, and watched the familiar palisade of reeds close around us as I had the first time with Thesiger.
Amara sat cross-legged amidships. He told me he had not been well; some trouble – a hernia perhaps – had forced him to avoid any strenuous work; he had never been strong, even in the old days. Farhan and Idan took up paddles in the bows; Jabbar, a powerful young man with a moustache and a face like a bedouin, crouched in the stern with a chunky neighbour of Amara’s called Musa. Between them, they made the canoe sing through the water.

  The morning was breezy with pale blue sky overhead and restless little clouds. The soft, creamy plumes of the reeds dipped and danced. The warblers flicked about in their jungle of sedge and eagles lazed about the sky. We burst out into Dima Lake: the soft, blue mirror of the water and the white, heaving blanket of pelicans seemed not to have moved since I had last been there.

  Farhan sang: Amara talked – ‘Yes, Rufaiya’s grown. Well, we have more land now. Since the sheikhs it’s been distributed and we all own what we farm. My son goes to school at Umm al Hosh. They have a 150 boys there and six teachers.’ I had not seen Amara’s friend Sabaiti the night before. ‘He’s a merchant in Mejar el Kebir now. We must go and see him. He’s grown quite fat and has a lot of children.’

  The familiar tinkle of water trailing off the paddles; the sudden flap of great awkward wings as a startled heron took to the air; the unmistakable, unique phrases of Marsh Arab talk: how could I have feared that the sounds of the Marshes would have changed?

  ‘I had better tell you,’ said Amara. ‘Sahain is still headman here. Hafadh, Sahain’s young brother, is dead; he suddenly fell ill. And Yasin is dead, too. He was shot. Some sort of blood feud, I think.’ Poor, big, gruff, quarrelsome Yasin, I thought. ‘His sons and wife are living in Al Qabab.’ And soon we were there. The curved mat roofs appeared above the reeds.