Baghdad Diaries

by al-Radi, Nuha;

  Day 9

  Funny thing, since the war started I have not been able to read a word, not even a thriller. Instead I’m writing this diary, not something I normally do. Ma, who usually never stops knitting, can’t knit. Instead, Suha and Amal, who have no talent in that direction, have started to knit. Fastidious Asam, who normally changes her clothes twice a day, now does so every other day. She also sleeps in them. She hid all the scissors in her house in case someone attacks her with them. I asked what about the knives? A shrug of the shoulders was all I got in response. She also placed her jewellery in boxes that were heavily wrapped in plastic bags and buried them in the garden, hoping that she will remember the exact spot.

  People’s reactions to the strains of the situation are funny and strange. Last night I took out a red dress to wear and went to have my wash with my allotted kettle’s worth of water. I came out of the bathroom and couldn’t find my dress anywhere. I wore something else, saying I would look for it in the morning. I still cannot find it; what did I do with it?

  Today, Abla Jalila, sitting upright in true Ottoman manner, sirens wailing outside, says to me, ‘Why don’t we take the Taurus Express train and go to Istanbul?’

  I said, ‘What makes you think the trains are running? Nothing else is.’ Admittedly, she is becoming a little deaf and since she left her house to stay with Talal seems even more distracted than usual. Her house is in the firing line, fairly close to Henry’s. I passed by him to convince him to come and join us; he opened the door ashen-faced, but refused to move out of his house. His real fear is being caught in a bombing raid with his pants down. He has to think carefully every time he goes to the loo.

  I’m trying to get M.A.W. to use his time constructively. I gave him my wall clock to repair. He complained endlessly, then started to fiddle with it and got it to work. He’s excellent at mending things, having an endless supply of patience for machines but almost none for life and people.

  Water situation is becoming bad. People have taken to doing their washing in the river, which is very fast flowing. Its high and steep banks don’t help.

  They captured an island in the Gulf that only appears at low tide. We didn’t even know its name.

  Day 10

  I say ‘Read my Lips’, today is the tenth day of the war and we are still here. Where is your three to ten days swift and clean kill? Mind you, we’re ruined. I don’t think I could set foot in the West again. If someone like myself who is Western educated feels this way, then what about the rest of the country? Maybe I’ll just go to India. I don’t know if it’s because we grew up there that I have such a close affinity to that country, or because they have a high tolerance level and will not shun us Iraqis.

  Suha mended her bike today. Hers was also new and punctured. We rode out together and caused a sensation in the streets. All very friendly. One guy also on a bike sidles by us and says, ‘Actually, I have a Mercedes at home.’

  ‘Are we in Paris?’ says another.

  One sour man says, ‘We don’t have girls who ride bikes!’ We yelled at him, ‘More fool you,’ and pedalled away. Nofa says I look like ET because I’m wrapped in a hundred scarves and they fly behind me. More like a witch, I’d say.

  Tomorrow I’ll be fifty years old. I feel very depressed. We’re in such a mess and it’s all so sad. So many people have to die, and for what?

  M.A.W. says we can get electricity in one minute if we attach ourselves to Turkey or Jordan because we have a connected circuit. Yesterday we heard we may be getting it from Iran. What can they connect it to if they have bombed the stations?

  Everyone talks endlessly about food. While eating lunch, it’s what we’re having for dinner. People’s freezers are beginning to empty. One goes visiting and is given a defrosting chicken and green beans to take home. We cooked up all the meat we had in our various houses. The basturmas that we had hung up in Dood’s house are starting to stink – the whole house has begun to reek.

  Hala says she will give me a bucket of water as my birthday present.

  Day 11

  I had great hopes for my birthday but in fact stayed sad and depressed. Me and Mozart share the same day. Lots of people were invited. They all came and more. Drinks flowed in buckets. Someone peed on my bathroom floor. I’m sure it was that horrid Mazin who came uninvited. Fuzzle stayed the night. She says to Yasoub, ‘Take me out to pee,’ and they went out into the garden arm in arm, so romantically after all these years of marriage. Lovely big moon out. Fuzzle entertained us with stories about her air-raid shelter. She goes there every night with Mary, her Indian maid, from six in the evening ‘til seven the next morning, when they unlock the doors. There are three tiers, hierarchical order with the biggies being at the lowest level. At each level there are three tiers of bunks, bodies on top of bodies. She gets very nervous when the bombing starts. Being diabetic, her blood count shoots up and she gets scared and starts shaking. We must all have the hides of rhinos here in this house. No one seems afraid. It was a particularly bad night and we had to take her mind off the noisy bombing outside – she was used to the quiet of the shelter with only the soldiers singing out to Mary, Mary ...

  Day 12

  We got water today from the garden tap – pressure is too low for the water to reach the kitchen taps. Drew endless buckets of water up to the tank on the roof. I filled them up and Munir pulled them up with a rope, eighty buckets in all. Very hard work, and I got sopping wet in the process. Back to Stone Age basics.

  Another freezing day with the usual air raids.

  Day 13

  I’m typing by candlelight and can see very little, maybe this won’t be readable tomorrow. Ma and Suha went to the souq today to buy more lanterns and an air raid started. No one bothered to move or go home, everyone carried on their business as usual. In fact, there was such a crush of people that Ma and Suha managed to lose each other. Maybe Iraqis have no fear. They were bombing the bridge at Southgate. The shock caused all the doors of the buildings in the vicinity to blow open. All the windows went, broken glass everywhere – a real mess. Amal’s shop, which is right beside the bridge, also got blown. Now both her house and her shop are damaged. She never complains and is very stoic. Mundher Baig went to check on our building. He just stood there and cried, thinking about Grandpa and what he would have thought of all this.

  Since it was Suhub’s birthday, we all met at their house for lunch. Driving across the Adhamiya Bridge, we could see black columns of smoke rising in all directions. It seems they are burning a lot of tyres to confuse the enemy. Some confusion. Samih said that an unexploded rocket had fallen in the garden of the Rashid Hotel. There was a mad scrabble for bits as mementoes before the security forces closed access to it. Mundher Baig came to the party from seeing the destruction in Southgate. He was very upset and kept repeating again and again to Ma, ‘Our country has gone. What do you think will happen now?’ Ma consoled him in her usual philosophical way by telling him that as it was ruined it would be rebuilt. ‘I’ll not see it,’ he said.

  Are we in for a nuclear war? I must say I don’t feel there is a risk of death, at least for myself. I know that I’m going to survive this somehow. Twenty-seven thousand air raids on us so far. Is the world mad? Do they not realize what they’re doing? I think Bush is a criminal. This country is totally ruined. Who gives the Americans the licence to bomb at will? I could understand Kuwait doing this to us, but not the whole world. Why do they hate us so much?

  This peasant’s life that we now lead is very hard; work never stops. I am usually the first person up. I come down, having refused to leave my upstairs bedroom. Some are still snoring. Suha leaves and goes to her house to do her ablutions. She doesn’t like our primitive toilet arrangements. Each of us has different chores to do. I collect firewood, clean the grate and make up the fire for the evening. I clean and sweep up a bit around the kitchen where all meals take place, and boil the water for coffee. Food is usually cooked by Suha and Amal, and sometimes by Ma though her main
responsibility is making bread and cakes. Mine is making the soups and salads. I pick and clean all the salad materials – lettuce, radish, celery, rocket, parsley and green coriander all grow in the orchard. I have four buckets of water for washing these greens; the dirty water is never wasted. It is then used for watering the garden or trees. Lunch is usually a simple snack. Dinner is early – between seven and eight – our one real meal of the day. Sometimes it’s accompanied by bombing; other times not.

  I have learned to do a lot of things in the dark but none of us has learned to sleep early. In fact, we sleep very little, adrenalin keeps us going. The snoring at night can be categorized into different types. Ma snores in small puffs, Amal’s is like a steam engine. The other night Munir dreamed that he was living Star Wars very vividly, only to wake up with a start and realize that it was the harmony of different snores. He promptly went back to sleep again.

  Salvador has got a new and horrid girlfriend. He bit Said yesterday. He is not a strokable dog.

  Day 14

  Mundher Baig died in his sleep early this morning. The war now seems very far away. Life is too immediate. We listen to the news, sirens, rockets, and bombs come and go. We are unmoved, it might as well be taking place on another planet. It’s true that he had a bad heart and yesterday he ran up nine floors to check the damage to our building. But he really died of sorrow. He could not comprehend why the world wanted to destroy us – us the people, us the city, and all that we had built up during the last fifty years. He kept asking Ma yesterday, ‘Why are they doing this to us?’ It’s strange, but I knew all during the time that I was painting his portrait that the painting would never hang normally in their house. To take this dread feeling away, I hurried and finished it and had the unveiling in my house even before the paint was dry. Sure enough, it is still here, drying. He was not made for dying, so lively and full of energy, good for laughter and for fights. He helped everybody. We are going to miss him a lot, a lot.

  We each had to take a section of Baghdad and drive around to inform friends and relatives of the funeral. I went to Mansur,* crossing the Adhamiya Bridge during a full-scale air raid. Normally we cross the river only after the planes have gone away in case the bridge gets hit while one is driving across it. This time I didn’t bother to wait. Sirens were going off, rockets and bombs were falling. I was unmoved.

  Lubna says she saw a plane fall in Karrada. Later it turned out to be a Cruise missile.

  I finally managed to send notes to Dood and Sol. Poor guys, they must be so worried. The isolation we feel is unimaginable.

  Day 15

  Amal went to pick some firewood from near the garage area and came back with one of Salvador’s trophies, an old yellow shoe that he had stashed in the firewood. It had been a present from my Kurdish guard and gardener, Tawfiq, who had bought a job lot of shoes from the Kadhum, including this single, yellow shoe. Poor guy, he was called up in December to join the army. I wonder where he is now? How could Amal have mistaken an old shoe for a piece of firewood? Her eyes must be worse than one thought, a real hazard on the road. Good thing there’s little driving to do.

  All the water that Munir and I hauled up to the roof tank yesterday leaked into the downstairs bathroom. A real tragedy. This loo is jinxed. I have lived here for three years and have had to change it twice already. This new loo has been fixed at least five times and the handle has been changed twice, and yet it still leaks. Life is very hard.

  Went and helped Amal clean up her shop, mostly a mess of broken glass. Her brother came with big sheets of plywood and boarded up the place. Saw the Jumhuriya Bridge from there, nice neat holes with a lot of metal hanging down underneath. Found a bit of shrapnel by the river. The bridge was packed with people gaping at the holes. A siren sounded but nobody budged.

  Day 16

  The women are gathered in Asma’s house for Mundher Baig’s ‘aza.* Ma and Needles’ house is being used for the men’s fatiha,** and I have been put in charge of that. Quite unconventional as I keep charging in and chatting to various bods. On the whole I am behaving myself. Word is getting around Baghdad that Mundher Baig died and people are coming from all over, using up their hoarded petrol, crying and bewailing his loss. All of them told me that he had come round to visit them recently. Apparently during his last week he had been going round Baghdad by bus, checking up on all of his friends, and saying goodbye to them. He must have sensed his coming death.

  We may be getting electricity from Qasr Shireen in Iran, but it’s all rumours. Nobody knows anything. There’s a total lack of local information. Baghdad Radio broadcasts for a few hours a day, giving us battle information ... how many planes we brought down, what the enemy is doing to us and how we are fighting back. Propaganda galore to keep up our spirits. Nobody pays much attention. We listen to Radio Monte Carlo at eight; at night there’s the BBC or Voice of America; Radio Austria, I have discovered, is quite sympathetic and actually remembers that there are people living here.

  Everyone here is living a village life in their own immediate section of the town. Little petrol, only enough for emergencies, and the few buses that run are overcrowded. Any contact between different parts of Baghdad is difficult and sometimes impossible. Poor soldiers at the front. Their situation must be a million times worse than ours.

  Salvador’s new girlfriend crawls in through holes in the orchard fence. I keep plugging them up but they find new entry points. I had to get up and shoo them away at five this morning. They were making such a racket. Howling dogs combined with the barrage in the sky was simply too much to bear. The only good thing about this dog is that she keeps Salvador busy and exhausts him enough so that we can go to the loo in peace. Otherwise he playfully attacks and terrorizes anyone squatting behind a tree. Amal has it the worst. He grabs at her trousers and tries to pull them off. He thinks it’s a wonderful game. Now she’s taken to giving him a bone every time she has to go to the loo. That occupies his attention.

  Day 17

  An awful night. Rocketing non-stop and the biggest and loudest explosion ever. It was apparently heard all over Baghdad but no one seems to know where it was. Not atomic anyway. We are still alive. I can understand the Kuwaitis hating us but what did we do to you, George Bush, that you should hate us with such venom? One can hear it in your voice. Is it because we stood up to the USA and said no?

  Tonight we shall have music. Amal has an old crank-up Victrola gramophone and M.A.W., who never throws anything away, has a lot of 78 rpm records that we can now play on it. Who could have conceived of such a day when the rest of the world has CDs?

  Wadad came by today and showed us how to make a candle using a bottle filled with kerosene and a wick. One seals the bottle neck with a mash of dates, leaving only a small section of the wick sticking out – a long wick produces columns of smoke. At least we can produce something. Normal candles leave much to be desired. They splutter, they drip, they grow enormous wicks and spew forth a lot of black smoke – in fact, they leave a terrible mess everywhere. This bottle candle lasts for ages, it’s safer and less messy. I thought it much like a Molotov cocktail but Wadad informed me that a Molotov is made with petrol whereas this is filled with kerosene.

  This morning there was a huge number of dead flies on the floor. I wonder if the big explosion shocked them to death?

  I had a great fight with Salvador. He was cavorting with his white fluffy floozie in one of my flower beds. They have an entire orchard to gad about in. Why pick on my flower beds? I may have to kill all these wild dogs. They could be carrying all sorts of diseases. I don’t know what all these lady dogs see in Salvador. He doesn’t seem to be that interested in them. His sexual attentions are centred on a favourite cushion.

  We are a multitude of women in the Suleikh*. No men. Now M.A.W. says he wants to leave too. He was touched when we asked him not to. Life would certainly be duller without him.

  Day 18

  Last night M.A.W. said, ‘Wars must be continuous. I have now got so use
d to eating charred food that when we finish this war we must start another.’ We are saving gas by cooking and heating food in the fireplace, which seems to be smoking. Maybe something is wrong with the chimney. We are baking our own bread. The favourite way is to place the unleavened dough flat on fine wire mesh, like pitta bread, and bake it on an Aladdin stove. These old kerosene stoves have proven their worth. They are the best heaters and now the best bread-makers. No Iraqi home is without one. People discovered that M.A.W. has a huge roll of wire mesh and started to queue up for their share. He has it all cut up and grudgingly doles it out.

  Every night I dream of totally unreal things. Last night it was people standing outside third-floor windows, just naturally hanging around in mid-air and having a conversation, just like a cocktail party.

  The birds have taken the worst beating of all. They have sensitive souls which cannot take all this hideous noise and vibration. All the caged love-birds have died from the shock of the blasts, while birds in the wild fly upside down and do crazy somersaults. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion.

  The sky is now covered with black clouds. We are fighting and confusing the enemy with our usual burning tyres. Meanwhile they use computer technology to destroy us. An astronaut on a Russian satellite said he saw huge black clouds and many fires burning across the region.

  Salvador has gotten more used to the noise of the explosions, but a very loud bang still sends him chasing about distractedly. Dogs seem to sense an air raid before it begins. They tense up and start barking before we can hear anything. I wonder why they don’t use them instead of radar? Wild dogs pile up against Salvador for comfort during bad air raids. He has us for his security; they have him. Some of them actually cry with fear, making the most awful and pathetic sounds.