Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

by Annia Ciezadlo

  When tribal mediators reached an agreement, they brought both sides together, almost always over a meal. Sometimes they even shared the ceremonial bread and salt. “The role of tribal leaders is to bring the two parties together very early on,” explained Janabi. “And we end up by breaking bread, kissing each other—and more often than not, the matter is resolved.”

  Back in the 1950s, Janabi’s father agitated to replace tribal law with a civil code. Janabi himself took a dim view of the supposedly hallowed Iraqi custom of settling disputes through the tribes. “The British imposed it—they brought it with them,” he told me, rattling his prayer beads impatiently. “Inshallah, if we have a civil society, I can rest at home and get a good night’s sleep. But my hopes for a quick resolution into a peaceful and civil society, I must say, are being dashed.”

  He added sadly: “I was thinking that it would take a couple of months.”

  By the time we sat down to dinner with Sheikh Shaalan, Iraq’s judicial system was in shambles. Police, investigators, and judges would wait for a bribe before opening a case. Honest judges were afraid to try cases for fear that those they ruled against would have them killed. A week before we had dinner at Nabil, Judge Rubini had written a memo to officials at the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, where he worked as a senior adviser to Iraq’s Ministry of Justice. He pointed out that while criminal courts had been open for seven months, there had only been twenty criminal convictions in Baghdad—a city already descending into anarchy.

  If Iraq’s new Ministry of Justice had any hopes of rebuilding the country’s legal system, it made sense to talk to the tribal sheikhs who had been serving as de facto judges for decades. That was why Alan had brought Judge Rubini to meet Sheikh Shaalan.

  “I speak from a point of ignorance,” said the judge, who had been carefully coached by Alan. “I know courts, but I don’t know tribes. I know you have 10,000 years of history. My country has only 225 years of history.”

  Smiling slightly, Sheikh Shaalan inclined his head.

  “You have the power—you and all the national tribes—and you have a lot of enemies, from without and within,” Judge Rubini continued. “The country is falling apart from corruption, there is tremendous power . . .”

  “That is very true, our country has 10,000 years of history,” said Sheikh Shaalan, interrupting smoothly. “You mentioned that your country has only 225 years of history. But in that 225 years, you have managed to achieve many things . . .”

  He paused, magnificently, and Judge Rubini nodded.

  “And here comes the role of the tribes, if they take their duty seriously,” said Sheikh Shaalan. “By practicing their role, they will be better because of these following reasons, which I am about to explain.”

  It would be years before we could eat. Everything Sheikh Shaalan said had to be translated into English; everything Alan or the judge said had to be translated into Arabic. I looked past the judge at Mohamad. He looked hungry. Ever so slightly, with a movement only I would be able to read, he rolled his eyes.

  “We would like to have a relationship that is on a good foundation, so that we can take full advantage of your presence here,” said the sheikh. “It is a correct step. We know you are leaving”—

  Here the sheikh paused, looking around the table, as if to underline that point—“but before you leave, we want to take advantage of your presence here. We have to make things run quicker than before, so that we can be ready when all these changes come. There is a constitution-writing council, as I’m sure you’re aware.” He waved graciously at Judge Rubini—

  “Painfully aware,” said the judge.

  Everybody laughed politely, a bit desperately. The long-awaited constitution had not yet been written, but the question of who would write it, and how they would be selected, was already causing bitter conflicts.

  “But we want to make these changes happen quicker,” said Sheikh Shaalan, frowning slightly. “We should be ready for rapid changes. The work that Colonel King is doing is one of the most important things for the CPA to get a true picture of what’s going on in Iraq . . .”

  Suddenly the lights blinked off. There was a second or so of shocked silence. In the small, windowless room, the darkness was absolute.

  Power outages were constant in Baghdad, and usually no cause for alarm. But Alan had said something about having a price on his head. If the wrong people had seen the four-by-four—if the wrong people knew an American officer was eating dinner here, along with two spooks, a tribal sheikh, and a couple of interlopers, then this would be the moment to attack.

  In the darkness, I was doing a risk analysis of my own. If we were going to be attacked, I thought with the feverish intensity of low blood sugar, I don’t want to face it on an empty stomach. I had been watching the food for what felt like hours; each plate of hummus, each skewer of meat was burned into my brain. I could reach out, grab a flap of bread and a mouthful of hummus, and no one would know who had committed the crime.

  At that moment, the “bodyguards” each clicked on a tiny but powerful penlight. They watched in silence, their faces lit from below.

  “And if some of these tribal leaders were to fail,” continued Sheikh Shaalan, resuming his speech as if nothing had happened, “if they fail in their mission, they will be shamed, deeply shamed, and blamed. Because they will be accounted for in front of their tribes, in front of their families, in front of the people in their area . . .”

  The lights blinked back on. The bodyguards clicked off their penlights. In perfect Levantine Arabic, one of them murmured “Alhamdulillah”—“Thanks be to God.”

  Sheikh Shaalan’s head snapped toward the sound. “And what a wonderful surprise,” he declared, smiling broadly, throwing his arms wide, “to discover that our friend speaks Arabic!”

  We all muttered that it was wonderful. Sheikh Shaalan smiled and tactfully resumed his oration. But before he could settle back into his speech, Mohamad tore off a piece of bread, reached his hand across the table, and dipped it into the hummus.

  Sheikh Shaalan froze, arm outstretched, in the middle of a multi-clause sentence. Alan frowned. Faisal, Alan’s elegant, British-educated translator, looked aghast. Even the bodyguards allowed themselves slight facial twitches. Mohamad looked back at us, chewing calmly, completely unapologetic.

  I glared at him. We were there to witness this alliance. Not to eat. Also it was my job, not his, to be the greedy one.

  “And I wish,” said the sheikh, placing his hand on his heart, and shaking his head with infinite sorrow, as though we had refused his food, “that our guests would eat something, and not wait for me.”

  Six days after our dinner with Sheikh Shaalan, a few days before Mohamad and I were supposed to leave, word rippled through Baghdad: the American military had finally caught Saddam. On December 13, 2003, U.S. troops captured him in a little hole in the ground outside the village of al-Dour. The next day, after he’d been debriefed and deloused, U.S. officials released a video to all of Iraq and the world: the great dictator dirty and defeated, following his captors like a senile child; ducking his head for the lice check; and opening his mouth, obediently, to receive the American flashlight.

  Shiite clerics passed out candy at prayer time. The Iraqi Communist Party raised red flags in jubilation. Sporadic happy fire rang out. In the streets, people burned the old Iraqi dinars printed with Saddam’s face. The celebrations ended early, when most of Baghdad rushed home to hide from gunfire and retaliatory attacks, and I called Roaa.

  When U.S. occupation authorities showed the Saddam footage at a press conference, one of the Iraqi journalists had leapt to his feet and shouted “Death to Saddam!”—words he had probably been waiting his entire life to say. I had thought of Roaa immediately: I was excited and happy for her. This would be a cathartic occasion, the moment when her freedom would finally feel real.

  She answered the phone sobbing.

  “I thought you’d be happy,” I said, feeling stup
id.

  “Happy?” she said. “When we saw this small movie of him, looking like this, it was something terrible.”

  Her voice had a flat quality that alarmed me. Normally it leapt from one syllable to another, lilted with unexpected accents. Now it sagged in a hopeless monotone.

  “I was sad because our whole lives were just wasted by this man,” she said. “And for what? For nothing.”

  Roaa and I spent the next day walking around the city, talking to people we met. They were torn between happiness, humiliation, and rage. A woman whose father had been killed by Saddam said she was angry that he had been captured by Americans. Another woman, who had lost twelve relatives to Baathist purges, said she didn’t know how to feel. The flavor of freedom was more complex, more bitter than we imagined.

  Finally a theater director in his late thirties said what everyone was thinking: Thank you, America. Now go.

  “When are the Americans going to leave?” he asked. “They said they wanted the weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction. They said they wanted the regime to fall. It fell. They wanted to find Saddam. They found him. Now what? What reason are they going to use to stay now?”

  Mohamad and I had been in Baghdad for two and a half months, and the honeymoon was over. I wasn’t sure where home was—we didn’t live here, or in Beirut, or in New York anymore—but I felt homesick. Suddenly I wanted to be in Chicago, where it would be Christmas, and the houses would be strung with colored lights. Instead, a few days before Christmas, Mohamad and I flew back to Beirut.

  Chapter 13

  The Devil’s Hijab

  BY THE TIME Mohamad and I returned to Baghdad in March 2004, a deep gloom had settled over the city. There was an undercurrent of fear in people’s conversations, a subtle change that had been building gradually in the past several months. People would disappear in broad daylight, their bodies found days later marked by signs of torture. Everyone knew someone—a friend, a relative—who had been killed. It was nothing compared to the sectarian slaughter that would come in the next few years, but at the time it seemed unimaginable.

  An American company had rented the entire Sumer Land and refused to accept any new customers. We moved into the Andalus, a small hotel off Abu Nuwas Street. It was just down the street from Firdous Square. On the other side of the square was the beautiful blue-domed mosque that most of the television correspondents tried to work into the background of their live shots. Across from the mosque were the Sheraton and the Palestine, two tall hotels surrounded by several layers of blast walls and checkpoints. Together they made up a compound, a locked-down fortress where the big television networks and wire services put their reporters. The Palestine had a pool and a panoramic bar where people said Saddam’s son Uday used to drink. I went there a couple of times: it was full of drunken contractors, and this, plus the underlit tables and retro 1970s lamps, gave the place a feverish, menacing glamour. From the windows I could see the Tigris, a dark snake dividing the city, and on either side, flickering orange lights kept alive by a thousand and one generators.

  Outside the Palestine and the Sheraton’s first line of checkpoints and concrete blast walls there was a small street with a couple of smaller, cheaper, and less secure hotels, including ours. The Andalus was an octagon inside a square: an eight-story atrium extended to the top of the building. Rooms radiated off the atrium, fitting together in strange shapes like puzzle pieces. Our room had no kitchen, but there was a tiny refrigerator and a sink in a narrow hallway outside the bathroom. I bought a Korean hot plate from Karada, perched it hazardously on top of the fridge, and made scrambled eggs. I filled plastic bins with onions and apples and Iraqi dates. We stayed on the fourth floor for most of the summer of 2004. We ate a lot of canned hummus at the Andalus.

  By the time we got to the Andalus, Abu Nuwas Street had changed yet again. Saddam’s old palace grounds across the river were now part of the Green Zone. Militants would fire mortars across the river into the Green Zone; the U.S. military would return fire. The few surviving masquf restaurants, which were hardly ever open, would occasionally get hit.

  Checkpoints and concrete blast walls and American tanks blocked off Abu Nuwas for most of the summer. Neighborhood street kids hung out practicing their English with American soldiers. Aging checkpoint ladies flirted desperately with young reservists. Boys as young as eight or nine, orphans of wars past and present, sniffed glue and offered to pimp their sisters. It was dusty and depressing. Abu Nuwas would have stopped and wept.

  But early some evenings, when the sun was setting over the long silver necklace of the Tigris and the remaining palm trees stretched their arms against the sky, people did still come to the river. Old men would sit quietly smoking and look out over the shining water. Watching them silently contemplate the river, I liked to think that life along the Tigris, which had seen much worse over the years—floods, plagues, Mongol invasions—would survive.

  A few days after we returned, I went to the Sumer Land to visit the staff and see if Layla was still there. The man at the front desk bought me a cup of tea. I asked him how everyone was doing.

  “Many problems,” he said, and shook his head. “After you and Mr. Mohamad left, we had many problems.”

  I asked him if I could buy a newspaper. The hotel usually sold them from a little rack in the lobby, but now it was gone.

  “No more newspapers,” he said. “When I go to the bathroom, they steal them.”

  “Who? Who would steal a newspaper?”

  “Americans,” he said bitterly.

  Upstairs, Layla and her daughters felt as if they were living in lockdown. They weren’t comfortable eating in the restaurant downstairs, which was full of drunken contractors every night. They didn’t go to the Internet café anymore. But the bitterest loss was the pool.

  Before the war, Layla had gone swimming at the Olympic-sized pool in Qadisiya, which set aside one day a week for women. After the war, she told me, “the Americans” took over the pool, and there was no more women’s day. For a while she and Shirin had splashed around in the tiny, kidney-shaped pool behind the Sumer Land, no bigger than a truck bed. Then the contractors came.

  “Now the only place I go swimming,” she said, making sad little breaststrokes, “is in the shower.”

  As we sat talking, a fleshy man with a crew cut and a red face came out on to the balcony across from her window. He was wearing a white polo shirt and khaki cargo pants. He looked at her window and waved.

  Layla did not wave back. “You see this man?” she said, tipping her chin and curling her lip at him with hatred. “He is a fool.”

  He waved again. He stood on his tiptoes and shaded his eyes, trying to peer in her window.

  “When we see him in the hotel, he always says, ‘Salaam aleikum, salaam aleikum,’” she said with disgust. “And he is wearing a dishdasha and dressed like a sheikh.”

  One night, Layla said, the contractor knocked on her door and tried to invite himself in. She was having a small party in her room: some relatives had come over, and they were playing music. She tried to shut the door so he wouldn’t see her daughters and her relatives, and they wouldn’t see him. But he’d stuck his foot in the door and tried to look in over her shoulders.

  “He said, ‘Hey, how come you didn’t invite me? We’re friends!’” She spat out the word “friends.”

  Maybe the guy didn’t realize what he was doing; maybe he was just trying to be friendly. Maybe not. But there was no way for Layla to reconcile Rachel and Ross with this very different kind of American friend. No way this contractor would have grasped that Americans were not guests but occupiers, and that hospitality was out of the question.

  By now I was filing stories regularly for The Christian Science Monitor. My editors were particularly anxious for one about Fern Holland, a thirty-three-year-old American woman who had been trying to set up women’s centers in southern Iraq.

  On March 9, Fern visited the women’s center in K
arbala with her assistant, Salwa Oumashi. In the late afternoon, Fern and Salwa got in their car with a press officer named Robert Zangas, and headed back to their office in Hilla. As they were driving, a car full of gunmen forced their car off the road and machine-gunned all three of them to death. Hours after the killings, Coalition investigators arrested six suspects. Four of them had valid Iraqi police identification cards.

  Those three people were casualties in a larger war, one against Iraqi women. There was no way to know if they had been specifically targeted for promoting women’s rights, but it seemed likely: I had already interviewed Yanar Mohammed, an outspoken feminist who had received several death threats, and she was not the only one. The Coalition had announced that it was going to shift the management of the women’s centers to the local staff. I wanted to focus my story on those Iraqi women. To do that, I would have to go to Karbala.

  I had never been to Karbala, and neither had Roaa. She could speak three languages fluently, but she had never ventured outside Baghdad or the northern city of Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan.“I’m twenty-three years old, and I still don’t know the rest of Iraq!” she said.

  This isolation had left her with some interesting ideas about Shiites: they were bad Muslims who did not pray enough; they used Shiite trickery to weasel out of religious obligations, such as fasting for Ramadan; their 1991 uprising against Saddam had failed due to their own shortcomings, not because the Americans had abandoned the southern rebels after calling on them to rise up. (The Kurdish rebellion, according to her, had succeeded thanks to Kurdish ingenuity and not the military assistance of a no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. and British fighter jets.)