When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad

by Mona Yahia

  The school premises consist of two colonnaded lengthy galleries on to which the classrooms open. Two-storeyed and equally long, they join at a right-angle, drawing a square space between them, in which is assembled a maze of courtyards and additional classrooms. Yards and building are surrounded by gardens, which, in their turn, are encompassed by tall walls, to shut out chaotic, unpredictable Baghdad. The solidity of the architecture gives the place a fortress-like feel. A sports club nearby is linked to our school. It has several ping-pong tables, four tennis courts, a basket-and volley-ball court, and a huge lawn for the smaller children to run about in. Our club is open only during the summer holidays. Both school and club premises belong to the Jewish community, but there is no nameplate at either entrance.

  About 600 girls and boys, aged between four and eighteen, receive pre-school, elementary and secondary education here.

  At five, they play hide-and-seek behind the bulky columns. At six, they scour the premises for the Rat Room. At seven, they scrape their elbows against the rough plaster, playing seven tiles. At eight, they steal flowers from the garden. At nine, they carve their names on the desks. At ten, they borrow books from the library. At eleven, they steal tubes from the chemistry lab. At twelve, they complain at the lack of mirrors in the toilets. At thirteen, secondary school begins. They move upstairs, to the first floor.

  At thirteen, the Six Day War breaks out.

  Ten years after the war, the Jewish community will cease to be. Only some elderly individuals will stay in Baghdad, and a few families. The school will be appropriated by the state. The new name will stand on a big plate, hung at the gate. To its right, a wall poster will read: “One Arab Nation, with an Eternal Message”. It will be an elementary school for boys. They will pee standing, even in the girls’ toilets. They will speak Arabic in the Moslem dialect. They will convert the small synagogue into a storeroom. They will dispose of the foreign books in the library. The eight steps will remain intact, but all the same, I would have lost my way in the new landscape.

  We have moved on to kindergarten, which is one year above the nursery. We are no longer the youngest class in the school. You are grown-up children now, they tell us, but still inspect our nails everyday and fumble through our hair for lice once a week. We carry wooden pencil boxes, reading and exercise books in our satchels.

  We are learning the alphabet.

  Three women teachers are in charge of our class. All three are very fat, yet none is interested in our lunch boxes. Each demands a separate exercise book. Each teaches a different type of alphabet.

  A wooden rule hangs beside the blackboard, for the lazy fingers.

  The Arabic alif is easy. It consists of a vertical, straight line. Any child of five can draw it. The hamza above requires some practice though. Three zig-zag lines, like a step, slightly slanting.

  In English, there is one big ay and one small ay. The small is not the miniature of the big. In fact they do not even resemble each other. The small ay is written differently from the printed one. My curved lines are shabby. My straight lines curve in the middle. I am incapable of making edges touch. I would rather draw houses.

  Hebrew has two alefs, one for writing, one for printing. I can manage none. I will never learn to write.

  And why so many alphabets?

  Arabic is your language, Hebrew is the language of your ancestors, and English is your future.

  In five years, we will be learning French too. More future, I guess.

  The double-lined exercise books give us spatial and dimensional orientation. Yet my small ays still look more like cracked eggs, and the printed alef, at its best, a crooked branch. I rub out the eggs and the branches, again and again, until the first page is torn. I will end up a shoeblack or a porter, the fate of the stupid and the lazy, so our teachers say. But before that, they will send me to the Rat Room.

  The Rat Room is a dark and squalid cell, where the lazy, the stupid, and the disobedient are dispatched for punishment. The rats gnaw their finger-nails and chew their earlobes. Everyone at school has heard of this room. Yet even those who swear they have seen it cannot indicate its exact location.

  I suck my pencil, waiting for the school bell to end the lesson, dreaming: again, the Tigris has overflowed its banks and drowned Baghdad. Mud-brick houses dissolve and bridges twist and break. The flat city sinks, together with its suqs and casinos, coffee shops, and parks and military bases and no-longer-royal palaces. Those agile among the Baghdadis clamber up minarets and palm trees. The rest use car tyres as life-buoys. Thumbing their amber worry-beads, they slump inside the black tyres and drift in the water amid red double-deckers and khaki jeeps.

  In spite of its stable foundations, our fortress of a school is instantly uprooted. Classrooms break apart and travel aimlessly in the water. Water knows no boundaries. The Tigris and the Euphrates have joined hands to inundate the land between them. We are sailing. Our exercise books are floating, like cream in a milk pot. It is fun to be on board. It looks like a journey without an end. Faraway land comes into view. Fair children are speaking English on the shore. They are a bunch of fools, their teacher says dismissively. Our teachers rush us back to the benches, and assault us with bee and cee and dee even if we are not through with ay yet.

  Selma is going through harder times than me. She is left-handed, but the teachers, all three, compel her to use her right. After weeks of clashes a compromise is reached: she may use her left, provided it is the right which eventually carries out the task. Left is allowed to begin. It attempts to reproduce what the eyes report. After some fairly good lines, the pencil passes to Right. Right emulates the gesture performed by Left, reruns the route which Left initiated. Selma’s upper lip is sweating. Her right will always linger behind her left. Whatever the class does, Selma must do twice. It’s her fate, she says, to lead a double life.

  With the blue ballpoint she has found in the garden, Selma draws a circle on her right wrist. Then she adds a few dashes inside, and a thin strap around the wrist to buckle the watch. Now I’ll know when the school bell will ring, she says. I borrow her ballpoint and copy her watch on my left wrist. Now I’ll know when cartoons are on TV. Selma snatches back her pen and marks, with her right hand, another watch, a clumsier one, on her left wrist. When the teacher discovers our drawings, she immediately reaches for the wooden rule. Are we Bedouins to tattoo ourselves left and right? She calls us filthy girls and confiscates our ballpoint. I open my right hand to receive my punishment. Selma is hit on both hands.

  We rub out our distorted letters, again and again. At the end of each day, shreds of rubber are heaped on our desks. Selma has a recipe for plasticine: add some spittle to the shreds of rubber, knead them together, and let the mixture dry in the sun. We try this for two years. The shreds do not fuse into dough. We rub away white and pink and green rubbers against the bench. Selma swears that at home the operation always succeeds. With her chewing gum, Selma can blow the largest bubbles in the class. She can coil herself like the Melwiyah, the spiral minaret of Samarra, and I believe every word she says.

  Bee, ba’a, and bet are more difficult to sketch than ay, alif, and alef. If every new letter is more complex than the preceding one, what a toilsome childhood is awaiting us!

  Arabic has three ba’as. One is put at the beginning of the word, one in the middle, and one at the end. Alif and ba’a form words together: ab, father, bob, door, baba, dad. I can write! I am writing! Soon I will decipher the signs in the street, and read out those blinking neon ads. Soon I will learn to write my name, Lina, in three languages. And when all three alphabets are acquired, I will already know more than any of our three teachers.

  Revolutions

  A yellow balloon lands on my nose and kisses it. It is the side on which Abd al-Karim’s face is printed which has touched me. I tap the balloon back into the air. Abd al-Karim, our leader, spins and somersaults in the blue sky. I chase him around our backyard, longing for his smell of warm rubber. The balloon falls agai
n, this time into my arms. I hold Abd al-Karim by his thick head of hair, and after making sure that nobody is watching, press my lips on his dry mouth to apply a long, thirsty kiss, the way lovers do in foreign films.

  His portrait hangs in every store and coffee house in Baghdad. It is printed on banknotes, exercise books, chewing-gum cards, calendars. In our classroom, we have al-Zaim, the leader, framed above the blackboard, in uniform, down to the chest, smiling, waving us hello. During the break, we play musical chairs as we sing:

  Long live al-Zaim, long live Abd al-Karim.

  Stand up, stand up and salute him.

  Back to your seats, all of you,

  except for the odd man out, ha, ha, ha.

  It does not really work in English.

  Father teaches me to arrange postage stamps in sets and to insert them behind the transparent film in the album. I handle them with care, these delicate perforated squares and rectangles in assorted colour combinations, illustrating landscapes and animals from other countries, and introducing me to famous personalities. Queen Elizabeth II. The Shah of Iran. The Greek royal family. Madame Curie. Abraham Lincoln. I am particularly keen on those in which Abd al-Karim appears. He is saluting the new republican flag on the second anniversary of the July Revolution. He is reviewing a file of troopers on Army Day. His profile watches over Medinat al-Thawra, Revolution City he built to house the squatters. He is shaking hands with farmers, on a set of four stamps commemorating the Agrarian Reforms.

  Every corner of Baghdad urges me to love the leader of the Revolution. He, and he alone, has put an end to the monarchy and to the corrupt Ahd al-Ba’id, the Old Regime which had served the British rather than our people. He has wiped out feudalism and established social justice. He will bring about peace with the Kurds. Even father, who had lost his heart to the British, retains a soft spot for Abd al-Karim. He calls him the ugly duckling, the pauper who has grown into a torchbearer, the daring brigadier who played at revolution and won – soaring very high that glorious 14th of July.

  Every year in July helicopters would shower Baghdad with colourful leaflets, celebrating the Revolution and its hero. Until the glorious 14th skipped to another month, reserved for another hero.

  Ramadan has fallen in winter this year. Around nine in the morning, we are reciting classical Arabic poetry in the class, when we suddenly hear shellfire. They issue from more than one direction. In no time textbooks are closed and tucked into our satchels. School buses are sent for to drive us home. Father, too, returns early from work. We switch on the radio. A shrill female voice blesses the Revolution of the 14th of Ramadan and barks out proclamations on behalf of the National Council for the Revolutionary Command. She is accusing Abd al-Karim of having betrayed the goals of the Revolution of the 14th of July.

  The station has fallen to the rebels. Explosions are heard in stereo, from the radio and live.

  A curfew is imposed. We cannot go to school the next day, that is certain. Neighbours are sauntering outside, men in pyjamas, transistor radio in hand, paying informal visits to each other. Children are cycling in the middle of the street. As long as vehicles are banned, no pedestrian restricts himself to the pavement. I chalk hopscotch squares on the roadway. Wafa’, our neighbour, keeps skating in and out of them. Next to us, the two boys playing Red Indians have knelt down and pressed their ears against the ground to eavesdrop on children’s doings in the entire neighbourhood. A few miles away fierce street fights are taking place between pro-Abd al-Karim July Revolution troopers and soldiers backing the Ramadan counter-revolution.

  The shelling stops at sunset, the time when Moslems break their fast. The radio claims that good has conquered evil and that with the help of Allah, Abd al-Karim’s resistance has collapsed.

  I wake up late the next morning. Artillery fire tells me that battles continue. My parents and brother have already breakfasted, and are listening to the radio in the living-room. The sight of father unshaved, in his bathrobe, astonishes me. He always shaves first thing in the morning and never stays in his pyjamas once out of bed. Not even on holidays. It is his eleventh commandment. The one which only the revolution could tempt him to break.

  Neighbours come in and out. The friend of somebody’s brother has seen tanks and armoured cars in Rashid Street. Someone’s father-in-law has heard planes strafing the Ministry of Defence, where al-Zaim’s headquarters are located.

  —Abd al-Karim has accumulated too much power. Such corruption could not last.

  —But who are the new boys? Will they do it better?

  —Their proclamations repeat the same stuff: struggle against imperialism, liberation of Palestine, Arab unity, democracy, Arab–Kurdish brotherhood …

  —Big words! Nobody surpasses us when it comes to words.

  Zeki has come all the way from Battawin to Alwiyah on foot, together with his dog. He says the Ba’ath’s National Guards are patrolling every neighbourhood he has crossed, hunting for Communists – Abd al-Karim’s allies. Bored by their constant talk, I go out to the garden, turn on the hose for the black mongrel. He drinks eagerly, wagging his tail, then licks my hand in gratitude. He has never done this before!

  —What about us? mother wonders, after all our guests are gone.

  For no ruler in Iraq, since King Faisal I in the 1920s, has granted the Jews equal rights the way al-Zaim has done.

  At noon the firing stops. Abd al-Karim has surrendered. The National Council of the Revolution appoints Abd al-Salam as President. Abd al-Salam, Abd al-Karim’s former protégé, his friend and collaborator in the July Revolution, has overthrown him. Worse. He has stolen the Revolution from him.

  A new public holiday is added to the calendar. The Ramadan Revolution, loyal to the principles of the July Revolution, will now correct the deviations of Abd al-Karim’s regime.

  In the evening I am reluctant to watch TV, lest they show Abd al-Karim dishevelled, humiliated, bruised perhaps. Although nobody has told me, I know that the hero with the boyish gaze, bushy eyebrows and timid smile under the greying moustache is gone for good. I fear the worst for him. That he will be dragged through the streets – like the Crown Prince, Abd al-Ilah, at the time of the July Revolution. So I was told. When the army delivered Abd al-Ilah’s corpse to the mob, they dragged it along the bridge to the west side of the capital and hanged it at the gate of the Ministry of Defence.

  The body of Nuri al-Said, the Prime Minister, resented for his pro-Western policy, did not receive any better treatment. On the morning of the 14th of July, the elderly statesman scuttled along the banks of the Tigris, disguised as a woman, seeking a hiding place. But the woman soon aroused the suspicion of passers-by. Her black abaya and black veil were ill-matched with the men’s pyjama bottoms underneath, which the fleeing Prime Minister had had no time to remove. When he was recognised, General Nuri shot himself on the spot. He was buried by the army, but two days later, the masses dug up the grave and virtually swept the streets with the Prime Minister’s corpse.

  Abd al-Karim is neither tortured nor dragged through the streets. On the day of his surrender, a court martial sentences him to death. He is shot that same day.

  The next day, the curfew is lifted and we are back at school. Above the blackboard a pale patch stands out from the white wall. A black nail protrudes on its upper margin. For five years the wall behind Abd al-Karim’s portrait has not been painted. When the classroom undergoes its annual whitewash, the pale patch will vanish. But, lacking the five layers from Abd al-Karim’s time, its outline will still be traceable.

  During the break Selma pulls me into the back garden, and indicates a window overlooking the cellar. It is the same cellar that, as smaller children, we suspected to be the Rat Room. I peep inside. Scores of framed pictures lean against the wall. In each, al-Zaim smiles behind glass, waves us goodbye.

  Selma says that very late last night Abd al-Karim was shown on television. He was seated on a chair, with bullet holes all over his body. The programme was lengthy with repetiti
ve scenes of the Ramadan Revolution and dead generals. Just as she was about to go to bed, a soldier grabbed Abd al-Karim’s head by the hair and spat into his lifeless face.

  The television programme was rich with corpses last night. Colonel Mahdawi, too, was displayed, lying at Abd al-Karim’s side. Mahdawi presided over the People’s Court in Abd al-Karim’s era. The function of the People’s Court was to try the enemies of the people and punish the conspirators against the country. The trials were broadcast on radio and television and were followed in every café in the country.

  “Mahkamah”, a hoarse voice cries out, announcing the opening of the session. Mahdawi enters the court. The audience greets him with long applause. The Colonel opens with a wise maxim, followed by his opinion on matters of the day. His tone changes as he turns to the defendants and bombards them with insults and rhetorical abuse. We hear laughter from the audience. A chuckle escapes mother. Immediately she corrects herself and calls him vulgar, arrogant. Mahdawi is now reciting some poem which supposedly echoes the present case. His voice, deepened by the eloquence of its inflection, impresses me. I do not catch the moral though. If only his achievements in military college were half as good as his distinction in Arabic poetry, our neighbour comments, cracking pumpkin seeds. Several spectators leave their seats and dance a dabka in the middle of the court. The audience claps hands to the rhythm of the dance. Mahdawi looks pleased with himself. Some judge! mother says. Would you be sitting there at all if you weren’t Abd al-Karim’s cousin? The officer next to him whispers something in the Colonel’s ear. Mahdawi stops the dance with a gesture, and embarks at last on the proceedings of the court. I flit to the kitchen, fetch myself a packet of potato crisps. Mahdawi points at the man in the brown dishdasha, who is standing among the defendants at the dock. Those to his left are sentenced to five years in prison. The brown dishdasha and those to his right are to be set free.