When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad

by Mona Yahia

  I dare say that she is trying to tell us something about life.

  When she is content with our achievements, she skips over to the photographs on the last pages of the French primer. We go through le quartier latin, le métro, les cafés, les bouquinistes, le guignol, la Sorbonne, les baguettes, while, chain-smoking, she tells background stories and anecdotes. I hang upon her words, and catch half of them, as she sticks to French, claiming that she knows no word of Arabic. Lost in her Parisian melody which I will always associate with husky voices, a sigh escapes me once in a while. Whatever Mlle Capdevielle’s message about life might be, it is infecting me with an incurable wanderlust.

  —Paris is so much more exciting than Baghdad, I grumble.

  —Only because it’s so far away, Selma objects.

  —That’s not true! In Baghdad we live in houses and not in flats and therefore we have no lifts or escalators. We have no sloping roofs, no café crème, no vending machines, no wallpaper, no Camembert, no painted eggs at Easter, no lovers kissing in public, no women wearing trousers in the street, and no women riding on scooters.

  Not even the women on scooters convince Selma. As she always finds adventure just around the corner, she seems to have no need to seek it overseas. Whatever Mlle Capdevielle’s message about life might be, what impresses Selma is our teacher’s red deux chevaux.

  Selma is looking for a French dictionary in the school bookshop. A mini-encyclopaedia is appended to the Petit Larousse, enclosing pictures of cities, bays, bridges, and portraits of famous people. Flags of all the countries of the world are illustrated on the inside of the hard cover, and arranged in alphabetical order. Only it begins in France, followed by Afghanistan, and ends in Zambie. My finger hunts Iraq, and hits Irak, and the outdated star from the times of Abd al-Karim, the emblem we used to draw in kindergarten years ago. The thought that not even the French can catch up with our revolutions amuses me. My finger runs further, over Iran, Irelande, and Iselande. The flag after Iselande is scratched out, as if with a razor blade. I examine the dictionary underneath. Flag and name have been similarly scraped away, at the same place. Selma and I check the whole stack. No Larousse has been spared. The damage always appears between Iselande and Italic

  Selma shows the blank to the bookseller and asks for a flawless copy.

  —All Larousses arrive in this condition.

  —But why?

  The woman bends forward, and peers at us over her spectacles.

  —Well, you’re clever girls aren’t you? Think for yourselves! What country succeeds Iselande, a-l-p-h-a-b-e-t-i-c-a-l-l-y?

  Selma’s face turns as red as the Coca-Cola ad. The clever girls open eyes wide and a still wider mouth. Yet no sound escapes them. The mere mental pronunciation of the taboo word provides plenty of excitement for the rest of the day. They will scan every inch of the map between Iceland and Italy, but with no success, for the name has obviously also been wiped off the atlas.

  The smell of orange blossom wafts through our neighbourhood in the springtime. I rejoice at finding the silvery coins in my pockets, forgotten from last year, as we change back into a white uniform, and the boys call us ghosts and fat geese. The street vendors, whose faces I have come to associate with hot chickpeas and turnips are now crying out “Lucky Stick”. The two words are drawn in bright Arabic letters on both sides of the white handcart. Our teachers assure us that the “sorbet” is manufactured under the most unhygienic conditions. When they are in a preaching mood, they go into vivid descriptions of filthy basins where flies hatch their eggs and cockroaches breed, but their accounts never managed to spoil “Lucky Stick’s” popularity. Officially, we are not allowed to touch it before we have received our annual vaccinations against typhoid and diphtheria, and years later, against cholera too.

  They are administered at school, in the big hall.

  Classes are summoned to line up. The hall reeks of surgical-spirit. The shorter the queue gets, the stronger the smell. I wait anxiously for my turn, wishing it would come and go, and then wishing it would never come. Tomorrow, my arm will feel as heavy as iron and will hurt so much that mother will have to help it in and out of the sleeve. Tomorrow is Saturday. How typical of them to time the after-effects of vaccination for our free day. As I look away to avoid the sight of the needle penetrating my skin, I spot Dudi. He is standing last in our line, now extended by the class below us.

  Dudi is making a scene.

  His request to leave for the toilet has been turned down, as his intention to disappear is all too obvious. Dudi must be dead scared of injections. It either does not occur to him that boys are supposed to demonstrate bravery and to conceal fear and pain, or he is indifferent to the opinion people hold of him. Though he is polite rather than cheeky, teachers often reproach him for a lack of due respect. They say lehyet al sultan indo mekinsih, the Sultan’s beard is no more than a broom to him.

  Catherine Capdevielle volunteers to take charge of him.

  She rolls up his sleeves and, standing behind him, clasps his shoulders. The doctor talks him into relaxing his arm. Dudi lets out a long shriek. Two pigeons, perching on the high window just beneath the ceiling, flutter their wings. Mlle Capdevielle scolds him. Ça suffit! He ought to be ashamed of himself, startling the poor birds, and setting such an example to the younger ones. Dudi gapes back as if he has never before in his life heard French. Then he falls into her arms, pretending to faint. Nobody believes that he has truly lost consciousness, none of the boys and girls who envy him this moment of proximity with her. Dudi is carried to the school clinic. We return to the classroom. Mlle Capdevielle lights another cigarette, and we proceed with French.

  Summer opens with small white apples in the market and with Pakistani beggars, ringing one doorbell after the other and asking, in broken English, for a handout. Most of them are boys, hardly older than myself. If it is his first time, mother will give him bread, a bunch of dates, and send him away. If he has been at our gate before, we tell him Allah yintik, may God provide for you, and send him away.

  Exams drag us into mid-summer. We are waiting nervously for the results. Applause is heard in the adjacent class. Soon the headmaster will step into our classroom, accompanied by his secretary. We busy ourselves in making paper planes and playing noughts and crosses. We make bets about who will come first this time. We stand up at their arrival. The three pupils with the highest marks are named and applauded. The rest proceeds without much ceremony. We are summoned in order of our performance. The secretary passes him the certificate and he reads out the name. He shakes my hand approvingly. I have not failed in any subject.

  The headmaster announces that Edward Lawy is to repeat the year. Good riddance, the girls whisper. No Dudi to harass us any more with marriage proposals. No Dudi to peep at our legs and thighs through his mini mirror arrangement. No Dudi to catapult paper bullets at the back of our necks with a rubber band. Dudi is handed his grades and given a condescending shake of the hand.

  At noon, the same day, the teachers’ lounge is overcrowded, like a summer sale in a department store. Mothers have occupied it to negotiate their children’s grades with the teachers. Dudi’s over sensitive, therefore he gets so nervous when sitting for an exam. Lydia’s extremely alert, only she’s too shy to participate in the lesson. Reuben grasps the subject matter before anybody else does, that’s what makes him so restless. Yair’s knowledge of geography surpasses his teacher’s, that is the real reason why the latter bears a grudge against him. Dudi’s mother is on the verge of tears. Yair’s mother threatens to remove her son to the local missionary school. All the same, blind to the children’s concealed qualities, the teachers refuse to improve their grades.

  By the afternoon, we have emptied our desks and broken up for the summer.

  I spend my summer afternoons either at the Jewish Sports Centre, where I meet my classmates to play ping-pong, or in the street, where I cycle, skate, or fly a kite. On the first day of the holiday, I take my bicycle out to the str
eet, keen to familiarise myself with Hindiyah, the new neighbourhood into which we moved last winter. The new house is twice as large as the old one. I am nine years old. I get a spacious room all to myself, and enjoy the right to drive Shuli out whenever he gets on my nerves. The walls and built-in wardrobes of my room are painted pink. The colour shocked me at first because the pink at which I had pointed on the chart had not looked so vivid. But I soon got used to it. The stony hand-rail along the stairs has a straight and wide surface, so I can slide down from the first to the ground floor whenever I wish. In addition to the living-room, we also have a guest-room, for more formal occasions, with French windows and a cute fake fireplace. In the garden is a young nabug tree which had borne fruit in the spring. Shuli shook the trunk, I held out my skirt underneath, and the ripe red fruit fell straight into it.

  What delights me, beside the new opulence, is the geographic closeness to Selma. She lives only a few streets away, and when I learn to cycle properly, father will allow me to ride to her place all by myself. A week after we had moved, Selma came over to do homework with me. She seemed mostly interested in my parents’ bedroom, asking whether they slept in a modern double-bed, or, like her parents, in twin beds pushed together. When I at last showed her around and let her glance inside my parents’ bedroom, she said nothing but a meaningful “aha” at the sight of the twin beds separated by a night table.

  The neighbours have children my age. Khaled and Nawal live next door, Nabil and Hassan across the street. They all go to elementary state schools. Khaled teaches me to ride my new bicycle. Nawal, a year older, skates fearlessly as if she was born with wheels soldered to her soles. Hassan and Nabil have a ping-pong table in their frontyard. Hassan is an expert in kites. Nabil, two years younger, is crazy about catapults. He keeps aiming at birds overhead, though his stones hit nothing but air. The sky above their house is a spotless blue. Pigeons, birds, and even clouds seem to swerve from their route to avoid it.

  Nawal and Khaled’s father, Abu Khaled, who is also our landlord, invites us every now and then to his farm, on the outskirts of Baghdad. For the whole day we ride on donkeys, play badminton, and fill our bellies with sweet corn. It is the Californian seed which Abu Khaled grows and is particularly proud of. The big kernels look like old yellow teeth, I whisper in Shuli’s ear, and he grimaces in disgust.

  Each summer, when Abu Khaled and family holiday abroad, Nawal adds a new Barbie to her collection. She often holds fashion shows, flaunting her Midges and Kens and Sindys. I count her blonde Barbies and envy her the number of trips to Europe. Otherwise I prefer cuddling my soft hairy Pasha to dandling the cold plastic of dolls.

  Dudi, whom I thought only a few days ago to have left behind me, reappears in the vicinity. The empty mansion, five houses away from us, is being renovated. The owner will soon move in together with his family. And who else do they turn out to be if not the Lawys?

  Contrary to my apprehension, Dudi is not interested in the social life of the street. He can neither ride a bicycle, nor is tempted by football – out of laziness, I would say. In fact, he scarcely goes out, except to buy his Coke from the grocer on the main street. But his triangle of a head with large protruding ears often pops out of the window to watch the other boys, drowning in sweat, tearing along after the ball.

  —I’d never waste my energy over such a trifle as chasing a ball, he replies to Khaled’s offer to join the team.

  Dudi frequently comes over to borrow comics from me. Semir, Besat al-Rih, Superman, Batman. I have some Archie comics too, which I take pride in reading in English, but Dudi does not go for English. He never stays long, and, contrary to the rules of politeness, I do not offer him a drink or ask him to sit either. One day, it occurs to me that my stack of comics has been reduced by half. The image of Dudi regularly leaving our house with a dozen comics under his arm and returning empty-handed to ask for more, makes my blood boil.

  I put on my sandals and set out for his place.

  Two men are rushing out of his house. I recognise his father by his angular features, identical to Dudi’s, with fifty years of strain added to his face. The other must be the non-Jewish partner without whom no Jewish merchant would get credit from the bank. I ring the bell. Lassie, the chained-up Alsatian, barks fiercely from the corner of the yard. Dudi opens the front door, runs down the stairs to the gate and receives me with excessive friendliness.

  —Ahlaaaan wasaahlaaan, welcome! Come in, come in. You won’t believe it, but I was just thinking of dropping by. Did you miss me as well?

  —Dudi, you borrow with your hands and return with your legs. I want all my comics back. Right now!

  —At your command. He gives me a military salute.

  —Don’t act the fool, Dudi.

  He tickles the nape of my neck. I slap his arm down. He sniggers. Then, still at the threshold of his house, he grabs me by the hips and lifts me up, roaring out for all the street to hear.

  —I’ll keep you in the air until you’ve confessed before the whole world that you’re madly in love with me.

  —Let me go, you lunatic. Put me down or I’ll pull every single hair out of your hollow head!

  Inside the yard, Lassie begins to bark again.

  —You’re as light as a feather. I can hold you up there till tomorrow morning.

  Two passers-by watch the scene with interest and a measure of disapproval. Unlike Dudi, I become ill at ease at even a hint of a reproof. I try to kick him, but my legs do not have enough room to move. I grab his hair and pull it as strongly as I dare. Dudi yells in pain and, without warning, releases his grip. I break my fall at the last moment.

  —Your brain’s in your ass, Dudi.

  He is recovering his breath, rubbing his head, shrieking with false laughter to assure me that he has not been beaten. I thrust my flat palm into his face, check it in mid-air, less than an inch before his nose. A rude gesture, to which one usually adds the curse, tfak, may you be snuffed out!

  Dudi’s mother appears at the front door. Although I am certain that she has seen my gesture, her smile is still warm and friendly. Her face is round and pretty, and apart from her red lipstick, is not made up. Her black hair is short, off her shoulders yet, unlike mother’s, is not permed. She gently scolds her son for not inviting me in, and insists that I have lunch with him.

  Lunch at 4.30 in the afternoon?

  When you have the good fortune to be an only son among five daughters, you lunch whenever you please, even if it’s two in the morning.

  As his mother is still watching, I let him take my hand and lead me to the dining-room. He sits at the head of a long table. His mother and the cook wait on him. Dishes of fried aubergine, fried fish, sweet kubba, burgul balls stuffed with minced meat and cooked with red beet, kitschri, rice cooked with red lentils, and tabbula salad are served simultaneously with Indian amba, mango pickles, pickled cucumber, and olives. A family-size bottle of Coke stands at his left side. I sit on his right and help myself to the jar of amba. Dudi dispatches the cook for bread. I should dip it in the amba, he says. He hands back the aubergine dish to his mother. They need two more minutes in the pan. On their return, the mother gives a start, the cook lets out a yell. The fried carp, its body nibbled to a skeleton, flies straight across the table and vanishes out of the window, the one which opens on to the street. The cook scowls. Mother tells him all about the hungry children in India. I wonder silently what the connection is between hungry children and her son’s bad table manners. To her credit, Dudi’s mother soon changes the subject.

  —Imagine what will your friend think of you now!

  Dudi roars with laughter and serves me Coke in a glass. He does not give a damn about my opinion, it is self-evident. And my opinion of him is so low anyway, it cannot possibly sink any further. We clink glass and bottle, drinking a toast to our mutual understanding. Trapped in a sudden loneliness, Dudi’s mother cries out that he is ripping out her soul, that she does not recognise her baby any more. As the baby continues to
act deaf, she leaves the room in tears. Unruffled, Dudi carries on with his jovial meal. Shocked by his lack of consideration, I leave the table, go over to the window. The now headless skeleton of the carp lies on the pavement. A white cat is licking its paws. Beside it, a tabby cat crouches, its eyes fixed on the window overhead, waiting for the next fish to commit suicide.

  —John F. Kennedy was shot yesterday, did you hear? Mama’s much upset about the news, I say.

  —Why? Is he a friend of yours?

  Then he gulps down the whole bottle of Coke, burps, and smiles in relief. His countenance is indeed as placid as a baby’s – unacquainted with remorse or ambivalence.

  Doesn’t he know who Kennedy is or is he only being sarcastic?

  Three years later, teachers, too, will try to gain insight into Dudi’s motives when he casually announces that he is setting up a class newspaper.

  Classmates respond with elation. Teachers offer editorial assistance, which Dudi accepts with untypical grace and without commitment. The headmaster is full of misgivings. The sixth grade has to promise that homework will always be given priority over the newspaper. Dudi gives his word that the edition will be devoid of pornographic as well as of political content. Everybody knows that Dudi’s word is of little value. After days of debate and hesitation, the school authorities finally conclude that the project is too harmless to oppose.

  For weeks, the pupils in the sixth grade seem to be having the time of their lives. They submit one contribution after another, as if their imagination, once awakened, cannot be checked. During the breaks, they whisper with conspiratorial pleasure and read out passages to each other, proud of the first newspaper to appear in our school in the last fifteen years. Nobody is willing to reveal the paper’s name to the rest of us. Dudi does not stop bragging about his position as editor-in-chief.

  —Anybody who’s learned the alphabet can write. But who can distinguish good from bad writing?