When the Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad

by Mona Yahia

  —I know, I know all that. Tell me about the English boy, what does he look like?

  —I’ve said it already. English. Yellow hair and blue eyes, what else there is to tell?

  —His hair? Is it golden yellow?

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  —Honey yellow? Lemon? Straw? Kraft cheese?

  Khaled purses his lips thoughtfully until a malicious smile spreads over his face.

  —Urine yellow!

  —Is he good-looking? I insist.

  —How should I know? Such trifles don’t interest me anyway. They’re girls’ concerns, he snaps and gets on his bike again.

  As Khaled pedals away, I blow at the sumptuous tail of my kite to open it out. A long chain of white paper rings flies and falls like the veil of a bride. I wait for a car to pass then start off into the clear roadway. The kite takes to the air. I pay out string. It soars further up to the height of the roof, revealing to me the sky’s third dimension, one that my eyes tend to overlook, reporting a flat surface – a kind of blue sheet hovering above the earth. Abruptly, and for no apparent reason, the kite dips. For lack of wind, I tell myself, and speed up. Nevertheless, the kite spins all the way down until it strikes its forehead against the asphalted ground.

  I run back and pick it up, examine the edges, the skeleton, the tail. All intact. While I am rewinding the cord, the hinges of some door or window creak. My neck cranes in the direction of the green house. The front window on the ground floor has opened. I cross the street to their pavement, the kite wiggling in the air at shoulder level behind me. Leaning it, as though by chance, against their iron fence, I pretend to be untying some knots, before I casually raise my head and peer into their window. Tiny squares in different shades of grey obstruct my view. The wire netting! I should have known better. Suddenly it occurs to me that by standing outside, I am more liable to be seen from inside than the other way round. Embarrassed by the possibility of having been caught peeping, I hasten back to our side of the street.

  I give the kite a second try. No use. To hell with it. I carry the kite back to the house, and return with a bag full of biscuits in the shape of animals. Still no trace of the new boy. I climb on to our fence, and seat myself on the iron railing, legs dangling over the climbing plants, my face to the street, as if waiting for a military parade to pass. Khaled, too, must be on the watch. Otherwise, he would not patrol up and down our road when his mother has recently extended his boundaries as far as the supermarket. I pour a mound of biscuits into my lap: cows, camels, fish, butterflys, giraffes. Enough to keep my teeth busy for the rest of the afternoon. Unless, of course, mother calls me to order with a tirade I know by heart. That I am damaging the climbing plants, that I am ruining my skirt, that I am not a boy to climb fences nor an urchin to crack seeds in the street.

  I set about a giraffe. Bite off the ears, chew the head, nibble the neck down to the hindquarters, and let the crumbs of the legs melt on my tongue. With the same thoroughness, I crunch the other animals, while cars pass by and Khaled shows off his mastery on his new Raleigh. Pedalling with one wheel in the air as if on horseback. Making countless figures of eight without falling down or even getting dizzy.

  While I am munching the head of a camel and Khaled is riding down the road with his hands off the handlebars, the front door of the green house clicks open. My heart misses a beat. This time, I will be the first to catch sight of our new neighbour. A boy steps out, shuts the door quietly behind him. My eyes follow him in disbelief. He gives the iron gate a push, and comes out into the street.

  Where does he think he is to wrap his head in a kaffiyah? Not the common gauzy black-and-white, worn by Bedouins and peasants, but a cream kaffiyah, made of silk, like that of an emir. Imported directly from The Thousand and One Nights!

  The sight reminds me of a card game in which people in different national and professional dress are drawn on cards, and cut breadthwise into exchangeable parts. The goal of the game is to form as many complete pictures as possible, while the fun of the game is to make grotesque combinations. Eskimos in sandals. Africans in Scottish kilts. Bullfighters with legs of belly dancers. Bedouins in swallow-tailed coats.

  He straightens his agal – the cord keeping the kaffiyah in position – feels its adorning amber beads. Only now do I notice the rifle slung over his shoulder. Although it does not look particularly heavy, its barrel is uncommonly thick. The English boy is inspecting the street with a dispassionate gaze which is, beyond doubt, blue. It wanders, from the cars parked on the side of the road, to the eucalyptus trees on the pavements, up to the street-lamps, and lingers by the birds on the telephone wire. While he is combing the front wall and the balcony next door, my body freezes, as if about to be physically touched. I vacillate between a friendly smile and a more ambiguous, enigmatic expression. The English boy skips me out altogether by sneaking across our roof to the next house in the row.

  At least I did not waste a smile on him.

  He pulls down his rifle and aims at the telephone wire above me. No, at the birds lined on the wire. After several single shots, he kneels down and empties the gun at one go. Orange, green, yellow, violet, red, blue, and pink ping-pong balls pitter-patter along the street and pavement. In no time, Khaled appears. He rights his bicycle on its stand, and chases, together with our English neighbour, the hopping hollow balls.

  A moment later, the rifle passes into Khaled’s hands.

  Tossing up a pink ping-pong ball in my hand, I approach the two boys. They are loading the rifle and discussing the latest wonders of the toy weapon industry. One is speaking in what must be the Queen’s English, the other in Arabic English. I try in vain to exchange conspiring glances with Khaled, but he is so absorbed in the mechanics of the gun that the English boy could be wearing underpants on his head and he would not care less. Our new neighbour stretches out his cupped hand towards me. I pass him the pink ball, making sure our hands do not touch. He nods curtly, then resumes his lecture on the muzzle of the rifle. I consider offering him some biscuits, but decide against the idea, for I would not like to appear too eager to please him. So I stand on tiptoe, my lips close to his kaffiyah where I roughly estimate his ear to be, and whisper some other offer. Quietly, lest Khaled should hear and burst into laughter. For the first time, the English boy looks me in the face. A violet rim surrounds his dark blue irises and grants his eyes a glistening shade, like that of a Cadbury wrapper. His eyebrows are very fair, almost invisible.

  —Show me!

  I motion to him to follow me. He trusts the rifle to Khaled and lets himself be led, his hands tucked behind his back. Khaled fires at the telephone wire although the birds have flown away since the onset of the ping-pong game. The skeleton of an old kite sways about the wire, wearily turning in its grave.

  In our back garden the English boy stands still, waiting for my promise to be substantiated. I point to the neighbours’ loquat and pomegranate trees across the wall, trying my best to find a decent way out of my fabrication. His brows, quite visible now, knit in silent indignation. I bite my lip. He is no archaeologist to be satisfied with traces. He is more of a hunter, demanding the animal I have claimed in flesh and blood.

  He turns his back on me and walks off. Easy come easy go, I tell myself, withholding my tears. He will never speak to me again. With a literal mind like his, he must have taken my jest for a lie.

  —Wait … listen … I can explain …

  My words dash swifter than my thoughts. English words, sounds which I can hardly claim as mine are emerging from my throat.

  —My father was a camel driver, I hear myself say, as the borderline between joke and lie stretches, like chewing gum, into fiction.

  The fiction I launched into the moment I slipped into the foreign language.

  The English boy halts and looks back. His blue eyes pierce my heart like a tin-opener. His iceberg of a face looks exactly like a younger version of Peter O’Toole, a son of Paul Newman or of James Dean …

  App
arently, I cannot tell blond people apart.

  —He owned a camel company, I go on. It was the biggest in town. It did all the transport in the city centre.

  He does not bat an eyelid.

  —He would have brought his camel service to the suburbs, if not for the revolution.

  The English boy wavers, then walks back. I take a deep breath, groping for a path between the spectacular and the credible.

  —The government of the revolution arrested him and threw him into jail. For months he lived on dry bread and dirty water. All his camels were taken. But with his savings he later opened a shop in Suq-al-Ghasel and sold camel wool.

  My English friend seats himself on our back door step. I sit beside him. The tail of his kaffiyah resting on the ground marks a delicate border between our thighs.

  —On my tenth birthday, I received a baby camel as a present. The first weeks, I fed him on milk, bread, and dates. Every afternoon, we took him for a walk along the river bank. People pointed at him, gave him sweets, and …

  Missing the word in English, I use my hand.

  —Chucked him, he softly says.

  —Yes, chucked him under the chin. When he was four months old, I threw sticks and he ran to fetch them. But not whole-heartedly. He was not really playful by nature.

  —At the age of six months, his toilet training began.

  The English boy voices no objection.

  —By the age of eight months, he learnt his name. I called him Jemil, meaning beautiful. Not that he was a beauty in particular, but because beautiful and camel sound very similar in Arabic, jemil and jemel. Can you hear the difference?

  He nods. I do not believe him.

  —Well, Jemil had his difficulties. He responded to both words the same way. He’d shake his head and … and … how’d you say … bark?

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  —Yes, he barked whenever one spoke the word camel in his presence. It made people go crazy. They thought the camel understood Arabic!

  The English boy giggles. I begin to feel uneasy. His own gullibility is far more ludicrous than the story I am inventing.

  —When he was ten months old, we hung a basket around his neck and sent him to the suq with a list of groceries to bring back. But soon we had to stop with this service, as Jemil started to devour all the dairy produce on the way back.

  The English boy bursts out laughing.

  —When his milk teeth fell and the permanent ones came out, he began to eat whatever crossed his way. His jaws chewed the whole day, as if he were reflecting on some serious matter. Slippers, food cans, and books with hard covers suffered the most. Whenever we caught him with such stuff between his teeth, we’d shout “khalas”, and it was enough to drive Jemil to a frenzy. He would spit out the schoolbook, now a shapeless, shapeless… what? Lump? OK, now the schoolbook became a shapeless lump swimming in his saliva. Then he’d run down the stairs, bump himself left and right, jump over the parapet and escape through the living-room to the garden, but not before he’d knocked a vase off a table, a picture off the wall, or even a whole bookshelf.

  The English boy looks amused. I can see my words illustrated as comic strips above his head. I venture one step further.

  —When he was one year old, I rode him to school.

  His jaw drops with fascination. He must have lost his critical faculty. Otherwise how does he swallow all the rot I am stuffing him with? Suddenly, I take no pleasure in my conquest any more. There I am playing at clever Scheherazade, putting the English boy under the spell of the Orient. All well and good. But at whose expense the joke is, I can no longer tell.

  Doesn’t he see that we drive cars and not horses and camels, that we live in houses and not tents, that we cook on gas stoves and not on camp fires, that we turn the red tap for hot water, that we too have our paved streets and victory monuments, that in spite of the heat we use toasters and hair-dryers, that we cannot do without laxatives and sleeping pills? And still he can easily picture me riding a camel to school! A jar on my head perhaps, fetching water from the well?

  Electrical appliances and paved streets do not admit you to the modern world, the English boy’s infatuation is telling me. Father believes that education does. Khaled’s father is more ambivalent towards the West and its so-called modernism. At times he praises its medical and technological progress, its wonder industry, and its commitment to the written word. Other times he reviles it as imperialist, morally decadent. It depends on what suits him best at the time.

  —As our house grew smaller and smaller for him, we made a hole in the ceiling so that poor Jemil could stand upright somewhere. The opening came into my room on the first floor. But the camel’s head sticking out from the ground didn’t disturb me at all. I did my homework, and he stared in the air for hours, chewing time away.

  I pause, waiting for my English neighbour to protest, but he is speechless, enthralled by my life.

  —His favourite place was the window in my room. He’d sit there for hours, his neck and head stretched outside, watching the coming and going in the street.

  I hear our car purr. Our gate jangles open. There is not much time left.

  —In the garden, he devoured everything. Trees, flowers, climbing plants. It broke mother’s heart to see the garden turn into a wilderness, but still she put up with it, because you see, Jemil was in a way her baby too.

  Laurence smiles sympathetically. He knows nothing of mother’s aversion to animals.

  —Serious trouble began the moment he moved on to the neighbours’ trees, which, as I’ve shown you, got shorter each day.

  I point to the loquat trees across the wall, the way I did at the start. This time, he nods in acknowledgement. Our car is moving into the frontyard.

  —We did our best to speak reason with them, but they refused and pressed for one and only one solution, that we get rid of the camel, within a month. Otherwise they’d poison him. Actually they swore it by the Prophet. No, no, not Khaled’s father, he has a heart of gold. It was the tenant before him. He terrorised us. Poor Jemil, who never went into tantrums, never bit anyone, never hurt a fly. I didn’t close my eyes for nights. Father got in touch with the zoo, but they wouldn’t bother about a camel. Then a rumour spread that the neighbours were planning to slaughter him and give a street banquet. My stomach turned at the idea of Jemil boiling in a pot. I insisted he sleep in my room from then on. By miracle, one week before the deadline, an Egyptian film director called us. He was urgently looking for a camel for a film on the battles of the Caliph Omar. Perhaps, you’ve seen it? No, the film didn’t come to England? Anyway, it was decided that day, and when I returned from school, Jemil was gone.

  I stop to take breath.

  —For days, my tears were running like a water tap. My eyes were so … large, what? Swollen? All right, my eyes were so swollen that I could hardly do my homework. Mother tried to cheer me up by saying that we now have an actor in the family. Knowing that Jemil was being treated kindly and that he was having an exciting life eventually consoled me. And believe it or not, I do catch a glimpse of him every now and then, in Egyptian films on TV.

  When father appears, the English boy stands up. Man and boy stare at each other, the man at the boy’s kaffiyah, the boy at the man’s suit and tie. Then they both gape at me. I remain silent, at a loss myself, too drained to offer an explanation to either of them.

  —Glad to meet you, young man, father says in English at last, and stretches out his hand.

  —Laurence, my pleasure, Sir! Our neighbour introduces himself, and shakes father’s hand.

  —Nice you’ve found yourself a new friend, Lina, father continues in English. But isn’t it getting dark out here? Why don’t you two go up to your room and have a game of Monopoly?

  The English Club

  Drained of water, the swimming pool in the English Country Club looks like a purposeless excavation. The wiggly black stripes have straightened, and the blue no longer floats but adheres to the walls and
to the ground. A stone wave marks the transition between shallow and deep ends. Eucalyptus leaves and carob pods, fallen from the surrounding trees, are scattered about. The ladders are cut short above the bottom of the pool. The spring-board charcoals its shadow between two black lines. In the absence of water, depth and height have united into one dimension.

  —A thirsty sight indeed, Laurence remarks.

  A remark he will repeat the whole season.

  —Unbelievable how dry your winter is. Put this pool in the centre of London, and you’d have it filled up with rain by now.

  Put it in the centre of Baghdad, and you’d have it flooding with urine by now.

  —It looks like a house turned upside down, I hasten to say, to drive away the stench rising in my head.

  —Great! Come down, let’s walk on the ceiling.

  The ground gradually disappears from view as I climb down the ladder after him. Unlike the boys in my class, Laurence has the grace not to peep at my thighs from below. From the last rung, he jumps into the shallow end. Carefully I follow suit. The pleats of my dress open up like a parachute. He is heading to the deep end. A chain of clouds skims overhead and shields the blue winter sky. The dry container shrinks into a drawer sliding into its compartment.

  While thirst saws me from within.

  Although acquainted with English ways by now, I still shake my head politely each time Laurence’s mother proposes to treat me to a sandwich or a fizzy drink, fully aware of the consequences. Oblivious to our manners, Mrs Langley still takes my no for an answer, instead of repeating her proposal several times until I utter my consent.

  No, I am neither hungry nor thirsty, thank you very much. And not greedy enough either to jump at your first offer. Why ask? Why not impose a fact upon me, the way Selma’s mother does? Order a muffin, a pie, a scone, or an ice-cream soda, and see if I have the cheek to refuse? Or a coke at least.

  Laurence lies on his stomach flat on the floor. His chin and hands press against the ground while his elbows are bent upwards.