A Reed Shaken by the Wind (10 page)

Meanwhile the terrified Aboud had fled to his father, who, instead of taking him to the father of the dead man and throwing themselves on his mercy, surrendered his son to the government authorities, a treacherous defiance of tradition that could only expect hatred in return. He employed official channels and lawyers, and Aboud was finally sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, which is the customary penalty for tribal murder.

Mehsin wanted vengeance. Another of his sons had been killed in mysterious circumstances, and his only surviving heir was not the apple of his eye. He mourned for Dakhil, saying, “Now I have no son left worthy of the name,” and he awaited Aboud’s release from prison.

At last Aboud’s sentence was ended, and he at once received word from Mehsin saying that he would be killed if he came back to the area. Terrified, he appealed to the government, who sent him back saying that the State would be responsible for his life. Mehsin raised the tribesmen, and Aboud’s canoe was ambushed and sunk before ever he reached home. Aboud escaped, and bolted back once more to the government authorities.

Mehsin disclaimed responsibility for the outrage, saying that he had never given the order, but his son was imprisoned for a while and the incident caused some loss of face. This time Aboud was sent back to live beside a police post, without cultivators or an appreciable amount of cultivable land. Threats reached the pedlars and travelling merchants, and none dared sell their goods to him. I do not imagine that an insurance company would give much for his life.

The atmosphere beneath the dim and stately arches of a sheikh’s
mudhif
is, for a guest, very different from that of a village house. As time wears on the
mudhif
fills
,
it is true, but for the most part with elderly and dignified Arabs who squat cross-legged in silence. Speech when it comes is gentle and desultory; the beads click slowly and aimlessly between their fingers like the clucking of hens in a summer farmyard. The blue smoke curls up like incense from the burning dung at the coffee hearth; overhead it has given to the reed arches of the
mudhif
a patina as rich and glossy as old mahogany.

The people drifted away early, since there is rarely singing or dancing in so august an establishment, and as we lay down to sleep swarms of bats flitted among the dim columns above us, casting huge upward shadows on the arch-tops. Near to the door the faces of four black slaves were lit alone in the darkness by the flame of a Lux lantern; they squatted by the hot embers with their rifles across their knees, and the grotesque whirling shadows swooped over them like vampires.

We lunched the next day at the fort of Mehsin’s brother, Jabir; in this atmosphere of internecine strife it was not surprising to learn that the two were not on speaking terms with one another—or rather were said to be “shouting insults at each other across the river”.

The day was marked for me by an incident of painful comedy. I had brought with me from England a fishing spear gun of the type commonly used in conjunction with a Schnorkel mask by holidaymakers on Mediterranean shores. The gun was not mine, and I had never used it; nor, indeed had its owner, who had confided to me that in circumstances of peculiar chagrin he had discovered his utter inability to load it. It was before these toys had become popular, and they were still a novelty on most
plages.
He had been reclining on the sand of an Italian beach with the shiny and as yet untried object beside him when a group of Italians approached and asked if they might look at it. They examined it with animation and interest, and inquired if it were really possible to spear fish under water with this weapon. Its owner assured them that this was the case. They remarked that it must require much skill, and my friend replied that this, too, was so. They tempted him with admiration and flattery; in a few minutes he had sketched in a light picture of gaudy gurnards and ink-squirting octopuses impaled by his deadly aim deep down in the jewelled garden. Almost diffidently they inquired how to load this beautiful toy.

He knew the principle but had never tried the practice. At the muzzle end of the gun were two big loops of finger-thick rubber, and these had to be stretched back by brute force until they engaged in two corresponding notches at the butt-end of the barrel. He did not anticipate any particular difficulty, and with an easy condescension he reached for the weapon to demonstrate the procedure.

Under the amazed and then frankly amused eyes of the Italians he strained and tugged at one of the rubber loops without being able to stretch it halfway toward the notch for which it was destined. He was dripping with sweat and scarlet with effort and embarrassment when after many minutes he had to explain that it was not in fact with this gun but with another that he had decimated the shoals. The
gun returned to England unfired, and was kept where it could arouse no moody memories of humiliation.

There was time to put away at Jabir’s fort by the edge of the river, and I decided to see whether I would fare better than the gun’s owner; making very clear to the onlookers, however, that I had neither loaded nor fired it before today. Owing to the sprouting curve of white rubber that grew from its muzzle the gun had early been christened by the canoe boys the Father of the Horns—(in the same way they refer to a particularly verminous house as the Father of Fleas, or to a hospitable sheikh who kept a lamp of invitation burning before his
mudhif
as the Father of the Light)—and they were no less curious than I to see just what the horns could do.

Whatever else they could do it did not seem at first as if they could be made to stretch a fraction of the required distance. I sat on the bank and jammed the pistol butt of the gun into my stomach and tugged until my muscles were aching and my stomach bruised, until at last, breathless, I slipped first one loop and then the other into their retaining notches. When I had done this I put on the safety catch and rested.

Hassan became impatient, and fetched some pats of buffalo dung to throw into the water as targets. At last I felt ready for a trial demonstration.

He tossed a pat on to the opaque yellow surface a little upstream of me so that it would be carried past me on the current some twenty feet away. I removed the safety catch, took careful aim along the barrel with the metal pistol grip a couple of inches in front of my nose, and pulled the trigger.

Something hit the bridge of my nose with shattering force, and I was knocked over flat on my back. I began automatically to get to my feet again, and saw as I did so that my shirt was covered with blood and that it was splashing heavily from my nose. I fumbled in my pocket for a handkerchief, and as I touched my nose I heard the bones
inside clicking like a box of dice. Thesiger was hovering between concern and uncontrolled laughter; and the tears were streaming down my face as uncheckable as the blood.

At this point an agitated slave rushed up to us with cries of sympathy and dismay, and on hearing that my nose was broken exclaimed in great agitation that he would bring medicaments at once. Thesiger indicated his vast medicine chests that were stacked within a few feet of us, but the slave’s goodwill would take no denial and he hurried off into the fort. A second or two later he came panting forth and with reassuring smiles pressed into my hand a small bottle labelled in English “Squibb’s Mineral Oil”. This struck both Thesiger and myself as excruciatingly funny, and I began to giggle so helplessly that the slave clearly thought my reason to have been affected by the blow.

When my nose had stopped bleeding and I had cleaned up my shirt as well as I could, I decided to try the gun again. This time I held it well away from my face with my arms braced. The shock against my tense muscles made it very easy to understand why my nose had broken. The spear shot merrily if inaccurately on its way, but as it did so I was conscious of a searing pain in my left thumb. This time the flying line connecting the spear to the gun had carried away with it an inch-long strip of skin. I returned the outrageous weapon to the
tarada,
uncomforted by a further offering of Squibb’s Mineral Oil.

In the afternoon we left Jabir’s
mudhif
downstream to visit his grandfather the great Mehsin, but when we arrived at his fort on the river bank he was in the act of stepping into a great high antediluvian-seeming motor launch to visit his son Ali. We abandoned the
tarada
to the canoe boys and travelled with him, our mountainous conveyance hammering and vibrating down-river between packed villages orange in the glare of light that comes before sunset.

It was in this same weird stage lighting that we came to Ali’s
mudhif.
It leaned drunkenly at an angle of forty-five degrees, its foundations undermined by floods three years before, and had been long since due for repair. Ali had planned this the previous year, but had been thwarted by the total destruction of the reed crop which should have rebuilt it. There had been a cataclysm of nature, a hail storm of unprecedented violence, whose stones had been bigger than golf balls, killing many men, decimating the birds, and smashing down the giant reeds until they lay flat over the marshes like laid corn at the end of a wet and windy English summer.

Slaves carried into the
mudhif
several of the heavy arm-chairs from the reception room of the fort, and in one of these Mehsin sat near the entrance, vast, hunched and amorphous, smoking incessantly. He was, I thought, like Charles Laughton with a stubbly white beard and moustache. Each man who entered kissed his hand; there was also much whispering in his ear. He was very fat and contrived to be stately with it all, but he blew his nose on to the floor; he also ignored the ashtrays with which the slaves had surrounded him, and threw the stubs still burning on to the reed matting. There was a vast and various spread for dinner, but Mehsin sat apart from us, eating his way steadily and messily through a large and somewhat raw fish.

For all his absurdities he gave the impression of power and shrewdness; well filling his position as one of the great figures of Southern Iraq. Throughout the evening his
wazir,
small, pockmarked, scribish and viperish, sat on the floor near his master with a huge ledger open on his knees, making a seemingly casual entry from time to time. Mehsin talked with Thesiger with increasing animation; after a while I could follow little or nothing of what they were saying. Their intensity gave me the impression that they discussed momentous matters. Suddenly Thesiger seemed at a loss, and turned to me. “What was the date of Ethelred the
Unready?” Even had I been less taken aback I should not have found the answer. After a few minutes there was another pause, and Thesiger said “Gavin, I’m very bad at knowing this sort of thing—how long is St. James’s Park?” Finally, “What word would we use in English for someone who lies in bed all the morning?” “Slugabed,” I hazarded, and Mehsin sent his
wazir
over to me to copy it down into his ledger. “Slukabeed,” they repeated over and over again with evident satisfaction, and later it became in this form a much-used term of opprobrium among our canoe boys.

Mehsin’s son Ali has little of the presence of the old man; his face is loose, cruel, and self-indulgent, and he has a sadistic sense of mischief. Once when Thesiger told one of his canoe boys to tie up the
tarada
near the stone fort Ali gave orders for the boy to be beaten up and thrown into the river. He also possesses a box filled with spikes, in which those who incur his displeasure are placed and shaken up.

Ali boasted a
sarifa
besides a
mudhif,
and it was in the
sarifa
that we slept that night, on beds carried in from the fort. I revelled in the guilty pleasures first of sitting in an arm-chair and then of sleeping on a mattress, but less in the third western amenity that so many sheikhs boast—the unspeakable lavatories.

Away from the towns practically no one except a sheikh would think of possessing such a thing anyway. In the marshes one takes a canoe into the reed-beds and perches precariously on its wobbling side; on the dry land one merely walks a little distance from the houses. (If one has a servant one says to him
harid ibrig,
“I want to wash”—a curiously European euphemism—and he leads the way carrying a jug of water.)

A number of the sheikhs’ forts, however, possess lavatories whose function must surely be that of prestige rather than convenience
.
These are usually on a river bank, four stakes round which a screen of reed matting is stretched over a shallow trench cut into the mud. The trenches are
presumably intended to be sluiced down into the river, but I never saw one that had been within a recent past. In dry sunny weather a million flies form a cloud like a solid obstacle; in wet weather the scene is better left to the imagination.

T
HE
next morning we made a short journey to the village of Sahain. On the way we passed long processions of water buffalo being towed by canoes heading northward towards Naija, the swimming beasts urged on by quick loud cries like the honking of wild geese. The great hailstorm had been responsible for consequences more serious than prolonged failure to rebuild the tottering
mudhif
; it had destroyed the reed crop that is the marshmen’s livelihood, and many of them, reduced below the level of subsistence, were forced to sell their buffaloes in the market at Naija.

Sahain turned out to be a big huddle of islanded houses criss-crossed by big and small waterways, running at right angles to each other like streets. In the centre of the village stood a small stone fortress, rushed up by Dakhil four years ago, when insurrection by the community against his father Mehsin had seemed imminent. The fortress was still garrisoned, and the muzzles of light machine-guns poked from its loopholes with a glint of dark metal. Just such another village had not long ago rebelled against their sheikh, and when the villagers had overcome his garrison the government had confirmed their independent status. It is easy to see how what may be for the State the only sensible solution to one problem may create a precedent forming others.

In this war-like setting it was a surprise to find that here was the first village that we had visited whose children went to school, and therefore spoke—though did not understand—a few sentences of English. English is compulsory at all Iraqi schools, and is taught by the Direct Method, of which Desmond Stewart and John Haylock have given an
illuminating description in
The New Babylon.
They learn, as I was to discover later, after some perspiring hours with their teachers, from Iraqi English Masters who are incapable of carrying on the very simplest conversation in any language but their own, but who have a few parrot-learned phrases and are able to read aloud with just-recognisable pronunciation from children’s primers.

I was sent out that afternoon to perform my now customary but still precarious function of shooting coots or duck for the evening meal, and the boy who paddled my canoe was determined to exercise his English; probably he wanted to score off his schoolmaster by retailing the grammar or pronunciation of a real Englishman. It was amazing how much he really could say when he tried, but much more amazing how little he could understand; nothing, in fact, but single words, and then only after constant repetition.

“In English please what is this?” He indicated the boat. “You have not answer my question. Is ‘motor-water’?”

A little later, after the inevitable disgrace, “Now Sahib Thesiger will not be your friend any more, because he very much love cartridges.” Then, with a hint of avarice “Does Sahib Thesiger love
empty
cartridges too?” Reassured on this point he began again. “Why are Iraqis yellow men and English red men? Answer my question. You have not answer my question; please answer my question. Why I yellow you red?” He wasn’t, in fact, very yellow, but as time passed I began to grow red.

At last I did shoot a duck, and as he held the carcase with its head pointing toward Mecca and began to slit its throat he asked “At England which way you point?” and then, impatiently: “Muslims,
this
way, head blood to
Mecca
—at England
how
?” I remembered how in Morocco I had been speaking to an Arab when a water-seller passed with his sheep-skin of water and his tinkling brass cups that cost a
penny to drink from: “How much do water-sellers charge in London?” the Arab had asked.

At Sahain that night I saw professional dancers for the first time, a man and his fourteen-year-old son. Our host brought them in to dance for us after we had eaten, but the boy sat down as soon as he had made his greetings, and no amount of cajoling could make him dance one step. His shoulder-length hair had been shaved two days before because he was going to school, and he wore a red skull-cap which he fingered nervously as he sat cross-legged and stared at the floor. At last he consented to drum while his father danced, and there were tears in his eyes as he watched the man tie his headcloth to resemble swinging hair, two dangling ropes of cloth with a heavy knot tied at the bottom of each.

The father danced well, and the erotic passage brought the usual applause from the audience, but I could not take my eyes from the boy. As he drummed he looked only at the rhythmically swinging
keffia
that was doing duty for his own lost hair, and slow tears rolled unnoticed down his face. His hands on the drum worked in a frenzy as though they had some life independent of himself, as though they were controlled by the rhythm of his father’s flying feet rather than by his own sad head shorn of its pride. The drums of stretched pelican-pouch have a twang like the plucked strings of a stringed instrument; they can be plaintive and melancholy, or menacing and ferocious when struck, as they were now, in quick hard rhythm. So furious was the fluttering of his hands on the drum that they left a succession of different positions on the retina of the eye, from the open upraised palm to the flat back of the hand as it struck. Never once did he turn his eyes from the swinging knots at his father’s head, until suddenly the drum split under his hands, and as he bent over it I saw him wipe his face quickly with
the skirt of his
dish-dasha.
Pity Samson at the mill with slaves.

During the talk round the fireside that night I heard mentioned again and again the name Ghadbhban, and after a while I asked Thesiger who this man might be. “A bandit,” he replied, “although actually rather more than a bandit; it’s a strange story.”

At the end of the First World War Ghadbhban, of the family of Beni Asad or Sons of the Lion, had refused submission to the British and had built himself a fortified position on one of the mud islands in the marshes. The first attacks against him were unsuccessful, and at length the British, with the aid of a powerful Arab, prepared for him a ruse. They sent a bombing aircraft, while the Arab ambushed Ghadbhban’s retreat from the island, and into this trap he fell. His canoe and gear were sunk, and he himself severely wounded in the leg. He escaped through the reeds, carrying his child, and sought refuge among the pastoral tribes of the uplands near to the Persian frontier.

Some thirty years later, in 1954, Ghadbhban’s brother Faleh decided to try whether he could not play the same hand with greater success. He occupied the same island that his brother had so ignominiously vacated, and levied and looted from the surrounding territory until at last the government recognised his claims and granted him land. During the time of his thrall rumour had gone round the marshes that he had attempted to hold up Thesiger’s party, and that there had been a battle. Thesiger himself was said to have escaped after inflicting damage upon Faleh’s men, but it was understood that Amara and Sabeti had been killed, and they arrived at their home village to find their parents preparing to mourn their deaths.

Away among the shepherd tribes to the east, Ghadbhban, who had spent his life in exile from the land that he regarded
as his own, heard of his brother’s doings and of the final successful negotiations with the government. What Faleh could do, it must have seemed to him, he could do too, so back he came to the island that had by now played so large a part in his family history, and with an armed band he was now following his brother’s example of loot and levy. Only last week, we were told, he had successfully held up a large cargo boat coming up the Euphrates with a cargo of dates and rifles.

I thought again of the insoluble problems of this intelligent and benign government; of how quickly the diplomatic handling of one problem could lead to another.

When we left Sahain we were right outside the marshes, in a land of semi-inundated rice fields, where every islanded strip of mud was thronged with a multitude of birds: storks, herons, egrets and great flocks of wading birds. Among them stood the ubiquitous eagles, strangely ignored by the press around them, as though they were indeed the purely heraldic symbols that their stylised attitudes suggested.

We came in the late morning to Umm el Gaida, a large village of Sayids on both banks of a wide channel. With these people Thesiger had had little contact in the past, finding them aloof and inclined to distrust the presence of an unbeliever, but our treatment was very different now. His reputation had spread year by year, and by now it had reached here, for from both banks Sayids called to us to come and eat with them.

Throughout our journey I was struck by the boorishness of western hospitality by contrast with that of the Arabs. If a stranger rings a doorbell in Europe, he must produce some very good reason before he can get into the house at all, much less eat there as a guest; yet in the lands where there are neither doors nor doorbells the stranger is not asked the
reason for his presence, and to hesitate in setting food before him would be shameful. In the parable of the Good Samaritan it is possible that the significance of the travellers passing by on the other side has been missed; it had to be on the other side that they passed, as though quite unaware of the thieves’ victim, because had they acknowledged the other’s presence at all there would have been no alternative to the actions of the Samaritan.

Both the European’s boorishness and the Arab’s profligate hospitality may be no more than separate manifestations of the will to power, but the first must mean security only for the individual, the second for the race.

We stopped at the
mudhif
of an important Sayid, and even a spectacled white-turbaned priest from Naija treated us with courtesy, and did not, as did most of those whom we met later, leave the building as soon as we had entered it.

The meal was lavish; a boy who went to school in Amara dismembered the chicken in front of me. “Here,” he said as he handed me a morsel, “I am eating you.” “Feeding me, you mean,” I said. His fingers worked busily in the gravy-covered carcase. “Yes,” he repeated in happy preoccupation, “I am eating you. I eat you very large.” Like the boy at Sahain he understood no word of the language he was speaking.

We had intended to leave the village that afternoon, but we had gone little more than a quarter of a mile upstream, the houses still on each side of us, when another Sayid called to us from the bank to come and drink tea with him. Thesiger declined at first, saying that we were expected far ahead by nightfall, but he was so insistent that we ended not only by drinking tea but by staying the night with him. He was so extravagantly polite that it struck me that he must want something from us, but, Arab fashion, it was some time before the request emerged. I was beginning to understand a little of the language now, and could often follow the gist of a conversation provided that it developed along
orderly lines. After the formal greetings and a little small talk he asked Thesiger about his doctoring, and whether he was carrying medicines with him; then he added that there were some people here who would be grateful for his attention.

In due course these prospective patients appeared, a group of a dozen or so boys who held their
dish-dashas
awkwardly away from their bodies. This was my first sight of the appalling effects of native surgery, and what I saw made me feel that Thesiger fully deserved his position of minor deity among the marsh peoples. These boys had been circumcised no less than three months before by a wandering professional, and the results were sickening. The magic powder had done its work, producing degrees of inflammation and sepsis so great that it seemed impossible that they could ever heal. Our host produced these unfortunate children by way of persuasion, for he wanted his own son circumcised, and was unwilling to entrust him to the perpetrator of these surgical outrages.

The appeal, made by a Sayid to an unbeliever, was the highest possible mark of confidence and acceptance; as a gesture, however, I saw it rivalled later during our journey, when one of the professionals themselves, a little shamefaced, brought his son to us with the same request.

This was the first community of Sayids that I had visited, and since previously I had only seen them singly and away from their kind, receiving from the common people the exaggerated deference due to their status—(everyone rises when a Sayid enters a house, and no man should ever precede him or otherwise turn his back upon him)—it was something of a shock to realise that they were after all part of a strictly secular hierarchy, descendants of a man who had never claimed divinity. Thus it was with a sensation of anomaly that as we sat round the fire that evening I noticed the number of pistol holsters visible as bulges or edges beneath the garments of our host and our fellow guests; the
same sensation as I remember when I saw photographs of the fabled, stately figure of the Glaoui drawing an automatic against his assailants in Morocco; almost as if the Pope were to open fire with a sub-machine-gun upon a group of Protestant heretics.

For some days we pottered about the cultivating lands and the outskirts of the marshes. We stayed sometimes in primitive reed dwellings whose floors, littered with straw and buffalo dung, were transformed in a space of minutes after our arrival by the laying of many carpets and cushions; sometimes in sheikhs’
mudhifs
or forts. One of these, I remember, was pockmarked with bullet-holes and chipped masonry; it had withstood some ten years before a lengthy siege from Mehsin’s men, who came on in waves and at last retired leaving sixty dead before its walls.

But it is nights in the reed houses, whether in the marshes or on the banks of the waterways, that I shall always remember best; and, with all their discomforts, the image they bring is one of nostalgia. I remember the pain of massage and its intolerable prolongation, and I remember nights that were hopping with fleas, but I remember, too, the proud curving silhouettes of the canoes and their reflections on moon-whitened water, the moon gliding through troubled cloud and the village women wailing for the dead; the fresh wind blowing through the house all night with the smell of rain upon it; the night sounds and sweet breath of the buffaloes at the end of the house. I used to wake in the night and take in these sights and sounds with a curious intimacy, like memories of childhood, as though they were things once known and forgotten.