Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (40 page)

village, but also by the middle-class women to whose tiny

social horizons she would be an important addition. If the new

teacher were gay and enthusiastic, it would mean a good year

for the school and a pleasant winter of afternoon teas for the

middle-class wives. If she were dull—the women sighed and

hoped she would not be dull.

Aziza, when she finally came, made an excellent first

impression, for she was pretty, well-dressed, poised, educated,

and her family background satisfied all camps. She was of

tribal background but her father was a teacher in Diwaniya, so

she had status with the middle-class ladies. This was her first

job after graduating from the teachers’ training college in

Baghdad, and she was eager to please and ready to work hard.

She was not above sitting cross-legged with the tribal women

and chewing pumpkin seeds, and she dutifully visited all the

civil servants’ wives and brought them the customary present

of sweets. Yet I sensed something different about this girl, and

the townspeople must have, too, for although in the beginning

she was liked and entertained, she did not develop any close

friendships, and she was never taken to heart the way Aliyah

and even Hind had been. Perhaps Aziza was too serious and

found herself unable to respond to the ironic teasing which

went on among the women. Perhaps it was the curious reserve

in which she seemed to hold herself.

She begged me to help her improve her English, and I

found her an apt pupil. Then Hind insisted that I must teach

her too. Hind was clever, but she had no patience and seldom

finished anything. The lesson hour with Hind usually

degenerated into gossip and fortunetelling, whereas Aziza

would drill on English plurals. The two girls began to vie with

each other about who was to teach me Arabic in exchange for

the English lessons. The competition became unpleasant and I

finally had to suggest a compromise. I would come twice a

week to the school after four o’clock. One day I would study

the Arabic primer with Hind and give her a lesson in reading

English; on the other day Aziza would help me with spoken

Arabic and I would reciprocate by instructing her in

conversational English. Gradually my days with Hind petered

out, but Aziza and I kept up our lessons.

Although Aziza had spent two years in Baghdad, she had

lived the entire time in the carefully supervised college

dormitory, so her knowledge of the big city was very limited.

She knew enough, however, to want to know more, and she

would question me by the hour; I had never seen such

curiosity about the outside world before. Every session,

whether we were discussing politics or religion or marriage or

geography, always ended in the same way. “Tell me,” she

would say, “about the high life.” By this she meant the kind of

life she thought I led when I was not in El Nahra, in which

women and men sat and talked together, went to restaurants

and movies in fashionable suits and well-cut dresses, and

danced, at one gala ball after another, under brilliantly lighted

crystal chandeliers.

Aziza and I became friends, but we did not speak of our

friendship. If we had, Hind would have felt affronted (after all,

she had known me first) and Laila and Khadija would have

complained bitterly. For, I discovered, friendships among

women were much more important and much more intense in

this segregated society than in our own. Where the men spend

the major part of their time away from women, the women

have to depend on each other for company, for support, and

for advice. A man might be a devoted father or brother or a

loving husband, but in El Nahra he was seldom, if ever, a

companion. I never heard a woman discuss her emotional

attitude toward her husband or her father or brother, but long

hours were spent in debates about the fidelity or indifference

of women friends. Naturally these friendships became most

serious for women who were single or childless or widowed,

but even married women with large families had close women

friends for whom they composed poems or cooked special

sweets. To a visitor in the sheik’s harem, Selma once said,

“Beeja is not Fatima’s friend, she is Laila’s friend,” and when

I protested, she said, “Yes, yes, you and Fatima like each other

but you are the
friend
of Laila.” And that was that.

20

An Excursion into the Country

Aziza and I kept up our lessons twice a week that autumn, but

it was usually I who went to see Aziza. Therefore I was

surprised to find her at my door after lunch one afternoon.

Laila, who had been visiting, sprang up in delight, pleased that

the teacher, a person of some importance, should appear when

she was present.

“Come for a ride with me,” said Aziza. “It is such a fine

day.”

“A ride?” I echoed.

“Yes,” replied Aziza. “My cousin is here from Diwaniya

with his car and his driver. They are going partridge hunting

along the canal. I will sit in the back seat to look at the view

and I thought you might like to come. Do come, Beeja!” she

urged, clapping her hands together. “The country will be

beautiful today.”

“I would love to,” I answered. An excursion away from my

house and garden would be a real event. But I turned to my

visitor Laila.

“Laila must come too,” said the kindly Aziza, and Laila

beamed. “But,” she added, “are you sure that your father

would allow you to go driving with my cousin?”

“Of course, of course,” said Laila.

When I remember that afternoon, I wonder what gave it

such a luster. It had none of the characteristics of autumn

afternoons to which I was accustomed—no brilliant leaves, no

crisp winds or changing skies. Perhaps it was the light, the

sunlight in Mesopotamia which warms without burning,

which adds subtlety to what is usually an elemental landscape.

For fall here is really spring. The year’s principal crops are

planted early in October. By the end of the month the brown

fields that have baked under the summer sun are fuzzed with

green. This thin dusting of green, the young barley and wheat

and sesame plants, casts a gentle haze over the flat land. Even

the uncultivated sandy sections develop shadows, and the

sharp fronds and spiny trunks of the date palms look softer in

outline. Gazelles race over the plains; the partridge nests in the

new grasses. This is the best season of the year, for the heat

has lifted and the icy muddy winter has not yet come.

Aziza’s cousin, one rifle in hand and a second rifle on the

seat beside him, rode in front with his driver. Both men wore

tribal dress, almost identical with the garments worn by the

men of the El Eshadda. For their tribe and the El Eshadda

were members of the same tribal confederation. The cousin

spoke occasionally to Aziza, but he was careful not to address

Laila or myself. We sat silently, wrapped in our abayahs,

enjoying a marvelous sense of release in the unexpected

holiday.

We went as far as Seddara El Nahra, the point where the

sluice gates of the El Nahra canal are located. Here a small

rest house had been built in a large garden facing the canal; I

knew this little house and garden well, for Jabbar, as irrigation

engineer, had free use of the place and often brought his sister

Khadija, Bob, and me here for picnics. Today, however, we

passed on to a section of canal that I could not remember

having seen before, and drove along for nearly half an hour

until the cousin stopped the car near a plowed but unplanted

field. Aziza indicated that we would get out and walk a little

while the men went on ahead to hunt. In this way they would

not intrude on our privacy while we strolled, and they would

return for us when they had bagged a brace of partridge.

Strange as it seems to me now, I realized as we got out of

the car and breathed deeply the country air how long it had

been since I had had a chance to walk aimlessly for pleasure.

It was not the sort of thing that ladies in El Nahra did; they

were busy most of the day, and in their leisure hours they

hardly felt the need of more exercise. Even if they had, they

were expected to stay indoors with their families and not

wander about in public view.

The three of us struck out over the furrows of the field,

clutching our abayahs up slightly above the ankles so that we

would not trip on the uneven earth. We walked away from the

road toward the bank of an irrigation canal no longer in use.

The bank formed a fairly high ridge where Aziza had

suggested we might sit for a better view; from there we could

easily see the car when it returned.

“How lovely it is,” said Laila. It was the first time she had

spoken since we had left my house.

“It is good for the mind, the countryside and its scene,” said

Aziza to me, in her stilted not-quite-colloquial English.

I looked about me and agreed.

Brown and green, the flat land stretched away to the

horizon, a horizon which seemed only a flat base for the arch

of the sky. Over and above the ridge toward which we walked

the camel-thorn grew, its spiny branches picked out clearly

against the wide emptiness of that cloudless sky. A few small

undistinguished birds rose from the brush and whirred over

our heads toward the water of the canal, and as we neared the

bank we heard a deep, pulsating note.

“It is the calling of the partridge,” said Aziza, and began

telling me the Arabic names of the birds and plants. Laila was

not listening; she walked along with her head down,

apparently deep in thought; I had never seen her so quiet.

Suddenly over the ridge three children appeared, two

barefoot boys with shocks of black hair and a girl in a ragged

abayah, carrying a baby on her hip. They stopped dead at the

sight of us, as surprised to see us as we were to see them in

this apparently empty place. Aziza spoke to them, but they did

not answer. After a moment of intense scrutiny, one of the

boys bolted down and across the hollow of the unused canal.

We were close enough to the bank to be able to see now two

or three mud huts clustered on the far side of the canal. A

scrap of green, raggedly outlined, marked the garden and I

guessed that these were water squatters who had settled near

the old canal in the hope of getting moisture from it. When the

rains came, the land would just sustain a small crop without

further irrigation.

While we watched, the boy disappeared into one of the huts

and reappeared with a man. Laila looked frightened and

turned to run but Aziza held her ground. The boy pointed, the

man started toward us, then seemed to change his mind, for he

retreated into the hut again and a woman emerged and came

toward us, the boy running ahead and pointing.

“Stand still, Laila,” said Aziza. “Where are you going?”

“Oh,” cried out Laila, “someone will recognize me and tell

my father I have been out wandering!”

“Then cover your face, you silly girl,” replied Aziza in her

severest, most schoolteacherish tone.

Laila stood still, but she covered her face with her abayah

and turned away as the woman neared us.

“Salaam daykum!”
called Aziza cheerfully.

The woman did not reply. She had paused on the bank

above to stare down at us, three ladies, wearing respectable

abayahs, out walking in a strange field. Every inch of her thin,

tattered figure seemed to question our presence. She peered

over our heads to see if we had escorts, and even I turned

around to search for a sign of the cousin’s Buick. The road

was empty.

Finally she returned our greeting.

“We are out walking because it was such a beautiful

afternoon,” offered Aziza.

“Where do you come from?” demanded the woman.

“Don’t tell her, Aziza,” pleaded Laila. “Please don’t tell

her.”

But Aziza recounted in detail the story of our outing while

the woman and the tousle-headed children listened; even the

baby did not make a sound. After Aziza had finished, there

was a long silence before the woman, her old-young face

already set into harsh lines of hunger or pain or fear, switched

her tattered abayah about her feet ever so slightly and said

perfunctorily (she would have been violating all of her social

codes had she done otherwise, even in this situation)
“Ahlan

wusahlan
. Come and drink tea with us.”

We declined with thanks and moved off, murmuring “God

be with you” and “Peace be with you,” farewells which were

not returned. After crossing perhaps half the distance between

the ridge and the road, we looked back. The woman and the

children still stood in a line against the sky.

When we reached the road, the Buick still had not appeared,

so I offered to take pictures of the girls. Laila refused, but