Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (39 page)

I told Hilmi Amin about my neighbors’ trip. He laughed and said, “Let’s arrange a trip to Damascus, as part of our plan for the future to cover the entire region. Let me first think of a visit on my own.”

I welcomed the step, even though I was preoccupied with Iraq by itself, day and night. Hilmi Amin went to Syria and he came back happy, having concluded some press agreements there. Finally, I said to myself, today Damascus, tomorrow Beirut and maybe the whole Middle East. My dreams were getting bigger.

Hatim had promised me to spend the first vacation we would have together in one of the countries surrounding Iraq, because it was difficult for him to travel to Egypt, since getting an exit visa there took a long time. He was also subject to be called as a reserve officer in the army. He let me visit Egypt whenever I wished and postponed his own visit until such a time that he could have a vacation to have enough time to renew his exit permit. I seized upon the opportunity of the reopening of the Syrian–Iraqi borders and asked him to fulfill his promise: a one-week vacation in which I would also work on some features.

He asked me, “Is it a vacation or work?”

I said, laughing, “Both. Please, please.”

Umm Tayih gave me the information about that tourist company that arranged her trip from which she had come back happy. She sent me a box of Syrian sweets and invited me to her house to show me what she had bought. I said, “You wiped out the family savings!”

She said, “You shouldn’t think that, dear lady. This is Syria, not London!”

My women neighbors used to put a box in the kitchen in which they’d save any surplus in their budget of spending money for an annual summer vacation. The men would go to Cairo, most of the
time without the rest of the family. One day Umm Mahmoud surprised me when I asked about her husband’s knee treatment in Egypt. She showed me a picture of his in which he was shown leaning on the shoulder of a dark, young Egyptian woman. I asked her who she was and she laughed and said, “A prostitute.”

We traveled on an old huge bus, which we preferred to a plane since it gave us a good opportunity for a more scenic trip. The bus filled up with Iraqi women, some of whom wore black abayas under which they had on the latest fashions. Those healthy-looking Iraqi women expressed their joy of living by singing aloud and eating together, sharing food that they had brought on the bus. As soon as they got on the bus, they took out thermos bottles filled with tea and began telling stories loudly. Before the bus stopped in two small towns on the way, all the passengers had come to know each other, including the few men who were on the bus. One of the women passengers addressed the bus driver using the name “Rashid,” the protagonist of the textbook used in the literacy campaign. The passengers laughed and the driver smiled. Rashid became the go-to man in the bus who helped with small chores and the whole situation became the subject of light-hearted exchanges. One woman said, for instance, “Give Rashid two dinars to buy us some hot samun.”

The driver played a cassette about al-Husayn and the women began to cry. I knew the story well, but when the singer got to the scene when the infant Abdullah ibn al-Husayn was killed while thirsty, the column of the cries rose and my own tears started coming down as if by contagion. I watched the collective sobbing in disbelief at the intensity, but when I saw one of the women beat her breast repeatedly, crying: “Oh mother! Mother! Mother!” I smiled. Hatim nudged me in the side as my grin grew broader, saying, “Watch out.”

The situation, for me, turned into a comic one. Hatim realized the awkwardness of the situation and that I couldn’t control myself and tried to curb my laughter, but to no avail. Then his pallid face and sharp reprimanding gaze restored my senses. I couldn’t understand
the pain they felt, nor the way they expressed it. I thought it was just an act. I had attended the wake of a very old man at the house of one of our women neighbors and noticed that at a specific moment, the women placed the abayas on their faces and began to wail and that they, with the exception of the close relatives of the deceased who were truly grief-stricken, were just playing an expected role out of courtesy. I didn’t know why I made a connection between that scene and the present one. Then I asked myself: courtesy to whom? Martyrs who had died centuries ago?

I took me years to understand the cruelty of the events that have given the land of Iraq that tragic character and the feeling that the bleeding was still fresh. I asked myself whether Iraq was predestined to go on shedding blood forever, whether it was something beyond their control or just foolishness. Those days in Iraq, things were looking up: development, work, and political success.

We arrived in Damascus at midnight. We entered the hotel happy and holding hands. It was pouring, and the cold that our friends had warned us about was much more than we had expected. We got up early and headed straight for downtown. A worker at the hotel had told us how to get to the Umayyad Mosque and Suq al-Hamidiya. We walked and on our way stopped in al-Marja district looking for the river Barada. We recalled the poetry written about it. Hatim recited:

A greeting, more tender than Barada’s east wind,

And tears that wouldn’t stop, Damascus!

Red freedom has a gate on which bloodstained hands are knocking.

I stared in shock at the stream and I asked Hatim, “What is this?”

Hatim said, “I don’t know. This can’t be.”

Hatim asked one of the young men passing by, “Where is the river Barada?”

The young man said, “That’s it.”

It was just a little canal of which we had hundreds in all Egyptian villages. The Nile immediately came to both our minds. We laughed and Hatim said, “That’s what you get when you believe the poets.”

I said, “It must have been a desert dweller who was impressed by the water. Imagine the difference between a well and a river. One of my Yemeni colleagues in college was walking with us to University Bridge in Giza and he shouted when he saw the Nile, ‘All of this is fresh water?’”

Hatim said, “It is all relative, my dear. But this poetry is from Ahmad Shawqi, the Egyptian poet.”

I called a Syrian journalist friend and made an appointment in the early morning to accompany me to the newspaper
Tishrin
. I asked Hatim if that would be okay and he told me to do as I liked, provided that we go together.

We toured the city and had lunch in a traditional restaurant. In the evening we enjoyed watching
Waiting for Godot
at the National Theater. We planned our schedule, divided between pleasure and work-related meetings. The first of these was with the Minister of Culture Najah al-Attar. I was met by Hanna Mina, who worked as one of her advisers. I said to him in a whisper as he was showing me in to see her, “I loved your novel
al-Yatir
and its wonderful heroine, Shakiba.”

He smiled and came in with me as I met with her to have an interview. I also met the president of the Syrian Women’s Union and I wrote a feature article about the return of Iraqi–Syrian relations. The editor in chief of
Tishrin
asked me to write from Baghdad about people’s reactions to the resumption of relations and to send articles and features to the newspaper on a steady basis.

Hatim went to museums while I worked, then went back to the museums with me when my work was done, and in the evening we would see another play. We went to Suq al-Hamidiya to buy abayas embroidered with the famous Syrian sirma. At the shop, I could hear the Palestinian dialect. I remembered what my mother
told me: “Don’t forget to buy Syrian brocaded silk and lingerie, especially bras.”

I heard the applause. I paid attention to the man speaking at the podium, to his words and his voice with which I was familiar. Was it really the thinker Ilyas Farah, who had been sentenced to death in Syria and who came to Iraq with Michel Aflaq to support the Ba‘th Party? Or was I confused and was Ilyas among those who had been executed?

Naglaa passed in front of me. I remembered Nafi‘a Othman, so I asked Naglaa about her. She told me that she was busy opening a new culture palace in Suleymaniya.

I had met Nafi‘a Othman, president of the Women’s Union in Erbil, one morning and heard her expounding on the Ba‘th Party efforts to develop the region and encouraging women to have regular jobs as factory workers. She was a beautiful, well-educated, strong woman who believed in her role in development and displayed great energy playing that role. I went back to the hotel to get ready to go with Hilmi Amin to the house of one of the founders of the Kurdish Communist Party.

The surprise that awaited us was that Nafi‘a was Abu Bakr Othman’s daughter. I said, laughing, “I was with you an hour ago. Why didn’t you tell me?”

She said, “I wanted to surprise you. This is my father’s house, not mine.”

We sat with a shriveled man whose stature was quite different from his tall daughter. We started talking about the Kurds at length. Hilmi Amin asked him, “Would Kurds revolt again despite the autonomy?”

“Yes,” he said calmly.

Hilmi Amin asked, “How?”

He said, “If any Kurd took up arms, be that Mullah Mustafa Barzani or any other revolutionary, everyone would follow him.”

I said, “A small country cannot stand by itself, and unity among the Kurds is impossible because they are divided among the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Would any of those countries put up with secessions of its Kurdish part?”

He said, “No. It’s an eternal struggle, bigger than the Palestine problem.”

I said, “Why is rebellion in Iraq more frequent and stronger than in any of those other countries, even though you have autonomy which the other countries don’t have?”

Abu Bakr Othman got up and opened the window in the room where we sat and said, “Here, come and look at the banner in the street right in front of you. What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Arab oil for the Arabs.’”

He came back to his chair as calmly as he got up and said, “This is the heart of the problem. This is not Arab oil; it is the oil of the Kurds and always will be. Kurdish wealth must be returned to the Kurds. Developing their society is the only way to peace. The region needs to be truthful as it confronts the Kurdish reality.”

I said, remembering what Nafi‘a was saying in the morning, “Isn’t the effort exerted equal to the value of the oil?”

He said, “Absolutely not. The state is interested in other things and their allocations for this area are much less than its actual needs. This is something they have to realize before it is too late. It is not a matter of Arabs and Kurds, but rather the Ba‘th Party as an authority that does what it pleases with the wealth of the country.”

Hilmi Amin said, “But a coalition front of five parties is ruling the country.”

Othman shook his head and said, “I am not optimistic.”

I said, “I like the idea of the coalition front. I hope it spreads in all our Arab countries.”

He smiled as he looked at me for a long time then said, “We all wish the best for Iraq.”

Nafi‘a was moving among us on tiptoe, serving us drinks and pastries stuffed with walnuts that they called klisha, like any other
homemaker. I wanted to ask her whether she was a Ba‘thist or not, but I felt abashed. I wished that the communist father would have a Ba‘thist daughter, and that Arabs and Kurds would merge. I had fallen in love with the Kurds and liked very much their women’s outfits that sparkled in the sun. I had never seen such cheerful attire anywhere else.

So, Nafi‘a was still working in the position of authority! But where is Anhar Khayun? Where are the other communist colleagues? What happened to that time when communists were everywhere in Baghdad? You know where they have gone, Nora, don’t you? I still remember the black days of the end.

One morning, after our bureau changed status and became a private press bureau, Hilmi Amin told me, “Let’s go first to
Tariq al-Shaab
before we go to
al-Jumhuriya
. Abu Ghayib did not find the newspaper in the market. We would know at least whether it had been banned or is just late for one reason or another.”

We walked under the pleasant warm sun of Baghdad in the winter. We opened the bolt of the garden gate of the office of
Tariq al-Shaab
. We rang the bell of the building door that had usually remained open in the past. A young journalist, a man, opened the door for us. Behind him came a frightened, beautiful young woman and asked in alarm, “Who are you?”

Hilmi Amin said, “I am the director of the former
al-Zahra
magazine bureau and this is my colleague Nora Suleiman. Is Ustaz Adnan here?”

A journalist came from inside quickly and said, “Please, come in.”

We heard the young woman say, “
Al-Zahra
bureau, now?” She left us wondering and went to the door and left it ajar as she looked behind it in apprehension. Then she came back and asked us, “
Al-Zahra
bureau? Are you Egyptian?”

The male journalist said, “She is wacky!”

She went back to the door and closed it. The room was plunged into darkness and we realized that there were no journalists except
for the two of them. In the past it used to be crowded with working journalists and their visitors. Nabil Yasin came in and welcomed us, saying, “Sorry. Most of the young journalists are on assignment and the editor in chief also is not here.”

Hilmi Amin said, “We didn’t find the paper in the market. Was it delayed for any reason? Or banned?”

He said, “I’ll get you a copy right away.”

He gave us a copy as the young woman kept looking around her and from behind the window curtain, then came back to stand in a dark corner of the room. We felt that something was suspicious. We took our leave, promising to come some other day. When we crossed the threshold of the outside gate, we heard it being locked with bolts. I said, “What are they afraid of?”

He said, “Maybe the police.”

I said, “Would a door stop the police? This is Iraqi security!”

He said, and I could hear a troubled tone in his voice, “The door wouldn’t stop the police, but it would give one of them a chance to escape. Things deteriorate very quickly. This is not the first time the paper has been banned. It seems that Iraqi communists have entered a conflict phase with the state and that it might escalate.”