The Orange Trees of Baghdad Read online

  My grandfather loved travelling and was a rare Iraqi in that he thought nothing of driving to London for weeks to visit his son. He’d come with his family in car convoys like desert caravans, stopping in Istanbul, Rome, Vienna and Paris before crossing the channel to England by ferry. My father’s parents, sisters and Aunt Lina came together, and on one occasion, his great-aunt Madeline and her husband, Daoud, accompanied them. My mother could never believe how they fit everything and everyone into the small cars. They came in a Volkswagen Beetle, but somehow managed to cram in endless numbers of suitcases and arrive in London with creamy pistachios, olives, nougat with nuts, boxes of dates and an Iraqi speciality called kletcha, crescent-moon pastries filled with dates, and of course baklava. Each time, my father reminded them that he could get nearly everything in London, but they didn’t care. It was Iraqi hospitality to come laden with gifts.

  There were also presents of gold for my mother, and food, spices and, most importantly, olive oil for my father, which came from Safita, Syria, from my great-grandfather’s olive groves. This was the most valuable gift because such high-quality olive oil couldn’t be found in London. The oil came in large glass bottles in woven grass baskets; to my father it was the best olive oil you could get. It was delicious and so fresh—the colour of liquid gold with only a hint of green. My father transferred the oil into another container so his parents could take the bottles back to Baghdad to reuse them.

  Without realizing what they were doing, my father’s relatives immediately transformed the English house usually run by my mother into an Iraqi home run by all the women. They took over our house, bringing the exotic right into the familiar; they came with their own pungent smells, spicy dishes, gold filigree jewellery, incomprehensible language, moaning music and strange belly dancing. To me, Iraq was my new family: hearing Arabic conversation peppered with English, eating Arabic food, listening to Arabic music—Farouz, Umm Kalthoum—and learning how to dance to it.

  I can see the house in the village in Surrey where I grew up, and can still feel them there moving up and down the stairs, in and out of rooms: my great-aunt Madeline who was a retired midwife; Daoud, who had owned a printing press and had been a journalist and publisher; my great-aunt Lina who worked in Customs; my grandmother Victoria and my grandfather Khalil who were both schoolteachers. My father’s three sisters, Amal, Ibtisam and Siham, who now live in London, were all in their early twenties and were beautiful with their unfamiliar, shiny black hair and smooth olive skin.

  The world was turned upside down; my father spoke a language I didn’t understand. I was embraced by countless fleshy arms, seated aloft on laps cushioning my small legs, kissed and tickled, submerged in love. I sat awestruck through entire conversations in Arabic, where I only recognized my own name, “Leilah.” My aunts teased and tortured my sister and I, little dark-haired English schoolgirls, randomly inserting our names into their conversations so we would tug at their sleeves with a physical need to know what they were saying about us. My mother called my father “habib,” which means “beloved.” It was one of the only Arabic words she knew. My father used “Yullah,” instead of “Hurry up.” I only understood a smattering of Arabic: “la” for “no,” “aye” for “yes;” the rest was a mystery of guttural sounds and deep laughs. My father never taught me Arabic; they say “mother tongue” for a reason—mine came from my mother. Raised in England, we girls spoke to both our parents in English; since my mother couldn’t speak Arabic, we didn’t hear it in our house. So my father, now among his Iraqi family, was suddenly sweetly foreign to me. And I loved it.

  Iraq came to me next through food. Our large polished dining-room table, usually empty except at Christmas and Easter and the odd Sunday lunch, creaked under a feast of yellow rice chicken biryani, dolma (stuffed vine leaves), green bean, tomato and lamb casseroles, chicken curry, bamiya, tabbouleh, hummus, baba ganouj, pita bread and fattoush. The hot dishes steamed their fragrance into the damp English air. Iraqi food is a mixture of all the countries that surround it; there are Lebanese, Syrian, Indian, Persian and Turkish dishes, so we had curries, sweet-and-sour dishes, Mediterranean-style mezze and grilled meats. My Iraqi family bustled around talking loudly, passionately, and their animated gestures, more sweeping than my mother’s, seemed to make them dance around the table.

  In my memories, my grandfather Khalil is a glass of chestnut-tinted cardamom tea. Into a tiny hourglass-shaped cup with a gold-decorated glass saucer, he drops three sugar cubes, almost spilling the tea over the rim, and sips. I watch him stir it with a tiny silver spoon that tinkles against the glass as the sugar spins white and syrupy and settles in a round heap at the bottom. He has thick silver and black hair, despite being in his sixties, and a small moustache, brown skin and black eyes. His frame is small and he is neatly dressed. He speaks to me in English because he is an English teacher in Baghdad.

  Victoria, my grandmother, is rosewater- and pistachio-flavoured Turkish delight. My mother took a photograph of her standing in front of a blooming bed of English rose bushes in our garden; yellow, red, pink, white, fuchsia, burgundy. She smiles slightly, shy with her dark hair piled on her head, her stout body covered in a flowery print dress. She had her own rose garden behind her house in Baghdad. She was a silent presence, and I realize now that it was because she couldn’t speak much English. She was large, pillowy, with big brown eyes and thick black hair, even then. We cuddled and kissed but couldn’t communicate with words. She’d feed me pieces of Turkish delight, soft gelatine that tasted unlike any sweet I’d ever eaten. The chewy, fragrant squares gave off puffs of white sugar when I bit into them that drifted into the air around me, making it magical to eat.

  Her sister, my great-auntie Lina, is a laughing face with an attractive gap in her front teeth. Fifteen years younger than my grandmother and single throughout her life, she had a youthful spirit. Her voice, deep and warm, caresses my ears. Since she had no children of her own, she doted on us like a mother. Her cuddles were powerful, fierce with a love that had only a short time to make its imprint. On her last visit to London, she brought a carpet for my brother, Clayton, to celebrate his birth. It depicts the great ancient king Nebuchadnezzar riding a chariot into battle on a dark blue background with red decoration.

  My grandmother’s aunt, my great-great-auntie Madeline (Maddie), is the remarkable beauty in the family. She is her night-black eyes and cheeks like polished stone, her wavy thick hair and her fashionable clothes. She grew wealthy from being a midwife to rich Iraqis. Childless, too, she was glamorous and exotic because she left Iraq on her own when she was only sixteen to study midwifery in India at a school run by nuns. She knew English from those days and was the first family member to travel to Europe, in the 1950s.

  Her husband, my great-great-uncle Daoud, is the chocolate uncle. Each time he saw us he gave my sister and I a massive plastic bag full of chocolate: large dark bars in gold paper, milk-chocolate buttons, slabs of nutty chocolate. It was more than my sister and I could carry, and we spent hours dividing the stash fairly between us. I found out later that he was a leftist in the democratic party and a journalist, and had spent three years as a political prisoner in Iraq not long before he visited us.

  My father is warm pita bread dipped in lebne (strained yogurt) dribbled in olive oil, which he ate each morning before work. He alternated each bite with a sip of sweet tea, just like his father, though he drank his with milk and sugar in a mug instead of black in a chiming glass. He is also Saturday afternoon standing quietly in the kitchen stirring an Iraqi bamiya—tomato, okra and lamb casserole—or an Indian-style potato and chicken curry. The weekdays were English food cooked by my mother, but the weekends were often Arabic food, tabbouleh (chopping the parsley took hours), grilled chicken with garlic sauce, kebabs, saffron rice with raisins, almonds and pine nuts.

  My mother is the tinkle of the six jangling gold bangles from Iraq that she wears on her right arm and has not removed in forty years since she first put them on. They
were a wedding present from my father’s family, the traditional gold jewellery given to a bride in Iraq. When I was a girl, they were an alarm, always announcing her arrival into a room before she got there. One day, she took me into her bedroom and opened her jewellery box and showed me all the gold necklaces, bracelets and rings that my father’s family had given her over the years of their visits. There was a gold-and-black winged bull of Assyria on a gold chain from her mother-in-law, a bracelet that was linked with small blocks of gold that looked to my eyes like tiny chocolate bars from Auntie Madeline, and gold-and-turquoise necklaces, rings and bracelets.

  I remember her unlacing a small velvet bag and showing me the tiny pearl-and-gold bracelet that my grandparents had given to me when I was born. It was a miniature replica of a bracelet-and-necklace set they had presented to my mother. Already it was far too small for me because it was made for a baby, but my mother fastened on my wrist another gold bracelet engraved with my name. The gold was so pure that it was soft and bent easily. Even though I never wore the petite pearl bracelet, it hung in my mind and I waited patiently for the day when my arm would be big enough to wear my mother’s bracelet.

  A year after their visit, when I was eight, Iraq became associated with a faraway place, rather than just a people. A foreign-looking package arrived from Iraq. My grandmother had sent me a traditional Arab costume, a black head scarf and an embroidered dress she’d made out of scratchy pink-and-silver material. The fabric was scented with the peculiar musky smell of another country that had been preserved in its packaging. The dress fit perfectly, and I wore it on a float that was part of a multicultural parade in the local village. I sat cross-legged in my costume, waving an Iraqi flag at the English townspeople. I felt different compared to all the other times I’d played dress-up. My dark brown eyes and brown hair looked right underneath the black scarf. My features that hadn’t looked pale enough in my maroon English school uniform suddenly felt like they had a place. On the float, waving behind this other self, I caught a glimpse of what it was to be an outsider, and of what England looked like from a small distance behind a head scarf.

  In 1982 my family moved from London to Canada, and I didn’t see my Iraqi grandparents or great-aunts and -uncles anymore or have any direct contact with them, never even hearing their voices on the telephone. The vitality of that half of my bloodline went dormant, silent, and I was left with my ghostly memories. But I always thought that I would see them again someday. I didn’t realize then that I’d already said my goodbyes.

  IBRAHIM

  AMAL IN THE GARDEN OF OUR HOUSE IN BAGHDAD

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Orange Orchard

  Ten minutes was all it took to keep the Pentagon’s promise . . . of “shock and awe,” as the trappings of Saddam Hussein’s regime were obliterated. The onslaught began at 9.02pm Baghdad time and by 9.12pm the mass of concrete hulks and lavish palaces that had symbolised Saddam’s thirty-year rule . . . were turned into burning pyres. . . . From the east side of the river, it was like watching a gigantic video game. As soon as one building was hit, low-flying jets struck again . . . They set off great jets of fire as easily as the flick of a cigarette lighter . . . trails of red anti-aircraft fire from the Iraqi defences twinkled in the sky, as insubstantial as fairy lights. . . .—“30 Years of Saddam Razed,” The Guardian, March 22, 2003

  I am alone at home in Vancouver watching Baghdad burning on television. It is March 22, 2003. Fires rage all over the city, and the black night is illuminated by those bonfires. A few nights ago, I woke from a vivid dream of walking in those streets, along the walls of Saddam’s palace enclosures near where I know my family house is, touching the sand-coloured stone. I felt such relief to be in Baghdad, despite my fear. Now it is all burning; great blazes of yellow light destroying the city. For the first time I can see a live feed of the Baghdad of my father’s childhood, which he hasn’t seen himself for more than forty years. I pick up the phone and call my father. His choked words echo in my mind: “There are people in all those buildings. Those aren’t empty buildings. Just think of that.”

  I imagine all the people I know who are trapped and cowering under the threat of those bombs landing on their houses: my great-aunt Lina, my cousins Karim and Maha, their children Reeta and Samir, my other uncles and aunts on my father’s side who I have never met. I think of all their extended families and of my friend Farah Nosh, an Iraqi-Canadian photojournalist who is covering the war for the New York Times and other international publications.

  Three days earlier, the front page of The Globe and Mail newspaper ran a photograph of Baghdad at sunset. The peaceful city is a beautiful golden sandy hue and pale green date palms line the Tigris River. Staring into it, I felt cheated. I was finally seeing Baghdad, but it was about to be destroyed.

  The next day, The Globe and Mail front page headline ran, “First strike on Baghdad targets Iraqi leadership.” The war had started. Cruise missiles and stealth F-117 warplanes launched “decapitation strikes” to kill Saddam Hussein at dawn.

  In all the months of buildup to the war, I hadn’t believed the United States would attack Iraq again. When the invasion proved imminent and inevitable, a week before war was declared, I’d called my aunts, Amal, Siham and Ibtisam, in London and asked them if they thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

  “How can he have weapons?” Amal said in her lilting Iraqi accent. “The country has nothing, no medicine, no food, no money, never mind weapons! How can people believe this?”

  Amal lived through the Iran–Iraq War until 1988 and was on holiday in London in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Gulf War started five months later, and she and her two sisters have lived in London together ever since.

  “I’ve just been on the phone with Auntie Lina in Baghdad. Of course, we are more frightened than they are,” she said.

  “We have lived through war before,” Lina had told Amal. Unmarried Lina, now seventy, had been like a mother to my aunts, visiting them every day when they were children and moving in with them when Amal was a teenager in Baghdad. “We know what it is to be bombed. In a way, the bombing has never stopped.”

  They were frightened, Lina said, but since they didn’t have satellite television they didn’t know just how much weaponry was targeting their country. Iraqi state television was galvanizing the weary people to believe that the war would be won by Iraq. And Amal didn’t contradict this message. She didn’t tell Lina that our newspapers were speculating that the US–UK war plan was to launch more missiles in the first day of bombarding Baghdad than they had done in the first sixty days of the Gulf War, and that the Pentagon planned to strike Baghdad with three thousand precision-guided bombs and missiles in the first two days.

  My middle-class relatives in Baghdad were reduced to stockpiling their yearly rations of flour, sugar and rice, which amounted to one sack of each and a small amount of tea.

  “We are already dieting,” my great-aunt joked.

  There were no perishable items, of course, because the fridge and stove wouldn’t work as soon as the electrical plant was bombed. The neighbours were digging a well. During the Gulf War, the water supply was hit immediately (“Why?” my great-aunt asked). But the well water was contaminated, and she’d have to boil it before they could drink it. She was planning to cook on a portable stove until her one canister of gas ran out.

  Amal asked Auntie Lina what she would do when that canister was finished.

  “I will look out at the Seville orange trees in the garden,” Lina replied.

  Lina was planning to stay at our family house for the duration of the war, however long it took. She was going to look after it, just as she had done during the Gulf War and since, because her own house was rented out. She didn’t want to leave our house empty for fear of looting. She saw herself as the guardian of our home and garden until our family could come back to claim it. It was if she was expecting us one day.

  When my father lived in Iraq as a
boy, in the months of February and March the narinj trees produced small juicy oranges as bitter as lemons. It is a different species of orange than the one we know and eat. Even in Spain, this species is merely ornamental, but in Iraq the fruit of the tree is used for cooking. My grandfather Khalil would cut down the oranges when they were ripe.

  “The juice was excellent for making many delicious dishes and salads,” my great-aunt told Amal. “Do you remember? Your brother and his cousins used to collect them, your mother would squeeze them and heat the juice, which we’d keep for the winter—a hundred jars of orange juice,” she said, “and we’d make marmalade with the peel.”

  During the Gulf War, the trees lost all their leaves.

  “Maybe it was the lack of water or they were poisoned,” Lina speculated.

  After the war, the trees produced deformed fruit that was inedible.

  “The orange trees are dying,” Lina told Amal.

  If the war lasted too long and the gas ran out, my great-aunt said that they planned to chop the trees down and burn them for fuel.

  “What else can we do?” she said, her voice rising.

  When Amal and I discussed it afterwards we agreed that we couldn’t tell how serious she was.

  On the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, through this short conversation, my great-aunt was resurrected for me. Through the sanction years, after the Gulf War until the 2003 invasion, no one had talked much about her. Since I had left London, she hadn’t been alive to me. And now I pictured her daily life, her real concerns and her kindness in protecting our family home while preparing for yet another siege and bombardment. Just as I’d found her, I was going to lose her again.

  We couldn’t drop bombs on my seventy-year-old aunt. I felt that anyone hearing her story would realize this. In a desperate rush, I wrote an article entitled “Living Through a War in Baghdad” and sent it to The Globe and Mail, praying the newspaper would publish it. But by the time the article was published, it was March 20, and the US and UK were dropping their “targeted” bombs on Saddam Hussein and “collaterally” on the people of Iraq.