The Dove Flyer E-Book

Eli Amir

• Herausgeber: Halban
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

When his Uncle Hizkel is arrested, Kabi and his family face an uncertain future as do all Jews living in 1950s' Baghdad. Each member of Kabi's circle has a different dream: his mother wants to return to the Moslem quarter where she felt safer; his father wants to emigrate to Israel and grow rice there while Salim, his headmaster, wants Arabs and Jews to be equal, and Abu Edouard just wants to continue to care for his beloved doves.

Leseprobe

To Ophira and to the memory of my father, Salim Liahu Khalaschi and my mother, Miriam Moshi Moelm

Contents

Title PageDedication1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.21.22.23.24.25.26.27.28.29.30.31.32.33.34.35.36.37.38.39.40.41.42.43.44.45.46.47.48.49.50.51.52.53.54.55.56.About the AuthorCopyright

1.

Although we should have been sleeping on the roof as we always did during the summer in Baghdad, my mother had yet to bring up the beds, fit them with mosquito netting, and put the water jug out to cool on the balcony. Perhaps she was loath to acknowledge the change of the seasons or feared the late spring sandstorms that turned the city’s skies red.

My father saw storm warnings too, which had raged like a whirling sword since the hanging of the wealthy Jewish merchant Shafik Addas. Every night the CID, the Iraqi secret service, visited houses in search of weapons, two-way radios, and the Hebrew textbooks distributed by “the Movement”, as the Zionist underground was called by us. Hundreds of Jews were dragged off to torture chambers and forced to confess at summary trials staged by the military regime.

Shafik Addas was not a native Iraqi. He was a Syrian who had turned up one day in Basra, the City of Date Palms, and gone into the car import business from which he made a fortune put at millions of dinars. Among the regular guests in his mansion were wazirs, emirs, sheikhs, army officers, even Regent Abdullah. Addas was to Basra what Big Imari, my father’s cousin, was to Baghdad. It was his overconfidence that proved his downfall. Instead of taking – like Big Imari – a Moslem from a prominent family to manage his affairs, deal with government officials and bribe them when necessary, he ran his business himself and acted the equal of any Arab. He was envied and made enemies, and neither his aloofness from his fellow Jews nor the life of a dyed-in-the-wool Iraqi that he led were able to save him in the end.

A hot desert wind blew that night. Lying in the kabishkan, my little attic room, I couldn’t fall asleep. It was asphyxiatingly hot and I was worried. Worse yet, Miss Sylvia had picked the next day to test us on Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” and I wanted badly to outperform George. To be or not to be. What choice was there? I was too young to dwell on death but the fate of Shafik Addas kept me awake. One spin of fortune’s wheel and even a muhtashem like him, a potentate at the height of his career, was just another Jew at the end of a rope. Although I hadn’t seen it, I could picture the screaming mob in the square. Both old Hiyawi and my Uncle Hizkel had been there and told me about it.

It had happened less than a year before, right after Passover, during the wave of arrests that followed the establishment of Israel. The new defence minister Sadik al-Bassam, or Sadik el-Bassam Damn-His-Soul as we Jews called him, had wanted to teach us a lesson. Shafik Addas was a godsend. The editor of the Basra newspaper An-Nas had asked him for a “contribution” of a thousand dinars and Addas had refused to comply. What, he had thought, could a mere journalist do to him when he was friends with everyone in the government and police?

Now, lying in bed, I couldn’t help reflecting how the choice of whether to be or not to be was sometimes made without knowing. Two days later the editor published a vicious article accusing Addas of selling arms to “the Zionist gangs” and spying for ad-dowa al maz’uma, “the make-believe state”, as Israel was called. The newspaper demanded an investigation, and as soon as copies of it reached Baghdad there was a clamour for Addas’s head. It was practically a holy war; the whole country talked of nothing else. The only one who seemed unaffected was Addas himself, who – or so it now seemed – had lost his instinct for survival. The night before his arrest he was secretly visited by the provincial governor, Fahri el-Tabakchali, who urged him to flee to Iran in a speedboat that was waiting to take him safely across the Shatt-el-Arab and out of danger in half an hour. Addas wouldn’t hear of it. “They have nothing on me,” he insisted each time the governor quoted the proverb El-hazimaranima, “He who runs for his life takes it with him as his loot.”

The next day Addas was arrested. The trial lasted three days. His three lawyers resigned one by one because the judge, Abdallah en-Na’san, a Jew-hating army officer, refused to hear any defence witnesses. Sadik al-Bassam signed the death warrant at once, after which the Regent equivocated for three days. He was Addas’s friend and knew better than anyone what a patriot the condemned man had been. Yet when Addas’s wife went down on her knees before him, he could only stare at the ground and reply that the matter was no longer in his hands.

“Kabi, my boy,” said old Hiyawi, “what can I tell you? The day before the execution I went to Basra with your Uncle Hizkel to fast and pray with the Jews there as Rabbi Bashi told us to do. On the way I wanted to say a prayer at the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel in Kifl. I was afraid your uncle would refuse – you know what a firebrand he is – but he not only agreed, he said he had been thinking of it too. By the time we reached Basra there were mass demonstrations in the streets. Even small children were carrying effigies of Addas and calling for his blood. And the next day – woe to the eyes that saw it! – he was hung in front of his home. Once wasn’t enough for them; they actually strung him up twice. I’m an old man and I’ve never seen or heard the likes of it. The mob went as wild as if the prophet Muhammed had come back to life. There were thousands of Moslems from Basra and the area, and some who had come all the way from Baghdad. Whole families. They waited up all night, dancing and shouting Allah akbar. We were afraid to go out and watched through the cracks in the shutters. Kabi, what can I tell you? We live in a country where judges mock justice and rulers know no mercy.”

In their hotel that night he and my uncle didn’t sleep a wink. Hizkel, from whom I heard the story too, said that Addas’s trial reminded him of the Dreyfus Affair, which had inspired Herzl to write his book The Jewish State. My uncle was a passionate believer in Zionism and an expert on its history. After Addas’s death he wrote an editorial titled “Confessions Of The Hangman’s Noose” for which the newspaper he published was shut down. “The trial of Shafik Addas,” it said, “was the trial of every Jew. If an Addas can be hung, who will save the rest of us?”

I tossed and turned on my wooden bed until I felt as if I was rocking in a hammock. I dreamed of purple fields and of a great eagle that carried me to the fabled gates of Jerusalem and knocked on them with its beak. And then, all at once, I knew for a terrifying fact that the knocks were on our front gate. It was useless to try to ignore them by pulling the blanket over my head. I got out of bed and stared blindly into the dark. They’re here. They would find the arms. They would take my father.

I roused myself and went downstairs to my parents’ room. The light was on and my mother stood by the double bed with the colour gone from her face. My father lay in bed. He had been running a fever for three days and had dark bags beneath his bloodshot eyes. Strands of thick grey hair stuck out from his woollen cap and his thin moustache had all but vanished in his unshaven face.

“They’re here!” whispered my mother in an unsteady voice.

“What will we do, Abu Kabi?”

“Kabi, open the gate for them,” said my father.

I headed for the courtyard, stopping at the end of the long hallway to grope for the light switch. My breath came in shallow spurts. The banging on the gate made me tremble. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I tried calling in Moslem Arabic, but the words came out in a Jewish dialect. I turned the big key and lifted the heavy wooden latch that my Uncle Hizkel had made not long before. I was immediately pinned against the wall. Four soldiers burst inside, dragging Hizkel who lived nearby. His bloody face was beaten to a pulp. His wife Rashel followed frantically behind them.

“Look what they’ve done to him!” she wailed.

“He’ll swing for it,” said a soldier, running a finger over his throat.

“No!” She let out a scream and reached for Hizkel, clutching at his shoulder.

“Out of the way, you!” barked the soldier.

2.

The devastation lasted a good hour-and-a-half. At four in the morning I was back in the courtyard again, accompanying the soldiers to the gate. Hizkel was lying by the cesspit. He seemed to be trying to smile at me with his swollen lips that were mashed out of shape. Rashel sat beside him with a frightened look, stroking his wounds as if drawing the pain from them. One of the soldiers, named Adnan, was in a vile mood because an oil lamp had shattered in his hands while he was searching the cellar. He rammed the jalala, the wooden chair-swing, with his rifle butt until it split lengthwise and calmed down only after booting Hizkel in the ribs. Rashel tried desperately to shield him and was driven back with a blow to her chest. Her eyes filled with tears.

Adnan studied the oil stain on his uniform. I wanted to throw a lit match at it. Would I ever carry out any of my fantasies? Not until the day that I could overcome my fear of these soldiers.

An officer appeared in the courtyard and ordered that Hizkel be taken away. Before he could get to his feet he was dragged to a jeep outside, his eyes two white flares in the dark lane.

“Kus um-el-yahud, get the hell up!” yelled Adnan.

Hizkel tried raising himself with his handcuffed arms, collapsed, and tried again. In the end he got to his feet with Rashel’s help. He stiffened when he saw me, turning his head away from the soldiers to hide a grimace that seemed to say: Hush not a word you know nothing. Perhaps Rashel, who was not in on the secret, was not meant to see either. She supported him while Adnan eyed her trim body in the glare of the headlights. “Instead of messing around with these Jews, we ought to be fucking their wives,” he said.

“Watch it now,” said the officer with a wag of his finger as he climbed into the jeep by the driver. “Allah let you off easy this time.” Two soldiers pushed Hizkel into the back seat and sat on either side of him.

“Hizkel, Hizkel,” wept Rashel. The jeep disappeared around a curve in the lane, leaving behind a stench of exhaust. Rashel threw back her head, buried her face in her hands and burst into sobs. “They’ll hang him like Shafik Addas,” she said, shaking all over. She bit her lips.

“Don’t even think of it,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder. “He’ll be back, I’m sure of it. Come on inside.”

“I want to go home,” she said. Her eyes had an eerie, blank look. “I need to be by myself.” She slipped away and left me standing there.

Only now did I feel how exhausted I was from all the tension and anxiety. Who knew what their next move might be or what they would do to Hizkel? They were sure to come back for my father. They always took the heads of families. I locked the gate and ran up the steps to my parents’ room. “They’re gone!” I shouted, as if to exorcise the stifling fear.

“And Hizkel?” My father sat up in bed.

“They took him.”

“God give him strength,” murmured my mother with tears in her eyes.

“Did they hurt him? Tell me the truth,” demanded my father. I said nothing.

“Did they search the cellar?”

I knew that my mother knew nothing and so I made a face as if to say: Hardly at all. They didn’t find a thing.

“I should have gone downstairs and tried bribing them.”

“They would have taken you too,” said my mother.

“If they had wanted me, they would have taken me from my deathbed. He’s my own flesh-and-blood, damn it all! I should have tried. Who knows if we’ll have another chance? It’s the damn fear that keeps a man from thinking straight.”

“I’m going to Rashel’s,” said my mother, belting her house robe.

“You do that, woman. And tell her to get in touch with Menashi Zleiha, the lawyer, and to give him my name. He can send me the bill. Kabi, walk your mother over and come right back.”

I went with my mother. “Whatever made us move to this damned place and this damned life,” she muttered as we crossed the courtyard. She meant that we should never have left our old house in the Moslem neighbourhood of el-Me’azzam for the Jewish quarter of Taht el-Takya. My mother blamed everything on that decision. If only we had stayed put, my father wouldn’t have fallen in with a bunch of shiftless Zionists who played at being heroes. What kind of life was that for a forty-year-old man with a wife and children? “Waweli, everyone’s gone mad: the Jews, the Moslems, everyone!”

It was beyond her. The Moslems had always been good neighbours. They had looked after us and protected us. We had all drunk from the same well. And then ten years ago, along came the Farhood, the anti-Jewish riots, and nothing was quite the same again. But, since daily life had gone back to a semblance of normality, why set up underground groups and run risks for a Jewish country far away? It could only lead to more hangings and persecution. “Allah have mercy,” my mother said in a loud voice, kissing the mezuzah on Hizkel’s front gate as I followed her through it.

“Why is the house so dark?” she asked Rashel, who was sitting in a trance on the marble bench in the courtyard. She switched on the light and led Rashel indoors. The courtyard looked like a battlefield. The torn quilts and scattered feathers made sense, but even after having seen our own home ransacked I couldn’t fathom the broken dishes, pieces of which lay everywhere. I stepped inside and stood aghast in the doorway of my uncle’s study at the sight of his torn, trampled books and dumped desk drawers, their contents splattered with smashed ink bottles. Rashel and my mother went into the bedroom and sat on the bed.

“Did they find anything?” asked my mother.

“How should I know? They took all sorts of books and papers.” Rashel’s eyes betrayed her shock.

“Oh my God, what have we got ourselves into?” murmured my mother.

Rashel wrung her hands. “What am I going to do?”

“Abu Kabi says you should go to Menashi Zleiha, the lawyer.”

“Where was he? Why didn’t he come downstairs to help his brother?”

“I told him not to. He’s sick. He’s had a high fever for the past three days. A beating could have killed him.”

“Only Hizkel stuck his neck out. Now they’ll hang him like Shafik Addas.” Rashel spoke the words to herself as if she couldn’t stop them.

“You mustn’t talk like that,” scolded my mother. “The prophet Ezekiel will protect him.”

Blouses, brassieres, even a pair of purple pants, littered the rug. My mother saw me staring at them.

“Go home to your father, Kabi,” she said. I blushed and left. My father was on his way up from the cellar when I returned. “You’re just in time,” he told me. “I forgot to bring a bulb. Go and get one and come downstairs.”

We screwed in the bulb and switched on the light, sending the bats flitting to their holes. There was a strong smell of oil from the broken lamp. “Quick,” said my father. “We have to finish before your mother gets back. It’s best she does not know.”

It took all our strength to move the old iron stove. We lifted the floor tiles beneath it and opened the wooden case that Hizkel had made. My father took out a flat box with the parts of a Thompson submachine gun and some cases of ammunition. I remembered how proud I had felt a few months ago to be taken down to the cellar when my mother and little brothers were away and was shown the hiding place in case I had to get rid of the arms in an emergency.

“I’ll take them somewhere,” said my father.

“Let me do it,” I said. “Tell me where.”

“No. I want you to go carefully to the souk and make sure there’s no army or police around.”

The windows facing the street were all lit. Querying eyes peered out at me. Farha, the cross-eyed widow who slept with the dove flyer and knew and gossiped about everything, was beside herself. “What happened?” she asked, pawing at me nervously. “Why did they come for Hizkel?”

“Mind your own business,” I told her.

“Listen to him!” she exclaimed to the neighbours. “Just the other day he was still filling his pants!”

I ignored her and continued up the street. Although I was supposed to be looking out for soldiers, in the darkness I was more afraid of djinns, those demons who were compared by some to flickering flames and by others to leech-like dwarves, vampire bats, huge, buzzing caterpillars, monsters dancing on the wind. Although there was a special incense used by Indian fakirs that was said to drive them away, the best method of sending them scurrying to their lairs was to stab their weird forms with a knife. Of course, I knew that this was all superstition, and my father worried me more than the djinns. Still, when I stuck my hands in my pockets, I wished that I hadn’t left my penknife in my other trousers.

The first grey glow of dawn in the sky was too weak to light the narrow lanes that wound between the crowded, piggybacked houses. I was at the edge of the neighbourhood now, near the street that led to the souk. Although they were generally up by this hour, the bakers, greengrocers, and chai’ikhana or teahouse owners had not yet appeared; they too must have heard of Hizkel’s arrest and were taking no chances. I thought of Rashel sitting among the debris of her home, her purple pants at her feet. She was half a woman and half still a girl, and she was attractive even when she cried. You idiot, I told myself, what kind of thing is that to think about now? I ran home. My father was dressed, his hair was combed and a straw shopping basket slung over his arm. “Is the coast clear?” he asked.

“They’re gone. I didn’t see one soldier or policeman.”

“Wait for me here,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

I heaved a sigh of relief when he returned safely twenty minutes later, without the gun.

“Remember, Kabi,” he told me, “if anything should ever happen to me, go to Abu Saleh the baker. He’ll be in charge.”

By the time my mother returned from Rashel’s, he was in his pyjamas and grey dressing gown again.

“She wouldn’t even let me help her clean up,” grumbled my mother. “She always has to do everything by herself.”

3.

As soon as it was light, I went as usual to buy bread and kemar. In the street I met old Hiyawi on his way to synagogue, a bag with his prayer shawl and phylacteries under his arm.

“Ah, Kabi,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me? After last night, we need to pray.” He nodded with his chin towards Hizkel’s house. “The poor thing.”

“Who?”

“As if you didn’t know. She’s a fine, a truly fine woman. The plagues of Pharaoh upon them, damn their souls! It’s worse now than in the days of the Turk.” Hiyawi always spoke of Turkish times with nostalgia. He patted my face with a bony hand. “Don’t you worry, my boy. ‘For the Lord will not forsake His people nor abandon His heritage.’”

“Amen,” I murmured, afraid he might spray me with spittle.

“I’m going this morning to see Rabbi Bashi, God preserve him. I’ll see what he can do for Hizkel.”

“Allah give you long life,” I said.

“Only the rabbi can get us out of this. He’s our leader and prince. None of your rebel upstarts against him is worth the dust on his feet.”

“My Uncle Hizkel is no upstart.”

“Don’t play innocent, boy. Your uncle doesn’t appreciate the rabbi. I pity his wife, though. Come to synagogue. Prayer does wonders for the soul. It restores a man to his God.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“And your answer is no again, eh? I suppose you have more urgent business.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Well, buy me two pittas and the Lord bless your day.” Hiyawi took some money from his robe. “And make sure they’re soft, boy,” he said, pointing to his rotten teeth.

“All right, all right,” I said. “You don’t have to remind me each time.”

I gripped my basket and walked on without looking back. If I was being followed, it was best not to show that I suspected it. In the little paved square in front of the souk I kept an eye out for Ismail, the Moslem street-gang leader who, something told me, worked for the police. Perhaps it was his asking so many questions each time he turned up in our neighbourhood to challenge us to the belt fights that he always won.

I wanted to run and had to force myself to act nonchalant. At the entrance to the souk a dense procession of mourners swept by me. Men in dark cloaks and dotted keffiyehs and women in veils and dark dresses appeared like wraiths from the underworld, engulfing me as if they were a swarm of black crows. Professional mourners dressed in black, their faces rouged and ashes on their heads, could have been ghosts. At a sign from their leader, a chorus of female voices let loose bloodcurdling howls of grief and the terror of death. I thought of the wizened old crone who had wailed through the seven days of mourning for my grandfather and who had frightened me so with her shrieks that I ran to hide in the cellar, from which not even the cries of the bats could pry me loose.

Curious onlookers, some of them Jews, lined the rooftops, staring at the black-draped coffin that bobbed precariously upon the hands that held it. Well, that’s one Arab less, I told myself, guiltily thinking of Miss Sylvia who liked to talk in her English literature class about humanism and the love of mankind. The funeral passed by. A heavy-set, unveiled woman, no doubt the dead man’s mother, staggered behind the coffin like a blind dove, striking and scratching her face. The professional mourners beat their breasts lightly, grazing them with their fists while shrieking as if torn limb from limb. I had to force myself not to laugh. I knew it was their job to stir the other mourners, but it amazed me how well they performed it, as if they were grieving for their own sons. Gradually their cries grew distant and the day went back to normal.

Souk Hinuni, the Jewish market place, rarely stopped to catch its breath. Its bustle started well before sunrise and lasted until long after sunset. Only the lack of electric light kept most of its stands from staying open till midnight. There were hundreds of them, each with its colours and smells. The porters beneath their baskets of fruit, shouting at the shoppers to make way; the donkeys braying at the crowds that blocked their carts; the fiercely bargaining customers; the passers-by talking in loud voices; the women shrilling with joy to meet old friends; the cries of the stuck kerosene wagon drivers; the bubble of gas burners in the teashops; the deep roar of the bread ovens – without its symphony of sounds, the souk would have been as dreary and lifeless as it was when it shut down on Sabbaths and Jewish holidays.

“Hot sambusak, hot sambusak!” The smell of cumin and chickpeas in bubbling oil tickled my nostrils. I stood by the sambusak stand as I did every morning, put down my basket, flexed my stiff shoulder muscles, rubbed my hands with outstretched fingers, reached out for a piece of the hot pastry, and bit into it, thinking for the umpteenth time: Paradise must taste like this. As I slipped my change into my pocket, I saw a policeman heading towards me. I started to choke, spraying spittle like old Hiyawi and bits of chickpeas in all directions.

“Ala keifak, ibni, easy does it,” said the sambusak vendor, wiping his stand with a dirty rag. “Move over, my boy, give someone else a chance.”

The man in uniform took his place beside me. I was too paralyzed to move. Instead of taking my basket and walking on, I stood there feeling as if my burning face had been deep-fried in oil too. Why hadn’t I gone straight to the bakery? “T’fadl azizi Here you are, my friend,” said the sambusak man, offering the policeman a slice. Although clearly intending to take it, the policeman gave it a deliberating look. Even after he bit into the crisp surface, smacked his lips, and flashed me a smile, I felt that he was staring at me suspiciously and my attempt to say knowingly “Good, eh?” ended with a doughy lump in my throat.

It was only when he turned away from me to ask for a second helping that I realized that guilt was not written on my face. I picked up the basket and moved on, throwing away the last of the sambusak with a sick feeling in my stomach. Although I felt like kneeling and throwing up right there, I kept going to the bakery, pushing my way through the crowd of customers at the door. Devilish flames shot from the cast-iron oven, before which stood Abu Saleh el-Hibaz, the baker and local hero, with a white keffiyeh around his head. Abu Saleh was a large, solidly-built man with a furry mat of black hair on his chest, a bullish neck with which he could lift a sack of flour like a feather when he wished to impress his admirers, dark, roguish eyes, and a swarthy, good-natured face that never lost its gleaming smile. Balls of dough were arranged on a rectangular kneading board at his side. One by one he took them in his big hands and flattened them with loud slaps, then pounded, stretched, and tossed them from palm to palm until they were the shape of thin platters. These he placed on a small cushion singed at the edges and flipped onto the wall of the oven, repeating the process over and over. When there was no room left in the oven, he began to sing in a deep bass voice:

Get your hot pitta,

Step up and eat her,

Come buy her before

I don’t have any more!

I knew it was pointless to try talking to him now. Luckily, Mi’tuk the rhymester wasn’t there, because once he arrived the two could go on all day inventing verses about the baker’s fragrant bread. Abu Saleh winked when he saw me. Did he know? He took hold of some tongs and peeled the pittas, steamy and crisp with the smell of life itself, off the oven wall with quick movements. Spreading them on the counter, he looked at them with fresh wonder and let out a whistle of admiration.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Amira, my friend Edouard’s gorgeous sister, wishing me a good morning. Every boy in the neighbourhood was in love with her. So was Abu Saleh, who wanted to marry her. I nodded hello, my eyes on the pomegranates of her breasts.

“Morning, princess,” beamed the baker. When Amira had been a little girl and he an apprentice, he had sculpted her tiny clay dolls and statues and baked them in the oven. As she grew older, she received her own private hununa, a small, flaky pitta made just for her. Later still he began singing verses to her, inviting his customers to join in.

By the window sat Amira,

Doing her embroidery.

Six curls tumbled on her forehead:

Three and then another three.

Up the street came a brave laddie,

To her window secretly.

Six whole hairs were in his moustache,

Three and then another three.

Through the window looked Amira,

And his heart burned ardently.

Six sweet kisses did he give her,

Three and then another three.

Soon enough word reached her father,

And he smouldered wrathfully.

Six slaps on the cheek he gave him,

Three and then another three.

The poor lad with shame was stricken

And turned red indignantly.

Six tears down his cheeks did trickle,

Three and then another three.

Although Abu Saleh el-Hibaz had asked for Amira’s hand, her father, Abu Edouard the dove flyer, thought his princess deserved better. The fact was that ever since the two men had competed to buy the bakery, Abu Edouard could not stand Abu Saleh. Amira’s father had coveted the bakery for the large open space at its rear, which would have made a perfect place for his junk yard, and Abu Saleh – so Abu Edouard told my father, who tried arbitrating between them – had sabotaged the deal by convincing the Moslem seller that he, Abu Edouard, would not be able to keep up the payments. Yet even though he refused to talk to the baker, on whom he had sworn to take his revenge, he went on relishing his bread, and most of all his barley pittas, there being none better in the neighbourhood.

Abu Saleh plastered the walls of his oven with more dough, told Sami, his assistant, to look after the customers, and beckoned me out to the yard. After looking to make sure there were no eavesdroppers, I said:

“They’ve taken Hizkel.”

“I know,” said Abu Saleh, sitting on a stool and wiping his brow. “We’ll make them pay for it. And we’ll spring Hizkel, too. You don’t know how much he means to me. I was just a dumb kid when I first met him. He took me into the new vocational school that he opened and I was in the first class to graduate. You should have seen how thrilled he was to see me, he who never thought I would amount to anything, reading his newspaper to the illiterate shopkeepers around here! After the Farhood he and your father asked me to join the Shabbab el-Inkath, the Emergency Youth Brigade set up to defend the Jewish quarter. I was already its commander when we started the Movement. I remember Hizkel saying at our first meeting: ‘We’ll rebuild the kingdom of Judah – we’ll restore our past glory – we’ll make history!’

“It was like hearing the wingbeats of the angels. We followed him to a man, my whole class. It was in my cellar that we celebrated the first anniversary of the State of Israel, swearing allegiance to it and reciting the Psalms as if the Messiah had come. I wanted to go there right away, to fight in the Jewish army, but Hizkel was against it. He wanted me to be here in case there were more Farhoods. ‘We’re the captains of this ship,’ he said, ‘and we won’t leave it until we’ve got all our passengers ashore.’”

Abu Saleh wiped his brow again with a grunt and said: “Lord, who can fill his shoes now? Waweli, I left the oven full of bread!” He ran back into the bakery, from which came a scorched smell, scooped the pittas from the oven, threw the burned ones into a rusty can, and laid out the good ones on the counter. When the crowd of customers thinned out, he handed me our daily order, adding two soft pittas for Hiyawi and four for Rashel. “Tell her to keep her chin up,” he whispered. “And that I swear by all the bread in the world to free Hizkel. We’ll all go to Jerusalem together.”

Fat’hiya, the pretty Bedouin kemar seller, was sitting on the floor by the right-hand wall of the bakery. In winter she moved to the other wall to be closer to the oven, sitting cross-legged on a thin cushion while listening to the musical crackle of the pittas and Abu Saleh crooning Bedouin love songs:

Would I were a golden chain

Worn around thy neck,

Sometimes falling on thy heart

Sometimes on thy breast.

Now and then their eyes met, and as soon as the bakery emptied she flashed him a smile, her one gold filling, or so she thought, adding a winsome touch to her rows of white teeth. Then they went down to the cellar to drive the rats from their holes with the groans of their love making.

Fat’hiya was cloaked in black from head to toe, revealing nothing but the cracked soles of her feet. The thin black kerchief on her head offset her desert beauty with her coal-dark eyes that were painted with kohl and her golden nose-ring. “Ya ayuni, ya Kabi,” she said to me. “You’re late this morning, I’ve kept some kemar for you, though.” With a long mattress-maker’s needle she sliced a big piece of the jelled butterfat that had been boiled and cooled, transferring it from its shallow wooden bowl to the serving board I had brought with me.

“Mashallah, the kemar came out extra good today,” she said as she did each morning. Her complexion was like the kemar, smooth, soft and silky. “Kabi,” she asked in her caressing voice, “ichar bich el-yom ya huya? You don’t look your usual self.”

“I didn’t sleep so well,” I said.

She grinned at me mischievously. “Who’s been keeping you awake, Amira?”

“You,” I answered. We both burst out laughing. A policeman sidled up and asked flirtatiously:

“What are you selling there, little sister?”

“The cream of your dreams,” said Fat’hiya.

“Like you, my sweet. A real beauty, isn’t she?” he asked me.

“You bet,” I said.

The policeman wagged his head. “Will you look at that! The boy’s still a child and he’s already got an eye for the ladies. You better watch out when he grows up.”

“He’s a man already, mashallah,” said Fat’hiya, spitting to one side against the Evil Eye.

“What’s your name?” asked the policeman.

“Kabi.”

“Last name?”

“Imari.”

“That rings a bell. Wait a minute … wasn’t someone by that name arrested last night?”

I took a deep breath and tried to look calm and unhurried, though all I wanted was to take to my heels.

“A relative?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.” I smiled at Fat’hiya and wished her a good day. The most important thing, I remembered my father saying, was always to look natural.

4.

Hiyawi was standing in front of Rashel’s house, looking like a scolded child. I waved his soft pittas in the air. “The Lord bless you and keep you,” he said in the words of the Priestly Blessing, placing his hand on my head with a mournful smile. “The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.” He kissed his fingertips, touched them to his eyes, patted my face, and asked: “What does she have against me? Why won’t she let me help her?”

“How am I supposed to know?” I retorted. As I was heading for my front door, he stopped me and handed me some bills. “Here, these are for her.”

“She has all the money she needs,” I said, returning it.

His bottom lip quivered. “Give it to her. She can use every dinar she gets.”

“All right, all right.” I pushed open Rashel’s wooden gate.

“Kabi!” she cried with relief when she saw me. The white dress she had on displayed her trim, full-breasted body. Impaled by her honey-coloured eyes, whose meaning always eluded me, I reached into my basket to hide my embarrassment. “These pittas are from Abu Saleh el-Hibaz,” I said, putting them on the marble bench. “The money is from Hiyawi.”

“The first of them will be the death of my husband and the second of me,” she said.

“I thought it was Hizkel who recruited Abu Saleh.”

“Hizkel is the mind and Abu Saleh is the body. One needs the other.”

“And Hiyawi?”

“That’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you some other time. Give the old lecher his money back.” I could hear a stifled scream in her voice. “You’re too young to understand,” she added, seeing my curious look.

“Exactly two-and-a-half years younger than you are!”

There was a loud knock on the door. “They’re here,” Rashel said, stiffening. A shiver ran down me. She couldn’t get herself to move and so I put down my basket and went to open the gate. All was lost: they would take my father now too. We should have left this damned place while we could have!

Abed was standing at the gate. “It’s you?” I gasped, the air sucked from my lungs all at once.

“The black slave in person.” It was his way of referring to himself.

“Why did you have to knock?”

“Walk in on a woman without knocking? Who taught you manners?”

“But you’re here all the time.”

“For Hizkel, not for her.”

Rashel relaxed when she saw him.

“I’m sorry to hear what happened to Hizkel,” Abed said. “Abu Kabi told me to take you to the lawyer’s. When is a good time for you?”

“I don’t need to be taken,” Rashel said with an obstinacy I had never seen before.

Abed stepped backwards with a submissive smile. “It’s just to escort you through the Moslem neighbourhoods,” he apologized. He had spent all morning helping my mother clean up the mess left by the army.

“I’ll manage on my own,” said Rashel. When he had shut the gate behind him, she said to me:

“What does your father take me for, sending his servant like that?”

“He could have been arrested if he had come here,” I told her. Didn’t she understand his situation?

“And why didn’t he come downstairs last night to see his brother, to talk to the police, to try bribing them?” The question, which clearly haunted her, seemed addressed more to herself than to me. The unwelcome memory passed through my mind of Hizkel being dragged outside like a sack of rice by three soldiers and dumped by the cesspit. “Keep an eye on him!” the officer, who had a chest covered with decorations, had ordered one of his men. “You stay here,” he had told Rashel. Glancing at the faint light from our house across the courtyard, he had asked me: “Where is your father?”

“Upstairs,” I stammered. “He’s sick.”

“Move, you son-of-a-bitch!” barked a soldier.

I climbed the stairs ahead of his studded boots. My mother was standing in the doorway. “Good evening,” she nodded to the officer.

“It’s almost morning,” he replied with a look at my father, who had the blanket pulled up to his chin. “You Jews are wearing us down. Every night it’s another house. Where are the weapons?” My father didn’t bat an eyelid.

“I asked you something,” said the officer.

“What’s that?” replied my father hoarsely.

“Where are the weapons?”

My father shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“We’ll know everything soon enough. Your brother will talk. He’s lying out in the yard now. Maybe you’d like to take a look at him. I’m giving you one last chance to avoid an unpleasant interrogation.”

There was no need to say more. The allusion to the Iraqi secret service sent a shudder through us. My father kept shaking his head. “No matter what happens to me,” I remembered Hizkel telling us, “you don’t know a thing.”

The officer lit a cigarette with a silver lighter and offered one to my father. My father broke into a hacking cough. The officer made a face, stepped away as though from a consumptive, and turned to my mother. My two little brothers, woken by the noise, held onto her dress and stared at him with frightened eyes.

“With your permission, ma’am,” he said with exaggerated courtesy, “I’d like to conduct a little search.”

“Please do,” said my mother, too scared to notice the mockery in his voice.

Our house was reduced to a shambles. Could my father have managed to bribe them? Certainly, the pointless havoc that they wreaked had seemed like an invitation to him to do so. Even he admitted that it wouldn’t have hurt to try. Anyone living in Iraq in those days could have told you as much …

“He was against our marriage from the start,” Rashel now said angrily about my father. “He told Hizkel that my family had no money, that we were nobodies.”

“Where did you hear that nonsense?”

There were tears in her eyes. “He’s had it in for me ever since I asked him not to pressure Hizkel into leading the Movement.”

“Come on, forget it. Why don’t I go to the lawyer with you?” I suggested.

“Thank you. I don’t need anyone. I’ll be fine.” I couldn’t tell if she was reassuring me or herself, but it seemed a good time to leave. At the gate I turned around. “Don’t go without me,” I said trying to sound firm. “The law office isn’t open yet anyway.”

Abed was waiting outside. “What will I tell Abu Kabi?” he asked. “He’ll be furious.” The perpetual twinkle was gone from his little eyes.

“Leave that to me and go and open the shop. My father wants us to carry on as usual.”

“Thank God they let him off.” Abed’s big hands dropped to his sides and he lowered his head meekly, baring equine teeth. “Kabi, walk me to the shop,” he said, putting an arm around me and leading me back towards the souk. “And Allah have pity on your great-grandfather.”

Hiyawi was already in his tobacco shop, sitting in his tattered old easy chair and drinking the morning coffee he had bought from a vendor. He was tapping the coffee cup rhythmically. My father’s shop, which had been purchased from a cloth merchant who sold up in a hurry and moved to India, was nearby in the middle of the neighbourhood. Three steps above street level, it had a large interior and boasted at its front end, visible through the display window, a superb antique glass chest with a selection of my father’s best timepieces, the ones he took special pride in. Two work-tables, his own and Abed’s, stood behind it. Towards the rear of the shop was a green safe and a nook for guests with a couch, a coffee table, two chairs, and some planters that my mother had insisted on. Three framed photographs hung on a wall. The middle and most prominent one was of King Faisal. To its right – guaranteed, my mother believed, to bring the business good luck – was a photograph of the late, saintly Rabbi Yosef Hayyim, and to its left, another of my great-grandfather.

The shop had no telephone. There weren’t many phones in Taht el-Takya. Although my father had begged the Postal Service for one and paid out bribe money, he had never got anywhere. The only shop with a telephone was Hajj Yahya Abd el-Hak, the metalworker’s across from us, which also happened to belong to the neighbourhood’s only Moslem. Hajj Yahya was a stooped, sombre old man with clear skin and a tricornered beard. He wore a white robe and turban and had a brown bump on his forehead from bowing to the ground so many times in prayer. I liked to look at him and his snow-white robe, which was always immaculate, though he spent the whole day hunched over his lathe. He had two sons. The eldest, Ghassan, was a colonel in the Iraqi army and hated Jews; he had fought as a volunteer in Palestine in ’48 and wanted his father to move to a Moslem area. Twice a week, trailed by his bodyguards, he came to visit the old man in his shop, carefully hitching up his trousers to keep them from getting creased and sitting in the only chair, from which he watched the passers-by in the street with his head flung proudly back. His arrival never failed to excite the neighbourhood. Abu Saleh el-Hibaz would come especially to look at him, standing in front of my father’s shop and staring with childlike wonder at Ghassan’s gold-buttoned uniform with its insignia. Before returning to the bakery he would swear that in the Land of Israel he would be a high officer too.

Hajj Yahya’s second son Karim was younger, plumper, and totally unlike his grim brother. He belonged to various organizations for the protection of minorities and considered himself a friend of the Jews, and before becoming a famous and very busy lawyer he had frequented Taht el-Takya nearly every day and dropped in on my father’s shop, which served as a local meeting place, to drink coffee, eat the torpedo-shaped burghul kubba made by Baruch the Kurdish kubba king, and chat with Hizkel and my father about Middle-East politics, the intrigues of the British, the regional interests of the Americans, and the dangers posed by the Communists. He was on familiar terms with the shop’s other visitors and often joined them for a friendly chat over a cup of bitter coffee or sweet tea.

Late in the afternoon I often sat in a corner of the shop, pretending to be reading or doing my homework while listening to the grown-ups talk and wishing that I could be one of them. Hizkel was usually there, stretched out on the couch and napping, or else smoking an aromatic pipe and telling my father the latest news, after which they discussed recent political developments and sought to fathom the motives of Abu Naji, as the English were called, or the byzantine ways of the Anglophile prime minister, Nuri es-Sa’id, whom everyone referred to as “the Pasha”. Among my father and Hizkel’s visitors were Jews from wealthier areas, too, like Bab-esh-Shargi, Ilwi, and el-Kerada. Some of them knew my father from his teaching days, while others simply enjoyed the company of the watchmaker with the legal education who was a member of the renowned Imari clan.

My father, who knew that nobody bought watches first thing in the morning, was not an early riser, and Abed, his Kurdish Jewish helper, opened the shop for him. He tidied up, polished the shop window, aired out the thin Persian rug in winter, sprinkled water on the black floor tiles in summer, and turned on the overhead fan. Abed loved the shop and its business like my father, who often sent him to fetch merchandise, collect debts, make payments, shop in the souk, and even help my mother and us. Abed came to our house regularly for the noon lunch break, and while my mother was filling the safartas, the multi-level food bucket, with cold fruit and slices of watermelon for the afternoon hours, he ate with the rest of us, burping with pleasure and savouring Hiyawi’s expensive Zabana cigarettes. My mother treated him like one of the family, inviting him for holidays and celebrations, giving him my father’s old shirts and suits, and even trying to find a nice Jewish wife for him. Unable to do enough in return, he ran little errands for her, accompanied her to the souk, carried her baskets, and even went back a second time to buy the fruit or vegetables she had forgotten. He also looked after us boys like an older brother, joking and playing pranks with us, or sometimes scolding us and giving advice. In cold, rainy weather, when I was loath to leave my warm bed for the morning’s pittas and kemar, he went in my place, dropping my little brothers off at school and even hoisting me onto his shoulders to keep me out of the muddy streets rutted with cart wheels, donkey hooves, and the bare feet of Kurdish porters. Indefatigable, he was also a jack of all trades who could break down a wall, fix a leaky pipe or tap, replace an electric socket, change a cracked floor tile, plaster and whitewash. He worked quickly and surely, and I liked nothing better than watching him.

The one thing Abed did not like to fix was watches. His big, strong hands balked at the precision of the work, which sometimes called for consulting English catalogues, and my father, who was a perfectionist, gave him none but the simplest tasks. Abed worshipped him. He was eternally grateful for having been taken on as a young orphan, and while my father would never have dreamed of dismissing him, his greatest fear was that this might happen. After sixteen years in my father’s service he still did not dare look at him directly, and it never occurred to him that my father needed him as much as he needed my father.

My father had paid for Abed to study in Hizkel’s vocational school, where he had been in the same class as Abu Saleh el-Hibaz. The two had joined the Movement together too, and Abu Saleh liked and trusted Abed. Like many poor Jews, Abed had no doubt that in Israel he would be treated like a king. He lived in a cheap room in Tatran, in the home of a widow – a mother of six who sometimes stole into his room at night to give him romantic pointers. Actually, he had little to learn from her, since he visited Fauzia, his Arab whore, every Friday night. After the blessing over the wine and the Sabbath meal, he washed and perfumed himself, smeared his head with cheap hair oil, put on an old suit of my father’s and a tie that had seen better days, stuck a rib’i, a half-pint bottle of arrack, in the inner pocket of his jacket, and went off to drink it with Fauzia and tell her of the week’s adventures before tumbling on her mattress until the dawn. Fauzia, who kept her Friday nights free for him and stood fretfully turning down customers in the doorway of the brothel if he sometimes turned up late, was genuinely fond of him. He spent a good part of his earnings on her, which greatly displeased the widow, who had hopes that he would marry her and grant her more than the mere crumbs of his virility.

5.

My father was sitting down to breakfast in his favourite corner near the kitchen, by the arched window with the coloured glass. He skimmed the crust off the milk my mother had boiled for him, spread it on his pitta, and sprinkled it with sugar.

“Babba,” I said, “I’m going with Rashel to the lawyer’s.”

“She wants to go by herself,” said my mother. “She told me so.”

“But why?” asked my father.

“Are you worried she’ll be kidnapped? The lawyer is a Jew and his office isn’t far from here.”

“I don’t know why she can’t do as she’s told,” he complained, rising from his chair.

“Where are you going? Stay at home and stop looking for trouble. You’re sick.” My mother set down a porcelain tray with a soft-boiled egg, kemar, quince jam, and some cubes of salty cheese in warm water. “Eat, it will give you strength,” she said. My father broke off some pitta, dipped it in the orange-coloured jam, and put it back on the tray.

“I’m not hungry,” he told her, watching the bees settle on the jam.

“At least drink something.”

“We have to leave this country!”

“That’s not for us. Leave that to the young folk.”

“Are you telling me I’m too old?”

“Drink some tea. It’s good for your throat.”

“Lots of families have been smuggled across the border. I wanted to leave after the Farhood.”

“Who was stopping you?”

“You were.”

“I was? You were too busy with your watches and your court case against Big Imari. You talked like a Zionist, but all you wanted to do was make money.”

“What kind of thing is that to say!”

“It’s the truth. All you’ve ever thought of is yourself. If you had wanted to leave so badly, you could have have done so.”

“Without you and the children?”

“How can you even pretend to care about us when you’re ready to take us to a country about which there are so many horror stories?”

“Woman, those stories are spread by our enemies. If things were so bad there, no one would stay. And yet not only does nobody come back from there, dozens more Jews set out every day. You believe in God, in the prophet Ezekiel, in the Bible, in the prayer book … why don’t you want to live in the Holy Land?”

“The Holy Land is a dream for the days of the Messiah.”

“Woman, the ground is burning beneath us! Who ever thought it would come to this? As soon as I find out what’s happening with my brother, I’m leaving. The sooner, the better.”

“And I’m not. Get that into your head.”

My mother put no stock in my father’s dreams of Israel, which seemed to her an impulsive male fantasy of distant conquests and adventures spawned by a sense of personal discontent. He had never forgiven himself for not joining his friend Abu Yosef, who went to Palestine after the Farhood. Instead, he, Hizkel, and Abu Saleh el-Hibaz organized the Youth Brigade, which in turn gave birth to the Movement. They collected funds for Palestine, and when reports reached Baghdad about the slaughter of the Jews in Europe and Rabbi Bashi declared a public fast and day of prayer, my father and Hizkel were the first to speak publicly of the need to study Hebrew and prepare for emigration. And yet, in the end, others went while they stayed. Perhaps my mother was right that it was not only she who held my father back but that he was simply afraid to take the plunge. Something bound him more tightly to Baghdad than he realized, a connection he could never break. He himself couldn’t explain it.

“Listen to a story, woman,” he said, pausing until he had her attention. “Once upon a time a man found a starving, frozen snake. He took it home and fed it and laid it on the warming pan to thaw out, and then he put it in bed with his only son. The boy and the snake became good friends and played together. One day, though, the boy stepped on the snake’s tail and it bit him. When the father heard his only son’s screams, he came running with an axe, but the snake wriggled away and only its tail was chopped off. The boy died, and after the week of mourning the snake came out of its hole and said to its master, ‘It’s time I took my leave.’ ‘My son is dead,’ replied the man, ‘and I’m all alone in this house. Stay and keep me company.’ ‘No, master,’ said the snake, ‘that would be a mistake. Whenever you see me you’ll think of your son, and whenever I see you I’ll think of my tail.’ That’s the story of us and the Moslems. They make us think of the Farhood, and we make them think of Palestine.”

“You and your stories,” scoffed my mother. “Why don’t you go and see Big Imari? He’ll get your brother out of jail.”

“Are you starting on that again? I haven’t spoken to him for fourteen years.”

“Your brother’s life is at stake and all you can think of is your own dignity!”

He rose, went to the jalala, and ran his thumb over the widening crack. “May the hands that did this be struck off, son,” he said to me. “It’s time to go to school.”

“Today?”

“Especially today!”

Edouard, the dove flyer’s son, was standing at the top of the street, his schoolbag on one shoulder and his roller skates on the other. He was the leader of our gang and did not usually wait for me, but today was not a usual day.

“Who’ll make us catapults now?” he greeted me.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“You mean you don’t know?”

It took me a minute to remember that my Uncle Hizkel had promised to make us boys catapults. “That’s all that’s on your mind now?”

“Do you think the army will come to our house too?”

“Why,” I mocked, “has your father become a Zionist?”

“It’s enough that we’re your neighbours.”

“Now you are talking like a Zionist.”

The old open-top, double-decker bus was full of students. We climbed the stairs; Edouard sat by the railing and I took the seat next to him. As always my job was to signal to him that the conductor was coming so that he could slip down below without paying.

The students sang marching songs as we slowly made our way past the hundreds of wagons and carriages clogging the road. The narrow streets of Taht el-Takya looked like so many city dumps. Tens of thousands of people lived in them, packed into a crazy quilt of brown and white brick boxes nearly as squalid as those of the nearby Moslem slum of Bab-esh-Sheikh. The same strong smell of urine hung over both.

The further we travelled, the wider the streets grew and the more the view changed. Now we were passing Bab-esh-Shargi, Batawin, Baghdad-el-Jedida, and Ilwi, the fashionable Jewish section of modern Baghdad, with its villas, lawns, flowerbeds, palm trees, cactuses, and long avenues of red and white oleanders. It was a different, peaceful world, the very air of which seemed clearer and smelled better. We passed the mansion of Menashi Dahud Imari, better known as Big Imari, which looked as if it had been lifted from the pages of an English tourist brochure. Behind its high walls, large green gardens could be seen from the top of the bus.