A Reed Shaken by the Wind (21 page)

We left Dibin next morning, through a country filled with a bewildering host of migrating birds, and spent that night at the
mudhif
of Haji Mahaisin, on the Agra. A few hundred yards from us, on the main waterway at right angles to ours, stood the imposing fortress of Nasr of evil repute. For some years past he had been strengthening it, so that now it appeared impregnable to men armed only with small arms. The compound was heavily encircled with barbed wire, and against a flame-coloured sunset the silhouettes of armed slaves showed where look-outs had been posted at various points on the wall of the fort itself. The government had established a precautionary police post hard by the wall of the compound, and police sentries with sub-machine-guns
patrolled the entrance from the river front and stood guard over the big white motor launch that was tied up there. I should not have cared to have joined his brother Jabir in an attack on that fort.

I soon found that the cub Chahala was restrictive of movement and activity. Carried habitually inside my pullover, she made an enceinte-looking bulge which collected the whole village round me as soon as I set foot outside the door; furthermore I could no longer carry my camera round my neck as I did normally, for it bumped against her body as I walked.

We moved in short journeys; the next day, I remember, we lunched at a village where there was a malarial epidemic, and there was not enough Paludrine left in our stocks to treat a tenth of the people who required it. That night we reached the fort of Talib, half-brother of Nasr and Jabir, who as a boy had opened fire on the Sayid deputy whom their grandfather, old Salman, had sent to reason with him when he rose in protest against the favouritism shown to Nasr. We did not stay there, however, for Talib turned out to be away in Amara, being tried for the alleged rape of a merchant’s daughter, a trial from which he eventually escaped with a petty fine. No one seemed to have the keys of the fort, so we stayed at the
mudhif
of Sayid Qadhim nearby.

That evening Thesiger and I discussed the prospect of weaning Chahala. We both felt that she should be old enough to eat solid food, and I felt that her rather skinny little body would benefit by something stronger than buffalo milk. However, I underestimated the power of instinct, for I thought that she would not connect flesh or blood with edibility and would need to be introduced to the idea very gradually. The best way to do this, I decided, was to introduce a few drops of blood into her milk to get her used to the taste. This proved to be extraordinarily naïve, for while I was holding the bodies of two decapitated sparrows and
trying to drip a little blood from them into her feeding bottle she suddenly caught the scent of the red meat and made a savage grab for the carcases. I think that if I had not stopped her she would have crunched up bone and all with those tiny needle-like teeth, and we took this as evidence that she had already been introduced by her mother to adult food. I took the carcases from her, much to her evident fury; and when I gave her the flesh from the breasts cut up small she wolfed it down savagely and went questing round for more.

“Finish with milk,” said Amara with a gesture of finality, “finish, finish; she is grown up now.” And it seemed so, but, alas, she was not.

The next night we spent at the
mudhif
of a somewhat unusual sheikh. He was a young man in his middle twenties, and one of the only two feminine-type homosexuals that I saw in the marshes. It is true that the marshmen, in common with many other Arab peoples, are not very selective in their direction of sexual outlet; all is, so to speak, grist to their mill, and the long years that many a youth of the poorer people may have to wait before he has acquired the bride price of three buffaloes, coupled with the tremendous taboos attached to intercourse with a girl of the village, make casual homosexuality general. It is not, however, the outcome of any exclusive leaning in that direction, and no shame is attached to it; I have heard young married men discuss quite openly whether they would rather sleep with their wives or with some particular boy, and usually reach the conclusion, after some argument, that they would prefer their wives. This sheikh, however, was something quite different; he was the feminine type that in England would be described as a pansy. He wore a
dish-dasha
of bright sky-blue, a pale beautifully cut European jacket, white buckskin shoes, two symmetrically placed gold teeth, and, surprisingly, a wide eyebrow-moustache. The little finger of his right hand was dyed with henna to the middle joint, and on the finger
next to it he wore two heavy gold rings, one set with diamonds and the other with a single sapphire. From his shoulders floated a diaphanous blue gauze
bisht
edged with rich gold embroidery.

He received us not in a
mudhif
but a
sarifa,
the small rectangular and often ornate reed house which many sheikhs maintain to entertain their personal friends in an atmosphere more
intime
than that of the
mudhif.
This
sarifa
was richly furnished in execrable European taste; the sofas and chairs were of the same type, mass produced in Basra and Baghdad, as are to be found in every sheikh’s reception room, but their upholstery was more flamboyant, an imitation velvet brocade with a pattern of big white fleur-de-lis on a blue ground. A heavy modern silk carpet covered the floor, in whose riotous pattern a heavily laden camel could be distinguished mistrustfully inspecting a group of chamoix on a nearby alpine peak, while farther off something that could be none other than a moose gazed with obvious dismay into the veiled face of a Tuareg who was menacing it with what appeared to be a sub-machine-gun. In the extreme foreground a green parakeet preened itself oblivious of its ecological insecurity.

The sheikh’s fancy fell on Sabeti, who squirmed with embarrassment, and, I think, pleasure. Probably he had never been ogled like this before, for he was a very plain young man with a big nose and an habitual air of apology. The sheikh draped himself on the arm of a chair and chattered and ate nuts from a little leather bag and flashed his gold teeth, and Sabeti sat cross-legged on the floor and gazed up with a moonstruck face that would undoubtedly have infuriated his wife.

I saw only one other womanish man in the marshes, and he was an extreme case, a transvestist. He was a robustly built man with no physical abnormality, who dressed as a woman, lived with the women, and did woman’s work. He followed us about for some time, requesting us to perform
a surgical operation that would make him a complete woman—a formidable task indeed, for he was at the moment a very complete man. Thesiger told me that the comparable situation among women was not rare, some women assuming a complete masculine role and dressing as men, and that these were approved by the men as being a stage in advance of normal womanhood.

Presently the sheikh left the
sarifa
in company with a muscular Ethiopian slave, who, I was told, was one of his stud of stallions, employed at a nightly fee which another slave confided to our crew, and which seemed wholly inadequate for the work.

That night was one of the few, during the whole journey, that I passed in acute discomfort. The
sarifa
was partially open at ground level, and over the zoological fantasy of the silk carpet tore an icy wind which only the chamoix could have endured with equanimity. It was bitter, and it blew all night. Thesiger and the others were rolled tightly in their blankets, but I had to leave the side of my sleeping bag open to allow exit to Chahala, who sensibly took shelter in the warmth behind my body. I lay shivering and listening to the jackals howling in the distance. I remember that a slant of weak moonlight came through the lattice and fell on Amara’s face; he was sleeping with his lips drawn back from his teeth to the gums, an expression of hatred so intense and yet so static as to appear inhuman.

During the slow icy hours between midnight and dawn, hours when the brain may sometimes outrun the plodding of reason and escape from habitual and safe corridors of thought to catch perilous glimpses of truth, some part of me was trying to interpret and give meaning to my presence here in the night and the cold on the bank of a strange river. I tried to think of the name of the place where I was, but I found that I did not know it, nor could I now project a map in my mind. I turned, and my eyes came back to the grinning mask of Amara’s face in the moonlight. I must be here for
some purpose, I thought, for those who wake at night in desert and in jungle to see the stars at strange slants in the sky have some goal before them, some enemy to conquer before returning home. The lines that drew them here would form some plan on paper, a firm design that showed the growth and aim of their endeavour, a geometry that expressed the journey of their lives. I tried to see my own like this and saw it as a doodle on a scrap of paper beside a telephone, formless, full of heraldic flourishes and ignoble retreat, with here and there a random line running far out on to the blank page; and at the end of one of these I lay now listening to the jackals skirling at the moon. What went ye forth for to see? A reed shaken by the wind?

In the morning we made a very short journey to the
mudhif
of Sheikh Jabir, whom three weeks before we had met at Dibin preparing to make war on his brother Nasr. The
mudhif
was on the bank of a narrow watercourse with land on one side of it and palms in the distance, a humble and untidy building speaking of poverty in striking contrast with the aggresive fortress of Nasr. He seemed a different man now from him who had led the war dance at Dibin, for though the issue was still in doubt it was rumoured that things were not going well for Nasr in Baghdad, and that the government would give a decision against him. Jabir had lost the wolfish and distrustful expression that he had worn when he was raising the tribesmen; he seemed assured and confident now, and he greeted us with great courtesy and friendliness.

We went out in the afternoon to shoot pig, and as we left the
mudhif
with Jabir in the
tarada
with us a passing canoe hailed him.

“There is news from Baghdad—Nasr is finished! Allah be praised!”

“Allah be praised,” replied Jabir quietly. He said nothing else, nor did he refer to the subject again, but his mind must have been full of it, for his whole future had changed. Before,
he had been a sheikh only in name; now he would have money and lands and position and many of the army of slaves that had belonged to Nasr. I thought of Nasr’s future, and because I did not know him and his vices were nothing to me I could pity him. He would be a hunted man now, a fugitive, without friends or money or property; driven perhaps like Aboud who had killed Dakhil in the shooting accident, to live beside a police post in the country of his enemies, until one day the police protection would not be enough, and his body would be found in a muddy channel.

I remember that afternoon particularly for the splendour of the sky. Against a background of the deepest blue great elongated cotton-wool clouds fanned out over us like the fingers of a giant hand; they seemed as solid a structure as the banks of the watercourse or the high prow of the
tarada.
We went downstream through idyllic palm groves with blossoming acacias and willows and the spring of delicate new grass, and on into recently inundated land, where the reeds were thin and short and green. The whole air here was a jewelled kaleidoscope of colour; a myriad bee-eaters thronged the reeds and the air above them, each one of this horde as gorgeous as any humming-bird. They darted low over the water with glittering glint of electric green, soared up to show the blinding sheen of copper beneath their wings, alighted in gem-like array upon the reeds that bent to the water under their weight. It was as though a rainbow had suddenly come to pieces and filled the air with irresponsible fragments.

Chahala slept in my pullover, and because of her I remained in the
tarada
with Jabir when Thesiger waded off to hunt for pig. It was impossible to be bored with so much to look at. Scattered pelicans drifted on the water, immobile as stuffed birds; overhead wheeled a restless pack of some five hundred clamorous stilts, a weird urgent clangour something between the calling of wild geese and of seagulls, haunting and unfamiliar as the tang of a strange spice.

Among the copper iridescence of the bee-eaters’ wings the kingfishers flitted, halcyons of chestnut and blinding blue, and pied kingfisher of staccato black-and-white; they hovered with their bodies held upright in the air, and their heads, below the vibrating wings, craned intently downward to peer into the water; they dived swift and arrow-like in a vertical plunge. Against the blue sky the pale bulrush tops looked like raw wool on the spindle of an old spinning-wheel, and above them flew, with the infinitely slow wing-beat of a giant, a single Goliath heron, a bird that stands nearly as high as a man.

We went home in the evening to Jabir’s
mudhif,
through waterways only a few paces across and with hard banks at their sides. The canoe boys were infected by the glory of the evening, and towed the
tarada
as fast as they could run, so that the thrust of the long craft in the narrow channel piled at our sides smooth rushing walls of water that were blood-coloured with the stain of the sinking sun. From the banks ahead of us yard-wide soft-shelled terrapins, or mud-turtles, plopped into the water in noisy panic.

Night had come before we reached the
mudhif,
and the moon was like a marshman’s curved dagger lying bright on dark velvet.

We travelled the next morning to a
mudhif
belonging to one of Jabir’s brothers. He had not, it seemed, suffered as badly at the hands of his misguided father as had Jabir, for it was a noble building, on the bank of a broad, brimming river, and it appeared the fresher and better tended for the sprigs of green corn-stem that decorated the arches in recognition of the New Year. The reed matting skirt of the wall next to the river had been furled up to allow entry to the cool breeze, and from where I sat I watched for more than two hours a monstrous profligacy of nature; a squandering, a wastage so gigantic that the thought of numbers
became as meaningless as when the brain tries to embrace the concept of the Milky Way. The river water flowed past the
mudhif
at some five or six miles an hour, and it was sixty yards across, yet during all of the two hours hardly a square foot of that smoothly sliding surface was bare to the sky. As the static waterways of the marshes were blanketed by a dense layer of white-and-gold flowers, so this river carried a great moving carpet of a myriad shivering, dying insect wings. Somewhere, perhaps far up the river’s course, these delicate gauze-winged creatures, in appearance something between a dragonfly and a mayfly, had hatched in their unthinkable millions, and sailed down the river, drowning as they drifted, to form this stupendous funereal pageant.