Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (11 page)

shift.

“See how lovely and fat she is,” the older women said

proudly, and picked her up so I could see her better. I nodded

politely.

Fatima and her sister, who had indeed become more lively

since the tea and cigarettes, were chattering volubly with

Abdul Razzak. As the child was being exhibited, they looked

at me in an almost friendly fashion and spoke to Abdul

Razzak.

“The girls asked if you have any children and I said no, and

they said they think there aren’t many children as fat and

healthy as this one. They are all very proud of the baby, so

you must praise her.” I did as I was told and Abdul Razzak

translated my remarks.

All the women looked pleased, and the one who was

holding the baby at the moment got up and brought the child

over to me, trying to get her to sit on my lap. The child did not

realize what was required of her, but obediently held out her

arms. I took her and everyone murmured with delight.

I looked at the child in my lap, the deceptive fat hanging in

gray rolls about her neck, wrists, and ankles. She smiled, but

through the layers of filth, the unhealthy flab, the scabs and

the oozing of the open sores on her face, it was a grotesque

gesture, hardly human. I was suddenly violently revolted and

found myself, to my horror, utterly unable to lean down and

kiss the small face turned up to me. The women pushed her at

me; I simply could not. I smiled wanly, patted the child’s

matted head, and handed her back.

Apparently the women had not noticed my distaste, for the

child tottered off, and they laughed at its uncertainty on the

flabby legs. I tried to think of a pleasantry to offer in the

conversation, but none came. Our host had lapsed into silence,

but Fatima was sitting on the box beside Abdul Razzak,

talking to him in a low, urgent voice. Her sister smoked,

resting her elbows on her bent knees and staring straight ahead

at nothing. Some of the women had gone off, and Jabbar said

he thought we should leave.

He nudged Abdul Razzak, who was nodding absent-

mindedly to Fatima as he rose. She continued her plea,

whatever it was. The host rose with us, but the women stayed

where they were and the girls huddled together, lighting still

another cigarette in the dying embers of the charcoal fire. The

child had disappeared.

At the tent flap the man bade us goodbye, and we walked in

silence to the car, followed by a hound sniffing hungrily at our

heels. I looked back at the tents, which were almost the same

shade as the dun-colored earth, at the shivering man wrapped

in his aba, his hand raised in a gesture of farewell as the dust

swirled around him. And I remembered the proud, gay

procession we had seen along the road, the drums, the pipes,

the flashing eyes of the women as they jingled their bracelets

and swished their bright-colored petticoats. I was glad Khadija

had not come with us.

6

Housekeeping in El Nahra

In a few weeks our life in El Nahra settled into a working

routine. After breakfast, Bob and I would listen to the BBC

news and drill on Arabic, adding to each other’s vocabulary

new phrases and words we had heard for the first time the day

before. By nine-thirty he had gone off for his morning

interviewing and I began the household chores. My

afternoons, like his, were given over to regular visits, he with

the men, I with the women of the tribal settlement. The

evenings we spent together, reviewing the events of the day,

writing in our journals, reading or playing chess.

Most of the problems posed by everyday living in the

village had been solved fairly easily. Our stove, refrigerator,

new cupboard and the aluminum work table and folding chairs

filled the bare kitchen. The dirt floors were covered with new

reed mats, and we had screens made for the windows. Bob and

Mohammed dug a garbage pit for tin cans and we burned

refuse in the cylindrical oven. After many days of delicate

negotiations, Bob finally found a man who was willing, once a

month, to clean out our mud-brick toilet. We arranged to have

our heavy laundry done in Diwaniya, as no one in El Nahra

wanted to do a Christian’s laundry, even at a price; the rest of

the clothes I did by hand. We even became accustomed to

taking baths out of two pails of water, one for washing, one

for rinsing.

The preparation of food, however, was a major occupation.

Shopping had to be done each day, for we were out of reach,

literally as well as financially, of the luxuries of canned and

frozen foods. Bob bought jam, dried yeast and coffee in

Diwaniya, and otherwise we ate what was available locally:

the vegetables and fruits currently in season, rice, eggs,

yogurt, and, since we were rich by village standards, meat

every day.

Mohammed did the marketing, and with his help I soon

learned what every merchant had to offer, although in all the

months in El Nahra I never visited them in person. Only

women of very low status ever appeared in the public bazaar;

rather than go personally, a woman sent her children, her

servants, even her husband to buy groceries, pick up mail, or

carry urgent messages to friends.

The village butcher slaughtered a goat or a sheep daily, and

if Mohammed got to the market early, we had lamb kidneys

for lunch, or liver, or the tenderloin which lies along the

backbone. But if he was late we got a kilo chunk of

unidentifiable meat, which might take one or four hours to

cook, depending on the age of the animal. With Mohammed’s

help, I learned to strip off the tough membranes, and then he

would either grind the meat or cut it into minute pieces

suitable for stews of various kinds, which we ate with rice.

Onions and garlic to give flavor to the stringy meat were

cheap and plentiful, and Mohammed brought me a fine supply

of spices, cinnamon bark, whole nutmegs, turtneric root,

peppercorns, saffron, dried celery leaves and mint. Whenever

I needed spices for cooking, he would pound them fine with

an old brass mortar and pestle which belonged to his mother.

Homemade tomato paste was the other ingredient essential

to local cuisine. In the summer, when tomatoes glutted the

market, every good housewife bought a supply, spread the

tomatoes on flat tin trays and carried them up to the roof of

her house. There, in the summer sun, the raw tomatoes dried

and thickened, and salt was added every other day for about

two weeks. The resulting tomato paste was then ready to be

packed into earthenware jars to be kept throughout the winter.

This paste had a delicious and distinctive flavor—the women

asserted it was the combination of salt and summer sun.

We used locally made
ghee
, or clarified butter, for cooking,

and after experimenting with a few tins of tasteless imported

margarine (specially treated to maintain, its texture in tropical

climates!) we turned to local butter for all uses. One or two

women in the tribal settlement specialized in making butter

and selling it to the market to be clarified into ghee. If we

ordered in advance and paid slightly more than the market

price, we could usually get part of the supply. Many months

after I arrived, I was visiting the butter-and-egg woman one

day and asked the purpose of a shapeless leathery mass which

lay near us on the ground. The woman demonstrated that it

was her butter churn, a young lambskin which had been

cleaned and dried in the sun, then greased for easy handling.

The cream was poured in, both ends of the skin were securely

tied, and then my neighbor simply shook the “churn” back and

forth till the butter came. Occasionally the butter we bought

was topped with a film of dirt, undoubtedly from the inside of

that old and fragrant “churn.” When this happened,

Mohammed would simply scrape off the dirt and return it to

the woman, explaining that we only paid for clean butter.

I made yogurt from water-buffalo milk, which was richer

than the thin milk yielded by the settlement’s undernourished

cows. The
jamoosa
, or water buffalo, huge black slow-moving

animals, were much better adapted to the local climate than

were cows. They seldom contracted tuberculosis. Their milk

was in demand and even the meat could be eaten, but, though

the buffalo herders were prosperous by local standards, they

did not enjoy a comparable social status. A cow was an animal

conferring prestige, but a water buffalo was not. Still, several

tribesmen owned buffalo, and from one of our neighbors

Mohammed would buy a quart of milk each evening. Still

foaming, the milk was put on to boil. It cooled during the

night. In the morning we skimmed off the cream, a rich, thick

butterlike substance
(gaymar)
which was delicious with jam

on toast. To the rest I added a spoonful of yogurt starter,

wrapped the pan in a towel to keep it at a constant

temperature, and by late afternoon we had yogurt, for cooking,

for eating, or for drinking if we diluted it with water.

We always got good rice, rice grown in Iraq, or the famous

long-grain “amber” rice which supposedly came from Iran.

When potatoes were available, we often buried them in our

charcoal brazier and baked them. Other vegetables were

seasonal; for weeks we might eat marrow squash, then spinach

would come onto the market, followed by broad beans and

okra. In the fall there were eggplant and carrots. The winter

fruits, oranges and bananas, were excellent and in summer we

ate watermelon and grapes.

For special occasions we could buy a chicken, which was,

predictably, very skinny and outrageously expensive, but had

a good flavor if parboiled or marinated before roasting. On

some nights we returned home to find by our doorstep a brace

of small partridges which had been shot by one of Bob’s

friends. Plucked and cleaned and sautéed, they made a fine

change of diet.

The local bread, flat round cakes made of barley or wheat

flour, salt and water, was healthful and good when hot, but

usually it was dry and often tasteless. Finally I tried baking

my own bread in our portable oven and soon I was baking

four fairly presentable loaves a week.

So we ate well, if monotonously, slept a reasonable amount

and were seldom sick. We were finding people generally

pleasant and helpful, and our painfully meager Arabic showed

signs of improvement. Gradually we began to feel more or

less at home in El Nahra, although new problems kept arising,

some more serious than others.

First there were the birds, which absolutely refused to leave.

We shooed them out of the house several times a day, and

tried to keep the windows and doors shut lest they swoop back

in. Bob had screen doors made with tight latches, and we crept

in and out of the house, shutting the doors quickly against the

flocks of swallows that filled the yard, perched on the roof or

in the lemon trees, waiting for the door to be opened the

smallest crack.

One night I awakened, coughing, for a feather had fluttered

down into my face. What would come next? “This must stop,”

Bob said, and in the morning he and Mohammed set out to

“do something definite about the birds,” I was not sure just

what. Mohammed returned with a long bamboo pole, and

every night thereafter before we retired. Bob would probe in

and around each of the beams, routing out the sly swallows

who had hidden there during the day, waiting for the peace of

the night to recommence their mating and nest building! After

a month of nightly probing, most of the swallows retired in

defeat, but the next spring they came again, small groups

which camped in the lemon tree, twittering sadly and

obviously unable to understand what had happened to their

haven.

Bob was also in some perplexity about horses. Much of the

visiting of tribal clan settlements in the back country had to be

done on horseback, as there were no roads. Bob enjoyed this,

for he had always liked to ride, and he found it another area of

common interest with the men of the tribe. For these occasions

the sheik insisted on lending Bob one of his good Arab

stallions. They were valuable and beautiful horses, worth at

least 500 pounds, and Bob lived in fear that, while he was

riding the borrowed animal, it might trip and break its leg, and

then what would we do? It was not only that we could not

afford to replace the horse, but that the sheik would probably

not allow us to do so (after all, we were his guests) and this

would have been even worse.

One morning the gate opened and Bob and Mohammed led

a horse into our garden. He was small and light brown and

slightly sway-backed.

“I’ve bought him,” Bob announced.

“Bought him?”

“Yes, what do you think of him?”