Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (29 page)

and winning.”

“Haji Abdul Emir, our grandfather, you mean,” said

Basima.

“Sometimes I dream about Haji Abdul Emir,” Fatima put in

unexpectedly.

The girls exclaimed at this. “Really, Fatima?” “How do you

dream about him?”

“I dream he is on horseback,” she answered. “You girls are

too young to remember, but before Haji Abdul Emir got sick,

he had a beautiful horse—it cost nearly a thousand pounds. He

would gallop up the road to the mudhif very fast and all of us

children would run after him. Once he even rode a racing

camel up the road, a milk-white camel.”

“Well,” said Laila primly, “I dream about my friend Salima,

and when you leave us, Beeja, we will dream about you and

what good times we had together.”

“But I’m not leaving yet,” I pointed out.

“You will, and you will forget us,” they said.

“No, no,” I protested.

Fatima smiled and winked at Laila. “Let’s buy a charm

from Um Khalil so Beeja won’t forget us.”

“Or look in the Book of Stars and see what it says,”

suggested Basima.

“What’s the Book of Stars?” I asked.

“Selma has one, that she keeps hidden from Haji, and it tells

you about everything,” said Laila. “I’ve looked in it many

times to see whether I am going to marry and it always says

no.”

“I want to marry a fat man, a fat man,” chanted Nejla, “a

man as big as a bar-rel.” She laughed at her own joke, but no

one joined in; they were too interested in what they are saying.

“We don’t believe in the Book of Stars, Beeja,” said

Fatima, “we’re just joking. This kind of magic is against the

Koran.”

“But Fatima,” Laila put in, “the Book of Stars must be

worth something because look what Selma did with it!”

“What did she do?” I asked.

Fatima looked disapproving, but Laila plunged ahead.

“When Selma first moved into the compound, Haji would

sleep one night with her, the next night with Bahiga and the

night after that with Kulthum. But Selma didn’t like that at all.

She wanted Haji all to herself.”

“Laila—” cautioned Fatima.

“Well, she did, and you know it, and so she got this Book of

Stars from her sister in Diwaniya and after a while Haji

stopped sleeping with Bahiga and Kulthum and only came to

Selma.”

“Yes, but-”

“She did it with her Book,” finished Laila triumphantly and

looked around her for confirmation. The other girls nodded.

“That is against the Koran,” repeated Fatima angrily, “and

you should know better, Laila. You know what the mullah

says.”

“Is the
hiriz
against the Koran too?” I asked, trying to turn

the conversation. I had seen these charms everywhere in Iraq,

small silver or tin amulets containing a few seeds and a roll of

paper on which some Koranic verses had been written by a

mullah. The amulet was pinned to a child’s clothing to ward

off the Evil Eye, or it was suspended from the mirror of a taxi

to bring good luck. Something blue was usually a part of it, a

blue glass bead or a fine turquoise set into the silver of the

more costly amulets.

“Well, no,” admitted Fatima. “Everyone buys a hiriz for his

children. Rajat was so sick when she was a baby that my

mother bought three for her from Um Khalil.”

“If children are afraid at night, they hold on to the hiriz and

then they are all right,” Laila added.

“And a hiriz can do a lot of good,” put in Basima.

“Remember Um Farid?” They nodded.

“Tell me,” I pleaded.

“Um Farid was once asleep in her house. Her husband was

away and only her mother and her baby were there. A wind

came in the night and blew out the lantern, and a burglar came

afterward and Um Farid got such a fright she could no longer

speak. After a while her mother went to Um Khalil and bought

a big hiriz and Um Farid got better. She was at Sherifa’s house

the other day and said quite a few things.”

“I think Um Khalil must be very rich from this work,” said

Laila. “Once Salima opened a big black box which belonged

to her mother-in-law and it was filled with five-and ten-pound

notes.”

“That is bad,” said Fatima, “very bad. Um Khalil takes

money for doing good and for doing evil too. One of the wives

of Haji Abdul Emir used to claim that all magic, the Book of

Stars and even the hiriz, were
haram
, a sin against God. But

when she was very old she said that what you do for the good

of your family is all right,
halal
, but if you try to use magic

and charms for a bad reason, then it is haram.”

“It’s better to pray at the tomb of Hussein and forget all

this,” said Sanaa, who had been quiet throughout the

conversation. “Or pray for something and promise to fast in

Ramadan if you get your wish. Then one is sure one is not

committing haram.”

Sometimes Nejla would entertain us with imitations. She

loved to dress up in her father’s clothes and play the irate man,

scolding wives, daughters, or sons. Her instinct for gesture

and gait was excellent, and we could always guess who her

target of the evening happened to be. Her
pièce de résistance

of that summer, requested again and again, was the scene after

the kraya, when the mullah had set upon the girls who were

pulling at me. Nejla did us all, the rowdy crowd of little girls,

myself shrinking timidly away trying not to show my distaste

(how had she seen that?), the erect mullah shouting and

striking fiercely out in all directions.

In Sherifa’s little court the neighbor women gathered also,

and Laila, Basima and I would often walk up to spend part of

our evening there. Once a woman, distantly related to Sherifa,

began to query me about the intricacies of childbearing in

America.

“What I can’t understand,” she said, “is how American

women stop having babies. Do they refuse to sleep with their

husbands?”

“No, no,” chorused the group. “How could they? They

don’t, do they, Beeja?”

“No, they don’t,” I started.

“They have operations by men doctors,” offered Basima,

“so they don’t get pregnant.”

“But what if they do get pregnant?” insisted the woman.

“American women want children too,” I began again.

The woman burst out, “So do I, but I have ten,
ten
, and the

doctor says I will die if I have one of those operations, but I

don’t care. If I have another baby, I will die anyway. I’m

pregnant again, and I’ve eaten lots of pumpkin seeds, but

nothing has happened. So now what do I do?”

“Never mind, Um Ali,” cautioned Sherifa. “Go to the

midwife. She knows how to get rid of babies. And don’t

worry. God knows best.”

The woman gestured impatiently and sighed, a long, tearing

sigh.

“Really,” counseled Sherifa, “the midwife is very good.

And not expensive either.”

Talk turned away from the woman’s insoluble problem.

Laila blurted out that she had always considered Christians

unclean because she had been told that they did not shave any

of their body hair.

“And is it true,” asked Basima, “that in America they put all

the old women in houses by themselves, away from their

families?”

I admitted that this was sometimes true and tried to explain,

but my words were drowned in the general murmur of

disapproval.

“What a terrible place that must be!”

“How awful!”

“And their children let them go?”

“Thank God we live in El Nahra, where the men are not so

cruel!”

It had never occurred to me before, but the idea of old

people’s homes must have been particularly reprehensible to

these women whose world lay within the family unit and

whose whole lives of toil and childbearing were rewarded in

old age, when they enjoyed repose and respect as members of

their children’s households.

For months the women had begged me to tell their fortunes

with coffee cups. This I could not do, but finally I admitted I

could read palms, and soon the palm reading became part of

the summer evening’s entertainment. I had to change my

approach, for one could hardly say, in this culture, that a

woman would have four or five flirtations and then a

marriage, but rather that she would have many offers before

marrying. Travel for these women meant religious pilgrimages

or visits to the doctor; a long travel line indicated a possibility

of visiting Mecca. Everyone wanted to know whether she was

jealous, whether she was passionate. The passion was

important; the married women would giggle and tell the

unmarried ones that they had yet to learn how much fun it

could be to sleep with one’s husband.

“Always?” I asked.

“Of course,” they would reply. “If we did not enjoy

sleeping with them, how could we love them?”

I thought to myself, truly how else, for they seldom saw

their husbands except to serve them at meals, and at bedtime.

On the night of the prophet Mohammed’s birthday a fine

full moon rose over the canal. For the occasion, the main

street of El Nahra and the suq as well had been hung with

paper streamers and colored lights. Bob left after supper to

attend the festivities, a skit to be held in the suq, followed by

refreshments. Laila and Sherifa and Fatima and Basima and I

could not stay indoors that night. We were not daring enough

to cross the canal, but sat in a row by our wall, wrapped in our

abayahs, watching the reflections of the colored lights and the

moonlight in the water and listening to the sounds of

merriment from the opposite bank.

Fatima and Laila tried to persuade little Rajat to go across

and watch the skit and come back and tell us about it.

Although Rajat wore the abayah, she was only eleven and

could easily have passed unnoticed, but she grew shy and

stubborn and refused to go alone. Fatima, to make up,

entertained us with accounts of the skits she had seen when

she was a girl and had hovered around the suq on the night of

the Prophet’s birthday.

“I wasn’t afraid of life the way this one is,” she said with a

contemptuous glance at the shrinking Rajat. “Abdul Latif, the

mukhtar
of the suq, always played the stupid pilgrim on his

way to Mecca,” she began, “and the foreigner was always

played by—” and she went on, describing the skit in detail,

complete with gestures, until we all laughed at her cleverness.

The moon was high in the sky and we sat close together,

loath to leave, when Rajat, the shy rabbit, sprang up as if shot,

hissed that she could hear Nour and her father coming along

the road, and that we had better hurry home.

We rose quickly and almost ran toward our respective

houses, still in good spirits. As I closed my gate behind me, I

heard the men’s voices on the path and knew the women

would be safely home before them.

When Bob came, he presented me with two pieces of

imitation toffee and a Jordan almond, the “favor” of the

evening.

“It was very interesting,” he recounted. “Abdul Latif, the

mukhtar, played a stupid pilgrim on his way to Mecca. He

meets a foreigner on the road, and this was very well done, I

thought, by a man named—”

“Yes,” I smiled. “I know.”

He looked a bit surprised. “What do you mean? Were you

there?”

“No, but it was just as good,” I answered and went on to

explain about my evening with the girls by the banks of the

canal.

16

Hussein

During the summer we also acquired an armed guard, or rather

Abdulla, Sheik Hamid’s brother, acquired him for us. Abdulla

told Bob that Haji felt we should have a guard, and had

instructed Abdulla to find us the right man. So we took on

Hussein, more to please Abdulla than out of any felt need for a

man with a loaded rifle to stand outside our door every night

Hussein belonged to another clan of the tribe, a somewhat

impoverished group which lived down the canal about half a

mile. Hussein’s wife Sajjida, accompanied by two thin

daughters, came to visit me, and I returned the call.

Their house was poorer and smaller than any in our

settlement. The single room was hardly more than a hovel,

with a ceiling so low one could not stand upright, but the floor

was swept neatly and the one reed mat was clean. We had

Coca-Cola, all of us, sitting together knee to knee in the tiny

room—Hussein, Sajjida, an aged woman cousin who lived

with them, and the two little girls.

After that Sajjida and I visited each other several times, but

though we both tried, the relationship never ripened into

friendship, for the odds were too uneven. I had so much and

Sajjida so little. I was the one who was at fault, for I felt

uncomfortable, but Sajjida felt no constraint at all and would

ask me constant and unanswerable questions.

“Can’t you give me something to keep boy babies alive?”

she said once, looking around the room as though the answer