Baghdad Diaries Read online

  Salvi is a little ill, maybe with a cold. He won’t eat and his stomach makes noises as if he’s swallowed something live – perhaps that’s how dog gasses sound. He looks miserable. His black son came by to visit and he walked him to the gate, came back and plonked himself in a heap on his blanket.

  Went and visited Fulayih, who has just spent four months in jail; he said it was frightful and wished he’d been in for murder rather than for stealing.

  ‘How could you say that?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if one has to be had up for something, with us Arabs it’s more honourable to kill than to steal.’

  Something strange is happening – little business enterprises are being started by seemingly ordinary individuals who take your money, invest it, and promise a 30–70 percent profit in a month. It starts off well enough, and the first investors duly get their profits. Slowly word gets round and more and more people put in their money, quantities of money, some even sold their houses and valuables. All this without a paper changing hands, your name is simply written in a ledger. After a few months, the government clamps down, the person running the enterprise is put into jail, the money is confiscated and the investors lose everything. My theory is that the government is in on it – it’s a government mafia scam organized to steal from the people. After all, they have the printing machines to print out the money, they can afford to hand out a few thousands and then collect them and the people’s money too. They may even pay the salaries of their civil servants with this money. One of these enterprises belongs to the wife of one of Saddam’s bodyguards – they even advertise it on TV. Perhaps this is their way of curbing rampant inflation! The latest joke circulating round Baghdad goes as follows. A guy is stopped on the streets by a beggar asking for money. The guy answers, ‘Go to Sam Co. [the latest enterprise to have crashed], they have my money.’ The beggar answers, ‘They have mine too.’

  The other day at Fuzzle’s house I met a lady who had a miserable story to tell. Her husband had worked for Iraqi Airways and was pensioned off after the war, when flying out of Iraq was banned by the UN. Apparently, they had been building a house that was nearing completion when it was robbed – light fittings, doors, bathroom fixtures, windows, everything that could be lifted was lifted. The landlord of the house they were renting wanted them out and took them to court; the judge was in the landlord’s pay and he won the case. So this poor family was forced to move into the shell of their new house. They boarded up the windows and doors with cardboard since they couldn’t afford windows or doors. They wrote a petition to the government to explain their case, and the answer came back informing them that even though this particular judge was caught on bribery and corruption charges and had been put in jail, they couldn’t pass a judgment on his judgment. The poor woman is going crazy, her husband does nothing all day long. He shouts at her, she just cries.

  Can’t use a normal-sized purse any longer; the quantity of money that one has to carry round means plastic bags, like Italian money used to be.

  A strange abnormality – many babies are being born dumb. It’s probably better for them that way: they won’t have a chance to talk against anything.

  25 November

  There are three generations of Salvi’s offspring barking outside. I can’t think what has gotten into them. They have been in and out all day. I shoo them away and see another lot coming from the other side. Perhaps they’re visiting him on his sickbed. He is still not well. Majeed made me cook some garlic for Salvi today, and he seems better for it.

  Saw Faiza today. She said she’d like a catastrophe to envelope the USA and swallow the whole continent.

  ‘What about my two brothers who live there?’ her husband Mahmood asked.

  ‘They can go down with it,’ she said. ‘Serve them right for living there.’ Hatred for the USA is paramount here.

  The Suleikh is nothing but women. Every home has only women. Where are the men, the husbands, brothers and uncles? Could they all be dead? Women are supposed to be the tougher sex.

  27 November

  Everyone is talking about the fall of Sam Co. They showed them on TV, a young man – a hairdresser – and his two unprepossessing partners. One wouldn’t give them a tenner, let alone all one’s possessions. People are kicking themselves over their stupidity. More and more I think it’s a government trick.

  Salvi is still ill and sleeps all day. After he eats he barks a bit and then collapses onto his blanket. Am beginning to worry.

  28 November

  Tim called. He is here to make a TV film on the embargo. Got Ma and Needles over, lit a fire and offered a few things to nibble on. My freezer has coffee and nuts from Amman, a few bones for Salvi and ice for me, so they got meagre offerings. They’re waiting for permission to start filming.

  29 November

  There were twenty to twenty-five ladies for tea at Ma’s, a number of them wearing red – including the largest in size, who never stopped talking. It seems that she was a wild thing in her youth, left her husband and ran off with her afternoon lover, married him and has lived happily ever since. Assia and Suha came late. Assia wants to write a book about sex and Islam so that she can become famous and seek asylum in Sweden. She was blowing her nose in a white towel today. She said it used to be a massage towel from times gone by when she indulged in massages.

  I’ve had a rat in my studio for the past three days. I’ve given him/her two kinds of poisoned sandwiches. It eats the bread and leaves the filling behind. I’m having my third try today. If it doesn’t work, then Suhair is giving me a trap that gets three at one go. The mind boggles. What sort of trap could it be, and is it likely that three rats would wait together to be trapped?

  No call from Tim. I guess they don’t have a permit yet. Rabab showed up from Amman with some mail. She says that the USA’s behaviour is even more amoral than ours. It’s predetermined, and only hurts the poor. More stories about burglaries, this time in the embassy of Qatar – the thieves went into the house, piled all the stuff into a lorry and made the consul drive his car ahead of them to show the guards that the move was with his permission. They got away.

  30 November

  Went with the girls to see Hajir. House full of photographs, mementoes, albums. We looked at a lot of old and new photos of births, marriages, and the kids growing up, followed by endless conversations about whose mother was who. A lot of the Jamil family ladies seem to start thinking about genealogies at eleven at night or later, and start phoning each other up, asking who was so-and-so’s mother – making lists. Hajir says it’s a sign of senility in their family.

  1 December

  Tim arrived with his crew at about 10.30. Filmed a scene with him arriving at the gate, ringing the bell and kissing me hello. Salvi went hysterical, barking all day and trying to bite everybody. Had to repeat the shoot because there was too much barking on the sound track. He certainly won’t get any more fan letters after this show. I managed to get a collar on him. (We will have to tie him up on Saturday when they come to take my kilns away – the end of an era.) I think they got enough filming done.

  3 December

  Well, my kilns have gone. I don’t know what to feel. They went on top of a rickety lorry that had to be pushed to start it. Before they left, the chief Kurdish mover told me to call on them if I ever needed anything. I said, ‘What’s your name?’

  He said, ‘Muhammad Kassim, like the superhighway.’

  I said, ‘I’ll not forget it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, and he leaped onto the now-moving lorry and went off waving. I am left feeling insecure – I have been wedded to the old kiln for the last thirty years. I didn’t feel any pangs for the new kiln. Too late to get sentimental. We finally found the rat, which turned out to be a mouse. It must have died last night after eating the poisoned meat I left for it. When they lifted the kiln we found her nest (she must have been expecting). Beside it was a collection of little objects – a blue bead, a little light
bulb 2 centimetres long that must have been part of the signal light at the back of the kiln, a couple of film spools and a button. What could she have been doing? Collecting toys for her future babies? I felt really sorry, and have kept the nest – it’s very neat and cushiony and built of insulating material from the air-conditioner.

  I decided to start something new so I got out the new typewriter ribbon that Sol had such difficulty finding for me in New York. It has a white correction strip that does not seem to be working. Maybe I put it in wrong. Had to tie up Salvi; he’s got a new yellow rope – I bribed him with a bit of food. He has to get used to being tied up again in the morning, otherwise everyone will refuse to come through the front gate. Janette has taken to parking her car on her lawn so it’s visible and somewhat safer from thieves, she hopes. I think I’ve been back a month. The first japonica bloomed today – I’m looking on it as an omen, an OK sign for me to have sold off my kilns. After reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, my kiln became my friend. It is much travelled, too, even though it weighs a ton. I feel a pang of regret.

  8 December

  In one day everything got frozen over, three degrees below zero. Mosul is six below – only Moscow is colder. Paolo just came and borrowed my big Syrian coat – no one is prepared for this cold, which is at least three weeks early. My little plants have shrivelled up. No electricity since six this morning. It’s now 5.30 in the afternoon. Something terrible must have happened. I’ll have to return to a freezing cold house tonight. The gas heater is on, it’s dark and I’m typing by an old war gaslight. It’s good that I’ve kept them functioning. It feels just like wartime minus the noise. My telephone goes off every time it rains and when it’s very cold. There are also long periods when it switches off. I think they rotate the exchanges, thus preserving the parts. There are none to spare.

  It cost me 2,675 dinars to have my car number scratched on the front and back windows of my car. Apparently Japanese cars are stolen with such ease that this is a way of controlling the number against the certificate of ownership. To check if the name and number tally on the computer costs 5,000 dinars – so if it’s stolen, the name of the thief won’t tally with the number. It makes wonderful sense, but who will pay 5,000 dinars for that information? I paid a 2,000-dinar fine because I was not there when my car number was called. I showed them my passport and told them that I was out of the country on that date, but they said fines for car numbers cannot be cancelled. In fact, they purposely delay the papers so that everybody ends up having to pay the fine. They scratched the numbers and stuck a badge that had UK protection, 100 D, written on it. No doubt these badges were stolen from Kuwait. The whole procedure is quite mystifying. And why only Japanese cars? All sorts of cars are being stolen these days.

  11 December

  Attended a conference on the after-effects of the war on the environment. An archaeological conference was going on at the same time but it was closed to the public. Muayad gave me the cold eye, staring straight through me. Donny also walked by and totally ignored me. They both still have protruding stomachs although Muayad’s is now smaller. Lunch with Bernard, the mad scientist, and we were joined by another mad scientist, a French princess called Isabel, who never stopped talking. She’s a specialist on the environment, in particular the aftermath of wars and nuclear fallout (she spent many weeks in Chernobyl after the explosion). Although all sorts of statistics are being gathered on Iraq, scientists need seven years of observation before they can be positive about the accuracy of their data. Baghdad and Basra got the worst of the bombing in an operation called Watertap when the USA experimented with Barite (is that correct?) bombs. Apparently, these do not make a big bang but just let out a lot of smoke. Some die immediately from its effects, others linger on for years. They were experimenting. In years to come, history will show how destructive the West’s policy was towards us. At the morning session, two Dutch scientists said that the Gulf War was an exercise undertaken intentionally to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq.

  While Isabel and I were talking, an Iraqi journalist came up to me and asked me whether I was Japanese.

  I said, ‘Do I look Japanese?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Where do you come from?’ All the while I’ve been talking to him in Arabic. If our own journalists have reached such a low point that they’re not able to distinguish an Iraqi from a Japanese, then we are worse off than I thought.

  I had the archaeologists from the seminar over for dinner, a good party. All their dig houses have been burned or pillaged for building materials and whatever was inside. Iraq does not have the money to pay for site guards. Anyway, what can one pathetic guard do against a gang intent on destruction? Foreign archaeological missions are not allowed to come and excavate – part of the cultural embargo and boycott. Only the Italians have managed to get round that ban. They are digging in Hatra and calling it research.

  14 December

  The newspapers are now 30 centimetres long and 20 wide, with tiny print. They’re economizing on paper, and a good thing too. (I keep seeing stacks of wasted New York Times on the streets of that city.) Our papers are a joke but I approve of their looks. Went to pick up a letter from Lubna, and Mahmood showed me our new stamps. The government is printing five or six dinars on old stamps – reuse of materials. Najul says if we’re still in the same situation this time next year, we’ll have to unravel our old socks and reknit them. They are already beginning to have holes.

  Jabra* has died of a heart attack. That is the end of a cultural era. What a year this has been. I wish it could end sooner. It’s making me very nervous. I never got to talk to him this time. Every time I said I would invite him for dinner, I couldn’t figure out who could drive him to the house. Even Fakhri had given up driving. It is a great loss.

  Salvi has started chasing the ladies again. He disappeared for three days and came back this morning looking completely knackered. He’s gone again tonight, leaving two sons on his blanket as replacements.

  15 December

  We have another mouse/rat in the studio. It too ate through two days of poisoned sandwiches, but it is still around and shitting. Today I found that it had taken the packet of poison seeds to a hiding place. Obviously he/she likes the stuff. So I went to a pharmacist friend and asked for a stronger poison. ‘The shelves are all empty,’ she said. She now opens for two hours a day. No point when there’s nothing to sell. She told me her rat story. She had put down poison, knowing there was a rat somewhere, and then a smell started coming from behind her shelves, so she pulled them from the wall and in a space between, she found half-eaten bars of soap and tubes of medicine that had been sucked dry. Apparently rats love to eat cortisone pills. Maybe my poison is out of date.

  The UN has found that we were hiding something else – a Chinese radar installation and chemical germ warfare stuff, seven tons of which seem to be missing. Sanctions will continue.

  16 December

  We planted nearly a kilo of onion seeds today. We had so many that I planted them even among the roses and sweet peas. It will be interesting to see whether an onion smell will permeate the roses, or vice versa. Sol might be coming tonight. I’m off to see Naila, who had a horror adventure the other day. She was driving her car and had stopped at traffic lights when a man opened the side door, got in, said ‘hello’, and proceeded to shove and push her out of the car. Since she is large and he was small, they had a good tussle. He punched her in the eye; she grabbed him by the throat. They struggled and he ended up running away. All this on a main street at seven in the evening. She now has half a black eye. Her cousin asked her whether the guy was trying to steal the car or making a pass at her.

  17 December

  Sol phoned at four in the morning. I dressed and rushed out in the car to go and fetch her. No Salvi, but once on the road, Salvi, Blackie and three generations of sons started chasing after the car and barking. I tried to talk sense to Salvi but couldn’t get through. I was worried that he’d continu
e to follow me so I returned to the house with the whole pack of dogs behind me. I opened the gates and as Salvi rushed in, I shut the gate behind him – he was looking foolish and shifty. The others chased me for a block and then gave up. I locked myself into the car after Naila’s story. One can’t be too careful these days. Arrived at the Rashid Hotel to see Sol and Lamia standing outside like two Orphan Annies, baggage piled up around them – all Sol’s because Lamia was staying at the hotel. Arrived back at the house. Salvi was at the gate, looking cross. I opened the gate and he went out into the night to join his extended family – gave me a dirty look on the way.

  24 December

  The other day in the souq I saw pullovers manufactured in Iraq on show in a shop window, multi-coloured with little black and white pandas on them, and right across the front the letters BANDA written in English – all colours. I took Sol to see them today, but there were only a few left. Obviously a popular line. Found other spelling mistakes on pullovers. A few had WIMTER, and one had BUEERELY written on it, and was surrounded by flying butterflies. Someone in this factory should be taught to spell.

  25 December

  Ate a lot of food at lunch today at Assia’s. She was running a high temperature from the flu. They killed their poor old turkey, stuffed it and sat it on a bed of rice. She told me that the day before, when she went out to kill the turkey, it thought it was going to be fed – it gave her a very pained look as she killed it.