The Weight of a Mustard Seed (2 page)

T
HE SACHET FAMILY LIVED IN SAIDIYA. SAIDIYA
was a district settled mostly by army officers on plots gifted from the government. It was a typical Baghdad neighborhood of cubist concrete houses stretched along highways built in the money-slick boom of the seventies, now sunk under the parched weeds and rubbish drifts and rubble of a flyblown sanctions decade liberated with an invasion.

In August the 133 degree sun switched off at dusk and the baked concrete of the city radiated into the evening. Not a cooling darkness, no puff of wind, but respite enough to venture outside, stretch your legs, sit in a café, sticky-necked in the furnace heat wreathed in kebab smoke, with a fuzzy warm Pepsi and listen to the traffic cacophony of a million second-hand cars flooding over the suddenly open border—no customs duties! No exit visas! No immigration officials! Nothing! Honking jammed in front of the traffic policeman at the intersection, stuck in a forty car line at the petrol station, brandishing a pistol at a line jumper, buying “jellycans” of fuel from the lithe and scabby black-market street boys. The shops cascaded pent-up imports onto the sidewalks: satellite dishes, electric fans (although the electricity was variably on-off—three hours on, three hours off), mobile phones (it was rumored a network
would be set up soon), tinsel, gold painted chandeliers, strings of multicolored fairy lights, cherry glitter lipstick, leopard print lingerie (for a woman must look enticing for her husband), pink dolls for daughters and plastic Kalashnikovs for sons. Men sat about, in sandals with cracked heels and loose tracksuit trousers, chain-smoked and complained about the electricity, the water, the Americans, no jobs, no rights; women walked past in long gowns and headscarves carrying kilos of tomatoes; small boys crammed the new internet shops, noses pressed against dusty second-hand monitors, gleefully, heedlessly playing Gulf War One, playing Americans hunting down Iraqis because the game was designed with only one protagonist.

We drove through the shopping throng, ignored the gunshot that might have been a car backfiring except that it really was a gunshot, past the tract of waste ground, right at the half-built mosque, raw and gray under redundant construction cranes, past a small abandoned police post; wove between a palm trunk chicane, a ball of tumbleweed razor wire and a pool of emerald sewage into an unassuming street of small villas with walled front gardens.

Kamel Sachet Aziz al Janabi had been a commander of the special forces, the general in charge of the army in Kuwait City during the Gulf War and a governor of the Province of Maysan, but the family's house was a modest, pleasant, middle class affair and there was nothing of the grandiloquent marble columns and bronze glass of the elite Baathie facades. The formal reception room for guests, where I was received, was large, bright and comfortable; I sat on a sofa in front of a glass coffee table laid with crocheted table mats and a vase of plastic roses, my translator sat next to me. The Sachets were very proud of their father and were happy to talk about him. We met in that first summer, each of us full of curiosity, optimism
and excitement. They had a lot of questions for me: Why had the Americans invaded? Was it for the oil? What kind of government would they install? But by the following winter, the Abu Ghraib rumors and detentions and hard knock raids had depressed all of us and I was reduced to apologizing—shaking my head, as abject and angry as they were—for the occupation.

Once or twice the daughters brought me into the private interior of the house, leaving my male translator behind, to show me something: how Ali, the second son, had decorated his room in pink satin and tulle for the arrival of his new wife, a new baby; or how to stuff eggplants. But usually when I visited, once or twice a week, I sat in the reception room and various members of the family would come in to say hello, bring me tea and then coffee, and sit for a talk.

 

K
AMEL
S
ACHET'S WIFE
was Um Omar, Mother of Omar (her eldest son), mother of his nine children. In rough order: Shadwan, Omar, Ali, Sheima, Amani, Ahmed, Zeinab, Mustafa, Zaid—and a burgeoning number of toddling grandchildren. She was a warm matriarch. Kissing her hello was like putting your arms around a feathered divan; when she moved it sounded like a swishing quilted curtain. She was firm and yielding; soft and bulky and upholstered in voluminous black velvet. She had aged into house-mother doyenne, indulgent of her family brood and prone to twinges of nerves. From time to time she suffered acute but nonspecific complaints: sleeplessness, problems with her stomach—not exactly a cramp but not exactly an ache. Once she went to three doctors in a week and came back with a bag of medicine, sleeping pills, anti-depressants, antibiotics and, bizarrely, typhoid tablets. I brought
a doctor friend of mine to give her some proper advice. She felt dizzy, she felt sick, but she had not been sick, yes, it happened once before like this, and it was very bad, that time she had fainted, maybe it was stress—yes, she nodded as my doctor friend explained the intersection of psychosomatic and physical. He told her to relax and not to worry and then some bomb banged distantly as if in ironic response.

Her headscarf framed her face in a severe black oval, but Um Omar's features were plump and powdery and, when she wasn't upset, her mouth smiled benevolently in repose. The big garrulous Ali, then in his early twenties, who seemed to get fatter and fatter every time I saw him, told me that when they were young she was strict and hurled slippers or wooden spoons at them if they ran around the house breaking things or neglected their homework. But it was hard to imagine this sternness—although not impossible; she wore large gold rimmed glasses and I could glimpse the school-teacher she had once been. Sometimes she seemed almost the naughty one of the family: her children had been brought up proscribed by the strictures of Saddam's regime and under the firm authority of their father, but Um Omar had grown up in a more indulgent time. She often giggled, almost girlish; she would swirl her wrists in gesticulation and roll her eyes as if to say it is not as serious as all that! And then she would look over her shoulder in comic concern that Ahmed, her devout and censorious son, had caught her being frivolous.

One afternoon at the end of 2003, when I went to visit, her hands were orange.

“Oh, I know! I was putting henna in Shadwan's hair and look at me!” She upturned her fluorescent palms.

“You have been shelling fava beans also.” I had noticed two large bags of discarded pods by the kitchen door.

“Oh, they are very delicious, now is the season for them,” said Um Omar, smoothing her lap, “but it takes a very long time to get the little beans out of their skins.” She shuddered comically at the work involved and clapped her hands on her knees, a movement that was like patting a cushion.

Presently Shadwan, her eldest daughter, thirty and unmarried, came in carrying a vast circular platter piled with rice and green fava beans. Um Omar beamed. Shadwan smiled triumphantly. Another daughter, Amani, thin and wan like a swaying reed, with a pale oval face, followed with bowls of yogurt. She looked up in docile polite greeting, but did not say a word. She carefully and noiselessly set the bowls down on the glass-topped table and then retreated, with a slight limp, back into the private interior of the house. Um Omar flapped her hands like semaphores:

“Eat! Eat!” The mountain of rice and fava beans looked like it was enough to feed the entire Janabi tribe. We bent to the task. Um Omar threw her arms up, the sleeves of her black gown fell back a few inches towards her dimpled elbows, and asked, “Is it good? I always worry if it will come out right. You know, when you are not paying attention everything works fine. When you want to do something well, it never works out.”

Um Omar had just come back from Mecca. It was the first time she had ever left Iraq, and she had applied for the lottery—each Muslim country is allotted a quota of pilgrims—and was accepted for
Haj
, the pilgrimage. She had remembered me in her prayers and brought me back a handbag as a present and I was exhorted to sip from a small glass of holy zamzam water. I protested about drinking their precious supply, but Um Omar shook her head and said she had brought back several liters.

So, I asked, how was it?

“Oh yes, it was very good, very interesting, but very tiring!”

Five days it took them to get to Mecca! They went by bus to Safwan and had to wait there, at a camp where there were permanent tents for pilgrims. The toilets were very bad; Um Omar shuddered. “We were like sheep; but the group before us was worse: they had to wait in Safwan for five days!” She threw her hands up to heaven in supplication. From Safwan they traveled to Kuwait on a yellow school bus. At first Um Omar did not know anyone, but the unaccompanied ladies on the journey soon became friends. She befriended a woman who was from the elite Mansour district of Baghdad.

“She was a
Wahhabi
, but she was very kind.” said Um Omar, referring to the fundamentalist Islamic strain to which the woman adhered. The Wahhabi woman had given Um Omar pamphlets and religious tracts to read, but Um Omar confessed she never bothered to read them and when she got home…! Ah, an uproar of hands, Ahmed had made a big complaint and confiscated them as heretical.

The Kuwaitis had a very nice place for pilgrims to stay in; it was like a village and the bathrooms were clean and the food was fine. Then it was time to go on the airplane. Um Omar had never been on an airplane and she had been a little nervous but she thought it was a very nice experience: the stewardesses were very beautiful, “they are from Turkey, you know—and the food! It was my best meal ever!” They flew to Jeddah and from Jeddah made their way to Mecca.

In Mecca the Iraqi contingent stayed in a good hotel with an elevator which alarmed Um Omar. At breakfast there were baskets filled with foil packets of honey, milk, orange juice and cheese. Um Omar had been rather taken with the sachets, so neat!

“But many people in Mecca! And from everywhere.” The crowds were thick and dense and if you got into the middle of one it was hard to get out of it. There were so many people pressing forward that on the way to Mount Arafat people would trip over the men who stopped to kneel down and pray. One old man was being continuously tripped over until other pilgrims dragged him up by his neck and told him to wait to pray later, for Allah's sake. Um Omar had wanted to stone the devil in the pillar but this was the most dangerous place for stampedes so she had given two stones to two different people to beat the devil on her behalf. “I asked two because you know, one might forget!”

The men all wore their special white robes, which left a shoulder bare. Women, Um Omar explained, can wear anything, of course, as long as it is
hijab
.

“Some of the women from Indonesia wore cosmetics and blue eye shadow!” Um Omar was shocked. And some of the Shia had brought pictures and likenesses of Hussein and this was wrong. And some of the pilgrims from England tried to give her some books and literature, but she refused them, no no! She waved her hands, waving away the foreign. Mostly, however, she was not impressed with the behavior of the other Iraqis in her group. Apparently they had quarreled and argued and caused too many problems about every little thing. Um Omar said that when she had been accepted for
Haj
she asked the man who was in charge of her tour what the most important thing to bring was and he'd replied that the most important thing on
Haj
was patience. So she was very patient through the long periods of waiting and organizing. The other Iraqis, she complained, had not been patient. She had wanted, for example, to spend more time in the second holy city of Medina on the way home, two days was not enough
time at the grave of the Prophet, but there had been so much arguing that they had left early.

“It was interesting, you know, that most Saudis are Wahhabis, and they do not agree with offering prayers to Mohammed or to Ali, they say these are only men, there is only one Allah. They are right, I was convinced by their arguments. But they would not let us throw our letters from relatives and friends into the grave of the Prophet Mohammed. I had a letter from Shadwan, and I threw it away.” Shadwan looked downcast and shrugged her shoulders. “And I wanted to buy a mobile phone that plays music as a gift—but they told me this was not allowed because music is
haram
! Why? It was a gift for a child!” Um Omar opened her palms in bewilderment. There was something foreign about it all, but what could you expect? “Ah. Of course, the
Haj
, like a feeling you cannot describe, like a feeling nowhere else.” Um Omar looked away and then back at me. “But inconvenient!” She said she was very happy to have gone but she did not want to go again. Once was enough. “It is what God has imposed upon us, it is a duty.”

Ahmed came in. He was seventeen and studied at the religious university in Baghdad. He was wearing a fawn colored
dishdasha
, extremely clean and well pressed, bowed to me hello and touched his hand to his breast in greeting, blinking his disconcertingly long eyelashes. He said he hoped one day to perform the
Haj
himself.

“A prayer in Mecca is worth 100,000 ordinary prayers. Yes, it is clear. And a prayer in Medina is worth 10,000, the same in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. A prayer in a mosque is worth twenty-seven prayers compared to a single prayer at home.”