The Weight of a Mustard Seed (3 page)

“I didn't wear
hijab
then.” Um Omar and I were sitting together, talking alone. I had told her I wanted to hear everything from the beginning, how she had grown up, how she had met her husband, and I had asked her if she had any old photograph albums.

“Not many,” said Um Omar, and then she had gone inside and come back with a box of loose snaps. Fingering this one, she regarded her younger Shamh self fondly and then said, with jokey self-admonishment, “If my husband had been a religious man back then, he would never have married me!”

Um Omar sat closer to me and laughed at another era and her memories.

“I am glad Ahmed isn't here…,” she suppressed a smile. Ahmed would certainly have frowned.

Shamh had gone to Baghdad University to train as a teacher; none of her sisters had gone to university—education was her abiding ambition. When she was in her second year she began to notice a young man from the neighborhood following her. She would see him at the bus stop wearing his police uniform. She was flattered by his attention, but she did not speak to him until he sat next to her on the bus one day, told her his name was Kamel and recounted his virtues and his circumstances and said he would like to marry her. Shamh was pleased, his speech showed that his intentions were honorable, the Sachets were
a known family. Shamh confided in her sister-in-law his attentions, and after a short time, he formally brought his parents to meet her parents. Shamh agreed to marry him on one condition: that he bought her a house so that they could live independently, but Kamel could not afford a house on his policeman's salary and so the plans for engagement were stalled.

Um Omar covered her mouth with her hand in a conspiratorial whisper, and explained, in mock-rueful horror at her own disrespect, the difference between her family, urban and established, and his family, recent immigrants from the village with Bedu manners. “You know I did not want to live with his family; his parents were a bit
Araby
!”

 

K
AMEL
S
ACHET HAD
been born in 1947 in the village of Hor Rajab, the third son of an illiterate farmer's family. Life was as plain and poor as it had been for generations. Hor Rajab was only twenty kilometers from Baghdad, but there was no road or electricity or radio or even a mosque. On Fridays the village sheikh would climb a small hill and make the call to prayer without a megaphone and prayer would be held in one of the rooms of the low mud-built schoolhouse.

Kamel was tall for his age and quiet, even as a child, to the point of taciturn. His life was barefoot and
dishdasha
, blackboard and chalk, elder brothers and father, cold in the winter and burning in the summer. The government provided lunch for schoolboys: eggs, oranges, bread and milk and a daily spoon of cod liver oil that they called caviar and hated the smell of. Lessons taught by the sheikh, reading and writing and the Koran, chores at home and play. The boys in the village made their own footballs out of bundled bits of rag and scraps of shoe leather tied up with heavy string. One time a camel caravan
came to the village and they scooped up tufts of camel hair and mashed it with camel milk and packed it hard to dry and make a rubbery ball that bounced, but the ground they played on was limned with salt and the salt would stick to the camel milk football and scratch up their toes as they kicked it.

Whenever I talked to Kamel Sachet's friends or military colleagues they always used two words to describe him. They said, “he was brave” and that “he was a simple man.” In translation, this “simple” meant uncomplicated, straightforward, straight talking and clear-cut. But I always imagined Kamel Sachet's simplicity in another way, as a purity of mind carved out of hard-edged shadows in a single color: yellow of the sun that beat through a yellow sky onto the yellow earth. Kamel grew up in poverty that did not know it was poor—spartan, austere,
simple
. It was not the way of the village for boys to fight and scrap but to let anyone hurt you was
haram,
forbidden, and shame.

Kamel was part of the clever group of boys at school and his teacher praised him to his parents and encouraged them to send him to middle school. Whether it was for this reason or economics, when Kamel was twelve his father Aziz moved the family to the outskirts of Baghdad, to the district of Dora, a pre-suburb area that was still then fields and unpaved roads and to which electricity (and television and radio and music and news) was not to come until 1964.

Here was the teenager, testing limits and boundaries, leading his little gang into the adjacent Christian neighborhood, fighting other little gangs, studying under trees when it was too hot at home and then jumping into the Tigris to cool down, falling in love with a girl from a good Jobouri family who refused his humble proposal, becoming momentarily inflamed with Unity! Liberation!
Ishtiraqiya
[Socialism]! during the short
lived Baathie coup of 1963, even temporarily manning the checkpoint near the Dora refinery with a green uniform and an Egyptian rifle (“so bad that if you dropped it, it would discharge and explode”) and encouraging his father to go to the new literacy classes sponsored by the socialist revolution.

His ambition, as that of his friends and childhood gang from the neighborhood, those that had seen their fathers struggle with the land, was to work as an employee in a government position that would bring a salary and a position. Many of them, after the humiliation of “The Aggression” of the 1967 war when the Arab states were defeated by Israel, felt compelled to join the military. After passing his baccalaureate, Kamel Sachet applied for the airforce, but he was turned down and joined the police instead.

 

A
YEAR AFTER
Kamel's proposal, Shamh was chatting at the bus stop with a boy from the university, who was praising her high marks. “I can still remember his name,” said Um Omar wistfully, “it was Mahmoud.” Kamel saw this, and walked over with high red indignation and his fists raised. Shamh told Mahmoud to leave to avoid a confrontation, but then she reminded her suitor that he had no rights over her.

The next year he agreed to buy a house of his own and she accepted his marriage proposal. Her sisters had married people introduced through matchmakers and relatives; Um Omar chuckled that she had found a husband by herself. Her brother asked around about the reputation of a young policeman called Kamel Sachet. In general people praised him: he had a reputation for being brave, but also he had a quick temper. He got into fights. If someone cut him off at a traffic light, for example, he was liable to beat them up.

Kamel Sachet and Shamh were married in 1972.

Was Kamel Sachet always religious? Didn't he impose the
hijab
on you when you were married?

“No, no! It came much later that he began to pray regularly and to study the Koran and then he regretted he had not started much earlier.”

Um Omar had wanted to continue her studies with a master's degree but her husband thought it was unnecessary and in any case she quickly fell pregnant. Instead she became a teacher at a primary school called
Etedahl
(Being Straight), which later changed its name to
Emtethal
(Setting an Example). She taught general studies, geography, history and
wataniya
, national studies.

Wataniya
was a kind of civics class. The syllabus explained citizens' duties, the structure of the government, the constitution, the authority of the police and the administrative divisions of the country. It also taught the duties of students: arriving on time, showing respect to teachers, taking care of the furniture and in particular, cleaning the portrait of the President which was hung in every classroom. In 1979 the face of President Bakr was taken down and replaced with the face of his usurping cousin, the self-promoted Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein was the Baathie strongman and Vice President with an increasing portfolio of key controlling positions in the army, the Party, and the Security Services. With his tribal connections to the President and his inner circle, he effectively
controlled the four pillars of the Iraqi state. He made sure he was the most visible politician in the country, always on TV, smiling, handsome, charismatic, well-tailored suits, polished shoes, mirror sunglasses. He would sweep into provincial towns in a black Mercedes cavalcade and emerge to cheering crowds of blushing young female university students and proud-backed Baathie Youth cadres, dispensing charm, gold watches, oil nationalization, agrarian reform. In the fat years of the seventies teachers salaries were increased, schools were repaired and built and stocked with expensive foreign equipment. In Um Omar's school, the pipes were fixed so that sewage didn't overflow in a corner of the playground, new desks and chairs arrived every year, there were modern exercise books and special dustless chalk. Saddam Hussein seemed as young and vigorous as his upwelling country and he promised a future that was as shining and rich and strong.

Through the seventies he took control of the mechanisms of state. Party members who crossed him were arrested, demoted, scared off with ringing telephone threats. Much as Stalin took advantage of Lenin's illness, Saddam overtook the aging Bakr, forcing him into the passive position of figurehead, until he was ready to take over publicly and Bakr “resigned for health reasons” in 1979. Saddam's first move as president was to invite prominent party members to a meeting. This meeting was videotaped. Saddam sits on a dais, smoking a cigar as his lieutenants announce that a conspiracy has been discovered. Saddam says, with regret and tears in his eyes, that he can remain merciful no longer. Name after name is read out. Those called stand up, shuffling, shocked, and are escorted out of the room by Amn security officers. No one dares to remonstrate, the tension builds electric, the tape goes on and on. Name after name. At the end, with the relief of expiated fear, the remaining assembled burst
into applause and laud their new leader with promises of fealty. Some of them are rewarded for this display by being invited to join the execution squads of the purged. Right from the beginning there was never any doubt that the penalty for being on the wrong side of Saddam was death.

The appointed class monitor dusted the face of Saddam every morning, it was the teacher's responsibility to make sure that the frame was not broken or damaged. At the beginning of every term the pupils wrote out a selection of the President's sayings and pasted them on the wall.

Saddam liked to make surprise visits to schools to see how much progress was being made and spot-quiz the pupils in front of the television cameras. Teachers were always careful to maintain everything very neatly and in order, just in case the President dropped by unexpectedly. When the schools' inspectors came they made sure that the portraits of the President were displayed well and emphasized that ideals and ideas of
wataniya
should be integrated into every part of the curriculum. There were rallies and meetings on national holidays but Um Omar never paid attention to the rhetoric.

“No one cared about the speeches. You just had to be present. I'd rest my head in my hands; if it was a long speech everyone would be asleep. We'd be thinking about what food we had at home, about our kids, what we should cook for dinner.”

Kamel Sachet left the police in 1975 and joined the army and subsequently the Special Forces as an officer. He strove to improve himself. He volunteered for every possible course of extra training. He spent three weeks in Germany in 1978 doing a course in mountain warfare. He learned Farsi and went on joint exercises with Iranian special forces under the Shah. He rose through the ranks to Major, distinguished by his leadership and ability.

He was a good husband and father. When he came back from Germany his suitcase was full of presents. For his wife, a coat with a fur collar, two blouses, a hairdryer, perfume, socks and long house dresses. He brought coats of equal value for his own mother and for Shamh's mother and blouses for her sisters and toys for the kids. On Friday afternoons he would drive Shamh around and take her to see her sisters. They would go on family picnics and the kids would throw up in the car and he would look grim about the smell. He liked to pick a picturesque isolated spot and point out a tree, a stream. Um Omar could never understand why he wanted to stop in the middle of nowhere. She would throw up her hands and say, “What are we doing in a place where there are no other humans?”

Kamel Sachet expected his family to adhere to his high standards. He did not like his wife, for example, to go out unaccompanied.

“My husband set the pace for me. He didn't let me out much. But he never imposed anything big on me. Going out is not a big thing. I could buy furniture, I could change things in the home. I could spend money or not spend money. He gave me his whole salary and he never questioned me. I was his accountant.” She laughed at it, “he had his allowance from me.”

And he was often away, training, and later, during the war against Iran, at the front. When he was away the house would relax, the children would be noisy, Um Omar would call up her friends and spend hours on the telephone and then, when Kamel called from the trenches and couldn't get through, she would tell him that the children must have left the phone off the hook. He bought her a car and taught her how to drive and she would go for drives with the children. She would visit her sisters and treat her nieces and her children to the ice cream parlor, admonishing them always that this was a big secret from
their father. They never told. All the Sachet children grew up with the authority of their father at home, and the authority of their president outside it. They knew not to tell their father about the ice cream and they knew never to mention things he said about the government at school.