The Mule on the Minaret (79 page)

Baghdad was hung with flags and with streamers stretched across the streets. The city was celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the Philosopher Al Kindi and its own thousandth anniversary. But in far greater part the celebrations were a display of personal glorification for the Dictator Kassim. His photograph was on every hoarding and in every shop. For every tribute to Al Kindi, there were a dozen to the leader of the glorious July revolution.

Reid landed shortly after ten. From the window of the aircraft, it all looked familiar enough; the yellow ochre countryside,
le pays beige,
the twisting river, the date palms, the low houses, the golden domes of Khadimain glistening in the sunlight, but once on the ground, on his way from the airport to his hotel, he looked in vain for certain familiar landmarks. There were the rows of two-storeyed flat-roofed villas, there were the stunted, blossomless dust-covered oleander bushes, but where were the statues to Feisal and to General Maude? They crossed the river and there to the right was a fine new bridge. But the east bank of the river had lost its charm. The picturesque old wooden houses, with their balconies and courtyards were desolate and shabby. Many of them had been replaced by concrete barrack-like constructions. The low palm-dotted skyline with its mosques and minarets had vanished. The air was heavy with dust. He turned to the right and there was Rashid Street with its colonnades and shabbiness. its shuffling pedestrians, its bicycles and donkeys. His nostrils wrinkled: that old pungent smell.

He had booked a room in the El Katib. He had been advised to
stay in the new American style hotel that had been built between the south gate and the Alwiyah Club. But he wanted to evoke memories in a hotel that he had known in wartime. Twenty years ago the El Katib had been the smartest and most expensive; when G.H.Q. had been billeted in hotels, it had been reserved for officers above the rank of major. It was very shabby now, and was mainly patronized by Russian technicians, who had camped there like Bedouins with their wives and children and had no spare funds for the least personal indulgence. They did their own washing in their rooms, and the bar was desolate. But Reid was content enough to be here. This was the Baghdad he knew. In the American style hotel down the river, he would wake in the morning, wondering at first whether he was in Kansas or Detroit.

His room faced on the river. He walked on to the balcony. The west side of the river was little changed, there were the palm trees and the low houses many of them dating back to Turkish times, some of quite recent structure but all of them blended into the pervading atmosphere of watered dust. The river though was different. Long banks ran down to it, on which small boys were feeding sheep and goats: mud islands in the centre were planted with vegetables; the river itself was narrowed so that it had become a stream, meandering through shallows. This was December, surely the river should have risen by now. Then he remembered: there had been a heavy flood six years ago. Another few inches and the city would have been submerged. A barrage had now been erected to the north; the flow of water had been restrained and irrigation projects were under way that might restore the country to the prosperity that it had known in the days of Haroun al Rashid.

‘I must get out into the street and see what it all looks like now,' he thought.

On his way through the hall, he was stopped by the room clerk. ‘A telegram for you, Professor Reid.'

He had hoped there would be. In Beirut, Farrar had found out Diana's address from the Iraqi Consulate. He had invited her by cable to lunch with him at the Alwiyah Club on the day before the celebrations opened. He tore open the envelope. He read ‘Delighted, love.' Now he could relax.

He spent the rest of the day making a long, slow, sentimental pilgrimage. It was a bright cool day; an easy day for walking. During the celebrations he would be taken he knew on a tour of
the latest developments, but he wanted to see what had happened to the places that he remembered. He crossed the river by the new bridge and turned south towards the Centre's building. The Prince Regent had acquired the mess and dormitories and planned to make a private palace there. A high tiled wall over which he could not see had been set across the entrance to the garden. No one was about. The office buildings were also empty. He looked through the windows. The rooms were in disrepair. The garden overgrown. The house would be pulled down soon. No one needed this kind of house any longer. They wanted solid blocks of concrete. Air conditioning had effected more changes in the life of Baghdad in a dozen years, than as many centuries of wars had done. He wondered if well-off Baghdadis still slept on the roof in summer. There might soon be a generation that did not know about that cool breeze that came off the Tigris at four o'clock. Not far from his old centre was Nuri Said's house. That too was abandoned. The walls and window frames were pock-marked with the machine gun bullets that had racked it on that fatal night.

He crossed the river again and walked north from the Alwiyah Club. The East bank was cluttered now with cafés and food stalls. There were flags and photographs of Kassim: many of the streamers had been inscribed in English: in an English that was not quite English, such as ‘all homage to the creative thought.' He did not see anyone wearing the high split felt hat—the Sidera—that Feisal had introduced. Many of the men were chewing lettuces as they strolled along.

He lunched in a café facing the river by the south gate. He ordered an arak and a plate of messé. The café was full of men under fifty drinking beer or arak. Baghdad had a beer factory now. Reid ordered a bottle; it was light and good. Most of the men wore dark Western suits. Half of them had no collars; those who wore shirts with collars attached, left the shirts unbuttoned at the neck. They looked very scruffy. The few who were wearing the traditional Arab dress looked infinitely more dignified.

There were large brown buses running now down all Rashid Street. He took one to the old part of the city, surrounding the bazaars. Here the work of demolition was in brisk operation. Whole sections were being torn apart, to be replaced by tall dun coloured barracks. Never had he seen an uglier city. Yet it had a certain poetic quality in the evening, when the fires were lit along the river, and the broad flat fish were grilled on them.

He acquired a card of temporary membership to the Alwiyah Club. He arrived there early. The inside had been done over. He did not think that had he been brought here blindfold, he would have known where he was. There were a couple of waiters though whom he remembered and who remembered him. And the garden was the same, though somehow he had expected the grass to be more green. It was pleasant sitting there in the sun, remembering how it had been on summer evenings when young officers in bush shirts had danced on the small stone circle. He tried to pretend that he was not feeling nervous. He wondered if he would still recognize her.

But there was no need for him to wonder that.

They had their gin and tonics on the lawn.

‘I've something to say to you that I don't want overheard,' he said.

He told her what he had to tell. She nodded. ‘Yes, I understand. Thank you very much.'

There were only two other couples lunching and one man by himself. The room was bleak. It needed to be crowded to look gay. The menu was like that in an English railway station.

‘I always have cold meat and salad here,' Diana said, ‘and don't order wine. The beer's really better.'

The whole thing was very far from seeming an occasion. ‘Do you know that in all my months here, I never had a meal alone in feminine company.'

She raised her eyebrows.

‘It was a very celibate world for most of us,' he said.

‘No little shulamite?'

‘No little shulamite.'

‘Poor Noel; poor, poor Noel. I'd have been very surprised then, if I'd been told I'd be lunching with you here in 1962.'

‘It would have surprised me too. When I was sitting out there, in the garden, I wondered if I should recognize you.'

‘I don't think that I've altered very much.'

‘Scarcely at all.'

Her hair was grizzled. She was a little thinner: and her mouth was lined, but there was no real change. He had thought that with her height and having had children, she might have become massive in middle age. She had not, though.

Their talk moved smoothly. They talked about the celebrations,
a little but not much about the changes since the establishment of the new régime. She had to be careful what she said in public. They were both sufficiently familiar with police procedure, to know that their meeting would certainly be reported to police headquarters. One meeting between two compatriots, between two old friends, was to be expected. But a second meeting would have been suspicious. Besides Diana did not live in Baghdad, but on an estate two hours' drive away. Whatever they had to say, had to be said now.

‘It seemed strange at first,' he said, ‘your being married to an Iraqi.'

‘Why strange? Is there anything stranger about an Iraqi than a Frenchman or a Dane?'

‘Surely his being a Moslem makes a difference?'

‘Not really, nowadays. One thinks of Moslems in terms of the Holy war, and of all those wives. And I suppose if one were married to a very devout Moslem it would make a difference. But then so would it if one were married to a devout Catholic; there's not very much difference between what Shawkat believes and what the average, casual English churchman does. The forms of worship may be different, but not the essence. Do most of us after all, have much more than a rather vague belief in God?'

She paused. She looked at him, questioningly. He did not reply. He did not know the answer to that question. He had often asked himself why he who had such a definite regard for what are called ‘the eternal verities,' had never found it possible to embrace whole heartedly any single creed, though he accepted the communion of the Established Church, and did not consider that his taking of the communion was an act of blasphemy.

‘As a matter of fact, you see,' she was continuing, ‘Shawkat is far closer to me in terms of upbringing than a Spaniard would be. He'd been to Sandhurst. He'd had the English grooming. He liked and respected the English way of doing things. But he wasn't a part of it. And that's really what I wanted in a husband. Someone who would understand
me,
through having seen and understood and what is more appreciated a way of life against which I was in reaction. You see what I mean.'

‘I see what you mean.'

‘A Spanish officer for example, couldn't have been a real husband for me, for he couldn't understand how I had come to be what I was. His attitude would have been “let's rub it out and start
afresh”; but you can't rub out something you were born to. That's what made Nigel Farrar wrong for me.'

‘Steady now, steady. You are going much too fast. How does Nigel Farrar come into all of this?'

‘Because Nigel, like myself, was dyed-in-the-wool English; he was reacting against England, just as I was, but in a different way, for different reasons. And for the very reason that we were so close, we were not quite close enough. We might have become enemies. Thank God, we had the sense not to marry.'

‘Was there any talk of it?'

‘Indeed, there was.'

He could not have been more surprised; a flash of intuition made him ask, ‘Did you have an affair with Nigel Farrar?'

‘Of course. Didn't you know?'

‘I had no idea.'

‘She laughed. Oh, my darling Noel, how innocent you were. We must, all of us, have been a fearful shock to you.'

Nigel and Diana! That explained a lot. Why had he not suspected? It was as well probably that he hadn't.

He switched the conversation. He asked her about her children. What were her plans for them? Were they to be exposed to European influences? ‘The A.U.B. should give them a chance of choosing. That's the best I can do for them. But I hope they'll decide to stay here. This country needs the kind of man I hope they'll be.'

‘What did your father make of it all?'

‘Tickled to death. Just what he's hoped for me. I can hear him talking about it, in the Rag. “That daughter of mine, no use for the kind of man that she met in her mother's house, picked up a blackamoor in Cairo. Still she was true to her training in her way. The man had been to Sandhurst.” '

‘Did he ever meet your husband?'

‘No, and I so wish he had. They'd have liked each other.'

‘He's not alive still, is he?'

She shook her head. ‘But he died only three years ago.'

The talk moved easily enough. There were no pauses. Yet Reid had the feeling that they hadn't really a great deal to say to one another. Though she had changed little in appearance he felt that he was sitting beside a stranger. Neither knew anything of what the other had been doing during the last seventeen years. The friends they had had in common had gone out of both their lives.
Their interests were different, too. This is the end, he thought; the last pages of the chapter that had begun in Beirut, on that November afternoon, twenty-one years before. It seemed appropriate that it should end like this, with him lunching with Diana the bearer of a message on which the fate and future of a régime, might depend.

Next day the celebrations started. They were highly tedious. The speeches were much too long. A remarkable array of Mayors had been assembled from places as remote as Rome, Tashkent and Peking. Each of them spoke at length. The mayor of Moscow considered it a suitable occasion to deliver an attack on the British colonialism to which Baghdad had been subjected. By universal acclaim the laurels, had there been any, would have gone to the mayor of Damascus who spoke as a scholar and a poet. The receptions were even more tedious than the sessions. Kassim always arrived late, and insisted on long conversations with individual delegates. On one occasion it was eleven o'clock before the guests reached the supper-room. There was a dearth of alcohol.