Читать книгу The Baghdad Eucharist - Sinan Antoon - Страница 7

Family Photographs

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No one knows the exact date the photo was taken. But Youssef remembers that it was a Friday a few months before the Haraka, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s coup in 1941. He was eight years old then. The shot was taken at the old family house, which they shared with Uncle Yuhanna and his family. The Armenian photographer had been going door to door trying to convince residents of the Christian quarter to sit for family portraits. Youssef’s father had been hesitant to begin with but they all insisted, and after his own brother, Yuhanna, had agreed to it, and was rounding up his wife and children to sit for a photo, Gorgis came around. The photographer had set up in a corner of the courtyard where the light was just right, and he had them drape a large white cloth across the garden wall as a backdrop.

Abu Youssef, as Gorgis was known, sat solemnly at the center of the photo, wearing a traditional damask robe and a yashmagh wrapped around his head in the style of migrants who had recently arrived from the north. Although he had come to Baghdad three decades earlier, he categorically refused to dress like an effendi and adopt western clothes; he ignored the harping about it, which he heard from everyone, and wore the traditional garb to his dying day in 1957. Youssef sat beside him, but like a flitting bird, he couldn’t keep still, and Gorgis had wrapped his left arm around his son’s shoulder, clasping the boy’s hand in his own. After smoothing his moustache one last time, he’d rested his right hand on his right knee just as the photographer instructed them to stop moving and to look straight at the lens. Pulling out a plate from the camera, the photographer began counting down, “Five, four, three, two, one, zero.”

Naima, Gorgis’s wife, sat next to him on the other side, smiling confidently. The absence of color in the black and white photo in no way diminished the radiance of the wide, dark eyes that had first captivated Gorgis and made him go back to his village to betroth her. After he’d spent years working in river transport with his cousins, plying the waters between Muhammara and Baghdad, she had assumed that he’d forgotten the village and its inhabitants. Some of the villagers had warned her parents against Gorgis: they considered him cursed because his first wife and her two children had died in a drowning accident. They feared that a similar fate awaited Naima. But her father wasn’t in the least swayed by such talk. He was actually happy to marry his daughter to someone he considered to be of good extraction: he and Gorgis’s father owned adjoining plots of land in Talkayf where they had farmed barley together their entire lives.

Naima looks happy in the photo; Amal, the last of their brood, was already quite active in her belly, as if she were trying to muscle her way into the picture or play with Salima, the two-year-old seated in her mother’s lap. Gorgis had insisted on the name Salima in tribute to Iraq’s most famous singer of the time, Salima Murad Pasha. Naima had wanted to bear Gorgis more children to make up for the two that he’d lost in the accident near Muhammara, even though he never talked about it. But two years later, Naima’s heart stopped beating after dinner one day. She passed away, leaving a heavy burden to Hinna, her eldest daughter, who, in the family portrait, is sitting beside her and holding onto her mother’s right arm. Hinna had to leave school at fifteen to devote herself to doing the cooking and bringing up her siblings, while also working as a seamstress to help keep the family afloat. This went on for five long years, until her brothers finished school and were able to start pulling their weight. The greater sacrifice, from her point of view, was giving up the dream of becoming a nun and devoting her life to God. She never married and instead of being the white-robed virginal bride of Christ she had always dreamed of becoming, she gave up her life for the sake of her siblings.

Habiba, who was three years younger but taller than Hinna, stood right behind her, resting her right hand on her older sister’s shoulder, as though to thank her in advance for all that she would do. At the time, she had no idea that she would be part of one of the first generations of nurses to graduate in Iraq or that she would be sent to Sulaymaniya in Iraqi Kurdistan. Gorgis and his daughters would end up moving to the faraway city in order to be by her side during her three-year stint there, while the five boys remained with their uncle in Baghdad. Habiba’s salary had been sufficient to support them all, and after a few years she was even able to relieve her father from years of hard work, allowing him to stay home after the accident that led to his retirement.

The photographer had asked Ghazi, Jamil, Elias, and Mikhail, whose ages ranged between four and seven, to sit on the ground at their parents’ feet. This was the one and only photograph of the entire family together. Over the years, they scattered, moving to other parts of the country or to other countries where they appeared in other photographs, either alone or in clusters, but never again as a complete group.

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Ten-year-old Youssef is wearing a white shirt, and a piece of white ribbon tied around his right wrist makes it look as if a large butterfly has landed on him. Encased in soft white gloves, his hands are joined together in prayer and a rosary with a crucifix on the end of it hangs between his index and third fingers—even though he wasn’t really praying. His black hair is carefully combed and it looks as if he is trying to stifle a smile. He had been the object of everyone’s attention that morning, and all eyes had been on him. He had just completed his First Communion at the nearby Church of Our Mother of Sorrows in the predominantly Christian quarter. Afterward, his father had taken him straight to the studio for a photo to commemorate the day when Jesus had entered his heart. From then on, he was expected to be observant like his elders, to pray every night before going to sleep, to accompany his parents to church every Sunday, and to take confession, and take Holy Communion. The photograph, which was an upper-body portrait, didn’t show his white pants or the shoes and new socks that his father had bought him for the occasion. That morning, at Our Mother of Sorrows, he had knelt down in front of a statue of Jesus on the cross and repeated the chants, which they had all learned by heart in the previous weeks. He could still recall some of the verses.

Holy God, almighty and eternal, have mercy on us. Glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, forever and ever, amen and amen. To You, Lord of all creation, we give thanks. To you, Jesus Christ, our praise.

He had listened to the sermon by the patriarch who had officiated at the ceremony and had placed the host in his mouth with his own hand. He could still taste the body of Christ moistened with his blood, which is how the patriarch described the wafer dipped in wine. He had remembered to let the wafer melt in his mouth and not to bite down on it because it was the friable body of Christ. At the ceremony now in the studio, he knelt before the camera, and instead of the patriarch, there was an Armenian photographer officiating, asking him in broken Arabic to look straight at the camera lens without moving. Youssef was puzzled because the man had addressed him as a girl, but when he saw the smile on his father’s face, he understood that this was a peculiarity of the photographer’s speech.

They went home afterward, joining his mother and siblings who had gone back to the house ahead of them. His mother had prepared a celebratory breakfast that she’d laid out on a big table in the courtyard where both their family and his uncle’s family were assembled. Taking advantage of all the commotion, Youssef stuffed himself with delicious kahi with gaymar, which his uncle had brought, and ate as many bread wraps as he could. He loved the paper-thin bread rolled around a filling of cheese and homemade jam which his mother made, and Hinna kept on rolling them because she couldn’t deny him anything that day. The next day, he was laid up in bed. All that food, followed by running around and playing with his siblings and cousins had done him in, and given him an upset stomach. His mother had chided him, saying he had no self-control, “Ay ma eeth brayshukh? Satana?”

Jesus may have entered his heart, she said, but the devil was still in his head! Their mother, who was a relatively recent arrival from the village, only spoke to them and their father in Chaldean. They all understood her but they answered her in Arabic.

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The graduating class of 1950 stood in front of the main building of Baghdad College, right under the large sign with the school’s name emblazoned on it, in both English and Arabic, along with a short reference to the Jesuits who had founded the school and taught there. Seven students stood in the back row against the school’s imposing door. One step down, another eight formed the middle row. Father O’Casey, who was from Boston, stood in the center of the first row flanked by three students on either side. Second from the right in the back row was Youssef, whose face and upper chest alone were visible. Standing between Nasim Hizkayl and Salem Hussein, his long arms were spread like wings across his friends’ shoulders, drawing them closer. It was not surprising that the three of them lined up next to each other: they always sat together in class and spent recess together in the quad—so much so, that Father O’Casey called them the ‘pack of wolves.’

“No, Father,” Youssef had told him, “we’re a harmless flock of birds.”

Soon after graduation, the flock dispersed, however. Salem went to medical school and his father, who was a prominent businessman, interceded on Youssef’s behalf and got him his first job as a legal translator with the Iraqi Date Palm Authority. If it weren’t for the scholarships the school offered to outstanding students from modest families, Youssef would never have attended Baghdad College. Nasim, for his part, went to work for the import-export firm called Andrew Weir. Although their lives got busy, the three of them would meet up from time to time, and they never imagined that the flock would lose one of its members.

Just weeks before the photograph was taken, the government passed the 1950 emigration law stripping Iraqi Jews of their citizenship. Yet Nasim appeared unworried when Youssef and Salem questioned him about the rumors of a Jewish exodus; his father gave the idea no credence, Nasim said. He would repeat his father’s words that it was nothing but a passing cloud, and they were not leaving Iraq. The violence of the Farhud had been truly scary when it happened years before, but it was over, and things had settled down. Although there were still occasional attacks, the situation was bound to improve.