Читать книгу Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family - Tamara Chalabi - Страница 24

SEPTEMBER 2005

My aunt Raifa invites me to lunch at her house in Putney, south of the river in London. She knows I am going to ask questions about her life in Iraq. My other aunt, Thamina, is also invited, as well as two cousins of mine, Raifa’s daughter Zina, and my uncle Rushdi’s daughter, Nadia. Both my aunts are in their eighties. Although, like me, Zina and Nadia are Bibi’s grandchildren, they belong to my mother’s generation, since my grandparents had my father relatively late.

I’m the first to arrive. As my aunt sets the table in the kitchen while we wait for the others, I sit in her reception room. I see many valuable pieces, antique objets d’art, silver and precious glass – a museum curator’s fantasy. Many of these inherited pieces have made a long journey, often from London or Paris (where they were purchased) to Baghdad, and back again to London via Beirut. Each has a story, like the silver tray table engraved with my grandfather’s initials which was bought decades ago from Mappin & Webb. My aunt likes to tell their tales. I think they reassure her.

A sadness comes over me as I think of how the emotional charge of these objects has changed over time. Here in my aunt’s flat, I feel almost as if they have been reduced to something grotesque. It is as if they have been dragged across history and then forced to fit into more cramped circumstances than they were once accustomed to.

Later we sit in the kitchen, three generations of women discussing Bibi over dishes such as timan za’faran, saffron-flavoured rice, and sabzi, green herb stew. It seems amazing that Bibi’s influence is so pervasive that nearly twenty years after her death she has managed to bring us together.

Culturally and psychologically, my aunts are very different to my cousins and myself. They seem stuck in a time warp, preoccupied with private and public decorum, their values inherited from the world of their parents. This is less the case with my two cousins, but there is also a gap between them and me. I think we are outwardly less governed by the tribal mores and allegiances that dictated my aunts’ identities. This is perhaps most vividly manifested in the old-fashioned way they dress, in silk gowns and pearl necklaces with diamond clasps.

Thamina is describing her idyllic childhood in Baghdad. She recalls life then as a constant round of activity. She keeps repeating how ‘beautiful, beautiful it was’. She has barely started her reverie when Raifa interrupts her: ‘Let me tell them about my mother, God rest her soul.’ She launches into a soliloquy about how Bibi loved life, how she charged towards it with her arms wide open so as to embrace as much as she could. She then says that Bibi loved to gamble, but warns me not to mention this, and that she loved to indulge herself with material possessions: jewellery, furs, clothes. Bibi loved herself, Raifa declares, quickly adding that she was also magnanimous with those less fortunate than herself; she was very generous, forever giving alms to the poor. When she got older she started to feel guilty about her indulgences, and worried that God would punish her in the afterlife. She asked forgiveness from him, and died a pious woman.

Raifa stops, and Thamina, not to be outdone by her sister, reaffirms that her mother was never hands-on when it came to rearing her children. She was famous for delegating. Yet Bibi had an outrageous story that she loved to tell her tailors: that one of her shoulders was lower than the other from all the children she had had to carry.

‘How preposterous – I don’t think I ever saw her carry anyone!’ Thamina exclaims.

I ask why Bibi would say that, and Raifa replies that it was because she was fat in later life, and wanted an excuse for it, so she blamed the number of her children. Quietly, I think that Bibi was probably right, having given birth on nine occasions.

Nadia embellishes Thamina’s story by saying that she thought Bibi looked like ‘a walking onion’. We quickly discover that it is one thing for her daughters to say certain things about their mother, but quite another for the grandchildren to do so; Raifa snaps back at Nadia that she clearly never liked her grandmother.

‘Yes, I did,’ answers Nadia defensively.

‘Well, I loved Bibi,’ I interject.

‘She loved you too,’ says Thamina.

‘Ooze away, why don’t you,’ growls Nadia.

I carry on: ‘She had lovely soft skin.’

‘I remember she always used rose water,’ Zina says.

We continue to share our memories, but after a while Nadia has to leave. However, she still wants to learn a little bit more from her aunts before she goes, so she asks them about Baghdad’s markets. They list several, including Soug al-Saray, where they sold books.

‘Really? What did the book market look like?’ asks Nadia with childlike enthusiasm.

‘They were all covered. Like the ones in Istanbul or Damascus. Have you not seen them?’ replies Thamina. She explains that Soug al-Saray was a big market, but it was burned to the ground during the war in 2003. They said at the time that civilization had been destroyed yet again in Baghdad, with all those burned books.

Zina remembers how there used to be men with typewriters sitting on the pavements outside Soug al-Saray. They would type letters and requests for people who were illiterate.

‘Yes, they were called ardahaltchi; it’s a Turkish word. “Arda Haltchi”,’ Raifa confirms.

‘Ah, and what’s the English word?’ wonders Nadia.

‘Can’t you see there’s no English word? I don’t think they even existed here. Use your imagination!’ I snap at her, irritated by her repeated cultural mistranslations. Of all of us, she remains the most nostalgic for her pre-exile childhood, yet she is also the most removed culturally from anything Iraqi, or non-Western for that matter.

‘The market was near the courts, so the ardahaltchis wrote complaints for people,’ says Raifa.

My aunts continue to reminisce about the markets. ‘The textile market had the best range of cloth. Your grandmother loved it. There were lots of different silks, devoré and taffeta, brought from everywhere, from Italy, France, India, everywhere.’ Raifa concludes sadly: ‘There was everything in Baghdad.’