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Lighting a fire

As you can see, life in what passed as the ‘city’ of Baghdad was still quite primitive. Take lighting a fire. Matches were unheard of; people still used a wax-coated cord with a compound on one end that was ignited by friction. (When matchboxes eventually arrived, they were an amazing novelty but relatively expensive.) To fuel their fires, everybody had what they called a ‘fuel room’, but it wasn’t coal or logs that were kept there. It was full of sacks of different kinds of combustible material, some to give a quick fire and some to burn slowly for use in the oven when baking. Dried sheep dung, bought by the sackload, was popular because it was smokeless. Khash khash, the red, inedible fruit of the hawthorn, was the most sought-after because it gave off a nice scent.

Hennouni

I have seen a map of the city in the 17th century and now realise that, in the second decade of the 20th century, it had hardly changed in size or, I suppose, in character. In the old quarters, there were no street names: you simply referred to a street by the name of the richest family living there – for example, Kutchet Beit Baher where all the Bahers lived. The alleyways were always filthy, as street cleaners were unheard of, and they formed a labyrinth in which it was easy to get lost. They were lined with sellers, not all of them nice. A barber would squeeze himself into a corner: he might have no shop but this did not stop him offering a range of interesting services besides shaves and haircuts – pulling teeth, for example, and lancing boils in full public view. Further down the lane could be a knife sharpener, then you might come across pedlars selling such delicacies as taaza ya fijil, fresh radishes with long leaves, or khastawee ya nabeg, lotus berries (hackberries) as sweet as dates, weighing them using old-fashioned iron scales, with their produce on one side and rocks, instead of lead weights, on the other. They were always cheating and bargaining.
    Passing the unpainted mud-brick houses in the poor quarters, you might see at the top of their doors an old shoe or a threadbare slipper nailed there as protection against the Evil Eye, with Jewish homes adding a mezuza with its short prayer to protect the house and those in it. You might come across the milkmaid with her cow, just managing to squeeze through to visit the homes of newborn babies so their mothers could be guaranteed a supply of fresh milk. She would milk the animal on the doorstep, always being watched carefully to make sure she did not dilute the milk with water. And through all this there was the remarkable sight of young country girls arriving from distant villages and heading for the Shorjah, the main market. Piled on their heads were towers of ’elba laban, wooden yoghurt containers that slotted together. Each load could weigh up to 90 pounds – over six stone! – and were often as tall as the girls were.

Living in harmony 

All the communities lived together peaceably, teasing each other good-naturedly and without inhibition about their religion. For instance, jewellery was the speciality of the Jews. A lovely story was told of how a Christian woman ordered a golden cross, encrusted with diamonds, to wear as a pendant for Christmas. When it was ready, she pointed out that one arm was ever so slightly bent and there was no symmetry to the piece.
    ‘As if it wasn’t enough that you Jews killed our Jesus, now you’ve deformed his image!’ she complained.
    ‘Look, madame,’ replied the jeweller Yakoub el Saa-yegh, ‘if you accuse me of killing your Jesus, I should know how it was done, and I assure you that the cross was not symmetrical. This is the correct way, and to prove it, you will find that it is the best talisman you ever wore.’  
    She paid up and was still laughing when she reached home.

Learning Hatikva

One day, Madame Sabbagh brought out her guitar and told us she had a new song for us. It was Hatikva, the Hebrew song that is now the national anthem of Israel. Learning it from Madame Sabbagh, I never guessed that it was in Hebrew, for it sounded just like the rest of the foreign languages I had been exposed to. Imagine a world without records, radio or TV: we could differentiate nothing. Madame Sabbagh’s accent didn’t change when she sang the song, so we assumed it was French.
    At the start, French was the only foreign language we knew; it was for school use only, just as children might learn Latin and only use it at school, not as a living language. A couple of years later, at home, we acquired a wind-up gramophone and a record of Hatikva. As all the family tried to pick out some words of modern Hebrew, I suddenly burst into song. Everybody was flabbergasted. It was only then that we realised that the song I had learned at school had been in Hebrew. (Now, that reminds me of the story of the Israeli who went into a kosher restaurant in New York. A Chinese waiter served him throughout the meal. As the Israeli was leaving, he complimented the manager on his Hebrew-speaking Chinese waiter. The manager quickly hushed him: ‘He thinks he’s speaking English.’)

How to make an ’ abaaya

Next to that was a room for our gardener Djassem, a big, sturdy fellow who remained with us for a good many years. His wife Fatoom did not stay the night with him; rather she returned to her own home and brought him his supper every evening, most frequently lamb with baamia (ladies’ fingers), their standard fare. Bran bread and raw onion was their lunch – always bran bread, for it was cheaper – sometimes replaced by dates, yoghurt or a glass of milk.
    Naturally, we saw more of Fatoom during the summer holidays, when she gave Djassem a hand. In the afternoon, when she wanted to relax, she would sit on the step by the doorway of their room and spin wool to make herself an’abaaya (gown) for the coming winter. In the spring, sheep-shearing time, she would get untreated fleece at a discount from her son-in-law who was a shepherd. She would wash and comb it, then turn it into wool thread by twisting it together, a little at a time, and winding it round a spool, the end of which looked like a toy top. On and on she spun, round and round, as if she was playing and enjoying herself. She let me try once, but it really was much more complicated than it looked. While spinning, she would tell us children long tales of chivalry and romance – many based on the Alef Leila wu-Leila (The Thousand and One Nights) – and we loved them, for her stories always had happy endings. After a few weeks, when she thought she had spun enough, she would take the wool thread to the weaver who then wove it into a length of material, enough for an ’abaaya for herself and one for her husband. How laborious, just for a couple of cloaks.

Healing

If a child fell sick or had a temperature, a mother would turn to one of two tried and tested home brews: either goat’s milk (some went so far as to keep a goat, just in case) or a sugared infusion of dried berries and violet flowers. If she suspected the child’s illness was due to the Evil Eye, she would dig a hole in the ground outside the house by the doorstep, pour a glass of water in it, then massage the child’s hands, feet, forehead, and sometimes the whole body with the mud from the hole. As a last resort, she would call on the great Muslim healer Mullah Juwad, whose remedy was supposed to be infallible. He lived in the Karkh across the river by the old bridge, a long way from the Jewish quarter – say, forty minutes or more by ’arabaana (gharry). Mullah Juwad would read a sentence from the Qu’ran, blow on the face of the child and write a blessing from Allah on a piece of paper that he would fold and give to the mother to sew on the child’s pillow, like a talisman. He would also give her another seven bits of folded paper, one for each day of the week, which she had to soak in water that the child would then have to drink. There was no fixed price; you paid what you could. Many were so grateful that they went back to give him presents.
    For adults, too, there was one last, desperate, course of action if other potions failed: to seek the Light of God. That really was the name – Noor-Allah – of one of our best-known doctors, who was reputed to have an infallible cure for everything. In reality, I believe he only ever prescribed one of two medicines: either a mild mixture of coloured barleywater or a powerful laxative – castor oil (his preferred solution in 90 per cent of cases).
   Jokes used to circulate about Dr Noor-Allah, all probably based on truth. For example, one day as he was sitting puffing on his nargiila (hubble-bubble), he noticed Selim standing nearby.
    ‘How is your father today, Selim?’ he asked
    ‘God rest his soul, he passed away last night,’ replied Selim.
    ‘Did you at least give him the medicine I prescribed before he went?’
    ‘Yes, I did.’
    ‘That was very lucky,’ said the doctor, breathing a sigh of relief. ‘God only knows what would have happened if he hadn’t taken it.’

Our origins

The scorching summer never seemed to want to end. And right in the middle of it, just when we felt we were on fire, came Tish’a-Bab, the Ninth of the Month of Av, a three-week period of mourning when, by chance, most of our own tragedies (like Baba being deported) occurred. It was during Tish’a-Bab that Babylonia’s King Nebuchadnezzar razed Jerusalem and destroyed Beit-Hamiqdash, the Temple that housed the Tablets – the original Ten Commandments brought down from Mount Sinai by Moshe Rabenu: Moses.
    Some 1,200 years earlier, our patriarch Abraham Abinou had journeyed to Judea in the Promised Land from his home in Ur in Babylonia (Mesopotamia) to found a new nation that, he was convinced, was destined to bring the knowledge of God to the world. In Judea, the migrants became known as Hebrews, from the word ebher – ‘the other side’ (of the Euphrates). So when Nebuchadnezzar captured the Jews and brought them back to Mesopotamia as slaves, initially to dredge the irrigation channels of the twin rivers, they were, in a sense, returning home. And so began the period known as the Babylonian Captivity.

The teeteepampa

Then came the neddaaf. His task was to fluff up fresh cotton for new mattresses and eiderdowns and the cushions and backrests of the takht (benches) in the outside areas, to replace the previous year’s, which would now be given to charity. We always had everything newly made and gave away the old. Sometimes we would save one or two of the old ones as spares for the many guests who would spend some weeks with us in summer. The neddaaf was known to everyone as the teeteepampa – an odd name which probably came from the huge bow he brought with him, just like the bows of wood and string small boys made to shoot arrows with. First, he would undo the matted cotton and then proceed to fluff it by twanging the string of the bow, starting on the outer edge of the pile and working through it until it was all fluffy again – and the buzzing sound it made was just like his name: ‘Tee-tee-pam-pa!’ Finally, he would fill the fresh cushion and mattress covers and sew them up.
    It was a delicious feeling when, once again, I could sink gently into my soft, springy mattress. But I would ask Nana if I could possibly keep my old eiderdown because it was now softer and lighter and I knew the new one would be hotter from the fluffed-up cotton, and the new cover would be starchy, noisy and scratchy. Sometimes she would let me. At this time of year, we were still sleeping on the sat-h (rooftop) although we usually took a lebbada (bedjacket), for at dawn the breeze was cool.

The nargiila

The nargiila consists of a large glass decanter half full of water with, above the waterline, a small spout to which is fixed a flexible tube ending in the mouthpiece. On the lid of the decanter is a small tin container full of the smoking material. This is covered in small charcoal embers, and as the smoker inhales, he fans the fire through the holes at the base of the opium container, which causes the water to displace and bubble, the action supposedly purifying the tobacco or opium. Only special opium grown in the east of Iraq and Iran was ever used.

The hab

Whenever we ate watermelon or pumpkin, we would save all the seeds – hab – then rinse, drain, salt and sun-dry them before roasting them on a slow fire until they crackled. The smell of roasting seeds was delicious and at certain times the aroma seemed to come from every house. Eating them was the best way to idle away the hours. While we children played a game of Ludo, backgammon or cards, the grown-ups and their guests would sit around gossipping, all the time cracking away at the hab.
    Hab-cracking was in vogue long before cigarettes came on the scene: tobacco became fashionable only with the advent of Hollywood films. At the cinema, during the interval, the vendor would cry: ‘Hab ya loz!’, saying his seeds were as good as almonds, and after the show the floor would be carpeted with discarded husks. It was the done thing for young men to parade by the river, watched enviously as they chatted with their friends, relaxed, looking and feeling like millionaires while they played with a sibha (worry beads) with one hand and cracked hab with the other.
    It takes years of practice to master the art of hab-cracking. It is not nearly as easy as it looks. The proper way is to take a good handful, then flip them to your mouth, one seed at a time. Flip carefully as you must catch each seed swiftly with your lips and not in the mouth itself. Then, with your tongue, you turn the hab sideways so that it sits edgewise between your top and bottom front teeth, with the point turned inwards. Be careful not to wet it lest it resist the cracking. Then crack the hab. The mastery is to use just the right amount of pressure, for you then blow the unblemished husks into the air using your tongue. The seed itself should also be left unbroken and stay in your mouth to be eaten. A really advanced hab-cracker can even organise it so that the unblemished husks are still joined together at the bottom when discarded. All this operation is done in a flash so that all the onlooker sees is flying clouds of husks and the resulting ring on the ground.
    I happened to know the champion hab-cracker of Baghdad well. He was my own Uncle Shaoul, brother of Baba, who could crack a good handful in seconds. In fact, in an unofficial competition, he managed as many as fifty in one minute.

Manna from Heaven

 
We also hired a guffa for the shakarchi, or patissier, whose cooking pot was too big to fit into a normal boat. He and his assistant would stay two nights to make the loozina, a sweet made from quince and covered in chopped almonds and cardamom seed, and the mann-essama (also known as  be’be’Qadrasii – literally, ‘holy biscuits’). This delicious nougat  is supposed to be ‘manna from Heaven’. The raw material is still collected by villagers in the north-eastern corner of Iraq. They put leaves on the ground to collect the overnight dew that forms and crystallises: truly Heaven’s plenty. The spot is supposed to be where Moses and the Hebrews camped and ate manna, which the Bible describes as having been found ‘on the face of the wilderness, thin and flaky, like frost on the land’ and the taste of it being ‘like wafers made with honey’. Even Marco Polo mentions coming across it on his travels. The shakarchi specialised in mann-essama. He would melt down the crystallised dew, remove the impurities and, in his enormous cauldron, mix in about 200 egg whites. Yet more eggs were mixed with the leftover yolks to make khebz-spania, a sort of sponge cake, supposedly Spanish bread.

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