.Spending the Night With an Iraqi Friend
BAGHDAD — Like other Western correspondents, I’ve forged some close friendships with Iraqis I’ve met here. But because being seen with Americans is so dangerous, it has been difficult or impossible to share the normal social exchanges of friendship like visits to people’s homes.
So when an Iraqi woman friend, inspired by the drop in violence and her move to a new apartment, invited me to come over for dinner and spend the night with her family in a conservative, mostly-Shia area of Baghdad during Ramadan, I was thrilled.
Even six months ago, my friend’s neighborhood was a killing ground for Shiite militias; bombings and assassinations were frequent. Several months ago, a car bomb killed dozens of people there.
Many residents in the area remain suspicious of Westerners, so I dressed in a black abaya, the long robe worn by religious women, and wrapped a black hijab around my head. Not wanting to draw attention with an American-made backpack, I packed my overnight things in a plastic bag from an Iraqi store. The situation is still precarious enough that I cannot use my friend’s name.
At 4 p.m., my friend’s brother picked me up at an intersection not far from where they lived, and we drove to the apartment building and walked quickly inside. The lights were turned out in the staircase, a precaution so that the neighbors would not look too closely at a visitor, and we negotiated the rough cement steps in darkness.
I was greeted by my friend, her husband and a pretty, mischievous 3-year old girl, who ran to me, gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Ahebich!” – “I love you.”
I had long ago fallen for this small child from afar, through photos and videos my friend had shown me. I’d given her, through her mother, small presents, and received presents in return. But I never dared hope to meet her in person, particularly at her home, in her own familiar surroundings
The apartment was small but cozy and spotless, its walls painted in dark pastels — orange, lilac, green. On a late afternoon when the temperature outside hovered at 114 degrees Fahrenheit, it was also swelteringly hot – the national electricity required to power the air conditioner worked only sporadically, at most 4 hours a day, my friend said — and their small generator is turned off during the day to save gasoline, which is expensive and difficult to get.
But as we walked into the main bedroom, the air conditioner suddenly switched on. “It is a gift from Allah!” my friend said, insisting that I sit on the bed in front of the blower to receive the strongest blasts of cold air. About 15 minutes later, the power shut off again, a pattern that was repeated several times that evening.
My friend and her husband, who had been fasting since 4 a.m., neither eating nor drinking liquids, plied me with cold juice and glasses of cool water. They gave me a tour: the living room; two other smaller bedrooms – one for their daughter, the other a storage room they hoped to someday turn into a guest room; a tiny hallway area that served as a kitchen, with a four-burner stove top but no oven and a small porcelain sink; an Eastern style, cement-floored bathroom. As in many Arab homes, the living room was empty of furniture except for a round plastic table and chairs – pallets on the tiled floor provided the setting for much of the family’s social life. A gold scroll with three verses from the Koran –one to protect against envy, another against black magic, my friend said — hung on one wall, a giant plastic Mickey Mouse watch on another.
I saw a door to the outside and asked if the apartment had a balcony. “We have only the letters ‘b’ and ‘a’ but not the rest of it,’’ she said jokingly. I wanted to go and look, but it was still light out and I might be spotted — too risky for my friends.
The electricity shortage, they said, is a problem not just for comfort but for the refrigerator in the bedroom, which goes off and on all day, making it difficult to store food. The water in the sink and shower, too, is unpredictable, sometimes working, sometimes not.
To pass the time until the fast ended at 6:45 p.m., we sat in the bedroom and talked about learning foreign languages (my friend’s husband was trying to learn English), about the security situation – there more people on the streets after dark in the neighborhood now, they said, more people in the park – and other topics to take their minds off the cold bottles of water that were still an hour away. When the small generator went on and the swamp cooler, which requires less energy than an air conditioner, kicked into life in the living room, we moved there.
I helped the 3-year old open a package of clay in small colored tablets that her father had bought and, while my friend cooked, the three of us shaped the sticky colored tablets into animals – a bird, a bear, an octopus. My friend’s daughter spoke only a few words of English and I speak little Arabic, but “Can I squish it now?” seemed to require no translation. I said that she could.
It had been a difficult fasting day for my friend and her husband. She had the day off, spending it cooking and preparing for my visit. But it was too hot to sleep in the apartment and too hot to spend much time outdoors. Her husband worked all day and then ran errands, shopping for bread and buying other supplies. The batteries in my camera were starting to run out and twice, he went out to he buy new ones, but the batteries were cheaply made and didn’t work.
While the old ones lasted, I took photos of my friend’s daughter and her husband, but my friend did not want me to photograph her without her hijab on – religious law forbids women to reveal their hair to men outside the family.
The heat was making my friend’s thirst almost intolerable, but she said that fasting during Ramadan was a lesson from God, teaching patience and restraint and reminding them that there were others in the world who suffered and who did not have food or water. Still, she joked, she was going to delay drinking past the appointed time a bit because the water had humiliated her by sitting so temptingly in front of her.
Iftar, the meal that breaks the fast, was laid out on a tablecloth on the floor, a feast of lamb kabobs, homemade babaganoush and dolma, grape leaves wrapping rice flavored with chickpeas and strips of lemon, yoghurt with cucumbers. We drank fruit juice and bottled water – even when there is tap water, it is not potable.
After dinner, my friend’s mother, her 16-year old brother and a 4 year-old niece dropped by and the party moved once more to the bedroom, where the air conditioning had decided to make a final brief appearance. While the teenager watched television – a popular show satirizing Iraqi politicians – and the small girls whispered secrets together, my friend’s mother began asking me questions about the United States. What was New York like? How much did it cost to live in America? What was the government like there? I told her that it was as difficult to describe my country to someone in Baghdad as it was to convey what life is like here to someone in the United States.
We talked about the nearby neighborhood where she and her husband lived. For several years there were killings and other violence every day – “like you cannot imagine,” she said. But now, after months of relative quiet, the government had finally put up a long blast wall, forcing her to walk 5 kilometers to work, rather than the 1 kilometer she walked before. “Why did they put it up now, why not before?” she asked.
After the visitors left, I snuck out on the partial balcony – a stone railing enclosing a narrow space – and stood behind a pillar, a borrowed hijab covering my head, peering at the largely deserted street. A police car whizzed by, its siren wailing A few men hurried along, carrying packages or smoking cigarettes. The lights in most apartments were already out.
For an hour or so, my friend and I sat on the bed – as if we were anywhere – and spoke about our lives, about religion, about the future of her country and mine. Then we joined her husband and daughter, already asleep on mats on the living room floor, the swamp cooler humming gently. I woke up only briefly at 3 a.m., when my friend and her husband got up to eat breakfast, pray and prepare for another day of fasting.
Baghdad Bureau
So when an Iraqi woman friend, inspired by the drop in violence and her move to a new apartment, invited me to come over for dinner and spend the night with her family in a conservative, mostly-Shia area of Baghdad during Ramadan, I was thrilled.
Even six months ago, my friend’s neighborhood was a killing ground for Shiite militias; bombings and assassinations were frequent. Several months ago, a car bomb killed dozens of people there.
Many residents in the area remain suspicious of Westerners, so I dressed in a black abaya, the long robe worn by religious women, and wrapped a black hijab around my head. Not wanting to draw attention with an American-made backpack, I packed my overnight things in a plastic bag from an Iraqi store. The situation is still precarious enough that I cannot use my friend’s name.
At 4 p.m., my friend’s brother picked me up at an intersection not far from where they lived, and we drove to the apartment building and walked quickly inside. The lights were turned out in the staircase, a precaution so that the neighbors would not look too closely at a visitor, and we negotiated the rough cement steps in darkness.
I was greeted by my friend, her husband and a pretty, mischievous 3-year old girl, who ran to me, gave me a kiss on the cheek and said, “Ahebich!” – “I love you.”
I had long ago fallen for this small child from afar, through photos and videos my friend had shown me. I’d given her, through her mother, small presents, and received presents in return. But I never dared hope to meet her in person, particularly at her home, in her own familiar surroundings
The apartment was small but cozy and spotless, its walls painted in dark pastels — orange, lilac, green. On a late afternoon when the temperature outside hovered at 114 degrees Fahrenheit, it was also swelteringly hot – the national electricity required to power the air conditioner worked only sporadically, at most 4 hours a day, my friend said — and their small generator is turned off during the day to save gasoline, which is expensive and difficult to get.
But as we walked into the main bedroom, the air conditioner suddenly switched on. “It is a gift from Allah!” my friend said, insisting that I sit on the bed in front of the blower to receive the strongest blasts of cold air. About 15 minutes later, the power shut off again, a pattern that was repeated several times that evening.
My friend and her husband, who had been fasting since 4 a.m., neither eating nor drinking liquids, plied me with cold juice and glasses of cool water. They gave me a tour: the living room; two other smaller bedrooms – one for their daughter, the other a storage room they hoped to someday turn into a guest room; a tiny hallway area that served as a kitchen, with a four-burner stove top but no oven and a small porcelain sink; an Eastern style, cement-floored bathroom. As in many Arab homes, the living room was empty of furniture except for a round plastic table and chairs – pallets on the tiled floor provided the setting for much of the family’s social life. A gold scroll with three verses from the Koran –one to protect against envy, another against black magic, my friend said — hung on one wall, a giant plastic Mickey Mouse watch on another.
I saw a door to the outside and asked if the apartment had a balcony. “We have only the letters ‘b’ and ‘a’ but not the rest of it,’’ she said jokingly. I wanted to go and look, but it was still light out and I might be spotted — too risky for my friends.
The electricity shortage, they said, is a problem not just for comfort but for the refrigerator in the bedroom, which goes off and on all day, making it difficult to store food. The water in the sink and shower, too, is unpredictable, sometimes working, sometimes not.
To pass the time until the fast ended at 6:45 p.m., we sat in the bedroom and talked about learning foreign languages (my friend’s husband was trying to learn English), about the security situation – there more people on the streets after dark in the neighborhood now, they said, more people in the park – and other topics to take their minds off the cold bottles of water that were still an hour away. When the small generator went on and the swamp cooler, which requires less energy than an air conditioner, kicked into life in the living room, we moved there.
I helped the 3-year old open a package of clay in small colored tablets that her father had bought and, while my friend cooked, the three of us shaped the sticky colored tablets into animals – a bird, a bear, an octopus. My friend’s daughter spoke only a few words of English and I speak little Arabic, but “Can I squish it now?” seemed to require no translation. I said that she could.
It had been a difficult fasting day for my friend and her husband. She had the day off, spending it cooking and preparing for my visit. But it was too hot to sleep in the apartment and too hot to spend much time outdoors. Her husband worked all day and then ran errands, shopping for bread and buying other supplies. The batteries in my camera were starting to run out and twice, he went out to he buy new ones, but the batteries were cheaply made and didn’t work.
While the old ones lasted, I took photos of my friend’s daughter and her husband, but my friend did not want me to photograph her without her hijab on – religious law forbids women to reveal their hair to men outside the family.
The heat was making my friend’s thirst almost intolerable, but she said that fasting during Ramadan was a lesson from God, teaching patience and restraint and reminding them that there were others in the world who suffered and who did not have food or water. Still, she joked, she was going to delay drinking past the appointed time a bit because the water had humiliated her by sitting so temptingly in front of her.
Iftar, the meal that breaks the fast, was laid out on a tablecloth on the floor, a feast of lamb kabobs, homemade babaganoush and dolma, grape leaves wrapping rice flavored with chickpeas and strips of lemon, yoghurt with cucumbers. We drank fruit juice and bottled water – even when there is tap water, it is not potable.
After dinner, my friend’s mother, her 16-year old brother and a 4 year-old niece dropped by and the party moved once more to the bedroom, where the air conditioning had decided to make a final brief appearance. While the teenager watched television – a popular show satirizing Iraqi politicians – and the small girls whispered secrets together, my friend’s mother began asking me questions about the United States. What was New York like? How much did it cost to live in America? What was the government like there? I told her that it was as difficult to describe my country to someone in Baghdad as it was to convey what life is like here to someone in the United States.
We talked about the nearby neighborhood where she and her husband lived. For several years there were killings and other violence every day – “like you cannot imagine,” she said. But now, after months of relative quiet, the government had finally put up a long blast wall, forcing her to walk 5 kilometers to work, rather than the 1 kilometer she walked before. “Why did they put it up now, why not before?” she asked.
After the visitors left, I snuck out on the partial balcony – a stone railing enclosing a narrow space – and stood behind a pillar, a borrowed hijab covering my head, peering at the largely deserted street. A police car whizzed by, its siren wailing A few men hurried along, carrying packages or smoking cigarettes. The lights in most apartments were already out.
For an hour or so, my friend and I sat on the bed – as if we were anywhere – and spoke about our lives, about religion, about the future of her country and mine. Then we joined her husband and daughter, already asleep on mats on the living room floor, the swamp cooler humming gently. I woke up only briefly at 3 a.m., when my friend and her husband got up to eat breakfast, pray and prepare for another day of fasting.
Baghdad Bureau
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