“Did you do anything special for fun when you were growing up?” Shafiq asked his father in search of distractions. Omar looked ready to try anything new.
“Fun? I had to work,” came the answer.
Feeling sheepish for seeking adventures, the boys were ready to drop the subject when Roobain quietly added, “But there was this one time”—he told them something too fantastic to be true—“when we flew a kite that had lit candles on it.”
“How?” Shafiq asked.
“You put the candles in paper lanterns and hang them on the kite string,” Roobain said.
“But doesn’t the wind blow them out?”
“Not if you are good,” Roobain said.
“Which we are,” Omar declared.
The boys aimed higher than just recreating the fabled kite; they were going to outdo the original. In Roobain’s day, the candles were wrapped in hurricane lamps of brown paper. But through begging, borrowing and perhaps using just a bit of—well—money taken from people who thought they were buying a pigeon when they were really just renting, Omar and Shafiq managed to procure spectacular shades of paper: magenta, sienna, chocolate, rose, orange, jade and violet.
It was easy enough to get a kite in the air for a boy in Basra, which had nothing but sky: up it went. And then, with Omar holding the soaring kite steady, Shafiq carefully began tying the rainbow of hurricane lanterns to the kite string. Each was attached to a three-foot string of its own, hanging straight while the kite flew up at an angle.
As the kite reached higher, tiny flames flickered against the black sky in Technicolor like in a movie from America. Omar’s brother Anwar and all of Shafiq’s siblings had joined them on the roof to watch the show.
“You did it!” Naji held Shafiq and Omar’s hands up like champions while the kite hovered above.
“Impressive,” Ezra allowed as the wind twisted it up farther.
“I wish I was up there…” Leah said wistfully. One candle flickered out but the rest held on.
“It’s like a glittering necklace,” cooed Marcelle. She was right—like jewels on a chain.
Sure, the delicate suspension collapsed under the forces of nature. The wind blew out the candles as it went down. By the time it was recovered, the magical kite was just a tangled pile of paper, string and wax.
And no, it hadn’t ignited an impressive fire in the palm farm below, as Omar and Shafiq might have mischievously hoped, but the drama was enough to send them the following day to Omar’s father in search of another idea.
Omar’s living room was just like Shafiq’s, with deep couches and woven rugs from Iran and a sweet sense of security that they had both enjoyed since Salwa breastfed them there a dozen years before. Only the Koranic verses on the walls made it different from Shafiq’s home, but the fact that the family was Muslim just reminded him of the Maiden’s Hair pastries that Salwa made special for Ramadan. She always brought over platefuls to his house. “It’s the least I can do—we eat more of Reema’s Purim cookies than all the synagogues in Old Basra,” she would joke, referring to how Shafiq’s mother sent over dozens of the date-and-cheese pastries she baked during the Jewish holiday. The only exegesis gleaned by the boys was, well, religious diversity is good for dessert.
When they asked Omar’s father what he had done for amusement as a child, he looked out the window, as though picturing the kite for inspiration.
“I’ll let you see something very precious,” he said, reaching up to a vaunted place on the mantel.
The two boys were singularly unimpressed when he retrieved a package wrapped in a brown paper sack. “From Beirut,” he declared.
Whatever. Lebanon wasn’t far enough to make what looked flat and square comparable to a kite on fire.
“Nice,” said Shafiq politely when Hajji Abdullah gingerly brought the two books out of the bag.
“What are they?” Omar was impatient.
“Well,” his father began, “you will have to tell me.”
Okay, fine, they were used to reading for the older generation. As Roobain said, in his day boys had to work; school was never in the equation. Omar’s father had managed to start a paper goods business, but the store had burned to the ground years before, along with its entire inventory. Ever since then he’d been a school custodian, on the outside of the classroom looking in.
“Khalil Gibran,” Omar read the author’s name.
“I hear you can travel far by reading,” the old man said in a gravelly voice that seemed even more muffled by his coarse moustache.
Yeah, yeah. Shafiq had been to the Kurdish north and to bustling Baghdad and he doubted any book would be as vivid. Omar looked skeptical too.
Trying to save his friend from embarrassment, Shafiq read the title of one of the books. “A Tear and a Smile.” Both boys were nearly as illiterate as their fathers when it came to the second book, which was all in English.
Now that was pretty interesting. It could say anything. It might be from Beirut, but it had a US-of-A sheen.
Opening A Tear and a Smile, Shafiq discovered enticing chapter names: Love, Poetry, Beauty and Peace.
“Omar, listen,” he said, reading a passage at random:
One hour devoted to the pursuit of beauty and love is worth a full century of glory given by the frightened weak to the strong.
“My turn!” Omar nearly grabbed the book. Too nearly. His father took it back.
“Another time,” Hajji Abdullah commanded, wrapping both editions and putting them back on the shelf.
Then, as if he had been too harsh in taking back the prize, he offered a gentle explanation. “It was a gift from Sayed Mustapha.”
The school principal, and the most principled man that either boy had ever met. Teachers came and went, but there was only one person who could enter a room and instantly command the full attention of a squirming class of twelve-year-olds.
“Who originated the first codified legal system known to man?” Sayed Mustapha once asked the middle-schoolers.
“King Hammurabi.” Everyone knew the ancient Babylonian ruler.
“There is a near-perfect copy of the Code of Hammurabi still in existence—a treasure, an Iraqi treasure,” the principal said.
“Of course it’s an Iraqi treasure!” Shafiq whispered to Omar.
“Yeah—who else’s? The Canadians?” They giggled.
“You don’t know where the Code of Hammurabi is because you have never seen it,” Sayed Mustapha said in a soft but firm voice that made the boys feel like he was revealing secret and even subversive information. “Because it sits, today, in a museum in Paris.” The last word he spat out in disgust.
They stole our laws, Shafiq thought, but they still don’t know how to follow them.
“Despicable,” Sayed Mustapha instructed, “but that’s our world.” Shafiq felt exhilarated by this information, but grew confused when the principal added, “The only answer is for each of you to be a rafiq to each other.”
Rafiq? There were boys named Rafiq. But he was using the word to mean “comrade.” Shafiq’s father had warned him darkly about Communists. “The police will beat you,” Roobain had told his son. “Maybe even to death.”
Still, hearing that the book came from their fight-the-imperialists principal, the boys took some interest. So when Hajji Abdullah, who had been taking longer and longer naps that started earlier and earlier in the day, fell asleep one afternoon, they explored its pages.
I am the lover’s eyes, and the spirit’s wine, and the heart’s nourishment.
I am a rose.
My heart opens at dawn and the virgin kisses me and places me upon her breast.
It was impossible to read more without giggling. Not because it was funny, just that it was so embarrassing. The boys convulsed with laughter.
Shafiq wanted to tell Omar about the maid from Salim’s house and her amazingly large, dark eyes. But all he could croak out was, “Ever see a really pretty girl?”
It wasn’t the first time he and Omar had broached the subject since their voices had changed, but for the first time there was a definite answer. “Are you kidding? I know where there’s a whole bunch of beautiful women.”
Soon they were plotting to sneak into the Port of Basra Club with their friend Iskender.
“I’ll break in even if none of you come along,” Omar declared.
“I’m not missing this,” Shafiq said with totally false bravado. He would get in a tank of trouble if they got caught. And it still wasn’t clear how they would sneak into the Port of Basra Club and swim with all of those European beauties without being apprehended, imprisoned and possibly killed.
Although most of the troops the boys saw in the streets were from far-flung parts of the empire, the white Brits from the United Kingdom had also managed to set up a life for themselves in the “Venice of the East.” That was Europe’s name for Basra, insulting to residents, who were sure it was much more beautiful than the Italian city, which would be hard-pressed to earn a “Basra of the West” rating from them.
For days, the boys practiced short phrases in English hoping to sound casual. “We shall meet Fouad at the café today,” Iskender said in English, trying to come off like a sophisticated gentleman.
“Fouad?” Omar laughed at his friend’s hopeless attempt to sound British. “Do you think they have a Lord in Parliament named Fouad?”
“Yeah, we need English names,” Shafiq said.
“Winston!” Iskender suggested.
“Are you a donkey or what?” Omar asked.
“A donkey who never left the backyard.” Shafiq laughed. “They’ll know in two seconds that we’re just a bunch of Iraqis who have only ever heard of the big prime minister.” He wanted to be the first to think of a good English name, but Iskender beat him. “Fred,” he christened Omar. “We are going to meet Fred Astaire at the café,” he stammered in horrendous English that sounded like it was trapped at the back of his throat, unable to flee.
The image of the great American performer turning up on one of the wooden benches where their fathers smoked hookah pipes sent the boys into new gales of laughter. It was about as likely as the three of them swimming in a British pool.
Flipping through their soft-cover, poorly bound English textbooks, they hunted for names and bits of more realistic dialogue. “John” worked well because the sounds were familiar. “Henry” was another story.
“Henrrrrry,” Shafiq tried. Even these native boys had heard enough BBC to know he sounded all wrong.
“I know!” Omar brightened like he had just discovered Aladdin’s magic lamp. “What about Al-Masseeh?” It was the Arabic word for Jesus.
Muhammad was such a common name in their crowd it seemed only natural that the Christian prophet would be as popular in the West.
Luckily, Iskender, a Christian, had gone to a Catholic elementary school. “They say ‘Christopher,’” he remembered.
“Christ,” Omar repeated.
“Christopher,” Iskender corrected.
“Christ-o-fer,” Shafiq tried.
“Just call me Chris,” said Iskender.
And so it was that Chris/Iskender, John/Shafiq and Hen (short for Henry)/Omar put on their best-pressed shorts to visit the British swimming pool located in the fancy neighborhood of Margeel. The area was full of foreigners, and not the Iranian or Indian or Lebanese kind. Just lots of pink people from Europe.
The three boys were middle-class enough to wear Western-style clothes, unlike the poorer Iraqis who sometimes went out in pajama-like robes. But even dressed in button-down shirts and slacks, the boys didn’t look as crisp as real Westerners, whose mass-produced clothes managed to fit them better than the Iraqi hand-tailored versions.
Worse, their darker skin could easily give them away, but the small gang fought this impediment with practiced phrases in “casual” English, like “I am cross the road to the chemist’s for buy the packet of biscuits.”
Any confidence that this would disguise them evaporated when real British people came into view. The men were so intimidating the boys hardly dared to look at the women.
And that was the whole point of the adventure!
They managed to move through the gate silently, but once they sat down at the side of the pool, their enthusiasm unleashed their tongues and they tried their see-Spot-run English. “I am look,” Iskender began. Omar and Shafiq squinted at him, trying to catch the meaning.
“Yes?” One of just two words Shafiq felt confident saying in English. He was ready to shout the other if anyone asked whether he was looking for trouble.
“I am look—you look too?” Iskender tilted his head toward a plump woman wearing a swimsuit skirt shorter than any dress they had ever seen. Shafiq stared at the striped wonder, his eyes lingering across her breasts before noticing a matching scarf on her head. She was grotesque but he was fascinated.
“I think look very…” Omar never ran out of things to say in Arabic, but his insistent verbosity met its match in English.
Maybe it was for the best that they had an excuse not to talk. Even in their own language their tongues would have been tied by the strange mix of arousal, disgust and bottomless curiosity gripping them.
But what a feeling, to be inside the British club!
Shafiq was elated to trespass on premises owned by the United Kingdom, that country which had caused so much trouble in his homeland.
Like two years before, in 1939, when the king of Iraq was assassinated. Sure, the government said King Ghazi had died in a car accident, but every self-respecting Iraqi knew it was a British plot. Looking down at the ripples on the surface of the pool, Shafiq remembered the exhilaration of marching through the streets and chanting:
“ARAB YOUTH BEAT ON YOUR CHEST,
WE AVENGE OR WE REVOLT!”
He was with Omar and the other students from the public school, but he felt a sweet sense of harmony when he saw that the giant procession filling the streets included kids from the Jewish school draped in black, all mourning in outrage with the rest of the country. Walking over a bridge he saw an array of heads below like the different stars in the Iraqi flag—the Muslims wearing the kaffiya, the Kurds with loose headscarfs, the older generation sporting the Turkish fez, and modern men looking smart in fedoras.
Some in the crowd wore the sidara, a narrow-brimmed hat invented by Iraq’s first king, Feisal, to unite the country. It was impossible to tell the religion or ethnicity of a man wearing a sidara, since the hat was a purely national symbol. He had no use for fashion but suddenly wanted one for himself. And for Omar, too, of course.
The principal, Sayed Mustapha, explained the king’s death at school. “The British are back, trying to make Iraq their property!” he railed. “First they drew the maps. Then they ‘liberated’ us—but only as long as Iraq was willing to lease out its oil fields for a pittance.”
Shafiq had seen the tall oil rigs pictured on Iraqi stamps. He felt a rush of energy when Sayed Mustapha told the students to unite against the imperialists.
“Do you know who will do this?” he interrogated the class.
“Us.” Shafiq knew.
“That’s right,” said the principal. “The Arab youth.”
A splash of water shook Shafiq from the memory and he watched with a terrible sense of foreboding as Omar slid into the shallow end of the blue pool. Iskender was next. Shafiq sensed some movement in the distance and instinct told him they were definitely going to be caught any second now.
Any second now and it would be over. He might as well take the plunge.
Warm water washed over his body. He couldn’t swim by any measure but felt a certitude that comes with impending capture.
“Hey, you!”
Of course.
Commands were coming at them from all sides in English, and the boys, as if by prior arrangement, hoisted themselves up on the side of the pool and began walking, then skipping, then dashing to the gate, breaking into a rush forward like the racehorses whose owners prodded them with hot pepper to make them run faster.
The English people shouted a few more unintelligible threats but let the terrified boys get their own wet bodies out of there. They ran and ran and, even realizing they weren’t being followed, kept running until they collapsed on a muddy street corner too poor and too Iraqi to attract any British attention, wanted or otherwise.
“Son of a whore,” Omar said.
“Son of a whore,” Shafiq repeated. It felt so good to curse the imperialists. Kicked out of the pool, when the British should have been kicked out of the whole country!