WE WERE BUYING A small silk rug. The dealer in the back street wanted nine hundred rupees, and I turned to the Head.
“How much is that in dollars?”
He made a quick calculation, and reported that it was something over three hundred dollars. I offered two hundred, but nothing happened, then two hundred and fifty. The dealer sadly shook his head and put the rug away.
“I get many other rugs,” he said, “but only one of him. I cannot.”
Finally we compromised on two hundred and seventy-five dollars, and carried the rug away with us for fear he would change his mind. And the next day we found that, at the rate of exchange for the rupee, his original asking price had only been two hundred and forty dollars.
Every now and then I ask myself if I really travel to learn and to see, or travel to shop. Only the other day I caught myself saying, in a very casual voice: “Oh yes. We picked that up in Bagdad.” And waiting for the caller to say:
“Bagdad! Have you been to Bagdad?”
I am still trying to find a place in the house where my blue enameled Damascus tray won’t stick out like a sore thumb; in the long Georgian drawing room the low carved Turkish table with a brass brazier on it looks as though the moving men had put it there and forgotten to take it away; and of the porcelain figure of a dancing Korean girl, which the Head carried painfully under his arm on and off ships and finally home, I saw a duplicate the day we landed in the window of a New York shop.
We shopped in Bagdad. There was nothing else to do, except to go to the movies! We tried that only once, sitting in the box of a small and almost empty theater, and seeing dimly projected without music an ancient French picture. As in all the Orient, the titles were not in one language but in three. They ran to the left of the picture on a separate roll, and as the action of the two machines was not always synchronous, the result was pure confusion.
But what strange ideas of our civilization these Oriental peoples must receive! Of shootings and seductions, of half-clothed women, in a land still of secluded ones. The hoots and derisive laughter at the suggestive situations they are so quick to grasp, has something contemptuous in it. As if they said: “And this is Christian civilization! Wherein is it better than ours? Or so good.”
The movies then, and the bazaars were all we had. There were no windows from which to view the street, that one wide street blasted by the Turks when the war began, so that they could get their motor transport through. They simply blew up the buildings, letting the ruins stand.
The only view to be obtained was from a stone bench inside the entrance arch. There for hours I sat, watching that strange procession which is Bagdad: Kurdish coolies, in rags and skins; Jewish women in brilliant brocades of orange and rose and green and blue, draping body and head, the face concealed by what looked like the wide end of a wire fly-swatter; crippled and blind men; dandies carrying and fingering their prayer beads, people of all nations and all creeds.
Down the street to the right was the American consulate, its rear verandah overlooking the Tigris. So great is the heat that in summer the executive offices are moved into the basement, but the business of America must be looked after, her occasional tourists speeded on their way. What thought do we ever give these people, serving us in exile? Just beyond us, in Teheran in Persia, our Consul there, Major Imbrie, was recently murdered, but it required his death to let most of us know he was there.
In heat and in cold, often under impossible health conditions and in hostile surroundings, these remote agents of our government live and frequently die, not only unhonored and unsung, but unknown.
Along the street were shops and coffee houses. Here and there was a native hotel, its upper windows jealously screened; the women’s quarters. The shops were dull and uninteresting, but a narrow by-street was the Street of the Silver Workers. Here they squatted over their small furnaces and anvils, and made by hand their tiny cups and coffee pots, and their cigarette cases inlaid with antimony.
But it was in the great bazaar that we saw native life at its noisiest, its dirtiest, and its most pitiful. Its streets only paths, so crowded in places that two people can pass with difficulty, on either side each merchant sits cross-legged within a tiny cubicle, his small stock spread before him. Roofed in as it is, the air is bad, the heat atrocious. The earth underfoot is dank with the accumulated filth of ages.
Through the crowd goes a coolie, bent double and carrying on his back a structural steel beam! It is an I-beam, possibly fifteen feet long, or even more. His feet wide apart, his face pale, his breath coming in gasps he staggers along. They do not live long, these men.
In the Street of the Scribes, the letter writers are at work, squatted behind low tables. Here is a veiled woman, dictating in a low voice; there a family group, arguing noisily, while the scribe waits stoically. But they are learning to write in Bagdad. I visited a night school there, where the youngest pupil was a boy of eight and the oldest a bearded patriarch of seventy.
The jewelers have a street of their own in the bazaar. Their stocks of rubies and sapphires lie out in common white saucers, and their antique lapidaries’ wheels are as they were five thousand years ago. The stones are sold by the caret, and are astonishingly cheap.
An incredible din draws us to the Street of the Metal Workers, and we find the workers in tin, in iron, in brass and in copper. Their forge fires blaze, throwing into relief their half-naked bodies, their muscular arms. All their work is done by hand; their hammers whang and white-hot metal glows. Outside are hanging their finished wares. I buy two brass trays and carry them along.
I have them now. They are sitting upright on top of the book shelves in the library, and every time a door slams they fall down. Besides, they don’t belong in the house. None of the stuff I bought really belongs except the rug. The dogs like to sleep on that.