A Stranger in Baghdad by Elizabeth Loudon

Author:Elizabeth Loudon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press

Early the following morning there’s a crash outside my bedroom door. My grandmother is lying in the hallway, flailing with one arm while the other lies inert. She’s speechless, her face drooping. I run to my parents, who lift her back to bed. My mother and Laila sit beside her all day, turning her limp body this way and that and dribbling orange juice into her mouth. My father gives her medicine to lower her blood pressure, but despite their care, my grandmother has a second stroke that evening and is dead by dawn and buried in the al-Karkh cemetery by the following sunset.

An Iraqi proverb says that when the mother dies, the house dies. That isn’t true of our old house. With Zubeida gone, it immediately comes more fully to life, for it is fiery, garrulous Laila, not my gentle, reticent father, who assumes command. Long before the last of the mourners have left, she piles books and ashtrays and pottery on the salon’s coffee tables, drapes scarves over sofas, and leaves embroidered slippers on the floor. Within weeks, she’s inviting curators and archaeologists for lengthy dinners with no warning, so the ladies of the courtyard have to fry mountains of peppers and onions while Laila debates the best way of preserving Sumerian artefacts. And it isn’t only Laila who grows to fill the space that Zubeida leaves behind. The posse of courtyard ladies swells, too, many of the newcomers the daughters of women who once worked for Zubeida: a dozen women might come and go in the course of one day, no longer seeming like slaves but rather like minor officials hired to impose a rule of law. They show patients upstairs—for people still come to the house for my father, although he’s opened a private clinic on Rashid Street. The courtyard ladies encourage them to wait if he’s out. My mother can’t stand it. The presumption! There’s always somebody in the bathroom, somebody else smoking on the balcony, two more people in the way in the kitchen if my mother wants to boil some water. The women spoil us children, feeding Ramzi sweet pastries and praising my beauty as if I’m a little film star—all of which only enrages her further.

How can she hold her own amidst all this fussing and visiting? Either there are too many people in the house, or too few. “It’s never,” she complains, “just normal.”

A red bus stops at the entrance of the souk every morning, and Ramzi and I climb up to take our places amongst our friends. Laila sees us off before going to the Museum. Bushra is busy with her own babies over in Adhamiya, and my father works from Saturdays to Thursdays, week in and week out. My mother is left alone with baby Ziad. She carries him up and down the inside balcony to stop him from fretting. She says it’s like being in prison. At this, everyone laughs at her: No woman has more freedom, they say.

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