Memories of Baghdad
Last night Peter and I went out with Dina and Maurice and the Bakhash clan to the Persian Tea Room. Tongue in cheek, Peter commented that we must be honorary Bakhashes, since we were the only non-Bakhashes there. That night they featured Arabic music and sang Arabic songs which are my mother’s favorite. That brought sharp pain to my heart and tears to my eyes. She is fading fast. She is a shadow of a shadow of what she used to be. Sometimes the Mama of old returns, but she quickly flickers away. She hardly eats. She muddles everything. She knows what is happening to her and she is badly frightened. I want to stop the evaporation of the essence of who she is, but I cannot. I feel so helpless. All I can do is watch in bewilderment. I am tormented by what is happening to her.
The clock in my study reads 5:30 a.m. It is still dark outside. A lone bird chirps intermittently. I tossed and turned in my sleep. Nora called last night. She finally spoke to Dr. Rubottom. Dementia. Dementia. That is what he suspects Mama of having.
I decided to write things I remember about our parents and how it used to be when I was a young girl. That way I can concentrate on the positive rather than the negative.
I think my first impression was as a toddler. Perhaps I was two or three years old. I was standing in the middle of a strawberry patch. As I bent down to pick a berry, I noticed a small speckled blue egg. I gingerly picked it up and looked at it with utmost fascination. Many years later when I described this memory to my mother, she told me that we were in Baghdad at my grandparents’ house. We had gone for a visit from Iran. Another memory was of me sitting on a stone step in the garden drinking a glass of milk. There was a lamppost by the step. Perched on that lamp, there was a little bird gazing down at me. I left him some of my milk at the bottom of my glass to drink.
I remember being in a dark cool room. I was sitting on the lap of a man. He wore a coarse spun reddish-brown cloak-like garment. He had his arm around me. With his other arm, he was putting morsels of food in my mouth. I lifted my face towards him, my mouth open, waiting for the next morsel. His beard tickled my cheek. I felt safe in his lap. That man was my grandfather, Bouyi. That is the only impression I have of him. I never met him again. We lived in Iran and they lived in Iraq. He passed away during the Iraqi revolution in 1958 from cancer. They could not bury him because of that. They had to keep my grandfather’s body at home because everyone feared leaving their homes during that time. My cousin Freddy had just returned from New York. He was on his summer holidays from college. At that time, they assassinated the young king and dragged his body and that of his uncle’s through the streets. It was a traumatic incident to go through. This incident caused Freddy to have a nervous breakdown, from which he never fully recovered. That is the tragedy of living in Islamic countries; the senseless and cruel violence.
I remember being on a plane with smooth planks on each length of the plane as seats. I sat between my parents. In my head, I can still hear the drone of the plane. We escaped in a British Army plane with only the clothes on our backs. We arrived in Iran for a supposedly temporary stay. It was not. It was where my sisters and brother were born. It was where I got married and had my children.
As a young girl, we lived in a large house which was staffed with many servants. There was a male cook with a combustible temper. He thought nothing of chasing the staff with a sharp kitchen knife if they displeased him. There was Khanom Gol, who supervised the household. She was a quiet, frail-looking woman with silvery long white hair, which she wrapped tightly with a scarf. There was the garden and the chauffeur, Gholam Reza, who would take Papa to the office and Mama and her friends shopping or to luncheons and coffee parties. The laundress came two or three times a week, if her laundry load was heavy. Usually, she laundered one day and ironed the next. Last but not least, there were Ashraf and Anna. Ashraf was my sister Nora’s nanny, and Anna was Gilda’s. Ashraf was a tough woman with dark curly hair. She was tough as nails. Anna, on the other hand, was a young Russian girl with a cheerful face and a ready smile. She had long blonde braided hair, which wrapped like a coronet around her head. One day she went on her day off and never returned. They found her body tossed in a ditch. Someone had run her over. I liked Anna. She was fun. She would wake us up at the crack of dawn. For exercise, we would dance and sing, then she would prepare kogel mogel for our breakfast. These were egg yolks combined with sugar, butter, and cocoa. They were beaten until they were double and tripled in size. We each had a cup of this. We would gingerly dip pieces of bread into it and eat it ever so slowly, relishing every morsel to make it last longer. After we finished breakfast, she washed our hands and faces and brushed our hair. She dressed us and gathered my long tresses and tied a bow on top of my head. Nora had a head of blonde curls, and Gilda was still a baby. When we were done, she picked Gilda in her arms to our parents’ bedroom. She knocked. When we were told to enter, Nora and I curtsied to our parents then rushed towards their bed to receive our hugs and kisses.