Forbidden Door

It was a large house he brought me to – all marble floors with punkahs on ceilings to cool feet and heads. There was a vineyard between this house and the one next door where my brother-in-law lived and towards the side of the house swinging hammocks had been set up for the extended family to enjoy the cooler evenings when the searing heat abated.

We had been given the upstairs rooms of the big house which had been readied in preparation for a western girl coming to live with an Arabic family. There was a modern bathroom with a flushing toilet which I didn’t initially understand was a real luxury in Sharaban, Diyala. In the corridor between the staircase and the upper floor rooms, pickle jars and fruit preserves at various stages of production lay stacked on the floor. Yom, or the “Duck” as the family called her, ran a busy and productive household. The flat roofed verandah could be used for sleeping under the stars when she was too hot or wanted to remember her youth.

Amina – her real name – Om Yas, Yom, Duck – she answered to them all. Illiterate, she had married her cousin when they were both very early teenagers which is why, I suppose, they looked a bit similar. She had a black ink tattoo on her face which seemed to be some sort of tribal marking and was bilingual. Turkish was her first language but when Iraq has been created the population from the north had been forced to learn Arabic. She knew a lot about a lot of things and it’s no surprise that all seven of her children went on to be engineers, teachers, a farmer and a vet. Not being allowed to go to school didn’t dim her intelligence. When I first appeared at her door she performed some sort of spell with fiery smoke and water before letting me in the house. She might have known about the world and breeding champion horses and a woman’s lot in society, but a lack of education had meant she retained the superstitions of her village, despite living in a town.

Only five of us lived in the house but mealtimes usually catered for between ten to twenty as the other sons would “drop by”, with their families as nobody could cook like the Duck, or so they said. Amina waddled wrapped in her black scarf which covered her hair and shoulders like a mini abaya, sitting down cross-legged on a cushion directing daughters and daughters-in-law to attend to the men and children, lest they should starve. She could get up again with great difficulty doing that downward dog style of pushing herself back into an upright position. The children laughed and played on the periphery of the meal and if they became too audacious one son or another would stand to pick up the boys – always the boys – by their wrists and heels airplane-like for a spin or grab them to throw them upwards towards the ceiling. No child was ever hurt while I was there but it must have come close a few times.

The bulk of the house was downstairs. A huge kitchen with multiple stoves and freezers was mostly where I was expected to reside. The Duck tried to teach me how to make various favourites in gigantic quantities. The kitchen led to what in the west would have been called the family lounge. And lounging was definitely what happened here, just not on chairs. Harking back to Bedouin days, cushions littered the ground and people grabbed however many they wanted in order to be comfortable on the smooth, white marble while the overhead punkahs whirred, wafting a gentle breeze around our overly hot bodies. The women, of course, fetched and carried dish after dish, drink after drink from the kitchen to the table cloth laid out without ceremony on the floor. Everyone tore off giant flatbread pieces to make edible spoons, scooping up vegetables and meats to eat their fill.

There was a part of the house downstairs that was off limits to me, well I was allowed to clean it when the men were out – lucky me – but it housed a western style toilet and a very formal lounge and dining room. There was a huge marble table with upholstered chairs set off with ornate golden woodwork. There was a collection of plush red velvet and gold throne type chairs to the side of this where presumably, people more important than women and children were brought to. If anyone arrived at the house they would enter by the main door, forbidden to me, and taken to this huge room. If anyone was visiting, the men who normally lounged around being catered to, suddenly became the servers – running through from kitchen to table with gigantic silver platters brimming with delicious food.

I presume that business was conducted there, possibly even bribery and corruption because carrier bags of money would be brought through from a backroom to the dining room and nothing would be brought back in exchange. I was reminded of this when reading about UK royals, being given carrier bags of money, to be used for pet projects. Men from the Middle East still seem to do this.

Amina must have died by now, as she wasn’t fully fit over thirty years ago when I lived in her house. She was one of the women who publicly gave away all her gold to help the Iraqi war effort. I often wonder, if her end was as peaceful as it deserved to be.