Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

28 Lost Lands: Seeking Shelter (1958)

29 Migration: Precious Cargo (1958)

30 Hunger Pangs: Yearning for Home (1958)

31 Arrivals and Departures: The Importance of Contacts (1958–1959)

32 Escape to Nowhere: The Threat of the Clown Court (1959)

33 A Temporary Home: Visits to the Park (1959)

34 Return to the Shrine: A Life by the Sea (1959–1963)

35 Of Carpets and New Blood: The Emergence of New Patterns (1967)

36 The Ruins of Kufa: A Coup and a Birth (1968–1972)

37 Civil War: A Shattered Sanctuary (1975–1982)

38 Creased Maps: A Move to a Different Land (1980s)

39 Lessons in Humility: The Loss of Everything Precious (1980s)

40 The Mortality of Gods: Burials of the Banished (1988)

41 The Lost Talisman: When Everything is Taken (1989–1992)

42 A Question of Identity: In Search of a Way to Be (1990–2009)

30 January 2005, Election Day in Baghdad

Epilogue

Glossary of Iraqi Terms

Acknowledgments

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Maps

CHALABI FAMILY TREE

Chronology

Prologue

THE KITCHEN WAS bare, an abandoned room. The sole trace of its former occupants was a squat, white bone-china teapot. I reached for it, turning it over in my hands. On its underside were stamped the words ‘State of India’. Alone in this silent space, the teapot spoke to me of a bygone era that had come to an abrupt end.

It was 19 April 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad to the US-led coalition forces, and the city, depleted and derelict, was grappling with a new reality. The heat of the day was intolerable, and I could feel my very eyeballs become coated in perspiration, a strange and unwelcome sensation. This was my first ever visit to Baghdad, my father’s home, his parents’ and grandparents’ before him, and theoretically mine as well. I had arrived in the capital after a long car journey from the south in the company of my father – Ahmad Chalabi, a leading opposition figure to Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime.

Everybody asks me about my father. He has been labelled a maverick, a charlatan, a genius. He has been named as the source of supposedly faulty intelligence that led America into the war in Iraq. He has been called a triple agent for the US, Iran and Israel. But this is my story. He has his own tale to tell, although I acknowledge that my father has played a pivotal role in shaping my relationship to his country, Iraq. As with everything in the Middle East, nothing makes sense until you understand the past, and the past is never straightforward.

During this, my first visit to Baghdad, whole convoys and fresh hordes were descending on the capital: the streets were busy with an assortment of opposition leaders, formerly exiled professionals, gold diggers and prospectors, sceptical foreign journalists – and ordinary Iraqis: doctors, lawyers, carpenters and shopkeepers who were returning home. For many, their homecoming was clearly a source of mixed emotions. For my part, as I entered the city with a large group of Iraqis who had been working for the opposition in exile, I swiftly understood that my life here would not be governed by a familiar set of values based on logic, chronology and order.

All of my companions, including my father, had their own personal memories of Baghdad. Like little children, they sparked with enthusiasm and anticipation when we entered the city in which they had been born. Many kissed the ground in tears before rising hastily, anxious to find their relatives and loved ones. I had none to find here. I stood by, silently searching their faces for an emotion I could recognize. None came. I felt cold and detached. This place was as foreign to me as any other, and I had no memories to draw upon to make me feel otherwise. What came instead was an image of Beirut, my birthplace. I remembered clearly the feelings of comfort, safety and warmth I always had deep inside whenever I was on a plane coming in to land in Beirut, the sea shimmering against the horizon. As much as I wanted to push that image away and connect with the ground beneath my feet in Baghdad, I couldn’t.

It quickly became clear on our arrival that the promised ‘liberation’ had not happened. The sense of excitement and expectation with which I had travelled was replaced by a deep foreboding as I entered a shattered world. I went to my grandparents’ house in Baghdad. Forty-five years had passed since they had been forced to flee the country. A big, solid, four-storey home, it was designed in the Bauhaus style and built in the late 1940s. The clean lines of the windows, the large rooms and elegant staircases were all suggestive of that era’s faith in a better future. The place smelt the same as my grandparents’ subsequent homes in Britain, infused with an aroma of rice and something indefinable. In London, they had recreated what they could of all that was soothing and familiar to them, building altars to their old life through the objects that had followed them into exile – their photographs, silver and precious carpets. However, they had merely been repeating a process they had already been through during an earlier period of forced expatriation, in Beirut, before the Lebanese Civil War drove them on once more.

I knew this house from the stories of other relatives, stories which had been told to me over and over again, but I could never have imagined the sense of emptiness that echoed down the long corridors and through the airy rooms. I tried to remember the rhythms of my grandmother’s deep voice as she spoke of her former home when I was a little girl: ‘You can’t imagine the wonderful life we had in Baghdad, Tamara. I was like a queen …’

A life-size stone statue of a deer stood in the withered garden outside the house. I knew that my grandfather Hadi had loved that deer as much as his father before him. Someone had beheaded it. My first impression was that the deer looked almost offensive among the unkempt grounds, as it suggested a more carefree time when the people and the country had been very different. It was now a dirty ivory colour, yet there remained a certain sensuality about it as it stood proud, the fluidity of its hind muscles elegantly carved. Even the amputated head lying on the ground was playful. Its large dark eyes were well defined and penetrating, their gaze frozen in time.

My journey to Iraq had really begun in my head many years earlier, in my grandparents’ house in Beirut. It was 1981. I was seven years old. A man’s voice, sonorous and beautiful, cut across a crowded room, singing about a land I did not know.

A man fired an arrow that slayed the child.

Oh my child, they killed a child

Woe is me, woe is me …

Although the singer was tucked away in a corner, his voice held the room captive. I could not understand why the audience wept as he sang about a thirsty child killed in his father’s arms. I had never heard anything like it before. It disturbed my sense of the established routine and quiet of my grandparents’ house.

I crawled through the legs of the grieving adults towards the familiar figure of my uncle Hassan. He sat listening intently, inscrutable in the dark glasses he wore to mask his blindness. I squeezed myself in next to him, watching as he tapped his knee with the palm of his hand in time to the song. I asked him why everyone was crying. He told me that it was in memory of Imam Hussein.

‘Did he die today?’ I asked.

‘No, no, Tamoura,’ he said fondly, calling me by the nickname he had given me. ‘He died a long time ago, before any of us were born.’

‘So why are you still crying?’

He explained that the singer was commemorating the Battle of Karbala, when Imam Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, was confronted by Caliph Yazid’s forces of 4,000 men. A very long time ago Hussein had gone to war, taking his family along, and a small army of only seventy-two men, many of whom also went into battle with their women and children. When the armies clashed on the banks of the Euphrates River, in the month of Muharam, Hussein was defeated. He, his infant son and his men were slain and the women and children taken into captivity.

My uncle smiled sadly. He said that time did not lessen the sense of tragedy of an act that had the power to haunt people forever. He told me that Hussein had been killed by an evil man for the sake of haqq – truth and justice.

‘But if it was so long ago, then why are you still crying?’ I persisted.

Hassan told me that during the first ten days of Muharam, which were called Ashura, this event and its consequences were remembered. My grandfather Hadi used to host a recital in Baghdad on the last day of Ashura, and hundreds of people would go to his home to commemorate it. He added that Ashura was especially painful for our family, because it reminded us that we had been deprived of our own country.

‘We are foreigners everywhere, and we have lost so much,’ he said. He touched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘You should know these things. They are part of your history, of who you are.’ I hated what he said. Surely I belonged exactly where I was? My uncle sensed my discomfort. ‘Do you deny your roots?’ he asked, smiling. I didn’t understand what he meant; he explained that he, my father, my grandfather and grandmother had once had another country, but that they had lost it. Their homeland was my home as well. I scowled. Lebanon was my country and my mother’s country, Beirut the city where I had been born. I was not a foreigner here.

A slice of chocolate cake soon made me forget what my uncle had said, but on some level I dimly perceived that the grievance captured in the words of the song was the same as that which made my father’s family weep in their exile. They were waiting to return to their homeland. Their lost country maintained a hold over them, the legacy of an inheritance centuries old.