Ascend to find paradise
Monday, August 27, 2007
IRAQ - I'm back. Back from the land of assassinations, kidnappings and war. Back from Iraq.
Back from the land that some claim to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve, and what Christians call the "Original Sin."
Over the past two weeks, the notion of this country being the original site of Eden ran through my mind, especially last week when I made my way on a rickety old bus through the Azmer Mountains outside of Suleimaniya. I rode with the Iraqi National Boxing Team. But my thoughts of paradise soon disappeared when I realized that two plainclothes bodyguards accompanied us on the bus. They had pistols stuck in the back of their pants.
Fun with a gun?
Later at a rest stop in a moment of bizarre levity, one of the bodyguards handed his gun over to the affable bus driver, who waved it around in the air pretending to shoot it. One of the boxing organizers discouraged such behaviour, but noticed I was watching and asked if I'd like to shoot off a few rounds. I didn't.
Later, the bus driver's son posed with the weapon stuck in his belt.
Along the way, we stopped at a mountain stream to cool down. We dipped our feet in the water, and washed our hands and faces. Someone hauled a cooler from the bus and filled it with spring water, and we drank this on the bus along the journey.
We kept climbing higher into the arid, rugged landscape, stopping at military checkpoints, and seeing at each the gigantic photographs of President Jalal Talabani of Iraq.
What seemed so bizarre is that along the ridge of these mountains you'd see playground equipment.
What parent would permit their children to romp about when this "jungle gym" is stationed adjacent to a drop of hundreds of metres?
The fact is people picnic here. We saw one man who, according to the driver, treks to this spot by the side of the road once a week, sets up a little table besides his car, sits in the shade, lights up a fire in a portable stove, cooks up some rice and vegetables, and makes himself a martini.
Along the way, we passed through a number of villages, a collection of tattered low buildings made of stone and mud, usually near a mountain stream. The people in these places stopped whatever they were doing as the bus wended its way along these switchback roads. A couple of young women standing in open doorways caught the fancy of the boxers who stuck their heads out the windows and waved frantically. The women smiled shyly.
As we circled the mountains, I got to thinking how remote and poor this area was, but in one sense, it wasn't any poorer or different than the cities. The people in the urban centres struggle to eke out a living just as they do here in the mountains. But the city streets are dusty, dirty and hot. There is no relief as you might get from a mountain stream where you can cool your feet and back of your neck. And beauty is absent in the cities, where the streets are strewn with garbage.
The struggle in the urban centre is for modernity. But the power goes out regularly. Water pressure slows to a drip. Still, there's a yearning for the western model, like the establishment of McDonal. You read that correctly. No McDonald's. The place is a knock-off. A Big Mac here is called "Big Mack." The building also has the golden arches, a complete rip-off.
Sought franchise
I stopped in there a few nights ago to buy Andre Gorges of Windsor what I thought of as a McDonald's burger. It's a fascinating place. Even more fascinating is its owner, Suleiman Qassab. He fought with the Kurdish resistance all through the 1970s but, like a thousand or more, fled the country. In his case, he landed in Vienna where he got a job flipping burgers at McDonald's. He returned to Iraq 10 years ago and applied for a franchise here, but McDonald's turned him down.
That's when he opened McDonal. With the fall of Saddam and the American invasion, Qassab started offering free burgers to the troops. But this got him in a lot of hot water with the terrorists who warned him to stop -- even to the point that they threatened to enlist a suicide bomber to take him out one day.
Other than the golden arches, the place doesn't look at all like McDonald's.
When I asked for "a combo," I got a single burger. I persisted: "Where are the fries?"
The man behind the counter obligingly heaped greasy fries on top of the meat and slapped the top back on.
Back to the mountains, to paradise, the Garden of Eden. I sat near the window. I let the hot air assault my face, and felt the sand grit from the arid landscape. I could see for many kilometres in the icy blue sky that hung over the peaks of the mountains. At times, we drove so close to the edge that, if the sandy soil gave way, the entire bus would plummet below. It was scary. I could hear the bus driver grinding the gears of the lumbering old vehicle, trying to find something lower to help ache its way up these narrow roads.
Along the way, you could see sheep huddled under a few trees in the shade of this mid-afternoon journey, and the shepherd asleep beside them. Later, in another spot, the sheep crowded the road, and the driver slowed and waited for them to clear the way.
Further along the road, we passed markers with hand-drawn skulls and crossbones on them, and the driver shook his head and muttered something about Saddam.
It seems wherever you go, they talk of Saddam. They speak of executions and torture. In the same breath, however, they remember a country before the American invasion when they had electrical power and running water and where you could go out at night.
But our minds were off this quickly when we caught the rising sound of music from a wedding, and filed out of the bus and edged closer. You could see women in bright dresses waving their arms and dancing and men battering the soiled tambourines with such fury. The aroma of food cooking wafted toward us.
A boy with a donkey seized the commercial opportunity and started earnestly coaxing us to have our pictures taken with his animal and, ridiculously, one by one we climbed up on it and rode down the road.
We resumed our journey, and pulled into another rest spot. The men working there whipped up some shish kabobs, cooking them in the sun on a narrow homemade contraption with charcoal. He placed thin pita-like bread on each table, and cut up onions and peppers. I watched the owner's son rinse the dishes in a spot fed by spring water. He let them dry in the sun while the food was cooking. And we sat in the shade of a makeshift cabana and drank water and later sipped hot chi tea.
And just before departing, I saw the Muslim bus driver in a corner, privately bowing and praying.
NEARER TO HEAVEN
I got to thinking about the Garden of Eden again, and the arguments that Iraq apparently is its location. Some archeologists might argue otherwise but, in this moment, it felt pretty good being here -- nearer to heaven -- where the temperature is tolerable.
But no matter where you travel in Iraq, there's no mention of it. If this were California or Florida, they would erect a theme park for the Garden of Eden and for $50 you could climb the Tree of Knowledge. You could also buy buttons, baseball caps, T-shirts, maybe even fig leaf-shaped ashtrays, displaying figures of Adam and Eve, of course looking very white and very American.
But in Iraq there's no mention of it. You can't find a T-shirt or a hat with the name of the country. You can't even track down a postcard, or any of those tacky items like a key chain or a tacky ashtray that says "I Love Iraq" on it. You would be hard put to find anything touristy. This is a country that people leave. Nobody comes here except soldiers. Or journalists.
But go to the mountains. You will find a people genuine and warm with smiles. They will offer you drinks and wave off all attempts to pay for them.
You will find wheat growing along sides of slopes. You will find a landscape that is rugged but beautiful. You will find peace.
More Iraq Articles from Marty Gervais:
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