"You must surround adults, ‘tatwiq’, through their sons, in addition to other means. Teach the student to object to his parents if he hears them discussing state secrets and to alert them that this is not correct. Teach them to criticise their fathers and mothers respectfully if they hear them talking about organisations and party secrets. Plant in a child's soul a vigilance not to give the foreigner anything of state or party secrets. The child in his relationship to his teacher is like a piece of raw marble in the hands of a sculptor who has the power to impart aesthetic form, or discard the piece to the ravages of time and the vagaries of nature'
Saddam Hussein, 'Al-Dimuqratiyya Masdar Quwwah li al-Fard wa al-Mujtama'
(Baghdad: al-Thawra publications 1977)
It was well past midnight, February 10th 1990, and this was it, Block 2 'Room 908’, with its abandoned frying pans and empty beer bottles, another enchanting abode in the hourglass of my life. I looked up at the taped windows, meant to protect me from breaking glass in the event of a missile attack and knew that here in this Neo-Stalinesque concrete block, one might live to be a hundred or then again one might explode to little pieces in the middle of an Iraqi night. Peter had warned me that previous roommates had found the untidy apartment rather repulsive, but late at night it exuded a character of its own and somehow the incoming missiles seemed to melt away and fade from sight. I took off my shoes and lay down beneath one of the bandaged windows, listening as a mosquito whined above my head and the black and white television in the living room flickered on and off in rhythm to a nearby air-conditioner. Peter opened some bottles of beer and sat down beside me for a while. I had known him for many years and I enjoyed his unending repertoire of humorous stories about our previous days at medical school. He now told me stories about Baghdad, about how the casualty nurse, Daphne Parish, had been arrested and charged with helping an Observer journalist to spy on the Al Iskandria missile complex, south of Baghdad. He told me that Iraq was recruiting international rocket engineers to modify the Scud missile, hoping to make it capable of reaching Israeli cities, especially Tel Aviv. The converted missiles had already been tested against Iran, who had retaliated by firing their own missiles back into the civilian areas of Baghdad. This phase of the conflict give rise to the interesting apartment windows and was called the "War of the Cities".
It was nearly two thirty in the morning as the haunting melody of Sinead O’ Connor’s latest single, "Nothing Compares 2 U’ was playing from some floors below us. It seemed that everybody from the hospital was there, the chefs with their platters of pizzas, samosas, and chicken legs, the porters with the latest rates on American currency but most of the people were Irish and British nurses who outnumbered the males by about ten to one. Large blocks of ice had been bought downtown, then broken up in the bath and now green bottles of Heineken and Tuborg bobbed about like sailboats in the melting liquid vying for adoption by the nearest hand. Before long, I was introduced me to Patricia, the Staff Health Nurse with whom I would be working for the next few weeks.
"How are you, don’t sleep in on your first morning!" she laughed.
"I wouldn’t like you to miss those porters with their ‘total body pains’ who’ll be lining up for a day off from around eight o’ clock".Patricia told me that the porters were mostly Catholic Indians from former Portuguese Goa and they were good people to know as they ran the currency black market in the hospital
I then met Sarah, one of the nurses who had accompanied me from Dublin. She told me she had been placed in Intensive Care and we chatted for a while on the balcony before retreating upstairs to my apartment. One of my roommates, Sean, had already returned home and was sitting at the table with a friend having a few drinks.
"What’s this I hear about you keeping animals in the apartment?" I said to him.
"Which animals do you mean?"
"Is the story about you lads taking a donkey up in the lift and getting it drunk, true?""Oh God yes!, you know for a moment I thought you were talking about the chickens"
"Chickens!" I replied nervously."Yeah, we had two chickens called ‘Curry and Supreme’ living with us for a while"
Sean went on to tell me that the chickens had been left over props from a Christmas review but as they grew older, they required more attention and my colleagues had decided to rear them on small cage on the balcony. Eventually the hospital authorities had found out about this and made them get rid of them to Hassan the Kurdish bus driver. We chatted together for a while together before going to sleep. Like many future nights, sunrise came prematurely, pouring its golden light through the lattice of plastic tape on the window. Then, as the winds changed and the fog in my head cleared, I heard the voices of schoolchildren coming from the courtyard below the bedroom. It was a song of the tala’i’a, the Iraqi youth, their young voices bound together in unison, their intonation gaining vigour and strength, like a fledgling bird first discovering it had wings to fly. I listened to their song, probably a memorised patriotic verse extolling the virtues of Saddam Hussein and their willingness to be part of his new order. Before long, I discovered that these revolutionary verses would continue for nearly thirty minutes every morning and their patriotic singing soon became my second alarm clock in Baghdad.
