Did someone feed the Baghdad bureau of the NYT "happy juice?" A positive article on Iraq.
This Baghdad Gunfire Celebrates Love, Not War
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 1 — In a little room above a slum, where the stink of sewage mingled with the scent of perfume, two newlyweds snuggled on a snow-white bedspread, tussling over a teddy bear.
This is the story of Shayma and Ali, two young Iraqis who recently were married.
It is a romance, a wedding, a fairy-tale start in the new Iraq for a henna-haired girl and a used car salesman.
The two pursued each other through a landscape of destruction and war, bucking curfews, power failures, pushy American soldiers, pesky tribal elders and the iron grip of tradition.
"Cousins, cousins, cousins," Ali lamented. "Everybody here is supposed to marry their cousin. Me, I wanted a dream girl. A choice. A love. What's so wrong with that?"
In the past few weeks there has been a resurgence in weddings as young couples who were forced to wait out the most turbulent moments of the war are now getting married.
The surroundings are still a bit hectic, with streamer-covered cars stuck in traffic behind 70-ton tanks, and brides in poufy dresses tiptoeing through coils of razor wire.
But the young couples are adding a speck of hope on a horizon that desperately needs it.
Raed Elia, a wedding photographer, says business has tripled since last fall.
"There was fighting before and no electricity, so it was really slow," he said. "But today, so many brides, so little time."
The wedding halls are booked, the rituals reinvigorated. Belly dancing parties. Bachelor visits to the bathhouse. Beauty salons packed with corpulent brides.
"Aris! Aris!" — Wedding! Wedding! — people shout out on weekend nights when the celebratory shooting starts.
These days in Baghdad, the crack of gunfire is actually the sound of things getting back to normal.
Ali, whose full name is Ali Dakhil Alawi, is a hopeless romantic. His favorite question in the world is how did he meet his wife. "She was sitting in the garden, and I'll never forget her eyes," he said. "It was like she threw a net over me. I was her victim."
It was May. Baghdad was a looted, picked over, unhappy place. Ali was importing cars. Shayma was working in a bombed-out office. One day Ali dropped by with a cousin looking for work. When he saw Shayma, his stomach turned to ice. The only words he could utter were: "Hi, my name is Ali, and I sell cars. Will you marry me?"
Her response: "Are you kidding?"
Twice, his father tried to fix him up with cousins. That is how most of his 15 brothers were married. It is a custom in Iraq. And at 36 years old and single, Ali was feeling the squeeze of tradition.
Her father, too, had mentioned some kin, an idea that made Shayma want to fly away.
When Ali went to Shayma's father, he only shook his head.
"She was so young," said Hamid Hamza, Shayma's father. "Just 21. And she was my only daughter."
But Ali's love had taken off at a gallop. There was no bridling it. For three months he visited Shayma's house. He bought her robes. He bought her teddy bears. He went to the mosque and prayed.
During car-buying trips to Syria, as he blazed through the desert in a dented BMW, his mind never left her.
"Not an hour would go by when Ali wouldn't mention his dream girl," said his nephew and business partner, Abdul Amir.
Her heart was occupied too.
"Every time I passed the place where we met, I got out of the car and kissed the door," Shayma said.
Finally Shayma's father relented. They could be married if Shayma would keep working and they would get their own home.
Ali agreed.
"He gave me his word," Shayma said.
More on that later.
Their engagement was not easy. The two were never allowed to be alone. When they were together, not even their fingers could touch.
War often slipped between them.
A few weeks ago a car bomb ripped into a crowd of army recruits near where Shayma worked.
"It was terrifying," Shayma said. "If something was going to happen to us, I wanted to be together."
On Feb. 19 the day finally came.
Ali began with a trip to the hamman, or bathhouse. As he stood on the sweating marble floor, ladling bowls of water over his shoulder, he beamed and said, "My new life begins today."
Shayma was getting dolled up at a beauty salon in Mansour, one of Baghdad's fanciest neighborhoods. Brides chatted freely behind the tinted glass windows that split them off from the world of men.
"I was so desperate to get married, I was going to ask Paul Bremer for help," said Sohar Bajget, 26, a policewoman who waited five years for this moment.
When Shayma emerged from the salon, Ali was waiting outside.
"Allah," he said, "take me to the hotel."
But there were a few steps before that.
As they walked to a photo studio, basking in the glow of strangers' smiles, Ali began to feel a little shy. He is from a conservative Shiite family. He was uneasy about what his mother would think of Shayma's scooped-neck dress.
"Did you bring the shawl?" he whispered. "Why this dress?"
"You should have seen what the other brides were wearing," Shayma said.
They giggled.
Ali dropped Shayma off at her house, tucked along an alley in northern Baghdad, and raced away to get his friends for the zeffa, or wedding convoy through town.
While Shayma was waiting, her father began to say goodbye. Her family is also Shiite, and Shiite tradition calls for the father of the bride to stay behind. "You are my pet," he said. "Who will make my dumplings now?"
Before he could say more, Ali came flying up the alley in a blue BMW covered in plastic roses, the engine in his car and in his chest revving wildly.
"Shayma! Shayma!" he yelled.
A line of cracked headlights shone in the alley. Ali's friends leapt out of their cars. Little boys tipped back trumpets. Drummers beat shivers down people's arms.
The wedding party, held at Ali's house, was traditional. For dinner there was goat, yogurt and rice. There was no beer, no Pepsi, not even a cake.
In the parallel universes of traditional Islam, women danced inside the house, men danced in the yard.
Ali and Shayma sat on plastic chairs outside, the affection glittering between them. He stroked her arm. She traced his wrist.
But the next day reality was waiting for them at the top of the steps.
Despite the conditions set by Shayma's father, the newlyweds moved into Ali's family home. Ali's older brother, Talib, gave up his room on the second floor, and Ali's family equipped it with new rugs, a new space heater and a new TV set with stickers still on it.
But it is a noisy house. Many children play in the hallways. With all the shrieking and shouting, it sounds like a school. Nearby is an empty lot bubbling with sewage. The smell reaches the bedroom.
Ali reneged on his promise to let Shayma keep working, which seemed to upset her. That is why the two started tugging over the teddy bear, a lime green creature with "Love" stamped on its furry chest.
But tradition holds that newlyweds spend one month together, in their house, getting to know each other.
And as Shayma curled up on a new satin bedspread, she shared a knowing smile.
"Maybe after a month," she said, "I'll be able to change his mind."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
