Bombs, blood and babies

From The Sunday Times
June 10, 2009

Bombs, blood and babies
The horrifically injured children Hala Jaber saw in Iraq drove the Sunday Times correspondent to set up a fundraising appeal. But the work was overshadowed by her grief at being unable to have a child of her own
If it had not been for a strange request from my office, I would never have written this story. “We need an orphan,” my boss said over the satellite phone to me in Baghdad. “Not just any orphan. A special one.” His instructions were as meticulous as they were startling in the days after the invasion of Iraq. I should not settle for the first injured orphan I came across, he told me firmly. I should scan all the paediatric wards for the special one.
A baby would be no good because it would not have an expressive enough face. The orphan we needed would be slightly older but still young enough to look defenceless. A girl would be best because she would seem more vulnerable than a boy. Ideally, she would be badly injured but still beautiful: she had to make a great picture.
So, to summarise, I was looking for a wounded girl, between one and five years old, whose parents had died and whose pretty face was more or less unscathed.
“Okay,” I said.
It was early April 2003, a few days after the Americans and British had invaded. With my husband, Steve, a photographer, I was reporting on the war.
For a moment I wondered whether anyone at the office in London understood what it meant to drive through Baghdad, with all its shooting and looting, on a mission to select and reject injured children with inconsolable families for a slot on the inside pages of our newspaper.
Yet I knew my brief was for a good cause. The paper was planning a fundraising campaign for the children worst affected by the war. My task was to find the face of that campaign.
Since I had begged my boss to set up this appeal, I was in no position to complain. On the contrary, I had seen so many children hurt by the bombardment that I would have done anything to help.
There was another reason for this quest. I was a war correspondent, but I was also a woman, and I had lived with a desolate, personal, childless emptiness for too long.
FOR as long as I can remember, I have lain in bed imagining that a magic carpet is transporting me from the anxieties of the present to an exotic, far-flung future where all my wishes come effortlessly true.
When I was a little girl, the carpet would rise above bombed-out Beirut while I slept. It would fly me away from the Lebanese civil war to a fairy castle where adoring crowds waited to hail the return of the enchanted Princess Hala.
As a teenager, I glided away from my British boarding school to fashion shows in New York, Paris and Milan. When I became a reporter in my twenties, the carpet showed me a blissful marriage, sons and daughters.
Sex education had no part in a conservative Arab upbringing. Girls were forbidden to go out with boys and expected to remain virgins until they married. If a couple did not conceive, it was taken as a sign of incompleteness or imperfection. The possibility of problems in conceiving wasn’t something I was even aware of when I married Steve. If anyone had told me at my wedding that motherhood would not be part of my future, I would have laughed in his face.
So when we started trying to have a baby, I became more and more mystified by our lack of success. I went to see my gynaecologist in Harley Street.
He asked all the obvious questions, and I told him I was troubled by an incident from the past. Some friends had told me about a fortune-teller who did readings from a cup of Turkish coffee.
“Bring her round,” I had said. But although the fortune-teller had read my friends’ cups, she had refused to look at mine. The following day one of my friends told me she had refused because the minute she saw me, she had felt something. “This woman will never bear a child,” she had told my friend. She had not been able to bring herself to tell me.
Now here I was, telling my crazy story to a specialist. “Please,” I begged him, “could we start some preliminary tests, just in case?”
He saw how emotional I was and agreed. “Go home, Hala,” he said. “Make love with Steve first thing in the morning and come back to me shortly afterwards.”
The next day, I waited nervously as he stared through his microscope. I expected to leave the clinic chiding myself for being superstitious and stupid. Perhaps I would look at some baby clothes on the way home.
“Good God,” he said, without looking up from the microscope. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
I don’t remember much more about that day, except that I walked in the cold for hours, thinking to myself, “I am a murderer. I kill every sperm, every possibility of life.”
In my mind — and here my Arab culture plays a large role — I was a woman if I could make babies. But at nearly 30, an age when most of my Lebanese contemporaries already had several children, I had just been told by this doctor that I was not like most women.
I was sobbing when I reached Steve. My poor husband. I ranted, cursed and cried. I screamed at him for being normal.
“I’m a Hitler,” I remember shrieking at the height of it. “I just butcher everything.”
“Look at me, Hala,” he said, shaking me gently. “I love you . . . I promise you I’ll make sure you have that bundle of joy in your arms.”
Together we tried everything we could. I strained every sinew and swallowed every prescription. On my back with my legs spread, I surrendered my dignity to doctors practising artificial insemination. I learnt how to inject myself with fertility drugs to stimulate my ovaries for IVF.
We bought a house in south London that I longed to fill up with our children. There was a quiet back bedroom with its own bathroom where I would wrap them in warm towels and sprinkle them with talcum powder before tucking them up with teddy bears and goodnight stories.
Nothing worked. As the months became years, I racked up IVF bills for thousands and thousands of pounds with nothing to show for the investment of our life savings. My father sent a cheque for £3,500, the cost of one cycle of treatment at that time, with a note saying: “Perhaps this will be the one, Hala.” His generosity made me cry because I knew he was not a rich man. I returned the cheque, saying this was something we could fund ourselves.
“Promise me you will ask if you need, Hala,” he said, choking up on the phone.
Eventually, I began to tire of the sterile rooms, the harsh fluorescent lights, the relentless merry-go-round of smiling doctors who boosted my hopes, only for them to die each month. It was too exhausting to keep challenging God’s will. When my mother sent me to an eminent obstetrician in Beirut I screamed at him: “I hate you all.”
I was in mourning for someone who had never existed. I was crying for all the hopes that had died — hope for life, for the future, for the person my child might have been and the person I might have become.
Not only was my faith in medical miracles fading fast, but with it was vanishing the passion for work that had driven me through militia roadblocks as a journalist in Beirut. The focus on having a child pushed everything else into oblivion. My ideas for assignments were drying up and so were the offers from newspapers. I was not a mother. I was barely a journalist any more. I was a total failure.
But when I saw the footage of United Airlines flight 175 slicing through the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, it sparked something inside me that I thought had been extinguished. I was filled with awe at the scale of the attack and pity for its victims. An enormous news story was breaking in front of my eyes and I realised I wanted to be one of the thousands of reporters covering it. It was a shock to feel the journalistic passion stirring again.
By early 2003, after a number of successful stories for this newspaper, I was speeding across the desert with Steve to Baghdad to await the expected invasion. What I did not realise was that — however hard I tried to bury myself in the new role of action-girl foreign correspondent — my maternal instincts would resurface in Baghdad, fully intact and emotionally devastating, as I reported the war.
For the most part, I have learnt to hold this pain inside me, but the desire for children is a demon that cannot be locked away. Every now and then it creeps out and catches me unawares, bringing back all the emotions in a surge of realisation.
“Perhaps this is why it was never meant to be,” I thought as our vehicle powered onto the six-lane highway that stretched for 650 miles to Baghdad. “Where I’m going, I’ll be glad I don’t have children left behind in London.”
THE peculiar thing about driving into Baghdad was that the war fever gripping everyone in London was nowhere to be seen in the city of 6m people where the fighting was actually going to take place.
Women still trudged to market for fish, spices and fruit. Men with clipped moustaches and oiled hair smoked gloomily in their cars to relieve the frustration of being caught in gridlocked traffic on their way to the office. Small boys chased a football around some wasteland like small boys everywhere.
The number of wedding celebrations showed, however, that Baghdadis sensed sorrow might not be far away. On one night alone I must have seen 80 young women in shimmering white gowns clutching their husbands’ arms in the grounds of my hotel. I saw in some of the couples’ eyes a determination to seize their chance of pleasure before it disintegrated.
Soon the streets were almost empty, save for women hurrying to stock up on food and water. I found myself drawn to the maternity department of one of the city’s great hospitals, the Alwiya. The sight of mothers with swollen bellies walking through the entrance, their toddlers in tow, made something stir inside me.
I was shaken by my reaction to the first newborn I saw in the waiting area. Envy of his mother convulsed me and I trembled with the shame of it. I took a deep breath, steadied myself and tried to concentrate on the reporting I had come to do.
A poignant drama was unfolding at the hospital. Dozens of women were asking doctors to induce labour now rather than risk giving birth while trapped in their homes a few days later. “There is a sense of hysteria among pregnant women,” said one of the busy obstetricians. “They are coming seven and eight months pregnant and saying, ‘I want my baby now’.”
He performed several caesarean sections that day. Other births were induced, even though everyone knew there would be no drugs to relieve the pain of these longer labours. Shrieks resounded through the corridors, but the hospital was saving its anaesthetic for the war.
Some mothers whose babies had been born prematurely insisted on taking them home. “Whatever happens, at least we’ll be together,” said a 28-year-old woman who removed her skinny premature son from his incubator. “I can’t leave him behind, not knowing if I’ll even be able to visit him.”
Some young mothers tried to make their newborns safe by taking them out of the country, only to be turned back by soldiers at the border.
Two days later — on March 20 — we were woken at 5.34am by the wailing of sirens. Steve and I glimpsed a moment’s panic in one another’s eyes and scrambled out of bed. Within seconds, muezzins were chanting from nearby minarets. Their call to prayer almost drowned out the clattering anti-aircraft fire at first, but the thump of cruise missiles finding their targets was unmistakable.
As we huddled together in the corridor outside our room, I heard the shrill barking of terrified dogs and another, less familiar sound. It took me a few seconds to realise that it was a donkey braying. For days afterwards he would bray just before the attacks began. He became my imaginary friend, my early warning system. I made a note in my head to find him when it was all over and present him with a feast of carrots.
The city centre, where we were holed up, was now the target of some of the most lethal weaponry ever devised, and it was coming closer. “Ya rab yasser wall tu’aaseer,” I prayed over and over again. “God, please help. Do not put obstacles in our way.”
One morning I went to visit a family whose diary of war I was compiling. The man of the house, Farouq Mohammed Ali, had studied civil engineering in Britain for seven years. His wife, Iman, was four months pregnant with their third child.
“It was an awful night and the children cried as I held them in my arms, whispering soothing words to them,” Iman said. “I had to get the children out of their rooms so that we could take cover by the entrance to the house. I couldn’t walk — my feet wouldn’t carry me — so I crawled on all fours. I know I’m pregnant but I had no choice. I don’t know if I’ll lose this baby out of sudden panic from those loud explosions.”
I pretended to sound knowledgable in the hope that I could reassure her. “Babies are tougher than you think,” I said.
She took my hand and guided it towards her. I had to stop myself from recoiling. If there was one thing guaranteed to melt the glacial sang-froid with which I had come to view my own infertility, it was a pregnant woman placing my hand on the warm, taut skin of her belly.
“I don’t know whether the heart is beating,” Iman was saying, as if I should be able to feel it. For a moment, I could not answer.
“All seems well,” I said, trying to hide my hopeless ignorance. “You’ll be fine, Iman, as will your baby. I am sure your child is kicking.”
To my astonishment, her face brightened. She believed me. I felt myself sway slightly and realised that my demon had returned. “Snap out of it, Hala,” I thought as I left Iman’s house. I went back to Steve and didn’t say a word about it.
On subsequent nights the bombing intensified. First would come the braying of the donkey, more agitated each time, then sirens and tracer fire. Anti-aircraft guns opened up with a roar and suddenly buildings around our hotel were evaporating in orange fireballs. The city shook from shock waves.
Walking into the Shifaa hospital in al-Shula, an impoverished Shi’ite suburb, was like entering a charnel house. Blood ran along corridors that resounded to wailing and sobbing. Doctors were shouting frantic instructions to nurses who could not hear them above the shrieks.
Dr Osama Fadel detached himself from the mayhem. Twice that day, missiles had struck markets where families were buying fruit and vegetables, he said. In the second attack, just before nightfall, 55 people had been killed. Seeing Steve’s European face, he turned on us angrily; but he apologised when he saw a tear rolling down my face.
In the morgue he showed me one of the reasons for his rage: a trolley on which a six-year-old girl was lying with her eyes half open as if she were falling asleep. She wore a 101 Dalmatians sweatshirt. Blood oozed from a sleeve. She had been hit in the back of the head by a piece of shrapnel in her home. Her name was Sara.
On the same trolley, partly hidden beneath Sara, was her seven-year-old brother, Karar. Part of his face had been torn off and there was a gaping wound in his chest. Little pieces of his toes were missing.
We drove back to our hotel in silence, save for my sobbing. I did not feel like a journalist. I was no longer responding in a professional way: my objectivity had deserted me. All I wanted to do was to wrap the children we had seen in my arms and carry them to safety.
The missiles had cut off the electricity. We walked up 17 floors and reached our room physically and emotionally drained. I wanted to curl up in bed, but Saturday was dawning. The deadline for my newspaper story was only a few hours away. While Steve slept, I wrote in anger and sorrow. I could barely contain the mass of conflicting emotions inside me.
I longed to do more than merely report the frenzy of these families in a western newspaper: I wanted to relieve their misery somehow. However crazy it would seem if I said it out loud, I wanted to save the children.
Within three weeks — with the newspaper’s support — this was what I set out to do. I had to find the “ideal orphan” who would be the face of our fundraising campaign for the children worst affected by the war.
I MADE a list of hospitals for the driver. Searching would be tougher now than at the start of the fighting. Barricades were going up to fortify all medical facilities against attack.
We drove past row upon charred row of burnt-out buses, cars and vans. The entrances to residential roads were sealed off with barriers made from tyres, planks, scrap metal — anything that came to hand. It reminded me of Beirut just before the civil war.
At a teaching hospital, we found the operating theatres empty and an evacuation under way. A doctor warned us: “There are a lot of armed men around. Nobody knows who anybody is any more. I can’t even protect my patients here. Please go away.”
In any case, he told us bitterly, there were no injured children in this hospital any more. Only children’s bodies were left.
By the time we reached the fourth hospital, a modern, single-storey building with a beautiful garden full of fragrant flowers and birdsong, I was beginning to despair. White-coated doctors made their rounds of the wards with AK-47 assault rifles over their shoulders.
One of them invited us to sit down with him for a cup of tea. We explained what we were looking for. He paused for a moment, searching his memory, then told us about a young man of 18 who had been admitted to this hospital as the battle for Baghdad was reaching its peak. The youth had been burnt from head to foot and never stood much chance. He had died in agony after four days, but not before telling a story that had so touched the doctor that he wanted me to hear it.
“It’s about a little girl,” he said. “She lost seven members of her family, including her parents and her brothers. She was severely burnt.”
“How do you know the story’s true?”
“I know it’s true because my patient was one of the little girl’s brothers. She could die if her burns are anything like his.”
“Where is she?”
“I really don’t know,” he said. “But there are many like her.”
The cool, professional detachment that had got me through the day was gone. I must find this child. I demanded the names of other hospitals where I might look for her. I was on my feet as soon as he had finished his list. How rude he must have thought me.
The late afternoon sun was setting as we emerged from the hospital. The curfew was looming but I did not want to wait another day to find this girl.
“Madam, stop!” a voice cried.
An old nurse was running towards me. I thought I knew what she wanted. Journalists were in great demand for their satellite phones. There was always somebody pleading to call loved ones abroad. Usually, I found it impossible to turn my back on these people. But time was running out to find my little girl. I hurried on.
“Madam,” she called again. “Wait. I know where the little girl is. Don’t waste your time looking all over the place. Go straight to the Karameh hospital. She’s there.”
I hugged and kissed her and rushed off.
Evening was almost upon us by the time we arrived at the Karameh. In the burns unit a rather strict doctor made us take off our shoes and jackets and put on masks and gowns.
As we padded barefoot after him, I braced myself for the shock awaiting me through the door at the end of the disinfected corridor.
© Hala Jaber 2009
Extracted from The Flying Carpet to Baghdad by Hala Jaber, to be published by Macmillan on Friday at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £15, including postage, from The Sunday Times Booksfirst on 0845 271 2135
Next week
“In some nightmares I would be kneeling with my hands bound, staring at the lens of a video camera in which I could see the reflection of a man behind me with a long knife” — Hala Jaber on the horrors of Iraq