At the top of a high hill on the north side of Amman, Jordan, a Baghdadi grocer tends his tiny store. In a ten- by twenty-foot space, he’s crammed just about anything a reasonable person could need: eggs and milk in an uncooled refrigerator, meat in tin cans, shampoos and soaps in faded, dusty bottles, AAA batteries, and heavy duty packing tape. One evening, however, I think I’ve stumped him. “Bidi laymoon?” I ask.
Like a magician, he reaches behind the counter. “Laymoon? Like this? Yes—I have.” In his hand he presents a perfect yellow lemon.
The grocer is about my height, maybe closer to six feet, and forty-three years old. He almost always wears a gray sweater with an old pair of jeans or dark gray wool pants. There are bags under his eyes and some gray in his hair, too. On most days, he wears ragged stubble on his gaunt face. On those days, especially, he looks very old.
I suppose, in a way, we’re in Amman for the same reasons. Our countries crashed into each other and the jolt sent us both flying. I landed smoothly, having flown by choice, he with a thud, forced from his home by the war. We landed on the same hilltop overlooking a city under constant construction, growing like a field of concrete to accommodate the constant stream of others like us.
The diplomats waging the war, the contractors rebuilding the cities, the reporters covering the events, the students learning the language, the aid workers combating the problems, and more than a half million Iraqi refugees have all settled in Amman. It’s the home base for the Westerners, and the temporary home for the Iraqis. For the Jordanians, this influx has brought with it a one hundred percent increase in property values and a nightmare for the overcrowded schools.
I met my grocer the first day I moved in. “Where are you from?” he asked. “America?”
“Yes,” I said. “America.”
“I am from Baghdad,” he said, emphasis on the “dad.” He looked at me sternly. I looked back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was trying to be sincere, but felt a little bit put on the spot. I didn’t start the war and I needed some milk.
“Yes,” he said. “I am more sorry.” He waited as I poked around and stepped over boxes. I brought my groceries to the counter. “Saddam Hussein is a very good man,” he said. “Believe me—yes—very good man.” He gave me the thumbs up.
“Masalamma,” I said as I left. It was a strange scene for a native Minnesotan. The checkout people at Cub never engaged me in a political discussion, and I appreciated that. They might have commented on the weather, or maybe made a casual observation prompted by something I purchased, but they didn’t touch politics, and never offered up the defense of a murderous dictator. I walked out the door into the warm and dusty Jordanian night, with the grocer’s friendly goodbye trailing after me.
Everything comes in smaller cartons in this country and the shops aren’t as far away from the homes as they often are in America, so I found myself stopping by the Iraqi man’s store nearly every night. Our early conversations were vaguely political. He defended Hussein and sang Sunni praises; I wondered aloud if perhaps this Sunni hero of his went to some unnecessary extremes with the Shiites and the Kurds.
“Troublemakers,” my grocer said dismissively, and changed the subject. “You don’t look so good today. Tired today? Not like a flower, not like yesterday.” I assured him I’d get a good night’s sleep and headed home with my cocoa powder and tomato paste.
Morning and night, there are other Iraqis in my grocer’s store, smoking his cigarettes and drinking the coffee he brings from home. One hefty middle-aged man always sits on a crate chain-smoking and breathing heavily. When he gets up to shake my hand, it’s not without a great deal of effort and several coughs. He left one day and my grocer told me he was about to die. “All of the Iraqis here, they’re all very sick. Yes, something wrong with every one: blood pressure, diabetes, cancer. We are all very sad right now.”
I assumed those problems probably had to do with poor health care under the old regime and the endless supply of cigarettes, but our logic usually differed, and he attributed the ailments to broken hearts. I wasn’t sure I had the ammunition or the willpower to argue.
One night he hardly muttered when I walked in the door. He was slumped behind his counter on a crate, looking ragtag, gray, and tired. “You see what happened today? Senseless!” Thirty-six people had been killed in a Baghdad roadside bombing. We talked for a while. “Iraq has made my words tired,” he said as I wished him good night. “I must go home.”
The next night I hardly muttered when he issued his usual ebullient greeting. “I’m just homesick,” I said, “and I think I have the flu.” He prescribed a remedy in Arabic and we talked. It was a pathetic follow-up to a roadside bombing, but he didn’t say so.
Through the International Catholic Migration Mission, Suzana Paklar has been working with the Iraqi refugee community in Jordan for the past fifteen months. For refugees, she says, “it’s a question of missing their normal, everyday life. Maybe their life wasn’t even that good back home, but they had a community, and they were somebody in that community.”
Atop a high hill on the north side of Amman, my Baghdadi grocer longs for the community he left behind. Around Amman, half a million Iraqis join him, and around the Middle East—in Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt—several million Iraqis hope for the same thing. My grocer is somebody in the community here—somebody to me and somebody to the friends who share his coffee and cigarettes. And because he’s somebody here, and somebody to me, I wish he was home, too.—Leah Fabel
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