Arabs like Abul enjoy Mother's Milk

As afternoon drew toward evening, Abul sent his kid Abbas over. Abbas, a skinny 15-year-old with a black caterpillar mustache, came bearing broad tin bowls perfectly brimming with omelettes, stacked high with pita bread, and two liters of RC Cola, as well as my four or five packs of odious, sulphur-flavored Court cigarettes and thankfully not-pine-tasting Pine cigarettes.

It was time for the infidel Christian dogs to have a Ramadan feast in broad daylight front of Allah and the Arab world. We weren’t trying to be insensitive to Muslim sensitivities—we loved many of our Muslim brothers, but we were famished. We ate, we took pictures with Abbas, Abbas took pictures for us, and we ate some more. Rather than give us our eggs and vegetables as we had ordered them—uncooked—Abul had the old lady whip it all up for us. It was the most thoughtful thing I had seen any Arab civilians do for us, and I was touched.

After we had eaten our fill, Eddie and I went over to Abul’s farmhouse to thank the old man profusely.

“Salaam aleykum, Abul. Shukran! Shukran!” I said emphatically, shaking his hand and touching my heart and bowing, doing everything I could to make the old farmer know we were indebted to his kindness. I felt warm inside. He seemed pleased. The old lady poked her head out from the house, and Eddie asked, “you make the food?” using ample hand gestures.

“Ee, ee,” she answered back, along with a bunch of other Arabic we didn’t understand. Yes she had.

“It was good, good. Mmmmmm,” Eddie said, smiling and rubbing his stomach. The two universally understood English words to Arabs we’d encountered in Iraq were: “mister,” and “good.” The old, worn-out-looking, life-weary woman beamed happily and said some more in Arabic and then closed the door. Abul shouted something after her in his raspy voice. After some brief conversation squatting on our heels with Abul and Abbas in the clover, the woman brought out a pitcher of piping hot, sweet chai.

It was Ramadan, and Abul wasn’t having anything pass his lips during the daylight, but he poured Eddie and I a cup each and had us take and drink. It was the first chai I had had in Iraq and it was delectable as a dessert. We lit cigarettes.

Soon enough, we were making headway in our vigorous attempts to communicate, with prolific use of gestures and many trips to my Iraqi Language Survival Handbook, and Eddie pulled a picture of his wife and daughter from his wallet to show Abul.

“Madam?” Abul asked, pointing to Eddie.

“Yes, yes, my madam,” Eddie said.

Abul said something indicating daughter, and Eddie said yes to that too. Then the old man, in his raspy voice, said, “Bebe?” and, putting his thumb between his index and middle fingers, proceeded to suck on them, imitating nipple sucking. “You?” Abul asked.

Eddie was perplexed, but I thought I knew what he was getting at.

“He wants to know if your daughter was breastfed,” I told Eddie.

“What?” Eddie asked, completely thrown.

“No, really,” I said, “he wants to know if she was breastfed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Eddie, smiling and laughing.

Abul laughed a long and raspy laugh, then repeated the gesture over and over, despite the fact that I was trying to brag about having three sons, which generally seemed to impress the hell out of Arab men. Abul ignored me entirely and continued pointing to the picture of Eddie’s wife, then to Eddie. I realized he wasn’t pointing to the photo of their daughter.

“Hey Jimenez,” I said, “I think he wants to know if you ever got any milk from your wife.”

“Whaat?” Eddie asked, incredulously. Somehow I felt like a pervert, but I knew exactly what Abul was trying to communicate.

“Dude, just say yes,” I told Eddie.

“Yes, yes,” Eddie said, in the spirit of going along to get along.

Abul laughed a long and raspy laugh and said, “Good, good!”

He seemed perfectly delighted and made several more rounds of his gestures, sucking the tip of his thumb and pointing at the pictures and at Jimenez, forcing Jimenez to insist upon the fact that yes, he had suckled from his wife’s boobs. This is getting weird, I thought. They didn’t warn us about this one in our culture training. It was time to be getting along back to the house. Eddie and I finished our chai and thanked our host several more times and skirted the lush little clover field back to our outpost. It had been a heady day, and only the sense of foreboding kept me from feeling truly at peace with the world.