Free Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea Page B

girls in shiny
    silky flowered dresses.
    Almost as soon as we saw them, the caravan moved over to
    the side of the road and stopped. The young men turhed to
    prance toward us and two children jumped down from the
    camels and proceeded to turn somersaults and cartwheels on
    the road, directly in front of our oncoming car.
    “Stop, Jabbar, please,” said Khadija, “so Beeja and I can
    see,” and when Jabbar put on his brakes, the men snapped into
    formation. The children wove, tumbling, among the oud
    players, the drummers, the men with pipes and nose flutes,
    occasionally even upstaging the leader, who had produced a
    handful of small balls from his pocket and was now twirling
    and tossing his baton and juggling the balls, all at the same
    time. The camels stayed by the side of the road, but the girls
    brought the donkeys round to serve as a backdrop for the
    performers and musicians, and, like bareback riders in a
    circus, reined in the beasts with one hand and gestured
    coquettishly toward us with the other. They shouted and called
    to us, but we could not understand what they were saying.
    Slowly the little tableau moved toward us on the empty
    road, until the gypsies were so close we could see the flashing
    gold teeth of the men, their embroidered skullcaps and the
    single gold earrings in their ears, the gold pendants about the
    slender necks of the children. Smiling and calling to us still,
    the girls turned the donkeys slowly around, jingling their gold
    bracelets and switching their black abayahs like the trains of
    ball dresses. I had already begun to think of the abayah as a
    sheltering cloak, a symbol of modesty. It was a shock to see it
    used in this way, at one moment framing the girls’ pointed
    faces and tightly laced bosoms, and then flipped toward us
    provocatively as they turned in time to the music.
    Now the music increased its tempo, the children twisted
    their narrow bodies in a frenzy of backbends and somersaults,
    and to the accompaniment of a long roll on the skin drums, the
    leader flung his baton high into the desert air. While it twisted
    and turned in a dazzling series of circumlocutions, he deftly
    juggled the balls, caught the baton, then the balls, tossed his
    black head triumphantly and sank to his knees in a sweeping
    bow. He landed almost directly beneath the car window, and
    while we clapped, Jabbar produced some coins, and the
    leader, with a brilliant smile, peered into the car where
    Khadija and I sat, in our abayahs, in the back seat.
    Would we like one of the girls to dance? he asked.
    “Oh yes,” said Khadija, who had stared fixedly at the gypsy
    girls during the entire act.
    “Not today,” said Jabbar. “That’s enough.”
    He waved off the leader and we drove on, while Khadija
    sank back against the seat and proceeded to sulk.
    “See, Khadija, they are still waving after us,” I said, looking
    myself at the group which receded quickly into the distance
    until finally only a few tiny sticklike figures and animals stood
    on the empty road under the wide blue sky. Khadija did not
    turn her head, and though even Jabbar tried to tease her, she
    did not respond. We rode home in silence and spoke no more
    about the caravan.
    A few days later Bob reported that the gypsies had camped
    again, this time near El Nahra and we had been invited to visit
    them by Abdul Razzak, a friend of Jabbar’s who was
    irrigation engineer in a neighboring village. Abdul Razzak
    was going to take presents to one of the dancing girls, who,
    Jabbar claimed, was Abdul Razzak’s mistress and very
    beautiful.
    Khadija did not go with us, for reasons which remained
    unexplained, and I was alone with the three men. It was a cold
    day, the sun darkened by a thick cloud which looked
    ominously like an impending sandstorm. As we left El Nahra,
    the wind whipped up the silt in clouds around us.
    The dust was worse farther out, blowing so hard that we
    almost passed the gypsy camp before seeing it. I had