It came up almost by accident. "Nobody talks about Iraqi suffering," Sohad, our 81-year-old hostess said angrily. A peasant wearing an apron and a knit cap proffered tiny, porcelain cups of thick, black Arabic coffee from a tray as we sat in Sohad's living room, which is furnished with Persian carpets and ornate, carved wooden furniture. In another country, in other circumstances, these widows of diplomats and doctors might have talked of gardening or bridge, but this was Iraq.
"Take the cancer," Naira, Sohad's 82-year-old sister answered. "It would not be an exaggeration to say that 40 per cent of Iraqis have cancer. She has cancer," she said, pointing almost accusatorily at the elegant woman in black seated in the corner. "She has breast cancer. Her husband and brother and a cousin died of cancer last year."
The woman in black is called Murtaza; she is 58 years old and she wears a turban because her hair has fallen out from chemotherapy. "Five people in my family have died of cancer," she said. "I don't know what is causing this - we think it's the bombs the Americans dropped in the Gulf War." No one is sure why the cancer rate has shot up so dramatically, but contamination from strikes on Iraqi weapons plants seems the most plausible explanation. Worst of all, Murtaza continued, "there is no medicine or equipment for treatment here. I went to India for treatment, because India is the only country that still gives us visas. I am due for a check-up now, and it cannot be done here. But I cannot afford to go to Amman."
Murtaza's brother in Canada and her sister in London sent her the $1,000 she needed for her cancer operation in India. "Imagine, we were a rich country and our relatives have to send us money! We used to send money to them. It's very depressing, especially for those of us who have travelled and seen the world. Now we can't even dial an international phone call; all calls have to go through the operator, and some days they don't get a line."
These elderly women are left to suffer alone; all their children have emigrated. "There are no jobs here," Sohad explains. Her son and two daughters live in Persian Gulf sheikdoms and the US. "We think this is also part of the plan - the brain-drain of Iraq." Hundreds of thousands of young professionals have fled the country, and young people growing up in Iraq have little access to computers, information technology, or the outside world. If the situation continues, a whole generation will grow up in isolation and alienation.
Murtaza says friends her own age have also fled: "The country is dead. Even if sanctions are lifted, I don't think it will come back - all the cultured people have emigrated. It is such a pity to destroy a country for politics, for power." That ambiguous statement - she could be referring to President Clinton - is as close as most Iraqis come to criticising Saddam Hussein's regime.
A taxi driver is more daring: "Do you know why that is called the April 28th market?" he asks bitterly as we drive down a boulevard. "Because April 28th is the birthday of our president. You know our president?" And he bursts into mocking, almost hysterical laughter.
Hatred of the US administration, the main force behind the economic sanctions that have crippled Iraq, is encouraged by the government. Yet it feels as if Iraqis are channelling pent-up hatred of their own regime into their expressions of anger at the US. An educated Iraqi woman agreed with my theory: "Of course, you are right," she said. "He (Saddam Hussein) has been in power for 27 years, and this country has gone from bad to worse."
At the Midan market at the end of Al Rashid Street, worn shoes with holes in the toes are lined up on the pavement, for sale. So are piles of dirty blankets, old keys, nuts and bolts, broken televisions and hairdryers. It is as if the contents of a rubbish dump had been sorted and displayed in the shadow of the exquisite blue-flowered dome of the Al-Qushla mosque. Leila sits at a low table, trying to sell secondhand clothing. She pulls a wad of dinar notes from the folds of her chador, the black shroud worn by Shia Muslim women. "Here, it's for you if you want it," she taunts me. "Our money is worthless." She raises her eyes towards Baghdad's polluted sky and adds: "We have only Allah."
A woman gynaecologist stops to chat in a restaurant. She is helping the owner, a friend of hers, but says she and her engineer husband never go to restaurants themselves - one meal would cost 10 days' earnings. "In the old days, I used to go to Beirut every summer; I went to Amsterdam and London. I haven't left Iraq since 1990. I sold all my gold jewellery so we could maintain our standard of living."
Two young men with the glowering look of the mokhabarat, the ever vigilant intelligence services, listen attentively from the next table. They have black hair and black moustaches and, like most Iraqi men, look remarkably like their leader. Iraqis believe Saddam Hussein has at least five look-alikes, to reduce his chances of assassination. It is not hard to believe - he seems to have produced a nation of clones.
Economic sanctions have turned Baghdad into a city of beggars and car thieves. The beggars materialise from nowhere, barefoot and haggard, clad in rags, like the woman, old man and child who peered in through our car windows as we slowed to enter traffic on the Qadissiyeh Highway. They held their hands to their mouths, in an eating gesture, to show they were hungry.
Baghdad newspapers are filled with offers of rewards for stolen cars; few are ever found. Instead, they are dismantled for spare parts. Windshield glass is prohibitively expensive, so cracked windshields are almost never replaced. Petrol - the only thing Iraq has in abundance these days - costs pennies a litre, and the roads are clogged with wheezing, rusting jalopies. Only farmers - prominent members of Baghdad's nouveau riche society - and sanctions profiteers can afford the rare new Mercedes and BMWs which Iraqis call "ghosts of bread".
The plate-glass windows of Sohad's modest villa overlooking the Tigris River are still marked with giant adhesive-tape crosses to prevent the glass blowing inward in the event of bombing. "I lost all my windows in 1991," she recalls. "I put the tape up last week when it looked like the Americans were going to bomb us."
When would she take it down? I asked. "Not for some time - we feel relieved, but not safe," she said. Naira sold her Baccarat crystal, the set she bought in Paris in 1949, at auction. The two women packed their opaline glass collection in tissue paper seven years ago and still haven't brought it out of storage.
Neither the Iraqi people nor the small foreign community in Baghdad trusts either party in the conflict: they feel the US is itching to bomb them, and will seize on the slightest pretext. At the same time, they don't trust Saddam Hussein not to provoke a confrontation.
`The Americans seem to be obsessed with punishing this country," a UN official says. "It [the crisis] is not over yet. The feeling is that we've got this wonderful document [the UN accord with Iraq], but the moment something goes wrong, the first time UNSCOM [UN Special Commission] inspectors can't get in to a site or an American is insulted, the guys in the Gulf will go for it."
To cope with deprivation and uncertainty, Iraqis have changed their whole way of thinking. "We've learned to take things calmly; there are things we can't control. We live from day to day," Sohad says.
"From hour to hour," Naira adds.
"This is how we've changed most," says Murtaza, the cancer victim: "No planning."
Planning ahead is not good for you, Sohad agrees: "You lose your sense of balance if you plan."
As Iraq waits, paralysed, going backwards not forwards, it is as if the forces of nature were making inroads into Saddam's decaying empire. Public gardens grow wild. At the Ministry of Information this week, a big green lizard dropped out of the Venetian blinds into an open briefcase beside me. Another day, a grey mouse scurried across the floor in the same building. Legions of small cockroaches seem to be consuming our hotel, once one of Baghdad's finest. But domesticated animals fare worst of all. A UN employee tried to stop an Iraqi from beating a horse drawing a wagon of gas cannisters. The horse was emaciated, and its protruding spine was bleeding from the lashes. But when he was admonished by the European woman, the delivery man just shrugged his shoulders and said, "What do you expect? There's no money in this country."
