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Chapter 9 Living in sexual deprivation In the mid-1950s, observing young men and women in their teens embracing, kissing, and ‘‘necking’’ openly in the streets, buses, and underground stations of London, Paris, Rome,TelAviv,andJerusalem,Icouldnothelpthinkingofthelongyears of sexual deprivation of the youth of the Baghdad in which I was born and grew up. And I own that these feelings were not always free of a kind of envy, a nagging awareness of what members of my generation missed in terms of vital human experience. But it was a life not totally devoid of awards. I don’t quite know what youngsters today do for ‘‘real’’ sex—whether, that is, the endless kissing and the very serious-looking necking always leads to actual intercourse. Be that as it may, my own deprivation was not as complete and final as it sounds. Apart from those so-called ‘‘nocturnal emissions,’’ in which one had to relyexclusivelyon the imagination aided bya certain kind of book or picture, there were always some opportunities for physical contact of sorts. Overcrowded public places and occasional female guests staying with us fora period of timewere the main source of such contacts. In the small room in the diwankhana we had for ourselves in Beit Abul Juss, there were five of us and we had to make do with two beds, one single and the other a rather large double bed. The arrangement was that Father and I used the single bed, while Mother and my two sisters occupied the large one. This was so because of religious and, I suspect, other reasons that made it unthinkable for my parents to share the same bed anyway. But I was supposed to be the spoiled child of the familyand I often made use of that piece of fiction to exchange my place with my younger sister, so that I could sleep in the other bed.The temptation to do so became especially strongwhenwehadHella’syoungersisterstayingwithusonherfrequent visits from Khanaquin where the family still lived. Sleeping in the same bedwiththeattractiveyoungwomanhadnaturallyitsownrewardswhere my sexual needs were concerned, and it was on one of thosewinter nights 86 the last jews in baghdad of 1935–1936 that I reached sexual maturity, and I still remember vividly the time I had my first real emission. I cannot say I was frightened oreven surprised—I just took it in my stride. I don’t know if I already had some knowledge of what it was; but somehow, coming after almost a decade of regular ‘‘dry’’ climaxes, I saw nothing unusual about the phenomenon except the inconvenience of wet underwear and the fear that I would be ‘‘discovered.’’ The reason why Hella’s younger sister stayed with us so frequently was that she came to Baghdad to meet a cousin of hers with whom she was having a long and illicit courtship. A senior official at the Ministry of the Interior working directly with the minister’s all-powerful British advisor, the young man was rightly considered a great success and his family had very high hopes as to the kind and class of girl they would consider suitable as his future wife. Themselves hailing from the north, they were a hardy, noisy, and querulous lot and quite determined to prevent the betrothal of their son to a cousin who could bring him neither a decent dowry nor social advancement. They kept quite a watch on the poor girl, so that every time she was staying with us two or three of them came—usually the father and the elder brother—and made such a scene thatthewholeneighborhoodcouldhear.Thefightswentonuniformlines ofargument—thewilyandimmodestcousinwastemptingtheirinnocent darling boy, arranging illicit meetings with him, and trying to snatch him from his family. And they always concluded by swearing that they would never, never let the boy take her hand in marriage. But they failed to keep their word: the two finally did get married and for many years to come there followed a total estrangement between the two sides. ‘‘nocturnal emissions’’ In an essay titled ‘‘The Transformation of Puberty,’’ Freud gives this description of nocturnal emission: ‘‘In the case of a man living a continent life, the sexual apparatus, at varying intervals . . . discharges the sexual substances during the night, to the accompaniment of pleasurable feelings and in the course of a dream which hallucinates a sexual act.’’ Not only do I feel obliged to take Freud’s word for it as a great authority; the fact is that every young man of my generation...

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