The Burga Baby

Yossi Alfi

Translated from the Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg

My mother moaned with labor pains for three days. At every opportunity she would recount the story of those pains to me, saying, “Ay, Yosef…with you it was the most difficult, abdallak. It took so long for you to come out

She lay in the room at the top of the stairway that was known as the tarar, where the breeze from the roof met the coolness of the house as it rose from the cellar. Mosquito netting hung over her to protect her from all manner of pests, and a mat was spread beneath her to support her back. The Christian midwife’s name was Atisha; it was Atisha who was called upon to birth the ‘pampered ones’ from among the young Jewish women. She was a certified midwife, and so knowledgeable that all the other women in confinement were jealous of those assisted by her.

Mother told me of ancient woes,

Among them, me!

A yellowing mat

A Christian midwife.

Lengthy days.

I was supposed to be born

But was apparently not interested.

I could have been born in Israel

Thus avoiding yet another complex.

But for whatever reason,

When my mother wished to cross the border

With me in her belly,

I wished to be born in Iraq

And I reminded her she was – pregnant.

With me

Inside her.

Thus it was, a worn mat.

I was born Yosef

I was given life

I said Shalom

And no one answered.

I was born.¹

Then the Christian midwife, Atisha, said, “Subhan Allah,” May God be blessed. And my mother was taken aback. “What happened?” she asked. “What happened? Is the child all right?”

“Not only he is fine, he is special, a special child!” Atisha cried out, her bellowing voice an immediate summons to the first row of women positioned just outside the netting, among them my older sisters, who had provided assistance to the midwife throughout the birth. Behind them stood the expectant aunts, and behind them, my father entered the tarar in a rush, his face pale with fear and worry.

“A special child has been born to you, with Allah’s help and that of the prophets. Women, ululate!”

“What? What’s happened?” my father responded with a parched tongue, on the verge of fainting on the midwife Atisha’s bosom.

“The boy has been born with a burga,” Atisha exclaimed from between pursed lips.

“A burga?” my father asked, gathering the pieces of himself that had shattered in every direction: the frightened piece, the astonished piece, the blessed piece, the sanctified piece, the honored piece, the curious piece…

“A burga? I’ve never seen a child with a burga,” my father said as he approached my mother, who was holding the baby in her arms. The baby’s face was still covered with the caul that was attached at the corners of his forehead, two breathing holes open beneath the nose. My father took a look and once again nearly fainted. The midwife held him up and seated him on the low stool that had until only a moment earlier been supporting her. He sat down, wiping the sweat from his broad brow. He thrust his fingers into his mouth and bit them like a babe seeking a pacifier. He muttered, “Burga, burga, we have a child with a burga…”

Throughout my life I had been searching for the proper Hebrew word for a burga but had come up with only an approximation. Then one day I was reading a book in which the author told of being born with a burga, which he translated to English using the word ‘caul’ – and I learned that this term was a familiar one, and the matter well known.

Not much time passed before the early-rising synagogue congregants received the news of my burga-birth, and the rabbi was led with great ceremony to our house, where he ascended the stairs in the direction of the tarar. The room was now filled with all the members of the household, who had been awakened by my sisters’ ululating cries, the gurgling praises made by the tongue at the top of the open pharynx.

The house contained a number of families, since we lived, as was the custom in those days, in a large home as one extended family – the uncle with his family, the aunt with hers, the grandmothers.

“A child born with a burga is not just special; he is one who heralds the coming of the Messiah,” said the rabbi quietly, privately, to my father, his pleasant words fluttering from his beard to my father’s ears. The midwife hastened to remove the caul from the baby’s face, my face, tugging lightly at the corners of my forehead and gently tearing it. She folded it and placed it in the embroidered kerchief that had been on my mother’s head through the long hours of the birth, and she placed it in the hands of the rabbi.

The rabbi opened the kerchief and gazed at the thin caul, then passed it to my father, who handled it with much anxiety, as though it were a precious diamond that might fall from his hands. The kerchief was then passed among the men, then the women, and the rabbi said, “It must not be touched, must not be touched, this is God’s handiwork, it must not be touched,” and the eyes of one and all at the top of the stairs were peeled wide, their necks stretched forward, in order to catch sight of the contents of the kerchief.

“Burga.”

“Burga.”

“Burga.”

The burga, which was a part of my body, from fetus to the birth that had taken place only moments earlier, became public property and was brought ceremoniously to the synagogue for the morning prayers, and there the folded burga was placed inside a lump of silver that was then smelted closed and turned into an amulet.

I was raised on this story, a blond child from Basra about whom all who approached were warned: “Take care with that little ‘Englishman’; he was born with a caul.” ‘English’ because of my blondness and the caul because of its holiness.

Right after reading about the term ‘caul’ I went online, and it turned out that this phenomenon is well known and that babies – one per several hundred thousand – are born with them. There are people – not just in Iraq where I happened to be born, but in other places like Europe and the rest of the world – who perceive cauls to be a symbol of holiness, and there are people who take part in caul cults for preserving cauls and sanctifying their lives through them in one way or another. I even saw dried cauls – go figure…

I remember, in my early childhood in Iraq, when I was three years old, and later in Israel, that people would come to me for a blessing. I would place my tiny hand on the person’s head and say ‘Bah-bah-bah’ just as I saw my father do when he would bless me with the verse “May God give you of the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth…”

Most surprising of all was that they, the adults, would come to me in awe and reverence and my mother would ask me – always humorously, with laughter, so that “the child will not be startled, abdallak,” to bless them, and she would take my hand and place it on the person’s forehead. In Israel, where I had already been living for more than a year with my grandmother but without the rest of the family, people would come to our tent in the transit camp for new immigrants and declare to my grandmother: “Is this the boy with the caul? Tell him to bless me!” and my grandmother would stroke my hand and place it on the head of the supplicant and tell me to say ‘Bah-bah-bah,’ and I would hasten to do as she told me. Once I had grown older and become Israeli in every way, “and not as we expected him to be,” as my uncles would say, they would remind me: “Do you remember how you would bless us with ‘Bah-bah-bah?’”

That is the story with which I grew up: the boy born with a caul, a burga. I know that word, burga, since it has been with me my whole life, so often repeated. “What are you talking about? Do you know who this boy is? He’s the one born with a burga.” I fought it, always; from the time I was a child, then a youth, an adolescent, an adult, I fought against such superstitions. Till this very day there are old people still alive who give me that look – do you remember that you used to do ‘Bah-bah-bah’ for me? I would bless them. It is now a kind of a joke, but for them it was a serious matter. For me, I was certain it was some sort of child’s play.

The burga became an amulet that my mother wore her entire life on a chain around her neck and used to heal one thing or another. She told me that when my father was in the throes of death and in terrible pain she placed the burga on his chest and it calmed him. In other cases of using the burga I employed my powers of logic to fight all those concepts and I ran away from all those old-time beliefs, seeking new answers in the Israeliness I had created as a means of protecting myself from my past.

Mother fell ill and suffered excruciating pain from cancer and other maladies. In our tradition, there is no such thing as sending a parent to an old age home, so my mother lived on at home though she spent a lot of time at my sister’s house. One night the heavy amulet that was always hanging around her neck was apparently keeping her from breathing easily, so she slipped it off and laid it on the headboard. The amulet fell behind the bed where no one could see it and even she did not notice its absence although she had worn it her entire adult life, had made aliyah to Israel with it after many hardships and lived with it for years upon years, from a tent in an immigrant camp to homes in Petah Tikva and Ramat Gan.

When she died a number of years ago, everyone went looking for the amulet, though no one ever mentioned it to me. Then recently my sister moved apartments, and one Friday evening she told me, “Yossi, listen. We found something that belongs to you. I have to return it to you. Just don’t get upset about it.”

She gave me this thing wrapped in an old cloth of Iraqi linen that had been specially tailored to fit the heavy amulet. I looked at it and told her, “I recognize this…this is what Mother would wear hanging…it’s…”

My sister said, “It’s your burga.” And the burga took me, a man in his fifties, straight back to childhood. At that time I had been unaware that my mother had been wearing it all the time; I had thought it was hidden somewhere. I knew they had used it in the synagogue, that it was brought to sick people and placed on their bodies. Before my uncle died, my mother took my father aside and told him, “Put the burga on him and he will be at peace.” They put it on him and he passed away tranquilly.

My sister placed the wrapped burga in my hand. I sniffed it, and it had my mother’s scent, a delicate soap smell, the smell of a pampered daughter of rich parents, the smell I grew up with as a shoot, a bud, a flower of a brand-new Israeli life. That scent of my mother lives on and is preserved in this burga, and I simply burst into terrible sobs that I could not contain inside me, the sobs of a child separated from his caul, which has returned and now seeks a place in his life.

So shocked and dismayed were they that my sister, my son, my daughter and the family members who were hosting us did not know what to do with themselves. “I’m sorry, perhaps I shouldn’t have given this to you…” my sister mumbled.

“No, no, no,” I said. “It’s good that you gave this to me and I’ll save it. I really did wonder what had happened to it.”

I placed the amulet in my wife’s hands, and she tucked it inside a velvet bag and put that into a safe, where it remains until today.

I do not know why I am telling this story that I have never told before, but this is yet another birth, another separation from knowing myself. A different self to an individuality that I will apparently never understand among all the screens and masks I have used to cover my face and my personality.

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