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Serving With Saddam’s Soup Ladle
The eBay listing: Saddam Hussein Palace Christofle Soup Ladle Malmaison. Starting price: $100.
The French-made silver serving piece had already racked up six bids. Its handle was stamped with Saddam’s eagle and Baathist slogan. The item, according to the eBay seller in Alabama, had been found in the lost luggage of an American soldier, lifted perhaps during a 2003 palace raid, or sold to the soldier by an Iraqi looter. The auction would end in 32 minutes. My family, though, had just launched into a long evening of blessings and chicken soup. I scanned the bid history, now up to $150. I placed a bid of $157 and ran downstairs.
“Come in peace, crown of God!” They were singing in Hebrew as I dropped back onto the family room couch. “Come with joy and cheerfulness!” Baghdad was a cheerless, fearful place back in July 1990, when I went there to visit my friend Howard, an intern at the American Embassy. Evidence of the regime’s brutality had so undermined Howard’s sense of security that my 6-foot-5 friend was sleeping with his bedroom lights on.
“It is He, our King,” my kids were now mumbling their prayers, hungry. “Delivered us from the grasp of all tyrants, avenged us.”
I couldn’t concentrate. Was I winning?
I ran upstairs and saw the message from eBay: “You’ve been outbid! Don’t let it get away.” I had expected to quietly buy the memento for $100. I had stumbled across it by accident, while looking for silverware. A regular Christofle ladle retails for $390. How much was dictator kitchenware worth? I remembered my nights in Baghdad, the shattered sleep, the shrieks of signal whistles every hour from the uniformed men in khaki caps biking around our neighborhood, spying for Saddam. Saddam, the president who tortured opponents, who executed his sons-in-law, who invaded Kuwait, who rained missiles on Tel Aviv, who seized Americans as human shields, who gassed Kurdish children….
“Mommy!” my 7-year-old called. “We need you.” I increased my bid to $175 and ran down.
My family was now gathered around the dinner table. My husband began to chant from Proverbs 31, the weekly hymn exalting wives: “A good wife, who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. Her husband trusts in her.” I checked my watch. Thirteen minutes left. There was time to bless and kiss each kid. Quickly. But when my 9-year-old daughter proudly dragged out the Kiddush over her goblet of trembling grape juice, I felt my eyebrows climb my forehead.
“I’ll be back,” I called, hurrying upstairs during the ritual washing of hands. Outbid! I countered with $183. Down the stairs, for my youngest son to thank God for challah bread. Then up again, palms sweating, too expensive. This would count for my next four birthdays, I reasoned, typing $207.50. I wondered who my competitors were, their names encrypted. Two of them dropped out. It was down to me and the mysterious a**i. I pictured him — a**i — as Saddam’s son, not the murderous Uday or Qusay, who both died in a gunfight in 2003, but the rumored third son, living in hiding, hunched over, shades drawn in a Swiss hotel, reclaiming his inheritance by clicking on eBay.
My own motives were less noble. I wanted the spoon because it would bother Saddam. Even dead, he would hate the idea of Americans using it to scoop matzo balls. He would be hanged, buried and irritated.
Six seconds to go, a**i and I went to war. At $222.50, I won.
“Where were you?” my 11-year-old son demanded when I came back to the table.
My cheeks felt red: “Working on the soup.” No one mentioned that the kitchen was in the next room, not upstairs.
The box arrived from Alabama a few days later, but by then I was battling buyer’s remorse. I thought the purchase would amuse my husband, but he recoiled: “Uch, that’s like eating off Hitler’s silver.” I Googled Saddam and Christofle and discovered that, indeed, Saddam chose the French pattern because it was a favorite of Adolf Hitler’s. When no one was looking, I picked it up and sniffed it. The cupped lip smelled like dog saliva.
We immersed the piece in a pot of boiling water, a process that renders flatware kosher. But every Friday, at soup time, I left it in the drawer. At first I blamed the menu — carrot ginger soup felt all wrong. The next week I blamed the company — my mother was too cheery, too Kansas City, to drink from the ladle of hate. When I considered bringing it out to feed my children, what I’d thought would be empowering turned out to be off-putting: what if Saddam’s black mustache had slurped that thing?
Finally, one evening an Israeli diplomat named Dan came to dinner. I didn’t know him well, but after we cleared the first-course plates, I stammered: “Um, would you like me to use this here ladle from Saddam Hussein’s royal palace to, uh, serve your soup?”
“O.K., sure.”
Just like that, Dan dug into a steaming bowl of crushed Moroccan lentils, while discussing his Middle Eastern neighbors. Iran’s nuclear threat. Syria’s political killings. Egypt’s Islamic resurgence. Dan licked his lips and smiled without a trace of complication: “I’ll have seconds.”
I had none. I reached for a glass of filtered water instead. I wondered what I was thinking when I tangled with Saddam. I had started something I couldn’t satisfyingly finish. I didn’t have the stomach for it.
Laura Blumenfeld is the author of “Revenge: A Story of Hope.”
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