An elixir of long life in Baghdad

Hadi Abu Ahmed lingers in his grape juice shop in the heart of Baghdad like a man waiting for something dramatic to happen. He smiles, as though there is a secret or a joke that amuses him.

He places a few mugs on a tray and tells of how a young Saddam Hussein loved the juice his family has made for more than a century. One time, when Hussein was jailed for scheming against Iraq’s leaders, he paid policemen to bring bottles to his prison cell.

The family’s beverage — only real grapes, he insists, no flavored powders — has won the favors of dictators and royalty, actors and singers, Islamic radicals and U.S. soldiers. And over the years, the fortunes of his Haj Zbala shop have mirrored Baghdad’s.

The world outside Abu Ahmed’s arched doorway today is nothing like that of the shop’s heyday.

Rashid Street, with its chiseled stone columns and elegant metal balconies, is in decline. Shopkeepers sit idly in the scouring heat. Their eyes scan the half-empty bakeries and cafes, once crammed with customers, now pitch-black with moldy wood paneling.

“This was the most famous street in Baghdad,” Abu Ahmed says.

If the city has left Rashid Street behind, the unflappable 55-year-old, lanky with graying hair, refuses to accept its demise. “We never think to quit this job,” he says. “We consider it our history.”

Today, Shiite Muslim cities to the south and Kurdish cities to the north have been revitalized by the fall of Hussein. Their crowded urban centers are jammed with pedestrians well into the evening. But the nation’s capital is a shadow of itself.

No longer does Baghdad boast a boulevard where all mingle, the way they once did on Rashid Street. People stick to the safety of their segregated districts.

Even as Abu Ahmed blames his bad luck on events after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, he knows the truth is far more complicated. Time chipped away at his shop’s happy position.

In the 1980s, business slipped when the Iran-Iraq war took too many men away to the front and Hussein closed traffic on bridges leading to downtown. In the 1990s, Rashid Street lost more clientele as middle-class Iraqis left the country.

After 2003, downtown gradually became a center for thieves and armed groups. Many of his best customers, he says with a bitter chuckle, looted banks and left for Cairo and Damascus, Syria. Still, the reverence for his shop helped Abu Ahmed’s family survive the darkest days, when fighters with the militant group Al Qaeda in Iraq cruised Rashid Street and dumped bodies in the gutters. “They came and drank our juice here,” he says matter-of-factly, adding that the militants, despite their bloody reputation, always paid him.

He also has kind words for U.S. soldiers. After every cup of juice, they gave him a thumbs-up. He adds, “I wish the Americans ruled in Iraq rather than these people.”

Obsessed with the past, Abu Ahmed’s family has turned the small juice shop into a shrine to Rashid Street’s better days. Dozens of shiny black-and-white photos hang on his pink-tiled walls.

A picture of Abu Ahmed’s father, Haj Zbala, who gave the shop its name, hangs there: his lips pursed in a half-smile.

The pictures tell the story of a family business launched in 1900. The avenue, started by the Ottomans and completed by the British in 1917, gave central Baghdad its first modern roadway. Rashid Street had cafes, shops, markets and government ministries. Zbala and his workers would bang metal trays and sing to attract customers. When people gathered to protest British rule, they did it on this boulevard, where they always knew they could grab a mug of his grape drink.

Even Iraq’s upper class and decision makers sampled Zbala’s juice. Among them was Nuri Said, an occasional prime minister, who often parked across the street from the shop and had his juice brought there by Zbala himself. Gen. Abdul Karim Qassim, who overthrew the monarchy in 1958, also ranked as a loyal customer. Abu Ahmed remembers shaking the general’s hand when he was a boy.

Abu Ahmed speaks fondly of the two men, not troubled by Said’s death at the hands of a pack of Qassim’s supporters, or Qassim’s execution a few years later.

The pictures on the shop wall also tell the story of a Baghdad long gone: the double-decker buses that once jammed the streets; Firdos Square, when it was decorated with a giant metal arch for Iraq’s unknown soldier and not the statue of Hussein that was famously torn down by U.S. forces and Iraqis in April 2003. There are portraits of Baghdad soccer teams, Iraqi actors who starred in popular comedies in the 1950s, and singers famous for their melancholy crooning.

None of today’s political figures has his picture in the shop; Hussein’s image is banished as well. Asked why, Abu Ahmed says, “No officials come to us.... Who should I make a picture of now?”

He adds dismissively, “They don’t know about our juice. They are ignorant.”

He sees little to celebrate in today’s Baghdad, noting the shot-up buildings, checkpoints and the neighborhoods sealed by tombstone-colored blast walls.

Abu Ahmed remains stubborn about his trade. All over Baghdad, fruit juice counters are decorated with pyramids of oranges and pomegranates. But not at Haj Zbala, which serves only grapes. The family believes in the juice’s healing powers, that it is good for strokes, headaches, anemia, heart disease and stomach problems.

The store gets its grapes from the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, and family members trek to Irbil province several times a year to inspect the vineyards. They used to press grapes by hand, but in the 1990s, they designed three gleaming silver machines for the task.

Abu Ahmed scorns the short cuts that other juice makers take.

“We use huge amounts of grapes, and the others they put in powders,” Abu Ahmed says. “We love our reputation, which is very hard to get but so easy to lose.”

Sometimes the family hears from Iraqis who long ago fled the country. Some ask, “How is Haj Zbala?,” not aware he has died. Other Iraqis visit the shop and grow nostalgic, remembering how they first came there as children after finishing their work at a blacksmith shop, or on a family trip to Baghdad from the south.

There’s a verse that Abu Ahmed and his brothers treasure, written by an exiled poet whose name they have forgotten but whose words capture their feelings:

Under the shadow of balconies

In summer and winter

We head to Zbala for his juice.

ned.parker@latimes.com