BAGHDAD — Abdullah Safar rests his silver 9-millimeter pistol on a bench at his family's bathhouse and talks about the past. His family's memories live here. In the waiting room, with its peeling lavender paint. In the gray-domed chamber, with its hot black massage slab. At the front gate, where a car bomb killed his 14-year-old son.
"If I had lost anything but my son, it would have been easier," Safar says. He closed for nine months after the blast, but he isn't ready to give up the bathhouse.
"My roots are here," he says. "This place is more dear to me than Iraq."
On the walls hang framed portraits of Safar's father, and his grandfather, Haji Mehdi, a sinewy wrestler with a handlebar mustache, flexing his biceps in a scratchy black-and-white photograph from 1921. Locals know the bathhouse, or hamam, by Haji Mehdi's name.
Safar considers Haji Mehdi a hero. His grandfather wrestled until he was 61. In the time of the monarchy, he ejected one of the king's bodyguards for beating a worker at the hamam. He threw the guard's clothes on the street and left him there standing naked.
"My grandfather was generous and had courage," Safar says.
Haji Mehdi opened the bathhouse in 1937 for his wrestler friends, who trained and sometimes held impromptu matches outside the hamam. It opened to the public in 1946, and women were allowed in until 1969, when Haji Mehdi decided to ban them because he thought they brought in food -- kebabs and oranges! -- and used too much water.
The bathhouse has weathered Iraq's upheavals. The fall of the monarchy, the rise of Saddam Hussein. The Iran-Iraq war. Sanctions. The U.S.-led invasion. The sectarian war.
Safar has tried to keep the place running. But now the price of heating oil needed to maintain the balmy temperatures in the bathhouse is rising. His water bills also run high.
"Should I starve my children and live off the memory of Haji Mehdi?" he asks. Sometimes, he wishes he could just shut down the place and turn it into an office building or trading company.
But his son Uday loved the hamam.
A picture of Uday is taped by the cash register -- a boy with soft black eyes and short black hair. He had been just outside the building's doors when the bomb exploded Jan. 27, 2007.
The teenager was dead upon arrival at the hospital, but his mother was convinced he was still breathing.
