Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  Early the next afternoon, before the ceremony, I stroll along Bevaix’s single-lane roads. I give myself enough time to get lost, and then do. An occasional car passes. In backyards hidden by hedgerows I hear children. The noise of my heel-strikes keeps me company through the disorienting stillness. I wander generally toward the lake until I see the stone redoubt of the abbey perched on a hilltop above the water. Its heavy walls seem to defend against a threat long since left, and its terraced fields, once tended by a congregation of monks, slope toward the banks of the lake. Pear trees line the abbey’s walk. They have dropped their fruit, and the crushed pulp smells sweet. Bridesmaids, almost a dozen of them, tie a bouquet of balloons to a pair of steel knockers on the abbey’s open oak door. In the back garden Laetitia and Abed take photos. He wears a dark suit, white shirt, and royal-blue tie. A red chiffon covers her shoulders, which arch forward, lithe as a question mark. While the photographer changes lenses, the two consider the lake, their arms looped around each other’s waists. Then more pictures and the two turn their backs to the vista.

  Harp music spills from the abbey’s door. Abed and Laetitia pass through a side entrance, toward the nave. I wander in through the front, past the balloons, into a groin-vault arcade whose stone arches trap the cold. Fifty of us gather beneath the ample light of high dormer windows. The delicate hum of conversational French rises above the harp’s notes. A young woman wearing a knee-length cocktail dress grabs my elbow, seemingly relieved to find me. “You are Elliot?” she asks, and then hurries me to a small corner room, where I find Abed and Laetitia sitting knee to knee. Abed stands and tells me I look good, and I tell him the same. Neither of us has seen the other so dressed up, and I notice the vent on his suit jacket is still sewn shut with an X of white thread from the factory. The four of us—the maid of honor, Laetitia, Abed, and then me—are organized in a line by another woman wearing a dour gray suit: a Swiss official, the justice of the peace.

  The harp plays a processional. We walk past flickering candelabras toward an altar where the four of us stand, facing the official. She motions for us to sit and we perch rigidly on a single pew without a back. The civil ceremony begins in French, which Abed does not speak. Laetitia leans toward him, quietly whispering a translation. The official slows the ceremony, giving Laetitia time. As Abed struggles to understand his vows, he glances over to me now and again, plaintively, as if apologizing that I can’t understand either.

  That a former American Marine should serve as the sole witness to a new life embarked upon by a former Syrian activist feels appropriate. We are veterans of the same war, the same disillusionment, one where high-minded democratic ideals left a wake of destruction, forcing both of us to craft new lives from the ruins. Sitting next to my friend, the particulars of his vows seem less material than the choice he’s made, to start again. What does it matter that we can’t understand?

  The Swiss official asks for the rings.

  Abed points to my coat pocket. Then he holds Laetitia’s hand and speaks to her in Arabic, offering his vow in a language they share. She does the same for him. The wedding party stands; so does everyone else. We walk over to a large registry, which the justice of the peace opens. While everyone trickles out of the abbey, we sign documents that make Laetitia and Abed husband and wife. They pose for a few final photos in front of the altar while I wander outside, to where the bridesmaids are handing out balloons from the bouquet they had tied to the abbey’s door. They encourage each of us to write a wish on a slip of paper and to safety-pin that wish to our balloon’s ribbon. Quickly our wedding party organizes into two ranks. The harp plays again from inside the abbey. When Laetitia and Abed emerge through the doors, we all release our balloons. Our heads are thrown backward. We cheer as the balloons find currents of air that will carry them over Lake Neuchâtel, toward the Alps, and perhaps even over the frozen peaks.

  At the door of the abbey, Laetitia weaves her fingers through Abed’s. While everyone’s attention is fixed upward, his eyes stray toward a nearby copse of trees. He wanders away from Laetitia, away from the wedding party, to where an irregular gust has blown a few unfortunate balloons. Standing alone beneath the trees, he swats at the limbs overhead, struggling to free what has become ensnared in the branches.

  BACK TO THE CITY

  BAGHDAD, FALLUJAH, MOSUL

  Three days I’ve been here, running from one ministry to another, making phone calls, emailing the US embassy, asking favors of friends, and then favors of friends of friends. Nothing has worked. I want to be in Fallujah. But I can’t get out of Baghdad. It’s two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late October. I’m in a nearly empty shopping mall, at a Toll House cookies kiosk across the street from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. It’s Fityan, Hawre, and me. We’re waiting for a call from Fityan’s cousin Tahrir, who is a captain in the police. He is inside the ministry negotiating my letter of permission into Fallujah.

  In Fallujah there is a doorway I want to stand in. Dan Malcom was shot and killed trying to cross its threshold as he stepped onto a rooftop twelve years ago. A sniper’s bullet found its mark beneath his arm, just under the ribs.

  In Fallujah there is a building I want to stand on top of. It was a candy store. The day after Dan was killed, my platoon fought a twelve-hour firefight from its rooftop. That was the worst day of the battle.

  That doorway in Fallujah, that rooftop—I remember exactly where they are.

  Fityan’s phone rings, startling him so much that a worm of ash tumbles from his cigarette. He brushes at the black T-shirt that is snug over his round belly. As he answers Tahrir’s call, I try to decode the jerky tonality of Fityan’s Arabic. His expression sags as he hears his cousin’s report.

  “They are asking for a five-hundred-dollar bribe,” Fityan says. He tosses his phone onto the coffee table between us. Fityan and Tahrir are Sunni, with deep ties in Iraq’s restive al-Anbar Province. I met Fityan through Matt, who knew him through one of his students at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, which is to say he hardly knew Fityan at all. Weeks ago, over long-distance Skype calls and emails, Fityan introduced me to Tahrir. The two of them promised that they could get me into Fallujah, and I’ve come a long way because of their promises. “If you were Iranian, it’d be easier,” Fityan mutters. “The ministries are all Shia. They’re giving you a hard time because you’re an American.”

  Our server brings us our drinks. Hawre, a photographer I’ve been working with, sets down his camera and examines the enormous cup of coffee in front of him. “Fityan, tell him I ordered a medium.” Hawre is an Iraqi Kurd from Kirkuk, north of Baghdad. His teeth are crooked and overlapping, like a deck of cards fanned out by an unskilled dealer. Whenever he parts his lips, it looks like he’s smiling. He is immensely proud that he hardly speaks Arabic.

  Fityan confirms that Hawre’s coffee is the size he ordered.

  “Toll House is an American chain,” I say to Hawre, attempting to explain his enormous “medium.” Everyone lights cigarettes.

  It’s been twelve years since I was last in Fallujah. If a bribe is all that’s preventing my return to the city, it seems I have no choice. “I could just pay the five hundred.”

  “They always do this bullshit,” Fityan says.

  They is Iraq’s Shia-majority government, which has marginalized the country’s Sunni minority since the United States officially withdrew in 2011. Shia flags emblazoned with the deific portrait of Ali—the Prophet Muhammad’s martyred cousin and son-in-law—line nearly every government building, lamppost, and shop front in Baghdad. Ali has an impenetrable black beard, a confrontational stare, and a forest-green shroud covering his head. The Shia believe that he was Muhammad’s legitimate successor, and he has become for them the personification of resistance to the Islamic State.

  As I wait for Tahrir to return, I slump in my chair and sit for another hour. Dysfunction in this country is millennia deep. Why did I expec
t that Tahrir and Fityan, two Sunnis from al-Anbar, would be able to navigate the bureaucracy of an Iranian-backed Shia government?

  Then Tahrir appears, strutting past the cashier, who, like everyone else, is nearly a head shorter than him. “Elliot, bro, you look sad. Why the long faces?”

  I’m about to ask him if I should pay the bribe when from behind his back he whips forward a brown envelope closed with an official seal. Handwritten Arabic script is lashed along its front. I go to tear it open as if it were one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. “Slow down,” he tells me. He takes back the envelope and gently places it on the table.

  “What about the bribe?” I ask.

  “I was fucking with you, habibi. You Americans think we Iraqis can’t do anything right,” he says. “I told you, the guy at the ministry is my friend.”

  We carefully remove the letter, a single page covered with seals and serial numbers and many signatures. “What does it say?” I ask.

  Fityan reads the text, his mouth silently forming the words in Arabic while the tip of his cigarette bounces over the syllables with metronomic precision. He glances up at me. “It says you’re going back to Fallujah.”

  * * *

  Early on Friday morning, the first day of the Muslim weekend, Baghdad is asleep as we drive out of the city’s deserted streets. Fityan and Tahrir are up front, and Hawre’s next to me in the back seat, hungover with a pair of knockoff Gucci sunglasses pulled over his eyes. He’s leaning his head against the window when his phone rings. The voice on the other end is frantic, and soon Hawre is frantic as well. “No, no,” he repeats. He tucks his phone away. “That was my brother. At four a.m. the Daesh attacked Kirkuk.”

  Four days ago, the Iraqis began an offensive to retake Mosul from the Islamic State. Thus far, an alliance of Iraqi security forces, Kurdish peshmerga, and Shia militias known as Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Forces, has made steady advances toward Mosul. These gains come on the heels of more than a year’s worth of successful offensives by Iraqi security forces in Tikrit, Hit, Rutbah, Ramadi, and Fallujah. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has staked the credibility of his government on the Mosul operation’s success, appearing on television to announce the offensive in the black uniform of his elite counterterrorism forces.

  The attack on Kirkuk was part of an Islamic State counteroffensive. We scroll through Facebook and Twitter, searching for news. “The Daesh are fucking smart,” Tahrir says as we pull up to the last checkpoint on the outskirts of Baghdad. A sentry makes a long examination of my passport and letter from the interior ministry. Tahrir has worn his police uniform for good measure, an ad hoc mixture of camouflage pants and an olive-green safari shirt. His pistol is tucked into his waistband. Opposite us, the queue of vehicles entering Baghdad extends for nearly half a mile. The lane of traffic departing for al-Anbar is virtually empty. We are waved through.

  The highway stretches out with palm groves on either side. More than a decade ago, on daylong foot patrols, our platoon would rest in the trees’ shade with our backs to their scaled trunks and our rifle barrels facing outward. Soon Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison, appears. The cupolas of its guard towers menace the prisoners inside and the travelers on the road: Watch where you’re going and what you do. Villages with low-slung dwellings and names as forgettable as passwords race by: Nasir Wa Salam, Zaidan, Amiriyat. There are also the places we named ourselves, because we knew no better, like the bulging peninsula cut by the Euphrates that separates al-Anbar and Babylon. We called it the “ball sack.”

  After twelve years, everything is unchanged. And looming over it now, as it did then, is Fallujah. Fityan points up the road, where four- and five-story buildings form a barricade on the horizon. “There it is,” he says. A picket of minarets stab heavenward, their sides paneled with crumbling mosaics. Everything anyone has ever built in this city is pocked with bullet holes. “Is it like you remembered it?” Fityan wants to know.

  * * *

  At a barbed-wire checkpoint decorated with flowers to welcome returning residents, we meet Colonel Mahmoud Jamad, the city’s chief of police, who escorts us to his headquarters. He is a member of the Albu Issa tribe, which supported the al-Anbar Awakening, a Sunni movement that rebelled against al-Qaeda in Iraq. We are served bread, fried eggs, and tea with a finger’s worth of sugar lurking at the bottom. We sit in his office, his unmade bed in the corner, a pair of his socks airing out on the windowsill. A clicking table fan circulates the inside air.

  For nearly an hour Colonel Jamad tells us how the city is being rebuilt, but what he says doesn’t correspond with what we see. Though Iraqi security forces retook Fallujah from the Islamic State four months ago, in June, three-quarters of the city’s population has yet to return. There is still no electricity, no water, no sanitation. Colonel Jamad grew up in Fallujah and has worked in and around the city as a police officer since 2005—longer than anyone, he tells us. “I will never give up on my home,” he says. One can’t begrudge him his persistence. In his job only an optimist—even a foolish one—could hold out any hope for success.

  “The Daesh are vampires,” Colonel Jamad says. “I insist on this description. They suck the life from everything.” He suggests that we visit an Islamic State prison the Iraqi security forces discovered after liberating the city. I agree but also ask to visit a couple of other buildings, obscure ones. Before he has a chance to ask why, there is a commotion at the front of the police station. A tall officer in a well-starched uniform with deliriously embroidered epaulettes and a retinue in tow steps into Colonel Jamad’s office. It is Brigadier General Mahmoud al-Filahi, commander of the Iraqi Army’s Tenth Division, which is responsible for all of al-Anbar Province, here for an impromptu visit.

  Colonel Jamad assigns us an escort of a few soldiers and ushers us hastily out of his office so that he can speak with the general alone. As I pack up my things, Colonel Jamad explains our plans to General al-Filahi. The general’s questions are pointed. “And what is it that you’re looking for?”

  I hesitate, not certain that I want to offer up this detail. Before I can respond, the general adds, “Perhaps you are looking for your WMDs?”

  I smile and laugh lightly at his joke. He does not.

  * * *

  “Life is like chess,” Dan would sometimes say, usually when he was winning. We played our last game sitting across from each other with his magnetic set spread over an upturned crate of MREs. When he was killed on the five-story high-rise, he was sprinting across the flat rooftop toward a door that would have taken him downstairs to relative safety. He collapsed across the threshold, dying almost instantly, or so I was told. He’s buried at Arlington now. I heard that his magnetic chessboard was in his cargo pocket when he was killed.

  After we leave the police headquarters in Fallujah, Hawre wants to walk. So do I. But our two escorts shepherd us into the bed of a pickup truck instead. The mayor’s complex is a few hundred meters away, on the north side of Highway 10, whose four lanes bisect the city. Across the street is the timeworn candy store, the other place I want to see. Tahrir begins to argue with our escorts in Arabic, insisting that they take us there. Fityan pulls me aside and says, “We’re not telling them that you fought here, so they’re a bit confused.” I can’t disagree with his judgment. Visiting this city as a former Marine feels like walking through New Orleans if your name is Hurricane Katrina.

  The escorts drive us to the mayor’s complex—or what is left of it. The Islamic State leveled most government buildings during their occupation. Our escorts warn us to be careful as we step through the rubble. The city has yet to be demined and booby traps are uncovered daily. Among fragments of cement, I stumble across a human hip bone. I also find the skeletal remains of Mary-Kate, from whose rooftop I had called Dan. Searching the horizon, I see only blue sky where the high-rise once loomed. Mysteriously, not even the wreckage remains.

  Tahrir glances at t
he rubble beneath his feet. “Is this where it was?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “It was over there.” I point at the empty patch of ground.

  “The door, habibi?”

  “I guess it’s gone.”

  I quickly find the candy store, where insurgents surrounded my platoon the day after Dan was killed. That morning, at three o’clock, we had crossed Highway 10 in advance of a larger assault of nearly one thousand Marines that was scheduled for later that morning. I had never seen the candy store from the outside in daylight. “This is the place,” I tell Hawre. He begins to shoot photos, which only increases the suspicions of our Iraqi escorts. They toss furtive glances in my direction and whisper among themselves. The sign affixed to the side of the structure is in English. It reads, “Moonlight Supermarket.”

  A rusted mesh fence, padlocked shut, encircles the building. I climb up the side. By the time I am on the rooftop, I am covered in familiar dust. I recognize not so much the building as the vantages it offers. The view from where we set in our machine guns so they could rake a long street. The approach where we waited desperately for an armored ambulance as one of the Marines, who’d been shot through the femoral artery, was bleeding to death. The southeastern corner where I crouched alongside my platoon sergeant, who in his early thirties seemed infinitely old and wise, seconds before he was shot in the head, only to miraculously survive. The spot in the basement where we placed bricks of C4 explosive when, surrounded as we were, our company commander ordered us to advance further into the city and we knew going out the front door would be suicide so we blew open a door of our own, understanding that a single miscalculation would cause the entire building to collapse on top of us.