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BAGHDAD FIXER
Ilene Prusher
No copyright 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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1
Moving
My mother says that I am an extraordinarily good catch — handsome, smart, employed. My father doesn’t say anything. And though the timing would seem preposterous to some, we Iraqis have done stranger things in the middle of a war than agree to go on a date.
These dates, if you could call them that, given that we have both sets of parents present, would seem bizarre to a Westerner. But my parents, modern as they are in many respects, are always arranging them: meetings at the homes of well-heeled acquaintances, of my father’s colleagues from the hospital, of second and third cousins I’ve never met. They all have something my parents want: an unmarried daughter in need of a husband.
The women bear common characteristics. I know her profile before I’ve met her. She is in her mid-twenties, even occasionally over twenty-five, attractive enough, and decently educated. She is younger than I am, but is considered to be getting old for this game; with each passing month she is less marriageable. She has never lived anywhere but under her father’s roof. She’s never had a boyfriend, or so her family says.
Noor is not much different, although she is working on a master’s degree in psychology, which is commendable. Unlike me, she’s never had any international experience. I doubt she speaks English, German or French, but she’s considered to be quite clever, Mum says, and rather pretty. It’s not like I didn’t notice that, which is why I agreed to a second “date”, the first having been a cup of tea with her — and her brother Adnan — at an upmarket café next to the University of Baghdad. The air raid sirens went off, so we had to cut it short.
Most importantly, I know my parents would be very happy to have the family of Dr Mahmoud al-Bakri, Baba’s old friend from medical school, as our in-laws. And so it can’t hurt to agree to a second date.
That’s where my tale ought to begin, for those of you who are joining me now, in this, the twenty-eighth year of my life, on the eighth day of the month of April in the year 2003, on the fifth day of Safar in the year 1424. You’ll find me here in the Hurriyah neighbourhood in the city of Baghdad, my beloved birthplace, ill-at-ease and feeling foolish, sitting on this sky-blue sofa with my parents. We’re facing a matching sofa, upon which Noor al-Bakri and her parents sit. I sip tea from their good porcelain cups and hope to avoid eating yet another stuffed date biscuit made by Noor’s mother with great care. If the mother knows how to bake a good kalijeh, we assume the daughter will, too.
Should I just say yes? It’s as if they’ve all proposed to me and I’ve told them I don’t yet know. I haven’t made up my mind. I’ll let you know in the morning.
Noor’s mother tries to get me to take one more, and when I decline, she gestures to Noor, then glances in the direction of the fruit on the coffee table that sits between us. Noor rises and then kneels at the table, takes two apples out of the bowl and proceeds to slice them as elegantly as possible. Before I can say no, she lays the pieces out neatly on three small plates. We watch as she cuts into a bright-orange persimmon, and I am thankful when my father breaks our nervous focus on Noor’s fruit-fixing skills by asking Dr Mahmoud whether he’d heard that Dr Abdel-Majid did not show up for work today.
“The psychiatric ward will be bouncing off the walls without him,” Baba says. Dr Mahmoud’s face cracks into a half-smile, the kind a person makes when they’re not sure whether it’s safe to laugh. Mum elbows Baba gently in the arm. Noor’s mother’s face goes blank. Apparently, Dr Mahmoud hasn’t let her in on the office humour. “Dr Abdel-Majid” is a nickname for Saddam that my father and his doctor friends made up. Many people don’t make the connection. The president’s full name is Saddam Hussein Abdel-Majid al-Tikriti. We took him on and put him in charge of the lunatic asylum years ago, the doctors joked. It was a bad move.
When you’re never sure who is listening, you speak politics in code.
Noor, too, seems unaware of my father’s news update: that Saddam has disappeared. Her concentration is locked on attractively arranging the fruit she is expected to serve us. She collects the three plates and rises carefully. Her dark, kohl-lined eyes dart at me, and then back down at the fruit. Her hands are shaking. Despite myself, despite my private conclusion that I cannot marry Noor — and I conclude this within five minutes of meeting most Iraqi women, so at this point I’m only here to indulge my parents’ desire to find a wife for me, to assuage their fears and to allow them to feel that they’re at least doing something to get me married off — I find myself feeling softened by Noor’s deep eyes and her jittery hands, wondering if I should just say yes. She’s earning a masters degree in psychology, after all. But at this moment, her marriage prospects will be reduced to her beauty and to how gracefully she serves us tea and fruit, and it all seems horribly unfair. She does have a pretty face, even if only in an ordinary Iraqi sort of way. She comes from a good family. She’ll make a perfectly decent wife, I’m sure.
Noor’s face freezes and she looks as if she will scream. She pulls in a gulp of air with a sharp squeak but never pushes it back out. Her mouth is locked in a small “o”, her dark eyes scrunch in on themselves like she’s heard a story she doesn’t believe. My mind rewinds to replay the sounds of the moment before, when I was lost in my deliberations, and this time I catch it: the distant pops, the whizzing noise, the fast plink of glass being broken. The echo and bounce and shatter. The eerie calm before the panic.
By the time I catch up to now, Noor has collapsed at our feet, making choking sounds. The red is seeping through the neckline of her crème-coloured blouse. For a second, or an eternity, there is an absence of sound. Fruit and bone-china and blood scatter across the floor, on my lap. A sliver of persimmon clings to Baba’s shirt. Noor’s mother screaming.
“Rahmet-Allah!”
“Where did it come from?”
“Get an ambulance!”
“Goddamn Americans!”
“Where did it go in?”
An air raid siren wails like an injured beast, but it’s dull compared to the shrieking. Her mother’s, my mother’s, Noor’s younger sister’s, conflating with the commotion of a few neighbours bursting into the living room, including Noor’s brother Adnan, who lives next door with his wife. Dr Mahmoud’s mouth keeps opening but no sound comes out, as if he — rather than his daughter — was struck by something in the back of the head.
Baba is already in motion, has long since run and grabbed a towel from their guest bathroom and is pressing it to the back of Noor’s neck. “Y’alla,” he yells, “has someone called the ambulance?” He shakes his head. “Makufaida,” he says under his breath. No way. No point. No chance it can end well. I don’t know if that’s Baba’s diagnosis, or just disbelief.
Noor’s mother is in the kitchen, pressing frantically at the telephone. I look in on her and she lets the receiver fall to the floor. Her lips tremble and she begins to bawl. “There’s no dial tone!”
“Leave it,” Baba calls out. “We’ve got to get her into surgery. We’ll take her ourselves. Nabil? Nabil, for God’s sake, are you with me?”
I start ordering anyone in the house who is coherent to help me get Noor into our car. Of course there’s no dial tone; most phones have been dead for a fortnight. And what are the chances of getting an ambulance here in time? The city has been under bombardment for more than three weeks. Bombs are shattering buildings to bones, aircraft are strafing entire neighbourhoods, shells are picking away at the very flesh of the riverfront. Who’s going to send out an ambulance to save one girl?
Adnan and Baba and I carry Noor into my father’s car and lay her down
on the back seat. Baba tells Noor’s mother to stay at home with her younger daughter, who is convulsing with hysterics, and to cover poor Dr Mahmoud with a blanket. There lies on the floor Baba’s old school friend, the oncologist, a fast-ageing man who has become accustomed to the slow, manageable death of strangers. Not the shooting of his daughter through the window of his own living room.
Baba gives Adnan his keys, assigns me the front passenger seat, and takes the back seat, where he holds Noor’s head in his lap. As we drive, I watch him put one hand against her neck while his other hand periodically feels her wrist for signs of life. Her small, limp hand is stark against her long, red fingernails. The hand my parents suggested I take in marriage, is now pale and clamped between my father’s thick fingers.
We speed through the darkened streets of a neighbourhood I’ve known my whole life, through intersections which have never seemed as empty as they do now. And then on to the main road, with a few frenetic cars rushing by, gunning to get somewhere. Who goes out in the middle of an air raid? It’s silly that my parents were so keen to sit with Noor and her parents in the first place, in the middle of this. But I knew it was their mark of sumud, their own form of steadfastness. Defiance through denial, by continuing life as normal.
Closer to the hospital, I now see who does go out. Even from a block away, we are stuck behind a queue of cars funnelling towards the entrance.
“To hell with it. Just go around them, up the kerb,” Baba orders.
Adnan hesitates.
“It’s my bloody hospital! I’m not going to wait in line while she dies in my lap!”
Adnan veers on to the pavement and accelerates, passing fifteen, maybe twenty cars. There are no tears in his eyes, only fear. I hear Noor make a small gasp for air, and I want Baba to be doing something more to save her life. More than twenty years as a doctor, and it comes down to this? Taking a pulse? Giving driving directions? My father, one of the best cardiologists in Baghdad, unable to do anything? At this minute he must be ticking off Noor’s vital signs in his mind, assessing her chances of survival, and not sharing them with us.
I say nothing, only speaking to God in my mind, asking that He take care of Noor. And we are overtaking all the other cars as if we have a different passport, a special licence that indicates to the world that we don’t need to wait in line. Mercedes beats Toyota, Subaru, Fiat. People stare their stares of anger and shock and brokenness, but no one tries to stop us, and so I turn away from searching their faces for responses. My stomach feels like it is contracting from the rest of my insides, trying to hide, trying not to face all the other people pushing get to the hospital in their battered cars, trying to save someone else’s life. I wonder how many more Noors there are out there at this very moment, with families praying for them, with mothers sobbing and fathers speechless, with holes in their windows. We all wanted to believe that this war might blow over us like a sandstorm, a force of nature that cannot hurt you if you just seal up the windows properly and stay inside. If only you refuse to go out there and meet it face to face — exactly the opposite of what Saddam told us to do.
The entrance to the emergency room is a communal nightmare, a realization that a hundred other people are all having the exact same bad dream. There are lot of people who don’t look right, wandering around in search of doctors, desperate for information about what is happening with their loved ones, men shouting and women crying. One heavy-set woman covered in a billowing abaya stands wailing like a black ghost near the admissions desk, hitting her forehead with her open palms again and again, and I wonder where her family is and why no one is waiting with her and trying to comfort her. A boy in a corner is screeching and rocking himself back and forth and I don’t even know where we’re supposed to go. I’ve been to this hospital many times and yet it feels like a place I have never been before, because it’s so much more crowded and messy and it looks like they’ve been bringing injured people in for days and not cleaning up afterwards. Instead of that clean, antiseptic smell that’s always in the air, there is a stench of burnt flesh and blood. I see a family carry in a man whose lower half seems to have been completely crushed but he’s still shouting and my head is too hot and spinning and—
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It takes a while for my eyes to focus, to come back. I am cold and the sound is weird, like a stuffed-up buzzing in my ears. My hands grope for something familiar. I’m lying on a plastic-upholstered sofa, I now realize, in one of the doctor’s offices down the corridor from the emergency room.
“You’re all right. Don’t worry.” Baba’s voice. “You just passed out again.” He puts his hand against my cheek and holds my face for a moment, then messes my hair like he is sending a small child away.
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2
Sending
Again. I hate again, but I’m relieved to know what’s happened. What am I doing lying down when all of these sick and broken people are heaving in that bloody room down the corridor, now a comfortable distance from me, where I can hear them but can’t smell them the way I did before? I wonder, if my father weren’t a doctor here, would I be lying on this sofa, or would I have been left out there with all the screaming, reeling families?
It has been several years since I’ve passed out. Baba behaves as if it happened only yesterday.
“Drink,” he says, handing me a glass of water. I wonder whose office this is. Baba would normally be in cardiology, on the fifth floor. I feel the rip of cleaning chemicals in my nose, an odour I have hated since I was a child — the smell of coming to visit my father at work. I passed out a few times then, too, until Baba decided to stop bringing me to see him at the hospital. I sensed disappointment in his decision, which seemed like a punishment. I feel a tinge of it now, just a few little particles of it floating in the air, invisible but irritating, like the chemicals.
When I try to sit up, he holds my shoulder and pushes me gently back down to the sofa. “Lie a little longer.”
I look up at him. He seems older, so much older, the dark lines under his eyes turned from ashes to charcoal.
“Where’s Noor?” I ask.
My father breathes in and purses his heavy lips to one side. “She’s in the operating theatre now. They will try, Nabil. But we need to be realistic. I...” he pauses. “I just don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so?”
“I don’t think you should have too much hope.”
I close my eyes again, trying to say a prayer for the sick, in my mind, on Noor’s behalf. I am ashamed. I cannot remember the words.
When I open my eyes, my father is gone. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, at the cheap, corky tiles that were once white but are now a crusty grey, with a film like the kind that accumulates on unwashed cars. I used to love to write on dirty car windows when I was a child. I always loved to use words I wouldn’t be held responsible for later.
The building shakes from something that must have landed nearby, and somehow all I want to do is close my eyes once more. It is only when I hear a woman speaking English that I finally sit up and listen. Her voice grows louder and she sounds upset, like she wants someone to answer her, and she’s shouting now because no one has. But there are not, I would imagine, too many people in this hospital who can understand English well, and now the woman’s voice becomes more pronounced, as if she thinks that by speaking slowly and loudly, yelling even, people will begin to understand.
“My friend, Jonah Bonn was brought here. Jonah Bonn. We think he was brought here. Please, check your lists for him. Can you check that for us? Do you understand me?”
I walk into the middle of the corridor and see her standing there, the foreign woman talking so loudly, and even if I had not heard her it would be clear that she wasn’t an Iraqi because her hair is almost lit by the colour of fire, a strange red I have never seen before and am sure does not occur in this part of the world. She is with another foreign woman who looks Chinese or Japanese, and a tall,
freckle-faced man stands behind them. His face is half-covered by his hair, and he looks like he has not slept in weeks and needs to exert great effort to hold up his eyelids. His eyeballs bulge bigger and then recede as the woman speaks, and then he shuts his eyes tight and winces. He leans against the wall next to him. I can’t help but wonder, why is he letting the women engage in all the talking?
The red-haired woman looks at the nurse she has cornered and tilts her head to one side. She makes a face like she’s about to cry and then is suddenly in control again.
“He was making a film,” she says. Shouts, really. “TV film? You know, camera, film for TV? Like CNN? Al-Jazeera?” She makes a gesture of holding up an old-fashioned camera, peering through a hole in her clenched left fist and cranking her right.
“No, no, no,” the hospital nurse says. “No film here. You need take permission. Go, ministry...take permission.”
The red-headed woman drops her forehead into her upturned hand. “Oh God, please! We don’t want to film. What I’m trying to tell you is that we’re looking for our friend, our colleague. A reporter, you know, journalist? Sahafi? Jonah Bonn. Maybe you have him here?”
Baghdad Fixer Page 1
