Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  I look at my watch. It is nearly 10:15 a.m. I ate almost three hours ago, and I didn’t feel hungry then, either. “Please, not for me.”

  She turns back to the waiter. “Do you think you could make me a cheese omelette? With toast?” She seems uncertain about this request. Does she think that Baghdad is such an Arab backwater, that we have nothing but fuul and hummos for breakfast?

  She stares at me hard now and when that strange gold-brown light in her eyes hits mine, I have to avert my eyes for a moment.

  “Let’s try this,” she says. “Work with me for a week at $100 and see how it goes. You have nothing to lose because school’s not in session anyway, right? If things go well, I’ll ask my editor about bumping you up to $125 a day. If it’s not your thing, fine, no commitment, we go our own ways, shukran and maa-salaama.”

  I raise my eyes involuntarily, surprised at her Arabic.

  “Deal?” Sam holds out her right hand.

  I am about to give it to her, but am suddenly aware of the waiter rushing back to the table, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, Misses Samara, but no eggs. No eggs today. But toast. We make the toast.”

  Sam grins and drops her hand.

  “Deal.” I have the urge to take her no-longer-on-offer hand, to feel her skin against mine for a moment longer than a handshake. Then I remember Noor and instead my hand curls in on itself. I feel my nails digging into my palm, almost hard enough to break the skin.

  ~ * ~

  6

  Digging

  Sam leaves me at the pool and says she’s going upstairs for a minute to change. When she comes back fifteen minutes later, she has swapped her snug jeans and T-shirt for a pair of flowing black trousers and a loose, white blouse with long sleeves. It has blue embroidery around the collar, sort of like a peasant dress converted into a modern lady’s shirt.

  As she is on her way over to me, a young man with blond, curly hair shouts her name from the far side of the pool, waving both arms in the air.

  Sam beams. “Oh my God,” she squeals. “I can’t believe it!” They rush towards each other, the man more quickly towards Sam, and when they meet they embrace with their bodies locked tightly against each other for a moment.

  “When did you get in?” Sam asks when he finally lets go.

  “Yesterday,” he replies, “but Jesus, it feels like a week.” His accent sounds like an American one I have heard in a film, maybe one of those John Wayne Westerns we used to get at the video stall with all the illegal copies of old films. “Came in with the Fourth Infantry. How ‘bout you?”

  “About five days ago,” Sam says, “but we’ve been in the north with the Kurds since the start of March.”

  “Sammy-baby, what a trooper! You’re my idol, man.”

  The man’s clothes look so informal next to mine: faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved undershirt with an adventurer’s waistcoat over it. I look down at my tie, my best trousers my mother pressed to make sure I would be presentable, and I begin to feel ridiculous.

  The man smiles widely at Sam and scans her up and down, as though checking to see her own dress code. “You staying here?” he asks.

  “Sweet, huh? They’re getting the pool cleaned up and everything.” She turns to me and gives me a hand gesture to come join them.

  “Sunbathing in Baghdad. Nice,” the man says. “We’re living in tents in the yard of one of the palaces. Can you believe that? We’re like campin’ on Saddam’s lawn. The generals are in one of his living rooms. But I’m hoping to get out of this embed soon and then maybe I’ll be able to check in somewhere a bit more plush, like this.”

  Sam cups a hand over her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun creeping higher in the sky.

  “By the way,” he says, “CNN’s having a big barbecue on Friday. You should come.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she answers. “I heard that. I’ll try to make it.”

  “You look great, Sam. I think war agrees with you. You always manage to look ever so fetching in the middle of a shithole.”

  Sam smirks, otherwise ignoring the comment, and then takes my elbow to move me closer to them. “Oh, Mark, this is Nabil. Nabil, Marcus Baker of the New York Times.”

  I hold out my hand and he grabs it roughly, squeezing it so hard I feel that all the bones in my hand ought to have been fractured. “Gooda meet’cha, Nabil.” He says my name with a long Nah to start, NAH-bil, placing the accent in the wrong place. It’s wrong, but not worth correcting. I see that Marcus Baker has the same weird phone as Samara. They read off numbers and jab at their keypads. They smile and hug once more.

  “Shall we?” She raises her eyebrows at me. “Y’alla.”

  I follow her out of the pool area towards the first tower lobby, pondering whether I should tell her that this use of y’alla is too colloquial, to the point of being rude, as a way of telling someone to move along, unless you know them quite well. We walk around to the hotel entrance, and the drivers loitering near their cars stare at her, then at me, and then pretend not to notice us. Sam lifts her hand to her brow and moves her head from left to right, scanning. “There he is,” she says, and I see Rizgar, the driver who came with her to Noor’s house, stand up and raise his hand.

  Rizgar is not driving the shiny black 4x4 jeep he had two days ago, but an old blue Impala that is as long as a living room. He holds the back and front doors open for us and sweeps a hand to show us in. “You remember Rizgar, don’t you?” It seems a strange question. Does she think there were many foreign women with their own drivers who showed up at Noor’s funeral? But perhaps this is her way of reintroducing us.

  I feel unsure of where I should sit. Ought not a guest, especially a woman, feel more respected, and more protected, by sitting in the back? But Sam hops into the front seat without a word. The car’s interior is dusty, and I can feel the particles in the air starting to tickle my nose. Most importantly, I feel relief. I am glad to find that Sam is no longer travelling around in that fancy new jeep with a sign that says TV on it.

  Rizgar smiles at me in his rearview mirror.

  “New car!” I say. “Very nice.”

  “The jeep is good for the north, because the roads are difficult,” he says in Arabic. “But here, if you drive big, new cars you look like an American government official or CIA. Those are the cars getting attacked. In a car like this,” he says, patting the dashboard, “we look just like regular Iraqis.”

  “Hey, what are you guys talking about? Don’t go leaving me out the first day on the job,” Sam says.

  “He says that you are safer in this car than in the jeep,” I explain.

  “Ah, yes, that’s true. I always trust Rizgar’s judgement. He got us through the war in one piece, didn’t you, Rizgar?”

  Rizgar peers at me again in the rearview mirror with a serious face. But then he smiles, revealing a gold eye-tooth, and forms a thumbs-up sign and we laugh. The thought that the war is through, that Sam — and therefore America — sees it in the past tense, is filling me with the brightest sensation I have had for weeks.

  ~ * ~

  7

  Filling

  We drive towards the centre of town, through Karkh, and suddenly it feels like we’re in a film, because all down Rashid Street there are American tanks, big rolling monsters in dark green, and other military vehicles with heavy artillery mounted on them. Nothing here has ever looked like this before. I see a few American soldiers, not many, and I cannot understand why. Where are all the soldiers? Shouldn’t they be marching in the streets? In the front seat, Sam is scribbling things into her notebook. Rizgar shakes a box of cigarettes, down to its last lonely occupants, and ejects one into his mouth.

  I keep searching for the soldiers who belong with the tanks, expecting to see hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and instead I only catch sight of three or four. I remember one time, when I was about fourteen, we saw a parade of Republican Guards marching by our high school. We all ran to the window to
watch, mesmerized by the syncopated stomp of their red boots, ignoring the teacher’s reprimand to go back to our seats. Was I expecting the Americans to appear like that, advancing into Baghdad in a perfect phalanx?

  “I’m surprised the Americans have not put up any of their flags around the city,” I say, feeling as if I am talking to no one, because neither Sam nor Rizgar react.

  I can hear her pen come to rest, and then she turns and looks over her shoulder at me, her hair full of bright light from outside. It occurs to me that for modesty’s sake, she should tie her hair back or otherwise put it into place, the way the female professors did at university if they didn’t wear hejab.

  “Well,” Sam purses her lips, “they did put that huge flag up on the Saddam statue. You saw that, didn’t you?”

  I peer out of the window and take in the Ministry of Information, which seems to be moving past us in slow motion. A massive hole cuts through three floors, around the fifth, sixth and seventh storeys and the building looks as though it has been hit by a wrecking ball. Twists of mangled metal emerge and wind in odd directions.

  I owe Samara an answer. “Uh, no. I didn’t see it.”

  “Oh God, it was all over the news. When they got into Baghdad on Tuesday these soldiers climbed up that big statue of Saddam in Firdos Square and hung an American flag over his face! I mean, before they toppled the thing with the help of a tank. The Bushies are getting a lot of flak for it back home. People here must be talking about it.” Sam stretches her neck further over her shoulder and smiles again, and in her face I see an expression that says, And where have you been?

  “They didn’t mention it on Iraq Radio,” I say.

  Everywhere there were stores, everything is either gated up or gone. Or burned. Or wrecked. Alarms are wailing, buildings are smoking, people are hurrying rather than walking. Almost every large building is damaged in some way. Several government ministries look like they have been hit by small airplanes. Maybe that is what this war is about: revenge for what happened a year-and-a-half ago, on September the 11th. But why punish us? Weren’t the hijackers from Saudi Arabia and Egypt? If Saddam were a little smarter, we could have been friends with America, just like them.

  Sam notices me staring out of the window in awe. “Haven’t you seen this part of town yet?”

  “No.” I am mesmerized by the sight of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, whose tower is twisted at the top into fine, curly filaments.

  Something feels wrong about this, this sense that she knows the city better than I do.

  “You know, nobody was going out since the war started unless they had to, to get food or something,” I explain. “Everybody was avoiding this part of town, especially this area where the palaces and a lot of ministry buildings are, because we knew that’s what would get hit the most.”

  No one was going out, I think. Unless, of course, they had a date. For many Iraqis, getting your son or daughter married off is its own kind of emergency.

  She jots something into her notebook and for a moment I wonder if she could be taking down notes about me, about what I do or don’t know. Perhaps she will write up an evaluation of me at the end of the day. She’ll send it to her editor and he will decide whether I am good enough to work for the newspaper. Or, maybe Sam isn’t a newspaper journalist at all, but a spy working for an international agency. Perhaps even her name is made up. She’ll just use me to gather information and later on I’ll be held responsible for collaborating with the enemy.

  She points out the Ministry of Education on our left, the whole side of it stripped open and exposed. I can see office chairs and desks and cabinets as high as the eighth floor, blackened by fire, sitting in the open air as if in an acrid conversation with the sky. It all seems unreal, seeing our national offices burnt black, left exposed for all to see. Baghdad is like a violated woman.

  “Damn! See what they did to that one. Amazing.”

  I am glad that there are some things that are new to Sam. They, she says. Look at what they did. Aren’t they her own people? Her government?

  Rizgar tries to get on to the highway near the 14th of July Bridge, but as we pull close to the ramp, we see three tanks lined up across the road. A soldier’s top half emerges from the turret, his page-white hands firmly on the trigger. Behind him, a black soldier puts one hand up towards the traffic and waves it back and forth, the other holding fast to the enormous rifle across his chest. The driver from the car two cars in front of us yells that he needs to get on the bridge.

  “Closed! Closed!” the soldier on the ground shouts back at him. He throws his arms forwards in a gesture that seems quite rude. The soldier in the turret puts his face behind his rifle scope and aims at the driver, and then rotates the gun in a wider arc to include all the drivers behind him, some of whom are getting out of their cars.

  “Go back! Move the fuck back! Now!” Both the soldiers are shouting and a nervous Rizgar turns the car around quickly, grabbing the wheel in short, quick yanks.

  Sam shakes her head. “Jeez,” she says with more air than sound.

  “No worry. No worry,” Rizgar says. He appears calmer once we are on our way, speeding in the opposite direction, towards Abu Nuwas Street. “Many many ways to go.”

  I keep thinking about the soldiers bellowing from their tanks. “Sam? Don’t any of your soldiers speak Arabic?”

  Sam looks at me with an apologetic shrug. “Some. But not too many of them. They’re usually not the brightest candles on the cake.”

  I watch through the back window as we drive away and I can see the soldier, his rifle still raised, shouting and enraged, or maybe just frightened, pointing the barrel directly at a man who had got out of his car to talk to him. The soldier is gazing through a large eyepiece on the gun, one of the most sophisticated rifles I have ever seen, and not at the man himself. The figure grows smaller and I wonder whether he will be shot.

  “I think they will have a difficult time in Baghdad if they cannot communicate basic things in Arabic,” I say. “They cannot expect a simple driver like that to understand English.”

  “You’re right, Nabil.” She turns to Rizgar. “But we need to get to the INC. Today. Can you get us to the Hunting Club some other way?”

  “Yes, Misses Samara, but is maybe more dangerous way, no highway. Bad places with many stealing.” Rizgar uses each hand to indicate one shooting the other. Then he smiles an uncomfortable smile, and I find myself wondering why anyone covers a bad tooth with gold.

  “Oh, it’ll be fine, won’t it? Just be careful.” There is no police anymore, no one in control. And so there is nothing to stop a man from simply approaching you at the wheel of your car with a gun and telling you to get out. There are more and more incidents like this every day. You’re lucky if they take just your car.

  Sam opens the sun visor in front of her, which has a mirror clipped to it, and puckers her lips. She then produces a blue plastic container and with this she runs a clear balm over her lips, drawing them in on each other. Her mouth seems softer now, and a bit more pink. She closes the visor and then flips it open again, this time bending it to an angle through which she can see me.

  “Oh, and Nabil? Don’t call them my soldiers.” She appears to be dead serious, but then she smiles in a way that almost seems playful. “I didn’t want this war either.”

  She begins to tap the gadget I saw her use back in the hotel. It emits a little squeak each time she pokes it.

  “It’s called a Palm Pilot. See?” She must have noticed me studying it. “They’ll probably open a store here by Christmas... This is my life, right here in this little slab of electronic memory. I can try to bring one back for you next time I go to America.”

  “So you will go back to America and then come to Iraq again?”

  She puffs out her cheeks and lets them deflate slowly, like air from a balloon. “Probably. I have no idea. Usually we are on an assignment like this for a month or two. That’s
about all a person can take.” She grins. “But I mean, this is the story. I can’t see leaving anytime soon.”

  “I see,” I say, even though I’m not sure I do.

  “Which is why Jonah is more than a little pissed off at me.”

  “Your friend who was in Abu Ghraib?” I notice my palms are sweaty, and rub them on my trousers which don’t absorb a thing.

  “Yeah. He’s decided he’s had it with the story and wanted to leave, which is understandable. But he wants me to go with him, which is not going to happen.”

  “Why would—-”

  “Actually,” she says, raising a hand, not so unlike the way the soldier had, “let’s not get into it now.”