Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  “But that would be interrupting him. It might appear impolite. We were guests in his house.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. You’ll get used to it. It’s already an unusual kind of conversation. Guy’s talking with a foreigner and half of the conversation is taking place in a language he doesn’t understand.” She pauses. “Also, I feel like you’re not translating exactly what the guy is saying. I need to have it in their words — as close to their words as possible.” She turns to me and lifts her eyebrows, and now the wrinkles that were in hiding are visible.

  “I understand that,” I say. “That’s what I am trying to do.”

  “But a lot of the time you were letting that man speak for a while and I know he would have said five or ten sentences, and you’re coming back to me with just one. I may not know much Arabic, but I can just feel that in my bones.”

  Sam’s right. I wasn’t giving her every sentence. I was trying to leave out the parts that seemed extraneous or confusing.

  “I see.”

  Or maybe embarrassing.

  “I need to hear everything, even if you don’t think it would be important.”

  “Everything? Every single thing he says, like the name of every relative he says Saddam killed? Or how he might go to Al-Hilla in the morning to look for his cousins’ remains?”

  “Wait, he said he was going to Al-Hilla?”

  “He said he was going to go to Al-Hilla to search for his cousins who he thinks were buried in a mass grave there, which is now being exposed.”

  “Exhumed. And?”

  “Or maybe he said Al-Mahawil. I think both, maybe. He said he’d go tomorrow, or on Monday.”

  Sam expels a long breath. I can smell the coffee in it when it hits my face.

  “Nabil, you never mentioned either of those places. You just said the south.”

  “They are in the south.”

  “Yes, but the fact that it’s Al-Hilla or Al-Mahawil makes a big difference. Specifics. Specifics are the heart of journalism. There were reports this morning that Iraqis are flocking down there and trying to dig up these mass graves with their bare hands. If I had known what he was planning I might have asked him about that. Maybe we could have followed his family there and spent the day with them. That would have been a great story.”

  “But I’m telling you about it now.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. I can’t ask him questions now. Unless we go back,” she says, looking at her watch, “which I don’t think we have enough time to do.”

  I can’t understand why Sam is making such a fuss over one man with looted goods and dead relatives. We can probably find a thousand men who will tell us the same story.

  “Do you want to go back?”

  “No, not really. That’s not the point. I just want you to know that I need to hear these things while we’re in the middle of the interview so I can ask follow-up questions.” She lifts her fire-eyebrows towards me. “Do you know what I mean? I need specific details, all the time.”

  “Yes, yes I see. I’m sorry. I thought these small details were insignificant.”

  “Sometimes small details make big stories. Let me be the judge of what’s significant or not.” She uncrosses her legs and stands up. With her back to me, she leans her weight into a bent knee while the other leg is straight — lunging left and then right, for the second time today. I hear a pop emerge from somewhere in the vicinity of her hips. I wonder how old Sam is. She looks like she is in her late twenties, but sometimes she moves like she might be younger. Like a teenager who cannot sit still.

  She spins back around towards me. “Don’t get me wrong, Nabil. You’re doing a fantastic job. Your English is beautiful,” she says, pinching her thumb and a few fingers together near her lips, and then releasing them with a tiny kiss. “You just need to learn how it all works.” She parts her feet and then doubles over, placing her hands flat to the floor.

  Her face is reddish-brown when she comes up. “Sorry,” she says. “My body is so sore. The chairs at that hotel are shit, and I was up late last night working. My editor lives in a fantasy world where a good reporter should be able break some big, earth-shattering story within a week of coming to Baghdad.”

  I almost forgot that some people might have reason to stay up late at night. Since the war began, we rarely have electricity past 8 p.m.

  She looks at her watch again. “Oh, and remember to speak in first-person. Don’t say, ‘he says so and so.’ Just say what the guy says as if you’re him.”

  “Sam, excuse me. But is it, ‘you are him?’ Or, ‘you are he?”‘

  Sam’s lips curve into a slight frown of incredulity. “Brilliant,” she breathes. “You’re right. It is ‘you are he.’ I think. Do they teach this kind of stuff in school here?”

  “Not really. But I studied the grammar on my own to make sure I understood all the rules.”

  “You like following rules, huh?” She stands and bends towards the glass window, which has no one sitting behind it now.

  “It just makes understanding the language easier.”

  “Jeez, these guys are taking forever. There’s also supposed to be another press conference with the army later, but I don’t think I’m going to go.” She locks her fingers together, then presses them out so they crack at nearly the same moment, sounding almost musical.

  A round of automatic gunfire splinters into the air and continues for half a minute. It could be a mile away, or two. Another round comes, with a slightly different rattle, angled to answer the first. They seem like the call of birds in the trees, one speaking to the other.

  Sam rolls her eyes at me. “Afternoon target practice. I guess you’re used to it.”

  “No. Really not. We never used to hear this before the war.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess they killed people in prisons and basements, not out on the street.”

  I don’t know where I could begin to explain, but somehow I want her to know that Baghdad was not a city with a lot of violence and crime. It is true that we all feared Saddam and his men, but we didn’t fear getting killed or robbed by each other, the way people do in the West.

  “Baghdad can be a very beautiful city,” I tell her. “I wish you could see it when everything is calm.”

  I suddenly feel terribly thirsty and I realize that for April, it has turned into a much hotter day than usual. My shirt has gone damp around the armpits and my face is sweaty. I forgot to bring a handkerchief so instead I wipe my face with my hand and notice that my upper lip feels wet, where my moustache once was, and maybe that’s what a moustache is there for. Sam doesn’t seem hot at all. And then I realize she is still talking to me about how she wants me to behave in interviews.

  “...so even though I’ve seen some translators take notes, I think it slows down the interview, so I’d really rather you not do that. You just need to listen and let it flow.”

  The door of the reception office opens. “Dr Marufi will be out for you in just one minute,” the man says. Sam gathers her bag and notebook and rises.

  I stand as well. “Can’t you change things afterwards to make it right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I say, ‘He says he supports the American invasion,’ can’t you change it afterwards to say, ‘I support the American invasion?”‘

  Sam’s eyes roll up and down my body, as if somewhere on it is the key to my inability to see things as she does. “No, it’s different. You’re not supposed to change quotes too much. What if you were just estimating and I make the guy sound like he said something definitive that he didn’t actually say?”

  “Either this way or that, he said the same thing.”

  Her chest rises and falls. “No, Nabil. A good journalist never changes the quote if she can help it. I need to get as close to the exact words as possible. And that’s where you come in.”

  The door swings open, and a man wearing a dark blue business suit steps out.
It’s a much more expensive suit than mine — I have now discarded the jacket — but I am glad that I am no longer the most overdressed person Sam has met today.

  “Ms Katchens! Such a pleasure to see you again.” He is a tall, greying man in perhaps his mid-forties. He extends one hand to shake hers and puts the other, for a brief moment, on her upper arm, as if he knows her well. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you. Come in.”

  “Dr Marufi, so nice to see you again. Actually, I had just wanted to confirm the interview for tomorrow, and of course, to say hello to you.”

  “Yes, well, why don’t you come in for a few minutes and we’ll talk.”

  “That’d be great. Oh, Dr Marufi. This is Nabil. Nabil, Dr Marufi from the INC. Nabil is working with us now,” she smiles at Dr Marufi, and I find myself wondering, doctor of what?

  “A pleasure,” he says when he offers me his hand. “Will you be joining us?”

  Sam’s eyes dart in my direction, and I know the answer.

  “No, sorry. If you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.” I shake his hand and notice that Sam has a pleased expression on her face.

  ~ * ~

  As I near the Impala, Rizgar grins at me. He tilts his head to his right, indicating that I should join him in the front seat. Inside, he has the air conditioning on full blast, which seems like a recipe for running through an awful lot of petrol in a day.

  “Aanisa Samara went into her meeting?” Rizgar asks.

  I glance at him sideways.

  “Yes, she said just a few minutes.”

  “That means at least a half hour. It’s always longer than she says it will be,” Rizgar says, shifting his belly. Well-proportioned elsewhere, he has a hefty stomach that seems to compete for space with the steering wheel. His skin is doughy, with early signs of jowliness in his cheeks. He looks very much as I imagine the Kurds up north to look: meatier than us, rounder, and largely fairer. But he does not behave in the manner we have been told to expect from them. Mainly, he is not aggressive, and he does not seem wily or manipulative.

  “So you’ll work with Aanisa Samara from now on?”

  “I think I’ll try it out.”

  “Oh, I think she is trying you out.” He laughs, and the rolling depth of it catches me in the stomach and makes me laugh, too.

  “Calling her aanisa all the time, isn’t that a little bit old-fashioned?”

  He shrugs. “I’m a lot older than you. I’m forty-five. I could be your father.”

  “I don’t think so,” I offer. But it’s true. If he’d had me at seventeen, which isn’t so unheard of in the countryside, I could be his son. “How long have you worked with her?”

  Rizgar shrugs. “About four weeks. Since she came to Suleimaniye, before the war. It seems longer. We don’t take many days off, even Fridays.”

  I wonder if Rizgar is religious. Then again, it might just mean that he wants to have a day of rest.

  “What was the other translator like?”

  “Luqman? Oh, he was a nice young fellow, like you. I liked him very much.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “No, no, I don’t mean that.” Rizgar reaches into the box next to the gearstick, a compartment that separates driver from passenger, and retrieves a pack of cigarettes. I am surprised that he is smoking an American Brand, Lucky Strike, for surely this is much more expensive than our Iraqi brands. He flips open the box and holds it out to me, but I wave my hand and say no thank you.

  “Good boy.” He taps the filter-end of a cigarette on the dashboard. “Your father is a doctor, so you must know better.” The lighter, which I hadn’t noticed him push in, pops out. He puts the cigarette in his mouth and mashes the end of it against the glowing circles, much like the target on the cigarette box.

  “Luqman was a decent guy, bright. But he was not brave enough for covering war. He was always afraid we were going to get hurt, or that he would get hurt and there would be no one to take care of his family. And his Arabic wasn’t very good because he was young and had only studied in Suleimaniye. You know, after ‘91, they stopped teaching Arabic in a lot of the schools in the north. Only Kurdish. And a little bit of English or German.”

  “Samara told me he had a hard time in Tikrit.”

  “Well, yes, they shot at him while he was getting into the car when we were trying to leave, and it scared him so much that he decided to quit the job.”

  “Was he hit?”

  “No. But it was very close.” Rizgar makes a gesture with his finger, indicating a bullet whizzing over one’s head. “He was fine. He just got scared. But he was scared of other things, too.”

  Rizgar takes deep pulls from the cigarette. Opens the window just enough to blow the smoke out into the hot afternoon, then closes it again. He takes another drag and says in a smoke-choked voice, “He was falling for her.”

  “For Sam?”

  “Of course. He told me he was in love with her and that he would try to make Samara his second wife, though he’d only been married for five years. Hah! The guy knew he was going to either wind up dead or with a broken heart. So he quit.”

  An explosion somewhere makes the car shudder. Rizgar sneers and flicks the burning end of his butt in a tumbling arc out of the window. He presses on the accelerator. “Walla, I was wrong. Al-Amira is back, much more quickly than I thought,” he says. I realize that he means Sam and wonder whether he intends this as a compliment, calling her the princess, or if there is a part of him which has started to resent her.

  She is still writing in her notebook as she walks over to the car. Rizgar flicks the remains of his cigarette out of the window. “You’re not married, are you?”

  “Inshallah,” I reply. In my mind, I picture my father’s irritated gaze.

  They threw something at him, Sam had said. Not shot. A good journalist never changes—

  She opens the door and her scent enters before she does: I think it makes her smell sweeter than she otherwise would. My mind’s overactive easel paints a picture of a handsome young man. He has my eyes but a shock of wavy red hair. He’s wearing an American military uniform and is sitting in a tank near the Tigris, turning people away from the bridge. That’s what my son would look like if I married her. A red-haired soldier. An occupier. No, I cannot imagine ever loving Samara Katchens.

  ~ * ~

  10

  Loving

  I follow Sam into the pool courtyard between the buildings. A cluster of foreigners turns when she strides past the white tables and one woman waves, while another man with yellowish-blond hair and no shirt calls out Sam’s name. I see Joon Park is with them and I nod and smile at her but she doesn’t respond — perhaps her eyesight is not very good.

  “Hello,” Sam chants back to them. “You guys still going to catch dinner at the Flowerland?”

  “After seven,” the shirtless man says. His T-shirt is tucked into his trouser pocket like a rag, “just after my Q&A.” His chest is firm and muscular in a way I would expect a professional athlete’s to be, and it has no hair on it. He seems half-man and half-boy.

  “Well,” Sam pulls the door of the first tower open again and gestures for me to walk ahead, “I may be a little late.” And I think I catch a gesture, a nod in my direction. Late, because of me?

  “Samara, my love, we wouldn’t dream of dining without you,” the blond man says sounding affectionate but artificial. “We’ll wait for you.”

  “It’ll give you time to work on that tan,” she says, and lifts her sunglasses with a quick flash that borders on flirty.

  She lets the door fall shut behind her and walks to the entrance on our right. We enter the hotel café, all done in orange and white, the futuristic-looking white chairs reminiscent of the 1970s. The café is empty except for three men sitting behind the counter. The oldest among them, maybe in his early fifties, rises to his feet.

  “Maftouh?” she asks. Open?

  “Aiy, tfaddali.” Yes, pl
ease, says the man. He points to the unoccupied tables near the window overlooking the pool, which seems surprisingly clear and blue compared to how it looked earlier.

  Sam faces me. “Why don’t we sit here and have a coffee before we call it a day?”

  I wait for her to choose a table, and find myself relieved when she chooses the one furthest from the men behind the counter, who are looking me over with some interest.