My mother’s family was willing to accept the marriage because she was marrying up, as they call it in the West. Although she was in university when she met my father, her parents had not had a higher education and they were, therefore, very impressed with him. His father was a doctor, and he was going to be a doctor, too. It promised moderate wealth, but also prestige and security, which were more important.
With my father’s family, it was a little different. They wouldn’t have been keen on their son marrying a Shi’ite girl, Grandma Zahra once told me in her later years. But there were several mitigating factors. First, my father’s father, had once treated one of my mother’s cousins when he was very ill. Thereafter, my mother’s cousin sent presents every year at the end of Ramadan.
And so, my father’s family knew that my mother came from a good family. Even if they were working class — my mother’s father was a welder — they had dignity, pride, good manners. Second, they were impressed that a working-class family would send their daughter to university and that my mother, unlike her mother, did not wear a veil, which they viewed as a sign of backwardness.
Finally, my mother was beautiful. As beautiful as any model in Paris or London, Grandma Zahra said. I knew she’d never left Iraq, and I wondered how she could know what women in Europe looked like. Later I realized it was just an expression, a way of saying that our beauty was as good as their beauty.
The typical path in our part of the world is for the woman to adopt the man’s sect or religion. And so, the idea was that even though my mother was Shi’ite, by marrying my father, she would follow Sunni ways, and adopt the Sunni style of prayer.
The only problem with that was that my father was probably the last person on earth to teach a person how to pray.
When I was small, and then after we came home from England, Mum would take me to the Imam Khadum shrine on Fridays, or to a small husseiniye, a Shi’ite mosque, in the neighbourhood. I was fascinated with the men who knew the Koran by heart. Oh, to have the labyrinth of all those poetic words imprinted in one’s mind! I didn’t know what they meant, but I loved the way they sounded. I came home one afternoon declaring that I wanted to learn the Koran by heart and become a hafiz. Baba gave Mum a talk and said she should stop taking me to prayers so much.
We’ve never even had any framed calligraphy with Koranic verses on the wall, like many Iraqis do, with the exception of a small ceramic plate my mother has hanging over the kitchen sink that simply says “Allah” on it. Baba didn’t like such displays of religiosity, and considered them closer to superstition than divinity. He didn’t like for Mum to put up pictures of Ali, as many Shi’ites do, but I’d seen the one she kept in her handbag, and another one she kept tucked inside the Holy Koran that sits by itself in a drawer in the lounge. When I was about fourteen, I asked why some of my friends’ homes had these religious items displayed and we didn’t. Mum told me that I should have a sign on the inside: in my heart and in my mind.
I was in my first year of high school when the Gulf War broke out. After Saddam pulled our defeated army out of Kuwait, all of the Shi’ites in the south tried to launch a war against him. We knew it was going to fail, but somehow the people in the south didn’t see that. My father said it was because America encouraged the Shi’ites to overthrow Saddam and made them think they could do it, but then did nothing to back them up when Saddam began to slaughter them.
I remember some of the boys in the school playground chanting slogans against the Shi’ites. Bassem Azabi started a chant, calling Shi’ites dirty infidels and collaborators with Bush. I was stupid enough to challenge him, trying to get everyone on my side in the name of Muslim unity. No one bought it. After class, Bassem and two of his friends jumped on me and started laying in to me, and all the other kids gathered around us in a circle, shouting. I don’t think they were for or against Saddam, because most of them didn’t know anything. They were just boys excited to see a fight. The headmaster came out after a minute or two and pulled them off me. By then, I had given up trying to fight back and was curled up like a snail on the asphalt. I don’t know what was more embarrassing, having the headmaster rescue me, or the fact that no one had jumped in to defend me. The friends I had were disparate parts who did not constitute a whole, and individually, they were no match for Bassem and his boys.
That evening, at home, my father saw my puffy left eye and my red face, patches of it swollen like I had been stung by a bee. I would have preferred that to having my father know I got beaten up at school.
“But you haven’t been in a fight since you were ten years old.” My father looked at me like he was looking at somebody else’s child, as if he preferred to trade me for the real son I must have been switched with at the hospital, the son who had his strength, his bulky arms instead of my skinny ones. The son who would be a doctor by the time he was twenty-five, just like my brother; the son who was popular in school. The son who never got pushed around.
I told my father what they had been saying in the school playground that day about the Shi’ites. He sat down on the edge of my bed and ran his fingers over the black stubble emerging from the pores of his chin. He sucked at something in his teeth.
“Did you tell them that your mother is a Shi’ite?” I was sitting at my desk and just wanted to go back to my books, where everything was resolved in the end, where my father and Bassem’s boys would never find me. I thought for a minute about running away, tracking down my mother’s simple relatives in Al-Kut and spending the rest of my life with them.
“No, I didn’t tell them, that wasn’t the point. I just didn’t think it was right.”
“Of course it’s not right,” he said. “But you don’t need trouble at school. You don’t need to talk about your family with boys like that. No one needs to know your business. You just do your work. Don’t get mixed up in politics. You’ll be sorry you did.”
“I am not mixed up in politics.” As usual, my father failed to understand what I was saying, to even try to understand. It was amazing that he could care so much and listen so little.
“Tell your mother you got hit in the face with a ball,” he said, beginning to stand up.
“She already knows,” I said, turning away from him and back to my book. He stood where he was and when I looked up at him, he was studying me. Behind the pity, behind the disappointment, was something that told me I had failed an even bigger test. What was it? Failing to protect the women from everything that went wrong? Refusing to reassure my parents that there were no complications to being half-Sunni, half-Shi’ite?
And after all, few people really see me as half-anything. You always take the religion of your father. My mother had to know that when she married my father, Grandma Zahra reminded me.
But my mother was the only one in the house who ever mentioned God, the only one who seemed to turn to something greater when she was upset, and the only one who had any interest in taking me to the mosque on the occasional Friday.
My father never went because he saw religious people as a bit common and naive, and the mosque as an intellectual backwater. He could appreciate the culture, the architecture, the liturgy, the literature, the history, but never the belief that required submission of thought. He didn’t like the idea of there being one truth, he said, when I asked him to explain it further. My father wore his Sunni identity like a pedigree that signalled grooming, a tick-box in his profile that gave him privilege. It had little or nothing to do with religion, except that he was proud that Sunnis don’t beat their own backs the way Shi’ites do on Ashura, to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson.
It was my mother who sometimes got me dressed on a Friday and announced that we were going to the mosque, usually the Imam Ali Shrine in Khadamiyah. My father would smile, his lips closed and faintly callous, and say zein. Good. Very nice. Good, fine, repeatedly, like he was trying to convince himself. Zein, zein. Please enjoy yourselves and put in a nice word for
me.
When my father wasn’t around, my mother seemed freer. Freer with her piousness, freer with her lips. She used them to place kisses on everything she saw: on the shrine’s weathered doors, on the larger-than-life pictures of Imam Ali, on the tombs of the great departed martyrs, on the laminated picture she carried of the faceless twelfth Imam. Even on the prayer turba she brought with her, that little square of pottery, so that when she put her head to the ground she would be in touch with God’s own earth.
In summertime, everything grew so hot I was afraid she would burn her lips kissing the walls as they baked in the sun’s open kiln. I’ve heard it can happen. But I came to the conclusion that my mother’s lips must have had a holy salve of protection over them, a special lip balm from God. Before letting me head off to the men’s side, she kissed my forehead, wishing me Allah’s baraka, His blessing. Allah ma ‘ak. Allah bi-kheir. God be with you. God has good plans in mind for you. After, she met me in the courtyard with her palms radiating bright orange from henna, as if God had placed a portion of his best light right in her hands.
~ * ~
12
Radiating
When I step up to the desk in the morning, Rafik hardly bothers to mumble sabah en-noor after I say sabah el-khair. He presses the numbers for Sam’s room and hands me the house phone. His mouth is pulled down at the corners, almost into a frown.
“Hello?” Sam told me 8:30, but her voice sounds groggy, as if she has just woken up.
“Good morning,” I say. “Shall I wait for you here in the lobby?”
“No, why don’t you come upstairs? I really need you to help me plan out what we’re going to do next. I don’t want to do it in the car.”
I hang up the phone and notice Rafik watching me. I wonder if he understands a lot of English or only a little. “She says to meet her upstairs,” I say, as if he is some male relative in charge of her safety, and I must ask permission. I still feel as if Rafik is keeping an eye on me on Sam’s behalf, whether she realizes it or not.
The stairs seem less onerous now that I know my way. I stare for a moment at her door. There’s a new sign on it. For main Tribune office, go to the first tower, Room 520. Perhaps she hopes this will deter people from bothering her. I press hard on the buzzer until my fingernail goes white. Sam’s voice skips towards the door. “Come in! Door’s open.”
She is in the kitchenette, lighting the stove. She sets the kettle over the flames and turns around. Her hair is wet, and damp indentations around her shoulders make the straps of her bra more visible.
I keep my gaze on the stove, away from her body, trying not to stare. Sam crosses her arms and looks at me. “I know Iraqis start early, so that’s why I said 8:30, but this isn’t my best hour of the day. I hope you don’t mind talking to me before my mind’s fully functional. And I need some coffee first. You?”
“Me?”
“Do you drink coffee?”
The kettle moans softy, growing gradually more audible, like the morning muezzin.
“Real coffee or Nescafé?”
“Nescafé.” She opens the cabinet and pulls down the jar, adorned by a picture of an attractive, European-looking man with his nose happily close to his cup. “That’s all we’ve got. If you want that rocket fuel you guys drink, just order it from downstairs.”
“I’m fine. I already drank some this morning.” It isn’t true, I had tea. But I will not drink her artificial coffee after she has put down our own.
Sam sits and blows across the surface of the milky-brown liquid. As she puts the mug on the coffee table a spill runs over the rim of her cup. “Uch, klutz!” She picks a few tissues out of the box on her desk to her left, pink then yellow then blue, dabs them over the spill and then pushes the soggy, coloured pile away from her.
“All right.” She takes a big breath and then exhales with a flourish, almost as if, had she puckered her lips properly, she might whistle. “So here’s the deal. A few days ago, the paper ran a story by a stringer named Harris Axelrod, and now—”
“The stringer is the writer?”
“Yeah. It’s a freelancer who gets paid by the piece. Anyhow, Harris is a very high-profile freelancer because he also writes for all of these vanity magazines, uh, how I can explain that? They’re very glossy magazines that cost a lot and pay a lot, and if you write political stories in them, you get a lot of attention. This guy is really a known name in journalism, even if most people out in the field have been saying for a few years that he’s bad news. Sketchy. There aren’t so many rules in journalism, but there are a few, and he doesn’t play by any of them. Okay? So this guy, Harris, files a story saying that a very controversial black politician in America named Billy Jackson took millions of dollars from Saddam to oppose the war, to oppose the sanctions, everything. And in fact, this politician — he’s a congressman from New Jersey — he’s been one of the lone, national voices against the invasion of Iraq. He was totally critical of Bush’s policy on Iraq from start to finish. I mean, this guy was one of only a handful of congressmen to oppose the use of force. So news that he was on the take from Saddam Hussein, and we know that Saddam was probably paying lots of his buddies in various countries, hey, that’s a pretty sexy story. You with me?” She lifts her coffee. “You sure you don’t want a cup?”
“No. Yes. I’m following. Thank you.”
“So you do want instant?”
“No. By thank you I meant, no, thank you,” I say, watching her take a few gulps of hers.
Her eyebrows dip. “So, why don’t you just say that?” She exhales. “Where was I? Look, a very sexy story...if it’s true. Harris said the whole thing was solid, and my editors believed him. Two days after Baghdad falls and he has this story, based on documents he says were found in one of the vacated government buildings, and then provided to him by a reliable source. You know, this Harris always has some big scoop that no one else has, and you’d have to wonder why that is. But you know how editors can be. They just assume some people are ‘charmed’,” she says, wiggling her fingers at the last word. “And if we don’t run with it quick, maybe someone else will get wind of it and beat us to it. And Harris convinces them, like he does every time, that it’s all air-tight. Stop me if I’m going too fast.”
“Not at all. I understand,” I lie. I wish I could take notes. My fingers are getting itchy to do so, virtually air-typing against my will.
“Okay, so he calls the desk, says he has documents to back it up. He photographs and e-mails a copy of the documents to the editors, and the paper goes and runs it. And that’s it. Presto, scandal of the century. Or the month, anyway. The paper gets to break the story and no one else has it, and everyone on the foreign desk feels very good about themselves.”
“If you break the story, it’s good, right?”
“Yeah, that’s the point. When someone breaks a story, it means they were the first ones to report it. If you have it and no one else does, you’re golden.”
For years we’ve had newspapers like Babil and Al-Zawra and Jumhuriyye, and also magazines like Al-Musawwar Al-Arabi and Alef Bah. Baba dutifully picked them up and left them near his reading chair. But they always had the same stupid stories flattering Saddam, often with almost-identical wording and photographs, and they never seemed to be worth reading. It now occurs to me that in Western countries, newspapers compete to get stories that other newspapers don’t have. Here, an editor who did such a thing would probably be sent to jail.
“Nabil, you with me?”
“I don’t think we break stories here.”
“Not yet. Listen, so my editors run this story, thanks to Harris, and it made a big splash. Actually, more like an earthquake. We’re talking about a liberal, African-American congressman who some people think has a very bright future. And now his whole career is in question. But here’s where it gets even better. As of last night, it turns out, we’re getting sued. And for quite a lot, I might add. This congressman, he said from t
he start that the story was patently false and that he’d clear his name. Well, turns out his lawyers think he has a strong case and they filed a huge libel suit against the newspaper yesterday.” She stops and smacks her lips, and leans forwards to take the coffee again. “You know what a libel suit is, right?”
“Sure,” I say. In truth, what I know is the definitions of the words “libel” and “suit”, but I don’t actually know what happens when they combine, though I can guess.
“In America, for someone whose livelihood depends on his reputation, if he can prove he was defamed, he could be awarded millions of dollars in damages. And, Jeez, I don’t have to tell you this, but my editors are flipping out. Not only that, but given that this congressman is black, it makes the whole thing even more explosive. People in his camp are making charges of racism.”
Baghdad Fixer Page 11
