Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  She tilts her wristwatch into the weakening light. “Ooh, is that the time? I really have to get writing,” she says. She moves to get up and I do, too, but then she is back down again, as if something heavy is pulling her back towards the lunar surface of the roof. She’s laughing at herself, and as I’m already up, she holds out her hand for me to help her.

  ~ * ~

  15

  Laughing

  I, too, had wanted to be a writer. Not a journalist, though. The journalists told everything from Saddam’s point of view. They pretended to ask questions, but only the questions they were allowed to ask. If you were smart enough, I thought, you should be a real writer, which meant being able to criticize the regime in a way that was so obscure, so intricate in design that no one in government would realize it. I wanted to write the Animal Farm of Iraq. No one who mattered would be clever enough to know you were taking the piss out of them.

  Yes, some Iraqis read books.

  I should cut back on the British slang. I learned most of my colloquial English when I was in year six. All the kids made fun of my accent, and I hated them for it. For a while, I even hated my parents for bringing us to Birmingham, which was so lacking in local pride that people didn’t seem to have the energy to pronounce the city’s name, so they called it “Brum.” No one does that to Baghdad, abbreviate it like that. I think making a nickname out of your hometown shows a lack of respect.

  But there were other things about the English that I loved. One of them was all the funny nicknames they made up for things, and the way people would say, ‘ello, love, which reminded us of the way Baba would call Mum hayati. My life. It was then that we stopped calling my mother Mama and began calling her Mum. Ziad liked it and began using it mostly because it made us laugh, saying it just like the English school kids when they whined for their mothers to buy them something in the shops. When we returned to Iraq, we kept on calling her Mum because we thought it made us sound posh.

  I learned more English in that year and-a-half, I expect, than at any point in my life. My brain was like a dry sponge, soaking up the new words and then dribbling them out in some inappropriate place. I still worry about saying the wrong thing.

  For a so-called immigrant — they didn’t know from where so sometimes they just called us Pakis — I got excellent marks in English Lit. I read anything ten times if I had to, looked up all the words I didn’t know. Just as I had begun to master the language, my parents announced that it was time to go back to Baghdad. I didn’t want to go.

  In fact, I wanted to stay in England. And then, angry at my parents for making us leave, I felt the urge to write. By the time I was fourteen, my fingers were constantly twitching and typing out sentences in the air as I walked around. It drove my father crazy. I told him that I had learned to type in school and that I wanted my own typewriter. He said typing was for girls who wanted to grow up to be secretaries, not for boys who would grow up to be doctors.

  When I was sixteen and nearly failing biology, my father finally bought me a typewriter. By then, I’d got used to Iraq again. I started forgetting some things about how Birmingham looked. I had high marks in Arabic literature, English and history. My teachers once nominated my essay on the greatness of “Our Beloved Leader, Saddam” for student essay of the year, and it came first. At the awards ceremony, the headmaster led the kids in the audience in singing odes to Saddam, written by Daoud al-Qaysi and other famous Iraqi singers whose songs we had to memorize. One song compared Saddam to the sun and the moon. What a bloody joke. I wonder if, at the time, I believed any of it. I only remember that I liked it when the teacher said I excelled at writing.

  Unlike Ziad, I would not follow in Baba’s footsteps. When I was fourteen, in fact, the doctors diagnosed with me vasovagal syncope, which is a medical term for an extraordinary tendency to pass out. They said it was not a disease so much as a syndrome, and that a fainting episode or “attack” might be triggered by situations of extreme stress or dehydration, or something as simple as a blood test. It might go away as I matured, they said. I was happy to be excused from having to dissect any more animals.

  My head was wired for words. I typed out poems in the air when I was walking around during the day, and tried to get them down on paper at night. They never came out as well as the air-typed ones.

  “Ah, the poet is home,” my father would say when I was still in middle school. “Recite a poem for us.” The more he asked me to read something I had written, embarrassing me in front of relatives when they were over for a meal, the less I wanted to write anything at all.

  I decided it made more sense to study other people’s writing, and to become an expert in English. My twitchy fingers got me as far as the English department at Baghdad University, where I did my Bachelor’s degree before finding a teaching position. It’s only now, years later, that I’m trying to write again. Sam would surely laugh if she saw my typewriter, a pale-blue, manual machine by Remington that comes in its own portable case. It is probably thirty-five years old, but it still works well, except for the “o” key bending in towards the “p.” Sam and the other journalists all have small, thin computers that they carry around with them everywhere, as though it were as natural as carrying your wallet or your spectacles. Before the war, I had never ever seen a laptop, though we’d heard about them. The only computer I’ve used, the one at the university, is the size of a small refrigerator.

  As much as I envy them, Sam’s friends and their laptops, I like this old typewriter. I love the clack of keys against paper, the feeling of my fingers rising and falling with deliberate force, the inability to erase things so easily and make them prettier, without any trace of what went before.

  That’s what the Americans seem to expect of us. We are a country of typewriters that will always leave the mark of corrections — a line through the words, a bumpy streak of liquid white paint over the mistakes. The Americans want us to be computers. With computers, it’s very easy to delete a few lines you don’t like. But this, I believe, has spoiled the

  Americans’ expectations, because this isn’t the way human beings work. The Americans believe they can erase our corrupted files and make everything right with the world in just one click.

  ~ * ~

  By the sound of her knuckles, I know it’s Amal at the door.

  I rip the paper out of the typewriter. “Just a minute.”

  The door creaks open, she peeks in with one eye, and then walks in anyway. I turn the pages upside down on my desk.

  “What are you working on?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Come on, you’ve been banging away at that thing for an hour.” She crosses her arms. “Last night you did the same. I thought you were going to tell me about what you’re working on every day. That was the agreement.”

  “What agreement?” I stand and cross my arms back at her. “Amal, I’m just messing around, writing myself some notes. I’m too tired for this.”

  “But you’re always tired,” she whines. “It’s not fair. I was the one who encouraged you to take the job and you’re not telling me a thing!” Her face morphs into a look of happy intrigue. “Are you writing reports for her?”

  “Not even close. Isn’t it your bedtime?”

  “Mum,” she calls as she leaves my room. “Nabil’s writing secret reports for the Americans!” She looks back at me from the hallway with a giggling smile, but I don’t smile back. “Oh, Nabil. Stop worrying. They never take me seriously.”

  ~ * ~

  16

  Worrying

  We asked around for long enough and people told us to try this small commercial street between Aadhamiye and Maghreb, and sure enough, we found Adeeb’s barber’s shop. It looks like it ought to be closed because the blinds are pulled tight and there doesn’t appear to be anyone inside. But I knock a few times and then I see two of the dusty white slats part, slowly, like an eye opening after a deep sleep.

  He yells a
t the locked glass door. “What do you want? Who are you looking for?”

  Sam shrugs, indicating that she hasn’t thought up a back-up story for us to use to work our way inside. And after all, what could we possibly say? That I’m an Iraqi man who happens to be going to get a haircut with his foreign girlfriend?

  “We’re looking for a Mr Adeeb? Subhi sent us. Subhi el-Jasra. He said you might be able to help us.” I try to appear as innocent as possible. But, judging from my reflection in the glass, I mostly look sweaty and nervous.

  The man, a rather short and wan-looking fellow with a wispy moustache and a high forehead, stares into my eyes for a moment, as if waiting for me to flinch or reach for a weapon, and then he shifts his gaze back and forth between Sam and me. He pulls away from the window and I hear the sound of the lock turning, and thank God he’s going to let us in after all.

  “Ahlan w-sahlan,” he says. He has sharp, narrow scissors in his hand, and strands of hair on his hands and tee-shirt, which covers a roundness in his belly that seems almost maternal. “Subhi sent you?”

  “Ahlan fi-kum. Yes. He said that you would be able to help us. I am sorry if we are disturbing you at work.”

  “No, no. It is I who must apologize for my behaviour. I would have let you in sooner, but you must understand, there have been several attacks on barber shops recently. I don’t know — they think we have money or something. Do you think a barber makes so much money? I only make enough to feed my children.”

  “What’s he say?” Sam demands, pushing for a translation.

  “He apologizes for not letting us in straight away, but he says a lot of barber shops like his have been attacked in days past.”

  “Really? You know, I heard that there have been a few attacks on beauty parlours because fundamentalists don’t want women getting all dolled up anymore.”

  “Dolled up?”

  “I mean, made up. You know, with a lot of makeup,” she says. “Great story.”

  I ask Adeeb if this is the case, and he says yes, he knows of several beauty parlours that have been robbed and even had their clients kidnapped in the past two weeks. He says it’s not a religious thing, but rather, people know that the lady clients usually come from families with money. “Even though we don’t do women’s hair, we are worried that they will think we do and so they will target us, too.”

  The heavy-set middle-aged man sitting in the barber’s chair turns his head slowly over his shoulder, like a person who has been in an accident, and frowns at Adeeb. His hair is greying but thick and wavy, and I imagine it would be interesting to cut. Adeeb notices his disapproving gaze.

  “Would you be so kind as to sit and wait for me for a few minutes while I finish with this good man, one of my most esteemed customers?” The man smiles with a parting of his heavy lips, and I point Sam towards the bench at the back of the room.

  An adolescent boy, probably Adeeb’s assistant or apprentice, watches us carefully, his eyes almost locked on Sam. Adeeb resumes trimming, eliciting a strangely comforting noise, like the chirp of early birds before dawn. The big customer sighs and leans back a little deeper into his chair, and these soothing sounds, along with an old-time Ustaz al-Gubbenchi ballad wafting from a staticky radio perched above the basin, is almost enough to put me to sleep. Hubb o-hikam...love and wisdom.

  But Sam is wired, and though others probably wouldn’t see it, I notice it in the way she is bobbing her head to the beat, a little out-of-time with the music, trying to appear entertained in the vacancy of time when there is nothing to do but sit and wait.

  “Is it real?”

  The boy, having swept up as much hair as he could until the burly customer is done, has his skinny legs crossed and his head turned to me.

  “Is it real?” He asks again, lifting his chin, in a failed attempt to seem discreet, towards Sam. “The hair colour. And all the curls. Does she put something on it to make it look like that?”

  “He wants to know if your hair is real or not.”

  Sam glances at me and then at him, and then sniggers. The young man laughs back. Adeeb glances at us as though he’s unsure whether he likes the idea of having us joke around while there are important customers in his shop.

  “Tell him you can buy it at Wal-Mart.”

  “What?”

  Sam smiles widely. “I’m just kidding. Sure it’s real.”

  “I wasn’t asking it, he was.”

  “I know, Nabil. Just being silly.” Adeeb glares at us.

  “So what is Wal-Mart?”

  Sam lets out a sigh, the sound of a flat musical note. “Just a store.”

  The fat man propels himself out of the swivel chair, leaning back first and then using the momentum to hurl himself forwards, leaving the chair in a spin behind him.

  “Only 7,000 dinars today,” Adeeb says. “Special post-war price.” The man plucks a wad out of his wallet, hands Adeeb what looks like twice that amount, and when he whispers a thank-you in Adeeb’s direction I realize it is because he is out of breath from getting himself upright.

  He nods at all of us, and walks out slowly with the side-to-side gait of overweight people. When he is gone, Adeeb’s expression changes to one of happiness that we have come. I look at Sam, who seems to be trying hard not to interfere with the pace of my introductions. She is studying the pictures on the wall, mostly photographs of Iraqi actors and singers, with great interest.

  “Subhi said you could help us,” I say. “We wanted to talk to you about a reporter named Harris Axelrod.”

  He smiles and my eyes follow his to the floor, where greying hair lies scattered around the chair vacated by the fat man. I have a fleeting thought of how Sam’s red curls would look if they mingled among the snippings. Like sparks of fire amid the ashes. Adeeb signals to the boy to come and sweep.

  “Harris,” I repeat. “Harris like Fares.”

  “Yes, yes, Harris,” he says. “I am surprised that Subhi would send you to me if you are looking for information about Harris.”

  “Really, why is that?”

  “Well you know...Hakim!” he calls out. “Would you please sweep up here so I can give you your million dinars and we can all go home?” Until now, the young teenager had been sitting behind the last basin, watching Sam and emitting an occasional plume of smoke from his cigarette. He swaggers out with his broom, smirking, and begins to push it brusquely across the floor.

  “Beautiful, thank you!” Adeeb says. We watch in silence as Hakim finishes his sweeping.

  Adeeb takes out his salary, and out of the corner of my eyes I can see him count out 30,000 dinars, or about $10, which is too much for someone doing Hakim’s job, at his age.

  Hakim thanks Adeeb, bids me goodbye, and stretches his neck to try to bid farewell to Sam, too, but having lost interest in the photographs, she appears to be unaware of him as she studies the combs and scissors in the blue fluid, and occasionally, herself in the mirrors.

  Hakim slams shut the door and it rattles the whole barber shop. Adeeb shudders as the swaying blinds come to rest.

  “You see, you can’t talk anywhere here. You couldn’t talk in public with Saddam, and even now you can’t talk because you have to worry about other people! Do you know him?”

  I turn to the door, as if the boy still stands among us. “This Hakim, your helper?”

  “No! The big guy. He was an operator in the Ba’ath party. We had to pay him to stay out of trouble. I give him cheap haircuts because I’m still afraid of what he could do.” He wrinkles his nose as if he smells something bad. “But I think they will get him soon enough.”

  “Who will?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Either the Americans, or the revenge mob. In fact it isn’t entirely a mob. They have a hit list with all the people on it they plan to get, and one by one,” he says, methodically picking stray hairs off his shirt, “they will get them.” He smiles at me. “Or so they say.”

  A sprinkling
of sweat has sprouted on Adeeb’s forehead, as if he were the one who’d swept the floor.

  “Which people are you worried about?” I ask.

  “If you say you don’t know, maybe you’re one of them!” He laughs with his mouth wide open and almost nothing but a wheeze coming out, but he so appears to be enjoying himself that it makes me laugh with him.

  Sam gets out of the barber’s chair in which she had been swivelling. “Hey,” she says, stopping herself with her toe. “Did you tell him what we’re looking for?”

  “I think he knows.”

  “I know many thing.”

  “Oh, you speak English?” she asks.