Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  “Mr Mubasher came to visit today.”

  From school? Moin Mubasher is the headmaster of the Mansour Boys School. My other boss.

  “Yes. He says that they are going to try re-opening the school next week. They want the boys to be able to finish the school year. He says they only expect about half the students, or maybe even a third, to show up. But they will fix some of the windows and bring new chairs. He would like you to come.”

  “To teach? Now?” It had never occurred to me that any school in Baghdad would try to re-open before September, which is five months away.

  “Sure. He says some of the boys need to take tests to move up into the next year’s class, or to university. He doesn’t want them to have to repeat a grade, to have a whole year of work go to waste.”

  “And what about the girls?”

  Baba shifts in the chair. “What do you mean? It’s a boys’ school.”

  “I mean what about the girls finishing out the year? Doesn’t that matter? If Amal’s school were going back into session, would you send her now?”

  He doesn’t respond but I know the answer. No one is sending any daughter to school right now because of the chaos, because of the rumours of kidnappings.

  “That’s not the point,” Baba says.

  “Did he say that there were other teachers who were willing to come?”

  Baba shrugs, nods without looking at me. “A few.”

  “So let them teach.”

  “Nabil, you have a job to do.”

  “I have a new job now. I’m working in journalism. It’s much more important.”

  “More important than education? More important than the future of the best students in Iraq? I don’t think even you believe what you’re saying.” Baba stands up and I feel his bulky body breathing heavily, hanging over me. “Think about it. You could tell your lady friend that your family insisted.”

  “She’s not my lady friend.” I gape at the air, searching for a word. “She’s my employer.”

  “But what about the Iraqi employer you’ve had for, what is it, five years now? And what happens after the Americans leave?”

  I roll out of bed. I’m too far from sleep now, and I want to be on his level. I lean against the window. If my father pushes any harder, maybe I can just escape from here, fly out on a carpet like they do in the fairytales. “I’m not quitting,” I say. “Definitely not.”

  In the distance, a crackling of gunfire fills the air. It is a gentle popping, so benign it may as well be the sound of boys bursting balloons at a birthday party. Then a bigger bang, followed by a feeling of a sound wave moving through my flesh, the sensation of something tingling down the length of my arms and across my back.

  What makes Baba think the Americans are leaving? Who says it would be any better if they left now?

  “You’ll do what’s right,” he says. He turns and lumbers towards my door. Across the floor, even his footsteps feel weighty. Then the sound of the door opening, the heft of my father standing in it. “My boys always do well. Eventually, they always do well.”

  He moves to close the door but then opens it wide again. “Your mother made a tabeet. That chicken is bursting with raisins and apricots and cardamom, the way you like it. She must have been in the kitchen all day. If you don’t eat some, then maybe you really have lost your mind.”

  “Tell her to save it for me and I’ll eat it tomorrow, Baba.”

  “There’s no electricity, remember? So there’s no refrigerator,” he says.

  “Well then, I’ll get up in a bit and eat some,” I say, but he’s already shut the door.

  I am alone again, and there is a small happiness that derives from the quiet of having no one here, no one talking to me or through me. But the joy of this feeling passes quickly, and I begin to think of how good it would be to be here with Sam. How, if I could be honest with her, I could tell her how hard it is to let my father down. How complicated she has made everything. She and the army she brought with her.

  My mind fails to enjoy the stillness. Instead, it circles like the thrilling rides at those little amusement parks Baba took us to when we were young, before Amal was born. I go to the section on my bookshelf with a collection of my favourite Iraqi poets. As I read I translate aloud, as if for Sam, to make her understand. This one is by Muzaffar al-Nawwab, who spoke most of his poetry in live performances.

  I whisper to my imaginary Sam, who lies with her head on my pillow, listening intently.

  I have been shining so radiantly for this moment,

  while the letters of passion on my lower lip lay sleeping.

  I read more to her, and she is mesmerized by the cadence of our poetry, the music inherent in its rhythm. It loses little of its beauty in translation. Soon her eyes begin to flutter. I want to tell her about Noor, that Noor means light, and that for the rest of my life, each time I see the word for light I’ll have to think of her and how she died trying to marry me. And then I will read more Muzaffar to Sam, until she is asleep.

  Who are you? And what is the story of your soul?

  What of the known world and its days have you lost?

  And who have you come to visit?”

  ~ * ~

  I think I was sleeping but I heard something crash and Baba shouting. I race out to the living room, sure we’ve been attacked. But it’s only Baba, who in the darkness tripped over the propane fuel stove he bought and the glass lantern that was next to it. He is cursing and limping and my mother is up with a candle already in her hand and I try to help them clean up, but it’s hard with the lamp broken and just my mother’s candle lighting up the living room and a bit of moonlight from outside.

  I find the torch and more candles and we sweep it all up and my mother says she’s amazed that Amal didn’t wake with all this commotion and that she’s going back to bed.

  I hold my watch close to my face. Not yet midnight. I can remember a time when we would all have been up watching an old Egyptian film on a warm night like tonight. Now, with nothing to do in the dark and no electricity for television, everyone goes to bed early.

  “Do you want to have a drink?”

  “Sure, Baba. I can make some tea.”

  “Not that kind of drink.” He takes the torch off the table and walks into the kitchen. From the cabinet above the refrigerator, so high Baba needs to stand on a chair to reach it, he retrieves one of the bottles which were only of interest to me when I was fourteen or fifteen, and fascinated with the idea that Baba was drinking alcohol despite the religious prohibitions. I was also aware that he seemed to drink more often after we came back from England than he did when we were actually there.

  He retrieves his bottle of Glenmorangie and pours a little into two glasses, his golden line a bit higher than mine. Still limping a bit, he hands me a glass, puts his on the table and relaxes into his favourite armchair.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he says. “Just bashed my foot against that damned gas cylinder. Can you remember that we didn’t always have that in the centre of the living room?”

  “I remember.”

  He holds his glass out to mine and says “cheers” like he is pretending to be British, and clinks my glass. “No,” he says, “still doesn’t work for me. Sahtak.” To your health. To clinking Baba’s glass again. He sips and I sip and I tell myself that this time, I’ll drink it like a man and it’s not going to make me shudder. Baba sighs, as if a little air has been let out of an over-pumped tyre.

  “It seems you’re keeping yourself very busy with this journalist friend,” he says. “But don’t you think it’s dangerous?”

  “Isn’t it dangerous wherever you go now?”

  “If you were teaching it wouldn’t be as dangerous.”

  I taste some more, let it burn the insides of my mouth. The whisky goes down hot, like sweet soup. It makes me shudder, against my best efforts to sit steady, like Baba. I still cannot s
ee what makes people find this so pleasurable. But somehow I’m glad for a moment like this with Baba.

  “Ziad got through on the phone today,” he says.

  “Oh, is the phone working again? How are they? Are they going to come for a visit?”

  “Not for a while.”

  I knew the answer. Maybe I asked the question because it’s a subtle way of making Ziad look bad, of reminding Baba that his beloved Ziad left, and that I’m still here.

  “I told him what you were out doing,” says Baba. “He says he’s afraid you’ll be accused of being a collaborator. He said if he were me, he’d demand you quit immediately. ‘He shouldn’t be working with some American whore,’” Baba quotes in a sardonic tone.

  “It’s not like that, Baba. Not at all.”

  He swirls the whisky in his glass and puts his nose down into it, inhaling slowly. “But he’s got a point. And if the school wants you—”

  I say nothing.

  “I didn’t think you’d agree,” he says. “If she weren’t beautiful, would you quit?”

  “That’s not what this is about.”

  “I hope not.” Baba puts two fingers on his temples and rubs in circles. He sniffs, tips his glass back a bit more, and after a minute, tosses back the rest. “So what are you doing out there? Are you reporting on what the Americans are up to?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Are they going to rebuild things soon? All the damaged buildings?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “They have to take control and stop all the chaos and the crime. They should go back and arrest all the criminals they let out of Abu Ghraib.”

  “Saddam let them out, Baba.” I breathe in the whisky, enjoying the scent of fermented alcohol, though I can’t stand to drink another drop.

  “So what’s the Americans’ game plan? Did you find out when they’re going to appoint a new Iraqi president? I guess it’ll be like Karzai in Afghanistan, where they just put their favourite man in charge. Or do you think there’ll be elections first?”

  “No one really knows.” I wish I liked alcohol. Maybe it would make it easier to talk to Baba. “There’s a new American being sent out to Iraq and he’s saying maybe by next year, or something like that.”

  “So what are you really working on? You must be spending all those hours working on something, and it’s not the things I’m asking about.”

  What harm could be done? If I can’t trust Baba, then who?

  He sits watching me, waiting.

  “Actually, we’re doing an investigative story.”

  “Isn’t that what a journalist is supposed to be doing all the time?”

  “This is different. We’re spending a lot of time trying to get the answers to one big story that seems very important to her editors.”

  “And?”

  “It’s about Saddam paying millions of dollars to a politician in America so he would have a supporter there who would be critical of President Bush. The newspaper has documents to prove it. But now they don’t know if the documents are real or fake.”

  “That’s what you’re working on?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were just making basic little reports about what the Americans are doing here and there.”

  “No. More than that.” Suddenly I long to be back in bed, to have not been woken up by Baba’s fall. Maybe it’s stupid of me to be telling him any of this. Maybe it will only make them more worried for me.

  My father picks up my glass. “You’re not going to finish this, are you?”

  “You have it.”

  Baba holds the glass up and makes a small circle with it. He puts it up to his lips, but then puts it down again. “It’s amazing that two sons from the same family can be so different.”

  Here it is, that thing my father does, thinking he’s saying something so revealing for the very first time, when in fact, he’s said it a hundred times before.

  “Leil o-nhar. Night and day, you and your brother. It’s okay. You don’t have to like the things I like.”

  What things, I want to say. What things? Hospitals? Drinking? Does it occur to Baba that, by all accounts, life in France has made Ziad more religious, not less, and that he probably hasn’t tasted alcohol in years?

  “I have a suggestion for you. Go to see your cousin Saleh in Amiriya.”

  “Why?” Saleh and I only see each other at big family events: weddings and funerals.

  “Yes, as soon as possible. Go and see him.”

  “He was just some manager in a UN office under Saddam, Baba. I doubt he knows a thing about what’s going on now.”

  “You may be surprised. He had very good relations with Saddam and all sorts of international officials through the UN. Maybe he can help you. He’s really well-connected.”

  I say yes, perhaps I’ll go soon, because what else can I say? But I won’t go. I won’t go because we have too many other things to do, and this story to report. Surely, if I told Sam she would say it was a waste of time. I move to pick up the glasses so I can take them into the kitchen, but Baba puts his hand over the one that’s not empty, with fingers that say, I’m not finished. He will stay here. I say goodnight, and he says, yes, goodnight. And soon I’m back in bed and in my head I see Baba’s hand with its wiry hair across the knuckles, holding fast to his glass like someone might take it from him.

  ~ * ~

  20

  Holding

  I awoke from a strange dream about Sam. We were in the back of the Impala, holding each other, as it swerved on a wide-open highway. I realized we were both in the back and no one was at the wheel. Sam started to scream and I woke up, swimming in sweat.

  Something about the dream is nagging me, making me feel like listening to my father’s advice for a change. Last night, I went to sleep sure that Baba’s suggestion was nonsensical. This morning it seems like the most logical thing in the world.

  And so after a short cab ride, I find myself at Saleh’s front door, where a guard or servant of some sort answers. Saleh soon appears, well-dressed for work in a tailored suit. He is angular and distinguished-looking despite his short height, almost like Hashemite royalty. He has a compactness and a darkness that might, on a less graceful man, be judged by some Iraqis to indicate a lower-class status. I would never like to admit to Sam or another foreigner that skin tone matters to us so much, but it does, although this contradicts the teachings of Islam. The swarthier you are, the more likely it is for people to assume you come from fellahin, farm people. Peasant stock, they called that in England. Skin-lightening cream is a popular product among Iraqi women.

  The only thing that looks different about Saleh since last I saw him two years ago is that he has grown a short beard, and it makes him seem older than his age, which is somewhere around forty.

  ~ * ~

  The moment I tell him I’m on my way to the Hamra Hotel, where the journalist I’m working with is staying, he insists on driving me there — apparently so he can bend my ear far away from his home as he proceeds to confide in me about his troubles. His wife, Ashtar, has been seeking advice from a mystic sheikh because in their more than eight years of marriage, they have not had any children. This mystic, who calls himself Ibn Suhrawardi after a famous Sufi master who died in the thirteenth century, is advising Ashtar that the couple must return to Islam.

  “I didn’t know we left it,” Saleh jokes, pounding on his horn for a slow driver to move faster.

  “Ashtar’s been haranguing me to grow my facial hair, especially now that it is much more acceptable, now that Ba’athists are out and beards are in.” He reaches over and rubs his knuckles teasingly against my close shave.

  “Ashtar also says Ibn Suhrawardi has advised her to adopt a new Muslim name, Aisha, because Ashtar is a pre-Islamic name from the Jahiliye, the period of ignorance before the Holy Koran was revealed, and perhaps that has angered God,” Saleh continues. “Or, he says, it mig
ht have attracted a jinn who’s now following her and cursing her womb. If she changes her name, it will be as if she is a new person, and the jinn will become confused and go away.”

  He waits for my reaction.

  “Yaani, she’s driving me a little crazy,” he groans as he drives towards Karada, the annoyingly long way around, since the 14th of July Bridge is still closed by the US military.

  “I love the woman, so I’m trying to indulge her. I only allowed her to start making visits to the mystic when she began having nightmares. She had always had vivid dreams. Now she was waking up in a terror, saying that she dreamt that the UN building where I work was blown up, killing everyone inside.” Saleh brakes, the rush hour traffic up ahead coagulating into a jam. “What do you make of that?”