Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  “It’s fine that you ask,” she says. “I do want those things. I know I don’t have forever.” She licks her lips, a shine on them from the buttery pastry.

  “I just think you would make a really wonderful mother.”

  Sam steals a glance at me, and then out of the window. She looks like she might cry. But very quickly, whatever tears that had almost been born are aborted. Her eyes wait with a thin gloss, like the one on her lips. “Thanks, Nabil. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

  “Really? Ever?”

  She is quiet for a moment. “Okay, ever since this war began.” We both smile and she gives a small nod of her head in the direction of the waiters, which I can read as the sign for me to get the bill. “But look,” she says in an undertone. “Before we bring babies into the picture, I need to know who cooked up these documents. So can we get going?” She seems almost embarrassed now, a pinkness in her face that perhaps I brought on without intending it. She folds one hand into another, the right gently turning the left sideways to allow her another quick glance at her watch.

  ~ * ~

  31

  Turning

  Saleh said this Khalil was a real professional, one of the best in the business. Long before he got on Saddam’s bad side, Khalil made up reams of fake Ministry of Health documents to show inflated numbers of Iraqi children dying due to the sanctions. Had those numbers been correct, more than one in five Iraqi children would have died for lack of food or medicine due to America’s insistence on slapping sanctions on the sale of Iraqi oil. After the UN dismissed a whole batch of documents as complete fabrications, somewhere around 1998 or 1999, Saddam had Khalil arrested and dragged over to Abu Ghraib. There, Saleh explained to me, Khalil was tortured for failing to do his job correctly. Several months later, after they let him go, he went to work for the underground opposition, most of them based abroad. His skills, he realized, were in demand from a better-paying clientele who didn’t break their suppliers’ fingers if the final product flopped.

  Given such an introduction, Khalil’s appearance isn’t at all what I expected. Did I imagine a suit and tie, perhaps a proper receptionist? Little pens and scalpels sticking out of his shirt pocket? Khalil Ibn Khaldoun’s office is just a mid-sized dukkan, a small convenience store where people get their milk and eggs and biscuits.

  He watches us walk in, and makes a noise with his tongue like someone calling a cat. A young man who looks just like him, only taller and less textured by time, joins him behind the counter. As we get closer, I realize that it isn’t just lines on Khalil’s face, but a patchwork of scars. Moreover, the entire tip of his right ear is missing, curved and scarred into a knobby flap of skin. Of all the things that can happen to a person in Abu Ghraib, I suppose this is like...what did they call that back at school in England? A rap on the knuckles.

  The father and son look at each other like their conversation needs no more than a round of eye contact and a lift of Khalil’s chin in the direction of the door. Khalil’s son walks to the entrance and locks the door, turning a deadlock. He twists a plastic baton that makes the dirty blinds close their eyelids to block out the light.

  “For your protection,” Khalil says. “You never know what kind of thugs and troublemakers could have seen you come in here with the nice foreign lady.”

  “Maluum!’ Of course. “Maluum,” I say again, wishing I had only said it once. I nod to Sam that this is a good idea, but her eyes speak other words to me, just the way Khalil’s did with his son: I don’t like it one bit.

  “Please,” says Khalil, pointing towards the door at the end of the aisle, near the cash register. “The office in which we do business is downstairs.”

  Sam seems to hesitate but I smile at her a little and blink slowly, signalling that it’s all right. Saleh wouldn’t have sent me here if he didn’t think it was safe.

  Khalil holds the door open and makes a gentlemanly gesture for us to enter ahead of him, and I feel that he must have had a better education than I had thought, because not everybody in my country knows that in the West it is considered polite to let ladies go first. On the contrary, it can be read as a sign of disrespect. By putting a woman in the vulnerable position of entering the room first, one might signal that she does not merit the protection of those accompanying her.

  We walk down the concrete steps, dim and mangy around the edges, and then I feel my shoulders fall with relief. The downstairs is clean and has all the trappings of a real office: a fax machine, modern telephones with LCD displays, several filing cabinets with labels on them, and two slanted drawing tables I would expect to see in an architect’s studio. Lodged in the wall is a large white air conditioner, continuously exhaling a cool, comforting hiss. I pray that Khalil doesn’t notice me exhale, too, as if only now do I trust that nothing terrible awaits us in his basement.

  “The lady will have tea?” he asks.

  “Sure,” she brightens. “Thank you very much.”

  “Talata chai!” He calls out for three glasses of tea, and suddenly I can hear someone rustling in the adjacent room. It irks me that I cannot tell how big the office actually is, or who else is here. He offers us a small black leather sofa that sometimes is called a loveseat.

  There is just enough space between us to ensure the appearance of modesty, though I consider switching to the armchair so the thought that Sam could be my girlfriend will not even cross Khalil’s mind. But it would be odd to move now, and anyway, sticking close to Sam seems more important.

  Khalil excuses himself for a moment, and we sit in silence, knowing there is nothing for us to say, worth the risk of being overheard. From the corner of my eye I watch Sam’s profile, the straight, gracious slope of her nose and the fullness of her lips, the silhouette of her eyelashes in the slight shadow she casts on the wall next to her. The lighting is oddly attached by a lamp in the corner as if an afterthought, reminding me that such a basement was never intended for an office. There are no windows, and therefore, no natural light. Sam’s eyes dart sideways at me, asking, Do you think it’s okay? A few purposeful dips of my eyebrows shoot back, Don’t worry. But Sam does seem worried. Her eyes are somewhere else, as if studying a picture I cannot see.

  Khalil comes back into the room, this time with a stocky man with a neck only a little less wide than his back. In his huge hands, he carries a stack of documents as thick as three or four Korans. Khalil nods at the coffee table and his friend puts the files down on it. As he does, I notice the revolver tucked into the back of his trousers, inside his belt. I try to acknowledge him but he does not respond, and Khalil does not bother with introductions.

  Instead, Khalil sits down in a large leather chair that matches the other furniture, except that it rolls and swivels. He rotates back and forth for a moment and looks at us. Then he leans back and closes his eyes, as if considering taking a quick nap before our conversation.

  He sits up quickly, eyes refreshed.

  “So, Mrs Katchens. You are interested in the documents we are making.”

  Sam smiles with her mouth half open, hesitates, and then answers. “Uh, yes, Mr Khaldoun, we are.” I am relieved Sam does not correct Khalil and insist on being called Ms or Miss. Maybe it’s better for them to think she’s married.

  I did not expect Khalil to speak much English at all, although perhaps that was shortsighted of me. I scan the walls of the office. No pictures of any of the new leaders, neither secular nor Islamic. No posters, no paintings, no Kaaba, no Dome of the Rock, no holy men, no calendar. Just one clock, its steely edges oxidizing in the underground humidity, ticking loudly.

  “You want to know about the documents of General Akram. Is this to be the correct thing?” He smiles with teeth fighting a losing battle against decay, like coffee steadily overtaking the milk-white. He is directing his words straight at Sam, and that makes me angry. I want him to treat me as her wasta, her middle man. Maybe even like her wali, like her brother or father, like
someone in charge of her safety. I want Khalil Ibn Khaldoun to at least recognize I am here to protect Sam, a young American journalist sitting in the basement of a locked grocery store in Sadr City, and yet he is acting as though I’m hardly here.

  “That’s right,” Sam says.

  “Well, this is the kind of information that I could make available to you — for a price. You are willing to pay a price for the information you require?”

  Sam hesitates. “I don’t know. It would depend on what you’re offering.”

  “I’m offering what you’re asking for.”

  That’s the problem, Sam must be thinking. You’ll concoct exactly what you think I want. Perhaps that’s what happened to Harris.

  Khalil runs his hand over the sides of his face, which seem so bumpy that I wonder why he doesn’t grow a beard. Perhaps he likes people to see his scars, the way other men like to wear a lot of stripes and medals on their military uniforms. His fingernails are uneven and dark, I assume from working with ink.

  “Why don’t you give me two days to find out what I can for you,” he says. “I will do my research, and you will do yours, so you can be certain of what you need, and how much you need it.” He turns to me. “Wadih?” he asks. Clear? He sounds the way I used to when I was giving out an assignment to my students. “It is good that you came.”

  With that Khalil rises, his hand gesturing to the stairs in the manner of a busy waiter seating us at a restaurant.

  ~ * ~

  Outside, Sam exhales as if she’s been holding her breath from the moment we walked into Khalil’s storefront. She takes deep gulps of air and lets them out, sounding like someone who has just finished running.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” she says, pulling at Rizgar’s front passenger door. She steps back with a shock. There’s a young man sitting in her seat. Rizgar points to the backseat and we get in.

  “Sorry, Miss Samara,” Rizgar smiles pleadingly. “This cousin mine, Hoshyar.”

  Rizgar tells me to tell Sam that he just ran into his young cousin and that he needs a ride home, and he hopes she doesn’t mind. Sam shrugs and says fine, if he’s a cousin after all, and she tugs at her headscarf as we pull away. She looks at me for a hint of disagreement, and though I wonder what his Kurdish cousin just happens to have been doing here, I hold my face in place and simply smile back.

  They engage in a low chatter of Kurdish, making sounds which, I am ashamed to say, sound like utter nonsense to me. It’s hard to believe so many people in our country speak a language other than Arabic, and that the rest of us cannot understand a word they’re saying.

  As we leave Sadr City, Sam takes off her headscarf. She shakes her head, beginning to breathe normally again. “That was bad news.”

  “With Khalil? Yes, I didn’t like him either. He doesn’t seem honest.”

  “Not just that.” Sam turns to me. “I started feeling like I was going to choke. Did I tell you that I have a bit of claustrophobia?”

  “Claustro—no. That’s when you are afraid of crowded places, right?”

  “Something like that. I used to feel that too, but I got over it. The only thing that I still kind of have a problem with is small, enclosed places where there’s not a lot of fresh air, and in particular, no windows. I can’t stand to be underground, or in rooms without windows.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? What happens?”

  “Nothing. I can deal with it now,” she says, making lines through the fog her breath made on the window.

  “What about in the lift? You take lifts, don’t you?”

  “Elevators? Well, yeah, I used to have a problem with that. In fact, they think that’s how it started. I once got stuck in an elevator as a kid for a really long time.” She opens the ashtray at the back of her seat, now filled by Hoshyar. She snaps it shut a little too hard, and when Hoshyar turns around to look at her, she smiles tartly back at him. “Didn’t you notice I always take the stairs if I can? At least there’s movement there — vertical space. You know you’re probably not going to get stuck.”

  I nod. Other than the two occasions I’ve seen her shed tears — once out of worry for Jonah and then in that moment when she was reminded of Jack — this is the first time I’ve seen something to indicate that Sam might not be the most invincible woman on earth.

  “But I learned this visualization technique. I just stare off into space and imagine I’m standing at the edge of the ocean, looking out at the wide, blue horizon, and then I can get through anything. Sometimes I tap on my forehead and it grounds me. Or sometimes I see myself lying on my favourite old sofa, floating down a river and watching the clouds in the sky.”

  Such imaginings don’t seem at all like Sam. Moreover, a sofa on the river would sink. I’m waiting for her to laugh, but she looks dead serious.

  “Does all that really work?” I ask.

  “Sure it does!” She seems surprised by my doubt. “But you have to train yourself to do it.”

  I wonder if, next time I feel I might faint, I can imagine Sam’s river and stay afloat. “Can you put a boat in the picture?”

  Sam breathes hot air on the window, then draws the crescent and triangle of a stick-figure sailboat. “It’s your imagination, Nabil. You get to do whatever you want.” She puts her hand flat on the window and drags it down, erasing everything.

  ~ * ~

  32

  Erasing

  Sam sent me off in the late afternoon with some errands to do, told me to take some time for “lunch or dinner or whatever it is you eat this time of day”, and asked me to come back at around seven to “check in”. I had thought that term referred to one’s arrival at a hotel, but now I realize it can mean something else entirely. So it seems that check-in time should probably be an appropriate moment to let Sam know that General Akram appears to be looking for her. I don’t know which of today’s events felt more uncomfortable: the feeling that we could have been trapped in Khalil’s basement, or running into Suleiman es-Surie in the supermarket.

  But when I walk into Sam’s room, carrying the case of Coke she asked me to pick up while I was out, she appears to be holding three other conversations. One on the satellite phone, where she’s on some kind of conference call with several people at the newspaper; one on the hotel phone, where she’s pleading with the restaurant to send up the room service she ordered an hour ago; and a third at the computer itself, where her fingers are playing the keyboard with great nimbleness.

  She doesn’t seem to notice me reading over her shoulder, watching her sign off. Things are fine...I just don’t have time to talk. Don’t worry about me. Love you, Sami.

  I wonder if she is writing to Jonah. Or maybe her mother. She exits out of the screen and swirls around in her chair.

  “Nabil! Shlonik, Habibi?” she chirps. Her Arabic pronunciation, I’ve noticed, is better than many other Americans. But the few words she knows are often too informal for a newcomer to the language. My boss, the woman who pays my salary, calling me habibi, my love. “Give me two minutes.”

  “You wanted me to come back, right?”

  “Yes, of course. I need two, no, ten minutes to finish up here.”

  “Sam, we need to talk about the story.”

  “Right now?”

  I study her face closely, and the reddened rims of her eyes. I try to imagine what goes on in her head when she is racing towards a deadline or towards some other goal. She’s like one of those runners who grab cups of water from anonymous people along the sidelines of a marathon without ever stopping to thank them, to look at their faces in return. I wonder whether in Sam’s life, I am like one of those anonymous people passing cups to a tired runner, or whether I will be more like one of those people at the finish line, someone Sam will throw her arms around after the race is over.

  “No,” I say, “not this very minute.”

  “Well, look, the editors want some answers from me about what we’
ve found so far. A memo. I mean, they wanted it yesterday. And I need to eat. Can you wait down by the pool for a little while and read a book or something until I finish this memo and get some room service before I faint?”

  “Sure, Sam. I’ll come back in a bit.”

  “Wait, Nabil, don’t you want to eat, too?”

  “I ate. You told me I could get dinner and come back, remember?”

  “Oh, right.” She looks at her watch, and sees it’s after 7:00. “But that was at about 4:30. Can you eat dinner so early after schlepping around in this heat?”

  I shrug. The truth is I went to visit Saleh again and had a late lunch with him. Then I stopped to pick up Sam’s Coke, and found myself face-to-face with Suleiman es-Surie, who was wondering why we hadn’t been back to visit.

  Sam pops open a can of Coke and suggests I take one too, but I hold up my hand to say no thank you. In this respect, she has a palate just like I imagined Americans would. I tell her that the owner of the store, who has been profiting from the arrival of so many foreigners, promises they will be getting Diet Coke in a week. She seems to find the prospect thrilling.