Pushing
I’m late, late, and late. I’m not the kind of man who is late, who likes to be late, who thinks it’s fine when other people are late. Of all days to sleep late!
Not that it was without reason. I came home last night and threw up twice more. I got up in the middle of the night, thinking I might be sick again, and instead passed out in the hallway. Apparently it woke up Baba and Amal, whose door I hit on the way down, but not my mother, who slept through the commotion. I told Baba I had eaten something bad. He made me drink a glass of water with sugar and salt in it, which tastes downright strange but always puts me right again, and then put me to bed. Amal must have shut off my alarm clock after I went to sleep.
And now, close to 10 a.m., I am finally heading out to meet Sam, filled with some eggs and fresh samoun my mother made me, cursing the fact that I can’t call to say I am running late. I promise my parents that I am perfectly fine. I am not sick, I just ate something bad. As I move towards the door, Mum moves in the other direction, heading to my room and the bathroom to do what promises to be an antiseptic cleaning job, as if I had the plague rather than an upset stomach. Amal, seeing that I wasn’t going to stay home despite my illness last night, went back to her room, a rather sad place for a fourteen-year-old to be at 10 a.m. on a weekday. But they’ve already decided that her school, unlike Mansour High School, is not reopening until the autumn.
“I want to ask you something.” Baba is sitting in his favourite chair. It seems he took the morning off to check that I was doing all right.
“Yeah, Baba?” My back is to him, and my hand, just a few inches from the knob of the front door.
“Can you come back here so I can ask you?”
“Sure.” There’s a part of me that would like to tell him I’m not up to it, I’m still not feeling so well, and most importantly, I’m running late. I turn around, a squish of inner cheek caught between my teeth. “They are waiting for me at work, Baba,” I say, glancing at the mantle clock.
“We’ve barely had a conversation all week,” he says.
“It’s been a busy week.”
Suddenly I realize that I sound just like him. All these years, it was Baba who wasn’t around because he was busy at the hospital, who couldn’t always keep regular hours because there were patients who needed tending. But teaching at school, we always knew that was something that had regular hours. That was controlled. That wasn’t about life and death.
I take a seat on the sofa, next to Baba’s armchair. He blows on his tea.
“What’s going on, Nabil?”
I shake my head. “Just busy. You know, she takes me on many, many interviews. It’s tiring, but very interesting. We’re still following up on that story I told you about.”
“And what? Haven’t you found anything yet?”
I look into Baba’s tea cup. The amber colour reminds me of Sam’s eyes. “Not really.”
“No?” Baba sips. “You didn’t have any tea this morning. What kind of day can a man expect to have if he hasn’t first had his tea?”
“The eggs were enough,” I say, putting my hand to my stomach. “I’m glad I managed to eat anything.”
“Tea’s good after you’ve been sick.”
“I don’t want to be late.”
“Some delays bring the best rewards,” he says, quoting a motto in fusha, high literary Arabic.
“I can always have tea somewhere later.”
My father clears his throat, and in it, I can hear something disapproving.
“I want to ask you about working with this journalist. This... Samara. What’s her family name again?”
“Katchens. She goes by Sam.”
“Do you know a lot about her?”
I lift a shoulder, release it. “I know enough. She’s a very good journalist. And very serious, very modest. Not like a lot of the Western women at the hotel.”
“They aren’t modest?”
“Well, they run around the pool in their little swimsuits and it doesn’t look very good. The Iraqis who work there think they’re practically prostitutes.”
My father looks at me hard, swirling the bottom half of the tea in its glass, making a whirlpool. “That’s just ignorance. It’s different in the West.”
“I know. I was there, too, remember?”
He smiles. “It was lovely, there, wasn’t it? Maybe we should have stayed in England after all.”
“Could we have? Was that an option?”
Baba yawns, covering his mouth as an afterthought. “Not really. Our parents were still alive. They needed us. Besides, we thought that if we stayed, we’d never be able to come back. That’s what happens to people who leave. They get stuck, living in exile. Sucking off someone else’s economy, living in someone else’s culture. It’s not for me.” He sniffs, curls his lip. “I don’t know how your brother does it.”
I check my watch. “I really need to go, Baba. We have interviews.”
He leans his left elbow on the chair’s arm, and lowers his voice as though he’s afraid someone might hear. “Tell me,” he says, his tea-breath right into my nose and eyes. “Is it true this Samara is Jewish?”
I can feel the floor falling out from under me, the clockhands spinning behind my head. I try to look mildly surprised by the question. “Who told you that?”
Baba unfolds the letter, slightly more crumpled than before. “Found this,” he says. “It must have fallen out of your trousers when you got undressed last night.”
I stare at the paper until the words blur. “No, I put that letter back in my pocket after I read it. I’m sure of it.”
“Well it wound up on the floor somehow.”
“I don’t believe you. You went through my things while I was in the shower? How could you do that?”
“Drop it, Nabil. It doesn’t matter how I found it. The main thing is, it seems that someone is trying to scare you by letting you know she’s Jewish.”
I focus on my father’s face, on the lines in his forehead that are becoming like bars, a checkpoint that keeps anyone from entering. His eyes are searching mine, flitting back and forth as if doing a scan.
“She’s not even really Jewish, Baba. Just half, or something like that.”
My father stares back at me. Didn’t he once tell me that he had a lot of friends growing up who were Jewish? They went to the Frank Eini School together, which was even run by Jews, and was considered one of the best secondary schools in Baghdad. He said he was sad when most of them left, and even sadder when a whole round of those who stayed were hung in 1968. He never said by whom. Were hung. Passive construction: the mu-form in Arabic. Muqatil — was killed. One who receives the action, who has it done to him. It was always safer to speak that way. Then you never had to say who did the hanging.
“It’s not that I would mind, Nabil, it’s just that it makes it more dangerous for her. And for you.”
“But it’s not even true, Baba. She’s not really Jewish.”
“So why are these people saying she is?”
“You know. It’s a way to try to threaten her, to scare her away from her work.”
“And it’s not working?” Baba hands the letter to me, and picks up the As-Sabah newspaper from the small table next to his chair. He unfolds a few pages as if he is browsing, though I’m sure he can’t be focusing on much. “If you want to go running around town making a new career for yourself as a journalist, maybe you should work for a paper like this. At least work for an Iraqi paper, not an American one.”
“What’s it matter?”
“If you worked for Iraqis you wouldn’t have these problems,” he says. “Personally, I don’t care if she’s Jewish. I always liked the Jews. Pity they all left. But you know everyone here isn’t like me.”
But they are, Baba. They’re exactly like you. Saying they don’t have anything against anyone — the Jews, the Kurds, the Christians, the Americans, the Iranians, the Shi’ites, t
he Sunnis, the religious, the secular. The Yezidis, the Chaldeans, the bourgeoisie, the felaheen. The people who aren’t exactly like us. But it’s always the same. They are always they; they are almost never individuals. I am guilty of the same thing. Everything Sam does that I don’t understand, I explain by assuming it must be something Americans do.
Why do I need to lie to my own father like this, keeping half the story from him? This is what Iraq has done to us. Fathers had to lie to their sons to avoid saying something that might get them in trouble with the mukhabarat. Sons know what not to tell their fathers.
“I should get going, Baba,” I say, rising. “I have a lot to do today.”
He closes As-Sabah, tossing it into the bin of yesterday’s newspapers. “You didn’t want to read this, did you?”
“No, I’ve already read that one.”
“I’m just worried that you’re not being careful enough,” he says. He examines a smear of grey print on his fingertips, rubbing them together with a look of distaste on his face. “If you’re going to be a journalist, maybe you can publish your own paper, and then, at least do a decent job of it. These new ones are always dirtying up my hands.”
~ * ~
45
Dirty
Late, and still later, I keep thinking as I trot up the steps of the Hamra. Too late to see Saleh again. Too late to go out and get a gun of my own. Too late to do anything but hurry over to Mansour and find a taxi, and Sam will be waiting, wondering what in the world took me so long. Too late to stop and buy her a gift, since apparently she is leaving soon.
From Rafik’s desk, I call up to Sam’s room.
“Is everything all right?” Not where were you and why are you late, though I can hear a tone of those, too.
“Yes,” I say. “Sorry I’m late.”
“It’s fine. I’ll be down in five, ten minutes.”
“I’ll wait for you here.” Five, ten minutes. Never right now. No matter how much later I am than I have promised to be, Sam is never ready anyway. Five, ten. Enough time to chat with the Shi’ite taxi driver I asked Rafik to arrange for me — in large part to stop his nagging for us to diversify our cadre of employees -and maybe just enough to find something small in the giftshop.
The taxi, a Dodge that must be more than twenty years old, feels odd, like clothes that don’t fit. Perhaps it’s only that in all the time I’ve known Sam, we’ve never travelled like this, in a regular orange-and-white cab, like two ordinary people. I have this feeling that she’s far away, even though she’s only in the back seat, like I want to be closer to her, protecting her, to find it easier to look her in the eye.
In my sideview mirror I can see Rizgar, following in a car he borrowed from one of his relatives, a beat-up old maroon Chrysler. Our driver, Ibrahim, seems competent enough. If we are going to go out without our own car, I figured, we can at least be in a taxi with a driver we have some connection to, in some small way.
I introduce him to Sam but I notice that he only smiles and doesn’t say it’s nice to meet you or anything of the sort. It seems that he doesn’t speak a word of English, which is something of a relief. Just in case, I decide to test it out.
“You have the ugliest car I have ever seen,” I say to him as we wind through outer Karada, away from the Hamra. He nods, glances in the mirror towards Sam, who has her head wrapped up in a pale-blue scarf I took from my mother’s wardrobe. When I asked Sam the other day if she had a headscarf, she said she had two. I asked her to show me, and she modelled each of them: one black and one white. In black, she looked like a member of the Badr Brigade from Iran, which for reasons I don’t know, produces people with fair skin and unusual eye colour. In white, she looked like a Sunni from some Eastern European country, like Bosnia. I decided she needed to wear a colour, so that wherever Mustapha was planning to take us, Sam wouldn’t be suspected of being pro-Sunni or pro-Shi’ite.
“So have you cleaned this car in the last five years? Or are you just letting the dust pile up to the point where it will feel like sitting on a beach?”
“Nabil,” Sam admonishes, pushing at my seat. “Stop it.”
I look back at her, hoping she would laugh with me. “It was just a joke. I’m testing to see if he knows any English so we can talk.”
“And?”
“Not a word.”
“Just hallo?”
“Hallo is goodbye.”
“I know. I’ve been here for almost two months, remember?”
Once, as I was passing by the pool, I overheard some journalists laughing about how often Iraqis finish a conversation by saying, “hallo”, when what they actually mean is “goodbye”.
I check in the side-view mirror again, and cannot find Rizgar. I turn around and see that he’s a few cars behind, but still there.
~ * ~
It’s a hot day and I feel my body growing clammy as we drive with the windows open. I wonder how it is that I convinced Sam to do this, when I should be getting her to reconsider the risks, to resist the urge to follow every lead. Maybe I am just like Rizgar. I don’t help her make decisions, I help make her decisions possible.
In Mum’s light-blue scarf, then, whom does Sam resemble? A Russian lady? Or maybe one of those Western converts you sometimes see, married to rich Gulfies?
Or maybe a Jewish girl. Would a religious woman wear a scarf like that? Maybe that’s what it is about Samara that fascinates me, that makes me want to keep looking at her even after I know I should turn away. The colour of her hair is so foreign, Western, shouting agnabiyeh. But something in the shape of her eyes, in her cheekbones and in the length of her nose, seems Eastern, familiar. Semitic.
Ibrahim winds around Al-Wathiq Square, where some of the traditional gift shops are. I’ve been thinking that if Sam is actually going to leave Iraq, I should find a special souvenir for her. But what would be appropriate? She would probably consider a carpet to be too much. Too expensive, too cumbersome to carry home. We have many great painters, but it is hard to know what she would like. She once joked that she would like to go home with one of those Saddam wristwatches, which I found hard to understand. If the Americans dislike Saddam so much, how could anyone in America wear a watch with his picture on it?
When I turn back to ask her whether this is still what she wants, a totally different question comes to mind.
“Sam? What does Samara mean? I mean, where does the name come from?”
Sam slides towards the centre of the back seat, so she is a little closer to me.
“You really want to know?”
“Of course I do.”
“It says a lot about my parents, who they were when they named me.”
“So?”
“Samara means guarded by God. In Hebrew,” she says, lowering her voice. “Actually, I’m told the Hebrew version of it would be shamar-ya. But in Latin,” she smiles gently, “it means elm tree.”
I turn my body around as much as it can go without seeming too awkward. “Elm tree. In Latin?”
“Yes, well, Latin for my mother. I told you, she was raised Catholic.”
I must not have given the appropriate expression of getting it.
“Latin, you know, that’s the language of the Catholic mass. It was, well, I guess you can say it still is, the Catholic religious language.”
“Oh, right.”
“Samara was really my Dad’s choice. And my Mom went for it because it meant something nice in Latin, and she liked the way it sounded.”
I try to combine this in my mind: a meaning so steeped in God it seems Islamic, and on the other hand, a tree I’ve never seen. “What does an elm tree look like?”
“An elm?” She shrugs. “I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s just a regular green, leafy tree you have on nearly every street in America. Or in Pennsylvania, anyway. In fact, a famous peace treaty between William Penn and the local Native Americans was signed under a huge, old elm tree.
“Samara, is that a popular name?”
“No,” she says. “In fact, not at all. I think I’ve only met one other Samara in my whole life, though I know there are others out there. It’s not just a place in Iraq, you know. It’s also a city in Russia, and there’s a river there called Samara, too. My father’s family came from there.”
“From Russia? I thought you said Germany.”
“I did,” she says. “His father’s side was from there. But his mother’s side was from Russia. That’s where I got this.” Sam puts her hand to her head with open fingers, as if she expected to run them through her hair. She pats the headscarf instead, fiddling with the edge of it. “My bubbe had the same hair. And of course, my mother’s Irish Catholic, so I probably get it from both sides.”
Baghdad Fixer Page 44
