Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  The circle stretches wider, the groan grows louder, the propellers disappear into a blur. A mission to save Sam is born, defying gravity and mischievous boys, who leap up to catch a ride on the landing skids before being yanked down by older brothers. We watch them lift into the sky, the children waving, the dust-cloud thickening, the noise deafening. I feel it coming, that sensation as if I am losing my balance. I press my hand into my forehead to try to make it stop.

  Inside, Sheikh Mumtaz and Hassan force me to drink a third cup of tea and a bowl of vegetable soup made by the lady of the house, whom I’ve not met.

  “Are you sure you want to go back now?” Sheikh Mumtaz asks again.

  I sip the tea, of which I’ve had more than enough, wishing I could find a way to dump it without their noticing. My hands are shaking, probably from having had too much of it. Too much of other things as well. “Yes, I should go home.”

  “But you passed out,” he insists. “Maybe you are not feeling well because of the accident. And the shock of your ladyfriend being injured. Maybe you should rest here.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I always pass out.”

  “Always?” Sheikh Mumtaz seems baffled.

  “Not always. Just at inappropriate times.” I smile to show it is a joke, but he doesn’t smile back. “It’s a problem I have.”

  “I see,” he says. “So for you this is a natural response to such a terrible event.”

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Rest for now,” he says. “When you’re sure you feel up to travelling, Hassan will drive you back to Baghdad.”

  “There’s no chance I can take my father’s car?”

  Hassan laughs. “The one we found you in back there?”

  “Stop,” Sheikh Mumtaz whispers angrily, “can’t you see he’s confused? Let him rest.”

  And because they insist, I do, laying out on the long floor cushions and folding my hands over my stomach, hardly able to listen to the last thing the Sheikh says.

  ~ * ~

  Sam and I are running up the steps of the Malwiya, laughing, out of breath, and she keeps trying to run away from me, and when I catch up and try to grab her, I almost push her over the unprotected edge. How could I be so careless?

  And then I wake up with a rush of fear, sitting up to find a young teenage boy watching me, and running off as soon as I am up. “Baba?” he calls. “Baba! He’s awake.” Sheikh Mumtaz appears at the door to what I presume is the rest of the house, its private quarters, and Hassan follows.

  It all comes back to me, the tumbling, the tinkling of glass over our heads. I wonder if Sam is already safely in Germany. From the light outside, I can see it’s early morning. I can hardly believe I’ve been sleeping since yesterday. Maybe they put a drug in my tea. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I must get back home.”

  “It’s very early,” Sheikh Mumtaz says. “You should have a little more rest.”

  “Please. I must contact my family. Please take me home.”

  “They don’t have a Thuraya phone you can call?” He sits down across from me, but Hassan remains standing.

  “No,” I say. “No one I know in Baghdad has one, except for foreigners.” Then again, Mustapha had one, and Technical Ali must have, too. “Or maybe some of the politicians. And the criminals.”

  “Do you find it necessary to differentiate?”

  I smile at his joke. Until now, he didn’t seem at all like the cynical type. “My parents only have a landline.”

  He clucks. “That won’t do. Thurayas can’t call those.”

  “You must have good contacts with the military that you were able to get them to come here so quickly.”

  “I believe in remaining on good terms with everyone. We are not strong enough now to fight the Americans, and we do not want to see more bloodshed, so we try to be co-operative with them and to see what they will do next. I keep asking them what their plan is now, and even the most high-ranking generals I’ve met say they can’t tell me, because they haven’t seen the plan either.”

  “Because there is no plan,” Hassan huffs, leaning a hand on the wall. “The plan is to control us. Why do you think they’re taking this American woman to Germany? Almost sixty years since the end of that war, and the Americans still have their bases there!”

  “Shh...” Sheikh Mumtaz says, closing his eyes. He seems to have much less interest in anything his son says than I do. “Do you want to take our friend back to Baghdad, or should I send your brother?”

  “I will,” Hassan says assertively.

  “Then please wait,” his father says, looking at me rather than Hassan. “Be patient and persevering, for God is with those who patiently persevere.”

  “The second sura,” I say.

  Sheikh Mumtaz nods. “Our visitor is obviously well-versed in the Holy Koran.”

  The words soothe me. I catch Hassan’s eyes roll. Perhaps he’s heard his father’s religious quotations too many times before. “Let me know when you want me to drive him,” he says, and walks out.

  “You must forgive my son,” Sheikh Mumtaz says. “He is young and impatient. He doesn’t like the fact I have chosen cooperation over conflict. He would prefer to be like the Al-Sud tribe, who are probably, by the way, the people who shot at your car and ran you off the road.”

  “Really? But why?”

  Sheikh Mumtaz looks over to his sheesha pipe sitting in the corner. “Do you smoke?”

  “Occasionally,” I say, holding up my hand. “I don’t think I could right now.”

  “That’s fine. You are invited to come and enjoy with us some other time. What I wanted to say is that people have different ways they like to smoke. Some like cigarettes because it is a quick rush, and easy to arrange, you just put it in your mouth and light it up. Instant pleasure.”

  “For some people.”

  “Yes. And some people, like me, would rather prepare and smoke sheesha. It’s a lot slower and requires much more maintenance. You must fill the bowl with water, keep the pipes clean, stoke the coals gently and wait for them to heat the tobacco. And then, even the process of enjoying it is much slower. It is not a smoke for a man in a hurry.”

  It’s true. On the few occasions I’ve had any with friends at university, it seemed to be an hours-long affair, and I sometimes found myself wishing I was home, reading a book.

  “Ultimately, sheesha is much healthier than cigarettes. You don’t have people getting cancer from smoking nargila once, twice a week. It is a smoke for solving problems, not making rash decisions. Do you see the difference?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this is a lot like the difference between tribes, like ours and the Al-Sud. Our brothers in the Al-Sud — and you should know, they are much larger in number than us — they are cigarette smokers. They have chosen to resist the Americans with violence and more violence. Sheikh Talal is their chief and he thinks that attacking all foreign forces in Iraq is the only answer to the occupation. He is building a whole tribe of people who say they are going to be the new resistance, to chase the ‘infidels’ out.” His dismissive frown says what he thinks of this plan.

  “We think otherwise,” he says. “We will invite the Americans to sit and drink tea with us. We will listen to what they have to say. We will smoke our sheesha and wait. And then we will decide. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Good.”

  I stand and he stands with me. “I don’t know how I will ever repay you for all you have done,” I say.

  “Be a sheesha smoker,” he says, putting an arm around my shoulders and giving them a manly squeeze.

  ~ * ~

  I don’t remember what happened after this, but it is now clear to me that I must have passed out once more. When I come to I find myself lying on the floor again, with the sheikh nearby. “Don’t worry,” he says, “we’re bringing a local doctor to have a look at you.”

  “D
id I — faint?”

  “Something like that. One minute you were okay, then your eyes fluttered, and well...” He makes a gesture with his hand, upright, and then falling to horizontal.

  I suddenly am aware of the pain in my shoulder again. I try to move it in a circle but it sends out a horrible shock. “I think maybe I hurt my shoulder when the car flipped over,” I say. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

  “Still, if you’re injured, you shouldn’t travel. The doctor will see you. Stay and recuperate here for a few days.”

  “I should really get home,” I say, though the thought of rushing back to Baghdad to tell my family that we never made it past Samarra, and that the family car is gone, fills me with dread. What will Baba think?

  The doctor who comes doesn’t look like a doctor to me. He isn’t dressed in a white lab coat like my father when he’s at the hospital, and his huge, intense eyes, set in a face full of wrinkles, make him look more like a fortune-teller than a physician. He examines me and concludes that my shoulder has been dislocated. “This will hurt a little,” he says, and manipulates my arm and shoulder with a force and swiftness that leaves me aghast. I can hear the pop of the bone returning to its socket. “Fixed,” the doctor declares. I feel woozy, but being conscious of it helps to stop me from going under again. He tries to make a sling for my arm out of the ghutra he was wearing on his head until a minute ago. He shakes his head no and takes the cloth off. “These don’t really do much anyway. Just take it easy and get a lot of rest.”

  Sheikh Mumtaz, sitting on a chair in the corner, concurs. “Doctor’s orders. You rest here a while.”

  “Actually, it’s probably going to hurt more for the next few hours, just from the shock of it,” the doctor predicts. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out some tablets in a miniature envelope. “Take two of these painkillers now, then again in four hours.”

  I spill some into my hand and eye them suspiciously. I don’t see a name on them. “That’s not necessary,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Just take one, then,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

  Every time someone has told me not to worry in the last week, I wonder if I should have worried more, not less. But what does Sheikh Mumtaz and his doctor friend have to gain by drugging me? Nothing I can fathom. And the pain in my shoulder is more unbearable by the minute.

  In and out. Awake and asleep. A kind of torpor in-between. I awoke at some point having had a dream about arguing with Sam over translations, like we did in our first days working together. Now, as I lay here in the middle of the night, I find myself trying to tell Sam that there’s no easy way to translate fixing. It’s impossible to find just the right word for “fixing” in Arabic. There is islah, but that’s more commonly used as reform. We also have the word thabbata, which could be said to be fixing. There is also inqadh, which is either saving or salvation. There is shifa, which means healing. And then there is i’ada and jadada, which are like restore and renew. I’m not even sure now if that’s what we argued about in the dream, or if that’s just me continuing the conversation. I just know that I can’t think of one word in Arabic to fit everything that I want the fixing to be, or which describes what my job was supposed to have been.

  I wake up feeling confused, but better. My shoulder is tender, but not so painful. I’m not sure now if I saw the doctor today or yesterday, if it’s already tomorrow. I go to my wallet, where I find Sam’s business card. It seems humbler now, having lost its hard edges. On it, I notice a number at the newspaper office in Washington. I promised her I’d call Miles.

  When Sheikh Mumtaz comes down to check on me, I tell him I’m better, and that I must leave now. He says it’s very late, but I can go with his son Hassan in the morning. In the meantime, I ask, could I use his Thuraya to make a call to America, to reach my ladyfriend’s employer? Of course, he says, and leads me upstairs and into the courtyard of their home, where the reception is good and the night sky is a riot of stars.

  “Tribune.”

  “Oh, I’d, could I speak to Mr Miles, please?”

  “Please hold.” Classical music at the other end, warped by the odd, distorted quality of the satellite call. “Sorry, no listing for a Mr Miles here.”

  “Oh, I meant, Miles, the international editor? Miles is his first name.”

  More music. “You mean Miles Crowe. One moment.” Another few bars of Bach, or someone who sounds like Bach, and then, that voice.

  “Crowe,” the voice declares in a syllable.

  It takes me a moment to find mine.

  “Hello? Someone there?”

  “This is Nabil al-Amari. I’ve been working with Samara Katchens here in Iraq.”

  “Yes, Nabil! We know all about you.”

  “Sam wanted me to call because we were...in an accident. The US army came to get her and took her to a hospital in Germany.”

  “Yes, yes, we know all about it. She’s going to be transferred to a hospital here in Washington by the end of the week, we think.”

  “So she’s okay?”

  “She’s in a stable condition,” he says. “She broke a few ribs and they’re probably going to do surgery for a torn spleen before flying her back here.”

  “I see.” I try to remember where the spleen sits and how it could tear.

  “We know you did all you could to help her. And we really appreciate the work you’ve been doing there for us. In fact, this isn’t such a good time to talk because we’re on deadline, but if you call me again tomorrow, a little earlier, we can talk about your continuing to work with us. With one of our other correspondents.”

  “Did the story run? About the Jackson documents?”

  “The story? Yes, yes. Yesterday. Highest number of hits we’ve ever had in a single day.”

  “Sorry? Come again?”

  “I mean, the web traffic to the Tribune site because of the story. Look, Nabil, I wish I could talk more, but I gotta move a story. And listen, be careful over there. Our main priority is making sure our staff are staying safe, and that includes our fixers and drivers.”

  ~ * ~

  60

  Staying

  In the car, Hassan asks me if I’d prefer to take a back road, which might be safer.

  “Actually, I want to see what condition my father’s car is in.”

  Hassan smirks. “I doubt it’s still there, but we can see.”

  He’s wrong, and at the same time right. The car, or what remains of it, is lying on its side about twenty-five feet from the road.

  “I’m sure I could get it fixed. It can be towed to a garage, can’t it?” What could I possibly tell Baba? That it was stolen at gunpoint? That would be better than telling him I crashed it, gunshots or no.

  He clicks his tongue. “It’s totally destroyed. Can’t you see they’ve already picked it clean? Fine, I’ll pull up so you can see it,” he says, veering off the pavement and on to that flat, soil-less earth that covers this part of our country, half sand and half rock, a little bit of the moon right here on earth.

  All is silent except for the crunch of our feet on arid ground as we approach the car. “Look,” says Hassan. “They’ve already taken the engine and the two tyres that didn’t get shot. Here,” he says, poking his head inside. “They even ripped out the leather seats and the wooden parts around the dashboard, anything of value. And the body — it’s like an old tin can now.” He swishes something around in his mouth, perhaps a wad of tobacco chew.

  There is no exaggeration in Hassan’s description. My father’s car is a skeleton, the flesh and blood of its insides already gone. I stick my head inside to find a hollowness, like the feeling of walking into an abandoned building you once knew well. The looters — I wonder if they are the same as the shooters? — have indeed removed almost the entire interior of the car. On the floor is a mess of papers and junk that would have been in the glove compartment, which is no longer there. I sift through the papers, chec
king to see if there is something important. Baba’s car registration, for example.

  Nothing. Nothing but old receipts, dead pens, an insurance bill he must have intended to pay at some point. Bits of the food my mother had sent with us. Shreds of fabric and lots of glass and a few bullet casings. And, somewhere in the mess of trash, the mashallah khamsa.