Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  Reggie shared a large room at the end of the corridor with two other managers. The project director, Tariq, worked alone in his long, bare office. A thin man, who held his elegant frame like a pole, he was anti-regime, or so Reggie had said in the car, but his professional acumen was apparently such that the government needed him for this job—supervising the design and construction of state-of-the-art bus stations; his rigidity suggested that he, as much as his masters, had accepted the appointment with bad grace.

  Within half an hour of arriving at her desk, Thea was craving coffee, tea, even another breakfast—anything to warm her up. The office boy, one of the women told her, could fetch her tea, so he was dispatched and returned with a glass of milkless tea so strong and sweet she couldn’t drink it. That was the first shock to the system: no ready supply of coffee, no standing around a communal kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil while catching up with friends; no opportunity to stop, stretch, breathe a little. The second shock was that there was no lunch break. In Saddam’s Iraq, nobody, it seemed, dared to stop working. They had to go right through until three o’clock—and Thea had brought no food. Their Iraqi colleagues produced their own lunches and ate at their desks, bread stuffed with beef and salad, the tantalizing aroma of unfamiliar spices wafting around the room.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Kim said. “We’ll eat something back at the hotel.”

  “What time will that be?”

  “Only another three hours.”

  The first day was long. Thea’s fingers were so frozen they could barely bang the sticky keys, and she knew that if she caught a cold, she would still have to show up to work in this icebox, because her contract allowed so few sick days per year. In search of warmth, she stood in the sunlight by the window, but the effect was minimal, so she retreated to her dark corner and Reggie’s letters. Kim, along the corridor, worked mostly for Geoffrey.

  When three o’clock came, they escaped into the brisk afternoon and their warm jeep, and Geoffrey delivered them back to the hotel, where they tumbled gratefully into the sunny lobby, which buzzed with businessmen. At one end there was a cozy alcove, with silky red cushions and bolsters, urns and copper lights, and a low table, so Thea and Kim spread out across the couches, and ordered tea and cakes. From where she sat, Thea could see, through the curved opening, the reception desk at the far end of the lobby, and the receptionist who had greeted her the night before.

  “Who are you looking at?” Kim leaned to the side. “Oh, that’s Sachiv. He’s one of the managers.”

  “He seemed nice, when I was checking in.”

  “He’s great. Really helpful—goes out of his way for us since we’re gonna be here long-term. Cool guy. And married. I thought I’d just throw that in. Married with three small kids.”

  “Pity.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  His hands had been the first thing she had noticed, when she had arrived the night before. He was writing up the register, taking her details, wearing a black jacket and starched white shirt. His fingers were long and slender, his nails neat. A good start, she had thought mischievously, catching a flicker of those dark eyes, as she leaned wearily into the desk. It had been a long day, and a disconcerting one, not least when the jet had come in to land and all the aircraft’s lights had been turned off—inside and out—so that they couldn’t be fired at. It was reassuring that such a calm, attractive man should receive her on the other side of the bridge.

  After tea with Kim, Thea went back to her room to unpack, and every time she took an item from her suitcase to place it on the shelves, her trajectory took her to the window. Baghdad. It was hard to grasp. Her mother had already decreed that it was her unattractive inclination to be impetu-ously reckless that had driven her there; her friends said she was like Amelia Earhart, always needing to reach higher altitudes; but she thought of herself more as a grasshopper. There didn’t seem to be much she could do about it, this tendency to make snap decisions and leap above the tall grasses to see what lay beyond. For months on end, it seemed, she could live unobtrusively, happy with her lot, until, feeling suddenly crushed by normalcy and expectation, she would do something wild, even dangerous. In such a mood she had climbed the “In Pin”—the Inaccessible Pinnacle—on the Isle of Skye with her brother when she was nineteen, though she had only hill-walking experience. At such moments she was fearless, but the payoff was considerable. Reaching the top of the In Pin was like stepping onto Heaven’s doorstep, where all she had to do was ring the bell for God to open the clouds and say, with a glance at His mountains, “Yes, I did rather well that day, didn’t I?” At twenty-two, she had learned to surf in the dull, peeved seas off Strandhill, even though the words “surfing” and “Ireland” were infrequent bedfellows, and years before that, at the annual school concert, she had barged onto the stage and made a plea for a new school uniform because their skirts were so tight, most of them couldn’t breathe. “Like women in corsets,” she had declared, to the consternation of dignitaries and her own headmistress, who suspended her from school for three days and soon afterward redesigned the skirts. Thea’s tendency to break out, like a whale coming up for air, gave her mother sleepless nights and was frequently embarrassing to herself. She regretted, bitterly, some of her devil-may-care impulses, particularly those involving men, which was possibly why she usually retreated into neutrality until she needed that rush again, that bit of chaos—the sliver of chili tossed into unremarkable food.

  And so, when she had seen the ad on an unremarkable day in November, her personal Richter scale had flickered. She was having tea and toast at the time, at a counter by the window of a café at the end of Dublin’s Leeson Street. Breakfast in the café was her morning yoga, a slice of peace before the slog that lay ahead—she was a commuter, a worker, part of the flow and throng into town, to desks and phone calls and whining shredders. Holding a half-eaten piece of toast, smeared with jam from a plastic packet, she read the ad and blinked. It was an alert, a call from the deep vein of unpredictability that ran through her, like a seam of ore, invisible, but rich.

  Before she had even put down the newspaper, she knew the job would be hers. She was sharp and efficient, a mean typist, and had an excellent manner with clients. Her reference would glow like a red hot coal, making the envelope smolder. She bit into her toast, startled by this hitherto unseen confidence in her own abilities. It suggested that she was underperforming. In her twenty-fourth year, at a counter in a window, the Irish Times had thrown down its cape—all she had to do was step out.

  Her confidence had hit the mark: within weeks, the job was hers.

  One day Leeson Street, the next Baghdad.

  The days were long in the office, and so were the six-day weeks, with only Fridays off. Thea adapted slowly, wearing layers of spring clothes and wrapping half her breakfast in a paper napkin so she could eat it in the cold office mid-morning. The rest she could deal with because the rest she loved. Kim, in particular. Perhaps it was their situation that created a depth of understanding they might not have enjoyed anywhere else, but they believed they would have been close in any situation. Different enough to be compatible, they shared the same curiosity and a tendency to long-jump when small steps would do. It couldn’t be long before they discovered one another’s irritating foibles—how could they not, when they shared their hotel, workplace, transport, and social life, but the prospect didn’t worry them. Kim was smart and gutsy and great company; emerging from a bruising relationship in London, she had come to Iraq because it was about the only place to which her obsessive ex-boyfriend wouldn’t follow.

  In the late afternoons they took to walking on the other side of the river, braving the erratic traffic and one of Baghdad’s busiest bridges to reach the quiet stretch of its bank. Here, where their conversations were unfettered by colleagues and hotel staff, they found their common ground, the yin and yang of their immediate friendship, and they discovered that both had been accused, back home, of profiting from another man’s w
ar. Each felt guilty as charged.

  “But if I am profiting from being here,” Kim said, “the salary is only a very small part of what I have to gain.”

  Thea agreed. “So many people said to me that it must be for the money—why else would anyone come to a war zone except for the cash? Well, maybe because even a humble secretary can do more than work in a lawyer’s office or a travel agency, and for my part, I just desperately wanted to see beyond the carriage return of a typewriter. I know that’s greed too, especially given what’s going on, but it might as well be me standing here on this riverbank as anyone else.”

  The evening sun was low. Kim stopped on the sandy track and shaded her eyes. The Tigris had turned pink. “I can sure live with being greedy if this is where it takes me.”

  Reggie was also easy to like. An expatriate of long standing, he couldn’t remember when he had last lived in England, and his contributions to any conversation usually began, “When I was in the Congo/Argentina/Bratislava. . . .” His enthusiasm worked like a battery on his team, and his penchant for overly large yellow and orange shirts, hanging from his narrow shoulders, with contrasting orange and yellow ties made for quite a startling wake-up call every morning. Geoffrey, in contrast, tended toward the maudlin. He was there only and unapologetically for the money, but even that didn’t satisfy him: he moaned tunefully about overbearing bureaucracy, inadequate leave and missing his friends. Their contracts were tough on the homesick—no holidays for twelve months, and then only ten days’ leave before embarking on another year. It felt like self-imposed exile to Geoffrey, but Thea felt no draw, no pull for home—at least, not until one night, very shortly after she’d arrived, when the city started popping outside. Gunfire.

  A zip of fear rushed over her, even as her friend knocked at her door. Kim hurtled in and made for the window. “What the hell’s going on out there?”

  The sky was flashing, the air banging. They turned off the lights and stood to the side of the window, flinching with every bang and watching arcs of light flying skyward. It was the oddest feeling—helpless, nothing to be done, nowhere to go.

  Another knock: Reggie come to reassure them. “I thought you two might be anxious.”

  Kim turned. “Are we under attack?”

  “No, no—it isn’t the Iranians, it’s a celebration. Those are tracer bullets. Usually means the troops have done well at the front. Probably won some battle or other, so they’re letting everyone know about it.”

  “Oh, man,” said Kim, hand on chest. “Scaring me half to death because they’ve killed more guys than the other side?”

  “Where was the battle?” Thea asked. “Not too close, I hope?”

  “We’ll never know. There won’t be any details in the papers tomorrow—or no details worth noting. The only thing the people of Baghdad need to know, those families who have brothers, fathers, and husbands at the front, is that some undefined battle has been won in some undefined place. Keeps morale up.”

  “So can we go outside and watch the fireworks?”

  “Yeah.”

  They stepped onto the small balcony. A moment’s homesickness glanced over Thea, as she thought about Dublin’s peaceful streets and imagined what her mother would say if she could see her now: standing on a balcony watching tracer bullets fly across the night sky as a nearby-faraway war landed on her windowsill.

  Dublin touched her again a few nights later when she heard that its streets had been, for several days, even more peaceful than she had imagined; that they had, in fact, been deserted. Every month an Irish colleague, Mic, came out from the London branch (usually carrying their mail) to do a few days’ work with Reggie, and it was he who brought the news that Ireland had suffered blizzards and a historic freeze soon after Thea had left, with temperatures dropping, in some places, to minus fifteen. Over dinner, he captivated them with his account of his own experience of the storm: he had landed in Dublin on the last flight before the airport closed down under the weight of twenty-six centimeters of snow, and had been forced to walk to his mother’s home, making the long trek into town in deep snow, along a deserted O’Connell Street and on out to the suburbs. It had taken him seven hours to reach his mother, but at least he’d got there, he said. Hundreds of passengers had been trapped at the airport for days. The image stayed with Thea, all that night and beyond: a white O’Connell Street, hardly a car or person in sight. It was in the letters she received too, this blizzard. Her mother had written of frozen pipes and snowdrifts two meters high, of ice floating down the rivers and of a strange quiet. The quiet of snow. It had gone on for ten days, the freeze, and Thea felt lonely for this disaster, this national emergency: she would have liked to have seen her city reduced to a whisper.

  Homesickness never lasted long. There were too many distractions, even right there, in their hotel.

  Her eye had been caught, and her heart was following. It was hard to ignore Mr. Sachiv Nair, impossible not to see him, center-stage behind the reception desk, when she hauled herself from the elevator every morning and made her way across the white marble lobby. He was also the first person she saw, most days, standing tall and straight, in his black suit and silver tie, when she came back from work. She found every excuse to speak to him: were there any telexes from home? Was the weather going to warm up any time soon? When could she hope to get her laundry back?

  Hotel living meant they had no choice but to use the laundry service for all their clothing—even panties and bras had to be put into the plastic bags provided and noted on a list. They started off by handwashing their underwear, but soon tired of having it hanging off the shower rail and draped around the bedroom. Relinquishing privacy, they stuffed everything into the see-through bags, duly filling out the forms, and watched as they were taken away by young boys wearing white gloves. There was no knowing exactly where their clothing went—somewhere into the bowels of the building—but it was washed, dried, and ironed, then returned to the rooms in carefully packed parcels, each item ticked off the list. The system sometimes broke down, but when Kim lost a bra, she was too embarrassed to inquire as to its whereabouts. “Can you imagine describing my white, lacy bra to Mr. Nair?”

  “I can just see him, down in the basement,” Thea laughed, “rooting through piles of men’s shirts in search of it! He does so like to provide a good service.”

  They spared themselves the embarrassment of sending him in pursuit of intimate clothing, but he was always particularly courteous to them, since they were usually the only women guests in the hotel, and whenever they came back from an evening stroll, he smiled and asked how their walk had been. Thea would veer toward the desk for a chat, like a speedboat changing direction, if he wasn’t too busy. One day when she came in, he was standing in front of the desk in jeans and a blue shirt. It didn’t help, seeing him in civvies. It eroded the barrier between them—the hotel manager behind the counter handing out telexes—and her attraction to him climbed a notch, becoming a more solid thing, an indisputable thing. It was his day off, he explained. He had been about to take his family to the park when he was called to the hotel to sort out a problem. He had now resolved it and was about to join his waiting wife . . . except that he stayed on, chatting with Thea.

  She went to her bedroom, lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling.

  It was said that the rooms were bugged. They were all working for Saddam Hussein. He was ultimately their employer, this great friend of the West. Build up Iraq, the reasoning went, and there’ll be no hope for those raging fundamentalists in Iran. But Thea had been warned. One of her colleagues in Dublin had an Iraqi friend, a student doctor, who had agreed to meet her before she left for Baghdad. In an Irish pub, in an Irish city, he had been reticent, nervous. His eyes jumped toward the doors whenever someone came in, and when he asked her why she was going to work in Iraq, her naivety shone through. Oh, it wasn’t the money, she had blurted, but then she had muttered and fumbled about with words like “adventure” and “experience” and felt a
shamed. Looking for personal thrills in the mayhem sounded even crasser than being motivated by a tax-free salary, and it was an insult, she realized, to a man whose country was in despair. He was anti-regime, hence his nervousness, and he would have no option, he explained, once his studies were finished, but to disappear into a corner of Europe or America, where the Secret Service wouldn’t find him. He would not work for Saddam—could not—so he could not return home, and yet he was polite to Thea, who was off to her high-paid job in the very city where his own family lived, the family he could not hope to see for years. He didn’t seem to begrudge her, that quiet Iraqi man, who wore no mustache. Instead he had warned her, in the cozy pub, to trust no one in Iraq. To be very careful what she said and where she said it. He told her that the walls had ears and the elevators had eyes, but left unsaid that adventure might be better sought elsewhere.

  Humbled, she had returned home that night feeling the first twinges of apprehension, and a little tawdry besides.

  Weeks later, staring at her Baghdad ceiling, it still bothered her to think that his family were only a few miles from where she lay, while he remained so far away from them, but she liked the city too much to be nervous, even though the student doctor had been right. Reggie had warned them—when they were in the jeep (the only place where they could speak freely)—not to be critical of any aspect of Iraqi life at work or even in their bedrooms among themselves, and to be extremely careful about what they said on the phone. Whatever about the rooms being bugged, the phones certainly were.

  But she endured the ubiquitous security and the giant poster eyes that followed her everywhere, because she loved the way it met her eyes, this city, with its fractured skyline—its modern monuments and the few high-rise buildings sprouting haphazardly from the low-roofed town. The Martyrs’ Monument, which they drove past often, was like a huge blue onion carved through the heart, one half dancing with the other, and it glittered at sunset with deep pink flashes of light. She loved the slow flow of the Tigris, the dusty palm trees scattered along its banks, the resonating call to prayer and the honking traffic. Every morning she woke elated, knowing that when she pulled back the curtain, her eyes would fall upon one of the great cities of antiquity and legend.