One day, after we finished our little cups of thick Arabic coffee, she flipped my cup facedown on the saucer. After a few minutes, she read my future in the dark slurry of sugary coffee grounds. I would go places, she predicted: in my cup, she saw rivers, trees, and a looming black giant with a pure white heart.
And her future? “You can’t read your own grounds,” she said. “It’s bad luck.” But we wanted the same things: travel, careers, advanced degrees. Parties where men and women could sit together and talk. The freedom to see the world. During those conversations, I often had to beat back the urge to promise her all the travel, education, and adventures that she longed for, all the things I wanted her to have, if only they were mine to give.
We all struggle to reconcile these two sides of our natures: the nomad and the homebody, the mother and the movie star. I wanted Roaa to have them both. In another Iraq—the one that “we” had promised “them”—perhaps she could have.
“I had this dream of knowing people from other cultures,” she said. “I hope to do this someday. Because we were blocked from the whole world for so long.”
“Do you still want this? Even if it’s dangerous?”
“I still have that dream,” she said. “And it’s very hard to make this dream come true. But maybe, someday, if Iraq settles down, I could do it.”
We were sitting in a restaurant that faced Abu Nuwas, looking out toward the Tigris. Even surrounded by tanks and barbed wire, the river had a sluggish, iridescent grandeur. The date palms leaned over and admired their reflections on the river’s gleaming skin. Inside, we sprawled on worn wooden divans covered with Ottoman-style cushions. The ceiling of the restaurant was woven with reed mats that gave off a wheaty, sun-baked smell in the dry heat. By the doorway a brass pot of tea simmered on a gas ring. We were the only customers.
Suddenly she shook her head, as if waking from a dream or in surprise at some private thought.
“Do you know, Annia?” she said, looking at me with a quiet, intense wonder. “I never imagined, not even after the war ended, that I would be sitting with a foreigner and talking about these things.”
On May 13, Mohamad left Baghdad for Beirut. I was supposed to go with him, but at the last minute the Christian Science Monitor editors asked me to stay and fill in for one of their staff reporters who needed a break.
That morning, we packed up our little room at the Andalus. We took the hot plate and the plastic bins and the apples and onions and the various packets of dried soup and pasta, and gave them to Abu Zeinab. I moved everything else to the Monitor’s room at the Musafir Hotel. Later that afternoon, the Monitor’s driver, Adnan, drove Mohamad and me to the airport. We held hands in the backseat as we drove down the highway that led to the airport, which was by then one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq.
Mohamad got out at the first checkpoint to wait for the shuttle bus that would take him to the terminal. Adnan stood outside the car and shook Mohamad’s hand and kissed him on both cheeks. “Mr. Mohamad, don’t worry,” he said in Arabic. “I will take care of her like I would my own sister.”
Once we drove away, I started weeping in earnest, big choking sobs. Adnan looked over at me in distress. “Mrs. Annia,” he said, struggling to find the words in the new language he was learning. “When I was in the Iraqi army, I went away for nine months—my wife, alone like you.”
Nine months at a stretch fighting the Iran-Iraq War. I could survive twelve days in Baghdad on my own.
“I tried to be like this”—here, he turned back to the wheel, gripping it with tight fists and stiff straight arms, as if trying to thrust it away from him, and thickened his neck in a parody of manliness—“but inside, I was crying.”
He turned to me, taking both hands off the wheel and balling them into fists and putting them over his heart: “I am sorry,” he said. “But after he is gone, more love.”
The next day I went to Shahbandar. I ran into Nassire, a handsome young poet I knew from Al-Najeen. He had once had a perfectly chiseled nose, but now the entire front of it had been sheared off. He held his head awkwardly to the side, trying to hide the hole where his nose had been, but you cannot hide a missing nose.
“What happened to you?” I said stupidly, so shocked I forgot my manners.
“They held me down and sliced off my nose with a paper cutter,” he muttered, looking down at the floor.
I didn’t ask him who “they” were. It was irrelevant. Everyone I knew felt lucky just to be alive. Abu Rifaat had been robbed and beaten six times; being Christian made him an easy target. He felt betrayed by America, by the culture he loved, and most of all by the man he had once idolized—the liberator George W. Bush.
“He said he was going to turn Iraq into an oasis,” Abu Rifaat said, pronouncing it like “Onassis.” His voice was raw with bewilderment and pain. “In the past several months, I have been attacked six times by thieves. One of them hit me on the head with a bottle.”
He leaned over and pulled off his watch cap, exposing a deep dent in his soft pink skull.
“So is this the situation of the happy people? Where is the security, where is the happiness, where is the oasis of Mr. Bush?” he cried. “This is an oasis where bottles are smashed on your head!”
As we spoke a thin, hunched man came up to us. He had a brown mole in the middle of his cheek and his eyes glittered and danced. He stood in front of me, leaned his face into mine, and shouted, “You tell her that we reject this new American-Israeli flag!”
Since everything else was going beautifully, the Governing Council had turned its talents to the country’s most pressing problem: designing a new Iraqi flag. The new flag’s dominant colors were white and pale blue, and this resemblance to the Israeli flag did not go over well with the Iraqi public. And it got rid of the words Allahu Akbar, God is Great, which Saddam had added to the old Iraqi flag during his faithfulness campaign—words that are always easier to add than to remove.
“You tell her that if they try to hang their new Iraqi flag in Fallujah, in Ramadi, we will kill them!” the man railed. “We will take down their flag and we will hang them up in its place!”
“But she is not American!” lied Abu Rifaat. “She is Lebanese! A Lebanese journalist!”
“She is a spy!”
“She is a journalist!” pleaded Abu Rifaat. “A French journalist!”
The conversation deteriorated from there.
After the man disappeared, a thin, kindly old man in a dishdasha and a white knit prayer cap came and stood over me. He was the manager. On behalf of the café, and the people of Iraq, he apologized for the angry man.
“You are a guest here, you are welcome here,” he said. “We know you, and you are a friend of Abu Rifaat, who is well known here; we know that you like Iraqi poetry, and we like this, and I am sorry that this man has spoken rudely to you.”
He would not let me pay for my tea.
The next time I saw Abu Rifaat, he was still apologizing. “After you left this place, myself and the owner of the café, we spoke very strongly to this man,” he told me. “And this man, he became very ashamed of himself, and he felt very badly for what he had said.”
I doubted that. I knew that Abu Rifaat and the old man would have welcomed me if I returned. But hospitality was a double-edged sword; I didn’t want my pleasure in books and the company of poets to identify them with the “enemy,” which was what I had by then become. So although Shahbandar was my most favorite place in Baghdad, and possibly the entire world, I stayed away from Mutanabbi Street and Shahbandar Café after that. Every Friday I would stay home, and think: this is what it must feel like for Roaa, for Laylak, for all the Iraqis who can’t go see their favorite friends or sit in their favorite places; except it’s much worse for them, because I can leave and they cannot.
I went back only once, to say goodbye. I sat in the back, talked quietly, and left after five minutes, and I never saw Shahbandar Café again.
A week later, Abu Rifaat came t
o visit me at the Monitor’s bureau in the Musafir.
“Books!” he shouted, when he saw the bookshelf in the office. He walked to the shelf, stood in front of the books, threw his arms open wide, as if to embrace them all, and shouted, “I am weak before books!”
He was rattling on about something or other, graffiti or magazines or poetry, when he noticed I was not saying anything. He stopped short and peered at me over his glasses.
“Would you like something to eat?” he asked suddenly.
Earlier that week, the head of the Governing Council had been assassinated, I had talked to several men tortured in Abu Ghraib, and I was finishing a story about female prisoners who had been psychologically tortured. An Iraqi from Fallujah had brought me a floppy disc people were passing around in insurgent circles, supposedly pictures of American soldiers torturing and raping Iraqi women. The photographs were fake—they had actually been lifted from a Hungarian porn Web site—but they were a graphic reminder that all sides were using women’s bodies in a dangerous game of political symbols, and when I saw them I lost my appetite for days. Every time I ate more than a mouthful of anything, a panic would come over me: a message from my stomach of extreme stress, my body completely rejecting food, and although I was not sick I would feel the urge to throw up. I had lost about ten pounds in ten days.
“Maybe a cigarette,” I said.
He frowned at me, and I remembered that before his wife moved to Canada with their two sons, Abu Rifaat had been a father.
“You are always working and smoking too much,” he said. “You work too hard, for you love the Iraqis too much, and you love your job more than you love yourself. And you are always eating in restaurants, and this is not good. The food in restaurants, it is not healthy. I cannot take you to my house, because it is not safe”—he lived with a couple of maiden aunts in a working-class neighborhood—“but I will take you to lunch, and I will show you the real food of Iraq.”
Down the street there was a small kebab shack. As Iraq’s fortunes had fallen, the kebab shack’s had risen: by now it had grown from a small wooden cart to a gleaming corrugated metal shed that you could actually walk inside. A tiny television played from a shelf on the wall. Abu Rifaat sat me down next to it and bustled off to get us food.
At the counter, he held an urgent conference with the cook, a plump young man in a dirty dove gray dishdasha. The cook laughed with amazement at what Abu Rifaat requested. When he saw that the old man was serious—the ajnabieh was really going to eat this thing—he set to work.
Instead of making the usual grilled kebab, he took the ground meat off the skewer and sizzled it over a very high flame in a little battered iron cooking pan. At the same time, he chopped a fat, juicy tomato into chunks and threw it into the pan together with some onions and a hint of hot pepper. He sautéed the vegetables in the fat and spices from the meat. The meat, in turn, soaked up the spicy hot tomato sauce. In Baghdad they called this banadura shamee, “Damascene tomatoes,” or sometimes “chili-fry.”
“This,” said Abu Rifaat, as he bore it to the table, “this is the real food of Iraq!” He showed me how to scoop up dripping hunks of meat with scraps of tanoor bread. He watched me, beaming, as I ate all of it. We mopped up the last of the sauce with more bread.
Over tea Abu Rifaat expounded on education, his favorite topic. According to him, the Iraqi people needed education more than anything else, “because from thirty-five years ago, these people were separated from the rest of the world. And this separation killed a great proportion of his manners, his morals.” And they needed travel, he added: “To travel around the world, which will make them feel they are citizens of the world, not of just one country.”
After the food, I felt exhaustion creeping back. But Abu Rifaat was unstoppable. “I love tea!” he shouted, and ordered another cup. When it came, he demonstrated the correct way to stir the tea without rattling the spoon inside the glass.
I couldn’t help laughing. I needed to get back to the office and finish my story, but Abu Rifaat always cheered me up.
Suddenly he realized I was waiting for him. “I will show you the Irrraqi way of finishing your tea quickly!” he declared. “You do like so”—pouring his tea into the tiny glass saucer, he swirled it around a few times to cool it quickly—“and then you drink it like this!” He tipped the saucer up to his lips and sucked down the tea in one long slurping suck. It was not pretty, but it was the essence of good manners.
Thanks to Abu Rifaat, my appetite was completely restored. The next day I went to the Sumer Land restaurant, which was still occasionally open to the public, for my usual plate of shajar, jazar, wa qarnabeet. For some reason the chef had chosen that particular moment in late May 2004—during the Mahdi Army uprising, the first Marine assault on Fallujah, and the Abu Ghraib court-martials—to make a chicken roulade stuffed with cream sauce.
It was a beautiful thing. A gesture that might, like Layla’s manicures, have seemed pointless to some; but to others it might contain the whole of civilization, or at least a reminder of normal life. I went back to the kitchen to thank him.
He sat slumped in a chair, sweating, surrounded by bedraggled pots and pans. Dirty knives lay on the counter next to him, attended to only by the flies. The air-conditioning was off. The generator must have failed, or maybe they just didn’t care any more.
“Why?” I asked. “Why make such a beautiful thing at a time like this?”
He shrugged. An expression of pride and despair, halfway between a smile and a sigh, flickered across his face.
“It’s what I do,” he said.
Chapter 15
Even a Strong Person Can Ask for Peace
AFTER HE BECOMES human, Enkidu goes straight to Gilgamesh, who beats the tar out of him. That makes them best friends, just like in a good martial arts movie, and Gilgamesh decides they should go on a road trip.
Gilgamesh wants to slay a monster and drive out evil from the world. Enkidu has a bad feeling; he tries to talk his friend out of it, but Gilgamesh won’t listen. They get their weapons. The old men sigh. The young men cheer. The two friends walk all the way to what is now modern-day Lebanon and kill the monster Humbaba, who guards the cedars.
Unfortunately you’re supposed to consult the gods before you kill their monsters. Somebody has to pay for this act of hubris. The trip was Gilgamesh’s idea, but the gods kill Enkidu.
Gilgamesh cannot believe that his friend is dead. He holds Enkidu in his arms for six days and seven nights and speaks to him as if he were still alive. On the seventh day, a maggot falls out of Enkidu’s nose, and Gilgamesh finally understands that his friend, the mighty wild man, is nothing but rotting meat. He wanders the wilderness for days, disheveled and haggard, dressed in the skin of a lion. Finally he arrives at the ocean, whose shore is also the edge of the world.
Luckily, just at the world’s outer limit, right where a wandering soul needs it most, is a bar where he can get a beer.
The bartender sees him coming, locks the door, and runs up onto the roof. “Who are you?” she shouts down at him. “You look like hell.”
Gilgamesh pounds on the door of the tavern. “My friend whom I loved has turned to clay,” he cries out. “Am I not like him? Will I lie down, never to get up again?”
Siduri, the bartender at the end of the world, looks at him with compassion. She solves a lot of existential crises in her line of work.
You will never find immortality, she tells Gilgamesh, because the gods kept it for themselves. So stop running after what you can’t have and enjoy the things you can:
Now you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full!
Be happy day and night,
of each day make a party,
dance in circles day and night!
Mohamad and I were in Beirut, taking a two-week break in between stays in Baghdad, when we heard the news: insurgents had tried to assassinate Dr. Salama as she drove through the Triangle of Death. She had survived. But her seventeen-year-old son a
nd one of her bodyguards had been killed.
As soon as we returned to Baghdad, we went to pay a condolence call to Dr. Salama at her office. We had made an official appointment, but for some reason the U.S. military guards refused to let us in. So Dr. Salama, still in mourning for her son, made a clandestine visit to the Andalus.
We met her in the lobby and took her upstairs to our room accompanied by several bodyguards, serious-looking young men who waited outside the door. I made tea, and we drank it while she sat on the chair in our tiny front room and told us what had happened.
She had gone to Najaf to talk to people there as part of her mediation between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military. That evening, U.S. troops had blocked the highway, so her two-car convoy was forced to take the smaller, lethal side roads. At about eight in the evening, a red Opel drew up behind them and then spun away. A few minutes later, it returned, and whoever was inside opened fire. Her driver sped away. She saw the car her son was in veer off the road. She begged the driver to turn back, but it was too dangerous.
She hoped that her son might be alive. But later that night, she found out that her bodyguard had died. “I thought that night about his mother, his wife, his young child,” she said. “I was very upset. So the next day, when I received the news about my son, it made it a little easier to accept it.”
In Najaf, she had met many women who had lost their sons, husbands, and brothers in the fighting between the U.S. military and the Mahdi Army. “Such simple things they wanted: to live peacefully and to have their families,” she said. “I think that in this occupation, it is the women who have suffered the most. And I think that this is why it is the women who want peace. I found this such a simple thing, yet the governments—the American government—didn’t understand it.”
She talked about the work she was doing with Sadr’s supporters, trying to convince them and the U.S. military to come to some kind of cease-fire. “The people say that because you are asking for peace, that means you are weak, you cannot fight,” she said. “So I told them, ‘No; even a strong person can ask for peace.’”
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