Baghdad Without a Map

by Неизвестный

  “Moo, moo,” went the passenger beside me. He was a middle-aged man named Ali who wore a University of Texas sweatshirt. “In Texas I learned all about cattle,” he said, laughing and mooing again. I was wedged tight between Marwan and Ali and buffered from the night wind. The sky was completely black, the sea air soothing. These people lived with danger and knew its contours. If they were unafraid, why shouldn't I be as well? After twenty minutes or so I drifted into a shallow sleep.

  The next thing I knew, Marwan was counting aloud and pointing at geysers shooting up from the sea. “One, two, three, four. . .” Whoosh. “One, two, three, four. . .” Whoooooosh. The first shell landed a hundred yards off; the second only fifty. Somewhere in the night a Syrian gunner was shifting his sights, just so. He unleashed another round. “One, two, three, four. . .”

  Marwan threw me flat against the deck. Facedown, I couldn't see where the shell came in, but it was close enough to tumble the boat in its wake. Inside the cabin, children began screaming. Marwan clutched his belly. “Never you get used to the bombs,” he moaned.

  The guns thudded again in the distance. This time we counted in unison. “One, two, three, four. . .” The shell splashed into the water somewhere just to the left, and a fine sea spray sprinkled the back of my neck.

  The six of us now lay in an untidy heap on the bow, as if scrambling for a fumble. There was a loud clacking sound, which I took to be Marwan's worry beads. Then I realized it was my teeth.

  “I'm freezing cold,” I muttered, barely able to get the words out between chattering molars.

  “Bullshit,” whispered Ali. His University of Texas shirt was drenched with sweat. “You're scared shitless.”

  Marwan laughed. I laughed. My teeth went clack-clack-clack. My arms and legs jerked wildly. I felt like a ventriloquist's dummy. “Where else in the world,” Marwan said, “do you get a welcoming committee like this?”

  We laughed again. The cannons boomed, twice in succession. We groaned and huddled closer together. The first shell splashed to the right and we skittered on all fours, crablike, to the left, almost hanging into the water. The captain banged the windshield of the bridge, motioning us back to the center; the weight shift evidently made it difficult for him to steer. He looked little more distressed than when he'd told me back at the ferry that “the sea is very calm tonight.”

  Whooooosh. The second shell plunged into the sea just ahead of us, and the pilot swung the wheel. My arms and legs flapped in near-convulsions. Can fear bring on an epileptic fit?

  The guns thudded. On the fifth beat, water splashed fifty yards off. The guns thudded and the next shell landed a hundred yards off. A moment later, the plumes of water were too far away to be visible in the dim four-in-the-morning moonlight.

  “God be praised,” Ali said, sitting up and lighting a cigarette. He offered me one. My hands were still shaking so badly that the match kept flickering out before I could light the cigarette. The entire episode had lasted perhaps three minutes.

  “How the hell did they miss us?” I asked.

  Marwan shrugged. “They were shooting blind,” he said. Apparently, the gunners had a rough idea of our course but didn't know our exact location. So they fired down one corridor of sea and then another, hoping to hit the mark.

  “Or maybe they didn't want to hit us,” Ali said. “The Syrians are brutal people. They would rather torture you than kill you.”

  I took out my notebook, now soggy, and scribbled to settle my nerves. “Firing blind. Sea corridors. Torture, not kill.”

  Ali looked at me, wide-eyed. “You a journalist?” he asked.

  “Uh huh. Just along for the ride.”

  He shook his head and said something to Marwan in Arabic, with a French phrase thrown in. The others laughed.

  “He says you are like Aoun,” Marwan translated. “Jusqu'au boutiste.”

  “What's that mean?”

  “You go right to the edge.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “Sort of.” He punched my shoulder and smiled. “It mean you are very brave. And maybe very stupid.”

  As shore came into view, my first instinct was to leap onto land and never board a boat again—any boat, anywhere. But I'd be leaping into East Beirut, hardly a safe haven. And the only way out of Beirut was the way I'd just come in.

  We pulled up at the dock, and my companions jumped ashore before the crew had even tied up. Marwan's face was grim; he was already focused on what lay ahead. He forced a smile and shook my hand before disappearing into the night. There was no one waiting on shore for the ride back out to the ferry. Was this it? Was I stuck here in Jounieh?

  The crew had disappeared into the embarkation hall beside the dock. The only man in sight was a militiaman patrolling the wharf with what looked like a sawed-off bazooka cradled across one arm. He saw me standing alone on the boat and wandered over to ask why I wasn't getting off.

  “I don't have a visa,” I said. Under the circumstances, it seemed an inane response.

  The soldier shrugged and waved his hand toward the shore, adding in Arabic, “Etfadil.” Help yourself. Then he hoisted the bazooka and melted back into the gloom.

  I hopped ashore and went into the embarkation hall. The gunboat crew sat in a circle, silently guzzling coffee and wolfing down sandwiches. I asked them why there were no outgoing passengers. The captain pointed at the far end of the hall. There were two jagged holes in the ceiling where shells had torn through.

  “Happened at sunset,” he said. “Killed a few people.” He returned to his sandwich. The passengers had moved to another dock across the harbor, and after refueling we'd head over there to pick them up.

  I strolled along the dock as the sky shifted from night-black to a dense, predawn gray. Tall apartment blocks ringed the water and climbed into the hills: shadowy towers of white and beige silhouetted against Mount Lebanon. A few of the buildings were pockmarked by shells. But at five in the morning, with electricity down and the guns momentarily silent, Jounieh seemed peaceful, almost inviting. Thinking of the boat ride again, I wondered if I should stick around.

  My doubts disappeared as soon as we reached the other side of the harbor. There were hundreds of people almost trampling each other to get onto the gunboat. It would be madness to get off. I felt guilty for occupying a space, though it wasn't much of one. Within minutes the boat was crammed so tight that it was impossible to sit down. A middle-aged woman almost tumbled into my arms as she rushed aboard. “Mon pays” she said, with Lebanese melodrama, “c'estfini.” Like many of the others, she'd abandoned her luggage at the bombed-out terminal and was fleeing Beirut with nothing but the clothes she had on.

  The crew struggled to untie us before more people tried to pile on. As we pulled out, the woman fell asleep on her feet, dropping her head on my shoulder. Then the boat slipped out of the harbor and into open sea. The light was coming up fast; we'd be an easy target for the Syrian guns. And sure enough, half an hour from Jounieh the awful thudding resumed. Babies began crying. A woman vomited on the two people beside her. But the captain had steered us out of artillery range, and the shells weren't very dose this time. My teeth barely chattered.

  When the shelling died down, I made sympathetic eye contact with a well-dressed young man wedged between the vomiting woman and a mother with two howling babies. He clutched a leather briefcase against his chest and wore the bored expression of a man accustomed to unpleasant travel.

  I asked him where he was going.

  “Only Cyprus.” He held up the briefcase. “It is all Lebanese pounds.” He was making a regular run, to buy dollars on the black market. He extracted an arm and handed me a business card. It had Arabic on one side and English on the other, with the words “Currency Exchange” printed neatly beneath his name.

  “I go back to Beirut on Tuesday,” he said, glancing at his digital watch. “Business is business. Even in Lebanon.”

  The ferry pulled into Larnaca thirty-six hours after I'd first b
oarded. No ferries attempted the passage to Beirut again for several weeks. When they did, one of the shuttle boats took a direct hit that killed all the people aboard. By then I was back in Cairo, busy on another assignment. My boat story had made the front page of three papers. DANGEROUS PASSAGE, read one of the headlines. SHIP OF DESPAIR, read another I pasted them into the looseleaf notebook where 1 kept all my clips, trying to feel like zjusqu'au boutiste Mostly I just felt stupid. A decision made in a moment of adolescent bravado had almost got me killed.

  I came back one night to find a message on the phone machine from Larry, the Oklahoman. He said the helicopters were flying into Beirut again. Did I want an exclusive with the general?

  I didn't bother to return the call.

  15—TEHRAN—Imam Is in the Peoples Hands

  Sorrow, sorrow is this day. Kbomeini the Idol Smasher is with God this day!

  —Slogan at the ayatollah's funeral

  Ihe plane taxied slowly down the runway in Frankfurt as a Persian-accented voice came onto the loudspeaker. “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. In accordance with the laws of the Islamic Republic, ladies must please wear Islamic attire.”

  Beside me, Geraldine tossed a black chador over her head and clutched it tightly beneath her chin. When she was standing, the black silk cloak reached to her ankles. She scowled in mock Islamic fury, then flashed me a crooked grin.

  “Anonymity, I love it,” she whispered, as stewardesses in head scarves came down the aisle to check that seat belts and chadors were in place. Geraldine, having endured two years of hoots and propositions from Arab males, welcomed her sexless disguise. I found it creepy. With one flick of the wrist, she'd transformed herself from the object of my desire into a forbidding black phantom, a foot soldier of the Islamic Republic. Returning from the airplane toilet a few hours later, I couldn't find my seat. Which form in this sea of black hoods was my wife?

  We touched down in Tehran at two in the morning, forty-eight hours after the announcement on Iranian radio that “Imam Khomeini has passed away. From God we come, to God we go.” Or, as an editor in the United States put it in a wake-up call to Cairo shortly after, “Khomeini's finally kicked it. Get up and write something.”

  The news was oddly surprising, despite the fact that the ayatollah was eighty-six and had reportedly been dying for years. Khomeini's failing health was one of those Middle East stories, like civil war in Beirut and the Arab-Israeli “peace process,” that had dragged on for so long with so little sign of actual movement that an end seemed unimaginable. The bionic madman would simply live forever.

  “I cannot believe he's really dead,” said the Iranian standing beside me in line at Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. He was a businessman returning from Germany and had told me on the plane that he hated Khomeini. “But I fear for the future. It is like your saying: 'The devil you know is better than a Satan you have not met.' ”

  The known devil scowled from a huge portrait on the wall, wreathed now in black crepe. Staring sleepily at the black-turbaned ayatollah, his eyebrows arched in menacing fury, I wondered aloud if Khomeini had ever smiled. Certainly not in any picture I'd seen. “He is not smiling now,” said the businessman, shuffling slowly toward immigration. “Not in hell.”

  The officials at the airport, most of them women, weren't smiling either. Their tightly drawn head scarves made them look both plain and severe, like unfriendly nuns. “Money,” demanded one, holding out her hand for my wallet. Confiscating booze and other contraband wasn't enough in Iran. The Islamic Republic also counted dollars to check that visitors changed money legally. The bank sold riyals at seventy to the dollar; the black-market rate was twelve hundred.

  We climbed into a taxi and traveled a mile before the headlights shone on a man with a gun, waving the taxi over. He jabbed his Kalashnikov through the window and fired questions at the driver. Who were we? Where were we going? What's in the trunk? It was no different from late-night roadblocks in any of a dozen Middle East capitals, except that our interrogator appeared to be sixteen and wore no identifiable uniform. Not for the last time in Iran, I picked up a whiff of Beirut, a malodorous mix of arms, zeal and anarchy.

  It was four in the morning when we reached the Intercontinental Hotel. Following the 1979 revolution in Iran, the hotel had been renamed the Laleh—Farsi for “tulip,” the flower of martyrdom—and the words DOWN WITH THE USA! emblazoned on a wall facing the door. A board near registration still advertised several nightclubs and a Polynesian bar, even though there hadn't been alcohol served here or anywhere else in Tehran for ten years.

  Standards at the hotel had also slid somewhat since the shah's days. Filthy curtains failed to block out the predawn light. In the bathroom a broken faucet dripped. There was crud on the carpet, and coffee-stained butts filled an ashtray on the bedtable.

  “Why should they clean it up for the Great Satanists?” Geraldine said, collapsing on the bed. We'd been up for two consecutive nights, filing Khomeini obituaries from Cairo and then flying to Tehran via Frankfurt (Egypt, along with most Arab countries, had no diplomatic or air links with Iran). Geraldine took off her chador, and the sight of her hair aroused me. It was five o'clock when we shut out the light. Lying awake, too tired to sleep, I tried to imagine us years hence, in some First World bed, reliving all the strange places we'd slept together.

  A moment later she was asleep. I listened to her soft breathing mingle with the melancholy call to prayer drifting out across the dawn, as it had every day for the two years we'd been in the Middle East—and for thirteen hundred years before that. God is Great! It is better to pray than to sleep!

  We were awakened an hour later by a loud thud at the door. A bus was leaving for Khomeini's funeral in five minutes.

  Geraldine pulled on her chador and we staggered downstairs to join a hundred journalists boarding the bus. An official from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance—Iran's version of the ubiquitous Information Ministry—hopped on, glanced at his watch and told the driver to go. We looked at each other in astonishment. A government bus in the Middle East leaving on time!

  Tehran's streets also surprised me. There was the usual dull sprawl of gray and brown storefronts, interspersed with domes and minarets. But the boulevards were wide, well scrubbed and bordered with trees. The wealthy district through which we were driving was dotted with carpet shops, boutiques and Mercedes-Benz showrooms. To my weary eyes Tehran looked more Western than Eastern, a bit the way Beirut must have seemed before shells and car bombs rearranged the architecture.

  We drove north toward the snow-capped mountains overlooking the city and parked at an airfield adjoining a vast prayer ground. It was here that Khomeini's body had lain in state for two days in a refrigerated glass coffin. Now, mourners poured in a black-lava stream down from the hills and into the prayer ground. There were women in black chadors and men in black pants and black shirts to match their black beards. Our group, with its blond heads and khaki clothes, looked like a small crowd of gate-crashers at a very strange party of punks.

  A half-dozen Iranians were trying to organize helicopter rides so we could view the gathering from above. But nothing in Iran was that simple. The officials seemed to represent several departments and they shouted at each other in Farsi, gesticulating wildly, as though even the most minor decision demanded theological debate.

  After half an hour, with no one yet airborne, Geraldine and I wandered out of the airfield and into the throng of mourners. As we neared the narrow entrance to the prayer ground, the crowd pressed so tightly that I felt myself swept away from Geraldine and into a current of shouting, jostling bodies. The mob funneled fast through the gate, and I grabbed for a vertical iron post, holding tight as the tide swirled past. Then a hand reached down, grabbed my forearm and hoisted me onto a high wall overlooking the prayer ground.

  “Cbabar nagar” I said, offering the phrase for “journalist.” It was the sum total of my Farsi.

  The m
an smiled. He was well dressed in a black open-necked shirt and a black sport coat. “Welcome to Tehran,” he said, in unaccented English. “You are American, yes?” I nodded, still catching my breath. “I hate America,” he continued. “It is not personal. I like Americans very much. I went to UCLA for four years.”

  He gestured out at the prayer ground. “Now tell America what you see with your own eyes. Tell America how much we love Imam Khomeini.”

  The view from the wall caused an odd sort of vertigo. Stretched below us, for a mile in every direction, was a seamless carpet of black tossed over the pink-brown hills. The carpet shifted, rearranging itself, as yet more mourners poured into the prayer ground. A high stand decorated the center of the rug, supporting Khomeini's coffin. The imam's trademark black turban, which denotes descent from the Prophet, rested on his chest. Several other ayatollahs stood beside the dais, and one of them moved to a microphone and shouted, “Allabu Akbar!” Mourners paused where they stood and bowed their heads in prayer. Five syllables had sufficed. What had seemed a riot was now an orderly requiem.

  “Allabu Akbar!” a million voices cried in unison. The crowd had segregated itself loosely by sex, giving the prayers a soprano and baritone chorus. “There is no god but God! Mohammed is the Messenger of God!” Then the Shiite clause, “And Ali is the Friend of God!” The quick switch from near-violence to total discipline was astonishing and a little spooky. I was reminded of Iraqi soldiers I'd spoken to, still scarred years afterward by the sight of Iranian boys surging straight into the Iraqi guns.

  The prayers were followed by a few brief eulogies.

  Then the mourners filed out of the prayer ground to begin the ten-mile march to a burial site in south Tehran.

  “Tell America what you have seen,” said the man beside me. He was sobbing. “As a Westerner you cannot understand what this man means to us because you have lost God.”