Baghdad Without a Map

by Неизвестный

  One architect of this fantasy, the Honorable Minister of Information and Culture, had become a media superstar. When I'd interviewed him two years before, Latif Jasim was a pistol-toting stiff who spoke only in staccato Arabic. Now he held frequent press briefings, grinning broadly as he made small talk in exuberantly bad English. The only echo of my earlier visit was the minister's careful choice of couches: he still sat with his back to the wall, facing the open door.

  He also remained reticent about his background. When a reporter asked about the minister's birthplace, Jasim replied, “Kuwait.” He waited a moment, then laughed awkwardly. “This is a joke,” he added, as though it were the first he'd ever attempted. Kuwait, of course, no longer existed. A map in the Information Ministry showed the emirate as the nineteenth province of Iraq, with one section of the annexed territory already renamed Saddamiyat. The ministry also had rushed into print a book called End of Fragmentation, which laid out the historical roots of Kuwait's “return to the Motherland,” just four weeks before.

  Jasim rambled on for an hour, spouting the usual Iraqi absurdities. He said “documents” proved that George Bush had dispatched U.S. troops solely to protect his own stake in several oil companies. A week before, Jasim had announced that any U.S. airmen shot down over Iraq would be eaten. Iraq's allies counseled him that this was a tad extreme, even by Baghdad standards—so Jasim corrected himself at the next press conference, saying that the bodies would be fed to dogs. Pressed for details this time, he moderated the threat again: “Your soldiers will go down in the sand. You will not find them.”

  I was encouraged by Jasim's open and amiable manner, and on the way out, I asked one of his minions, a slick, fluent English speaker named Naji Hadithi, if I needed a permit to visit Babylon (a trip that would let me survey the countryside). Hadithi's calm face curled into a chilling smile. “To follow the line of Bazoft?” he asked. Farzad Bazoft, a London-based journalist, had been hanged by the Iraqis a few months before, accused of spying during a drive south near Babylon.

  In the elevator, a reporter from The New York Times fired a few follow-up questions about food shortages. Again, Hadithi's smooth veneer vanished. “Do you have another card other than the press card?” he snapped. “Your questions are put the same way as FBI people.”

  It was the paranoid and thuggish Iraq I remembered so well from previous trips. And two months later, on a return trip to Baghdad, the all-seeing eye of Iraqi security caught up with me. It was Halloween night and I was strolling through a leafy Baghdad district, gathering color for a story about the trade embargo's impact on Iraq. Well-dressed Baghdadis promenaded along a broad avenue, munching popcorn and window-shopping. Most of the goods were looted from Kuwait, and I asked a young shopkeeper the cost of certain foodstuffs. He eyed me warily but told me the price of coffee, tea, powdered milk, and other goods—most of them beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis. I continued along the street until I thought I was out of eyeshot, and scribbled down the details in my notebook. Then I crossed the boulevard and lost myself in a crowded arcade. As I gazed in one window, two merchants tugged me inside. When I told them I was a reporter, one of the men spoke in an agitated whisper.

  “Do not be fooled by what you see,” he said. “We have no money, and prices are high. We are choking.”

  His friend cut him off. “Abdul,” he cautioned in Arabic, “stop talking.” Abdul kept talking.

  “In Iraq I am supposed to see nothing,” he said, putting his hands over his eyes. “And hear nothing and say nothing.” He put his hands over his ears and mouth. “If I do, they do like this,” he added, running a finger across his throat. “But I cannot think nothing.”

  “Abdul,” his friend said again. “Stop!” I noticed them glancing over my shoulder. Someone was watching from outside the small shop. Abdul prodded me toward the door, saying in a loud, forced voice, “Goodbye, mister! Good-bye!”

  I walked on, then hailed a taxi back to the hotel. As I climbed in, someone climbed in beside me. It was the young shopkeeper from the first store I'd visited, to ask about food prices. He'd been trailing me. Sweaty and nervous, he spoke sharply to the driver, who made a quick U-turn and pulled to the curb. Three police cars appeared and a security officer jumped out. He wore crisp green khakis and a disconcerting badge—a tricolored Iraqi flag beside a single long-lashed eye. Because I was sitting in the car and he was standing by the window, the unblinking badge loomed in front of me. When he began firing questions, I wasn't sure whether to look at his face or at the third eye pinned to his breast.

  “What you are doing? Why you are spying? Where you are from?”

  “I am a reporter from America,” I said. The officer reached for a radio phone and read out details from my passport. He waited five minutes and did it again. And again. An hour passed. Two merchants approached and offered to help interpret. But as the questions continued, the police began interrogating the two men instead of me. The merchants showed their ID cards and pointed at their shops. Then they melted into the night, assuring me, “No problem, mister. No problem.”

  A police car carried me to a nearby station, and I was taken into a bare room with a naked light bulb, a smiling portrait of Saddam, and a badly wired telephone that kept yanking out of the wall each time someone tried to make a call. An officer finally got through. He was calling another branch of the secret police. “No problem, mister,” the officer said after reading my passport details into the phone yet again.

  I kept asking to make a call myself, to the Information Ministry desk at the hotel. Surely someone there could vouch for my press credentials. But the men looked at me blankly and shook their heads.

  The one officer who spoke more than a few words of English brought me a glass of water and a sweet cookie in the shape of a heart. “Eat now,” he said. “Food in jail no good.” He translated the words for the others and they laughed loudly, slapping me on the back. Iraqi joke.

  The cookie man seemed friendly enough, but every time I tried to engage him in conversation, he drifted out of the room, leaving me alone with my Arabic inquisitors. Like the English-speaking merchants, he was reluctant to become an interlocutor, as if any link with me would somehow make him guilty by association.

  Months later, I met an Englishman, part of Saddam's “human shield,” who had been held in a dungeon for weeks after trying to escape Iraq. As individuals, he said, his Iraqi captors were friendly, bringing him small gifts and soothing his fears. But if another Iraqi entered the room, the same guard became impersonal, even cruel. Iraqis' fear of one another was the buttress that kept Saddam's police state aloft.

  Two more hours passed. Sweat prickled the back of my neck, a knot of paranoia twisted in my chest. Had I mistakenly let the Israelis stamp my passport during some late-night arrival at Ben Gurion Airport? (It had happened to me once before.) Did the Iraqis keep track of all the nasty stories I'd written about them?

  The three-eyed interrogator loomed before me again, firing the same questions he'd asked a half-dozen times already. He seemed weary of my bland responses, and apparently had received no instructions from his superiors. I asked to use the phone again, and this time he relented.

  An hour later, an Information Ministry escort from the hotel arrived at the station. It felt strange to suddenly regard this man as an ally, but I told him what had happened and pleaded for help. He nodded gravely and called in the shopkeeper who had first apprehended me. The youth explained with shouts and gestures that I had questioned him suspiciously. Maybe I had a camera. Maybe I was a spy. Maybe I was a Jew.

  The young man was probably a paid informer, like so many other young men in Baghdad. Or perhaps he was guilty himself of smuggling or price gouging, and genuinely feared that the information in my notebook could be used against him.

  The ministry man consulted with the police, then turned to me grim-faced. “I can do nothing,” he said. “Now they take you to your cell.” I gasped. He laughed. Iraqi joke. He reached for the telephone, signe
d a few papers, and escorted me out of the station. On the long drive back to the hotel, he lectured me sternly on the need to take a ministry escort along wherever I went.

  A few days later, I found myself passing through the neighborhood where I'd been apprehended. It was midday, a brilliant autumn sun shone through the trees, and Baghdad appeared pleasant and unthreatening. I got out of the cab and found myself wandering toward the shop where Abdul had whispered to me about seeing, hearing, and speaking nothing. The shop was closed. I asked a merchant at a neighboring store if he knew where Abdul had gone. The man shrugged and turned away.

  The Iraqis waited until January 9 before issuing me another visa. “You are so lucky to go to Baghdad at this time,” Mr. Adon said, in what I suspected was another cruel Iraqi joke. Baghdad, after all, had been date-stamped. If Iraqi troops didn't leave Kuwait by midnight on January 15, all hopes for peace would expire. Baghdad, with its command centers and weapons factories, was the obvious first target for allied bombs.

  The deadline gave Baghdad a strange, fin-de-crisis atmosphere. People can bear only so much anticipation, and now, at least, the tension had to break—with a cloudburst of bombs, or with an eleventh-hour retreat from Kuwait. Either way the awful waiting would be over. Weeks later, when I visited foxholes in northern Saudi Arabia, American soldiers exhibited the same manic compulsion to “go home, or go in and get the job done.” Sitting in limbo was driving them mad.

  In Baghdad, the madness manifested itself in sharp swings between total denial and quiet despair. One moment, residents braced for war, taping windows to guard against flying glass and bundling their families off to the countryside. The next moment, Baghdadis busied themselves by dancing on the gallows. Bars and restaurants, abandoned a few months before, now bustled late into the night. And at the Baghdad Horsemanship Club, several thousand men crowded the rail, studying scratch sheets and swigging beer.

  I struck up a conversation with a retired professor named Yussef, and he invited me to join his party in the members' gallery, beneath a portrait of Saddam in bedouin garb, riding a muscular steed. It was a measure of how giddy Baghdad had become that I suddenly found it easy to talk to strangers. Either the regime was too preoccupied to monitor its citizenry as it had before, or Iraqis themselves were so light-headed that they wantonly abandoned their usual reticence around foreigners.

  Yussef and his friends had been coming to the track each week for years and saw no reason to abandon the habit now. “America is no baby,” Yussef said, broaching politics, unprompted. “It has brains. It will not fight Iraq.”

  I asked him where he planned to be on the fifteenth.

  “In my family's village, of course,” he said without irony. “It is safer there.”

  At the fifth race, an elderly schoolteacher named Hassan took me to the edge of the gallery and offered me his binoculars. “I am too blind now, even with a telescope,” he said, smiling wanly. As the jockeys led their horses to the starting gate, Hassan reminisced about the day four years before when he'd watched a crude Iranian missile plunge into downtown Baghdad, a few miles away. “We shook our heads and went to bet on the next race,” he said. “It will be the same this time.”

  The fifth race proved portentous. Hassan had bet on the favorite, Ruthless. But at the stretch a long shot named Emir—Arabic for “prince” and the title given to Kuwait's royal rulers—pulled into the lead. It won by several lengths, leaving Ruthless far back in the dust-clouded pack. A groan rose from the crowd, and torn-up tickets blanketed the stands.

  “What happened?” Hassan asked, gazing Wearily at the track.

  “Ruthless lost. Some horse named Emir won.”

  Hassan shrugged and flashed me another wan smile. “It is just a horse race,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him somehow that war wouldn't be the same at all this time. But he'd already wandered off to the bar to buy us another round of beer.

  The next day I caught a taxi driven by a Christian man who was trying to supplement his salary as an engineer. He was desperate to buy a used car to ferry his family to the countryside. “I have food, I have gasoline,” he said, nervously navigating the quiet traffic. “But I do not have a place to hide.”

  At a stoplight he rested his forehead against the steering wheel, choking back tears. “Eleven years of this, living in hell with Saddam. Everyone, they hate him. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine. But if you speak, you hang. Not just you. Your whole family.”

  The light changed and he recovered. Then he turned to me, panic-stricken. “Now I am afraid for speaking to you. You have tape recorder?”

  “No,” I said, opening my sports jacket. “Just a notebook.”

  “You don't understand,” he said. “I mean, maybe they put one on you without you knowing.” He pulled over and began patting my jacket and checking my collar. Then he looked away, embarrassed. “I am so sorry. But I am weeping inside. Only the dumb ones are not afraid. They think we can win this war.”

  He cut back into the traffic, made an illegal turn—and narrowly missed a head-on collision. “Everyone is having accidents now,” he said. “All Baghdad is out of its mind.”

  I stayed in Baghdad five days, each more ominous than the one before. Military police appeared along major highways, dragooning civilian buses to carry troops to Kuwait. Rumors swept the city that the government had purchased thousands of coffins for shipment to the front. And newspaper editorials blustered that Kuwait would soon become “nothing but crushed bones spread in the desert” and a “marsh of blood where American corpses will swim.”

  Yet life went on. The Education Ministry calmly announced that mid-year exams would go ahead as scheduled, a few days after the U.N. deadline expired. And younger students continued the ritual of anti-American demonstrations that had been proceeding without pause since August 2.

  I caught up with Suhail Abdullah and his sixth-grade class a few blocks short of the American embassy. “Today was our turn,” the teacher cheerfully explained, herding sixty boys along the sidewalk. The class, waving placards of Saddam Hussein and elbowing and joshing one another, had the gay, liberated air of school expeditions everywhere.

  “We are peace messengers,” Suhail said. “We know America really wants peace.”

  I was the only American to receive the message. The embassy had closed earlier that day, its diplomats evacuated, and the Stars and Stripes taken down to avoid desecration. Undeterred, Suhail raised his baton to coach his pupils in three precise words of English: “No more war!” One boy removed a lollipop from his mouth just long enough to join the chant before scattering with his friends.

  “Boys are boys. They go to play,” Suhail said with a shrug. But as he wandered off, he said something else before vanishing into the shimmery afternoon: “They are very afraid, you know. At home they hear their parents say that everyone may soon be dust.”

  Two days short of the U.N. deadline, as the last slim hopes for peace slipped away, the government media drifted into the ozone. The first seven items on the TV news showed footage of a visiting Zambian delegation: Kenneth Kuanda in African robes, spread across an overstaffed sofa, exchanging pleasantries with Saddam; Kenneth Kuanda kissing schoolchildren; Kenneth Kuanda at Saddam International Airport waving a white handkerchief as he boarded his plane home. Only at the end of the broadcast did the news turn to the “latest developments in the Arab Gulf region”—accompanied by soundless footage of anti-war protestors in New York, identified only as “the feminist guerrilla theater.”

  The news was followed by a tape of Saddam's birthday celebration eight months before. Young girls in tutus danced around a giant cardboard heart with the president's face at the center, singing, “Happy Birthday, oh Saddam!” The birthday boy watched solemnly from a nearby dais.

  I turned off the TV and headed out to meet an Iraqi journalist for a late-night dinner. He and his friends were drinking straight whiskey, and laughed aloud when I suggested that America was serious about attacking if Iraq did
n't withdraw.

  “Attack us? Iraq?” one man said, genuinely astonished. “Why? Bush knows how strong we are. America does not want Vietnam again.” The others raised their glasses and shouted their assent.

  The day before, an American diplomat had urged me to board the embassy flight out of Baghdad, declaring, “You want to stick around and become a pound of ground round?” I'd laughed off the warning. Surely, Iraq was still bluffing and would fold its cards rather than risk annihilation. But watching Saddam on television, and listening to the Iraqis bluster over their whiskey, I wasn't so sure anymore.

  Outside, a hard rain fell on the city. There were no taxis on the street, but a car pulled over to offer me refuge. The driver was a soft-spoken thirty-seven-year-old named AH, who said he was due to report to his artillery unit at dawn. Driving slowly through the empty streets, he talked about his long service during the Iran-Iraq war and how he dreaded another battle. “If war comes, I kill many people. My piece,” he added, miming the recoil of a cannon, “I don't know where it lands.”

  He didn't want war, but he wouldn't shirk his duty. “Anyway, it is my country,” he said, staring gloomily into the rain. “What I can do?”

  I wondered what I would do if caught in a similar circumstance. Go AWOL maybe. Or drink straight whiskey until dawn.

  A mournful song came on the radio and Ali began to hum along. I asked him to translate the lyrics. “Iraqi song,” he responded. “It says, 'It is up to the God.' ”

  When the sun came up, Ali went to man his “piece,” and I caught a taxi to Saddam International Airport for what was reputed to be the last plane out of Baghdad.

  The next Iraqi soldier I saw was an ill-clad infantryman urinating at the edge of a barbed-wire enclosure near the border of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It was February 24, the first day of the ground war, and Iraqi soldiers were surrendering in droves. The soldier wore khakis so baggy that he seemed to have lost thirty pounds during the five weeks of pounding by allied bombs. His tattered city shoes, untied to give his toes room to wiggle, suggested instead that he'd borrowed the outfit from a comrade buried in the Kuwaiti sand.