“I am living very quietly in my house,” he said. I asked him about his sons, but he only said, vaguely, “They are out of Baghdad.”
Muntazzer’s medical specialty was psychiatry. This was unusual in Iraq because mental illness was taboo and very few admitted themselves or their relatives for treatment. As the senior psychiatrist in the Iraqi Army during the Iran-Iraq War in the eighties, Muntazzer told me he had been responsible for evaluating officers as mentally fit for the front line. Despite the stigma, it was a common ruse to try to get a “mentally unfit to serve” certificate to avoid deployment. He said he had helped many of his friends’ sons in this way.
I found I oddly liked Muntazzer. He was shallow and callous but every so often a flush of resignation, regret—even something that might approximate compassion—would wash over his face. He said he appreciated that I wanted to tell the stories of real Iraqis; so many journalists (he flattered me) were only interested in the Americans. I told him that I would very much like to talk to some of his patients. Muntazzer told me, indeed, he had many patients with different kinds of mental disorders. He had, that very morning, visited a woman in her thirties whose hair had turned white overnight and her body had gone rigid as a board. Her husband said it happened when bandits broke into their house and tied up their children and threatened to cut their necks.
“I diagnosed psychosomatic paralysis.” Muntazzer made a compressed smile, pleased by his own professionalism. “Yes-yes, these things are quite common. Once I saw an executioner who had turned blind for no medical reason.”
“And you must have treated many victims of torture,” I said, my turn to probe.
Muntazzer was in the process of pouring more whiskey into his glass, the amber flow halted for a moment.
“Yes, all of us have suffered.” I thought I saw a tremor in his cheek muscle.
We talked about my theory that Iraqis were suffering an epidemic of trauma. He nodded gravely. Yes, this was evident, but nothing could be done.
“There are only a handful of psychiatrists in the country. I am only one man, I cannot treat a million people. And now there are drugs coming in through all the open borders, people are buying Valium, diazepam, lithium, ketamine, even antipsychotics in unlabeled packs from street vendors. People eat them as if they are sweets.”
The plight of the people, yes, yes, it was all very sad—but he seemed to accept it as axiomatic. It is what it is. About his own fate, he was more alarmed.
He told me that in the past two months he had survived two assassination attempts. He had sent his unmarried daughters and his wife to live in Amman. He railed against the Americans and the lawlessness that accompanied their occupation. A gang had stolen his other Mercedes (“a gift from Saddam!”) and when he went to the police station to report it stolen, they had just shrugged and turned him away.
“These thieves are all Kuwaitis!” he declared, almost spitting on his own carpet. “They have come on the coattails of the Americans. They pretend to be from Basra, but it is obvious when you talk to them, from their accent and their noses, that they are only Kuwaitis who have been waiting for their revenge.”
He began to rant about the state of the country. “Nothing is working! Imagine it. You have a driver who takes your children to school, your wife to shopping, everything the state provides for you so that you can concentrate on your position—and this is all gone and suddenly there is nothing—and in addition to nothing, worse than nothing, there is the collapse of everything. No petrol, no water, no telephone, no electricity, no leader.”
He told me, with some indignation, that he had to sell his wife’s gold jewelry to pay for the small apartment in Amman. “Two rooms with windows facing a wall!”
He had been reduced to driving his remaining Mercedes as a taxi. “Should I wait for hours just to fill my taxi with petrol? When Iraq is full of oil? This is our shame! Should I wait for hours in the street queuing for my army pension? Who can endure this? I am not a proud man! I try to work!” He lit another cigarette and pulled a lungful of smoke to calm his indignation. I sat back and let him recover his emollient smile.
“I must find work,” Muntazzer continued, quieter, supplicant. “I hope that my good friend and yours,”—again he watched me carefully to see if I would give anything away—“Ahmed, will help me in this endeavor. My knowledge and my experience, I feel confident, could be of great help to the Americans. They are making many mistakes, they are trusting the wrong people and employing the thieves.”
_____
Muntazzer did not introduce me to any of his patients, but he did set up a meeting for me with the head of the Saddam Psychiatric Hospital.
It was a place of cinder block and iron bars full of raving figures, squatting, walking in circles, hollow cheeks and half-moon brands on their temples from electroshock therapy.
“Oh yes, it can be very effective,” the director, Dr. Farhid, told me cheerfully. “One of my patients, his name is Ahmed Merry. He is our most interesting case. He was arrested for throwing paint on a picture of Saddam. In prison he was tortured. To protest he continually banged his head against the wall—hard enough to bring blood—and after several weeks of this behavior they sent him to us. He told us he hurt himself just to get out of that place. We said, we are sorry, but if you are not really mad we have to send you back. He said, OK, I really am mad, and he made all the actions of a madman. He went naked, he scratched himself. He went mad. We administered electroshock therapy and immediately he became better. We said now you are recovered you must go back to prison. So he went mad again. After many years of playing mad I think he really did go mad. But I think he must have been mad all the time, because it is a madness, no? To throw paint on a picture of Saddam—”
I retold this story to Ahmed later as I cooked him lamb chops. He had pretty much moved into my minisuite at the Hamra Hotel. Beige curtains, beige carpet; in the winter the bathwater was tepid, in the summer the air-conditioning was feeble, but it was our first home-place together. We tacked up maps and sepia prints of Ottoman-era Baghdad on the walls. Ahmed made me take down my portrait of Gertrude Bell—British imperialism he could not forgive. Of French imperialism he was more indulgent (I don’t know why); American imperialism, I teased him, was his worldwide dream. Ahmed laughed at my account of the mental hospital, trying to follow the circle of mad-pretending-to-be-mad and came up behind me and put his arms around my waist.
“It’s something very disturbing,” I said, “it’s a mirror game; but it’s not funny not to be able to know sane from insane, real from not real. It’s like Muntazzer, a psychiatrist who is on Prozac,” I said. “I saw the pills in his bathroom.”
“Did you?” Ahmed took his hands away from my waist, went to the minifridge and took out a bottle of arak. He cracked ice cubes out of the ice tray and poured two glasses, clear turned to cloudy. “Interesting. But I’m not surprised he needs medication to maintain some kind of equilibrium, to keep the mask on. I’ve been trying to persuade Colonel Don that we should start to bring Muntazzer and some of the other Baathie dragons into the fold, put them on the consultancy payroll, keep them close. We will need them to counter the Shia. The Shia think it’s their show now because democracy means the majority rules and they are the majority.”
“What does Colonel Don say?”
“He thinks it’s a good idea, he understands the danger of alienating the old state apparatus—such as it was, it held some kind of government together—trying to reconstruct without scaffolding is just foolhardy. But he says the de-Baathification program is the official policy. We can’t be seen to be supporting Saddam’s henchmen.”
“So they will just let the Shia take over?”
“They can’t.” Ahmed drained his arak and poured another. “It will be civil war.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” Ahmed on the subject of the Shia was intractable; he sighed and went back to talking about Muntazzer.
“He is like mercury, he will find any slot to sl
ip into. Did you know he was arrested? In the eighties, during the Iran-Iraq War. The matter of a prescription for amphetamines for a general. The general was arrested for retreating and then implicated him under interrogation. My father spoke up on his behalf, despite the risk. Did he tell you this? No, of course not! He is still clinging to his friendship with Saddam, as if it was a badge of honor instead of shame—worse, he is trying to sell it as if it had any value!”
“Muntazzer didn’t tell me he was arrested,” I said. “But it makes sense in a screwed-up way. The rope that twists to make a loop; the psychiatrist who has treated so many victims of trauma—he is his own doctor and his own patient.”
“Prison No. 1, the cushy prison—Muntazzer was only locked up for three months, the kind of arrest they used to call ‘a holiday.’ After he came out, do you know what he did? He was taken straight to the palace and he fell on his knees in front of Saddam and kissed his ring.”
_____
Sometime around Christmas, Muntazzer and I met again at the Hunting Club, once the preserve of the elite, now down-at-the-heel. The swimming pool was cracked and drained; the patio was covered with moldy plastic-grass carpet. There was a metal articulated Christmas tree in a corner of the dining room, dragged out of storage, a leftover from a bygone secular era. The crabby bent waiter took an age to bring us two beers. Muntazzer’s shirt was frayed at the collar, but he would not allow me to pay. Iraq is my country, I am inviting you.
He sat back in a scuffed leatherette armchair.
“How is your wife?” I asked him. “How are your daughters?”
“Al hamdillullah. They are safe in Amman.” His voice was more relaxed than before, he drew his vowels out; sanguine—or perhaps resigned. There were pouches under his eyes. I saw that his belly strained against his belt, he had let go of his upright military formality and crossed one leg over the other.
He told me his wife had been diagnosed with bowel cancer and needed radiation treatment. He complained that it was very expensive. He’d gone to Amman to take the money from the sale of some land because he did not trust anyone else to carry that much cash through the desert road. There were bandit attacks around Ramadi and Fallujah all the time.
“How are your sons?”
The club library (there were no books) was almost empty, but he looked behind himself to a corner where a woman with a bright headscarf was sitting with a small child, feeding it Pringles one at a time, which the child ground into dust with little fists.
“They have chosen a difficult path,” he said. He looked directly at me as if he was going to tell me something, but then he seemed to decide not to. He called the waiter to bring an ashtray and began to talk about Saddam’s capture the previous week. Muntazzer was upset at Saddam’s humiliation.
“To show our president being dragged out of a hole in the ground by common soldiers is a national shame.” He shook his head sadly, angry. “This is not right, this is not respect for a head of state. When a general surrenders, he must be given all dignity, it is against even the Geneva Conventions to make him look like an ordinary criminal. And the Shia went out onto the streets and celebrated! I do not know where the honorable Iraqis have gone.” I commiserated. Then the conversation devolved, inevitably, to what was universally referred to as the situation. Muntazzer railed against the ascent of SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an Iranian-sponsored Shia political party, which had set up an office in Karrada, black flags flying on the roof and guarded by men with black balaclavas. He was indignant that Americans had blocked off Abu Nawas and the traffic jams were worse than ever. A bomb hidden in a horse cart had gone off next to the Palestine Hotel. The Armenian supermarket had stopped selling alcohol under pressure from some Imam. Ambushes on the Qanat road, gunfire in Saidiya, a friend of his had survived another assassination attempt. But! Muntazzer grinned heartily. There was now a mobile phone network up and running! He showed me his new Nokia and gave me his new business card: Muntazzer al Samarrai, Medical Professional, Consultant at Large, in smudged serifs. The phone number underneath had a blue biro slash through the 8.
“The printers made a mistake,” said Muntazzer, “it should be a 3.” He had gone through the whole stack and amended each one by hand. But nevertheless he was cheered by the black and white evidence of his self-styled title. “We are finally joining the twenty-first century. My daughter has email now in the apartment in Amman!”
A certain veneer of forced jollity, urbanity, pretense. Muntazzer was bluff and calculating. But perhaps because he was so obviously so, I didn’t mind. It was like a pantomime act; every so often he would offer an aside, a confidence, a morsel of sincerity, as if to acknowledge, wink-wink, the ruse and, in doing so, plead indulgence for the pride of an old washed-up man. He played his part, victim of history, wise elder, and I mine, his deferential audience.
Friendly, but only as much, I suspected, as I was useful, as a connection to Ahmed, who was a connection to the Americans. In the meantime Muntazzer was happy to stretch his nostalgia and tell me stories about Ahmed’s father when they were at university together, both middle-class boys from Samarra. About the nightclubs and pool parties from before the wars, the time no one could remember anymore, when an Iraqi dinar bought three dollars, and the young women wore skirts and blouses in the streets and there was a discotheque at the Hunting Club every Saturday night.
“When I was training I lived in Vienna for six months in 1979 and this was the most beautiful time in my life.” Muntazzer took off his gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and wiped a wistful tear from the corner of his eye. “I fell in love with a woman even though she was Jewish. I had to go back to Baghdad because my father died and I promised to take her to Paris when I returned. But when I was home, the war against Iran arrived suddenly and everyone had to put on the uniform and khalas”—he made the gesture of finish, wiping one palm over the other. “Now maybe, I can dream of Paris again.” He smiled. He looked at me. “Ahmed tells me you are a good friend with the French ambassador?” (Ahmed told me afterwards that he had not told him this. But, thinking back, how else would Muntazzer have known about my connection to Alexandre?) He leaned forward to pour a little more whiskey in my glass. I did not answer directly, but I made an assenting sort of smile. I wasn’t going to lie, but I didn’t want to encourage a quid pro quo. That was Ahmed’s domain, he understood the form; when we were haggling in an antique shop, he always took over the negotiation.
“It’s the different mentality,” Ahmed had explained. “In Europe you go to a shop and the price is displayed and everyone pays the same. This is democracy. An Arab shopkeeper would never stoop to make his price public. He will make up a different price for each customer. Every transaction is a negotiation, not about a sum of money, but to determine the relative status of buyer and seller, who is more powerful, who is wealthier, who is the dominant one. Don’t ever think that you are just buying a kilo of lamb or that the butcher is happy to see you as a valued customer. You think that you are patronizing him because you have money, but he is overcharging you and boasting to all his shopkeeper friends that he has put one over on the foreigner.”
I did not understand the rules; Muntazzer was forced to show me a glimpse of his hand to encourage me to play along. He said, “Perhaps my son can be persuaded to talk to you.”
“What can he tell me?”
“He will tell you himself.”
“Is he—involved?” I asked, couching my words carefully. Muntazzer raised his finger to his lip, circumspect.
“At least tell me his name.”
“Oberon.” said Muntazzer. “I have three sons, Oberon, Othello, and the youngest one, my favorite, is Caesar.”
“Seriously?”
“I love very much Shakespeare,” Muntazzer admitted. “I called my first daughter Regan, she was born in 1984, we were still friends with America. But after the Gulf War we had to change her name to Raghad.”
FOUR
When the Ham
ra Hotel was bombed, Alexandre bent all the rules of protocol and persuaded me to move into the French Embassy. Inside those well-guarded blast walls the talk was high-handed. Oil executives and Kurdish PR operatives, visiting senators, American technicals from the Green Zone—the man responsible for health care in Iraq, the man responsible for electricity in Iraq, the man responsible for education in Iraq. “The earnest evangelicals,” Ahmed nicknamed his colleagues, “they are just like the Iranians: very polite, they sit forward on the edge of the sofa and refuse to drink alcohol.”
Alexandre was a gracious and accommodating host, variously cynical, synthetically corrupt, or sympathetic, as required. The French had abstained from the invasion and were now able to spread their hands wide, I-told-you-so, the-world-is-never-as-we-would-wish, quel dommage. Alexandre sat on his mezzanine, above the fray, courted by all sides as a go-between. No one ever refused an invitation to the French Embassy. The chef had oysters flown in once a week; his specialty was quail stuffed with fois gras. The Russians clapped with delight at his Stroganoff Rossini.
After dinner we would gather in the Sykes-Picot salon. It was decorated with a hand-painted orientalist wallpaper landscape of palm trees, elephants, and pagodas.
“Saddam was a great leader,” Alexandre said to the Russian ambassador there one night. He raised his brandy balloon in ironic salute. “Who else can control these unruly Iraqis? The Americans have made a grave mistake. One day, mark my words, one day we will all wish Saddam back. After all, who doesn’t now lament the demise of the Soviet Union, even with all its imperfections? Who can say all those little countries have brought better prosperity and security to their people?”
Under strict pain of excommunication, I was not allowed to report on anything I heard inside the embassy walls. This frustrated Oz, but as I always reminded him, the stories were only as true as their sources believed them to be, and therefore entirely unconfirmable. When the guests had gone, sealed into armored SUVs with tinted black windows and driven back to air-conditioned compounds, Alexandre would sit on the terrace, swirl his glowing cigar coal against the mosquitoes, and rue that there were more conspiracy theories inside the diplomatic corps than on the streets.
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