One day killed the next in Iraq, and the months rose up to murder their forebears, and it all piled up into one year and then the next. The blood kept flowing until it covered everything.
It was getting harder and harder to find a piece of dry ground.
NINE
WE EXPECTED SOMETHING BETTER
What kind of place would Jordan be if it weren’t marooned on the map between the West Bank and Iraq? By now the country has been shaped by neighboring wars—census redrawn by the massive resettlement of Palestinian refugees, politics defined by making nice, memories stained by spillover fighting. And yet, in itself, Jordan doesn’t leave a deep impression. As capital cities go, Amman is bland: A spread of hotel lobbies and snips of desert and sleepy hills; a sand-hued turnstile churning the somnambulant traveler from one vivid elsewhere to the next. It is a city trading on its placid nature, destined and designed to be passed through on the way to, or from, bigger problems.
It was 2004, the time of year when gritty winter still clings to the landscape, and the sky sagged heavy as a damp sheet onto Amman’s seven hills. Nora* shushed up to the curb in a car thick with perfume and pop music. It would have to be Mecca Mall, she said. We didn’t have much time.
“Hey,” she pointed at a minivan up ahead. “I think that’s a mouse.” This was Nora’s code. It meant “I think that’s an intelligence agent.”
“How can you tell?”
“The picture of flower. Look how big it is. The mice love those pictures. They all have them.” (“The picture of the king. Look how big it is. Intelligence agents love those pictures. They all have them.”)
“I see them everywhere.”
“Well …” She tugged at the wheel. “There are a lot of mice.”
I knew something was wrong when I sat across from her at the café. Nora’s face played emotions like a movie screen—the jellyfish squeeze of her pupils dilating and contracting, catching pieces of light, the half smile that hung on her lips, always about to stretch into a shout of laughter that would rock her frame and squeeze her eyes shut. Today her shoulders hung low and her features had a vacant look. She had pulled her personality back, buried it deeper in her head.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, Megan,” she said with rote cordiality. “I’m fine. How are you?”
I laughed. “I’m fine, too.” She laughed too, a quick stab, and then her face sank back into ashy stillness.
“I can’t believe this about Abu Ghraib,” she said.
So that was it.
“I know,” I said.
I wasn’t supposed to have met her at all; it was a mix-up from the start. That had been more than a year earlier, when the invasion of Iraq was just beginning. I was stranded in Amman, waiting to go to Baghdad. For the time being everybody was frozen in place, the border closed, and the road to Baghdad a cemetery of bombed-out cars. Reporters stuffed Amman’s hotels, steaming and scheming into their beer at night. They twitched with plans to sneak into Iraq, or they had been in Baghdad already but lost their nerve and fled Saddam and his alleged arsenal of mass destruction. We all had the smell of meat in our noses, close but out of reach; we were crazed with hunger, not for a story, but for the story. Reporters begged for Iraqi visas from the embassy of a nearly defunct government, and waited for permits from the Jordanians to drive to the Iraqi border. We hunted for generators, stocked up on Cipro, piled helmets and flak jackets against minibars.
Spring came too early and too hot that year. Sandstorms clawed at buildings and machines. Fog came in the morning and bound the city blind, wrapped like bandages around the buildings. In these glaring, wilting hours, the televisions squawking nervously about collateral damage and new world order were as obscene as anything you can imagine. The invasion began and blood wafted over the sands, over the border, on eye-stinging winds. Amman filled with people and the people kept talking and all that gas built into pressure, sizzled like carbonation through the nightclubs and bars, hissed down the highways at night and punched lonely border outposts. Jordanians, aid workers, Iraqis who’d gotten out all mixed together, everybody on edge, angling and outraged. There were no proper nouns except Iraq and the Americans, Saddam and Bush and Blair. Waitresses plodded up behind glazed faces; sad hotel clerks stared over teeming lobbies; cashiers dropped coins into white hands with a sneer. The truth of the invasion was new and angry. It had been a suggestion that seemed impossible until, with the smooth birth of enormous news, it became real. Some faceless pilot dropped the first bomb into Baghdad and the war had come. Arab countries melted into pure rhetoric. People shouted about the Americans and spat on the ground to clear their mouths of bile. The Americans would take over all Arab lands. There was no more United Nations, no more decency, no more rules. This is terrorism! They are the terrorists! George Bush is a terrorist! The Americans wanted land and oil, they hated Muslims, and they were doing it all for Israel. This was the new face of colonialism. American power would redraw the borders. And the Arabs wouldn’t stand for it. They would fight to the bitter end, every last one, the portly man smoking in his great-grandfather’s coffee shop, the pampered middle-aged princess with her Botoxed forehead and husband’s crooked bank accounts, the calloused farmers of the Nile Delta.
Earnest aid workers rigged refugee camps in the eastern desert. They thought it would be that kind of war, that refugees would straggle out and live in tents. Everybody imagined how the war would be and set things up for the war they had conjured. But you can’t see a war before it’s happened. Those tents stood nearly empty for months, irrelevant crusts on the edge of a sinking country. The first refugees cruised into Amman in gleaming cars with smoked windows. They sweated filthy dollars, bought posh flats, and drove the price of real estate through the sky. Saddam’s daughters flounced through the beauty parlors. It was that sort of war. But in the beginning nobody knew.
Then the twitching, sand-blind city stared down the first Friday after the U.S. invasion began, and news spread: The clerics would sermonize about the evils of war, and then people would rampage in the streets. It was a useful idea, because inaction was driving everybody crazy. Maybe the government could have stopped it, but then a clever regime bends so as not to break; this is otherwise known as staying power. All that anger shouldn’t fester; it had to find release. So it would go into the streets, but only in a flash, as a quick demonstration of the travails the monarchy faced in keeping the people’s passions in check. It would show the Americans how their invasion made everything harder for this benevolent government with the pretty, plucky queen, and let the Arab brethren see that Egypt and Syria weren’t the only ones who got into a lather for the Great Arab Cause. Yes, Friday riots were the answer. Everybody had something to gain, and so did we, because the reporters were pent up and chomping for a story. Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, and everybody goes to the mosque to hear the sermons. It was a good day to whip up the crowds.
Friday came and I overslept, woke up, and called the L.A. Times translator, Nour.* She was snippy. We had never met. “I’ll be in the street with some other journalists,” she said. “You can meet me there.” I heard small children yelling in the background.
“What street?”
“Near the al-Husseini mosque.”
“What mosque?”
“Al-Husseini!”
“Where is it?”
“It’s—it’s downtown,” she sighed heavily. “The taxi drivers will know. Okay?” She hung up.
Creaking cars and tinted Mercedes and policemen jammed the streets. Koranic verses moaned from streaked windows. The taxi wove and wheedled downtown until the driver’s weary gestures indicated it would be faster to walk. As I pushed through the crowds in the shadow of dingy apartment blocks and dreary offices, I dialed and redialed Nour, hearing busy signals.
Then I saw them: a cluster of jeans-clad foreign journalists, cameras swinging from their necks, all of them clumped around a young Arab woman who chattered into her telephone as if she were alone.
I planted myself in front of her and stared until she hung up. “Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said.
“Are you Nour?”
“Nora,” she said archly. “Do I know you?”
“I’m Megan. From the L.A. Times. We talked a while ago. We were supposed to meet.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You were supposed to translate for me.”
“I don’t know who you are,” she said lightly. “But I’d be happy to help you.”
I sighed. “We just talked on the phone.”
“Well,” she said, “why don’t we walk together anyway, and I’ll help you out.”
She had been herding us along as we talked, Nora the Pied Piper of pale and gangly journalists, and now we had reached the old mosque. Piled rose-and-white limestone in the oldest quarter of Amman, the mosque is not far from the skeleton of the Roman amphitheater, and they say it was set on the ruins of the Temple of Philadelphia. But whatever splendor graced this valley in the days of the Romans has been rubbed away by centuries. Wealthy Jordanians didn’t stay in the tight, shabby streets of downtown; they climbed up the hills and into the desert to build lavish white houses. At the al-Husseini mosque, poor men peddled slabs of cardboard for makeshift prayer rugs and knelt down like ragged flowers in a stained concrete garden. The voice of the preacher piped through a loudspeaker.
“The Arab nation is being humiliated because we are not religious enough,” Nora translated. “The Arab nation tasted humiliation because we do not pray enough.
“If we unite as Arabs, we will win this war. This war is a sign for us to move forward and do something about our nation.”
Not very radical, I thought. Whatever happens, this cleric will be able to say it wasn’t his fault. Rings of praying men radiated from the mosque, a field of timeworn carpet and bowed heads. Everybody was tensed. It was coming and we waited. The prayers ended and the men stood, dusted off their dishdashas and the knees of their slacks. The street was crowded as a circus and silent as a cemetery. More men poured from the dim recesses of the mosque. Eyes flicked around, wary. Who would start the demonstration? They had so little practice.
A knot of men broke from the shadows and charged into the street, words in their throats and fists in the sky, screaming the timeless incantation of Arab dictatorship:
Bil roh! Bil dam! Nafdeek, ya Saddam!
With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice for you, O Saddam. This is shouted in every single Arab country; only the name changes. We will sacrifice for you, O Mubarak, we will sacrifice for you, O Rafik, we will sacrifice for you, O Bashar, we will sacrifice for you, O Islam, O Nasrallah, O Sheikh Yassin. In every Arab country, crowds of young men rush into the street to holler about sacrificing soul and blood for a dictator. It’s the cave art of political discourse, done as automatically as American students pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic, et cetera. Except these men are not passive, muttering their lines, hands limp on their hearts. They flame with rage and fierce pride. And then, through some alchemy, it cakes off like dried dust and blows away. The feeling is there, and then it is not. I looked many times at these skinny men with their thin mustaches and injured eyes, watched their mouths stretch and snap around the words. They looked back at me with hatred and yet it was tainted with confusion over which they hated more: themselves and their circumstances, or me standing there staring. Could they even say themselves, could they sort through the palpable indignity of having to cheer for an abusive power, through the vague pride and eagerness to please authority that rang in their voices?
With our souls! With our blood!
Disorder had been induced, the shouting scared away the pigeons, and after that nobody needed a prompt. The men who lurked cagily on the stained old streets, waiting for somebody else to get things started—they joined in, too. They punched at the sky, screamed for Iraq and Saddam, cursed America and Israel. The protestors emptied the dirty air from their lungs, the chains loosened for just this one afternoon, just this hour, just this place smeared with sun until it looked like a dream of itself. Nora stood unabashed in her short sleeves and blue jeans, hair knotted back into a ponytail, bangs dripping into her eyes, translating the chants, matter of fact and unreadable.
Rows of riot police stomped up a side street, gripping shields and clubs for beating. The demonstrators marched toward them, screaming their chants.
I put my hand on Nora’s back. “We’re in the wrong place,” I had to yell. “We’re going to get stuck in between them.”
“I think it’s okay,” she said. “So far it’s calm.”
“It won’t stay calm. Watch.”
The crowd had thickened by then, swollen and scraping against the shuttered market stalls, too big for the cramped stone streets. The police sticks pointed skyward, and the afternoon collapsed in running. Shoes slammed on hard streets. Every shop was a blank eyelid, screwed tight. There was nowhere to escape and so we ran with the demonstrators, riot police at our backs, swinging their clubs, thwacking at any limb, any spine. These were not hardened activists; these were middle-aged Arab men whose resolve vanished at the first smack of club on skin. Their hands thumped against our shoulders, shoved us aside. Panic turned to stampede and we raced through bodies slamming blindly into bodies, bone on bone and muscle on muscle, ragged breath, and clothes snagging on the sides of buildings.
Somebody was shouting and we turned to see a shopkeeper holding a demonstrator by the collar, punching him in the face, over and over. “Get out of my store!” he yelled hysterically, thrusting the man into the stampede. Somebody had found an open door and we jammed ourselves through, ran up one flight of wobbling stairs after the next, hunting for a window. Sweating, shaking, laughing. Nora was silent. Her enormous brown eyes flickered.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “This is great.”
I worked my cell phone out of my jeans pocket. I had a message from Nour: Are you here? I stared at it, frowning.
“Wait,” I said to Nora. “So you’re not Nour.”
“I’m Nora.”
“You don’t work for the Los Angeles Times.”
“No.”
“And we didn’t talk on the phone this morning.”
“No,” she said, and a laugh spread across her face.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. You must have thought I was crazy. I thought you were somebody else. I never met our fixer here, I don’t know what she looks like.”
“Megan,” she cut me off. “It’s no problem.”
She started giggling. I started giggling.
“Hey,” I said, “we can’t really see anything from here. You want to go back out?”
She did.
It took police half an hour to haul the last diehard protestors into paddy wagons. When they finished, the shopkeepers unlocked the metal screens and threw open their dens. Clumsy racks sprouting feather dusters and baseball caps resurrected themselves from the bed of concrete. The men hauled out old chairs, lit coals for their water pipes, and sat smoking, eyes fixed over the street as if nothing had passed.
Nora packed us into her car and whisked us off to a café. Here the Jordanians were young and lithe with designer eyeglasses, tight jeans, and flirty glances. Pop music bounced off walls the color of watermelon. It felt insane to be here, insane that this was the same country as the sweaty, tumultuous warrens of downtown an hour earlier. Do these kids even know about the demonstration? Nora shrugged. They are not interested, she said.
One of the journalists in our group is talking about the men who follow him from his hotel.
Nora frowns. “Shhhhhhh.”
“It’s not safe to talk here?”
“It’s not safe to talk anywhere.”
We fall quiet. Then Nora says, “Here’s what we do, guys, okay? My friends and I have a system we use so we can talk. It’s like a code. Like, we say ‘flower’—what do you think that mean
s?”
The queen? Somebody guesses.
“Her husband.”
Flower means “king.”
Mouse means “intelligence agent.”
These days, Jordan is full of mice. Everybody is afraid of them. They have never been so prevalent, or so powerful. Why? Because flower is scared. He’s very close to the West, which is not popular, especially since the Palestinian intifada, the war in Afghanistan, and now this war in Iraq. Flower was educated in English, people criticize his Arabic. Since September 11, it seems like everything is illegal. There are a lot of things the Jordanian newspapers won’t print; they just can’t. After September 11, there were even more red lines and topics that angered the government.
What are the repercussions, we ask.
Actually, she says, it’s like a point system. The first time, if you mess up, say they know you said something bad about flower, you get called in. They might give you a warning. The second time, they might give you a beating. The third time, you’re going to prison. Roughly like that.
Nora closed her mouth as the waiter drew near. The girl at the next table wiggled her shoulders and sipped through her straw, eyes locked on her boyfriend. The music pumped on.
After the United States invaded Iraq, my job got more complicated. Suddenly it was a tiresome problem, being an American. My nationality invaded every interview. If I wanted to talk about agriculture or mosque renovation, we’d end up dissecting America first. Every Arab had a detailed critique of U.S. foreign policy, and no intention of missing his chance to unburden all that outrage into the ear of an honest-to-God American. If I were strategically smart, I’d listen sympathetically to the complaints about America’s basic moral unseemliness, my silence a delicate, implicit apology. And then, after I’d scraped and nodded and mm-hmmed, I could wedge in a few questions. Stay cordial, I’d remind myself. You catch more flies with honey.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 13
