But I couldn’t always do it. I didn’t have the patience.
“You don’t really have a democracy in America. I know you’re not free to write what you see. You can only write what the government allows you to write. You don’t have to pretend with me. I know how it works.”
“America used to be a great, powerful country. Now you let the Israelians run everything. The government and the business, too. The Israelians knew about September 11. Why is America so blind?”
“How did the United States elect this Bush? We thought Americans were intelligent but now we see that they are not.”
Sitting there, I’d get agitated. I didn’t rub this man’s nose in his country’s corrupt, cruel leaders, or remind him of the shame of living quietly inside a dictatorship, impotent amid torture and censorship. I did not force him to represent his government. And yet I could not expect the favor to be returned, because my own government dripped with strength. As a citizen of an invading power, I could be called to account. My leg bounced wildly, my eyes narrowed, I dropped the pretense of taking notes. When you stop writing, people always notice.
“Write this down, please,” he intoned condescendingly.
“I don’t need to. I’ve heard it before, and it has nothing to do with the story I’m working on.”
Then a flash of shame, seeing myself through his eyes, brittle and snappy. I’d try to smooth things down.
“Look, I understand what you are saying. But we are not in Baghdad and I am not here to write about the invasion of Iraq. I’m writing about this other thing. So please, I am asking you, can we talk about that instead?”
It was hard to stomach. People who lived under the thumbs of dictators could look at America with a gleeful sneer: Look how your strong country has been drawn into a trap that will cost you dearly. Now we see that America, too, is criticized by the international human rights organizations. Now we see how America can sap its own strength. Now we see how the mighty stumble.
But there was always Nora. I’d find her leaning in the marble corner of some hotel lobby, in the shadow of lily stalks. Her car was with the valet. She did not so much drive as slide through the city, slipping crookedly over lanes, giggling when the horns honked. Somebody would pull up and wave. “Oh, it’s a friend of my father’s.”
As soon as we were in the car, she was spilling out the things she’d saved to say. “Did you see that story in The New Yorker? What did you think?”
Nora had earned a bachelor’s degree at a small university in the United States, and she filled my ears with stories about the professors she missed, nights out trolling the clubs, her visits to New York City. She had an imprint of America on her—not the menacing America in fatigues and boots, but the America that Americans know instinctively, the open, eager, optimistic one.
Nora was in her mid-twenties then but she seemed even younger. She moved slowly, looking and listening and drawing everything in to someplace deep and out of reach. She seemed to have no convictions, but in a good way, in a young, deciding way, and she met all people and scenes with flat frankness, dutifully picking up more material to put on her scales, to weigh out her beliefs, as if this were a lifelong project, as if it might take decades. She asked questions about everything, and she read religiously, especially American coverage of the Middle East. She was always dressed expensively, her makeup carefully done. Her family had money.
“Okay, where do you want to go?” Very serious all of a sudden, fiddling with the radio. Businesslike. That made me laugh. Whenever I laughed, she laughed. I could feel the weight slipping off—the airports and strangers and long, sleepless nights. I was so often with people who made me nervous, and now I laughed with relief, she laughed for company, we’d laugh constantly. We’d trade stories about what we’d been up to. Telling Nora about things, they didn’t seem so bad.
“What are the choices?”
“Maybe Italian. There’s a new place. Or the Blue Fig, you know that. Or we can have sushi.”
“Is the sushi good?”
“Yes, it’s very good.”
“Then I say sushi.”
“There’s one thing, though, Megan. You might think it’s strange.”
“What?” I was laughing already.
“It’s at the Best Western!”
“The Best Western!”
“But I swear, it’s good, you’ll see. If you think it’s bad we’ll leave.”
“I’m sure it’s great.” Laughing from low in my seat.
Through the yellow light of a cramped lobby to a creaking elevator that pushes us up. The doors open and we hear tinkling china, braided voices. Every wall is a great window. Amman is spread at our feet, a winking, bejeweled carpet. Fish gleams under glass.
“What do you think, is it all right?”
“It’s all right.”
Late one sticky summer night, Nora and I walked through Abdoun Circle, looking for ice cream. At this hour the shops and cafés were crammed with Kuwaitis, Emiratis, and Saudis. They shrank from the heat of day; it was never too late for them to pace the streets, thobes swishing around their legs, fidgeting endlessly with their red-checked headdresses and unfathomable cell phones. They rented luxury cars and choked the roads with late-night traffic. Cigarettes dangled into the dark; hubcaps gleamed wicked under the streetlights; 50 Cent and Amr Diab churned in the desert air. Some of them drove all the way here from Saudi Arabia or Qatar. These were not the richest Gulf Arabs, because if they had serious oil money, or the kind of influence known as wasta, they’d be in Europe. But they were plenty rich all the same, and they came every year to hide from the Persian Gulf summer in the cooler places—Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, or Amman. They are an invasion and the locals complain, but only behind their backs, because you can’t insult their cash. In Egypt I’d had my ass squeezed in an elevator, with a hissed “What are you doing tonight?” I’d watched a drunken Saudi yank sadistically on the testicles of the emaciated and crumbling singer at a cheap, smoky bellydance club, and the guy was so broke and beholden he just doubled over and smiled, sickly, as his cracked voice creaked on. They sat in horse-drawn carriages and threw firecrackers at the poor Egyptian kids who hung out on the bridges over the Nile, watching them scatter and screaming with laughter.
We passed a pair of twenty-something Saudi guys, wandering along in their robes. As soon as we were out of earshot, Nora turned her face to me in astonishment.
“Do you know what they just said?”
“What?”
“One of them said to the other, ‘Look, they are from the enemy.’ They were talking about us. They thought we were Americans because we were speaking English.”
“I am American.”
“Megan! That’s so crazy.”
“No, you know what’s crazy? That they were eating McDonald’s.”
“Oh my God.”
We laughed and laughed under the trashy neon stars.
And now we were here, Nora with her slumped shoulders and drawn face, looking empty because of Abu Ghraib, and I trying to find, not the right words, but first the right feeling.
By that time, I was steeped in torture. The Middle East was divided into three classes: the torturers, the tortured, and those who stayed out of the way. Filthy things happened in back rooms, people were driven mad by torment, and slick rulers lounged on top of it all. It seemed like half the people I interviewed had been tortured. Worse, half the people I hired had been tortured. The news assistant in Cairo, Hossam, had been tortured for organizing political demonstrations when he was a student at the American University in Cairo. A translator in Morocco had been tortured so hard for so long that he could hardly walk, and one awful morning he started yelling about it in the middle of an interview. You got tortured for being too religious, for being too left-leaning, for being gay, for marching in protests, for blogging, for refusing to pay a police bribe. People were raped and sodomized; waterboarded; electrocuted, cut, beaten, frozen, burned. I met an Iranian blogger my age who
made me cry, talking about how he’d been broken behind bars, about how even in freedom he lay sleeplessly in his bed and wept, too ashamed to tell his mother the truth of what had happened to him. Torture lurks at every single level of the Middle East. It’s in the fiber of the place.
“It’s pretty bad, huh, Megan.”
“Yeah. It’s bad,” I said. “But are you really surprised?”
Her eyes flickered. “Yes,” she said. “Of course!”
“But Nora, it’s a war. These soldiers are kids. What do you think happens?”
“But Megan,” her habit of repeating my name sounded, now, like an accusation. “This is the Americans.”
“But at least it’s coming out. At least at some point the system worked. It got found out by investigative journalism. And now people will get punished.”
“Yes. I know that’s true. But Megan, don’t you think this is really bad for the United States, to have people seeing these photographs?”
“Worse than invading Iraq in the first place?”
“This is different.”
“Why?” Why was I doing this? Of course it was bad for America; of course, in its way, it was worse. The photographs had made me feel sick. But I could not bring myself to tell Nora, and I couldn’t understand why.
“This is worse. It makes everything that’s happening in Iraq worse. It shows it in a different light.” She said the last sentence slowly, like she was reading it from a paper.
“But Nora …” The sentence fell off in a sigh. All the questions were piled up in my throat: Did you really believe in us? Did you think we came to Iraq to fight a noble war, did you honestly think that? Don’t you see what we have done? It felt foreign, suddenly, the two of us. After all our conversations about war, about Israel, about America, these photographs were stuck between us like a thorn tree, pricking our hands when we tried to reach through. Her fingers twisted and worked, and a forgotten coffee steamed into the afternoon.
“I mean … Nora, what did you think would happen when the U.S. started a war with Iraq? It’s a war. And—God, I sound like I’m defending what these soldiers did. I’m not. I’m absolutely not. But—I guess I’m just surprised by your reaction. It’s not like you were supporting the war until now.”
“They said they were coming to bring something better than Saddam Hussein.”
“Is that what you think this war is about?”
Nora studied her sleeves.
“I interview people every day, all over the Arab world, and I never meet anybody who thinks the Americans invaded Iraq because they don’t like dictators.”
“But Megan, people believe in the Americans.”
“Who?” My voice was bitter. “Why? Where?”
Then I looked at her, and I understood what she was saying. In fact, people did not believe in the Americans. But Nora had. Nora had loved America, and she had stood up for it, not so much in words as in deeds. She had embraced the Americans she met, aspired to American-style journalism, traveled to America to be educated.
“Americans are the ones who always say that America is the model,” she said weakly.
There were a lot of things I wanted to say, but it was all wedged too deep. I wanted to tell her about rural America, about all the different classes and experiences and geographies she hadn’t penetrated when she’d studied in New York. About the cruelties and brutalities of American history that she could not intuit, the things that dragged behind my country. Just as I could not hope to understand the men who hollered for Saddam, she could not make any sense of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib. We were both just crusts of deep and complex icebergs, the small pieces that poked over the water and showed themselves to one another. At the end we were standing side by side, just standing there and looking, like that first day when we’d met, Nora with her bangs in her eyes and her bright red T-shirt watching the praying Muslims at the mosque and waiting for the riot to begin. I was thinking of police beatings, prison rape, racial tensions; about lost suburban youth; about senseless, sadistic crime I’d covered in stifled, silent, dying small towns, the America that Nora didn’t see, in all its ugly complications and rotting institutions. I wanted to say, if you believed in the place before, don’t stop because of this. But it was more, too, and all these thoughts and memories spun through, fast, and so I started blurting things out.
“You know, I really don’t understand the Arab reaction to all of this. I just don’t. In these countries, people get tortured every day. And nobody says a word about it. And then the Americans are exposed and everybody wants to talk about that. Why don’t all these Arabs who are so angry at the Americans deal with their own leaders? Why don’t they demand something better from their own governments?”
Nora gave me a look I’d seen many times, but never on her face. It was resentment, impatience.
“But Megan,” she said slowly, “that’s the point. We don’t expect anything from the Arab governments. We expect something better from the Americans. That is the idea of America.”
“After everything that’s happened? Seriously?”
“I thought so,” she said. Then she got quiet. Her eyes were down again, and I thought she was about to cry.
But she held it together and we sat there while piped music wove its canned dreams through sterilized air. Boys in spiked hair and slender women in hijab poured through the shining caverns of this shopping mall named after Mecca—rich Iraqi refugees and the rich Jordanians who resented them, buying American sneakers and Chinese microwaves with their British credit cards. Nora was an Arab and I was an American, after all. That distinction grew up like a wall, and we each sat on our separate sides, sipping at our cappuccinos, groping around for words, both of us polite to the end but not bothering to pretend this could be repaired.
I saw Nora again the next time I came to Amman. We ate sushi and neither of us breathed a word about Abu Ghraib. Not too long after, Nora left Jordan to go to graduate school in the United States.
She didn’t like it nearly so much the second time around.
* A pseudonym.
* A pseudonym.
TEN
A QUESTION OF COST
It was the kind of lazy, sun-dappled day made for lemonade and swimming pools, and kids all over the compound banged through screen doors with the taste of summer freedom in their mouths. It was the weekend, and men in primordial hunches grunted along sidewalks in headphones and jogging shorts, teenagers wheeling past on bicycles.
“I can’t get over how American it is here,” I said vaguely to Valerie. She laughed an airy laugh and said, “Yeah, that Leave It to Beaver thing.” Yeah, I thought. A world bleached clean of traffic and bad moods and fights that couldn’t be set right within half an hour—the America that America had never been.
Valerie was an aerobics instructor and the wife of an American oil worker. I’d gotten her name from a woman in Riyadh; they had met at a Girl Scout convention in Kuwait. Well, great, come on over, Valerie chirped when I called. A towering blonde with bright blue eyes, fine features, and a southern lilt, she picked me up from the front gate in a Land Rover. Her yellow hair gleamed and bounced, fresh from a hair dryer and unwilted by a head scarf. The bronzed run of flesh from her fingertips to shoulder stretched bare. Outside the gates, back in the real Saudi Arabia, she could have been caned and jailed for any number of sins. But we were in the compound now. I slithered out of my abaya and felt my limbs go suddenly light, as if I had peeled Saudi Arabia itself off my back.
Here in the far stretches of the kingdom, the compound was a hologram of America complete with baseball diamonds, a cheery library stocked with English titles, and lawns sprinkler drenched in defiance of a withering Arabian sun. Smooth, flat streets vein the desert with implacable American nomenclature: Rainbow Road, Golf Course Boulevard, and Prairie View Circle. On the edge of the Persian Gulf, near the hardscrabble towns of chronically disadvantaged Saudi Shiites, the compound cradles the workers of the Saudi Arabian American Oil Company, Saudi
Aramco for short, the government-owned corporation trafficking in the world’s largest proven oil reserves.
For decades, thousands of foreigners have hidden behind walls in Saudi Arabia, barricaded against the kingdom’s stringent code of public morals. The compounds boasted smuggled whiskey and bathtub gin, outlawed Christian services, and pools where men and women mingled illegally. Saudi Arabia stayed outside the gates; within, the capitalized West thrummed along. But now, in the summer of 2004, an insurgency battered Saudi Arabia’s expatriate housing compounds and oil facilities. Militants rammed car bombs into apartment blocks, attacked government ministries, and gunned down BBC reporters. It wouldn’t be long before they sawed the head off an American helicopter engineer and stored it in a refrigerator. One bright day in May, they had dragged a dead American oil worker into a schoolyard to preach about the murdered Muslims of Fallujah. The insurgents worked languidly, as if time meant nothing, and everybody was muttering about whether Saudi law enforcement was infiltrated by jihadis. Answers and information were scarce. This is a Saudi problem, inscrutable Saudi officials said, and only Saudis know how to handle it. They droned on about tribes and families, swore that everybody was against terrorism and that, despite appearances, everything was under control. Still the violence kept coming, cracking the calm of desert life and turning the compounds into strategic forts. The walls and guards, once a protection from the cultural nuisance of strict laws, were now a barricade against mayhem. America was fading into armed fortresses, first in Iraq and now in Saudi Arabia.
A few days before I visited Valerie at Aramco, insurgents had stormed the nearby Oasis compound and killed twenty-two people, almost all of them foreigners. The Oasis was an unremarkable warren of palm groves and condominiums under red tile roofs. The gunmen stalked the grounds hunting for non-Muslims, and spared the infidels no mercy. An Italian and a Swede were butchered, their throats cut like animals. Others were shot dead. When they tired of slaughtering nonbelievers, the insurgents simply scrambled up an artificial waterfall, clambered over the back wall, and evaporated. This should have been impossible. Eight hundred Saudi commandos ringed the walls. Had security forces helped them slip away? There were other questions, too—disputes over how many men had been involved, things that gave the distinct impression that Saudi officials knew more than they said, that there was a deeper, hidden truth even more frightening than the version of events we were encouraged to accept as fact. I reported often in Saudi Arabia, and the only thing I believed with conviction was that I knew very little. Truth was buried like oil under blank sands. I still haven’t heard a coherent explanation for why the insurgency turned so intense that year, or why it later petered out.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 14
