Baghdad Fixer (10 page)

“...so then we must act as if we are the judges and must compensate ourselves for what Saddam took from us. We hope in the future we will have a true Islamic society based on sharia, and then we will never again see a situation such as this. Moreover, you must know that all of what we are seeing is presaged in the Holy Koran. You should read sura 15:47. ‘We shall strip away all rancour that is in their breasts.’ I can show you the place. It means that the belongings of a decadent regime must be stripped away. When there is a war against a corrupt ruler or an infidel regime, this is what we are called upon to do.”

“I understand. One moment? Let me explain to the lady.” And I start to summarize his points for Sam, but she is sitting with her arms crossed and looking annoyed. “You don’t want to write this down?” I ask.

She picks up the notebook she had placed on her lap and grimaces. “Yeah. Go ahead and tell me again.”

I give her a summation of everything he has said, focusing on the most important points. Sam shakes her head.

She lowers her voices and tries to sound gentle. “Nabil, this isn’t working. I need exact quotes, not summaries. Ask him to run through his day yesterday and tell me what he did. Where he went, what he stole. How he got it home. How did he get all of this stuff into his living room?”

“...and so you can explain to this lady that when we have a true Islamic government that works in concert with the
ummah
,” and I cannot think of how to translate this, “we can reconcile any disputes over this process. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon Him, said to care for the poor. And we will make sure that the proceeds of what we reclaim are evenly distributed to the poor.”

I do not know how to get him to slow down, or how to translate half of what he is saying. His arguments do not even make complete sense to me.

I nod emphatically. “Sorry, sorry? She wants to know where you went for these items.”

“Where we went?”

“Yes, where everything is from.”

And so he explains that most of these things came from one of Uday Hussein’s homes, and from a government office that was run by him, and I tell Sam all of this, but she still does not look happy.

Hatem excuses himself and leaves the room. “He says that he has at least seven family members who have disappeared in the past decade. He is going to show us pictures.”

“Nabil, could you try getting into his voice when you translate? Say, I did this or that.”

“I should say I did this?”

“Yes, don’t say, ‘He says he has more than seven family members.’ Say, ‘
I
have more than seven family members.’ First-person. Know what I mean by that? Pretend you are speaking for him.”

Of course I know what first-person is. But I didn’t understand until now that Sam would want me to speak like that, and I didn’t expect that she would be constantly correcting and interrupting while I interpret for her.

Hatem comes back with a stack of pictures. The edges are tatty, and their faded colour betrays their age. Young men in their twenties and thirties with thick moustaches, some resembling Hatem, stare back at us. Hatem names each one and the time he disappeared. Many of them were picked up after March 1991, he says, after the war with Kuwait and America.

“On Monday we are going to go to Al-Mahawil to look for them,” Hatem tells me. “The people are digging up the mass graves there and I think this is where they might be buried. We must give them a proper Islamic burial.”

“He says he may go to the south to look for them when they excavate the area,” I tell Sam. “I mean, sorry. ‘
We
are going to the south to look for them. The people will dig up mass graves there.’”

“Hmm. Wow, that’d be an amazing story. Nabil, ask him if he minds letting me get a shot of him holding these photographs.”

“You want him to stand in front of the looted items while you take the picture?”

Sam seems doubtful, then dismissive. “Nah, I don’t want to pose the picture that much, you know?”

I can’t imagine how the photograph wouldn’t seem posed. If posed means that the people arrange themselves in such a way that they know the picture is being taken, and they try to look appropriate for the photographer, then isn’t it posed? Hatem calls his sons over and the smallest boy, fully recovered from his brother’s pouncing, comes running to his father’s knees. Hatem pulls him on to his lap, and then splays out the family photos like a fan.

“Okay,” he says, “now I am ready.”

“You can take the picture,” I tell her.

“I already did,” she says. But this time I didn’t hear the click, so I am wondering how that could be.

“Take down all of their names,” Hatem says, setting his son, who seems disappointed at the brevity of his father’s affection, back on to the floor. “Put them all in the newspaper. Saddam has killed millions of Shi’ites. Millions. Now the future of the country belongs to us, and we will rebuild it in their name,” he says, smiling at his boy. “Tell her that.”

“He is saying that Saddam was very bad to the Shi’ites and killed a lot of them. But all the Shi’ites say this. We don’t know if it is true but many people have been saying this.”

Hatem interrupts me. “She’s American, no? Maybe if America had come sooner, my cousins would be here with us now. One of them had his tongue cut out.” He looks at her. “You had a chance to get Saddam twelve years ago, and then you come now. Why? Why so long?”

“What is he saying?”

“He is saying he is glad the Americans are here now.”

“Is that what he said?” Sam gives him a face of pleasant surprise, which looks feigned. “Really? Are you happy the Americans are here?”

“Yez, habby. Now habby.” Hatem answers in the shreds of English he must have learned in school, his “p” coming out as a “b”. I wonder, is this the kind of English my students will speak one day, long after they have finished my class?

A ringing tone emerges from Sam’s bag. She scrambles to find the phone and, pulling it out, looks at the screen. “This is my editor again. Do you have a balcony?” I check with Hatem, and he shakes his head.

“What about a window facing southeast?” Sam stands with a posture that says it’s urgent. Hatem leads her through the back of the apartment, towards his bedroom. His wife and smallest son stand at the entrance to the kitchen, confused, but Sam hardly takes notice. She opens the window, fumbles to put an extension into the end of the phone and sticks her arm out with the phone pointed towards the sky. Then she dips an earpiece at the end of a little black cord inside her ear.

“Miles?! Miles?” Sam glances at us and pats the air in our direction to say that it is all right. “Hold on. Can you guys give me a minute? I just need to take this call.”

We return to the salon.

Hatem searches my eyes. “She’s an American?”

“Yes, she is.”

“But you said France.”

“I said...she lives in France. I thought you meant that you wanted to know where she was coming from now, before she came to Iraq.”

Hatem’s face is still. “How do you know she isn’t working for the government? Most of the journalists are working for the government. Who else could have such a phone?”

Hatem’s wavy beard fascinates me. Though I think he must be my age, and certainly not more than thirty, there is a marbling of grey in it that makes him seem like he could be a decade older. I find myself making assumptions about his life. A childhood of urban poverty in a large family, a brief education. How much could he know about freedom of expression in the West? About a media outlet which isn’t owned and operated by the government?

“In America, the media and the government are separate,” I explain.

Hatem’s mouth twitches with disagreement. He takes a set of
sebha
from his pocket, a string of jade beads with gold dividers. I know that this quality of prayer beads is very expensive, and I wonder if it, too, was looted. He twirls it around his fingers, clockwise and counterclockwise.

“How do you know she’s not a spy?”

The thought, however preposterous, has crossed my mind. I want to ask him which kind of spy he would prefer she be, CIA or Mossad. But he looks too serious to think it is as funny as I do.

“Believe me, I know. She’s just a young woman travelling with other journalists. I know the newspaper she is writing for. It’s famous. I can show it to you.”

“How long have you known her?”

“More than a year. She came here to report before the war.” I don’t know what shifted, what made me make up another lie. I want people to trust Sam, and for her to trust me.

I feel her pacing back towards us, the squeak of her sandals across the cheap linoleum. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I think we should go. There’s another story breaking and my editors want me to file on something else.”

I stand and Hatem stands, too. I try to explain why we are leaving so quickly, but I don’t think he understands. He seems to feel we’ve only just arrived, and should stay for a meal.

“Thank you so much for your time, Mr— oh! Wait,” she says, flipping back over her last two pages of notes. “I didn’t get your name.”

“I have it,” I tell her. “I will give it to you in the car.”

“But I need to make sure the spelling is right. Some people have a preference for how to write it in English.”

“Hatem Mohammed,” Hatem says.

“Mohammed? That’s his last name?”

“Badr. Hatem Mohammed Badr.” His eyes are locked on Sam’s forehead as she writes down the name, but she seems oblivious.

“Do you use b-a-d-r, or b-a-d-e-r?”

He looks to me for an answer. His features expand, a map of his suspicions occupying more territory across his face.

“Put b-a-d-r. No ‘e’,” I say. I am afraid that with the “e,” Sam’s readers will see the name and think “badder.” Even though I know there is no such word, it is the way people will see it, and this troubles me. On the radio, I’ve heard the way Bush pronounces our president’s name. He makes it sound like “sad” and “damn”.

Sam peeks around the corner towards the kitchen to say goodbye to Hatem’s wife. She is reticent but smiles broadly, and then hurries to Sam and kisses her on both cheeks.

Nearing the door, I remember how we got here. “Oh, your brother Adel never came by. He said he was going to join us. Please thank him.”

“How do you know Adel?”

“We met—” Lie again? “We met him just today.”

“Oh, I see.” Hatem nodded, as if ticking off mental notes for himself. “You know, Adel is not really my brother.”

And now I feel daft, because when I think about it, the two men do not look at all alike. Adel was fat and fair to the point of coming across as foreign, while Hatem is like any other working-class guy on the streets of Saddam City, gaunt and brown-skinned.

“But you can say he is something like a brother.” He runs his hand over his beard and winces.

Sam stands in the hallway, snapping her bag shut. “You’ll tell me about this conversation in the car, I take it?”

“Our brotherhood is something the Shi’ites have that I’m not sure you can understand,” Hatem says. “Just like it is difficult for you to believe the evil things Saddam did, perhaps because he is one of yours.”

“Actually, I’m also Shi’ite,” I say “I mean, sort of — I am both. I am Sunni and Shi’ite.”

“
Sedog?”
He smiles and slaps my back as a good friend might, rubbing where his hand has landed. “The two sides of the Iraqi heart. Maybe you are the Mahdi, like the messiah, coming to bring peace!” He laughs deeply, and I try to laugh along with him. “Seriously, it must be hard for you to decide which side you are on.”

“Nabil?” Sam is holding on to the rail above the staircase.

“When you choose, if you choose well, you are always welcome to come back and visit us.” He puts his hand on my shoulders and draws me to him, kissing alternating sides, three times, or maybe more, because already I am finding it difficult to keep track of how many times things have happened and how much time has passed. He lets me go and Sam is tapping her foot and a waking dream suddenly shoots through my mind: Noor’s bullet zooming in the window and me flying up to catch it, my cupped, glowing hands saving the world from disaster.

~ * ~

9

Saving

Sam’s editor, it seems, wanted her to go to the Museum of Art. He read on the newswire — this is a new word for me — that the museum’s ancient art is being carried away by what they called “professional” looters. But we cannot get anywhere near the building. There are American military vehicles cordoning off the area, sending people back.

“Maybe we can come back later,” I offer. “What can you do? One can’t argue with a tank.”

“That’s not a tank,” Sam says. “It’s a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. See? There’re no treads on it. It’s just a scary-ass Humvee with big guns mounted on it. Okay, Rizgar. To the Hunting Club.”

“Now Hunt Club? Again?” I am impressed with Rizgar’s Arabic, given that many Kurds from the north do not speak so well. But his English is so nominal that I wonder how he and Sam manage to communicate.

“Yes.” She turns towards me, and as she does so, I hear the vertebrae in her back clicking against each other, and then a sigh, maybe of pain and maybe of relief, passing her lips. “We need to see if we can get that interview for tomorrow.”