Baghdad Fixer (74 page)

“Ultimately,
sheesha
is much healthier than cigarettes. You don’t have people getting cancer from smoking nargila once, twice a week. It is a smoke for solving problems, not making rash decisions. Do you see the difference?”

“Yes.”

“So this is a lot like the difference between tribes, like ours and the Al-Sud. Our brothers in the Al-Sud — and you should know, they are much larger in number than us — they are cigarette smokers. They have chosen to resist the Americans with violence and more violence. Sheikh Talal is their chief and he thinks that attacking all foreign forces in Iraq is the only answer to the occupation. He is building a whole tribe of people who say they are going to be the new resistance, to chase the ‘infidels’ out.” His dismissive frown says what he thinks of this plan.

“We think otherwise,” he says. “We will invite the Americans to sit and drink tea with us. We will listen to what they have to say. We will smoke our
sheesha
and wait. And then we will decide. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I think I do.”

“Good.”

I stand and he stands with me. “I don’t know how I will ever repay you for all you have done,” I say.

“Be a
sheesha
smoker,” he says, putting an arm around my shoulders and giving them a manly squeeze.

~ * ~

I don’t remember what happened after this, but it is now clear to me that I must have passed out once more. When I come to I find myself lying on the floor again, with the sheikh nearby. “Don’t worry,” he says, “we’re bringing a local doctor to have a look at you.”

“Did I — faint?”

“Something like that. One minute you were okay, then your eyes fluttered, and well...” He makes a gesture with his hand, upright, and then falling to horizontal.

I suddenly am aware of the pain in my shoulder again. I try to move it in a circle but it sends out a horrible shock. “I think maybe I hurt my shoulder when the car flipped over,” I say. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“Still, if you’re injured, you shouldn’t travel. The doctor will see you. Stay and recuperate here for a few days.”

“I should really get home,” I say, though the thought of rushing back to Baghdad to tell my family that we never made it past Samarra, and that the family car is gone, fills me with dread. What will Baba think?

The doctor who comes doesn’t look like a doctor to me. He isn’t dressed in a white lab coat like my father when he’s at the hospital, and his huge, intense eyes, set in a face full of wrinkles, make him look more like a fortune-teller than a physician. He examines me and concludes that my shoulder has been dislocated. “This will hurt a little,” he says, and manipulates my arm and shoulder with a force and swiftness that leaves me aghast. I can hear the pop of the bone returning to its socket. “Fixed,” the doctor declares. I feel woozy, but being conscious of it helps to stop me from going under again. He tries to make a sling for my arm out of the
ghutra
he was wearing on his head until a minute ago. He shakes his head no and takes the cloth off. “These don’t really do much anyway. Just take it easy and get a lot of rest.”

Sheikh Mumtaz, sitting on a chair in the corner, concurs. “Doctor’s orders. You rest here a while.”

“Actually, it’s probably going to hurt more for the next few hours, just from the shock of it,” the doctor predicts. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out some tablets in a miniature envelope. “Take two of these painkillers now, then again in four hours.”

I spill some into my hand and eye them suspiciously. I don’t see a name on them. “That’s not necessary,” I say. “I’ll be fine.”

“Just take one, then,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

Every time someone has told me not to worry in the last week, I wonder if I should have worried more, not less. But what does Sheikh Mumtaz and his doctor friend have to gain by drugging me? Nothing I can fathom. And the pain in my shoulder is more unbearable by the minute.

In and out. Awake and asleep. A kind of torpor in-between. I awoke at some point having had a dream about arguing with Sam over translations, like we did in our first days working together. Now, as I lay here in the middle of the night, I find myself trying to tell Sam that there’s no easy way to translate fixing. It’s impossible to find just the right word for “fixing” in Arabic. There is
islah
, but that’s more commonly used as reform. We also have the word
thabbata
, which could be said to be fixing. There is also
inqadh,
which is either saving or salvation. There is
shifa,
which means healing. And then there is
i’ada
and
jadada,
which are like restore and renew. I’m not even sure now if that’s what we argued about in the dream, or if that’s just me continuing the conversation. I just know that I can’t think of one word in Arabic to fit everything that I want the fixing to be, or which describes what my job was supposed to have been.

I wake up feeling confused, but better. My shoulder is tender, but not so painful. I’m not sure now if I saw the doctor today or yesterday, if it’s already tomorrow. I go to my wallet, where I find Sam’s business card. It seems humbler now, having lost its hard edges. On it, I notice a number at the newspaper office in Washington. I promised her I’d call Miles.

When Sheikh Mumtaz comes down to check on me, I tell him I’m better, and that I must leave now. He says it’s very late, but I can go with his son Hassan in the morning. In the meantime, I ask, could I use his Thuraya to make a call to America, to reach my ladyfriend’s employer? Of course, he says, and leads me upstairs and into the courtyard of their home, where the reception is good and the night sky is a riot of stars.

“Tribune.”

“Oh, I’d, could I speak to Mr Miles, please?”

“Please hold.” Classical music at the other end, warped by the odd, distorted quality of the satellite call. “Sorry, no listing for a Mr Miles here.”

“Oh, I meant, Miles, the international editor? Miles is his first name.”

More music. “You mean Miles Crowe. One moment.” Another few bars of Bach, or someone who sounds like Bach, and then, that voice.

“Crowe,” the voice declares in a syllable.

It takes me a moment to find mine.

“Hello? Someone there?”

“This is Nabil al-Amari. I’ve been working with Samara Katchens here in Iraq.”

“Yes, Nabil! We know all about you.”

“Sam wanted me to call because we were...in an accident. The US army came to get her and took her to a hospital in Germany.”

“Yes, yes, we know all about it. She’s going to be transferred to a hospital here in Washington by the end of the week, we think.”

“So she’s okay?”

“She’s in a stable condition,” he says. “She broke a few ribs and they’re probably going to do surgery for a torn spleen before flying her back here.”

“I see.” I try to remember where the spleen sits and how it could tear.

“We know you did all you could to help her. And we really appreciate the work you’ve been doing there for us. In fact, this isn’t such a good time to talk because we’re on deadline, but if you call me again tomorrow, a little earlier, we can talk about your continuing to work with us. With one of our other correspondents.”

“Did the story run? About the Jackson documents?”

“The story? Yes, yes. Yesterday. Highest number of hits we’ve ever had in a single day.”

“Sorry? Come again?”

“I mean, the web traffic to the
Tribune
site because of the story. Look, Nabil, I wish I could talk more, but I gotta move a story. And listen, be careful over there. Our main priority is making sure our staff are staying safe, and that includes our fixers and drivers.”

~ * ~

60

Staying

In the car, Hassan asks me if I’d prefer to take a back road, which might be safer.

“Actually, I want to see what condition my father’s car is in.”

Hassan smirks. “I doubt it’s still there, but we can see.”

He’s wrong, and at the same time right. The car, or what remains of it, is lying on its side about twenty-five feet from the road.

“I’m sure I could get it fixed. It can be towed to a garage, can’t it?” What could I possibly tell Baba? That it was stolen at gunpoint? That would be better than telling him I crashed it, gunshots or no.

He clicks his tongue. “It’s totally destroyed. Can’t you see they’ve already picked it clean? Fine, I’ll pull up so you can see it,” he says, veering off the pavement and on to that flat, soil-less earth that covers this part of our country, half sand and half rock, a little bit of the moon right here on earth.

All is silent except for the crunch of our feet on arid ground as we approach the car. “Look,” says Hassan. “They’ve already taken the engine and the two tyres that didn’t get shot. Here,” he says, poking his head inside. “They even ripped out the leather seats and the wooden parts around the dashboard, anything of value. And the body — it’s like an old tin can now.” He swishes something around in his mouth, perhaps a wad of tobacco chew.

There is no exaggeration in Hassan’s description. My father’s car is a skeleton, the flesh and blood of its insides already gone. I stick my head inside to find a hollowness, like the feeling of walking into an abandoned building you once knew well. The looters — I wonder if they are the same as the shooters? — have indeed removed almost the entire interior of the car. On the floor is a mess of papers and junk that would have been in the glove compartment, which is no longer there. I sift through the papers, checking to see if there is something important. Baba’s car registration, for example.

Nothing. Nothing but old receipts, dead pens, an insurance bill he must have intended to pay at some point. Bits of the food my mother had sent with us. Shreds of fabric and lots of glass and a few bullet casings. And, somewhere in the mess of trash, the
mashallah khamsa.

How did they miss this one? Or did they deem it worthless - a
mashallah khamsa
that failed to bring its passengers good luck? Perhaps they left it on purpose.

The sound of banging on the roof startles me and makes me bang my head as I move to stand.

“Y’alla!”
It’s Hassan, his arm resting on the roof. “Satisfied? Let’s go.”

Behind the wheel, he puts his foot down and flies past other cars — I assume to get out of town quickly. After a few miles he slows down.

“There was nothing you could do.”

“My father’ll kill me.”

“Your father should kill
them.
He’ll be glad you’re alive. You both could have died in a wreck like that. Did you see those bullet holes in the back of the car? How is it that they didn’t succeed in shooting either one of you?”

“Who are they? The Al Sud tribe?”

“Is that what my father told you? Who knows. The Al Sud tribe has 30,000 people in Samarra. You may as well have been nearly killed in Sadr City and said ‘the Shi’ites did it.’”

That’s also possible, I want to say. What if Ali did follow us? What if he knows I got out? My head vacillates with other worries. I’ll tell Baba what happened, but somehow, he’ll think it was my fault.

“It would have been better if they had killed me.”

Hassan scoffs with amusement more than surprise. “Don’t speak nonsense.” He glances at me and trains his eyes back on the road. “You’re still in shock. What a mess back there, sending off your ladyfriend like that, in so much pain. What could you do?”

Nothing, I want to say. As usual, nothing. And then the tears fill my eyes, and I feel like I might just not bother stopping them. I can feel that salty-sea taste underneath my top lip, where my moustache should be. Should be. If I were letting myself be an Arab. If I weren’t trying to be a Westerner. If I wasn’t trying all the time to please Sam. To please someone.

Let them fall, anyway. I turn towards the window, wipe them away with my hand, wishing that the tears would fall only out of my right eye, and not from my left.

I can feel him checking me over, watching me cry. So this is how city boys are, I want him to say. Go on, say it. But he says nothing, nothing at all, and for that I want to thank him more than anything. And so we roll silently back to Baghdad, quiet but for my periodic sniffling, and his sucking at the bits in his teeth with a
tsk tsk.

~ * ~

I consider asking Hassan to drop me off somewhere else. Maybe at Saleh’s. He never should have sent us to Mustapha’s in the first place. He should know what a disaster he got us into with his tips and leads. Or maybe I should go to the Hamra, to tell Joon and Marcus or some
Tribune
reporter what happened to Sam.

Instead, I ask to be dropped off at the school. This way, he won’t know where I live. Why that matters at this point, I don’t even know. But maybe it will mean trouble for me, for my family. Maybe men from the Al Sud tribe will have followed us, and when they’re looking for people who work with the Americans, they’ll come after me.

It’s only 2 o’clock, but the school is already locked up for the day. They are now having three hours of class, I understand, and ending by 11 a.m., so students can get home before the spate of afternoon bombings.