It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (20 page)

See?
I thought.
The forehead rubbing worked.

A man came from inside the house, carrying a dented silver bowl a bit larger than a fist, and handed it to the commander.

The commander offered the dripping bowl to Matthew and me. “Drink.”

In Iraq, offering water was a sign of hospitality—a decisive moment when one went from being an enemy to a guest. I took a sip and turned to Matthew. “Drink as much as you possibly can.”

I knew we would live.

The commander, pleased with his new friends, then said, “We want to offer you Pepsi as a sign of Iraqi hospitality.”

We smiled.

Before the Pepsi emerged from the house, all the men surrounding the car started scurrying around the grounds of the headquarters.

“We are about to launch an attack on the marine base nearby,” the commander said proudly. “Watch, we will fire rockets.”

Before the words escaped his mouth, piercing booms ripped through the air above our heads, punctuating the silence. The commander instructed us to leave the village at once.

 • • • 

G
AREIB ESCORTED
us out of town. We were driven in the minivan back to the main road into madness. Insurgents rallied around a rocket launcher, firing off successive rockets. Others unloaded bullets from their Kalashnikovs into the air. They had lost interest in us.

Waleed was back in the driver’s seat of our car, waiting for us to be transferred from the minivan to our armored car on the side of the road.

We grabbed our things and started across the street toward Waleed. I whipped around.

“Commander!” I called out to the man in AmberVision sunglasses who had just authorized our release. “Can I take pictures?”

He stared at me. “No! Go. Now!”

“But I am a journalist . . . ,” I said. “And you are attacking the Americans.”

I was somewhat shocked at my own request, but the words flew out of my mouth before I even had time to think about them. The fact was that we were genuinely trying to show their side of the story, and we were sitting in an insurgent’s den in the midst of a very photogenic battle. I only half-expected to get permission, but I would have been disappointed in myself had I not asked.

He smiled. And then he refused.

I ran back toward the car.

Gareib again led us out of town in a separate vehicle as the commander had instructed. His car moved suspiciously slowly. About two hundred yards down the road, Gareib’s driver pulled over, got out, and motioned to Waleed and Khalid. Matthew and I sat in the backseat, too scared to talk.

“You cannot leave this evening,” Gareib said. “You must spend the night somewhere in the village, and you can leave in the morning.”

“No way,” Matthew said. He was fiddling, anxious, almost angry. “We are leaving. The commander told us we can leave. We have been released. Let us go!”

Gareib explained that the insurgents had just launched an attack on the Americans, and if the Americans happened to counterattack—and fire on the area from which they had received fire—everyone in the village would assume it was us who told the Americans where to bomb.

Matthew was getting angry. “That is ridiculous. We are leaving. We are not spending the night. No. Way.”

I whispered softly, “I don’t think we have a choice. We are kidnapped, remember?”

Gareib called me out of the car. He leaned in close. “You better tell your friend to relax and keep his mouth shut.”

I apologized and said that we were scared.

“Just tell him to stay quiet. He is pissing me off.”

I turned to Khalid and Waleed. “This is your country, your culture. You understand the situation much better than we do. What do you guys think we should do?”

“We are
leaving,
” Matthew said again.

“Matthew, just be quiet for one minute. Khalid and Waleed will tell us what to do—they speak Arabic, they know these guys, they will tell us what to do. We really don’t have much of a choice.”

“If we spend the night, they will kill us in the morning,” he said. He was losing it. “It’ll give them time to think and plot. They will kill us.”

He was probably right.

“I think we should do whatever they tell us to do,” Khalid said. “They know where our house is in Baghdad, and Gareib is saying that if the Americans really counterattack, the guys from this village could bomb the
New York Times
bureau.”

We closed our doors, Gareib got back into his car, and we continued driving along the narrow streets, farther and farther into the residential area of Garma. We pulled up to a house, where the gates opened almost immediately, and pulled right up to the living room door. There was no chance any neighbors even witnessed our arrival.

The owner of the house, a short, stocky man with a tightly trimmed beard and dark brown eyes that showed the exhaustion of war, greeted us in the driveway. Gareib handed us off to a new captor and disappeared.

The room was a typical Iraqi sitting room, with a rug-lined floor and long, overstuffed cushions against the wall. I had been in Iraq long enough to know that they would try to separate me from the men and put me in a room full of women who spoke no English and whose questions revolved around whether I was married and had babies. I couldn’t handle the thought of such mundane conversation when our lives were all at stake. When the inevitable offer came, I refused politely, explaining that I just wanted to stay with my husband and that I would sit with the men. I wanted us to be together. The owner’s son, no more than eight, brought us tea and cookies—the irony of hospitality while being detained in Iraq.

Matthew and I reversed roles. I was calm; he was slipping into a trancelike panic, convinced we were going to be killed. It was about 5 p.m. now, and we had only a few more hours of daylight before it would be impossible to travel back along the dark roads from Garma into Baghdad. Our fate depended on Gareib. Matthew stopped talking almost entirely. I asked our captor (the owner of the house) about his family. We sat. We drank tea. It got darker. Waleed, looking incredibly oversized in the claustrophobic room, made small talk with our new captor. I wanted the AmberVision commander back.

An hour later Gareib returned with a British reporter I didn’t know. The only thing we could deduce was that Gareib had basically gotten the British journalist embedded with the insurgents, and because we had stumbled upon them and hadn’t arrived invited and vetted, we were kidnapped, whereas he was allowed to work. But the British guy had no idea we were being detained, and he spoke to us as if we were sharing a beer in a bar. We could hear mortars, rockets, and small-arms fire in the distance, and the pair was about to go to report on the battle from the perspective of the insurgents. Matthew and I asked Gareib if we could tag along. He refused.

The British reporter, who was either oblivious or stupid, tried to make small talk. “So, where in America are you guys from?”

I looked at him with daggers in my eyes. “We are not from America. I am from Italy.”

Fortunately Gareib was talking with Waleed and Khalid. I mouthed to the reporter to stop mentioning the words “America” or “United States.” I wanted to kill him.

I wondered what the chances were of our getting hit by air strikes from the marine base nearby.

Gareib and the British journalist left, and we pleaded with them to come back before dark.

Time inched on, and our captor became loquacious. He asked us about our time in Iraq and was pleased to hear that Matthew and I had traveled extensively around the country, that I had been in Iraq since well before the war and was very sympathetic to the locals, as well as against the occupation. At a certain point the man launched into a soliloquy on the fundamental differences between Ali Babas, a colloquial name for bandits, and insurgents, who were fighting against the occupation of their country. No better time for a philosophical discussion. He was worried that Ali Babas gave the insurgents a bad name. I shared with him that I had been held up at gunpoint very close to Garma and that the men who held me up were clearly different from the men in his village. He said the insurgents were not bad people but had been provoked and humiliated by American hostility and violence—to the point of no return.

“Wouldn’t you fight a man who came into your house in the middle of the night, touched your women, stole your belongings?” he asked. “Who humiliated you in your own country? Wouldn’t you fight him?”

We all agreed.

Matthew was so stressed that he lay down beside me and improbably started dozing off. I had an idea and whispered to him, “We could always tell them that I was pregnant and feeling ill. Perhaps they would release us if they thought we were having a baby, no?”
He closed his eyes.

I knew it might be interpreted as sexual, or improper, to lie down in front of strange men, so I sat there upright, envying Matthew’s sleep. I wanted to curl up next to him and wake up to the familiar sound of birds outside our Baghdad window.

The captor asked if I would like to meet his wife, and he led me through a dark room and into the kitchen, where his wife sat on a stool, watching the children play in front of the house. She stood up, overjoyed at the sight of someone new to speak with, and the man walked away, leaving us women time to get acquainted.

I had been through this process an infinite number of times, and though my Arabic was minimal at best, I knew that women needed few words in common to communicate.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.” I pointed to the other room, where Matthew lay sleeping.

“Children?”

I held my stomach, gesturing as if I were pregnant. I thought there was no better time to start the rumor than with the wife.

She looked me over, and as many village women who have met few foreigners do, she decided she wanted to look at my clothes and my body beneath the
abaya
. She opened my black cape to see tight jeans and a tightly fitted T-shirt. She smiled and started patting down my thighs, running her hands over my stomach, laughing.

Her two sons burst into the kitchen, giggling. They stood before a mirror to my right, repeatedly wrapping their faces in a keffiyeh like the men in the village. They were playing dress-up.

It was now almost dark, and Gareib reappeared in the room, breathless, back from monitoring the progress of the attacks on the Americans. He summoned the stocky owner of the house and stepped back out the main door to the outside. Matthew sat back up, groggy and ready for the end.

The door to the room where we sat was ajar, and partially through the crack and partially through a small window we could see our captor negotiating with a new man, dressed in all black, with a Kalashnikov slung around his back. They were obviously discussing our fate, and they went back and forth in disagreement. Matthew was convinced again that we were going to die.

But Gareib came back and told us we were free to leave. They just wanted to use our Thuraya phones to call our office in Baghdad and confirm that we were really who we claimed we were.

We went outside and stood beside our car, waiting for the unknown. The driveway door opened, and Gareib asked for Matthew’s Thuraya once again and the number of the bureau. There was a palpable tension between our captor and Gareib. They seemed to be fighting over what to do with us.

The man in black approached and looked us over.

“I want to marry a foreign woman,” he said, looking me directly in the eye, smiling with tarnished, crooked teeth. Khalid was translating.

“Thank you,” I put my hand to my chest, “but I am married. I have three sisters though . . . Perhaps I can introduce you to one of them the next time I am here . . .”

Our captor suddenly decided he had had enough of both Gareib and the man in black. He turned to us and directed us back into our car. “Everyone get in the car!”

He ordered me to lie down across the floorboard in the backseat, out of view, and ordered Fat Khalid and Matthew into the backseat and Waleed into the passenger seat. He wrapped his face with the keffiyeh and got into the driver’s seat. I felt us backing out of the driveway, the sky darkening with every second, and we drove slowly through the town toward the main highway leading to Baghdad. I raised my head just enough to see that every ten feet or so an insurgent stood, poised with his weapon along the side of the road. They were building trenches with explosive devices for the next arrival of American troops to the village, our captor proudly explained.

We had reached the highway. He tapped Waleed on the shoulder, motioning him to take his place once again behind the wheel, and with that he jumped out of the car and ran across the street, back toward the village. Our captor had saved our lives.

We were on our way home.

I sat up to see the sun setting over darkened fields. We drove in a superstitious silence. No one wanted to speak about our fate until we were home. Our cell phones didn’t yet have service, and we didn’t dare stop long enough on the side of the road to make a satellite call with our Thuraya. Matthew and I clenched hands, no longer ashamed to show our feelings in front of Waleed and Khalid. Forty minutes passed in a blur until we entered the periphery of Baghdad and Waleed’s phone started ringing. I heard him cooing typical Arabic expressions of love and affection:
ayooni
(my eyes),
habibti
(sweetheart),
galbi
(my heart).

I thought only of my parents and hoped they hadn’t been told anything.

 • • • 

W
HEN WE ARRIVED AT
the
New York Times
house, our office manager, Basim, started toward us from outside the front of the house, where a crowd of about twenty staff members had gathered. The formalities between men and women in the Arab world disappeared, and we embraced, one by one. It was dark, but I could see proud Basim weeping like a child. He sent me reeling into fits of tears as the gravity of the last few hours overcame me.

“Your parents have all been called by the New York office,” a colleague said. “You should call them.”