The Assassins' Gate (24 page)

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IRAQ WAS RESTLESS
and convulsive, as if liberation had introduced a virus into the organism and a fever was burning through the country. Day and night the background noise was gunfire, and it grew especially intense after the ten o'clock curfew, when no one who cared about his safety went outside. Now and then the walls shook with a grenade or mortar round. The only force of order was the American military, but convoys of Humvees rattled through the city streets at speeds that had more to do with force protection than policing. Guerrilla attacks on soldiers were already occurring at a rate of twenty per day in Baghdad alone.

When I arrived in mid-July, summer was going full blast. The temperature usually passed 120° by midafternoon, and on some days it reached 130°. Sticking your head out the window of a moving car felt like turning a blow-dryer directly on your own face, or standing behind a jet engine at takeoff. If there was no shade to be found, simply being outside for more than ten minutes in the blinding yellow light made you start to weaken, and if you tried to keep going through the day, a moment came around three o'clock when a wave of woozy inebriation swept over you and you felt that you might faint. Relief came only hours after dark, but even at night the heat was oppressive enough that Iraqi families slept out on their roofs, unless gunfire and helicopter patrols made it too loud or too dangerous. A soldier once said that his deployment in the Iraqi desert was like being in the middle of a loaf of baking bread, thrown this way and that as the dough rose, with no idea what was happening or where he was. To me, the Iraqi heat had the quality of a malevolent and inescapable tyranny, turning everyone stupid and passive.

The electricity was on barely half the time in postwar Baghdad, and the hours of operation from neighborhood to neighborhood were unpredictable. Iraqis who didn't own a generator stayed up most of the night fanning their small children; in the morning they looked exhausted. The telephone exchange had been badly damaged by bombing and looting, so there were scarcely any working phones in the city and carrying out the simplest business, such as arranging a meeting, took enormous effort (in August a Bahraini company managed to put up enough transmission towers for rudimentary cell phone service, which didn't exist under Saddam, but it was unlicensed and lasted only a single day before the occupation authority, which had its own internal MCI network, shut it down). There were also shortages of fuel and liquefied petroleum gas, and the lines outside filling stations of those who couldn't pay black market prices stretched a mile or more. The streets were choked with angry drivers, each one a president of the republic unto himself. The stoplights no longer worked, the traffic cops had abandoned their posts, and the network of arteries was clotted with American military roadblocks and the sealing off of the vast Green Zone, which fouled up all the normal patterns. In addition, with the borders wide open, a million cars were pouring into the country from Jordan and Kuwait, most of them illegally. There was nothing and no one to control traffic, so each driver made up his own rules, racing along streets and roundabouts the wrong way, taking shortcuts over curbs and across highway dividers. Every intersection was either a dangerous game of chicken or a dense knot of hundreds of vehicles. In the middle of a traffic jam a driver would grow desperate enough to get out and direct the cars around him, and the knot would start to come loose a few inches at a time. The noise of honking was incessant. In this bedlam I was never able to get oriented to the layout of the city, partly because I never drove and partly because the postwar grid was irrational. The Iraqis themselves were disoriented.

One of the first things that struck me in Iraq was the look of the faces. I noticed it as soon as I crossed the border driving in from Jordan and saw a group of men hanging around the first filling station: Compared with the Jordanians on the other side, who after all were brother Arabs and probably members of the same border tribe, the Iraqis looked poor and beaten down. Their cheeks, covered with gray stubble, were leathery and hollow, their eyes downcast and at the same time quick and watchful in the way of people used to anticipating dangers and seizing furtive chances. They reminded me of the faces in postwar Italian neorealist movies, with the roles played by ordinary men and women wandering through the rubble of bombed cities in search of work. Even the frayed, long-outmoded jackets the Iraqi men wore and the eternal cigarette butts dangling from their lips looked the same. As a rule, Iraqi men always turned out to be at least a decade younger than my first guess, and this became a sort of bleak joke. I once rode in a taxi—the usual wheezing orange-and-white metal oven—and the driver asked my age. When I told him, he said, “Forty-two? Forty-two?” He drew the number with his finger on the dashboard, thinking he must have misunderstood my English. “Forty-two?” He pointed at the digital clock on the dash, which read 5:41. “This forty-one. You, forty-two?” Finally accepting it, he said in wonder, “You are beautiful.” I knew what was coming next. “Me, forty-three,” he said. It was my turn to be shocked—I'd figured him for at least sixty. I told him that he was beautiful too, but he wasn't having any of it. He pointed at the grizzled beard and mass of wrinkles on his face. “Iraq no good.”

Another time, I met an old man who was trying to make his living by selling straw fans outside a restaurant. Though he was still in his fifties, he had only one tooth left. “Saddam was a dog,” he slurred. “He took ten years of my life.” The man had gone to prison for refusing to go fight in the war with Iran. “Under Saddam if I were talking to you like this, the Mukhabarat would come at once and pick me up.” He laughed, dancing from foot to foot, and the tooth came into view. “I feel young again. Thanks forever to the Americans and British. You can make us whole human beings again.” In the first summer of the occupation it was still possible to hear such things.

Baghdad was a crumbling, sun-blasted city. It was hard to tell how much of the squalor was recent and how much came from habitual neglect. Almost nothing in the capital looked new or well maintained. The garbage piled thick along the roads never seemed to get picked up, and some residents told me that, with no functioning sanitation system, only those who paid off the trucks now enjoyed service. You could identify the looted buildings at a distance by their hollow windows and fire-blackened outer walls. These far outnumbered the structures that had been bombed during the war, such as the palaces and party buildings in the Green Zone, or the telecommunications building a little north along the river, or the high-rise on the eastern bank that Iraqis called the “Turkish restaurant” and that had housed Uday's militia. The bombing had done its work relatively cleanly: The missile often plunged directly down the core, causing the roof and multiple stories to implode like a building demolished deliberately with munitions. These war wrecks, together with the bullet-pocked facades along avenues in western Baghdad, added to the city's general appearance of collapse, but the damage done by looting looked more sinister and contagious—the difference between a deep bruise and septicemia. There was rubble everywhere, and green ponds of sewage filled the streets in the poor, Shiite eastern and southern districts, and coils of concertina wire wound around important buildings or American checkpoints, and fourteen-foot blast walls were starting to arrive on flatbed trucks from Iran or Turkey and rise up in sections along the main thoroughfares of the Green Zone. A coat of summer dust lay on everything; by the end of the day my shoes were always the monochrome ocher of Baghdad. The city seemed to have become ugly by design. Only the Tigris still had a sluggish sort of majesty. The river was a couple of hundred yards wide, and each bank was lined with a stone wall slanted downward at a shallow angle, and every hundred feet or so a flight of steps cut the wall, running from the street down into the water. Not all of the palm and eucalyptus trees had been cut back, and as the sun set behind the shallow turquoise dome of the Republican Palace in the Green Zone and the heat died a little, it was possible to feel the picturesque romance of the river. But swimming was forbidden, and a number of Iraqi boys who didn't know or care about the new rules had to be scared out of the water by warning shots from American soldiers. A few swimmers who ignored them were killed.

In the first days, I kept finding myself drawn to the Baghdad Zoo. It was in the middle of Zawra Park, a rectangle of tired eucalyptus trees and parched grass that ran opposite 14th of July Street from the Rashid Hotel and the Baghdad Convention Center, the two structures in the Green Zone to which Iraqis still had some access. At the other end of the park from the zoo was the Unknown Soldier monument, a hideous overgrown flying saucer in concrete, and next to it the parade ground, with the gigantic crossed swords at either end and Saddam's viewing stand in between. This part of the city was imposing, vast, and deserted. It had been the same under Saddam—these were his palaces, his monuments, and ordinary Iraqis generally stayed clear unless they had official business—but the zoo had been a popular place for families to come and picnic in the evening or on Friday.

Now it was empty, except for the company of Army engineers that was undertaking a modest reconstruction project, and the Iraqi employees, and the animals. I visited the zoo several times, and the experience was always upsetting. It was the one place in Iraq where the old regime seemed still to exist. The cages looked like prison cells. In one, a blind bear that had mutilated its own chest sprawled in a catatonic heap. In the next cage, dogs and puppies lay panting beside bowls of dirty water. “Spp Fox—dog. Origin: UK” said the placard. The puppies wagged their tails when I approached the bars, but the adults had long since stopped knowing that they were dogs. They were in the zoo, I was told, because dogs had been favorites of Saddam, though some were fed to the lions when food supplies ran out during the war.

The animal population had been dramatically reduced by war, from 650 before the invasion to only thirteen. Monkeys, birds, lizards, and the ostrich were gone; the creatures that remained had survived the firefights when the city fell and were too dangerous or worthless to loot. The soldiers from the Third Infantry Division who had occupied the zoo in April found a baboon loose on the grounds; it proved harmless to them, but when one of the zookeepers, who had been hiding in his office, was brought out the animal flew into a rage and attacked him, so that the soldiers had to shoot the baboon to save the Baathist. A few months later, a group of soldiers, drinking after hours, were fooling around near the cage of a Bengal tiger, when the hand of one soldier started to disappear into the tiger's mouth. His buddy shot the animal dead.

A South African named Brendan Wittington-Jones, from a conservation group called Thula-Thula Zululand, was collaborating on the renovation with a sweating, harassed captain from the engineer company. Both men were frustrated with the zoo's Iraqi staff, who, in the absence of familiar authority, were terrified of making any decision. The one responsible and competent Iraqi had been fired because he was a Baathist. So the foreigners were taking the lead. “The military's got to get a win, something that's big and visible,” Wittington-Jones said. “The park is like a big green lung in the middle of Baghdad—it's the only green area. It would be good for PR, and give the kids something to do.” The occupation authority spent one hundred thousand dollars on the initial renovation, and the zoo reopened to the public in late July, with great fanfare, though it had received only a face-lift—the cages still looked like animal prisons. On a subsequent visit I found the place nearly abandoned. Its location in the heart of the Green Zone, surrounded by American checkpoints, was too intimidating for most families, and its hours of opening, ten to six, put in place for security reasons, were almost intolerably hot. The Baghdad Zoo combined the cruelty and injustice of the old regime with some of the stupidity and carelessness of the new.

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PHYSICALLY
, the city appeared to be stricken, or dying, or convalescing from a life-threatening illness. But in the very first hours, beneath the decrepit surface of things, I was aware of Baghdad's intensity. It came from the constant fear of violence, but even more from the sense of a momentous experiment going on every minute of every day: Iraqis and Americans thrust together into something uncertain and new. I remember driving across the Jordanian border at sunrise and seeing the first American soldier at the first checkpoint on the Iraqi side, and being stupefied that all the abstract arguments over the idea of a war had actually led to
this
—this soldier wearing camouflage in the red desert of western Iraq, leaning against his vehicle, saying, “Looks like it's getting to be a nice day. What part of the country you from?”

Before leaving for Iraq, I'd had dinner at the usual Brooklyn bistro with Paul Berman. He kept comparing the situation in post-totalitarian Baghdad to Prague in 1989. I kept insisting that Iraq was vastly different: under military occupation, far more violent, its people more traumatized, living in a much worse neighborhood. Yet one reason I wanted to go was to see the political and cultural flowering post-Saddam Iraq might produce. I expected young people to be joining political parties, attending public lectures, staging poetry readings and film festivals. I expected to see exciting things.

The Hiwar Gallery was a bohemian oasis, next to the Turkish embassy, in the otherwise die-hard Baathist district of Adhamiya in northern Baghdad. It opened after the Gulf War, and because its owner, a gimp-legged sculptor and bon vivant named Qasim al-Sabti, had paid off the secret police with grilled fish and whiskey, the gallery and its tight coterie of artists had been left alone by the authorities. “There was government pressure on the theaters and writers,” the owner told me, “but about the plastic arts there was no pressure because contemporary art is a high language. The Baathists didn't understand it. They only understood realism. So we played free in our island here.”