The Assassins' Gate (42 page)

Ali's family tried to make his life as easy and fulfilling as possible, because it wasn't clear how long he would live. Since childhood he had suffered from a disease of the left leg. He lifted his dishdasha to show me: The leg was horribly swollen and discolored, with knots of bulges up and down the thigh and calf. An operation had been unsuccessful; the doctor had told him that unless he went abroad for treatment, the disease would eventually kill him.

“The reason I'm patient is that I know Imam Hussein suffered much worse things,” he said. “The killing of Hussein led to a revolution. But this revolution was not one of blood—it was of the spirit.”

The two-story house was built around a small inner court that was open to the night sky. A bird fluttered in a cage, a boom box played rhythmic chants of self-flagellation, and Ali, his uncle, and I sat talking in the court while neighbors came and went. Ali was an ardent student of Islamic philosophy. For years under Saddam, he had gone down to Najaf, not telling his parents, and pursued a course of study with the leading Shiite clerics of the Hawza. The government monitored the students, and two of Ali's teachers were eventually executed, but he had always been plagued with hopelessness, and what he was learning in Najaf made life not just bearable but ecstatic. “The whole world is built on the love of God,” he said. “Not just human beings—everything you see in life, every living organism.” He became a follower of the seventeenth-century Persian mystic Mullah Sadra, an idealist philosopher in the spirit of Neoplatonism, who taught the unity of all existence. “He built this road, Mullah Sadra, and all the scholars after him built the same road, and I wanted to follow him, but Saddam and my uncle wouldn't let me take that road.”

Ali's uncle, an old communist who was not particularly religious, said, “We didn't want him to follow it, because at that time just listening to this music would have killed him, and the punishment would have been for the whole family.”

Eventually, Ali's health and the dangers forced him to stop attending classes in Najaf. He kept studying with a secret group of friends in Baghdad. The hardest part was finding and buying books. In his bedroom upstairs Ali had Machiavelli's
The Prince,
a brand-new copy of Mullah Sadra's
Philosophy of the Principles and What Is Promised,
and other texts, but it was never enough. The Internet had become his obsession—it was, he said, Bremer's greatest gift to Iraqis. On his desk there was a picture of Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

We talked on into the night: about Mill's idea of liberty, Islam and democracy, the role of women in religion and tradition, the leading Iraqi politicians, the place of the clerics in the future government. Ali's ideas were half formed; at times he came close to advocating Iranian-style
wilayat al-faqih,
at other times he wanted to keep religion and politics separate. He asked me a thousand questions. What did I think of
The Passion of the Christ?
Had I met anyone famous other than Bremer? How could I separate what was the government's business from what was Allah's? Would the Americans let Iraqis write their own constitution? It was a rare and bracing conversation, for Ali was open to every idea; nothing was out of bounds.

The Shiite surge during the days of Muharram in Iraq had all the heat and fervor of a long-suppressed desire, but it was not a tolerant month. Students were threatening academic deans for taking down their religious banners, and Moqtada's followers were conducting themselves more and more like a fascist militia. Mustafa al-Kadhimi, the exile I first met in London, who in his youth had been a member of the Islamist Dawa Party, once explained that this religious explosion was not just a reaction to the Baath Party's repression but a version of the same dictatorial mentality, for the generation of younger Shia had grown up knowing nothing else. It would take two or three years to spend itself, and in the meantime a lot of mischief would be done. As for Ali Talib, he didn't know exactly what he thought, but how he thought was self-critically, with a touch of metaphysical joy.

We even talked about sex. The mutual friend who introduced us had told me that for six months Ali had been carrying on a semisecret affair with a widow. The Shia sanctioned a practice known as
zawaj mutea,
or pleasure marriage. It was based on a verse from the Qur'an and had all the trappings of conventional Islamic marriage: There was a contract, payment up front, consent of both parties, approval of the woman's family, and clerical blessing (the woman couldn't be a prostitute). The difference was that
zawaj mutea
was temporary: It could last anywhere from one hour to twenty years, and it was indefinitely renewable. I had heard that there were rooms in Kadhimiya rented out for just this purpose, and imams with albums full of pictures of good men and women for their flock to choose among. “But there's a sensitive point,” Ali cautioned. If the woman was still a virgin, “You cannot have sex with her—you can only touch and kiss.” He explained, “It would be a disaster for that virgin because her brother would kill her. It isn't Islamists who would kill her—she would be killed by tradition.” (In the case of widows and divorcées the restriction was lifted.) But if you clicked on
www.sistani.org
and looked up the grand ayatollah's teachings on the subjects of oral and anal sex, you realized that thousands of young Shia were well advanced in the arts of love before they ever married in the traditional manner. Ali described the practice as a doctrinal act of kindness. “We Shia don't want to have forbidden sex, so we have
zawaj mutea.
It's like having mercy, so that he or she wouldn't suffer inside, to make it easier for them.”

All the while we talked, the women of the household—Ali's mother, sister, cousin, and neighbor—were cooking holiday dishes just a few feet away in the kitchen. The younger women kept coming to the door, dressed all in black for Muharram but unveiled and extremely curious, and made eye contact with me before retreating to whisper among themselves and giggle. I told them that they were making me feel like an animal at the zoo. On any other occasion, Ali said, they would not have shown me their faces at home, but this was a feast day and I was an honored guest.

His sister Ibtisam, a volleyball instructor at a local college, finally stood in the doorway, her face half hidden by the jamb, and engaged me in something like a conversation. She asked why the American soldiers no longer smiled and waved as they used to after the liberation. She wanted me to know that after a year they had seen nothing from the occupation. And women, she said, wanted their rights. “We want to take part in the elections.”

“Nobody said you can't vote,” Ali told her.

“We want higher education,” she said. “We want better jobs. And respect in society.” With that, Ibtisam retreated to the safety of the boiling pots.

Around three in the morning, I followed Ali up the exterior staircase that ran from the court to the second-story roof. A cool breeze was blowing. Down below, the penitents on the boom box were still chanting and beating themselves. Under the stars and a half-moon, palm trees and lights stretched out across the city. All of Baghdad seemed to be awake, waiting for Imam Hussein, and at this distance, on this night, it was a magical place. Ali and I said goodbye just before dawn.

*   *   *

AS THE MONTH WORE ON
, Iraq became noticeably more dangerous for someone like me. On March 9, a young CPA official who had been working with women's groups, a colleague of hers, and an Iraqi translator were chased down and shot to death on the road between Karbala and Hilla by five men wearing Iraqi police uniforms. An hour earlier, I had been driving back to Baghdad on another road a few miles away. On March 15, four Baptist missionaries were killed by automatic weapons fire in Mosul. The next day, two foreign water engineers were gunned down in a roadside shooting near Hilla. Their corpses became part of the nightly work at Dr. Shaker's morgue. Perhaps as a warning, he gave me the clinical details of the Dutchman's case: A Kalashnikov bullet fired at a distance greater than six feet shattered the right ankle; a second entered the back of the right thigh, tore off the scrotum, and exited through the left thigh; a third penetrated the right kidney with shrapnel; a fourth entered the left side of the neck and exited with part of the lower jaw, causing death.

I was staying at a small family-owned hotel on a side street in the commercial district of Karada. Its clients were mostly Turkish, Arab, and Iranian businessmen. The low visibility of the place seemed safer as well as more congenial than the big downtown hotels surrounded by blast walls, which were widely known to house Western journalists and contractors. My room was off the street, and I had scoped out an emergency exit through the bathroom window. Nonetheless, the explosions that went off two or three times a night were making it harder to sleep. One night in the middle of the month, around midnight, a bomb somewhere in the city rattled the windows and walls of my room just after I'd slipped into unconsciousness. You could never tell where it came from or how far away—the blasts always sounded much closer than they were. I tried to fall asleep again, but it was no use. I pulled on my clothes and went out to the street.

The security guard, Saad, who had one AK-47, was standing outside his booth with the night manager, Dafir. Dafir reassured me that the explosion had come from the direction of Liberation Square, a mile or so north. Both men were in their forties but looked the usual decade older, underpaid and underdressed on a chilly night. They invited me to join them. I knew that I wasn't going back to sleep, so I stood with Saad and Dafir while a movie about the martyrdom of Imam Hussein played on the DVD. They began to reminisce about their experiences in the eight-year war with Iran.

“Saddam destroyed me.” Saad lifted his shirt to reveal a nasty eight-inch vertical scar on the right side of his stomach. He had been wounded in the battle of Majnoon. The Iraqi soldiers used to find the hands of the dead Iranians still clutching keys, to get into paradise. Dafir had also seen action in Majnoon, as well as other battlefields along the border. His job had been to test the air for safety after the chemical weapons attacks by the Iraqi army that turned the tide of the war.

I asked Dafir what they had been fighting for. “No, the government just told us to fight.” He quoted the words of a Moor who had led the conquest of Spain in the eighth century: “The enemy is in front of you, the sea is behind you. Nothing to do—you must fight.” He added, “We fought against Iran and now here we are, making fifty dollars a month.” They laughed heartily. Dafir, a man of painstaking dignity, wrote out daily news summaries of Iraq's calamities for me in his self-taught English. Tonight he was wearing a sheepskin coat given to him by a Kuwaiti guest; Saad had no coat.

The movie about Imam Hussein ended in martyrdom and lamentation. Saad took it out and replaced it with vintage Iraqi porn. A man was undressing a woman in a seedy-looking bedroom. The production values were quite low, but Saad was more attentive now than he had been during the Karbala movie. I ribbed him that Moqtada al-Sadr would have him punished. He waved off Moqtada and pointed upward. “Allah,” he said. It was between him and his God.

After an hour with Saad and Dafir I felt much better.

A few nights later, a huge car bomb destroyed a hotel a dozen blocks away. The Mt. Lebanon matched the profile of mine perfectly. Iraqis speculated that the bomb had detonated prematurely, that the intended target had been one of the Western hotels. Nonetheless, I didn't think it was wise for me to stay at a hotel whose only protection was Saad and his AK. The next morning, Dafir asked for no explanation as he wrote up my bill, but it was hard to look him in the eye. I had the feeling that I was abandoning them.

Foreign journalists were beginning to realize that they might be specifically targeted as Westerners, which elevated the risk far above the bad luck of being blown to pieces by a stray mortar round that happened to land next to you. And since journalists spent a good deal more time wandering around Iraq's streets and highways looking for Iraqis to talk to than either CPA officials or private contractors, many decided that they needed more protection than simply keeping a low profile afforded. Those with bureaus in Baghdad had the means to hire security consultants and buy armored cars and even build blast walls and watchtowers around private compounds. I had no bureau, no staff—whenever I went to Iraq I had to cobble together a team of driver and translator almost from scratch.

I decided to hire a bodyguard. The man I found for the job had relevant work experience and was currently underemployed, having formerly served as one of Saddam's, and later Uday's, bodyguards. Emad Hamadi was a short, broad-chested thirty-four-year-old with a Fuller brush mustache and mirthful eyes. He was spending his days sitting at home in Qadisiya, one of the newer Baathist neighborhoods on the western side of the river (Saddam liked to bestow them with Arab nationalist names: Qadisiya for the seventh-century Arab victory over the Persians, reprised for the Iran-Iraq War; Andalus for the Arab conquest of Spain; Jihad for jihad). One or two days a week, Emad ran intergovernmental mail from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where, owing to family connections, he had worked before the fall of the regime. For this sinecure he was still earning a hundred dollars a month, as much payoff as salary. As far as I knew—and I had only his and a few other people's word for it—Emad was staying out of the insurgency.

His family was Sunni Arab, from Falluja and the small towns of Anbar province. All his relatives had battened off the old regime. A brother had worked in the now-defunct Ministry of Military Production and also owned a trading company that had once done brisk business through government cronies, but with no contracts coming from the CPA, he had closed his shop in Mansour. A cousin had been a decorator of the hideous guest rooms in one of Saddam's palaces, now accommodating American soldiers; another had been laid off by the Ministry of Health. Emad's nephew, the son of a diplomat at the Iraq UN mission in New York, had been working at a Brooklyn deli when federal agents arrested him, just after the invasion, on a visa violation in a sweep of suspect Iraqis, jailed him for four months, and then deported him to Iraq. Emad's family was just one small block of Saddam's vast edifice of patronage and control that the war had sent crashing to earth.