The Assassins' Gate (43 page)

In the past few months, half a dozen of Emad's friends from the old regime had been bumped off in mysterious circumstances. One of them, a notorious womanizer from Tikrit, had said to Emad shortly before being killed, “What's happening? The world has turned upside down.” But Emad was too good-natured to express any bitterness. When American soldiers came through his neighborhood searching houses, he burned his snapshots taken with Uday, Qusay, Arafat, and Qaddafi; they were of strictly sentimental value. Emad was one of the thousands of younger Iraqis who came after Saddam's generation and who had no ideological attachments, simply using a regime that had turned into a criminal operation for personal gain and pleasure. Emad was about the same age as Ali Talib and Bashir Shaker and his brothers: Though they had lived on different sides of its fault line, they all knew nothing but the rule of Saddam. Now Saddam was in American custody, having been caught in a hole in the ground looking like a homeless man.

Since the present had grown so bleak, Emad lived happily in the past, the good old days when he could fuck a woman behind a tree in Zawra Park, get into a fight with a group of men who tried to take their turn with her, shoot one of them in the leg, and then be sprung from jail by Uday himself. Women and booze were easy to find, the problems they led to could be solved by pulling the right strings, and justice was done within the extended family. After deserting from military college during the war with Iran—he couldn't take the drills, and he wasn't used to washing his own clothes—a chance family connection to Saddam's private secretary landed Emad a place as one of the thousands of men on the president's personal security detail. The first line of guards consisted entirely of Saddam's cousins, favored with a piece of land and a yearly car, empowered to remove even a minister; the second line was distant relatives, who could place a phone call and move an entire division. There were five lines in all, and Emad was in the third.

Saddam loomed over Emad's life as an awesome but just god. “From what I saw and heard, Saddam was a man of mercy,” Emad told me. “He didn't punish—he forgave, he gave gifts. Let me tell you this as an example. One of the guards at the gate, who controlled the spikes in the road—he saw Saddam coming out of the palace, and when he saluted he stepped on one of the spikes. Saddam stopped and asked him, ‘Why did you do this?' ‘I don't know,' the guard said. ‘It's the first time I saw you.' He was crying the whole time.” Saddam ordered medical treatment and gave the injured man money and a Toyota Corolla. Emad's direct encounters with Saddam were few but memorable. There was the slow Friday afternoon when he and his mates were lounging around outside the palace in their underwear, when two cars pulled up. Saddam was in the backseat of one. “We didn't expect him, we didn't know what to do. We stood and saluted.” Saddam's much-feared first secretary promised the guards extreme punishment. But Saddam let them off. “It's Friday,” he said. “They didn't know.” Most unforgettably, during the American bombing of Baghdad in 1991, Emad and a few other guards stayed in the presidential palace while others fled the explosions. Saddam handed out gold watches and Browning revolvers to the loyalists. Emad was trembling in fear—less of the bombing than of the president. Saddam laid his hand on Emad's head. “His presence was something abnormal,” Emad remembered, “like a magician's.”

Emad was well aware that the regime he served massacred thousands. He once spat out the worst epithet imaginable in Iraq for the whole Baathist elite: “They were criminals, sons of dogs.” But it was the life he knew, and leaving aside the occasional whipping or incarceration for one infraction or another, he had done well by it. Emad made a point of insisting that he had never committed murder. He swore up and down that, during the intifada that followed the Gulf War, he had refused an order to shoot a rocket-propelled grenade into a house in Karbala with women and children inside, for which he was flayed with a cable and hose. I had no way of judging the truth of this. In my dozens of conversations with servants of the old regime in Iraq, none of them ever admitted to having harmed a soul.

The rough experience in Karbala led Emad to request a transfer, and he ended up on Uday's detail. Uday was a source of constant, dangerous fun. Emad freely acknowledged that he was insane, his mood swinging wildly from hour to hour, especially when he drank. His generosity was as overwhelming as his cruelty. When things turned dark inside the head of the first son, Uday would pull out his pistol and no one knew whether he was going to shoot out a ceiling light or the brains of someone who had displeased him. Emad spent two years in Uday's pleasure palaces and nightclubs. It was the swimming pool incident that prompted him to try to leave the service. This was nearly impossible to do, but after several attempts and interventions by high-placed connections, Emad was allowed to retire on his memories.

By the time he entered my employ, Emad was past his prime. With a 9-mm. pistol tucked under his Hawaiian shirt, he needed constant reminding to walk behind me and to keep an eye on more than just girls. Still, I enjoyed his company. Amid the humorless righteousness of Muharram, it was a relief to travel around with a steady source of jokes. Emad felt a fond nostalgia toward Baathist corruption and decay, and he looked with disapproval on a city—his city—so thoroughly transformed, its walls draped in black banners of Shiite faith, its streets taken over by youth militias in green headbands, the familiar names of its bridges and neighborhoods changed to religious ones. Emad was outraged that a friend of his had been stopped on his way to Basra at a Shiite checkpoint outside Najaf and, when militiamen found a case of whiskey in his trunk, had been beaten forty times with a length of rubber hose.
Zawaj mutea,
Shiite pleasure marriage, was a source of particular amusement to Emad. “Ask a Shiite if you can have his sister for a month,” he said. “He'll go crazy.” It was better to be a bad Muslim and admit it than to pretend to be good. “All Iraqis are going to hell,” Emad told me on our last day together. “I know I am. So why not sin?”

*   *   *

THE MORE DANGEROUS
Iraq became, the more I depended on the Iraqis I worked with: to overhear hostile comments in a restaurant and decide that it was time to pay the bill and leave, to talk us past police checkpoints and divine the real from the fake, to scope out the mood of a crowd before bringing me onto the scene, to lend me a jacket that allowed me to blend in. Eventually, I couldn't cross the street by myself.

I hired several different translators. Because each visit seldom lasted more than a month, after my departure they always got snatched up by other journalists with permanent bureaus in Baghdad, and on the next visit I had to find someone new. The skills required for the position went far beyond fluency in English and Arabic. The wave of kidnappings placed a high price on every Westerner's head, and simply working for a foreign journalist endangered an Iraqi (many local employees of Western news organizations were threatened, and a few killed). So the relationship between journalist and translator was forced onto ground where mutual trust became essential, and the balance of power equaled out. I was the boss and paid the salary, but it was his country, his language, and my scalp was more valuable than his. There was a running joke between me and my driver, Qais, who worked with me on each trip and displayed fanatical loyalty: If I didn't come to his house and have dinner with his family, he'd turn me over to the jihadis.

I was well aware that by employing these young men I was forcing them to choose every single day whether or not to say a few words to a cousin who had a friend who had a friend in a criminal gang and, just like that, collect ten or fifteen thousand dollars. One translator who worked for me seemed a little unstable. He sometimes swore to himself when there was nothing obviously wrong, and he had a tic of snapping his head back on his neck with a groan as if he were in mental pain. He also lied to me about work more than once (I would never have known if Qais hadn't told me—such was the state of ignorance in which we Westerners spent most of our time in Iraq). One day I suddenly stopped trusting him, and from that moment until my departure I was aware of every chance the guy had to turn me over—all he really had to do was speak English in public in a loud voice. Fortunately, I left a few days later and never saw him again. But some of the news bureaus were virtually hostage to gangs of drivers and security guards, most of them blood relatives, who couldn't be fired because the risks were too great.

When one party to a relationship has the power of death over the other and, at great financial sacrifice, steadily chooses not to exercise it while at the same time risking his own neck just by the fact of working together, the personal bond grows strong. I never left Iraq without feeling a little emotional about the young men who had kept me safe.

The best translators in Baghdad weren't professionals (these were mostly the corrupt middle-aged minders from the previous regime) or graduates of the College of Arts with textbook English. The best had been doing some other kind of work and fell into the job by accident after the arrival of the Americans, sometimes by a chance conversation with a journalist on the street. They were quick-witted, resourceful, more than a little brave, and had to thrive on the pressure of moving between our world and their own. They harbored a sort of double consciousness, interpreting Iraq for us while belonging to it, accepting that nothing in their country of holies was going to be sacred, sharing our nonstop patter of profanity and sex talk, our mockery of sheikhs and imams and
zawaj mutea,
then going home to shrouded mothers who hardly ever left the house. The translators were ambitious, they knew that the opportunity wouldn't last forever, and the best learned fast enough to grow restless in the job, perhaps even a little resentful that we needed them so much and that they got so little glory. As the insurgency became more brutal, news organizations began to rely on local staff to go out and do the reporting for them, first in no-go cities like Falluja, and then, once the kidnappings started, almost everywhere. After a few cases that amounted to literary theft in the pages of America's leading dailies, followed by bitter complaints, the Iraqis began to receive professional credit. What they lacked in training they more than made up in street knowledge and willingness to risk their lives.

One of my best translators was a young doctor named Ali. He was half Sunni, half Shiite (he called himself a Sushi), and a year before the war he had fled to Yemen when the security police got wind of the fact that he was running a side business making copies with a banned color printer (Saddam had declared Hewlett-Packard office equipment to be “Jewish”). Ali came back after the invasion, dug up the printer where he had buried it in his yard in a watertight wooden box, and soon abandoned medicine, which bored him, for a desultory career working with and then abruptly leaving some of the best journalists in Baghdad. He was that rare thing in Iraq, a free spirit as well as a daredevil, willing to smuggle Westerners into Falluja at the height of the fighting there. He had good contacts among the insurgents and sympathized with their resentment of the occupation, as well as with the civilians suffering in the war zones. We once stayed up half the night arguing whether the young judge in the case against Saddam should be considered a national hero. I thought so—he represented the new value of law against the old object of power worship. For Ali it was too soon. Such a man was too close to being a collaborator, the sting of humiliation was still more compelling than the principle of democracy. But Ali's own life had opened up under the Americans. He liked the soldiers individually, and he was restless enough to apply for one of the newly available Fulbright scholarships so he could study journalism in the United States.

Ali bought a suit and wore it to the Green Zone for the finalists' interview with State Department officials. Afterward, he called me in New York on his cell phone from the checkpoint outside the convention center. He was in despair. One of the questions had been, “Do you consider America to be a liberator or an occupier here?” Every other young Iraqi candidate had answered the former, but when it was Ali's turn he had said “occupier” and felt a chill come over the interview. He was sure that his honesty had cost him the scholarship. Ali was impressed when the U.S. government gave him a Fulbright anyway. He arrived in Philadelphia determined to learn how Americans managed to do what Iraqis were increasingly incapable of doing: to break down their group identities, to become individuals, to live together. Ali had become a harsh critic of the Sunni insurgents, the Shiite militias, and their uses of Islam.

My first translator in Iraq, and the one I got to know the best, was a Kurd whom I will call Serwan. He was thirty-three years old when I met him that first summer, with a skinny, angular frame, a right shoulder that had an agonizing habit of dislocating (it happened one day when Serwan, Qais, and I were swimming in a lake above Suleimaniya), and a scar on his forehead just above one of his black brooding eyes. He liked to drink beer, and he liked the feel of his 9-mm. pistol in his hand and the businesslike metallic sound when he shoved in the clip (I wouldn't let him carry his gun on the job). He had the coiled, intense air of a former intelligence officer, which he was, and which women found attractive. He felt that he had been born in the wrong country, that his hard life as an Iraqi had been a mistake.

Serwan was the older son of a powerful tribal leader in Suleimaniya, in the foothills of northeastern Iraq. He was adored by his mother and bullied by his father, who considered pleasures like bicycles and musical instruments unworthy of a boy of Serwan's station. He grew up with a sense of grievance, and when he was eighteen it found a focus larger than his father. A friend recruited Serwan into a small underground political party. “What do they want?” Serwan asked. Kurdish independence, the friend said. Suleimaniya was a Kurdish town under the control of Arab Baathist security police who had a license to arrest, torture, kidnap, rape. Throughout the eighties, with the intensification of the guerrilla war in the mountains and the Baathist campaign of destroying villages, the repression in Suleimaniya grew worse. Serwan joined the party, and at secret meetings its politics quickly got into his blood. “I was crazy,” he said. He began to carry around a concealed bomb, keeping others in his room. “I was ready to do anything. I was ready to kill. It was very easy for me to do it if they asked me, but they didn't.”