You Know When the Men Are Gone (9 page)

“Why do you do it, if it is such a dangerous job?” he finally managed.

Raneen’s hair had loosened from its bun after a long day, strands curling around her face, and Moge knew suddenly that she had always been a very attractive woman, which explained why she wore no makeup, why she wore a uniform too big and her hair so tightly braided, to try to hide that fact.

She leaned back in her chair. “It pays well,” she said softly, and Moge nodded, disappointed. That was the nonpolitical answer all the terps gave but it didn’t explain away that interpreters made up more than forty percent of the civilian deaths reported by private contractors and yet they continued to sign up.

Then, as if also embarrassed by her glibness, “I used to work as a secretary in the Economics Department of Baghdad University. It is where I met my husband, but I was fired in 1998 when every woman in Iraq was fired from their government jobs.” She sipped at her cup of tea. “It was Saddam Hussein continuing to tighten his already tightened fist, as if trying to get olive oil from an olive pit. Women helped put the Baathists in power, they promised us many things and for a little while it was so. Then Saddam Hussein wanted the approval of the imams, and women could no longer travel without being accompanied by a man, the schools became only single sex, and women began to hide in our homes once again.” She touched her hair, tugging at a freed strand. “Now I make more money than my husband ever did. I speak with the Americans and they must respect me because I tell them what the people say and I hope Iraq will soon become safe. Is that not a good reason?”

“Hell yeah,” Moge replied. “You ask American soldiers why they’re here and they usually say they’re saving up for a new Ford truck.”

Raneen laughed. They sat like that until the lights flashed off and on in the chow hall the way bars in the U.S. did for last call, with Moge telling her about his life outside of the army, about skyscrapers in New York that left their streets in perpetual shade, about taking his dad’s boat out on the Hudson River, about the year he spent studying in England during college. And Raneen told him about her trip to Massachusetts with her diplomat family when she was eleven years old, how she bought a pair of Jordache jeans and a box of scented Magic Markers, how she still remembered the smell of each bright color.

Moge actually got a day off, his first in weeks, and he went to one of the new coffee shops springing up in the relative safety of the Green Zone. He should have been waiting in line for the phone, trying to call Marissa, but instead he took his time reading a London financial newspaper, glancing up over the pages, hoping to see Raneen, to accidentally “bump” into her. He knew she had gone home for the week; the terps worked five weeks on and then had one off, but she had mentioned this place, how it sold the best Turkish coffee and how she would buy a few pounds every month for her family. Then he started to imagine asking her to meet him. Why not? They were friends. It would be good for both of them to socialize outside of the base, away from camouflage and guns, to flip through a newspaper and eat stuffed grape-leaf
dolmas
and not think about war. Yes, he would ask her to meet him and she would smile, showing her crooked front teeth. He thought about it when he fell asleep that night but when she returned to work and he was sitting next to her in the Humvee, he couldn’t get the words out of his dry mouth. He told himself that next month he would ask her for sure. He imagined that they would sit close together at the coffee shop, his knee hitting hers under the table, how she would wear a white blouse and he would glimpse her collarbone and her long skirt would reveal her ankles. Maybe she would wear her hair down and it would fall in front of her brown eyes. He never took the fantasy further than that, never held her hand or kissed her throat or unbuttoned her blouse, just sat with her in the shade of a big umbrella, sipping strong coffee, talking.

But the next month he was still shy. And, after her week off, when she didn’t return to Liberty, he didn’t worry at first. The terps sometimes returned a few days late; there were trips to their extended families and undependable transportation, power outages or funerals or highways that were suddenly closed down. An eighteen-year-old Kurd with halting English rode out with Moge’s squad most days.

But after two weeks, each morning hiding his disappointment when the young Kurd showed up at formation, Moge started asking around. “Perhaps her daughter is sick,” the other interpreters would say, but Moge felt chilled by their eyes, how they glanced away from his in a way they had never done before. During his patrols, Moge peered down the streets, looking for her tightly woven bun, and he went to the coffeehouse in the Green Zone as often as possible, ordering the Turkish coffee she liked so much, sipping slowly in hopes that she would appear. Once he even went to her quarters. There were two bunk beds but only the bottom of one was made up in white sheets neatly tucked under the mattress. There was a small desk with a stack of books, most in Arabic but also an English dictionary and, oddly, a worn biography of Oprah Winfrey. There was a cardboard frame that held a photo of a small, serious girl, seven or eight years old, her hair in two dark braids down her shoulders, wearing a starched blouse, standing in front of a brightly tiled doorway. There was nothing else.

Then Khaled returned, fatter since his marriage, bringing a large bag of shelled pistachios and sharing them with Moge and his men as they drove out to check on the shops in Kindi.

“Ah, yes, my wife’s family now beg me to be an interpreter.” Khaled undid the top buttons on his camouflage. “They say to me, ‘Khaled, you were once so rich, now you are like a goat herder,’ and I say, ‘A rich man must do a dangerous job.’ My wife, she cries when I leave for work but she more happy than sad when I return with much money!”

The soldiers laughed.

“Khaled, who is hotter, Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman?” Dupont called from the back of the truck.

“Jolie has skin the color of the desert at sunset, and Nicole is like a drowned thing that bruises easily. That is no question, all men with hot blood must agree, yes?”

The guys hooted in approval.

When there was a lull in their talk, Moge leaned into Khaled. “We had a woman interpreter while you were away, Raneen Mahmood. But last month she went home for a few days and never came back. Did they transfer her to another FOB?”

Khaled wiped at the corners of his mouth. “Even a widow, a mother, is not safe.”

The muscles of Moge’s face tightened. “I don’t understand.”

Khaled hesitated, Khaled, who never was at a loss for words. The soldiers glanced at each other, listening.

“She is missing,” Khaled finally said, carefully wrapping up his bag of nuts so he would not have to look at Moge. “There has been no ransom. Her family no longer has hope she will return.” He coughed into his hand. “This is the risk we face. But we must remember it is God’s will.
Inshallah.
”

Moge turned away and caught Dupont staring at him, his mouth open, a thin line of tobacco spittle shining on his dark chin. Dupont dumbly moved his mouth as if trying to get enough saliva together to speak or spit but couldn’t, then swallowed, lip of chew and all. Moge felt a wave of nausea move through him as if that wad of black was in his own stomach, secreting and rotting. He fastened his eyes on the smudged window of the Humvee.
This is the risk we face.
No one spoke as they rode back to the base.

Lieutenant Colonel McCormick was making the rounds in the mess hall, eating lunch with a table of privates, asking them for the good word. There had been a big push to stop the soldiers from writing graffiti on the walls of the latrine, and once a week a private was tasked with painting over the new scrawls. Then that private would hold court at the mess and announce to his buddies the clever witticisms he had eradicated.

“Sir, so some guy writes:
Soldiers are like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed shit.
” The private, as disgusted as he might have been by the morning’s work, was now beaming with pride as the colonel put his fist to his mouth and tried not to laugh.

“And below that, sir, someone wrote in big, angry capital letters:
No one tries to blow up a fucking mushroom! I just wanted money for college!
”

The table erupted, laughing more for the lieutenant colonel than for the scribbles.

“Hey, sir?” Moge asked from the end of the table.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Colonel McCormick patted the private on the back and leaned back in his chair.

“Sir, there is an issue I’d like to talk to you about. I brought it up to my company commander but haven’t heard anything back.”

“Go ahead.”

“One of our terps has been kidnapped and we haven’t done jack about it.” Moge could see his first sergeant stand up from an adjacent table and walk over. Quickly.

The colonel took a sip of his Diet Coke and glanced at Moge’s name tag. “Where and when did this happen?”

“From what I could find out, about a month ago, in Salman Pak.”

“Hell, Sergeant Mogeson, a month ago? Salman Pak isn’t even in our brigade’s Area of Operation. Are the Iraqi police or Iraqi Army investigating?”

“Sir, they say they are.”

“Is the family cooperating?” The colonel dusted nonexistent crumbs from his uniform.

“I doubt the family will cooperate, sir, since it was the terp’s cooperation with American forces that got her kidnapped to begin with.”

The colonel pushed his tray away and stood. He glanced at the first sergeant and then back at Moge. “Sergeant, I sympathize. But we found eleven dead bodies on the Ghazaliya Bridge yesterday, and had three separate reports of kidnap-pings in the last twenty-four hours.” He started to collect his trash and when the first sergeant tried to take it, he waved him away. The colonel strode over to the garbage can and jammed his empty cup and crumpled napkins inside.

“But, sir—” Moge ignored the first sergeant’s glare.