Baghdad Fixer (11 page)

~ * ~

Once we get past the checkpoint, where a few American soldiers are posted, we drive into the Hunting Club. The grounds are green and spacious, and from here it seems that we are no longer in Baghdad. There are many types of beautiful shrubs and trees and everything is well-manicured. Rizgar stops the car outside the main building and Sam hops out and I step out, too. “You can walk me up, but I don’t think you’ll need to come in with me. These guys speak English better than I do.” She rolls her eyes, which I’ve come to realize means that I shouldn’t take what she just said seriously.

“I will be happy to escort you anyway.”

“No, seriously, these INC folks have been spending so much time in Washington, they ought to be naturalized citizens by now. They probably prefer not to have an unknown Iraqi in the room.”

“Oh. Of course,” I say, feeling foolish.

We walk into the wide-doored, white building and I follow Sam to the reception area. There are dark, rectangular spots along the walls where pictures must have been removed, the area around them bleached lighter from the sun. I can imagine the line of photographs of Saddam and his sons — dressed in equestrian uniforms or riding atop their favourite horses — which must have been removed only in the last day or two. These photographs of Saddam doing sportsman-like things were often published in the newspapers.

The man behind the desk says that we can stay where we are until the press spokesman comes to collect us.

“Oh, he’s just waiting with me,” Sam says, gesturing in my direction.

The room has large wooden chairs, upholstered with red leather seats. Sam runs her fingers down one of the carved arms and sits, and I take the chair next to her.

“It’s like Saddam tried to make it look like a real English hunting club, smack in the middle of Baghdad.” She points up at the mountings above the window. There are wooden plaques with hooks that were obviously a display for old rifles, judging from the shape of the faded spots, but the guns are absent.

“Look at this place.” Sam leans in towards me and lowers her voice. “The lap of luxury when people were supposedly starving due to the sanctions.” She gets up and inspects a massive vase, painted blue and white in a Chinese motif, sitting next to the end table. “This one might be an antique.” She tilts her head back and uses her eyes to direct me to the huge chandelier, glittering like a sun shower above our heads. She sits down again and crosses her legs, letting the upper bounce against the lower. “Just like the palaces. You’d think people would have wanted to tear the place apart.”

The receptionist slides open the glass panel covering the window that he sits behind. He sticks his head through and says to me, “Dr Marufi says he can see her in ten minutes.”

“He says ten minutes more,” I tell Sam.

“I got that.”

I hadn’t considered the possibility that Sam would know more than how to say hello and thank you. “Do you speak some Arabic?”

“Not really. Dribs and drabs. I learned a bit from a phrasebook, but the numbers and minutes are among the few things that stuck. I wish I’d done Arabic in college.”

“So you went to college? Not to university.”

Sam takes out her notebook and flips to a blank page. She begins making a list. I feel she is speaking to me one moment and then ignoring me the next. But now I realize that she must be making a list of important questions to ask in her interview. She stops after five lines. “I know in England college means something less than university, which is probably what you’re thinking of.”

“Yes. I have friends who studied there and they say it was very important to get accepted to university.”

“Right.” Sam shuts the notebook and taps on it with her pen. “You know, Nabil, I think we’re having little misunderstandings about a lot of things.”

I can feel a muscle in my throat go tight, like a bicycle chain when the gears are changed too quickly.

“I need you to work a little harder to be on the ball for me when we’re doing interviews. I wasn’t, well, entirely happy about the way things went earlier.”

“I...did you find that I was not on the ball?” I know I should listen to her first, but I thought that the expression “on the ball” means to be alert. Was I not alert?

“I mean, we need to be on the same page with how this works. I need you to translate sentence by sentence. Word for word. You can’t listen for five minutes and then translate. You’ll forget what the guy said and then—”

“Oh, but I won’t forget. I have a great memory. Also, he didn’t want to stop for me to translate. He wanted to tell me everything, and then for me to explain it to you.”

She shakes her head, her eyes squinting as if to see something far off in the distance. “It doesn’t matter what he wants, or what anyone we’re talking to
wants.
You have to find a way to slow them down or stop them when they’re speaking. They’ll get used to it, everybody does. Just do something like this,” she says, tilting the palm of her hand up at a forty-five-degree angle, “and say, ‘wait, I have to translate.’”

“But that would be interrupting him. It might appear impolite. We were guests in his house.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. You’ll get used to it. It’s already an unusual kind of conversation. Guy’s talking with a foreigner and half of the conversation is taking place in a language he doesn’t understand.” She pauses. “Also, I feel like you’re not translating exactly what the guy is saying. I need to have it in their words — as close to their words as possible.” She turns to me and lifts her eyebrows, and now the wrinkles that were in hiding are visible.

“I understand that,” I say. “That’s what I am trying to do.”

“But a lot of the time you were letting that man speak for a while and I know he would have said five or ten sentences, and you’re coming back to me with just one. I may not know much Arabic, but I can just feel that in my bones.”

Sam’s right. I wasn’t giving her every sentence. I was trying to leave out the parts that seemed extraneous or confusing.

“I see.”

Or maybe embarrassing.

“I need to hear everything, even if
you
don’t think it would be important.”

“Everything? Every single thing he says, like the name of every relative he says Saddam killed? Or how he might go to Al-Hilla in the morning to look for his cousins’ remains?”

“Wait, he said he was going to Al-Hilla?”

“He said he was going to go to Al-Hilla to search for his cousins who he thinks were buried in a mass grave there, which is now being exposed.”

“Exhumed. And?”

“Or maybe he said Al-Mahawil. I think both, maybe. He said he’d go tomorrow, or on Monday.”

Sam expels a long breath. I can smell the coffee in it when it hits my face.

“Nabil, you never mentioned either of those places. You just said the south.”

“They are in the south.”

“Yes, but the fact that it’s Al-Hilla or Al-Mahawil makes a big difference. Specifics. Specifics are the heart of journalism. There were reports this morning that Iraqis are flocking down there and trying to dig up these mass graves with their bare hands. If I had known what he was planning I might have asked him about that. Maybe we could have followed his family there and spent the day with them. That would have been a great story.”

“But I’m telling you about it now.”

“It doesn’t matter now. I can’t ask him questions
now.
Unless we go back,” she says, looking at her watch, “which I don’t think we have enough time to do.”

I can’t understand why Sam is making such a fuss over one man with looted goods and dead relatives. We can probably find a thousand men who will tell us the same story.

“Do you want to go back?”

“No, not really. That’s not the point. I just want you to know that I need to hear these things
while
we’re in the middle of the interview so I can ask follow-up questions.” She lifts her fire-eyebrows towards me. “Do you know what I mean? I need specific details, all the time.”

“Yes, yes I see. I’m sorry. I thought these small details were insignificant.”

“Sometimes small details make big stories. Let me be the judge of what’s significant or not.” She uncrosses her legs and stands up. With her back to me, she leans her weight into a bent knee while the other leg is straight — lunging left and then right, for the second time today. I hear a pop emerge from somewhere in the vicinity of her hips. I wonder how old Sam is. She looks like she is in her late twenties, but sometimes she moves like she might be younger. Like a teenager who cannot sit still.

She spins back around towards me. “Don’t get me wrong, Nabil. You’re doing a fantastic job. Your English is
beautiful
,” she says, pinching her thumb and a few fingers together near her lips, and then releasing them with a tiny kiss. “You just need to learn how it all works.” She parts her feet and then doubles over, placing her hands flat to the floor.

Her face is reddish-brown when she comes up. “Sorry,” she says. “My body is so sore. The chairs at that hotel are shit, and I was up late last night working. My editor lives in a fantasy world where a good reporter should be able break some big, earth-shattering story within a week of coming to Baghdad.”

I almost forgot that some people might have reason to stay up late at night. Since the war began, we rarely have electricity past 8 p.m.

She looks at her watch again. “Oh, and remember to speak in first-person. Don’t say, ‘he says so and so.’ Just say what the guy says as if you’re him.”

“Sam, excuse me. But is it, ‘you are him?’ Or, ‘you are he?”‘

Sam’s lips curve into a slight frown of incredulity. “Brilliant,” she breathes. “You’re right. It is ‘you are he.’ I think. Do they teach this kind of stuff in school here?”

“Not really. But I studied the grammar on my own to make sure I understood all the rules.”

“You like following rules, huh?” She stands and bends towards the glass window, which has no one sitting behind it now.

“It just makes understanding the language easier.”

“Jeez, these guys are taking forever. There’s also supposed to be another press conference with the army later, but I don’t think I’m going to go.” She locks her fingers together, then presses them out so they crack at nearly the same moment, sounding almost musical.

A round of automatic gunfire splinters into the air and continues for half a minute. It could be a mile away, or two. Another round comes, with a slightly different rattle, angled to answer the first. They seem like the call of birds in the trees, one speaking to the other.

Sam rolls her eyes at me. “Afternoon target practice. I guess you’re used to it.”

“No. Really not. We never used to hear this before the war.”

“Well, yeah, I guess they killed people in prisons and basements, not out on the street.”

I don’t know where I could begin to explain, but somehow I want her to know that Baghdad was not a city with a lot of violence and crime. It is true that we all feared Saddam and his men, but we didn’t fear getting killed or robbed by each other, the way people do in the West.

“Baghdad can be a very beautiful city,” I tell her. “I wish you could see it when everything is calm.”

I suddenly feel terribly thirsty and I realize that for April, it has turned into a much hotter day than usual. My shirt has gone damp around the armpits and my face is sweaty. I forgot to bring a handkerchief so instead I wipe my face with my hand and notice that my upper lip feels wet, where my moustache once was, and maybe that’s what a moustache is there for. Sam doesn’t seem hot at all. And then I realize she is still talking to me about how she wants me to behave in interviews.

“...so even though I’ve seen some translators take notes, I think it slows down the interview, so I’d really rather you not do that. You just need to listen and let it flow.”

The door of the reception office opens. “Dr Marufi will be out for you in just one minute,” the man says. Sam gathers her bag and notebook and rises.

I stand as well. “Can’t you change things afterwards to make it right?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I say,
‘He
says he supports the American invasion,’ can’t you change it afterwards to say,
‘I
support the American invasion?”‘

Sam’s eyes roll up and down my body, as if somewhere on it is the key to my inability to see things as she does. “No, it’s different. You’re not supposed to change quotes too much. What if you were just estimating and I make the guy sound like he said something definitive that he didn’t actually say?”

“Either this way or that, he said the same thing.”

Her chest rises and falls. “No, Nabil. A good journalist never changes the quote if she can help it. I need to get as close to the exact words as possible. And that’s where you come in.”

The door swings open, and a man wearing a dark blue business suit steps out. It’s a much more expensive suit than mine — I have now discarded the jacket — but I am glad that I am no longer the most overdressed person Sam has met today.

“Ms Katchens! Such a pleasure to see you again.” He is a tall, greying man in perhaps his mid-forties. He extends one hand to shake hers and puts the other, for a brief moment, on her upper arm, as if he knows her well. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you. Come in.”