Baghdad Fixer (17 page)

Malika wails louder. Her father whispers her name and clicks his tongue to hush her, but it seems her family’s sympathy is spent, spread in too many places over too many days. Mohammed stares at the blank television set, studying his exhausted reflection in the curved glass. He picks up the remote control and presses it, shrugs, and tells me that even in Abu Ghraib they had electricity.

Sam keeps writing. When Malika calms down a little, Sam begins to ask more questions, and we get some answers. What his name is. What he believed in. Finally, Sam sighs. Asks me to tell them she’s sorry for their troubles and that she hopes things get better. She rises from the chair.

“Can I take a picture of Malika holding a photograph of her husband?”

Mohammed shakes his head. “It isn’t nice for Iraqi women to be photographed for Western men to see.”

Sam appears to understand the “no” without any translation from me, says she is very sorry again, and closes her bag.

~ * ~

Outside, the hot afternoon haze hovers over us, prickling my skin. We walk towards Rizgar’s idling car, and the most appealing thought is the air conditioning inside. Sam tugs at the handle several times. Rizgar has locked the door and is dozing, open-mouthed, against his headrest. Sam bangs on the window and Rizgar sits up, momentarily confused, and then clicks the lock open. She tucks herself into the front seat and I climb in the back, as I’ve become accustomed to doing.

“Where go, Miss Samara?”

She rests her head against the window, then pulls it back, bringing her hand to the bridge of her nose and holding it there.

“Where do you want to go now?” I ask.

“Give me a minute,” she says, turning to look out of the window. I can see her back rise, almost as if she were about to retch. When the rise subsides, there’s a tear clearing a path down her cheek.

“Are you all right?” But Sam is my boss now. Is it even appropriate to ask the boss if she’s all right? I never imagined a boss being a she.

She uses the edge of her hand to wipe her face. “I’m fine.”

Is Sam really crying for this woman? It must be about something else. Although it
is
an awful story.

“You wanted to go and meet another guy who was tortured in Abu Ghraib, right?” I take the paper out of my breast pocket, the one on which I’ve written the names of four other men who have terrible stories to tell.

“Fine. Let’s do that.” But her fingers are still holding the upper part of her nose. She moves her hand up, taps on the space between her eyebrows. “You know what? I’ve had enough for today. I’ve got what I need here. Let’s head back.”

No one says anything all the way home. The unreal blur of Baghdad passes us in silence. The river, the buildings, the trees, the bridges, the mosques, all of these are the same, except for the damage to the bigger buildings. And yet, nothing looks like it once did, because now you can really see that the American military is everywhere, and that the Iraqi government is nowhere. Unlike last week, there are no people out stealing and looting in the street. The summer heat is crashing in, luring us inside, slowing us down. We have conceded.

As I walk Sam to the reception desk in the second tower, she thanks me and says I’m doing well. Doing a much better job, she says. Really excellent, in fact.

She stands with her back to the stairs as if I shouldn’t pass, as if she wants to say goodbye to me right here. But then she says, “Why don’t you come up for a moment?”

I follow her, watching the sway of her body as she takes the steps, one and then two, one and then two. Outside her room she exhales heavily and pushes the key into the door. When it swings open, a man sitting at the desk looks up, one elbow leaning over the back of the chair. It’s the same man with the Mediterranean features and the long hair, now pulled back into a ponytail.

“Carlos!” Sam looks surprised.

Carlos is wearing a tight-fitting, sleeveless undershirt, showing off arms with tightly braided muscles. He looks like one of those young Lebanese heart-throbs my sister tapes up on her wall.

“Hey, Sam,” he smiles somewhat guiltily, as if he might have done something wrong, but he’s not yet sure. He grins at me and then looks back at Sam. “Hope you don’t mind. Just using your computer to file some pictures to Washington. My sat phone’s busted.”

“No worries,” Sam says. “Oh, Carlos, this is my new translator, Nabil.” She gestures between us, and I hold out my hand. He rises lazily so he can extend one of his athletic arms to meet mine.

“Carlos is a star photographer with the paper,” she says. She smiles at him in a way that suggests she’s holding back a joke I wouldn’t understand. “One of the best up-and-coming shooters around.”

“Nabil, was it?” Carlos looks me over and puts those arms, which look pumped for a fight, on his hips. “Do you know you’re working with one of the hottest young talents in journalism?”

“Oh, right.” Sam rolls her eyes and gives him a playful push in the arm. “Actually, Nabil and I have some things to talk about for tomorrow, so I was just dropping this off,” she says, dumping her bag onto one of the sofas. “Be back soon.”

She walks to the door and holds it for me with a flash of petulance in her eyes. “Come up to the roof,” she says. “There’s a good view of the whole neighbourhood up there.”

We walk across the roof’s funny white surface, which is almost as I’d imagine the moon to be — bumpy, crusty, pocked. There is a sprinkling of small satellite dishes. Some of them look like inverted mushrooms, and others, like solar panels.

Sam’s right. From here, the pool looks quite beautiful, and already surprisingly clear compared to its green-and-brown appearance of a few days ago. I wonder what kind of chemicals they put in it to make all the dark, corroded stuff go away.

She puts her back to the rail and leans her elbow over it, sending a wave of worry through my bones. What if a gust of wind were to push her off? What if there was another stray bullet?

“You’re sure it’s safe by the edge?”

“Why?” She shrugs. “I don’t see any soldiers around here that anyone’s trying to hit.”

From below, there’s a commotion of splashing, and then laughing. Sam watches the swimmers. “I guess the pool is open for the season,” she says. “Looks pretty nice, actually.” She faces me again and crosses her arms. “I can’t believe I got upset today. It’s not like me to get all teary like that in the middle of work. I mean, I’m not a big crier.”

“That’s okay,” I offer. “We were already in the car.”

“It’s just that, I don’t know...that one really hit me somehow.”

“The men being tortured, you mean?”

Sam sinks towards the floor, and I join her, sitting at a respectable distance.

“Well, hmm. Where to start? When I was twenty, I lost someone very close to me,” she says. She drags a finger across the roof’s pasty white surface, and then rubs it against her thumb to make the fine powder disappear. “We were together throughout school. I thought I was going to marry him.”

“Your boyfriend,” I finally force out the word. A relationship forbidden in our culture, but normal, I know, in hers.

“Yeah, Jack. Jacob Sorenson,” she says, closing her eyes. “We always thought we would get married.”

I try to imagine it, and find it easy. He’s blond, handsome, wealthy. Together, they raise happy white children with cheeks that glow like summer tomatoes. They live in a big American house where there’s no danger and nothing ever goes wrong. Samara Sorenson. It even sounds better.

“He died in a car accident, just after sophomore year. He got caught in a rainstorm on a very slippery road.”

Better than what?

Her face tightens. I hear her swallow old tears.

“He was really my best friend,” she says. “We had the same kind of...background.” She runs her fingers into the mess of locks near her forehead and pulls some of them into a bunch. She ties this section above her head into a twisted knot, which splays itself up against the white wall behind her like a spill of orange juice. Like this, she looks more girl and less woman. “I guess that story, Malika losing her husband, reminded me of Jack. It’s still hard sometimes.” She shakes her head. “I’ll never find anyone like him.”

Sam appears to be watching a replay of some other moment in time. I wonder if Noor dying is anything like that. Can you grieve for someone you didn’t actually love?

“You can understand, yeah?” She searches my eyes, her own seem out of focus. I consider telling her about Noor, but decide against it.

“And with Jonah going missing, that gave me a big scare. But he’s fine. I was running nightmare scenarios in my head.”

“Jonah is your boyfriend?”

“Sort of.” She picks at a white bubble on the roof’s surface, and I keep it in mind to warn her to wash her hands afterwards, that we might be sitting on a blanket of asbestos. “He was, for a while. It’s probably coming to an end. He’s a little ticked off with me.”

She tilts her wristwatch into the weakening light. “Ooh, is that the time? I really have to get writing,” she says. She moves to get up and I do, too, but then she is back down again, as if something heavy is pulling her back towards the lunar surface of the roof. She’s laughing at herself, and as I’m already up, she holds out her hand for me to help her.

~ * ~

15

Laughing

I, too, had wanted to be a writer. Not a journalist, though. The journalists told everything from Saddam
’
s point of view. They pretended to ask questions, but only the questions they were allowed to ask. If you were smart enough, I thought, you should be a real writer, which meant being able to criticize the regime in a way that was so obscure, so intricate in design that no one in government would realize it. I wanted to write the
Animal Farm
of Iraq. No one who mattered would be clever enough to know you were taking the piss out of them.

Yes, some Iraqis read books.

I should cut back on the British slang. I learned most of my colloquial English when I was in year six. All the kids made fun of my accent, and I hated them for it. For a while, I even hated my parents for bringing us to Birmingham, which was so lacking in local pride that people didn
’
t seem to have the energy to pronounce the city
’
s name, so they called it
“
Brum.
”
No one does that to Baghdad, abbreviate it like that. I think making a nickname out of your hometown shows a lack of respect.

But there were other things about the English that I loved. One of them was all the funny nicknames they made up for things, and the way people would say,
‘
ello, love,
which reminded us of the way Baba would call Mum
hayati.
My life. It was then that we stopped calling my mother Mama and began calling her Mum. Ziad liked it and began using it mostly because it made us laugh, saying it just like the English school kids when they whined for their mothers to buy them something in the shops. When we returned to Iraq, we kept on calling her Mum because we thought it made us sound posh.

I learned more English in that year and-a-half, I expect, than at any point in my life. My brain was like a dry sponge, soaking up the new words and then dribbling them out in some inappropriate place. I still worry about saying the wrong thing.

For a so-called immigrant
—
they didn
’
t know from where so sometimes they just called us Pakis
—
I got excellent marks in English Lit. I read anything ten times if I had to, looked up all the words I didn
’
t know. Just as I had begun to master the language, my parents announced that it was time to go back to Baghdad. I didn
’
t want to go.

In fact, I wanted to stay in England. And then, angry at my parents for making us leave, I felt the urge to write. By the time I was fourteen, my fingers were constantly twitching and typing out sentences in the air as I walked around. It drove my father crazy. I told him that I had learned to type in school and that I wanted my own typewriter. He said typing was for girls who wanted to grow up to be secretaries, not for boys who would grow up to be doctors.

When I was sixteen and nearly failing biology, my father finally bought me a typewriter. By then, I
’
d got used to Iraq again. I started forgetting some things about how Birmingham looked. I had high marks in Arabic literature, English and history. My teachers once nominated my essay on the greatness of
“
Our Beloved Leader, Saddam
”
for student essay of the year, and it came first. At the awards ceremony, the headmaster led the kids in the audience in singing odes to Saddam, written by Daoud al-Qaysi and other famous Iraqi singers whose songs we had to memorize. One song compared Saddam to the sun and the moon. What a bloody joke. I wonder if, at the time, I believed any of it. I only remember that I liked it when the teacher said I excelled at writing.

Unlike Ziad, I would not follow in Baba
’
s footsteps. When I was fourteen, in fact, the doctors diagnosed with me vasovagal syncope, which is a medical term for an extraordinary tendency to pass out. They said it was not a disease so much as a syndrome, and that a fainting episode or
“
attack
”
might be triggered by situations of extreme stress or dehydration, or something as simple as a blood test. It might go away as I matured, they said. I was happy to be excused from having to dissect any more animals.