Baghdad Fixer (19 page)

“I prefer...no.” He struggles for a word, behaving as if he is very close to finding it, like a person riffling for a lost file. He turns back to me and continues in Arabic. “It’s better if you come to my house and I will explain. Come to us tonight after dinner, about 8 o’clock. My wife will be thrilled to serve the foreign lady tea and practise her English.” He takes out a pen and scribbles his address across the back of a receipt pad. It’s in Shamasiya, not far from here. Adeeb whispers to me, as if Sam could understand were he not speaking in undertones, that it would be good if she could come in a long dress with her hair covered, so the neighbours wouldn’t easily notice a foreign woman coming to visit.

I coax Sam out of the door and indicate that we’ll see Adeeb later, and she seems content with this and thanks him.

“Ah, and also,” he says, “I almost forgot. If you see Subhi again, tell him when you came by the shop was closed, okay?”

I agree, wondering why I’d have any reason to see Subhi again anyway. Sam says
shukran,
stretching the vowel out as so many foreigners do until it sounds like
shuuukran.
He repeats his quasi-English niceties, mechanical as the talking doll Amal had when she was small. “You are most welcome. Please. Hallo. You are most welcome,” he says, his hand waving like a child’s.

~ * ~

17

Waving

“This cars an oven.” Sam turns to Rizgar. “No air condition?”

Rizgar turns it up higher so she’ll feel it.

“Let’s go to Fallujah,” she says.

“Fallujah? Why? You know it’s far,” I say. “And maybe not so safe.”

“I spoke to a colleague last night who says he knows a sheikh there who might be able to tell us more about General Akram.” She shrugs. “It’s worth a try.”

“Who? What sheikh?”

She glances in her notebook. “Uh, Duleimy.
Yalla,
let’s go”.

Rizgar seems concerned. “Tell her she should go in the back seat and you should be in the front.” He looks at me in his rearview mirror. “We don’t want to announce that we are driving a foreign woman around when we’re near Fallujah.”

“Rizgar suggests that you sit in the back seat whilst we drive into Fallujah and that I take the front. For your safety.”

Sam smiles at Rizgar with a half-open mouth. “Really? Is that what he said?”

Rizgar nods with his eyes cast downwards and laughs a little. He turns to her and smiles gently. “For you safe,” he says.

“Well, then, no problem,” she says, and hops out. She climbs into the back seat and I take her front seat, which is warm and a bit sunken in where she sat. A flash of a thought: how warm her body must be to heat the seat like this.

We head south until we get to the Qadisiya Expressway. Sam yawns and lays across the back seat. “I didn’t realize how nice it was back here,” she says, putting her hands behind her head. “I think I’m going to close my eyes for just a few minutes. I was up too late last night. But wake me if anything good happens.”

Rizgar asks if he could put in a tape of his music, and Sam and I readily agree. I immediately regret it: he has put in Zakaria, a Kurdish singer from the north who is liked even by many Arabs here in Baghdad. But I have also heard he is a separatist and very nationalistic, and that makes me wonder about Rizgar. Mostly, I don’t much care for Zakaria because his music is mournful and even if I can’t understand the words, there is something about the longing in his voice that I don’t really want to hear just now.

At the entrance to Fallujah, there are several American tanks in the centre of the line that divides traffic going in and out of town. On the right, the police station appears to have been looted and vandalized, and then taken over by American soldiers. Next to that, a building carries a banner with a handmade sign in Arabic and poorly written English: Democritic Fallujah Counsell. Otherwise, most of the buildings are intact.

“Just keep going straight,” Sam says, “and then when you get to the large mosque with the nice blue tiles on it, you go left.”

She directs us to the northern edge of town, where the houses become larger and are spaced further and further apart. Suddenly we are no longer in the city, but in a semi-rural area with farmland; Sam points the way to a marshy terrain and then up to a long white house so large, it looks more like an institution or a
madrase,
an Islamic school.

A man in a
thob
opens the door, and we ask when Sheikh Duleimy is expected.

“Soon,
Inshallah.
Soon time,” the aide answers in English. “But you can please to wait for him,” he says, and leads us into one of the most beautiful sitting rooms I have seen in Iraq, with brocaded fabric, opulent floor to ceiling curtains, and two sparkling chandeliers that scream wealth. The aide indicates a choice between Western and Eastern sitting areas, and Sam immediately opts for the floor cushions. “We can wait,” she says.

In minutes, I’m bored with waiting.

“Sam, what was it like growing up in America? Where did you grow up?”

She seems pleasantly surprised, and a little embarrassed. “Good ole Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.”

“Is that a small city?”

“No,” she laughs. “Actually it was more like a village! But, not like here. In America, village doesn’t necessarily imply rural. Phoenixville probably has 20,000 residents. It’s about an hour from Philadelphia, which is a big city.”

“I know about Philadelphia. It is supposed to be the city of freedom and I know much of American history begins there. But in terms of history,” — a fly is now circling over Sam’s cup, and she flaps her wrist to chase it away, paying more attention to it than to me — “in terms of history, the original Philadelphia is actually here.”

“What do you mean, here?”

“I mean, not here exactly, but in the Middle East. Amman was once called Philadelphia, and so was a city in Turkey. Americans didn’t invent brothery love.”

Sam pouts her lips in that shape that tells me she isn’t sure she believes what she’s heard. “Really? Didn’t know that.”

“So what’s it like in Phoenixville? Is it beautiful?”

“No! It’s ugly as sin. Well, that’s not totally fair. It has its charms. These cool old colonial houses with big porches. Ours was kind of nice. But essentially, the place was a steel town, so it’s pretty much dead. It’s falling apart at the seams. Or it was when I was growing up there.”

I try to picture a dead town, but I imagine Halapca, in northern Iraq. There are rumours that Saddam killed the entire village. But things like that don’t happen in America.

Sam’s eyes run back and forth across the blank wall across from us, like she’s viewing an old film that only she can see.

“Why do you say that the village is dead?”

Sam holds up a finger. “A borough! We were actually a borough. Whatever that means. The borough of Phoenixville. Like the mythical Phoenix? And ville, like a little city. P-h-o-e-n-i-x-v-i-l-l-e.”

I don’t mind her spelling it out. Otherwise, the names are hard to grasp. I might have spelled it fee-necks-fill.

“Do you think it is anything like Birmingham, England?”

“Never been there. But I doubt it. That part of Pennsylvania, it has its own feel to it. It’s basically, well, in a way I guess it’s very American. It grew up around the whole Industrial Revolution.” Sam draws her index finger down through the air, meandering this way and that. “There’s a river that runs through that area and basically, industry sprung up around that, so they used hydropower for the steel mill. For years it was a sort of boomtown for immigrants from poor countries in Europe. Almost no one lived in Phoenixville without being connected to the steel industry in some way. My father grew up in Philadelphia but he moved to Phoenixville after he finished school to be an electrical engineer at the Steel Works.”

I had never given much thought to what Sam’s father might be, but I assumed him to be better educated than mine. More privileged, and more successful.

“He worked there for over twenty-five years and then one day in 1985, they closed the plant. Just like that,” she snaps her fingers. “It simply devastated him and he hasn’t worked since. If it weren’t for my mother’s work, I don’t know how they would even survive.”

“What does she do?”

“Teaches piano. Nearly every kid in Chester County — which goes far beyond Phoenixville — who knows how to play learned from her.” Sam nods several times. “She was considered really talented when she was younger. She studied music at the University of the Arts, which was regarded as very prestigious.” There is something in her face that looks wistful on her mother’s behalf.

“Do you play as well, then?”

“Of course!” She wiggles her fingers with a dexterity that suddenly makes it very easy to imagine her at the keyboard. “How do you think I learned to type so fast?” She moves them more quickly now, as if she has a more upbeat tune to play. I can picture her fingers moving effortlessly from black to white.

I’d imagined every American’s life to be perfect. Perfect houses, roads, cars. Perfect skin and perfect teeth. Nothing ever rotting, nothing corrupt, nothing, anyway, that one can see. Certainly Sam — with her beautiful face and her important job, everything about her seeming smart — could not have had anything but a perfect existence until she arrived in Baghdad.

A tall man towers over us, and his size startles me. I stand, and Sam, taking my cue, follows suit. He smiles widely and says, “How do you do,” in perfect English. He holds out his hand. “Sheikh Faddel el-Duleimy.”

“Oh, hello. I’m Samara Katchens from the
Tribune,
and this is Nabil al-Amari, who works with me.” I notice that this is the phrase she often uses when she introduces me. Not translator or interpreter. A verb but not a noun. Nabil, who works with me.
Works,
do they wonder, doing what?

He holds out his hand to suggest we sit back down. “Please, please, make yourselves most comfortable.”

“You speak English so beautifully,” Sam says, with a look that mixes curiosity with flirtation. “Better than most Americans I know.”

He laughs. “Even in Iraq we have many well-educated people,” he says. “I wonder if most Americans realize that.”

It is hard to place his age, due to the fact that he has a lean, handsome face, and a physique that seems equally young and trim. Only the wisps of grey near his temples make him seem any older than forty.

“I studied for several years at a boarding school in Switzerland. We had all our classes in English,” he says.

“Oh,” Sam replies, “did you enjoy it there?”

He pulls his arms in on each other and shudders. “I suffered from the cold. It was a good place to learn, but not to live,” he says. He calls out to the coffee boy in the adjacent room. “Will you have a coffee? Tea?”

Sam’s eyes brighten. “Yes, coffee please.” He looks to me, and I nod that I will have the same.

He sits and spreads the extra material of his
bisht,
a black robe with fine gold embroidery at the edges, over the cushions.

“What can I help you with today?”

“Well, my friend, Jonah Bonn sent me. He spoke very highly of you and said it would be helpful to get your opinion of the current situation in Iraq.”

Funny, I thought we were here for information on General Akram.

“What would you like to speak about?” he asks.

“Well, I’ve heard that several sheikhs are working out a cooperation deal with the Americans so that there won’t be any resistance to them in this area.”

He smiles and closes his eyes a moment. “Do you think that will work? They can sign, but it’s only the beginning of what is going to be a very brutal fight.”

“Really?” Sam sounds amused but interested. “I keep hearing that these are just little pockets of resistance, of Saddam loyalists and hangers-on that the Americans just have to shake out, and then it’s done.” Sam looks at me and then back at him, waiting for one of us to offer some agreement. “To be honest, I don’t think there’s much they can do at this point to put even a dent in the American military.”

“I think you might be wrong there,” Sheikh Faddel says. “I think maybe you are being influenced by the hopeful propaganda of your own government.”

Sam opens her notebook to a new page. “Do you mind if I take notes?”

“That’s fine,” he says. “Look, the Americans are doing everything wrong.”

“Such as?”

“Not getting a grip on the lawlessness. Everyone here is starting to think the Americans want this lawlessness. And then it will be an excuse for them to stay here longer, and longer, and they will say it is never the right time to leave. And by that time, they will have full control over all our oil resources.”

“Not if these stupid saboteurs keep bursting pipelines all over the place.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Kind of self-injury, isn’t it?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, you’re only hurting yourselves by attacking your pipelines. They’re
your
natural resources.”

“It nice to hear an American say so.” He reaches for the small coffee that has been left in front of him. I was so mesmerized by his odd charm that I had not even noticed that it had arrived.