A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal (3 page)
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Authors: Asne Seierstad,Ingrid Christophersen
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Editors; Journalists; Publishers, #History, #Military, #Iraq War (2003-2011), #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Journalism, #Social Science, #Customs & Traditions, #Sociology
BOOK: A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal
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- What are you really doing here?
- I . . . eh . . .
- Make a list of what you want to do, then I’ll consider whether you can stay or not, Mohsen says. - In any case, I’ll give you a maximum of ten days.
With a gesture he tells me to stay seated on the sofa. It is so soft that I am knee-high to him. Mohsen despatches an assistant to find me an interpreter. No foreigner can function without someone to monitor what we do, where we travel, to whom we speak. The assistant returns with an older, thin-haired gentleman.
- This is Takhlef, our most experienced. I am giving you the best as you are so young, Mohsen smiles.
Takhlef tiptoes around under Mohsen’s gaze. He is small, skinny and dapper, dressed in a dark-blue suit, freshly ironed shirt and polished shoes. The suit is too big, as though he might recently have lost a lot of weight. The sparse hair is brushed back in a futile attempt to conceal the shiny crown. He stands beside Mohsen in a manner which shows that he works for Mohsen, not for me. - Just don’t try anything, his look tells me. - We are in charge.
In order to work together we will both have to fawn, lie, conceal. Maybe that is why I dislike him from the beginning. Later I wonder whether I never really gave him a chance. Maybe he was actually quite a nice chap, squashed by the Baath Party’s vice like everyone else. But at the time I thought my luck had run out, being given him.
- What interests you? is his first question, as though all I have to do is to choose. An interview with Saddam Hussein, perhaps? There is no time to think of ideas before he continues:
- Are you interested in culture?
- Hm.
- Then let’s request Babylon. Let’s go to Babylon. Are you interested in art? Then we’ll request the Saddam Art Centre, the National Gallery, the History Museum, the Museum of Antiquity, the Monument of the Revolution. Shall we begin with Babylon? Tomorrow?
I am in no mood to go sightseeing; I want to talk to people, find out how they live. It becomes apparent that an application is needed for even the smallest thing. To visit a school, a hospital, an institution. Even to visit a family one has to apply before a name and an address will be supplied. I give that one a miss. There is no mileage in visiting a model family, hand-picked and approved by the Ministry of Information.
A special permit is required to leave Baghdad; the further away, the more difficult it is to obtain. To travel to the Shia Muslim areas of the south is virtually impossible - very few journalists are allowed to visit Basra. But the most difficult is to get to Tikrit, Saddam’s home town. It is almost hermetically sealed to foreigners. The permit to Babylon takes five minutes; the town can’t be of much interest.
The next morning Takhlef is waiting for me in reception, at a safe distance from Mino.
- Are you ready? he asks and glances casually at his watch. I take this as an indication that I am five minutes late.
Takhlef sits in the front seat of the car, I am in the back. I try to initiate a conversation, but every question receives a noncommittal answer, so I give up. Our newly established cooperation is based on very different objectives. I probe, he conceals. After an hour’s drive on sand-blown roads the car stops in front of a high blue gate, painted with animals in yellow and white.
Ishtar Gate
is written in large letters - gateway to the legendary city. Can this be Babylon? It looks like the Disney version - all is new, shining, sleek.
Ishtar Gate
is written in large letters - gateway to the legendary city. Can this be Babylon? It looks like the Disney version - all is new, shining, sleek.
We are welcomed by Hamid, the archaeologist whose job it is to show us around in what was the centre of the globe five thousand years ago. Here culture and science, literature, mathematics and astronomy flourished. Here the world’s first law codes were collated. The Sumerians and Babylonians were the first to divide the circle into 360 degrees, the day into 24 hours, the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. Five thousand years ago they impressed signs on wet clay-tablets and invented cuneiform writing. One of these tablets reveals that the Babylonians were aware of what later came to be known as ‘the Pythagorean doctrine of right-angled triangles’ a thousand years before Pythagoras.
The legendary Babylon appears in many classic tales. Most famous are the writings of the man one might call the world’s first reporter, the Greek historian Herodotus. He visited the city around 400 BC. He wrote,
Babylon’s splendour exceeds that of every other city in the known world.
Babylon’s splendour exceeds that of every other city in the known world.
Ishtar, the gate with the holy, snakelike bulls’ heads, led into a temple with walls of gold. At the far end was a room enclosing a seat of pure gold.
The astrologers relate, although I doubt it,
Herodotus wrote,
that the gods themselves visited the sacred room and rested on the seat.
The astrologers relate, although I doubt it,
Herodotus wrote,
that the gods themselves visited the sacred room and rested on the seat.
Gods and gold have long gone. One hundred years ago German archaeologists removed anything of value to Berlin. In the Pergamon Museum thousand-year-old statues and sculptures are preserved. A few years ago Saddam Hussein decided that the ruins should be rebuilt. Everything was to resemble the world’s first metropolis in its heyday. Thus Babylon got a new emperor. Many of the stones of the Ishtar gate are engraved with his signature. Not even King Nebuchadnezzar had thought of that.
Babylon is a tourist attraction without tourists. In fact Takhlef and I are the only ones there this morning. Everything in the showcases is a copy.
- The complete Ishtar gate is in Berlin. Other stolen items are in the Louvre or the British Museum, our guide sighs resentfully. - The originals still in Iraq are stored in vaults. You know, the war might start at any moment. It’s best to hide things away. The whole of Babylon might be blown to smithereens.
The archaeologist lives alone in Babylon with his young wife and a small son. He is the guide by day and watchman by night. - The Americans want to ruin our country. First they’ll get the Presidential palace, then Babylon, he snorts. - They want to destroy our culture and lord it over us, take our oil, our resources.
He halts by the model of the Hanging Gardens. Cascading down the rock face the Sumerians planted the most glorious flowerbeds. - Well, this is what we think it looked like, he says.
He is on firmer ground when talking about the Tower of Babel. The square ruins have been left standing in Babylon; the copy is in miniature. The story is told in Genesis.
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and slime had they for mortar.
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
Hamid shows us out and we walk along the temple walls. They stretch ahead, straight as an arrow; there is no sign of exposure to wind and weather. A man appears amongst the rebuilt ruins. Hunchbacked and dressed in a long tunic he sweeps a large square with slow, rhythmic movements. The broom is a palm leaf twice his size. He might have been sweeping all his life. Had this been Disneyland one might have thought he was put there to represent a worker from the past. But the hunchback is real, and his task is to keep the desert sand away from the historical copies. The man and the palm leaf seem to be the only genuine articles in all of Babylon.
I tell Takhlef I want to talk to the sweep.
- Why to him? Takhlef exclaims.
- He might tell me something about Babylon.
- That one. Takhlef points and laughs scornfully. - He doesn’t even know where he is, he’s probably illiterate. You shouldn’t interview illiterates; they don’t know what’s right or wrong and won’t give you a correct picture of Iraq.
- But I want to, I say, and regret it immediately. I mustn’t rub my guide up the wrong way so soon. Takhlef approaches the sweep after all. He towers above the skinny man, who looks up at him, terrified, and gives monosyllabic answers.
- His name is Ali. He lives close by and has worked here for many years. Was there anything else you wanted to know? Takhlef asks tersely.
- No, thank you, thank you very much, that was exactly what I wanted to know.
On a hilltop overlooking the compound is a large building. It is square, like the foundations of the Tower of Babel, but brand new. Two dark-coloured jeeps are parked outside.
- Can we go up and have a look? I ask. The sweep has returned to his customary movements and is working his way around the copy of one of Babylon’s famous statues: the lion overpowering a man.
- No, says Takhlef. - That’s impossible.
- Why?
- That’s one of Saddam’s palaces.
That’s what I thought. That’s why I asked. If only we could walk up the few hundred yards to the villa. We might meet one of his sons, the dreaded Uday? Or the ice-cold Qusay? Curiosity gets hold of me and almost impels me towards the building, but then I look at Takhlef and common sense takes over. I see before me the president’s sons as little boys, on nocturnal wanderings around Babylon. Perhaps they climbed the lion, tamed it, fought imaginary barbarians.
Back in the dust of the present I tag along behind Takhlef to the exit. Hamid opens up the souvenir kiosk. I buy two Babylon T-shirts, a slab of ceramic depicting the holy ox, a picture book of the excavations, a bunch of postcards and stamps with images of the ruins, unaware that this little kiosk in a few months will burst into flames and become a gaping black hole. The display cases in the museum will be emptied, the ceramics smashed, the miniatures of the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens broken to pieces. The light bulbs will be unscrewed from the lamps, the sockets torn out of the walls, the cords cut up and sold as scrap at the markets. Every age has its own catastrophe. But it is still some time away. In the meantime, Hamid, like most other Iraqis, lives in fear of the storm that is brewing. Will the wrath of God strike Babylon again?
Takhlef is more talkative. - Show me America’s Babylon, he guffaws. - They were nothing at the time we ruled the world. They are historical upstarts. They don’t build, they just tear down. It’s important that you write about Babylon, show the world who we are!
Takhlef drops me off outside the hotel. Do I want him to fetch me for dinner?
I pluck up enough courage to say no.
- Saddam’s Art Centre? he asks. He is planning the following day’s programme.
I am here to find dissidents, a secret uprising, gagged intellectuals, Saddam’s opponents. I am here to point out human rights violations, expose oppression. And I’m reduced to being a tourist.
- You have to follow the rules, Takhlef says. - That’s very important; otherwise you’ll have to leave. You can’t wander around alone, talk to anyone or write bad things about Iraq. Believe me, trust me, do as I say.
My head is spinning.
- OK, I say. - I look forward to seeing Saddam’s Art Centre. I’m very interested in art and culture.
Back in my room I throw myself on the bed. There is a knock on the door. Said and the toiletries. I thank him and pay. He straightens the bedcover, nods and leaves. I tear the cover off.
Patience. That is what Gertrude Bell recommended. Patience.
Saddam’s Art Centre is a huge concrete structure in the middle of Baghdad. It consists of a few floors of Iraqi paintings from the last centuries and two floors of Saddam Hussein. We proceed quickly through the first centuries and stop at the 1970s. From there on it is all about the big leader: painted, photographed, woven, appliquéd, reproduced in graphic art and woodcut, in mosaics, in silk and cotton. With sunglasses, in a white suit, presenting arms, in an armchair, genial, or upright, mounted on a horse.
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