Baghdad Fixer (70 page)

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Samarra.” I say it as if I had intended to say it all along. Although, for more reasons than one, it is the most logical answer.

“There’s been a lot of looting around this neighbourhood. And also, a lot of people giving tips to the Americans. Anyone who does either of these things will be killed on the spot.”

“We’re going to see relatives.”

“Which family?” The man asking is young, but has teeth like an old man, yellowish brown, with the gums retreating.

“Duleimy.”

“Which branch?”

“If you wish to know,” I say, stalling for time and speaking in the syncopated, proud tones I remember hearing the upper-class
shiyukh
west of Baghdad use. “I’m from the family of Sheikh Faddel of Fallujah. We’re a rather large and established family, as I’m sure you know.”

The man repositions his grip on his gun and says nothing.

“I’m quite sure that your people are on very good terms with mine, and neither of them would want to have any problems in the future, which sometimes has been happening when people are held up at checkpoints.”

He looks over at Sam, who stares out straight ahead. The other two gunmen are staring at her. She runs her hand over her belly, which suddenly seems plump and rounded, the way a pregnant woman’s would be. She winces and shifts.

“Fine sir, please.” He waves at the others and they lift the barrier. “May you and your family have a safe trip, God-willing.”

We drive away and when they are well out of sight, Sam’s giggle spills into something like a cackle.

“What is
that?
How did—”

“It’s just a little pillow,” she laughs, and reaches into her neck-to-floor
jupeh
to take it out. “Your sister gave it to me.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. She’s one smart cookie, that Amal.” She says my sister’s name like the word for labourer,
amil,
rather than hope, which is what Amal’s name means. “Maybe in Baghdad I should have gone around like that all the time,” she says. “Think of all the things we could get away with. We could just pretend we’re perpetually on our way to a doctor’s appointment.”

With her long dress and her hair covered up, not only does she look like an entirely different woman, she looks like a woman who really could be married to me.

“Well, put it back in there!” I grab the pillow from the space between the seats and throw it into her lap. “Who knows if we’ll get stopped again.”

She puts the pillow back under her robe and her giggling starts again, and then it subsides and we are both quiet. The traffic keeps moving, pulling us from the city like liquid out of a narrow-necked bottle, and the further away we are from the northern slums, the more relaxed I feel. The worst is behind us. All I have to do is get Sam safely to Dohuk, where she can get a taxi to the border with Turkey. Or maybe I will take her to the border myself, if that’s possible, and then everything will be fine. Except that then Sam will be gone.

“Actually, we pronounce it ‘Amal’.”

“What?”

“My sister’s name. You pronounce it
ah-MAHL.
You want me to help you with your pronunciation in Arabic, right?”

“Definitely,” she says, looking at me with a mysterious face which I think says,
where did that come from?
“I wish you would teach me more,” she says. “What does Amal mean?”

“It means hope.”

“Hope? That’s beautiful.”

“It can also be a verb.
Ani at’amal inno y-kun salaam.
I hope that there will be peace.”

“Ani...
hold on, hold on. Too fast. One word at a time.”

“Maybe we’ll leave it with ‘
amal’
’. When you come back to Iraq, I’ll teach you the rest.”

“Deal. What’s this area called?”

“This?
Hajj
Sallum. Why?”

Sam shrugs. “I just like to know the names of places. It’s when you pass through this part that the architecture changes. You really feel like you’re leaving the city for something more, I don’t know, traditional...pastoral.”

“You mean when there are more mud buildings?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s kind of pretty.”

I nod. Pretty to foreigners, poverty to us.

“What does Nabil mean?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“No, I told you what Samara means, but you didn’t tell me what Nabil means.”

“Maybe you didn’t ask.” I glance at her, her honey-and-sand eyes more arresting than ever, with all her hair hidden away. “It has two meanings. The main one is noble.”

“Noble,” Sam smiles. “How appropriate. That’s really you.”

I find myself feeling hot. Perhaps it is Sam’s words, though she looks warm, too. I put my hand in front of the vent for the air-conditioning. “Is it cool enough in here?”

“Well, it’s a little stuffy to me, but I’m not used to wearing this thing,” she says, pulling at the
jupeh.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Nabil, you don’t need to apologize. I don’t mind at all. In fact, part of me likes it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It reminds me of being a little girl and playing dress up. Usually I’m so, well, kind of noticeable here. Wearing this, I feel like I can blend in. Sort of lose myself and just disappear.”

~ * ~

We are safely out of Baghdad, and I don’t see nearly as many illegal checkpoints as we expected. Mostly, I think, they’re just attempts by people to protect their neighbourhoods. Baba probably worried too much. Still, I’m glad not to have to make meaningless conversation with Safin. Glad to be alone with Sam. I wonder if I could take her for a visit to Samarra — a beautiful picture to leave her with, to wash out all the ugly ones we saw in Baghdad.

“Ah. So what was the other meaning?”

“Oh. Nabil also means sublime.”

“Sublime? Ooh. That’s pretty heavy...I mean, deep. Sublime!” We both laugh at the same time. “What an amazing name, Nabil. Is there any connection to the word noble in English?”

“You know, I thought this was very likely, and I still think it. But when I checked in a dictionary of etymology at the university, it said that noble was from Old French or Latin. But I think they are wrong. Arabic has been around much longer than those languages, you know.”

Sam nods. I probably sound like I’m trying to hold an originality contest between East and West, which wasn’t my intention.

The traffic slows down now, the two-lane highway quite congested, in part with other cars heading north. Baba was smart to have us pack up the car like this; we’ve probably seen ten others just like it. Occasionally we pass humvees and Bradleys. Painted in their desert beiges and faded browns, they are starting to become an unwanted but familiar part of our landscape, like a piece of furniture in your parents’ home that you never liked, but wouldn’t dare ask to be removed.

“We will pass through Samarra soon.”

Sam reaches back for a bottle of water, twists the cap off, and throws back her head to swig it down.

“You know, if we are in any place where there are people around, you mustn’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Drink the water that way.”

“What, from the bottle? Don’t Iraqis get thirsty?”

“Yes, but they will never drink from a bottle in public. Especially not a woman, and not people of a certain class. You will never find a lady driving in a Mercedes and drinking straight from a bottle.”

“So what happens when you’re thirsty?”

“You must always pour it into a glass first. If you search around in the bags there, I’m sure you’ll find that Mum has packed at least one.”

“Oh-kay-ay!” She drags out her syllables just like that, in a way that says she finds this lesson in Iraqi manners amusing, but won’t bother to argue.

“So, you know, Samarra is very beautiful. The city, I mean!” Sam looks at her knees, smiling at my clarification. “Well, not the city itself, but the shrines and the Malwiya minaret. “When you came to Baghdad in April, did you see them?”

“No,” she says. “Baghdad was falling. We didn’t exactly have time for tourism.”

“When we went to Tikrit, I thought to take you then, but we also didn’t have time to spare. But it is very special, Samarra, and I haven’t been in a very long time.”

I glance in my rearview mirror, the way I have countless times in the past hour.
Al-Hamdulilah,
there is no one following us. “I would love to take you there now. To stop just for a little while and see the shrines. I want you to see the view from the top of the Malwiya minaret.”

Sam doesn’t answer. But the movement in her face defies her quiet: the widening of her nostrils, the suddenly rapid fluttering of her eyelashes.

“You don’t want to.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to,” she says. Her eyes softening in that arc of pity, that same look I had trouble facing yesterday on the roof. “I just don’t want to take any more stupid chances. I want to get as far away from Baghdad as possible. What if someone is following us?”

“No one is following us.”

“The people who know how to follow someone
know
how to make it look like no one is following us. We really have no idea what could—” Her voice breaks up.

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“I can’t believe Rizgar is gone.”

“I know.”

“I still keep expecting to find out it’s a mistake. When I woke up at your house this morning, I thought I was at the Hamra. I’ll just get dressed, go downstairs and meet Rizgar. That’s what I thought.”

“I know what you mean.”

“You do?” Sam reaches into her bag and pulls out the tail end of a roll of toilet paper, rips some off and blows into it. “I always felt like maybe you two didn’t like each other so much.”

It takes me a moment to answer her truthfully.

“I know because of Noor. I didn’t really want to marry her. But I didn’t want her to die, either. It’s still a shock. It’s still a horrible thing. Just because I didn’t want her to be my wife, it doesn’t mean I’m not sad for her. And bloody angry, too. Somebody made a totally innocent girl die. And that happens here every day.”

She places a hand on my upper arm and squeezes gently. “I’m sorry.”

What do Americans say now? Thanks for feeling sorry? It seems better our way.
Allah yarhamha.
God keep her. Then again, that’s all about the one for whom we grieve, and not at all about the one who does the grieving.

Sam waits a few minutes to see if I have anything more to say, and then finally asks: “Do you want to tell me about Noor?”

“Not really, Sam. Not right now. I think I’d better concentrate on where we’re going.”

Sam lets out a quick sigh of acquiescence. “Well, tell me more about Samarra. It’s a Sunni area, isn’t it?”

I consider telling her I don’t feel like talking at all. But in a few days, when she’s gone from Iraq, I might regret it.

“In terms of population, yes, it’s Sunni,” I say, “but this is where it gets interesting. One of the most important sites for Shi’ites anywhere in the world is there. Shi’ites will come from all over to make pilgrimages to the shrines there.”

“You mean the Malwiya minaret?”

“The Malwiya is something totally different. The Malwiya, you’ve seen pictures of it? It’s the huge spiral minaret with steps going up the sides, so that you climb to the top on the outside.”

“I saw the top of it from the road. How old is it?”

“Well, that’s the funny thing. It’s built like one of the famous ziggurats of Mesopotamia, but in fact, it is much newer than that. A Caliph, that’s the ruler, named Al-Mutawakil began building it in the middle of the ninth century, when Samarra was the capital, during the period of the Abbasids. Oh, but you asked me about Samarra. So, yes, it’s Sunni, and the Al-Mutawakil Mosque — I mean, the old one connected to the Malwiya, which isn’t really functioning any more as a mosque — that’s considered a Sunni site. But also in Samarra you have the graves of two of the Shi’ite imams, the Tenth and the Eleventh, plus the, I don’t know what you would call that in English, the spirit, I guess, of the Twelfth Imam, who is known as the Hidden Imam. Shi’ites believe he will return again at the end of days.”

“This is why some of the Shi’ites are called Twelvers, right?”

“Exactly. Most, in fact, are twelvers. It sounds funny to me, but that’s it. We call it
it’naashariya,
but it’s the same thing. Have you heard of the Mahdi?”

“He’s like the messiah, right?”

“Sort of. So, in Samarra there’s one shrine with a beautiful golden dome, the Al-Askari Shrine, where Imam Ali al-Naqi, who was the Tenth Imam, is buried, along with his son Hasan al-Askari, who is the Eleventh. And the second shrine has very beautiful blue tiles, and downstairs is the place where the Imam al-Mahdi went into concealment. Whether he disappeared or is hidden, we don’t know. But people view him as if he is still alive and will come back again to bring peace and justice to the world. Something like what Christians and Jews think too, no?”

Sam’s head wavers from side to side. “Something like that.”