Escape from Saddam (15 page)

The man was no longer on the street corner.

I stopped, turned around, and scanned the crowds to see if he was still among them. No sign—until suddenly he walked out from behind a group of people. He started ambling coolly toward me, and even though I had no way of knowing whether he really had any interest in me or not, I was overcome by a paranoia that would let me do only one thing: run. Not caring how conspicuous I made myself, I turned and fled, losing myself in a maze of backstreets. I ran with a painful limp for five or ten minutes, all the while glancing back over my shoulder to check that I wasn’t being followed. I invited curious glances as I hurtled down the streets in my filthy clothes, seemingly running from nothing and with sweat moistening my skin. But when I stopped, it was not out of a desire to stay still. Out of the blue I was almost floored by an excruciating, burning sensation in my stomach. I stumbled to a halt, then bent double as I gasped for breath—half on account of my exertions, half on account of the terrible, piercing pain that was ripping through my abdomen. I collapsed on the side of the road, unable to move, and waited until this sinister pain had subsided.

The relief I felt when it had done so was like a balm. I touched my hands to my cheeks and realized they were wet from unnoticed tears, so I wiped my face with the back of my hand and tried to regain my composure. Part of me felt foolish, as though I had been running from shadows; but I knew that in the same situation, I would do the same thing again. I had come too far to throw everything away through carelessness. What the pain in my stomach had been I had no idea. Probably just hunger, or maybe stress, but I couldn’t worry about it now, as there was too much to do. I went to find someone of whom I could ask directions back to Hashemite Square, from where the buses out of Amman departed. It was time to meet Saad’s friend.

Wissam lived with his wife and children in a well-to-do Christian area some miles out of Amman. After an uneventful bus journey, I approached his house with a certain amount of trepidation. It was a large, beautiful place draped in grapevines and with fruit trees in the courtyard, not the sort of place I expected to find myself on my second day in Jordan. I knocked rather timidly at the door, unsure what to expect. The man who greeted me was friendly, if formal at first, tall and good-looking with piercing green eyes. He introduced me to his family, his wife brought us some tea, and we sat down to talk. As we dealt with the necessary pleasantries, I immediately gained the impression that despite his friendliness, he was a firm man, somebody who knew what he wanted in life and was comfortable with the position he had achieved. I could trust him, I knew; but I would not be able to overstep the mark. He would help me so far, and no farther.

“Now that I think about it, I remember you,” he said mysteriously when we had made ourselves comfortable in the shade of the vines forming a canopy over the courtyard. I looked at him questioningly. “When I came to Baghdad to study in the seventies, you were just a little baby.” He smiled at the memory. “Your uncle took care of me when I was a stranger in a strange land. He showed me where to go and what to do, and even let me stay with him for a while. I would be repaying him poorly if I did not do the same thing for you.”

“Thank you,” I said sincerely.

He sat back in his chair. “Why don’t you tell me everything?” he asked.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and started to tell my story: how they had wanted me to join military intelligence; how I had escaped the barracks; how Saad had helped me to get out of Iraq. Certain things I kept to myself—the shooting, the journey across the desert with the Bedouin—so as not to make myself sound too dangerous a charity case. All the while I spoke, Wissam stayed silent, nodding gently, and I realized that although some Jordanians—like the youths with whom I had had a run-in the previous night—resented the presence of Iraqis in their territory, others, like the man in front of me, understood what the reality of life was like in our country and were prepared to help us. It was a reassuring moment.

When I was finished, he was silent for a while as if he was mulling my story over in his mind. Finally he spoke. “Do you have money?”

“A few American dollars. Not enough.”

“And what is your plan from now on?”

“To get to England and study to become a doctor.”

He nodded silently. “And how do you propose to do that?”

“I don’t know. There must be a way, but I’ll have to make inquiries…” I knew it sounded feeble even as I spoke the words, but it was the truth.

Wissam waved his hand as if to indicate that he didn’t want to hear about such things. He knew that I was alluding to an underground world of false documents and people-smugglers, and he clearly didn’t want to go down that path. He clapped his hands briskly to divert me from the subject. “You’ll need a job, then,” he said in a businesslike fashion. “What can you do?”

Of all the questions he could have asked me, that was the one for which I was the least prepared. I had never really had a job, and my academic qualifications, such as they were, seemed next to useless now. “I can speak English,” I told him with a shrug.

“Okay,” he told me. “That’s good. Tomorrow I’ll take you around, speak to a few friends. We’ll see if we can find you some work. In the meantime, until you get a place for yourself, you can sleep here.”

As he promised, the following day he started taking me around to places he knew that might be able to offer me a job. We started out at a baker’s shop, but when they found out that I had never worked in a bakery before, they rejected me out of hand. “I’m sorry,” Wissam was told. “He has no expertise. We’ve got Iraqis who know how to bake bread lining up for jobs.” Everywhere we went it was the same story, and as the day progressed I started to grow demoralized—and so, I think, did Wissam.

“It looks like there are a lot of Iraqis trying to find work,” I said to him at one point. “Too many. What if I’m not successful?”

He didn’t answer.

Eventually he took me to the last place on his list. “It’s a company I know,” he told me vaguely, before explaining that it was run by three Iraqi brothers. The law stated, however, that you had to be Jordanian in order to own a company, so foreigners paid Jordanians to front their affairs for them. The man we were about to meet was the Jordanian front for the company.

“Their business is imports and exports, and they have offices in Baghdad. I’m sure they’ll be impressed that you speak English, but I imagine they’ll want to know if you have any degrees or more advanced qualifications. Just tell them you have.”

I nodded. Dissembling was becoming second nature to me now, and I knew that if I could lie my way through Iraqi checkpoints, I could lie about a few examinations. Besides, I liked the sound of this place. A proper company. There would be desks and carpets, people doing business—it sounded a lot better than the sweltering kitchens of the bakery that I had been to see, and maybe I would learn something useful. I wondered why Wissam had left this place till last.

The man we were led in to see was enormous—one of the fattest people I have ever witnessed—with a long, scraggly brown beard. He had the unusual and slightly off-putting habit of placing his left thumb under his left armpit and digging it into his ribs, almost as if he was massaging his overstrained heart. His name was Khalil Bakir, and he looked at me with utter disdain. I had the impression that Wissam was a client of his and that that was the reason I was being given so much as the time of day.

“Can you make tea and coffee?” he asked in response to Wissam’s inquiry about job openings, surprising me because I had been preparing myself to answer much more complicated questions.

“Yes,” I replied meekly.

“Good. You can start the day after tomorrow. One hundred dinars a month.”

And so it was that I became an employee of the company.

On my first day at work they took a photocopy of my passport without paying it much attention. It was little more than a formality to them. Wissam had vouched for me and clearly his word was trusted, and in any case they were in no position to tell a genuine passport from a fake one. My job was to make tea and coffee for Bakir and his brother, do a bit of cleaning up, and run a few errands, and it wasn’t long until I started to learn more about the company and its workings.

The first thing that struck me was how little work everybody seemed to do. The office was staffed by Bakir’s family as a condition for him fronting the company. Clearly Bakir had told his Iraqi colleagues that if they wanted to set up in business, his nearest and dearest would have to receive paychecks. His family members were illiterate—they neither read nor wrote Arabic, which was not uncommon—and they did literally nothing other than sit around chatting and drinking the tea I made them. I remember thinking, perhaps slightly naively, that the import-export business must be a very profitable one in order to allow the management to keep on such a large number of unused staff. It was not up to me to say anything, however, because Bakir, their benefactor, had me under his thumb.

There was something about his demeanor that terrified me. I can’t explain what it was, but I do remember wondering why it was that I, who had escaped the army, been shot, and fought with wild wolves in the desert, was so scared of this one man. Perhaps it was the fact that he now held my livelihood in his hands. Iraqis were treated like scum in Amman. I was lucky to have this job, and it was the only way available to me to earn enough money to continue with my plans. Bakir knew he had a hold on me, and he took advantage of that to make me work hard: his gaze was ferocious, and his eyes followed me around the office as I went about my business, keeping me well and truly in line. I exercised all the politeness I had on him, but most of the time he seemed impervious to it, like a smooth, fat rock that would not shine no matter how many times it was buffed.

Deep down, though, Bakir had a heart. On occasions his sons, who were younger than I—one about fourteen, the other perhaps ten—used to come into the office. They were well dressed, and their full faces spoke of a healthy, plentiful diet and privileged lifestyle—a stark contrast to my ragged and undernourished features. I used to envy them and wonder why life had not rolled the dice for me a bit differently. Sometimes, after his sons had been to the office, I caught Bakir looking at me thoughtfully, as though the difference in our circumstances was not lost on him. And so, although he treated me with brusqueness, he also did his best to help me.

He knew that I spoke English—he himself spoke very little—and after a while, once it had become clear to him that he could trust me, he started giving me little jobs to do. Writing a letter, translating something—little tasks that an English-speaker was suited to. Then after about nine months and after I had demonstrated my ability, he sacked his secretary and put me in her place. It was a brutal move, and one that did nothing to dispel my fear of the huge man, even if what he had done was in my favor. I felt as if I was strangely favored but had a sword hanging over me nevertheless. I shuddered to imagine what Bakir’s reaction would be if he knew the truth about my past. Doubtless nobody in the company really expected this young Iraqi man to be around forever, but every instinct informed me that my story was best left untold.

But now I had more responsibility and a slightly bigger paycheck. Because the company had offices in Baghdad, I was allowed to divert some of my pay there, so that my family—normally Saad—could pick up the money when times were lean. I was not the only Iraqi to do this. It was a common way for my fellow countrymen to send money home, and as a result I met quite a few other Iraqi immigrants. Some of them paid me little attention; others I grew to be friendly with. An architect whose name was Abu Firas seemed to take a particular shine to me. Whenever I saw him at the company offices, we chatted; and now and then I saw him outside his favorite café in Hashemite Square.

Occasionally, when Bakir was not looking, I used the company phone to make calls home and speak to my mother or to Saad. Sometimes they even phoned me. These conversations were short and nonspecific, for we couldn’t be sure that nobody was listening in. Personal household telephones could be—and frequently were—tapped; and if you wanted to make a call from a public phone, you had to submit all your details, including your civil registration card, and then wait for two hours before making the call. Anonymous calls were practically impossible. So everyone was careful not to disclose anything that might give away where I was—they just asked after my well-being and thanked me for the money I had sent or told me that they were okay this month and that I should hold on to my earnings. They knew how important it was that I saved up.

As time went on, these phone calls home became more sinister and traumatic. At first all I had was a vague sense of misgiving, the uncertain impression that something was wrong. Gradually, however, I managed to piece together from our coded conversations that a soldier from my unit had, about three months after my escape, arrived at my grandmother’s house to deliver notice that I had gone AWOL. A month or two later, things escalated when my mother, my brother, and Saad were apprehended by
Al-Istikhbarat
and taken to Division 5 in the area of Al-Khadimiya.

What happened to them there, I did not know at the time. I had to piece it together from snippets I gleaned from my mother and from what I knew went on in that place. He was told that I had six months to return to my unit. If I did, they said, I would be dealt with leniently. My ears would not be cut off, and I would not face the imprisonment or even worse that I would be expecting; I would just be made to complete my military service in the usual fashion. My family knew, of course, that they were lying, and they remained firm. So they threatened them with economic sanctions. If he did not help them, Saad was told, they would arrange for him and his family to be cast out of the house in the Al-Zaafaraniya compound, which he had been given as a gift because he was an amputee from the Iran-Iraq war. Still Saad insisted he did not know where I was. So they took his gun from him, held it to his head, and cocked it. “How would you feel,” he was asked, “if we shot you with your own gun? Now tell us where he is.”