The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (34 page)

On the same street as Nanuchka, the club Lima Lima hosts a popular Sunday night showcase for Russian bands called "Stakanchik," or "little drinking glass." Amid luxuriant
George of the Jungle
decor, young, hip, and sometimes pregnant people in ironic CCCP and Jesus T-shirts shimmy and sway by the stage. A young singer wearing an ethnic hat begins a song with the words "Now it has come, my long-awaited old age," a sentiment somehow both Jewish and Russian.

I end my tour of Russian Tel Aviv at a much stranger place, the cavernous Mevdevev nightclub, located a stone's throw from the American embassy but occupying, until its recent closing, a space-time continuum all its own. As the evening begins, a birthday boy in his forties, dressed in a plaid shirt and sensible slacks, is paraded onstage by the MC and forced to sing seventies and eighties Russian disco hits.

A young woman in a skimpy plaid schoolgirl outfit dances around a SpongeBob birthday balloon as the nostalgic Russian music, along with a detour into the early Pet Shop Boys, bellows and hurts. My friend Zur-Glozman meets an armed, cigar-chain-smoking Ukrainian, a graduate student of the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University who now lives in the occupied territories, as do many ex-Soviet immigrants. He invites Zur-Glozman and some of our friends for a ride in his car, which is the size of a school bus. We negotiate the gleaming white curves of Bauhaus Tel Aviv, looking for a nightcap. Over at Little Prague, the inevitable Israeli political argument breaks out between the right-wing Russian-speaking settler and some of my liberal Israeli friends. "You probably think our houses are built of Palestinian babies," the settler huffs.

"Well, you're the one with the gun," an Israeli woman tells him.

I worry for the sanctity of the evening, torn between geographical kinship with the formerly Soviet settler and political kinship with the progressive Tel Avivians, but as mugs of Kozel beer are passed around and the nighttime temperature falls to bearable levels, the passions cool. "As you can see," an Israeli friend tells me, "we aren't killing each other."

FROM
Harper's Magazine

A
BARE BULB WAS GLOWING
from the ceiling of an olive-brown tent outside the city limits of Khanaqin, in the place called Mulik Shah Camp; and cigarette smoke and kerosene smoke were bitter on the tongue. Three little children sat in a row beside three men, the smallest child, a girl, watching me, her hands on her knees. They were Feyli Kurds from Baghdad. It was not safe for them anymore.

And coming back late at night on the chalky road from the beleaguered camps of various transnational Kurdish insurgencies in the Qandil Mountains, hoping to avoid the checkpoints set up specifically to catch journalists, we saw the sadly glowing boxes of many refugee tents: Kurdish families who had fled Turkish shelling. Not far away, on the other side of Rania, were many more tents, longer established, testament to the earlier intentions of Turkish and Iranian fighter planes.

All of these places hinted that Kurdistan, like a sunken land diked all around against high and hostile seas, might not last forever, which was why my fixer said that he would kiss the boots of any American soldier. He imagined that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, she might have built a military base to turn Kurdistan into a "second Israel"—the Kurds' best hope, he thought. The interpreter, who agreed with him that the Kurds had no friends other than the Americans, was more realistic about my nation's fidelity to her friends. For him the only comfort was that wherever else America went—Iran, for instance, or Somalia—terrorism would follow.

The interpreter told me the tale of the three Kurds who, driving home from Baghdad, bearing atop their car the corpse of one of their fathers, whom the doctor had failed to save, reached the checkpoint of a certain militia—Sunni or Shia, the interpreter did not know—and were informed that one of them must yield his head to their prince, their Emir (this was the word used, as if the story were a fable). Money and persuasion finally impelled the highwaymen to behead the father's body; the Emir would never know the difference. But when they came safely back into Kurdistan, the mother was angry with the son who had permitted this.

I wondered whether Kurdistan itself could be preserved by means of some similarly painless sacrifice, or whether Kirkuk must be given up, and who knows what else. What would be enough?

 

Sulaimaniya was safe, and the fixer said: "Here in my city I don't take care for you. Why? Because even in market at two, three o'clock morning is no problem. But in Kirkuk I must watch for you." Indeed, Kirkuk was not especially safe, although it was safer than Mosul, where I could perhaps have manipulated the fixer into taking me had I not minded the possibility that I might then be informing his wife and children that he had been murdered for the sake of a few photographs.

In Sulaimaniya, in a refugee camp for Arabs called Camp Qalawa, one was surrounded by blocky tents, laundry, and garbage, and across the highway dusty houses smeared into semi-invisibility in the bad air. We were standing next to a water tank from which the refugees shared a metal dipper; the tank leaked and the mud stank. The air smelled of manure from the cattle that came grazing there, human urine, and sweat: of the many people all around, the closest man, in sandals and striped shirt, squatting. The women were in a row at the rear, some in striped headscarves, a few of the younger ones naked-haired and even blonde with reddish highlights.

They seemed to live by begging in the market, and perhaps (said the interpreter) by prostitution. A gray-bearded man said: "For what we do? Begging. Nobody like to do this, but what is the suggestion? I want to work. In Sulaimaniya the cold was very hard and we lived a horrible day. The Kurdish governor, he don't want anything to do with refugee here."

"Why did you leave Baghdad?" I asked a man in a white headscarf, who answered: "Because of the violence between Sunnis and Shias. The Shia militia killed fourteen members of my family. All of the families here have same problem."

He did not much like Americans, as you might imagine. I asked about George W. Bush's actions, and he replied: "When he come to Iraq, some things true and some things lie. If he say America come to make a good thing for Iraqi, now it is six years and there is nothing happen, no good thing!"

"Should the Americans stay or go?"

The gray-bearded man answered: "If he come just to make free, now Iraq is free. Better that he going. Why the soldier although he have a family in America he stay here until now?"

I told him of a friend's son whose military tour in Iraq kept getting extended and extended. He said in an ugly tone: "This is not an answer."

They all wanted money. I asked one man to take a few steps away with me so that I would not be mobbed. One of the younger men came regardless. When I reached into my wallet they all lunged, and an old woman spread the wings of her robe, shouting: "Money, money!" I gave the man twenty thousand dinars (not quite twenty dollars) and he spread his hands in angry disgust, pointing to all the members of his family. The fixer finally gave him twenty thousand more.

Being a Kurd, the fixer disliked them; he thought they should be resettled outside the city.

I asked a man what he thought about Kirkuk, and he said: "It is not my problem. I don't stay in parliament. I am simple person and I don't care if Kirkuk stay in Kurdistan or not."

"What is America doing good for Iraq?" he shouted, and the crowd around him buzzed threateningly.

"Maybe Kurdistan," I said. "As for the south of Iraq, I don't know what to tell you."

 

Sometimes the dust was so thick in the air as we came down into the valley of Kirkuk from the second-to-last checkpoint that the world ahead became as dead white and blanked out as sea fog in Monterey; dust pricked my eyelashes and I breathed in the chalky smell. Then one day it rained, making the desert a trifle greener and the air clean enough to reveal a few red and blue tints in the pale dirt hills; and when we began to descend toward the last checkpoint, we could actually distinguish ahead, against the tan dirt darkly flecked with rubbish, Kirkuk's blue-gray sprawl. In spite of such variations, the drive always felt the same.

To separate the safe from the unsafe, the Kurdistan Regional Government had in its wisdom established nearly half a dozen checkpoints between Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk. Each checkpoint possessed its own character. Some installations were elaborate, such as Tasluja Checkpoint on the hill above Sulaimaniya; some were humbler, such as the traffic island in Sulaimaniya, where a soldier in a dust-colored camouflage uniform stood beside a concrete column. Across the street, a girl all in black walked beside a girl whose hair swung free.

At every checkpoint our experience was the same: since the fixer's car bore license plates from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and because the fixer knew so many soldiers, we rarely needed even to raise our documents to the window and already the sentry was waving us through, which is to say waving
at
us, sweetly.

Taxis crammed with bearded Arabs or private cars with plates from outside Kurdistan got swept with a pole mirror. Occasionally we would see a car pulled off to the side in order to be more thoroughly searched, the driver and passengers standing in the road. If an Arab wished to come into Sulaimaniya, he had to wait at Tasluja until a Kurd arrived to vouch for him in person, and very likely it was such measures that had kept Sulaimaniya safe: only a couple of bomb blasts in the past two years.

Aside from the checkpoints, there were other points of interest along the way, such as Chamchamal, near the thirty-sixth parallel, the southern border of Kurdistan, which at the end of the first Gulf War America had amputated from Saddam's zone of control. Some of the most ancient relics of humanity in all Iraq were found near this spot. The interpreter preferred to describe Chamchamal as "the front line between Kurdish and Iraqi forces before 2003." Kirkuk lay beyond, in the region Kurds referred to simply as "Iraq."

It was ninety-four kilometers from Sulaimaniya to Kirkuk. Wherever there were roadside settlements there would be vendors with their rows of jerry cans yellow and red, the red being Iranian gasoline, which was stronger than the yellow Iraqi gas. The fixer liked to fill his hundred-liter tank with a "cocktail" of the two. The dust settled on the jugs, and on the fixer's windshield. The best sources of brightness amid the dust were women, who occasionally wore colorful clothes; the nearer to Sulaimaniya we happened to be, the more brightly clad were the women. The owner of a women's clothing boutique in Kirkuk explained to me: "Usually people here wear the veil for their own security. Since the old time it has been like that. It has not much changed until 2003. After that, more people are wearing the veil. Here and in Erbil, the majority of people put on the veil. Sulaimaniya is more like Europe." He had many slinky dresses of Turkish make, but those were for parties; in Kirkuk, women were well advised to cloak themselves before going out in public.

So we came down the hill into the hot dry valley of Kirkuk, where entrepreneurs sometimes sell people to kidnappers.

 

Kurdistan is an idea, or a series of ideas, encompassing parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. My Turkish taxi driver in Vienna sternly said, upon learning where I was headed, that Kurdistan does not exist. The Kurds I met in northern Iraq thought otherwise. Of the four countries just listed, all but the first lack, and intend to continue lacking, autonomous Kurdish regions. Many Arab nationalists in Iraq would likewise do away with the Kurdish Regional Government if they could. My interpreter's father, who had been a member of the National Assembly in 1997, said: "Maybe there is a chance that Arabs will suppress us again, since they consider us second class. If it happens, I don't think that Kurds will be able to fight back. Let us hope there will not be another Saddam."

By the half accident from the first Gulf War that brought the KRG into existence, Kurds are some of my country's few remaining friends. I felt almost young again to be in a place where "America can do everything." When I got home, I told my neighbors about it, and they said: "Kurds, Shias, Sunnis, I can't keep them all straight."

 

Kirkuk's various fortresses of officialdom express their character with prudent literalness. In perhaps the most glorious of them all, Brigadier Sarhad Qadir, chief of police of Kirkuk districts and sub-districts, had agreed to receive us. The fixer threaded his incredible six-cylinder vehicle through a pinball machine of gates and concrete slabs. A blue-clad policeman met us and slowly inspected the underside of the car with a pole mirror, then waved us through. We traveled along corridors with armed escorts. Sarhad's office was typical of such places: a long, spacious, air-conditioned room with half a dozen matched chairs and sofas along the side walls, a television shining and softly babbling at the back wall, and then in front a grand desk with a uniformed man beside it. A young man brought tea in narrow-waisted glasses.

Sometimes when an official wished to create an informal impression he would come and sit in one of the armchairs beside me; then he would gaze across the room at the interpreter while I politely craned my neck. Sarhad, however, sat at his desk. Three silver stars shone on each shoulder of his black vest. His hair was cropped; his mustache was dark. Behind his chair hung photographs of him in the company of various dignitaries. I spied a framed memento of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Miniature Iraqi, American, Kurdish, and Kirkuk Governorate flags flew beside the telephone. Nor should I omit the framed certificate from an American official, the framed appreciations of an American combat team, or the framed article from an American military newspaper: "Iraqi Police Uncover Major Weapons Cache." The uncovering had been one of Sarhad's triumphs.

About the situation in Kirkuk he said: "In comparison with last year there is a big difference, a big improvement, not 100 percent but more than 60 percent. Last year, there were daily explosions of nine vehicles. But now in one week one cannot even find one explosion."