I nod and glance quickly at my watch. It’s almost seven o’clock.
Sam reaches for the satellite phone, pushes a few buttons on it, and looks surprised. “Oh, wow. My editors have been chasing me for the past hour. I really have to run upstairs and call the desk. How about you meet me up there in fifteen minutes so we can finish the conversation?”
And with that she is on her feet, telling the men at the counter to charge it all — and anything else I might order — to room 323, leaving me at the table with nothing to do but to sip lukewarm coffee and eat bitter olives and watch two foreigners diving into the pool on the other side of the glass.
~ * ~
Rafik is still working the front desk when I walk into building two. His face seems heavier than it did this morning, as if he’d gained a bit of weight over the course of the day. He brightens when he sees me. “Miss Samara said you can go right up,” he says, gesturing to the lift. “Third floor.”
I wonder if what is going through my mind is going through his. Loose woman. Prostitute. Only a prostitute would allow a strange man to come up to her hotel room. Especially in the evening. If my sister ever did a thing like that...
“You only need to press it once,” Rafik says.
“Right, sorry.” I stand there waiting, resisting the urge to make an excuse as to why it’s okay to go up to her room. When I can’t stand it anymore, and the lift still hasn’t arrived, I ask if I can take the stairs instead.
“It’s a free country now, my friend,” Rafik answers. “You can do whatever you want.”
~ * ~
I’m almost out of breath when I reach the third floor and wishing I got more exercise. As I walk along the corridor, I see a handsome man with Mediterranean features and hair down to his chin, pulling the door of room 323 shut. We have to turn sideways in the hallway to let each other get by, and he gives me a small “hey” as he does, not quite looking me in the eye, and I watch him disappear down the stairwell. He could almost be a European-Arab, perhaps Lebanese but certainly not Iraqi, because I don’t know any Iraqis who wear their hair long like that. I notice it, in particular, because it’s wet.
I stare for a moment at Sam’s door. My fingers hesitate, and then knock. When there’s no reply, I rap harder. The door creaks open, and when Sam sees it’s me, she swings it wide and holds it open.
“Hi Nabil. Look, I want to apologize. I’m under a lot of stress. I didn’t mean to give you such a hard time on your first day.”
She moves a few inches back, behind the line that separates the room from the hallway, her from me. She smiles at me and says, “Well?
Ahlan w-sahlan.
Welcome to my humble abode.”
Inside, to my surprise, is a small kitchen area and a modern lounge which looks very Western with two small sofas, a coffee table between them, a large cabinet with glasses, and a white formica desk with a small computer sitting on it, open. There are at least a dozen wires running around the computer and on to the floor, leading towards the sliding glass door that might lead to some kind of balcony. Whatever is out there is blocked by a line of eggshell-coloured curtains. If Sam sleeps, it is not here — or not in this room.
“You’re still on board, I hope?”
“Me? Of course. You don’t need to apologize.”
“Good,” she says, gesturing towards the sofa against the wall, and seating herself in the other one. “Because I’ve just realized I’m already having an astonishingly shitty day.”
“Sorry?”
“No, I’m the one who should apologize for my bad manners. I know that’s important around here. Can I get you a drink? Orange juice? Pepsi?” Out of the corner of my eye, I notice there’s a bottle of what looks like vodka on the cabinet.
“You’re quick, Nabil,” she says. “But that one’s not mine.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean to suggest that—” I glance at the Timex watch my parents gave me as a graduation gift. It’s 7:15 p.m. “I probably should go soon anyway. My family will start to wonder...and I think there’s a military curfew at eight.”
“Nine,” she says. “But no worries. You should get going soon.”
“Was it that bad a day?”
“Oh that,” she says, rising and going to the kitchen. She takes a jug of orange juice out of the fridge, pours two small glasses and then slams the refrigerator door shut. “I tend to exaggerate. But not in my copy,” she says, raising a finger. “Never in print.”
She brings the glasses to the coffee table and sits down. “My editor, Miles, wants me to drop everything and focus on some clean-up story.”
“You mean from the oil spill? I heard on the radio this morning that someone blew up the pipeline from Kirkuk to Baghdad.”
Sam shakes her head. “Not that kind of clean-up. Though that
would
be a good story. In fact, that’s a story I’d be glad to do right now. What I mean is that they need to clean up the mess from another reporter, and they want
me
to do it. Can you believe that? It’s practically a fact-checking job. Something you’d give an intern. I don’t know what to say. It’ll totally take us off news features for a while. I won’t get a damn thing in the paper, all because of having to clean up after some schmuck.”
Sam shakes her head in disbelief. Funny, that word.
Us.
“The best part of it is, this morning, which was last night for him, East Coast time? Miles was using Harris Axelrod’s stories as an example, suggesting that I should be trying harder to get good scoops like that. Hah! And now it turns out Harris is in hot water, and the paper is trying to decide whether to bail him out.”
“A scoop, that’s a good story?”
“Hell, at this point, I’d settle for a good story that isn’t exactly a scoop. That’s where I need your help. Anything that might give an indication as to where Saddam’s weapons facilities are. Or, in fact, if there are any. Any story that gives clear evidence of life under Saddam. Witnesses to a massacre, people who say they’ve been tortured. We had a big story in the paper yesterday about people who had their tongues cut out for criticizing the regime. Made the front page,” she says, focusing somewhere in the vicinity of my chest. “That’s what my editors want. Any time you get a good story that no one else has, it’s a scoop. Or an exclusive.”
“Why do you call it a scoop?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it usually means we’re digging up the dirt on somebody. When you dig up something,” she says, her hands holding an imaginary shovel, “it’s a scoop. But we don’t always use the dirt when we have it. Sometimes it’s more trouble than it’s worth. You have to save things for a rainy day. For example, do you know why the Hunting Club isn’t being looted, even though every other symbol of Saddam’s regime is? Did you notice that it was hardly touched?”
I hadn’t given the contrast much consideration. “Perhaps the people don’t really know it’s there,” I say. “It’s hidden away, not like the other buildings right on the main roads. Ordinary people wouldn’t be aware of it.”
“No, no.” Sam is shaking her head. “That’s not why. It’s because Chalabi wanted it for a base, or at least one of his bases, and his folks went straight there with the protection of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had a nice gaggle of Marines sent over to guard the place so the riffraff wouldn’t come in and Chalabi could slide right into his new headquarters. Or at least one of them, because I’ve already seen another huge villa that he’s taken over. How’s that for planning?”
One of several phones on the desk rings. She rises, still watching me, and picks it up. “Hello?” A smile spreads across her face. “Hey, surfer boy. Did you have a nice swim?” I soon realize, during the part of the conversation that I can’t hear, that this is an internal hotel telephone. “Wait for me. I’m coming down for dinner right now.”
When she hangs up, she remains standing. “How about we wrap this up. I’ll explain the rest of it tomorrow, okay? Come, say, 8:30?”
As I make my way out, my own head is swimming with questions, about the Marines, Chalabi, the Hunting Club...
“You be careful going home at this hour, all right?”
This “surfer boy”, presumably the blond fellow I saw earlier, is he Sam’s boyfriend? And what about the one I saw leaving as I arrived?
“Of course I will,” I say.
“Don’t get in the path of any of those looters.”
“Sam, if the Marines could guard that Hunting Club for Chalabi, like you say, or any of the other buildings, why couldn’t they manage to guard the other buildings from looting? The Art Museum. Or the hospitals.”
Sam jiggles the doorknob for a moment, then shrugs. “No idea. Understaffed, I guess. They’re picking and choosing their battles. Just like we have to pick ours. At the moment, mine is getting you out the door so I can get a decent dinner in my stomach.” She gives me a wide smile and so I smile along with her, though I’m not sure if this comment is funny or insulting.
“Bukra, Inshallah,”
she says. Tomorrow, God willing.
I suppose these are the kinds of sayings a foreigner would pick up in a few days, but still, the sound of her words in Arabic moves something in me, and I’m not sure if it’s attraction or disdain. I want to compliment her on her pronunciation, but she is already releasing the door, allowing it to close behind me.
~ * ~
11
Allowing
I devour the
baamya
and rice my mother has saved for me, one of my favourites, meat with okra. But since they’ve already eaten, they seat themselves around the table and use the opportunity to pepper me with questions.
Baba: So what did you do for so many hours?
Mum: Didn’t she give you a lunch break? You haven’t eaten all day!
Baba: Did you interview anyone important?
Amal: What’s she like? Was she nice?
Baba: How much does the job pay?
I feign being hungrier than I am so I don’t have to answer, buying time. And when I get to the fruit for dessert, I allow my eyes to flutter as if I’m about to fall asleep on them.
Bukra,
I promise. Tomorrow I will tell them more. Tonight, I’m too exhausted to speak.
But later, in my room, I’m wide awake. I want to tell someone, anyone, everything. But there’s no point — it will only confuse them and worry them. Or maybe I want to tell Sam. Maybe. So I take my old typewriter out of the cupboard. I’ve hardly touched it in the past year, and am relieved to find that the ribbon is still good. The surprising thing is that I don’t have an urge to write about what happened today. Instead, I feel the need to write about what happened leading up to today, about things that happened a long time ago. Things I would like to tell Sam, assuming she would want to listen.
~ * ~
I didn
’
t lie to Hatem, not about myself, anyway. My mother is a Shi
’
ite and my father is a Sunni. When I tell people this, which isn
’
t often, they sound surprised. But it
’
s not so uncommon. Sam was impressed when I told her. Westerners assume that all Sunnis hate all Shi
’
ites and vice versa. But it doesn
’
t work that way It
’
s all much more complex than that.
In our neighbourhood, there are other mixed families like us, though no one really talks about it. Still, it
’
s considered a Sunni neighbourhood, and that meant it always felt relatively safe and calm
—
that is, up until now. In university, I met friends who were real Shi
’
ites and I came to realize that they had suffered more harassment, more late-night visits by the
mukhabarat,
than the rest of us.
My mother
’
s family was willing to accept the marriage because she was marrying up, as they call it in the West. Although she was in university when she met my father, her parents had not had a higher education and they were, therefore, very impressed with him. His father was a doctor, and he was going to be a doctor, too. It promised moderate wealth, but also prestige and security, which were more important.
With my father
’
s family, it was a little different. They wouldn
’
t have been keen on their son marrying a Shi
’
ite girl, Grandma Zahra once told me in her later years. But there were several mitigating factors. First, my father
’
s father, had once treated one of my mother
’
s cousins when he was very ill. Thereafter, my mother
’
s cousin sent presents every year at the end of Ramadan.
And so, my father
’
s family knew that my mother came from a good family. Even if they were working class
—
my mother
’
s father was a welder
—
they had dignity, pride, good manners. Second, they were impressed that a working-class family would send their daughter to university and that my mother, unlike her mother, did not wear a veil, which they viewed as a sign of backwardness.
Finally, my mother was beautiful. As beautiful as any model in Paris or London, Grandma Zahra said. I knew she
’
d never left Iraq, and I wondered how she could know what women in Europe looked like. Later I realized it was just an expression, a way of saying that our beauty was as good as their beauty.