On our way to Tikrit, we pass the detritus of the old regime: buildings that have wilted like flowers past their season, burned-out Iraqi military equipment left like crushed aluminium cans on the roadside. Even the fertile green areas seem to be yielding a crop of rubbish and ripped plastic bags. There’s something about the landscape that I don’t recognize.
Faisal Hamdani. Should I have known this name? I don’t, but Sam does. She says if you read any of the books written about Iraq in recent years, you can find mention of him. As we drive north, she begins to fill me in on what she’s read and heard. Faisal Hamdani is considered deeply loyal, not particularly political, and financially astute. Most importantly, he was one of the only three people entrusted with keeping tabs on Saddam’s cash.
Cousin Faisal. A blood relative, a member of the clan, probably a player in Saddam’s inner circle. Most likely, a man of substantial wealth and the means to maintain a small militia to protect himself. If any of these things are accurate, we should probably turn the car around and head back to Baghdad. The more I think about it, I cannot believe Sam’s editors have compelled her to go into Tikrit searching for such people. Even more unbelievable is that I haven’t really tried to stop her. We are barrelling up the highway at 130 kilometres an hour, the villages beside the road a haze of muddy brown and palm green. Rizgar makes an emergency stop and the abruptness of it throws us forwards, a feeling that our bodies and the car are at cross-purposes.
“Shit!” Sam is pushing, involuntarily, on the back of my seat; she had agreed to let me sit in the front in the interest of safety in the countryside. Neither of us had noticed the line of cars up ahead, which we might easily have crashed into at that speed. At the end of the queue are two tanks, various military vehicles, and soldiers in clothes the same colour as the desert.
Rizgar turns around. “Sorry, Miss Samara.”
“Okay, okay,” Sam says. “But I don’t want to get stuck waiting at some checkpoint. Just drive up to the front of the line.”
“Do you think we should?” I ask. “There are a lot of people waiting. If we skip the line it will be very obvious and then people will know that we are foreigners.”
Sam stares out of the window to her right and I follow her gaze. A framed and encased photograph of Saddam, perhaps twenty feet tall, emerges from the grassy garden just to the side of the road. In it, he wears his full military regalia and a smile that is almost that of a roguish youth. In the picture, he looks trim and almost dashing — it must have been taken twenty-five years ago.
“They haven’t touched it,” Sam says with wonderment. “Not even a dot of graffiti.”
Rizgar chuckles quietly; from the corner of my eye, I can see his belly shake. “
Tadhkar!
” he says. Souvenirs. “Tell her! It’s a good souvenir. Maybe we can get one for her to bring home.”
I translate this for Sam and she grins and doesn’t answer, but has already slipped her camera out of her bag and is holding it to the window. She winds down her window and I hear her camera devour a few images. And then there is someone in my face, in front of the windscreen, and another guy knocking on my window near the front passenger seat.
His knuckles rap the glass louder, and I look at Rizgar and then roll the window down.
“Salaam Aleikum
,” I say to the young man, whose eyes glitter with agitation.
“No photographs. You tell her not to photograph here or we will make sure you don’t leave Tikrit. No more American pictures for laughing at!”
“Sam, put the camera away,” I say, trying not to stare at the pistol on the other guy’s waist.
Sam takes the lens away from her face and squints. “Is that what this guy’s on about?”
“Just put the camera away and don’t make eye contact with him.”
She complies and looks in the other direction. The line moves up by a centimetre and the man who threatened us, accompanied by two friends, disappears down a sidestreet.
“Well,” says Sam. “So much for trying not to make it obvious that we’re here.”
My head screeches with a thousand retorts for everything Sam has said and done in the past week. I don’t know how I will contain them any longer. She doesn’t consult me enough.
“Maybe you shouldn’t take pictures when we come to a place like this.”
Sam sighs. “That’s fine. Just tell me ahead of time. I can’t read your mind.”
I tell Rizgar we should make for the front of the line after all.
“What?” Sam grabs on to the handle on the ceiling. “I thought you said you didn’t want to go making a scene by getting in as foreigners!”
“Yes, but it’s too late now. Those men already saw you taking pictures. Do you think there are many Iraqi women holding thousand-dollar digital cameras out of the window when they are entering Tikrit?”
Sam puts up her hand like a stop sign. “Fine, I get the point. Just
tell
me when you want me not to do something I would normally do, like taking pictures. That’s part of what I do, remember?”
Rizgar lurches to the front of the line so that we’re only two cars from the inspection point. Some of the drivers behind us are honking their horns, though no one gets out of his car. A soldier, fattened by his gear, his hands positioned to shoot the M16 hanging around his chest, rushes to Rizgar’s side and kicks his bumper. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He shouts, glaring at Rizgar. The soldier’s face is red and his pupils are as tiny as
nuktateen,
two little dots that hover above certain letters in our alphabet.
Rizgar’s face flushes. He moves to open the car door.
“Don’t, Rizgar!” Sam is lowering her window on the other side. “Let me.” She leans her arm and head out of the window. “Sir? Officer? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make problems for him. He’s my driver and I asked him to skip to the front of the line. We’re journalists. I’m with the
Tribune
?” She smiles widely at him, and although I know her well enough by now to see something around the edges of her lips that is entirely artificial, she is, none the less, suddenly all the more comely for it. “Sam Katchens from the
Tribune
.” She holds a business card out of the window, and with the other hand a plastic badge that says “PRESS” on it.
“Yeah? I see,” he says, taking the card in the hand that is not on the trigger. His lips move as he reads the name. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but there’s no more preferential access for media.”
“What? Really?” Sam is speaking a little more sweetly than she normally would, and more slowly. “I was here twice since Tikrit was captured, and they always let us go through.”
“Well, orders have changed. You’ll have to wait in line.”
“Really? But...oh sorry, what’s your name, sir?”
“Specialist Gavin Johnston.”
“Specialist Johnston, please, do you think you could just let us through this time?” She smiles and lowers her head a little, so that she’s looking up at him with a wide-eyed, flirtatious face. “It’s just that it’s not very safe around here and I’m kind of scared. Two guys just threatened us while we were in line.”
“Well, if that’s your feeling, maybe you shouldn’t come to Tikrit.”
“But we have to. We just need to get in and get out. We’re only looking to find one guy for a report that I absolutely have to do. Please?”
He lingers, looking at her with his mouth half-open. “All right, then. But you better tell your driver he should never do that again. We have orders to shoot anyone who refuses to stop at a checkpoint.” He waves to a soldier next to the crossing bar and yells something to him, but the car in front of us has yet to move. Specialist Johnston — and what kind of title is that? — repositions his rifle to his side. He leans back in towards Sam, resting an arm over the window where she sits.
“How’s things in Baghdad?” he asks. His pupils seem fuller now and less agitated, and the irises around them more blue.
“A mess,” she answers. “But otherwise, quite a kick.”
“Must be more interesting than here. We’re bored out of our skulls. When we’re not gettin’ shot at.” He looks around to see if the other soldiers are listening. “I hear that you guys got like, parties and stuff down at the big hotels. Is’sat true?”
“Sometimes,” Sam emits a silent laugh, and her eyes flutter suggestively. “You’ll have to try to get sent out on a visit and see.” The car in front of us begins rolling.
“Which place d’ya stay at?”
Sam winks at him and begins raising her window. “Top secret. But thanks, Specialist Johnston.”
I feel angry at Sam, but the truth is, I know I have no right to be. For what could I blame her? Talking our way through the checkpoint? Pacifying a volatile soldier?
We turn towards the centre of town, and come to a sort of square where there remains the only untouched statue of Saddam Hussein I have seen. In years, I want to say, in years, but in fact, it has only been days. In the statue, made of what appears to be a darkened bronze, Saddam cuts a trim military figure on horseback, forever poised to be our hero.
Sam says Rizgar should do a quick detour so I can see the Tikrit Museum. He drives straight to the museum car park, though I tell Sam it’s not really so important for me to see it. She says it doesn’t matter, we’re already here, and we are. The museum is more like a small palace actually, one that has been stomped on by a mythic monster, a destroyer who is larger than life. The ends of the building are intact, while the centre is nearly flattened. The brokenness in the middle makes a fascinating valley that I follow with my eyes many times over. Why does one part get spared and another destroyed?
“Amazing, huh? When we came here, all the local folks were saying it’s a sign of America’s attempts to wipe out Iraqi culture. But the Americans say it was just a big propaganda house for Saddam. Apparently it wasn’t really a Tikrit Museum but a museum dedicated to Saddam. They’re trying to wipe out all the personality cult.”
Sam again, calling the Americans
them,
when it’s about things
they’ve
destroyed. She only makes the Americans
we
when it is something she finds easy to defend, such as American journalistic ethics.
We turn back to the main road, each lamppost carrying its own photograph of Saddam in the different stages of his life, some of them in black-and-white, each in a different costume. A more recent one, the one in his hunting hat, pointing a shotgun into the air with one hand, makes me want to laugh. How ridiculous it now seems, the very notion of Iraq with a strong military. Our Kalashnikovs against their F16 fighter jets. Our trucks against their tanks. Precision bombs versus pathetic bullets, which are liable to tumble through the atmosphere and land up in the belly of a girl like Noor.
I have the urge to tell this to Rizgar, but thinking twice, I don’t. Sometimes I can forget for a while that he is a Kurd from the north. He has his
peshmerga,
his Talabani and Barzani tribes to protect him. His people have their defences intact. He is not among the defeated.
Rizgar asks me where to go next. Sam says that she was told to make for the northern part of the town, towards the river, where the grander houses are.
I turn around and face her. “You just want to ask random people when we get there?”
“I don’t know. Not so ideal, huh? We could ask to see a sheikh or something.”
“I thought you had some kind of lead from your friend.”
“What friend?”
“Your CIA friend.”
“Jeez! Don’t say that out loud! I don’t know for certain if he’s CIA. What do I know? I’m just a little reporter here who’s got an intelligence source, but I wouldn’t put a name on it yet. Don’t tell
anyone
we might even know a soul in the CIA. Do you know how royally fucked we’d be? Let’s just not say those initials again, okay?”
“What, CIA?”
“Nabil, I’m serious. Do you think this is a game?”
I feel my front teeth cutting into my tongue. No, Sam, it’s not a game, but you’re acting like it is. It’s only the three of us in the car, so what does it matter? If I don’t lose my hair by the time this war is over, I will have made myself buck-toothed instead.
“You are the one playing with fire.”
“Me? I’m the one?” Sam leans into the space between Rizgar and me. I realize now that I prefer having her in front. With her in the back seat, I feel she is hanging on to me, pushing the hair on my neck in the wrong direction.
“Being here is dangerous. And if you want to be discreet about it, you don’t stick your camera out of the window just to take some fun pictures.”
“Fine! I was wrong.” The sound of a page being ripped out of her notebook triggers a nerve inside my eardrums. “But you need to be careful about what you say to people. For everyone’s sake. Would you have gone and thrown the word
mukhabarat
around when Saddam was still running the show?” Sam folds the paper she ripped out into a square, and shoves it into her pocket. I hear her exhale with force, as though she is trying to push aside bad air.
Rizgar’s eyes are checking me out, as though he’s wondering what I did wrong. After a moment, Sam starts again.
“Nabil, this is getting out of hand. I don’t mean to overreact. Should we do this, or not?”
Should? I don’t know what that means anymore. But I do know the answer she wants to hear. “We’ll be fine. We’re already here. I’m just afraid they will think you are some kind of American spy and if we ask about anyone related to Saddam, they will think we’re looking for him, and then I don’t know what will happen.” Rizgar pushes in the cigarette lighter, and after a few seconds with no sound but the wheeze of the air conditioning, it pops out. He brings the burning hot circle up to a cigarette dangling from his lips, and for the first time, I envy his habit — an activity to fill the void and stifle the stress.