Sam’s mouth twitches, her nostrils widen. “We might not need to go more than once. I think I should just go with you. I’ll wear an abaya.”
“It isn’t just about wearing an abaya. You look too American. And even if you were Iraqi, an Iraqi woman wouldn’t be involved in going to these places.”
Sam grabs a wad of napkins, more than she needs, and wipes her hands on them. Then she takes a tiny plastic bottle from her bag and spills a gooey clear liquid on her hands, rubbing them together.
“What’s that?”
“Oh this?” She turns the bottle around to look at the label. “It’s Purell.” She reads on. “Instant hand sanitizer. Disinfectant.” She turns the logo towards me and smiles. “Makes life a little cleaner.”
“Do Americans use this all the time? After every meal?”
“Of course not!” she laughs. “I mean, some people — when you’re in a place where it’s...where you’re travelling.” She rubs her hands together, giving off an odour that is a mix of ammonia and menthol. “Want some?”
I shake my head, and mouth to the waiter that we would like tea. Thinking again about how my refusal could be insulting, I hold out my hands.
Sam spills a drop into each palm. It feels like cold glue, but after rubbing it into my hands for a moment, it disappears.
“Actually, you’re supposed to use it before you eat so that you’re eating with clean hands,” she says. “But whatever. Sometimes I do things backwards.” She dips her head closer to me. “How does your cousin know about these places? Is he involved in this sort of thing?”
“No!” I probably sound too forceful, but the question is a little off-putting. “No, absolutely not. But he was some kind of management official at the UN liaison office in Baghdad, and of course anyone in those jobs had to be approved first by Saddam. He’s a smart guy, my cousin Saleh, and basically innocent — he was doing what he had to do to survive. I don’t think he ever really liked Saddam. He’s definitely not a Ba’athist, though his father probably was.”
Sam nods. “Okay.”
“Okay, so, during the oil-for-food programme, and you know, during the years of the embargo against Iraq—”
“The sanctions?”
“Yes, the sanctions. He was one of the people who had to give the UN the reports about the number of children dying from lack of medicine and malnutrition. They had to make the number look very high — to make America look bad. So these experts in documents, I mean, these men who have an expertise in creating documents that look very real, well, Saleh and another guy in his office sometimes had to go to Saddam City, you know, now it’s Sadr City, to pick them up. He said that’s where the best forgers were. Saleh knows a few names.”
“Where?” she asks. “I mean, do you know where exactly? Sadr City is huge.”
“One place is Souq Mureidi,” I say, my voice so low it is almost a whisper. Across the screen in my mind, I see myself whispering that way right in her ear, her eyes closing, her mouth opening.
Sam stares at me. Her face is still but her sealed lips grow full, pleased with themselves. The tea has arrived, hers first. As the waiter puts mine down a hot splash lands on the back of my hand, making me flinch enough to knock over my water glass. Sam manages to catch it before much can spill.
“So sorry. So sorry.” The waiter, a spotty-faced fellow with bushy hair who cannot be more than sixteen or seventeen, keeps apologizing while I dip my napkin in the rescued glass and dab it on my hand. I tell him it’s fine, but he still looks concerned and, looking a bit helplessly at me, runs off.
Sam makes the kind of sympathetic face you might for a small child. “Let me see.”
I peel the wet napkin away to reveal the red spot across my hand. “It’s fine. It hurt for a second, that’s all.”
Sam turns her head to watch the young waiter rushing back towards us, a plate in hand. “Well, sometimes it pays to exaggerate a little, huh?”
He puts the plate down in front of us.
“Sambusi,
special for you, on the house,” he says in English, which I find a bit worrying, because it just proves how obvious it is to everyone around us that Sam is American. “So sorry,” he says again.
“That’s not necessary,” I say.
“Please. Please. On us,” he says, and makes for the other side of the restaurant where the other waiters, who are not as young, are smirking at him.
“Have you tried this?”
“No-o,” says Sam, interested. “Looks decadent. Bet it’s really sweet, yeah?”
“Sweet, but with warm cheese inside. Try it.”
She shudders, which tells me this doesn’t sound appealing, but places her fork into the triangular pastry none the less and tries to break it in half. I want to tell her she would be better putting the whole thing in her mouth, but I suppose that’s not the way a woman, Arab or otherwise, likes to approach the eating of a dessert.
“Mmm,” she says, or moans, really. “It’s so rich.” She closes her eyes as she chews. Something in her shut lids suggests a deep satisfaction, a side of herself she has never shown me.
She opens her eyes again, breathes out through her nostrils.
“Sam, are you happy?”
She smiles wryly and takes the half she left behind, more interested in the
sambusi
than my question. She puts the fork down and stops chewing, her eyes rolling across mine like one of those scanning lights in the middle of the night looking for invading ships.
“Oof,” she lets out a breath, as if she’d been holding it all this time. “That’s crazy sweet. But amazing,” she says, nodding, as if to make sure I know she likes it.
“You should taste the ones my mother makes.”
Sam smiles, pushes around the second piece of pastry on the plate, and glances at her watch. With Sam, there is rarely a full attention, an awareness that it isn’t polite to talk to someone about food while looking at your watch. Everything that I hate in these moments, when her courtesies fail, I can love a minute later, when I remember that it’s only about her dedication to the story. My grandmother, Zahra, once told me you could be a
mujahid
your whole life, she said, just in struggling for the truth.
“Am I happy? What kind of question is that?” She stares at the second pastry, pondering, I presume, whether or not she will eat it.
“Oh, I mean, do you like this job you have, being in Iraq, travelling all over the world all the time? Don’t you want, well... I guess you must think my life is boring. I have only been to England and Dubai, though that’s more than most Iraqis.”
“You’re not boring,” she says. Her eyes leave the plate a second to meet mine, and then go back to the second
sambusi.
“Why don’t you eat it?” she asks.
“I don’t want any sweets now,” I say. I almost forgot. The truth is, since Noor was killed, I decided that I would give up eating anything sweet for a year, which is an appropriate period of mourning for a loved one, even if that’s not how I see Noor. I want to show that I’m not indulging in sweetness after what happened. But to whom? As if God cares whether I eat sweets. But there aren’t many other luxurious things in my life to give up.
“Why not?” Sam says, spreading out the sweet honey sauce that surrounds the pastry. “You sure?”
“Yes. And you can’t let good
sambusi
go to waste.”
She pushes it across the table, towards me. “You eat it, then.”
“What I meant is, maybe you’re the happiest woman in the world. All your dreams come true. But in your country, is it not important for a woman to have children? To get married and be a wife?”
She stares at me, and there’s something of a hurt look across her face, flaring in her nose. “Sure it’s important. But it’s not the only thing. I’m not just a body with a womb.”
“I-I know. I didn’t mean that—” I feel my hands stuttering to defend me.
“No, it’s fine.” She taps her fork into the
sambusi
she had pushed away. She looks at me to make sure I haven’t changed my mind, and when I shake my head, she presses her fork down into the pastry, and watches the cheese ooze out from the sides. She continues to press on what was round and full until it is flat.
“It’s fine that you ask,” she says. “I do want those things. I know I don’t have forever.” She licks her lips, a shine on them from the buttery pastry.
“I just think you would make a really wonderful mother.”
Sam steals a glance at me, and then out of the window. She looks like she might cry. But very quickly, whatever tears that had almost been born are aborted. Her eyes wait with a thin gloss, like the one on her lips. “Thanks, Nabil. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Really? Ever?”
She is quiet for a moment. “Okay, ever since this war began.” We both smile and she gives a small nod of her head in the direction of the waiters, which I can read as the sign for me to get the bill. “But look,” she says in an undertone. “Before we bring babies into the picture, I need to know who cooked up these documents. So can we get going?” She seems almost embarrassed now, a pinkness in her face that perhaps I brought on without intending it. She folds one hand into another, the right gently turning the left sideways to allow her another quick glance at her watch.
~ * ~
31
Turning
Saleh said this Khalil was a real professional, one of the best in the business. Long before he got on Saddam’s bad side, Khalil made up reams of fake Ministry of Health documents to show inflated numbers of Iraqi children dying due to the sanctions. Had those numbers been correct, more than one in five Iraqi children would have died for lack of food or medicine due to America’s insistence on slapping sanctions on the sale of Iraqi oil. After the UN dismissed a whole batch of documents as complete fabrications, somewhere around 1998 or 1999, Saddam had Khalil arrested and dragged over to Abu Ghraib. There, Saleh explained to me, Khalil was tortured for failing to do his job correctly. Several months later, after they let him go, he went to work for the underground opposition, most of them based abroad. His skills, he realized, were in demand from a better-paying clientele who didn’t break their suppliers’ fingers if the final product flopped.
Given such an introduction, Khalil’s appearance isn’t at all what I expected. Did I imagine a suit and tie, perhaps a proper receptionist? Little pens and scalpels sticking out of his shirt pocket? Khalil Ibn Khaldoun’s office is just a mid-sized
dukkan
, a small convenience store where people get their milk and eggs and biscuits.
He watches us walk in, and makes a noise with his tongue like someone calling a cat. A young man who looks just like him, only taller and less textured by time, joins him behind the counter. As we get closer, I realize that it isn’t just lines on Khalil’s face, but a patchwork of scars. Moreover, the entire tip of his right ear is missing, curved and scarred into a knobby flap of skin. Of all the things that can happen to a person in Abu Ghraib, I suppose this is like...what did they call that back at school in England? A rap on the knuckles.
The father and son look at each other like their conversation needs no more than a round of eye contact and a lift of Khalil’s chin in the direction of the door. Khalil’s son walks to the entrance and locks the door, turning a deadlock. He twists a plastic baton that makes the dirty blinds close their eyelids to block out the light.
“For your protection,” Khalil says. “You never know what kind of thugs and troublemakers could have seen you come in here with the nice foreign lady.”
“Maluum!’
Of course.
“Maluum,”
I say again, wishing I had only said it once. I nod to Sam that this is a good idea, but her eyes speak other words to me, just the way Khalil’s did with his son:
I don’t like it one bit.
“Please,” says Khalil, pointing towards the door at the end of the aisle, near the cash register. “The office in which we do business is downstairs.”
Sam seems to hesitate but I smile at her a little and blink slowly, signalling that it’s all right. Saleh wouldn’t have sent me here if he didn’t think it was safe.
Khalil holds the door open and makes a gentlemanly gesture for us to enter ahead of him, and I feel that he must have had a better education than I had thought, because not everybody in my country knows that in the West it is considered polite to let ladies go first. On the contrary, it can be read as a sign of disrespect. By putting a woman in the vulnerable position of entering the room first, one might signal that she does not merit the protection of those accompanying her.
We walk down the concrete steps, dim and mangy around the edges, and then I feel my shoulders fall with relief. The downstairs is clean and has all the trappings of a real office: a fax machine, modern telephones with LCD displays, several filing cabinets with labels on them, and two slanted drawing tables I would expect to see in an architect’s studio. Lodged in the wall is a large white air conditioner, continuously exhaling a cool, comforting hiss. I pray that Khalil doesn’t notice me exhale, too, as if only now do I trust that nothing terrible awaits us in his basement.
“The lady will have tea?” he asks.
“Sure,” she brightens. “Thank you very much.”
“Talata chai
!” He calls out for three glasses of tea, and suddenly I can hear someone rustling in the adjacent room. It irks me that I cannot tell how big the office actually is, or who else is here. He offers us a small black leather sofa that sometimes is called a loveseat.