What Sam doesn’t realize is that the days of an Iraqi man seen reading a book in public went out with Nasserism. Up until the late 1950s, it was acceptable. But it wasn’t long before the Ba’ath Party made a suspect out of anyone who was too inquisitive, and being labelled an intellectual was almost as bad as being fingered as a royalist.
The fear still has its residue. But I put one of the new Iraqi newspapers under my arm to impress Sam none the less. She seems so convinced that all of these new publications signal a blossoming of free media after Saddam. I am afraid to tell her that the new papers are just as full of lies as the old ones — but now we have a greater variety of liars to whom we can donate a few dinars.
And so I sit down by the pool, at a table in the far corner in the shade, and watch some of Sam’s colleagues swimming. Brooke from
Time
is doing laps. Melanie from French TV is enjoying the last of the day and reading a book, while that young blond man with the body-builder physique tries to talk her into a swim. Both women are wearing bikinis. I notice the pool attendants and the hotel waiters staring at them with every free moment they can get, making an entire occupation out of peering at the ample display of foreign flesh. I cringe and think of Sam; I hope that she doesn’t dress like this by the pool, too, in the late evenings when I’m not around.
In some of the men’s eyes, I can see the awe, the longing for the freedom of a culture that lets its daughters wear what they want, even if it is a swimming costume that doesn’t cover very much. On other faces, I see disdain and resentment. Before the Americans came, we never had these foreign women walking around like they were on a beach in California.
I open the
Az-Zaman
paper, which has a sensationalist story about Americans stealing all the army’s pension funds from the national reserves. Then again, could it be true? It might explain why one of their first acts after Saddam’s disappearance was to dissolve the army.
It occurs to me that the sun is setting, which is a time of day when I’m usually with Sam or with my family, and I decide to slip out to that small gathering room near the car park behind the hotel to pray.
Salat al-maghrib,
the fourth of the daily prayers, should be said now, and I wonder, is it wrong to start here, when I’ve missed the first three and probably won’t do the fifth? I’ve been wanting to make prayer a habit again, but I don’t seem to have the time or the discipline. It was something I had done for a while, back in my teenage years and at university, but then I just stopped. I have no interest in going to the mosque, especially now, because everyone there is anti-something. Everything is political, everyone is a target. And to whose mosque shall I go? So I prefer to pray alone, or just in a roomful of men. Lately, I find myself also wanting to pray for Sam. Sometimes my
sallih
feels wonderful. Sometimes I feel like a fraud. Nabil, a voice in my head sometimes asks, do you really think anyone is listening? I wonder if the voice is Baba’s or my own.
I have counted thirty minutes, and so I go back up to the suite to see Sam.
When I knock, she opens the door briskly and mouths “hi”, and runs back to her desk to pick up the Thuraya earpiece.
“Yeah. Yeah. Miles, look, someone important just came by and is waiting for me. Can I call you back a little later? ‘Kay. Thanks. Bye.”
Sam’s plate of hummus is swiped almost clean, just a few trails left like tyre tracks in the drying mud. But she hardly dented the chicken they brought for her — she says it’s too dry. She is sitting like a swami, one leg folded on top of the other, and she seems calm now, or like she is trying to convince herself she is calmer.
“Sam.” I clear my throat and sit on the sofa. “Sam, I ran into one of Akram’s guys today and he was asking about you. He was asking me where you live and which newspaper you’re working for.”
“What? Which guy?”
“That Suleiman character. Suleiman es-Surie. Or Suleiman Mutanabi. Even that’s probably not his real name, apparently. He assumed it because it’s the name of a famous Iraqi poet, Mutanabi, who was of Syrian origin. And speaking of which, they’re not even sure what
your
name is. But they want you to come and talk to them again.”
“Wait, go back.” The lines between Sam’s brows trace themselves deeper. “Where did you see him?”
“I decided not to go home to have dinner. I went to my cousin Saleh’s house instead. On the way back, I stopped in to the Al-Wahde Supermarket to pick up the case of Coke for you, and as I was leaving, he came in.”
“Wow.
Wow,”
she repeats. “Do you think he was following you? Or that he followed you here?”
It hadn’t occurred to me to check, and so I shake my head no.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told them that your name is Sally and that you work for
The Guardian.
I said I was in a rush and took off.”
“Well, that was quick thinking. But I don’t think you had to lie outright.”
“Sam, didn’t he tell us that he and his whole group of mates killed everyone at Uday Hussein’s house the night Baghdad fell? Maybe they kill other people, too.” I wonder if, in Sam’s obsession with Harris’s lies and Jackson’s lawsuit, she’s paid any attention to all the Iraqis who’ve been killed just in the past week. “Yeah, but what if some woman freelancing for
The Guardian
runs into problems now? You can’t do things like that. It’s unethical.”
“But there’s no Sally, and apparently they weren’t sure what your name was because you didn’t leave a card. He’s trying to figure out where you live, and maybe where I do. Why would they need to know that? Doesn’t that concern you?”
Sam sighs and follows her feet into the kitchen. There, she tears open a bag of chocolate chip cookies that one of the other reporters just brought in from Jordan.
“You want?” She holds them out in my direction and grumbles something inquisitive, which seems to say “take one”, but never quite enunciates itself.
I eat two, waking up some dormant gland in the back of my throat. But when she offers a third, I hold up my hand to say no thanks, suddenly remembering my vow not to eat sweet things. Sam throws another in her mouth, then falls into the seat in front of her desk and taps on a key, bringing her computer back to life. She hands me a copy of the
Ninth of April,
a weekly newspaper, named for the day after Baghdad fell. I tell Sam I’ve never seen it before. She says I ought to be watching for these new papers springing up everywhere. This one is in its third edition.
I take the paper in my hands and start thumbing through the pages of such cheap newsprint that it is already leaving foggy trails of evidence across my fingers. I can immediately see that the quality of the writing is terrible, just like the newspapers before Saddam. What should I tell Sam — that no one here has figured out how to be a journalist yet? That we are too accustomed to being told what to say?
“Can I talk while you type?” I ask.
Her shoulders droop a little, and then she stops and closes the computer. “The memo will wait.” She turns to me. “So you think I should be concerned about Akram.”
“I don’t know about should be...but I have a question.” Seeing her eagerness, I begin again. “What if Harris had paid for the documents and they
weren’t
artificial? Everything would have turned out fine, would it not?”
Sam swivels in her chair and studies me with a look of wonderment. The gold in her eyes, usually the colour I’d imagine a lion to be, drains into a shade of straw, as if made lighter from trying to take in a bigger picture of me. She says nothing.
“I mean, is that so bad, paying for some information that’s true?”
“Nabil, of course it’s bad. As a journalist you shouldn’t
buy
information. It prejudices the integrity of what you receive. If there’s money involved, maybe they’ll just tell you what they think you want to hear.”
I listen and nod, as if she might be right. I must try to make her understand.
“But,” I say, “I don’t think that’s the most important thing. In our culture, you pay for things you value. The documents, or any information, that’s of value, right? Otherwise, if you don’t pay, it’s a gift and a gift comes with all kinds of obligations. If I get a gift, I feel obligated until I give a gift in return. And then it never ends. Our grandchildren will be giving each other gifts on every
eid,
bringing food over each Ramadan. But if you pay, the relationship is over. Then you’re done. Being obligated, that’s much more dangerous. Then they own you.”
“Nabil, you’re wrong on this, trust me.” She stands and leans back on her desk, her arms folded. “We don’t pay for documents. It’s not allowed. And if Harris took them — what, he’d have been indebted to General Akram for presents at Ramadan? Give me a break.”
“No, Sam. Not like that, of course. But in Iraq, you don’t want to be in debt to someone like that. And now we are, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We took his time and his tea. We took that...that picture of him when we visited. We were there for a long time. He’ll think we owe him something.”
Sam’s brows fold into a scowl. She walks towards the sliding glass door to the balcony and reaches for the handle. “I’m going to reposition the sat dish,” she says, letting in a steam column bleached with end-of-the-day sun. “The reception lately has been really bad.” She turns back to me with a wry half-smile. “Oh, and it’s ‘det’. When you say it, you don’t pronounce the ‘b’. It’s silent.”
I stew with embarrassment at getting something wrong, with irritation at having her correct me. Sam messes around with the machine on the balcony. It’s the one that I had thought was a laptop computer at first, and I was shocked to see her leaving it outside, balancing it on the ledge as though it were nothing special. Won’t it get damaged sitting out there in the sun and dust, I asked. She laughed and said oh no, Nabil, this one isn’t a laptop, this is our new satellite. Later, when she was in the loo, I went out to look at it and realized that this was, in fact, the B-GAN of which she spoke not long ago. What a strange name. She said it cost about $4,000 — all sitting out on the balcony! Maybe it will accidentally slip from Sam’s hands and land in the pool below. I air-type a couplet, an ode to its demise.
it began as the B-GAN began to sink
upon me did she at last begin to think
Sam comes back in smacking her hands together, letting dust particles disperse in the air. “It’s lost the signal,” she says. “Carlos says when that happens you need to shut the whole thing down, give it a couple minutes’ rest, and then bring it up to the roof or to some other wide open space again where it can sort of find itself again.”
I nod as if it’s perfectly clear.
“Do you want to see how to position it?”
“Whatever you prefer.”
Sam breathes out hard through her nostrils. “Fine. Wait here and I’ll go and do it.”
“No, Sam,” I say. “I would be happy to come.”
In silence, I follow Sam upstairs to the roof. I can see it has filled up with more satellite dishes and other journalists’ B-GANs. She sets hers down and says we should leave it for a few minutes to get a GPS coordinate. That means global positioning satellite, she explains. In the meantime, she says, we can sit in the hallway, where it is cooler — the roof feels hot, even at sunset, perhaps due to the little colony of technology taking root here. She drags a plastic chair across the balcony, and I grab the other, a wooden and metal one, which reminds me of a classroom chair.
Sam leans back in her chair and puts her feet up on the edge of the staircase. “I’m sorry I was being all huffy and rude with you before,” she says. “There’s really no excuse for it.” She looks at her shoes — worn black sandals that seem more like a pair for men than any kind of sandals most women here would wear - and then at me.
“Of course, Sam. Don’t worry about it.”
She rests her hands on her head. “Look, I’m stressed out. But I don’t want to go getting all snippy with you. It’s not your fault.”
“What’s not?”
“None of this,” she shrugs. She pulls her knees up close to her, wrapping her long arms around them. “You know how I got claustrophobic?”
“No. Do you just get it? Like a disease?”
“Well, no, you don’t really
get
it. But they made me figure out when it started, and then I remembered,” she says. “You know, when was the first time I remember feeling trapped, how do I feel in small spaces, and then I remembered. My older brother and one of my cousins, when they were about ten and eleven and I must have been four or five, my parents gave us permission to leave my grandmother’s place in the city, to go outside to play. But in the elevator, they pressed a whole bunch of buttons — out of order, when I wasn’t looking — and then at the ground floor, they ran out and left me inside. Actually, they pushed me back from following them just before the doors closed, and ran off.”
Sam winces. There’s a tiny, sour smile on her lips. She doesn’t look at me.
“And so I was all alone and the elevator just kept going to different floors for the longest time. You know, 8, 12, 3, 6, 10, all over the place. I had no idea where I was! It was terrifying. I just started bawling.” She smiles with a kind of embarrassment in her eyes. “At that age, you don’t pay attention to things like what floor your grandmother lives on, what your own address is, how you get from one place to the next. People just take you and you don’t need to know where you’re going. I kept peeking out of the elevator but every floor looked exactly the same, even smelled the same. I was actually sniffing for my grandmother’s food. Finally, I just decided to get out, crying, going left to the end of each hallway, to that last door on the left, where I knew her apartment should be, only to see that it wasn’t hers. Eventually, some old couple heard me sobbing in the hallway and they asked who my Grandma was, and they just happened to know her, and finally took me back to her place.” She lets her legs go and slumps a little in the chair.