When we are far enough away from Mustapha’s building, she moves closer to me. “Do you trust this guy?”
Now we’re passing the section with household goods, buckets, cleaning materials, sponges and mops. Things anyone who had a home would want to stop and price, things that are far removed from Sam’s reality because someone comes into her room to clean every day.
“Not entirely.”
“You don’t? Well me neither. He seems like a slimeball to me.”
“I know. But sometimes the slimeball people have the good connections. I don’t think he would lie about that — about what he can get for us.”
“Really?” Sam touches a silk scarf as we pass through the part where the market gets narrow.
“I think he is a crooked man, for sure, but he might be our only way for you to finish the story,” I say. “And if Saleh sent us here—”
At the mouth of the market, where the cars are parked, Ibrahim awaits us. Across the street, about four cars away, I see Rizgar, his eyes peeled towards us. “Don’t even look at Rizgar,” I breathe in Sam’s direction, “just in case they are following us.”
I open the door to Ibrahim’s car, and we hop in. He looks suspicious, like he can feel that there’s been a change of plan.
“Nabil, wait,” Sam says. “Do you think we should go with this guy or not? I mean, we could have tried to insist on taking our own driver—”
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t see any other way. I don’t know who else to go to get you the answer you need. Maybe we don’t go with him and we just say thank you very much and you tell your editor that that’s it. We did what we could.”
Sam clucks her tongue.
“You said they were ready to run the story without knowing who made the documents and why. You said they would just do a story saying that they were fake and that would be it. So if you want, let them do that, and
khalas.
You did your job.”
“No, I didn’t. If I let them run it now, it’s a totally incomplete story.” She pulls at her headscarf around her chin, clearly uncomfortable with the way it frames her face. “How can I just give up and not really get the story?”
I see in her eyes a love that I don’t love. A love of the story, whatever that means. But in that love, I see a love I respect: a love of getting to the truth, of a chance to set things right.
“So we go, then.” I face Ibrahim and put a small stack of dinars in his hand. “As soon as we re-enter the market, can you go and tell our friend over there in the old Chrysler that we want him to try to follow us? Tell him that we’re getting into a car parked at the other end of the market. Just tell him to stay back and follow us, several cars behind, like he did this morning coming here. Got that?”
“Okay,” he says,
“Inshallah.”
We get out with only the smallest glance in Rizgar’s direction, and Ibrahim waves us goodbye, his wrinkled hand held up in a way that almost makes him look like a holy man bestowing blessings on his followers.
~ * ~
46
Bestowing
We are inside Mustapha’s 1991 Mercedes 300 SE, black outside, brown leather inside. It is spotless; perhaps he vacuums his car every day and dumps his dust on the floor of Ibrahim’s. In Iraq we call this kind of car “the submarine”, and everyone knows it was one of Saddam’s favourites, in particular, we understood, because it seemed to defy America after they forced their way into the war with Kuwait. In 1991, Saddam bought new luxury cars, started several new palaces, and apparently sent for all sorts of lavish goods from Europe.
Maybe Mustapha has done well as a lawyer. Or maybe he stole the car last month.
With Brutus in the passenger seat, Mustapha drives us towards Ishbiliya and Idris, back towards the centre of town, and as he does, I can feel the tension in my spine drop just a bit, like letting a little bit of the air pressure out of an over-inflated tyre. If we’re no longer in Sadr City, where everyone knows bad things happen, where you probably ought not to bring a foreign girl anyway, we must be in less danger. We pass through Saddoun Street, the old theatres, the safe places. I find myself looking at the silver buttons on the doors, noticing that they’re unlocked. If things went terribly wrong, we could jump out. I should write this down for Sam.
I reach for the notebook in my backpocket and then realize I don’t have a pen. I make a sign with my thumb and forefinger, asking her for something to write with. She takes a pen out of her bag and hands it to me, but as she does, Mustapha looks over his shoulder and notices what she’s doing.
“I just want to check our schedule,” I say, unable to think of anything better, drawing a line through some notes in the pad. “Sam, we have to be back in the Green Zone at three for your interview, right?”
“That’s right,” she says. She lifts her sleeve to look at her watch. “We really can’t be late for that.”
“Don’t worry about no thing.” Mustapha says again, which has a way of making a person worry more. What is the worst that can happen anyway? These people are in the business of making fake documents, not killing foreigners. If they kill Sam,
la small’Alla,
they can’t get any money out of her, and that’s what they want.
La smah’Alla.
What Mum and Grandma Zahra said for just about anything terrible under the sun that could happen. May God not allow it.
Sam won’t mind the lie. She’ll know that mentioning the Green Zone wasn’t just by chance. It tells Mustapha that we need to meet the Americans later, and that if he doesn’t bring us back on time, the Americans will notice. Will come looking, maybe. It’s a theory I have: as much as we sneer at the Americans, at their tanks and missiles, as much as we speak of them as if they are strong but stupid, we are terrified of them and what they are capable of doing.
Mustapha raps the backs of his fingernails softly against the window. He bends his head to look past Brutus and then turns to Samara. “You see that big stadium there? You know what stadium?”
“Is that Shaab Stadium?”
“Ah, you know Baghdad very good,” he says, sounding impressed. “Too good.”
“Somewhat,” she says. “Shaab Stadium is famous.”
“Maybe you heard about it because here we have our football game. Sometimes the national team plays another country team and Iraqi lose. And then Uday is torturing the players right there in the basement, below the looker room!”
“Locker room,” I interject.
“Lucker, lucker! That’s what I said. Did you know it?” His tone is aggressive, demanding an answer from Sam. “Did you know that people were being tortured?”
“Well, yes, I mean, there were stories in the paper sometimes about how cruel Saddam was, although I think the Bush administration was more concerned about what kinds of weapons he was acquiring than whether he was beating up on a few athletes.”
Mustapha frowns. I’m not sure he is getting the nuances of Sam’s language, the hints of sarcasm about her own government. I have the urge to translate what she said.
He suddenly thrusts his hand between us, scaring me to the point where I almost lurch to protect Sam. “Have you ever seen fingers like that?”
Each of the nails on his fingers is dark and disfigured, ridged like a carpet that needs straightening. “That,” he says, pulling his hand back again, “they do to me while I was still in high school. One of my uncles was involved in the uprising against Saddam in one-and-ninety and they said I’m not giving them enough information about him. Not being enough helpful. And so they pull out each one, until I convince them I don’t know anything about my uncle, my cousin, no one.”
Next to me, I see Sam’s fingers curl in on themselves. “That’s awful,” she says.
“Yes, very, very awful. But this is how we live here. And America see and say oh, very bad, Saddam, but wait another twelve years to do anything. So why now?”
Sam doesn’t respond.
“I mean, why now? Why come Iraq now?” His voice is louder, and he seems to be struggling for the words. “If America come in one-and-ninety—”
“In ninety-one,” I say. “You mean in nineteen ninety-one.”
We say
wahad u-tiseen
instead of
tiseen u-wahad.
But Mustapha is clearly furious with me. He doesn’t want my corrections, regardless of his mistakes.
“If you want to stop him because of the human rights, then you must stop him in ninety-and-one. American knows Saddam kill many people, and torture them and take my fingers out,” he says, becoming more and more agitated, wiggling his hand in the air. “You know what I think? I think that if you,
yaani
, America, were here for our rights, you must come
long
time ago. And if you come for our weapons, then
Ya Allah,
where are they? And why you don’t find them and show them! So maybe, just my opinion, maybe you come here for something else.”
Brutus turns up Abu Nuwas Street, and the sight of the river comforts me. On it there is a lonely fisherman in a boat as slender as a banana. A flash of jealousy for him burns through me. Living a simple life, barely literate, selling the day’s catch to the great fish restaurants along the Tigris. Bringing home the proceeds to a loyal wife and doting children. Far away from the problems of how to play Mustapha and how to protect Sam.
“What do you think America came here for?” Mustapha asks.
I hope Sam doesn’t think she can win this argument with Mustapha and his completely incompatible premises.
Saddam was evil. Who are you to take Saddam away from us? You have no right to be here. But what took you so long come?
“You are the journalist, yes? Maybe this is your job to find out.”
No one says anything more, and as we drive north on Abu Nuwas, I watch the array of some of our family’s favourite old restaurants along the water, shuttered up or empty of everyone but their owners. When things are better, I will bring Sam there sometime for dinner. Afterwards we’ll go strolling, and perhaps I’ll hold her hand, even just for a moment.
I must have passed these three-storey brick homes along the waterfront a thousand times in the last few years. There were rumours that after Saddam had these townhouses built, he gave them to senior members of the Republican Guard. The officers received a gift of prime land with one of the best views in town and Saddam received a ready-made line of defence from any attack from the southern side of the river.
The houses stand out from the landscape because something about their neat lines, overly modern and attached like townhouses in some smarter part of Birmingham, is really not the architectural style of Baghdad. They have pointy angles that don’t belong here, triangular roofs designed for countries where there is much rain and snow to be managed. It is a European design, imported for prestige purposes. The only thing that is familiar is the colour of the bricks: lighter than mud, darker than tan, something like a mix of camel hair and sandy earth.
It’s now, what? More than three weeks since Saddam and the other ministers simply ceased to appear in public, signalling Iraq’s surrender to America. People say all of the Republican Guard fled these houses with their families on the very same day, and that hours later, new tenants took over. Whether they are poor squatters or armed militias is anybody’s guess.
Brutus stops the car and Mustapha steps out, brisk and confident, and motions for us to move with him. We get out, too, following the
yalla yalla
motions from his hand of unseemly nails, telling us to move quickly. We follow Mustapha up the steps to the front door, Brutus shifting heavily behind us.
Mustapha knocks twice but doesn’t wait for an answer, pushing the door open and telling us to follow him inside and up stairs demarcated with a red line of carpeting, as well as one of those plastic runners that make sure you don’t trample the carpet into peach fuzz. “Come, come,” he says, racing up almost as fast as we raced down yesterday, at the hotel. Why does every yesterday feel like three days ago? Dog years. We run up the stairs, me behind Mustapha, Sam behind me, Brutus behind her. At his size, if he moves as fast as Mustapha he could have a heart attack in the stairwell. And then, perhaps, we can end up back at Al-Kindi hospital, right where we started, Baba rolling his eyes at me.
On the third floor, Mustapha taps on a simple door once and then once more. The door is opened by a man who is built like a goalie, fairly young but with a bald head, which makes the grizzly nature of his beard all the more striking. He looks past Mustapha to take us in, with eyes like those of searchlights that nervously pan the sky at night.
The room is big and sparse, with a large writing desk and some chairs to the left, windows to the right. On the carpet are discoloured, flat spots where the furniture used to sit. There are others: three men. One sitting, two standing in varying forms of repose against the wall, armed with pistols.
Be calm, like the Tigris, flowing out there through the windows, just beyond the void of what was someone’s living room. Four of us coming, and they needed to match it with four of them. Perfectly normal for a business meeting: parity.
“Mr Ali,” says Mustapha, “this our American friend, Miss Samara, and her translator, Nabil al-Amari.”
We smile at him and I move to shake his hand, but he doesn’t seem to notice because his eyes are focused on Sam.
The
Ali, as in Ali al-Yaqubi al-Sadr?
“American?” he asks.