She then raises the phone to her ear and turns her back towards me, leaving the fat antenna pointed in my direction. I can still hear her from across the pool.
“Hi Miles. Sorry. Can’t always get good reception at the hotel because of the tall buildings.” Sam is quiet for a minute. “Jonah? Yeah, he’s all right. Well, some of Saddam’s security guys actually arrested him while he was filming somewhere without permission and took him to Abu Ghraib. You know, where they torture people for fun. No, I think they just roughed him up. He’s very lucky.”
She drags a plastic chair from a nearby table and sits down. “Well, yeah, everyone was worried. After we heard that report about the bodies of two European-looking men lying near Haifa Street, and they said one looked like him and all.
She looks back at me, rolls her eyes, and mouths: “Sorry.” She’s nodding, issuing several “uh-huhs.” She lunges to one side and then the other, like a football player stretching out. “He’ll be all right. No, no. I’m definitely staying.”
A waiter comes to ask me if I want to order anything, and I decline, not wanting to miss what she’s saying.
“Axelrod’s big story? Yeah, I read it. Quite the scoop.” She hesitates. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know how he gets his stories. But yeah, good for him. I mean, good for us.”
Sam turns and looks at me again. Her lips have the look of sucking on something sour.
“Of course, Miles, I know we need more of that. I’ve got a few things cooking here on the INC that could be really good. Just give me some time. Sorry, Miles? I really have to go. You got me in the middle of trying to hire a new fixer.”
Trying?
She seems frustrated and her expression is very different from the one she wore when she leapt down the stairs.
“Sorry. My editor. Nagging me for investigative stories at two o’clock in the bloody morning. For him, I mean.” She stands the black phone up on the table. Across the top in Arabic and English, it reads
Thuraya.
“You can get a mobile phone that works in Iraq?”
She smiles as though I’ve said something silly. “It’s a satellite phone. It connects to a satellite somewhere over the Indian Ocean. You haven’t seen one yet?”
I have to admit that I haven’t, and I wonder, should I have? Our phones have been out of order for weeks. The government said it was because of the US bombing our stations, but now there are rumours that the government itself shut down the lines to prevent the Americans from listening in on any of Saddam’s advisors and figuring out their strategies. Even when we did have service, we couldn’t call overseas. But we could get calls from abroad, and there were only two types of those. A short call from Ziad every month, and a yearly call from one of my father’s old colleagues in England, wishing us a happy Christmas and a jolly good New Year.
“Samara, I must tell you, nobody in our country is allowed to have these kinds of things, not even a satellite dish to watch television,” I explain. “The only person who could have a phone like this would be
mukhabarat,
you know, the secret police. Maybe some other people working directly for Saddam.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says. She picks up the coffee the waiter brought while she was on the phone and blows on it with puckered lips. “And please, call me Sam.”
“Even though your given name is Samara? It’s a beautiful name.”
“Thanks. But I prefer Sam.”
“Samara almost sounds like an Arabic name. We even have a city by this name, but we say it a little differently.”
She grins at me and sips the coffee, placing it a bit lazily back into the saucer, so that a milky film spills over into it. I hate this kind of coffee, with the hot milk and too much sugar, but I assume that the hotel makes it because this is the way foreigners like it.
“I know,” she says. “I passed it on my way to Baghdad.”
I feel embarrassed again, because she is new in my country and has already been to places I hardly know. Samarra is less than two hours to the northwest, but I only remember going there once, when I was a boy and our parents took us on a holiday up north.
“Where else did you go? Did you go to Tikrit?”
“Yeah,” she says, gazing into the distance, as if remembering the view of it. “We were covering the war from the north and went everywhere we could on the way down, essentially wherever the lines were retreating — from Suleimaniye and Irbil down to Kirkuk, and then Tikrit, through Samarra and then here.”
“And you did all of that without an interpreter?”
Sam makes a face like I have just posed the most preposterous question in the world. “Oh, no. That’s never an option. We had a translator until Tikrit. And then he, well, decided to give up and go home. So I teamed up with Jonah for a while and shared a fixer with him.”
“A fixer?”
“Fixer, translator, same thing. More or less.”
“And so your friend Jonah is okay.”
“Yes,” she smiles, her chest falling with relief — or exasperation. “You heard?” She wags a finger at me. “You were eavesdropping.”
“You were not speaking quietly.”
She picks up her coffee cup again and puts it to her mouth, all the while with her eyes set on me. “Also, Rizgar’s been my driver all along. I mean, since Suli.”
After a moment I realize she means Suleimaniye, and I feel a rising distaste over the idea that Sam and her colleagues have already given abbreviations to Iraqi cities I have never seen, as if they are old friends, on intimate terms.
“What happened to the last interpreter?” I suddenly realize that it is as if I’m interviewing Samara, not the other way around, and now I regret my words. I certainly don’t want her to find me cheeky or rude.
She grins close-mouthed, her lips spread wide. “I like you, Nabil. I like people who aren’t afraid to ask questions.” She drinks her coffee again, watching me across the rim of her cup. “My last translator was Saman. Kurdish, of course. He and Rizgar started with me in Suli. They were a good team. But Saman’s Arabic was weak and he had an accent when he spoke it, and so when we got to Tikrit he had a hard time.”
“What happened?”
Sam lifts her cup higher this time, and I can hear the rest of its contents draining into her throat. When she’s done, she shrugs. “Someone said something nasty or something, then, when we were trying to leave, they threw things at the car. It was just...it scared him a bit and he decided not to come to Baghdad with us. Hopped a ride back to Irbil, where he’s from.”
“I see.” Most of the people I know think that the Kurds are part of the cause of the American invasion. One of Baba’s friends who came for a visit a while back said the Kurds have been selling their souls for years, begging for Washington to overthrow Saddam. Baba nodded, and though we were sitting in the garden speaking quietly, I felt his discomfort with any political talk in our house. Most people I know don’t like the Kurds, especially the nationalist ones from the north. A Kurd from Irbil probably
would
have a bad time in Baghdad.
“I was thinking, Sam, that many of the interpreters for the Ministry of Information are professionally trained. Maybe you would prefer to work with one of them.”
Her nose crumples as if smelling something bad. “Someone who used to be a minder? That’s the last person I want to hire.”
I have never heard of a “minder” before, but I can use my imagination.
“You know, they’re basically government lackeys who happen to speak some English. Kinda like a low-grade spy. There’s no way I’d voluntarily work with one of them.” She raises her hand and waves it until a skinny waiter in a bowtie, the ends of it drooping like a frown, heads over to our table.
“Nabil, listen. Your English is essentially perfect, and that’s why I want you to work with me, but I also think this is a good opportunity for you. You’ll get to find out what’s really going on and meet people you’d never meet, and you’ll help me get the right information out there in the public eye. That’s never happened in Iraq before. Do you know how important that is?” She looks up at the waiter and offers a tart smile. “I’m starving,” she says to me. “Have you had breakfast yet?”
I look at my watch. It is nearly 10:15 a.m. I ate almost three hours ago, and I didn’t feel hungry then, either. “Please, not for me.”
She turns back to the waiter. “Do you think you could make me a cheese omelette? With toast?” She seems uncertain about this request. Does she think that Baghdad is such an Arab backwater, that we have nothing but
fuul
and
hummos
for breakfast?
She stares at me hard now and when that strange gold-brown light in her eyes hits mine, I have to avert my eyes for a moment.
“Let’s try this,” she says. “Work with me for a week at $100 and see how it goes. You have nothing to lose because school’s not in session anyway, right? If things go well, I’ll ask my editor about bumping you up to $125 a day. If it’s not your thing, fine, no commitment, we go our own ways, s
hukran
and
maa-salaama
.”
I raise my eyes involuntarily, surprised at her Arabic.
“Deal?” Sam holds out her right hand.
I am about to give it to her, but am suddenly aware of the waiter rushing back to the table, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, Misses Samara, but no eggs. No eggs today. But toast. We make the toast.”
Sam grins and drops her hand.
“Deal.” I have the urge to take her no-longer-on-offer hand, to feel her skin against mine for a moment longer than a handshake. Then I remember Noor and instead my hand curls in on itself. I feel my nails digging into my palm, almost hard enough to break the skin.
~ * ~
6
Digging
Sam leaves me at the pool and says she’s going upstairs for a minute to change. When she comes back fifteen minutes later, she has swapped her snug jeans and T-shirt for a pair of flowing black trousers and a loose, white blouse with long sleeves. It has blue embroidery around the collar, sort of like a peasant dress converted into a modern lady’s shirt.
As she is on her way over to me, a young man with blond, curly hair shouts her name from the far side of the pool, waving both arms in the air.
Sam beams. “Oh my God,” she squeals. “I can’t believe it!” They rush towards each other, the man more quickly towards Sam, and when they meet they embrace with their bodies locked tightly against each other for a moment.
“When did you get in?” Sam asks when he finally lets go.
“Yesterday,” he replies, “but Jesus, it feels like a week.” His accent sounds like an American one I have heard in a film, maybe one of those John Wayne Westerns we used to get at the video stall with all the illegal copies of old films. “Came in with the Fourth Infantry. How ‘bout you?”
“About five days ago,” Sam says, “but we’ve been in the north with the Kurds since the start of March.”
“Sammy-baby, what a trooper! You’re my idol, man.”
The man’s clothes look so informal next to mine: faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved undershirt with an adventurer’s waistcoat over it. I look down at my tie, my best trousers my mother pressed to make sure I would be presentable, and I begin to feel ridiculous.
The man smiles widely at Sam and scans her up and down, as though checking to see her own dress code. “You staying here?” he asks.
“Sweet, huh? They’re getting the pool cleaned up and everything.” She turns to me and gives me a hand gesture to come join them.
“Sunbathing in Baghdad. Nice,” the man says. “We’re living in tents in the yard of one of the palaces. Can you believe that? We’re like campin’ on Saddam’s lawn. The generals are in one of his living rooms. But I’m hoping to get out of this embed soon and then maybe I’ll be able to check in somewhere a bit more plush, like this.”
Sam cups a hand over her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun creeping higher in the sky.
“By the way,” he says, “CNN’s having a big barbecue on Friday. You should come.”
“Oh, yeah,” she answers. “I heard that. I’ll try to make it.”
“You look great, Sam. I think war agrees with you. You always manage to look ever so fetching in the middle of a shithole.”
Sam smirks, otherwise ignoring the comment, and then takes my elbow to move me closer to them. “Oh, Mark, this is Nabil. Nabil, Marcus Baker of the
New York Times.”
I hold out my hand and he grabs it roughly, squeezing it so hard I feel that all the bones in my hand ought to have been fractured. “Gooda meet’cha, Nabil.” He says my name with a long
Nah
to start, NAH-bil, placing the accent in the wrong place. It’s wrong, but not worth correcting. I see that Marcus Baker has the same weird phone as Samara. They read off numbers and jab at their keypads. They smile and hug once more.
“Shall we?” She raises her eyebrows at me. “
Y’alla
.”
I follow her out of the pool area towards the first tower lobby, pondering whether I should tell her that this use of
y’alla
is too colloquial, to the point of being rude, as a way of telling someone to move along, unless you know them quite well. We walk around to the hotel entrance, and the drivers loitering near their cars stare at her, then at me, and then pretend not to notice us. Sam lifts her hand to her brow and moves her head from left to right, scanning. “There he is,” she says, and I see Rizgar, the driver who came with her to Noor’s house, stand up and raise his hand.