Rizgar is not driving the shiny black 4x4 jeep he had two days ago, but an old blue Impala that is as long as a living room. He holds the back and front doors open for us and sweeps a hand to show us in. “You remember Rizgar, don’t you?” It seems a strange question. Does she think there were many foreign women with their own drivers who showed up at Noor’s funeral? But perhaps this is her way of reintroducing us.
I feel unsure of where I should sit. Ought not a guest, especially a woman, feel more respected, and more protected, by sitting in the back? But Sam hops into the front seat without a word. The car’s interior is dusty, and I can feel the particles in the air starting to tickle my nose. Most importantly, I feel relief. I am glad to find that Sam is no longer travelling around in that fancy new jeep with a sign that says TV on it.
Rizgar smiles at me in his rearview mirror.
“New car!” I say. “Very nice.”
“The jeep is good for the north, because the roads are difficult,” he says in Arabic. “But here, if you drive big, new cars you look like an American government official or CIA. Those are the cars getting attacked. In a car like this,” he says, patting the dashboard, “we look just like regular Iraqis.”
“Hey, what are you guys talking about? Don’t go leaving me out the first day on the job,” Sam says.
“He says that you are safer in this car than in the jeep,” I explain.
“Ah, yes, that’s true. I always trust Rizgar’s judgement. He got us through the war in one piece, didn’t you, Rizgar?”
Rizgar peers at me again in the rearview mirror with a serious face. But then he smiles, revealing a gold eye-tooth, and forms a thumbs-up sign and we laugh. The thought that the war is
through,
that Sam — and therefore America — sees it in the past tense, is filling me with the brightest sensation I have had for weeks.
~ * ~
7
Filling
We drive towards the centre of town, through Karkh, and suddenly it feels like we’re in a film, because all down Rashid Street there are American tanks, big rolling monsters in dark green, and other military vehicles with heavy artillery mounted on them. Nothing here has ever looked like this before. I see a few American soldiers, not many, and I cannot understand why. Where are all the soldiers? Shouldn’t they be marching in the streets? In the front seat, Sam is scribbling things into her notebook. Rizgar shakes a box of cigarettes, down to its last lonely occupants, and ejects one into his mouth.
I keep searching for the soldiers who belong with the tanks, expecting to see hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and instead I only catch sight of three or four. I remember one time, when I was about fourteen, we saw a parade of Republican Guards marching by our high school. We all ran to the window to watch, mesmerized by the syncopated stomp of their red boots, ignoring the teacher’s reprimand to go back to our seats. Was I expecting the Americans to appear like that, advancing into Baghdad in a perfect phalanx?
“I’m surprised the Americans have not put up any of their flags around the city,” I say, feeling as if I am talking to no one, because neither Sam nor Rizgar react.
I can hear her pen come to rest, and then she turns and looks over her shoulder at me, her hair full of bright light from outside. It occurs to me that for modesty’s sake, she should tie her hair back or otherwise put it into place, the way the female professors did at university if they didn’t wear
hejab.
“Well,” Sam purses her lips, “they did put that huge flag up on the Saddam statue. You saw
that,
didn’t you?”
I peer out of the window and take in the Ministry of Information, which seems to be moving past us in slow motion. A massive hole cuts through three floors, around the fifth, sixth and seventh storeys and the building looks as though it has been hit by a wrecking ball. Twists of mangled metal emerge and wind in odd directions.
I owe Samara an answer. “Uh, no. I didn’t see it.”
“Oh God, it was all over the news. When they got into Baghdad on Tuesday these soldiers climbed up that big statue of Saddam in Firdos Square and hung an American flag over his face! I mean, before they toppled the thing with the help of a tank. The Bushies are getting a lot of flak for it back home. People here
must
be talking about it.” Sam stretches her neck further over her shoulder and smiles again, and in her face I see an expression that says
, And where have you been?
“They didn’t mention it on Iraq Radio,” I say.
Everywhere there were stores, everything is either gated up or gone. Or burned. Or wrecked. Alarms are wailing, buildings are smoking, people are hurrying rather than walking. Almost every large building is damaged in some way. Several government ministries look like they have been hit by small airplanes. Maybe that is what this war is about: revenge for what happened a year-and-a-half ago, on September the 11th. But why punish us? Weren’t the hijackers from Saudi Arabia and Egypt? If Saddam were a little smarter, we could have been friends with America, just like them.
Sam notices me staring out of the window in awe. “Haven’t you seen this part of town yet?”
“No.” I am mesmerized by the sight of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, whose tower is twisted at the top into fine, curly filaments.
Something feels wrong about this, this sense that she knows the city better than I do.
“You know, nobody was going out since the war started unless they had to, to get food or something,” I explain. “Everybody was avoiding this part of town, especially this area where the palaces and a lot of ministry buildings are, because we knew that’s what would get hit the most.”
No one was going out, I think. Unless, of course, they had a date. For many Iraqis, getting your son or daughter married off is its own kind of emergency.
She jots something into her notebook and for a moment I wonder if she could be taking down notes about me, about what I do or don’t know. Perhaps she will write up an evaluation of me at the end of the day. She’ll send it to her editor and he will decide whether I am good enough to work for the newspaper. Or, maybe Sam isn’t a newspaper journalist at all, but a spy working for an international agency. Perhaps even her name is made up. She’ll just use me to gather information and later on I’ll be held responsible for collaborating with the enemy.
She points out the Ministry of Education on our left, the whole side of it stripped open and exposed. I can see office chairs and desks and cabinets as high as the eighth floor, blackened by fire, sitting in the open air as if in an acrid conversation with the sky. It all seems unreal, seeing our national offices burnt black, left exposed for all to see. Baghdad is like a violated woman.
“Damn! See what they did to that one. Amazing.”
I am glad that there are some things that are new to Sam.
They,
she says. Look at what
they
did. Aren’t they her own people? Her government?
Rizgar tries to get on to the highway near the 14th of July Bridge, but as we pull close to the ramp, we see three tanks lined up across the road. A soldier’s top half emerges from the turret, his page-white hands firmly on the trigger. Behind him, a black soldier puts one hand up towards the traffic and waves it back and forth, the other holding fast to the enormous rifle across his chest. The driver from the car two cars in front of us yells that he needs to get on the bridge.
“Closed! Closed!” the soldier on the ground shouts back at him. He throws his arms forwards in a gesture that seems quite rude. The soldier in the turret puts his face behind his rifle scope and aims at the driver, and then rotates the gun in a wider arc to include all the drivers behind him, some of whom are getting out of their cars.
“Go back! Move
the fuck
back! Now!” Both the soldiers are shouting and a nervous Rizgar turns the car around quickly, grabbing the wheel in short, quick yanks.
Sam shakes her head. “Jeez,” she says with more air than sound.
“No worry. No worry,” Rizgar says. He appears calmer once we are on our way, speeding in the opposite direction, towards Abu Nuwas Street. “Many many ways to go.”
I keep thinking about the soldiers bellowing from their tanks. “Sam? Don’t any of your soldiers speak Arabic?”
Sam looks at me with an apologetic shrug. “Some. But not too many of them. They’re usually not the brightest candles on the cake.”
I watch through the back window as we drive away and I can see the soldier, his rifle still raised, shouting and enraged, or maybe just frightened, pointing the barrel directly at a man who had got out of his car to talk to him. The soldier is gazing through a large eyepiece on the gun, one of the most sophisticated rifles I have ever seen, and not at the man himself. The figure grows smaller and I wonder whether he will be shot.
“I think they will have a difficult time in Baghdad if they cannot communicate basic things in Arabic,” I say. “They cannot expect a simple driver like that to understand English.”
“You’re right, Nabil.” She turns to Rizgar. “But we need to get to the INC. Today. Can you get us to the Hunting Club some other way?”
“Yes, Misses Samara, but is maybe more dangerous way, no highway. Bad places with many stealing.” Rizgar uses each hand to indicate one shooting the other. Then he smiles an uncomfortable smile, and I find myself wondering why anyone covers a bad tooth with gold.
“Oh, it’ll be fine, won’t it? Just be careful.” There is no police anymore, no one in control. And so there is nothing to stop a man from simply approaching you at the wheel of your car with a gun and telling you to get out. There are more and more incidents like this every day. You’re lucky if they take just your car.
Sam opens the sun visor in front of her, which has a mirror clipped to it, and puckers her lips. She then produces a blue plastic container and with this she runs a clear balm over her lips, drawing them in on each other. Her mouth seems softer now, and a bit more pink. She closes the visor and then flips it open again, this time bending it to an angle through which she can see me.
“Oh, and Nabil? Don’t call them
my
soldiers.” She appears to be dead serious, but then she smiles in a way that almost seems playful. “I didn’t want this war either.”
She begins to tap the gadget I saw her use back in the hotel. It emits a little squeak each time she pokes it.
“It’s called a Palm Pilot. See?” She must have noticed me studying it. “They’ll probably open a store here by Christmas... This is my life, right here in this little slab of electronic memory. I can try to bring one back for you next time I go to America.”
“So you will go back to America and then come to Iraq again?”
She puffs out her cheeks and lets them deflate slowly, like air from a balloon. “Probably. I have no idea. Usually we are on an assignment like this for a month or two. That’s about all a person can take.” She grins. “But I mean, this
is
the story. I can’t see leaving anytime soon.”
“I see,” I say, even though I’m not sure I do.
“Which is why Jonah is more than a little pissed off at me.”
“Your friend who was in Abu Ghraib?” I notice my palms are sweaty, and rub them on my trousers which don’t absorb a thing.
“Yeah. He’s decided he’s had it with the story and wanted to leave, which is understandable. But he wants me to go with him, which is not going to happen.”
“Why would—-”
“Actually,” she says, raising a hand, not so unlike the way the soldier had, “let’s not get into it now.”
~ * ~
8
Raising
I find it strange, this term Sam keeps using, “looter family”. We must find a looter family. Does she expect to find an entire family in which everyone is participating in the looting — men, women and children? Or does she mean a larger family, a whole
hamule,
which translates as clan, though that doesn’t sound quite right to me. Certainly, one can find extended families like that, where crime or smuggling or being in the
mukhabarat
seems to be a family inheritance, but does that mean now that looting could be arranged along family lines? It would seem odd, and yet this is the myth of what the looting actually is. Sam says that President Bush in Washington is being criticized for it back home because the looting is getting out of hand, doing almost as much damage as the war itself. Maybe more.
Sam says there are reports that the Baghdad Museum of Art is half empty. I tell her that my cousin heard a rumour that the American soldiers stood there and let it happen, even held the doors open as all of Iraq’s treasures, our pre-Islamic artifacts and even Babylonian antiquities, were carted away. I find it hard to believe.
What concerns me at the moment is that Sam doesn’t seem to realize that it is actually a very small part of the population which is doing all of this stealing. Apparently, the American Defense Secretary, Mr Rumsfeld, said yesterday that it is understandable for the Iraqi people to want to release some of their frustrations. “Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things,” Rumsfeld said, according to Sam, who read the quote to me from a story her editor sent her. The comment made me furious. Do they view us as a nation of criminals?
We have also heard that many institutions are simply disintegrating and people are walking free: patients from psychiatric institutions, criminals from prisons. My father says that his hospital has organized its own round-the-clock security system to prevent the looting that has occurred at other hospitals.