Barefoot in Baghdad (19 page)

Before I finished dialing the number I saw his car pull into the cul-de-sac. I was surprised he returned so quickly. Wasn’t he going to wait on the parsley? Fadi was empty-handed but my disappointment was replaced with excitement at seeing Yusuf in the passenger seat. My entire staff had been extremely supportive in helping me to cope with Fern’s loss, but none were as supportive as Yusuf. He had remained on call in the last few weeks, and he visited me almost every other day.

When I opened my front door, Fadi asked if they could come inside and talk. I nodded, bracing myself for more bad news.

“Would you like some tea?” I was behaving with uncharacteristic formality, but for some reason, I felt very nervous in front of them.

“Don’t worry about tea,” Fadi declared. “Yusuf and I have the perfect solution!” He energetically poured out their master plan. The two of them had decided that the only solution was for them to move in with me in the house in Mansour. Yusuf explained that all attempts to strengthen security could not eliminate the fact that I was a single non-Iraqi woman living alone, the easiest of targets.

As they saw it, the equation was simple: if I was willing to risk my life to work inside Iraq, then they were willing to risk their lives by staying by my side 24/7.

This time I was aware of my tears. I was so touched by this act of kindness that all I could do was put my head in my hands and sob. The feelings I had been unable to release over the past months all seemed to pour out of me at once. All inhibitions had disappeared, and I allowed myself to cry openly.

Not knowing what to do with a crying woman, Fadi and Yusuf gave me the space I needed. When my sobs gave way to silent tears, they came back into the kitchen. They resolutely insisted that there was no other solution.

Still, my first reaction was to refuse. No matter what they said, I knew this was beyond the call of duty. Even if I could ignore this fact, allowing them to move in would cross the line between employer and employee. It would put an end to an eight-hour work day and force them to work twenty-four-hour shifts.

In reality, that was only a quarter of my real fear. The main thing running through my mind was the question of what I would tell my mother. The news of my living with two men would be enough to give Mom a trans-Atlantic heart attack. In our culture, it’s simply not done. There was a saying from the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) that when an unmarried man and woman are alone, they are accompanied by a third: Satan. Add two men and double that. I shook my head and explained how touched I was by the sentiment, but on many levels it was not an acceptable solution.

“Then you must leave,” Yusuf exclaimed. “You cannot stay here alone. You will be killed or kidnapped before the summer. We will not be men if we stand by and let that happen. There are only two options: we move in or you move out.”

I was stunned by his bluntness but begrudgingly realized he was right. This was probably the only solution. But I could not imagine the conversation I would have to have with my parents to explain the situation. Although I was almost thirty, I still needed their permission. And although I have been known to be a talented salesperson, this arrangement was going to be a tough sell.

I checked to make sure their families were aware of what they were thinking. I was truly touched by the conversation with Fadi’s and Yusuf’s mothers, who both reiterated the same sense of urgency in providing me protection. Convinced by Fadi and Yusuf’s arguments, I agreed that I would discuss it further with my family and with headquarters.

Women for Women was happy with the arrangement, provided it was clear it was strictly voluntary and being done out of a personal rather than any professional commitment. My parents were not as easy to convince. The ideal solution in their mind was for me to get the hell out of Iraq. When he realized I would not accept this as an option, my father began to question me about the arrangements. I explained the layout of the house, describing it as a large villa with four bedrooms on the second level and a master bedroom on the ground floor. I would be taking the master bedroom that had an en suite bathroom. The boys would stay upstairs. The master bedroom had a lock, and I promised to lock it every night. Reluctantly, my father agreed it was better than my staying alone.

Up until then I had suppressed any feelings of hope. Once my father agreed, I openly celebrated. Finally, something was going my way. I decided that the cloud of misfortune over my head had blown away. After all, it was truly amazing that I was faced with absolutely no opposition. In any other context, the idea of a boss living with her staff—a Muslim woman living with male bachelors—would have been scandalous. Yet in the surreal backdrop of Baghdad, it seemed like the natural solution.

***

The next month was one of the worst in Iraq. Granted, over the next few years the contest for worst month would be hard to judge. But April 2004 is still one of the primary candidates. It was one of the first times the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was able to demonstrate the strength of his militia by confronting the coalition forces. The U.S. military responded robustly to the four Americans killed in Fallujah with a month-long siege that left hundreds of Iraqis dead and even more displaced, many of them women and children.

It was not a good month for U.S. soldiers either. In fact, it was the deadliest month for Americans since the 2003 invasion, with 135 soldiers killed. The road to the airport was now known as Death Row due to the large number of deaths from roadside bombings. By the end of April, fuel was added to the flames when news of the physical and sexual abuse of prisoners in the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison at the hands of U.S. troops hit the international news wires. The soldiers were the main ones to feel the impact of the news. Many needed to hold on to the belief that they were making the lives of Iraqis better, but the news of Abu Ghraib was demoralizing.

The news didn’t have such a large impact on the Iraqis themselves, however. Throughout the previous year, most Iraqis knew very well what was happening inside the prison walls. For many Iraqis it just reinforced their belief in American double standards when it came to human rights and justice. Others were quick to point out it was nothing in comparison to the torture Saddam and his cronies subjected the people to.

The day after CBS aired Abu Ghraib photos on
60 Minutes,
I met with my friend Capt. Anne Murphy. I was shocked to see her in civilian clothes, a punishable offence subject to court-martial. She explained to me that she had voluntarily enlisted in the army because she believed it was her duty, but after seeing the photos of Abu Ghraib, she felt ashamed to wear her uniform.

***

During the worst incidents, I would be under house arrest, ordered so by my organization’s security officer and headquarters. Sometimes I would not be able to leave the house for days. As much as I disliked it, I knew I was treading a thin line with my insistence on staying in Baghdad, and so I willingly acceded to all the additional security procedures.

Despite all that was going on outside, April was one of my best months on a personal level. Somehow the men in my house helped me to create my own protected bubble. On the days I was allowed outside, we established a routine that included all the necessary
Mission: Impossible
–like tactics needed to complete a workday. I still managed to visit the women’s centers we had established in various districts across Baghdad, and I often met with Iraqi women’s organizations with which I worked in close partnership. Meetings in the Green Zone were limited, though, because of rumors that insurgents were monitoring the checkpoints and that people were being followed.

I watched these events with dismay as they unfolded. How could I keep ignoring the fact that Baghdad was no longer safe when even seemingly harmless acts such as looking out a window could prove fatal?

The reality that I could easily be caught in a roadside bomb had slowly seeped into my conscious, and somewhere along the line I had come to terms with the concept of a wrong-time, wrong-place death. I made it a habit never to leave the house without completing my prayers and asking God for forgiveness.

***

Within twenty-four hours of Yusuf and Fadi’s moving in, all awkwardness between my roommates and me disappeared. The house was large enough to accommodate us without infringing on my privacy. By the second night, Salah and Mais had joined us. It was a G-rated Iraqi version of MTV’s
Real World
—only in a war zone.

In the evenings the guys and I stopped being work colleagues and became our own dysfunctional family of sorts. All the men except Salah were single, so most of them spent the entire day and night at my home. Soon the family expanded, and we developed our own extended community. Salah’s wife and the kids would frequently drop by during the day, as did the mothers of the other men. They often brought pots of food, and we spent entire evenings gorging ourselves on home-cooked meals. The food quickly became legendary.

Every Friday morning Mais would go downtown to get us breakfast:
qahi wa qaymar,
a phyllo puff pastry with thick clotted cream. At lunchtime he would go to our office on the Tigris River and pick up fresh
masghouf
(an open cut river fish) to be grilled and spiced. But he wasn’t just a delivery boy. Mais would often spend hours peeling an entire bag of potatoes and frying them for the best french fries I ever had.

I made desserts and was most renowned for my carrot cake, which was a new phenomenon for the men. Salah would usually coerce his wife into making something, and Fadi and Yusuf were responsible for the endless supply of Diet Cokes in the refrigerator. Who knew that those Fridays would become some of the best days of my life?

The only request the four men made was that I teach them English. I have never been a good teacher, so in the true American spirit I turned to my main learning tools: television and board games. I had the not-so-bright idea of starting with Scrabble. But when the vocabulary pool was limited to
dog, cat, run,
and
fun,
I realized we had to get more elementary. So we jumped into my DVD collection and started with
Finding Nemo.
It was no mean feat to get four Iraqi men to watch a cartoon, but I was never one for easy struggles. All movies included my constant commentary.

I created a syllabus of movies as my crash course to the American immigrant experience, starting with mafia flicks from
Carlito’s Way
to
The Usual Suspects,
interspersed with
My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Selena,
and
American History X
to emphasize diversity.

When we did move back to games, such as Uno and Arabic Scrabble, they evolved into the ultimate battle of wits. As the only female among four Iraqi men, there was a lot of pressure to win. The symphony of gunshots was drowned out, and the bomb explosions that caused the windows to shake only added emphasis when I managed to take over another country in the game of world domination, Risk.

Soon, our lives centered on DVDs, board games, and food. I gained ten pounds during the first three weeks that the guys moved in. I wasn’t the only one. The five of us started discussions for our internal competition to see who could lose the most weight. On the day that we decided to start our biggest loser competition, however, Mais brought home my favorite brownies from a bakery in Al Hamra, together with sour cream and onion Pringles, and dozens of different chocolate bars for our late-night moviethon. Mais explained this was our “farewell to food” party. We would eat all our favorite foods and start the diet the next day. I took one look at the junk food–laden coffee table and exclaimed, “Let’s pig out!”

Four pairs of eyes stared at me with bewilderment. I tried to explain that pigging out meant eating to our hearts’ content, but then I realized the pig allegory wasn’t going to work. I had never thought of what an inappropriate phrase that was in a Muslim country where Islam forbids the eating of pigs. Mais quickly grasped the concept, however, and he was thrilled by the term. Thus our “Pig-Out Parties” were born.

Somehow the competition for who could lose the most weight was indefinitely postponed, and the farewell to food was extended from one final night to the weekend, to a week, to the resolution of the al-Sadr saga.

***

Although I was grateful to the men for staying at my home, I had to draw some lines. First was establishing a firm curfew. The citywide curfew that was sometimes imposed by the CPA was not enough of a deterrent. There were times when the guys wandered back to the house at midnight, even though we had agreed on a 10 p.m. curfew.

One night Mais did not return until 10:15. When he knocked at the door, I refused to open it unless he promised he would never be late again.

He agreed, and I let him in. Then he lugged a sack of potatoes into the kitchen and threw it on the table. Mais gave me a lopsided grin by way of apology. His grins had slowly come to symbolize my virtual security blanket. There was something about it that made me feel like everything was going to be all right.

Mais ripped the sack open and pulled out a potato. He held it up in the palm of his hand, saying, “I make the best fingers in Iraq.”

I never figured out where that Iraqi euphemism came from, but that didn’t make his french fries any less delicious.

“Nobody can know that I cook,” Mais said. “It doesn’t look very good for an Iraqi man to be behind the stove.”

Mais loved to open his sentences with a conspiratorial whisper of “nobody can know.” Two nights ago this statement followed one of his frequent visits to the Internet café: “Manal, nobody can know how much time I spend at the Internet café.”

Mais was an emerging Arabian Don Juan, although he was embarrassed by the fact that his love connections were cyber-based. Most nights he would stay at the café until dawn and chat with girls online. He seemed to have skipped his adolescent years, and now that he was knocking at the door of thirty, he seemed hell-bent on getting as much Internet love as possible.