Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  * * *

  When buildings fall down in Cairo, as they frequently do, Egyptian engineers often blame the collapse on “metal fatigue,” as though the structural beams simply give out from accumulated exhaustion and stress. I returned from Iran feeling the journalistic equivalent. I had turned thirty at an Arab summit in Algiers, waiting for a midnight press conference with Colonel Qaddafi. I had turned thirty-one at Khomeini’s grave, amid a sea of head-beating Shiites. I wasn’t sure what to do for an encore. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

  Midnight flights to Baghdad and boat rides to Beirut were losing their thrill. Cairo had once seemed exotic and abrasive. Now it just seemed abrasive. I was weary of peeling, disinfecting and voodooing the bacteria from bruised fruit and limp carrots; weary of bribing the mailman so he wouldn’t toss our mail in the gutter; weary of the heat, the dust and most of all the noise. In between flights, I’d taken to shutting the city out, wrapping myself in a cocoon of Herald Tribunes and long-distance phone calls. And by the end of my second year it had become a ritual, that sunset run, as the faithful prayed and “Boogie Oogie Oogie” thundered through my headset.

  * * *

  Soon after our trip to Iran, I returned from a run one hot night to find Geraldine at the door with a bubbly grin on her face and a flat Egyptian beer in her hand. While I’d been boogy-oogying around the track, she’d been phoning friends and gathering intelligence. She had heard word of a job opening in London that I might apply for, and a chance for her to transfer there as well.

  I slumped in front of our Middle Kingdom air conditioner to consider the news. Free-lancing had worked out much better than I’d originally dreamed possible, carrying me to fifteen countries—usually at someone else’s expense—and into the pages of a half-dozen newspapers. But there had been plenty of sand traps and double bogeys along the way: long evenings spent hanging on a crackly phone line from Khartoum or Algiers or Tripoli while a secretary in New York or Washington or Atlanta put me on hold so editors could search through their desks for some forgotten story I’d filed weeks before.

  I turned the air conditioner to “high cool” and bathed my head in the lukewarm breeze, trying to clear my brain.

  “Don’t start thinking about a shower,” Geraldine said. “The water’s down.”

  “Malesh,” I said. We’d taken to tossing Arabic phrases into our conversation; malesh—“never mind”—was the one that came most often to our lips.

  “Plenty of showers in London,” Geraldine said. “Indoor and outdoor.”

  “Trees. Grass. Edible vegetables.”

  “Harrods’ food hall.”

  “Mmmm.”

  During a recent six-hour layover in London, we’d managed to spend three hundred dollars at Harrods, all of it on food to carry back to Cairo. I’d felt like applying for citizenship at the checkout counter.

  “Should we go for it?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  The air conditioner wheezed and blew hot. We shared the last inch of beer. I went to type up my résumé. Another Major Life Decision, made on the soundest of grounds.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until we began packing that I felt the first flicker of nostalgia. Where else in the world would I collect the odd trinkets I’d gathered in Arabia? There was the curved dagger I’d secured after endless haggling with the Jewish merchant in Yemen; it had since rusted stuck in its scabbard. There was the PLO keyring I’d been given by an aide to Yassir Arafat, during a four-hour wait for a press conference in Tunis that never happened. I had a Saddam Hussein watch from Iraq and a Khomeini watch from Iran, though neither one told time. And I had a going-away present from Mr. Mahn at the Information Ministry in Baghdad: a small glass globe containing an inch of dirt and a tiny Iraqi flag, commemorating Iraq’s “liberation” of a strategic peninsula called Faw. The globe’s wooden base bore an inscription that read: “The Earth of Faw Mixed with Blood of Iraqi Martyrs.” It was destined for the mantelpiece in London.

  I hit on the television to keep me company while I packed. The English-language news began as it always did, with a crude Mercator projection of the Middle East and an off-speed medley of Arab tunes. An anchorman began reading the AP wire in halting English. There was shelling again in Beirut. Something about hostages in the Bekaa Valley. A new American plan for Middle East peace. And the Israelis had shot dead two more Palestinians in Gaza. I wondered for a moment if Egyptian TV, through oversight or impoverishment, had simply rebroadcast a tape of the news from two years before. Or five. Progress in the Middle East was measured in grains of sand.

  Just before midnight, my Nubian friend, Yousri, showed up to wish me goodbye before heading to work at the hotel. He repaid most of the money I’d lent him eighteen months before to wheedle a visa out of one of a dozen Western embassies. It hadn’t done him any good.

  Yousri perched on the edge of a suitcase, guarding the crease in his trousers, and smoked Cleopatra cigarettes as I finished packing. “You know the old saying,” he said. “He who drinks of the Nile always comes back. Insha’allah.” God willing. It was the same line Egyptians gave every departing Westerner.

  “I only drink bottled water,” I said.

  Yousri smiled. “Don’t kid yourself, man. Most of those bottles are filled from the Nile, too.”

  He went silent for a moment, then asked, “What’s England like?”

  “Cold and wet. Nothing like Egypt.”

  “Must be a good place, then.”

  I looked up. Yousri seemed on the verge of tears. In twenty-four hours I would be back in the First World, reading about the Middle East on the Underground. Yousri would be back working the graveyard shift at the hotel. Probably forever.

  “I cannot wait much longer,” he said, having waited his whole life already. “I will shortly go out of my mind.”

  I reflected, not for the first time, on the accidents of birth and place that had landed Yousri here and me on a plane out the following day. I responded, reflexively, with a material offering.

  “Here, your pick from the summer collection,” I said, gesturing at my frayed wardrobe of shirts and jackets. It wasn’t much. But I couldn’t see that Yousri would have much use for a Yemeni dagger or a watch with Saddam Hussein’s face on the dial.

  “Tony. I can’t take those.”

  “Why not? You think I’m going to wear short sleeves in London?”

  Reluctantly, he picked through the pile, plucking out the three items with faded designer labels. He left the rest. “Too much synthetic,” he said, casting a discerning eye across the discards. “I prefer one hundred percent cotton.”

  Yousri, like Egypt, had nothing to lose but his pride.

  * * *

  Months later, on a raw November day, I received a letter from Cairo. It was carefully typed in capital letters on a small page of hotel stationery.

  HI TONY MAN!

  HOW ARE YOU IN COLD RAINY LONDON!

  ABOUT ME I’M STILL LOOKING FOR AWAY TO BREAK. I HAVEN’T LOST HOPE YET!

  MAN IT’S SO BORING HERE NO THING HAPPENED AND EVERY DAY IS THE SAME!

  I STOPPED READING NEWSPAPERS I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE TRUTH IS!

  BUT LIFE GOES ON AND TIME IS THE INVISABLE ENMY FOR ME!

  I’M TRYING NOW TO IMPROVE MY FRENCH SINCE I SEE SO MANY FRENCH LADIES!

  IF YOU WANT ME TO COME TO LONDON LET ME KNOW AND MAYBE I CAN GET VISA!

  WELL TAKE CARE MAN AND WRITE SOON!

  YOUSRI

  I put the paper in my pocket and headed out into the drizzle, composing a letter in my head. I would tell Yousri about the cold, about the pasty English women, about the bad food and warm beer. And I’d tell him to come to London, just the same.

  Insha’allah, we’d find a way.

  Epilogue

  No One Makes Love to Iraq

  Yousri was right: I would be back, though it was t
he Tigris, not the Nile, to which I returned.

  Twelve months after leaving Egypt, I switched on the BBC one morning to learn that Iraqi tanks had overrun Kuwait. A few hours later, I’d been redeployed by my editors to the Middle East, on a Royal Jordanian jet crowded with Palestinian businessmen drunkenly toasting Saddam Hussein. It would be seven months and eleven countries before I boarded a military transport plane in liberated Kuwait for the long trip home again.

  After a year of writing features in Europe—most recently about elf worship in Iceland—I was badly out of shape. The submachine guns poking through taxi windows made me uneasy. My Arabic was so rusty that I was reduced to making small talk with toddlers (“My name is Tony. What’s yours?”). And I’d forgotten to pack key Middle East accessories, such as wads of hard currency and an album’s worth of passport-sized snapshots.

  So it was that I found myself one sweaty afternoon, crouched outside the Iraqi embassy in Amman, cutting up my Scotland Yard press pass to get at the plastic-coated mug shot inside. The short walk to the embassy had become my daily constitutional and ritual humiliation. Each time I’d ask for an alcoholic press attaché named Mr. Adnon. Each time a man would scowl at me through the embassy’s tiny, barred window and bark, “Adnon not here!” or “No visa!” One day he blankly announced, “Mr. Adnon dead. First martyr of the Mother of All Battles.” After a moment he cackled grimly and slammed the window shut. Iraqi joke.

  Then one day Mr. Adnon appeared and blearily announced that my visa had been granted. All he needed was another photo to add to the dozen or so I’d given the embassy already. Mutilating my Scotland Yard pass, I imagined information ministries across the region, their drawers overflowing with the same blurry, box-camera snapshot a sweaty Egyptian man had taken of me three years before, on my first day in the Middle East.

  At a nearby pharmacy, I scored an anti-dysentery drug with the reassuring French name Arret. And through a wan moneychanger named Ali H. Ali, I managed to cash a personal check—at a fee of ten percent. Cashed up, passport stamped, and stomach in a tenuous state of arret, I was as ready as I ever would be for another expedition to Iraq.

  * * *

  Or three expeditions, as it turned out, the last just a day before American bombs dismembered Baghdad. With the benefit of hindsight, the journeys form a melancholy triptych, each panel darker than the one before, charting Iraq’s slow and inexorable slide into war.

  Arriving in Baghdad on the last day of August, I was struck once again by the jarring contrast between desert light and dictatorial gloom. Diplomats had once dubbed Baghdad “Moscow-on-the-Tigris,” but the name never stuck. With its Mesopotamian sun and riverside lushness, Baghdad always seemed a surreal backdrop to despotism, as if painted by Henri Magritte.

  The foreground, however, had changed during my two years’ absence. Revolution in eastern Europe—particularly in Bucharest, Baghdad’s sister city—had evidently spooked Saddam Hussein. Soon after Ceausescu’s fall, Saddam lifted the long-standing ban on overseas travel by Iraqis. Foreign newspapers briefly appeared on the streets; even the weather report returned to the airwaves after a six-year pause (announcing with withering regularity that the midday temperature was 110). And intersections that had once displayed four huge portraits of Saddam were down to only one.

  But Iraqi perestroika had its limits. When I optimistically asked for a map at the desk of the Baghdad Sheraton, the receptionist looked at me as though I’d dialed room service and ordered a gun. “I am so sorry,” she said, pointing me toward an Information Ministry desk in the lobby. “I am sure they can tell you where to go.”

  Information policy also was depressingly familiar. When I casually inquired about the missing Saddam portraits, an official at the Ministry desk assured me, “It is normal. They needed to be cleaned.”

  Or, more likely, enlarged. Wandering the city, I quickly realized that while the number of Saddam portraits had plunged, new likenesses hewed to the architectural axiom “Less is more.” One fresh sculpture rivaled the Colossus of Rhodes, four stories high, with Saddam’s outstretched arm casting a shadow the length of a football field. Even Iraqis seemed stunned by its size. “Normally, you must be dead before they put up something so big,” a taxi driver confided, stalled in traffic beneath the statue’s Promethean gaze. A much smaller monument, titled Arab Horseman, had been yanked down from an adjoining lot so as not to obstruct the view of Saddam’s shins.

  In a nearby parade ground, a new monument called Hands of Victory soared a hundred and fifty feet into the air. The hands—pharaonic in scale and modeled on Saddam’s—clutched enormous crossed sabers, their hilts draped with nets of Iranian helmets. There was a certain irony to the monument now that Saddam had unsheathed his sword again, this time to smite Kuwait. The Baghdad Observer no longer featured the staple of two years before—Orwellian communiqués about victories on some distant front of the never-ending war with Iran. Instead, in an even eerier echo of 1984, history had been hastily rewritten. Persians, the perennial foes, had become “fraternal” allies, while the Gulf sheikdoms that had once bankrolled Iraq were now the “backward agents” of the West.

  Iraq had enemies everywhere—just as Mohammed the fishmonger had told me. I found Mohammed where I’d left him two years before, in a blood-stained smock, clubbing fish at his restaurant by the Tigris. Thrashing around in their tiled tub of water, the unsuspecting fish looked fat and happy. Mohammed didn’t.

  “Business is no good,” he said, waving his monkey wrench at the sole customer in his restaurant. The trade blockade on Iraq was starting to bite, and most other restaurants in Baghdad had already closed as milk, meat, and other amenities disappeared from the shops.

  Still, Mohammed seemed glad to see me, even though America had joined the long list of Iraq’s enemies. “And Egypt and Saudi and England and France and Russia,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers. I pointed out that Iran, at least, was off Iraq’s hit list.

  “Persians be enemies again someday,” he predicted—correctly as it turned out. “No one makes love to Iraq.”

  I offered Mohammed a consoling beer at the neon-lit club where he’d taken me one midsummer’s night two years before. I was curious to see if the quality of the bar girls had improved, as Mohammed had hoped. For the first time his mood brightened. “I only go out with Allah now,” he said. He pointed at a picture of Mecca that now hung above his fish tank, beside a dusty portrait of Saddam. Mohammed had found religion.

  “Nine years I throw my dinars away at ugly women and bad beer. Why I do this?” Clutching his monkey wrench, Mohammed smiled suggestively at the fish tank. “Stay here, Mr. Tony. I make you nice dinner.”

  I declined the offer and ducked across the street to visit the nightclub without him. The joint was closing early for lack of customers, but the doorman said I could poke my head in for a quick look around. Two Iraqis hunched over a half-empty bottle of whiskey as a lone dancer shuffled back and forth across the stage. Months-old tinsel hung from the rafters, cigarette burns scarred the tablecloths. One amplifier had blown out, bombarding half the club with deafening warbles and feedback.

  The doorman, a glum Egyptian named Omar, said the club would probably close for good now that the free-spending Kuwaitis no longer came to town. “Kuwaitis paid, got drunk, and paid some more,” he said. Even Egyptians—the club’s other principal clientele—were fleeing Iraq in the mass exodus of foreign workers. “I think the happy days are all done in Baghdad,” Omar said.

  I walked back past shuttered shops, then found a bench by the riverbank. Antiaircraft emplacements, which had come down after the Iran-Iraq war, had been resurrected now that enemies threatened again. At one o’clock on a weekend night, the only other person in sight was a soldier snoozing over his submachine gun.

  A night out in Baghdad was never my idea of a good time. But it depressed me that what little vitality the city once possessed was draining away so fast. War or no war, Ira
q seemed destined to become a desert Albania: destitute and lifeless, armored against the outside world.

  * * *

  It was a lonely and defiant stance that the Iraqi leadership relished. Saddam, after all, had spent eight of his eleven years as president exhorting his citizens to war. Conventional wisdom held that he’d invaded Kuwait to buoy Iraq’s economy. But I half suspected Saddam simply had no aptitude, or appetite, for ruling his country in peace. Not for him the humdrum business of balancing budgets and building vocational schools. The bunker was where he belonged.

  Saddam’s imperial dream state percolated through the media. Newspaper cartoons showed camels urinating on U.S. soldiers in the desert. A front-page story gleefully reported that the Kuwaiti royal family was riddled with syphilis. Meanwhile, in America, legions of protestors demonstrated against “the devil Bush, aided by criminal Zionism.”

  One architect of this fantasy, the Honorable Minister of Information and Culture, had become a media superstar. When I’d interviewed him two years before, Latif Jasim was a pistol-toting stiff who spoke only in staccato Arabic. Now he held frequent press briefings, grinning broadly as he made small talk in exuberantly bad English. The only echo of my earlier visit was the minister’s careful choice of couches: he still sat with his back to the wall, facing the open door.

  He also remained reticent about his background. When a reporter asked about the minister’s birthplace, Jasim replied, “Kuwait.” He waited a moment, then laughed awkwardly. “This is a joke,” he added, as though it were the first he’d ever attempted. Kuwait, of course, no longer existed. A map in the Information Ministry showed the emirate as the nineteenth province of Iraq, with one section of the annexed territory already renamed Saddamiyat. The ministry also had rushed into print a book called End of Fragmentation, which laid out the historical roots of Kuwait’s “return to the Motherland,” just four weeks before.

  Jasim rambled on for an hour, spouting the usual Iraqi absurdities. He said “documents” proved that George Bush had dispatched U.S. troops solely to protect his own stake in several oil companies. A week before, Jasim had announced that any U.S. airmen shot down over Iraq would be eaten. Iraq’s allies counseled him that this was a tad extreme, even by Baghdad standards—so Jasim corrected himself at the next press conference, saying that the bodies would be fed to dogs. Pressed for details this time, he moderated the threat again: “Your soldiers will go down in the sand. You will not find them.”