We climbed five thousand feet past the apiaries to a hill station called Thandiani to pick a chicken, have it killed, and drink Sprite. Like Aunt S. and her family, they spoke Hindko up here, a Punjabi dialect named for its relation to India, Hind, as a distinction from the Pashto all around. Thandiani means “cool wind” in Hindko—and the descent felt all the hotter for it.
FROM: MASHA
SUBJECT: (NO SUBJECT)
FRI AT 10:53 PM
I have been trying to help you be you by accepting that you would rather be in Iraq or the Sudan than with me . . . but its hard. And i want you to choose me.
CHAPTER 9
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IRAQ
OÙ EVE!
MASHA HELD MY KITE string, in the way that is almost always good for a kite. Or really—she was the string, the security against fears of drifting off the planet, and I felt safer to have her knotted to me wherever I went. She was stuck to a place, though—in America—and I couldn’t imagine being so stuck to any solid ground.
After nine months apart, it was infinitely clear that we couldn’t stay together long distance if we didn’t see each other’s faces. I flew to Chicago for a fast week in a small hotel. The world of deep dish pizza and pork sausages and hand-holding in the streets: I was electrified to be with her, and nearly panicked to get home to Abu Dhabi. Like I’d left the kettle on, and it was screaming.
I was sick almost from the first bite of pepperoni until the plane back, uncomfortable with the comfort she offered.
I DIDN’T FEAR IRAQ as much as I obsessed over it, quietly. And I didn’t obsess in the notebook-pages-filled-with-its-name kind of way. It was a name that had reverberated just under surface awareness since we—and it was we—began to bomb it—and only since then. And what a good name to do the reverberating!—in with a vowel, out with the hardest of consonants.
As a boy, I trailed in the logic of a country going to wars; now I’d followed it to the Afghan datelines and through to the place where the punishment for our hurt was executed on its most personal scale. Next, I would have to make the logical leap into Iraq.
Two days before leaving for the Eid al-Adha break, I was about as far as I’d get in the brainstorming phase of a week in Iraqi Kurdistan—the final “itinerary” would be a few phone numbers and a general understanding of the east-to-west order of Kurdistan’s three major cities.
My colleague Nora swiveled to face me from her desk in the corner of a large floor of loosely tangled cubicles in our new, stark, glassy offices in Abu Dhabi. Originally she was from Baghdad, but her Assyrian Christian family, native speakers of a modern dialect of Aramaic, had sought refuge from extremist persecution by Arab Muslims in the south. Now her family lived in Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurdish city of about a quarter million near the border with Turkey.
“I’ve never even seen the waterfalls,” Nora said.
At points off the beautiful road from Dohuk to the capital of Kurdistan in Erbil, there are waterfalls, shillal—or so her family had told her. But they had never packed her in the car to see them, despite the modern Mesopotamian fondness for picnicking in pretty places. The Nineveh Plain, the lush region on the upper banks of the Tigris where the legendary cities of Nineveh and Nimrud poked out from the underbrush of suburban Mosul, was her family’s ancestral homeland. But even there, in the autonomous north where Baghdad is despised, Kurdish nationalism and religious persecution of Christians have not made for the most peaceable homecoming.
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Kurdish autonomy had increased exponentially. As Kurdish minority status in Iraq became majority rule in Iraqi Kurdistan, hawkish nationalism found new enemies to fill the role of Existential Threat. No surprise, then, that the smaller religious minorities are not champions of the region’s new “freedom.”
Echoing Antonia from Maaloula at her café in Syria, Nora felt more comfortable with a minority group in power. Though Saddam’s Baath Party was founded by Shiites with pan-Arab idealism, it quickly became a party of the Sunni minority (about 35 percent of Iraqi Muslims). And even though other ethnic groups were not invited under this umbrella, Nora’s family opposed the full independence of the Kurdish region for fear of becoming foreigners in their own land. Their religion was already a point against them; now, everywhere but in the north, their Kurdish nationality would be, too.
“They want to have their own country. This is impossible,” Nora spoke flatly. “I’m really supporting Saddam in it. This is Iraq—it cannot be divided into two.”
Ever since her father put her and her little sister on a plane in 2001, away from persecution and toward opportunity, she had been a refugee. He was living now in political asylum in the UAE; she was in the process of becoming an Australian. Her brother Fady, his wife, and their tiny twin daughters stayed behind in Dohuk.
Her Australian citizenship process depended on the plea that it was too dangerous to return to Iraq. She browsed tickets on Etihad Airlines that she knew she couldn’t take. Only once she became an Australian could she go home again.
“Take so many pictures,” she said excitedly. “I want to see my country.”
Danny had written me after an unscripted week in Iraqi Kurdistan. You’ve got to go, he said. His roommate and Arabic teacher in Damascus, Khaled, was a Syrian Kurd who told him just before he left about another student of his.
“She went with her friends to Kurdistan and now she’s in an Iranian prison,” Khaled had said. But Danny had come back delighted.
I passed our building’s security desk on the way out to gather American dollars for the trip. (U.S. currency is common tender in Kurdistan, along with Iraqi dinar, and there were no ATMs.) Ahmed, a guard from Egypt, wasn’t happy with my answer about the upcoming days off.
“Why are you going to Iraq? Don’t go to Iraq.” His eyebrows peaked high above the rims of his glasses. “You need to have a reason.” A United Nations worker or a doctor would have valid reasons, he said, but I was just a tourist. I contested unconvincingly, saying something about wanting to distinguish between facts and fears, and seeking connection. “Or maybe I just want to tell a story to a girl at a bar,” I offered. Ahmed laughed, and a shrug rolled from his shoulders to his teeth.
He found it distressing, then curious, that I would choose Iraq. “There is something wrong with your thinking that you see danger and you say, ‘I’m going to go.’ ” He wasn’t upset. At another moment, he might have been right—there were many moments when I saw danger and teased the gas pedal. But Kurdistan was the opposite: I expected peace.
“You will see they are becoming much better than the other parts of Iraq,” Nora had told me. Despite unresolved ethnic and national and spiritual issues, Dohuk was no Baghdad. Kurds had fought the Arabs for hundreds of years, long before Saddam made their persecution a national pastime. For this, “they lived to learn independently,” Nora said, and had been rich even before foreign companies settled in northern cities to corner new markets and prepare for a postwar boom.
Ahmed had never heard anyone say this. He admitted that even his hometown, Cairo, wasn’t now the tourist trap it used to be, but he wasn’t as afraid—he knew more. Iraq was still a great unknown, still one big messy piece he preferred everyone he cared about would stay away from.
“We have a phrase in Islam,” he said grandly: “La tulqu b’ayadkum ila tahluka.” “Don’t throw yourself by your own hands into hell.”
“Jews don’t really believe in hell,” I said, and he laughed. My consequences and rewards were terrestrial things.
EID AL-ADHA, the Festival of the Sacrifice, celebrates Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac and played the role of a long Thanksgiving break. I offered my parents the decoy stories of stuckness in Abu Dhabi while I made arrangements to go to Kurdistan with Charlotte, a college friend working in Dubai, and her friend Sue, whom I knew mostly from e-mail blasts as our former student body president.
Three hours nonstop and we’d
be in Erbil, the Kurdish capital. Of the few facts I knew before takeoff: the seven-thousand-year-old Erbil Citadel, a fortified earthen mound more than a thousand feet wide and a hundred feet tall that UNESCO says “may be regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the world,” sits at the very center of town.
Nora’s brother Fady and his friend Makh picked us up at the airport to spend the afternoon exploring the countryside just outside the capital. Fady, short and stout with a round face and a small snub nose like a grape tomato, appeared almost unceasingly jovial, smiled while he worried, and laughed as a reply to English he didn’t understand. Makh was as quiet as Fady was talkative.
At an intersection near Pirmam, home of the Kurdish Democratic Party’s political bureau, a strange edifice poked out from behind roadside trees, surrounded by low, crumbling walls of some porous material. I thought they really might have been stacks of skulls and femurs. The outer wall of an ancient ruin no bigger than a 7-Eleven, it featured knobby tan and gray stones piling into a tall peak that nearly clipped the telephone wires overhead. A firm overhang shaded the room of an old house or church. Inside, a group of children shared a cigarette, inconspicuous. Out front, a pond of dirty, green water.
Kids scrambled up the rocks. Fady and Makh weren’t exactly sure what the ruin might be—monuments weren’t always well preserved in areas of conflict, what with a revolving cast of bureaucrats responsible for creating agencies of preservation. “Maybe four thousand years ago,” said Makh. It didn’t seem impossible—archeological research had confirmed sedentary presence in the area far earlier.
Content with our analyses, we tromped back to the car, nodding to a man who looked local. What the hell, I thought, maybe he knows something.
“How old is this? Maybe eight . . .” he threw his head toward the bony piles, remembering. My ears buzzed. Eight thousand years of mankind, here! No travel advisory would keep me from the Cradle of Civilization! My heart jumped, in those milliseconds before he spoke again, in the breath before “. . . or nine years.”
Through tears of laughter, I wondered how many of my other gut feelings influenced by a little local confidence had been 99.6 percent wrong. Fady and Makh smiled, too, embarrassed a little about their tour guiding. “I am not from Erbil,” said Fady.
We drove a little farther on to the town of Shaqlawa. On the right, one side of a huge valley slopes up into a sharp slablike ridge. To the left, across the brown and yellow space sprinkled lightly with stubby trees, the opposite escarpment looked like a long cut of pepper steak sliced into thick strips to reveal a deep, smooth red. We turned back toward town.
ERBIL’S MAIN STREETS are concentric orbits around the Citadel, which looks down on the fountains of Shar Park from the top of the massive hill covered thoroughly in steep stone slabs. The hill was home to Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians through the millennia, claimed by the Third Dynasty of Ur, Assyrians, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Muslims, Mongols, Ottomans and now the Kurdish government.
Two hundred feet away, the Rubenesque singer at the Erbil Tower Hotel’s second-floor bar was squeezed into a skin-tight pink evening gown with a sheen like thinly striped wallpaper, a long slit running up her midthigh, and she thumped to the music and crooned a few notes when breaks from her repartee with tables of dark-haired men allowed. I wasn’t sure if I could call her voluptuous, Iraq being, as I thought, a conservative country. If I could, though, she was.
Tresses of straightened black hair framed an image of heavy white makeup lit irregularly by rotating disco lights of primary colors, flaming sparklers the men would buy from the pink lady, and the unmistakable sound of Arabian pop synth when the keyboardist felt like playing. We were sitting in the back on red velvet couches. “We have another beer from Turkey,” the bartender suggested, and presented Heinekens from Amsterdam.
The singer spoke deeply into the microphone. “Here are my friends from Falujah!” Howls from the front. “Anyone from Basra?” Cheers. “Baghdad?” Bigger cheers. They couldn’t care less where the beer was from.
She never cooed Philadelphia? or The Upper East Side? or Detroit? And so I sat gladly and conspicuously on the velvet with Charlotte and Sue, watching this room of outsiders from the outside.
One of the Erbil drinkers shouted to us over the noise of the bar and the fizzing of the sparklers his table had bought. He said he was having a party on Tuesday. (On Tuesday, just as he said, he called with an invitation.) He paid for our Heinekens. Beer was liberty; the noise was liberating, and the farther these tourists had come—in distance, in difficulty—the happier they were to be in Kurdistan.
OUR TRIPLE ROOM on the ninth floor was the pink of a faded skirt. The bathroom was pastel yellow. We had worried about room-sharing rules for unmarried men and women, but the hotel asked no questions despite our name that mismatched far beyond the possibility for claims of kinship (Chinese, and German-Jewish sounding). It hardly ever mattered. In restaurants we were always seated in the family section (as groups with one or more women always are) and we were treated warmly everywhere as a blend of long-lost relative, zoo animal, alien, and celebrity.
Minutes after we rode the outdoor escalator into Hawler Mall (Hawler is the city’s Kurdish name, Erbil is Arabic—and with whatever we Anglophones called it, we made a little political statement), I felt the weight of universal public curiosity. The gaze was hot, my neck hairs spiked, my skin moved as if I were connected by strings to everyone I could see.
I pointed my camera at a couple of groups of mall-trawling guys with a standard pairing of gelled hair and leather jackets, but soon the tables turned. Crowds sensed action and gathered, almost everyone pushing to have their picture taken with us, the foreigners, or pushing their friends in as if on a dare. On the mezzanine of this mall that sold nearly identical Western-looking merchandise from nearly identical stores manned only by silvery mannequins with no faces and, maybe, some of the curious we were posing with, we obliged as long as we could and kept snapping, with our cameras or with theirs; the product didn’t seem to matter. We hardly ever spoke. We said we were from America. I’d never felt so famous.
When we rode down, they seemed to follow and lead, a tight circle of dozens and dozens of Kurdish teens and adults thronging toward the escalator, out of the mall and across the street, chattering, praising the USA, and halting traffic like a small protest fueled by fascination. Occasionally, someone would present himself as an envoy, suggesting with body language to follow him, to escape from the riffraff. We’d follow for moments, not to escape, but to adventure further until, muddled into lanes of slow-moving cars, we realized our ushers had nowhere to go either. Still, the group lingered. Who were we?
My female companions were more uneasy. It was possible to feel their attention-gathering as something of a different sort. After dark on this crisp November night, there were only men on the Saturday streets of Erbil; there were only men in the malls and at the bar. Only by the fountains in Shar Park, dead in the center of the city, did we see a few small groups of women in headscarves gathering around the fountains lit from below with colored lights. A woman in her black abaya sat with some kids, playing. Everywhere else I looked, women had simply disappeared.
I CALLED FADY after the morning azan. Staggered from every corner of the city, the sounds of the call to prayer were richer than I remembered hearing anywhere else, evolving in a lilting weave and dissolving into the sounds of streetside banter. Mosque megaphones broadcast morning sermons that overlapped with other calls broadcast to those in bed, wafting in gentle cacophony from a hundred minarets up to our pink room on the ninth floor. An hour or so after the first call had sounded it was quiet again—only a handful of mosques were still active in the distance, fading. A car would whoosh by every now and then and disappear.
Fady answered my fourth call. He had decided to leave the night before, abandoning us, and was already in Dohuk. The city felt deserted, too—it was the morning of Eid al-Adha, the Greater Eid
, the holiest of all Islamic holidays, and Muslims were busy commemorating Abraham’s obedience. In reverence they would make sacrifices of their own, on the creature substituted for Abraham’s son. I watched drainage ditches and street gutters trickle bright red with sheep’s blood.
Sue and Charlotte didn’t feel forsaken. I hadn’t even thought it was possible to rent a car in Iraq, but it was, and soon we had one, because Sue was from Detroit, Motor City, and having a car was like packing a water bottle. Free for the moment, we sped off on clear roads to the north.
HIGHWAY 3 RUNS FROM ERBIL about 180 kilometers to the Iranian border, and is known by many as the Hamilton Road, named for its New Zealand engineer who completed it in 1932. In between, on one of the five mountain ranges of varying severity, I noticed something humbling out the back window of our Hyundai: a man in a brown T-shirt and shorts, protected from nippy autumn winds only by simple gloves, was cresting this couple-thousand-foot climb on his bike. He had a shaved head and an American military look about him, wearing a hikers’ backpack and smiling as he pedaled. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses. We wished one another well through the window, and Clay—he told us his name with breath to spare and an accent just like mine—pushed on uphill.
Hours later we were parking at the Gali Ali Beg waterfall. The pride of all of Iraq, Gali Ali Beg is printed on the back of the blue five-thousand dinar note (about enough to get kebab nearby). In one of its did-anyone-actually-come-here moments, our Lonely Planet had given us cause for dissatisfaction: the “80 meter” cascade they describe is really on the much shorter side of 80 feet (more like 50–60). Still, Iraqi tourists, who came from all across the country, were genuinely wowed—unspoiled like us natives of waterfall-rich countries with easy road trips.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 14