“You want me to work with you?”
“You’d be perfect for the job.”
“But I’m not a journalist. Or an interpreter. I’m an English teacher.”
“That’s why I’d really like you to work with me. You’d make a fantastic translator. Where did you learn your English? Oh, right, in England, you said.”
She puts her arm deep into her bag, then brings out a small leather case. She snaps it open and takes out a white card. I run my finger over the raised letters. Samara B. Katchens. Paris Bureau Chief. Under her name, she has written in a curling script the name of her hotel and the room number which she had passed to me in the hospital. “This is what I meant to give you yesterday, but I couldn’t find it.”
“Paris? You live in France? Not in America?”
“I’m based in Paris. Doesn’t mean I actually live much of my life there.” She peers in the car window and smiles. Perhaps towards Rizgar, or perhaps at her own reflection. “Can you come by tomorrow? Make it the next day. Maybe you need time with your family.”
“I don’t know, Miss Samara...”
“Call me Sam.”
“Sam, yes. Well, you know, I have no training in your line of work. Or in interpreting.”
“Who said you need any training? It’s innate. Some people have it, some people don’t.” She lifts a shoulder. “I can see you’re one of those people who do. Please, just come. Okay?”
“I can’t promise you,” I hear myself say. “And forgive me for asking, but how did you find me?”
“Oh, that was easy. I went back to the hospital and asked where your dad lives. They gave me the name of the neighbourhood, and there they said to come here, that you’d be at your friend’s funeral,” Sam explains matter-of-factly. And then, with some contrition: “It’s sad. I hope you weren’t close with her.”
“You asked for me in Yarmouk?”
“Yeah.” She smiles, clearly proud of herself, and clearly oblivious of what that might mean for me. “I usually find what I’m looking for.”
“How about your friend?”
Her eyes lose focus and her nostrils widen. “Still missing.”
I see Sam to the door of the huge car, which says Cherokee Jeep on the back. Only when she opens the door can I see Rizgar waiting behind the wheel. She waves and I wave back to her, my mind tumbling with what my neighbours are already saying.
~ * ~
4
Tumbling
In our living room my father flicks the light switch, but there is no light. He switches it back and forth, curses and lifts the end table with the lamp on it and slams it down again. “Bastards! How are we supposed to live without any light?” The lamp falls over but lands on the carpeted floor. Amal is standing behind me and I can hear the break in her throat and she starts to cry. My mother announces that they are going to bed.
With dim light trickling in from outside, I watch her walk Amal to her room. In a few minutes, my mother comes back with an old torch from the kitchen.
She hands it to Baba. “We’ll buy an oil lamp tomorrow,” she says. Baba switches the torch on and off. “Excellent,” he says. “Maybe the next day we will trade in our car for a donkey! Would you like that?”
I worry that my mother might start to cry, too, but instead she exhales a brusque retort through her nostrils. “Don’t you start, Amjad. And don’t stay up too late.”
Baba sits in his favourite armchair in the dark, and I sit on the sofa across from him. It’s quiet except for the ticking of the antique mantle clock on the shelf above the dining table. My father bought it when we visited London during our time in Birmingham, despite my mother’s objections. Mum said she’d never be able to read the Roman numerals. To him this was already a compromise; he’d wanted a grandfather clock that was taller than a person, but acknowledged it would be difficult to get it back to Baghdad. In tense moments, the ticking reminds me of a children’s book we read in England, Through the Looking Glass. The clock isn’t saying tick tock, but saying tsk, tsk.
My father switches the torch off and on again, and shines it in my face. “Where were you on the night of the eighth?” he growls in a perfect Tikriti accent, just like a real guy from the mukhabarat. Saddam’s men usually have that countryside drawl.
“Start talking,” he orders, and we both laugh a little.
He flashes it on and off again, and I realize now why Americans call this a flashlight. I suddenly remember the game my brother and I used to play with the torch as children, when we were off school and would stay up late, making each other dance in the strobe light that we’d create by toggling the torch switch as fast as we could. The jumpy movements, the light that came and went, made the dancing person look like he was in an old black-and-white film. If I reminded Ziad of this now, he’d say he didn’t remember. Ziad, my brother, a doctor like Baba, is living comfortably with his young family in Marseille, France. He is my parents’ success story.
Baba stops his light show and places the torch on the wooden side table, leaving the beam of light to shine on the ceiling. Its white disc is like a small, full moon above, providing some relief from the darkness.
“I still can’t believe Mahmoud’s daughter is gone,” Baba says. “She was so young.”
My father has never liked to deal with emotional complications. Medical crises are much more manageable. There is either a cure or there isn’t.
“There is no justice in this world,” he adds. “Even if every imam up and down the Tigris tells you it is God’s will that innocent martyrs die in this war, don’t believe them.” He stares at me in the dark. For a moment, his eyes seem brighter than the torch. “Would God let an innocent girl like Noor die? And the whole Alusi family?” The Alusis were a family of five who died last week, when the Americans tried to get Saddam while he was out at lunch with his sons in Mansour; Baba had once mended a hole in their twelve-year-old daughter’s heart.
I nod and say nothing. Tonight is not the night to challenge my father’s absence of faith. He reaches over and puts his hand on mine, clutches it to the sofa’s armrest. I want to feel thankful for the gesture. But another part of me feels trapped. Pinned, not consoled.
He sits back. “It’s a nightmare, isn’t it? The evening started like a dream and it turned into a nightmare.”
I cannot remember my father ever speaking in such terms. Since when did he ask after my dreams? The clock clucks slowly, marking our silences.
“Nabil, you know it was one of ours, right?”
“What was?” I ask.
“The bullet that hit her. It was Saddam’s fadayoon shooting at the American helicopters. Can you imagine? Bullets at helicopters. So we have our own brilliant defenders to thank.”
“For...Noor’s death?”
Baba sighs. I think he’s still afraid to say anything directly, even in our own home.
“I think I’ll go to bed.” I lean forwards to stand.
“You didn’t seem sad when that foreign woman came in.” I lean further and turn my head from him, glad it’s dark.
“No, Baba, I was just — surprised. I didn’t expect her to come.”
“You were very keen to help her at the hospital. You were practically flirting with her.”
“She was desperate for help! I was only trying to help. Her, and her friends. She wasn’t alone.” I hate sounding like I’m trying to justify myself, but it’s too late.
This is one of my father’s oldest tricks: a brush at being understanding, an opening, followed by censure. It’s a boxing match that’s been fixed: I will always lose. But now it’s pointless for me to hide the real reason she came.
“She wants me to work with her.”
“With an American lady? In the middle of this?”
“What should I do? Sit around at home all day? What are we going to live off? Who will pay the salaries at a government hospital when there is no government?”
“Keep your voice
down.”
“And school, Baba. When do you think it’s starting again? Did you hear what they did to my school today? There isn’t a window left intact. All the books are gone. Burned, stolen, I don’t even know. Gone! They looted almost every desk, every chair.”
His face is full of disbelief. “It’s true,” I say. “It’s to be expected. It was seen as a school for the elite — everyone knows that it’s mostly for wealthy Sunnis. What am I going to do until they repair the school? It will be next September if we’re lucky!”
“It’s only what? April.” My father squints at his beloved clock, as if to figure out the month, and maybe the year as well. “What about all the boys who need to finish the school year?”
“None of the schools are going back until the autumn, only some universities.”
My father breathes in deeply, and lets out a full belly of air. He takes the torch off the table and slaps it into the palm of his left hand, sending a whir of light against the wall. “Who did you say she works for?”
“I don’t remember. The Tribune?”
“In London?”
I consider lying. “No, in America.”
My father puts two fingers on each eye and rubs his eyelids in and out, like he might be able to erase something from sight. “What will your mother say?”
~ * ~
I lie in bed with her card, bending it back and forth, listening to its small snap. I flick the torch on and off and look at her name lit up, and then catch its afterglow in my vision in the dark of the room.
Samara B. Katchens. Paris Bureau Chief. On the flip side of the card, the same thing, with the job title in French. The paper is much thicker than other business cards I’ve seen. The edge is sharp enough to slice skin.
There is a quiet knock, then a creaking of the door opening. My sister is in her nightgown, her eyes open as if she has not slept. The clock says 1:20 a.m.
“You’re still awake, too?”
“Go to sleep, Amal. You shouldn’t be up.”
“But you’re playing with the torch. I can see the light beneath my door.”
She comes over to the edge of my bed and sits down. I put my arm around her and kiss the back of her head. I want to say something to her that will sound wise, something that will make her feel strong. Maybe I’m only searching for something to say because I want her to keep looking up to me, the way I looked up to Ziad.
“Noor lived a good life,” I tell Amal. “She was happy before she died. She won’t have to suffer through this like the rest of us.”
Amal looks at me. Her eyebrows contract. They are almost as thick as a man’s: she has yet to be corrupted by Baghdad’s beauty salons, which like to strip eyebrows like hers into thin, doll-like arches. Her eyes are like our grandmother’s, deep-set and wide, like they have eyeliner on them when they don’t. Mine are similar. In junior high school, other boys teased me and said my eyes were pretty, like a girl’s. Baba once told me, somewhat disparagingly, that my eyelashes were as long as a woman’s.
“You really believe that?” Amal fixes me with a look and I have to turn away. Every so often it feels like she is fourteen going on forty. She has none of the impressionability I would want in a daughter of her age. Amal has always been like this. My father says it comes from being a late-in-life child, as he calls it. When Amal was born, I was fourteen and Ziad was sixteen. Amal was always in a rush to grow up, to catch up with us. Amal says she just has an old soul.
“Are you going to work with the American woman?” she asks.
“Who said anything about that?”
“Don’t think I’m stupid, Nabil. I know why she came to the house today.”
“Sometimes I wish you were stupid. Just a little.”
Amal grimaces and tucks her hair behind her ears. Her hair is perfectly straight and black, almost like Joon Park’s. “I think you should do it. You’ll learn loads and make good money. You’ll get to find out what’s really happening and then you’ll come back and tell us stories every night.”
I already know I want to work with Sam. What I didn’t expect is for Amal to encourage me.
She bends her knees and clasps her arms around them. “I know you’re sad about Noor,” she says, “but she wasn’t the one. You could never love her.”
If I kept a diary, like they do in England, I’m sure my sister would read it. Instead, she reads my mind, turning pages in a book I cannot keep closed to her, unlocking secrets she appears to know better than I do.
“Amal, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t say things like that.”
“Why? Is she going to come back and haunt us?” I admire my sister’s way of flaunting superstition, her utter fearlessness, but it worries me. I see my mother’s courage and my father’s irreverence, and I’m not sure it will always be a good combination.
“I liked her,” I shrug. “You never know what could have happened.”
Amal takes my chin and looks at me like she’s the older sibling, like she knows best. She lowers her voice, and pulls back her shoulders as if to remind me she is more adult than child. “Nabi,” she says softly. She is the only person in the family who calls me by a nickname, and I like the way she pronounces it, because it almost sounds like the word we have in Arabic for prophet, nebi. “You have to live your own life. You shouldn’t make yourself miserable because you’re not living the one Baba wanted you to.”
~ * ~
5
Living
On the drive over, I find myself thinking about Amal and her precocious advice. Beneath her sympathy is her own self-interest, and rightly so. She’s not sympathetic to arranged marriages — nor to parents choosing our professions. Her hope is that if I can escape all of this, she can as well. Ziad married a woman he met at university in France, but no one even likes the thought of her. This is the only blemish on Ziad’s record. But my parents blame her, not him, for the fact that he’s stayed in Europe without having returned in over three years. They disregard Ziad’s explanation: he’s afraid if he comes back for a visit, he won’t be allowed to leave again. Only his job at a hospital there keeps him in good stead with Baba. That, and a grandson.
The car park outside the Hamra Hotel is full of cars of a sort I’ve rarely seen in Baghdad. A lot of them are luxurious-looking vans and big jeeps with wheels almost as high as my waist, and they have signs taped to the windows that say “TV” or “Press”. I wonder if the commanders tell the reporters where to stay, or if the reporters decide on their own, because just yesterday my neighbour Imad told me that the new foreign journalists in Baghdad, the ones who weren’t here before the war began, are actually part of the American army. I wonder if that’s true. Would Samara Katchens have come in with the army, but not have told me so?
The hotel’s front entrance is blocked by a line of cheaply set bricks, and the drivers outside tell me to go around the back, towards the service entrance. After asking two other people which way to go, I finally find my way inside. The lobby is dimly lit and small, but something about it seems posh to me. There’s a gift shop selling carpets and ancient jewellery that the women I know would never wear, because it looks old-fashioned and tribal, and is made of silver rather than gold. Each of the windows and doors has an “X” taped over them, like surrender signs. I think that’s why Baba didn’t tape up our windows at home; it would be an acknowledgement that we’re afraid. The X-ing, the boarding, the bricking, all of these are an admission that the Americans are more powerful than we are. That they are going to beat us, that we can only try to minimize the damage.
Small clusters of men are standing around, and it’s easy to tell who’s who. Young Iraqis dressed in trousers and short-sleeved shirts. Foreigners, largely white-skinned and taller, carrying bags, cameras and bottles of water. The latter remind me of the way football players stand on the sidelines before they rush into the game. Just like the footballers I watched from the stands with Baba when I was twelve, suppor
ting Birmingham City against Manchester United. Back then, I wished that we would stay in Britain forever, become English, be just like a regular family going to see the footie on a Saturday.
All the other Iraqis are dressed informally. When I got dressed earlier this morning my mother had insisted I wear a suit, and now I am beginning to think that maybe I’d have done better not to listen to her.
I walk to the reception desk and tell the man I have come to see an American woman. I put my hand into my jacket pocket to pick out her business card.
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