Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  I do not know how to get him to slow down, or how to translate half of what he is saying. His arguments do not even make complete sense to me.

  I nod emphatically. “Sorry, sorry? She wants to know where you went for these items.”

  “Where we went?”

  “Yes, where everything is from.”

  And so he explains that most of these things came from one of Uday Hussein’s homes, and from a government office that was run by him, and I tell Sam all of this, but she still does not look happy.

  Hatem excuses himself and leaves the room. “He says that he has at least seven family members who have disappeared in the past decade. He is going to show us pictures.”

  “Nabil, could you try getting into his voice when you translate? Say, I did this or that.”

  “I should say I did this?”

  “Yes, don’t say, ‘He says he has more than seven family members.’ Say, ‘I have more than seven family members.’ First-person. Know what I mean by that? Pretend you are speaking for him.”

  Of course I know what first-person is. But I didn’t understand until now that Sam would want me to speak like that, and I didn’t expect that she would be constantly correcting and interrupting while I interpret for her.

  Hatem comes back with a stack of pictures. The edges are tatty, and their faded colour betrays their age. Young men in their twenties and thirties with thick moustaches, some resembling Hatem, stare back at us. Hatem names each one and the time he disappeared. Many of them were picked up after March 1991, he says, after the war with Kuwait and America.

  “On Monday we are going to go to Al-Mahawil to look for them,” Hatem tells me. “The people are digging up the mass graves there and I think this is where they might be buried. We must give them a proper Islamic burial.”

  “He says he may go to the south to look for them when they excavate the area,” I tell Sam. “I mean, sorry. ‘We are going to the south to look for them. The people will dig up mass graves there.’”

  “Hmm. Wow, that’d be an amazing story. Nabil, ask him if he minds letting me get a shot of him holding these photographs.”

  “You want him to stand in front of the looted items while you take the picture?”

  Sam seems doubtful, then dismissive. “Nah, I don’t want to pose the picture that much, you know?”

  I can’t imagine how the photograph wouldn’t seem posed. If posed means that the people arrange themselves in such a way that they know the picture is being taken, and they try to look appropriate for the photographer, then isn’t it posed? Hatem calls his sons over and the smallest boy, fully recovered from his brother’s pouncing, comes running to his father’s knees. Hatem pulls him on to his lap, and then splays out the family photos like a fan.

  “Okay,” he says, “now I am ready.”

  “You can take the picture,” I tell her.

  “I already did,” she says. But this time I didn’t hear the click, so I am wondering how that could be.

  “Take down all of their names,” Hatem says, setting his son, who seems disappointed at the brevity of his father’s affection, back on to the floor. “Put them all in the newspaper. Saddam has killed millions of Shi’ites. Millions. Now the future of the country belongs to us, and we will rebuild it in their name,” he says, smiling at his boy. “Tell her that.”

  “He is saying that Saddam was very bad to the Shi’ites and killed a lot of them. But all the Shi’ites say this. We don’t know if it is true but many people have been saying this.”

  Hatem interrupts me. “She’s American, no? Maybe if America had come sooner, my cousins would be here with us now. One of them had his tongue cut out.” He looks at her. “You had a chance to get Saddam twelve years ago, and then you come now. Why? Why so long?”

  “What is he saying?”

  “He is saying he is glad the Americans are here now.”

  “Is that what he said?” Sam gives him a face of pleasant surprise, which looks feigned. “Really? Are you happy the Americans are here?”

  “Yez, habby. Now habby.” Hatem answers in the shreds of English he must have learned in school, his “p” coming out as a “b”. I wonder, is this the kind of English my students will speak one day, long after they have finished my class?

  A ringing tone emerges from Sam’s bag. She scrambles to find the phone and, pulling it out, looks at the screen. “This is my editor again. Do you have a balcony?” I check with Hatem, and he shakes his head.

  “What about a window facing southeast?” Sam stands with a posture that says it’s urgent. Hatem leads her through the back of the apartment, towards his bedroom. His wife and smallest son stand at the entrance to the kitchen, confused, but Sam hardly takes notice. She opens the window, fumbles to put an extension into the end of the phone and sticks her arm out with the phone pointed towards the sky. Then she dips an earpiece at the end of a little black cord inside her ear.

  “Miles?! Miles?” Sam glances at us and pats the air in our direction to say that it is all right. “Hold on. Can you guys give me a minute? I just need to take this call.”

  We return to the salon.

  Hatem searches my eyes. “She’s an American?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “But you said France.”

  “I said...she lives in France. I thought you meant that you wanted to know where she was coming from now, before she came to Iraq.”

  Hatem’s face is still. “How do you know she isn’t working for the government? Most of the journalists are working for the government. Who else could have such a phone?”

  Hatem’s wavy beard fascinates me. Though I think he must be my age, and certainly not more than thirty, there is a marbling of grey in it that makes him seem like he could be a decade older. I find myself making assumptions about his life. A childhood of urban poverty in a large family, a brief education. How much could he know about freedom of expression in the West? About a media outlet which isn’t owned and operated by the government?

  “In America, the media and the government are separate,” I explain.

  Hatem’s mouth twitches with disagreement. He takes a set of sebha from his pocket, a string of jade beads with gold dividers. I know that this quality of prayer beads is very expensive, and I wonder if it, too, was looted. He twirls it around his fingers, clockwise and counterclockwise.

  “How do you know she’s not a spy?”

  The thought, however preposterous, has crossed my mind. I want to ask him which kind of spy he would prefer she be, CIA or Mossad. But he looks too serious to think it is as funny as I do.

  “Believe me, I know. She’s just a young woman travelling with other journalists. I know the newspaper she is writing for. It’s famous. I can show it to you.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “More than a year. She came here to report before the war.” I don’t know what shifted, what made me make up another lie. I want people to trust Sam, and for her to trust me.

  I feel her pacing back towards us, the squeak of her sandals across the cheap linoleum. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I think we should go. There’s another story breaking and my editors want me to file on something else.”

  I stand and Hatem stands, too. I try to explain why we are leaving so quickly, but I don’t think he understands. He seems to feel we’ve only just arrived, and should stay for a meal.

  “Thank you so much for your time, Mr— oh! Wait,” she says, flipping back over her last two pages of notes. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “I have it,” I tell her. “I will give it to you in the car.”

  “But I need to make sure the spelling is right. Some people have a preference for how to write it in English.”

  “Hatem Mohammed,” Hatem says.

  “Mohammed? That’s his last name?”

  “Badr. Hatem Mohammed Badr.” His eyes are locked on Sam’s forehead as she writes down the name, but she seems oblivi
ous.

  “Do you use b-a-d-r, or b-a-d-e-r?”

  He looks to me for an answer. His features expand, a map of his suspicions occupying more territory across his face.

  “Put b-a-d-r. No ‘e’,” I say. I am afraid that with the “e,” Sam’s readers will see the name and think “badder.” Even though I know there is no such word, it is the way people will see it, and this troubles me. On the radio, I’ve heard the way Bush pronounces our president’s name. He makes it sound like “sad” and “damn”.

  Sam peeks around the corner towards the kitchen to say goodbye to Hatem’s wife. She is reticent but smiles broadly, and then hurries to Sam and kisses her on both cheeks.

  Nearing the door, I remember how we got here. “Oh, your brother Adel never came by. He said he was going to join us. Please thank him.”

  “How do you know Adel?”

  “We met—” Lie again? “We met him just today.”

  “Oh, I see.” Hatem nodded, as if ticking off mental notes for himself. “You know, Adel is not really my brother.”

  And now I feel daft, because when I think about it, the two men do not look at all alike. Adel was fat and fair to the point of coming across as foreign, while Hatem is like any other working-class guy on the streets of Saddam City, gaunt and brown-skinned.

  “But you can say he is something like a brother.” He runs his hand over his beard and winces.

  Sam stands in the hallway, snapping her bag shut. “You’ll tell me about this conversation in the car, I take it?”

  “Our brotherhood is something the Shi’ites have that I’m not sure you can understand,” Hatem says. “Just like it is difficult for you to believe the evil things Saddam did, perhaps because he is one of yours.”

  “Actually, I’m also Shi’ite,” I say “I mean, sort of — I am both. I am Sunni and Shi’ite.”

  “Sedog?” He smiles and slaps my back as a good friend might, rubbing where his hand has landed. “The two sides of the Iraqi heart. Maybe you are the Mahdi, like the messiah, coming to bring peace!” He laughs deeply, and I try to laugh along with him. “Seriously, it must be hard for you to decide which side you are on.”

  “Nabil?” Sam is holding on to the rail above the staircase.

  “When you choose, if you choose well, you are always welcome to come back and visit us.” He puts his hand on my shoulders and draws me to him, kissing alternating sides, three times, or maybe more, because already I am finding it difficult to keep track of how many times things have happened and how much time has passed. He lets me go and Sam is tapping her foot and a waking dream suddenly shoots through my mind: Noor’s bullet zooming in the window and me flying up to catch it, my cupped, glowing hands saving the world from disaster.

  ~ * ~

  9

  Saving

  Sam’s editor, it seems, wanted her to go to the Museum of Art. He read on the newswire — this is a new word for me — that the museum’s ancient art is being carried away by what they called “professional” looters. But we cannot get anywhere near the building. There are American military vehicles cordoning off the area, sending people back.

  “Maybe we can come back later,” I offer. “What can you do? One can’t argue with a tank.”

  “That’s not a tank,” Sam says. “It’s a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. See? There’re no treads on it. It’s just a scary-ass Humvee with big guns mounted on it. Okay, Rizgar. To the Hunting Club.”

  “Now Hunt Club? Again?” I am impressed with Rizgar’s Arabic, given that many Kurds from the north do not speak so well. But his English is so nominal that I wonder how he and Sam manage to communicate.

  “Yes.” She turns towards me, and as she does so, I hear the vertebrae in her back clicking against each other, and then a sigh, maybe of pain and maybe of relief, passing her lips. “We need to see if we can get that interview for tomorrow.”

  ~ * ~

  Once we get past the checkpoint, where a few American soldiers are posted, we drive into the Hunting Club. The grounds are green and spacious, and from here it seems that we are no longer in Baghdad. There are many types of beautiful shrubs and trees and everything is well-manicured. Rizgar stops the car outside the main building and Sam hops out and I step out, too. “You can walk me up, but I don’t think you’ll need to come in with me. These guys speak English better than I do.” She rolls her eyes, which I’ve come to realize means that I shouldn’t take what she just said seriously.

  “I will be happy to escort you anyway.”

  “No, seriously, these INC folks have been spending so much time in Washington, they ought to be naturalized citizens by now. They probably prefer not to have an unknown Iraqi in the room.”

  “Oh. Of course,” I say, feeling foolish.

  We walk into the wide-doored, white building and I follow Sam to the reception area. There are dark, rectangular spots along the walls where pictures must have been removed, the area around them bleached lighter from the sun. I can imagine the line of photographs of Saddam and his sons — dressed in equestrian uniforms or riding atop their favourite horses — which must have been removed only in the last day or two. These photographs of Saddam doing sportsman-like things were often published in the newspapers.

  The man behind the desk says that we can stay where we are until the press spokesman comes to collect us.

  “Oh, he’s just waiting with me,” Sam says, gesturing in my direction.

  The room has large wooden chairs, upholstered with red leather seats. Sam runs her fingers down one of the carved arms and sits, and I take the chair next to her.

  “It’s like Saddam tried to make it look like a real English hunting club, smack in the middle of Baghdad.” She points up at the mountings above the window. There are wooden plaques with hooks that were obviously a display for old rifles, judging from the shape of the faded spots, but the guns are absent.

  “Look at this place.” Sam leans in towards me and lowers her voice. “The lap of luxury when people were supposedly starving due to the sanctions.” She gets up and inspects a massive vase, painted blue and white in a Chinese motif, sitting next to the end table. “This one might be an antique.” She tilts her head back and uses her eyes to direct me to the huge chandelier, glittering like a sun shower above our heads. She sits down again and crosses her legs, letting the upper bounce against the lower. “Just like the palaces. You’d think people would have wanted to tear the place apart.”

  The receptionist slides open the glass panel covering the window that he sits behind. He sticks his head through and says to me, “Dr Marufi says he can see her in ten minutes.”

  “He says ten minutes more,” I tell Sam.

  “I got that.”

  I hadn’t considered the possibility that Sam would know more than how to say hello and thank you. “Do you speak some Arabic?”

  “Not really. Dribs and drabs. I learned a bit from a phrasebook, but the numbers and minutes are among the few things that stuck. I wish I’d done Arabic in college.”

  “So you went to college? Not to university.”

  Sam takes out her notebook and flips to a blank page. She begins making a list. I feel she is speaking to me one moment and then ignoring me the next. But now I realize that she must be making a list of important questions to ask in her interview. She stops after five lines. “I know in England college means something less than university, which is probably what you’re thinking of.”

  “Yes. I have friends who studied there and they say it was very important to get accepted to university.”

  “Right.” Sam shuts the notebook and taps on it with her pen. “You know, Nabil, I think we’re having little misunderstandings about a lot of things.”

  I can feel a muscle in my throat go tight, like a bicycle chain when the gears are changed too quickly.

  “I need you to work a little harder to be on the ball for me when we’re doing interviews. I wasn’t, well, entirely happy about
the way things went earlier.”

  “I...did you find that I was not on the ball?” I know I should listen to her first, but I thought that the expression “on the ball” means to be alert. Was I not alert?

  “I mean, we need to be on the same page with how this works. I need you to translate sentence by sentence. Word for word. You can’t listen for five minutes and then translate. You’ll forget what the guy said and then—”

  “Oh, but I won’t forget. I have a great memory. Also, he didn’t want to stop for me to translate. He wanted to tell me everything, and then for me to explain it to you.”

  She shakes her head, her eyes squinting as if to see something far off in the distance. “It doesn’t matter what he wants, or what anyone we’re talking to wants. You have to find a way to slow them down or stop them when they’re speaking. They’ll get used to it, everybody does. Just do something like this,” she says, tilting the palm of her hand up at a forty-five-degree angle, “and say, ‘wait, I have to translate.’”