Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

“Nabil, I know the name of every politician who came to visit Iraq in the past ten years. Doesn’t mean he was taking money from Saddam. Who else would they accuse? He’s black and he opposed the war. Perfect target.”

  Saleh coughs into a tissue, and I can sense a glob of something thick having landed in it before he crumples it and sticks it on the table.

  “You think that Chalabi could be part of this as well? Would he have been trying to retaliate against influential people who were too friendly towards Saddam? Or who opposed the Americans coming?”

  Saleh runs his hand over his small beard. “You know, that’s a very interesting theory. But the truth is, I would imagine it’s just that. Interesting. I think Mr Chalabi has more important concerns to attend to. He is dealing with the Bush administration and the CIA, and MI5, and probably the Mossad, too.” He laughs again, leaving his mouth hanging open in a smile that is both boyish and hungry. “Then again...let me think about it. I can ask around.”

  “But you can’t tell anyone,” I say. “Yaani, off the record.” Funny that those words would come out of my mouth — I only learned the expression the other day, when Sam told me about how it works when someone talks to you “off the record”. As she spoke I daydreamed of the turntable Grandma Zahra used to have in the living room, where she’d play the records of Salima Pasha and spin her wrists to the languid melodies. Now I know “the record” means something else, some kind of holy boundary between what you are free to write about and what you are not, and that if you violate this unwritten rule of journalism, it’s as good as committing blasphemy.

  “I can’t find anything out for you if I can’t give away some details.” His voice has an authoritative tone. “I won’t tell anyone I don’t really trust.”

  “Well, then you should be very, very vague. Don’t mention Sam, Samara that is, or her newspaper or the lawsuit.”

  He pretends to zip his lip. “I never even heard her name. And Akram?”

  “Well, other journalists seem to know about him, so I guess that’s fine.”

  Saleh looks at his watch. “Curfew starts in twenty minutes. So unless you have a special military pass from your American friend—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then you’d better get going. But look, I need you to help me, too.” His throat clicks a few times, as if trying to swallow an insistent wad of phlegm. “I really need a new job. My family name is associated with the Ba’athists, mostly because of my father. I’m not going to be able to keep my job with the UN now that the Americans are demanding they fire all Ba’athists, and it’s going to happen soon. I need a job like yours, in the news with foreigners. Or even with a foreign aid organization. I don’t care where, just not the army. I avoided the damn Iraqi military, I’m not going to work for the Americans. You know my English is excellent. Maybe not like yours, ustaz, but more than decent.”

  I smile at his compliment, calling me something akin to professor. It’s a way of saying you really respect someone who is a teacher of any sort. But this is the second time he’s asking me, and given Sam’s reaction, the conversation makes me uncomfortable.

  “Not even a job, Nabil, just introductions. You know how it works. Foreigners are afraid of us and they don’t know who they can trust. But a recommendation from people they know, that’s what gets a man a job.” He looks into my eyes, hard but intimate. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “So just try. Try for me and I’ll try for you. If you can’t, if the woman you’re working for says no, then it’s not a problem. I have other contacts. But the truth is, I need the money. We are looking into going to a private doctor in Europe to see about our problem, you know,” and he falls into a whisper, his head so low it’s as if he’s talking to his belt buckle, “about why we haven’t had a baby yet. These doctors cost a lot of money. Can you believe, in the middle of a war, the country being invaded, people stealing and kidnapping and killing each other in the street.”

  He looks towards the door, then back at me. “All that,” he mouths almost soundlessly, “and all my wife can talk about is wanting to have a baby! That, and this bloody dream about the UN being blown up with me in it!”

  He dismisses his tea cup towards its saucer, but it slips from his hand and fails to regain its composure, spilling its speckled brown contents on to the table.

  ~ * ~

  24

  Spilling

  It’s close to the 9 p.m. curfew when Rizgar drops me off, grumbling about how he’ll hardly make it home in time, how he should have let me take a taxi. A few days ago, I began to ask him to drop me at least two blocks from my house, because after all, there’s no need for everyone to see me getting dropped off each evening in a chauffeur-driven car. People will wonder why I never came home in this fashion before. Baba warned me not to tell anyone who doesn’t already know that I’m working with Sam.

  The neighbourhood is dark and silent. It used to be that everyone would have their televisions on at this hour, but there is no electricity tonight, like the night before. I guess people are cooking on gas stoves or talking quietly near their propane lamps or making love by candlelight or telling stories to their children. We are doing many things at home in the evening these days, but watching television is not one of them.

  I walk towards our house, open the front gate and close it quietly behind me. I hope that Baba bought a small generator like he said he would so we can watch television again and hook up the new satellite dish I bought with my first week’s salary and do something else at night, something other than just sitting by the dim candles and listening to the radio.

  And just as I’m passing the car park, I have a feeling that something isn’t right but now it’s too late because I hit a pole, except there’s no pole here, and I haven’t hit anything but something has hit me. And then I realize that it’s a man’s hand that’s slammed across my mouth and his other arm is across my chest and I start to squirm but then I feel the cold metal pressing into my temple and am conscious that there’s another man with him and the sound of the safety lock being released is like a deafening rush in my head that smothers my ability to breathe, to think, to do anything at all.

  “Don’t move,” the man with the gun against my head says, and he could never know that my real fear is that I will faint and he’ll think that I moved and that will be the end of it. “If you say a word we’re going to distribute your brains all over your baba’s nice big Mercedes over there.” The gun is cool against my head, like ice on hot skin on a sweaty day, and I feel oddly thankful for the low resting temperature of metal because it may be the only thing saving me from melting.

  “Listen, Amari.” It is another man now, and though I cannot see him I can suddenly picture him: one of the thug-boys from middle school, grown fatter and thicker. “We suggest you stop working with all foreigners. Particularly the Americans.”

  I’m coming to hate this label — the Americans. As if Sam represents the Americans as a whole, as if she is the same as the soldiers who dropped bombs on our homes and rode into our cities on their tanks. I think I could bite the man’s clammy hand and hurt him, but I realize the futility of this, as the gun presses even harder against my temple.

  “Do you understand?” The man with the gun hisses in my ear. Then the other man lifts his hand from my mouth and pushes me up against the car park wall. Unlike the gun, the concrete is surprisingly warm against my face, as though exhaling all the heat it has reluctantly accepted throughout the day. “If you turn around in the next sixty seconds, we’ll shoot you in the head and you’ll be gone so quickly, even doctor-baba won’t be able to help you.”

  I hear clicks again and I wish I knew something about guns, to at least know for sure whether he is switching the safety lock on or off, or maybe rotating the revolver a few times just to scare me.

  I hear the man who is holding my hands mutter something in the other’s man’s ear. “Yes, and your friend,” the
man with the gun says, poking the barrel hard against my temple before pulling it back a bit. “We’ll get her, too. She’ll go back to America in a pretty coffin with a red, white and blue flag draped on it. Would you like that?”

  I feel a quiver in my neck but stop it, I will stop it from swelling into a flinch, a palpable shudder. The thought of something happening to Sam feels worse than something happening to me. And then, the second man rearranges his grip to hold me at my elbows, which sends a bolt of pain through my shoulders, and then he pins my hands in the small of my back and finally lets go. I can now feel the gun against the back of my head.

  “They are just innocent journalists,” I say. “They don’t agree with their government.” Sam told me this is true, that most of the American journalists here don’t even agree with their government’s policy, and that most of them didn’t vote for Mr Bush. But neither did we vote for Saddam, and did that make the Americans think we were innocent? I have been fighting the urge to struggle against the clamp of their arms holding my arms, their hands stronger than my hands. But once they let go, I have to fight my instinct to twist and run. But to where? To my father, inside the house? I am practically inside my house. They know where I live.

  “No! Not just journalists.” It is the man who slammed his hand into my mouth, the one without the gun. Between my tongue and my lips I taste blood, sweet and salty, and I draw my mouth in on itself and hope the bleeding will stop before the thought of it starts to make me nauseous. “They’re Americans. We in the neighbourhood resistance committee have ruled that no one here should work with Americans. Do you understand, Amari?”

  I wonder if they even know my first name and if they know Sam’s name or whether they just heard something about me or about her, a picture not quite complete, and as I’m thinking this, the man with the gun puts the barrel into the hollow of my right cheek and pushes harder.

  “The infidels are only here to occupy our country and exploit it. They’re here to steal our oil and defile our women. No collaborators will be tolerated.”

  It is pointless for me to say another word. The one without the gun has a sandpaper voice, and he leans in towards me, hangs an elbow on my shoulder and puts his mouth up to my ear. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I murmur.

  “You know, you might think of joining the resistance, too,” he says. “We could use English-speakers like you. Think about it.”

  I can feel the heavier one, the one who first jumped on me and clamped my mouth, moving away and heading for our gate, whispering for his friend to hurry up. I can sense the gun being tucked into the front of the man’s trousers, and the sound of a half-laugh, as though amused by my compliance, waiting there for the next order.

  “Sixty seconds,” says the man at the gate, the gunman. “Start counting.” I hear a small explosion somewhere to the south and it makes me feel insignificant. Somewhere in Baghdad, someone else’s house or car or store or Bradley Fighting Vehicle is getting blown up. Why would anybody care if there’s a man holding a gun to my head just outside my doorstep?

  “Count!”

  And I do, and I can hear them run for the gate, leap over it without using the door. When I get to twenty-five and can’t hear them anymore, I stop counting and rush to the gate, where I can see the soles of their trainers rising and falling, growing faint somewhere at the end of my street.

  ~ * ~

  25

  Growing

  Sam’s door flies open with such a rush that it fans my face and forces my eyes shut. “Gooood morning!” she says to my closed lids. She sounds artificially cheery, like one of the radio anchors back in Birmingham. She looks surprised to see me. “You’re early. It’s not yet 9.”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night, and got up early. But I can wait downstairs.”

  “Wait, before you do,” she says, and indicates for me to come inside. Once the door is closed, she talks quickly, and in a lowered voice. “Can we go to Tikrit today?”

  “Tikrit? Well, I guess so. Why?”

  “Miles asked me to. He wants me to verify the signatures on the documents. Even one man who knows Uday or the other signers and can vouch for a signature.”

  “Who, you mean, Uday’s signature? That’s...we can’t do that.”

  “Nabil, you never know what you can or can’t do until you try.” She takes some milk from the refrigerator and stirs it into the coffee she was making. “Do you want a cup?”

  I ponder the container of instant coffee on the counter, deciding to say yes, but not quickly enough.

  “Oh, right, you hate my coffee. Picky, picky,” she says. “So yeah, why don’t you go wait downstairs in the lobby and I’ll be down in ten minutes. I’m not quite ready to go. Oh, wait in the main lobby, not in the one downstairs. Lately that Rafik gives me the creeps. I don’t want him picking your brain while you wait for me. And don’t tell him what we’re working on.”

  I make for the door, but pause before I open it. “Sam, you do know it could be dangerous, going to Tikrit now? And to get someone to look at a signature and say it’s real or not real? And how can we trust that person? What difference would it make?”

  “All the difference in the world,” she says. “In Miles’s mind anyway.” She puts her hand on the wall and leans into it.

  “Isn’t it already clear from what we saw yesterday that Akram’s documents are fake?”

  Sam shakes her head. “No, Nabil. It’s not enough that something looks clear. It has to be clear. That’s why people like Harris Axelrod get into trouble. You can’t run a story on a hunch. We need concrete proof,” she says.

  I nod and she looks at me with a little bit of embarrassment in her eyes. “Nabil, I’m sorry about last night. I think I overreacted to your questions.”

  “No, I should—”

  “No, it’s me. It’s your country and I want to understand your culture. I’m learning a lot from you.” She drops her hand from the wall and clasps it in the other one. “I told you I like people who ask a lot of questions. That’s why I hired you. I guess I’m just not as good a sport when the subject of the questions is me.”

  Is I, I think. The subject is I. Though I can’t be sure, because certainly her English must be better than mine. Or maybe in America it’s different? I think about the strangeness not just of the American language, but of the American mind. Concrete proof. As if truth were so hard in that way, like rocks and cement. In Iraq it is rarely so.

  “Sam, I—” What happened last night is on the tip of my tongue, but why bother? It’ll only worry her, and what can she do? Either I want to keep working with her, or I don’t. “I’ll just wait for you downstairs.”

  ~ * ~

  I take a chair next to the youngest man in the lobby. He is well-dressed and has what I think of as a stylish haircut which makes me think he’s not from here, though otherwise he certainly looks Arab. His legs are crossed, the top one playfully kicking in the air.

  When I check my watch, I notice that a full two minutes have gone by.

  What is it about sitting in a hotel lobby that is so awkward? Even, dare I say it, humiliating? Everyone knowing that you’re waiting for someone, and that they have kept you waiting. For ten minutes, or for an hour? No one around you knows exactly. And yet, we’re all waiting here, for one of them, il aganib, the foreigners. Our bosses. Our big salaries. I can see it in their faces.

  The young man turns to me and to my surprise opens in perfectly clear British English, almost like mine, but with a regional accent I cannot place.

  “Are you enjoying it?”

  “Enjoying what?”

  “Being her fixer.”

  “I’m her interpreter,” I say. “Mutargim.”

  “You don’t need to translate for me, mate,” he says, and switches to Arabic. “Mutargim sounds nice, when you say it in Arabic. But when you’re not around, she’ll say you’re her fixer, just like the rest of them.”

 
I shrug, wishing I had a newspaper with me. “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, an interpreter, out in the real world, is someone who gets paid by senior government or business people and is expected to do the work of interpreting their conversations. For example, I know someone who worked for the United Nations, and there he was treated with dignity. Here, with the journalists, they pay you more, but they don’t treat you with respect.”

  I can think of many moments where Sam and I have had difficult conversations, where we have disagreed, and where she has been perhaps a little too direct. Even too demanding or lacking in patience. But I wouldn’t say she ever treated me with disrespect.

  “A fixer is a fixer because they want us to fix everything for them, from start to finish. They don’t want us to just interpret what’s said in the interviews. They want us to arrange their meetings, get their money changed, go and fetch food and supplies for them, go ahead of them to check on the situation to see if it’s safe enough for them to go. My fellow sat down to send his story yesterday after I’d been chasing about with him all day, and while he sat there in his comfortable, air-conditioned office, he asked me to go out and buy him a case of bottled water to drink, and some chocolates. Hands a little stack of dinars to me, doesn’t even look me in the eye when he does it. Doesn’t say please or thank you. Then looks at me while I’m standing there and says, “Do you think you need more?” And then as I’m leaving he asks me to stop by the INC headquarters and see if we can get an interview with Chalabi.”