Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  “I never saw you smoke before,” I offer.

  “That’s because I don’t,” she says, pulling out another cigarette and lighting it with the burning butt of the last one. “I quit five years ago.” She drops the remains of the old cigarette on to the white floor, turning it into a black blur with her sandal. I hate that fresh cigarette, and the thought of Sam ruining her health with it, but there is something sensuous about the way her mouth wraps itself around the tip and pulls it in. Her lips seem a little puffy, but perfectly sculpted and pinkish, as though they belong on one of those plastic baby dolls that seem to multiply like mad before the holidays, when people are expected to bring gifts to all the children in their family. There is something about the lines in her lips that is attractive, even if I know that someday, they will be an old lady’s lines. Even as a grandmother, she will still be beautiful.

  “Five years ago is a long time.” I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to be in a place of giving Sam grief.

  “Yeah, well,” she says, inhaling deeply, as if she expects half the cigarette to be pulled inside her all at once. “That was when I met Jonah. He got me to quit.”

  I can feel my chest fall as Sam exhales. “He required you to quit? In order for him to be your boyfriend?”

  “Well, something like that. He convinced me. No one requires me to do anything.” She laughs a little. I watch the smoke make ringlets above her hand, floating up towards her neck before being caught by a hot breeze and carried off somewhere north, towards Sadr City.

  “You’re disappointed in your editors, yes?”

  Nabil al-Amari, master of subtle questions. She doesn’t answer and so we don’t say anything for a while, and I don’t mind that. It is good to just sit here and know that she must be comfortable enough around me not to say anything. I think only people who really trust each other are able to do that.

  On her third cigarette, Sam begins to talk again.

  “Disappointed isn’t the word, Nabil.” She takes two drags, one after the other, and then exhales the smoke through her nostrils. It reminds me of a bull in the cartoons, just before it charges. “I’m fucking furious.”

  I think of the conversation we’d had about cursing, how I had used “fuck” during an interview — as part of my translation, to convey someone’s anger — and she scolded me for it afterwards. She said it was too impolite to use, even in an informal interview, around anyone who knows any English at all, because you never know how much they really know.

  But now doesn’t seem the right time for pinning Sam down on the finer points of when vulgarities are or are not acceptable.

  “It’s fine,” she says, as if trying to convince herself.

  “Is it?”

  “What’s the difference?” Sam takes off one of her sandals and throws it on to an adjacent roof across the slim alley. “After all I’ve done for them, they go ahead and do this without even telling me! I’m endangering my life in this hellhole and they’re playing around with some friggin’ Get Smart, Inspector Gadget nerd in Washington. Jesus! The fucking nerve of them!” She annunciates the words in a staccato, as if spitting each one into hot air. She gets up and paces for a moment, limping because of her missing shoe, and then she stops and looks at me.

  “You know what?”

  “Yes, Sam?”

  “The floor’s too hot to be walking on barefoot, even at night!” She plonks herself back down into the chair, dropping her bare foot over the sandalled one. “This is pathetic,” she hisses at her feet, as if talking to herself. “Why am I here if they want to figure it out from their end? Why am I here? What am I doing here?”

  Quiet. And then the sound of the izzan to answer her, called out by a nearby muezzin, who is soon joined by a chorus of many more, none quite in sync with the other, sending their melodic dissonance wafting over the rooftops. There is now a sweet quorum in the air, and I want to pray with them, to pray for Sam and for all of us, but I am not about to say prayers with Sam around.

  “Why is it so bad, Sam? The information they have, doesn’t it back us up? The story is still correct. I mean, it doesn’t contradict what we’ve found.”

  “Yeah, but they think it’s all we need, as if it’s the end of the story. They want to run it in the next day or two. Tomorrow if they could. They’re impatient. Just like they were when they ran Harris’s original story that got the paper into this mess. Just like every damn newspaper in America. And across the free world.”

  “Does that include Iraq? President Bush says we’re free now.”

  Sam sputters a mouthful of smoke. “Very funny.”

  “Can’t you get them to wait?” I ask. “You’re good with negotiating.”

  “How? Well, I could scream and pout and insist until I’m blue in the face and threaten to quit...”

  “Would you?”

  “No, I can’t go giving them an ultimatum. It’s...bad form.”

  I turn to her and say in my poshest English accent, “Oh! Terribly tawdry!”

  She laughs. “You’re a trip, Nabil. You crack me up sometimes. Do you know how ridiculous it sounds when that accent comes out of a mouth like yours?”

  Even if I’m glad to see her laughing, I’m a little bit insulted. What does it mean, a mouth like yours? Is my mouth so different from an Englishman’s? I do not even wear a moustache anymore. But I can see that no matter how good my English is, Sam will always view me as an Arab who, by speaking so well, is a source of amusement.

  ~ * ~

  34

  Speaking

  Taking the steps two at a time, I fly up the stairs and tap on the door of Sam’s room. There is no answer. I try buzzing and knocking, but still no reply. Nearly 9 a.m. She had said to come between 8:45 and 9.

  Next door, a young woman in shorts that only cover the start of her thighs shows herself in the doorway. I have noticed her around the pool, usually in a bikini and dark glasses, as if the latter might let her disappear among the other foreigners. I have noticed her because she has a skinny Western figure but a delicate Arab face, almost like a Yemenite, I think.

  “You’re Sam’s fixer, right?”

  The fixer: the person who makes it all happen. Will I ever live up to the title? And then Taher, who made it sound sort of insulting, someone’s errand-boy.

  “I’m her interpreter. Uh, translator.”

  “She asked me to tell you that she decided to stay overnight at the Sheraton. There was some big party there for all the journos last night, and she didn’t want to rush back before the curfew. So you should just wait for her.”

  When I left at 8:30 p.m., Sam left afterwards and went to a party? From being so angry, she went out to socialize?

  “I see.” I can feel my Adam’s Apple move up and down, a lever gauging my nervousness. I try to avoid letting my eyes fall towards her bare legs. She closes the opening a bit, moving her body further from the door.

  “Excuse me,” she says, “I just woke up. Had a late deadline.”

  “Yes, oh, I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I’m Nabil.” I consider giving her my hand, but as the opening in the door is so narrow now, I hold it up instead, a frozen, mid-air wave.

  “I know. I’m Leila,” she smiles, without looking directly at me. “See you soon, then,” she says, and shuts the door, leaving me between their two doors in the hallway.

  I wander downstairs to the bakery that I must have passed a hundred times since I started working for Sam, but never bothered to enter. I’m surprised by the wide selection of biscuits and cakes, and I feel that the two women working the counters are equally surprised to see me. Perhaps only foreigners staying at the hotel shop here, and very few Iraqis, despite the beautiful delicacies. Can they possibly get enough traffic here to keep such a well-stocked bakery in business?

  Caught in the coffee-eyed gaze of a young woman waiting for me to buy something, I order two boxes: Arabic ones for Sam, European-looking puff pastries with colo
ured icing for my family. Each will be more impressed with something from the other. I will use the opportunity to teach Sam about the different kinds of baklawa. It would be a shame if she left Iraq someday and didn’t know that much.

  Walking out, I realize there are only a few choices. The first is to sit here with Rafik. The second is to go back to the first tower, where I might have to sit with the nasty receptionist, or Taher, or some other translators I don’t feel like talking to just now. I’m afraid I’ll open my mouth and say something I shouldn’t.

  A third option is to wait for her in the café with the ugly orange decor and those guys who watch and eavesdrop. Or to wait by the pool, though it’s already hot like a firin out there. So I may as well wait here in the second tower lobby, with Rafik at his desk.

  I open the European pastry box for him. “Tfaddal.” Take, please.

  “No, no,” he says. “It’s too early.” He grabs at the small tyre around his middle. “And my wife says I must watch this.”

  We laugh and I sit.

  “Miss Samara not in?”

  I know he knows she’s not in, so why must he ask?

  “She had to stay with her friend Melissa at CNN, over at the Sheraton Hotel. She was asked to do a live interview at midnight. That’s only four in the afternoon in America.” I don’t know why I do this, start making up lies to protect Sam. But what will the men in the hotel think of her if they see she doesn’t come home at night, off late at parties with men and alcohol? They will assume the worst. It’s only for her own good.

  Rafik nods, but looks down at his desk. “Want to read a newspaper?”

  “Thanks,” I say, getting up to take it. It’s one I haven’t seen before, Al Sabah Al-Jadida. The New Morning. Paul Bremer Arrives in Baghdad Today to Replace Jay Garner, the failed Occupation Chief of President Bush. In the first paragraph, it says that Mr Bremer is going to dismiss anyone associated with the Ba’ath party and senior and even mid-level officials will be investigated and then banned from government positions. I know that Mr Bremer’s real name is L. Paul Bremer III, because I saw it in a story Sam showed me on her computer screen the other day. Otherwise, if I were only reading the Iraqi papers, I might think his name was Bol Breemer, a terrible start because it’s too close to buul, which means urine. Since we have no “p” in Arabic, most people substitute a “b”. When people try to speak English with Sam, they start talking about the Iraqi beoble, and that’s when I convince them to stick to Arabic and let me translate.

  “So we’ll have a new American in charge,” I offer.

  “Aiy,” says Rafik, nodding. “Things can only improve, yes?”

  I wonder if Rafik is testing me, trying to determine whether I actually like the Americans. Who can know whether to trust him? But he is friendly, and does seem to like Sam.

  Rafik scans the hallway, where there is no one but us, save a German photographer making his way out of the door. The bank branch across from him is still closed.

  I continue reading about what Mr Bremer is expected to do.

  “Do you tell the men at the other reception desk what you’re doing when you go out every day?”

  I look up. “What?”

  “Do you tell them? In the first tower,” he says, lifting his chin with a quick jab towards the pool and the other building beyond it.

  “No, not usually.”

  “Well you shouldn’t tell them at all,” he says, coughing into his hand, like he’s trying to hide what he just said.

  “You don’t trust them?”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s just that one of them is mad at you.”

  “At me?” I sit up. What could I have done?

  “At you and Sam. He says his cousin worked with Sam first and that you took his job away.”

  “But I’ve been working with Sam since the start!” I feel my back stiffen, my vertebrae acting defensive. “Since Baghdad fell, I mean.”

  “Didn’t she say that she worked with someone before then?”

  “No, she said she worked with a Kurdish guy who didn’t want to come south of Tikrit.”

  Rafik nods, but says nothing. “And then after, when she got to Baghdad, she must have worked with someone. None of the foreigners are capable of functioning here alone.”

  It’s true. I don’t think there’s been any story Sam was able to do without my help — without my fixing. Why didn’t I consider that she must have had someone else before I met her at the hospital?

  “Anyway, he’s the brother of one of the bellboys, and he’s got a grudge against you because they think you’ve wronged his family by taking his brother’s job.”

  I can feel the blood pushing up against my heart. Why didn’t he tell me this before? Why didn’t Sam?

  “There’s another thing you should beware of. You and Miss Samara have a staffing problem.”

  My hands have started to shake, and feel moist against the newspaper. I fold it up so Rafik won’t notice. “Really? How is that?”

  “You’re a Sunni, and your driver is a Kurd. You don’t have a Shi’ite working for you.”

  I shrug. “We don’t have a Christian or a communist, either. Maybe we need one of each of them.”

  “I’m serious,” he murmurs. The lift arrives and Joon Park walks out, smiling slightly for a change. “Oh hey, Nabil. Did Leila tell you that Sam decided to stay late at the party at the Sheraton last night?”

  I nod. Joon, the one time she bothers to be friendly with me, ratting on us. But then, maybe Rafik’s English isn’t so great; I’ve never heard him say more than hello, goodbye, thank you, and please, as he hands over the keys to the hotel clientele. Maybe he missed it. Otherwise, he’ll start thinking that I’m a liar.

  Rafik stares at me until Joon is out of the door.

  “You should have a Shi’ite on staff, too. To have all of your bases covered.”

  “Maybe a Yezidi for good measure? The Mandeans are also not well-represented.”

  Rafik’s nostrils flare so much that I can see black tufts of nose hair.

  “Sorry, sorry. I was only joking,” I say. “It’s just, we’re a small team. I don’t think Sam would want another person.”

  “You should have a Shi’ite with you,” he says in a low voice. “And maybe a bodyguard.”

  “A guard?” I laugh and look out to the pool, where I can see two sets of peach-white arms emerging from the water at a fast clip, racing each other. The truth is, I have thought of it in recent days. If someone ever tried to hurt Sam, la-smuh-Alla, God forbid, what would I do? Talk them out of it?

  “You need to be very careful about making enemies around here,” Rafik says. “Shi’ites are going to be in control in the future. You have to accept that.”

  “You know, I’m also Shi’ite.”

  “What do you mean, also? With a name like Nabil?”

  “My mother is Shi’ite and my father is Sunni.”

  “Oh,” he says, motioning for me to come back with the box of sweet pastries. “That’s different. But you’re still a Sunni. You can’t be both.”

  “I am both,” I say, holding the box open. He takes one that looks like a giant chocolate hotdog. I think it’s a Napoleon. No, an eclair.

  Rafik mumbles a Bismillah and sinks his teeth deep, covering at least a third of it. I hadn’t taken him for a religious man. As he chews he wiggles his head from side to side, as if he likes the taste. “It’s delicious! I have never thought to go in there.”

  “In the bakery? It’s right behind you.”

  He shrugs. “It’s meant for foreigners, you know. It’s not priced for Iraqis.”

  I sit back down, and wait for Rafik to finish. I’d have one myself, but there’s my rule on sweets. Noor.

  He eagerly devours the last bit. When it’s gone, he makes a tiny grunt of pleasure. “You can’t be both Sunni and Shi’ite,” he declares.

  “Why not? Of course you can.”

  “No,” he s
ays. “You cannot. Either you are a supporter of Imam Ali or you are not. Either when you say the Shahada, you say there is no god but God and Mohammed is His Prophet and Imam Ali is His Successor, or you don’t. Either you fast and cry and suffer on Ashura or you don’t. Either you go to a husseiniye instead of a mosque, or you don’t. You make pilgrimages to the holy places in Najaf and Karbala, or you don’t. This is what it means to be Shi’ite. You can’t be both.” He smiles, looking at me as if he could go on all morning. “So which is it for you?”