Baghdad Fixer

by Prusher, Ilene

  “Bobby? Isn’t it a boy’s name?”

  “No, not Bobby. Bubbe. Grandma.”

  “Oh. In Russian or in German?”

  She smiles and looks away. “Neither. Yiddish.”

  “I see.” She’ll think I won’t know what that is, but I do. I’ve read references to it in books.

  “All those funny words you’ve heard me use, like schmuck and schlepp? It’s not really slang, it’s Yiddish. It is, or it was, the Jewish European language. It’s almost dead now.”

  “Why dead?”

  “I don’t know. I guess people learn Hebrew now instead.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I never went to religious school or anything like that. It was the deal my parents made with each other. No conversions, no Sunday schools, no rites of passage. Yes to presents on all holidays, and yes to family meals that involve eating or drinking a lot. All in all, not such a bad way to grow up.”

  A deal. I thought that in the West, marriage was all about love. Deals exist only in the East, where families discuss marriage prospects in very concrete terms, down to who’s paying for the furniture and the apartment. I have so many more questions for Sam, but I’m starting to feel nervous, thinking that we should prepare for going to see Mustapha. We’re already at the edge of Sadr City.

  “Did you bring those photocopies of the documents?”

  Sam pats her bag. “Yep. They’re right here.”

  “What about money?”

  Sam’s mouth flinches, more of a tick than a frown. “I always have some money with me but, I don’t know, Nabil,” she says, pushing her hand down on her bag. “I’m still not comfortable with paying this guy.”

  I reach into my pocket to find a handkerchief and wipe my forehead. It feels like the weather is slipping into summer early this year. Maybe God is disappointed by how we have responded to violence with even more violence, and is turning up the heat on us, harsh and ahead of schedule. I heard on the radio that it may get up to 44 degrees today, or about 111 Fahrenheit, which is pretty high for May.

  “Sometimes,” I say, “it’s good to make a deal.”

  Sam grins with closed lips that say, don’t go throwing that back at me.

  “Did their parents oppose it, your parents getting married?”

  “That? Oh, probably,” she says. “But they never really talked much about it. Neither of them is particularly religious and they just didn’t think anything should stand in their way.”

  “But your father chose Samara in part because it means ‘protected by God’. So he is a religious man.”

  “Not exactly. I mean, he probably fancies the idea of God. But he was never really into religion.” Sam looks out of the window. ‘“You can have faith without thinking any one religion has a direct line to the man upstairs.’ That’s the kind of thing my father used to say.”

  The man upstairs, as a term for God! If you said that in front of some imams, you could probably be accused of blasphemy. Comparing God to a man!

  “And your mother? When you were a little girl, did she take you to church or to the...Jewish shrine—”

  “A temple. Or synagogue. Neither. Honestly, they met in the late sixties, free love and all that. They thought you could raise kids on good morals. Just be nice to each other, stop making war, that kind of thing. A whole generation was raised like that. And we turned out okay, didn’t we?”

  “Except for the making war part,” I say, just to make her laugh again.

  A memory of Mum taking me to the Imam Ali Shrine flashes through my mind. Where would I be today if at least one parent didn’t believe in taking us to pray, in nourishing our souls as well as our bodies and our minds?

  Guarded by God. I wonder if a name creates a reality, a sort of personality that is outlined for us before we even begin to be.

  “Why do you use ‘Sam’, then? Samara is very beautiful.”

  “I like it, Samara. Sam is just, I don’t know, easier, catchier. I remind people that it’s Samara when they assume it’s Samantha and I have to correct them. And after all, it’s in my byline.”

  The housing has become dense, the road bumpier from neglect, the architecture grim and crumbling. I begin to direct Ibrahim towards the address for Mustapha.

  “What does Nabil mean?”

  I hold up my hand to her, asking her to wait, describing the rest of the way to Ibrahim. “I’ll tell you later.”

  ~ * ~

  “Here,” I say, when we get to the building where Mustapha’s office is. “This is it.”

  I turn back to Sam. “You’re ready?’

  She snaps shut her bag and looks at me, indicating that she is.

  “You know what Samara actually means in Arabic? I mean, the city name?”

  Sam shakes her head.

  “The name Samarra is derived from the Arabic phrase of sarre men ra’a which translates to A joy for all who see’. And, this is also very fitting for you.” I get out and hold the door open for her, my hand feeling the heat of the metal handle that might burn me were it any hotter, and as she leaves the car, I notice that for the first time, I believe I made Samara Katchens blush.

  Brutus pulls open the door. Mustapha is at his desk.

  “Ah! We’ve been waiting for you!” he rises to offer a hand towards Sam.

  “This is the American journalist I told you about,” I say.

  “Yes, Misses Samara, right?”

  “Yes,” she says, putting her hand in his open one. Were Sam a marionette under my control, I might have pulled on the strings just before her hand went into his. The fact that he asked her to come in a hejab suggests that he is religious, or at least, the people he plans to arrange for us to meet are.

  “I expected you earlier,” he says. “We’re running a little late.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “We had another commitment. She’s a very busy lady. She was being interviewed on television.”

  “Oh,” he says, looking at Sam transformed, wrapped up in her blue scarf, all the red hair tucked away, except for the hints in her eyebrows and around her temples. “Is she a famous correspondent?”

  “Of course,” I say. “One of the most important in America.”

  Respect, first and foremost. They must know to treat Sam with respect.

  “Well then it’s definitely appropriate for her to meet the people to whom I’m going to introduce you.” Mustapha turns and switches to English: “It’s such a pleasure to meet you.”

  “And you,” she answers, oblivious to everything that has just transpired.

  “Please. Have a seat,” he says, pointing to the old sofa I sat on yesterday. “Would you drink the tea?”

  “Well, if we’re running late,” I say.

  “Nonsenseness,” he says, claiming his right to speak English, even if he seems to be creating the language as he goes along. “Always there is time for the tea.”

  Mustapha seems different today. A change of clothes? A closer shave?

  “You are very nice American lady,” he says, his eyes coursing over Sam as if she were wearing a skimpy dress rather than her loose trousers, a long-sleeved tunic and a headscarf.

  Sam’s lack of reaction makes me proud; her expression is pleasant but not pleased.

  “I think we can help you very much with your research, but you must trust on me. Can you trust on me?”

  Sam glances at me for a moment, and then back to him. “Sure I can trust you.”

  “Trust is very important to the Iraqi people. If I trust you, I am willing to give you the keys to my own house,” he says, picking his own pair from his pocket and dangling them in the air. “Nothing is more important than trust.”

  Sam nods.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I do. Trust is important.”

  “In America, you have a lot of money and the big weapons, so you doesn’t need the other countries to trust you. But here, different. We think, important to
trust each other.”

  “Of course. Mr—”

  “Call me Mustapha.”

  “Mustapha, I do trust you. Excuse me for getting down to business, but can you explain something to me about these documents?”

  He looks to me for a moment like he wants me to translate, and then turns back to her. “You understand everything when you getting there.”

  “Where?” she asks. “I mean, where is this neighbourhood you want to go to?”

  “You see. No need for worry about no thing.”

  We follow Mustapha down the few steps from his office and out of the front door. Sam and I turn right to go back towards the place where Ibrahim is parked, but Mustapha goes left. Brutus stands beside him, twice his width and probably six inches taller.

  “It’s this way,” Mustapha says, switching back into Arabic.

  “Well, our car is this way,” I say, pointing up the narrow street. “We’ll follow you.”

  “No, no. That’s no good. Leave your car and come in my car.”

  “I thought that was the whole point of not coming in our own car. We came in a taxi.”

  “Yes, of course. For your own safety. But it is also for your safety that you come in my car because the people we’re going to see will know it’s me, and you’ll be safer.”

  “Sam, he wants us to go in his car.”

  “Because?”

  “Because he says it’s safer that way.”

  There is a deepening in her eyes, like sand darkened by a rainshower. “Is that...okay with you?”

  “Well, it’s up to you. It’s...whatever you want to do.”

  “I told you,” he says, smiling at Sam with an almost flirtatious face. “Don’t worry. You’re with me! My goodness, American people, so careful! In Baghdad we trust people, especially our friends.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Do Nabil tell you that we went to university together?”

  “Yes,” Sam says. “He did say that.”

  “See,” he says, holding on to my collarbone and shaking it affectionately. “Ahui,” he says, calling me his brother. “If you study with someone, you’re like his brother, always.”

  “Always,” I say, and look at Sam, who looks back at me with the most neutral face possible. “Well, then. Give us a minute to go back and tell the driver to wait here for us.”

  “Ah. He’s still here? Well then, you can send him home. We’ll get you other taxi, later, or if I can, maybe I can drop you off.”

  “Well, how long will we be?” I ask. “Maybe he should just wait here for us while we’re gone.”

  “That the problem,” Mustapha says, shaking his head. “We don’t know. It no make sense you pay the taxi to wait here for you. Don’t worry,” he says.

  Sam and I make our way past the stores and stalls selling the average sorts of things that people, particularly women, used to come to this part of the market for: frilly nightgowns, handbags, slippers, veils, makeup. Piles of fake blue jeans no woman in her right mind would be caught dead wearing on the street now, unless it were totally hidden under her long jupeh or an abaya.

  “See something you like? Maybe a new handbag?” Sam asks, smiling mischievously.

  “I was looking for a present for you. I think maybe you need a nice gown like that,” I say, pointing to one of the long, embroidered houserobes usually worn by women my mother’s age.

  “Beautiful!” she whispers. “Or one like that,” pointing to a mannequin dressed in one of those fancy, finely embroidered abayas that come from the Gulf countries.

  When we are far enough away from Mustapha’s building, she moves closer to me. “Do you trust this guy?”

  Now we’re passing the section with household goods, buckets, cleaning materials, sponges and mops. Things anyone who had a home would want to stop and price, things that are far removed from Sam’s reality because someone comes into her room to clean every day.

  “Not entirely.”

  “You don’t? Well me neither. He seems like a slimeball to me.”

  “I know. But sometimes the slimeball people have the good connections. I don’t think he would lie about that — about what he can get for us.”

  “Really?” Sam touches a silk scarf as we pass through the part where the market gets narrow.

  “I think he is a crooked man, for sure, but he might be our only way for you to finish the story,” I say. “And if Saleh sent us here—”

  At the mouth of the market, where the cars are parked, Ibrahim awaits us. Across the street, about four cars away, I see Rizgar, his eyes peeled towards us. “Don’t even look at Rizgar,” I breathe in Sam’s direction, “just in case they are following us.”

  I open the door to Ibrahim’s car, and we hop in. He looks suspicious, like he can feel that there’s been a change of plan.

  “Nabil, wait,” Sam says. “Do you think we should go with this guy or not? I mean, we could have tried to insist on taking our own driver—”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t see any other way. I don’t know who else to go to get you the answer you need. Maybe we don’t go with him and we just say thank you very much and you tell your editor that that’s it. We did what we could.”

  Sam clucks her tongue.

  “You said they were ready to run the story without knowing who made the documents and why. You said they would just do a story saying that they were fake and that would be it. So if you want, let them do that, and khalas. You did your job.”

  “No, I didn’t. If I let them run it now, it’s a totally incomplete story.” She pulls at her headscarf around her chin, clearly uncomfortable with the way it frames her face. “How can I just give up and not really get the story?”

  I see in her eyes a love that I don’t love. A love of the story, whatever that means. But in that love, I see a love I respect: a love of getting to the truth, of a chance to set things right.

  “So we go, then.” I face Ibrahim and put a small stack of dinars in his hand. “As soon as we re-enter the market, can you go and tell our friend over there in the old Chrysler that we want him to try to follow us? Tell him that we’re getting into a car parked at the other end of the market. Just tell him to stay back and follow us, several cars behind, like he did this morning coming here. Got that?”

  “Okay,” he says, “Inshallah.” We get out with only the smallest glance in Rizgar’s direction, and Ibrahim waves us goodbye, his wrinkled hand held up in a way that almost makes him look like a holy man bestowing blessings on his followers.

  ~ * ~

  46

  Bestowing

  We are inside Mustapha’s 1991 Mercedes 300 SE, black outside, brown leather inside. It is spotless; perhaps he vacuums his car every day and dumps his dust on the floor of Ibrahim’s. In Iraq we call this kind of car “the submarine”, and everyone knows it was one of Saddam’s favourites, in particular, we understood, because it seemed to defy America after they forced their way into the war with Kuwait. In 1991, Saddam bought new luxury cars, started several new palaces, and apparently sent for all sorts of lavish goods from Europe.

  Maybe Mustapha has done well as a lawyer. Or maybe he stole the car last month.

  With Brutus in the passenger seat, Mustapha drives us towards Ishbiliya and Idris, back towards the centre of town, and as he does, I can feel the tension in my spine drop just a bit, like letting a little bit of the air pressure out of an over-inflated tyre. If we’re no longer in Sadr City, where everyone knows bad things happen, where you probably ought not to bring a foreign girl anyway, we must be in less danger. We pass through Saddoun Street, the old theatres, the safe places. I find myself looking at the silver buttons on the doors, noticing that they’re unlocked. If things went terribly wrong, we could jump out. I should write this down for Sam.

  I reach for the notebook in my backpocket and then realize I don’t have a pen. I make a sign with my thumb and forefinger, asking her
for something to write with. She takes a pen out of her bag and hands it to me, but as she does, Mustapha looks over his shoulder and notices what she’s doing.

  “I just want to check our schedule,” I say, unable to think of anything better, drawing a line through some notes in the pad. “Sam, we have to be back in the Green Zone at three for your interview, right?”