Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  I asked him, “Did you love her? Are you still sad?” I reached for his hand and he let me hold it for a moment before withdrawing. He spoke between rhythmic drags on a cigarette. Inhale, pause, smoke, puff. He kept looking towards the door to the kitchen. His mother was slicing onions and we could hear her, exclaiming, “Ow-weesh,” stinging eyes and weeping. Chop, chop, “ow-weesh.” He lowered his voice.

  “She was only the second daughter, not the pretty one.” I had the sense that he had been pushed into the union against his wishes. I asked him what her name was, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said that he felt guilty and he closed his eyes, as if retreating into some private interior torment. I thought that he felt guilty because she had died and he had not loved her. I told him that guilt was of no use to anyone—that her death was not his fault, that he must not allow the past to poison our future. That he must live his life and be happy and that was all anyone could do. I gathered my love into a force that would wipe away his pain and would lead us, together, towards a new and better future. I moved to put my arms around him, but he was stiff, stuck, somewhere else, and would not look at me. I knelt at his feet and rested my head on his knee. He started to say I’m sorry, but he said it in Arabic, “Ana asif.” I heard it in English, “as if.”

  “As if what? Ahmed, don’t worry. Everything is possible,” I told him, my American dreaming half who believed, back then, in love and happy endings.

  _____

  Ahmed was very gratified with his new job. The Development Fund for Iraq for was responsible for dispersing monies and contracts for civil projects. This was rebuilding, he thought, a Marshall Plan for the Middle East. His boss was a Vietnam vet Arabist on the State Department’s Iraq desk. Colonel Don was in his sixties with plenty of salt in his wisdom, a Vermonter, a fisherman; he had optimistically packed his rods. “One of these days I’m going to get upriver, out of the Baghdad sewage stream, and haul in one of those mythical Tigris salmon.” He treated Ahmed like a sidekick son-in-law. They barreled around the country in a white SUV convoy meeting tribal elders and dispensing wads of cash.

  At the beginning it was a grand adventure. Sheikhs came out into the yards of their compounds and lined up their sons to greet the new rulers. A wary deference, bowing, welcoming, Yes, yes, it is very bad in our town, Saddam punished us too much. Coffee was poured into small thimble cups and the foreign entourage was ushered into the formal reception room.

  Sometimes Colonel Don let me tag along. We’d take off our shoes and sit cross-legged, careful not to display the soles of our feet. A succession of coffee, tea, coffee, tea. Low concrete houses, chickens scratching in the yard. Small children throwing stones at crows and shooting each other with plastic Kalashnikovs. Inside, endless talking as a fan swirled the flies about. Hours of this. Interminable lunches, whole lambs slaughtered in our honor on giant mounds of almond raisin rice. The old men wore their tribal robes and sat beneath portraits of their fathers and grandfathers. You can see we have no electricity, the bridge is in need of repair, the road was washed away in the floods last year. We are humble men who want to serve our people with your freshly printed bundles of green dollars that arrive shrink-wrapped in million- dollar blocks on cargo planes twice a week. Colonel Don shrugged and nodded at their demands; this was the policy.

  Ahmed was contemptuous of them. Backward, greedy village idiots, everything according to inshallah. Classrooms were repainted, but the school walls fell down; incubators were ordered, but there were no generators to power them. All those billions and good intentions ran into the sand and seeded IEDs. Like some strange greenhouse effect, as the weather got hotter the violence grew. Ahmed rolled his eyes that the first thing a sheikh would ask for was an air conditioner before any work could be done.

  _____

  In the winter the car bombs began, slowly at first—perhaps one a month—but then more frequently. One day Zorro turned a corner and the street blew up bright orange! His photograph made the front page of the New York Times. Zorro became obsessed with finding the Baghdad golden hour, when the sky would be blue and the shadows could cast faces into bronze. He never did. The sky was white and it leached all the colors away so that only shades of ochre and yellow, beige and sand remained. Dust, dust, fucking dust.

  Helicopters veering overhead all the time, ping-pong gunfire, constant, nothing to turn your head about. Pink globs of flesh wobbling like jelly on the tarmac after a bomb. Women wailing, flapping their black nylon wings, too heavy to fly away. But mostly when I think back, I recall that time in Baghdad as halcyon. I was in love, the story was the center of the world. Oh, happy days.

  To think that we used to laugh at Zorro’s luck, to always be next door to the explosion! He would tease me about my “bad” luck. “She goes up to Sadr City in the morning and buys tomatoes and chats to the neighborhood militia Moqtadr men and sits in a café and has a glass of tea with the mullah. I go up two hours later and the whole place is exploding and there’s a Humvee burning.” Zorro had all the luck. Until he got caught in crossfire under an overpass. And even then we continued the myth of Zorro’s luck, because the bullet hit only his left arm and he got second prize in the World Press Photo Spot News category.

  I was never struck by the violence in Baghdad. I lived there for two years after the American invasion and I never saw a dead body. Partly this was my bad luck, partly it was deliberate. I didn’t go to count corpses in the morgue. I didn’t want to look closer when they pulled up the sheet covering the dead fighter so that we could see how his face had been blown off by a mortar. I didn’t want to have PTSD like all the old guard. I didn’t want those war porn images in my dreams. I never watched the beheading videos, even when it was all the rage.

  I was the girl who stood by the side of the road and wrote down what I saw in my notebook. Observe. That’s what Jean had taught me in Moscow when I was new and green. He would take me along on reporting trips, Ingush orphanages, oil cities in Siberia, political campaigning in the Urals.

  “Just write what you see and what you hear. Think about the word reporter. That’s what you should be, the person who reports, tells what they have seen. Just that. Leave all the editorial guff—What does this mean for XY and the future of U.S. foreign policy? et cetera, et cetera. Don’t worry about context, trying to compress history into subclauses—the editors will cut and paste their boilerplates. Editors—god rid the world of editors, I would say they are a necessary evil except I cannot see the necessity—an editor must edit, otherwise he has no job, so he edits, which means he fusses about all these irrelevancies and others—like what the foreign minister said this morning. Another thing to avoid is press conferences. Press conferences are the way of the politicians to put journalists into a zoo. The most important thing is to keep your eyes and your ears open. You must notice.”

  Soot-blackened chassis. Another car-bomb crater. Tiny silver triangles of jets overhead. Puffs of thunderhead smoke rising between tower blocks. Trails of red tracer in the night dark. Wailing black abaya triangles. I ran out of synonyms for rubble. I sat in cafés by the side of blasted roads and listened to people tell me what had happened to them. My pencil tip looped across the page, pages and pages of gunfire and wounded brothers hiding, arrested, tortured, fighting. I wrote down their terror and outrage and pain and noted the details: three tribal tattoo dots on the bridge of her nose . . . fingernails missing from his right hand . . . Osama Bin Laden screen saver on his mobile phone . . . I took their stories and sold them.

  I was, Ahmed once told me, unkindly, the mistress of aftermath.

  On panel discussions in the safe parallel world of New York or London, I was asked why I went to war zones. I answered that I felt a duty to understand and explain the Other to readers at home. This is not “an Iraqi,” this is a person, even if he is called Ahmed, I would say to the interlocutor on the panel. Let me add something more to his identifying subclause beyond his age and occupation: 38, taxi driver. For example, there is an Ahmed I know who
is funny and wry and does a very good impression of George W. Bush, Mission Accomplished! Let’s go back to playing golf with the heads of Iraqi babies! This Ahmed is hospitable and always invites me for tea and his wife bakes pistachio cookies that are delicious. You cannot imagine how friendly they are! This is a real Ahmed, with a life and family and a sense of humor. He has copper hair, and he laughs that they used to tease him in the army about being the descendant of a lost crusader tribe or those mythical long-lasting batteries that you could never get under sanctions. Yes, that Ahmed! His son has bright copper hair too and his wife calls him “my little orange.” Ahmed, you know, the one who worked as a driver on the road to Amman and was hired by Reuters. Yes! Him! Funny lovely guy. Shot on the road to Fallujah last week. Another dead Ahmed.

  I once said to Oz: “I want to give Iraqis a real, three-dimensional life. Not to lump them into a group of villains or victims and label it them.”

  “Yes, characters. We need good characters,” Oz replied. The satellite phone connection cracked. The exigencies of the newspaper’s style manual impinged on the clean blank page of Jean’s idealism. “Find me a donkey,” said Oz. A donkey was a character whose own narrative carried the bigger issues of the story on his back through a feature story.

  I reported, I wrote. It is true that the stories were all unhappy—war, injury, pain, loss—each an episode that peeled back another onion layer to reveal a previous misery. Iraqis were scabs over wounds that had never healed. I listened and diligently wrote down ruined lives in my notebook. When people cried, I found tears in my eyes too. I would hold their cracked and callused hands in mine and tell them it was all going to be better now. There would be reconstruction, renewal, redress. I was a fool.

  _____

  Fire ringed a black hole crater. Everything was covered in a thin film of gray dust except for bright red pools of blood. The foreground was jumbled and full of lies. The women scratched their faces and ululated grief for the foreign cameras. The men stood beside the blasted scrim, smoking. When I asked them what happened, they pointed to the sky and said, “American helicopter!” Despite the irrefutable evidence of the burnt-out carcass of a car bomb.

  The ambulance men picked up a severed leg and wrapped it in a sheet. The white bloomed red. A boy, perhaps eight years old, watched with the dispassionate fascination of little boys with war. I asked him what he had seen. He looked me up and down and asked for ten dollars, and when I rolled my eyes and walked away, he yelled after me, in English, “We will kill all you foreigners!”

  I walked back and stood in front of him.

  “OK,” I said, pulling the scarf off my head. “Kill me then.”

  The kid laughed and said, “I will spare you if you give me a cigarette.” I made a show of pulling a cigarette up from my pack and offering it to him, as politely adult as if we were at a cocktail party. He took it, made a small ironic bow, produced a lighter from his pocket and lit my cigarette before lighting his own. We got talking. He was adamant that the Americans were responsible for the bomb that had killed two of his neighbors and supported every attack on the occupying imperialists.

  “You just blame everything on the Americans,” I remonstrated. “It was a car bomb! Iraqis did this!” But the boy shook his head as if my version was as absurd as his. Truth has two points of view. Jean had told me to look through the looking glass.

  “It’s as if all Iraqi emotion is expressed by gunfire,” I complained to Ahmed. “Angry at the occupation? Shoot at the Americans. Frustrated, stuck in a traffic jam? Fire off a couple of rounds in the air just to let off steam. You’ve had a son? Spray the air with celebratory bullets.” When the Iraqi football team won an international match, there was so much gunfire all over the city the Americans thought the insurgents were staging an offensive.

  “And another thing. What about all the looting, armed break-ins, carjackings, routine banditry on the roads.” Ahmed reasoned that it was the breakdown of law and order.

  “And the kidnapping?” Thousands of children were being ransomed by gangs of extortionists. “I mean, stealing I can understand. But taking a four-year-old boy and locking him in a garage until his father sells his house to pay? Making a business out of threatening to rape a teenage girl? This is not just opportunism, it’s something much nastier.”

  I decided to focus more on the backstory and delve into recent history. What had happened to Iraqis in the terror time of Saddam? How had violence become so inculcated?

  “I’ll introduce you to an old friend of my father’s,” Ahmed offered. “He grew up with my father in Samarra, they were the bright young generation sent abroad to be educated while the oil money still flowed. This man became an army doctor, very senior. He is a slippery kind of chameleon, he has a different face for every occasion. He refused to answer my mother’s calls when my father was arrested. I saw him the other day, by chance, at the Haifa Street checkpoint next to the Green Zone. They wouldn’t let him in, and he was stranded there with the flares of his ridiculous three-piece suit left over from 1976 flapping and snagging on the barbed wire. Our roles were reversed. It was his turn to ask for help, and my turn to say I couldn’t. But I took him for coffee at that place around the corner you like to go and find sob stories, the one Jean calls the Salon des Refusés. He saw my lanyard and that I was working for the Americans, so he became full of apologies and crocodile smiles. ‘I swear on my eyes, there was nothing I could do.’ They all say that. ‘On my eyes, you are like a son to me!’ He has three sons, all officers in the Republic Guard! I decided to play along, so I said, ‘But I am not as brave as your sons, the lions of our country! May Allah have delivered them safely from the defense of our nation!’ Ha-ha! Of course they were all burying the gold and hiding in some relative’s compound in the countryside when the Americans invaded. Naturally this loyal man now wants a job with the Americans. I said I would see what I could do. I can try and talk to Colonel Don about him. You should not trust him—he is full of slander, he will pry any crack to his advantage. But if you want to talk to someone who was on the inside, he might be interesting. His name is Muntazzer.”

  _____

  I first met General Muntazzer at his house, a well-appointed concrete villa in one of Baghdad’s middle-class suburbs of walled houses. An old man was washing a Mercedes in the forecourt. I buzzed but there was no electricity, so the old man helpfully honked the horn and Muntazzer came to the door. Stiff bearing, thick black moustache. He wore a tan suit with crisp pleats in his trousers, a burgundy shirt and a matching burgundy tie secured with a tie pin. On his wrist he wore a chunky brushed-steel watch ringed with pavé diamonds. A typical Baathie military type.

  He showed me into the public reception room of his house. There did not seem to be any wife at home to bring us coffee. Instead he had set out two glasses and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, ice cold from the fridge. It was the middle of the afternoon. The room was decorated in Louis Farouk luxury: satin sofa covers, tasseled cushions, gilded claw-foot coffee tables laid with gold plastic doilies. Two photographs hung on the wall. In one Saddam was pinning a medal to Muntazzer’s chest, in the other Muntazzer stood at the end of a line of eight generals. The second picture seemed to have been taken hurriedly. It was badly composed, the generals were too small for the landscape, and the camera had been held at an odd angle so that the line of commanders tilted as if they were about to fall over. Underneath was handwritten “1991.” It must have been taken during one of two ignominious episodes, Kuwait or the uprising afterwards. Muntazzer proudly pointed out that he was wearing a red, black, and white sash, which had been awarded for his participation in the “Mother of All Battles.”

  He smiled easily and appeared friendly, but his eyes were still and his lids flickered. I could not tell if this was because he was blinking slowly or fast. From time to time his tongue licked at the side of his bottom lip.

  Pleasantries: had I found the right crossroads easily? Most taxi drivers knew the blue minaret, but
the Americans had closed the access road to the highway, so now you had to take a big loop around.

  “I am very happy to help any friend of Ahmed. He is like a son to me. How did you meet?” His eyes narrowed. I demurred. Ahmed had warned that Muntazzer would probe, but I shouldn’t let on that we were engaged, because he would gossip and Ahmed’s mother still didn’t know.

  (I went along with these games. I loved Ahmed, I trusted him, I knew Iraqi society was complex and honor-bound. I swallowed his plausible explanations and did not add them up into any accountancy. Ahmed divided his life into compartments, but I did not know that. The idea that I was kept in a separate folder, cross-referenced with other personnel files only occasionally and with caution, was impossible to imagine. To this day I don’t know why he risked introducing me to Muntazzer. Perhaps because by connecting him to Colonel Don he had indirectly connected him to me anyway.)

  I sipped my cold Johnnie Walker and asked Muntazzer jokingly where Saddam was hiding. He repeated the more colorful rumors. House arrest guest of the Turks, eating caviar in Riyadh. I asked him directly about the big Baathies like Izzat al-Douri, the King of Clubs. Muntazzer spread his hands wide and empty and told me he was out of the inner circle these days.