Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  Ahmed often stayed overnight because it was dangerous to drive back to his mother’s house late at night. Baghdad in the dark had become a lottery of carjack, car bomb, random bullets. His mother lived in Mansour, and the route home took him through the SCIRI checkpoints in Karrada. “Scary-SCIRI-we-are-so-silly,” I used to singsong mock the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. “Shia who want their revenge on us,” said Ahmed. He had started to keep his father’s old pistol in the glove compartment.

  Alexandre liked to discuss the situation with Ahmed. He found he was a useful analyst of the political culture and mood inside the Green Zone, that strange UFO bubble dome constructed out of razor wire wrapped around portacabins held together with duct tape. Ahmed said it was like Star Wars being shot with extras from The Hobbit. All the same he was grateful for his daily Starbucks latte and sometimes he would bring me back a congealed Bacon Double Cheeseburger from the Burger King as a special treat. Ahmed did not have the right pass to access the PX store, but Colonel Don would take an order for Oscar Mayer hotdogs and bacon and I would implore the French chef to cook them up for us, which he did with an expression of indulgent contempt for “cette choucroute nue.”

  Ahmed and I had a long-running joke that we should write a series for HBO called The Diplomat, which would fictionalize all the comic ridiculousnesses that the title character, an erudite ambassador from an unnamed European country, had to navigate in occupied Baghdad. Alexandre pretended to be aghast when we made up storylines at the dinner table: The Wahhabi gardener and the Argentinian ambassador’s wife who wore a yellow polka-dot bikini to swim in the embassy pool. The donkey cart bomb outside the North Korean Embassy; working title, “Donkey Kong.” The sheikh who refused to check his gun at the door and ate his dinner with the pistol next to his plate. The American hard-knock raid on the Hashemite pretender to the throne who lived next door. The strange nighttime comings and goings into a First Gulf War bomb shelter on the other side of the street, which turned out to be a Blackwater interrogation site. The one about the invitation to invite Moqtadr Sadr to a dinner party in honor of Jacques Tati.

  Alexandre said that no one would believe such plotlines. “The trouble with fiction is that you cannot make it as absurd as real life. Reality is not credible, it is incredible!”

  _____

  In late spring, after a hot Eid weekend, slaughtered lambs in the streets, insurgent attacks on the airport road, black helicopters hovering, flies over carrion, Muntazzer called.

  “My son Oberon is ready to meet you. I will pick you up from outside the Embassy in one hour.”

  The traffic was terrible, clogged in an inching, honking mass; a lake of sewage had flooded Karrada, no traffic lights, because the electricity was off. The thick hot air smeared my skin; I stared out of the grimy car window I dared not wind down in case anyone saw strands of foreigner blond hair escaping from my hijab. A man was selling gasping carp from a wooden handcart, a beggar with one arm waved his stump at the cars, an explosion boomed somewhere, a jet whined far above; there was a line of twenty-five cars at the 14 July Bridge checkpoint into the Green Zone.

  It took us an hour and a half to get to the sprawling car market on the highway. The King of the Faeries was sitting in a plastic chair outside a prefab sales cabin. The rows of secondhand cars radiated heat. Oberon was tall, with hooded eyes like his father, stubble, swarthy. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and black sneakers. Leaning against the portacabin was a Kalashnikov. He shook my hand. Polite, serious. (Sexy.) He asked if I wanted tea, I nodded, and he clicked his fingers for the boy to fetch it.

  He told me he had come from Samarra that morning and they were very well organized there. He wanted me to understand this. They were not kids, they were not terrorists. He told me they were attacking the American FOB, the forward operating base set up in the old Baath Party administration building, with mortars every night. He said that the Americans were too frightened to leave their fort even to patrol the streets. Once a week they resupplied their garrison with an armored convoy from the battalion at Camp Beast outside the city, but they could only do so with the cover of Apache helicopters.

  “We now control Samarra,” Oberon told me. “The Americans cannot go out in their Humvees without being hit. They used to drive their tanks down the main street. Now they don’t dare. Their tanks sit on the edge of the town and drive a little way in and destroy houses because they cannot do anything else. At night they arrest people in their homes, they arrest anyone their informers tell them to. They are looking for us but they cannot find us.”

  There had been very little news from Samarra for three or four months. The roads north had become too dangerous for Westerners to drive. I asked him if he could verify any of what he said. He brought out a white envelope containing photographs. Several were nighttime shots, streaks of red and white tracer against black sky—unidentifiable. Several were of a burnt-out Humvee, but this was not exceptional and could have been anywhere. The last few pictures were of an Apache helicopter, crashed on its side in a winter wheat field, crumpled like cardboard. One was a close up of the stenciled registration number on the tail. There was also a shot of the rotor blades sheared off, and lying, like a decapitated ceiling fan, on the nearby riverbank.

  “You must tell the Americans who read your newspaper that we are in control of Samarra and we are fighting the Americans, that we are defeating them and that we are not terrorists.”

  I nodded.

  “This is important and interesting, but I need to see this for myself.” Oberon smiled. His father, I noticed, did not.

  “We will arrange it.”

  The traffic on the way back was even more interminable. I sat in the passenger seat of Muntazzer’s white Mercedes with my forehead resting against the scorching glass of the car window, listening to the shushing whirr of the AC fighting the heat. The car crawled and stopped. The endless street moved past slowly like a trundling stage set, grime and dirt, misshapen structures. A series of garages set up in shipping containers made a row of rotting teeth. Among these ruins, men in rags beat panels into rough satellite dishes, black horned toes hooked over the edge of sandals, black lines etched on foreheads, a small boy balanced a tea tray on his shorn and scarred head. Men sat on warped plastic chairs smoking cigarette after cigarette. Paper and leaf to ash, each cigarette butt trod into the dust.

  All this misery went past, and I congratulated myself that I was in the right place to bear witness to it. I felt a burp of excitement nestling in my sternum. My own personal insurgent! All the people I could see out of the window were fucked, but I was buzzing. The stupid thing is that I don’t remember being frightened.

  _____

  I sent my Oberon file to Oz. He was skeptical. He asked me to confirm the downing of the American helicopter. I had copied down the registration number of the Apache in the photograph, but the American military spokesman would not even verify that this helicopter was in Iraq.

  “I have to go to Samarra,” I told Alexandre. “It’s a proper scoopy-scoop.” Alexandre pressed his lips together, pulled on a fleshy earlobe. In his breakfast kimono, he looked like my worried aunt.

  “Zorro and Jean are coming next week.”

  “Oh are they?”

  “Wait until they come. I don’t want you going up there alone.”

  _____

  All the time, time-lapse chrysanthemum spreading its petals into full-blown flower, the violence blossomed. And with it came its corollary, spiritual attrition. The quotidian horror ground us down into contempt, black humor, cynicism. I did not notice at first that my periods had stopped. At first I was elated, but the French Embassy doctor confirmed that I was not pregnant. He told me that my blood test indicated idiopathic perimenopause. When I asked him what this meant, he said it was not clear, perhaps the hormone imbalance was due to stress, I should wait six months and see if I my period returned.

  Ahmed began to deride the Americans almost as much as he derided the stupid Iraqi
s and their mendacious sheikhs. His callow Green Zone colleagues, ciphers in blue button-down shirts and chinos, revolved on six-month secondments to the Development Fund for Iraq, as if a posting to Iraq was like a semester abroad, he complained, CV filler for young Washington insider wannabes. They were only in the office long enough to pick up the mannerisms of occupation, never long enough to actually do anything. They tossed around in-country slang, “towelheads” and “bedsheets.” Ahmed told me, incredulous, that one of them, a real asshole named Brogan, used to carry a bottle of antibacterial gel to wash his hands after shaking hands with an Iraqi. I met Brogan at one of the Sunday barbecues by the pool in Saddam’s old palace. He took off his T-shirt to swim, and I saw he had a Marines tattoo, a giant eagle with semper fideles across his back, even though he had never enlisted.

  “You’re our terp’s fiancée. Cool. Yeah, he’s one of the good-uns,” he said to me, cuffing Ahmed on the shoulder. “Shit, man!” He twirled a pair of tongs in an accidentally aggressive loop. I took a step back. “We got like all sausage and ribs, like all pork. I forgot.”

  “It’s no problem,” said Ahmed, “I eat pork.”

  “Like I said, he’s one of the good-uns!”

  Embrace the suck.

  Then Ahmed found out that the Americans were being paid ten times more than him and this really stung. He confronted Colonel Don, but Colonel Don only shrugged and nodded in his equitable way. He said he would do what he could, which turned out to be nothing.

  Ahmed redacted these slights when he gossiped about Green Zone shenanigans with Alexandre in the embassy. Was it water-off-a-duck’s-back or denial? At the time I didn’t think Ahmed took them personally, but maybe these barbs stuck more than I guessed.

  It took me a long time to see that Ahmed’s Achilles heel was his pride. He was, after all, an Iraqi, an Arab. But I never thought of him this way, partly because he was accentless and Westernized, partly because I thought of him—loved him—as just Ahmed. Was he overcompensating when he criticized Iraqis, Muslims, Arabs, or was it a deflection, camouflage? The outsider pissing out to show he was inside the tent. I remember wondering to Jean about it one day in Baghdad. He told me not to worry, he didn’t think Ahmed was secretly resentful. Rather, he thought Ahmed was ambitious, that he looked at the anointed Americans and wanted to join the club. Maybe Jean was right. Ahmed wore the T-shirt Brogan had printed up for all the Iraqis in the office—ONE OF THE GOOD-UNS emblazoned across the chest—for ages.

  FIVE

  Muntazzer had given me a story. Now it was my turn to reciprocate the back scratch. At the same time Ahmed wanted to find some way to introduce Muntazzer to Colonel Don, to stop him calling him every two days to ask when his invitation to the Green Zone would be ready. Colonel Don had said no, there was no point, discretionary funds for “sources” had been stopped. Confluence of interests, I persuaded Alexandre to invite Muntazzer for dinner at the embassy. Ahmed oiled the wheels by telling Alexandre that Muntazzer “knew people” and then, when he had reluctantly agreed, suggesting that he ask Colonel Don to come too.

  Muntazzer arrived first bearing a large box of chocolates and a bouquet of carnations. He wore a brown suit with a brown shirt and a brown tie secured with his gold tie pin. He had been to the barber; his moustache was neatly trimmed and he had dyed his salt and pepper hair black.

  “You look very natty,” I said.

  “What is natty?”

  Alexandre poured him a Johnnie Walker with ice. Muntazzer smiled like an iguana in a sun spot, gold incisor gleaming.

  “Monsieur Ambassador, it is very kind of you.”

  “Please call me Alexandre. I hear you are a psychiatrist?”

  “It is not an easy specialty in my country,” Muntazzer sighed, lapsing into his professional lament. “Most Iraqis have sustained some kind of psychological trauma. It comes from different origins and triggers, at the base there is a generalized national psychosis. What I call Saddam paranoia.”

  Ahmed arrived with Colonel Don and one of the ciphers. Josh had blond hair parted on the side. Introductions were made. Wine was poured. Josh asked for juice. We went out onto the terrace. The gendarmes patrolled the roof and their shadows made gargoyle silhouettes on the lawn.

  “We were discussing Saddam paranoia,” explained Alexandre.

  “Some people were socially withdrawn, they were afraid to go to work,” continued Muntazzer.

  “No one talked to anyone,” agreed Ahmed, looking directly at Muntazzer. “When my father was arrested, all our friends ignored us.”

  “It was between social phobia and agoraphobia,” Muntazzer continued. “You would see normal people displaying signs of paranoia, not wanting to talk on the telephone, afraid of the doorbell. You never mentioned Saddam’s name. Especially in front of your children.”

  Ahmed added, “Every conversation was a half conversation or an avoidance.”

  “Yes,” said Muntazzer, as if they were in agreement. “For a long time we had to lie in every situation. For example you would never tell your father that you smoked cigarettes or drank whiskey with your friends. You lied to your boss because he was under obligation to write an official report about you every six months. You must never admit to going to a mosque, because this was officially frowned upon. Within your own family it was dangerous to say what you really thought about anything, especially about the regime, the system, the ruler. Especially in front of your children who could repeat something to a teacher and you would be investigated. As a result Iraqis became expert liars. Yesterday I was questioned at a checkpoint by an American soldier and I was afraid to give him my ID card because I am a former Baath Party member and now they are arresting people like me. It feels as if we have just swapped one kind of fear for another.”

  “That is very interesting,” said Josh, blinking behind his Harry Potter glasses.

  “Do you think this kind of national fear accounts for the resurgence in religiosity?” asked Colonel Don.

  “Iraqis have been turning to Islam for several years now,” replied Muntazzer, gratified to find his opinion solicited. “It is partly a defense mechanism,” he explained. “The stress of the situation draws us back to religion. It is also a surrender to divine responsibility. Islam is not like Christianity; we believe what happens is written on your forehead; fated. This occupation is a catastrophe.” I saw Josh wince at the word “occupation.” Colonel Don only nodded. “But somehow we blame ourselves as if Allah is punishing us. It is a manifestation of insecurity. This chronic frustration will lead to aggression. I don’t know if the Americans understand the Iraqi mentality.”

  “Well, it’s a difficult learning curve for a lot of people,” said Colonel Don. Josh stood by, junior, listening. “We old-timers in the State Department don’t have much sway with the hotbloods in the DoD.”

  Colonel Don was an Arabist, one of the old Middle East hands, scholarly, intelligent, well informed. I had heard him chafe at the Defense Department before.

  “We have our hotbloods too,” said Muntazzer. He put on his wise, grandfatherly voice: let me tell you, you naïve new arrivals, twisting your ankles in our potholes, stumbling into our sinkholes. “There are no maps of Iraq; did you know that? Saddam would not allow them, in case of spies and foreign invasions. Saddam drained the marshes, but don’t imagine there are not still swamps and quicksands that can swallow whole armies.”

  Muntazzer puffed out his chest and pressed his advantage.

  “The young Iraqis see their country humiliated. We cannot stand by and be patient. Don, my friend,” Muntazzer held Colonel Don’s gaze as he spoke, “in Samarra—” Some kind of warning glance passed between Ahmed and Muntazzer. I felt a queasy tremor. A delicate cat’s cradle of acquaintance was looped around the fingers of the assembled. Which string was Ahmed tightening, which was he playing out?

  Ahmed interrupted. “The insurgents claim they are fighting the great enemy America, but they are killing more Iraqis than Americans.”

  �
��They are resisting,” said Alexandre, nodding at Muntazzer with an expression that wore kid gloves. Alexandre was ever the grand master diplomat. It occurred to me—fleetingly—that he and Ahmed might have rehearsed this scene, so that Alexandre could appear to come to Muntazzer’s defense and draw him into his confidence. “Resistance is never pretty,” said Alexandre, full of sympathy, tristesse, and wisdom, “it is only glorious afterwards, when you have won. Resistance is fought in your home, and therefore the bleeding is internal.”

  The majordomo announced dinner. We sat in the dining room with the shades drawn against the evening’s slanting sun. At each place was a small menu card, handwritten in ink. The chef had made a gazpacho. Muntazzer asked me why the soup was cold. The conversation turned to the problem of the Shia. Josh, looking around to see which spoon to use, said he thought it was a natural part of a readjustment to democracy. The Sunni would have to get used to the idea of being a minority.

  “We cannot,” said Ahmed. “It is one thing to be a minority in a democracy, but Iraq has never had democracy. Iraqis have no idea what it means to agree to disagree! The Shia will turn this country into a Persian colony.”

  “But Shia and Sunni are intermarried in Iraq, even some tribes are mixed,” said Josh.

  “Everyone always lives perfectly happily together before a civil war,” observed Alexandre.

  The butler served filet mignon with ratatouille. Muntazzer pushed his pink meat uneasily around the plate. He did not drink the wine and instead asked for another Johnnie Walker. The conversation continued: Shia, Sunni, bombs, insurgents, hard-knock raids, the Abu Ghraib scandal, de-Baathification, Paul Bremer III, Bush the Younger, Ayatollah Sistani, Moqtada Sadr, the Iranians, the Kurds, the British in Basra. Push and pull, a good discussion. Dessert was lemon sorbet with fresh fruit. After dinner we moved into the library and the discussion broke up into pairs. Muntazzer, who had not spoken much since the beginning of the meal, now turned to Colonel Don again.