“I want to help my American friends,” he said. A black eyebrow raised in a scimitar arch; powdery clumps of beige makeup were caught in the bristly hairs at the bridge of his nose. “I have information about the situation. Your colleagues in the 2nd Armored Division are having difficulties in Samarra. I am originally from Samarra, I have many relatives there. Perhaps I could visit you at your office, I am sure you will find what I have to say very interesting.”
“Samarra is out of my area, but why don’t you give me an idea of what you know.” Colonel Don kept his face very straight. Noncommittal, direct. Blond hair razored close at the back of his neck, graying at his temples, frank wide-open blue eyes, square jaw. He stood, arms folded, opposite Muntazzer’s coiffed and lacquered beehive. The crusader and the orientalist cartoon. A perfect racist portrait in black and white. One supplicant, groveling, inveigling, the other standing, legs akimbo, half-listening, indifferent. I looked over to the corner where Ahmed was talking to Alexandre and saw the reverse negative of this vignette. Ahmed was leaning against the mantelpiece with the languid elegance of confidence. Against the backlight of the sunset, his profile was cast as a silhouette, a handsome marble bust. Alexandre, by contrast, was pale pompadour, lace handkerchief in his top pocket, vestige of an ancient regime.
Each of us wanted something in return. Ahmed wanted Alexandre to write him a recommendation for a position at the U.N. Muntazzer was desperate for money and medical treatment for his wife. Alexandre needed leverage with the Americans. Colonel Don was gathering information for his final report, due before his retirement in a few weeks, that would indict the ideological zealotry of the Defense Department’s Iraq policy. (Not that it would do any good, he had confided to Ahmed, but at least for the record.) Dinner discussion dispensed with, now we came together to horse-trade in euphemisms. I was stuck with Josh earnestly describing an imaginary hospital renovation program. Over his shoulder I could see Alexandre nod and smile; a written recommendation for Ahmed’s U.N. application was in his easy gift, I knew. Then they began to talk about Muntazzer; both looked over towards him.
Muntazzer’s hands were pressed together in a gesticulation of obsequiousness and prayer. The glints of gold in Ahmed’s eyes caught the lowering rays of the sun and flashed. There was something unfathomable about the way he looked at Muntazzer and Don and then back to Alexandre. Did he feel caught between two sides, fearful of betraying one to the other? Probably this was my own sensitivity that I superimposed on Ahmed. Ahmed was playing to his own rules, as he always did, making them up as he went along, expedient, opportunistic.
I am sure Colonel Don understood what was being offered, but he seemed reluctant to take Muntazzer’s heavy swinging bait. His expression was neutral, but his hand kept going up to pull on his earlobe, a poker signal or for keep-awake sake.
“Even in families,” Muntazzer continued, leaning forward on the edge of the silk sofa, “things are breaking down. Sons do not obey their fathers.”
“Do you have sons?” Colonel Don asked pleasantly, as if making a small-talk enquiry. Perhaps Ahmed had told him about Oberon after all.
“Yes. They are my pride and also my painfulness,” said Muntazzer. “They are the hotbloods, they are the future of Iraq, and I fear for them as I fear for my country. This younger generation wants revenge and they will destroy everything in their thirst for it!” Muntazzer made a sweeping movement with his arm and slapped his palm against his forehead in a theatrical display of despair. “They do not like to listen to their fathers anymore! We are just the stupid old men who led them into this disaster. They think only of avenging our mistakes. They think they are all Salah ad-Din! They grew up in Saddam’s classroom and they think war is glorious, because we, we who saw it and fought it and suffered when our friends and families were killed, did not tell them how it was, because we could not, we did not dare. And now when I tell them no good will come, they say we are cowards and do not listen to us. What can we do? We did not teach them to trust us because we lied to them and now they despise us. For family and nation, when old traditions of honor and respect are broken, is the destruction of family and nation, everything is torn down—how do you say it—the material, the cloth?”
“The fabric of society,” supplied Colonel Don. Muntazzer wiped the tears from his eyes. He had poured out a great torrent of anguish and now threw himself at the feet of Colonel Don’s mercy.
“Yes, exactly. You understand! I am, like many of us—the old men, the failed generation, we must find a way to protect our sons and serve our country, even as our sons ignore us and our country burns with their fire!”
Muntazzer’s performance and the tragedy he described were worthy of the Bard. But he overplayed it. Colonel Don was going home soon. To Vermont, where the air was clean and cold and the apples grew crisp and plentiful on the trees. He did not want to be drawn into an emotional stew of conflicted and conflicting filials. (“He has seen this before, after all,” Ahmed told me later. “At the beginning he thought reconstructing Iraq would be an expiation of the sin of Vietnam. He was enthusiastic, he wanted to help. Then he was angry when he saw how the idiots at the Defense Department were screwing everything up. After the fuck-up in Najaf he became resigned, and then he actually resigned. Now he just wants out. He goes through the motions at the office, compiles his ‘list of stupidities,’ as he calls it, counts the days.”)
Colonel Don, a good man, faced with his own inutility, gave Muntazzer a shoulder squeeze. “I am hearing the same thing from a lot of people.” Muntazzer sat with his palms upturned on his lap, waiting for something to fall into his hands. But Colonel Don stood up and said he was sorry, it was time to go, curfew and all. Josh shook my hand, dry and formal. Colonel Don thanked Alexandre for such fine French hospitality and told Ahmed he would see him tomorrow, bright and early worm. Muntazzer did not get up because he was scowling into his whiskey.
When the door closed behind them, Alexandre and I went into the garden. Jasmine flowed into the cooling purple dusk, the sparrows in the jacaranda squawked nighty-night. Muntazzer took Ahmed aside and they walked along the lavender hedge.
“Muntazzer is asking Ahmed for something,” I said to Alexandre.
“Hmmm,” said Alexandre, lighting a cigarillo.
They walked, talking, to the far end of the garden, to the swimming pool. I saw Muntazzer make a chopping gesture with two hands. Ahmed put both his hands out in front of his chest as if to protect himself. Threat, remonstration, appeal? Ahmed’s legs made ambulatory triangles against the blue glow of the water. I wondered for a moment if Muntazzer would push him in. But by the time they returned and sat beside us on the terrace, it was all smiles and congeniality. Alexandre poured balloons of brandy.
“Ah,” he said, settling into his seat and turning to Muntazzer. “My dear general. Now do please, I pray, if you think I can be of some assistance, tell me what my American friend didn’t want to hear.”
“It is a delicate position,” said Muntazzer. “How to explain?”
“You are worried about your family.”
“Yes. I am worried about my family. I have three sons.” He paused. Alexandre did not prompt him.
“Beware of Iraqis asking favors,” said Ahmed. He was either trying to make a joke or inserting himself into the conversation; there was something bitter in his tone.
“Ahmed.” Alexandre was irritated, the rhythm had faltered. “Dr. Muntazzer, please continue.”
“My wife is very ill and the doctors say she needs radiation treatment. It is very expensive.”
Alexandre nodded. “Of course.”
“I am driving my car as a taxi. I am not proud. In every life, sometimes fortune smiles, sometimes she is angry with us. I can bear this for myself, but for my family—”
Muntazzer did not say that his sons were fighting the Americans in Samarra; Alexandre did not say that he knew this already.
“We, in France, have some latitude to provide medical visas,” offered Alexan
dre.
“I would be very grateful, my friend. On my eyes,” said Muntazzer using the strongest Iraqi expression of sincerity he could muster, “you can see the difficulty of this situation. A husband must protect his wife. A father must protect his family.”
SIX
I went to Samarra to meet Oberon at the end of September. Jean didn’t come after all—he was in and out of Iraq; I think he had gone back to France for a while. Zorro drove me in an orange-and-white-quartered taxi we hired. He took off all his jewelry, dyed his beard dark brown, tied up his dreadlocks in a keffiyeh and wore a checked shirt and a tired pair of suit trousers, Iraqi mufti. I wore a black enveloping abaya and sat in the backseat. We had IDs from Alexandre that said we were Moroccan nationals working for the French Embassy to get us through the checkpoints. No guns. A satellite phone in the glove box, a hundred dollars in small notes in our pockets, enough for a robber to take, be satisfied with, and go away. Zorro kept two hands locked on the steering wheel all the way out of Baghdad, until I told him it looked too rigid and suspicious and so he let one arm dangle over the gearshift. Between us and them, only the frame of a metal chassis, inside outside, safe to not-safe, was only half a misunderstood exchange, a pothole, an overheated engine, a minor accident, anything. I repeated to myself: as long as we are in the car together, as long as the car is moving forward . . . but the car kept stopping in the jams and security funnels. We got stuck behind an American convoy with signs that read: KEEP BACK 100 FEET OR YOU WILL BE SHOT. We lugged a heavy silence for twenty kilometers before the convoy turned off to Balad. Further north, the road became emptier and emptier, the occasional pickup, a boy behind the reins of a horse cart mounted on truck tires.
Samarra was quiet. It was high noon, no shadows, shops shuttered against the midday heat. Groups of gunmen sat in cars at crossroads, engines idling; sentinels sat on broken chairs on corners and watched who went past. They knew we were coming. Two foreigners asking for Abu Omar, Oberon’s nom de guerre. Frown, nod, rifle barrel, surly wave-through. At the third checkpoint we were told to leave our car, we would be taken the rest of the way.
Zorro and I sat in the back of a dust-bucket black sedan, no windows or license plates. The driver was a jolly fellow and gave us the grand tour.
“Here is the house Americans raided two days ago, they took away the father and the elder son.” Smashed windows, orange glow sticks littering the garden. “No one knows why they leave these orange things, for marking or signal, or maybe to make intimidation.” We drove past the house where Jean and I had interviewed the family of the boy who had been thrown off the bridge and drowned. When I asked about them, the driver shrugged and said they had gone to relatives in Mosul. “Many people leaving.” A row of run-down shops, an old man selling tomatoes from a tarpaulin spread on the ground. The market was closed, he said, because the Americans wouldn’t let the farmers come in with their vegetables. I asked him if they were under siege. The driver only grinned and pointed straight ahead to a modern cracked concrete building. “Here is the hospital, the Americans paid a thief to rebuild it and he took the money and nothing happened, not even a single brick. The head doctor has gone.”
“What do you do with your wounded?”
“We have our people.”
The houses became more spaced out, compound walls turned into rough fences, wooden posts patched with corrugated iron. A mother duck led her ducklings along the ditch; the driver kindly swerved to give them room. The river, fringed with tasseled bulrushes, came into view.
“Our mighty and great Tigris!” announced the driver. “Our mother and our life.”
“These days full of corpses,” Zorro said to me in an undertone.
“Look, the bird!” said the driver, stopping the car so we could see. A large and beautiful heron stood on one leg on the piling stump of an old abandoned jetty. It was pure white, a zeppelin ballerina, pointing its yellow beak like a spire into the azure sky. It gulped and a fish bulge traveled down its long sinuous throat.
“When I was a boy, we caught fish here by the basketful. We call them sun trout. Samarra is the most beautiful country in the world, we have water, oil, and fertile land. It is a paradise!”
Here was the mythical land between two rivers, the origin of writing, city, bread, and law. Of civilization. The river flowed by, seemingly eternal, constant, and impartial. But not. Dammed, tricked into irrigation channels, diverted into pipes. Subject to man’s ambition and its own vagaries, looping detours, dead-end oxbow lakes, rushing headlong over eroding cliffs. One of the Green Zone technicals, the man responsible for water in Iraq, had told us, one evening at the embassy, about the Mosul Dam. “It’s held together with duct tape. The original design was totally flawed, its foundation is made out of soluble gypsum. And if it goes—whoosh, eleven trillion cubic meters of water will flood Iraq in a giant tidal wave and wash a million people away. Like God flushing the whole country down the toilet.”
But for now it was bucolic: blue water flashed with rippling crescents of gold sun. The heron spread its great wings and ascended, pure and fluid, into the fathomless blue sky. Jean liked to say that war was a conservational preservative—killing, migration, abandoned houses, no tourists; fewer people to disturb the herons, nature left alone to grow over the ruins.
The driver turned off the rutted track onto a paved road. We looped back towards the town. Green river verdancy gave way to the always encroaching desert. The land was dun and camel-humped, scarred with tracks and random, abandoned excavations. The famous spiral minaret came into view.
“Wow!” said Zorro.
“It is our best feature!” said the driver, grinning at the climax of our tour.
“It looks like an upside-down ice-cream cone,” said Zorro. The driver stopped the car beside it.
“We get out now.”
I looked up in awe. A thousand years old—conquerors, empires, vainglory, history. Let it stand, extant! The driver ushered us forward. We walked up, winding around the cone of gently ascending curves. A warm breeze billowed my abaya behind me. Above, a hawk wheeled in the clear sky, feather trousers luffing in the wind, Iraq left behind on the ground. My boots made prints in the fine layer of sand dust and the wind blew them away. We climbed slowly, in reverent silence.
We arrived at the summit, a small crenelated circle. There, alone, dressed in black combat trousers and a black T-shirt, black bandana tied around his forehead and a new big black pirate beard, was Oberon. Glock pistol on his hip, Kalashnikov rested against the low wall.
“Welcome.” He opened his arms wide, to embrace us and the view, master of all he surveyed. “This is my favorite place in the world!” he said. “Do you like it?”
He stood on the rampart and pointed out landmarks among the grid of streets spread before us. The Shia shrine, the market, the former Baath Party Headquarters which the Americans held as their forward operating base.
“There, further, where the river bends, do you see?” I followed his index finger to the outer edge of the buildings. “That is the main bridge into the town. The Americans have a checkpoint there, but we attacked it last night again. They sent two tanks against us—there, can you see? Where they blew up that building, it is still burning.” A faint haze of smoke hung in the air below his fingertip. “But we were expecting this and attacked the tanks from the roofs behind—the old bus station—and they retreated.”
“What did you attack them with?” I asked. Oberon wagged his finger, mock admonishing me.
“Aha, you want to know our weapons and capabilities! So you can take this information back to Colonel Donald Goodman in Baghdad.”
“You have been talking to your father.”
Oberon smiled but did not reply.
“He’s not a colonel,” I said. “He used to be, but he’s a civilian now. He’s an infrastructure officer. He’s on the construction side, not the destruction side.”
“For us there is no difference. The Americans will be defeated, as all i
nvaders in our country will be defeated.” He said this without any particular animosity. “I have sworn to free Iraq from the occupiers. This is what I want you to write in your article. The American people think we are the supporters of Saddam and we will crawl into our holes and hide—like that coward!—that our fighting is only—what do they call it?—teething troubles! Are we babies? Are we learning to walk? It is better the American people understand who we are so that they can tell their politicians so that they can tell the army to leave. This is the way democracy works, am I correct?” He smiled again, even white teeth. Lion stalking a hippo. There was a merriness in his eyes, an intelligent twinkle, he was teasing me and teasing me out.
“What’s the point in attacking Americans, blowing up a helicopter, killing a few soldiers? You are only provoking, creating more violence.”
The back of his hand wiped his smile into a sneer.
“You have been listening too much to what that Americano—Ahmed—says.” He saw my expression, discomfited; the character in my story had crossed the line into real life. It had not occurred to me that Oberon knew Ahmed. “We are relatives, from the same tribe. He did not tell you? Ahmed was the foreign boy who visited one summer with his father. He had a big bag of Lego, and my brothers and I told him we should roll dice to see who can play with it. We were three and he was one and he could not beat all of us. That is the law of probability. When he lost, he cried that it was unfair. His father was furious and slapped his face. Ahmed was so surprised he stopped crying. My father pretended he was angry with us, but after they left he laughed and told us we were his lion cubs. Ahmed’s father was from Samarra, he understood that his son had shamed him, but his son learned at the school of Americans and has no shame.” Oberon picked up the Kalashnikov and propped it against the parapet, idly sighting a distant, putative target.
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