Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Shame and honor, these are the central pillars of Iraqi society that the Americans will never understand,” I said.

  “Because they do not have these values. Their minds are shallow, their souls are hypocrites. Ahmed—and he is not the only one—has been seduced by American toys. What is this game called democracy?” The rifle stock had a Bush 2000 campaign sticker on it. Oberon saw me looking at it. “Did you vote for him?” I said I was British, I couldn’t vote. “I thought you were more intelligent, Catherine Kittredge. The half-American, half-British woman who has come alone into the territory of the terrorists should not tell lies.”

  Zorro had been taking pictures, but now he took a step forward.

  “She is not alone.”

  “I’m only trying to understand,” I said. “That’s how journalism works. I ask questions to understand.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps you are a spy.”

  “We are in Samarra at your invitation,” I said, invoking the sanctity of Arab hospitality. “As your guest.”

  This Oberon conceded. He clapped his hands together and shouldered the Kalashnikov, “Yes. Come! It is time to eat!”

  _____

  We ate in the garden of a house nearby. Fig trees heavy with red rotting fruit; wasps buzzed over the table in droves. Oberon relaxed and played the diligent host, insisting Zorro have the fattest chicken leg, spooning more rice onto my plate, clicking his fingers for one of the men to bring dates and yogurt. Zorro was allowed to take pictures as long as there were no faces in them. One of the fighters was assigned to watch him, and once or twice, when he caught an edge of smile or a thick eyebrow, made him delete the image from the flashcard. We continued our discussion of the Arabs and the West and our misconceptions of each other. We talked about media and conspiracy theories, about public debate and demonstrations and freedom. Oberon said he had never been out of Iraq except once, recently, to Amman.

  “It was very modern, very clean, but their rice is not tasty like our Anbar rice and the Jordanian Mukhabarat are all CIA.” He did not have memories, like his father did, of the old days, of wealth and prosperity and European capitals. He had no experience of the good life to lament or miss or wish for. He had grown up in the hard-bitten sanctions years, in an atmosphere of humiliation and betrayal, schooled in violence and suspicion. He was sure of himself in his little fiefdom of Samarra, but of the wider world, of its possibilities and complexities and profusion, he was ignorant. For him it was a blank territory beyond the borders of his imagination. At the same time, he knew there was much he did not know and I think, in part, he wanted to talk to us to find out more. At the same time, he insisted he had read many books about the West and knew a great deal, but when I asked him which books, he waved away my question.

  “Many, too many!” He was alternately sun and thunder, courteous and aggressive, curious and defensive.

  “I consider myself a democratic leader,” he announced when the other men had gone into the house and left the three of us alone in the garden. Zorro looked sideways, his cigarette hung from his bottom lip. “I would like a glass of cold beer, but my men disapprove of alcohol and so I do not drink for their sakes and to provide the good example that they want to look up to. I tell my men we must learn from the Americans. Know your enemy! But they say this is heresy, we must resist Western culture and anything that is not the true path of the Koran.” Oberon lit a cigarette as if to waft away these didactics with its smoke, and leaned forward.

  “This is what you must understand. Spy or journalist, it is the same to me! Tell the Americans this: For me the fight is for my country, for Iraq. But for many of my men the fight is against the Western infidel. They say kill them in their homeland as they kill us in our homes. For them every kaffir is an enemy, for them every Shia is a kaffir. They watch the foreign imams on the internet. They are inspired by Al-Qaeda. They think Osama is their prophet. I tell them Mohammed was a warrior. He knew there was a time to pray and a time to fight and a time to plant fields and raise a family. But for them it is a jihad and their eyes burn with their desire for martyrdom—”

  The driver returned and Oberon stopped talking. He looked at his watch and nodded.

  “Excuse me,” he said, sighing, a little reluctant. “I must pray now.”

  _____

  “He is charismatic,” I said to Zorro when we were left alone. “See how his men are around him? Disciplined, deferential. Soldiers, not terrorists.”

  “Terrorist, freedom fighter; same diff,” said Zorro. “He wants you to make a distinction, but there isn’t one. He will fight using whatever means he can. If he thinks he can get money for us, he will kidnap us.”

  “He hasn’t kidnapped us.”

  “Yet.”

  “Why would he bother to persuade us then? To talk to us?”

  “You are telling him more than he is telling you.”

  “What am I telling him?”

  _____

  When Oberon returned from his prayers, he apologized. He had wanted to take us to see the helicopter wreckage on the other side of the river, but the Americans were patrolling in that area and it was not possible. More tea was brought. We waited for an escort back to our car. Only ten more minutes, we were promised several times, half an hour, soon.

  Oberon went in and out of the house issuing orders, listening to a crackling walkie-talkie, making calls on his cellphone. In between he sat with us and chatted. He asked Zorro about his dreadlocks but shook his head, perplexed: reggae? dope smoking? hippy? I asked Oberon about his childhood, but he only said, “My father is the old man, he has time for old stories.” I tried to ask him again about the number of men under his command, weaponry, tactics, supplies, coordination with other groups. He smiled disingenuously or frowned or put his hands out to stop my spy questions and repeated his main point. “We are soldiers, not terrorists.”

  A teenage boy, a lookout, incipient moustache shadow, came running into the garden, panting, pointing. “Amrikan Amrikan,” he said, and delivered a rush of urgent Arabic. Oberon barked at us, “Stay here.” The men all came out of the house with their guns, ready. Oberon shouted orders into the hissing walkie-talkie, dispatched his men in ones and twos. The metal gate banged. I saw Zorro use their distraction to angle a few discreet table shots. I kicked him; nervous-nelly me, left over from school; I never liked to break rules. He kicked me back. Look. Oberon signaled to the driver and pointed at us. The driver nodded, all politenesses gone, pulled me up by my armpit, jabbed at Zorro who was pretending to put his camera away while taking out his flashcard and hiding it in his boot. Pushed me into the house, into a corner. Pushed me hard. We heard the door lock. We sat there, not talking, hugging our knees to our chests to make shields of our own selves. I felt the residual imprint of the driver’s thumbs in my shoulder socket. It had finally touched me, physically. Torn through the cobweb of my own invincibility, my penciled sentences and earnest observations. It was nothing, not even a bruise, but it was shocking to me because I was the unlucky girl and immune. And suddenly not. I leaned against the gray plaster wall, leaned against Zorro, warm, next to me.

  “It’s alright, I think, it’s alright,” he said, taking my hand in his. “Something happened and they got spooked, that’s all. It’s alright.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’ve put us in a room with a window.”

  We sat there for two very long hours. The sky darkened into a somber sienna twilight. But Zorro was right. Eventually the lock turned and the driver reappeared and took us back to our car. We asked him what had happened, but he said only, “Amrikans. You go now.” We drove back to Baghdad in the dark, in silence. There were no cars on the road.

  _____

  Later, as a wedding present Zorro gave me one of the prints from the series he’d taken. It was of Oberon’s broad back, leaning forward to hand a piece of bread to the black abaya (me) sitting next to him.

  I wrote the article about our trip without mentioning being locke
d in a room for two hours. Journalist sin of omission; my own denial. The sensation of the driver’s thumbs in my flesh faded. The flash fear of the locking door was replaced by the relief of our safe arrival (several cognacs and a played-down description of events for Alexandre) and the get of a good story.

  Oz ran it under the headline, “Lunch with the Enemy.” We had a huge fight about it. I remember screaming at him down the phone: “They are not my enemy!”

  Oz shouted back at me. “Well, just whose side are you on, Kittredge?”

  SEVEN

  In October 2004, Thomas Sligo, a stringer for the Washington Post, was kidnapped from his hotel room in Basra. He managed to escape after three days. I didn’t know him; Basra was in the Shia south, under the British, a different kind of demographic and risk. Then Marla was killed by a car bomb two weeks later and that was awful because she was my friend; in the early days we used to swim laps together in the Hamra pool. In November, Celestine Cornudet was kidnapped—I had only met her a couple of times, but Zorro and I had been in the same area in Sadr City only the day before. It took Alexandre two weeks of nail-biting negotiations via the Iranians to get her back. The French government paid three million euros. Alexandre told me never to print this. The president himself had directly intervened; the Quai d’Orsay was in uproar about it.

  It became very dangerous to go out. Most of Baghdad was no-go, either seriously Sunni or Shia militia in balaclavas. After my Samarra insurgent story, I tried to work on something about orphan street urchins. Ahmed rolled his eyes derisively and called it my “shoeshine boys” story. He thought it was sentimentalist nonsense when the real story was the mysterious Ayatollah Sistani and Moqtadr; the Shia and the Iranians and the upcoming elections.

  I had not left Iraq for twenty months. Ahmed was waiting to hear about a U.N. position in Beirut he had applied for and in the meantime had only a Coalition Provisional Authority document, a stamped, misspelled piece of paper with his headshot stapled to one corner, and no passport because there was no Iraqi government to issue one. Alexandre kept telling me to take a holiday, to go to stay with Margot in Brittany, rest, recuperate, but the outside world was far away—the other side of a long desert road cut with bandits and insurgents or a dog-legged plane ride, spiral ascent from Baghdad airport to avoid missiles, via Erbil or Amman. Like Oberon, I could no longer imagine that somewhere else existed. I had a spot of blood in my underpants one day and I thought my periods had returned so I didn’t go back to the doctor and forgot about it. I lived in a brocade-lined bunker well stocked with black humor and green chartreuse. Sometimes Alexandre and I would sit up together watching CNN and laugh at their reports on subjects like “Cats on Prozac” or “Sugar: A Deadly Killer?” I went to bed drunk on brandy because I could no longer concentrate long enough to read a single sentence of a book.

  Nonessential staff were evacuated from the embassy. The gendarmes were replaced by French Special Forces who imposed new security protocols. Alexandre gave lunch parties because no one wanted to be on the streets after dark. I spent days sitting in the residence, eating cheese sandwiches, getting up the courage to go out to report. When I went out, I used one of the embassy drivers and never stayed anywhere longer than an hour.

  _____

  One afternoon, close to my second Baghdad Christmas, I went to the SCIRI headquarters to find out about the candidates on their party list for the election in January. Ahmed had been offered a position as a protocol officer for the U.N. in Beirut. A pale blue U.N. passport was in the works. We were going to stay for the elections—Iraq’s first free and fair!—and then go.

  It was raining. The Tigris was swollen and turbid, the streets were flooded, mud slopped against the concrete block chicanes at the checkpoints. Khalid the driver was irritable, he hadn’t wanted to go out. Someone had posted a threatening note on his door because he was working for foreigners. At SCIRI headquarters we met a barrier of young men with trim beards and clean white shirts and no ties. They were southern Shia grown up in exile in Iran. They were not friendly. They told me to wait and didn’t offer any refreshments. Khalid the driver did not want to wait, he kept saying: “We go now? We go? Not good people.” He was jumping up and down, very antsy, and I realized he was Sunni and suddenly this whole expedition didn’t seem like such a good idea. Jean always said: Pay attention to your driver’s mood, they always have better exit instincts than you do. So I conceded to the nugatory, threw up my hands, OK, OK! and we left. I was angry with the unnice SCIRI boys, the hoppity driver, the rain. A wasted, pointless afternoon. It took us two hours to get back through the checkpoints and the traffic. A bomb boomed somewhere and all I could think was: For fuck’s sake.

  When I got back to the embassy, I found Alexandre with Ahmed and Muntazzer sitting in the Sykes-Picot salon having coffee. They were in the middle of a discussion, but when I came in they stopped talking. I had a sense of negotiation and complicity; my arrival was an interruption. I sat down, but Alexandre said, in his sharp pince-nez voice, “Kittredge, would you mind waiting for us in the residency?” I looked at Ahmed, but his expression only confirmed my exclusion. I stomped out.

  Ahmed stayed for dinner. Alexandre kept the conversation going with tales of Beirut in wartime and the legendary Johnny’s Bar. Ahmed asked him questions about the different factions; I was too tired to follow the intricacies of Lebanese politics. Alexandre and Ahmed kept up a jolly talking show. I kept quiet; shadow premonition. It was cold and I cupped two hands around my soup bowl. The coldest I have ever been was Baghdad that winter. The embassy had no heating system and the floors were tiled to keep cool in the summer. The generator was needed to power the communications systems and there wasn’t enough capacity for electric radiators. I went up to bed before coffee.

  An hour later, Ahmed came up. I was hunkered under the covers wearing a thick sweater, socks, and a ski hat. Ahmed got into bed and put his arms around me to quell my shivering. I was not in the mood to be mollified.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing. You were all sitting there conspiring.”

  “Muntazzer was upset, that’s all.”

  “Why? What was he doing here?”

  “It’s a security clearance thing. It’s better you don’t know. Alexandre wants to keep proper protocol.” Ahmed put his finger to his lips, hush-hush. I sat up straight, resistant, suddenly furious. He looked surprised.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Muntazzer is doing a deal,” I said. “That’s what’s happening, isn’t it. He tells Alexandre the identity of insurgents in Samarra, Alexandre takes the information to the Americans, you are the bridge. It works out very nicely for everyone. Muntazzer and his wife get a humanitarian medical visa to France.” Ahmed got up from the bed. He did not answer, but he did not deny my guess either. His face was turned away from me. “I’m right, aren’t I? Muntazzer has sold his son.”

  “And you bought him.” I had not heard this tone from him before; sharp, cornered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The brave resistance fighter,” he mocked. “He is taking money from the Iranians, did you know that? You think you know this country, Kit, because you are fucking an Iraqi—” I was startled, it was the first time Ahmed was mean to me. I tensed. “You think people are the same everywhere. You believe in your universal humanity—but humanity is a luxury, you need prosperity to have humanity. It’s about money. The doctor wants to take Muntazzer’s money to operate on his wife. The insurgents need money for rockets, they don’t care whose money. They will take it from Saudi, American, Israeli agents, they will take it from the Pasdaran who want them to fight the Barzani Kurds who are being sponsored by a different Iranian intelligence cabal. Oberon and his group are too stupid to see that it is a Shia trap. War is only money. Today the insurgents are full of pride and boast they are killing Americans! But if the Americans pay them, the same people will find other infidels to fight. They will
happily sell their own brothers to the Americans for the right price, for bounties and visas and green cards. They want to kill Americans on one day and the next day they want to move to America. It is the dream of every Iraqi to kill an American and to be American.”

  I cowered. I could not make sense of what he was saying, and as I tried to untangle the knots of his screed and understand his hostility—against the Shia or against the insurgents, against me?—I forgot about Muntazzer and the invidious triangular arrangement I had witnessed in the Sykes-Picot salon.

  “Beware of unintended consequences,” I remember Alexandre telling Josh the Earnest Evangelical during dinner.

  “But the consequences of doing nothing are worse,” Josh had said.

  “Seldom,” Alexandre had replied.

  _____

  I did not see Muntazzer again. Once or twice over the following years, I asked Alexandre what happened to him. He offered only a broad sketch: Muntazzer had indeed moved to Marseilles, but his wife had eventually died. And Oberon? Lost in the maw. Almost certainly dead or detained. The Oberons and his Shakespearean brothers-in-arms fought, refought, changed sides, realigned with or against the Americans, the Shia government in Baghdad, Al-Qaeda. Shuffling loyalty jihad God and country; half of them ended up commanders in ISIS.

  In January, Iraqis voted and dipped their forefingers in indigo ink and held them up for the cameras. Democracy for a day. The Shia won, of course. The following week Ahmed and I left for Beirut.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  BEIRUT

  ONE

  Ahmed and I got married a month after we moved to Beirut. February 13, 2005. When I try and remember if I was happy on my wedding day, I am not sure. Perhaps already the niggles of unanswered lacunae had begun to undermine my in-love certainty, perhaps I distracted myself with bridal details of dress and guests and cake.