“It looks like there are a lot of Iraqis trying to find work,” I said to him at one point. “Too many. What if I’m not successful?”
He didn’t answer.
Eventually he took me to the last place on his list. “It’s a company I know,” he told me vaguely, before explaining that it was run by three Iraqi brothers. The law stated, however, that you had to be Jordanian in order to own a company, so foreigners paid Jordanians to front their affairs for them. The man we were about to meet was the Jordanian front for the company.
“Their business is imports and exports, and they have offices in Baghdad. I’m sure they’ll be impressed that you speak English, but I imagine they’ll want to know if you have any degrees or more advanced qualifications. Just tell them you have.”
I nodded. Dissembling was becoming second nature to me now, and I knew that if I could lie my way through Iraqi checkpoints, I could lie about a few examinations. Besides, I liked the sound of this place. A proper company. There would be desks and carpets, people doing business—it sounded a lot better than the sweltering kitchens of the bakery that I had been to see, and maybe I would learn something useful. I wondered why Wissam had left this place till last.
The man we were led in to see was enormous—one of the fattest people I have ever witnessed—with a long, scraggly brown beard. He had the unusual and slightly off-putting habit of placing his left thumb under his left armpit and digging it into his ribs, almost as if he was massaging his overstrained heart. His name was Khalil Bakir, and he looked at me with utter disdain. I had the impression that Wissam was a client of his and that that was the reason I was being given so much as the time of day.
“Can you make tea and coffee?” he asked in response to Wissam’s inquiry about job openings, surprising me because I had been preparing myself to answer much more complicated questions.
“Yes,” I replied meekly.
“Good. You can start the day after tomorrow. One hundred dinars a month.”
And so it was that I became an employee of the company.
On my first day at work they took a photocopy of my passport without paying it much attention. It was little more than a formality to them. Wissam had vouched for me and clearly his word was trusted, and in any case they were in no position to tell a genuine passport from a fake one. My job was to make tea and coffee for Bakir and his brother, do a bit of cleaning up, and run a few errands, and it wasn’t long until I started to learn more about the company and its workings.
The first thing that struck me was how little work everybody seemed to do. The office was staffed by Bakir’s family as a condition for him fronting the company. Clearly Bakir had told his Iraqi colleagues that if they wanted to set up in business, his nearest and dearest would have to receive paychecks. His family members were illiterate—they neither read nor wrote Arabic, which was not uncommon—and they did literally nothing other than sit around chatting and drinking the tea I made them. I remember thinking, perhaps slightly naively, that the import-export business must be a very profitable one in order to allow the management to keep on such a large number of unused staff. It was not up to me to say anything, however, because Bakir, their benefactor, had me under his thumb.
There was something about his demeanor that terrified me. I can’t explain what it was, but I do remember wondering why it was that I, who had escaped the army, been shot, and fought with wild wolves in the desert, was so scared of this one man. Perhaps it was the fact that he now held my livelihood in his hands. Iraqis were treated like scum in Amman. I was lucky to have this job, and it was the only way available to me to earn enough money to continue with my plans. Bakir knew he had a hold on me, and he took advantage of that to make me work hard: his gaze was ferocious, and his eyes followed me around the office as I went about my business, keeping me well and truly in line. I exercised all the politeness I had on him, but most of the time he seemed impervious to it, like a smooth, fat rock that would not shine no matter how many times it was buffed.
Deep down, though, Bakir had a heart. On occasions his sons, who were younger than I—one about fourteen, the other perhaps ten—used to come into the office. They were well dressed, and their full faces spoke of a healthy, plentiful diet and privileged lifestyle—a stark contrast to my ragged and undernourished features. I used to envy them and wonder why life had not rolled the dice for me a bit differently. Sometimes, after his sons had been to the office, I caught Bakir looking at me thoughtfully, as though the difference in our circumstances was not lost on him. And so, although he treated me with brusqueness, he also did his best to help me.
He knew that I spoke English—he himself spoke very little—and after a while, once it had become clear to him that he could trust me, he started giving me little jobs to do. Writing a letter, translating something—little tasks that an English-speaker was suited to. Then after about nine months and after I had demonstrated my ability, he sacked his secretary and put me in her place. It was a brutal move, and one that did nothing to dispel my fear of the huge man, even if what he had done was in my favor. I felt as if I was strangely favored but had a sword hanging over me nevertheless. I shuddered to imagine what Bakir’s reaction would be if he knew the truth about my past. Doubtless nobody in the company really expected this young Iraqi man to be around forever, but every instinct informed me that my story was best left untold.
But now I had more responsibility and a slightly bigger paycheck. Because the company had offices in Baghdad, I was allowed to divert some of my pay there, so that my family—normally Saad—could pick up the money when times were lean. I was not the only Iraqi to do this. It was a common way for my fellow countrymen to send money home, and as a result I met quite a few other Iraqi immigrants. Some of them paid me little attention; others I grew to be friendly with. An architect whose name was Abu Firas seemed to take a particular shine to me. Whenever I saw him at the company offices, we chatted; and now and then I saw him outside his favorite café in Hashemite Square.
Occasionally, when Bakir was not looking, I used the company phone to make calls home and speak to my mother or to Saad. Sometimes they even phoned me. These conversations were short and nonspecific, for we couldn’t be sure that nobody was listening in. Personal household telephones could be—and frequently were—tapped; and if you wanted to make a call from a public phone, you had to submit all your details, including your civil registration card, and then wait for two hours before making the call. Anonymous calls were practically impossible. So everyone was careful not to disclose anything that might give away where I was—they just asked after my well-being and thanked me for the money I had sent or told me that they were okay this month and that I should hold on to my earnings. They knew how important it was that I saved up.
As time went on, these phone calls home became more sinister and traumatic. At first all I had was a vague sense of misgiving, the uncertain impression that something was wrong. Gradually, however, I managed to piece together from our coded conversations that a soldier from my unit had, about three months after my escape, arrived at my grandmother’s house to deliver notice that I had gone AWOL. A month or two later, things escalated when my mother, my brother, and Saad were apprehended by Al-Istikhbarat and taken to Division 5 in the area of Al-Khadimiya.
What happened to them there, I did not know at the time. I had to piece it together from snippets I gleaned from my mother and from what I knew went on in that place. He was told that I had six months to return to my unit. If I did, they said, I would be dealt with leniently. My ears would not be cut off, and I would not face the imprisonment or even worse that I would be expecting; I would just be made to complete my military service in the usual fashion. My family knew, of course, that they were lying, and they remained firm. So they threatened them with economic sanctions. If he did not help them, Saad was told, they would arrange for him and his family to be cast out of the house in the Al-Zaafaraniya compound, which he had been given as a gift because he was a
n amputee from the Iran-Iraq war. Still Saad insisted he did not know where I was. So they took his gun from him, held it to his head, and cocked it. “How would you feel,” he was asked, “if we shot you with your own gun? Now tell us where he is.”
Saad remained silent.
At that point, the interrogation was handed over to somebody else. The two officers who had apprehended Saad had seen him in his home environment, with his parents and his sister. Perhaps they would have been inclined to treat him with undue lenience—to treat him like a human being—if it had been their job to take the questioning to the next stage, so a specialist was brought in to complete the job. Someone who could complete the job without emotion or mercy. Someone who did this kind of thing day in, day out.
My uncle was brutally beaten across the face and chest with a thick iron bar. The fact that he had suffered so much on account of his country meant nothing to his assailant. Whether he asked for pity, I don’t know, but I doubt it: his pride was too great for that. His skin was then branded with a hot iron—a common way of reminding people of the pain they had undergone. Then he was released, but not without the demands of the intelligence officers being reiterated: I was to return within six months; otherwise the consequences for my family would be dire.
I found out the details of what had happened to them only later, but through my coded conversations with Saad on the phone, I deduced that I was being pressured to return, and I knew such pressure would be far from lenient. I fell to pieces. I suppose I had always known it was possible that my family would be questioned in some way, but I didn’t really expect it to go to that extreme. Saad had filled me with his confidence, and I had felt sure that he would be able to protect everyone from the most extreme of the security forces’ predilections. It seemed I had been wrong. The treatment that Saad had undergone did not bear thinking about, and it was all because of me. There was only one thing that I could ethically do: turn back, return to my unit and hope that I was afforded the leniency that Saad had been promised. But when I made my thoughts known to my uncle, I was shot down in coded flames. “Forget my studies over here,” I had told him. “I’m going to come back. I’ll finish them another time.”
“No,” Saad told me sharply. “Think of all the money we’ve spent sending you abroad to study. Just remember what I told you when you left.”
I wanted to ask him how he would deal with this situation, but of course I couldn’t. I knew the answer to my unspoken question in any case. It would come down to money. A few dinars in the pockets of the right people, and perhaps he would keep the military police away from my family, for a while, at least. It wasn’t foolproof—after all, there was no record of whom he had bribed—so he might have to grease the palms of different people in the future. But for now he sounded confident despite his horrible experiences: “You just concentrate on what it is you have to do,” he told me, “on behalf of your family.”
With terrible misgivings, I gave up all thoughts of returning; but the terrible prospect of my mother and siblings being harmed did not leave my mind for a single waking moment.
I stayed with Wissam for a couple of weeks, but I soon had the impression that he considered his debt to Saad to be repaid. Nothing was spoken; there was just a vague subtext. I certainly did not want to outstay my welcome, so I asked if I could sleep at the company offices for a while, and arrangements were made for me to do so. After a couple of months I discovered that the company owned an apartment in the prime area of Amman, and I was offered the opportunity to stay there. Excited by the prospect, and expecting the apartment to be something rather special, I made my way to the place, only to find that what awaited me was quite different from the picture I had in my mind.
The apartment was occupied by ishroog, backward and illiterate itinerants from the south of Iraq. It was a three-bedroom apartment with about twenty of them living there. The floor was covered with tattered cushions gathered into makeshift beds, and the occupants seemed to keep their few belongings in old nylon bags. The apartment was not too clean, and as I stepped inside I became aware of the musty smell of too many people living in too cramped a space. Everyone eyed me suspiciously before asking me a barrage of questions. Who was I? Where did I work? Who had given me permission to stay there? I answered the questions honestly and in good humor, not wanting to fall out with these people, who were clearly going to be my roommates, on the first meeting; but they didn’t make it easy, closing ranks like a group of frightened criminals. They worked at the head office of the company, it transpired, and because I wasn’t working there and wasn’t a threat to their jobs, they grudgingly welcomed me into the fold.
As part of my job, however, I occasionally made trips to the head office, running errands for Bakir, and it was there that I started to learn even more about the company’s business. It was a large building—eight stories high and owned by the company—and in the reception area was a large picture of Saddam Hussein meeting with King Hussein of Jordan. The company wore its Iraqi origins firmly and even proudly on its sleeve. I had learned from chatting with people in the office where I worked that the driving force behind the company was an Iraqi, a member of the Al-Bu-Nimer—the Tiger tribe from the Sunni Al-Anbar region near the Jordanian border. Although Al-Anbar was a long way from Saddam’s power center, the members of this tribe were very loyal to him and received favors as a result. The main man was called Mushtaq, and he had something of a reputation as a flamboyant character. Occasionally I saw him at the head office—from time to time he came to work in a football shirt, but usually he wore brightly colored yellow or pink suits and a wide smile. Even from a distance he had a magnetic personality—good-looking, confident, and suave—and I was keen to meet him.
One day I got my chance. Running an errand of some sort, I was sent to Mushtaq’s office. He was friendly enough, gregarious, but clearly supremely busy and without much time to devote to a lowly secretary from one of his other offices. His own office was huge and richly appointed, but as I stood there answering his half-interested questions, my attention was not focused on the furniture. My eyes fell on something that to me seemed much more sinister. On Mushtaq’s desk, in pride of place, was a picture of Mushtaq himself shaking the hand of Uday Hussein, and another picture of him with Saddam. I found myself transfixed. They looked so easy in each other’s company—clearly theirs was a relationship that went a long way back. What would Mushtaq do if he knew that one of his employees was here on a fake passport with fake entry stamps, having gone through everything I had gone through in order to leave Iraq? I felt my skin prickle underneath my clothes and realized that I had not taken in a word of what Mushtaq had been saying to me. I made my excuses and left.
That night, back in the apartment, I couldn’t sleep. I lay there listening to the heavy breathing and snores of my roommates, unable to get the image of those pictures out of my head. By this time, my bullet wound had largely healed up. It still bled from time to time, but it had crusted over and grown much smaller. It should still have served as a reminder for me to be constantly wary. But in the weeks since starting at the company, I had allowed my guard to drop a little. I hadn’t been careless, but I found that I had slipped into this new life with surprising ease. The picture I saw in Mushtaq’s office, however, brought home to me the fact that I could never forget I was on the run. I was grateful to the company for giving me a job, but I knew without question that the business interests of my employers would always come before their charity to me, so I could never let them know the truth about my situation. Part of me wondered if I should look for other work, but I soon dismissed that idea. Having started to make acquaintances with other Iraqis who congregated around Hashemite Square, who had to make do with filthy jobs for scant wages, I knew that I was lucky to be in my position. I was able to put money aside for my ultimate escape from Jordan, and even send a little back home to my family. I would just have to be on my guard.
As I lay there that night, I felt sick. Then I felt scared.
Then I steeled myself to continue working hard to earn the money that would buy me my passage out of Jordan.
CHAPTER 9
CAUGHT
The weeks turned into months. I procrastinated, putting off making any calls to my family and feeling terrified whenever I did call because I dreaded hearing terrible things. As the six-month anniversary of Saad’s beating by the military police arrived, I was even more full of foreboding. But the anniversary came and went, and I heard no bad news from home. It seemed as though they had decided to forget about me, for now at least.
I moved out of the company flat and used some of my earnings to rent a place of my own, deep in the Palestinian quarter of Amman. Here, years before, on the side of one of the hills on which Amman is built, Palestinian refugees had set up camp and formed what can only be described as a ghetto. Back then the hillside was covered in tents; now the buildings were more permanent, and the area was perfect for me: generally cheap and a place where I could melt into the background whenever necessary. The room was nothing to speak of: situated by itself on the roof of a high-rise building, it was a former laundry room with little in the way of amenities, and it was disproportionately highly priced; but it was my own space, where I could disappear whenever I wanted or needed to.
One morning I woke up to the sound of rain. The rainy season had arrived and such downpours were not uncommon. I lay in bed for a while, mustering the enthusiasm and the energy to get up. It had been a restless night, but that was nothing unusual for me these days—my dreams were filled with gunshots and wild animals and Republican Guards around every insubstantial, shadowy corner, and I awoke several times every night wide-eyed and sweating. Occasionally my dreams were accompanied by the same sinister and excruciating stomach pains that I had experienced the day I ran from the UN, and I lay there in darkness that multiplied my fears tenfold.
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