“We’re in luck,” I tell Sam. “Apparently he’s a well-known student here, or maybe more than that. The guard knew him.”
Sam looks up from the magazine she was skimming. “What do you mean, more than a student?”
“Well, he says Subhi is on some security committee. Hawza security, he said.”
“House security?”
“No, HAW-za,” I say, pronouncing it so she can hear the word clearly. “Hawza is the religious establishment in Najaf. I mean, not the establishment, but where the establishment get their—” I search for a word, but have a hard time finding the right one. “Their intellectual ideas.”
Sam’s eyebrows form a sceptical arch. “Intellectual ideas? Really? I thought the purpose of being a fundamentalist was to shun all things intellectual. It’s all about the man upstairs, right?” She points her finger upwards. “Nothing too complicated about that.”
Sam must notice something in my face that betrays my discomfort with her generalization. It occurs to me that she and my father would get on well. Her eyes narrow. “I’m being facetious, Nabil.”
“Well, there is some truth in what you say. But maybe not the full truth. But the men in the Hawza study holy Islamic books all the time, and they try to come up with decisions on all of the social questions of the day.”
“Like issuing fatwas?”
“Yes, like
fatawa”
I say. “This is the plural of fatwa.” I can’t help but feel that it sounds strange when English speakers take an Arabic noun and simply add an “s” to it. In fact, this is one of my translation peeves.
Sam takes a black clip and snaps most of her hair into it. It’s so thick that it doesn’t all fit. “Do you take those seriously?”
“What? The
fatawa?
It depends.” It’s beginning to irritate me, the way Sam uses words like facetious. And all sorts of slang. What if I were just a regular Iraqi with decent English? Most people wouldn’t know words like that.
She turns in her seat, with the bottom of one foot, free of a sandal, against the inside of her thigh. “Whadd’he say?”
“He said we could go to see this man in Aadhamiye who’s the head of the Hawza’s security committee, and that maybe he would tell us how we can find Subhi.”
“Cool. Shall we go now?”
I look towards Rizgar, hoping he will chime in with some advice about driving to Aadhamiye. But he says nothing, flicking his cigarette into the hot wind through a crack in his window. I keep expecting direction from him, as if simply by virtue of being older and wiser, he must have a better idea of what to do. And then I remember that he only knows about twenty-five words of English, and so he often isn’t listening. I’m the Baghdadi, not him.
But that does not mean he isn’t thinking.
~ * ~
It didn’t take long to track down Mahmoud al-Tarabi. I went to the Showja Market and said I was looking for Iyad al-Tarabi. The smell of the spice-stalls there infused me with energy, and I asked a few merchants and one thing led to another and I was pointed towards a line of homes facing the market, ones that didn’t look run down compared to others nearby. Mahmoud came to the door right away, a young man with a light-brown beard that was destined to become bigger and eyes that made me suspect that I had woken him from a nap. When I said I was looking for Subhi, he asked who I was. Right there I decided that Sam’s story was too long and complicated and so I told him I was from the University of Baghdad and we wanted to talk to Subhi to coordinate setting up a similar student-run security committee there. He nodded and said he’d have helped me but he was busy now although if he could help some other time he would. But he gave me the address I was after. As I walked back to the car I bought some fresh cardamom, always my favourite spice because it gives coffee — real coffee — just the right flavour, and I wondered if this was Saddam’s legacy to us: the sense that if you just cooperate a little and tell people what they want to hear, you make your life easier.
~ * ~
We stand in Subhi el-Jasra’s doorway. He doesn’t look happy that his friend Mahmoud was so co-operative. He smiles only the most feeble of smiles, as if a ventriloquist from above has yanked the corners of his mouth into the most perfunctory crescent a mouth can make. And then his smile collapses, but he turns away from me so fast I hardly see it.
It could be the heat. Today feels less like late spring and more like midsummer, when no one goes out in the middle of the day if they can avoid it.
“Do you want to sit?” He points to a shabby blue sofa. A film of cigarette ash covers its fabric like a grey, carcinogenic dew. As we move into the room, I notice another young man, about the same age, engrossed in a newspaper. He looks up to acknowledge us, but doesn’t say hello.
We sit but Subhi remains standing, clearing newspapers off the other sofa. With better light here than we had in the doorway, I can see that he has traces of a black eye, a dark arc that throws his face off balance. Perhaps I didn’t introduce ourselves properly, because Subhi doesn’t seem impressed.
“So, I am Nabil and I’m finishing my doctorate at Baghdad University, and this is Samara Katchens, from the
Tribune
newspaper.” I clear my throat, waiting for the “Ah, yes.” It does not come. It is true, I have been saying for several years that I’m going to do my doctorate, though I’ve done nothing to forward this goal, save some graduate courses.
Subhi sniffs at the air as if trying to sniff us out. Or maybe all the smoke hanging around him has clogged his sinuses.
“So what do you want from me? I mean, what kind of information are you after?”
His manners are not usual for our part of the world. He has not said “welcome” yet and he has not offered us anything to drink, and I’m wondering whether I was wrong to accept his offer to sit.
“I want to find the general you introduced to a colleague of this fine lady-journalist here from America. This general, or maybe he was a former general, gave some documents to another reporter, Harris Axelrod.”
“Harrees?” Subhi turns to his friend, who has his head buried in a newspaper in the corner. “Do you remember a Harrees?”
“Harris,” I repeat. “Harris Axelrod.”
Aks-el-rad,
I pronounce it, as this is the closest pronunciation when you put it into Arabic. “He says you were the one who led him to General Akram,” I offer. “He said you were a part-time translator for him.”
“Oh, him. The big American guy, yes? Green eyes, very tall. Yes, I remember. I wasn’t a translator for him. I worked for him maybe three days. I’m still a student at the university.”
There are papers all over the floor and we could be in the sort of flat a young bachelor would keep. But I don’t know many students who live on their own. In Iraq, a decent son lives with his family until he gets married, which is why I am still living at home.
Unless, that is, the young man is estranged from his family, or makes an awful lot of money.
“I’m just trying to understand how you got some of the documents Harris had. We need to find the general who gave him these documents.”
Subhi turns to his friend. “Munir,” he calls, “do you remember anything about this Harris having some help from a general?”
Remember. As if I were asking about an event that happened years ago. Munir gives an indifferent blink. “Can’t say I do.”
“Me neither,” Subhi says, eyeing Sam out of the corner of his eye. “Like I said, I didn’t work with him for long. But you should go find Adeeb. He was the one Harris worked with most of the time.”
“Adeeb? And where would I find him?”
“Adeeb. Adeeb Maher. Or Malaki. He has a pharmacy in Mustansiriyah. You can look for him there.”
“Can I tell him you suggested I find him?”
Subhi watches me with a distrust crouching in the hollows of his cheeks. He is about twenty-one and in his presence, sluggish as I am and with a bit of a paunch, I feel much more than seven years older than him. He takes a pen out of his breast pocket. “I have to leave to meet someone, but I’ll try to explain how to get there.”
We stand and he shows us to his front door. He raises his chin, and now the fading purple bruise seems more prominent, like a border indicating where the cheekbone ends and the eye socket begins. “Do you have some paper in that notebook?”
I had forgotten the small pad tucked into my breast pocket and tear off a blank page. Subhi takes it and scribbles in an almost-legible script: Adeeb Maher/Maliki — Mustansiriyah Pharmacy. “There you go. So you won’t forget. He’s about five streets away from the university.” I hold out my hand and he compresses it slightly in his, and then nods at Sam without offering his hand. “Good luck,” he says in English.
We head down the exposed stairs. From the car I see Subhi still standing there in his doorway, watching us, lifting a hand to his sandpaper beard and stroking the hairs in the wrong direction.
~ * ~
14
Stroking
It turns out that the cells of Abu Ghraib are empty. Just before Saddam disappeared last week, he set the remaining prisoners free. Some former prisoners are going there now to tell their stories to foreign reporters, and ordinary people are arriving to listen, to look, to check if there’s anything left to loot.
That’s how we find people to interview. Somehow I thought that this work of being a real journalist would have more logic to it, but what I’m discovering is that most of it is random and unplanned. The business of “reporting” resembles hungry shoppers scooping up bargains in the last hours of a flea market more than it does a method of research.
Anyone who feels bad about his life should spend an hour interviewing someone who’s been held in Abu Ghraib. Some were tortured for actually being opponents of Saddam, and some simply for being suspected as such. Some for being overheard saying the wrong thing, and others for getting on the wrong side of someone. Sometimes, there was no reason. Some of the stories are so horrific — one actually involved a meat grinder — that I find myself ashamed to relay the details to Sam. But whenever I leave something out, she notices and insists that I translate everything. A few times I notice her wince at the thought of what I have told her. But she asks more questions. It’s as if her protection from being truly disturbed by such gruesome details is to ask for more. And to take down every detail. “How long did they beat you that day? With what? How did you feel? And then?”
I don’t know how she can tell when I leave something out. She listens even when she doesn’t understand. More than once, I’ve found myself entertaining suspicions of her being an American spy who actually speaks fluent Arabic, and who is gathering information to be used against us. When she works the two of us into a rhythmic dance of conversation with the person she’s interviewing, she’s just like a musician playing a piece of music. That makes me the instrument, and if I miss a note, she notices. She just senses things.
~ * ~
Our Abu Ghraib visit leads us to the home of the Sarraf family in Khadamiyeh to interview one of their sons, who was held over the last two years. Mohammed Sarraf was active in a religious Shi’ite group with support from Iran, he readily admits, and that’s why Saddam had him thrown into prison and tortured. Sam steps into her usual interview mode, and makes pained faces when Mohammed Sarraf describes his torture or shows the marks on his back. I even start wondering if perhaps this is exactly the kind of “story” the American government wants the rest of the world to hear. The more their reporters describe the bad things that happened under Saddam, the more they’re able to justify taking over our country
I try to push these thoughts out of my head. But the work of interpretation is becoming more natural, almost automatic: I am becoming the two-way radio Sam wanted me to be. But that leaves the creative corner of my mind yearning to keep itself occupied while the translation part of my brain does its job of moving sentences. They flow in through my ears, pass back and forth between the Arabic-English membrane in my mind, and exit my mouth.
As we wind down the interview, a woman of about twenty-five comes into the room with her gaze towards the floor. She asks if she can tell her story, too. This is Mohammed’s younger sister, he explains, Malika. Mohammed and his father — a sunkenfaced man who has been sitting in the corner saying absolutely nothing for the past hour — look at each other and agree.
Malika has moist, dark eyes that seem girlishly large, and she is carrying a baby boy in her arms. She sits with him and begins to tell the story of her husband, who was arrested in the middle of the night about a year ago. She has gone to Abu Ghraib, she tells us, and all the other prisons, searching for him in vain. Her family, she says, has reached the conclusion that he must have been killed, and has even brought her some report that her husband was probably buried, along with many other young men he was arrested with last year, in a mass grave near Baqubah. Malika doesn’t want to believe it.
“My husband must come home,” she announces slowly, in English. “He has never seen his son!” And then she is in tears, which are quickly turning to sobs. “What America will do for me now?” Malika demands of Sam, pleading with her a bit louder and rocking the child, who has also begun to cry. “America will bring back my husband? America will pay support for my son with no father? Every child must have father!” The words come tumbling out of her mouth, and she looks at me, and then back at Sam, as if expecting one of us to say something.