“Sam, what kind of name is Katchens?”
She looks at me and the rims of her irises, today the colour of honey, seem to grow thinner. “It’s a German name.”
“What kind of a German name? Does it mean something?”
Her toes curl, and one of them cracks. “It means ‘pure’. So my ancestors must have been saintly people, or at least very clean.” She faces me for a moment with an artificial grin.
“Sam, someone gave me an envelope in the car park last night, and then just took off.”
“Hmm.” Sam plucks another cigarette from the pack on her lap and turns to me with it in her mouth, unlit. She takes it out. “I can’t believe I’m smoking like this again. Did I tell you that I quit five years ago?”
“Yes, you did.”
“So what was in the envelope?”
“Someone doesn’t want us to continue with our investigation. And I think it’s far beyond Akram.”
Sam’s face crumples into a wrinkled pout, as if someone has just tried to sell her something for ten times its rightful price. “Nabil, these guys don’t have any say-so over what stories were working or not. Don’t let them intimidate you. It’s a free country. Or it will be anyway.”
She rolls a thumb over the orange plastic lighter in hand. She holds a flame to the fresh cigarette and breathes in the glow. I watch her belly rise as she draws it in, holds it somewhere inside, and sends its amorphous grey exhaust into the morning air.
“Inside this envelope was a letter, a typed letter, saying that you’re Jewish. It said you are Jewish and your father is Jewish, and that you should avoid interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq, and that you might otherwise find yourself accused of being a Zionist spy.”
Sam’s eyes bulge. She takes her legs down off the ledge.
“If this is true, Sam, they could make a lot of problems for you. For us.”
Sam stares ahead, beyond the pool and the buildings on the horizon, where the date palms stand guard. Of all the buildings we have seen shattered during the war, our
tamr
are the one proud thing on our landscape which stand unscathed. She is quiet, but I see her eyes running back and forth, searching.
She puts the cigarette back into her mouth and drags on it, and then crushes the burning butt against the balcony ledge, sending a spray of embers to the floor. She turns to me, and I see lines in her forehead I don’t remember seeing before, arrows pointing towards an axis of stress between her eyes.
“Nabil? I would never lie to you, and I never have. It’s true. My father is Jewish. But I’m — I don’t know what I am. I’m really not anything. Not in terms of religion, anyway. I’m just an American. I mean, maybe I believe in God, or at least some kind of intelligent design, but that’s about the extent of my religious identity.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you? There was really nothing to tell. Like I said, only my father’s Jewish. My mother’s Catholic. Neither of them think it’s important. I didn’t think there was something worth telling.”
“You could have told me anyway. You should have told me.”
Sam looks annoyed. “Did you ask me? No. You never asked me.”
“I asked you where your family name was from. You should have told me then.”
“Oh, please,” she says. Sam goes inside and comes back with her sunglasses. “This sun is killing me.” She sits back down and lights another cigarette. I wave the discharge of it out of my face.
“Sorry,” she says, though I think she’s only willing to apologize for the smoke.
I don’t answer.
“You think I should have told you.”
“Yes, I do.”
She pulls one knee up towards her chest, wrapping a hand around her shin. “Well, I didn’t think there was anything to tell. I’m telling you right now. My father is Jewish, so that is part of my heritage, but the only -ism I follow is journalism.”
“But if your father is Jewish, then you are Jewish.”
“No, actually. No, I’m not. That’s not how it works. To be Jewish your mother has to be Jewish. At least, that’s the way it works if you go by the book.”
“But the religion always comes from the father.” I can hardly believe my own words. Exactly what religion did I get from my own father?
Sam coughs out her negation, shaking her head. “Well, yes, in the Muslim world it works that way, but for Jews, it’s the other way around. Every religion has its own way of discriminating... of deciding who’s in and who’s out.”
The Muslim world. I never thought of there being a Muslim world before. Sam makes it sound like we’re on our own planet.
“But still, you are partially Jewish then, right? Like I am half Shi’ite, half Sunni.”
It never occurred to me until now that this makes us very much alike. I wonder if she realizes this. I want her to know I don’t like her any less for being Jewish, but I’m pissed off at her for lying.
“It would have been fine if you told me,” I explain. “I don’t have a problem with that. I am open-minded. But Sam...” I search for the right words, and there are none. “I feel very sad.” I want to say angry but I don’t think I should. “Sad that you would keep that from me. You’ve asked me so many questions about my life, my family, and I answered everything, everything, as honestly as I can. So why weren’t you honest with me? Why did you lie?”
Sam tilts her head to one side, looking sceptical. “I didn’t exactly lie to you. I never told you I was something I’m not. I just didn’t tell you. It didn’t come up.”
“But when you spoke about your family, about where you’re from, you kept it from me. Not saying what is true can also be a lie.”
Sam’s shoulders lose their composure. Her face shifts from right to left, arguing “no” without putting out the energy to say it.
“You know why I didn’t tell you? Because I had a feeling you’d react like this. You’d make a big deal out of it, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I didn’t want it to be an issue. Because frankly, I don’t care about religion. I mean, I respect it in you and in other people. But it doesn’t mean anything to me.” Sam is waving her right hand in circles, like she is digging for words to show she is right. “It’s an interesting thing to study, to watch. Especially here. But I don’t want it for myself. I never did. I never really had much of it in the first place. And so I’m not going to go around wearing it on my sleeve.”
“But you believe in God?”
“Oh, Nabil. I just said I did.”
Sam walks back inside, and I follow her. She plants herself on the sofa and puts her thumbs between her eyes, while I remain standing.
“Sam, it’s not an issue with me. But of course, with many people it is.”
“No, really?”
“Look, I’m not daft,” I say. “I know there are a lot of people in my country who don’t like the Jews. But that’s not the way I am. That’s not the way I was raised.”
Sam runs her hand through her hair, twirling up a loosening curl. “So then why are you making such a big deal out of it?”
“I’m not! I’m trying to protect you!” I wish I weren’t losing my calm. Everything is going the way it wasn’t supposed to go.
“Yeah, well, that’s not the job you were hired to do. I didn’t ask you to be my bodyguard!”
At the top of the small stack of cards in my wallet is the fake press ID we had made up for me so I could have an easier time getting past American checkpoints. I slip it out of its slot, and toss it down on the table in front of her.
My hand is on the doorhandle when she calls me. “Wait. Nabil, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Please don’t go.”
I turn around, lean on the door.
“Nabil.” She approaches until she reaches the kitchenette by the door. “I do need you. I do need you to protect me. It’s just, for Christ’s sake, the whole thing is starting to scare the shit out of me!” And I can hear the break in her voice, and for a moment, in her eyes, too, but she has already turned around and now her back is towards me. And by the time I walk back towards her, she has banished the onset of tears and is focusing on some place in the distance, taking deep breaths.
“Look, Nabil, I want you to know, I really do trust you. If I had thought that it was important to know, I would have told you. In fact, I was thinking that if I told you it might create problems rather than prevent them, so I just never told you. And what difference would it have made?”
In my mind, I take Sam into my arms, hold her close and stroke her hair until she feels safe enough to cry. But in the room, that’s not what happens at all.
“What difference does it make? I would have known, so I could have protected you. I would have kept it a secret.”
“Yeah, but you knowing or not knowing wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. It wouldn’t have stopped these goons from somehow figuring out my father is Jewish and then trying to use it against me.”
“Why do you never ask me if I would like to drink a beer with you?”
“What?” Sam laughs. “I didn’t want to offend you. Isn’t that against your religion?”
“You know, you can be a good Muslim and still have a drink once in a while. The point is not to abuse it. I believe that. My father always had a drink at weekends, on Fridays.” I smile at the hypocrisy, and I think Sam gets it, because she smiles back. “Besides, I think the Koran is clearer about not drinking wine or spirits. It doesn’t say beer, so some people say this isn’t really included.”
“It’s also 9:15 in the morning,” she says.
“So?”
“So. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. Let’s have beer for breakfast. It’s liquid bread, you know.” She gets up and heads to the fridge. I watch her from behind as she removes the top from two greenish bottles. “I just didn’t want to corrupt you,” she says, and hands me the beer, a Carlsberg, cold and still smoking.
She falls back on to her sofa and holds up her bottle. Before my eyes, it drains into her until it’s almost half-gone. She takes the neck of my bottle, my hand still wrapped around the bottom of it, and raises it up. She clinks hers against mine. “So what are we going to do about it now?”
“Sam, you have to tell me about things. If we’re working together on this, you need to let me know everything that’s happening. You didn’t tell me you were Jewish, or half-Jewish, or however it is. You didn’t even tell me what happened in your meeting with Baylor yesterday and you were with him for hours!”
“Nabil, we had lunch, and then we stopped over to see some military source whom I thought would be a good contact, but so far, nothing. There wasn’t that much to tell.”
She tips her bottle back, and I watch the moving lump in her throat as it goes down.
“I don’t ask you for a full briefing of everything going on in
your
life. Did we sign some contract in which I’ve agreed to disclose my entire day’s events to you?”
I rise to leave again, though we both know I won’t.
“Nabil, wait. Sit. Please. I’m sorry. I’m cranky today, and that was before you walked in.”
Back on the sofa I swirl the beer in my bottle.
“You were right about something,” she says, staring at her beer. She peels at the label, letting wet, silvery flakes fall into her lap.
“I was?”
“Yeah. The thing you told me about the yellowcake story? That bit your cousin told you?”
“Yes?”
“It’s true. That’s what Baylor told me yesterday.”
“So it wasn’t true? I mean, that Saddam was trying to buy this stuff, the yellowcake, from Nigeria so we could make a nuclear weapon?”
“Apparently not.” Sam shakes her head.
“And now you want to do that story, too?”
“No, no. Not now, anyway. My editors want Congressman Jackson’s suit off of their backs. They’re complaining about all the legal fees they’re racking up each day. They think that the sooner we clear the record, the better it looks for us, and then Jackson will drop his case or settle quickly.”
I try throwing back a bigger gulp of beer, but it simply doesn’t go down as quickly as it seems to for Sam. Some of it catches in my nose, and I cough.
“Whoa, partner. Maybe you should stick to orange juice.”
“It’s not that,” I say, wiping my nose. “I think I’m getting a bit sick.”
Her eyebrows round in sympathy and she pouts, as if to say, poor Nabil.
“You’re right, Sam.”
“About what?”
“I’m also keeping things from you.”
“Yeah? Good. Let’s hear all your dirt.” Sam finishes off another long swig and puts the bottle on the table. Her beer looks shabby from having its label pried away.
“A few nights ago, someone came to my house and accosted me.”
“They what?”
“Two gunmen grabbed me on the way into my house after work. They knew I was working for an American woman. I don’t think they knew who you were. But they accused me of working with the occupation.”
Sam sits up, her face contorted. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” I can feel my chest shaking as I tell her, a shiver coursing through my right arm. “They held a gun to my head and they knew who I was, and that my father was a doctor. They threatened me and said that everyone had to stop working with the Americans, and that I should join the resistance.”