“Are you going to work with the American woman?” she asks.
“Who said anything about that?”
“Don’t think I’m stupid, Nabil. I know why she came to the house today.”
“Sometimes I wish you were stupid. Just a little.”
Amal grimaces and tucks her hair behind her ears. Her hair is perfectly straight and black, almost like Joon Park’s. “I think you should do it. You’ll learn loads and make good money. You’ll get to find out what’s really happening and then you’ll come back and tell us stories every night.”
I already know I want to work with Sam. What I didn’t expect is for Amal to encourage me.
She bends her knees and clasps her arms around them. “I know you’re sad about Noor,” she says, “but she wasn’t the one. You could never love her.”
If I kept a diary, like they do in England, I’m sure my sister would read it. Instead, she reads my mind, turning pages in a book I cannot keep closed to her, unlocking secrets she appears to know better than I do.
“Amal, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t say things like that.”
“Why? Is she going to come back and haunt us?” I admire my sister’s way of flaunting superstition, her utter fearlessness, but it worries me. I see my mother’s courage and my father’s irreverence, and I’m not sure it will always be a good combination.
“I liked her,” I shrug. “You never know what could have happened.”
Amal takes my chin and looks at me like she’s the older sibling, like she knows best. She lowers her voice, and pulls back her shoulders as if to remind me she is more adult than child. “
Nabi
,” she says softly. She is the only person in the family who calls me by a nickname, and I like the way she pronounces it, because it almost sounds like the word we have in Arabic for prophet,
nebi.
“You have to live your own life. You shouldn’t make yourself miserable because you’re not living the one Baba wanted you to.”
~ * ~
5
Living
On the drive over, I find myself thinking about Amal and her precocious advice. Beneath her sympathy is her own self-interest, and rightly so. She’s not sympathetic to arranged marriages — nor to parents choosing our professions. Her hope is that if I can escape all of this, she can as well. Ziad married a woman he met at university in France, but no one even likes the thought of her. This is the only blemish on Ziad’s record. But my parents blame her, not him, for the fact that he’s stayed in Europe without having returned in over three years. They disregard Ziad’s explanation: he’s afraid if he comes back for a visit, he won’t be allowed to leave again. Only his job at a hospital there keeps him in good stead with Baba. That, and a grandson.
The car park outside the Hamra Hotel is full of cars of a sort I’ve rarely seen in Baghdad. A lot of them are luxurious-looking vans and big jeeps with wheels almost as high as my waist, and they have signs taped to the windows that say “TV” or “Press”. I wonder if the commanders tell the reporters where to stay, or if the reporters decide on their own, because just yesterday my neighbour Imad told me that the new foreign journalists in Baghdad, the ones who weren’t here before the war began, are actually part of the American army. I wonder if that’s true. Would Samara Katchens have come in with the army, but not have told me so?
The hotel’s front entrance is blocked by a line of cheaply set bricks, and the drivers outside tell me to go around the back, towards the service entrance. After asking two other people which way to go, I finally find my way inside. The lobby is dimly lit and small, but something about it seems posh to me. There’s a gift shop selling carpets and ancient jewellery that the women I know would never wear, because it looks old-fashioned and tribal, and is made of silver rather than gold. Each of the windows and doors has an “X” taped over them, like surrender signs. I think that’s why Baba didn’t tape up our windows at home; it would be an acknowledgement that we’re afraid. The X-ing, the boarding, the bricking, all of these are an admission that the Americans are more powerful than we are. That they are going to beat us, that we can only try to minimize the damage.
Small clusters of men are standing around, and it’s easy to tell who’s who. Young Iraqis dressed in trousers and short-sleeved shirts. Foreigners, largely white-skinned and taller, carrying bags, cameras and bottles of water. The latter remind me of the way football players stand on the sidelines before they rush into the game. Just like the footballers I watched from the stands with Baba when I was twelve, supporting Birmingham City against Manchester United. Back then, I wished that we would stay in Britain forever, become English, be just like a regular family going to see the footie on a Saturday.
All the other Iraqis are dressed informally. When I got dressed earlier this morning my mother had insisted I wear a suit, and now I am beginning to think that maybe I’d have done better not to listen to her.
I walk to the reception desk and tell the man I have come to see an American woman. I put my hand into my jacket pocket to pick out her business card.
“Miss Samara Katchens from the
Tribune,”
I pronounce.
The man frowns at me like I am bothering him. Behind him I can see that the wooden honeycomb of boxes for the room keys is almost empty, with only one or two dangling from their nests.
The man asks me to repeat her name, and looks at the business card I have shed from my palm. He checks his list.
“Your name?” he asks.
“Nabil al-Amari.”
His nostrils flinch and he jots something down. “The second tower,” he says, lifting his chin towards his left.
~ * ~
Sunk into the centre of the courtyard is a vast swimming pool, the likes of which I can’t remember ever seeing in Baghdad. The water looks dirty, coloured to a light brown that gets to be almost coffee at the bottom. But the hotel staff are working on it, standing near the edge in their white shirts and black bowties as they run two underwater vacuums across the water with great concentration.
A sun-reddened foreigner with a shaved head directs me towards the second tower, and even though it is right in front of me, somehow I still need it pointed out. A shift of nausea rises in my stomach. How utterly strange to be asking a visitor in my own country for directions.
The entrance to the second tower is brighter and more lush, with plants and oil paintings lining the atrium that leads to another reception counter. The man behind the desk picks up the phone, punches in some numbers and hands the receiver over to me. Beneath his moustache a smile is gaining ground.
“Nabil!” Over the phone her voice sounds strong, less demure than it did when we were at Noor’s house. “I’m
so
glad you came. Do you want to come up?” Her voice moves something inside me and subsequently no answer comes out.
“Uh, yes, or...do you prefer to meet down here?” I manage.
She is quiet for a second and then says, sure, she’ll be down in a minute, and I think I can hear a tiny ripple of amusement in her voice when she says it.
The ridges in my yellow tie are still crisp from never being worn, and I consider taking it off. I will roll it tightly and stuff it in my pocket. But what will the man behind the reception desk think?
He continues to look me up and down and I pretend not to notice because I don’t want to have to answer questions, to admit that I’m about to take a job I wouldn’t have been offered if that bullet hadn’t come through Noor’s window three days ago.
“Visiting United Nations’ teams used to stay here, including the weapons inspectors,” he says, answering a question buzzing in my head. “I guess they won’t be back to bother us for a while!” He laughs like a motor, mechanical and a little too loud. I force myself to laugh, too.
“Are you going to be Miss Samara’s new translator?” He has very bad skin, as if someone had taken a fork and poked holes, the way my mother does before she bakes potatoes.
“Perhaps. Did she have one before me?”
“Sure she did. Most of them need an Iraqi or they can’t work.”
Sam comes down the stairs in multiples and then lands near the reception desk with a clap of sandals on tile. “Rafik!” She beams a wide grin at the man behind the reception desk.
“Sabah el-khair.”
The pock-faced man looks like the happiest person I have seen in months, and he smiles back at her with a sheepish countenance.
“Sabah en-noor,
Miss Samara.”
After they say their good mornings, I step out to greet her. I hold out my right hand and she takes it firmly. Then she extends her left as well and clasps my hand between both of hers. Her hair, so full of that orange fire the other two times I met her, seems darker now, and I realize that’s because it’s wet. The smell of a shampoo or maybe a powder runs invisible circles around her, carrying the scent of some flower that grows somewhere else in the world, but not here. In Iraq, a woman would never come to a meeting with her hair like this, as if she’s just stepped out of the shower.
“You found me,” she says, though she doesn’t look at all surprised to see me. “I’m glad you held on to that.” She points at her business card, which I’m still holding in my hand, having bent it back and forth so often that my sweat has nearly worn it to tissue. On those two occasions I met Sam, she was dressed in clothing that resembled what I might have worn when I was a teenager — loose khaki trousers and a button-down shirt. There was nothing particularly ladylike about it, although the way she moved in her boyish clothes seemed feminine. Today, however, she’s wearing blue jeans that are tighter, like the way the women dress in music videos. She’s wearing a white T-shirt with a deep V along the collar. I haven’t seen a woman dressed like this, in person that is, since our time in England, when Mum used to nudge me in the shopping centre and whisper to me about how inappropriately the young women were dressed. I try to block out her voice grating somewhere between my ears.
And then I realize that Sam has already been telling me what she’s been doing since I last saw her, and I haven’t heard a word she’s said.
“Anyway,” she looks at me and blinks twice, then stretches out a hand much the way the merchants do when they want you to look at their fruit. “Why don’t we have a coffee out by the pool?”
I follow her out of the atrium to the courtyard, towards the big murky mass of the swimming pool. She doesn’t wait for me to open the door, and when I try to hold it open while it’s already in mid-swing, she exhales a small laugh.
We sit on the white plastic chairs at a table in the sun, and I wonder why she would choose a table without an umbrella, without shade. I remember that on the rare sunny days in Birmingham, young people with white skin would sit in the park, their faces turned skywards. In England, even a slight suntan was a source of pride. Here, of course, it is frowned upon. Only labourers who must work out-of-doors get suntanned, my grandmother once said, and women especially want to be lighter, not darker.
Sam plonks her notebook on the table, and this seems to define the way she touches things around her. She does not place objects, but lets go of them and allows them to fall — her bag on to the chair next to her, her sandals on to the concrete ground. She looks at her watch and raises her hand to catch a waiter’s eye. “Wow, it’s almost ten,” she says. “We’ve got an interview at twelve with the INC.”
“We...we have an interview? Today?” I am embarrassed by how slow I must sound, but I am confused. “I thought you wanted to tell me more about the position first.”
“Oh, right.” Her mouth drops open, her lips coated by something shiny. “We forgot to talk money, didn’t we? Would a hundred dollars a day be okay?”
“A hundred dollars a day?”
“Well, I could maybe go up to $125, but that’s really the most I can do.” Sam reaches into her bag and pulls out a thin electronic gadget that is the same size as the grocer’s receipt book which tracks my family’s monthly bill. She puts the tip of her fingernail to the screen, I expect, in order to clean off the dust. But instead, I see she is curving her index finger in different directions, creating tiny black letters on the screen.
“You write on it with your finger?”
“Well,” she smiles without looking up at me. “You’re supposed to use a stylus, but God knows where I left mine.” I focus on the grey screen and I think I can make out the words, though upside down:
ask M about money.
And then she presses the green button and the words disappear. “I can’t remember anything if I don’t put it into my palm,” she says.
I nod. If I were to write anything at this moment, I’d make calculations about what my savings might look like a month from now, because in one day of working for Samara Katchens, I can make more than what I earn in a month of teaching at Mansour High School.
“Sorry, what is the INC?”
“Oh.” She looks surprised. “The Iraqi National Congress. Ahmad Chalabi’s group?”
“Yes, yes of course,” I say, though there isn’t any reason I would have known the name Ahmad Chalabi, had my father not mentioned it recently. “I just didn’t recognize the translation to English.”
There’s a strange jingling coming from her bag, and she pokes around in it and comes out with a black phone about the size of a large spectacles case.
“Damn. Nabil, I’m sorry. I need to get this. Can you wait a minute?” And I wonder where Sam could think I need to be going in such a hurry that I’d have trouble waiting a minute for her, or five, or twenty. “Of course,” I say, but I feel that she has hardly heard me, because she is already putting the phone to her ear and bellowing into it. “Wait, I can’t hear you. The reception here sucks.” And she walks away, moving to the other end of the pool while holding the phone out straight in front of her, like it could be one of those falcons the men in the Gulf States train to fly and return home again, landing dutifully on its master’s arm.