We are driving towards Saddam City and as we get closer I can see that vandals have blotted Saddam’s name from the sign and changed it to Sadr City. It is spray-painted neatly, although it is obvious that it is not the real thing, nothing official. Or perhaps they will do this, take Baghdad’s largest Shi’ite area and name it for Sadr, one of the most important Shi’ite clerical dynasties in modern Iraqi history. Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr was killed by Saddam, and his son Moqtada is now becoming the hero of all young Shi’ites. Except me. But then, I’m a half-breed. I don’t count for much. And if I had to choose between being Shi’ite or Sunni, I’d just as soon as leave for Europe or America, like Ziad did.
There is an enormous mural of Saddam to the right of the sign, the one with him wearing a black fedora and holding a hunting rifle. The vandals have turned the hat into a woman’s
hejab,
added earrings, and painted on false eyelashes. They have also turned his moustache and smile into a pair of fat, red lips, like a woman’s. They’ve made the rifle into a sword and depicted blood — with the same colour red as they used for his lips — dripping down and trailing off the board. Saddam’s titles have been crossed out. “The Leader, The Saviour”, now reads “Il-Qassab, Il Kadthab” — The Butcher, The Liar.
“Whoah, check out that one.” Sam rolls down her window with jerky cranks of the handle. “Rizgar, can you slow down for a minute? I want to shoot that one.” As Sam puts the camera to her face, it becomes clear to me what she means by shoot and this strikes me as funny, because I have never heard the word used this way before. It seems noteworthy that the two things Americans shoot in Iraq are either a gun or a camera. Bullets, or photographs.
What’s happening to Saddam’s image is surreal. I cannot remember a time in my life when it was not around, and so I hardly noticed it. But now that his image is being defaced, he’s everywhere. Sometimes it seems funny, and at others, humiliating. His image is becoming a national embarrassment for us in front of all the other Arab countries, in front of the entire world, watching and filming. Shooting. I could tell Sam all of this, but she wouldn’t understand.
Rizgar turns back towards me and asks me where we should go. How should I know? I’ve only been to Saddam City once in my whole life when I was a teenager. Back then, it was called Thawra, meaning revolution. There were troubles here after the war with Kuwait and America and the residents are quite poor. It was a place that you stayed away from, unless you had some reason to go.
“What part do you want to visit?” I ask Sam, searching for clues. I don’t want to linger here without some direction. But she is still taking photographs and she leans out of the window to capture a small statue, presumably of Saddam, lying on the ground. It is nothing like the one in Firdos Square, but still large enough to look like a fallen giant.
The bronze body is splattered with the same red paint that was on the mural, and some small boys are using it like a jungle gym, leaping over its backside, climbing over its shoulders. One boy jumps gleefully on its head, while another uses his shoe to bat it in the face.
Sam leans on the open window. Click click. Click. She puts the camera down and turns back to me. “Oh, anywhere. We need to find a looter family.”
I hesitate. “What does it mean, ‘looter family?”‘
“You know, a family where one of the brothers or sons, one of the men of the house, has been out doing the looting. I want to see them in their house and just get a sense of what they’re thinking. I mean, it’s not that they’re just after stuff, right? It’s about getting back at the regime.”
This seems simple enough, and yet completely ridiculous. Do you stop a thief in the middle of the act and ask him why he’s doing it? Maybe it is different in America, or in France. Maybe in those countries, criminals agree to be interviewed.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying so,” I begin, “but I think it will be very hard to find someone who will admit that they are stealing.”
“Really? Lots of papers have started to run stories like that. Someone’s talking.”
Rizgar drives deeper into a neighbourhood I don’t know. The houses become denser, without any spaces between them, without any green in the gardens. And soon there are no gardens, only dwellings, cluttered and compressed into a warped grid of concrete and pipes and washing lines.
“So any family will do?” I ask. “Anyone who’s stolen something since the looting began?”
“Yeah, anyone. Anyone who took things of value. Not just rusty old office equipment.”
We enter an area with a string of shops and I get out of the car. I notice a dairy which has a steel gate pulled across it, and even though it’s closed, there’s a man inside, and I can see that he must still be open for business because a woman just went in looking for milk and I saw him pass it to her through the metal lattice. I walk up to the gate and I see the man, perhaps in his early forties, inside. His face twists in my direction; I appear to have startled him. I hold up my hands, perhaps on instinct to show him that I am unarmed, and begin to explain what I need. And he says to go to Rimal Street and ask for his brother, Hatem.
I thank him over and over, and he looks at me as if he doesn’t know why. He wipes his hands on his trousers. “We’re not ashamed,” he says. “We are only taking back what the government stole from us. Everybody I know took only from the government offices and police stations, not from private stores. Not the real Iraqis. Go to see Hatem. Tell him Adel sent you. He will help you. I’ll try to come and join you in a bit, after I close up here.”
My mind is racing now with an energy that I forgot I had, like the feeling I used to have when I ran relays in school. I try to hide the breathlessness in my voice. “It’s good,” I announce. “We have an address of someone who will talk.”
Hatem is wearing a thin T-shirt and blue trousers that are fraying around the bottoms, as if they might have been washed and hung out to dry in the sun a hundred times. He looks very young, but has grown a heavy beard that makes him look more mature. Behind him, two small children are wrestling with each other. The bigger boy has the upper hand and he bangs the slightly smaller boy’s head on to the floor. The shrieking swells, and then a woman who is fully covered, I presume she is Hatem’s wife, rushes to pick up the crying boy. She slaps the bigger boy lightly on the back of his head, and drags him by the shirt until the noisy mess of them disappears from sight.
Hatem is tall and slim and has a facial structure so sharply defined you can follow its angles beneath his beard. But his height is a slouching height, not a proud one, and I notice my shoulders receding to meet his, as if to assume a stance of solidarity.
Their sitting room is simple: floor cushions, marked and ripping in places, placed in a U-shape around the room. On the wall there is a picture of Moqtada in a cheap plastic frame. But I soon find myself counting up all the things that don’t belong. A typewriter, much newer than the model I have at home, sits in the corner, next to a mound of shimmering white glass that sparkles like diamonds in the sunlight from outside. Hatem has noticed me eyeing it. “Do you want to see the other things that we have reclaimed?” he asks.
“Reclaimed?”
“Well, this isn’t theft, you know. We are taking back the things the regime stole from us. This is like blood money that can never be claimed.”
Sam points to the glittering glass. “Did they take that chandelier from one of the palaces?”
Hatem lifts his gaze to me and his eyebrows move closer together. It’s clear he doesn’t understand much English, nor does he know why the woman speaking it is standing in his home, and so I begin to explain that she is a journalist, and he says from where, and I don’t know why, but I say France, and after all, doesn’t her card say she lives in France? And he says
Ahlan w-sahlan,
you are welcome as if family, and that if Adel sent us, we must be okay. And I think of stopping right there, explaining that we only met his brother ten minutes ago by chance, but instead I smile and say thank you.
“First, come,” Hatem says, and he leads us into the family room behind the sitting room, the place to which, in many houses of the religious, a stranger wouldn’t often be invited.
There are many chairs and sofas and lamps, and everything is in an antique-looking European style, with velvet fabrics and fancy wooden carvings along the edges, some painted with gold. There are also some wooden side tables and a few Syrian folding chairs with inlaid mother-of-pearl. The furniture is packed in so tightly, it looks like a dealer’s warehouse.
“Christ,” Sam mutters to me. “This is amazing. Did he loot a whole palace living room?”
I ask Hatem the same question, in more polite form of course, and he clicks his tongue against the top of his mouth. “No, not a palace. A villa. One of the minister’s homes.”
“Really? Which one?”
Hatem hesitates. “Chemical Ali. He has many homes in Iraq, two in Baghdad. My brothers and our relatives decided we would target these homes.”
“
Mashallah
,” I say, and I am, in fact, impressed. Everyone knows that Chemical Ali, whose real name is Ali Hassan al-Majid, is said to have killed thousands of Kurds as well as Shi’ites, many by chemical warfare. When Saddam has a problem, I once heard someone say, Chemical Ali has the solution.
Sam is not as impressed as I expected.
“Which house?” she asks. “Where was it?”
Hatem smirks, staring at her but speaking to me. “Ask around. Anyone can tell you where the house is.”
Sam walks up to one of the chairs and runs her hands along the rich trim. “Can I photograph him with all of his loot?”
I cannot think of a way to interpret these words without insulting him. I certainly cannot use
hawasim
, since he doesn’t view this as looting. The only words I can think of are stolen things, or other words that have
sariqa
in them, which can only mean theft. So for now I won’t translate the question at all.
Hatem asks me to ask Sam if she knows who Chemical Ali is.
Sam strokes the green velvet on one of the sofas. “Sure I know.”
“Well,” says Hatem, “he is responsible for the murder of at least thirty of my relatives.”
When I tell Sam that, she looks at Hatem with eyes that seem determined at looking sad. “I’m very sorry,” she says. “That’s awful.”
Hatem nods. “Why don’t you come back into the sitting room. Coffee or tea?”
And so we go back into the front room and settle into the cushions, and Hatem begins to tell us about all the relatives who have been jailed or killed in the past fifteen years — or who have simply disappeared.
Sam is fidgeting with the camera inside her bag. “But what about the rest of the city? The looters are picking Baghdad to pieces. People are getting killed in the street.”
Hatem raises his right hand as if shielding himself from something. “That is not our people. Those are others. Maybe the criminals who escaped from Abu Ghraib when the regime fell. Maybe Kurds from the North. They are coming down here and committing the real crimes.”
I feel my face tense at the thought: Rizgar. Did Hatem notice him pull up? Is he still out by the car?
“Tell her this,” Hatem says to me. “Explain to her that in Islam, there is a difference between stealing and making reparations. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon Him, said that stealing is so despised by God that the thief’s hand should be cut off. But it also says in the Holy Koran that when an injury is done by one party, he must fix what he has broken or pay the damages. There must be a
sulha
.”
“Nabil,” Sam turns to me. “Can you translate what he’s saying?”
“Wait one minute. I need to understand first what he’s trying to say.”
“Well, I’d prefer you translate sentence by sentence, or you’ll forget what he said.”
“No, yes...please continue.”
“But in our culture, please explain to her, we have a concept of the
sulha,
in which the families of the two parties get together to reconcile the differences. The elders negotiate and decide what is fair.”
Sam’s hand cuts the air. “Nabil, just stop him and tell him you need to translate.”
“But in this case, Saddam has disappeared and we may never hear from him again. Maybe he is already in another country. And so, how will we get our
ta’wid?”
’ he says, using the term for reparations. “Who will give me the blood money for my other brother, for all my cousins who are dead and missing? The United Nations? George Bush? I don’t think so.”
I turn to Sam. “He is saying that he doesn’t believe they will be compensated for their losses.”
Sam’s shoulders fall and she tilts her head, petulant. “He said a lot more than that. It was at least a few sentences, wasn’t it? I need to hear the whole story.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you after.”
“No, not after.”
“Just one minute—”
Hatem keeps talking, eyeing Sam like she is interrupting. “In a true Islamic society, if the families cannot solve the problem then they go to a
mahkameh,
to a religious court, and the judge there can decide who is wrong, and will award damages to the injured party. But since a fair court based on sharia doesn’t yet exist anywhere in Iraq—”
Sam is shifting noisily now, and I give her a hand signal to wait just one more moment.