AT FIRST, SULAYMANIYAH DID not seem to me all that different from Baghdad. The nearest usable airport was a fourteen-hour drive and at least one international border crossing away. Slightly older than middle-aged men waddled around with their heads down and their hands clasped behind their backs, prayer beads dangling from three fingers. Most of the electrical power was being produced by backyard or rooftop generators. There was running water for only half the day, so as soon as it came on people started filling the gigantic drums they’d placed on their roofs just for that purpose. Practically everyone smoked. Actually, that might be the entire list of similarities.
Among the differences was language, for one. Our first morning there, walking in search of a money changer, my father and I got as far as a block before I noted how eerie it was that we could read all of the signs well enough to make out the letters and their pronunciation, but neither of us had a clue as to their significance. Both Kurdish and Arabic are spelled phonetically, and the alphabets are basically identical—although Kurdish, like Persian, has a handful more letters. So we were looking for a bank, or a money changer, and hoping that the words in Kurdish for bank or money changer were cognates with the Arabic, but we didn’t find one until Sami’s Kurdish driver came and took us to one. The word for bank is the same, but the word for money changer is not, and while I have never learned the etymology behind this minor asymmetry I can imagine it represents centuries of cultural and ideological dissidence.
Another difference: security. There’s a fork in the road not far from Dohuk. Bear right and before long you’re on the outskirts of Mosul. Bear left and you remain well inside Kurdistan. Waving an American passport around would have yielded very different results, depending on which way we went. We went left. This was not without cost: the drive to Sulaymaniyah from Zakho, on the Iraqi-Turkish border, took about nine hours that way. If we’d cut the corner and gone down to Mosul and then across to Kirkuk, it would’ve taken about five. That’s if we would have arrived at all. My grandmother and cousin came up via Kirkuk and it was of considerable concern whether Hussein would be able to carry both his American and Iraqi passports without the wrong one being glimpsed on the wrong side of the Kurdish border.
A year after my last visit to Iraq, we were in Kurdistan for my brother’s engagement to Zahra, a recent University of Baghdad graduate who’d grown up in Sulaymaniyah and persuaded Sami to take a job at the teaching hospital there so that they might start a family in the relatively peaceful north. Short of returning to Bay Ridge and establishing his own practice over the Irish ophthalmologist’s on Fourth, my brother could not have made my parents much happier with this news, and I too felt a certain precipitous relief. Eleven months earlier, a double suicide attack at the offices of Kurdistan’s two main political parties had killed more than a hundred people and wounded at least as many more, but even this contributed to an incidence of violence less frequent, less pervasive, and less indiscriminate than what had been mounting in Baghdad. And, in Sulaymaniyah, things worked. Not by Western standards, of course, but compared to the rest of the country it was encouraging to see how functional Kurdistan was. Elections for the new National Assembly were less than a month away and the Kurds really seemed to believe that they were part of something momentous. The Kurdish Democratic Party dominated in the two states east, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan dominated in Sulaymaniyah itself, but the Kurdish flag—the Italian tricolore rotated ninety degrees, with a golden burst of sun at its center—flew everywhere. On the rare occasions when I saw the Iraqi flag flying, it was the old one, the pre-Saddam one, the one that doesn’t have God is great written on it. Of course we believe God is great, Sami’s Kurdish driver told me; we just don’t think Saddam should have written it on the flag so that he could pretend to be a champion of the faith.
On the day of the engagement, Zahra’s father Hassan and I went out for a walk. The weather left a bit to be desired: rain every morning, clouds all day, exceedingly early sunsets because we were in a deep valley. But the landscape was stunning—mountains in every direction, and covered with a shrubby vegetation similar to that one sees on the mountains of Santa Monica. In fact it was striking how much Iraq reminded me of Southern California; if the area around Baghdad is like the deserts east of Los Angeles, then Sulaymaniyah would be up around Santa Clarita, where the mountains just start to get big enough to collect snow at the top.
For a man in his sixties, Hassan was an impressive walker. He was also a schoolteacher by trade, and, as far as I could tell, perfectly suited to it. Whenever I asked him a question, even something innocuous like, Is it always cloudy in the winter up here?, he would smile delightedly and say, Aaaahhh, yes, now that is an excellent question, and there is an amazing story behind the answer. Following which you could expect a forty-five-minute disquisition that would begin directly related to your query but then spiral outward to include anecdotes and observations regarding many other intriguing if not entirely innocuous matters as well. Thus in our three hours switchbacking up Goizha we discussed Aristotle, Lamarck, Debussy, Zoroastrianism, Abu Ghraib, Hannah Arendt, and the as-yet-unknown contingencies of de-Ba’athification, Hassan managing even with respect to the more sobering of these topics to display a certain philosophical resilience. At one point I said I’d heard there was a new hotel going up in town, and that this seemed to me a positive sign, and Hassan halted to announce that even if they built a hundred new hotels there still wouldn’t be sufficient accommodation because the number of tourists coming to Kurdistan was going to overwhelm. No no, he said, when I looked at him askance. Don’t think about the present. Think about the future. I wish you were staying with us longer. I’d show you some of the wonderful places we have, in the mountains and the valleys. You’ll see. They’ll come from everywhere.
Think about the future. And yet: if I were to articulate the prevailing impression of the seven cumulative weeks I spent in Iraq between December 2003 and January 2005, it would be to venture that the future meant something very different there from what it means in, say, America. In Iraq—even in the comparatively auspicious north—the future has long been viewed as a much more nebulous eventuality, if indeed one expects to be around for its eventuality at all. Over dinner on the night of his engagement, my brother was trying to explain to his soon-to-be in-laws about New Year’s resolutions. In America, he said, it’s traditional for people to promise themselves they’ll change aspects of their behavior in the coming year. Zahra’s family thought that was crazy. Who are you, they asked, to think you can control your behavior in the future? Well, you know, my brother replied, some things you can control. You can decide you’re going to eat more vegetables. Or that you’re going to exercise more. Or that you’re going to read a little each night before you fall asleep. To which Zahra’s mother, an X-ray technician at the teaching hospital, replied: But how do you know you’re going to be able to afford vegetables next month? Or who says there won’t be a curfew tomorrow, preventing you from going to the gym or running in the park after work? Or who says your generator won’t give out and then you’ll have to read with a flashlight until the batteries die and then with a candle until that burns down, and then you won’t be able to read in bed at all—you’ll just have to sleep, if you can?
By contrast: the following day, having driven across town to check out a used Yamaha my brother had seen advertised online, he and I found ourselves eating breakfast in a café next to three journalists, two American and one Scottish, who were telling their driver the plan. First we want to go here. Then at eleven we’ll leave there for here, and then at one thirty we’ll go here. The driver listened with brow-furrowing bemusement. It got better. Oh! said one of the Americans. And on the fifteenth, there’s this meeting that I want to go to in Arbil. Now the driver looked as though he’d been asked to drive to Shanghai and back by Tuesday. Arbil was a ways from here. The fifteenth was a ways from now. In Iraq, when so remote a prospect is raised, a common response is: Well, look . . . God is generous. Meaning: Well, okay, fine. Let’s talk about it when it’s relevant. But if this journalist isn’t in Arbil in two weeks’ time, it’s going to come as a surprise to her. In the interim, she’s going to plan her life as though she’s going to be in Arbil on the fifteenth. If she learns of another meeting somewhere else on that day, she’ll probably say, Oh, I can’t go to that; I’m going to be in Arbil. Arbil is two weeks from now, and 125 miles from here, but meanwhile our resolute American is already then and there in her mind. Well, let us see. God is generous.
The Yamaha was a glossy black baby grand that had belonged to a British woman who’d lived in Sulaymaniyah for thirty years until her husband had died and she’d returned to Shepherd’s Bush. In addition, she’d also evidently left behind this disaffected-looking young man whose biceps implied less interest in the piano he was trying to sell us than in the weightlifting equipment densely arrayed on the Persian rug underneath it. When Sami asked if he might lift the Yamaha’s lid and play a little something to get a sense of its sound, the man gave us a disinterested wave and went back to frying garlic in his kitchen. Unsurprisingly, the piano was out of tune, but instead of discouraging my brother its dissonance appeared to intrigue him like a benign and fascinating medical mystery to be solved: after a brief flurry of warped Mozart he pressed and held down one long note after another, then another, and another, presumably to confirm that each on its own had the purity and resonance of a respectable instrument; only in combination did they jar and jam. Meanwhile, I toured the little room with my hands in my pockets, still thinking about Arbil. I was determined not to contemplate the future or even the past but only what was happening to me right now—which unfortunately can be a little like trying to fall asleep and failing to do so because you cannot stop thinking about how you are trying to fall asleep. A poster of Che Guevara rendered in calligraphic Arabic reminded me that I hadn’t yet rescheduled a meeting with my Argentinian dissertation advisor. A stack of Hawlatis on a ring-stained coffee table conjured the ardent recycler I’d broken up with two months before. Also on this table were an open can of Wild Tiger and a porcelain ashtray made to look like a crumpled Camels pack, completing a sort of Kurdish bachelor-pad tableau that inevitably led to comparisons with my own hermitic home life. But for a few moments there, distracted by the ashtray’s uncanny verisimilitude, I did succeed in not thinking about my singleness, nor about my dissertation, nor about when I was going to learn the results of my latest grant application and not about the long drive to Baghdad my parents and I were intending to make the following day—I was not even thinking about the drift and worthiness of my thinking—and I suppose another way of saying all this is I was happy.
While Sami counted out a stack of American hundreds, I stepped over a barbell to approach the piano as if for a better look. Behind it hung a large, gilt-framed mirror that did not, when I caught my reflection in it, fail to disappoint, in that like all mirrors it gave back startlingly little a sense of the worlds within worlds a single consciousness comprises, too dull and static a human surface to convey the incessant kaleidoscope within. Invigorated by my new surroundings, my brisk mountain walks and the spirit of possibility that accompanies the advent of a year, I’d been feeling in Sulaymaniyah more attuned to life and richer in potential than I’d felt in a long time—maybe not even since that first summer after college, with Maddie. In Sulaymaniyah, unburdened by routine and inspired by my brother’s apparent tranquility and contentment, I envisioned myself approaching a kind of bifurcation, a meaningful deviation that would steer my life closer to his and our Iraqi ancestry than ever before. Here was the future; here was where one of the most important revolutions of my earthly tenure was taking place, and emboldened by the extra passport in my pocket I wanted to witness it and play a part in its fruition.
This is how I felt. But in the mirror on the other side of Sami’s new piano I didn’t look like a man teeming with so much potential. On the contrary, in my eleven-year-old jeans, a week’s worth of stubble, and a fraying windbreaker from the Gap, I looked rather more like the embodiment of a line I would later read—something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person. A problem, I suppose, that it is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.
Having agreed on terms of delivery, my brother and the taciturn Kurd were now emptying the piano’s bench of its contents. I watched as out came a stack of old sheet music, some composition paper with a smattering of handwritten notes that ended after only a few bars, and a book of poems by Muhamad Salih Dilan. There was also an antique postcard of the Royal Opera House that my brother lodged admiringly into the bottom left-hand corner of the mirror’s frame, and a 1977 copy of The Portable Stephen Crane. This last item was entrusted to me for the inventory’s duration, and, after a bit of idle leafing through An Experiment in Misery, An Experiment in Luxury, and An Episode of War, I landed on this: It perhaps might be said—if anyone dared—that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another. The context was an essay written about Mexico in 1895, but under the circumstances, the grievance felt personal and prescient, and in the car on the way back to my brother’s I said it reminded me of something Alastair had once said, about how the more time a foreign journalist spends in the Middle East the more difficult it becomes for him to write about it. I said that when I’d first heard this it had sounded like an excuse, an alibi for failing to do the hard work of writing well, but that the more time I’d spent with Alastair—and for that matter in the Middle East—the more sympathetic to it I’d become. After all, humility and silence are surely preferable to ignorance and imperiousness. And maybe East and West really are eternally irreconcilable—like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect. My brother looked unimpressed. I see what you’re saying, he said, as we slowed for a group of teenagers exiting a fast-food restaurant called MaDonal. But wasn’t it also Crane who said that an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways?
• • •
My parents and I arrived in Baghdad the same day its governor Ali al-Haidari and six of his bodyguards were assassinated, sinking my optimism and adding to my growing list of differences between north and south that the latter was much more politicized. Though this made sense: Baghdad was the capital, the situation up north was much more stable, and as far as the Kurds were concerned the election results were a foregone conclusion. Of course, aside from my brother and his driver and Zahra and her relatives, I knew no one in Sulaymaniyah, whereas in Baghdad my parents and I were surrounded by my large extended family, who have always been a pretty political bunch: of my eight aunts and uncles still living in the city, two worked in the Green Zone and three, including Zaid, were running for office. But it was also what one saw in the streets, like the billboard at the end of my grandmother’s road that read: So that we might leave a better country for our children. This appeared over a picture of a ballot box and the date on which everyone should vote, making it somewhat difficult not to interpret the caption to mean: Yes, for our generation it’s probably a lost cause, a hopeless and terrifying mess, but maybe if we vote first our children will still inherit a better country. God is generous.
Indeed, everyone I observed in Baghdad was afraid, much more than the year before. They were afraid of being robbed, shot, stabbed, taken hostage or blown apart by an explosion. They weren’t going out at night. They were changing their paths to work each day. One afternoon Zaid’s driver noticed that a car, the same car, had been in our sight nonstop the whole way from Hayy al-Jihad to al-Jadriya. Sometimes it was ahead of us, sometimes behind, sometimes a lane or two over, but always in our vicinity. Zaid’s driver insisted this was probably a fluke, but all the same he turned off the main road and we drove around al-Bayaa for a while before getting back on track. It worked. Or rather, it turned out we needn’t have worried, or that our casers gave up, or had concluded their reconnoitering for the day. The point is that these things were always on Baghdadis’ minds, much more than the year before. The year before—in late 2003 and early 2004—people had been perplexed. Wary. Conversations had revolved around questions such as: Who are these people and why are they suddenly so interested in bringing us freedom? What do they really want? How long will they stay? By January of 2005, however, the questions at the heart of such discussions had become: Why are they such bastards? Were they planning for things to go like this all along? Or is it really possible they are this incompetent? And: Are they going to let us run our own country even if they don’t like the constitution?
You went to the moon, one of my uncles’ friends reminded me, when he learned I was American. We know you could fix this if you really wanted to.
But I did want to. Didn’t I? Or did I only want it to be done? A week earlier—inspired, paradoxically, by the conversation I’d had with my brother about the seeming futility of just this—I’d renewed my efforts to keep a journal. (A New Year’s resolution, it’s true.) But whenever I sat down with it the following week in Baghdad I was reminded of the moment in The Red and the Black when the narrator announces that in lieu of a political conversation the author had wished to put in a page full of dots. This is because politics in imaginative work is like a shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is deafening but it imparts no energy. It doesn’t harmonize with the sound of any other instrument. (That would show very little grace, warns the author’s editor, and if so frivolous a piece of writing lacks grace it is fatal. If your characters don’t talk politics, this is no longer France in 1830, and your book is not the mirror you pretend it to be. . . .) Well, I too would have liked to substitute every political conversation I had in Baghdad in January of 2005 with a page of dots. But if I had, all I would have had at the end of it was a Moleskine full of dots. And in any case my family and their friends and I weren’t characters in an imaginative work; we were real people weathering real lives, in which politics aren’t merely like a gunshot in the middle of a music concert; sometimes they actually are a gunshot in the middle of a music concert, making the urgency one feels in talking about them all the more urgent. Imploringly, as though I had my own line to the Situation Room and the exclusive wherewithal to plead their case, my relatives would describe to me what Baghdad used to look like. They told me that as recently as the seventies it looked like Istanbul does now: bustling with tourists and businesspeople, a thriving cosmopolitan capital in an ascendant Middle East. Before Iran, before Saddam, before sanctions and Operation Iraqi Freedom and now this, theirs too had been a country of culture, of education and commerce and beauty, and people came from all over to see it and be a part of it. And now? Do you see, Amar, this chaos outside our doors, this madness? In the evenings, mindful of the inadequacy of dots, I pored over the books and photographs and letters that my grandfather had saved from his government days, and these too described a Baghdad vividly at odds with what I saw when I dared to step outside—which was a place in which you could not forget about politics for one minute, never mind the time it takes to eat a meal or read a poem or make love. Very little worked. Very little was beautiful. The order and security that undergirded even my unhappiest moments back home seemed here the wondrous luxuries of another world. Baghdad, to borrow four words from If This Is a Man, was the negation of beauty.
Around midmorning on our last full day in Iraq, my father and uncle and I returned from visiting Zaid’s grandchildren to find we had a visitor. My grandmother made some coffee and the six of us, including my mother and Zaid, sat around in the front garden and talked. Like most conversations, this one had its lulls, and each time there was a lull our visitor would attempt to dispel it by saying: This will pass eventually. It was like a nervous tic, repeated maybe half a dozen times in our presence: This will pass eventually. This will pass eventually. At one point after saying it the man looked up and caught the doubtful expression on my face.
I mean, he said, it’s not as though things can continue like this forever, right?
Under the circumstances, this is what passed for optimism in liberated Baghdad: the vaguely morbid notion that things couldn’t possibly go on so very awfully indefinitely. In truth, I found it difficult to endure, and even more so when the pervasive dejection was joined by a creeping guilt: the guilt of an inveterately forward-thinking American counting down the days before he and his parents would be boarding their flights home. But not everyone is fatalist, Zaid tried to reassure me. The political activists are smarter and more sophisticated than they were last year. And last year they were smarter and more sophisticated than they’d been the year before. They see opportunities they’ve been waiting for for decades and they’re moving hard and fast to exploit them. They’re thinking ahead while also being mindful of past mistakes. Their political opponents have chosen violence over competition, which means that if people do make it to the polls, they’ll win, and they’ll write the constitution, and then the game will be theirs to lose unless it’s stolen from them. A nontrivial condition. If the elections really are free and fair, Americans are not going to like the outcome. But assuming it doesn’t get stolen things will only get harder after the constitution is writ.
I must have looked convinced, or at least open to persuasion, because when my mother and father and I had loaded our bags into the car and were coming back up my grandmother’s driveway to say goodbye, Zaid pulled me aside and asked whether I might be willing to consider a job in the Green Zone. A friend of his had been named the government’s liaison to the UN regarding a fledgling economic project and the liaison wanted someone he could trust to keep up with the technical aspects of the initiative and advise over the course of its negotiations with the various parties involved. Not dishonestly, I told my uncle that I was flattered, and that naturally it would be an honor to help, but also that I couldn’t be sure of when I’d be able to make it back to Iraq, as it was becoming of critical importance to my psychological welfare that I prioritize finishing my PhD. But yes, I added quickly, when I saw the disappointment in his eyes. I’ll think about it. Think about it very carefully, said Zaid, and let us know your decision as soon as you are able. You are in a unique position to help us help our country, Amar. You understand as well as anyone that we will not be remade in Amrika’s image, but nor should Amrika want us to be. So, come back to us. Come back to us soon. This last line he repeated while also giving my shoulder a gentle shake, as if to wake me from a dream.
• • •
By the summer of 2007 I had finished my coursework and teaching requirements and had only to conquer my dissertation, which had been growing at the dilatory rate of one paragraph per day. I decided that Los Angeles was the problem, or rather that my Los Angeles–born addiction to Internet browsing was the problem, so I subleased my apartment in West Hollywood and moved for the summer out to a cabin on Big Bear Lake, one hundred miles east, in the San Bernardino Forest. There I had a woodstove, mountain views, and an Ansel Adams print on the wall where you’d expect a flat-screen to be. The first thing I did after arriving and flushing a spider down the toilet was to move the kitchen table into the living room, where I envisioned myself surrounded by textbooks and datasets, working easily and ingeniously into the night. The second thing I did was to get back into the car and go in search of an Internet café. I had only just turned out of the driveway when my cell phone beeped and it was my father calling to tell me that Zaid had been kidnapped.
It had happened right in front of his house. His driver had come to pick him up for work and was opening the rear passenger door when another car pulled into the driveway and two men got out and pointed Kalashnikovs at Zaid’s head. Tafadhal, ammu, one of the men said, opening the front door to their car. Be our guest, uncle.
The following morning my aunt Alia received a phone call requesting fifty thousand dollars.
But Kareem’s offered them half, said my father.
Who’s Kareem? I asked.
Our broker.
Ten days later, anti-Shiite factions bombed al-Askari for the second time in sixteen months. Curfews were imposed in Samarra and Baghdad while in retaliation Shiites set fire to Sunni mosques—and Zaid remained missing. On being hired, Kareem had asked my uncle’s driver where the kidnappers had put him. In the front seat, said the driver. Good, Kareem said. The front seat is good. If you put your hostage in the trunk, you’re probably going to kill him, for political reasons, whereas if you give him the front seat you don’t care if he’s Sunni or Shiite; you’re just in it for the ransom and you’re looking after your hostage in order to get paid. So, let’s negotiate. But as time passed with only curt and sporadic communication from the kidnappers, followed by even terser and more infrequent instructions from someone who identified himself as Big Yazid and complained he’d bought Zaid from his original captors at too high a price, the more difficult it became to believe Kareem’s theory was sound. Meanwhile, holed up in my Californian idyll, checking and rechecking my phone and listening to the lake water lap placidly at the dock, I was not getting much work done. In the afternoons, I went for long bike rides or loitered in the Internet café, where I met a girl named Farrah who lived over in Fawnskin and with whom I went to bed a couple of times before she invited me to a cookout on the Fourth of July. It turned out to be a small party, less raucously collegiate than I’d expected, and while we were waiting for the sun to go down and the fireworks over the lake to begin someone suggested a game of Pictionary. I was on Farrah’s team, along with two other women whose sundresses, when they leaned over the table, gaped to reveal the lace trim on their pastel-colored bras, and shortly after I’d removed the cap on my first bottle of beer in six years someone drew an All Play. The timer was upended and everyone leaned in, shouting guesses that became predictably louder and more urgent as the sand trickled down: Person. People. People holding hands. People dancing. Angry person. Mean person. Mean person holding a letter. Parking ticket. Manifesto. Mein Kampf. Karl Marx. Bag. Sack. Money. Robber. Bank robber. Heist. Bandits. Butch Cassidy. Bonnie and Clyde. Dog Day Afternoon. Heist. Somebody already said that. No grunting! Sounds like . . . Eyelashes. Hair. Beautiful. Handsome. Sounds like handsome! Bandsome, candsome, dandsome, fandsome, gandsome . . .
At one point, Farrah looked up and gave me a meaningfully exasperated look. Then she drew a car.
Then she drew two stick figures holding hands next to the car.
Then she drew an arrow between one of the figures and the front seat of the car. Then she x-ed out the trunk.
Oh, I said. Kidnap.
Widening her eyes, Farrah nodded, and stabbed her pencil at what looked like a scrunched-up paper bag with a dollar sign on it. She was a pretty good drawer.
Ransom! shrieked the girl on my other side.
Ransom note! someone else shouted, on the other side of the table. He wasn’t on our team. Anyway, the sand in the little imitation hourglass had already run down. And when the drawings were passed around for inspection more than one noble stickler for rules pointed out that symbols, including dollar signs, aren’t allowed. I don’t remember who won. It tends to be the regrettable things, the details that in retrospect seem to reflect your own pettiness and a certain incurable myopia, that you remember most clearly of the prelude to a shock. The next day my father called to tell me that even though Alia had wired the forty thousand dollars agreed for her husband’s release Zaid’s body had been left in a plastic bag under the porch, a bullet in his head.