IN DECEMBER OF 2003, approximately seven months after Bush declared his mission accomplished and the UN lifted a majority of its sanctions against Iraq, I saw my brother again for the first time in thirteen years. I was living in West Hollywood, three semesters into my economics PhD, and I had flown from LAX to Paris to Amman, at which point a driver was supposed to pick me up at the airport and take me to the hotel where my parents, who had traveled from Bay Ridge, were waiting for me to meet them. From Amman we would be driven across the desert to Baghdad, a journey that takes some ten hours. Before sanctions, and then the invasion, one could fly from Amman to Baghdad in less than one hour, such that reaching Amman meant you were almost there. Now, it meant you were only about halfway there.
When I got to the airport, there was no driver. Or rather, there were plenty of drivers, all of them keen for my custom, but none holding a sign bearing my name. At some point I realized that the address of the hotel in which my parents were staying was written in a notebook I’d left in the facing seat back of my flight to Charles de Gaulle. After about an hour, I gave up trying to find our arranged liaison and, via a series of leery interviews, identified a man willing to take me to up to five different hotels for a flat fare of 250,000 dinars, or about eighty dollars.
In the car, when this man heard that I was ultimately destined for Baghdad, he became delirious with ambition. I take you! I take you right now! Be there by morning!
Quite possibly, this was an offer made with the intention of selling me to kidnappers in the desert. I thanked the man and explained politely that I wanted to rest a little at my hotel before continuing my journey. At this the driver looked not only undaunted but delighted. Yes! Perfect. You rest, and I’ll come back later and take you in the morning. He might as well have said: Even better. I’ll just make some arrangements to sell you in the desert and then we’ll be ready to go.
My parents were at the third hotel. When I approached the front desk, the receptionist was on the phone. After a moment he placed the receiver on his shoulder and I asked if a Mr. Ala Jaafari and his wife were among his guests. And you are? Their son. The receptionist’s eyebrows went up. He pointed at the receiver on his shoulder. This is your driver. He wants to know where you are. Where is he? I asked. At the airport, said the receptionist. No, I said. I’ve just come from the airport, and I swear it to you: he wasn’t there. The receptionist nodded, inspecting me kindly, then returned the receiver to his ear and communicated my message into the phone. A muffled string of invective ensued, making both of us wince. Then the receptionist gave me another long look, as if he were listening to someone describe me—as one describes a wallet or a watch that has been lost—and, as the voice on the other end continued to chew him out, he hung up.
You know what? said the receptionist, shaking his head. I know this guy. He wasn’t there.
When my mother opened the door she was wearing a head scarf. Typically she did not wear one in Bay Ridge and for the first time I thought the hard black oval around her face gave unflattering emphasis to her jowls. She had also, owing to her age, taken to walking at a slight forward angle, as if leaning in the right direction might preserve or even generate momentum. Lately, when I called home and spoke to my father, he would answer questions as to how he and my mother were doing with a report on how well or badly my mother had slept the night before. It was like a poltergeist, her insomnia and its effects, and my father warned me of its presence the way he used to warn me approximately once a month that Fatima is not herself today. Now, in Amman, even as she beamed maternally on my arrival, I could tell that my mother needed sleep, and I hoped she’d be able to get some rest in the car. I hoped I’d be able to get some rest in the car. But shortly after we’d embraced my father took me to one side and said that while it was all right for my mother to sleep one of us would have to remain awake at all times. We were leaving in the middle of the night, in order to reach Iraq around dawn; moreover, night or day most of the journey would be monotonous—mile after mile of scrubland and dunes—so it was equally important that we be on alert that our driver should not nod off, or, in my father’s words, pull something funny.
This was the same driver who’d been supposed to meet me at the airport, and who greeted me now with an air of superior and charitably suppressed exasperation. His armored Chevy Suburban, with its tinted windows and long boxy rear, looked like a hearse. I could not have slept if I’d tried. Every uptake in speed made me start. Every pair of headlights advancing toward us seemed to push through the dark with an ominous stealth. Our driver gripped his steering wheel tightly, with both hands, bouncing his unoccupied knee and chewing his lip. He was a smoker, obviously; the car stank of it, and every spare compartment had been stuffed with cigarettes—dozens of Marlboro boxes marked CHINA DUTY FREE wedged over the visors and into the pockets behind the seats—but before we’d set off my father had asked if he wouldn’t mind abstaining. Much of the first hour of our ride I spent silently debating the pros and cons of this request. If our escort needed nicotine to deliver us safely into Baghdad, let him have it. We would not die of secondhand smoke in ten hours. On the other hand, my father, who had only recently given up tobacco himself, had paid dearly for this service: three and a half thousand dollars. Why shouldn’t he have his way?
We arrived at the border a little before four. Slowing, our driver opened the glove compartment and removed a billfold of American twenties, which, after powering down his window, he began peeling off and passing out to the border patrol officers as though they were the standard toll. Any foreigners? one of the officers asked, in Arabic.
Our driver shook his head. All Iraqis.
Now he was handing out Marlboros: two packets per officer. Then he powered the window back up and it seemed we would be waved through until one of the officers standing in the road turned around and held up a hand.
The window went back down and two more packets of cigarettes were offered through and pocketed unceremoniously. Then the officer said something about Baghdad. Our driver nodded. The officer walked away.
Sitting in one of the SUV’s middle seats, I turned around to face my father inquiringly. My mother, with her dark eyes and snug headwear, looked like an owl.
What’s happening?
They want us to take someone to Baghdad.
An officer?
Our driver nodded.
An Iraqi intelligence officer?
Jiggling his leg, our driver ducked to peer under the rearview mirror and didn’t answer.
What should we do? asked my father.
Please, said the driver. Pretend to sleep. Do not speak.
I have to go to the bathroom, my mother said quietly.
I am sorry, our driver said urgently, turning around to face us now. We cannot stop unless he says to stop. You must be quiet. Your accent will discover you. I will try to take you quickly, quickly as possible, but please: do not speak.
By now a large man with a beard and gray army fatigues was approaching. Our driver unlocked the SUV and the officer opened the passenger-side door and sat down in front of me, causing the vehicle to cant. Sabah al-khair, said the officer. Sabah al-noor, our driver replied. Good morning. We Jaafaris said nothing. Our driver relocked the Suburban, put it into gear, and resumed driving, waved off by the officers in the road. Our new passenger adjusted and readjusted his seat, reducing my own legroom by half. Then he reached up above the visor, removed a pack of Marlboros, peeled the cellophane away, drew out a cigarette, and did not stop smoking for the next six hours.
• • •
My grandmother’s house was smaller than I’d remembered it, whereas my brother was larger. Not fatter. Not softer and wider, as some of us become when we age, but bigger all over, in a solid and proportionate sort of way, as though to save space my mind had shrunk him down by 20 percent.
He was also handsomer than I’d remembered: ruddier in the cheeks and readier with a smile, sprouting long lines around his eyes. When at last my parents and I entered our grandmother’s living room, Sami stood, put his hands on his hips, and grinned at me for a long moment, as if he knew my preconceptions were in the process of being dashed. And what had my preconceptions been? That he would be both more and less the Sami I’d remembered. More boyish. Less boyish. Going a little gray behind the ears. He was going a little gray behind the ears, but this was less uncanny than the ways in which he seemed almost exactly the same. The squareness of his hairline. The singular shadows around his mouth. They unnerved me, these animated relics, but in an oddly pleasant sort of way—as it can be oddly pleasant to pass a stranger on the street and catch a whiff of your high school chemistry teacher’s shampoo for the first time in twelve years. We think we have evolved, we think the dross of consciousness is shed, and then all it takes to splice in a frame from 1992 is a noseful of Prell.
One afternoon we sat out in the garden and while Sami smoked a cigarette he plucked an orange off the grass and tossed it to me for peeling. He’d graduated from medical school a few years earlier and was now a junior doctor at al-Wasati, the hospital for corrective surgery. Prior to the war, the majority of his cases had been nose jobs, breast jobs, liposuction, and hip replacements; now he spent his days staunching rocket wounds, tweezing shrapnel, and swaddling burns. There’d been talk of the Health Ministry funding ear replacements for the men who’d had one or both of their own cut off for deserting Saddam’s army in the nineties, and my brother seemed to look forward to this. After all, he said, if he were reconstructing ears instead of staunching rocket wounds, it would mean the fighting had died down a little. Wouldn’t it?
We were quiet for a while, and then I mentioned the little boy I’d known at the children’s hospital in London, born with what looked like a butter bean for an ear. Putting his cigarette out in the grass, my brother responded wryly: I wish we had only nature’s mistakes to fix.
And yet he seemed mostly serene. Not with the situation, of course, but with his choices in life. Certainly no one could accuse him of doing a job that did not matter. After the invasion, and despite the presence of overwhelmed American troops patrolling the city, al-Wasati had been the only public hospital in Baghdad not plundered to the point of incapacitation. Nine months later, it was still undersupplied and understaffed, as an increasing number of doctors refused to make the commute into town or had fled the country altogether. The day my father and I went to see my brother at work, a drive that in peacetime would have taken twenty-five minutes took us an hour and a half. Somewhere, a tanker had exploded, bottlenecking traffic and burdening the hospital with a fresh influx of casualties. Outside the entrance, a man sobbed as the body of another was loaded onto a gurney. The sobbing man covered his face with his hands. Then he lifted his arms to the sky and cried, Why? Why? Why are they doing this? What do they want? Is it money? Why? Just inside the entrance, another gurney contained a child of about ten, his legs wrapped in blood-soaked gauze and his eyes blinking with an otherworldly sort of resignation. No one appeared to be with him, and as my father and I waited to one side, looking for Sami, a doctor came over to us and pointed at the boy.
Who is dealing with him?
We don’t know, my father replied.
The doctor turned to the rest of the lobby and shouted into the rabble of people milling, weeping, praying:
Who is dealing with him?!
Waleed! someone shouted back.
While the doctor continued frowning at the child in a way that suggested only minimal satisfaction, a nurse led us off to the staff mess, where an Arabic soap opera was playing on a television in the corner and my brother presently appeared wearing scrubs. A young man who’d been hit by shrapnel the evening before was waiting for him in the operating theater. My father asked if we could watch.
This happened yesterday? Sami asked the man on the operating table.
The man nodded. At sundown. I was just going out for some bread.
Sami gouged two holes in the man’s torso, just under his arms, to drain the blood from his lungs. The man screamed. He’d been given a small dose of anesthesia, but because anesthesia was one of the things the hospital had too little of, no one gave him more.
Allahu Akbar! cried the man.
Give me more light, said Sami.
An assistant changed the angle of the lamp over the man’s body while two more men, one on either side of him, held him down. My brother fed tubes into the holes under his arms and then adjusted their position so that the man’s skin was drawn away from his rib cage this way and that, like Silly Putty.
No Muslim would do this to another Muslim! cried the man. My son, he is two, his face was blown off! Why are they doing this? Why?
Sami sunk a syringe into the man’s abdomen. When he began digging around in the intubated holes again, I closed my eyes and turned to leave. About half an hour later, when I looked back into the operating theater, it was empty. In the doctors’ mess, the television had been turned off and two men waiting for a kettle to boil were arguing over whether Saddam’s capture of four days earlier was real or a lie propagated by the Americans for publicity. I found my father and brother back in the lobby, standing over the boy with the bloody legs, my father with his arms folded as if he were cold and my brother smoking. Another doctor stood beside Sami, also smoking. Waleed, I guessed. On the other side of the gurney stood three more men, two in dishdashas and the third in a red-and-white keffiyeh knotted under a thick black beard. We found him on Wathiq, one of the men was saying. Says he lives in Zayouna. Says his name is Mustafa. Says he hasn’t seen his parents since last week. It wasn’t until that point that I looked more closely at the men standing over the boy—who even as he was being discussed continued his preternatural blinking at the wall—and saw that the one with the very black beard and the red-and-white scarf tied around his neck was Alastair.
• • •
PLEASE NOTES read a sign taped to the front door of the Al-Hamra. GUNS MUST BE LEFT AT SECURITY DESK. THANS FOR YOUR COOPERATION.
Inside, a man wearing a camel-colored turtleneck sat at the hotel’s reception desk doing a crossword in Arabic. On his desk were a pocket watch, a security wand, and a Kalashnikov, the barrel of which lay aimed at my groin as Sami and I lifted our arms to be frisked.
Through a pair of heavy wooden doors, the journalists’ Christmas party was already under way. The restaurant’s red walls, red tablecloths, and dimly glowing wall sconces all suggested a supper club in purgatory. In one corner, two waiters in bow ties stood quietly at attention, the fabric of their shirts so thin you could plainly see the outline of their tank tops underneath. In another corner, a third Iraqi sat playing big band standards on a piano. The instrument was a blond old upright that faced into the room, its crisscrossed innards partly veiled by a floral-print curtain that matched those on the windows. Although: it was dark outside, and the hotel’s windowpanes had been reinforced with dense argyle iron grids; there might as well have been no windows at all.
In the center of the room a crowd of correspondents, cameramen, photographers, and contractors mingled festively, pouring drinks and cutting cigars. Most of them were men, although there were also a few women present, including one in tight white jeans being cornered by a man who, in a French accent, was explaining how the situation was not unlike Vietnam. You try to crush the resistance and in so doing you inflame the neutral population. We found Alastair out by the pool, sitting at a candlelit table cluttered with bottles and ashtrays and talking to a young American man whose hat identified him as with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Each man was working his way through a cigar, the American rather less adroitly, and because Alastair was no longer wearing his keffiyeh I saw now that while his beard was real, the black was not.
Anyone who was paying attention in the nineties, he was saying—anyone who learned anything from Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Somalia—would have anticipated this. If you disband the military, if you fire everyone who ever worked for the government, if you take away people’s jobs, their income and their pride, what do you expect? That they’re going to sit around playing Parcheesi until you show up at their door and hand them a ballot? And if they know where the old munitions are hidden, and you aren’t guarding those either—is it really a surprise when they turn them against you?
In the pool, a series of fluorescent deck lamps reflected like a row of shimmering moons. A chin-ups bar had been installed on the far side of the water, where, as we talked, an impressively muscled silhouette strode over, sprang up, and began vigorously pistoning himself into the air. The UNHCR man, who had a Southern accent and continuously shifted his cigar from one hand to the other as though even its unlit end were unbearably hot, said:
Well, what choice did we have?
For that matter, said one of the other Americans, why wasn’t anything done sooner? Like when Saddam was murdering Kurds and Shiites for staging a rebellion at our own not-so-subtle suggestion? Leading to thousands of them being killed right under our noses, because our troops were under inexplicable orders not to intervene? Even though they were there. Even though the attack arguably breached Schwarzkopf’s cease-fire treaty. Why didn’t we do anything then?
You sound like an exceptionalist, said Alastair.
So? said the American. Exceptionalism is only a problem when it’s used to justify bad policies. Ignorance is a problem. Complacency is a problem. But to aspire to exceptional behavior—exceptionally generous, judicious, humane behavior—as anyone lucky enough to have been born in an exceptionally rich, exceptionally educated, exceptionally democratic country should do . . .
The man in the UNHCR cap nodded sagely and blew smoke rings that stretched oblong before dissolving into the collective haze above the pool. Less than two years later, the same pool would have the body parts of suicide bombers floating in it, but on this night, an Iraqi Christmas of relative calm, Saddam had been captured and it was impossible not to hope that the arc of the moral universe was not, after all, so very long and unyielding. I watched my brother light a cigarette without taking his eyes off the man on the pull-ups bar and thought maybe he wasn’t listening to the conversation, or listening but dismissing it as unworthy of his own participation. But then, still with his eyes on the exercising silhouette, Sami exhaled and said:
Isn’t it possible that what the West really wants is simply not to be inconvenienced by the Middle East? Not to be terrorized, not to be charged too much for its gas, not to be threatened with chemical or nuclear weapons? And otherwise you couldn’t really care less?
No, said the man with the UNHCR. I believe the average American is sincere when he says he wants Iraq to become a peaceful and democratic nation. A free and secular nation. Though we understand this may not be possible for some time.
But you wouldn’t want us to become richer than you. More powerful than you. To have greater international clout and the same seemingly boundless potential.
The man in the UNHCR cap looked nonplussed.
Well, Alastair put in quietly, it’s hard to imagine. But it would make for an interesting development, geopolitically speaking, yes.
Inside, the journalists, cameramen, and contractors were sitting around one long table now, carving up a Honey Baked Ham someone’s mother had FedExed from Maine. I sat down with Alastair at one end of the table, where two plates of meat were passed down to us and Alastair ate them both. While he did, I noted that he seemed more alive than when I’d last seen him, which had been in London five years earlier; his body now appeared more charged and alert—as though, casualties aside, he really rather preferred life in a war zone. I asked whether it didn’t occasionally feel hypocritical to be censorious of a war while at the same time drawn to its energies. Still chewing, Alastair nodded and said, Yes, it’s true, there’s something thrilling, addictive even, about the idea you’re living every moment only half a step ahead of death. But if it weren’t for those willing to do it, those willing to risk their lives to witness and record what’s happening, how would the rest of us know what our governments are doing in our names? I pointed out that the very proliferation of pseudo journalism these days, the cacophony of conjecture and partisan agendas and sensationalism that seem orchestrated above all to provoke and entertain, tended to leave me feeling as though I know less than ever what my government is doing in my name. Drinking, Alastair shrugged and nodded as if to concede: Yes, well, there’s always the moronic inferno.
It was also on this night that Alastair told me about how, eight years earlier, in Kabul, he and his crew had been packing up after a segment when an Afghan boy darted over and snatched his cameraman’s bag. A few minutes later a policeman happened by and Alastair stopped him to describe the boy: five foot seven maybe, fourteen or fifteen, wearing a light-blue shirt and a dark-green shemagh. Went thataway. A few minutes later the policeman returned with the boy and handed Alastair the bag. Alastair thanked him, and the policeman told the boy to apologize, which the boy did. Then the policeman drew his pistol from his holster and shot the boy in the head. You can imagine, said Alastair, the number of times I’ve replayed that scene in my mind and regretted my unwitting participation. And if it’s violence driving up your employer’s advertising revenue and you’re the one reporting the violence it’s hard to see how in that respect, too, you aren’t one of the ones perpetuating the violence. So, no, I don’t always sleep soundly at night. But if I quit, which I considered very seriously after that day, I think I’d go mad from the alternative. When I’m working, when I’m high on adrenaline, I’m not exactly in what you would call a contemplative state. But when I go home, when I go out to dinner or sit on the Tube or push my trolley around Waitrose with all the other punters and their meticulous lists, I start to spin out. You observe what people do with their freedom—what they don’t do—and it’s impossible not to judge them for it. You come to see a mostly peaceful and democratic society as being in a state of incredibly delicate suspension, suspension that requires equilibrium down to the smallest molecule, such that even the tiniest jolt, just one person neglecting its fragility with her complacency or self-absorption, could cause the whole fucking thing to collapse. You think about how we all belong to this species capable of such horrifying evil, and you wonder what your responsibility to humanity is while you’re here, and what sort of game God is playing with us—not to mention what it means that generally you’d prefer to be back in Baghdad than at home in Angel with your wife and son reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If I am unnerved by peace and contemplation, if something biochemical in me craves the stimulus of violent spectacle and proximity to conflict, where am I on the spectrum? What am I capable of, under another set of circumstances? How different am I, really, from ‘them’?
I didn’t know you believe in God.
I don’t. Or rather, I’m agnostic. A foxhole agnostic. There’s a Mandelstam poem that goes: ‘Your form, agonizing and fleeting / I couldn’t make it out in the haze /—God!—I said by mistake / Without having thought to speak.’ That about sums it up. You?
Yeah.
As in Allah?
I nodded.
Alastair lowered his beer.
What?
Nothing. I just . . . You’re an economist. A scientist. I didn’t know.
Beside us, four men in flak jackets sat down with a deck of cards. It was one of those military-issue packs, with ranks comprising the fifty-two most-wanted Ba’athists and Revolutionary Commanders; the game was Texas Hold’em and Chemical Ali led the flop. Designed and distributed to familiarize American soldiers with the names and faces of those they’ve been charged with capturing or killing in a raid, the concept is a descendant of one also employed in the Second World War, when air force pilots played gin rummy with cards sporting the silhouettes of German and Japanese fighter aircraft. It’s a curious tactic, this teaching of whom we should target and exterminate through a medium traditionally associated with playtime entertainment; one wonders whether the instructional advantage isn’t undermined by the incendiary implication that, to the Americans, war is akin to a game. In the one under way beside me, Saddam was the ace of spades, his sons Qusay and Uday that of clubs and hearts, respectively, and the only woman—the American-educated Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, aka Chemical Sally—the five of hearts. Thirteen of the cards, including all four deuces, had in lieu of a photo only a generic black oval that resembled the outline of a head wearing a hood like the grim reaper’s. And yet it was these cards, I thought, as the man nearest me laid down a flush—the cards without faces—that had the most humanizing effect. Maybe because their featurelessness more readily suggested that you, too, could have been born Adil Abdallah Mahdi (deuce of diamonds) or Ugla Abid Saqr al-Kubaysi (deuce of clubs) or Ghazi Hammud al-Ubaydi (deuce of hearts) or Rashid Taan Kazim (deuce of spades). If only your great-grandfather had met a different woman. If only your parents had taken a later flight. If only your soul had sparked into being on a different continent, a different hemisphere, a different day.
Meanwhile, the din of laughing and clinking and drunken caroling had begun to compete now with a slow but steady crescendo emanating from the piano in the corner. I looked up to see my brother there, sharing the instrument’s bench with its hired player, each man looking after his own half of the keyboard while also carrying on a conversation that made their cigarettes bounce between their lips. The music was no longer Cole Porter and Irving Berlin but instead a sort of jazz fever that had no beginning, middle, or end—just a cycle of surges, looping swells and contractions, long frenetic improvisations that managed to sound both triumphant and apocalyptic at once. It reminded me, in places, of the sort of music that accompanies a silent-movie brawl, or a Charlie Chaplin chase, or the headlines of history being peeled away one by one. And it went on late into the night—long after the ham had been finished and most of the journalists and contractors and cameramen had gone up to bed, long after the waiters had cleared the soiled tablecloths away and the camouflage-backed cards had gone back into their box, long after the cerulean pool had settled into a state like glass and the tiny column of ash on my brother’s cigarette had grown long enough to bow downward and drop off.