The Apartment: A Novel (6 page)

Saskia opens her mouth but says nothing, then closes it. Say it, I say. She says it’s not a happy story – it’s about her parents. I tell her it would be nice to hear. I don’t believe you, she says. Well, I say, now it will be awkward if you don’t. We continue, and after a considerable pause she says, When we moved away from this city, when I was a girl, we lived in Spain. My father was a civil engineer. We lived in a village full of men who looked like mushrooms. My mother was from here, but my father was from Spain. Leaving here made him happy, but it made her sad. How long did you live there? I ask. Ten years. About ten years. We left when my mother died. I was fifteen. Then we spent three years in Athens, and my father died, then I went to university in Brussels. Then I came here and got a job. Do you still have family here? I ask. Cousins, uncles, she says. It’s tough to lose your parents so young, I say, which is, I think, the same thing I said when she first told me. She says yes but not sadly, just agreeing. My mother’s death caused my father’s death, she says. Her death took a long time. She became tired of toxic medicine – every time the doctors gave her something, they would joke that it would kill a horse, different doctors, always a horse – and she decided to die. My father saw every hour of his life as a series of decisions that led to her death, and became depressed for about a year – our first year in Athens. Then one morning he woke up and shaved his beard and put on a suit. I told him he looked happy. Happy? he said. No, but I’m not sad. Your mother decided to die instead of going on living with us in Spain. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Then for the next two years he drank and womanized and stole money from his own business, and got very fat. In the end he died because of high cholesterol. Did he give up working? I ask. No, he kept working. He designed sewers. One day I was at home and he had grown very fat and his eyes were turning yellow, and he said, The function of a civil engineer is in all cases to ease the flow of human misery. We remove barriers to human connectedness and progress. Because of us, man could create cities. He was gentle and optimistic all his life, she says. But he had no courage. She stops and looks behind her, because she has heard the dinging bell of a streetcar at a stop at the bottom of the street. My feet are getting cold, she says. How are yours? My feet are fine, I say, but I don’t mind getting the streetcar. We wait. We watch the streetcar climb toward us. It has one bright light, a Cyclops eye, that points down at the street and makes the wet rails sparkle. Do you want to get some dinner tonight? she asks. Sure, I say, I owe you for today. Not at all. If it weren’t for you, she says, I’d probably be sitting in that café with Janos, complaining about the capitalists.

The streetcar stops and we get on. It’s crowded, and this disappoints Saskia, who had wanted to sit and rest. She holds onto a pole and I grab a dangling loop. At the top of this street, there’s a palace in two parts, the upper and the lower, and a garden in between. In the upper palace, one of the most famous paintings in the world hangs. It costs a lot of money to get in, and all they have is that painting and five or six rooms of old artefacts. People go straight to the painting and leave. They walk right up to it, take video cameras out, and film it, and on the way out, they complain. I heard an English couple complain that it was not very good. An American man said he thought it would be bigger. Nobody pays any attention to the other stuff. One room has nothing but Mesopotamian artefacts – it claims to be one of the largest exhibitions of Mesopotamian art in Europe – and, on the two occasions I visited, I spent most of my time there. When I was in Iraq, with the Navy, Mesopotamian art and artefacts were being looted. And when I went back, as a civilian contractor, I met, and worked with, people who were trying to locate and rescue the pieces. One guy sat in my hotel room and sobbed. He’d been the curator of a museum, and everything had been taken. He came in smiling. We shook hands and he told me a joke. We had some tea. I never understood how Iraqis drank hot tea when it was 120 degrees, but I did it anyway. He’d gone to Cambridge, which meant he spoke better English than I did. He was discussing various pieces matter-of-factly, handing me folders. He showed me a database on his computer that listed each artefact, and the progress of the investigation into its whereabouts. Then he came upon one piece that was in no way different from the others, not at all special, not more valuable, not larger, and he started sobbing. He sobbed and sobbed, in that tiny room, with the curtains drawn, in the middle of summer. Being here, and having no job to do, seemed about as far away as I could ever get from that moment. But then I walked into that room in the palace and found myself surrounded by Mesopotamian art, so I stayed a while.

Do you mind me talking about that stuff? asks Saskia. Not at all, I say. Are your parents alive? she asks. Yes, I say. Were you ever married? No, I say. She seems satisfied, and she leans down to look out the windows and check where we are. The streetcar stops, and more people board, about six or seven, and push us closer together. They shake the cold out of themselves by hopping and clapping and rubbing their hands together. The road suddenly becomes steep, but the streetcar stays smooth and quiet. In the spring and summer, she says, we should have a picnic in the palace garden. Good idea, I say. I’ve walked through the garden a few times. I’m drawn to parks in winter. I sit on benches and watch the snow, or I enjoy the cold sunshine or the grey wind. I don’t do anything. I just observe, and stay very still, until it’s too cold to stay still. The parks and gardens are usually attached to a palace or an imperial office that makes me think of power and of glory and how these things, here, have passed into history like an artefact. In Qatar I sat in a room the size of a hangar, and on the walls were five hundred large screens flipping through live satellite and ground surveillance of every inch of soil in the various theatres of war that stretched from the Horn of Africa to eastern Pakistan. We had something smaller in Baghdad, in Camp Victory. I used to sit and watch and make notes and disseminate bits of intelligence, and then I’d go have a coffee with Italian commandos and intelligence officers. I met a bunch of French officers in Qatar, and found out the French military was taking part in small-scale but extremely violent combat with Iranian forces near the border. It was not official combat, but engagements took place. The Syrians and Iranians were fighting Americans. Israeli commandos were fighting Iranians. It was all happening. I led a four-man Forward Dissemination Element. Our job was providing surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting intelligence to coalition air assets and ground forces. We worked with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 42nd Infantry Division. My days on rotation, which were long and busy, went like this: after a couple hours’ sleep, I’d wake very early in the morning, grab a coffee, and head in to check SIPR for tasking. SIPR is the classified intranet system that, some months before I arrived in this city, a young kid named PFC Manning used to download hundreds of thousands of military documents and diplomatic cables, which he gave to WikiLeaks. Then I’d check ATO – air tasking orders. ATO is the flight schedule for war, published by the Combined Air Operations Center. It’s a document that includes all scheduled flights and missions for all squadrons. After that, I’d check Air Mobility Command for theatre transportation – C-130s shuttling between Qatar, Iraq and Afghanistan. Then I’d check email. These checks determined the battle rhythm for the day and night. Outside the regimented nature of my FDE work, Camp Victory was a place of incongruity and a stupefying lack of drama. In bright blue pools, Army guys played water volleyball with the ugly hot Polish girls who worked at the post exchange. Behind the palace, pacing around alone and in a cloud of fathomless confusion, General Ricardo Sanchez smoked cigars and scratched his cheeks. Paul Bremer walked around with this practised gaze of victory on his face, but in closed-link video meetings he did nothing but scream and excoriate and blame at the top of his lungs, or so I heard from people who knew. From the bottom to the very top, the one thing all American leaders had in common was an unpreparedness for the very thing they’d wake up to face the next day. We drove around in SUVs, ate Pizza Hut and Subway, drank Budweiser. We sunbathed. We surfed the internet. VIPs with entourages took tours around the camp. Bremer was trying to create a free-market epicentre at the heart of the Islamic world, and Camp Victory was like the epicentre of the epicentre. There was always the sound of faraway firefights and detonations, and from time to time we’d come under mortar attack. There was a lady from Oklahoma working for KBR as a room-assignment queen – a sixty-something grandmotherly dyed blonde. She probably made more money than half-decent basketball players in the NBA. She was responsible for all the hooches on our compound. One day my boss came in to get a room ten minutes before she was closing. He had travelled by C-130 from Qatar and was hot and tired. She was closing up early and wanted to go home. Come back tomorrow, she said. We said no, give us a room, but she did not. There were very nice Filipinos working for pennies doing our laundry. There was a guy working for a Dutch multinational that had the sewage and waste contract. He and I drank together often. I’d sometimes think of how absolutely perfect it seemed, to have picked this place, where the first cities appeared – Uruk, Nippur, Nineveh, and Babylon – where man invented civilization, to carry out a war, secretly fought by all the nations of the world, that would be the beginning of the final war, which would be waged for two hundred years, or five hundred, and fought all over the earth, and which would probably end with the total disappearance of one or two or three of the great cities on earth – London, Paris, New York – or perhaps all of them.

On my second stint in Iraq, as a civilian contractor, I set up IT networks and did a lot of investigation. In the end it was mainly computer surveillance, trying to evaluate patterns of chatter to predict insurgent activity, or locate insurgents behind the anonymity of the web. I had a lot of nice equipment. It was always getting stolen, but it was insured, and I was making so much money that it didn’t matter. I worked with various private military companies, engineering firms, the Iraqi police, and the US government. I made a thousand dollars an hour for a period of about four weeks, taking vast amounts of information across multiple systems and organizing them onto a database I built for the Army. The way I estimated my fees for the Army – I worked for the Army more than anybody else – was to dream up a figure that seemed unreal and add a zero. The Army didn’t trust you if your fees weren’t preposterous. I didn’t spend anything. When I wasn’t working, I sat in my room and smoked cigarettes, and I listened to the city. The hotel was quiet during the days. In the mornings and evenings, it was manic. Everybody had their TVs on loud. Phones rang. Voices passed outside my door. Many of the people on my floor were journalists. Some were long-term residents, like me, but most were short-term. As they walked by, equipment rattled off their bodies. Sometimes they came by in groups of two or three, whispering, or not whispering. They spoke many different languages.

After I returned from my private work in Iraq, I went back to my city in the desert again, the one I kept leaving and returning to, for the last time. I had money that seemed – at least for my way of living – unlimited. I rented a four-bedroom, three-bath place on half an acre of fine, green grass near a country club, about an hour north of the city. I leased a gigantic black pickup – a Ford F-250 – with leather seats. I was all alone, and I had no furniture, just a couch and a TV, and some kitchen stuff. I drove, once a week, to the nearest grocery megastore and wheeled a shopping cart around the aisles slowly for an hour or two, examining lots of things but buying very few, and other than that I rarely left the neighbourhood. I mowed and watered the lawn a lot. I got to know a guy who lived just down the road with his big family in a six-bedroom, seven-bath house with a huge pool. Everyone in that development used a golf cart to get around – mainly this was because it allowed them to legally drink and drive – and my neighbour had a bright red one that would do thirty-one miles an hour downhill. It had silver spinning rims. A neurosurgeon down the road had a yellow cart jacked up and gold rims. It could do twenty-seven miles an hour. Mine was just white, and had no speedometer. This guy, my neighbour, worked as a distributor entirely from home, and never wore anything but shorts and T-shirts. He never had meetings. He never had to go anywhere. He drove a large black Denali with tinted windows and played old-school rap, like NWA, as loud as possible. He had a few employees who worked in an office, cold-calling, but he rarely saw them. There was a time when distributors were linked to particular industries. If you needed something specific, you needed a specific guy. If you needed steel, you needed a steel guy. But my neighbour represented a new breed – guys who could get anything in a second, from bolts for submarines to tortilla-making machines to silicon chips to garden furniture to bricks to small arms to parts for Tomahawk missiles. He put the company in the name of his wife so he could classify it as a woman-owned business, which gave him priority for government contracts. I get an order, he’d say, for 50,000 surgical coils. I go online and get a decent price from a guy I know who delivers quality stuff. Let’s say each coil costs me fifteen cents. I charge my buyer thirty-five cents. That right there is nearly a motherfucking speedboat, he’d say, and by speedboat he only meant a second-hand, small motorboat with an ice chest near the driver’s seat. I hear that, I might say. But that’s small time, he’d say. Big time is military. I mark my prices up one thousand per cent. My girl knows this. This girl he speaks of is his buyer in the Navy, who likes him because when he is on the phone with her, he turns into a right-wing hawk. This girl, he’d say, has to spend her budget, so she’s just looking for a guy who will flirt with her and be patriotic. What the fuck do I care?