The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (37 page)

As soon as Mr. Salar referred to the meddling of neighbor countries, I seized the hint, and asked what IEDs in Kirkuk might look like.

"Mostly they are homemade," he said, thereby confirming the fixer's account of TNT in plastic bags. "The terrorists connect the wires. They differ in shape. Yesterday's was two rockets, you know, artillery bombs, connected by a wire, and there was detonator capsule."

I mentioned the IEDs of Khanaqin, to which he replied: "Maybe there are such kinds of things over there, which is closer to the Iranian border, but here they cannot pass all the checkpoints. Even here you can find some Iranian thermal bombs, but most are handmade."

Now it was time to visit the operations room just behind the door. The wall-size aerial photograph of Kirkuk had not been partitioned, but the deputy and his interpreter pointed to a certain long boulevard that ran west to southeast across town, and they said that below this were the two southern sectors, "the hot places," which were mostly Turkmen and Arab in their composition; the southwestern sector was hottest of all. I was quickly informed that just because those zones were hot did not imply that the Kirkuk Security Directorate was out of control down there, and I replied that I had never doubted it.

The previous night, terrorists had launched a rocket from the Khasa River, whose name means Good River. In that season it was very low between its sloping concrete banks, like the Los Angeles River; insurgents often staged such attacks from the riverbank, especially in the southeastern sector, since few other people went there. The launchers, said Mr. Salar, were of local manufacture: but he showed me a photostat of the markings of three 107 mm rockets (eighteen-kilogram payloads) that he believed to be Iranian. Last night's rocket had struck the Kurdish neighborhood of Azadi. There had been no casualties.

He said, without exactly giving it, that there was evidence not only of Iranian IEDs and rockets but also of "Turkish backup to the Iraqi Turkmen Front" in Kirkuk, a group that Brigadier Sarhad had not mentioned.

 

And what can I say about the Turkmens?

The few I interviewed wished without exception for the withdrawal of American troops. The Kurds never did.

On one of our first drives into Kirkuk, before our license plate had been too frequently seen, we had entered the Turkmen district and arrived on a silent bright street occupied by a gutted car, a cyclist, an old woman in fluffed-out black robes, and a hijabed young woman whose eyebrows were so black they glittered. It was, said the fixer, a dangerous place. He got out of the car and began knocking on doors, trying to find a Turkmen for me to speak with. He went from house to house. "All of them afraid!" he reported. We swung around the traffic circle, whose center was nothing but sand, and then he parked and went to try again. To you, this will sound quite dull, especially since nothing happened to us who waited in the car; certainly we felt vulnerable as we sat there in that brightness, hoping not to get kidnapped, blown up, or shot. The fixer had several faults, but cowardice was not among them.
^*

He finally persuaded an old Turkmen to invite us in (later the interpreter said bitterly that the man had agreed only because his mother was Kurdish). He had lived all his life in this house, which was two hundred years old, with a horseshoe-arched ceiling, arched white walls inset with niches for cups and saucers and a clock, and two huge whatnots in the far space, holding a television each, one of which was on. Daylight came in through the curtained doorway.

In the corner sat a younger woman, probably his wife, looking stiff and sad, covering her mouth with the end of her hijab.

He said: "Life is beautiful if there is no explosion, no violence. Whenever my children go out, I just think: Will they come back?" It had been this way for about three years. He blamed neighboring countries who were "playing" in this area, specifically Syria. Not surprisingly, he did not accuse Turkey.

"What do you think about Kurdistan?" I asked, and he said: "I don't care. We as Turkmens don't care to whom Kirkuk belongs." He spoke in a deep, rather stern voice. His gestures were always various and beautiful.

"In general, do Turkmens get along better with Kurds or with Arabs?"

"Relations between Turks and Kurds are stronger than between Turks and Arabs," he said, "because in old times Arabs had a small existence in this city. But now Arabs are infiltrators."

Like everyone else in Kirkuk, he had bad memories of the conscription and discrimination under Saddam. In those days he had been barred from acquiring land. His brother-in-law was imprisoned for seven years because he had prayed in a mosque. The last five of those he passed in a place whose hideousness was perpetuated by American torturers: Abu Ghraib. The Turkmen said: "You cannot imagine how many young people were inside those prisons and kept there for nothing."

 

The sixth and last time we went to Kirkuk, when there was no reason to go there at all and the fixer simply passed through the city out of childish bravado, he undid my seat belt; he thought that made me less conspicuous.

We drove past black car skeletons crumpled into the dirt from an explosion eight months before at a car show; one of the twenty-odd murdered was a thirteen-year-old cigarette vendor whose corpse, said the fixer, they finally discovered on the roof of the tall building across the street. I wanted to take a photograph, and as I stepped out of the fixer's vehicle alone a white car pulled up slowly beside me and I looked into the driver's face, my hands already sweating. He appeared to be a family man; he was not going to kill me.

I got back into the fixer's car, and we drove around a trifle longer in the Kurdish area, the Arab quarter being now too hot for us (the interpreter had asked the fixer to drive a different car today for safety's sake; the interpreter even volunteered his own car, but the fixer refused, fearing an argument about gas money). Barbed wire guarded walls with nothing but scrap behind them. We passed a market—wheeled stalls of shoes on the sidewalk—and men crossed the street between taxis, carrying big plastic bags. Kirkuk threatened us with a trio of women in black, with men lounging beside a cigarette stand. What might have been sanitation workers, all in blue, stood in a crowd on a truck bed; one of their faces was masked by dirty mummy wrappings, and he turned toward me and reached inside his clothes, but it must have been only to scratch; then came two bank entrances piled shoulder-high with sandbags, guarded by machine-gun men in dark sunglasses; beyond these, on a stretch of dirty wall, someone had written
KURDISTAN.

FROM
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+
1

DATE: JULY
2005
VENUE: VILLA VIZCAYA
LIQUOR SPONSOR: FLOR DE CAÑA RUM

T
HE VILLA VIZCAYA
is one of those Gatsbyesque single-family mansions that have been converted to event spaces. The new owners installed an industrial kitchen to accommodate catering companies and an HVAC system to dissipate the warmth generated by large groups of people. They removed the permanent furniture so gilt chairs could be trucked in for weddings. Guests still had the run of the extensive gardens, but there was no longer anything particularly Gatsbyesque about the place, just a rental tab of $10,000 for a weekend evening.

The Vizcaya was still a very nice event space. From the parking lot, a jungle of banyans and broad-leafed foliage obscured the house. At night, when picking one's way down a path lit with honeycomb floodlights around the ground, there was a feeling of tropical intrigue, followed by awe when the coral mansion finally emerged from the fronds and the vines, a floodlit beacon in the night. This used to be a Xanadu, a neo-Italianate castle built before Miami was even a city, before Miami Beach was even solid land. Where one person saw a mangrove swamp, the mind behind the Vizcaya saw greatness. Thus the first real estate boom began.

Now another real estate boom was happening, here in Miami, where I had just settled (in the gravitational rather than pioneering sense of the word: for several years I had been sinking in a southerly direction, like the pulp in a glass of orange juice). This was my first party. I don't remember much—not even what the party was intended to celebrate—and I took bad notes. The mosquitoes were formidable. I was plastered in sweat. The night was thick and hot and the concrete steps in back descended into still, inky water. The moon hung over all of it: the bay, the stone barge, the topiaries. Corporations were the sponsors. They hung banner ads promoting Clamato; girls in miniskirt uniforms served free mojitos with Flor de Caña rum. I picked up a free copy of a magazine called
Yachts International.
A real-life yacht was moored to the dock out back, and its passengers were drunk and tan.

I stood with my friend Krishna, watching fireworks explode over Biscayne Bay, over the girls serving rum, over the maze hedge and the moss-covered cherubs and the coral gazebos. We sipped our drinks and scratched our mosquito bites. He gazed at the explosions and said, "The fireworks were so much better at the condo opening I went to last weekend."

DATE: JULY
2005
VENUE: HOTEL VICTOR
GIFT BAG: YLANG-YLANG-SCENTED BATH CUBE, THONG UNDERWEAR

I moved to Miami from Arkansas to work at an alt-weekly newspaper. My first order of business, after finding an apartment, was to make friends. I appealed to a girl from work to rescue me from loneliness, and she sent me an e-mail about a spa opening at a new boutique hotel on Ocean Drive, steps away from the mansion where Gianni Versace had met his violent end.

I walked up from my new apartment past the deco and neon, past Lummus Park and the homeless people and mounds of malt liquor bottles beneath the stands of palm trees. It wasn't yet dark—this was an early weeknight party. My co-worker checked us in with the tan girl at the door with the clipboard. From then on there would always be tan girls with clipboards. We were led to an elevator past tanks filled with pulsing jellyfish lit a glowing indigo. The elevator went down to the basement area where the spa was, and when the door slid open an impossibly tall drag queen greeted us, dressed only in white towels except for the diamonds that twinkled from her earlobes.

Petrova, a woman with a thick Russian accent, stepped in front of the towel-bedecked drag queen and handed us champagne glasses. She said they contained cucumber martinis, but I think it might have been cucumber and 7Up. "Welcome," murmured Petrova. She took us on a tour that was like a ride at Disney World. Curtains were pulled aside: behind one was a naked man on a slab of heated marble. Behind the next was a woman having her breasts gently massaged. "Ew," said my co-worker. We stayed twenty minutes, then collected our gift bags, which contained thong underwear and an effervescent bath cube. I didn't have a bathtub.

DATE: AUGUST 2005
VENUE: MY APARTMENT BUILDING, SOUTH BEACH
LIQUOR SPONSOR: MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR BRETT
PHARMACEUTICAL SPONSOR: IBID.
FOOD: FROZEN PIZZA
ATTIRE: SWEATPANTS

Maybe nobody remembers now that Hurricane Katrina hit Miami before New Orleans, but it did, as a baby hurricane. Then it crawled over to the Gulf of Mexico and turned into a monster.

On the afternoon of Katrina I waited too long to wrap my computer in a trash bag and leave work, and the outer bands of the storm were laying into the city by the time I drove across the causeway from downtown to Miami Beach, my car shuddering in the wind. I understood I was to buy nonperishable food items.

The grocery store was chaos, and I was completely soaked from the trip across the parking lot. While I considered the selection of almonds, the power went out. A dramatic hush fell upon us. One minute the store was all beeping scanners and fluorescent lights, the next darkness and total silence but for the wind and rain. I ate some almonds. In the darkness someone broke a wine bottle.

We were told to move to the front of the store. Minutes passed. Rain pounded, wind howled. Suddenly a generator turned on, creating just enough electricity to bathe the store in low-key mood lighting, enough for us to grab bottled water and get out but not enough to forget that the hurricane was something to be taken seriously.

Outside, Biscayne Bay, normally tranquil, was a mountainous expanse of gray and white in extreme motion. Plastic bags flew through the air. The high-rises looked exposed and frail, the dozens of cranes in Miami's skyline like toothpick structures that would come crashing down with the first gust of storm. Once safely home, I put on my pajamas and uncorked a bottle of wine. I opened my door to a blast of wind, rain, and sand that filled my apartment with leaves. I ran across to my neighbor Brett's place, on the other side of the stoop. He opened his door and his apartment filled with leaves.

A friend in Miami once referred to Florida as "America's funnel," and that's what I'd thought of when I met Brett. He was in his mid-thirties and had dyed black hair, stained teeth, and a permanent sunburn, and was almost always smoking on our building's stoop and drinking from a bottle of Tequila Sauza. His apartment was draped in fabric of different psychedelic patterns. He had been looking forward to Burning Man. He had played in an early-nineties grunge rock band of some repute—they had toured with the Smashing Pumpkins—but things hadn't worked out very well. In a moment of idle gossip one afternoon, my landlord Dave told me that Brett had woken up one morning after a night of substance abuse in New York and found his girlfriend dead next to him. So he took their cat and moved to Miami, and now the cat was in its waning days and Brett was selling boats on the Internet, supposedly.

Once I left him my rent check to give to Dave, since I was at the office most days. The next morning Dave, a tan surfer type from Boca Raton who never seemed upset about anything, knocked on my door. "Um," he said, embarrassed. "Don't give your rent check to Brett."