The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (14 page)

Khalil always wanted to travel, and it damned him. He worked for the Intelligence Service under Saddam, the only job he could get after school, and was posted to New York City as a United Nations diplomat with the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1991 he watched coverage of Desert Storm from his apartment on Manhattan's East Side while, two hours up the Hudson, I watched as a senior at Vassar College. Because of his connection to the Baathists, he can't get a visa to move his family to the United States now, despite many years as an interpreter for American forces during the occupation. He will be left in Baghdad as Iraq falls apart.

Traffic was sparse as we drove into the city's center, where I spent two nights in the Karada district. The storefronts were luminous at the base of dark apartment buildings. There were no police rushing past, no shots fired, just the growl of generators and thump of trucks hitting holes in the road, the cool air thick with exhaust. A radio reported car bombs: 8 killed, 22 wounded.

“The numbers are all lies in Iraq,” Khalil said. “How many votes, how many dead.”

“How was it here today?” I asked.

He smiled. “Shit.” He was numbed by survivor's fatigue. The country had all the symptoms of collapse, but the lights were on, international flights were landing, and stores were open as bombs went off. “Even if it's bad we say, ‘Today is better than tomorrow.'”

Traffic filled the streets, and sunrise lit the haze. Flocks of pigeons turned bright as they beat their way above the shadows cast by buildings. Cigarette smoke hung in the lobbies, the clink of small tea glasses ringing like bells. In the alleys wires were draped loose and tangled from rooftops.

Iraq is a place of prismatic identities, the ancient diluting the present, portraits of Shia martyrs appearing on market walls beside crude paintings of Mickey Mouse. There was a time when, despite ethnic and religious conflict, Iraqis were forcibly nationalized. But our occupation labored to ensure that Baathists were criminalized, erased with the declaration that the country was to be a democracy in which they could not participate. Soon people began to see change not as progress but as a steady decline into dysfunction. Many now feel nostalgic for Saddam's autocratic predictability, and they see their internal conflict as a proxy battle between foreign powers.

A man sweeping the sidewalk said, “Look around. There are only products and politics from other countries here. This is not Iraq anymore.”

A salesman who overheard our conversation added, “What is my country? This is my homeland, but I'll be a refugee here all my life. I'm a refugee who can vote.”

The street merchants had not yet set up. Congestion and checkpoints delay many motorists for up to three hours, so even at 10:30 most are just getting to their shops. The clothing-stand mannequins are bare, hundreds of plastic torsos hanging on steel bars or wrapped in sacks, legs piled in carts along the curb. Suicide bombers often target crowds in shopping areas like these or cafés where young men gather to watch soccer and play cards, punished for simple pleasures. There were almost no children to be seen out in public areas.

Crews worked jackhammers in the streets for pothole repairs, but the ground underneath was just dirt, sandy concrete shoveled in and leveled, the business of a city sealing its wounds with scabs. Construction was under way everywhere: buildings being chipped down and new ones being poured into rough molds. The quality was so poor it looked like they were erecting ruins. Khalil explained that this part of Baghdad was Jewish until the early 1950s; it is believed the land is still in their names, billions in real estate, but they are gone.

Foreign imports drive the marketplace now. An iPhone 5 is $700, but gas is only 40 cents a liter ($1.51 a gallon). The most popular shirts and jeans come from Turkey; fruits and vegetables come from Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. China is pumping the stores full of cheap merchandise, and though the lore of American quality still exists, the Chinese have found the bottom dollar. This has wiped out most local shoemakers, carpenters, and textile workers. Unemployment is high. Almost no Iraqis have credit cards, so people can spend only what they have in hand.

Every few blocks there was a corner that glittered with tinsel on artificial evergreens. Ranks of inflated plastic Santas smiled with lunatic glee from patches of cotton snow. I asked Khalil whether there were many Christians in the neighborhood. He said, “No. Everyone here celebrates Christmas.”

Billboards showed another world, clean and Edenic. Framed posters of waterfalls were everywhere, fantasies imported along with wide-eyed dolls and stuffed bears. Photo shops covered their windows with studio pictures of children posed on backgrounds that resembled anywhere but here.

The Fourteenth of Ramadan Mosque blared its call to prayer over the whine of police sirens. It stands on one side of Firdos Square, where U.S. Marines pulled down the statue of Saddam in 2003; his bronze feet are still standing on the pedestal. Across the square from the mosque is the Cristal Grand Ishtar, a former Sheraton, where many Western journalists stayed during the war. There were dozens of flags flying in front of it, but the American flag was missing. The absolute absence of Americans anywhere was noticeable. I didn't see us on the streets, at the airport, or even in the hotels. Our diplomats are hidden in the embassy, our largest oil company is divesting from wells outside of Kurdish control, and our military has vanished.

Banners with Husayn ibn Ali's impassive face colored the streets. He was killed in Karbala in 680 and enshrined there. The pilgrimage had begun, Shias walking to his tomb to mourn his death, targeted by Sunni extremists along their route. Traffic was constant, the jabbing of horns continuous. Iraq looked busy but it did not look happy, a concrete hive filled with families grinding out the day just to make it to the next one. As long as I kept moving I stayed inconspicuous. It was when I stopped that I felt out of place. Iraqis moved around me, purposeful like I had been when I was a Marine.

The door of a corner post office opened into a blackened hole, the inside filled with bricks and trash, wild cats slinking over the piles. It had been hit by a car bomb and had never been rebuilt. I asked how people got letters now, and a snack vendor replied, “Who would write?”

Khalil and I stopped at a café on the next street. In October 2007 another car bomb went off here, killing 230 people, Khalil said. (Official estimates put the number of dead at only 25.) Khalil had lived above the café; his apartment was destroyed and his daughter was badly wounded. He was an interpreter for an American army unit based in Baghdad at the time, and the soldiers came to her rescue after Khalil made a desperate phone call to their headquarters.

Baghdad is a city of armed men and bullet-pocked barricades. The ministries are still ringed with our fortification walls and makeshift watchtowers. Wire, soldiers, and up-armored Humvees are placed at regular intervals. The feeling is of an invisible siege, the awaiting of another inevitable defeat. In 2003 the transition from what Iraq had been into what it could be, though in disarray, was colored by potential. We couldn't see that instability was going to replace autocracy so completely—and then Nouri al-Maliki's government brought both. The blast barriers we erected as temporary defenses became permanent fixtures, giant nameless gravestones.

To get to Jassan, we had to go to Kut, the capital of Wasit Province. At a transportation hub on the eastern edge of Baghdad, drivers yelled the names of Iraqi cities as if they were reading from a Shia map: Basra, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Kut. The U.S. State Department had been emphatic in trying to dissuade me from independent travel in Iraq, especially so far from Baghdad, but journalists have always come to that city and told the country's story from its point of view. I needed to see what had become of the distant villages I had known. They had remained intact for centuries because of their political insignificance and isolation. It was my hope that those same qualities had preserved them, so far, from the violence and social collapse of the cities.

Khalil got a cab to Kut for 30,000 dinar ($25 at 1,200 dinar per dollar), and we set out on a route that ran east, above the erratic path of the Tigris. The traffic out of Baghdad moved in jerks, passengers expressionless as they stared into other cars, men in the front and women in the back. We passed a former American base, now Iraqi, and it looked rundown, dirt-filled Hesco barriers sagging into piles, soldiers slumping at their posts. We saw hundreds of flatbeds loaded with rebar for new construction, and there were herds of sheep, pens of chickens, and mesh bags of melons pressed up to the road. Baghdad was being fed from its immediate perimeter like a medieval city. It is a medieval city.

We were stopped and questioned at an elaborate new structure on the border between Diyala and Wasit. It had the design of a triumphal arch, the paved passages through it incomplete and the building still empty. It looked just like a border station between countries. These never existed between provinces before. There was no point. Khalil felt it was preparation for the future division of Iraq.

Boys swirled through the stalled traffic selling boxes of cookies and cigarettes. A heavy man in the passenger seat rubbed beads in one hand, smoked with the other, and spoke as if he had grit in his throat. “Half of us are soldiers, the other half are merchants now. All of Iraq is a shop with a war in it.” The backs of his hands were dark tan, his palms bleached pink. The driver looked like a bird: long, sharp, drooped nose, small eyes, gray leather jacket. He barely made a sound, eyes fixed on the road.

For a few miles, when the river curled close, there were fields of green grass and young palm trees. New brick houses have replaced huts once built from the silt of the Tigris. It was like another climate, a verdant country winding through an arid one, the two sharing nothing but proximity.

Police checkpoints profiled “foreign” Arabs, men from Saudi Arabia and Qatar especially. Muqtada al Sadr was on billboards promoting his religious rank among Shias, his dark glower no longer adolescent. (His Mahdi Army, raised to expel occupation forces, has been reconstituted as the Peace Brigades and is now fighting ISIL alongside the Iraqi army.) Gigante cigarettes posted their own highway signs, photographs of wealthy men smoking. They stood above hovels where laborers squatted by fires, the fumes from burning plastics stuck to the air. Mourning flags waved over homes, and donkeys grazed in trash. Traffic surged after each checkpoint, and we sped along the open road, sparse scrub on the desert side, tall reeds and fields irrigated from the Tigris on the other.

Roadside refreshment stands had been set up with rows of chairs for pilgrims to rest on as they made their way to Karbala. Separate tents were nearby for men and women to sleep in. I asked Khalil whether he had ever walked the route, and he said you only walk if you believe.

In 2003 we advanced from Kuwait to Kut with orders to push all the way to the Iranian border afterward. Most of our maps had nothing but a single road drawn through flat space, our pen marks on the route meaningless to the land. We would piece the maps together as we drove north, passing from one rectangle of desert to another. The terrain was open and scarred by tank trenches dug to guard the only highway from the Persian Gulf to Baghdad. The tanks—Soviet imports—were still there, scorched by air strikes, relics of two-dimensional thinking. In these dirt barrens nationhood was impossible to see: a herd of sheep and a single man, a Bedouin tent sometimes afloat on the near horizon. My unit had been brought from the cold, wet coast of North Carolina late, and we hurried into Iraq far behind the fighting. It was a kind of immediate war tourism, the burned wreckage of our own amphibious assault vehicles still on the muddy shore of the Euphrates in Nasiriyah. Torched and hollow, they sat below the bridge as we crossed, heading north in disbelief. The fires had died out, but the buildings along the river looked long forsaken: pitted by bullets, windows chewed open, with bricks spilling from the walls. Marines from Task Force Tarawa were on rooftops and street corners, Iraqi women walking cautiously around rubble and wire with their children, in occupied territory.

The war moved entirely along two highways, both regime and coalition forces ignoring small periphery towns, the vast desert and its villages of no strategic importance to anyone. As we approached Kut, Iraqi army uniforms lined the road near abandoned outposts. No bodies or blood, just helmets, pants, and shirts. There had been a large army garrison waiting for the advancing Marines, but they quickly fled or dissolved into the city dressed as civilians.

Today, as our cab arrived at Kut, Iraqi soldiers at the checkpoint wore U.S. tricolor desert camouflage, the same my unit had been issued for the invasion. It was as if the hidden army of Saddam had reappeared wearing our uniforms. They walked carefully along our cab with a fake bomb detector, purchased from a crooked British contractor who resold $20 American novelty golf-ball locators for $27,000 each. Corrupt Iraqi officials bought $40 million worth of them. The soldier stared intently at the indicator light, three years after their sale had been banned, a keeper of the lie. “Everyone knows it does nothing,” the passenger in the front seat said. They scrutinized my passport and visa stamp. “Ameriki?” they kept asking, as if it couldn't be true, and then brought out an officer to verify my papers. He walked from the office with annoyed importance and asked where our weapons were. Khalil explained that we were alone and unarmed. The official looked up from my passport, shook his head, and let us go. Ten years ago I might have done the same to him.

My photographs have been kept in an order absent of chronology: a blindfolded skull, a pile of boots, an English gravestone, a child waving. I never labeled them, just expected I would remember like everyone does. Seven months of circumstantial evidence. Military mobile exchanges only sold 400-speed film, meant to shoot subjects in lower light, so the reduced resolution is noticeable when the pictures are enlarged, their definition becoming increasingly granular, as if composed of pressed dust. The imperfection of vision is at work, the flickering of lines, the involuntary squint to identify exactly what you're seeing, the desert going from vast and static to pulsing and immediate, like memory does.