The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (15 page)

Kut was familiar but disorienting, the streets swollen with shoppers and thousands of pilgrims. The city made the sounds of collision: sharp honks, truck engines, salesmen calling out, and the constant chirp of police whistles. Goats ate the stiff dead grass in the median. The center of town looked battered.

We stopped in at the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate office. All the government furniture was foreign-made, wood glossy with thick lacquer chipping at the edges. Everyone smoked. They couldn't believe I came by cab from Baghdad with nothing but an unarmed interpreter. A man shook my hand and smiled. He said they have a proverb: “You enter the house from the door, not by the window.” The last American journalist anyone could remember came here three years ago in an armored convoy and only stayed for an hour. The manager said, “There is not enough violence for Kut to be news. You look for stories, and the city doesn't exist.” Another added, “I would rather not exist than make the news here.”

A man named Nassir took us to see a cemetery built by the British for the men lost in the battle for Kut during the First World War, its headstones, like its soldiers, brought from overseas. It was the only place in the region that commemorated the people most responsible for Iraq's creation.

Nassir drove in rushes and jolts, stabbing in between cars, everyone around him doing the same, warning beeps constant, lanes filled like blood vessels, everything somehow pumping through. Traffic intensified as we pushed into the marketplace, the streets channeling a reckless braid of pedestrians, motorcycles, trucks, carts, and cabs.

“It's amazing the roads aren't filled with car accidents,” I said. “I can't believe no one gets hit here.”

Khalil interpreted and Nassir laughed. He had a joyful face.

“Happens,” he said, smiling.

He'd been assigned as our official escort for the next eight days in the province and had been cheerful since we arrived. Tomorrow we would hear that he hit a young boy on his way to pick us up, and a cousin was sent with another car to drive us in his place. The child died in the hospital, and we wouldn't see Nassir again as his life became suspended between tribal atonement and court. But today he was happy to be on a journey with the only American in Wasit.

We went to the souk, which was easily three times the size it had been in 2003. Even then the market had been a kind of neutral space, uninterrupted by invasion or regime, the stalls passed from generation to generation. Trade was conducted in dinar notes stamped with Saddam's victorious image or in dollars stamped with our own Founding Fathers. Under Saddam, an Iraqi soldier made the equivalent of $120 a year. By 2004 the Coalition Provisional Authority desperately rehired them at a salary of $400 a month. There was immediate, irreversible inflation. Corruption in the military bloomed as soon as wages did. An Iraqi soldier makes $1,000 a month now.

When I first walked through the market in 2003, the concrete pillars in the central square were covered with Xeroxed posters of the people “disappeared” by the regime. A week later, near the Iranian border, we would watch as some of them were exhumed from the site of their execution.

Today we passed through groups of women in black, children emerging and retreating beneath their parade of robes, salesmen with handfuls of cash manning caverns of cloth, sandals, and spice. We arrived in the street where the Kut War Cemetery lay. There was a new fence in front, but the rear wall had been pushed down, exposing the site to the city. The concrete cross still stood, but it looked changed, some graffiti spray-painted on it, the U.S. Marine rededication plaque torn off. Children played on a worn dirt clearing where headstones had been, kicking a ball over the soldiers below, one of them digging on the surface with a little toy shovel. Phragmites reeds had overgrown the rest of the lot. The owner of a nearby shop said it had been used as a dump but the Americans cleaned it, and for a while it had flowers and a guard. The guard went unpaid, he added, and “kids” took the headstones and sold them in the market. The cemetery was a dump again.

“Many groups have come to study the cemetery since 2003. The Americans built a new fence to replace the British one. Then the British built one to replace the American one. They all look for the missing stones, but they find nothing. They ask questions, take pictures, and leave. Just like you.” Just like me.

Outside Iraq, Kut is a city remembered only as a military disaster. The British had marched a colonial Indian division up the Tigris toward Baghdad but were stopped by the Turks and their Arab allies at Ctesiphon and sent into a retreat that ended here. For five months they were trapped by siege, unable to resupply or escape, pounded by Turkish artillery, finally surrendering at a loss of 12,000 men. Only 420 have graves here; the rest are buried somewhere underneath the city. I waded into the dense stand of reeds and found a few toppled headstones still largely intact.

1525 PRIVATE

W. HOSKINS

SOMERSET LIGHT INFANTRY

24TH NOVEMBER 1915, AGE 20

LORD REMEMBER ME

WHEN THOU COMETH

INTO THY KINGDOM

The reeds stood 10 feet tall and were plumed with clouds of seeds. I watched them sway above me while crouched by a grave in their shade, a cat passing by using the line of fallen stones as a path. It was my birthday, and I thought of all these soldiers, their entire lives marked by nothing but the day they died and now marked by nothing at all. I emerged coated with dust, my hair downy with silky seeds. Khalil had been pacing the perimeter, calling to me every few minutes as if I were lost in the wilderness.

Outside the gate, I noticed some bright fragments tamped into the gutter and recognized the elegant carving of a wreath in marble, the crest of a gravestone sunk into gray drain water. Men watched as I took a photograph. They followed as I went up an alley and found an entire headstone facedown in concrete used as a step into a gated courtyard. It showed no sign of damage or wear, dug up unbroken precisely for this purpose and moved a mere 50 feet from its grave. Another photograph and Khalil suggested we hurry. A small crowd was gathering. As we left I found more stacked as a stoop in front of a shop. Then, embedded in the street itself were five stones used to fill in potholes, carts rattling over them, a carved cross facing up. I kicked aside trash and drew attention from nearby vendors, who wondered why I was so interested in the pavement.

In contrast to the forlorn British cemetery, the Ottoman memorial is proudly guarded by an Iraqi Arab paid by the Turkish Embassy. He is the fourth in an unbroken line since his great-grandfather dug the graves. He greeted me with his young son beside him, the next guard. Polished plaques on the gate say
TURKISH MARTYRS, 1914–1917
in Turkish on one side and Arabic on the other. The white concrete markers inside bear no names, just the raised Turkish star and crescent, dabbed red with too much paint. These 50 Turkish soldiers and 7 commanders are all that can be found, representatives of 10,000 lost here. I asked where the rest are buried and the guard swept his arm around the horizon. Iraqis are not interred in Kut. They are carried to the city-sized cemeteries in Najaf and Karbala. Only invaders are buried here. The caretaker showed me the visitors' log, and it was a list of foreigners, mostly Turks. I added my name. On our way back to the car Nassir bought diapers for his new baby. Today is better than tomorrow.

We checked in to one of the two hotels in Kut, and it was unfit for prisoners. They made a copy of my passport visa for the Iraqi police. The state now tracks all guests in hopes of catching foreign terrorists who have no family and nowhere to stay. Guests in hotels are all suspect. Despite the thousands of pilgrims passing through Kut, the hotel was almost completely empty. We tried to find a restaurant but failed to please Khalil after two cab rides. He was suspicious of all the kebabs, since meat is no longer inspected and regulated like it was under Saddam, and some places will secretly serve donkey. (If there is anything an Iraqi disrespects more than a donkey, I'd like to know. I remember a police officer wiping his hands and saying, “Saddam Donkey,” as the highest sign of his disgust.)

I lay awake most of the night, feeling insects real or imagined, seeds from the cemetery still in my hair, the bed uncomfortable and heat up too high. The ventilation fan didn't work, pigeons nesting in it, septic gas seeping out of the bathroom and smearing the air in the room. Unlike Baghdad there was no security curfew in Kut, so the sound of horns and police whistles came through the coo of birds all night. A loose wire kept a long fluorescent light blinking, the mint-green paint on the walls appearing and disappearing in flashes. Everything was worn down and dirty like everything else in the city.

In the morning, after being locked in our room by a broken latch, we waited to meet Mahmoud Talal, the governor of Wasit, in a building notable only for a sign in the lobby that Khalil translated as “Don't torture your children.” Men waited with papers, their needs requiring the brief review of government. Some strode through with an obvious sense of privilege, family of the governor or officials of note.

We were finally invited into the governor's office, a large empty space with ornate chairs pushed up against the walls. He reviewed and signed documents, pausing to speak with us, his attention often drawn to men bringing messages whispered to him. He answered questions with the neutrality required of his position, the room listening carefully. I asked about the British cemetery, and he said it had been reported to the British Embassy but they had done nothing. I asked about the arrest warrant issued by Maliki against Sunni members of his Provincial Council, and he regarded his audience. “That is just political propaganda,” he said. I responded, “It is very effective political propaganda.” Everyone laughed.

The area around Kut had become dangerous for tribal sheiks. Notable men were said to be targeted by al-Qaeda now because it was big news and reflected poorly on national security. It was believed that Sunni extremists were attacking their own to frame Shias and encourage sectarian violence. But Kut was rarely the target of bombings. Most of Wasit's own security forces had been sent to the mixed city of Suwayrah, near Baghdad, which had been especially unstable. Governor Talal was trying to preserve the support of his Sunni minority while Maliki was estranging them. I found out later that a sheik sitting in the room was from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the violent Shia militia allied with Maliki. They had attacked Americans for years. He was a very dangerous man who smiled benignly while I questioned the governor and radiated consequence as he responded. I was the only one who didn't notice that he was silently presiding over the conversation. It must happen all the time. The man who confided this to us said, “We can't make him leave.”

After the interview Khalil and I were invited to stay in the governor's guesthouse, a kind of overwrought hostel for officials visiting from out of town, and we were very grateful to leave our miserable hotel. Our new room could have been anywhere in the world. The bedsheets had
Pour les Amoureux du Café
printed on them, and the furnishings still wore plastic wrap as if their newness could be preserved, the desert dust kept off for one more day. An ad for a Saudi falconry contest played on the TV, the only clue that we weren't somewhere in Mexico, and most channels showed American movies.

Back out in the city I traced the edge of the Tigris and came to the souk from a new direction as night fell. The air was damp and smelled of fresh bread.

One shop selling uniforms for security forces displayed the modern U.S. Marine desert digital camouflage,
USMC
in tiny letters embedded in the pattern. They can only be purchased with an official government ID, and the vendor showed me the logbook in which each purchase was recorded. A T-shirt had the misspelled slogan
If Everything Is Exploding Around You. “Thrt's Probably Us.”
 At a tailor's shop, portions of shirts and pants were pinned to the wall. They looked like men blown apart, clothing for the bare dismembered mannequins piled on the streets of the Karada district.

The American memories of Iraq are largely urban. Drawn into population centers where people and religion rubbed against each other, our experience became associated most with the names of a few cities. The villages spun away in an expanding orbit, growing more distant from us, and from Baghdad.

The floodplain between Kut and Jassan was covered with winter rainwater, a gray sea reflecting the cloudless atmosphere. As we rode out the next day, the horizon was without distinction, above and below nothing but a singular color, the sky spilled onto the desert. The land here betrayed no proof of an underneath, no outcroppings of bedrock, no hills and no sedimentary layers distinguishable in the dust. It seemed to be of an almost infinite depth, the soil going down for miles, all the way to oil.

Stockpiled aerial bomb fins we once found on an abandoned air force base in Kut were now painted white and used as traffic cones at checkpoints everywhere. We saw buses full of Iranians on their way to Karbala, a sign of tremendous change here. Our cabdriver said that once, a few years after the Iran-Iraq war, “they found a candy wrapper made in Iran and the whole area was swept by the military looking for the Iranian who dropped it. All the way from Kut to the border. There was no border traffic before the U.S. invasion. Control by the Iraqi military was absolute.”

The road was lined with blown tires or the rusted steel rings of burned ones. We stopped to visit Bedouins camped along the route. A man from a nearby hut guided us across a ditch to a tent. His wife immediately called his cell phone, afraid that we had taken him. He smiled as he explained her worry. “In Iraq many men have been taken. Walk off like this with unknown people and never come back to the wife.”