JANUARY 30, 2005
The Green Zone; Baghdad, Iraq
“Thanks,” said Allison O’Connor, once she was back inside the blast walls and being driven up the Hotel Rashid’s date-palmed driveway.
“A pleasure,” said Fadhil Hasani, her driver and translator, as she exited the armored Humvee. For much of the trip back to the embassy compound, Fadhil had been talking happily, about the new baby he and his wife were expecting, to both Allison and Tim Gleeson, the Aussie PSD (personal security detail) she’d had with her today and a couple of times before.
She walked around to the driver’s side to say goodbye to both men.
“Safe home,” Tim wished her from the backseat. Leaning through the open window, he gave her a kiss.
“You too,” said Allie. If he didn’t get shot going to places like the ones they’d gone today, Tim would return to Oz after a ten-month employment contract with “gobs of money,” he’d assured her; enough to buy a house for the wife and child he had waiting back home.
Fadhil, who’d worked with her regularly, extended his arm through the driver’s window for a chaste handshake. “God be with you, Miss Allison.” He had tears in his eyes.
She felt an impulse to apologize, for her occasional short temper, for the whole botched war, for the cruelties of fate that would leave Fadhil in this place long after she and Tim had gotten out. She settled for saying, “You’ll give my love to Rukia, right? And remember to send me a picture of the baby?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” he replied, his eyes still glistening, even while his facial expression seemed suddenly abashed over the “of course,” as if the effusion of politeness might itself be rude. She had never figured out the degree to which Fadhil was constrained by natural shyness or male religious reserve. At times he could chatter lyrically about things like the date-palm orchards he’d grown up around, but then he would quickly go silent, as if he’d said too much, however inconsequentially, or just remembered the dangers of his unexpected profession, this translator’s job that marked him as a collaborator to some and which might, Allie thought, be a source of nonpolitical shame as well, an enforced if lucrative substitute for the architectural work he’d trained for in England and could not find at home.
She reached through the window and gave him a tight farewell hug, and heard him whisper thank you even as he flinched.
After a few hours outside it, Allie felt relieved to be back in The Bubble, as she’d learned to call the four-square-mile Green Zone upon arriving six months ago. Even with yesterday’s rocket attack—two Americans had been killed inside the perimeter—she generally felt safer here than she had in her old Chicago neighborhood, during law school in the late eighties.
Making a quick stop in her room, she threw on some sweatpants and a University of Pennsylvania T-shirt (her undergraduate alma mater) before going down to the Rashid’s gym—past the second-floor disco, which already, at six p.m., was thrumming with noise.
She set the treadmill to 7.5 miles per hour and the television to CNN, which was reporting not on the Iraqi elections but the jury pool for the Michael Jackson trial, scheduled to begin tomorrow in L.A. She decided to hold her nose and switch to Fox, but found no Iraq coverage there either, just a Sunday-morning segment on how the media this past week had covered the death of Johnny Carson. That left Al Arabiya, whose usually jaundiced commentator seemed happily caught up in a report on what looked, at least so far, like a successful election. He pointed to the quarter million exiles from the time of Saddam who’d cast absentee ballots; the full one-third of the candidates who were female; and how participation by the once-powerful Sunni minority, angry at being shoved aside with Saddam, appeared to be “exceeding expectations,” giving the Americans a chance to claim success.
Sunni turnout couldn’t have exceeded expectations by much, thought Allie, judging by what she’d observed this afternoon in Gazalia and Azamiyah, two of the sect’s Baghdad neighborhoods. Switching off the TV, she took the treadmill up to eight miles an hour, and noticed a few more strands of gray in her long red ponytail, as its wagging picked up speed and amplitude in the gym’s mirrored wall. The sun over here had given her more freckles than she’d had since her high school year in Texas, and she hoped she hadn’t already packed up her little tube of concealer.
Back upstairs, after a quick shower, she rejoiced in having the room all to herself on her last night here. Double occupancy remained the norm at the Rashid, but Gloria, the IT woman who’d spent most of the last six months in here with her, had departed last week for home. A strange gal—you had to imagine a chatterbox on the autism spectrum—Gloria had driven her crazy by going on and on each day about all the computer equipment she’d helped to install, oblivious to how the long-term goal here was to get out, not to give the Green Zone a permanent American infrastructure.
The concealer was nowhere to be found. Allie threw some scrunchies and socks into the leftover lucite ballot box a colleague had this morning given her as a souvenir. She would be wheels up and out of here at six a.m. tomorrow after a stay that had been interrupted by a few nights in emirates like Dubai (“Islam with hookers,” she’d e-mailed her mother) and a quick detailing to Kabul, early in December, for the Karzai inaugural.
It was all catching up with her, the dozen years as a civilian lawyer for the Department of the Army, an adventurous low-paying alternative to the white-shoe law firm she’d started out with in New York. She’d by now seen more of the world than she wanted to, participated in too many projects and romances that had proved equally inconclusive. Among the personal tokens just tossed into the lucite box was a greeting card from her mother that showed a career woman slapping her forehead and exclaiming OMG!! I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN!
Very funny, Mother. It would be funnier if Allie hadn’t been carrying the card around since her thirty-fifth birthday, more than six years ago. Here in a country where orphans had become as common as howitzers, she’d found herself prone to adoptive urges, which she tried to repel like “intrusive thoughts,” those absurd id whispers telling you that you could, you know, jump in front of the subway train.
A knock on the door made her flinch. Even inside the secure Rashid one had to be wary of anything unscheduled. But a look through the peephole revealed a ridiculously unthreatening white boy with a cowlick.
“Ms. O’Connor?” he asked, after she opened up. “My name is Kevin. You have a videoconference request for twenty minutes from now. I’m supposed to take you to a secure hookup. RP Room 214.”
“Who is it?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. Only that it’s Washington.”
Somebody wanting her on a Sunday morning back there? She threw on a zippered top, something between a sweatshirt and an actual blouse, and followed the kid down to a Jeep for the quick trip to the Republican Palace. As he drove, she smelled the eucalyptus and discouraged conversation. There seemed to be twice as many helicopters overhead as usual, brought into the sky by today’s election and yesterday’s rocket attack. The crater made by the latter was now ringed with razor wire, as if it were a piece of ground triumphantly secured instead of gouged out by an explosion. Allison thought of the two people who’d died, glad not to have known either. She wondered if the razor wire wasn’t protecting their pulverized World Trade Center–style remains.
She entered the palace where Saddam had never lived, and on her way to the second floor passed a few heroic murals that in twenty months of occupation had yet to be painted over. Kevin led her into a warren of drywalls and partitions that had been thrown up to provide offices for twenty-five-year-old assholes like himself, people whose main credential was having worked for Bush during the Florida recount—a deployment not much shorter than the ninety-day ones they were now “proudly serving” here. She would bet that Kevin went to the Wednesday Bible classes.
“Here we are,” he told her. “Room 214.”
“Thank you,” she replied, settling herself in front of a screen.
“I’ll connect you.” He went into an adjoining room and closed the door between them.
As she waited for a face to appear on the screen, she had a pretty good idea whose it would be. In fact, it could only be him, the unlikely new patron who had chatted her up on a photo-op chow line at Bagram during her recent Afghan visit.
We’re not doing so badly with only twenty-five thousand, are we? he’d said, more or less answering his own question about Afghan troop levels.
Better than you’re doing with a hundred and fifty thousand back there, she’d replied, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Baghdad.
They’d had only a few minutes of conversation—his half of it probing, her half skeptical—and then two days later she’d received her very own “snowflake,” one of Donald H. Rumsfeld’s legendary, compulsive memoranda. He liked the skepticism, he told her, and believed they could use it in an open slot on the National Security Council staff. Really? she thought. When she’d spent most of her stretch here just settling arcane issues of authority and jurisdiction between the U.S. Army and the supposedly sovereign government of Iraq?
The screen flowered to life with the Department of Defense seal, which soon gave way to Rumsfeld’s smiling, squinting presence. He wore a V-neck sweater in what appeared to be his home library. A little clock on one of the bookshelves showed 10:14 a.m.
“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.”
“Good evening, Allison.”
His skin was as crinkly as her late father’s, but the expression had a boyishness that took her back to Lubbock High.
“You packed?” he asked.
“Just about, sir.”
“The reports are good.”
“Yes. No polling places routed. Unless you want to count the one in Mosul that got shot up by AK-47s.”
Rumsfeld shrugged over this news from a Sunni stronghold, as if to say, Well, if that’s the worst…
Modest goals leading toward modest success. That’s what they were getting in Afghanistan, he’d maintained; and it’s what he wanted here. She knew that he would have preferred no occupation at all—just defeat Saddam’s army, then get the electricity back on and get out. If they’d done it that way, the mission would be accomplished. When she’d listened to one of his recent press conferences, something in Rumsfeld’s tone made her wonder if he’d wanted his friend Cheney’s war in the first place. The thought had given her a moment’s sympathy for him, but then she remembered all of her headaches and revulsion over Abu Ghraib—having to set up procedural safeguards for those lowlifes with their leashes and electrodes—as well as Rumsfeld’s rumored, theatrical willingness to fall on his sword over it, an offer Bush never took him up on.
She still hadn’t responded to his shrug. “Well, I guess the hand is coming off the bicycle seat,” she finally said, using a favorite analogy of his for pushing the Iraqis toward doing things on their own. “Of course they may decide to ride the bike straight toward a Shiite theocracy.”
Rumsfeld laughed. “I’ll give you another pithy pronouncement—not mine, but the late Pat Moynihan’s: ‘In unanimity one often finds a lack of rigorous thinking.’ ”
“Ah, yes,” she said. “That breath of fresh air you say I’ll provide the NSC. I’d feel a little more confident about delivering it if I had a little more expertise.”
“You’ll be surprised. Agility is more helpful to us now than the usual qualifications.”
He certainly knew how to pivot. From the way he talked lately you would think he had opposed Bremer’s calamitous decision to dissolve Saddam’s army after the surrender in ’03. (The head of the occupation hadn’t imagined that sudden unemployment might add to the soldiers’ resentments.)
“Well,” said Allison, “as an assistant to a special assistant to the president, I’m sure I’ll be changing the world right away.” When Rumsfeld said nothing, she added: “Joke.”
“The ones on the NSC staff who are connected to State will impress you the least,” the secretary told her.
“Noted,” said Allison. “I guess we’ll see.”
“What did you see today?” Rumsfeld asked, the twinkle back in his eye.
She proceeded to tell him about Gazalia and the three Sunni women she’d noticed arguing excitedly with one another on the voting line. She’d thought they were debating the wisdom of participating in the election, until her translator revealed it was just prattle about the suitability of somebody’s prospective husband.
Rumsfeld laughed. “Tell them that story when you get to the White House.”
“You think it’s a hopeful one?” Allison asked.
“They can decide that for themselves.”
Rumsfeld held up a red ticket. “Think you can get over jet lag by Wednesday evening?” He moved his hand closer to the camera; the ticket said it would admit the bearer to the House gallery for the president’s State of the Union message.
“I’d better remember to pick up my dry cleaning before I get out of here,” she responded.
“Wave to me down on the House floor,” said Rumsfeld, as he now waved goodbye to her onscreen. His head was quickly replaced by the DoD seal.
Allison told Kevin, when he emerged from the other room, that she didn’t need him in order to get back to the Rashid. His face fell. He had wanted to hear all about Rumsfeld: how she knew him; how, no doubt, he himself might meet the secretary.
She caught a shuttle bus from the palace to the hotel and was soon again inside her room. Safe home: she thought of Tim Gleeson’s Aussie-accented words. She wanted to stay home, but was already guessing when she’d next have to come back here: for the two votes coming up later this year—the ratification of a new constitution and the election of a permanent government. Looking around the room, she realized how little she had to pack and how few goodbyes she had bothered to say. There hadn’t seemed much point in hunting up people when you couldn’t recall who’d be rotating in or rotating out from one day to the next.
She thought of Rolf, her German, well, fuck buddy—a married lawyer helping the interim government deal with genocidal issues left over from Saddam’s time. They’d clicked when he introduced himself to her and used “Germany” and “genocide” in the same sentence. “Well,” she’d responded, “they say experience counts.” After two drinks at the Rashid’s bar he’d proposed a “coition of the willing,” and she was off on the usual race to nowhere.
Should she call him? No: six a.m. would be here before she knew it, and on Tuesday morning she didn’t want to arrive among the White House Christians feeling skanky. She packed up a few knick-knacks—a tiny box, empty, marked “WMDs,” a present from a construction contractor—and began charging her laptop for the long flight home.
Another knock on the door—if it was cowlicked Kevin, she’d murder him—which she opened, only to find Rolf holding two burritos from the RP cafeteria. He was sporting an OIF T-shirt: the almost-forgotten acronym stood for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the initial military phase of the American adventure here.
“That always looked to me as if it meant ‘Oy, fuck,’ ” said Allison.
“Ancient history,” said Rolf, handing her a burrito. “But there are no IECI T-shirts.” The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq had had charge of today’s voting.
“From ‘Oy, fuck’ to ‘Icky.’ ”
Rolf unwrapped his burrito and said, matter-of-factly, about the election: “Thirty-five killed. Not bad, really.”
“If it ends up that fifteen percent of the Sunnis turned out, that will be ‘not bad,’ ” said Allison.
Rolf had clearly not come here to evaluate the election figures. Taking a bite of his burrito and swaying his hips, he began singing to the tune of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”: You say Sistani, and I say Zarqawi—naming the Shiite cleric who’d urged people to vote and the Sunni terrorist who’d threatened to kill them if they did.
Allison put a last handful of books into the lucite ballot box.
“Want the T-shirt?” asked Rolf. “A keepsake?” He peeled it off his appealingly lean torso and tossed it to her.
“Subtle,” she said.
“Effective?” he asked.
“Oy, fuck,” she said. “All right. Give me a minute to brush my teeth.”
She went into the bathroom and noticed in the mirror that the edge of her palm was still stained with some of the purple ink that had been applied to voters’ thumbs today, to keep them from casting more than one ballot. After being marked, a Sunni woman in Azimayah had clasped Allison’s hand and said something to her in loud, fervent Arabic. A translator converted the words to English: “It’s a great day, isn’t it?”
She scrubbed at the ink spot, which was harder to get off than she would have guessed.