Baghdad Without a Map Read online

  Baghdad Without a Map

  Tony Horwitz

  Prologue—Love at First

  I was driving alone, on a moonless night, along the rim of the vast desert known as the Empty Quarter. The road was black and narrow, the occasional sign written in Arabic script I couldn't yet decipher. I turned and turned again and felt the back wheels spin in drifting desert sand.

  Retracing my route, I stopped at a small oasis of palm trees and whitewashed villas. Arab houses, particularly those in the Persian Gulf states, reveal little to the outside world. Knocking on a plain metal door set in a high wall of stucco, I wondered if the home inside was a palace or a hovel.

  The door creaked open a few inches and a woman peered out, her face concealed by a black canvas mask. It formed a beak around her nose, with narrow eye slits, like medieval armor. I asked in simple Arabic if she could direct me back to the town I had left to watch the sunset, three hours before.

  She paused, glancing over her shoulder. There was a rustle of garments and the whisper of female voices. Then she invited me in and slipped behind another door to find someone who could help.

  Five women sat on a carpet in the courtyard, sipping tea from tiny glasses. They wore masks like the woman at the door, and billowy black shrouds that fell to their toes, concealing hair and skin.

  I smiled and offered the ubiquitous Arab greeting: “Salaam aleikum.” Peace be upon you. Ten eyes stared back through their peepholes. It was difficult to tell if anyone returned my smile. Then one of the women stood up and offered me a glass of tea. She spoke in hesitant English, and her voice was muffled by the veil. “I love you,” she said.

  I looked down, embarrassed, and studied the red henna dye painted in swirls across the tops of her toes. Somehow, saying “I love you, too” to a Muslim woman in a face mask didn't seem appropriate. So I smiled and thanked her. We stood there, blue eyes to black eyes, until a man appeared at the edge of the courtyard. He wore a starched white robe and a white kerchief folded like a fortune cookie atop his head. “I love you always,” the woman said, retreating toward the black-robed huddle on the carpet.

  The man explained in a mix of English, Arabic and pantomime that I should follow the oil wells, vast laceworks of steel strung out along the highway. At night, wreathed in blinking lights, they looked like dot-to-dot drawings without the lines sketched in. Before Mohammed brought Islam to the Arabian peninsula, the bedouin worshiped stars and used them as guides in the night. These days, nomads navigated by a constellation of oil.

  The drive was long and dull, and I passed the time by replaying the courtyard scene in my head. I'd noticed a satellite dish perched atop the villa; perhaps the women had been watching television. Wasn't “I love you” what men and women often said to each other in the West? I let my imagination drift out across the sand. Perhaps the women dreamed of strangers in the night—though probably not blond men in khakis and sneakers, sputtering bad Arabic. Perhaps the women were concubines, held captive in a desert harem. It was the sort of thing that often happened in movies about Arabia.

  Most likely the meeting was meaningless, a linguistic impasse common to rookie correspondents. “My first few months out here, I felt like Helen Keller,” a fellow journalist had confided a few weeks before, welcoming me to the Middle East. “Blind, deaf and also dumb—particularly dumb.” He chuckled and took another swig of soapy Egyptian beer. “But I've stopped worrying. Your average reader, even your average editor, can't tell if you know what you're writing about or not.”

  So I shrugged off the strange encounter. Surely, as my Arabic and my understanding of Arab subtleties improved, I'd be able to make sense of such scenes, even use them as anecdotes in my feature stories.

  But strange things kept happening. And in the two years that followed, I often found myself in dimly lit hotel rooms or dusty airport lobbies, trying to fathom notes I had scribbled just hours before. What was I to make of the teenager in Gaza, his face wrapped in a black-checked keffiya, who guided me through streets smudged with burning tires, then paused to ask, “Mr. Tony, there is something I must know. Are you Portuguese?”

  Did he know somehow I was Jewish? What did this have to do with the Portuguese?

  Months later, I arrived by boat in Beirut, amid heavy artillery fire. A lone sentry patrolled the dock, and I assumed he would ask for my papers. “Visa? Who said anything about visa?” he said with a shrug. Gesturing toward the shell-pocked shore, he slung his weapon onto his shoulder and melted back into the gloom.

  Was this an invitation or a warning?

  On a later reporting trip, to cover the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, I found myself stuck in Tehran traffic beside a taxi driver who kept grabbing my thigh and shrieking: “America! Donkey! Torch!” He refused to accept a single riyal for the hour-long ride.

  After a time, I contented myself with scribbling in my notebooks and filling the margins with question marks. Islamic society, like die homes I had passed that first night in the desert, didn't open easily to Westerners. To pretend that I understood all that I saw and heard was folly.

  But the mystery kept tugging, even after I left the Middle East. The margins were still filled with question marks. And some nights, when the rain raps hard against my window, I wander south to the Empty Quarter, to black masks and black eyes and red-henna toes, and wonder why it was she loved me.

  Free lance. . . one of those military adventurers, often of knightly rank, who in the Middle Ages offered their services as mercenaries, or with a view to plunder. . . a “condottiere,” a “free companion.”

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  Some men follow their dreams, some their instincts, some the beat of a private drummer. I had a habit of following my wife.

  This wasn't a problem, except for the places she chose to go. First frostbitten Cleveland, where she had a job and I didn't. Then Australia, her parents' home and ten thousand miles from mine. Now, after three years Down Under, Ger-aldine proposed that we move Up Over again—to Cairo.

  “It's seven time zones closer to America,” she said hopefully. Her newspaper office had just called to offer her the Middle East posting. “You like historical places,” she added. “It's awfully old, Egypt.”

  The thought of starting over again, in another strange country, alarmed me. In a month I would turn twenty-nine, an age at which most pharaohs were already drifting toward eternity in their barges of the night. Tut didn't even make it to eighteen. By then, he'd been ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt for seven years. At twenty-eight, I was still struggling to rise from the ranks of cub reporter.

  I quit my job and traveled home to explore my journalistic prospects. They weren't very good. Several years of reporting on koala care at the Sydney Zoo and school board meetings in Fort Wayne, Indiana, hardly qualified me for a foreign correspondent's job writing about Abu Nidal or the finer points of OPEC negotiations.

  Work as a stringer was the best I could hope for. “Stringer” is a descriptive non-job title. It means you are paid piecework, for occasional stories, usually when the regular correspondent is out of town or busy with a more important assignment. Stringers are the double-A players of journalism: pitifully paid, forced to travel on the cheap and strung along with the promise of being called up to the majors. Most never make it.

  So I decided to take a job-hunting swing down the East Coast, to make sure I wasn't missing a shot at big-league journalism in America.

  “We need someone to cover education, and you've got experience at that,” said Editor #1, at a big paper in Boston. I moved to the edge of my chair. “Have you tried the Quincy Patriot-Ledger?” he asked. “They beat us on a lot of suburban stories. There's also a weekly in Braintree. You might try that.”

/>   As the train chugged south, past Pawtucket and Providence, I perused Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “All men dream; but not equally,” wrote Lawrence of Arabia, on the opening page. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

  Editor #5 glanced at my clips and said, “Good ear for quotes. Fine writing.” He stubbed out his cigarette, stared me straight in the eye. “We may have an opening on the business desk, covering metals. Are you sure that's what you're looking for?”

  I was looking for shortcuts, for adventure. On the train to Baltimore, I daydreamed of dusty casbahs and caftaned bedouin. The melody of Middle East cities began to enchant me. Fez, Khartoum, Bengazi, Baghdad. I read The Blue Nile. “We must go to the East,” Napoleon declared, shortly before heading off to conquer Egypt. “All great glory has always been gained there.” He too was almost twenty-nine at the time.

  Editor #8 handed me his business card, told me to “think small,” and suggested I stop in again—like sometime in the twenty-first century. I told him I'd rather wing it as a free-lancer in the Middle East.

  “Mr. Horwitz,” he cautioned, “you could end up with a definite flake factor in your resume. A year here, a year there. Beware of that.”

  Stalking out through the crowded newsroom, I jump-shot my resume into die trash and booked two tickets to Cairo.

  Cairo. Mother of the World. In Arabic, Al-Qahira; the Triumphant. Largest city in Africa, capital of the Arab world. And on a stifling September night, the most awful and bewildering place my jet-lagged eyes had ever beheld.

  I'd never set foot in the “Third World.” Nor had my hurried reading on modern Egypt purged old stereotypes, bred of The Alexandria Quartet, the mummy collection at the British Museum and the Passover service, in which Pharaoh commanded that Hebrew sons be cast in the Nile. I knew that the Mother of the World was an overcrowded mess. But I clung to the notion that ancient glory would still be visible in the rubble.

  It wasn't, at least not from the back steps of the Nile Hilton at nine o'clock on a Thursday night. A hundred yards away, on the opposite side of Cairo's central square, stood the Egyptian Museum and its trove of antique treasures. But between myself and Tut's tomb lay a dense moat of flesh and combustion, swirling dizzily through the gloom.

  There were trucks, taxis, trolleys, buggies and buses, the latter so overloaded that bodies draped from the doors, limbs stuck out of windows and a few brave passengers even clung to the rooftops, their turbans unraveling in die wind.

  There were men on bicycles, men on oversized tricycles, men on motorbikes—whole families on motorbikes, children crammed in the drivers' laps, sometimes two in a lap, clutching the handlebars. There were donkeys and burros and even a camel: toting firewood, toting fruit, toting garbage, toting ashes. There were two-legged men in wooden wheelchairs, one-legged men with Crutches shaped like tree limbs, and a no-legged man on a wooden skateboard, propelling himself with rapid pawing motions across the ground.

  There were also pedestrians, erupting out of the earth and swarming into the traffic from a newly built subway. Men in white robes and sandals, black Sudanese in foot-high turbans, men in frayed business suits, women in full-face veils, women in what looked like bathrobes, Africans with rings through their noses and tribal markings burned on their cheeks. And at the eye of the maelstrom, an old man selling melon seeds and stalks of sugar cane spread on a scrap of cardboard that served as his open-air shop.

  A crowd clustered beside me, wading a few feet into the street and shrieking toward the traffic. “Shubra!” “Giza!” “Abdin!” From my guidebook I recognized the words as Cairo neighborhoods, but it took me a moment to realize that the crowd was hailing taxis. If a cabbie heard the name of a place to which he was already headed—over the honking and the atonal Arab music blaring on his radio—he paused just long enough for the lucky person to pile on top of his other passengers, then drove off, leaving the rest to continue their pleading chorus: “Dokki!” “Attaba!” “Bulaq!”

  This was Cairo's hub, Medan Tahrir—Arabic for Liberation Square. Standing at its center, I gazed down broad boulevards laid out by Napoleon: dimly lit arteries pumping more cars and bodies into the clotted square. In Cairo, all roads lead to Tahrir.

  I retreated back inside to collect Geraldine, and we headed out the hotel's other flank toward the Nile-side cor-niche and the wide, slow river winding behind it. As we picked our way through the closely packed cars, stepping onto bumpers, six men on the far shore began waving sheets of brittle paper. They were hawking papyrus. Or rather, “babyrus.” The Arabic alphabet doesn't include a p sound and the letter almost always comes out as b.

  “Blease, misyer,” the first man said, merging “mister” and “monsieur” into one all-purpose address. “Babyrus for bretty madam.”

  “Just to look, not to buy.”

  “Very cheap, very real.”

  The papyrus was decorated with images of ancient Egypt: long-bearded pharaohs, smiling sphinxes, Cleopatra-like princesses with snakes entwined about their heads. A certificate accompanied each sheet, assuring the buyer that the cheap banana leaf was actually genuine Egyptian papyrus, freshly plucked from the banks of the Nile.

  “Is like Moses from bulrushes!” cried one exuberant salesman, holding his banana leaf as delicately as Torah scrolls. “Is holy! Is ancient!”

  The corniche looked considerably more timeworn, as though it had been excavated for a sewer line some years ago and then abandoned. Refuse gathered in the furrows, as did mangy cats. In one pothole, a boy had ignited the trash and was using it to barbecue ears of corn, fanning the flames with discarded papyrus. Parked or abandoned cars, it was hard to tell which, crowded onto the pavement, nudging pedestrians into the street. Only the young couples, discreetly holding hands on a low wall beside the promenade, seemed oblivious to the bleating of car horns and commerce.

  As we shoved our way past the papyrus men, eyes trained to the ground, I felt something strange clinging to my throat and nostrils. It was the exotic air of the East, a greasy and malodorous broth of dust, dirt, donkey dung and carbon monoxide. The air was so dense that it brushed against my face, whole particles collecting in the creases of my skin and on the lenses of my glasses. “Cairo,” a long-suffering correspondent once declared, “is the biggest upturned ashtray in the world.”

  We scrambled onto the riverbank and into the arms of men offering rides on wooden boats lining the water's edge.

  “Habibi, my friend,” a teenager said. We seemed suddenly to have many babibi, many friends. “I give you finest trip on the river.”

  The Nile was black and silent, and a few stars poked bravely through the smog. A trip on the river seemed a romantic way to celebrate our arrival in Cairo—and to escape the wretched corniche.

  Geraldine asked our new friend how much his finest ride would cost.

  “Ten bounds,” he said, spreading both hands just to make sure we understood. He was missing two fingers.

  “Okay, eight,” I said, offering the equivalent of four dollars.

  “Okay!” he cried. And then the news tamenya guinea—eight pounds—resounded along the Nile. Boatmen raced toward us from all directions, swallowing the eight-fingered teenager. It seemed two pounds would have been an appropriate counterbid.

  “Misyer, madam, this way,” said the pilot with the strongest stiff-arm, who announced himself as “Ahmed of Aswan.” He helped us down a creaking gangplank and onto an even creakier boat. Then he shoved off from shore with a huge wooden oar. It wasn't until we'd glided thirty yards out that I realized our boat had no sail.

  “Malesh,” Ahmed said, producing a second oar. Malesb is an Egyptian phrase of surrender, meaning “never mind” or “doesn't matter.” It is the most commonly used word in Cairo, usually when something matters very much but isn't going to happen.

  Ahmed
splashed one oar in the water, and then the other, turning us in wild wet circles. Peals of laughter drifted out from the boatmen on shore. It seemed that Ahmed of Aswan had never worked oars before. In his frenzy to win our business, he had commandeered the first boat at hand, not bothering to check its rig.

  After flailing for a few minutes, he let go of the paddles and sighed. “Malesb,” he said again. Meaning, I guess, that the current would carry us to shore before we reached Alexandria.

  I offered to do the rowing, and Ahmed took my seat in the back of the boat, beside Geraldine. The oars were thick and clumsy, and the oarlocks quickly buckled. Water seeped through the boat's cracked floor, soaking my sneakers and making me uneasy. The Nile is rife with a microscopic parasite called bilharzia, which burrows through the foot and lodges in the liver, lungs, eyeballs.

  Ahmed's anxiety centered on something else. “I do not want to take a bath,” he said, glancing overboard as a motor-boat roared past, tumbling us in its wake.

  “Malesb,” Geraldine said. Ahmed laughed and complimented her Arabic. Then he let go of the side just long enough to grab her thigh. She edged away, causing the boat to list still more.

  I stopped rowing. We were in the middle of the river now, far from the noise and congestion. The water lapped gently against the oars, and the Muslim call to prayer wafted out across the river. It was the calm, contemplative moment I'd hoped for on shore—except that the boat was sinking, and the captain was groping my wife.

  We reached the island of Gezira, midway across the Nile, and decided to abandon ship and return on foot, on one of the river bridges. As we struggled up the bank, clutching tall reeds, Ahmed shamelessly demanded, “Eight bounds.” I rifled through my pockets. A ten-pound note was all I had. Ahmed kissed the bill and put it in his pocket, mumbling in Arabic that Allah would bless me for my charity.

  We found a bench and gazed out at the skyline we'd be living with for the next few years. Just to the south rose a tall statue of a fat man in a fez, gazing determinedly into the smog. Behind him soared the Cairo Tower, a modern building of such ugliness that my guidebook described it as “an immensely elongated waste-paper basket.” Farther back, somewhere in Gezira's thicket of tall, tattered apartment blocks, was the building we'd be moving into the following day.