Ali Bader - The Tobacco Keeper

After another day of research, Faris Hassan came along and announced that our work had entered the danger zone. He’d received a signal indicating that a decision had been taken to kidnap and liquidate me.

I told him that I’d always felt it would come to this. Immediately, I jumped up and called a friend of mine who worked at Iraqi Airways to book seats for Faris and myself on the next flight out of Baghdad. I changed my trousers and shirt, and ran to pack the essentials into my small black leather bag that I would carry over my shoulder. I tied everything else up with string, leaving behind a great many things that I no longer needed. I was very selective of what I put in my bag, for I was extremely agitated and tense.

Faris said that he would go and negotiate with the militias.

‘Don’t. Don’t go to them! I’ve already booked a flight for you,’ I screamed at him.

But as usual, he insisted on meeting them because he knew them and had had dealings with them in the past.

After midnight, I received word from the friend working at Iraqi Airways that the flight had been booked. At dawn, I came downstairs to the lobby. I asked the security guard of the building to keep all the stuff I didn’t need in the left luggage office. The guard had worked before at one of the American bases, and I liked talking to him, for he was one of a kind. With his worn, pallid face, bulbous nose, large fat lips and thick glasses he looked like a Bollywood actor. As I was speaking with him, I noticed for the first time the presence of foreign women workers in the Green Zone. They looked like overdressed Pigalle café whores. They walked with great pride and gazed around them from beneath the edges of their urinal-shaped hats.

I left the guesthouse, got on the minibus and sat at the back. I hid my camera in my bag. The driver was a dark young man called Marwan, a resident of Al-Karkh. He was brave and experienced. Nermine had told me I could depend on him.

Baghdad’s image fluctuated before my eyes: war, expulsion, kidnapping, terrorism, failure and occupation. The picture moved like a chain swinging to the right and left. I uttered a few incomprehensible words. I thought of a myriad of things during the hour it took the minibus to reach the final checkpoint of the Green Zone, near the Arch of Triumph. The vehicle took a little turn into a dusty road. At a checkpoint, a man in civilian clothes stood examining car documents. His face was expressionless and his eyes were rigid, inattentive and careless. On the road, we saw a lot of tanks and armoured vehicles that had been damaged by missiles, a sign that the area had witnessed numerous battles.

As soon as we’d turned onto the airport road, I felt that we were being followed. A car was pursuing us along the narrow street. Marwan had already spotted it in the wing mirror and quickly decided to take evasive action. When we left the narrow street, we were overtaken by another car with three men in it. Their machine guns were directed at our car. This prompted Marwan to take another narrow street to avoid our tyres being targeted. At the end of the street, we saw a corpse thrown onto the pavement, its intestines hanging out, its head severed and placed beside it. As we turned onto another road, we saw more corpses stretched out in the middle of the street. Marwan drove over them as though going over a small ramp. When I looked back, I saw that the corpses had burst open. Fluids and blood were spurting out, as if from a hosepipe.

‘It’s nothing. Just a body!’

After an hour, I arrived at the airport feeling utterly drained. I completed the procedures quickly. When the plane was high in the air, I cast a quick look at Baghdad. It was covered with a pall of dust and its river had the colour of mud. I began to repeat the last words of ‘Tobacco Shop’: Eat your chocolate, little girl. Eat your chocolate! Believe me, there are no metaphysics in the world beyond chocolate. Believe me, all the religions in the world do not teach more than a sweetshop. Eat, dirty girl, eat!

My whole body was shaking.

2006-08

Baghdad — Tehran — Damascus

Amira Nowaira is a professor of English Literature at Alexandria University. She has previously translated Susan Bassnett’s book Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (with Azza El-Kholy — Blackwell Publishers, 1993), Iqbal Qazwini’s Zubaida’s Window (Feminist Press, 2008) and Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Where the Streets Had a Name (Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2010). She lives in Alexandria.