Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

314 Pages·1992·1.13 MB·English

by  Tony Horwitz

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, Geraldine 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 corniche 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.