Monday, November 14

My skin felt the ghoulish caress of the cold clammy air before my eyes were able to focus on the gray lack of clarity. Unease had built up in my gut and was swelling as it passed my throat on its way to my brain. Something formless and evil was out there waiting for me. Maybe I could see it better if I cleared the fog from my glasses--but I wasn’t wearing my glasses. My hands flailed out in the gray wilderness to try to find the glasses. The back of my left hand found the edge of my night-stand, hard. I cursed monosyllabically, sat up on my bed, and wondered why I was so damned cold. Oh. Last night I hadn’t turned off the air conditioning, even though the fall nights in Iraq were coolish now, with temperatures in the 50s, and then I must have kicked off my blankets, which I now retrieved and wrapped around my torso. A terror dream was not the best way to wake up, but I supposed it was better than an angry call from an ex-wife.

I saw the phone flashing on the nightstand. The time was 7:13, and Émilie had called twice from her cell, at 11:53 and again at 12:01. Damn. I checked and found I had somehow switched the ringer off. I dialled her back, figuring eleven-something at night back home wasn’t too late for a college girl, but got no answer. I tried again, same lack of response. Great. She had reached out to me, I wasn’t there--again--and now she was no doubt back to screening out my calls and hating me. There was no point in calling Marguérite, since all I could expect was expert opinion on my inadequacies as a father.

Lingering memories of the cold twilight landscape where my dream had taken me, reinforced by recriminations at having missed Émilie’s call, left me unable to go back to sleep. I got up, dressed, grabbed a coffee and some toast at the mess hall, and went out to face the day. I checked my work-station at the Cabana and saw no e-mails, no overnight cable traffic of interest. So, I went out to the Ministry of Defense to see if there was anything new on Herb’s death--maybe Aliya had uncovered new information on Latif’s crooked dealings, maybe Jaburi had an update on the al-Maghribiya project from his contacts at the Prime Minister’s office.

On arrival at the Ministry--after a perfectly, mercifully uneventful trip--I was waylaid by a politely fawning young man in an immaculate white shirt, a small gold cross on a chain, and perfectly pressed khakis. “Please, Mr. William, good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, ah, Butrus,” I said, retrieving the name by a small miracle. I also remembered that he was one of the rare Iraqi Christians still around and the office manager for General al-Stambuli, the deputy minister. “I hope you and the general are well this morning.”

“Yes, thank you, it is very kind to ask. Please, Mr. William, the General would like to see you if he may.”

So I followed Butrus into a remarkably modest office, with just a desk and a half-dozen overstuffed chairs--but none of the Farouk Quatroze gilding that smothered the furnishings of most high-ranking Iraqis. This was in keeping the General’s character. He was a short, trim man, with an erect bearing that belied his 70 years and 3,000 parachute jumps, and never with a single wrinkle on anything he wore. The General had two main jobs, as far as I could tell: providing a reassuring, avuncular presence for the Ministry’s career military personnel left over from the Saddam regime, and staying out of the way of the Minister and the other returned exiles who actually ran things. The General excelled at both.

“Mr. William, please come in, sit down,” he said, leaning across the desk to shake my hand. “My most important duty today is a sad duty, to express to you and all your colleagues how sad I was to learn of Mr. Herbert’s death. It is a great loss, especially because he was so young. Brigadier Jaburi tells me it was an accident. That would not happen for an Iraqi, we don’t have accidents here any more.”

“Yes, sir, an accident, that’s what the investigator at our Embassy seems to be concluding,” I answered. “It’s very kind of you to be so concerned. Your concern is another reminder of how lucky we are to have you from the Defense IAS Service as our friends and family.”

“Friendship and family are normal feelings. Your friend Brigadier Jaburi is preparing a memorial service for Mr. Herbert that the Brigadier will want to discuss with you later. But for now, I hope you will indulge an old man. I have found the photographs we talked about and would like to show them to you.”

A few weeks earlier, during a long bout of polite chit-chat over coffee, and after the General had told his fourth war story of the morning, I had suggested he pull his experiences together into a memoir of all the changes in Iraqs he had lived through. He said then that he had at home photographs that showed all the history of modern Iraq, and I of course expressed my deathless desire to see them.

The photographs that he pulled out began with a sepia-toned photo of a man he identified his father, wearing an odd uniform that started at the bottom with knee-high boots and ended on top with a fez over a fierce mustache. “In the first war, my father here fought for the Sultan, in the battles against the English and the Indians when they landed at Basrah. You remember of course that my family were real Turks, from Stambul or Istanbul as you call it, but they were also real Iraqis who married Arab girls, and we stayed here even when most of the other Turks left. But we are also real Turks of Turkey, unlike these Turkomans in the north.”

The general’s photos moved us forward through Iraq’s 20th century. At first the images were almost familiar: Stambouli père in a frock coat posing stiffly next to his wife in a modest Western dress in a park, images changing as fashions evolved and as children joined the group and grew. The images veered in a different direction by the late 1950s as the General became a young man. There was a poignant shot of young Stambuli in a singlet shaking hands with a young man wearing a dark double-breasted suit and delicately stretching a smile across an unlined face. “That,” the General said, “That is the young king, the second Faisal, awarding me the trophy for best wrestler at the Royal Military Academy. This was June 1958, just one month before General Qasim had his coup and the mob killed the king, even though he was still a boy, just twenty-three. We all thought that was progress back then, because kings were backwards and becoming a republic meant being modern and scientific.” He shook his head sadly.

Then the theme of the photos changed, and all the images were military. Stambuli and other young Iraqis grinning with Russian jump instructors, on some Central Asian steppe in the 1960s. Posed on the lip of a cliff with endless mountains behind, during operations against Kurdish guerrillas in the early 1970s. Holding a Star of David flag. Huh? “Yes, that was in the Golan in 1973, the Ramadan war. There were 75,000 of us Iraqis fighting alongside our Syrian brothers, and we fought the Jews to a standstill then. Of course, that was before Saddam destroyed our army.” More snapshots against the backdrop of Kurdistan, then an older officer posing with Russians, other Arabs, Africans--and is that large black man . . .? “Yes, Mr. William, that is Idi Amin Dada, when he was president of Uganda. We were sent to train his troops how to jump, but there were bad problems with their planes, and we lied that the weather was not right for the exercises we had planned. We ate dinner at Idi Amin’s palace with him and his offices, but I had heard the stories so even though he said he was a Muslim like us I decided I could not eat the meat.”

Now a middle-aged officer beamed at the camera from the ruins of a city. The same face beamed back at the photograph and then at me. “Abadan, at the beginning of our war with the Persians. That is when I became a general, when we drove into Iran at the beginning of Saddam’s war.” And the general launched for at least the tenth time in my hearing into the haircut story: how, under intense enemy shelling, he ordered his orderly to give him a haircut. “I never had a worse haircut in my life. Mustafa’s hands were shaking so badly I’m lucky he didn’t cut my ears off. But my men saw the haircut, and maybe they thought I was very brave, maybe they thought I was just crazy, but they held the line that day no matter how many shells the Persians fired.”

The next photo showed the general standing ramrod straight, right hand out shaking the hand of him, the man with the thick black moustache and the toothy, self-satisfied grin. “That, Mr. William, was January 1981--or was it February, I’m not sure any more--when Saddam himself awarded me the Wissam ar-Rafidain, the Order of the Rivers, the highest award he could give, because even he could recognize what we had accomplished on the southern front when we fought the Persians in Abadan. I was called from the front, but at first they didn’t tell me why. When I got to the airport in Basrah they took my pistol and put me in a plane with the windows covered up, and I started to worry, because you could always get arrested for no reason. For 90 minutes in the air I wondered which captain or corporal had a grudge against me and might have turned me in to the Istikhbarat, the military intelligence. When we landed the plane went into a hangar, and they put me into a van with no windows. I was really sweating by this time, even though the weather was cold, and they probably could have got me to confess to anything if they had wanted. We drove into another covered structure, and then the guards--who never gave names and wore no markings on their uniforms--led me down hallways that looked too comfortable to be a prison, but you could never tell in those days. So you can imagine my surprise when I was brought into a room with a clean uniform, exactly my size, laid out on a bed, and polished shoes, and told to take a shower and shave. Then an orderly came for me, and we went to another waiting room, but this one with security men who patted me down, and then another orderly brought me into a throne room, and there he was, President Saddam Hussein, surrounded by other officers I barely knew and a photographer and a cameraman from the television news. I must say the President was nice to me, telling me to stand at ease and praising me and my men for all the Persians we had killed. I felt very good and proud--and maybe my relief at not being arrested had something to do with this--and I was happy to be praised by the President and to know that my wife and sons would see my picture with him in the newspaper. I can’t say how long the ceremony lasted, but when it was over I remembered what the President didn’t say. He didn’t ask about my troops, whether they had enough to eat or enough bullets to hold their positions or how their morale was. So when I was given a furlough for a few days before returning to the front, I thought it was my duty to write a letter to the President letting him know what my boys at the front needed to do their duty and how they were short on bread and petrol and certain types of ammunition. I never got an answer, but about one week after I returned to the front, I got new orders to become head of physical fitness for the Army and maybe one year later was told that I was able to retire on full pension. I guess that Saddam did not want to hear what I had to say after all.” The general smiled wanly, maybe thinking of the dangerously foolish optimism of his youth.

The remaining photos lacked the drama of the others. There were various shots of the General and his wife and his children. Each year they looked a little more threadbare and worn. “Mr. William, when I first retired, my pension was adequate, but things became very hard. After the war that your first President Bush had with Saddam because of Kuwait, our money became worthless. An honest man like me, and I praise Allah for steering me clear of temptation, who only owned property in Iraq, could not get by on his pension and his savings. I used to calculate the value of my pension every month in U.S. dollars and British pounds, but when my 10,000-dinar pension became worth less than three dollars--and that used to be the rate for just one Iraqi dinar, mind you--I couldn’t do it any more. If we wanted something more than the rice and tea and sugar the government gave us every month every month, we had to sell some furniture or a piece of my wife’s jewelry. I tell you, Mr. William, when the regime fell two years ago, we were down to nothing; all we had left was our bed, our wedding bands, and a 15-year-old car.” Stambuli straightened the pile of photos and stared at them wistfully.

“General, your life has been Iraq’s, and after seeing your photos I think more than ever you should write it down so the young people won’t forget,” I said, looking for a tactful way to disengage. “If Iraqis lose touch with this past, they will have much less of a future.”

“Thank you, Mr. William, for your kind words,” Stambuli responded. “The future, ah yes, that reminds me. We have been asked to help with a project that will be very good for Iraq’s future, and I hear you have discussed it with Brigadier Jaburi. This is the al-Maghribiya project to buy the seeds and everything else so the poor farmers out in the west will stop being terrorists. It is so positive that the Shia members of the Prime Minister’s party have found a way to help the Sunni people out in al-Maghribiya, and especially because your American Ambassador and all his advisers are committed to help. And with my colleagues here in the Intelligence and Analysis Service at the Defense Ministry, we will of course do everything we can to make this happen; we will focus resources on finding and defeating the terrorists who want to rob the Maghribiya farmers of their chance to grow food and get rich. It is very good for us to work with the government like this.”

So Stambuli, too, had been sipping from the al-Maghribiya Kool-aid. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“General, I don’t know nearly as much about this project as I would like,” I said, weighing my words carefully. “It is great, though, to see our colleagues here in the intelligence bureau have such a direct role in something so important to the Prime Minister.”

I judged it was an appropriate time to bolt. “Sir, again thank you for being so generous with your time and showing the pictures. But I must excuse myself. Mr. James back at the Embassy has asked me to take care of some business with Mrs. Aliya and Brigadier Jaburi, and I of course cannot let him down. And again, we all appreciate your condolences for Herb and his death.”

“So sad, so sad that a young man who was our good friend had to die. Please, Mr. William, go, and thank you for your company and advice this morning.”

I decided to head next to Aliya’s office, largely because there was one fewer flight of stairs than going up to Jaburi’s. The climb itself and finding clean, secure footing free of catshit and other obstacles took all my attention. A more observant person might have found it odd that I was the only one on this staircase late on a weekday morning, and probably would have heard sounds from the ongoing construction on the third floor. Such a person would have been a lot less startled than I was when suddenly a hammer hurtled no more than a half-inch from my face and bounced off the railing by my right hand before landing somewhere in the basement. Someone yelled out “Afwan--sorry" and by a miracle of self control the contents of my bladder remained in situ. This had to have been a random near-miss, but I couldn’t help but reflect that another conversation about al-Maghribiya--no matter how bland and uncontroversial--had been followed by another apparent accident seemingly aimed at me. When I got to the top of the flight of stairs and turned toward Aliya’s office, I stopped to collect myself until my hands stopped shaking, but couldn’t will any strength back into my legs.

When I stepped into Aliya’s office, things appeared normal at first glance. Three employees in her section were standing in front of her desk, heads down, clasped hands clutching folders while she held forth in rapid-fire, high-pitched Arabic. A closer look gave a different picture, though. Aliya’s face was drawn and colorless, with bags drooping under her eyes. Her makeup was haphazard and smudged. Aliya saw me in the doorway, nodded, gave a last burst of irritated-sounding Arabic, gestured for her three staffers to leave, and then waved me in. She smiled at me and gave my hands a warm squeeze, but her eyes were dull and no gold flecks glimmered from her pupils.

“Mr. William, I am always so glad to see you,” she said, motioning for me to sit. “Especially when I have to deal with people like those three who say they are lawyers but cannot take the first step in our profession. I asked them to work on the simplest thing, to check the leases on some houses we are renting, but they are incapable of the smallest amount of common sense. They thought it was perfectly normal for us to pay a security deposit on the lease equal to a full year of the rent, and then to pay monthly rent. I cannot make up my mind if they are stupid or maybe taking payments from the landlords.

“And then I must deal with these idiots after two very bad nights with Haydar.” She got up and shut the door to her office. “I do not care what they think we are doing in here”--it was risqué for an unrelated man and woman to be alone together behind closed doors--"but I do not want them to know of my troubles at home. Haydar is worse than ever. He stopped touching me as a man touches his wife months ago, but now he does not even shake my hand and will not eat food that I prepare. He says I am impure and polluted by the way I dress and the way I spend time with men. He knows I meet with Americans like you and Mr. Herbert, and says he would kill them if he could for dishonoring me and him and our country and religion. I think he would beat me if he could stand touching me. Now he says he will take another wife, some 16-year-old girl who is the daughter or sister of the imam from the Sadr party husseiniya (Shia mosque), and he says I cannot stop him. If he wants to do that, he is right, I cannot prevent it. But I do not have to accept it, so I am going to get a divorce. I will have to leave our apartment and move in with my cousin and her husband, but at least he is a nice and modern man like you, Mr. William, a professor of mathematics at the University of Baghdad. Now my whole family will know all the troubles I have had with Haydar, and I know my sisters will say it is my fault.”

Aliya’s eyes filled with tears, which provided the refraction the gold flecks needed to shine again, and her jaw trembled with the effort of holding them back. I felt the stirring of a strange, strong cocktail of pity and desire. I took her right hand and gently patted it--while trying desperately to conjure up images of cold showers to douse my combustible feelings.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Aliya, so sorry that your husband can’t appreciate what a beautiful, smart, strong woman he married. You’re living something very hard right now, but I think things will get better. You don’t deserve to be stuck with some man who lets an imam do all his thinking for him, and once you are free of Haydar, you’ll be able to find the good, decent man you deserve.”

Now the tears poured out, but she also smiled, and it was like a seeing a rainbow through a storm. She lightly stroked my face with her left hand.

“Thank you, Mr. William, for being my good friend." She paused as in mid-thought, touched my face again but this time clinically, and folded her hands in her lap. “You are pale and do not look well. Now that I think about it, you maybe were trembling when you came in. Are you sick? Is it something about Mr. Herbert’s death?”

“It’s not Herb’s death,” I said. “The investigator from our Embassy has made a pretty good case that Herb died because of an accident. What you see with me right now is the after-effects of a stupid almost-accident,” I said. “One of the workers on the renovation of the third floor dropped his hammer, and it fell very close to me. You know I’m no hero, and any sort of fright like that is hard on me.”

Aliya looked doubtful. “Accidents do not happen in Iraq, not now, Mr. William. As I told you on Saturday, when a young, healthy man like Mr. Herbert dies here, it is because somebody makes it happen. And I do not think that hammer fell near you by accident. I think you are asking questions about Muhammad Latif and his Maghribiya project, and somebody is warning you to stay away. I think there might be other so-called accidents that are happening to you, and you are not telling me. And maybe you are so worried it is giving you bad dreams. Mr. William, you are my friend and I cannot lose you.”

She almost whispered the last few sentences as the tears welled up around the gold flecks again. She reached into her blouse and pulled out a chain on which several pendants hung. She unhooked the chain, took one of the pendants off, put it in my palm and folded my hand over it.

“This is for you to borrow,” she said. “It is a charm that my grandmother gave me when I was in school. It is an eye that will look for evil and keep it away from you. I did not have it with me the day Saddam’s police arrested me, but I have worn it ever since I left prison. I think you need it more than I do now. Please be careful, Mr. William.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Aliya.” I was able to put the pendant--an open, almond-shaped eye, maybe a half-inch long, surrounded by lashes like sun rays--on my key ring. “I will keep it for a few days, to make you feel better. When we really know what happened to Herb, then I’ll return it to you.”

I stood and excused myself because I needed to speak to Brigadier Jaburi. Aliya lingered over my farewell handshake, eyes shining with tears and jaw slightly trembling. She said nothing as I left.

The near-miss from the hammer and Aliya’s concern left me too preoccupied to pay my usual attention to the cat-shit and carpet barriers between her office and Brigadier Jaburi’s analysis department on the next floor up. Once I reached the third floor, the employees of Jaburi’s analysis department--most of whom I was seeing for the first time that work week--sidled out of their offices and quickly and quietly offered their condolences on Herb’s death. I shook dozens of hands and mouthed refrains of “Thank you, it’s very kind of you” as I worked my way down 50 yards of hallway. At the corridor’s end, Jaburi was alone in his office, engrossed in a pile of documents containing what liked like schematic diagrams.

He looked up and waved me in. “Please, Mr. William, have a seat. You see, we are very busy here. The Minister, Dr. Salah F. Brahim, has asked us to prepare a memorial service for our friend Mr. Herbert, to take place tomorrow, so we are of course complying. This is important to show our respect for all of our foreign friends, from America as well as England and Australia, and also because we were so fond of Mr. Herbert.”

The tea-boy come in. I asked for qahwa ma sukar, sweet strong Turkish coffee, and thanked Jaburi for the concern he and the other Iraqis were showing for Herb.

“This is only normal, Mr. William. Mr. Herbert was very special to us, very special. He was so young and so full of life, and he always was so generous in sharing his advice with us. We will miss him so much.”

Jaburi’s comments could have been interpreted as an unfavorable comparison between the ambitious dead guy--so young, so willing to tell the Iraqis how to go pound sand--and the living, breathing burned-out case in front of him, but I didn’t think this was the time to ask. Instead, I sighed, “Yes, Herb was one of a kind. He’ll be hard to replace.”

“But I think Mr. Herbert had a good death, even for a young man,” Jaburi continued. “He was helping us Iraqis fight against terrorism and building the friendship between the Iraqi and American people. When he died, he was in a place surrounded by friends who valued so much what he was doing. Maybe, if he had to die, Mr. Herbert was lucky in what happened. But it is because he was so impotant to us ...” I lost track of Jaburi’s exact words because the cadences of his encomiums on Herb and his good death evoked something strangely familiar. Yes, I thought, that’s it: Jaburi is channeling Arthur Miller, talking about young Herb the same way that Willy Loman described the old guy who died the death of a salesman in his green velvet slippers in the smoking car of the New York, New Haven & Hartford.

When I returned from my excursion back to 11th-grade English, Jaburi was continuing on his plans for commemorating Herb. “That is why planning a ceremony for Mr. Herbert is so important for us. We will have the ceremony down in our conference room on the entrance floor. We will conduct it in a non-sectarian way, of course, honoring the new Iraq and recognizing that all of us--Sunni and Shia and Christian and even others, you know even some of the fire-worshippers from the hills in the north work here in the Ministry--are children of God. The Minister, Dr. Salah himself, will make some remarks, and some of us others who have benefitted so much from Mr. Herbert and you and the other friends, and we will invite you and Mr. James and even the English and Australian friends we work with. There is so much to do in so little time!”

Jaburi got up from behind his desk and started pacing around the office, punctuating his steps with stabs of his right index finger. “Look, Mr. William, at the charts of everything we must do: enlarging a photo of Mr. Herbert that we can display; deciding who will sit where in the most dignity, ordering refreshemnts--and don’t you agree that simple cakes with coffee and tea would be best; finding an expression of our sympathy that we can ask you to send to his family back home; and even thinking about music. Here, you see, we have got the Iraq and American flags that we will honor along with Mr. Herbert in the ceremony. So much, so much to do.”
He circled around behind his desk again, grabbed a pile of envelopes, and handed them to me. The paper was heavy but with a smooth texture and a fine cream color--the highest quality stationery I had seen in Iraq. Jaburi continued, “And,before I forget, here are the invitations for you and Mr. James and your colleagues. With your kind permission, we would like for the ceremony to start at eleven tomorrow morning.”

I made a show of pulling the frayed little calendar from the credit union out of my pocket and consulting it. “Brigadier, I think that will work for us, but I’ll have to check with the boss and let you know if there’s any conflict. I can speak for us all in expressing how moved and grateful we are with the effort the whole Ministry is showing for my dead colleague.

“Before I leave you to carry on with all the preparations for tomorrow,” I continued, “I’d like to see if you’ve got any additional information about the al-Maghribiya project. It seems to be on everybody’s mind. When I paid my respects to General Stambuli first thing this morning, he mentioned it and said the Minister has pledged to support it in any way possible.”

“I am glad to be able to tell you that the news on this front remains good,” Jaburi said. “Yesterday I spoke with Dr. Jibril, our friend who works on the Prime Minister’s staff. Dr. Jibril told me that he and Mr. Muhammad al-Latif had a very positive meeting on Saturday with the experts from the American USAID mission and even with a member of the American Embassy political section. And he said this was a very good meeting, and they think Muhammad al-Latif will have the funds he needs from Washington by the end of this week. And also on Saturday, when the Prime Minister took tea with your Ambassador and your commanding General, he explained the importance of the Maghribiya project and they promised to do everything to help. This is all very good. For just a few million dollars, by Spring we will have more farmers and fewer insurgents out in Maghribiya Province. It is all very good.

“And our service will play its role, of course,” Jaburi continued. “Dr. Jibril and I will speak in the next few days about the types of information, on terrorists and the tribes and so on, that we can provide. It will be a big boost for us to be involved in something so important.”

“Well,” I said, “It sounds like some real progress is being made there, and it’s great you’ll have a key role. I know you’re very busy, what with planning for the ceremony and getting ready to help the Prime Minister’s office with the al-Maghribiya project, so I”ll excuse myself and go now.”

“Mr. William, I cannot do that,” Jaburi protested, loking at his watch. “It is one-thirty and time for lunch, and we have a special Iraqi treat today that you must share with some of my colleagues and me.”

The tea-boy cracked the door and said something in Arabic. “The timing is very good, Mr. William. Our lunch is here on the table out in the hall and waiting for us. Please, let me show you.”

I felt too worn out by the portents that had followed Herb’s death to protest Jaburi’s cheerful, energetic invitation to lunch. I let him usher me out to the hall, where his three section chiefs--Kamal, Dulaimi, and Hamid—stood expectantly around a pungent platter of fish, salad, and bread.

“Mr. William, welcome,” said Kamal. “Today you will get to know mazhguf, the famous fish of Iraq.”

“I have heard that in the old days, Baghdad was well known for restaurants that grilled fish along the river. Is that what mazhguf is?”

“The very best food you can get in Baghdad, or maybe anywhere in the world” Kamal said. “Mazhguf is the best, the noblest fish in our Tigris river. It is the fish that stays on the bottom, so he can eat all the food that is there and get fat without fighting for his food. And the very best mazhguf, like this one we will eat, is from the river right here in Baghdad and prepared by the fish cooks of Abu Nawas street along the Tigris. That way, you know it is absolutely fresh. You see, Mr. William, the trick in preparing mazhguf is to smoke the fish over a fire, but not too long or too close, and you must use the wood from a pomegranate tree. That way it will stay tender and juicy, just the way it should be.”

As I put all this information together, I wanted to gag. The Iraqis had worked themselves into a gastronomic frenzy over a close approximation to a carp from the Cuyahoga or the East River: a bottom-feeder that had been fattened on all the shit--literal shit--and corpses and other pollution that accumulated every day in the fetid open sewer that passed for a river in Baghdad. But I had to suppress the reflex and surrender my digestive well-being to the needs of God and country. I responded to Kamal, “I am uniquely lucky to be able to taste this remarkable dish.”

Jaburi grabbed a plate and with his right hand ripped off a large, dripping piece of the fish. After adding a piece of bread and a bit of salad, he handed it to me with a flourish. “Please, Mr. William, start, do not wait for us. Mazhguf waits for no one.”

The fish was juicy and with a pleasant woody taste, but all I could think of was the turds and water-logged bits of human flesh that had entered its mouth and been transmogrified into the glistening white lumps that kept reappearing on my plate. I manfully polished off each serving that Dulaimi and Kamal and Hamid and then Jaburi again politely insisted I must have. I felt I was on the receiving end of a gastro-intestinal gang-bang. My stomach gurgled and my head spun, but like a true professional diplomat I kept eating and smiling.

After 30 minutes or so we had made enough of a dent in this undercooked bottom-feeder to leave the remnants to the tea-boys and floor-sweepers who had been jealously eyeing the feast. Dulaimi fetched an atomizer from his office and doused us all with cheap, strong eau de cologne. Now I reeked of counterfeit perfume as well as coprophagic fish. Watering eyes joined throbbing head and flip-flopping gut. We retreated to Jaburi’s office for the obligatory cups of sweet tea and chit-chat about the glories of Iraqi cuisine and the wondrous products of agriculture in the Land of Two Rivers. Digestive twinges steadily crept ever lower down my gut. Around 3:00 I was able to excuse myself without hurting the Iraqis’ feelings. Mercifully, my walk to the car in the Rashid Hotel parking lot featured no sudden, spasmodic cramping below the belt.

What I saw as I strolled into the parking lot was not merciful. Another slashed tire, this time the rear left. I remembered the statistics class required for my economics major. You need three points to draw a trend line--and now there were three points of cut-up tire going counter-clockwise from the front right one. It didn’t take much to guess that the line would next hit the right rear tire, and that maybe my person would be the ultimate target of the line of slashing. My left hand slid in my pocket and felt for Aliya’s eye charm on my key ring. I felt I needed all the help I could get. I took a couple of deep breaths and got in behind the wheel. As I put the key in the ignition, I remembered: I was so distracted by the slashed tire that I hadn’t checked for stray wires or grease stains that might indicate a car bomb. I turned the key any way. Insh’allah, I thought--God willing--I just wanted to get out of there and back to our compound as fast as I could. The motor started smoothly, and for the third day in a row I limped into the garage for a new tire.

Grease Man the mechanic was having a smoke in front of the garage when I limped in and parked. His eyes turned down to check at the tires, and when they reached the rear left the cigarette dropped out of his oily fingers. He kept his eyes fixed as he walked over, squatted by the mutilated tire, and ran his fingers along the wound.

"Mo-ther-fuck-er," he said, almost reverentially. "Looks just like what happened to your tires yesterday and Saturday. You're a spaceman, Purdue, and you drive like an asshole, but I don't think even you could manage to fuck up three tires in a row like this. Gotta be somebody who really hates you that's doing this."

"I wish I knew, Grease, I wish I knew," I said. "You figure that there's 25 million Iraqis out there and an awful lot of them wish us all types of hurt. But somebody thinks I'm real special. Jesus, if I knew who it was, believe me, I'd stay the hell away. The good news for you is that I don't think I'll need this til tomorrow."

"Mo-ther-fuck-er," Greaseman intoned again. "Yeah, looks like this would be a good night for you and my car to stay in. I'll have a new tire on for you for the morning, but for fuck's sake, be careful man."

I went over to the Cabana to check my e-mails. O’Dwyer was on the front porch as I entered. He nodded a greeting, sniffed, stared at me, and sniffed again.
“Jesus-fucking-Christ, Will,” he said. “You smell like you just swam across the Anacostia River after visiting a cheap French whorehouse. What the hell happened to you?”

“Muzhguf,” I answered. “I was over at IAS today and had the bad fortune to be in Jaburi’s office at lunch time when they brought one of those goddam fish in. It’s just carp pulled off the bottom of the Tigris, where it’s gotten fat from all the shit and bodies, and then they undercook it. Jaburi and his guys were pushing it down my gullet like I was a French goose. I can feel the damned stuff working its way down my gut, and I think something nasty is gonna happen real soon.”

“Yeah, I know all about muzhguf,” Jim said. “It’s one of the reasons you’ll never see me over there at meal time. Of course, if you used your brain as much as you worry about your dick, you’d have been able to tell them something about why Presbyterians can’t eat freshwater fish. I’ve got ‘em convinced that it’s against my proud bog-hopping Irish heritage and mackerel-snapping religion to eat fish unless it’s Friday and they can serve boiled potatoes alongside. If you get sick, it’s your own fucking fault for not thinking on your feet. Just try not to puke around me.

“While you were over there, Will," he continued. "Did you learn anything of interest, besides the earth-shattering fact that bottom-feeding fish eat a lot of turds?”

“Well, the only thing on Herb’s death was invitations to a memorial service they are holding for him tomorrow--here they are. Jaburi was obscenely ecstatic about getting all the details down. The Minister’s gonna preside over this zesty session. I told Jaburi there shouldn’t be any problem in us showing up at eleven.”

Jim nodded his head and said, “Yeah, it’d be pretty bad form for us not to show up. Luckily, it’s not too early because we just set up our own ceremony for Herb at nine tomorrow morning. Herb was one of ours, after all. I’ll clear my calendar for late morning and lunch time and have Neidermeyer”--that was O’Dwyer’s deputy--"clear his as well.” He sniffed again and crinkled his mouth and nose in disgust. “Did you just fart? That stank even worse than the damned fish on your breath and your clothes. For God’s sake get out of here before you kill somebody.”

He had taken the words right out of my mouth. “Sorry, Jim. You’re right, I’d better run. My gut’s starting to cramp bad.”

I managed a fast, cheek-clenched walk back to my room with as much dignity as possible. I at least had the solace of company since gastro-intestinal distress was even more common than dust in Baghdad. Whether it was airborne bacteria, food that had traveled too far on its way to our messhalls, or some remnant of Saddam's biological warfare programs, just about every Westerner in Baghdad seemed to catch the Mesopotamian two-step.

Once safely home I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening pouring pepto-bismol down my digestive tract to try to compensate for the ravages wrought by the muzhguf. The exorcism of my intestinal flora raged past 10, when the last traces of the filthy, carp-processed sediments of the Tigris spewed out of me. I took a shower and a last dose of pepto and flopped down to bed.