Strawberry Fields Read online

  Xenith landed in Baghdad in the heady days just after the invasion, didn’t miss a beat and in fact had beaten me there. I’d sat alone in an airport bar watching the shock and awe, firestorm in the night of an ancient city. It seemed that almost as soon as we freelancers had sorted our visas, stepped off the plane, charged our laptops, Baghdad had fallen. So there we were: birth pangs of an occupation. Coalescing around us what would be known forever after as the heavily fortified Green Zone.

  I was there, I thought I was good to go. I’d found an interpreter but within a day lost him to the death of his mother. I could have tagged along here or there, made it work, but I caught some bug and spent day after day in my room sweating, thick-headed.

  From my window I saw a war. A Marine unit doing sweeps, the same one always, I suspected, by my glimpses of a boy’s orange hair. Humvees and occasional tanks forced themselves down the street, fat cats squeezing through a pet door, I thought, feverish and tired of metaphors. I listened: sirens, traffic, distant explosions, it could have been a TV set to static. In the room next to mine a man shouted in an unknown language.

  Once a day I forced myself out of the hotel and to a local teahouse, not the one where I was most welcome. I interviewed the regulars, but got little, no one wanted to talk to a flushed soft-eyed American, damp with some disease out of the heartland. I filled a notebook with sketched maps, brief interviews, impressions of the smells and prayer song, the migration of bursts of gunfire across the horizon. I photocopied a fourteen-year-old’s diary, loaned to me by its author. I think I believed that one day all this would signify something. Testify to something in the boundless history of war.

  Walking too slowly back to my hotel one afternoon I ran into none other than my ginger Marine, hair just visible beneath his helmet. I nearly greeted him before remembering he wouldn’t know me. But he must have seen my expression on the verge of warmth, and from that day whenever he saw me he stopped me to chat. I couldn’t seem to avoid him.

  The second time we met he pulled a handful of vitamin C packets out of a pocket and offered them, saying: I gotta say, you look like shit.

  Thanks, I said, and wiped at the snot dried on my face.

  More where that came from, he said: Embed with us and reap the rewards.

  He looked pleased with himself. He looked not a day over twelve.

  Goes against almost everything I believe in, I said.

  I’m just talking good old-fashioned military-friendly journalism, he said. What’s not to love?

  I’ll think about it, I said.

  Don’t cry now, he said.

  My eyes didn’t stop watering the whole time I was in that country. In my room I drank fizzing glasses of vitamin C, though I suspected it was far too late. Every day my interpreter called to say he’d be back tomorrow and for the first ten days I believed him. The truth was I didn’t care, or I cared too much. I stayed in bed. You all right? came the knocks at the door and a baby laughed on speakerphone through the wall. I thought, maybe this was the body’s natural response, or should be. To shut down, not go on with business as usual, if that’s what you could call foreign correspondence. I believed—no, something less than believed—that in my passivity I might claim a perspective no one else could, if I could exist in time so slowly, moment by moment as around me a nation fell to its knees, if I watched my ceiling and heard the long coda of an invasion, I would know something. Something else? Something more true? Looking back I can’t defend myself, can’t say what more true might mean, though at the time I wrote the phrase surprisingly often. I’d begin with the men, long dead, who had sat around a map and drawn the borders of what we know as Iraq. I would lead in with the history of colonialism, the fall of the US’s groomed leaders, the rise of the nationalists and theocrats. The gas attacks in the north we’d closed our eyes to, the weapons we’d sold. I would depict not just the scene before me but the motion of time within it, the forces of history that had pushed this nation to this wall, oil wells lit in the fields and not a flower thrown at our feet.

  But I was silent, I was a woman, sick in a room. No country confessed its secrets to her. A people, a history, a language, a god, not one truth, though she waited attentive on street corners, notebook open for days. Every word I wrote anyone could have written. I filed some stories I don’t care to remember. Around me my colleagues and rivals assembled and I was slow to follow, looking off to the side, to the sky, to the ditches, the hands of children, begging or selling or waving a flag. Looking anywhere but at the page that was supposed to be mine. I walked the streets in a haze and if I turned toward anyone, I knew what they saw: a woman who did not share their fate.

  You’re sick, the others said, when I tried to explain. Sweetly they left brandy at my door.

  Alice! one day a voice cried behind me. I was leaning on a blast wall outside a half-empty market, watching the stalls get set up, rugs unroll. This was before the market bombings started.

  How do you know my name? I asked Ginger, who was now beside me, pleased as any puppy.

  He winked.

  How’s the unembedded life? he said.

  I love the taste of freedom, I said.

  Come with me, he said. I have some real shit to show you.

  Reader, what should I have said?

  Mounir

  I am writing to you regarding Ibrahim. I have waited to write, too long. I would call but over the phone my accent is strong, I am told.

  I am a photographer. I did not work with Ibrahim officially but for a French news service. I was partnered with a reporter, and he and I traveled with Ibrahim often, four or five of us all together, because we got along and because there are many official tours in this war, often you end up on helicopters or buses full of journalists. We are marched around in little groups and everyone we manage to speak to is anxious that we report they are winning—we’ve learned that if it is said you have yielded an advantage, you will pay a price. Ibrahim has perhaps told you this. I do not mean to presume.

  Ibrahim said that he did not like to tell you the worst stories until at least a month later because then they would be only the past. A month is long enough, he explained. A new moon. He believed that even in the city people notice the moon more than they know. I imagine he has shared this theory with you.

  Something beautiful that Ibrahim and I once saw: in the river that divides these two countries, a river which is in fact the juncture of two great rivers, an oil tanker had been trapped for three weeks. The captain was frightened by the attacks on civilian vessels and would not move the tanker unless it was guaranteed an escort all the way to the gulf. By now there was fighting all around it, tank guns trained on it from the eastern banks, and even the gulf had been mined. This is not the point. For several days the tanker had kept its lights on through the night. I could not say why. But these ships are enormous, and when one is lit up like that, lit on every level and in every aperture, floodlights illuminating each bare deck, it is so bright, so bright that it can hurt to see. You see this offense of light, near enough to the mouth of the river that the tide touches it twice a day, and you know then what a miracle light is. Power. In the belly of this tanker. But this is not what I called beautiful. Imagine a night like this, a yellow beast in the river. The moon is almost full, and its yellowing face looks to you like not a reflection but a mockery of the scene below, the mammoth ship pinned and unblinking. Tonight Ibrahim and I are on the western side, in a dock area that has been abandoned since the beginning of the war. The tanker is Canadian and Ibrahim is enjoying this, acting out little dialogues that include everything we know about Canada, which is little. The only one who isn’t laughing is Bertrand, the reporter I am working with, and he rarely laughs at anything, except the sight of very young whores, though not out of cruelty. But picture the moon. It is strange to think of. Bertrand says something about the moon, pointing at its reflection on the water. The reflection o
f the moon can at this moment be distinguished from the tanker’s relentless reflection—on the surface of the river a sphere, deformed and lovely. The light around the tanker looks like a fluorescence of creatures suckling at its hull.

  But then a fleet of shadows crosses, disturbing the moonlight, like a rush of dark fish through the yellow glow. Ibrahim is the one who understands. Run, he says, shells, and as he says this they explode, not far behind us, and terribly, terribly loud. Ibrahim is pulling me and Bertrand is running ahead. The Australian, Daniel, is slow—he had twisted an ankle jumping down from one of the wretched helicopter tours. But Ibrahim grabs him by the wrist. Someone’s sweat smells to me like sweetgrass left out to hay, though perhaps this odor comes somehow from the shelling.

  We run northward along the bank, to an abandoned shipyard. We all survive, and the explosions were not that close to us, although the ringing in the ears takes some time to subside. Above us the sky the shells traverse does not reveal them: death so quick you see only its shadow.

  The next morning I thought of you, in a way: I thought that a few days before the next full moon, Ibrahim may tell Sarah this story.

  No one has told you how Ibrahim died. I was the only one there, the soldiers and I. I did not tell his editor this story, although you may, if you wish. I do not mean I am telling you what to do. I considered contacting Ibrahim’s editors, but he spoke so often of you. It was not that he talked of your and his past, rather plans, or qualities he ascribed to you—he would interrupt himself, shaking his head, and say, if Sarah could hear me, she’d be shaking her head. I do not claim I knew him well.

  The essential thing to understand is that one country has five times the population of the other. Five times. This means five times the army. And this means that the Deputy (this is all his name means, in translation, this is important to remember)—who calls the opposition a wave of insects he is prepared to exterminate—has to kill large numbers of troops while losing next to none. This is the only strategy by which he may win the war he began. Along the easternmost river, one of the two I have mentioned, which serves as the border between the two nations and thus as a perpetual front, there are ancient marshlands. Both sides have advanced through them; most recently troops came in great force from the east, which was a considerable territorial acquisition; they were only a few dozen kilometers from the highway that leads to the capital. There are people who live in the marshlands. Tribes is what they are usually called, marsh people. I grew up among what you might call hill people (I was sent away for school, as you can tell, I was lucky; it was during the civil war and not a good time to be a young man at home). My people are hill people, goat people, even though my family is rich: they are surrounded by goat and sheep and hill people, and so that’s what they are as well. The marsh people are marsh people, is what I mean.

  When they saw the enemy coming through the marshland, the Deputy’s general bombed huge stretches of the marshes, lit everything that could be lit. There are animals there that live nowhere else in the world, several species of which are now gone. The bombs lit the reeds and reed houses, plants of all kinds, the rice fields. Then the Deputy’s soldiers ran cables through—through the marshes themselves, and this is kilometers. They electrified the water and everything in it: enemy soldiers, their own people, the marsh tribes, fish, water buffalo, gazelles. A day after this Ibrahim and I arrived.

  I believe we were the only ones allowed into this place. Ibrahim had very good contacts in the army, and he requested that I come with him, although as it turned out I was forbidden to take pictures. They confiscated my camera and it was only upon Ibrahim’s death that they returned it.

  I will not describe the place to you. We walked along a sort of dike and nothing could be worse than the stench. To our right the marshes extended and everywhere bodies floated in clusters. The water was dark with ash. As the bodies moved you could start to see that some had been slit open. I have told this story in the wrong order. We had been walking to this place for some time, from the village where the main defensive forces were stationed. We knew nothing yet of what had happened in the marshlands, except that the Deputy’s general had called it a victory. The soldiers we followed wouldn’t talk much, but led us to one embankment, where we stood a long time not speaking, waiting for some higher-ranking military liaison to arrive, to tell us what I don’t know. Ibrahim needed to relieve himself. He walked over to one side, a ditch in the network of causeways. Then he began to scream. I have heard screaming like this before and I thought it must somehow be coming from the dead, I did not at first understand. The water was still electrified. I learned this later. In fact, although we could not see it, one of the generators was in a hut not far from us. We had no way to imagine this. The soldiers who were escorting us yelled at Ibrahim, running toward him. I reached him before they did, but the electricity had already stopped his heart. You do not want to be a piss martyr, the soldiers were calling as they ran. Piss martyr was the phrase they were using. I do not know if this was because there had been other piss martyrs or if they had only thought of this, in their time there, as a sort of joke with each other. I tried to resuscitate Ibrahim, but I am not trained, and there was no one else to summon, not in time. Probably they told you he died in an accident at the front. Do not think less of him for pissing into the marshes of the dead. I saw the ditch below him and there was no one.

  I neatened him before they sent his body back.

  One soldier laughed. I tell you this so that you will not wonder if anyone laughed. It is a reaction. And the soldiers there, their job was to patrol the banks of these lagoons of corpses.

  I believe Ibrahim would shrug at the name, piss martyr. He would laugh. You know him better. Perhaps I am wrong. I slapped the soldier who laughed on the face, though I am sorry for this now.

  Alice

  Outside the VA hospital I ran into Modigliani. The crime scene had resumed its somber bustle and I was embarrassed to be there. As if Modigliani had found me wrist-deep in a jar labeled clues. I couldn’t confront him with the failure of his investigation without claiming that failure as my own.

  It could be true, what I’ve been suspecting, that I’ve lost my edge. The first installments of the hurricane stories had made a big splash, but then what—? No arrest, no resolution. On an American street in an American city someone had executed a man and a woman: a social worker and addict—former teacher—barrel of the gun right to the back of each head, a lynching too familiar and yet to this day, no thanks to me and Modigliani, too vague. What had happened that night? What could these deaths mean? Was the shooter some white-power night rider, or among the uniformed Xenith forces, trained and paid to proliferate through that city’s bad dream? Or were those identities, for at least a night, indistinct? The story should end, should have ended, with a call-to-arms, a finale of sheer moral force: the unanswered questions, unavenged crimes, proclaimed again and searingly, so that someone, some public-interest lawyer, some professor with a grant, free from deadlines, from political badgering and law enforcement quotas, someone could have demanded justice. Instead Modigliani had been reassigned and I, I had trailed off. What was I to do, I asked the editors who no longer call me, run an investigation from the pages of a magazine? Witness, judge, and jury, in one byline? Once again the dead had picked the wrong champion. And once again here I was, at something like the beck and call of Modigliani.

  When he saw me by the hospital door, he shook his head. Since in my experience Modigliani has never made a joke, it’s hard to know what he might mean when he tries.

  Got ten minutes? he said.

  I wanted to say no, but I had all the time in the world.

  Any progress with Xenith? he said as we walked.

  I’m not sure what you were expecting, I said.

  We entered the cafeteria. He picked out an egg-salad sandwich. I let him buy me a juice and we sat in the corner everyone else avoided, where the bul
bs flickered spastically.

  About Xenith, I said, I’m not going to do your grunt work in exchange for shit information and—I flicked the bottle—cranberry juice cocktail.

  That’s not what’s happening here, he said. This case could be their Achilles’ heel and I thought you’d be interested. This is as good an opportunity as you’re likely to get.

  There’s a vote of confidence, I said.

  Modigliani unstuck plastic wrap from the golden squish of his sandwich. You were in Baghdad with them, he said.

  Yes, I said.

  I knew where he was going: The three journalists Xenith had killed. I’d been thinking about it the whole time; I’d been thinking about it for years. The journalists were unarmed and everyone knew the Xenith guys were drunk, blasting through in one of their Humvees, opening fire on any group of men gathered on a corner. But the men had just been setting up a camera, to interview this local sculptor, of all people, who was initiating a series of civic art projects. After the shootings one of Xenith’s top guys goes in and soon enough no one can be tried in any country. For all we knew the men—murderers—had been redeployed. I’d researched our five victims wondering if I might uncover this kind of past. Not yet.

  Modigliani said: You didn’t stay long in Baghdad. You were gone before the incident with the journalists, you didn’t even cover it. Why was that?

  He looked worse than I did, his cheeks hollowing in the unsteady light.

  I was kidnapped, I said.

  He didn’t reply and it occurred to me he might think I was joking.

  I said: I’d started going around with this Marine unit sometimes, and one day we went out to a rough part of the city, where there was a big standoff, a bunch of Marines, a peanut cleric and his ragtag militia, and these Polish forces there as a part of the coalition. By the time I got there shots had been fired. A Polish guy had been hit in the leg and one Iraqi had been shot in the stomach. He was bleeding and bleeding and beside him, two goats were dead. Sounds like the set-up for a joke. It was a very tense scene, everybody was shouting. I got there and was angling around to try to get a sense of things, heading just a little deeper into the neighborhood, when—hood, van, bam.