Other Peoples’ Journeys III

His name was Joseph. He had deep red hair and lines on his cheeks. He moved in that edgy way of all small, thin men who are ready to fight. He was an Iraqi with British citizenship.
The share-taxi sped north out of Amman in a grey-cold morning, out past the last of the off-white blocks of concrete on the strange hills of the city and into a stony, winter desert. The road to Syria was broad and straight and Joseph and I sat side by side on the back seat, hemmed in on either side by petty Jordanian businessmen in polyester shirts and nylon trousers.

Joseph was going to Baghdad. He had flown in from London the night before. The cheapest flights were to Amman. Now he was travelling north to Damascus. He would stop there for a couple of days, then travel east through the dry-dust cold of grey grit and checkpoints to Iraq.
“How is it in Baghdad now?” I asked. It was the beginning of 2005.
“Ah, my friend, things are so good now,” he said.
This was not what he was supposed to say. “Really? When was the last time you went there?”
“I was there last year for three weeks, and again the year before that. That was the first time for ten years. I am happy that I can go back there now.”

Joseph lived in London. “I work for a cleaning company, but I am not a cleaner; that is important. I am in the sales department.”
I asked how long he had been in London.
“I have been there for 12 years, my friend. I am a British citizen.”
“Why did you leave Iraq?”
“Why?” incredulous. “Why do you think? It is impossible to live with Saddam. I want the Americans to kill him very slowly so he feels a lot of pain.”
“If he’s going to be executed don’t you think it would be better if the Iraqi government did it?”
“No. The Iraqis are still scared of him; they will probably let him go. The Americans caught him so it is their right to kill him. I will be very happy on that day my friend.”
We were close to the border now, and Damascus was marked on the road signs.
“After you left you never went back to Iraq until after the war?”
“How can I go back with Saddam there? It is impossible.”
I had only ever heard good about the Iraq war from the kind of people who read the very worst kind of British newspapers. But Joseph, though he was a British citizen, was also an Iraqi.
“But aren’t things worse now? Before the war there was water and electricity and education and healthcare. That’s all gone now. And there are extremists now, al Qaeda.”
“Listen my friend,” said Joseph, “this is all worth it. What good is water and medicine if you cannot live? I cannot live with Saddam. We will have water and electricity again soon and I am not worried about al Qaeda; the Americans will kill them.”
“But what about all the civilians who’ve died?”
“And what about all the civilians Saddam killed? You know, I live in London, and it makes me angry when I see all these people, all these British and American people, people like you – I’m sorry,” he gently touched my arm, “at their protest with their flags and signs saying no to the war. I want to tell them try to live in Iraq with Saddam. You should be proud of your government.”
“I’m not.”
“You should be.”

At the border there were cracked concrete barriers across the road and the smiling, jovial portraits of Jordan’s boy-faced king with his beautiful wife and young children were replaced by sour-faced pictures of Bashar al-Assad. He wore sharp-cut suits, a little too loose for his long frame. He was so lean and long that they seemed to have made the billboards taller to fit his portrait. He looked down coldly at the traffic with his strange, weak-chinned face. His eyes were the colour of the blue shade under the overhangs of arctic ice.
A border guard in green thumbed through my passport.
“You go to Israel?”
“No.”
He stamped me into the country.
Joseph had walked very deliberately to the non-Arab-national counter, with his tight-sprung gait, ready to fight. He was still carrying his British passport as we walked back to the taxi. He had taped a Union Jack flag to the burgundy cover.

We sped on north. The road was straight and good and there were stony fields on either side under a vast, arching winter sky, cut across with running cloud. The Lebanon Ranges, streaked with snow, showed to the west.
“Honestly,” said Joseph, “I know you people don’t like it, but what the British and Americans are doing in Iraq is the best thing. And they should not stop.” Outside another ice-eyed portrait of Assad whipped past. Joseph lowered his voice and flicked his thumb towards it. “They should come here next, and kill him, bomb Damascus, then all the others, Saudi, Egypt, they are all like Saddam. If Bush is strong he will destroy them all.”
I squirmed a little in my seat. We had been in Syria for barely five minutes. “Perhaps you shouldn’t say that here…”
Joseph clicked his tongue. “What can they do? I’m a British citizen.”
He gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I had any problems with the bad people in Syria.
There were dead dogs beside the road all the way to Damascus.

***

Some days later I had another encounter. It was after dark, and together with two Canadians and a pretty American girl I had gone to a bar in the modern part of Damascus. There were expensive places to drink in converted basements off the Street Called Straight at the far end of the Old City, but this was not one of them. It was up a flight of grubby stairs above a kebab shop with half a raw goat carcass hanging in a glass case with a few limp stalks of parsley.
The bar was loud and smoky and lit too brightly and full of sad, drunken Arabs, and categorically no women. The Canadians and I had been there before; the American girl had not. She flared her blue eyes and said “Oh, my gosh…” as we stepped through the door.

The thin, weary-looking waiter brought us Barada beer – which was drinkable, while ash-Sharq beer was not – and salty peanuts. There was a man sitting alone at a table near the window. There were nine empty bottles on his table and he was leaning forward with an expression of bitter hatred on his face. But I doubted that he could see anything and the hatred was targeted only at the air around him.
We drank and chatted, and after a while I heard a voice speak in English behind me. I turned in my chair, smiling now after a couple of beers.
Four men, all of them wearing leather jackets, all of them with that certain shabbiness that is so hard for Arab men to avoid as they move into middle age, were sitting at the next table. A bottle of tea-coloured liquor stood between them, three-quarters empty.
The man with the iron-grey hair and a clipped moustache and heavy, jowly cheeks was smiling at me. “Where are you from?”
I smiled back a little idiotically, “I am from England, they are from Canada, and she is from America.”
He tilted his head back, “A-ha. And where am I from?”
I was in that state of slightly inane happiness on the southern edge of intoxication. “I don’t know,” I said stupidly, grinning, “Syria?”
He smiled. “No.”
“Palestine?” “No.”
“Lebanon? Jordan?”
“No,” he said, “I am from Iraq.”
“Ah,” I said.
“This my uncle, this my cousin, this my friend. We are all from Iraq…” he paused and laughed; it was only when he laughed that you could see that he was drunk. “Actually we all was from Iraq. Now – boom!” he grinned and opened his hands in mock starbursts. “Now no more Iraq, now we have no more country. Now,” he laughed and tapped the table, “this bar is our country!” He translated this to Arabic for the other three men who spoke no English and they all roared with laughter.
They were traders, he said, from Baghdad. He said “Baghdad” in that low, ominous way that the word has when pronounced correctly.
“We are import-export, Baghdad-Damascus.” He drew a finger between two imaginary points on the table, “Baghdad, Damascus, import, export, Damascus, Baghdad. Every week, maybe three, maybe four times, Baghdad, Damascus, import, export. But now? Boom!” Again the starburst hands. “No more business, no more import-export. If we go Baghdad now, we dead!” He translated this too, and they roared with laughter again, and he called something to the weary waiter.
“Now we have no more job.” He raised his glass. “Now our job is drinking, in our new country – this bar!” They all laughed again, and I kept on grinning, inanely.

The waiter came back with four empty glasses, and the Iraqi filled them with the tea-coloured liquor. He said it was whiskey. The colour was right, but the smell was wrong. He passed the glasses to me, and when he leaned forward you could see how drunk he was.
“Yes, yes, for you and you. Yes, and for the American.” He sat back and raised his own glass. “Drink with me, my friend.”


© Tim Hannigan 2008