Granta 131: The Map Is Not the Territory (The Magazine of New Writing) by Sigrid Rausing

Author:Sigrid Rausing [Rausing, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905881888
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2015-04-22T18:30:00+00:00

AFTER ZERO HOUR

Janine di Giovanni

1

In the last days of Iraq, shortly before the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Ministry of Information, which controlled the movements of all the press, granted my request to travel the country by car.

That was in 2002. My companions on these long and melancholy trips – shadowed by the coming American invasion – were my driver, Munzer, a transplanted Palestinian Sunni whose family had emigrated to Iraq in 1948, and my translator, Reem, who came from Babil Province. Sometimes we were accompanied by a bad-tempered ‘minder’, graciously provided by the ministry, whose purpose was to spy on us and take detailed notes about where we were going and whom we saw.

Occasionally Ali, another translator, a film scholar who worshipped Martin Scorsese, also came along. But he and Munzer had a tumultuous relationship, which sometimes came close to blows, so we tried to keep them separated.

Munzer had a 1987 Oldsmobile, like something out of Starsky and Hutch. I would load the car with fruit and water, a medical kit and emergency supplies, and we would begin, driving up and down, north and south, east and west, across the country.

I knew then, even as we were traversing the endless Saddam Hussein highways – Baghdad to Basra, Baghdad to Mosul – that I would never take those routes so effortlessly again in my lifetime.

With the invasion, and the insurgent war that followed, Iraq would virtually disappear. The land of date trees, oasis and desert would be marked by checkpoints and graves.

I did not know then the extent of the anguish that would fall on this beguiling place, known as the land between two rivers – the Euphrates and the Tigris – but I did know as we drove through those biblical ruins, those languid farming villages, those dusty cities, that they would be closed forever after the bombs started falling.

The American invasion was planned and even had a date, but there was little solid information about it. We were cut off from the world on those trips. The Internet in Baghdad was carefully controlled, and there was no cell-phone service. I did have a smuggled satellite phone, but it was illegal to use it. The Mukhabarat, the secret police, watched us so closely that it would have been impossible to go outside, find a satellite in the sky and set it up without being caught. I kept it for near emergencies.

Occasionally Reem and I would watch Iraqi TV, but mostly we talked to people and got immersed in local gossip, the rumours and paranoia that inevitably come with the end of a regime. It was an overbearingly tense and claustrophobic time: a great sense of doom hung in the polluted air.

‘What will happen when the Americans come?’ I asked Reem, or Ali. In Baghdad, children were digging trenches and sandbags were being piled on street corners, but no one wanted to look too far ahead. Reem usually stayed silent. Once, Munzer answered: ‘We will fight!’ and that was that.

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