Baghdad Journal

First morning

At Al Mosafer "The Traveler." A Hotel featuring Fully Furnished Apartments and Edible Ant Colonies.

I wake up early, before the sun rises. The supersized generator from the Australian embassy next door is a constant roaring rattle. We are at the Mosafer, just south of the Tigris River and around the corner from Al Hamra, a 10-story muddy orange-colored hive of journalistic types, which has no vacancies even though it charges $130 a night. We were led to the Mosafer by Farid Esmail, a wild eyed hairy browed Sunni man who says he's a translator but who spends most of his time on the front steps of the Hamra telling people about the merits of the Mosafer. "Much cheaper place. $45. Safe. Large area. Kitchen. AC. Very nice."

The evening before we watched the scene below from the our balcony at the Mosafer: Australian guards in camoflage gear wave their M16s and usher some VIPs -- looking more like middle aged golfers in their sunglasses and shorts -- out of a BMW with an orange square ductaped to the hood and into the embassy. A moment later an Iraqi lad on a cart carrying what looks like a bed of reeds rolls by, whipping and cursing his donkey, the lowest of all accursed beasts in the Islamic hierarchy next to dogs and pigs.

The rattling generator might have kept us awake last night were we not totally exhausted from the trip from Amman to Baghdad.

Now, in the early morning, it's an oven in here -- the electricty must have gone out hours ago and taking the AC along with it. Driven by hunger pangs, I clamber out of bed and stumble into the living room of our shabby shaghq, or apartment, feeling in the dark for the bag of digestive biscuits I bought at the Safeway in Amman and left open on the top of the refrigerator the night before.

Very satisfying to bite into a digestive biscuit especially for the gastro-nostalgia it congers of my days in London ... but then, in my mouth and on my fingers and down my arm, the biscuit comes to life in the form of many tiny, overexcited things. I finally realize it: they are ants, hundreds of them, panicking, trying to flee the great gaping maw which swallowed their comrades.
After several tries, I cough up enough to fill an ant farm.

Then I try to flush the toilet. The chain -- more of a knotted string really -- on top of the toilet tank breaks off in my hand. I take off the faux porcelain lid off the tank and lean it against the wall. No water inside. As I walk back into the bedroom where Adam is sleeping twisted uncomfortably in bed, there is a thundering crash behind me and Adam jumps up, certain that our saghq has been hit by a SCUD. But it is only the toilet lid sliding to the floor and breaking in umpteen pieces.

Around 10 a.m. I call down to the reception. Farid is there and offers to come up and take a look at my mooshkila, my problem. He looks at the broken tank lid. "No problem. Maybe $5 to fix," he shrugs.
What he wants to tell me really is that he canceled all his appointments to be with us today. He offers to set up an interview with one of the resistance fighters. Through hand gestures, he pantomimes an angry bearded fanatic holding a bazooka and chuckles. We tell him thanks but we have a friend of a friend who has offered to help us with our stories. I give him a Ben Franklin and tell him to keep $10 for his trouble along with the $45 for the room and the $5 for the toilet. After we tell him that we are not staying another night, he disappears and returns, his brow deeply furrowed. "I talked to the management. They say they need to replace the whole tank. Maybe $20."
He counts back my change -- it's a couple dollars short. We look at Farid perplexed. "I keep $12 for me, yes?" We don't argue. Just pick up our bags and head out of the Mosafer.

Posted by Brandon Sprague at July 30, 2003 12:43 PM | TrackBack