Baghdad Journal

Last Night in Baghdad

A policeman leaning out of his car was shooting. We didn't see him at first, so we didn't know it yet. We were out late last night making arrangements for our trip to Amman. After more than three weeks in Baghdad we were leaving.

Abu Abdullah, Brandon and I coasted through the dark as if the constant Baghdad knife-to-the-throat danger were not in the air of the Al Mansur. Our windows were down. Warm air flowed through the car and it felt as good as an Al Hamra Hotel nightswim. Pop! The three of us slid down into the seats, bullets in the air and our fear from the ignorance about where they were headed. The same sudden hyperawareness I had on that day near the railroad tracks in the Kadizmiya with the soldiers chasing after gunfire [see Riding With the 1-13]. I saw the police cars first, their red and blue lights swirling in the night black. Most of the street lights were out in Al Mansur, but there was a fluorescent blue light on top of a building illuminating a parking lot and some of the street. One of the chasing police cars drove through the light and I saw the policeman leaning out of the passenger window firing his gun. Pop! His arm stretched out in front of him, the gun bucking in his hand and him trying to steady it as he fired.

There were two other police cars behind the one shooting following each weave and swerve. I could barely see what they were chasing: something swerving and without lights, it's beatup shape shifting in the dark like something that wanted to disappear. Pop! Pop! The noise loud now, the gun adjacent to our windows on the other side of the street. We tried to push down more into the car out of sight. The bullets flying in the opposite direction. The cars flying through the night, the policeman still sitting in the window on the door. It all happens in a few seconds, and then the cars are gone towards the busy center of Al Mansur.

"This is your last night," Abu Abdullah said. "I like to make it interesting for you." He laughed a little, his intense, almond eyes betraying the laughter. I was thinking of my own death then, contemplating it the way Baghdad had forced me to for the last three weeks. "It's better knowing that you are alive," I said to Brandon, "Rather than not knowing you're dead." And if the nothingness is knowable, then it is a different kind of knowing. Actually, I've thought about that Nothingness each day. At first, it was a kind of weight. Then, with time, it became a daily meditation that put me in touch with where I was.

At the next intersection we made a U-turn and drove in the opposite direction, far behind the police chase. We pulled in front of the Al-Madinah Al-Munawara Company for transportation, the parking lot full of white Suburbans. We were out late because there had been a mix up between Lamis in Jordon, Jameel, wherever he was, and a driver they were talking to in Baghdad. In the end we needed a driver, so we made plans with Hidr at Al-Madinah. Abu Abdullah haggled with Hidr over the price. Hidr pleaded, his hands out begging, saying something about too many of their vehicles were in Jordan, plenty of businessmen, journalists and diplomats leaving Baghdad and not enough returning. Abu Abdullah sat cool in his BMW while still argueing, his face cold and obstinate, until they agreed on the price, then he was as warm and grateful as a kind brother. $170, he said, and it sounded like the right price to leave.

It was close to 10 and the streets were emptying. The only people out were running their cars hard. Too dangerous to slow down. Too risky to stop, especially for fools like us taking their time at the curb. We pulled into traffic and Brandon began dreaming out loud of a shwerma and beer. I was dreaming of getting home in one piece.

Our black car with its tinted windows like a shadow driving through the night. We start to make across a main thoroughfare. A car raced towards us, not breaking. Abu Abdullah didn't see it or didn't realize how fast it was coming on or didn't believe in the kind of maniac behind the wheel. The car barrelling toward us layed into the horn, one long, annoyed honk growing toward us. I saw the car crashing right into the passenger side door where I was sitting. Abu Abdullah reluctantly stomped his foot on the gas--I know he takes the other car as an affront and he won't be pushed around--and pulls and swerves out of the cars path. My heart like a rabbit's foot thumping up against my chest. I halfway don't believe I will make it out alive.

Not more than a couple kilometers for our hotel, we stopped again for shwerma and beer. We stopped on the side of the road where men standing in the dark sold beer from dirty and chipped styrofoam coolers. Abu Abdullah orders two beers from him and shouts the order to someone else who runs back into the dark, down a driveway and into a compound. Abu Abdullah said the house used to belong to a Baath party official, but after the war when the Baathists fled, people begin reclaiming their stolen houses and property. With three hot lamb shwermas already in my lap, I grap the beer cans from the man who thanks, You have my heart, he said in Arabic.

As we drove the last kilometer to the Alrabiya, we began to say good-bye, exchanging gratitudes. Abu Abdullah said he hoped Brandon and I understood his people and that we will speak well of them when we return to the States. He wanted us to know that just because "some do bad things" it doesn't mean all Iraqis are bad. I know he was trying to talk about the condition they're in, arising from underneath the repression and cruelty of Saddam Hussein and now dealing with the reconstruction of their country through an occupation by a foreign power, people who may mean well, but have different ideas, different ways of thinking and acting. His manface melted into something child-like and injured, helpless, something pleading and desperate, a face I'd seen before in Iraq when Iraqis weren't pretending like they had everything under control in their crumbled, bombedout, no security world. "We don't know freedom," he said, "Some one has to teach us."

We said we will email to stay in touch. I wrote our email addresses down on a sheet of paper including Abu Abdullah's, the one we helped him open at an Al Mansur internet cafe a few days before. He wanted us to call Jameel when we arrived in Amman, so that he knows we made it safe. Jameel was robbed on the Amman highway last week, when bandits forced his driver to pull off the road. We don't know this at the time, but he must. Good-bye Abu Abullah, our friend, our guide through Baghad. Thank you for keeping us safe. The man confidence and strength returned to his face. Perhaps we will meet again one day, he said. Perhaps.

Posted by Adam Shemper at August 23, 2003 08:44 PM | TrackBack