November 23-30, 1990

Abu Alaa entered for breakfast, just returned from bringing Reiner and Jurgen to Baghdad. He and Saad moved to a corner of the mangeriyah to talk. Then Saad left for Basra.

Abu Alaa smiled, pointing to a bag he held with his left hand.

“From Baghdad, I bring sekesiveejoo,” he said, winking.

I had no idea what he meant.

“A sekesi vee joo,” he repeated.  “You want see?”

“Sure,” I said, not sure what I was getting myself into. He pulled a VHS tape from the back.

“Come see,” he said, winking more.

Leaving breakfast, I followed him through the gate and to the clinic. I got somewhat nervous when he locked the door once we were inside.  The guards never locked doors. He turned on the TV and put the cassette into the VCR. The video began with a naked woman alone on a bed touching herself.  Her skin tones were green; lighting, harsh to toxic; background music, scratchy. Words and names in the credits were Slavic but in Roman alphabet. After a fade, a new scene began: the same woman and now a man sat on a bed looking at each other. After twenty seconds, on cue, they kissed and stripped, without lust. His erection seemed automatic.  He entered her, like one machine part fitting into another. No voice, no pleasure, no sound except the slapping of body parts and scratchy music. They didn’t grunt or moan.  I wondered if they breathed. But Abu Alaa was transfixed, and—honestly—so was I.  I suppose I reconnected with my own ability to desire, or to remember it.  And he and I had found a lowest common denominator between us, that which we had absolutely in common: two men without women watching a sekesi vee joo. It attracted our attention and occupied the vacuum; for me it was a glimpse of another life. Neither of us spoke or looked at each other;  we connected in no way, but we shared a moment, of isolated sex simultaneously. It wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t want him to shut it off either.

In the next scene, two women on the same bed began taking off each other’s clothes. Abu Alaa got up and turned it off. “The Koran this no good. Haram (Forbidden).” I was angry that he shut it off, but didn’t protest. When I said I had to go, he unlocked the door. “No tell!  No tell other guests sekesi vee joo.”

I went back to my house, feeling lonely.  When I got there, Umm Kul sat on a chair, fuming. I’d never seen her sitting before.  At first she just stared, mute.  Then she said. “All morning all morning in the police house. Why?”  Before I could answer, she left.  Had she missed our morning banter, our improvised Arabic study?  Had she looked in on Abu Alaa and me watching the video?  I’ll never know.

The following day she came at her usual time, just after breakfast, and announced that her anger was finished. Then she gave me a kiss on the cheek. A kiss like a sister would give, but in this context, it astonished me. And then she talked.  Her manner was non-stop and frantic.  She captivated me. She talked about a grandfather who hunted the marshes near Qurna with bow and arrow.  I missed most of the words and interpreted her gestures. And then somehow she transitioned to telling me emphatically that she wouldn’t wash clothes for the guards although she would do it for us.

“Wash, police? No. Never. You? Yes. British? Yes. Japanese? Yes. Police? No.” I wondered why she told me this, but we never discussed why’s for things. She dusted for a while, then came back and looked at Diana’s picture.

“Why doesn’t she come to get you?” I thought she asked.

“Inshallah,” (God-willing) I said. I didn’t know how to say, “Diana would if she could.”

That afternoon I burnt up nervous energy by swimming: without Reiner and in the increasingly chilly water, it took a higher level of effort just to keep at it. The Gulf would now be too cold for any long distance swim without hypothermia.  The mesbah was about training for escape now; the exertion exercised rage, like swinging the pipe, fury about the situation. It was exertion as struggle, not sensual.   No more warm sun, my body covered itself with goose bumps, which felt like scales or pointed armor plates with spines, skin like a reptile’s, a sea turtle’s. I couldn’t conjure up images of Diana. While swimming on my back, I saw no birds that had migrated away south; instead, I saw contrails of high-flying jets in the southwestern sky over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Several times an aircraft leaving a trail approached the Iraqi border and then veered off. The BBC said the UN had just authorized the use of force. I could hear a distant rumbling. Test firing, the systematic demolition of Kuwait, the imminent loss of my future?

At night I walked at a furious pace around the refinery, wondering if sometimes I frightened the workers on duty. But most places were too dark for them to see who strode past with such speed and determination, looking skyward for stars most of the time. The moon waxed large.  I felt stronger, and I sometimes walked one more lap than the previous night. Four laps tonight, five laps tomorrow night, six laps a few nights after that. I imagined that like the Biblical Joshua, I could eventually make enough laps, blow a horn or scream, and the walls and barbed wire fences would tumble down. Maybe a rogue wave on the bay would flood inland, swallow me, and send me home, even if looking like a glossy white drowned mammal.

One night, I stopped to talk with a tanker truck driver loading up with drinking water from a fill pipe near the gate. He spoke no English, but I jumped up on the running board, smiling at him and saying routine greetings while studying the controls:  air brakes and a 10-speed transmission like a truck my older brother once drove: I could drive this, I imagined, following reckless thoughts of breaking out with a semi trailer for a final glory ride.  How far I could get and through how many fences and roadblocks and how thrilling the trip before I died?

Abu Alaa had become more patriotic than ever. One night the news brought him to his feet. In response to a mob of Saddam supporters marching in Baghdad, he chanted, “By my spirit, by my blood, I’ll ransom you, Saddam. By my spirit, by my blood, I’ll ransom you, Saddam,” dancing, stabbing an index finger in the air; the look in his eyes suggested he was surprised I didn’t join in.  It amused me that he spoke of ransoming Saddam although I was the hostage, but I kept those thought to myself.

In the next breath, he would sometimes ask, “I can come to visit you in America?” He seemed to recall the US as the ally that supported Iraq against the Iranians.  I felt no malice toward him or Saad. It was easier for me to pity than either hate or fear at this point. They were just misled pawns, dangerous ones. They showed no malice.  Saddam was the mastermind: these guys, just the footmen. I wasn’t on their side: I was on the same side as Joe, Nigel, and others whom I couldn’t bear to spend time with and now rarely did. Actually, I felt mostly on the same side as Ali, Umm Kul, and Abu Mahmoud, victims imposed on in a similar way.

Yet I no longer doubted that, given the need, I could bring the pipe down on the head of Abu Alaa. I respected him, as I would respect the sea, the cold, a killer, any killer no matter how charming. And these guys had charm, if only vestiges of the hospitality legendary of Ali Baba and Sindbad: an element of a life that was gracious, simple, traditional still existed in them—though not so much so as in Umm Kul or Mr. Ali.

So far, I’d not been hit, bound, locked in an actual cell, tortured, really even threatened. On the contrary, we’d gotten acquainted to a certain level, I’d bargained for better living conditions for myself and others, made jokes. None of these guards had been sadistic, the rules here forbade their incubating and satisfying that urge, it seemed, as it forbade our watching two women make love. Bored young men, the guards welcomed opportunities to chat, drink tea, watch TV together.  As I write this now after the horrible legacy of Abu Ghraib, I feel compelled to emphasize these points.

Over ten weeks before, Kamal had announced the move into the refinery where we would die if the bombs came. I had expected to die soon after that move. It felt like death row. I’d become fatalistic, accepting the events of each day as they came. Losing fear was liberating. This must be a secret of life, the one that allows people to endure adversity. I wondered what other secrets I had to learn.

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November 15-22, 1990

Abu Alaa wanted to know the details of the divorce, but before I could answer, two men came into the room. One had an unmistakable Arab face. He wore a green uniform with no markings and a heavy jacket; the desert was getting cold. On his right hip rode a holstered pistol, stains on the flap covering the grip, as if it had been opened or shut with dirty hands. He came in and sat down. The other man, who went straight for the tea thermos, wore a similar uniform, but he was blond. At first glance, I assumed he was a new hostage, but the uniform puzzled me. When he’d filled two glasses with tea and stirred the four cubes of sugar he dropped in each, he came over, and set both cups on the table. He greeted Abu Alaa with a kiss, then offered his hand for me to shake. He seemed to speak fluent perfect Arabic with the other two.

“We’re on leave,” said the darker man, “from police work in Kuwait.” He spoke English very well, but my eyes kept going back to the blond who seemed to speak no English.

The first man took a sip of tea. “You think my blond friend here is from your country?” he laughed as he spoke. “We Iraqis come in all colors, even blond.”

“I from Mosul, north Iraq,” said the blond.

“Ahlan,” (Welcome) I said.

The first man changed the subject. “Why do expatriates generally not talk highly of Kuwaitis?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I wanted to say he’d just have to ask “expatriates generally,” but I decided to stay quiet.  I’d found in Kuwait my friends tended to be anyone but Kuwaitis but chose to avoid talking about this.

Later, back in my bed, I couldn’t sleep, troubled by a renewed sense of powerlessness.   I repeatedly gripped my steel pipe, sometimes swinging it through the air for practice. As the pipe whistled through the air, I was puzzled about my behavior.  I maintained decorum outside this cell.  Why didn’t I strip, run amok, destroy equipment, attack civilians in the factory? Why not surrender to my fury and force a change, any change, even if it meant I’d not survive?  Of course, I knew my answers to all those questions were like Patty Hearst’s about people expecting that when the Symbionese Liberation Army took her hostage, she would just “spit them in the eye and get killed.”

When I tired of alternately trying to sleep and swinging the pipe, I sat at the window. The sill spanned a wall almost two feet thick; I considered it a table across which to look into the refinery. Straight ahead was the RO water plant, a quarter-mile, five-story building topped with huge fan units, each with mist coming from them.  Toward morning, a slight wind carrying some comforting moisture into my cell whetted my appetite.

At breakfast I learned from Reiner that Jack was gone.  Two guys fitting the description of the ones I’d met the night before took him to Baghdad to meet his wife.  He’d had only ten minutes to pack.

Umm Kul was waiting for me when I got back to my cell.  Her mission that day seemed to be giving me a five-dinar bill:   she walked in, stopped in front of me, reached into her housecoat, and pulled out the money. Maybe she’d heard we’d stopped at the market on the way back from the mesbah.

I refused it at first: I had no need for cash. I had other things on my mind anyhow.  But she insisted, going on and on, I think, saying that I, like her son Kul*, a military conscript in Baghdad, needed some pocket money. It seemed a strange name, Kul.  A word with the same sound meant everyone, if I’d learned the word correctly. Her description of Kul made him seem as much a hostage as I was: when she talked of him, she held up her hands as though they were bound. Did I understood her logic that her son was subjected maybe more even than I was to the whims of people from Kamal to Saddam, or was she talking about herself? When talking with her, given that my vocabulary was so limited, I never knew if I was just hearing what I wanted.  I suspected the less I understood her language, the more passionate it sounded.

She talked with uncharacteristic urgency.  She even referred to muhandes Saddam; muhandes (engineer) was a term of respect. She always referred to Mr. Ali as muhandes Ali, which technically he wasn’t.  I hadn’t heard her use this term for people beyond the refinery before. But now she talked of muhandes Saddam, muhandes Jaber Al Sabah, muhandes Bush even. She usually let on her dislike for Saddam: however, this morning, she was talking about some British and muhandes Saddam. She may have been talking about Jack, who was now in Baghdad, possibly to meet Saddam and then leave for home, Great Britain or whatever. Then I must have missed the language connection somewhere because she mimed acts of torture like pulling out fingernails and attaching electric probes. For an instant I wondered how this uneducated, traditional marsh Arab woman—she’d said she was originally from Qurna, the mythical Garden of Eden—how she knew about such things as torture?  Then I wondered why we had so far been spared learning of it first hand.  A few weeks before, Ali seemed hurt about reports in European newspapers called us “mistreated.”  Torture, other than at its broadest definition—deprived of rights to move—never  happened yet.

Circelia’s planning to come here was so crazy that, much as I wanted to see Diana, to be with her, an idea emerging recently was of imprisonment as perverted security. I wondered if this was what causes ex-convicts to commit more crime to “free” themselves from the uncontrolled life outside the security of the prison. Circelia would beg that I call off the divorce and torment me if I didn’t. Continued detention—even along with its death threat—gave me respite, an opportunity to float along in time that had slowed down, almost stopped.  Days didn’t matter.  I had no deadlines of any sort; death might arrive on its own schedule with ten of fewer minutes notices.  If I escaped, made it to Saudi Arabia and then back to Diana, I’d still need to navigate the wiles of Circelia. Clocks would start ticking again. Security behind walls and barbed wire had an appeal.

I went on learning Arabic, sounding out words in the dictionary when no one was around to help. Seeing a drawing of a mermaid in the dictionary, I guessed it would be pronounced harous. One day I told Saad I wanted to go to the mesbah to see the harous: without missing a second he said, “No, that was a dead toad.”

“But no,” I said. “Harous is there.” I wanted to see such a creature as I swam, the stuff of fantasy and the substance of Diana. I would follow wherever it led. “Harous is my zawaj.” He laughed some more: but I didn’t want to amuse him—only make him doubt my sanity, suspect me so delusional that I saw hallucinations under the water. I wanted those hallucinations to happen, dreaming of her enough.

I ignored all fellow hostages except Reiner.  My after-supper routine started with playing a few sweaty games of ping pong with him.  Then I’d put on the stiff new steel-toed shoes Ali’d finally got for me, and hike a few laps of the factory to break them in and develop the right set of calluses. Speedwalking around the refinery roads, I gazed at the moon, almost gone again, and bright stars I imagined were Al-Mareekh (Mars), Aldeberan, Betelgeuse, my new guardians, brothers in the sky I talked to like harous in the mesbah. These lights needed names and it didn’t matter if I mislabeled them.  Then I’d go to the guards’ house to drink tea and watch the 10 o’clock Baghdad news. One night while I was sitting there, a soldier came in, bundled against the cold. I assumed he was one of those dug into the desert around the plant. The guards offered him tea and cigarettes. While I sat there, he asked the guards nothing about me. He noticed my shoes; they were just like his. Did he suspect the guards, secret police, might not have this bizarre situation under control? The police slept in beds in a building; he went back out to sleep in the desert, I supposed. Did he resent this? Revealing nothing, saying little, he left.

The lead story on the Iraqi national TV news was Jack, his wife and six other couples. The women who’d come two weeks earlier to plead for their husbands had been granted an audience with Saddam. Saddam, after telling the women and their relatives his opinions, announced they could all go home. We saw our own Jack, the uncompromising, now a changed man in spite of shaved head, shake hands with Saddam. Was this what Circelia intended to do as well?  Would I maintain decorum and shake Saddam’s hand?

Ali stopped by as he did sometimes when he worked the night shift. He asked about the improved food served at lunch the past few days.

“If it was my decision, I would send you home this hour,” he responded to my saying they should send us all home, as they had with Jack, rather than try to improve our food.  “Since we can’t send you home, we really are trying to make you all as comfortable as possible, Mister Will.”

“I appreciate the excellent food these last few days,” I assured him. “But you should continue to expect complaints.  Food is very personal. I don’t even like my own mother’s cooking after I visit her for a few days, because I’m used to my own cooking now.”

“I understand some of you don’t like Abu Mahmoud’s cooking,” he said, adding, “I went to Italy a few years ago, and what I disliked most about Italy was the food.”

I was shocked until I thought about pork. “Tell me more about your trip to Italy, Ali.”

His smile seemed broader than usual as he told about his travels eight years earlier. Part of the problem with the food was pork, prohibited by his religion, as was the case with wine. But he had gone there to bologna for a metallurgy course, the high point in his life.

“If I could, I would invite you to my house to see the souvenir I brought back from Italy, a model of a gondola. It’s on a shelf in my house. It’s a little like the boats here in the Iraqi marshes, the bellams.”

When I pressed him to show me, he laughed. “The police don’t want that; otherwise, believe me, I would.” We went on to talk more about food. I asked if we could have more variety, like olives.

“You like olives?” he asked, surprise in his voice. There was so much we didn’t understand about each other, weren’t supposed to, probably, but we tried.

“And you, Mr Will, do you and the others want to go to a church?”  He seemed genuine, and I said I did.  “Mr. Yusuf is also Christian.”  Ali explained that he knew Christmas was an important holiday and promised to arrange a trip to an orthodox church in Basra at Christmas—if we were still here—for anyone who wanted.  I assured him I would appreciate that.

He stayed for over an hour. “By the way, Ali, how much notice did you have at Asmida that “guests” were coming to the factory?”

“Just four days,” he said. “It was an order from the police. When they came, the D. G. called me to the office. He said I was responsible to prepare for about a dozen guests. I knew nothing more than that.”

Talking with Umm Kul remained one of the strands of sanity.  It seems strange thinking that now.  Picture this:  she would walk around the room with a broom, mostly not touching the bristles to the floor as I accompanied with a flyswatter pointing at objects.  One day I’d point at some something and ask “Ish hatha?”  (What’s that?) again and again.  I’d write the word on a paper phonetically.  The next day, I’d point to those objects and test my memory and pronunciation.  And ask for new words.  She’d supply words, laugh at my mispronunciation, and make commentary I’d not understand.

Not that we fully understood each other about very much.  When she arrived one morning with a bottle containing a small wet rat, suggesting—I thought—that I keep it, maybe as a pet to replace Biggles, now long gone, I insisted it go outside.  My fellow hostages tolerated my conversations with the Iraqis, but the keeping a water rat would have crossed a line.

One morning Saad said Americans needed to be ready at 9:30.  It was Thanksgiving. I stood on the landing waiting. I’d put on my usual jeans and T-shirt, my favorite one with a map of coastal Maine on the front.  When Umm Kul saw me, she strongly disapproved.  “Laa, Muzavne,” (No, bad.) she said, pointing to my outfit and pulling up her nose and pushing forward her eyebrows. She said other things that sounded like lazaam sawa sheikh (must be like a sheikh),  repeating it and pointing to other clothes enough that I assumed she meant to put on my new gray suit and white shirt. Umm Kul stayed near my cell as I dressed for the “ruckus,” her word, the Arabic term for a party with dancing, I guessed. I liked the connotations of this. Through the grapevine she knew about Saad’s instructions and Mr. Mohammed’s visit a week or so earlier with Abed al Khaliq’s pickup.  In the pickup bed was a pile of new white shirts and double breasted suits, grays and ivorys;  I presumed Ali Baba had looted them from a boutique in Kuwait.  Like everyone, I’d chosen a jacket and pants, hung them up, and forgotten about them.  Later when Abu Alaa asked why we didn’t wear the suits, I just said they didn’t fit. She influenced my choice: when Saad arrived, armed and in uniform, I met with Umm Kul’s approval:  white shirt and jeans.

I joined Max and Gray in the back of a Mercury, no doubt also thanks to Ali Baba. Saad sat next to the driver, a stranger, riding shotgun, quite literally. The driver, like many other maniacs on the road, darted around and between the army trucks.

Gray pointed out Basra University as we passed: new public buildings, each one like the others and surrounded by hundreds of people walking on the sidewalks that cut across sand. Near a billboard of Saddam dressed as a Bedouin on a white horse, we passed a flea market, which Saad identified as the place to buy used VCRs and TVs, used in Kuwait, no doubt.  A little farther, we drove up to a large fenced complex. Gray said it was the South Oil Club.  The fencing obscured the correct entrance.

“No, you can’t enter here,” said Gray to the driver. “Back up. Go around that corner, and go in that gate,” he explained, pointing out a counter-intuitive route in. I could see no surprise on the face of the driver or Saad about Gray telling them how to get to the location they had apparently received orders to take us to. Gray pointed to a modernistic four-story cylindrical tower. “There.  We used to hold meetings among drillers and Iraqi government officials over there,” he said. Other cars and military vehicles were parked every which way in front of the building. Guards stood around at the entrance.

We followed Saad and the driver inside. In a lobby area stood about twenty other people I guessed were Americans, the youngest Caucasian and about twenty, long blond hair held down by a baseball hat, brim turned to the back. Besides a tall bearded black man in his fifties and two Latino or Arab men, most looked middle aged, white, gaunt.  Most had beards, longer than my unevenly cut stubble. More than an equal number of uniformed guards mingled, some sitting drinking tea like Saad.  A few others recorded the event:  three teams moved around with cameras, lights, and audio booms.

I walked over to see my old friend Hendrik. “Hey, you still at the LNG?” I asked, shaking his hand.

“No, the bastards moved me to a pumping station in the Rumailah oilfield. It’s flat and empty there for miles around,” he said. He looked weak but more defiant even than before. “I think the SS at the LNG wanted to get rid of me. And I wanted to get out of there with those tanks of liquid nitrogen right above us. So I kept hammering away at them. How you doing?”

I told him about fighting to be allowed to swim to stay in shape. “I took your advice and got a weapon and know where holes in the fence could allow escape.”

“Good, Good,” he said without smiling. His new location sounded bleak.  Missile batteries stood near his residence.  Russians and Yugoslavs working at his installation had revolted, sabotaging equipment in hopes of being deported, but instead they were handcuffed and taken away by military trucks.

After a half hour, the guards told us to move into the center of the round banquet hall where tables were arranged in the shape of a “U”. I sat with Hendrik. We didn’t talk much besides to comment on the show:  immaculate tablecloth, bouquets of plastic flowers and real peacock feathers, elegant silverware. Drinks of many hues were arranged between us and the cameras; I checked the labels: Russian wine, Jordanian beer, Hungarian brandy, Iraqi arak, Kuwaiti Pepsi, pre-August 2, 1990, of course. The sound system assaulted us with Michael Jackson’s ditty “I’m bad, I’m bad.” A few of the guards moved their heads in time with the music.  Two video teams moved in close as we drank. I wondered if they expected us to be jolly, get drunk, and fall on our faces, maybe get up and moondance. I sipped a beer slowly, alternating it with lots of water. The guards sat outside the view of the cameras, watching us.  Most of them drank Cokes.

After a few beers I went to the toilet.  A guard directed me to the room marked “Ladies.” Umm Kul was the only woman I’d talked with in months, longer it seemed. Servers there bringing drinks were nervous-looking young men dressed impeccably, white shirts, no ties, sharply pressed black pants, oiled hair slicked back like Abu Alaa’s.  After an hour or so, Colonel Syphr appeared.

“Gentlemen. We are so happy to let you celebrate your holiday of thanks. Please move to the dining room.”

In another part of the building, four large conference tables had been pushed together. When we had all taken a seat, waiters brought in four platters: each held a large turkey cooked with its head still attached. For a while, no one moved. “Eat,” said an officer moving behind a camera team. I picked up a large knife and began to carve the turkey nearest me. The camera moved in. Hendrik gathered the slices onto a plate and passed them around; the camera followed the platter. One hostage, wearing around his neck a large cross he seemed to have made, proposed that he begin a prayer. “I’ll start. I’ll stop when I’m finished, then whoever wants to add something, just speak as you feel moved to.”

Then we ate. Two Iraqis sat at the table with us; one was the jolly director of PC 1.  He laughed at one point. “Sorry, gentlemen. We couldn’t able to get zee cranberry. In your country I always had cranberry wheez turkey on Thanksgiving.”

After a while, the officer with the camera team came forward with a microphone and loops of cord. “Does anyone wants to make a message to send to his family in Unite State?”

A lanky man off to my right stood. With a gentle voice and a Texan accent, he introduced himself as Tom. The video camera team scrambled to get him in, I suppose, the most sumptuous frame. He took the microphone. “I would like to say hello to my wife.” Pause for swallowing tears. “I am well but I wish this came to an end, peacefully. We hope that our two governments sit down and resolve this.” Pause. Lots of swallowing. “And not make mountains out of molehills. We . . . .”  He choked and could say no more. He sat down and passed the microphone to the man with the cross. He started . . . but didn’t finish. Several others tried, with the same result. I just passed the microphone to Hendrik, who passed it quickly to his neighbor.

At dusk I returned to Asmida with a six-pack of Jordanian Petra beer for my housemates. I’d gathered the bottles from a case beside our table. If there were other bottles available, I would have taken them. Everything had become free as we lived without money or keys. I offered a bottle each to Reiner and Jurgen.

“Keep the beer,” Reiner said. “Abu Alaa told us to pack today.” His voice was tired.

Jurgen, on the other hand, popped open the bottle and guzzled it, dancing around the room.  It pained me to hear that they were going.  I felt abandoned, depressed to be left behind.

“I’m really glad for you. Don’t misunderstand me, my face,” I said, imagining my expression showed pain of loss more than happiness for them, but I felt mostly overwhelmed by a diminishing chance now to reach the opposite shore.

“Listen, Will, don’t say anything, I know how you feel,” he said.

“Look Reiner, you know me well enough. Get my diary pages to Diana.” He had agreed to take another installment of the diary out. “Call her collect and explain who you are and how we’ve spent the past few months together.”

Just after nightfall, Abu Alaa came by to pick them up.  I stood on the landing as they disappeared.

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November 8-14, 1990

“Her letter showed so much respect for el raees Saddam Hussein,” Abu Alaa said one morning, as he began talking about the el raees releasing me soon in gratitude for her gesture—her wonderful letter printed in the Baghdad newspapers and read on the radio.

“What letter? Whose letter?” I really thought he was joking or had gone insane.

“Your wife, from Africa. You never told me your wife was from Africa,” he said.

“She’s not my wife now. We’re divorced, or should be,” I protested, wondering if I sounded shrill.

“Maalesh (no problem),” Abu Alaa responded. “It doesn’t matter if she is your wife or your ex-wife. It was a great letter. El raees likes it.”

“B-but what exactly did it say?”

“I’m not sure. I just heard by phone from Baghdad that your wife wrote a very respectful letter to el raees. But we can listen to it on the radio news.”

I went with him and the other guard, Saad, who also thanked me for my wife’s letter.

“She’s not my wife,” I said, watching Abu Alaa smirk.  “To me it does matter a lot that you know she’s not my wife. She’s not. We stopped being husband and wife maybe five years ago. She is not my wife,” I insisted.

Abu Alaa changed the subject. “You teach me English,” he asked. “You every night teach me English.” I could understand him, but he spoke not nearly so well as Kamal.

“Sure,” I said. “I agree to do this if you teach me Arabic in exchange.”

“Good. We start now.”

The how’s of teaching he left to me, so I decided to introduce him to seven or eight words of English he wanted to know in exchange for seven or eight words of Arabic I wanted, nightly. When we started, he picked up an Iraqi military magazine that had pictures of tanks, missiles, and rifles—words he wanted to know immediately. When we got to what I told him was a “rifle,” he told me the Arabic term was bandokhiya. This stunned me: it sounded not coincidentally like bandoki, the word with the same meaning in Lingala, a language of Congo. I knew that Swahili, another official language of Congo, borrowed words from Arabic, but here was the first one I’d come across in Lingala. This also scared me: was it possible my life had come full circle now? A word in the first non-European language I studied was the same as that word in this latest language. And the word was what might just kill me. Did coming full circle mean that my end was near, that I’d soon be shot like the people in Kolwezi? Or was I just off-balance, interpreting a coincidence as if it were an omen that it wasn’t, expecting symmetry where there would be none?

In truth, the fact of her letter wasn’t so strange.  I’d written to the powers-that-be myself:  To el raees Saddam I wrote respectfully that holding us could not help his cause. To Bush I wrote that sitting down to talk with Saddam would improve his status. After all, American presidents spoke with Soviet presidents at the height of the Cold War.  How could this be different?

I’d written to my children, repeating over and over that I missed them.  But most of my writing went to Diana, weekly letters as well as the journals. I hoped she already had the first part, from Olivier. Iraq was getting colder: this might be my winter journal.  When this ordeal had started, it’d been summer by her, and I imagined Lost Pond, mosquitoes, lady’s slippers, and Diana’s flower garden. Now snow might cover the frozen ground. I wrote the first journal page at my window sill:

“I’m losing the sensual pleasure of the warm sun on my skin. I hope you’ve found solace in something while you’re enduring being hostage of this situation.

It pains me to write that for a week or so I’ve had dreams that you’ve fallen out of love. In one, you’ve built a large piano in the cabin.  It’s so large that there’s no room there for me anymore. If these are dreams prompted by months of being out of touch with you, then it’s just another torture, insidious sowing of doubts that may bear cruel fruit later. I shudder to write this but do so as a way of staying faithful to the idea of being frank.

The moon is getting full again; I imagine this means I’m safe for a while once more, the most fruitful time for an attack coming on the new moon. I’m doodling a lot those days, drawing dozens of variations on a same cartoon face: a surprised look on the full moon. I don’t know why I draw this or why the face on the moon is surprised.”

Umm Kul came to talk the first thing the morning after Abu Alaa told me about the letter. She too wanted to thank me for the good letter, but she seemed confused about who was who in my life: she knew that the woman in the picture by my bed was not African, as news reports about the letter described her. I explained again that the letter was written by a zawaj talaq, one of the words I’d learned from Abu Alaa. She seemed not to understand; maybe my Arabic was too limited to explain complex issues like ex-wives.

She changed the subject and pulled out four postcards I guessed she’d bought from a market in Basra. She pointed to one that showed the shrine of the tomb of the Shi’ite prophet Ali;  the other three cards depicted boats:  boys poling bellams, a Gulf dhow under sail, and small tugboats with barges under a date palm grove. She’d picked up on my not-so-subtle interest in boats, though she didn’t know that talking about ships and boats—like watching clouds—was about fantasy, about escape and survival.  Two powerful vehicles—boats and postcards—if only the cards could travel and bring response and if only those hulls could bear me away, I thought. Or maybe she did know, and she did understand my predicament because it was her own too: she needed escape from the facts of her life as an Iraqi.

Messages came in other forms.  One night someone shook me out of sleep. I opened my eyes.  My watch said 1:30. Colonel Syphr stood beside my bed.  I sat up. He was smiling. Is this the execution? was my first thought, but I didn’t reach for the pipe.  Someone about to kill me wouldn’t have that expression and might not even want to awaken me before the dispatch to a final sleep.

Instead, he drew a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I have a message for you,” he said grinning, with his usual disgusting sophistication. I saw the Japanese in the other room behind him, as they hadn’t gone to sleep yet.  I understood any curiosity they’d have about his going into my “cell,” as I called it.

The paper was a telegram from Circelia, a cryptic note of less than twenty-five words dated almost four full weeks earlier: “Will Jr rushed hospital 10/21. Think can save right eye. Surgery tomorrow. I’m losing mind. Circelia.”

The rest of the night I couldn’t sleep. Questions swirled through my head. Why was he rushed to the hospital? Why was the right eye in danger? Did this imply that the left eye was gone? What had surgery accomplished? Why was Circelia losing her mind? Was this real, or was the whole thing an exercise in misinformation she had generated to try to get me released on humanitarian grounds?  Was this a bizarre Iraqi ploy?  What could I do with this disturbing information except be tortured by my impotence?

A few days later, Saad entered the mangeriyah for a routine breakfast: the hostages crowded at one end of the long table, and the guards at the other end. The open space in the middle of the table got larger and larger after the French and Jack left. I again sucked in my cheeks whenever I wasn’t talking to Reiner in order to appear more gaunt than I was in case the guards would notice. But Saad had a box and an unusual smile.  Then he pulled out a letter and called Reiner’s name.  Then another for Nigel. When he was done, I had seven, seven! fantastic bundles of paper, from Diana, my children, parents, friends.  All said the same things in a variety of ways:  we pray for your safe release soon.  For some minutes, I felt free already.

On Diana’s, the one I opened first, I had noticed a faint #4 to the left of the return address on her letter.  Inside the date read October 7, six weeks earlier. . . . She was dejected, she said, because the US State Department wouldn’t talk with her because—they said—she had no legal claim to information about me. It troubled her that Circelia was telling all who’d listen about our happy marriage, and that she would do all to get me—her beloved—out.

The photograph of Diana, unmistakable and standing near the edge of a horse pasture, puzzled as well as comforted me:  she wore a helmet and boots and carried a switch; a dozen or so paces behind her were two horses, brown. The trees beyond the horses had red leaves colored by the bright sun of a glorious fall day, but in a place I didn’t recognize, as if the year had brought changes as profound in her world as in mine. While we were together, she’d  always wanted a horse. Her face was tight. I wondered what she’d say if we spoke face-to-face in that horse pasture sitting on that rail fence.

She’d included a note from a mutual friend, which I left beside her photo—“Will, Just grin, and don’t stop grinning. Grin until you believe it, and one day soon, they will put you on a plane. I promise. Love–Warren.”  Good advice, I thought, better than swinging a pipe or flinging excrement or otherwise acting like a madman.

The next afternoon, Kamal brought a telephone to our house and plugged it into the wall. At supper the night before he’d announced that we’d get to call a family member, but the catch was we needed to invite that person to spend Christmas with us, here in Asmida.

As he made the first call—with Joe, a new guest—the calling system turned out more convoluted than the proposition was ludicrous.  First, he called the Asmida switchboard, asked the operator to call Baghdad, and then hung up. When the switchboard operator got through to Baghdad, he called Kamal.  Then he told Baghdad the overseas number and then hung up again. When the Baghdad operator got through to the overseas number, he called Kamal, and Kamal passed the phone to us. The eerie thing about the arrangement, as he described it, was that he—the guard, the “enemy”—would hear our loved one’s voice and converse before we actually did.

Joe was a Londoner who’d been moved in recently from a power plant near Ur. I knew little about him and I decided it’d be better to ignore him than to dislike him. The steps and waiting involved in making a call this way epitomized inefficiency, but I learned more about Joe that evening than I had in the two weeks he’d been a housemate. He’d been on Somerset’s flight, traveling to Calcutta to see his fiancée, whom he was to have married at the end of November.

Several times, Kamal warned us, “I will be listening, as will people in Baghdad. If you say something military, my hand will be on the receiver to cut the line immediately.”

I tried to anticipate problems with the call: there’d be an echo on the line and without forewarning, Diana would be speechless—half asleep or teased into thinking I was calling from an airport on my way home.

Joe’s timing was right for him to catch his family and fiancée—she’d come to wait for him at his parents’ home—at Sunday dinner. At first I thought he must have felt self-conscious to have us all listening in on his call. But I focused more on rehearsing what I’d say to Diana, not on listening to others.

Then Kamal handed me the receiver, and despite the labyrinthine system, my call connected, all the people in the room disappearing and the misery of several months falling away when I heard Diana, the voice associated with better times.  But the connection was poor and scratchy.

“Diana, it’s Will.  I’m in Iraq.”

“Will, oh my.”  She said nothing for a few second, and I supposed she might be crying.  The line hissed and echoed ghostly sounds.  “Will, We’re trying to get you out.  Nabil has offered to take your place.”  She said nothing again for some time.  Who’s Nabil, I wondered.

“How are you doing, love?” I asked.

“Sorry, I didn’t hear that.” She said.

I repeated my question.

“It’s hard,” she said.  “And the State Department won’t tell me anything,  They talk only with Circelia.”   She was crying, and so was I.

I said nothing about her coming here for Christmas; unable to hear well, what I did perceive raised many questions.  We lacked time or clarity to pursue something about a Palestinian friend volunteering to take my place as a hostage, but I didn’t know any Palestinians in common with her. She said the divorce wasn’t final and that Circelia had told people—including a newspaper reporter—that I’d indicated an interest in reconciliation. Why wouldn’t the divorce be final? Why the hell is Circelia talking to the newspaper about these things? What form of insanity would lead her to think I would reconcile? Didn’t everyone know that through this ordeal, “getting back to Diana” had been my mantra? She said nothing about my son’s hospitalization. Was she withholding bad news?

The line suddenly went dead.  It couldn’t have been ten minutes.  I felt overwhelmed by a sense of the horrors when private people get caught up in the trawl net of international politics.

Subdued, I said, “Thanks, Kamal. Thanks.”  I’d just talked at her. I didn’t catch much of what she said.

“Maybe you can call in two weeks again,” he said.

The call helped me believe I’d get out. Escaping across the desert or through the water might not be necessary anymore. Diana existed again; immediacy returned. She was the audience for my diary. In the following days I saw her more clearly again. I swam harder, farther underwater without coming up for air. I resumed doing exercises. I walked longer and faster around the refinery, especially at night. I worked even harder on seeing and writing down all the sights within the refinery. More than ever, I drank in through all my senses, but I had to see all I could.  Looking at everything in this refinery seemed to give me power.  Maybe I distracted myself by scrutinizing the details and writing them into my notebook.  Distraction freed me from thinking about my son and other kids, our future, my life.

Jack learned from his phone call that his wife was coming to Iraq not at Christmas but in a few days, “This is not just for a visit,” she had stated.

One evening a few days after the telephone call and Diana’s familiar voice, the sun set colorfully as we walked the dusty road back from the mesbah. It was Thursday, the eve of the Sabbath, and something about the backlit small blue clouds floating in a pink and yellow sky made it feel like an American Saturday night. In spite of a waning moon and all the threats we faced, I almost felt comfortable.  Saad had walked us to the mesbah that afternoon even though his Volkswagen stood by their house. Walking had become an important ritual for me; besides providing exercise, going out the gate hinted at freedom, a reminder of a normal life I once had, one that might never return.

Walking to the mesbah, we met friendly faces and ones that became so.  Umm Kul on the road with her daughter—about the same age as mine—pushing a cart carrying large gray plastic water jugs, RO water for their home up beyond the camp. Her daughter wore a long frilly white dress and had her hair in braids halfway to her waist. Sometimes the people in the Evinrude truck passed slowly by us, reminding me of the small motors on fishing boats on a New England pond. An old Iraqi man named Nasser occasionally greeted us: lean and grizzled, he wore a white cheffafi on his head. His gray shirt had a red pocket patch that read Mitsubishi Heavy Industries; his accent and mannerisms—bowing and touching his nose with his index finger whenever referring to himself—reflected  the Japanese who must have taught him English while he helped build the refinery.

Saad never seemed like a guard:  a guide to the culture maybe, but not a member of the “secret police,” a term often now used with the adjective dreaded; informal and bored, he slouched as we walked and smiled most of the time.  I considered him the one to bribe for a ride to the border. He never talked about Saddam. One day when I asked if he was in the army, he shook his head. “No, I’m an economics student at the University of Basra, but as I told you, there are no classes now.” I had suggested to him once that I was bored and could spend some time teaching English at the university, and he  responded that it was closed that semester, as if, were it not closed, naturally he’d get me a job application.  He reported he liked English, that he had read The Merchant of Venice the previous year.

Walking with Saad and Reiner admiring this sunset made me very restless. And then in the twilight I spotted an old bus parked beside the market; I’d never seen it before, a 1957 Chevrolet cab, like a pickup, to which a wooden bus coach had been added. The wood, a rich but dry color, looked old and dry enough to spontaneously combust.

“Saad, let’s go look at the bus?” I asked, hoping he caught the eagerness in my voice.

“Why?” he asked.

“I just want to. It’s a great bus, don’t you think so, Reiner?”

“Why?” Saad repeated. He seemed concerned I was teasing him. “It’s an old bus.”  Reiner said nothing.

“Yes, but it’s a fifty-seven Chevy,” I said.

He laughed. “What?”

“It’s a Chevrolet built in 1957,” slowing the sentence down.

“We call this ‘fifty-seven’ also,” he said, but it sounded more like fuffety-seben.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, leading us toward the bus.

“Why do you call it a fifty-seven?” asked Reiner, looking at me.

“Because that’s the year it was made. That’s what it is,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “maybe that’s why Iraqis call it a fifty-seven too.”

“But it’s English,” I said.

The metal parts of the bus had been painted over so many times that they had texture; orange was the top color although a few pitted spots revealed a green underneath, maybe a new layer of color for each new owner. The wood had once been varnished but now bore the color of the desert.  The Iraqi desert already preserved American technology and trucks.

Kamal had disappeared again after all the telephone calls.  Whatever other missions he was assigned to turned him sour.  He would talk little and lost his temper quickly.  Once he appeared with a notepad.  “I need to get everyone’s size and color preferences for coats, sweater, boots, and so on,” he said, sitting down at the table near the metal door. I imagined it was going to snow soon, or maybe we were moving to a place in the northern mountains where there would be snow.

I sat across from him. “Kamal, I appreciate your giving me clothes, but I would rather go to Kuwait and get my own clothes—and other things—papers and books.”

“Just give me your size,” he snapped. “None of this is my idea, Will. I have orders to follow.” I gave him some numbers, caring little whether they were correct or not. I reiterated wanting shoes just like Ali’s.  My tennis shoes were worn out and the sandals were not right for cold weather or running across the desert. Ali wore steel-toed work boots that no desert thorn could rip.

A few days later as Abu Alaa and I studied Arabic and English, he asked if I wanted to call the United States. I told him I wanted to talk with zawaj talaq, of whom he had become a fan. Unlike Kamal, he just dialed the number I gave, and Circelia answered.

“Hallo?” she said, her voice was clear but far away. This was the voice of conflict and incessant fighting. Once it had been a different voice, a beloved one: it still had the same accent, but the associations had changed since we first met. I switched immediately to French; Abu Alaa didn’t even show that he noticed or cared.

“Yes, all is well with our son. But I can tell you more about that when I visit.” she said, conveying no trace of hesitation.

“What’s wrong with Junior?” I pressed.

“I’ll tell you when I’m there,” she repeated.

Do not even think about coming here,” I told her. To my astonishment Abu Alaa didn’t question my talking another language. He didn’t even appear to be listening.  I repeated the sentence: “Ne viens pas!” (Do not come here)

“Oh, yeah. OK. Uh—huh,” she said, the manner of her agreeing making me nervous, since it seemed clear she’d already decided to come.

News chronology:

November 7:  Iraq releases some hostages

November 19:  Iraq offers to release all hostages by spring

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November 1-7, 1990

Kamal had been edgy the past weeks. He lost his temper with John the guest guest at supper once when John said there was an explosion in Basra recently. John and Ali had recently returned from the Baiji fertilizer refinery in northern Iraq.

Kamal said, “How do you know about this explosion?”

“Kamal, everyone in Basra is talking about the explosion. Tell us some more,” said John, calmly.

Kamal, sullen, said, “There is nothing to tell.”

One morning Jack gave Kamal a letter addressed to his family in “Great Britain.” Kamal looked at it, hesitated for five or so seconds, and handed it back. “Put a new address the envelope as ‘United Kingdom,’ said Kamal. Great Britain does not exist except in minds of imperialists. I don’t accept a letter addressed ‘Great Britain.’”

Jack refused to take the letter back. “I don’t give a fuck what you do or think, Kamal. Don’t accept it then. I just don’t give a fuck.”

Jack and others here had been separated from their wives or children for just over a month; it occurred to me that they were struggling to cope with this loss, a fresh severing, still in early unstable stages. I’d been coping without Diana for almost a year and without my children for much longer. Maybe this helped me distance our togetherness from all this, and helped me cope better. I’d felt that pain months ago and come to some resolution about it, independently of the pain of losing freedom.

The same day a man I’d not seen before came into the house. I assumed he was an engineer who worked at Asmida. He sat down and talked with Gray, who always wore his flameproof overalls. Kamal came in and saw him there. He rushed over and began to yell at him in Arabic. Other than that Kamal was upset because the man was talking to Gray, I couldn’t follow the conversation. Kamal grabbed his shirt collar and tried to move him toward the door. The man was much larger than Kamal, big enough to kill him with his bare hands if he wanted to. He struggled to free himself from Kamal’s grip. At one point, Kamal punched him. He could have gotten a pistol and shot him. “Kamal and the other guards could kill any or all of us whenever they have to;”  I regularly repeated this truth to myself.

I left, afraid of what I might see. Later I asked Gray.

“That was Ahmed, a Jordanian engineer who worked with me on a South Oil rig. He’s been bringing me medicine. He asked permission to enter the factory twice before, but not this time. The people at the gate just let him in because they thought Kamal or the others weren’t around. So when Kamal came by chance and found us talking, he accused Ahmed of sneaking in. When Kamal said he was in charge, Ahmed asked what possible qualification a secret police agent had for being in charge of a factory. That was when Kamal punched him.”

A few days after Abu Alaa had driven Olivier out of the refinery, Kamal told me to move to the other control room. I gathered up my books, took down the tanker calendar, and picked up my two bags. I walked over to Control Room #2 but found no bed. The Japanese were in their area, but they neither knew of a place I could sleep nor expressed any welcome. So I walked back to #1.

At supper, Kamal asked me why I had not moved. I told him I’d found no bed.

“There is one now. Move immediately,” he said. His eyes were glassy, humorless.

So I repeated the move,  the easiest move I’d ever had: I could carry all my belongings in a pack and a small duffel bag, and most of the weight of these bags was the canned food I’d carried since leaving my apartment more than two months before: tuna fish, and sweetened evaporated milk. For the first time in many years I had no keys for car, office, or home. No keys and yet I myself was locked in.  Keys, if they existed, rested entirely in others’ hands.  Equally ominous, I moved with a weapon, the two-foot steel pipe I’d picked up after Max had suggested we get a weapon.

When I got to #2, Mr. Ali waited for me, smiling as usual. He showed me an area that looked like a cell:  one bed, a square space maybe 10′ by 10′ defined on two sides by plywood about 10′ high, a 12′ ceiling. The plywood walls and the other two concrete walls of the building were a faded white, and the paint chipping; the floor was unpainted concrete. The two windows had screens and bars.  Access was no more or less than from my previous space, but although it looked like a cell, I imagined it could free me from the loud racism and misogyny of #1.

At sunrise I sat with the window open, and a cool mist washed into the room from the RO water filtration plant, giving the illusion of rain or mist.  The “plant” was an industrial complex the size of an apartment complex, eight large units topped with fans that emitted the spray now blown toward my open window.  If I closed my eyes and inhaled the mist, I could make this a balcony over a harbor. I pulled the chair up to the window first thing that morning and used the wide sill as a table and wrote in my journal and watched the shift workers come on duty carrying their black plastic water cans.  I recalled the Bible story of Daniel, a captive in Babylon, praying from an open window facing Jerusalem.  I took comfort in these waters of Babylon; the poetic truth of that thought made my plight palatable.

Umm Kul came in later. She laughed when she saw I’d once again moved my tanker calendar. She asked why. I told her I was planning to leave soon on my “safiynah” (ship). “Inshallah,” she said, holding her hands up in prayer. I’d put my photo album on a chair beside the bed; she sometimes looked at it, at the photo of Diana.

My cell had a closet with steel doors built into one of the concrete walls: inside was a green wool army jacket. I immediately hid it so that I might use it in case I ran: that and a stubbly face might make a disguise. I’d been clipping my facial hair infrequently like Abu Mahmoud and Abed al Khaliq. Besides part of a disguise, a week’s growth of beard made me feel mean, capable of using my pipe.

This cell would let me be alone with Umm Kul. This was important, never for the slightest idea of romance, but she gave me hope, support. She might be my age but seeming ancient, she exuded wisdom I lacked, as Saddam lacked.

“Kamal has a wife?”  I thought she said, after asking about Diana. I wondered if I heard her right. I was not confident she understood that Diana was my one and only true love and that Circelia should have been my ex‑wife by this point. And why would she think that I was anything of an authority on Kamal, I asked myself.

“Yes. Maybe, Why?” Feigning some ignorance seemed a useful strategy here.

But she changed the subject. She told me she was going to Basra the next day and offered to get me something.  I wondered. I didn’t really want anything, but I considered asking her to buy a cheffafi like Abu Mahmoud’s, which along with a week’s growth of beard, could be part of a disguise if I ran off across the desert.

I thanked her and said I’d tell her if I thought of something.

The next morning I met Kamal while walking around the grid of service roads within the refinery, something he’d told me not to do. I was near the clinic. But instead of reminding me not to walk inside the refinery or bringing up the move to Control Room #2, he asked if I wanted to walk outside the fence. I was puzzled but enthusiastic. He seemed frustrated. I assumed it was because his wife was pregnant and overdue, and I asked how she was.

“She’s fine,” he said, and then nothing more. We walked past the market, past the gate to the mesbah, and up the road past a school. We’d gone past there once at least a month earlier on our way to the LNG.

“That’s the Martyrs’ Memorial School,” he said, “named in honor of those who died fighting Iran.”

One child yelled out, “Goud mor nink Mee ster Wee lee am.” Kamal and I both turned in surprise. I feared it may be Umm Kul’s daughter and that this sort of spontaneity might be dangerous for that family, but Kamal said nothing about the child and appeared not even to give it a second thought. We walked a few hundred yards beyond the school and then turned around and returned to the factory. He didn’t really say much until we were almost back to the gate.

“Are you alright?” he asked, puzzling me again.  It made me wonder if I should know something he did. “Francis and the Captain at PC1 said they were worried for your health.” It’d been weeks since I’d seen them one day when I’d talked the guards into taking a few of us to PC1 for books.

“Strange,” I thought. “He holds us in deprived conditions and then starts to worry when our bodies start to break down.” Actually I felt weak but in good spirits unless I had diarrhea, which hadn’t been too often. I spent a lot of time hunting flies, crushing them with a fly swatter I got Umm Kul to leave for me. I now enjoyed killing flies. Using the swatter, I thought of bringing the pipe down onto the head of a guard—of Kamal—as he tried to stop me from running to a helicopter. I wondered if after killing a human once I’d get to enjoy that too, as I had with flies.

A few days before, Jurgen just let the door shut itself: the door-closing mechanism was poorly adjusted, and the door slammed. I’d spoken with Jurgen at lunch that day, and he’d not been upset about anything. The slam was just inattention I was quite sure, but Kamal jumped up and ran out following Jurgen.

“Get back here,” he yelled. “You will show respect. You will never slam the door that way.”

Jurgen walked back to the door and pointed at the mechanism. “You must fix this,” he said, quite sincerely. Jurgen the craftsman valued attention to repairs.  His face was red.

“Just close the door with respect,” Kamal said.

“Ok, ok,” said Jurgen, holding the door until it was a few inches from being shut. It made little noise. And Jurgen left.

Kamal’s instability reminded me that I did not know him. We no longer treated him with the same civility we’d showed two months before when he promised an unlimited beer supply and he joined us to play cribbage. Most of the guys didn’t even speak with him now; no one discussed politics as we had until he cut it off a month before. Maybe he was trying to deny that we perceived ourselves as prisoners. And he was not a host but just a guard, powerless to prevent us from perceiving the situation in any way we chose.

Rumor from the guest guest was that Kamal’d been bitter about conditions at Asmida because factory directors had been trying to get Colonel Syphr to dismiss him by filing a complaint that he’d been having sex with local women in the clinic where the guards lived. An underlying current to this was, John said, that Kamal was a Sunni from Baghdad, and the locals, mostly Shi’ite, resenting him, conveniently brought up the accusation that he was corrupting local women. I wondered if this was the intention behind some of the questions Umm Kul’d asked me about Kamal being married.

Abu Alaa, Mr. “Ali Baba,” had become the de facto head guard, as Kamal was usually away.

“In Iraq somewhere,” was all Abu Alaa would answer if I asked about Kamal’s whereabouts.

He’d chuckle when I retorted that Kuwait or Kathima was part of Iraq.  Abu Alaa intrigued me most of all the guards; he was the one that mattered then.  Unlike Kamal, he wore a three-piece, double-breasted suit and his hair was slicked back in a long pompadour, as if he were going out to a fancy nightclub. He said he was twenty-nine, though I could not help but think he was my senior. He had none of Kamal’s “holier than thou” pretentiousness, none of the hypocrisy Kamal’d showed with the Emmanuelle video, none of the prudery that prompted Kamal at one time to dictate that “guests” walking to meals had to wear long pants and shirts.

“Some of the women have complained that a few of you are wearing shorts and no shirts. You have to respect the women here,” Kamal had said, bringing up his favorite topic, respect.

“Damn you, Kamal,” I’d thought. “How about a little respect for our lives?”

Abu Alaa was from Babylon, which he called Bob ul. Actually he was from Hilla, the modern center across the Euphrates from the ancient city known in phrases like “Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of the earth’s abominations.” When he returned from bringing the French to Baghdad, he’d given me two pomegranates. “Here. Will. Have these romaans (pomegranates).  They’re from my town, Bob ul,” he said.

Abu Alaa lacked Sabah’s fetish for weapons. Sabah had disappeared, maybe to guard “ones like us” at another of the strategic sites in the area. Abu Alaa talked with Reiner, me, and the guest guest—we joked with him to know who he was. And he distanced himself from guys who’d solidified themselves into a traditional prisoner’s role. I wondered what sort of prisoner my grandfather had been.  Had he too sought to know which guards were approachable, corruptible from an ideological point of view.  He probably protected himself with his humor, his laugh.

<<News chronology:

November 4:  Interview with a returned hostage from the NYTimes.

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