The minibus stopped in front of a modern building. We carried our luggage up to the second floor. I followed Faris into an elegant apartment consisting of three well-furnished rooms. There was also a spacious living room with Western furniture, curtains, a wooden desk, a large bookcase and a beautiful balcony.
‘How much is the rent?’ I asked Faris.
‘A thousand dollars,’ he said as he carried my luggage into the room assigned to me. It had a bed, a table, a wardrobe and a chair. I followed him into the room and looked it over. Then I went out and sat on the large leather sofa placed directly beneath the window. I looked around the living room as Faris entered the second room and came out holding a large wallet.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go to a bar, then we can go to the Press Cooperation Agency and AC Media & News.’
Parson’s Pub
‘The Green Zone has changed a great deal,’ I said as soon as we were out on the street. ‘Are there any new pubs?’
‘There are seven bars, a disco on Thursday nights, a sports bar, an English pub, a rooftop pub run by General Electric and a pub in a container run by Bechtel.’
‘Which one do you like best?’ I asked.
‘Parson’s Pub is quite nice and it’s always open to Iraqis.’
‘Only Iraqis?’
‘No, there are other nationalities as well. But mostly reporters.’
We saw a beautiful pub on our way. When I asked about it, he told me it was the most luxurious of all, with bamboo furniture. ‘Rumour has it,’ he added, ‘it’s the pub that belongs to the CIA so it’s known as Pub OGA.’ He turned to me smiling, ‘That’s the codename for the CIA.’
‘Is it really smart?’ I asked, trying to find out whether he’d been there or not.
‘Yes, I’ve been there once as a guest. It has a dance floor with a rotating disco ball and a games room.’
We passed a pizza place, two Chinese restaurants and a McDonald’s. It wasn’t long till we reached Parson’s Pub. As we arrived, I saw a large tent pitched in a parking lot, which had clearly once been a petrol station. According to Faris, this was one of the most exciting places to relax in the Green Zone. It had a random assortment of Marines, politicians, interpreters and correspondents who came to cover press conferences. As we walked past the tent, we saw American women soldiers in camouflage gear smoking hookahs, their machine guns lying beside them. There were also contractors on the make, chuckling aloud while drinking their beer, and strategic-affairs experts in light desert boots, white shirts and khaki trousers. They drank beer and played Risk, the board game. Suddenly Nermine Haidar, who’d flown in with me earlier that day, emerged from among those seated. She came forward in her jeans and open blouse that revealed her round breasts. She shook hands with us.
‘So, you’re here!’ she said.
I asked her about the journalist who’d been with her.
‘Don’t know how I got rid of him,’ she said.
‘Well, we’re going to the bar to have a bite to eat and a beer, and later we’re going the Press Cooperation Agency and AC Media & News. Would you like to join us?’
She paused for a moment. ‘Fine, I’ll join you later!’ she said.
We went into the bar, which was in the shape of a hut and fairly dark inside. As soon as we’d entered the main door, a black South African guard approached us. His accent was hard to understand but he told us to write our names in the guest book. The bar was beautiful, like a neighbourhood bar in Los Angeles or Miami. There was a lounge full of tables and chairs, and a dartboard on the wall. An American employee was holding a glass of beer in one hand and throwing one dart after another. At the front was a wooden barrel with draught beer. The pub itself was huge and consisted of several rooms. There were a few black barmen standing behind the wooden bar, with all kinds of bottles of drinks behind them. On the right was a tiny back room, used as a store for whisky, vodka and wine that could be sold at almost twice their price outside the Green Zone.
Faris stood at the bar and ordered two beers, at two dollars each.
‘Are you going to write your book on Kamal Medhat while you’re here in Baghdad?’ he asked.
‘I’ll write the Baghdad part here,’ I said, wiping froth from my lips with a tissue, ‘but I have to drop by the agency first to collect some important documents.’
‘Is your role as a ghost writer?’ he asked.
‘No, not at all. The book will come out in my name this time,’ I said. He nodded in agreement. ‘You know, of course, that I’ve written many reports under other people’s names,’ I added, still wiping my mouth, ‘but this time, I want the book to be mine.’
Then I began, I don’t know how, to draw an analytical comparison between two images that obsessed my imagination at the time: the image of the tobacconist — or the tobacco keeper, as I called him — as presented in Pessoa’s poem, and that of the ghost writer. I told Faris that each of us has two distinct personalities: one that we are born with, like the character of the keeper of flocks in Tobacco Shop, and one that we acquire, like that of the protected man. But few can distinguish the second from the first, whether regarding name, age or life history. What is even rarer is someone capable of creating the character of Campos, the tobacco keeper, who treated the other two personalities so condescendingly. He travelled and brought back the tobacco, guarded it, smoked it and lived his life stimulated by its clouds of smoke. That day, discussing the poem with Faris was like a hallucination, especially since he hadn’t read it. ‘Read it!’ I said to him as I drank my beer and continued to rave. I told him that I believed the work of a ghost writer was totally different from that of the tobacco keeper. The latter was unique in being enriched by the other two personalities, while the ghost writer was always ground down by his role. The ghost writer represented total absence and existed on another unconnected plane, living an empty life in an absolute vacuum. No sooner had I become totally absorbed in explaining my theory, than Nermine came in. The bar was overcrowded, so I stood up and beckoned her over. She came towards us and sat beside Faris, facing me. She raised her hands to tie her hair back with an elastic band. This was the first time I’d looked closely at her face. She was pretty with delicate features, thick black hair and a very fine nose. Her thick lips made her very sensual.
‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked her.
‘A beer,’ she said smiling.
It was Faris who asked her about her current work. She told him she was working for the BBC, making a documentary about Baghdad. On that day we learned many secrets of the Green Zone from Nermine. She told us that there was more than one sort of pass that enabled Green Zone residents to move around. The pass was your key to the Green Zone. We had to get either the military press ID or the pass for the International Zone, which was the official name of the Green Zone. The first one was red and the second was pink. The pink one was clearly the better, and was naturally only carried by Americans and government officials.
Nermine drank as she talked about the guards of the Green Zone. ‘They’re the most dangerous in the whole world,’ she said. ‘They’re authorized to kill, and you’d better keep a safe distance.’
She also explained the differences between the checkpoints. The ones closest to our residence were controlled by Gurkhas, the ferocious special security guards from Nepal. The ones further away were controlled by Irish guards.