First drafts are the hardest. Getting all the bits floating around in my head – all the hard facts and all the connections – to behave and getting them down on the page is a chore. Having a touch of a stomach bug doesn’t help.
Drifting to sleep last night, I could see the story. But when I woke up it was gone. I guess I’ll have to do the work.
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Fatima (not her real name) lives on the top floor of a crumbling cinder block and cement apartment building down a narrow street in Jaramana. The outer entrance is two steps up off a street mounded with small hills of crushed gravel and dusty leaking bags of Portland cement. There is a lot of new construction here.
It’s hard to tell if Fatima’s building is new or old. Like so many apartment blocks in Damascus, the places seems half finished, like the workers got called away or took a break and never came back. In the dank, chilly stairwell, PVC electrical conduit sprouts anemone-like from the unfinished window frames. Cinder block walls on the landing are open topped, bits of trash stuffed in the gaps.
Outside each apartment door, flocks of shoes herd around torn and stained doormats. The stairway winds upward, the screech and clatter of the street receding floor by floor.
Fatima answers the door. In black jeans and sweater, her dark hair cut short, she hugs the old woman and they murmur to each other.
About three feet off the thinly carpeted floor, a ring of smudges on the gray white wall in the entryway evidences children at play. The plaster walls are nicked, gouged, scribbled.
Bags of rice and beans sag on the small counter in the tiny kitchen. Loaves of bread poke out of a paper sack. On the range top, a greasy teapot gurgles, wisps of steam floating from the spout.
The bedroom is a heap of clothes and thin mattresses pushed against the walls. The cracked window is frosted white in the corners. A milky yellow mercury vapor streetlight bleeds into the room. There are no toys.
The single fluorescent tube screwed high on the wall casts a sickly green glow over the common room. A refrigerator hums in a corner. A rust flecked electric heater with a single glowing element is the only heat.
Sweet tea is brought out in small glasses. A plate of sugar cookies is passed around. Sitting in a plain chair, hands in her lap, Fatima looks only at the floor. Her fingers lace and unlace, skin raw, nails bitten to the quick.
Jet-black hair spiking from his head, the boy, her son, peaks around the corner, his nose red rimmed from the sniffles. He sprints across the cold floor and clutches his mother’s knees. Her hands move to his shoulders, then his head. He looks up at her.
Across the room, the older woman fidgets in the spongy orange upholstered chair. Her purse is perched on her knees. Behind her gold-framed glasses, her eyes dart around the room, moving from person to person.
“He shouldn’t hear this,” she says. Fatima pushes the boy away but he springs back to her like attached by an elastic band. He smiles. This is a game. Fatima runs her fingers through his hair and the daughter gets up and gently pulls the boy away and into the other room.
Fatima looks into the middle distance. Then down again at her ravaged hands.
She tells her story.
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This is a video of Rana Alouiby, my translator and fixer. I don’t know when the video was shot but, as her English was much better during my visit, it must have been awhile ago. Or she’s playing a role here. I don’t know.
Rana is a contradictory character. She talks a lot about peace but is quick to condemn Iraqis who’ve worked with the Americans as collaborators and traitors. She describes a childhood of relative priviledge under the documented brutality of the Saddam regime, skirting the murderous excesses and focusing on the petrodollar fueled golden age of the 1970’s and early ’80s. I trusted her to help get me the story I needed but as for her underlying political values I’m not so sure.
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And now the project. This project has been gestating awhile. A long while. Frankly, I’ve been wrestling with how to structure the thing. I’d thought I’d blend all my experience together – the Sabean, my fixer, Damascus, etc. – into a larger metastory about the Iraqi diaspora. Lately that’s seemed unwieldy. There is so much there. So much to tell. But upon reflection it did not seem to hang together. So I’m taking a different direction.
Now I’m going to break the whole into pieces. I’m going to work on two main pieces – the Sabean and the fixer. The Sabean story stands on it’s own. An ancient people besieged, in exile and in danger of being lost. The individual stories I heard are harrowing and need to be told. While there are nuances and convolutions, their story is straightforward really.
The fixer story is more complex in a way. Rana, my fixer, translator and guide, tells a compelling story as well but one fraught with contradiction. And questions for me as a journalist. While her commitment to my work is unquestioned, her character is less easily ascertained. Does she have an agenda? I’ll have to dig into that, ferret out some truths. We’ll see.
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