Another knock: Reggie come to reassure them. “I thought you two might be anxious.”
Kim turned. “Are we under attack?”
“No, no—it isn’t the Iranians, it’s a celebration. Those are tracer bullets. Usually means the troops have done well at the front. Probably won some battle or other, so they’re letting everyone know about it.”
“Oh, man,” said Kim, hand on chest. “Scaring me half to death because they’ve killed more guys than the other side?”
“Where was the battle?” Thea asked. “Not too close, I hope?”
“We’ll never know. There won’t be any details in the papers tomorrow—or no details worth noting. The only thing the people of Baghdad need to know, those families who have brothers, fathers, and husbands at the front, is that some undefined battle has been won in some undefined place. Keeps morale up.”
“So can we go outside and watch the fireworks?”
“Yeah.”
They stepped onto the small balcony. A moment’s homesickness glanced over Thea, as she thought about Dublin’s peaceful streets and imagined what her mother would say if she could see her now: standing on a balcony watching tracer bullets fly across the night sky as a nearby-faraway war landed on her windowsill.
Dublin touched her again a few nights later when she heard that its streets had been, for several days, even more peaceful than she had imagined; that they had, in fact, been deserted. Every month an Irish colleague, Mic, came out from the London branch (usually carrying their mail) to do a few days’ work with Reggie, and it was he who brought the news that Ireland had suffered blizzards and a historic freeze soon after Thea had left, with temperatures dropping, in some places, to minus fifteen. Over dinner, he captivated them with his account of his own experience of the storm: he had landed in Dublin on the last flight before the airport closed down under the weight of twenty-six centimeters of snow, and had been forced to walk to his mother’s home, making the long trek into town in deep snow, along a deserted O’Connell Street and on out to the suburbs. It had taken him seven hours to reach his mother, but at least he’d got there, he said. Hundreds of passengers had been trapped at the airport for days. The image stayed with Thea, all that night and beyond: a white O’Connell Street, hardly a car or person in sight. It was in the letters she received too, this blizzard. Her mother had written of frozen pipes and snowdrifts two meters high, of ice floating down the rivers and of a strange quiet. The quiet of snow. It had gone on for ten days, the freeze, and Thea felt lonely for this disaster, this national emergency: she would have liked to have seen her city reduced to a whisper.
Homesickness never lasted long. There were too many distractions, even right there, in their hotel.
Her eye had been caught, and her heart was following. It was hard to ignore Mr. Sachiv Nair, impossible not to see him, center-stage behind the reception desk, when she hauled herself from the elevator every morning and made her way across the white marble lobby. He was also the first person she saw, most days, standing tall and straight, in his black suit and silver tie, when she came back from work. She found every excuse to speak to him: were there any telexes from home? Was the weather going to warm up any time soon? When could she hope to get her laundry back?
Hotel living meant they had no choice but to use the laundry service for all their clothing—even panties and bras had to be put into the plastic bags provided and noted on a list. They started off by handwashing their underwear, but soon tired of having it hanging off the shower rail and draped around the bedroom. Relinquishing privacy, they stuffed everything into the see-through bags, duly filling out the forms, and watched as they were taken away by young boys wearing white gloves. There was no knowing exactly where their clothing went—somewhere into the bowels of the building—but it was washed, dried, and ironed, then returned to the rooms in carefully packed parcels, each item ticked off the list. The system sometimes broke down, but when Kim lost a bra, she was too embarrassed to inquire as to its whereabouts. “Can you imagine describing my white, lacy bra to Mr. Nair?”
“I can just see him, down in the basement,” Thea laughed, “rooting through piles of men’s shirts in search of it! He does so like to provide a good service.”
They spared themselves the embarrassment of sending him in pursuit of intimate clothing, but he was always particularly courteous to them, since they were usually the only women guests in the hotel, and whenever they came back from an evening stroll, he smiled and asked how their walk had been. Thea would veer toward the desk for a chat, like a speedboat changing direction, if he wasn’t too busy. One day when she came in, he was standing in front of the desk in jeans and a blue shirt. It didn’t help, seeing him in civvies. It eroded the barrier between them—the hotel manager behind the counter handing out telexes—and her attraction to him climbed a notch, becoming a more solid thing, an indisputable thing. It was his day off, he explained. He had been about to take his family to the park when he was called to the hotel to sort out a problem. He had now resolved it and was about to join his waiting wife . . . except that he stayed on, chatting with Thea.
She went to her bedroom, lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling.
It was said that the rooms were bugged. They were all working for Saddam Hussein. He was ultimately their employer, this great friend of the West. Build up Iraq, the reasoning went, and there’ll be no hope for those raging fundamentalists in Iran.
