“Hey,” Kim nudged her, “we’re just secretaries.”
Back at the hotel, Sachiv came into the restaurant while they were eating and stopped by their table. Thea, who had launched into her usual starter, tried to munch demurely.
Sachiv lifted his chin. “So—it is a nice place, your new apartment?”
“Disaster,” said Kim.
Reggie shook his head. “A few rooms over a car park. It won’t do.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” He sat on the bench next to Thea. “Tell me, the boy you were not sure about, have you seen him recently?”
She swallowed her mouthful. “Yes, but I’ve also seen three or four others.”
“You didn’t note his name? You know, on the. . . .” He gestured toward his own name tag.
“I’ve been trying not to look at them.”
“Next time you see this one, the one you suspect, try to read his name.”
“All right, but—”
“We won’t do anything until we are sure. In the meantime, if he phones, call Reception immediately.” He stood up. “Have a good evening.”
“Night, Sachiv, thanks,” said Reggie.
“Call Reception?” Thea hissed. “What are they going to do? Rush up to my room, grab the phone and tell him he’s a very naughty boy?”
“Still.” Reggie put down his napkin. “You have to be careful. He might take the next step and come up to the room.”
“He already has.”
Iraq, like the night caller, remained aloof. They worked in the midst of a silent population, among fearful colleagues. A friendly people, gagged. Though they smiled at one another, the foreign cadre and the local employees, though they leaned over the same desks and documents, consulted and considered, said “Good morning,” and “Bye, now,” they never really talked; they simply operated in the same space. To live in a war zone was one thing; to live in a zone where no one could speak, quite another. The only Iraqi who spoke to them fluidly, fearlessly, was Saddam Hussein—on their television screens every night, relentless, ranting and raging to his soldiers at the front or opening public lavatories in bleak villages, surrounded like a rock star by an exhibition of ululating women.
But, for one day in March, the barriers came down. Arriving at the office that morning, Kim and Thea made their way past the security man, who sat on a kitchen chair in the entrance, and the cleaning woman in the hallway who, every day, was hunkered to the ground with a bunch of twigs, sweeping the dust from one place to another. As soon as they got upstairs, they noticed a change. The women were not only made up, but dressed up. They looked at Thea’s office clothes—skirt, panty hose, V-neck jumper—perplexed, yet with a degree of sympathy.
“You are not celebrating?” Najma, the chief engineer, asked her.
“Celebrating?”
“Yes. International Women’s Day. We will have a small party later.”
And party they did. At lunchtime, in the large office where Thea worked, desks were pushed aside, trays of canned drinks and snacks were set on a table, the men were kicked out, and the women gathered. There was chatter, laughter—lots of laughter—and talk of family, as the women opened up about their mothers and grandmothers, in turn asking Kim and Thea, who were feeling more than usually dowdy in the midst of glamor, about their homes in Dublin and Philadelphia. This soon gave way to singing and dancing until, as the party wound down, they all formed a circle, holding hands, and turned around the room, then broke off, kissed one another three times and repeated a blessing.
“What does it mean?” Thea asked Alia.
“We are wishing for one another healthy children, nice homes, and husbands.”
“I love the husband bit,” Kim said, sotto voce, to Thea. “Like an afterthought. A necessary accoutrement, like a good vacuum cleaner.”
“Alia couldn’t understand why we hadn’t dressed up.” Thea shook her head. “I was too ashamed to admit I’d never heard of International Women’s Day before.”
“Me neither.”
“We should know these things.”
“We do now.”
For that one afternoon, the invisible film that surrounded their colleagues dissolved. For a few hours they were neither Irish nor American nor Iraqi; neither spies nor spied upon. They were women all. But when the party ended, their colleagues went back to their desks, the men were granted access, and the shutters came down.
“We caught a glimpse,” Thea said, on the way back to the hotel, glancing at two women on a street corner gripping their abayas at the chest. “A glimpse of who they might be. The repression is paralyzing.”
“After the war,” Reggie said, “things will relax.”
“And if he loses the war?”
“Iraq won’t lose. The West can’t let that happen. Why do you think we’re all here, building up the place? Not to hand it over to the mullahs, that’s for sure.”
Back in her room, Thea took up her spot beside the window for her daily feed of muddy Tigris. Although those waters had come a long way, it was hard to see any flow or movement. The Tigris and the Euphrates had their sources in the same mountain range—the Taurus Mountains in Turkey—and, like siblings born of the same womb who kept their distance, they ran from north to south, sometimes quite close, sometimes far apart, before finally joining up to create the great delta of the Shatt al-Arab. The Euphrates was mentioned in the Bible and so too was the Tigris, although it was referred to by its ancient name, Hiddekel, because these, it was generally believed, were two of the four rivers of the Garden of Eden. This was Thea’s day-to-day now: gazing down at the waters of Eden, no less. Whenever she stared at her map, her eyes always followed the rivers south and settled on the Marshes, highlighted by the blue dashes that symbolized wetlands, and she knew she would have to be patient, since such a trip would need planning and time off. Just as she could not wait to see more desert, so she longed to see this
