Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Page 15

  Later, when I compared notes with other journalists, I realized how lucky I was I never got sick. I guess years of late-night meals from the Death Kebab van at university had given me a cast-iron stomach. But how I fantasized about the cheeseburgers and cold beer in the American Club!

  There was not much to do. Once we went on a crazy late-night raid into the city to try to take out a Soviet guard post; our sortie failed dismally and ended with us running like crazy to try to get back. Mostly we just sat around. Sometimes the mujahideen picked flowers to put in their hair or tie to their guns. One day Ratmullah found a little sparrow, which he tied by a string to a multibarrel rocket launcher. Some of the fighters amused themselves by firing Kalashnikovs near it to make it jump.

  Then one night Borjan told us we were going to attack the Kandahar air base where the Russians were stationed. Today it’s the base of NATO operations for the south, referred to as K Town and complete with a boardwalk where you can find Pizza Hut, Tim Hortons coffee, and a TGI Friday’s featuring surf-and-turf suppers and Elvis posters.

  The plan was to depart at dawn, but we ended up leaving late morning. There were about twenty of us, all on motorbikes. I sat behind Ratmullah, trying to balance without touching his body so as not to offend him, and consequently almost falling off. My turban kept slipping down over my eyes and threatening to unravel.

  But it felt good to be outside the shed—until we passed a tractor with the driver’s body hanging off the side. His brains had been blown out.

  We motored into a mulberry wood, where we stopped and hid the bikes in a branch-covered hole. Then we all passed under a Koran held by Ratmullah. Through the trees we ran and eventually down into one of trenches the mujahideen had built in rings around the city.

  In the distance were some hills, and beyond that was the airport. Some men took up positions in the trench while others climbed into a tower, one of many used for drying grapes that are scattered around the south. From there they began firing rockets toward the airport, hoping to blow up a tank or fighter jet.

  A shout went up and I saw Ratmullah’s face crease with panic, then he pulled me down to the bottom of the trench. Two Soviet tanks had appeared on the crest of the hill and were rolling down toward us. It was an agony of waiting before they began firing, then there was a dull thud as the raisin tower behind us was hit, sending hot dust and rubble down on us.

  Abdul Wasei dragged me into a foxhole in the side of the trench. We could hear the cries of the wounded, but there was nothing we could do. After a while the silence was almost worse.

  And the tanks did not go away. All day they stayed there, leaving us stuck in our trenches, not daring to emerge.

  We had nothing to eat or drink, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. There were odd pools of muddy water in the trench, which the mujahideen scooped up in their hands and drank. The water was brown with mosquitoes feasting on top, and I couldn’t imagine what diseases it might carry. But soon I was too thirsty to care. I too began scooping it into my hands and mouth. Mostly it tasted dusty.

  Ratmullah suddenly jabbered excitedly in Pashto and held something up in his large hands. It was a mud crab. He bit into it, making noises of delight. Soon all the others were scratching the ground for mud crabs. Ratmullah offered one to me, but I shook my head. I wasn’t sure how starved I would need to be to eat that.

  Finally, on the second day, the tanks went away, presumably deciding we were all dead or gone. We ran along the trenches and eventually back out into the mulberry woods. As we emerged into the trees, the first thing I saw was a small boy eating watermelon, juice dripping from his mouth. I had never wanted anything so badly in my life. “Ratmullah, I want that watermelon,” I said shamelessly.

  Without hesitation Ratmullah grabbed it from the bewildered child. Nothing had ever tasted so good in my life.

  When we got back to the hut, it felt like home. Everyone was talking excitedly. I turned the dial of my shortwave radio to BBC World Service, all static and crackle. Suddenly Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” came across the airwaves. It was a magical moment that afterward I thought I must have imagined. How would I have got that on the air in remote Afghanistan?

  That night, our last in Kandahar, we had rice with a thin gruel crunchy with tiny bits of meat and bone. The next day as we left to head back to Pakistan, I realized that the sparrow had disappeared.

  MUNTHER CANNOT COOK

  YOUR TURKEY

  ~ IRAQ ~

  RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN

  BACK WHEN SADDAM HUSSEIN RULED IRAQ, MOST FOREIGN VISITORS were required to stay at the Hotel al-Rasheed, a concrete-and-glass monstrosity in central Baghdad. It was once a fine establishment, with marble floors and crystal chandeliers, but by the eve of George W. Bush’s war the modern facade belied an intolerable interior. You had to bribe the housekeeper for a roll of toilet paper or a bar of soap. The televisions offered just three channels: Baathist agitprop, Iraqi sport, and bad 1970s movies dubbed into Arabic. The in-room surveillance cameras installed by the secret police had long since broken, but nobody knew that then, so female guests took to changing with the shower curtain drawn. But the biggest vexation was the daily breakfast scam. The buffet, served up in the Sheherazade Café, was atrocious: stale bread, cold omelets floating in grease, eggs boiled so long the yolks had turned gray, rotting fruit covered with flies. After two mornings of this horror, for which I had the pleasure of paying sixty thousand dinars a day—about thirty dollars at the exchange rate back then—I told the front desk I no longer wanted to eat breakfast, at least not in their restaurant.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we must charge you for the breakfast,” the manager informed me.

  “But I’m not eating your breakfast,” I protested.

  It did no good. “It is the rules,” he said.

  Then he leaned toward me and let me in on the secret. The fifty-dollar-a-night room charge went directly to Saddam’s treasury. The only way for the hotel to pay its employees was by gouging us in the mornings. “Without breakfast,” he said, sotto voce, “we cannot survive.”

  I tried to stomach the buffet, but after another two mornings I concluded that there was no way I’d survive in Baghdad with that breakfast. I raised the matter with Khalid, my enterprising driver, who kept a Shakira tape on continuous playback in his royal blue Chevy Caprice. He had boasted to me that he had an illegal satellite dish at home, and friends with an even more verboten Internet connection. Did he know of somewhere else I could eat breakfast?

  In those days, food was hard to come by in Baghdad. Most families subsisted on government-issued rations of wheat, sugar, and rice. The few restaurants that catered to foreigners served only lunch and dinner. Khalid said he’d make some inquiries, but he made no promises.

  A few days later, he beckoned me toward his car and said, “Mr. Rajiv, let’s go for a drive.” We headed west toward Mansur, the neighborhood filled with imposing mansions inhabited by Saddam’s apparatchiks. He barreled down the main drag and pulled off near a small row of shops. Khalid pointed at one. The sign read Al-Malik Market. “Go in there,” he said. “You will find what you need.”

  Malik was a culinary smuggler’s dream. There was Heinz ketchup, Kellogg’s corn flakes, Campbell’s soup, and Ritz crackers. Seemingly everything you’d find in an American Safeway was packed into this little store—and several items even had Safeway price tags. I later learned that the owner’s son traveled to Jordan once a week, where he filled up three taxis with a few of everything off the shelves at the Safeway in Amman. In twelve hours, after a couple of well-placed bribes to customs inspectors at the border, the food was for sale in Baghdad. Chilled, smoked Norwegian salmon? Yup. Philly cream cheese and a bottle of capers? Sure. They had frozen pork bacon and tinned hams, which, in the predominantly Muslim Republic of Iraq, were about as forbidden as pornography. I even saw a Butterball turkey in the freezer. “Aliseesh,” the owner said, teaching me the Arabic word for it. Who, I asked, buys turkeys
in Baghdad? Nobody, he said. His son picked it up on spec, and it had been sitting in the cooler for a year.

  Malik existed because, despite the UN sanctions that restricted oil sales, there still were thousands of Baathist cronies who had grown rich through smuggling and had dollars to blow. And unlike their neighbors, Iraqis of a certain age and class had traveled to Europe and America back in the 1960s and 1970s, before the wars with Iran and Kuwait, when one dinar was worth more than three dollars. They had a taste for Western food, for French cheese and Danish cookies. But like so much else in their country, these were luxuries out of reach to all but a few.

  I shopped like a glutton. Wedges of Brie, fruit preserves, muesli, mango juice—more than I could fit in the mini-fridge back in my room, and more than I could consume before it would all spoil. Malik soon became my little escape from the chaos of prewar Baghdad. When I grew tired of Saddam’s fulminations, the orchestrated protests we were obliged to attend, the UN weapons inspectors running from one installation to another, the maddening arguments with the Ministry of Information about their draconian rules, I headed back to the market, fished a few hundred-dollar bills out of my wallet, and filled up a basket with comfort food.

  Soon after U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad, I headed back to Malik. I was in charge of the Washington Post’s bureau, and my responsibilities included ensuring that a half-dozen colleagues didn’t go hungry. We had been subsisting on military rations and cans of beans and tuna fish that we had squirreled away before the invasion. Our supplies were running low, and I was yearning for slightly more gourmet provisions. But like so much else in Baghdad at the time, Malik had been gutted by looters. There were some broken jars on the floor, but everything else had been taken, even the freezer case and the turkey inside.

  I despaired for a moment, and then it came to me: I’ll just do what the owner’s son did. I had a colleague visit a supermarket in Amman and fill up a GMC Suburban. The result, unfortunately, was more tuna and two cases of Cheez-Its. There was, thankfully, also a case of Pinot Grigio, and the realization that with a proper shopping list we could sustain ourselves without Malik.

  Soon the need for shipments became less acute. The end of dictatorship meant we could move into a hotel with a decent kitchen, and then into a comfortable house a block from the Tigris River. I hired a chef named Munther, who scoured the markets for ingredients to indulge his experiments with Western cooking. One day we got a Waldorf salad. There was crème brûlée for dessert, albeit a little too sweet and runny. When a young reporter in the bureau came back with a Whopper and onion rings from the new Burger King at the military base next to the airport, Munther decided to copy the meal. The burgers, made from sheep that had been grazing on garbage, were a bit gamy, but the onion rings were perfect—crunchy, perfectly circular, and the size of half-dollars.

  I put on fifteen pounds that first summer. Munther served up a three-course feast every night, donning a white jacket as he brought his creations into the dining room. I gave him carte blanche to buy whatever he wanted—figuring that with Malik closed, he couldn’t get into too much trouble—and he managed to find a seemingly endless variety of produce. The lack of supermarkets meant everything was made from scratch. He baked the bread and trimmed the meat and simmered the sauces.

  In idle moments, over cups of tea and cigarettes, I came to learn about the lives of the Iraqis who worked for us as interpreters, drivers, and guards. One had been a pilot for Iraqi Airways. Another was a mechanical engineer who had a master’s degree from UCLA. And yet another had worked as a driver for the general security directorate before the war, no doubt shuttling people to torture sessions. But Munther remained a mystery. He spoke little English, so every conversation required an intermediary. Every interaction was transactional: What do you want for dinner tomorrow? Can I buy a new meat grinder? My efforts to engage always seemed to fall flat. After a few months, all I knew about him was that he was in his thirties. He was lanky and had close-cropped hair. He arrived in the afternoons with a stack of Arabic books and kept to himself in the kitchen. He left as we tucked into dessert. Where did he learn to cook? How did he feel about making sumptuous meals for a bunch of Americans while millions of Iraqis were still living hand to mouth? I had no idea.

  One day I walked into the kitchen as he entered from the back door. He placed his books in two stacks, and I pointed to them with a quizzical expression. He gestured to one pile. “Shia books,” he said. Then the other. “Cookbooks.” I beckoned an interpreter to join us, but we were able to wrest only the most meager details about his life. He had grown up in the overwhelmingly Shiite south, and by the time he was in his late teens, he was torn between his desire to train as a cook and his desire to rebel at the oppression of his fellow Shiites by Saddam’s regime. His religious activism soon landed him in prison, where he was tortured so brutally that he lost hearing in one ear. When he was finally released, a few years before the war, he managed to land a job as an apprentice in a Baghdad restaurant. When the restaurant closed after the invasion, the owner sent him my way.

  That’s all I got. Despite the white jacket and Waldorf salads, I could tell he was ambivalent about working for a bunch of foreigners. Sure, the money was good, and he got to experiment in ways he never could in a kebab restaurant, but he was cooking in a house where the occupants drank wine and the women let their hair flow freely. Of the three dozen Iraqis who worked for me, he was the most conflicted. At the time, I thought him an anomaly. I blithely assumed most Iraqis were like the rest of my staff—guys who liked to sneak a beer and check out pornographic sites on the office computers; one young interpreter was so enamored of the United States that he took to wearing an American flag T-shirt. Munther never socialized with them. He holed up in the kitchen.

  In the following months, I tried to win him over. When I was in California for a holiday, I bought him a ten-inch Wüsthof chef’s knife and a cookbook with photos so he could pick out recipes he wanted translated. Our vegetables were chopped a little finer, and the menu became more varied, but he didn’t become any less standoffish.

  In mid-December, U.S. forces found Saddam hiding in a hole, and any hopes I had of spending Christmas with my family in California were shot as quickly as the celebratory gunfire that lit up the Baghdad sky. I decided to host a secular Christmas Eve dinner at our house. It would be a chance to see friends in Baghdad with whom I had lost touch because of hectic work schedules. It would be a way to expose our Iraqi colleagues to new traditions. And it would give me a chance to challenge Munther with his most complicated meal yet.

  The essential ingredient, of course, was an aliseesh. But with Malik still closed and my supply convoys from Jordan suspended because of banditry on the highway from Jordan, I had to find a new smuggler. I approached a few shopkeepers, but none of them was willing to try. Then, on the advice of a friend, I went to a market in the city’s Christian quarter that was so secretive it had no sign or door from the street. To get in, I had to go through an unlit adjoining building. When I entered, I discovered why: there were cases of whiskey, gin, and beer amid a Maliklike assortment of foreign foodstuffs. I inquired about a turkey. “Come back in three days,” the man said. I thought about asking whether it would come from Jordan and, if so, whether it would be kept cold. Or would it be packed into the hot trunk of a taxi with a dozen boxes of Cheerios? Or did he have a connection on a military base who’d slip him a bird under the barbed wire? I kept silent and purchased a bottle of whiskey.

  When I returned home, I asked Munther whether he had ever cooked an aliseesh. Never, he said. Did any of his books have instructions for how to prepare one? Not that he had seen. Since these were the days before one sought answers to every random question on Google, I did what I always do when I find myself in a culinary fix: I called my mother—on a costly satellite phone—and asked her to e-mail me her turkey recipe.

  On December 23, we got word from the market: Come get your turkey. There, in a waist-high chest freezer
, was a genuine Butterball turkey. Fifteen pounds. Frozen as a rock.

  Munther showed up early the next morning to prepare the feast, which would also include roast beef, potatoes au gratin, sautéed peas and carrots, fried zucchini, rice, and a fattoush salad. I printed out my mother’s turkey recipe, gave it to one of my Iraqi colleagues to translate for Munther, and then settled down to write a story.

  An hour later, there was a knock on my room door. I opened it to find one of my interpreters and a grave-faced Munther.

  “Munther cannot cook your turkey,” the interpreter said.

  “Why not?”

  “The recipe calls for wine,” the interpreter said. “He cannot touch any alcohol.”

  “It’s just for the broth and to baste the turkey,” I said. “All the alcohol will evaporate in the heat of the oven and the stove.” But Munther was adamant. He wasn’t going to touch the turkey or the broth. “Fine,” I huffed, “I’ll do it myself.” And I walked down to the kitchen, uncorked a bottle of Chablis, and set about preparing the turkey.

  As I was assembling the ingredients for the broth, Munther came up to me with the interpreter. He cracked a smile. He noted that I had thrown a large party for the Iraqi staff and their families a month earlier to celebrate the Eid al-Fitr holiday after the monthlong Ramadan fast. Because of that, and because the recipe was from my mother, and because I promised him that the alcohol would evaporate, he said he would cook the turkey. “You respected our traditions, so I will respect yours,” he said. And with that, he shooed me out of the kitchen.

  It was the sort of grudging, uneasy accommodation that came to define the American presence in Iraq. The rest of the staff were like the exiles who sought power in the early days: unabashedly pro-Western and modern, eager to please and happy to change. But Munther was the real Iraq: strong, proud, conservative, tradition-bound, and more than a little bit stubborn. There was common ground to be had, but it wasn’t going to be achieved easily.