Matthew and I reversed roles. I was calm; he was slipping into a trancelike panic, convinced we were going to be killed. It was about 5 p.m. now, and we had only a few more hours of daylight before it would be impossible to travel back along the dark roads from Garma into Baghdad. Our fate depended on Gareib. Matthew stopped talking almost entirely. I asked our captor (the owner of the house) about his family. We sat. We drank tea. It got darker. Waleed, looking incredibly oversized in the claustrophobic room, made small talk with our new captor. I wanted the AmberVision commander back.
An hour later Gareib returned with a British reporter I didn’t know. The only thing we could deduce was that Gareib had basically gotten the British journalist embedded with the insurgents, and because we had stumbled upon them and hadn’t arrived invited and vetted, we were kidnapped, whereas he was allowed to work. But the British guy had no idea we were being detained, and he spoke to us as if we were sharing a beer in a bar. We could hear mortars, rockets, and small-arms fire in the distance, and the pair was about to go to report on the battle from the perspective of the insurgents. Matthew and I asked Gareib if we could tag along. He refused.
The British reporter, who was either oblivious or stupid, tried to make small talk. “So, where in America are you guys from?”
I looked at him with daggers in my eyes. “We are not from America. I am from Italy.”
Fortunately Gareib was talking with Waleed and Khalid. I mouthed to the reporter to stop mentioning the words “America” or “United States.” I wanted to kill him.
I wondered what the chances were of our getting hit by air strikes from the marine base nearby.
Gareib and the British journalist left, and we pleaded with them to come back before dark.
Time inched on, and our captor became loquacious. He asked us about our time in Iraq and was pleased to hear that Matthew and I had traveled extensively around the country, that I had been in Iraq since well before the war and was very sympathetic to the locals, as well as against the occupation. At a certain point the man launched into a soliloquy on the fundamental differences between Ali Babas, a colloquial name for bandits, and insurgents, who were fighting against the occupation of their country. No better time for a philosophical discussion. He was worried that Ali Babas gave the insurgents a bad name. I shared with him that I had been held up at gunpoint very close to Garma and that the men who held me up were clearly different from the men in his village. He said the insurgents were not bad people but had been provoked and humiliated by American hostility and violence—to the point of no return.
“Wouldn’t you fight a man who came into your house in the middle of the night, touched your women, stole your belongings?” he asked. “Who humiliated you in your own country? Wouldn’t you fight him?”
We all agreed.
Matthew was so stressed that he lay down beside me and improbably started dozing off. I had an idea and whispered to him, “We could always tell them that I was pregnant and feeling ill. Perhaps they would release us if they thought we were having a baby, no?” He closed his eyes.
I knew it might be interpreted as sexual, or improper, to lie down in front of strange men, so I sat there upright, envying Matthew’s sleep. I wanted to curl up next to him and wake up to the familiar sound of birds outside our Baghdad window.
The captor asked if I would like to meet his wife, and he led me through a dark room and into the kitchen, where his wife sat on a stool, watching the children play in front of the house. She stood up, overjoyed at the sight of someone new to speak with, and the man walked away, leaving us women time to get acquainted.
I had been through this process an infinite number of times, and though my Arabic was minimal at best, I knew that women needed few words in common to communicate.
“Are you married?”
“Yes.” I pointed to the other room, where Matthew lay sleeping.
“Children?”
I held my stomach, gesturing as if I were pregnant. I thought there was no better time to start the rumor than with the wife.
She looked me over, and as many village women who have met few foreigners do, she decided she wanted to look at my clothes and my body beneath the abaya. She opened my black cape to see tight jeans and a tightly fitted T-shirt. She smiled and started patting down my thighs, running her hands over my stomach, laughing.
Her two sons burst into the kitchen, giggling. They stood before a mirror to my right, repeatedly wrapping their faces in a keffiyeh like the men in the village. They were playing dress-up.
It was now almost dark, and Gareib reappeared in the room, breathless, back from monitoring the progress of the attacks on the Americans. He summoned the stocky owner of the house and stepped back out the main door to the outside. Matthew sat back up, groggy and ready for the end.
The door to the room where we sat was ajar, and partially through the crack and partially through a small window we could see our captor negotiating with a new man, dressed in all black, with a Kalashnikov slung around his back. They were obviously discussing our fate, and they went back and forth in disagreement. Matthew was convinced again that we were going to die.