In the Background

These days the war feels more like background noise, a fly buzzing in the distance of everyday life. The women here tell me this. Night falls in the city; the lights in store windows have gone down, curtains are drawn, and shadows move in secrecy along walls and alleyway paths. In a pet store dogs that look American to me wag their tales and in muted voices bark for freedom at my camera lens. I snap their photograph, the light of the bulb blinding them for a moment. They turn their tails to me and walk off, and though they may release the gas in their bowels I cannot hear it and they attend to half-chewed bones and one of them naps on a red rug. The war buzzes in my ear to the east, and a cool wind forebodes against the nape of my neck.

I stopped by her apartment in the middle of the city every evening, and she greeted me in different ways each time. Some days she came to the door with a baby in her arms and she would have been crying and some days she has been laughing to herself about what she calls nothing. I had ways to knock on her door to tell her who I was, and some days she wouldn't answer at all. Some days she came to the door after I'd knocked three time-three times meant I came alone and just wanted to talk-and she'd see my camera and tell me to get away from her house and a moment later she'd cry a bit and invite me for some tea. Inside her house was cool and a little damp, with her two little dogs that yipped at whoever came into the house and her brother sat in a corner smoking a hookah pipe and staring at me with dark eyes. I didn't trust him, but I trusted her, and she was my friend while I was there, though not when I left that place.

Her brother came to the door one day and said she had fallen ill and I should come by tomorrow maybe, yes, maybe tomorrow she'll be better. He asked me: "Will you take my photograph for your American magazine? Will I be the front page news?" I told him I would take his picture, and no, he likely would not make the front page. He said something in his language and walked off, leaving the door open. One of her two dogs scampered past my feet and licked my bare toes before wandering off down the road toward the sounds of the war.

I walked into the tiny apartment and for some reason my hands trembled when I snapped her brother's photograph at the hookah, staring up at me with those dark eyes. He said: "She sleeps upstairs but today she is sick. Maybe tomorrow." But he pointed up the staircase, and said again: "She sleeps upstairs, yes."

In the next room a boy sat looking at an American television program. It was in English with sporadic Arabic sliding up, the closed-captioning at the bottom of the screen. He laughed at the jokes a few moments late each time, a few moments after the audience already forgot the punch line. The brother pointed again to the staircase. I left the boy to laugh alone, and wondered if he was her son.

This was the first time I went to her bedroom. Across the way I could see an open window where two women sat with a teapot centered on the table between them. One took a small cube of sugar and placed it on her tongue and sipped the tea through her front teeth, and a smile crossed her lips as the other woman spoke. They reminded me of my friends back in the hotel where I stayed while I lived there: two more American women, and one American man who no longer went with us anywhere. The women dressed in the traditional clothes of the Iraqis, with head coverings and long robes and slippers on their feet most days but sandals occasionally. The man with us had been caught snapping photographs at the funeral of a native man killed by what the American military presence calls friendly fire. Some of the mourners, some of the men, beat him almost mercilessly, and after a few weeks in a hospital he was able to eat mostly solid food again, but he no longer came with us. His camera sat on a bedpost near my own and the film went bad a long time ago because he wouldn't develop those photos and so could not develop the roll. He lives somewhere in California now with his wife and two dogs and works as an editor for some big paper, and won't talk about Iraq anymore. But at that point he was with us, and would not go anywhere near the buzzing of the war that filled the background of everyday life.

The people who lived around the hotel were mostly polite to us and sometimes fed us their native foods and spoke to us in English and let us practice our Arabic. They were more polite at the beginning, before they began to see the photographs we took on our Times magazines that were translated into their language on newsstands. Then they stopped talking so much, and some families even moved, and we stopped asking so many questions. One of my photographs, a photo of a young Iraqi girl holding the edge of a battered American flag up to her face, made the cover of a newspaper back in America and they'd brought it here and put it on newsstands in Arabic. I had not been ashamed of the photograph before, but I never told any of my Iraqi neighbors that I took the picture. I had a reputation for boldness and bluntness back in America, and there I learned how to keep my silence and simply think about the things I saw and take my pictures and just shut up sometimes and watch.

The woman I visited lay in her bed, coughed when I said hello, and told me to open her window in Arabic. She had begun teaching me small phrases in Arabic months ago when I first met her, when she still worked in her factory and war was nothing but background noise. Once I told her I would like to understand her language, and I had a great deal of interest in her culture, and she had responded, "Yes, interest, you keep your interest in your little camera there, but you do not speak to us." And so she started to teach me small phrases so we could speak with each other, and finally decided that we should talk mainly in English. 'For when I go to your country," she told me, "someday soon, I think."

The woman looked different in her bed than when she ran around her little apartment and served meals to her brother and some children I felt certain were not her own, and cleaned. I had never seen her without her hair neatly combed just so and put under a covering. She looked frail and old that day. She coughed again into a clean white handkerchief and hit it beneath her pillow. The room smelled of saffron, I think, or some other spices I couldn't name. I asked her how she was feeling, in Arabic, and she looked at me and said: "In English, please?" I tried again in Arabic, and she barked at me not to bother and to get out of her house. She coughed and asked me to bring her tea.

"Will you tell about me to your American people?" she asked me. "In English, please."

"I might," I said to her. "If I go back."

"You would stay here?"

"Not forever, but a little longer, I think."

"It is stupid," she said sadly and coughed again. She coughed into her hand, perhaps forgetting the handkerchief beneath her pillow. "You should not stay here."

"Why should I not stay?"

"In English, please."

"Why should I not stay here like you?"

"You should not stay," she replied tersely. "No one should ever stay in one place forever. When the world gets like this no one should ever stay. It would be better to die, die."

I asked her why, why would it be better to die, and she told me again to get out of her house. She said: "Just get out, get out now, please." She coughed into her hands and covered her face with them and kept moaning for me to get out, just get out. I walked down the narrow staircase and into the smoky room where her brother still sat. He looked up at me as though he'd been anticipating the exact moment of my return. I could not leave just then. My knees had suddenly gone shaky and the war in the distance no longer buzzed. It roared. I heard the thunderous sound of war as though it came from my own mind and her brother got up and went to a window at the back of the house. When he came back into the room I was sitting on a cushion near his own at the blue and green hookah and he sat across from me. He crossed his legs and took the pipe I had been studying. "You watch," he said, and took a deep breath from the hookah pipe. He blew out little rings and shot streams of smoke spiraling through the rings toward my camera lens. "You watch," he said again and kept blowing rings at me. He told me about his sister's son, who four years ago had been just barely old enough to join the Iraqi army. He went off to help with the war and boasted one day of killing a sheep with a rifle. His mother had screamed at him to never touch a gun again and he had promised he never would. Her brother told me these things four years later, after the son had gone to a peace rally against both the Iraqis and the Americans. Just that morning, hours before I'd come, they had been told the son was found with exit wounds originating from both sides of the battle lines, American and Iraqi, and nobody knew who had fired first. It was the last way anyone expected the son to die. His mother thought he would become a doctor. She thought he would die a married man, and happy, with children of his own, and that he would die of old age.

She did not come out from her room for a week. When she finally did, she took her brother's hookah and threw it away and cursed him for his laziness. The next time I visited she had bought him a new hookah, red and black, and I found her sitting beside it breathing smoke through her nostrils and reading an American magazine. She had found her picture on one of the pages and pointed at it, holding it up to me.

"Look," she said to me, pointing with her index finger near the image of her left eye. "Look. You see? You see?"

She came to America two months ago, I think. I have not seen or heard of her since. Her brother stayed in Iraq, and I can sometimes still see his dark eyes and hear the war in the distance.