Weighing His Words, and the Risks, in a Pent-Up City

BAGHDAD —  This city at dawn, before the mortar rounds come, is still.

The Tigris slips past, an oil fire burns in the distance, and the Muslim call to prayer warbles across the skyline. I listen and try to mimic the words. They are scratchy. Arabic is throaty and brief, like a half-blossomed flower. I think I should learn a few phrases. Words spoken in Arabic -- and my unshaven face -- might be enough to give pause to a masked would-be kidnapper. A twitch of doubt about nationality can save a life.

Language is a weapon in war. Concealing and unmasking, it targets identity. Faces, hands, a smile, the cut of an eye -- these tell you little. The enemy hides in vowels and syllables, the hardness of a consonant, the tender inflection, the spin and whirl of nuance. Words are invisible armies to protect you, or draw you out.

At least 40 foreigners have been kidnapped in recent weeks. Some have reappeared unharmed. Others have not been heard from. A few have turned up dead, including an American who was decapitated. Talk on the street is that terrorist and insurgent networks will pay $10,000 for an American. Sitting in traffic these days, I feel eyes on me, and I wonder if it’s more perception than reality. Is the one-legged beggar at my window a danger? Do the young men sauntering past the windshield have pistols hidden beneath their T-shirts? Will the battered orange-and-white taxi next to me explode in a flash of jihad?

The translators teach me a word here, a word there.

Inshallah. God willing.

Shukran. Thank you.

Shlonak? How are you?

La tudhrub. Don’t shoot.

My accent is hopeless.

There’s a bottled-up feeling in Baghdad. The hostage-takings and sporadic attacks on foreigners have kept journalists close to their hotels. One can wander the city but not too far, and not for too long. Going west toward Fallouja is more dangerous than going south toward Najaf. North is uncertain. It’s a strange journalist calculus, weighing risk against story value, reinventing plans in the afternoon that had seemed firm in the morning. Truth is more elusive here than in many places, and reconstructing events becomes tangled in a miasma of competing, dangerous logics.

Reports of pitched battles are nearly always contradictory: American troops killed a kid in northern Baghdad. No, the rooftop insurgents did. There’s a Humvee on fire. What happened? The facts slither away through a blur of heat and smoke, through angry faces and hurled stones. Notes in notebooks don’t make sense.

Iraq grinds on -- an improvised explosive device detonates, a rocket strikes a hospital, a cleric calls for martyrdom operations and, in a moment that can only be described as surreal, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” blares from a car radio beneath the blue-green dome of a mosque.

There is much hate and frustration on these streets. Saddam Hussein is gone, but life has not improved for many Iraqis, and they wonder why. And then they blame.

“The U.S. needs to improve things here,” a former Iraqi general, sitting cross-legged in a black suit and maroon tie, told me the other day. “The foreign fighters and terrorists are using religious extremism, and the people are starting to believe them because life under occupation is no good.”

A man with a gun asks my translator in Arabic, “Where’s he from?” There is a pause.

“He lives in Germany.” This is true. I do live in Germany, but the man was really asking if I was an American. The gunman looks at me and smiles. The sensation is like playing Monopoly and advancing to Go and collecting $200. My translator found a loophole and we slipped through.

Language can save or trap you. I am left with this thought: If Americans are liberators, why must we hide our passports?

Iraqi translators and drivers are remarkable. They know they can be killed for being “collaborators” with the enemy. Some of our local employees have pinkish shrapnel scars from a New Year’s Eve suicide bombing. One of the staff came to my room recently. He pulled out a $100 bill stained with his blood from the night of the bombing. He asked me if I’d give him a new one because merchants and money-changers here will take only crisp or shiny currency.

By nightfall, most reporters are inside their compounds and hotels, behind coils of barbed wire and barricades of concrete. My hotel has the added protection of a few U.S. Bradley fighting vehicles. That’s not as comforting as it first sounds after one realizes that American troops are the highly prized targets.

There’s a new marble floor in the hotel, but there’s no water in the pool, and everyone’s waiting for a rocket to burst through the atrium. Mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades have struck the building numerous times.

A young Iraqi woman who works as a translator with the troops roams outside the hotel. She is thin. She wears dirty denim pants and tries to look pretty with eye makeup. She chats up the Americans and strolls past a bronze statue of a flying carpet that seems conjured from the pages of “1,001 Arabian Nights.”

The woman is there in the heat of day and in the evening, when a breeze lifts from the Tigris. When I pass, I hear bits of her conversation. Her English has improved over the weeks. She has learned the language of war, and she doesn’t flinch when a shell explodes.

They sell Cuban cigars and Saddam lighters in the hotel lobby. Three young American soldiers wait for the elevator to take them to the “chow hall” on the 17th floor. They hold big guns in sweaty hands. Below my window, past the date palms and eucalyptus trees, there are seven clay tennis courts at the Al Wiyah club. They’re dirt courts really, but the club keeps the nets taut and the white chalk lines bright. A few people play -- defiant of the helicopters, the gunfire and the wisps of smoke around them.

A mortar shell landed near the courts not long ago. It left a scar like a big paw print. But the men keep playing. I hear their Arabic voices and I wonder what they say.