The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 10

"I believe that many terrorists come from Turkey, Iran, Syria, more than from Iraqi Arabs. They are all the time plotting against the Kurds."

When the subject of ethnic cleansing came up, he remarked that some discrimination against the Kurdish majority had begun in the 1960s. "Later on, we discovered even before Saddam that all were treating Kurds with cruelty in order to Arabize Kirkuk City. Now when we hear there are some campaigns against the Arabs, we are not surprised. But on the other hand, we don't want it to be repeated, for the Kurds to repeat the acts of the former Iraqi regime."

Sheikh Ahmed al-Ubaidi, also known as al-Hamid, was secretary-general of the Iraqi Kirkuk Front. To meet him we headed for Hial-Wasadi district, "an Arab area, not so safe," advised the fixer. The feeling of fear was getting very tiring. Pa.s.sing the city council office, we whirled down hot, uncrowded streets, the fixer watching left and right. Here was an auto repair shop, then we entered the s.h.i.+a Turkmen area, then left behind a vacant lot with rubbish heaps and polka dots of rubbish, a car empty in the dirt, everything silent, a figure sitting knees up on a wall ledge, police at a concrete island with sandbags, then a walled compound with caltrops, followed by the Academy of Kurdish, the Academy of Police, and the sheikh's office, where we were greeted by bodyguards.

He was a big man with a husky voice, balding and graying, not distinctive, with the exception of his long, delicate fingers. "The Arabs are forming one third of the population-one third!"

Regarding ethnic differences, he said: "We did not think about those things, but unfortunately after the arrival of the occupier, the situation changed."

"Where would you like to see the border of Kurdistan?"

"As it exists now, according to the determination of Paul Bremer."

He demanded to know why an Arab with an out-of-town license plate must be checked if he goes to work in Erbil.

The fan was slowly turning. On the desk was a small red, white, and green flag with stars. "I see you looking at the flag. This is the old Iraqi flag. We consider this the flag of our party. It contains three stars symbolizing unity between Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. We in the Front would like to have the same unity on our side."

He was formerly an officer in the Baathist army, but he too had been arrested.

I raised the subject of the violence and he stared at me through half-shut eyes, saying: "The problem is an Iranian conspiracy through the s.h.i.+a in the south of Iraq. They are sticks in the hands of Iranians." He saw Iraq as a cake layered with petrol.

But the security situation of Kirkuk was now "very good"; recently he had gone to visit some friends in a formerly dangerous place and did not even bring a knife! "The improvement took place due to the partic.i.p.ation of all groups," he said meaningfully. "Maybe Turkmens or Arabs would not inform the police about terrorism, since police are Kurds. But now we feel the city is for all."

Even so, he considered himself underrepresented in the city council. Right now there were twenty-six seats for Kurds, nine for Turkmens, only six for Arabs.

"Why should we consult the Kurds?" he asked me. "After all, if something happened here, the people of Sulaimaniya do not care. Kirkuk is the mother of troubles. Kurds are ruling themselves. Turkmens are supported by Turkey and Syria. So, we need Arabs outside to support us." If the city council could come to consensus, "Kirkuk will turn into heaven."

The fifth time we went to Kirkuk, we grew a trifle silent as usual after Bani Maqan Checkpoint, speeding down from the dry hills into the valley of Kirkuk, the dust-dome of sky higher and broader today, the air better to breathe. The gray city began to spread before us, its hordes of concrete stumps truncated by the dust. Here came the final checkpoint's familiar stop sign, the left-hand lane of the highway blocked off by concrete slabs and three caltrops, the fourth caltrop in the right shoulder. The soldier was different today. Gray cinder-block houses burst silently out of the dirt. From a billboard a lovely young girl gazed out hijabed and smiling, decently covered from the throat down. Here came the roundabout, one sector of which had been closed off with barbed wire, and then we arrived at the Kirkuk Security Directorate-one of two, I should say, for each of the main parties maintained its own office, which in America might have seemed redundant or worse; but the interpreter, who was a member in good standing of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), approved, explaining that adherents of one party might decline to phone in terrorism tips to any branch of the other. So we came, as I can now more properly put it, to the Kirkuk Security Directorate of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), whose entryway was studded with spanking-new yellow caltrops. A machine-gun bearer in desert-gray cammies and a green camouflage facemask over which glared dark sungla.s.ses greeted us. I could see part of his mustache and teeth through the round breathing hole. He wore one light trauma plate in front and another between his shoulder blades. All in all, he seemed dressed for the weather of Kirkuk, whose meteorologists must sometimes report light showers of lead, steel, or concrete fragments.

Our way now wove between concrete blocks painted absurdly with water scenes and peace doves. We entered another gate, rolled slowly down a concrete-walled alley where machine-gun-carrying camouflaged soldiers stood smoking; and a small girl and a small boy toddled among them, holding hands. Presently we found ourselves inside an air-conditioned carpeted office. There was soccer on the television and a light machine gun propped up behind the desk. The white and tan drapes were drawn, and the sun of Kirkuk glowed soothingly through them.

Our amiable interpreter said that he had learned his English from television; he spoke with a trace of a midwestern accent, and I wondered whether he might have been in contact with troops from Kansas or Missouri, perhaps a.s.sisting them in interrogations. Also present was Salar Khalid Kamarkhan, deputy-in-charge. As such people so often are, he was youngish, cheerful, and fit. I flattered him that he must be an excellent shot, and he smilingly agreed that he was.

The reason I had asked to meet the deputy was that everybody kept a.s.serting that Iraq, and Kirkuk specifically, was being destabilized by neighboring countries, especially Iran. Since similar claims about Iraq had been one of our twin pretexts for invading that country, I guessed I might feel happier if and when we bombed Iran into democracy to know that Iranian materiel had indeed been employed by terrorists.

In Khanaqin, a colonel who declined to be interviewed had described IEDs as olive-green metal boxes about the length of a man's hand. He did not know what was inside them, because he simply phoned the Americans, who came and took them away, but he called the devices "well organized," meaning well constructed, "not something made at home. Maybe some company makes them."

As soon as Mr. Salar referred to the meddling of neighbor countries, I seized the hint, and asked what IEDs in Kirkuk might look like.

"Mostly they are homemade," he said, thereby confirming the fixer's account of TNT in plastic bags. "The terrorists connect the wires. They differ in shape. Yesterday's was two rockets, you know, artillery bombs, connected by a wire, and there was detonator capsule."

I mentioned the IEDs of Khanaqin, to which he replied: "Maybe there are such kinds of things over there, which is closer to the Iranian border, but here they cannot pa.s.s all the checkpoints. Even here you can find some Iranian thermal bombs, but most are handmade."

Now it was time to visit the operations room just behind the door. The wall-size aerial photograph of Kirkuk had not been part.i.tioned, but the deputy and his interpreter pointed to a certain long boulevard that ran west to southeast across town, and they said that below this were the two southern sectors, "the hot places," which were mostly Turkmen and Arab in their composition; the southwestern sector was hottest of all. I was quickly informed that just because those zones were hot did not imply that the Kirkuk Security Directorate was out of control down there, and I replied that I had never doubted it.

The previous night, terrorists had launched a rocket from the Khasa River, whose name means Good River. In that season it was very low between its sloping concrete banks, like the Los Angeles River; insurgents often staged such attacks from the riverbank, especially in the southeastern sector, since few other people went there. The launchers, said Mr. Salar, were of local manufacture: but he showed me a photostat of the markings of three 107 mm rockets (eighteen-kilogram payloads) that he believed to be Iranian. Last night's rocket had struck the Kurdish neighborhood of Azadi. There had been no casualties.

He said, without exactly giving it, that there was evidence not only of Iranian IEDs and rockets but also of "Turkish backup to the Iraqi Turkmen Front" in Kirkuk, a group that Brigadier Sarhad had not mentioned.

And what can I say about the Turkmens?

The few I interviewed wished without exception for the withdrawal of American troops. The Kurds never did.

On one of our first drives into Kirkuk, before our license plate had been too frequently seen, we had entered the Turkmen district and arrived on a silent bright street occupied by a gutted car, a cyclist, an old woman in fluffed-out black robes, and a hijabed young woman whose eyebrows were so black they glittered. It was, said the fixer, a dangerous place. He got out of the car and began knocking on doors, trying to find a Turkmen for me to speak with. He went from house to house. "All of them afraid!" he reported. We swung around the traffic circle, whose center was nothing but sand, and then he parked and went to try again. To you, this will sound quite dull, especially since nothing happened to us who waited in the car; certainly we felt vulnerable as we sat there in that brightness, hoping not to get kidnapped, blown up, or shot. The fixer had several faults, but cowardice was not among them.*

He finally persuaded an old Turkmen to invite us in (later the interpreter said bitterly that the man had agreed only because his mother was Kurdish). He had lived all his life in this house, which was two hundred years old, with a horseshoe-arched ceiling, arched white walls inset with niches for cups and saucers and a clock, and two huge whatnots in the far s.p.a.ce, holding a television each, one of which was on. Daylight came in through the curtained doorway.

In the corner sat a younger woman, probably his wife, looking stiff and sad, covering her mouth with the end of her hijab.

He said: "Life is beautiful if there is no explosion, no violence. Whenever my children go out, I just think: Will they come back?" It had been this way for about three years. He blamed neighboring countries who were "playing" in this area, specifically Syria. Not surprisingly, he did not accuse Turkey.

"What do you think about Kurdistan?" I asked, and he said: "I don't care. We as Turkmens don't care to whom Kirkuk belongs." He spoke in a deep, rather stern voice. His gestures were always various and beautiful.

"In general, do Turkmens get along better with Kurds or with Arabs?"

"Relations between Turks and Kurds are stronger than between Turks and Arabs," he said, "because in old times Arabs had a small existence in this city. But now Arabs are infiltrators."

Like everyone else in Kirkuk, he had bad memories of the conscription and discrimination under Saddam. In those days he had been barred from acquiring land. His brother-in-law was imprisoned for seven years because he had prayed in a mosque. The last five of those he pa.s.sed in a place whose hideousness was perpetuated by American torturers: Abu Ghraib. The Turkmen said: "You cannot imagine how many young people were inside those prisons and kept there for nothing."

The sixth and last time we went to Kirkuk, when there was no reason to go there at all and the fixer simply pa.s.sed through the city out of childish bravado, he undid my seat belt; he thought that made me less conspicuous.

We drove past black car skeletons crumpled into the dirt from an explosion eight months before at a car show; one of the twenty-odd murdered was a thirteen-year-old cigarette vendor whose corpse, said the fixer, they finally discovered on the roof of the tall building across the street. I wanted to take a photograph, and as I stepped out of the fixer's vehicle alone a white car pulled up slowly beside me and I looked into the driver's face, my hands already sweating. He appeared to be a family man; he was not going to kill me.

I got back into the fixer's car, and we drove around a trifle longer in the Kurdish area, the Arab quarter being now too hot for us (the interpreter had asked the fixer to drive a different car today for safety's sake; the interpreter even volunteered his own car, but the fixer refused, fearing an argument about gas money). Barbed wire guarded walls with nothing but sc.r.a.p behind them. We pa.s.sed a market-wheeled stalls of shoes on the sidewalk-and men crossed the street between taxis, carrying big plastic bags. Kirkuk threatened us with a trio of women in black, with men lounging beside a cigarette stand. What might have been sanitation workers, all in blue, stood in a crowd on a truck bed; one of their faces was masked by dirty mummy wrappings, and he turned toward me and reached inside his clothes, but it must have been only to scratch; then came two bank entrances piled shoulder-high with sandbags, guarded by machine-gun men in dark sungla.s.ses; beyond these, on a stretch of dirty wall, someone had written KURDISTAN.

Miami Party Boom.

Emily Witt.

FROM N + 1.

Villa Vizcaya.

DATE: JULY 2005.

VENUE: VILLA VIZCAYA.

LIQUOR SPONSOR: FLOR DE CAnA RUM.

THE VILLA VIZCAYA is one of those Gatsbyesque single-family mansions that have been converted to event s.p.a.ces. The new owners installed an industrial kitchen to accommodate catering companies and an HVAC system to dissipate the warmth generated by large groups of people. They removed the permanent furniture so gilt chairs could be trucked in for weddings. Guests still had the run of the extensive gardens, but there was no longer anything particularly Gatsbyesque about the place, just a rental tab of $10,000 for a weekend evening.

The Vizcaya was still a very nice event s.p.a.ce. From the parking lot, a jungle of banyans and broad-leafed foliage obscured the house. At night, when picking one's way down a path lit with honeycomb floodlights around the ground, there was a feeling of tropical intrigue, followed by awe when the coral mansion finally emerged from the fronds and the vines, a floodlit beacon in the night. This used to be a Xanadu, a neo-Italianate castle built before Miami was even a city, before Miami Beach was even solid land. Where one person saw a mangrove swamp, the mind behind the Vizcaya saw greatness. Thus the first real estate boom began.

Now another real estate boom was happening, here in Miami, where I had just settled (in the gravitational rather than pioneering sense of the word: for several years I had been sinking in a southerly direction, like the pulp in a gla.s.s of orange juice). This was my first party. I don't remember much-not even what the party was intended to celebrate-and I took bad notes. The mosquitoes were formidable. I was plastered in sweat. The night was thick and hot and the concrete steps in back descended into still, inky water. The moon hung over all of it: the bay, the stone barge, the topiaries. Corporations were the sponsors. They hung banner ads promoting Clamato; girls in miniskirt uniforms served free mojitos with Flor de Cana rum. I picked up a free copy of a magazine called Yachts International. A real-life yacht was moored to the dock out back, and its pa.s.sengers were drunk and tan.

I stood with my friend Krishna, watching fireworks explode over Biscayne Bay, over the girls serving rum, over the maze hedge and the moss-covered cherubs and the coral gazebos. We sipped our drinks and scratched our mosquito bites. He gazed at the explosions and said, "The fireworks were so much better at the condo opening I went to last weekend."

Spa Opening.

DATE: JULY 2005.

VENUE: HOTEL VICTOR.

GIFT BAG: YLANG-YLANG-SCENTED BATH CUBE, THONG UNDERWEAR.

I moved to Miami from Arkansas to work at an alt-weekly newspaper. My first order of business, after finding an apartment, was to make friends. I appealed to a girl from work to rescue me from loneliness, and she sent me an e-mail about a spa opening at a new boutique hotel on Ocean Drive, steps away from the mansion where Gianni Versace had met his violent end.

I walked up from my new apartment past the deco and neon, past Lummus Park and the homeless people and mounds of malt liquor bottles beneath the stands of palm trees. It wasn't yet dark-this was an early weeknight party. My co-worker checked us in with the tan girl at the door with the clipboard. From then on there would always be tan girls with clipboards. We were led to an elevator past tanks filled with pulsing jellyfish lit a glowing indigo. The elevator went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt area where the spa was, and when the door slid open an impossibly tall drag queen greeted us, dressed only in white towels except for the diamonds that twinkled from her earlobes.

Petrova, a woman with a thick Russian accent, stepped in front of the towel-bedecked drag queen and handed us champagne gla.s.ses. She said they contained cuc.u.mber martinis, but I think it might have been cuc.u.mber and 7Up. "Welcome," murmured Petrova. She took us on a tour that was like a ride at Disney World. Curtains were pulled aside: behind one was a naked man on a slab of heated marble. Behind the next was a woman having her b.r.e.a.s.t.s gently ma.s.saged. "Ew," said my co-worker. We stayed twenty minutes, then collected our gift bags, which contained thong underwear and an effervescent bath cube. I didn't have a bathtub.

Hurricane Katrina.

DATE: AUGUST 2005.

VENUE: MY APARTMENT BUILDING, SOUTH BEACH.

LIQUOR SPONSOR: MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR BRETT.

PHARMACEUTICAL SPONSOR: IBID.

FOOD: FROZEN PIZZA.

ATTIRE: SWEATPANTS.

Maybe n.o.body remembers now that Hurricane Katrina hit Miami before New Orleans, but it did, as a baby hurricane. Then it crawled over to the Gulf of Mexico and turned into a monster.

On the afternoon of Katrina I waited too long to wrap my computer in a trash bag and leave work, and the outer bands of the storm were laying into the city by the time I drove across the causeway from downtown to Miami Beach, my car shuddering in the wind. I understood I was to buy nonperishable food items.

The grocery store was chaos, and I was completely soaked from the trip across the parking lot. While I considered the selection of almonds, the power went out. A dramatic hush fell upon us. One minute the store was all beeping scanners and fluorescent lights, the next darkness and total silence but for the wind and rain. I ate some almonds. In the darkness someone broke a wine bottle.

We were told to move to the front of the store. Minutes pa.s.sed. Rain pounded, wind howled. Suddenly a generator turned on, creating just enough electricity to bathe the store in low-key mood lighting, enough for us to grab bottled water and get out but not enough to forget that the hurricane was something to be taken seriously.

Outside, Biscayne Bay, normally tranquil, was a mountainous expanse of gray and white in extreme motion. Plastic bags flew through the air. The high-rises looked exposed and frail, the dozens of cranes in Miami's skyline like toothpick structures that would come cras.h.i.+ng down with the first gust of storm. Once safely home, I put on my pajamas and uncorked a bottle of wine. I opened my door to a blast of wind, rain, and sand that filled my apartment with leaves. I ran across to my neighbor Brett's place, on the other side of the stoop. He opened his door and his apartment filled with leaves.

A friend in Miami once referred to Florida as "America's funnel," and that's what I'd thought of when I met Brett. He was in his mid-thirties and had dyed black hair, stained teeth, and a permanent sunburn, and was almost always smoking on our building's stoop and drinking from a bottle of Tequila Sauza. His apartment was draped in fabric of different psychedelic patterns. He had been looking forward to Burning Man. He had played in an early-nineties grunge rock band of some repute-they had toured with the Smas.h.i.+ng Pumpkins-but things hadn't worked out very well. In a moment of idle gossip one afternoon, my landlord Dave told me that Brett had woken up one morning after a night of substance abuse in New York and found his girlfriend dead next to him. So he took their cat and moved to Miami, and now the cat was in its waning days and Brett was selling boats on the Internet, supposedly.

Once I left him my rent check to give to Dave, since I was at the office most days. The next morning Dave, a tan surfer type from Boca Raton who never seemed upset about anything, knocked on my door. "Um," he said, embarra.s.sed. "Don't give your rent check to Brett."

But Brett was the social nexus of our building, which was a low-rent holdout in a neighborhood at the bottom tip of South Beach that had gotten much, much fancier since Brett moved in. Our building was funny-the walls of most of the apartments had variously themed murals: underwater scenes, jungle scenes, and, my favorite, in the studio behind mine, hot-air balloons and clouds. My guess is that the landlords originally painted the murals as a sort of spell against the crack-addicted undead that were said to have ruled the neighborhood in the early nineties. The building even used to have some kind of tiki setup on the roof, but the door to the roof was padlocked when the rule of law finally arrived, sometime around the turn of the century. My apartment was painted the colors of a beach ball and included sloping wood floors, bamboo shades, and a mosaic tile counter. It was a one-room studio and a total dump, but it had beach style.

Our two-story baby-blue building was surrounded by towering new condominiums of gleaming white stucco, one of which had a helicopter landing pad. I saw a helicopter land exactly once in the two years I lived there. Rent was month-to-month, which meant I was the only person in the building with a salary.

Upstairs lived a call girl with whom Brett was good friends. She would come down sometimes in her evening finery and ask Brett if he would "do her," meaning would he please fasten her black lace bustier to maximize the lift of her fake b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Brett would flash his tobacco-stained teeth, hook her into her corset, pat her b.u.m, and rea.s.sure her that he would do her anytime. They were fond of each other.

She didn't like me, with good reason. She lived above me, in a jungle-themed studio. Once, when I was sitting on my couch on a Sat.u.r.day morning, a thin stream of amber-colored liquid began to patter steadily on my windowsill from somewhere upstairs. f.u.c.k this, I thought. I went upstairs and banged on her door, asking why somebody was peeing out the window. It was that kind of building. She said that she had spilled a cup of tea. "Peeing out the window!" she yelled. "What kind of trash do you think I am?" I apologized, but the damage was done. Later she moved back home to Michigan, leaving in a sweats.h.i.+rt, with no makeup on. But that was much later, when everyone was leaving.

Brett's friends were always hanging around, none of them model citizens, but I would regularly cross our foyer to chat with them, because being alone at the end of the day sometimes felt unbearable. Two months in, my friend-making campaign was going only so-so.

The night Hurricane Katrina hit Miami, Brett had a pizza defrosting in the oven-the power wasn't yet knocked out-and he dispensed Tombstone, Percocet, and beer. This combo hit me quickly, and I soon staggered home. It was raining so hard that a puddle had seeped under my door. As the streetlights flickered and the eye of the storm pa.s.sed over the city, I slept.