leather boots…Max leant over to me and whispered… ‘Bang goes the costume budget.’
There was a post-script to the interview. The actress Catherine Russell who was playing Hala Jaber in Talking to Terrorists, went to see her three days later at her home, and Hala said that whereas she had been reasonably sanguine about the maelstrom of events she had been caught up in at the time, recalling the events to us at the interview had awoken a feeling that they had affected her more deeply than she realised.
THE FALL OF FALLUJAH
Hala (40) with a glass of red wine.
HALA: We stayed with some insurgents. It was Ramadan, and there was about half-an-hour before the end of fasting. They said, ‘You can stay as long as you cook for us.’ So I said, ‘Fine.’ The market was still open…I said, ‘Get some meat, get some vegetables’ and I walked into this kitchen, and it was the most disgusting thing…the cooker was…I don’t know…full of yuk. They had no salt, no herbs. And then these guys walked back with bagfuls of stuff, and they opened…there’s about 8 or 9 kilos of meat with fat like this and then you can see some red. There’s one small knife that hardly cuts anything, and the gas things are not functioning properly, and Iraqi food…I mean forget Ramadan…on a daily basis they must have like a rice and a stew, otherwise they feel hollow. I put some oil, rice and tomato paste…I had to get it right because these guys, I was going to spend the night with them, and I had to make sure they were happy with me, so they protect me at least if anything happens, otherwise they say, ‘She’s a bad cook, take her.’ So Ali…he’s my fixer…and I did a stew of God knows yuk, and I did potatoes and salad, and one guy fixed up a gas ring to a big cylinder of gas, and I despatched two other guys and they came back with black pepper and turmeric, and we put this in, and it became a sort of yellow stew of yuk, and the break-fasting call came…you break fast with fresh dates… so I rushed out to have…my main thing is to have a cigarette… I sent a text message for my editor, ‘Ok, I intend to spend the night in Fallujah; by the way I have to cook them dinner.’ And he sends one back saying, ‘Blimey, I can’t believe what I’m hearing.’
The drones start about 8.00…they’re small, but very loud, like ZZZZZZZZZZZZ…continuous, and at about 11.00 the bombing started. In the first 36 minutes there were 38 bombs, and they said, ‘Relax, stop counting, there’s more to come; make it as a background noise.’ They were very religious these guys. They were sitting doing a lot of Koran, because they believe their lives are in the hand of God.
The Americans continued shelling til about 5 in the morning, and then there were the minarets, the call to prayer from a hundred minarets, and the drones all at the same time. Suddenly, suddenly, ten-past-five…everything stopped…not a shell…nothing…and then I slept for like two hours…I was sleeping on the sofa which was also very hard, smelling, and I think the mattress might have these little things.
The plan was for me to stay on…we had bought everything for the duration, but on that day something personal happened that I wasn’t prepared for…at all…um…
If there were any chemists in Fallujah I didn’t know, and how was I going to tell those particular guys to buy what I needed, I mean, what? It was not going to be right in lots of different ways, and the place I was staying in from cleansing point of view was just…yuk...it’s the hole in the ground…if that’s clean it’s fine, but if it’s dirty and yukky and smelly…and anyway we needed to buy a generator and candles.
I decided we should go back to Baghdad…there was one exit still open…Ali and I went back, and we did the shopping we needed. I was in my hotel getting ready to return, and I heard they had sealed Fallujah completely, even the exit I had used to get out. We heard later that most of the guys we stayed with had been killed by a bomb. I was crying maybe. They had been good to us.
6
VITYA
Talk of food and bombs leads me naturally on to The Arab-Israeli Cookbook. It struck me in 2003 when I went to Israel to research the play that all the opinions I had heard expressed about the situation there had come from politicians, pundits, professors, military experts, religious leaders, and that discussions very quickly degenerated into arguments of the ‘We-only-did-this-because-you-did-that’ variety. What about the people who live with the situation every day? What about their voice? It is remarkable that the people who know most about a situation are often the least likely to be asked for their opinion. And one of the philosophies behind my writing is to give a voice to those very people. Not surprisingly, they usually have an overview which is analytically sounder than the politicians and surprisingly balanced in a way that many so-called pundits are not.
On our first morning in Jerusalem we went to the local supermarket with Vitya, who was friend of the director Tim Roseman. She was shepherding us through our first few days and had arranged a number of interviews. We walked through a sunlit square in the south-west of the city, and just before we entered the supermarket, she took my hand and said, rather like The Ancient Mariner clutching at the arm of the wedding guest…
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?
Vitya (50s) outside a supermarket.
VITYA: I want to be a little bit dramatic. I went with my daughter… she’d come from Tel Aviv…we went to the Mall in Jerusalem to buy presents for the holiday of Passover. I remember I bought a black and white blouse for my sister, and for my mother I bought a large ceramic bowl, brown and beige, for putting pasta in. So we’d done all the big shop…it was one o’clock in the after-noon…we were in a hurry because it was the Friday before Passover, and the shops close at about three o’clock, and I suddenly thought, ‘I haven’t got anything to eat tonight’ and my son and his family were coming as well, and I thought, ‘I’d better nip into here my local supermarket and get something for supper.’ I parked down there at the back, and then walked up these stone stairs here into the square to get to the front of the shop. It was cold, it was very cold, wintry, the wind sharp like a knife, and we went inside quickly. We passed four Arab women who were sitting on the pavement outside, their heads covered, and they were selling parsley and garlic and fruit. I thought it was encouraging that they were sitting with the Jewish flower-sellers, who always have their flowers just here. I didn’t buy anything off the Arab women that day, but before that I had often bought stuff off them. On that day it was so cold I rushed straight inside with my daughter. The guard was in the foyer, and also in the foyer were all these boxes of Matzos…Passover of course; and also tins of white paint, because at Passover everyone touches up the paint-work round their doors and porches; and for some reason there were stacks and stacks of lavatory paper.
I bought a lot of dairy products…milk, white cheese, cream, fruit yoghurts…cherry, peach, not kiwi…I don’t like kiwi; I bought eight chicken thighs…my family likes chicken thighs with a sauce made of soya, honey, olive oil and garlic. I bought potatoes…I do them with rosemary and butter…tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, lemons. There were four or five people in front of me at the checkout…Friday’s always crowded, especially Passover Friday…it came to my turn, and I put all the stuff out of the trolley on to the belt. The woman on the cash till was Russian, maybe sixty years old, very beautiful bone structure, and very polite, even though she didn’t speak fluent Hebrew… all the stuff had gone through…I had already taken my Visa card out of my wallet and put it in my pocket because I knew I would be in a hurry when it came to paying…I remember I took my Visa card out of my pocket…my daughter was on my left helping the lady pack the carrier bags…I pulled out my Visa card…and at that moment the
