Читать книгу Deep Heat: Encounters with the Famous, the Infamous and the Unknown - Robin Soans - Страница 11

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HALA JABER

While we are on the subject of cooking, there can’t have been many more bizarre meals prepared than the one Hala Jaber cooked for the group of insurgents she was staying with during the second bombing of Fallujah, in Iraq.

This is a story which clearly demonstrates the difference between journalism and playwriting. As she was the only Western journalist in Fallujah that night, the Sunday Times accorded her the single honour of devoting both the first and second pages to her story. Yet in all that verbiage, there is no mention of the two key elements I chose from her interview when she came to talk to us in Max Stafford-Clark’s old office at The Royal Court Theatre. I suppose very roughly the Sunday Times concentrates on news, fact and opinion; I am more interested in the complexity of the human condition, self-knowledge through the experiences of others, and emotion.

Hala Jaber was exquisitely dressed for the interview...cashmere jumper, twill skirt, high 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.