THE VIEW FROM SADDAM’S BED

Iraq has been in the news so much lately, and it has been such sad news, that it brought me back—mentally—to Baghdad, where I was a year ago, at just about this time. Of all the places I saw in the city, the most exciting was undoubtedly, Saddam’s weekend palace on the banks of the Tigris River.

A company of the Third Infantry Division had occupied the palace having set up their cots and mosquito nets in the various public rooms on the first floor. The showers and toilets—with their solid gold fixtures still in place—were working. The dining room with its twenty-foot tall windows afforded a beautiful view of a pathway that wound through the park-like grounds to a kind of observation deck that jutted out over the river. Someone told me that Saddam used to swim from this deck. I think I do remember seeing a photo of Saddam floating in the Tigris some years ago.

I remember, wandering through some of the rooms upstairs, littered with plaster and fallen chandeliers, trying to feel some sort of presence of Saddam. I can’t say that I did. Only when a soldier showed us Saddam’s bedroom with the unmade bed in it, I think then, I did feel something of the missing dictator.

I took pictures of the two guys I was with, and then asked one of them to snap mine. Looking at the picture now, I wonder what I was thinking. I’m not sure. I think that I was contemplating just how strange it was to have my photo taken sitting on Saddam’s bed. Nothing more or less than that.

In the photo I am looking out the window which led to a balcony overlooking the Tigris. In the backyard, there was a huge swimming pool filled with some of the furniture from the palace.

When we walked down by the pool, a soldier told us they were going to clean the stuff out so they could swim in the pool. As he was telling me that, I remember seeing another soldier step into the shower in the cabana at the foot of the pool. That was the first time in the palace I had imagined seeing Saddam living there. It was easy to picture him stepping out of the pool and into the shower.

Being there in Baghdad, back then, it felt like a sad place and, for some reason, especially in Saddam’s palace. That wasn’t the only palace we visited but that one—supposedly his favorite—was, come to think of it, permeated with sadness. I’m not sure I can explain it further than that. It was just a feeling, something beyond words.

Staring out the window from my position on his bed, did, come to think of it, give me a certain perspective—if only a tiny glimpse—of what it might have been like to be that man who, in the end, as caused so much commotion.